proofreading team "great writers." edited by eric robertson and frank t. marzials. life of browning. for full list of the volumes in this series, see catalogue at end of book life of robert browning by william sharp. london walter scott, limited paternoster square contents. chapter i. london, robert browning's birthplace; his immediate predecessors and contemporaries in literature, art, and music; born may th, ; origin of the browning family; assertions as to its semitic connection apparently groundless; the poet a putative descendant of the captain micaiah browning mentioned by macaulay; robert browning's mother of scottish and german origin; his father a man of exceptional powers, artist, poet, critic, student; mr. browning's opinion of his son's writings; the home in camberwell; robert browning's childhood; concerning his optimism; his fondness for carravaggio's "andromeda and perseus"; his poetic precocity; origin of "the flight of the duchess"; writes byronic verse; is sent to school at peckham; his holiday afternoons; sees london by night, from herne hill; the significance of the spectacle to him. page . chapter ii. he wishes to be a poet; writes in the style of byron and pope; the "death of harold"; his poems, written when twelve years old, shown to miss flower; the rev. w.j. fox's criticisms on them; he comes across shelley's "dæmon of the world"; mrs. browning procures shelley's poems, also those of keats, for her son; the perusal of these volumes proves an important event in his poetic development; he leaves school when fourteen years old, and studies at home under a tutor; attends a few lectures at university college, - ; chooses his career, at the age of twenty; earliest record of his utterances concerning his youthful life printed in _century magazine_, ; he plans a series of monodramatic epics; browning's life-work, collectively one monodramatic "epic"; shakspere's and browning's methods compared; browning writes "pauline" in ; his own criticism on it; his parents' opinions; his aunt's generous gift; the poem published in january ; description of the poem; written under the inspiring stimulus of shelley; its autopsychical significance; its importance to the student of the poet's works; quotations from "pauline". page . chapter iii. the public reception of "pauline"; criticisms thereupon; mr. fox's notice in the _monthly repository_, and its results; dante gabriel rossetti reads "pauline" and writes to the author; browning's reference to tennyson's reading of "maud" in ; browning frequents literary society; reads at the british museum; makes the acquaintance of charles dickens and "ion" talfourd; a volume of poems by tennyson published simultaneously with "pauline"; in he commences his travels; goes to russia; the sole record of his experiences there to be found in the poem "ivàn ivànovitch," published in _dramatic idyls_, ; his acquaintance with mazzini; browning goes to italy; visits asolo, whence he drew hints for "sordello" and "pippa passes"; in he returns to camberwell; in autumn of and winter of commences "sordello," writes "paracelsus," and one or two short poems; his love for venice; a new voice audible in "johannes agricola" and "porphyria"; "paracelsus," published in ; his own explanation of it; his love of walking in the dark; some of "paracelsus" and of "strafford" composed in a wood near dulwich; concerning "paracelsus" and browning's sympathy with the scientific spirit; description and scope of the poem; quotations therefrom; estimate of the work, and its four lyrics. page . chapter iv. criticisms upon "paracelsus," important one written by john forster; browning meets macready at the house of mr. fox; personal description of the poet; macready's opinion of the poem; browning spends new year's day, , at the house of the tragedian and meets john forster; macready urges him to write a play; his subsequent interview with the tragedian; he plans a drama to be entitled "narses"; meets wordsworth and walter savage landor at a supper party, when the young poet is toasted, and macready again proposes that browning should write a play, from which arose the idea of "strafford"; his acquaintance with wordsworth and landor; ms. of "strafford" accepted; its performance at covent garden theatre on the th may ; runs for five nights; the author's comments; the drama issued by messrs. longman & co.; the performance in ; estimate of "strafford"; browning's dramas; comparison between the elizabethan and victorian dramatic eras; browning's soul-depictive faculty; his dramatic method; estimate of his dramas; landor's acknowledgment of the dedication to him of "luria". page . chapter v. "profundity" and "simplicity"; the faculty of wonder; browning's first conception of "pippa passes"; his residence in london; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is "pippa passes" a drama? estimate of the poem; browning's rambles on wimbledon common and in dulwich wood, where he composed his lines upon shelley; asserts there is romance in camberwell as well as in italy; "sordello"; the charge of obscurity against "sordello"; the nature and intention of the poem; quotations therefrom; anecdote about douglas jerrold; tennyson's, carlyle's, and m. odysse barot's opinions on "sordello"; "enigmatic" poetry; in browning contemplated the re-writing of "sordello"; dedication to the french critic, milsand. page . chapter vi. browning's three great dramatic poems; "the ring and the book" his finest work; its uniqueness; carlyle's criticism of it; poetry _versus_ tour-de-force; "the ring and the book" begun in ; analysis of the poem; kinship of "the ring and the book" and "aurora leigh"; explanation of title; the idea taken from a parchment volume browning picked up in florence; the poem planned at casa guidi; "o lyric love," etc.; description and analysis of "the ring and the book," with quotations; compared as a poem with "the inn album," "pauline," "asolando," "men and women," etc.; imaginary volumes, to be entitled "transcripts from life" and "flowers o' the vine"; browning's greatest period; browning's primary importance. page . chapter vii. early life of elizabeth barrett browning; born in ; the chief sorrow of her life; the barrett family settle in london; "the cry of the children" and its origin; miss barrett's friends; effect on her of browning's poetry; she makes browning's acquaintance in ; her early belief in him as a poet; her physical delicacy and her sensitiveness of feeling; personal appearance of robert browning; his "electric" hand; elizabeth barrett discerns his personal worth, and is susceptible to the strong humanity of browning's song; mr. barrett's jealousy; their engagement; miss barrett's acquaintance with mrs. jameson; quiet marriage in ; mr. barrett's resentment; the brownings go to paris; thence to italy with mrs. jameson; wordsworth's comments; residence in pisa; "sonnets from the portuguese"; in the spring they go to florence, thence to ancona, where "the guardian angel" was written; casa guidi; w.w. story's account of the rooms at casa guidi; perfect union. page . chapter viii. march , birth of robert wiedemann barrett browning; browning writes his "christmas eve and easter day"; "casa guidi windows" commenced; , they go to rome; "two in the campagna"; proposal to confer poet-laureateship on mrs. browning; return to london; winter in paris; summer in london; kenyon's friendship; return in autumn to casa guidi; browning's essay on shelley for the twenty-five spurious shelley letters; midsummer at baths of lucca, where "in a balcony" was in part written; winter of - in rome; record of work; "pen's" illness; "ben karshook's wisdom"; return to florence; ( ) "men and women" published; the brownings go to london; in summer "aurora leigh" issued; , mrs. browning's waning health; - comparatively, unproductive period with r. browning; record of work; july , they travel to normandy; "legend of pornic"; mrs. browning's ardent interest in the italian struggle of ; winter in rome; "poems before congress"; her last poem, "north and south"; death of mrs. browning at casa guidi, th june . page . chapter ix. browning's allusions to death of his wife; miss browning resides with her brother from ; , collected works published; first part of "the ring and the book" published in november ; "hervé riel" written; browning's growing popularity; tauchnitz editions of his poems in ; also first book of selections; dedication to lord tennyson; , he goes to la saisiaz, near geneva; "la saisiaz" and "the two poets of croisic" published ; browning's later poems; browning society established ; browning's letter thereupon to mr. yates; trips abroad; his london residences; his last letter to tennyson; revisits asolo; palazzo rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, thursday, dec. th, ; funeral in westminster abbey; sonnet by george meredith; new star in orion; r. browning's place in literature; summary, etc. page . note. in all important respects i leave this volume to speak for itself. for obvious reasons it does not pretend to be more than a _mémoire pour servir_: in the nature of things, the definitive biography cannot appear for many years to come. none the less gratefully may i take the present opportunity to express my indebtedness to mr. r. barrett browning, and to other relatives and intimate friends of robert browning, who have given me serviceable information, and otherwise rendered kindly aid. for some of the hitherto unpublished details my thanks are, in particular, due to mrs. fraser corkran and miss alice corkran, and to other old friends of the poet and his family, here, in italy, and in america; though in one or two instances, i may add, i had them from robert browning himself. it is with pleasure that i further acknowledge my indebtedness to dr. furnivall, for the loan of the advance-proofs of his privately-printed pamphlet on "browning's ancestors"; and to the browning society's publications--particularly to mrs. sutherland orr's and dr. furnivall's biographical and bibliographical contributions thereto; to mr. gosse's biographical article in the _century magazine_ for ; to mr. ingram's _life of e.b. browning_; and to the _memoirs of anna jameson_, the _italian note-books_ of nathaniel hawthorne, mr. g.s. hillard's _six months in italy_ ( ), and the lives and correspondence of macready, miss mitford, leigh hunt, and walter savage landor. i regret that the imperative need of concision has prevented the insertion of many of the letters, anecdotes, and reminiscences, so generously placed at my disposal; but possibly i may have succeeded in educing from them some essential part of that light which they undoubtedly cast upon the personality and genius of the poet. life of browning. chapter i. it must, to admirers of browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in london. it would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. what fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the "subtlest assertor of the soul in song," the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror of the age? a man may be in all things a londoner and yet be a provincial. the accident of birthplace does not necessarily involve parochialism of the soul. it is not the village which produces the hampden, but the hampden who immortalises the village. it is a favourite jest of rusticus that his urban brother has the manner of omniscience and the knowledge of a parish beadle. nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the metropolitan heart is not that which is native to it, one might well be proud to have had one's atom-pulse atune from the first with the large rhythm of the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever ebullient centre. certainly browning was not the man to be ashamed of his being a londoner, much less to deny his natal place. he was proud of it: through good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through some instinctive apprehension of the fact that the great city was indeed the fit mother of such a son. "ashamed of having been born in the greatest city of the world!" he exclaimed on one occasion; "what an extraordinary thing to say! it suggests a wavelet in a muddy shallow grimily contorting itself because it had its birth out in the great ocean." on the day of the poet's funeral in westminster abbey, one of the most eminent of his peers remarked to me that browning came to us as one coming into his own. this is profoundly true. there was in good sooth a mansion prepared against his advent. long ago, we should have surrendered as to a conqueror: now, however, we know that princes of the mind, though they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter upon no heritance save that which naturally awaits them, and has been made theirs by long and intricate processes. the lustrum which saw the birth of robert browning, that is the third in the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed. thackeray came into the world some months earlier than the great poet, charles dickens within the same twelvemonth, and tennyson three years sooner, when also elizabeth barrett was born, and the foremost naturalist of modern times first saw the light. it is a matter of significance that the great wave of scientific thought which ultimately bore forward on its crest so many famous men, from brewster and faraday to charles darwin, had just begun to rise with irresistible impulsion. lepsius's birth was in , and that of the great flemish novelist, henri conscience, in : about the same period were the births of freiligrath, gutzkow, and auerbach, respectively one of the most lyrical poets, the most potent dramatist, the most charming romancer of germany: and, also, in france, of théophile gautier and alfred de musset. among representatives of the other arts--with two of which browning must ever be closely associated--mendelssohn and chopin were born in , and schumann, liszt, and wagner within the four succeeding years: within which space also came diaz and meissonier and the great millet. other high names there are upon the front of the century. macaulay, cardinal newman, john stuart mill (one of the earliest, by the way, to recognise the genius of browning), alexandre dumas, george sand, victor hugo, ampère, quinet, prosper merimée, sainte-beuve, strauss, montalembert, are among the laurel-bearers who came into existence betwixt and . when robert browning was born in london in , sheridan had still four years to live; jeremy bentham was at the height of his contemporary reputation, and godwin was writing glibly of the virtues of humanity and practising the opposite qualities, while crabbe was looked upon as one of the foremost of living poets. wordsworth was then forty, sir walter scott forty-one, coleridge forty-two, walter savage landor and charles lamb each in his forty-fifth year. byron was four-and-twenty, shelley not yet quite of age, two radically different men, keats and carlyle, both youths of seventeen. abroad, laplace was in his maturity, with fifteen years more yet to live; joubert with twelve; goethe, with twenty; lamarck, the schlegels, cuvier, chateaubriand, hegel, niebühr (to specify some leading names only), had many years of work before them. schopenhauer was only four-and-twenty, while béranger was thirty-two. the polish poet mickiewicz was a boy of fourteen, and poushkin was but a twelvemonth older; heine, a lad of twelve, was already enamoured of the great napoleonic legend. the foremost literary critic of the century was running about the sands of boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of sainte-beuve. again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the _comédie humaine._ in art, sir henry raeburn, william blake, flaxman, canova, thorwaldsen, crome, sir thomas lawrence, constable, sir david wilkie, and turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, beethoven, weber, schubert, spohr, donizetti, and bellini. it is not inadvisedly that i make this specification of great names, of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense contemporaries of robert browning. there is no such thing as a fortuitous birth. creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of david scott's where from the footprint of the omnipotent spring human spirits and fiery stars. literally indeed, as a great french writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. it is a matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men do not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period. they are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of that wave itself. the epoch expends itself in preparation for these great ones. if nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life would have meagre results. i think it is turgenïev who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the destinies of man. if there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that the great days had passed away even before robert browning and alfred tennyson were born. the way was prepared for browning, as it was for shakspere: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these. there were 'roberts' among the sons of the browning family for at least four generations. it has been affirmed, on disputable authority, that the surname is the english equivalent for bruning, and that the family is of teutonic origin. possibly: but this origin is too remote to be of any practical concern. browning himself, it may be added, told mr. moncure conway that the original name was de bruni. it is not a matter of much importance: the poet was, personally and to a great extent in his genius, anglo-saxon. though there are plausible grounds for the assumption. i can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were jews.[ ] [footnote : fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, on the paternal side, is afforded in the fact that, in , the poet's great-grandfather gave one of his sons the baptismal name of christian. dr. furnivall's latest researches prove that there is absolutely "no ground for supposing the presence of any jewish blood in the poet's veins."] as to browning's physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him were told he was a jew they would not be much surprised. in his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often of late been claimed. what, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to jews nor gentiles, did he ever admit more than that he was a good protestant, and sprung of a puritan stock. he was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural bias towards anglican evangelicalism. in appearance there was, perhaps, something of the semite in robert browning: yet this is observable but slightly in the portraits of him during the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which represent him as a young man. it is most marked in the drawing by rudolf lehmann, representing browning at the age of forty-seven, where he looks out upon us with a physiognomy which is, at least, as much distinctively jewish as english. possibly the large dark eyes (so unlike both in colour and shape what they were in later life) and curved nose and full lips, with the oval face, may have been, as it were, seen judaically by the artist. these characteristics, again, are greatly modified in mr. lehmann's subsequent portrait in oils. the poet's paternal great-grandfather, who was owner of the woodyates inn, in the parish of pentridge, in dorsetshire, claimed to come of good west-country stock. browning believed, but always conscientiously maintained there was no proof in support of the assumption, that he was a descendant of the captain micaiah browning who, as macaulay relates in his _history of england_, raised the siege of derry in by springing the boom across lough foyle, and perished in the act. the same ancestral line is said to comprise the captain browning who commanded the ship _the holy ghost_, which conveyed henry v. to france before he fought the battle of agincourt, and in recognition of whose services two waves, said to represent waves of the sea, were added to his coat of arms. it is certainly a point of some importance in the evidence, as has been indicated, that these arms were displayed by the gallant captain micaiah, and are borne by the present family. that the poet was a pure-bred englishman in the strictest sense, however, as has commonly been asserted, is not the case. his mother was scottish, through her mother and by birth, but her father was the son of a german from hamburg, named wiedemann, who, by the way, in connection with his relationship as maternal grandfather to the poet, it is interesting to note, was an accomplished draughtsman and musician.[ ] browning's paternal grandmother, again, was a creole. as mrs. orr remarks, this pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of the poet's genius. possibly the main current of his ancestry is as little strictly english as german. a friend sends me the following paragraph from a scottish paper:--"what of the scottish brownings? i had it long ago from one of the name that the brownings came originally from ayrshire, and that several families of them emigrated to the north of ireland during the times of the covenanters. there is, moreover, a small town or village in the north of ireland called browningstown. might not the poet be related to these scottish brownings?" [footnote : it has frequently been stated that browning's maternal grandfather, mr. wiedemann, was a jew. mr. wiedemann, the son of a hamburg merchant, was a small shipowner in dundee. had he, or his father, been semitic, he would not have baptised one of his daughters 'christiana.'] browning's great-grandfather, as indicated above, was a small proprietor in dorsetshire. his son, whether perforce or from choice, removed to london when he was a youth, and speedily obtained a clerkship in the bank of england, where he remained for fifty years, till he was pensioned off in with over £ a year. he died in . his wife, to whom he was married in or about , was one margaret morris tittle, a creole, born in the west indies. her portrait, by wright of derby, used to hang in the poet's dining-room. they resided, mr. r. barrett browning tells me, in battersea, where his grandfather was their first-born. the paternal grandfather of the poet decided that his three sons, robert, william shergold, and reuben, should go into business, the two younger in london, the elder abroad. all three became efficient financial clerks, and attained to good positions and fair means.[ ] the eldest, robert, was a man of exceptional powers. he was a poet, both in sentiment and expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. he was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion: not indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained for the greatest writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for horace and anacreon. as his son once told a friend. "the old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. he was completely versed in mediæval legend, and seemed to have known paracelsus, faustus, and even talmudic personages, personally"--a significant detail, by the way. he was fond of metrical composition, and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic couplet were the admiration, not only of his intellectual associates, but, in later days, of his son, who was wont to affirm, certainly in all seriousness, that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist than himself. some one has recorded of him that he was an authority on the letters of junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this to the esteem of his fellows. it was his boast that, notwithstanding the exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the history of art as any professional critic. his extreme modesty is deducible from this naïve remark. he was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as poet, critic, and student. i have seen several of his drawings which are praise-worthy: his studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably touched: and, as is well known, he had an active faculty of pictorial caricature. in the intervals of leisure which beset the best regulated clerk he was addicted to making drawings of the habitual visitors to the bank of england, in which he had obtained a post on his return, in , from the west indies, and in the enjoyment of which he remained till , when he retired on a small pension. his son had an independent income, but whether from a bequest, or in the form of an allowance from his then unmarried uncle reuben, is uncertain. in the first year of his marriage mr. browning resided in an old house in southampton street, peckham, and there the poet was born. the house was long ago pulled down, and another built on its site. mr. browning afterwards removed to another domicile in the same peckham district. many years later, he and his family left camberwell and resided at hatcham, near new cross, where his brothers and sisters (by his father's second marriage) lived. there was a stable attached to the hatcham house, and in it mr. reuben browning kept his horse, which he let his poet-nephew ride, while he himself was at his desk in rothschild's bank. no doubt this horse was the 'york' alluded to by the poet in the letter quoted, as a footnote, at page of this book. some years after his wife's death, which occurred in , mr. browning left hatcham and came to paddington, but finally went to reside in paris, and lived there, in a small street off the champs Élysées, till his death in . the creole strain seems to have been distinctly noticeable in mr. browning, so much so that it is possible it had something to do with his unwillingness to remain at st. kitts, where he was certainly on one occasion treated cavalierly enough. the poet's complexion in youth, light and ivory-toned as it was in later life, has been described as olive, and it is said that one of his nephews, who met him in paris in his early manhood, took him for an italian. it has been affirmed that it was the emotional creole strain in browning which found expression in his passion for music. [footnote : the three brothers were men of liberal education and literary tastes. mr. w.s. browning, who died in , was an author of some repute. his _history of the huguenots_ is a standard book on the subject.] by old friends of the family i have been told that mr. browning had a strong liking for children, with whom his really remarkable faculty of impromptu fiction made him a particular favourite. sometimes he would supplement his tales by illustrations with pencil or brush. miss alice corkran has shown me an illustrated coloured map, depictive of the main incidents and scenery of the _pilgrim's progress_, which he genially made for "the children."[ ] [footnote : mrs. fraser corkran, who saw much of the poet's father during his residence in paris, has spoken to me of his extraordinary analytical faculty in the elucidation of complex criminal cases. it was once said of him that his detective faculty amounted to genius. this is a significant trait in the father of the author of "the ring and the book."] he had three children himself--robert, born may th, , a daughter named sarianna, after her mother, and clara. his wife was a woman of singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity. her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late in life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. she was, moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry. in the latter she inclined to the romanticists: her husband always maintained the supremacy of pope. he looked with much dubiety upon his son's early writings, "pauline" and "paracelsus"; "sordello," though he found it beyond either his artistic or his mental apprehension, he forgave, because it was written in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he regarded with sympathy and pride, with a vague admiration which passed into a clearer understanding only when his long life was drawing near its close. of his children's company he never tired, even when they were scarce out of babyhood. he was fond of taking the little robert in his arms, and walking to and fro with him in the dusk in "the library," soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of anacreon in the original, to a favourite old tune of his, "a cottage in a wood." readers of "asolando" will remember the allusions in that volume to "my father who was a scholar and knew greek." a week or two before his death browning told an american friend, mrs. corson, in reply to a statement of hers that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle: "it would have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best. my dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work i was capable of. when i think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, i have no reason to be proud of my achievements. my good father sacrificed a fortune to his convictions. he could not bear with slavery, and left india and accepted a humble bank-office in london. he secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. it would have been shameful if i had not done my best to realise his expectations of me."[ ] [footnote : 'india' is a slip on the part either of browning or of mrs. corson. the poet's father was never in india. he was quite a youth when he went to his mother's sugar-plantation at st. kitts, in the west indies.] the home of mr. browning was, as already stated, in camberwell, a suburb then of less easy access than now, and where there were green trees, and groves, and enticing rural perspectives into "real" country, yet withal not without some suggestion of the metropolitan air. "the old trees which grew by our youth's home--the waving mass of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew-- the morning swallows with their songs like words-- all these seem clear.... ...most distinct amid the fever and the stir of after years." (_pauline_.) another great writer of our time was born in the same parish: and those who would know herne hill and the neighbourhood as it was in browning's youth will find an enthusiastic guide in the author of _praeterita_. browning's childhood was a happy one. indeed, if the poet had been able to teach in song only what he had learnt in suffering, the larger part of his verse would be singularly barren of interest. from first to last everything went well with him, with the exception of a single profound grief. this must be borne in mind by those who would estimate aright the genius of robert browning. it would be affectation or folly to deny that his splendid physique--a paternal inheritance, for his father died at the age of eighty-four, without having ever endured a day's illness--and the exceptionally fortunate circumstances which were his throughout life, had something to do with that superb faith of his which finds concentrated expression in the lines in pippa's song--"god's in his heaven, all's right with the world!" it is difficult for a happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist. he is always inclined to give nature the benefit of the doubt. his favourite term for this mental complaisance is "catholicity of faith," or, it may be, "a divine hope." the less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order. an eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls browning's insanity of optimism: it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance. all this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes. a man may have a liberal hope for himself and for humanity, although his dinner be habitually a martyrdom. after all, we are only dictated to by our bodies: we have not perforce to obey them. a bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be found embodied in the gastric juice. he was not altogether a fool, this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he wide of the mark. as a very young child browning was keenly susceptible to music. one afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself. she was startled to hear a sound behind her. glancing round, she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. the next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with shy urgency, "play! play!" it is strange that among all his father's collection of drawings and engravings nothing had such fascination for him as an engraving of a picture of andromeda and perseus by caravaggio. the story of the innocent victim and the divine deliverer was one of which in his boyhood he never tired of hearing: and as he grew older the charm of its pictorial presentment had for him a deeper and more complex significance. we have it on the authority of a friend that browning had this engraving always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. he has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in "pauline":-- "andromeda! and she is with me--years roll, i shall change, but change can touch her not--so beautiful with her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze; and one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven, resting upon her eyes and face and hair, as she awaits the snake on the wet beach, by the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking at her feet; quite naked and alone,--a thing you doubt not, nor fear for, secure that god will come in thunder from the stars to save her." one of his own early recollections was that of sitting on his father's knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the tale of troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment--from the neighbouring room where mrs. browning sat "in her chief happiness, her hour of darkness and solitude and music"--of a wild gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences. a story concerning his poetic precocity has been circulated, but is not worth repeating. most children love jingling rhymes, and one need not be a born genius to improvise a rhyming couplet on an occasion. it is quite certain that in nothing in these early poemicules, in such at least as have been preserved without the poet's knowledge and against his will, is there anything of genuine promise. hundreds of youngsters have written as good, or better, odes to the moon, stanzas on a favourite canary, lines on a butterfly. what is much more to the point is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take delight in pope's translation of homer. he used to go about declaiming certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to those who overheard him. about this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of horace. one of these (viii. bk. ii.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme of his "instans tyrannus." it has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. he was scarce more than a child when, one guy fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was, "following the queen of the gipsies, o!" this refrain haunted him often in the after years. that beautiful fantastic romance, "the flight of the duchess," was born out of an insistent memory of this woman's snatch of song, heard in childhood. he was ten when, after several _passions malheureuses_, this precocious lothario plunged into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness. a trifle of fifteen years' seniority and a husband complicated matters, but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a horatian ode upon an unclassical mistress that he gave up hope. the outcome of this was what the elder browning regarded as a startling effusion of much byronic verse. the young robert yearned for wastes of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that nothing could quench but the silent grave, and, in particular, for hollow mocking laughter. his father looked about for a suitable school, and decided to entrust the boy's further education to mr. ready, of peckham. here he remained till he was fourteen. but already he knew the dominion of dreams. his chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of incoherent human music borne thither-ward by the west winds across the wastes of london. here he loved to lie and dream. alas, those elms, that high remote coign, have long since passed to the "hidden way" whither the snows of yester year have vanished. he would lie for hours looking upon distant london--a golden city of the west literally enough, oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind the towers of westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of st. paul's. the coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains, the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the dross and débris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own--all this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an extraordinary fascination. one of the memorable nights of his boyhood was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms. there, for the first time, he beheld london by night. it seemed to him then more wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars. there was something ominous in that heavy pulsating breath: visible, in a waning and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of norwood. it was then and there that the tragic significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a corresponding chord. chapter ii. it was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare reminiscent moods, that browning felt the artistic impulse stirring within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree. he remembered his mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters whom he had heard called "the norwich men," and he wished to be an artist: then reminiscences of the homeric lines he loved, of haunting verse-melodies, moved him most of all. "i shall never, in the years remaining, paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, make you music that should all-express me: ... verse alone, one life allows me." he now gave way to the compulsive byronic vogue, with an occasional relapse to the polished artificialism of his father's idol among british poets. there were several ballads written at this time: if i remember aright, the poet specified the "death of harold" as the theme of one. long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of "over the sea our galleys went," and "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies. mrs. browning was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out and carefully stitched mss., she lost no opportunity--when mr. browning was absent--to expatiate upon their merits. among the people to whom she showed them was a miss flower. this lady took them home, perused them, discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read them to her sister (afterwards to become known as sarah flower adams), copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated rev. william johnson fox to read the transcripts. mr. fox agreed with miss flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. the originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new thing for him: from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning, transformed to a dominating reality. passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as "mr. shelley's atheistical poem: very scarce." he had never heard of shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the "dæmon of the world," and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto, constituted a literary piracy. badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched him to a new emotion. pope became further removed than ever: byron, even, lost his magnetic supremacy. from vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called shelley; that he had written several volumes; that he was dead. strange as it may seem, browning declared once that the news of this unknown singer's death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or less earlier, the tidings of byron's heroic end at missolonghi. he begged his mother to procure him shelley's works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet's name. ultimately, however, mrs. browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the olliers' in vere street, london. she was very pleased with the result of her visit. the books, it is true, seemed unattractive: but they would please robert, no doubt. if that packet had been lost we should not have had "pauline": we might have had a different browning. it contained most of shelley's writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of "the cenci": in addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, john keats, which kindly mrs. browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase on mr. ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of shelley's writings, and that mr. keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint "pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "adonais." what an evening for the young poet that must have been. he told a friend it was a may night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of gold," and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden, two nightingales strove one against the other. for a moment it is a pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of keats and shelley uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. we can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of "epipsychidion" or "prometheus unbound," "alastor" or "endymion," or the odes to a nightingale, on melancholy, on a grecian urn. more than once browning alluded to this experience as his first pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. often in after life he was fain, like his "wise thrush," to "recapture that first fine careless rapture." it was an eventful eve. "and suddenly, without heart-wreck, i awoke as from a dream." thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous. shelley enthralled him most. the fire and spirit of the great poet's verse, wild and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion of delight. something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm of keats affected him also. indeed, a line from the ode to a nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in "epipsychidion," haunted him above all others: and again and again in his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those "remote isles" and "perilous seas"--as, for example, in "the dim clustered isles of the blue sea" of "pauline," and the "some isle, with the sea's silence on it--some unsuspected isle in the far seas!" of "pippa passes." but of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry. his education at mr. ready's private academy seems to have been excellent so far as it went. he remained there till he was fourteen. perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from his own reticence in self disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any school-mate deeply. we hear of no one who "knew browning at school." his best education, after all, was at home. his father and mother incidentally taught him as much as mr. ready: his love of painting and music was fostered, indirectly: and in the 'dovecot' bookshelf above the fireplace in his bedroom, were the precious volumes within whose sway and magic was his truest life. his father, for some reason which has not been made public, but was doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it, a matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a large public school, nor, later, to oxford or cambridge. a more stimulative and wider training was awaiting him elsewhere. for a time robert's education was superintended by a tutor, who came to the house in camberwell for several hours daily. the afternoons were mainly devoted to music, to exercise, and occasionally to various experimental studies in technical science. in the evenings, after his preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company of his father, he read and assiduously wrote. after poetry, he cared most for history: but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his eager intellectual appetite. it was a period of growth, with, it may be, a vague consciousness that his mind was expanding towards compulsive expression. "so as i grew, i rudely shaped my life to my immediate wants, yet strong beneath was a vague sense of powers folded up-- a sense that though those shadowy times were past, their spirit dwelt in me, and i should rule." when mr. browning was satisfied that the tutor had fulfilled his duty he sent his son to attend a few lectures at university college, in gower street, then just founded. robert browning's name is on the registrar's books for the opening session, - . "i attended with him the greek class of professor long" (wrote a friend, in the _times_, dec. :' ), "and i well recollect the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students. he was then a bright, handsome youth, with long black hair falling over his shoulders." so short was his period of attendance, however, and so unimportant the instruction he there derived, that to all intents it may be said browning had no university training. notwithstanding the fact that mr. browning but slightly appreciated his son's poetic idols and already found himself in an opposite literary camp, he had a profound sympathy with the boy's ideals and no little confidence in his powers. when the test came he acted wisely as well as with affectionate complaisance. in a word, he practically left the decision as to his course of life to robert himself. the latter was helped thereto by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for, and that, if need be, there was sufficient for himself also. there was of course but one way open to him. he would not have been a true poet, an artist, if he had hesitated. with a strange misconception of the artistic spirit, some one has awarded the poet great credit for his choice, because he had "the singular courage to decline to be rich." browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit: he was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as "singular courage." there are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as mr. barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded horne when he heard of that poet having published "orion" at a farthing: "perhaps he is going to shoot the queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania." with browning there never could have been two sides to the question: it were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered. the outcome of their deliberations was that robert's further education should be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign literatures. by this time the poet was twenty. his youth had been uneventful; in a sense, more so than his boyhood. his mind, however, was rapidly unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming days. it was in his nineteenth year, i have been told on good authority, that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover for this wooer. why and when this early passion came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known. what is certain is that it made a deep impression on the poet's mind. it may be that it, of itself, or wrought to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of "pauline," that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of browning's genius. it was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all freely of his youthful life. perhaps the earliest record of these utterances is that which appeared in the _century magazine_ in . from this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times and in various ways, we know that just about the time balzac, after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the titanic range of the _comédie humaine_, browning planned "a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls--a gigantic scheme at which a victor hugo or a lope de vega would start back aghast." already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion. in a sense he has fulfilled this early dream: at any rate we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls. in another sense, the major portion of browning's life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic "epic." he is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual. he is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which shakspere is. shakspere and his kindred project themselves into the lives of their imaginary personages: browning pays little heed to external life, or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself into the minds of his characters. in a word, shakspere's method is to depict a human soul in action, with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while browning's is to portray the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said in his dedicatory preface to "sordello," "little else is worth study." the one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping potentialities. the one deals with life dynamically, the other with life as thought. both methods are compassed by art. browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence. his finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas. he realised intensely the value of quintessential moments, as when the prefect in "the return of the druses" thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, "no draught coming as from a sepulchre" saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when anael, coming to denounce djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the god by her single worshipping cry, _hakeem!_--or, once more, in "the ring and the book," where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity not upon god or the virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife--"abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god, ... pompilia, will you let them murder me?" thus we can imagine browning, with his characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in "macbeth," or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect, the word 'wrought' towards the close of "othello," when the moor cries in his bitterness of soul, "but being wrought, perplext in the extreme": we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even the author of "the ring and the book" could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue. in the late autumn of browning wrote a poem of singular promise and beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.[ ] thirty-four years later he included "pauline" in his "poetical works" with reluctance, and in a note explained the reason of his decision--namely, to forestall piratical reprints abroad. "the thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which i have since written according to a scheme less extravagant, and scale less impracticable, than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time." these be hard words. no critic will ever adventure upon so severe a censure of "pauline": most capable judges agree that, with all its shortcomings, it is a work of genius, and therefore ever to be held treasurable for its own sake as well as for its significance. [footnote : probably from the fact of "richmond" having been added to the date at the end of the preface to "pauline," have arisen the frequent misstatements as to the browning family having moved west from camberwell in or shortly before . mr. r. barrett browning tells me that his father "never lived at richmond, and that that place was connected with 'pauline,' when first printed, as a mystification."] on the fly-leaf of a copy of this initial work, the poet, six years after its publication, wrote: "written in pursuance of a foolish plan i forget, or have no wish to remember; the world was never to guess that such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same notable person.... only this crab remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." it was in conformity with this plan that he not only issued "pauline" anonymously, but enjoined secrecy upon those to whom he communicated the fact of his authorship. when he read the poem to his parents, upon its conclusion, both were much impressed by it, though his father made severe strictures upon its lack of polish, its terminal inconcision, and its vagueness of thought. that he was not more severe was accepted by his son as high praise. the author had, however, little hope of seeing it in print. mr. browning was not anxious to provide a publisher with a present. so one day the poet was gratified when his aunt, handing him the requisite sum, remarked that she had heard he had written a fine poem, and that she wished to have the pleasure of seeing it in print. to this kindly act much was due. browning, of course, could not now have been dissuaded from the career he had forecast for himself, but his progress might have been retarded or thwarted to less fortunate grooves, had it not been for the circumstances resultant from his aunt's timely gift. the ms. was forthwith taken to saunders & otley, of conduit street, and the little volume of seventy pages of blank verse, comprising only a thousand and thirty lines, was issued by them in january . it seems to us, who read it now, so manifestly a work of exceptional promise, and, to a certain extent, of high accomplishment, that were it not for the fact that the public auditory for a new poet is ever extraordinarily limited, it would be difficult to understand how it could have been overlooked. "pauline" has a unique significance because of its autopsychical hints. the browning whom we all know, as well as the youthful dreamer, is here revealed; here too, as well as the disciple of shelley, we have the author of "the ring and the book." in it the long series culminating in "asolando" is foreshadowed, as the oak is observable in the sapling. the poem is prefaced by a latin motto from the _occult philosophy_ of cornelius agrippa, and has also a note in french, set forth as being by pauline, and appended to her lover's manuscript after his death. probably browning placed it in the mouth of pauline from his rooted determination to speak dramatically and impersonally: and in french, so as to heighten the effect of verisimilitude.[ ] [footnote : "i much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. i do not know, moreover, whether in striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend--that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (_genre_) which it can merely indicate. this unpretending opening, this stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations almost impossible. the reasons which he elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent, have secured my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise i should have advised him to throw into the fire. i believe none the less in the great principle of all composition--in that principle of shakespeare, of raphael, and of beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than to their execution; i have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and i much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. it would be best to burn this, but what can i do?"--(_mrs. orr_.)] "pauline" is a confession, fragmentary in detail but synthetic in range, of a young man of high impulses but weak determination. in its over-emphasis upon errors of judgment, as well as upon real if exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. an almost fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a matter of question if this be absolutely vicarious. to me it seems that the author himself was at the time confused by the complicated flashing of the lights of life. the autobiographical and autopsychical lines and passages scattered through the poem are of immediate interest. generously the poet repays his debt to shelley, whom he apostrophises as "sun-treader," and invokes in strains of lofty emotion--"sun-treader--life and light be thine for ever." the music of "alastor," indeed, is audible ever and again throughout "pauline." none the less is there a new music, a new poetic voice, in "thou wilt remember one warm morn, when winter crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath blew soft from the moist hills--the black-thorn boughs, so dark in the bare wood, when glistening in the sunshine were white with coming buds, like the bright side of a sorrow--and the banks had violets opening from sleep like eyes." if we have an imaginary browning, a shelleyan phantasm, in "i seemed the fate from which i fled; i felt a strange delight in causing my decay; i was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever within some ocean-wave:" we have the real browning in "so i will sing on--fast as fancies come rudely--the verse being as the mood it paints. * * * * * i am made up of an intensest life," and all the succeeding lines down to "their spirit dwelt in me, and i should rule." even then the poet's inner life was animated by his love of the beautiful greek literature. telling how in "the first dawn of life," "which passed alone with wisest ancient books," pauline's lover incorporated himself in whatsoever he read--was the god wandering after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to tenedos--his second-self cries, "i tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives." never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor sweet nature's face"-- "yet, i say, never morn broke clear as those on the dim clustered isles in the blue sea: the deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves-- and nothing ever will surprise me now-- who stood beside the naked swift-footed, who bound my forehead with proserpine's hair." further, the allusion to plato, and the more remote one to agamemnon, the "old lore loved for itself, and all it shows--the king treading the purple calmly to his death," and the beautiful andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how deeply browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some degree, cherish in various guises. yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in "pauline," written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the inspiring stimulus of shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged. "twas in my plan to look on real life, which was all new to me; my theories were firm, so i left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as i pondered on them all, i sought how best life's end might be attained, an end comprising every joy." again: "then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul, till it was changed. i lost myself, and were it not that i so loathe that time, i could recall how first i learned to turn my mind against itself ... at length i was restored, yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life i led, apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me thus far back to peace." no reader, alert to the subtle and haunting music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical. it would seem as though, from the first, browning's ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse. some flaw there was, somewhere. his heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the o'er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far perspectives of the brain, "as arab birds float sleeping in the wind." i have dwelt at this length upon "pauline" partly because of its inherent beauty and autopsychical significance, and partly because it is the least familiar of browning's poems, long overshadowed as it has been by his own too severe strictures: mainly, however, because of its radical importance to the student who would arrive at a broad and true estimate of the power and scope and shaping constituents of its author's genius. almost every quality of his after-verse may be found here, in germ or outline. it is, in a word, more physiognomic than any other single poem by browning, and so must ever possess a peculiar interest quite apart from its many passages of haunting beauty. to these the lover of poetry will always turn with delight. some will even regard them retrospectively with alien emotion to that wherewith they strive to possess their souls in patience over some one or other of the barbarisms, the titanic excesses, the poetic banalities recurrent in the later volumes. how many and how haunting these delicate oases are! those who know and love "pauline" will remember the passage where the poet, with that pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk and through its rustling foliage "look for the dim stars;" or, again, can live the life of the bird, "leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;" or be a fish, breathing the morning air in the misty sun-warm water. close following this is another memorable passage, that beginning "night, and one single ridge of narrow path;" which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and broader music to be evolved long afterwards. for, as it seems to me, in "thou art so close by me, the roughest swell of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting of thy soft breasts -----" (where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence between the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint of that superb scene in "pippa passes," where, on a sinister night of july, a night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, ottima and sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with "the thunder like a whole sea overhead." again, in the lovely turneresque, or rather shelleyan picture of morning, over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with the high boughs swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists, and the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks, whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion, an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the poet's penultimate volume, beginning-- "but morning's laugh sets all the crags alight above the baffled tempest: tree and tree stir themselves from the stupor of the night, and every strangled branch resumes its right to breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free in dripping glory. prone the runnels plunge, while earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, each grass-blade's glory-glitter," etc. who that has ever read "pauline" will forget the masterful poetry descriptive of the lover's wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines beginning "walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old and green"? there is indeed a new, an unmistakable voice here. "and tongues of bank go shelving in the waters, where the pale-throated snake reclines his head, and old grey stones lie making eddies there; the wild mice cross them dry-shod".... what lovelier image in modern poetry than that depictive of the forest-pool in depths of savage woodlands, unvisited but by the shadows of passing clouds,-- "the trees bend o'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl." how the passionate sexual emotion, always deep and true in browning, finds lovely utterance in the lines where pauline's lover speaks of the blood in her lips pulsing like a living thing, while her neck is as "marble misted o'er with love-breath," and "... her delicious eyes as clear as heaven, when rain in a quick shower has beat down mist, and clouds float white in the sun like broods of swans." in the quotations i have made, and in others that might be selected (_e.g._, "her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and _lips which bleed like a mountain berry_"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art he brings forward his new and striking imagery. browning, indeed, is the poet of new symbols. "pauline" concludes with lines which must have been in the minds of many on that sad day when the tidings from venice sent a thrill of startled, half-incredulous, bewildered pain throughout the english nations-- "sun-treader, i believe in god, and truth, and love; ... ... but chiefly when i die ... all in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me, know my last state is happy--free from doubt, or touch of fear." never again was browning to write a poem with such conceptive crudeness, never again to tread the byways of thought so falteringly or so negligently: but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much over-rapturing joy in the world's loveliness, such bacchic abandon to the ideal beauty which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest height and brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. the browning who might have been is here: henceforth the browning we know and love stands unique among all the lords of song. but sometimes do we not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, to the young dionysos upon whose forehead was the light of another destiny than that which descended upon him? the icelanders say there is a land where all the rainbows that have ever been, or are yet to be, forever drift to and fro, evanishing and reappearing, like immortal flowers of vapour. in that far country, it may be, are also the unfulfilled dreams, the visions too perfect to be fashioned into song, of the young poets who have gained the laurel. we close the little book lovingly: "and i had dimly shaped my first attempt, and many a thought did i build up on thought, as the wild bee hangs cell to cell--in vain; for i must still go on: my mind rests not." chapter iii. it has been commonly asserted that "pauline" was almost wholly disregarded, and swiftly lapsed into oblivion. this must be accepted with qualification. it is like the other general assertion, that browning had to live fifty years before he gained recognition--a statement as ludicrous when examined as it is unjust to the many discreet judges who awarded, publicly and privately, that intelligent sympathy which is the best sunshine for the flower of a poet's genius. if by "before he gained recognition" is meant a general and indiscriminate acclaim, no doubt browning had, still has indeed, longer to wait than many other eminent writers have had to do: but it is absurd to assert that from the very outset of his poetic career he was met by nothing but neglect, if not scornful derision. none who knows the true artistic temperament will fall into any such mistake. it is quite certain that neither shakspere nor milton ever met with such enthusiastic praise and welcome as browning encountered on the publication of "pauline" and "paracelsus." shelley, as far above browning in poetic music as the author of so many parleyings with other people's souls is the superior in psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life not one such review of praiseful welcome as the rev. w.j. fox wrote on the publication of "pauline" (or, it may be added, as allan cunningham's equally kindly but less able review in the _athenæum_), or as john forster wrote in _the examiner_ concerning "paracelsus," and later in the _new monthly magazine_, where he had the courage to say of the young and quite unknown poet, "without the slightest hesitation we name mr. robert browning at once with shelley, coleridge, wordsworth." his plays even (which are commonly said to have "fallen flat") were certainly not failures. there is something effeminate, undignified, and certainly uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not failure in literature. so enthusiastic was the applause he encountered, indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt--so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one among the high gods of our fathers. fortunately the deep humanity of his work in the mass conserves it against the mere veerings of taste. a reaction against it will inevitably come; but this will pass: what, in the future, when the unborn readers of browning will look back with clear eyes untroubled by the dust of our footsteps, not to subside till long after we too are dust, will be the place given to this poet, we know not, nor can more than speculatively estimate. that it will, however, be a high one, so far as his weightiest (in bulk, it may possibly be but a relatively slender) accomplishment is concerned, we may rest well assured: for indeed "it lives, if precious be the soul of man to man." so far as has been ascertained there were only three reviews or notices of "pauline": the very favourable article by mr. fox in the _monthly repository_, the kindly paper by allan cunningham in the _athenæum_, and, in _tait's edinburgh magazine_, the succinctly expressed impression of either an indolent or an incapable reviewer: "pauline; a fragment of a confession; a piece of pure bewilderment"--a "criticism" which anticipated and thus prevented the insertion of a highly favourable review which john stuart mill voluntarily wrote. browning must have regarded his first book with mingled feelings. it was a bid for literary fortune, in one sense, but a bid so handicapped by the circumstances of its publication as to be almost certainly of no avail. probably, however, he was well content that it should have mere existence. already the fever of an abnormal intellectual curiosity was upon him: already he had schemed more potent and more vital poems: already, even, he had developed towards a more individualistic method. so indifferent was he to an easily gained reputation that he seems to have been really urgent upon his relatives and intimate acquaintances not to betray his authorship. the miss flower, how ever, to whom allusion has already been made, could not repress her admiration to the extent of depriving her friend, mr. fox, of a pleasure similar to that she had herself enjoyed. the result was the generous notice in the _monthly repository_. the poet never forgot his indebtedness to mr. fox, to whose sympathy and kindness much direct and indirect good is traceable. the friendship then begun was lifelong, and was continued with the distinguished unitarian's family when mr. fox himself ended his active and beneficent career. but after a time the few admirers of "pauline" forgot to speak about it: the poet himself never alluded to it: and in a year or two it was almost as though it had never been written. many years after, when articles upon robert browning were as numerous as they once had been scarce, never a word betrayed that their authors knew of the existence of "pauline." there was, however, yet another friendship to come out of this book, though not until long after it was practically forgotten by its author. one day a young poet-painter came upon a copy of the book in the british museum library, and was at once captivated by its beauty. one of the earliest admirers of browning's poetry, dante gabriel rossetti--for it was he--felt certain that "pauline" could be by none other than the author of "paracelsus." he himself informed me that he had never heard this authorship suggested, though some one had spoken to him of a poem of remarkable promise, called "pauline," which he ought to read. if i remember aright, rossetti told me that it was on the forenoon of the day when the "burden of nineveh" was begun, conceived rather, that he read this story of a soul by the soul's ablest historian. so delighted was he with it, and so strong his opinion it was by browning, that he wrote to the poet, then in florence, for confirmation, stating at the same time that his admiration for "pauline" had led him to transcribe the whole of it. concerning this episode, robert browning wrote to me, some seven years ago, as follows:-- "st. pierre de chartreuse, isère, france. * * * * * "rossetti's 'pauline' letter was addressed to me at florence more than thirty years ago. i have preserved it, but, even were i at home, should be unable to find it without troublesome searching. it was to the effect that the writer, personally and altogether unknown to me, had come upon a poem in the british museum, which he copied the whole of, from its being not otherwise procurable--that he judged it to be mine, but could not be sure, and wished me to pronounce in the matter--which i did. a year or two after, i had a visit in london from mr. (william) allingham and a friend--who proved to be rossetti. when i heard he was a painter i insisted on calling on him, though he declared he had nothing to show me--which was far enough from the case. subsequently, on another of my returns to london, he painted my portrait, not, i fancy, in oils, but water-colours, and finished it in paris shortly after. this must have been in the year when tennyson published 'maud,' for i remember tennyson reading the poem one evening while rossetti made a rapid pen-and-ink sketch of him, very good, from one obscure corner of vantage, which i still possess, and duly value. this was before rossetti's marriage."[ ] [footnote : the highly interesting and excellent portrait of browning here alluded to has never been exhibited.] as a matter of fact, as recorded on the back of the original drawing, the eventful reading took place at dorset street, portman square, on the th of september , and those present, besides the poet-laureate, browning, and rossetti, were mrs. e. barrett browning and miss arabella barrett. when, a year or two ago, the poet learned that a copy of his first work, which in could not find a dozen purchasers at a few shillings, went at a public sale for twenty-five guineas, he remarked that had his dear old aunt been living he could have returned to her, much to her incredulous astonishment, no doubt, he smilingly averred, the cost of the book's publication, less £ s. it was about the time of the publication of "pauline" that browning began to see something of the literary and artistic life for which he had such an inborn taste. for a brief period he went often to the british museum, particularly the library, and to the national gallery. at the british museum reading room he perused with great industry and research those works in philosophy and medical history which are the bases of "paracelsus," and those italian records bearing upon the story of sordello. residence in camberwell, in , rendered night engagements often impracticable: but nevertheless he managed to mix a good deal in congenial society. it is not commonly known that he was familiar to these early associates as a musician and artist rather than as a poet. among them, and they comprised many well-known workers in the several arts, were charles dickens and "ion" talfourd. mr. fox, whom browning had met once or twice in his early youth, after the former had been shown the byronic verses which had in one way gratified and in another way perturbed the poet's father, saw something more of his young friend after the publication of "pauline." he very kindly offered to print in his magazine any short poems the author of that book should see fit to send--an offer, however, which was not put to the test for some time. practically simultaneously with the publication of "pauline" appeared another small volume, containing the "palace of art," "oenone," "mariana," etc. those early books of tennyson and browning have frequently, and somewhat uncritically, been contrasted. unquestionably, however, the elder poet showed a consummate and continuous mastery of his art altogether beyond the intermittent expressional power of browning in his most rhythmic emotion at any time of his life. to affirm that there is more intellectual fibre, what rossetti called fundamental brain-work, in the product of the younger poet, would be beside the mark. the insistence on the supremacy of browning over all poets since shakspere because he has the highest "message" to deliver, because his intellect is the most subtle and comprehensive, because his poems have this or that dynamic effect upon dormant or sluggish or other active minds, is to be seriously and energetically deprecated. it is with presentment that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself. if he cannot _present_ poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet, though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer. browning's eminence is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called "the mere handiwork, the furnisher's business, of the poet." it is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent should be wrought to a high technique equally by the shaping brain and the dexterous hand. browning is great because of his formative energy: because, despite the excess of burning and compulsive thought-- "thoughts swarming thro' the myriad-chambered brain like multitudes of bees i' the innumerous cells, each staggering 'neath the undelivered freight--" he strikes from the _furor_ of words an electric flash so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature, but only in the visionary eye of man. form for the mere beauty of form, is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance. if nothing animate it, it may possibly be fair of aspect, but only as the frozen smile upon a dead face. we know little of browning's inner or outer life in and . it was a secretive, not a productive period. one by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of titanic aim melted away. he began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. that land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the enfranchised spirits of great dreamers! in the autumn of he went forth to his university, that of the world of men and women. it was ever a favourite answer of his, when asked if he had been at either oxford or cambridge,--"italy was my university." but first he went to russia, and spent some time in st. petersburg, attracted thither by the invitation of a friend. the country interested him, but does not seem to have deeply or permanently engaged his attention. that, however, his russian experiences were not fruitless is manifest from the remarkably picturesque and technically very interesting poem, "ivàn ivànovitch" (the fourth of the _dramatic idyls_, ). of a truth, after his own race and country--readers will at once think of "home thoughts from the sea," or the thrilling lines in "home thoughts from abroad," beginning-- "oh, to be in england, now that april's there!"-- or perhaps, those lines in his earliest work-- "i cherish most my love of england--how, her name, a word of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!" --it was of the mystic orient or of the glowing south that he oftenest thought and dreamed. with heine he might have cried: "o firdusi! o ischami! o saadi! how do i long after the roses of schiraz!" as for italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her: but who has worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal a love, as browning? one alone indeed may be mated with him here, she who had his heart of hearts, and who lies at rest in the old florentine cemetery within sound of the loved waters of arno. who can forget his lines in "de gustibus," "open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it, italy." it would be no difficult task to devote a volume larger than the present one to the descriptive analysis of none but the poems inspired by italy, italian personages and history, italian painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. from porphyria and her lover to pompilia and all the direful roman tragedy wherein she is as a moon of beauty above conflicting savage tides of passion, what an unparalleled gallery of portraits, what a brilliant phantasmagoria, what a movement of intensest life! it is pleasant to know of one of them, "the italian in england," that browning was proud, because mazzini told him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow-exiles in england to show how an englishman could sympathise with them. after leaving russia the young poet spent the rest of his _wanderjahr_ in italy. among other places he visited was asolo, that white little hill-town of the veneto, whence he drew hints for "sordello," and "pippa passes," and whither he returned in the last year of his life, as with unconscious significance he himself said, "on his way homeward." in the summer of , that is, when he was in his twenty-second year, he returned to camberwell. "sordello" he had in some fashion begun, but had set aside for a poem which occupied him throughout the autumn of and winter of , "paracelsus." in this period, also, he wrote some short poems, two of them of particular significance. the first of the series was a sonnet, which appeared above the signature 'z' in the august number of the _monthly repository_ for . it was never reprinted by the author, whose judgment it is impossible not to approve as well as to respect. browning never wrote a good sonnet, and this earliest effort is not the most fortunate. it was in the _repository_ also, in and , that the other poems appeared, four in all. the song in "pippa passes," beginning "a king lived long ago," was one of these; and the lyric, "still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no?" afterwards revised and incorporated in "james lee," was another. but the two which are much the most noteworthy are "johannes agricola" and "porphyria." even more distinctively than in "pauline," in their novel sentiment, new method, and generally unique quality, is a new voice audible in these two poems. they are very remarkable as the work of so young a poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred. "johannes agricola" is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. in its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty, "porphyria" is still more remarkable. it may be of this time, though possibly some years later, that mrs. bridell-fox writes:--"i remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to venice. i cannot tell the date for certain. he was full of enthusiasm for that queen of cities. he used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. my own passionate longing to see venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood." "paracelsus," begun about the close of october or early in november , was published in the summer of the following year. it is a poem in blank verse, about four times the length of "pauline," with interspersed songs. the author divided it into five sections of unequal length, of which the third is the most extensive: "paracelsus aspires"; "paracelsus attains"; "paracelsus"; "paracelsus aspires"; "paracelsus attains." in an interesting note, which was not reprinted in later editions of his first acknowledged poem, the author dissuades the reader from mistaking his performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common, from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded, and from subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. he then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem, and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced. instead of this, he remarks, "i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency, by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. i have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama." a little further, he states that a work like "paracelsus" depends, for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader: "indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation--a lyre or a crown." in the concluding paragraph of this note there is a point of interest--the statement of the author's hope that the readers of "paracelsus" will not "be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular, and perhaps less difficult form." from this it might fairly be inferred that browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method: that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear: and that he was alert to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines similar to those of "paracelsus." nor would this inference be wrong: for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication of "paracelsus," determined to devote himself to poetic work which should have so direct a contact with actual life that its appeal should reach even to the most uninitiate in the mysteries and delights of verse. in his early years browning had always a great liking for walking in the dark. at camberwell he was wont to carry this love to the point of losing many a night's rest. there was, in particular, a wood near dulwich, whither he was wont to go. there he would walk swiftly and eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed, with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances, even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. at this time, too, he composed much in the open air. this he rarely, if ever, did in later life. not only many portions of "paracelsus," but several scenes in "strafford," were enacted first in these midnight silences of the dulwich woodland. here, too, as the poet once declared, he came to know the serene beauty of dawn: for every now and again, after having read late, or written long, he would steal quietly from the house, and walk till the morning twilight graded to the pearl and amber of the new day. as in childhood the glow of distant london had affected him to a pleasure that was not without pain, perhaps to a pain rather that was a fine delirium, so in his early manhood the neighbourhood of the huge city, felt in those midnight walks of his, and apprehended more by the transmutive shudder of reflected glare thrown fadingly upward against the stars, than by any more direct vision or even far-borne indeterminate hum, dominated his imagination. at that distance, in those circumstances, humanity became more human. and with the thought, the consciousness of this imperative kinship, arose the vague desire, the high resolve to be no curious dilettante in novel literary experiments, but to compel an interpretative understanding of this complex human environment. those who knew the poet intimately are aware of the loving regard he always had for those nocturnal experiences: but perhaps few recognise how much we owe to the subtle influences of that congenial isolation he was wont to enjoy on fortunate occasions. it is not my intention--it would, obviously, be a futile one, if entertained--to attempt an analysis or elaborate criticism of the many poems, long and short, produced by robert browning. not one volume, but several, of this size, would have to be allotted to the adequate performance of that end. moreover, if readers are unable or unwilling to be their own expositors, there are several trustworthy hand-books which are easily procurable. some one, i believe, has even, with unselfish consideration for the weaker brethren, turned "sordello" into prose--a superfluous task, some scoffers may exclaim. personally, i cannot but think this craze for the exposition of poetry, this passion for "dissecting a rainbow," is harmful to the individual as well as humiliating to the high office of poetry itself, and not infrequently it is ludicrous. i must be content with a few words anent the more important or significant poems, and in due course attempt an estimate by a broad synthesis, and not by cumulative critical analyses. in the selection of paracelsus as the hero of his first mature poem, browning was guided first of all by his keen sympathy with the scientific spirit--the spirit of dauntless inquiry, of quenchless curiosity, of a searching enthusiasm. pietro of abano, giordano bruno, galileo, were heroes whom he regarded with an admiration which would have been boundless but for the wise sympathy which enabled him to apprehend and understand their weaknesses as well as their lofty qualities. once having come to the conclusion that paracelsus was a great and much maligned man, it was natural for him to wish to portray aright the features he saw looming through the mists of legend and history. but over and above this, he half unwittingly, half consciously, felt the fascination of that mysticism associated with the name of the celebrated german scientist--a mysticism, in all its various phases, of which he is now acknowledged to be the subtlest poetic interpreter in our language, though, profound as its attraction always was for him, never was poet with a more exquisite balance of intellectual sanity. latest research has proved that whatsoever of a pretender paracelsus may have been in certain respects, he was unquestionably a man of extraordinary powers: and, as a pioneer in a science of the first magnitude of importance, deserving of high honour. if ever the famous german attain a high place in the history of the modern intellectual movement in europe, it will be primarily due to browning's championship. but of course the extent or shallowness of paracelsus' claim is a matter of quite secondary interest. we are concerned with the poet's presentment of the man--of that strange soul whom he conceived of as having anticipated so far, and as having focussed all the vagrant speculations of the day into one startling beam of light, now lambently pure, now lurid with gross constituents.[ ] [footnote : paracelsus has two particular claims upon our regard. he gave us laudanum, a discovery of incalculable blessing to mankind. and from his fourth baptismal name, which he inherited from his father, we have our familiar term, 'bombast.' readers interested in the known facts concerning the "master-mind, the thinker, the explorer, the creator," the forerunner of mesmer and even of darwin and wallace, who began life with the sounding appellation "philippus aureolus theophrastus bombastus ab hohenheim," should consult browning's own learned appendical note, and mr. berdoe's interesting essay in the browning society papers, no. xlix.] paracelsus, his friends festus and his wife michal, and aprile, an italian poet, are the characters who are the personal media through which browning's already powerful genius found expression. the poem is, of a kind, an epic: the epic of a brave soul striving against baffling circumstance. it is full of passages of rare technical excellence, as well as of conceptive beauty: so full, indeed, that the sympathetic reader of it as a drama will be too apt to overlook its radical shortcomings, cast as it is in the dramatic mould. but it must not be forgotten that browning himself distinctly stated he had attempted to write "a poem, not a drama": and in the light of this simple statement half the objections that have been made fall to the ground. paracelsus is the protagonist: the others are merely incidental. the poem is the soul-history of the great medical student who began life so brave of aspect and died so miserably at salzburg: but it is also the history of a typical human soul, which can be read without any knowledge of actual particulars. aprile is a projection of the poet's own poetical ideal. he speaks, but he does not live as festus lives, or even as michal, who, by the way, is interesting as being the first in the long gallery of browning's women--a gallery of superbly-drawn portraits, of noble and striking and always intensely human women, unparalleled except in shakspere. pauline, of course, exists only as an abstraction, and porphyria is in no exact sense a portrait from the life. yet michal can be revealed only to the sympathetic eye, for she is not drawn, but again and again suddenly silhouetted. we see her in profile always: but when she exclaims at the last, "i ever did believe," we feel that she has withdrawn the veil partially hiding her fair and generous spirit. to the lover of poetry "paracelsus" will always be a golconda. it has lines and passages of extraordinary power, of a haunting beauty, and of a unique and exquisite charm. it may be noted, in exemplification of browning's artistic range, that in the descriptive passages he paints as well in the elaborate pre-raphaelite method as with a broad synthetic touch: as in "one old populous green wall tenanted by the ever-busy flies, grey crickets and shy lizards and quick spiders, each family of the silver-threaded moss-- which, look through near, this way, and it appears a stubble-field or a cane-brake, a marsh of bulrush whitening in the sun...." but oftener he prefers the more succinct method of landscape-painting, the broadest impressionism: as in "past the high rocks the haunts of doves, the mounds of red earth from whose sides strange trees grow out, past tracks of milk-white minute blinding sand." and where in modern poetry is there a superber union of the scientific and the poetic vision than in this magnificent passage--the quintessence of the poet's conception of the rapture of life:-- "the centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, and the earth changes like a human face; the molten ore bursts up among the rocks, winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright in hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask-- god joys therein. the wroth sea's waves are edged with foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, when in the solitary waste, strange groups of young volcanoes come up, cyclops-like, staring together with their eyes on flame-- god tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: but spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes over its breast to waken it, rare verdure buds tenderly upon rough banks, between the withered tree-rests and the cracks of frost, like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; the grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms like chrysalids impatient for the air, the shining dorrs are busy, beetles run along the furrows, ants make their ado; above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark soars up and up, shivering for very joy; afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls flit where the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets; savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain--and god renews his ancient rapture." in these lines, particularly in their close, is manifest the influence of the noble hebraic poetry. it must have been at this period that browning conned over and over with an exultant delight the simple but lordly diction of isaiah and the other prophets, preferring this biblical poetry to that even of his beloved greeks. there is an anecdote of his walking across a public park (i am told richmond, but more probably it was wimbledon common) with his hat in his left hand and his right waving to and fro declamatorily, while the wind blew his hair around his head like a nimbus: so rapt in his ecstasy over the solemn sweep of the biblical music that he did not observe a small following consisting of several eager children, expectant of thrilling stump-oratory. he was just the man, however, to accept an anti-climax genially, and to dismiss his disappointed auditory with something more tangible than an address. the poet-precursor of scientific knowledge is again and again manifest: as, for example, in "hints and previsions of which faculties are strewn confusedly everywhere about the inferior natures, and all lead up higher, all shape out dimly the superior race, the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, and man appears at last."[ ] [footnote : readers interested in browning's inspiration from, and treatment of, science, should consult the excellent essay on him as "a scientific poet" by mr. edward berdoe, f.r.c.s., and, in particular, compare with the originals the references given by mr. berdoe to the numerous passages bearing upon evolution and the several sciences, from astronomy to physiology.] there are lines, again, which have a magic that cannot be defined. if it be not felt, no sense of it can be conveyed through another's words. "whose memories were a solace to me oft, as mountain-baths to wild fowls in their flight." "ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once into the vast and unexplored abyss, what full-grown power informs her from the first, why she not marvels, strenuously beating the silent boundless regions of the sky." there is one passage, beautiful in itself, which has a pathetic significance henceforth. gordon, our most revered hero, was wont to declare that nothing in all nonscriptural literature was so dear to him, nothing had so often inspired him in moments of gloom:-- "i go to prove my soul! i see my way as birds their trackless way. i shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, i ask not: but unless god send his hail or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, in some time, his good time, i shall arrive: he guides me and the bird. in his good time." as for the much misused 'shaksperian' comparison, so often mistakenly applied to browning, there is nothing in "paracelsus" in the least way derivative. because shakspere is the greatest genius evolved from our race, it does not follow that every lofty intellect, every great objective poet, should be labelled "shaksperian." but there is a certain quality in poetic expression which we so specify, because the intense humanity throbbing in it finds highest utterance in the greatest of our poets: and there is at least one instance of such poignant speech in "paracelsus," worthy almost to be ranked with the last despairing cry of guido calling upon murdered pompilia:-- "festus, strange secrets are let out by death who blabs so oft the follies of this world: and i am death's familiar, as you know. i helped a man to die, some few weeks since, warped even from his go-cart to one end-- the living on princes' smiles, reflected from a mighty herd of favourites. no mean trick he left untried, and truly well-nigh wormed all traces of god's finger out of him: then died, grown old. and just an hour before, having lain long with blank and soulless eyes, he sat up suddenly, and with natural voice said that in spite of thick air and closed doors god told him it was june; and he knew well without such telling, harebells grew in june; and all that kings could ever give or take would not be precious as those blooms to him." technically, i doubt if browning ever produced any finer long poem, except "pippa passes," which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a 'play' nor exactly a 'poem' in the conventional usage of the terms. artistically, "paracelsus" is disproportionate, and has faults, obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear: but in the main it has a beauty without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous pressure of ideas or stammering. it has not, in like degree, the intense human insight of, say, "the inn album," but it has that charm of sequent excellence too rarely to be found in many of browning's later writings. it glides onward like a steadfast stream, the thought moving with the current it animates and controls, and throbbing eagerly beneath. when we read certain portions of "paracelsus," and the lovely lyrics interspersed in it, it is difficult not to think of the poet as sometimes, in later life, stooping like the mariner in roscoe's beautiful sonnet, striving to reclaim "some loved lost echo from the fleeting strand." but it is the fleeting shore of exquisite art, not of the far-reaching shadowy capes and promontories of "the poetic land." of the four interlusive lyrics the freer music is in the unique chant, "over the sea our galleys went:" a song full of melody and blithe lilt. it is marvellously pictorial, and yet has a freedom that places it among the most delightful of spontaneous lyrics:-- "we shouted, every man of us, and steered right into the harbour thus, with pomp and pæan glorious." it is, however, too long for present quotation, and as an example of browning's early lyrics i select rather the rich and delicate second of these "paracelsus" songs, one wherein the influence of keats is so marked, and yet where all is the poet's own:-- "heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes of labdanum, and aloe-balls, smeared with dull nard an indian wipes from out her hair: such balsam falls down sea-side mountain pedestals, from tree-tops where tired winds are fain, spent with the vast and howling main, to treasure half their island-gain. "and strew faint sweetness from some old egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud which breaks to dust when once unrolled; or shredded perfume, like a cloud from closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung, mouldering her lute and books among, as when a queen, long dead, was young." with this music in our ears we can well forgive some of the prosaic commonplaces which deface "paracelsus"--some of those lapses from rhythmic energy to which the poet became less and less sensitive, till he could be so deaf to the vanishing "echo of the fleeting strand" as to sink to the level of doggerel such as that which closes the poem called "popularity." "paracelsus" is not a great, but it is a memorable poem: a notable achievement, indeed, for an author of browning's years. well may we exclaim with festus, when we regard the poet in all the greatness of his maturity-- "the sunrise well warranted our faith in this full noon!" chapter iv. the _athenæum_ dismissed "paracelsus" with a half contemptuous line or two. on the other hand, the _examiner_ acknowledged it to be a work of unequivocal power, and predicted for its author a brilliant career. the same critic who wrote this review contributed an article of about twenty pages upon "paracelsus" to the _new monthly magazine_, under the heading, "evidences of a new dramatic poetry." this article is ably written, and remarkable for its sympathetic insight. "mr. browning," the critic writes, "is a man of genius, he has in himself all the elements of a great poet, philosophical as well as dramatic." the author of this enthusiastic and important critique was john forster. when the _examiner_ review appeared the two young men had not met: but the encounter, which was to be the seed of so fine a flower of friendship, occurred before the publication of the _new monthly_ article. before this, however, browning had already made one of the most momentous acquaintanceships of his life. his good friend and early critic, mr. fox, asked him to his house one evening in november, a few months after the publication of "paracelsus." the chief guest of the occasion was macready, then at the height of his great reputation. mr. fox had paved the way for the young poet, but the moment he entered he carried with him his best recommendation. every one who met browning in those early years of his buoyant manhood seems to have been struck by his comeliness and simple grace of manner. macready stated that he looked more like a poet than any man he had ever met. as a young man he appears to have had a certain ivory delicacy of colouring, what an old friend perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly described to me as an almost flower-like beauty, which passed ere long into a less girlish and more robust complexion. he appeared taller than he was, for he was not above medium height, partly because of his rare grace of movement, and partly from a characteristic high poise of the head when listening intently to music or conversation. even then he had that expressive wave o' the hand, which in later years was as full of various meanings as the _ecco_ of an italian. a swift alertness pervaded him, noticeable as much in the rapid change of expression, in the deepening and illuming colours of his singularly expressive eyes, and in his sensitive mouth, with the upper lip ever so swift to curve or droop in response to the most fluctuant emotion, as in his greyhound-like apprehension, which so often grasped the subject in its entirety before its propounder himself realised its significance. a lady, who remembers browning at that time, has told me that his hair--then of a brown so dark as to appear black--was so beautiful in its heavy sculpturesque waves as to attract frequent notice. another, and more subtle, personal charm was his voice, then with a rare flute-like tone, clear, sweet, and resonant. afterwards, though always with precise clarity, it became merely strong and hearty, a little too loud sometimes, and not infrequently as that of one simulating keen immediate interest while the attention was almost wholly detached. macready, in his journal,[ ] about a week later than the date of his first meeting with the poet, wrote--"read 'paracelsus,' a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, and diction, but occasionally obscure: the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time." the tragedian's house, whither he went at week-ends and on holidays, was at elstree, a short distance to the northward of hampstead: and there he invited browning, among other friends, to come on the last day of december and spend new year's day ( ).[ ] when alluding, in after years, to this visit, browning always spoke of it as one of the red-letter days of his life. it was here he first met forster, with whom he at once formed what proved to be an enduring friendship; and on this occasion, also, that he was urged by his host to write a poetic play. [footnote : for many interesting particulars concerning macready and browning, and the production of "strafford," etc., _vide_ the _reminiscences_, vol. i.] [footnote : it was for macready's eldest boy, william charles, that browning wrote one of the most widely popular of his poems, "the pied piper of hamelin." it is said to have been an impromptu performance, and to have been so little valued by the author that he hesitated about its inclusion in "bells and pomegranates." it was inserted at the last moment, in the third number, which was short of "copy." some one (anonymous, but whom i take to be mr. nettleship) has publicly alluded to his possession of a rival poem (entitled, simply, "hamelin") by robert browning the elder, and of a letter which he had sent to a friend along with the verses, in which he writes: "before i knew that robert had begun the story of the 'rats' i had contemplated a tale on the same subject, and proceeded with it as far as you see, but, on hearing that robert had a similar one on hand, i desisted." this must have been in , for it was in that year that the third part of _bells and pomegranates_ was published. in , however, he finished it. browning's "pied piper" has been translated into french, russian, italian, and german. the latter (or one german) version is in prose. it was made in , for a special purpose, and occupied the whole of one number of the local paper of hameln, which is a quaint townlet in hanover.] browning promised to consider the suggestion. six weeks later, in company with forster, with whom he had become intimate, he called upon macready, to discuss the plot of a tragedy which he had pondered. he told the tragedian how deeply he had been impressed by his performance of "othello," and how this had deflected his intention from a modern and european to an oriental and ancient theme. "browning said that i had _bit_ him by my performance of 'othello,' and i told him i hoped i should make the blood come." the "blood" had come in the guise of a drama-motive based on the crucial period in the career of narses, the eunuch-general of justinian. macready liked the suggestion, though he demurred to one or two points in the outline: and before browning left he eagerly pressed him to "go on with 'narses.'" but whether browning mistrusted his own interest in the theme, or was dubious as to the success with which macready would realise his conception, or as to the reception a play of such a nature would win from an auditory no longer reverent of high dramatic ideals, he gave up the idea. some three months later (may th) he enjoyed another eventful evening. it was the night of the first performance of talfourd's "ion," and he was among the personal friends of macready who were invited to the supper at talfourd's rooms. after the fall of the curtain, browning, forster, and other friends sought the tragedian and congratulated him upon the success both of the play and of his impersonation of the chief character. they then adjourned to the house of the author of "ion." to his surprise and gratification browning found himself placed next but one to his host, and immediately opposite macready, who sat between two gentlemen, one calm as a summer evening, and the other with a tempestuous youth dominating his sixty years, whom the young poet at once recognised as wordsworth and walter savage landor. every one was in good spirits: the host perhaps most of all, who was celebrating his birthday as well as the success of "ion." possibly macready was the only person who felt at all bored--unless it was landor--for wordsworth was not, at such a function, an entertaining conversationalist. there is much significance in the succinct entry in macready's journal concerning the lake-poet--"wordsworth, who pinned me." ... when talfourd rose to propose the toast of "the poets of england" every one probably expected that wordsworth would be named to respond. but with a kindly grace the host, after flattering remarks upon the two great men then honouring him by sitting at his table, coupled his toast with the name of the youngest of the poets of england--"mr. robert browning, the author of 'paracelsus.'" it was a very proud moment for browning, singled out among that brilliant company: and it is pleasant to know, on the authority of miss mitford, who was present, that "he performed his task with grace and modesty," looking, the amiable lady adds, even younger than he was. perhaps, however, he was prouder still when wordsworth leaned across the table, and with stately affability said, "i am proud to drink your health, mr. browning:" when landor, also, with a superbly indifferent and yet kindly smile, also raised his glass to his lips in courteous greeting. of wordsworth browning saw not a little in the ensuing few years, for on the rare visits the elderly poet paid to london, talfourd never failed to ask the author of "paracelsus," for whom he had a sincere admiration, to meet the great man. it was not in the nature of things that the two poets could become friends, but though the younger was sometimes annoyed by the elder's pooh-poohing his republican sympathies, and contemptuously waiving aside as a mere nobody no less an individual than shelley, he never failed of respect and even reverence. with what tenderness and dignity he has commemorated the great poet's falling away from his early ideals, may be seen in "the lost leader," one of the most popular of browning's short poems, and likely to remain so. for several reasons, however, it is best as well as right that wordsworth should not be more than merely nominally identified with the lost leader. browning was always imperative upon this point. towards landor, on the other hand, he entertained a sentiment of genuine affection, coupled with a profound sympathy and admiration: a sentiment duly reciprocated. the care of the younger for the elder, in the old age of the latter, is one of the most beautiful incidents in a beautiful life. but the evening was not to pass without another memorable incident, one to which we owe "strafford," and probably "a blot on the 'scutcheon." just as the young poet, flushed with the triumphant pleasure of the evening, was about to leave, macready arrested him by a friendly grip of the arm. in unmistakable earnestness he asked browning to write him a play. with a simplicity equal to the occasion, the poet contented himself with replying, "shall it be historical and english? what do you say to a drama on strafford?" macready was pleased with the idea, and hopeful that his friend would be more successful with the english statesman than with the eunuch narses. a few months elapsed before the poet, who had set aside the long work upon which he was engaged ("sordello"), called upon macready with the manuscript of "strafford." the latter hoped much from it. in march the ms. was ready. about the end of the month macready took it to covent garden theatre, and read it to mr. osbaldiston, "who caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay." it was an eventful first of may--an eventful twelvemonth, indeed, for it was the initial year of the victorian era, notable, too, as that wherein the electric telegraph was established, and, in letters, wherein a new dramatic literature had its origin. for "strafford," already significant of a novel movement, and destined, it seems to me, to be still more significant in that great dramatic period towards which we are fast converging, was not less important to the drama in england, as a new departure in method and radically indicative of a fresh standpoint, than "hernani" was in france. but in literary history the day itself is doubly memorable, for in the forenoon carlyle gave the first of his lectures in london. the play was a success, despite the shamefully inadequate acting of some of those entrusted with important parts. there was once, perhaps there were more occasions than one, where success poised like the soul of a mohammedan on the invisible thread leading to paradise, but on either side of which lies perdition. there was none to cry _timbul_ save macready, except miss helen faucit, who gained a brilliant triumph as lady carlisle. the part of charles i. was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again within measurable distance. "the younger vane" ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house. there was not even any extraneous aid to a fortunate impression. the house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the "scenery" commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid. but in the face of all this, a triumph was secured. for a brief while macready believed that the star of regeneration had arisen. unfortunately 'twas, in the words of a contemporary dramatic poet, "a rising sorrow splendidly forlorn." the financial condition of covent garden theatre was so ruinous that not even the most successful play could have restored its doomed fortunes. after the fifth night one of the leading actors, having received a better offer elsewhere, suddenly withdrew. this was the last straw. a collapse forthwith occurred. in the scramble for shares in the few remaining funds every one gained something, except the author, who was to have received £ for each performance for the first twenty-five nights, and, £ each for ten nights further. this disaster was a deep disappointment to browning, and a by no means transitory one, for three or four years later he wrote (_advt._ of "bells and pomegranates"): "two or three years ago i wrote a play, about which the chief matter i much care to recollect at present is, that a pitful of good-natured people applauded it. ever since, i have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention." but, except in so far as its abrupt declension from the stage hurt its author in the eyes of the critics, and possibly in those of theatrical managers, "strafford" was certainly no failure. it has the elements of a great acting play. everything, even the language (and here was a stumbling-block with most of the critics and criticasters), was subordinated to dramatic exigencies: though the subordination was in conformity with a novel shaping method. "strafford" was not, however, allowed to remain unknown to those who had been unable to visit covent garden theatre.[ ] browning's name had quite sufficient literary repute to justify a publisher in risking the issue of a drama by him; one, at any rate, that had the advantage of association with macready's name. the longmans issued it, and the author had the pleasure of knowing that his third poetic work was not produced at the expense of a relative, but at that of the publishers. it had but an indifferent reception, however. [footnote : "it is time to deny a statement that has been repeated _ad nauseam_ in every notice that professes to give an account of mr. browning's career. whatever is said or not said, it is always that his plays have 'failed' on the stage. in point of fact, the three plays which he has brought out have all succeeded, and have owed it to fortuitous circumstances that their tenure on the boards has been comparatively short."--e.w. gosse, in article in _the century magazine._] most people who saw the performance of "strafford" given in , under the auspices of the browning society, were surprised as well as impressed: for few, apparently, had realised from perusal the power of the play as made manifest when acted. the secret of this is that the drama, when privily read, seems hard if not heavy in its diction, and to be so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple, as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of shakspere out of the question. but when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed. its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught with the utmost it can convey. the outlines which disturbed us by their vagueness become more clear: in a word, we all see in enactment what only a few of us can discern in perusal. the play has its faults, but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic, because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops. but there are dramatic faults--primarily, in the extreme economy of the author in the presentment of his _dramatis personæ_, who are embodied abstractions--monomaniacs of ideas, as some one has said of hugo's personages--rather than men as we are, with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion. one cardinal fault is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection to its popular acceptance. another, is the misproportionate length of some of the speeches. once again, there is, as in the greater portion of browning's longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis. the conception of charles i. is not only obviously weak, but strangely prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as browning. for what a fellow-dramatist calls this "sunset shadow of a king," no man or woman could abase every hope and energy. shakspere would never have committed the crucial mistake of making charles the despicable deformity he is in browning's drama. strafford himself disappears too soon: in the fourth act there is the vacuum abhorred of dramatic propriety. when he again comes on the scene, the charm is partly broken. but withal the play is one of remarkable vigour and beauty. it seems to me that too much has been written against it on the score of its metrical rudeness. the lines are beat out by a hammer, but in the process they are wrought clear of all needless alloy. to urge, as has been lately urged, that it lacks all human touch and is a mere intellectual fanfaronade, and that there is not once a line of poignant insight, is altogether uncritical. readers of this mind must have forgotten or be indifferent to those lines, for example, where the wretched charles stammeringly excuses himself to his loyal minister for his death-warrant, crying out that it was wrung from him, and begging strafford not to curse him: or, again, that wonderfully significant line, so full of a too tardy knowledge and of concentrated scorn, where strafford first begs the king to "be good to his children," and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores, "stay, sir, do not promise, do not swear!" the whole of the second scene in the fifth act is pure genius. the reader, or spectator, knows by this time that all hope is over: that strafford, though all unaware, is betrayed and undone. it is a subtle dramatic ruse, that of browning's representing him sitting in his apartment in the tower with his young children, william and anne, blithely singing. can one read and ever forget the lines giving the gay italian rhyme, with the boy's picturesquely childish prose-accompaniment? strafford is seated, weary and distraught:-- "_o bell'andare per barca in mare, verso la sera di primavera!_ _william_. the boat's in the broad moonlight all this while-- _verso la sera di primavera!_ and the boat shoots from underneath the moon into the shadowy distance; only still you hear the dipping oar-- _verso la sera,_ and faint, and fainter, and then all's quite gone, music and light and all, like a lost star. _anne_. but you should sleep, father: you were to sleep. _strafford_. i do sleep, anne; or if not--you must know there's such a thing as ... _william_. you're too tired to sleep. _strafford_. it will come by-and-by and all day long, in that old quiet house i told you of: we sleep safe there. _anne_. why not in ireland? _strafford_. no! too many dreams!--" to me this children's-song and the fleeting and now plaintive echo of it, as "voices from within"--"_verso la sera, di primavera_"--in the terrible scene where strafford learns his doom, is only to be paralleled by the song of mariana in "measure for measure," wherein, likewise, is abduced in one thrilling poignant strain the quintessential part of the tense life of the whole play. so much has been written concerning the dramas of robert browning--though indeed there is still room for a volume of careful criticism, dealing solely with this theme--that i have the less regret in having so inadequately to pass in review works of such poetic magnitude as those enumerated above. but it would be impossible, in so small a book as this, to examine them in detail without incurring a just charge of misproportion. the greatness and the shortcomings of the dramas and dramatic poems must be noted as succinctly as practicable; and i have dwelt more liberally upon "pauline," "paracelsus," and "strafford," partly because (certainly without more than one exception, "sordello") these are the three least read of browning's poems, partly because they indicate the sweep and reach of his first orient eagle-flight through new morning-skies, and mainly because in them we already find browning at his best and at his weakest, because in them we hear not only the rush of his sunlit pinions, but also the low earthward surge of dullard wings. browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps no other poet has been to like extent. in the "venus and adonis," and the "rape of lucrece," we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of "hamlet," "othello," and "macbeth"; had shakspere died prematurely none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence, the immortal fruit of his maturity. but, in browning's three earliest works, we clearly discern him, as the sculptor of melos provisioned his venus in the rough-hewn block. thenceforth, to change the imagery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines, or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established. in the consideration of browning's dramas it is needful to be sure of one's vantage for judgment. the first step towards this assurance is the ablation of the chronic shaksperian comparison. primarily, the shaping spirit of the time wrought shakspere and browning to radically divergent methods of expression, but each to a method in profound harmony with the dominant sentiment of the age in which he lived. above all others, the elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure, of the mind as well as of the body, and above all others, save that of the renaissance in italy, animated by a passionate curiosity. so, too, supremely, the victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast titanic struggles of the human spirit to reach those gates of truth whose lowest steps are the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan, by piling ossas of searching speculation upon pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge. the highest exemplar of the former is shakspere, browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter. to achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashion a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete individualities. the one reveals individual life to us by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light. the elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction, compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity, as by the spectrum analysis. the one, again, fulfils his aim by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection of vital details: the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis. in a word, shakspere works as with the clay of human action: browning as with the clay of human thought. as for the difference in value of the two methods it is useless to dogmatise. the psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable only so far as it is convincingly true. the profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities of depth. the physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety, barely ever even its profile. the utmost we can expect to reproduce, perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment, is a partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette. as no human being has ever seen his or her own soul, in all its rounded completeness of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of what is temporal and perishable and what is germinal and essential, how can we expect even the subtlest analyst to adequately depict other souls than his own. it is browning's high distinction that he has this soul-depictive faculty--restricted as even in his instance it perforce is--to an extent unsurpassed by any other poet, ancient or modern. as a sympathetic critic has remarked, "his stage is not the visible phenomenal england (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle, as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this." no doubt there is "a certain crudeness in the manner in which these naked souls are presented," not only in "strafford" but elsewhere in the plays. browning markedly has the defects of his qualities. as part of his method, it should be noted that his real trust is upon monologue rather than upon dialogue. to one who works from within outward--in contradistinction to the shaksperian method of striving to win from outward forms "the passion and the life whose fountains are within"--the propriety of this dramatic means can scarce be gainsaid. the swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly than by the most electric succinct dialogue. again and again browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking, he transcends in this dramatic method. at the same time, none must take it for granted that the author of the "blot on the 'scutchcon," "luria," "in a balcony," is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense. above all, indeed--as mr. walter pater has said--his is the poetry of situations. in each of the _dramatis personæ_, one of the leading characteristics is loyalty to a dominant ideal. in strafford's case it is that of unswerving devotion to the king: in mildred's and in thorold's, in the "blot on the 'scutcheon," it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (lord tresham, it may be added, is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all browning's "monomaniacs"): in valence's, in "colombe's birthday," to chivalric love: in charles, in "king victor and king charles," to kingly and filial duty: in anael's and djabal's, in "the return of the druses," respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism: in chiappino's, in "a soul's tragedy," to purely sordid ambition: in luria's, to noble steadfastness: and in constance's, in "in a balcony," to self-denial. of these plays, "the return of the druses" seems to me the most picturesque, "luria" the most noble and dignified, and "in a balcony" the most potentially a great dramatic success. the last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the funeral march in beethoven's _eroica_ symphony. the "blot on the 'scutcheon" has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous "clearing the ground" by syncope and suicide. another is the juvenility of mildred:--a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of king victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. more disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer, she, like the typical young _miss anglaise_ of certain french novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect, "what, you've murdered my lover! well, tell me all. pardon? oh, well, i pardon you: at least i _think_ i do. thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!" i am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one, but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius which could be indicated. even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, "there's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest," is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. no wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. it is with diffidence i take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of mildred and mertoun, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance, that i find myself at variance with mr. skelton, who speaks of the drama as "one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies in the language." in the instance of luria, that second othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution: the death of anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds. but thorold's suicide is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and mildred's broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician. "colombe's birthday" has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader's more or less acute perception of the radical divergence, for all valence's greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young duchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity. though "a soul's tragedy" has the saving quality of humour, it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of laughter. in each of these plays[ ] the lover of browning will recall passage after passage of superbly dramatic effect. but supreme in his remembrance will be the wonderful scene in "the return of the druses," where the prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated; and that where anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails djabal as _hakeem_--as divine--and therewith falls dead at his feet. nor will he forget that where, in the "blot on the 'scutcheon," mildred, with a dry sob in her throat, stammeringly utters-- "i--i--was so young! besides i loved him, thorold--and i had no mother; god forgot me: so i fell----" or that where, "at end of the disastrous day," luria takes the phial of poison from his breast, muttering-- "strange! this is all i brought from my own land to help me." [footnote : "strafford," ; "king victor and king charles," ; "the return of the druses," and "a blot on the 'scutcheon," ; "colombe's birthday," ; "luria," and "a soul's tragedy," .] before passing on from these eight plays to browning's most imperishable because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, "pippa passes," and to "sordello," that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, i should like--out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details--to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present theme. one is that the song in "a blot on the 'scutcheon," "there's a woman like a dew-drop," written several years before the author's meeting with elizabeth barrett, is so closely in the style of "lady geraldine's courtship," and other ballads by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that mertoun's song to mildred was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape one of mrs. browning's best-known poems. the further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment of the dedication to him of "luria," which landor sent to browning--lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age:-- "shakespeare is not our poet but the world's, therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, browning! since chaucer was alive and hale no man has walked along our roads with step so active, so enquiring eye, or tongue so varied in discourse. but warmer climes give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze of alpine heights thou playest with, borne on beyond sorrento and amalfi, where the siren waits thee, singing song for song." chapter v. in my allusion to "pippa passes," towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of browning's dramatic poems, i would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. it seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. it can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. it has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of leonardo da vinci in the latin epitaph of platino piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. by its side, the more obviously "profound" poems, bishop blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics. the art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest. whenever Æschylus, dante, shakspere, milton, are at white heat they require no exposition, but meditation only--the meditation akin to the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable, and passionately eager of soul, to hearth-side tragedies. the play of genius is like the movement of the sea. it has its solemn rhythm: its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight: its surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all, the deep oceanic music. there are, of course, many to whom the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway and as the nursery of the winds and rains. for them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. to them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. the "profundity" of browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. there is more profound insight in blake's song of innocence, "piping down the valleys wild," or in wordsworth's line, "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," or in keats' single verse, "there is a budding morrow in midnight," or in this quatrain on poetry, by a young living poet-- "she comes like the husht beauty of the night, but sees too deep for laughter; her touch is a vibration and a light from worlds before and after--" there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries of "sludge the medium" literature. mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. _de profundis,_ indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his "volatile essence" to a living rhythmic joy. in this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. he may learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. if wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul there can be no "far ken" for him. here it seems apt to point out that browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy german student, the shadowy schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. has he done wondering at men?--there's god to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one." this wonder is akin to that 'insanity' of the poet which is but impassioned sanity. plato sums the matter when he says, "he who, having no touch of the muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, i say, and his poetry, are not admitted." in that same wood beyond dulwich to which allusion has already been made, the germinal motive of "pippa passes" flashed upon the poet. no wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places, and that he lamented its disappearance as fervently as ruskin bewailed the encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar upon the wooded privacies of denmark hill. save for a couple of brief visits abroad, browning spent the years, between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage, in london and the neighbourhood. occasionally he took long walks into the country. one particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances and the mood concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space upon his recumbent body. i have heard him say that his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a seminole or an iroquois: he saw and watched everything, the bird on the wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth. these were his golden holidays. much of the rest of his time, when not passed in his room in his father's house, where he wrote his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily, was spent in the library of the british museum, in an endless curiosity into the more or less unbeaten tracks of literature. these london experiences were varied by whole days spent at the national gallery, and in communion with kindred spirits. at one time he had rooms, or rather a room, in the immediate neighbourhood of the strand, whither he could go when he wished to be in town continuously for a time, or when he had any social or theatrical engagement. browning's life at this period was distraught by more than one episode of the heart. it would be strange were it otherwise. he had in no ordinary degree a rich and sensuous nature, and his responsiveness was so quick that the barriers of prudence were apt to be as shadowy to him as to the author of "the witch of atlas." but he was the earnest student for the most part, and, above all, the poet. his other pleasure, in his happy vagrant days, was to join company with any tramps, gipsies, or other wayfarers, and in good fellowship gain much knowledge of life that was useful at a later time. rustic entertainments, particularly peripatetic "theatres royal," had a singular fascination for him, as for that matter had rustic oratory, whether of the alehouse or the pulpit. at one period he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds: and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother because of his nomad propensities in search of "_pastors_ new." there was even a time when he seriously deliberated whether he should not combine literature and religious ministry, as faraday combined evangelical fervour with scientific enthusiasm. "'twas a girl with eyes like two dreams of night" that saved him from himself, and defrauded the church independent of a stalwart orator. it was, as already stated, while he strolled through dulwich wood one day that the thought occurred to him which was to find development and expression in "pippa passes." "the image flashed upon him," writes his intimate friend, mrs. sutherland orr, "of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of asolo, felippa or pippa." it has always seemed to me a radical mistake to include "pippa passes" among browning's dramas. not only is it absolutely unactable, but essentially undramatic in the conventional sense. true dramatic writing concerns itself fundamentally with the apt conjunction of events, and the more nearly it approximates to the verity of life the more likely is it to be of immediate appeal. there is a _vraie vérité_ which only the poet, evolving from dramatic concepts rather than attempting to concentrate these in a quick, moving verisimilitude, can attempt. the passing hither and thither of pippa, like a beneficent fate, a wandering chorus from a higher amid the discordant medley of a lower world, changing the circumstances and even the natures of certain more or less heedless listeners by the wild free lilt of her happy song of innocence, is of this _vraie vérité_. it is so obviously true, spiritually, that it is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life. its very effectiveness is too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford to tamper further with the indifferent banalities of actual existence. the poet, unhampered by the exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely, and artistically, achieve an equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude, by means which are, or should be, beyond adoption by the dramatist proper. but over and above any 'nice discrimination,' "pippa passes" is simply a poem, a lyrical masque with interspersed dramatic episodes, and subsidiary interludes in prose. the suggestion recently made that it should be acted is a wholly errant one. the finest part of it is unrepresentable. the rest would consist merely of a series of tableaux, with conversational accompaniment. the opening scene, "the large mean airy chamber," where pippa, the little silk-winder from the mills at asolo, springs from bed, on her new year's day _festa_, and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true as it is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere: but how could it succeed on the stage? it is not merely that the monologue is too long: it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its purpose. it is the poet, not pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music, this strain of the "long blue solemn hours serenely flowing." the dramatic poet may occupy himself with that deeper insight, and the wider expression of it, which is properly altogether beyond the scope of the playwright. in a word, he may irradiate his theme with the light that never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby sacrifice aught of essential truth: but his comrade must see to it that he is content with the wide liberal air of the common day. the poetic alchemist may turn a sword into pure gold: the playwright will concern himself with the due usage of the weapon as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent value, no miraculous properties. what is permissible to blake, painting adam and eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from happily-perceived concrete facts to a glorified abstract concept. in this opening monologue the much-admired song, "all service ranks the same with god," is no song at all, properly, but simply a beautiful short poem. from the dramatist's point of view, could anything be more shaped for disaster than the second of the two stanzas?-- "say not 'a small event!' why 'small'? costs it more pain than this, ye call a 'great event,' should come to pass, than that? untwine me from the mass of deeds which make up life, one deed power shall fall short in or exceed!" the whole of this lovely prologue is the production of a dramatic poet, not of a poet writing a drama. on the other hand, i cannot agree with what i read somewhere recently--that sebald's song, at the opening of the most superb dramatic writing in the whole range of victorian literature, is, in the circumstances, wholly inappropriate. it seems to me entirely consistent with the character of ottima's reckless lover. he is akin to the gallant in one of dumas' romances, who lingered atop of the wall of the prison whence he was escaping in order to whistle the concluding bar of a blithe chanson of freedom. what is, dramatically, disastrous in the instance of mertoun singing "there's a woman like a dewdrop," when he ought to be seeking mildred's presence in profound stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the mouth of sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where he has passed the night with ottima, while her murdered husband lies stark in the adjoining room. it must, however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge of what is to follow. a conclusive objection to the drama as an actable play is that three of the four main episodes are fragmentary. we know nothing of the fate of luigi: we can but surmise the future of jules and phené: we know not how or when monsignor will see pippa righted. ottima and sebald reach a higher level in voluntary death than they ever could have done in life. it is quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. every one who knows browning at all knows "pippa passes." its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "the ring and the book" and "the inn album" can equal. its technique, moreover, is superb. from the outset of the tremendous episode of ottima and sebald, there is a note of tragic power which is almost overwhelming. who has not known what jakob boehme calls "the shudder of a divine excitement" when luca's murderer replies to his paramour, "morning? it seems to me a night with a sun added." how deep a note, again, is touched when sebald exclaims, in allusion to his murder of luca, that he was so "wrought upon," though here, it may be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more culminative cry of othello, "but being wrought, perplext in the extreme." still more profound a touch is that where ottima, daring her lover to the "one thing that must be done; you know what thing: come in and help to carry," says, with affected lightsomeness, "this dusty pane might serve for looking-glass," and simultaneously exclaims, as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "three, four--four grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror turns abruptly to sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe-- "is it so you said a plait of hair should wave across my neck? no--this way." who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning night"? "_ottima_. the day of it too, sebald! when heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat, its black-blue canopy suffered descend close on us both, to weigh down each to each, and smother up all life except our life. so lay we till the storm came. _sebald_. how it came! _ottima_. buried in woods we lay, you recollect; swift ran the searching tempest overhead; and ever and anon some bright white shaft burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, as if god's messenger thro' the close wood screen plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke the thunder like a whole sea overhead ----" surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic than this first part of "pippa passes." the strains which pippa sings here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic. there is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in "_give her but a least excuse to love me! when--where----_" no one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts ottima and sebald at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness, behind which is the narrow twilit backward way. "_ottima_. bind it thrice about my brow; crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, magnificent in sin. say that! _sebald_. i crown you my great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, magnificent.. [_from without is heard the voice of_ pippa _singing_--] the year's at the spring, and day's at the morn; morning's at seven; the hill-side's dew-pearled; the lark's on the wing; the snail's on the thorn: god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world! [pippa _passes_, _sebald_. god's in his heaven! do you hear that? who spoke?" this sweet voice of pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches luigi in his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches jules and phené when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the balance, reaches the prince of the church just when his conscience is sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial moment in the life of each. the ethical lesson of the whole poem is summed up in "all service ranks the same with god-- with god, whose puppets, best and worst, are we: there is no last nor first," and in "god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world!" "with god there is no lust of godhood," says rossetti in "hand and soul": _und so ist der blaue himmel grosser als jedes gewölk darin, und dauerhafter dazu_, meditates jean paul: "there can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the omnipresent and the omniscient," utters the oriental mystic. it is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and "dewy eve," in the wooded districts south of dulwich, at hatcham, and upon wimbledon common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song. here, too, it was, that carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by 'a beautiful youth,' who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest admirers. it was from the dulwich wood that, one afternoon in march, he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of luigi to his mother: here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with "notched and burning rim." he never forgot the bygone "sunsets and great stars" he saw in those days of his fervid youth. browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion i heard him smilingly add, to some one's vague assertion that in italy only was there any romance left, "ah, well, i should like to include poor old camberwell!" perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "pippa passes," of the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius-- "may's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights-- gone are they, but i have them in my soul!" there is all the distinction between "pippa passes" and "sordello" that there is between the venus of milos and a gigantic theban sphinx. the latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the _symmetria prisca_ of ideal sculpture. i have already alluded to "sordello" as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. this, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "i should do it justice," thereby meaning that i should eulogise it as a masterpiece. it is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling titan. that the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape towards high thinking. but it is monotonous as one of the enormous american inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight. the fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been browning's ruin here. there is one charge even yet too frequently made against "sordello," that of "obscurity." its interest may be found remote, its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not obscure. it is a moonlit plain compared with the "_silva oscura_" of the "divina commedia." surely this question of browning's obscurity was expelled to the limbo of dead stupidities when mr. swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of phoebus apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his "essay on chapman." too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our o'ertoppling extremes, "sordello" will be as little read as "the faerie queene," and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land--a continent with amaranth-haunted vales of tempe, where, as spenser says in one of the aeclogues of "the shepherd's calendar," they will there oftentimes "sitten as drouned in dreme." it has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. i know of no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so seductive. how can one explain paradoxes? there is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. _tutti ga, i so gusti, e mi go i mii_--"everybody follows his taste, and i follow mine," as the venetian saying, quoted by browning at the head of his rawdon brown sonnet, has it. all that need be known concerning the framework of "sordello," and of the real sordello himself, will be found in the various browning hand-books, in mr. nettleship's and other dissertations, and, particularly, in mrs. ball's most circumspect and able historical essay. it is sufficient here to say that while the sordello and palma of the poet are traceable in the cunizza and the strange comet-like sordello of the italian and provençal chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by dante set forth in leonine guise--_a guisa di leon quando si posa_--in the "purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. the sordello of browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid chronicles. sordello is a far more profound study than aprile in "paracelsus," in whom, however, he is obviously foreshadowed. the radical flaw in his nature is that indicated by goethe of heine, that "he had no heart." the poem is the narrative of his transcendent aspirations, and more or less futile accomplishment. it would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption of lines of singular beauty. readers familiar with the poem will recall passage after passage--among which there is probably none more widely known than the grandiose sunset lines:-- "that autumn eve was stilled: a last remains of sunset dimly burned o'er the far forests,--like a torch-flame turned by the wind back upon its bearer's hand in one long flare of crimson; as a brand, the woods beneath lay black." ... what haunting lines there are, every here and there--such as those of palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on elys, with her "few fine locks coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks sun-blanched the livelong summer," ... or these, "day by day new pollen on the lily-petal grows, and still more labyrinthine buds the rose----" or, once more, "a touch divine-- and the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod; visibly through his garden walketh god----" but, though sorely tempted, i must not quote further, save only the concluding lines of the unparalleled and impassioned address to dante:-- "dante, pacer of the shore where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume, or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope into a darkness quieted by hope; plucker of amaranths grown beneath god's eye in gracious twilights where his chosen lie----" * * * * * it is a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it. "sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control, "voluminously vast." it is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers. who can fail to sympathise with douglas jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a copy of "sordello." thomas powell, writing in , has chronicled the episode. a few lines, he says, put jerrold in a state of alarm. sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. at last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked. the perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying, "o god, i _am_ an idiot!" a little later, adds powell, when jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust "sordello" into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. he watched them intently while they read. when at last mrs. jerrold remarked, "i don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish," her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, "thank god, i am _not_ an idiot!" many friends of browning will remember his recounting this incident almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein: though he would never admit justification for such puzzlement. but more illustrious personages than douglas jerrold were puzzled by the poem. lord tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have admitted in bitterness of spirit: "there were only two lines in it that i understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, '_who will may hear sordello's story told_,' and '_who would has heard sordello's story told!_'" carlyle was equally candid: "my wife," he writes, "has read through 'sordello' without being able to make out whether 'sordello' was a man, or a city, or a book." in an article on this poem, in a french magazine, m. odysse barot quotes a passage where the poet says "god gave man two faculties"--and adds, "i wish while he was about it (_pendant qu'il était en train_) god had supplied another--viz., the power of understanding mr. browning." and who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful gilead p. beck, in "the golden butterfly": how, after "fifine at the fair," frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up "red cotton nightcap country," and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery. "his eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. then he arose, and solemnly cursed robert browning. and then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. 'i wish,' he said, 'that i could put the poet there too.'" one other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet. on his introduction to the chinese ambassador, as a "brother-poet," he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. the great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as "enigmatic." browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship. that he was himself aware of the shortcomings of "sordello" as a work of art is not disputable. in , mrs. orr says, he considered the advisability of "rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarising the contents of each 'book' in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story." the essential manliness of browning is evident in the famous dedication to the french critic milsand, who was among his early admirers. "my own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? i blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." whatever be the fate of "sordello," one thing pertinent to it shall survive: the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface--"my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study." the poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure. "vast as night," to borrow a simile from victor hugo, but, like night, innumerously starred. chapter vi. "pippa passes," "the ring and the book," "the inn album," these are browning's three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic plays. all are dramas in the exact sense, though the three i have named are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation. each reader must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the electric quality of the poet's genius: within the ken of his imagination he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling, complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than upon the conventional stage. the first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions. i understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of browning's poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from the vast tableland of "the ring and the book"; that thenceforth there was declension. but browning is not to be measured by common estimates. it is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or steal almost imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons. but with browning, as with shakspere, as with victor hugo, it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment. like balzac, like shakspere again, he has revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the sun westering athwart distant andes, the gold of sunrise is already flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of atlas. it is certain that "the ring and the book" is unique. even goethe's masterpiece had its forerunners, as in marlowe's "faustus," and its ambitious offspring, as in bailey's "festus." but is it a work of art? here is the only vital question which at present concerns us. it is altogether useless to urge, as so many admirers of browning do, that "the ring and the book" is as full of beauties as the sea is of waves. undeniably it is, having been written in the poet's maturity. but, to keep to the simile, has this epical poem the unity of ocean? does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes which wash from arctic to antarctic, through zones temperate and equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? if it have not this unity it is still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. and though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of comparative literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of time--not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is not clad in perfection, be it absolute or relative--for relative perfection there is, despite the apparent paradox. the mere bulk of "the ring and the book" is, in point of art, nothing. one day, after the publication of this poem, carlyle hailed the author with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony: "what a wonderful fellow you are, browning: you have written a whole series of 'books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" here, carlyle was at once right and wrong. the theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. but the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. here, as elsewhere, browning's real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. his triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that, notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. stress has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. again, in point of art, what significance has this? none. there is no reason why it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through fifteen or twenty. poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of hers, "tour-de-force." of the twelve parts--occupying in all about twenty-one thousand lines--the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of the implicated priest, caponsacchi, with the meditation of the pope, and with the pathetic utterance of pompilia. it is not a dramatic poem in the sense that "pippa passes" is, for its ten books (the first and twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues. "the ring and the book," in a word, consists, besides the two extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a poetic koh-i-noor. the square little italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its heavy type, which has now found a haven in oxford, was picked up by browning for a _lira_ (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall in the piazza san lorenzo at florence, one june day, . therein is set forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain count guido franceschini; and of that noble's trial, sentence, and doom. it is much the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of webster, ford, and other elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity of emotion and situation distinguishes the victorian dramatist from his predecessors. the story fascinated browning, who, having in this book and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the part of the individuals more or less directly concerned. the more he considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment, and early in he began the most ambitious work of his life. an enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as "one of the most extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature." but poetry is not mental gymnastics. all this insistence upon "extraordinary feats" is to be deprecated: it presents the poet as hercules, not as apollo: in a word, it is not criticism. the story is one of vulgar fraud and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in italy, in the picturesque rome and arezzo of two centuries ago. the old bourgeois couple, pietro and violante comparini, manage to wed their thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of arezzo. they expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and other tangible advantages. he, impoverished as he is, looks for a splendid dowry. no one thinks of the child-wife, pompilia. she becomes the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties stands revealed. count guido has a genius for domestic tyranny. pompilia suffers. when she is about to become a mother she determines to leave her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes. since the child is to be the inheritor of her parents' wealth, she will not leave it to the tender mercies of count guido. a young priest, a canon of arezzo, giuseppe caponsacchi, helps her to escape. in due course she gives birth to a son. she has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower. guido, who has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon the child's dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the darkness of night betakes himself to rome. he and his accomplices enter the house of pietro comparini and his wife, and, not content with slaying them, also murders pompilia. but they are discovered, and guido is caught red-handed. pompilia's evidence alone is damnatory, for she was not slain outright, and lingers long enough to tell her story. franceschini is not foiled yet, however. his plea is that he simply avenged the wrong done to him by his wife's adulterous connection with the priest caponsacchi. but even in the rome of that evil day justice was not extinct. guido's motive is proved to be false; he himself is condemned to death. an appeal to the pope is futile. finally, the wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy. there is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos in the fate of the innocent child-wife pompilia. it is clear, therefore, that the greatness of "the ring and the book" must depend even less upon its subject, its motive, than upon its being "an extraordinary feat" in the gymnastics of verse. in a sense, browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. both "the ring and the book" and "aurora leigh" are metrical novels. the one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. but there the parallel ends. if "the ring and the book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister "getting up" a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to, say, "the moonstone"; its author would be insignificant beside the ingenious m. gaboriau. the extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented upon. as neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment. to arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. one must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done or refrained from doing. "the ring and the book," as i have said, was not begun in the year of its imagining.[ ] it is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married period of less than fifteen years came to a close in . [footnote : the title is explained as follows:--"the story of the franceschini case, as mr. browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. the pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. the ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. mr. browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. it was too _hard_. it was 'pure crude fact,' secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. in its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. he supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. he breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise in what he set before them unadulterated human truth."--_mrs. orr_.] on the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the book from end to end. "a spirit laughed and leapt through every limb." the midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above vallombrosa and the whole valley of arno: and the air in florence was painfully sultry. the poet stood by himself on his terrace at casa guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime. "beneath i' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky when flame fell silently from cloud to cloud, richer than that gold snow jove rained on rhodes, the townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked, drinking the blackness in default of air-- a busy human sense beneath my feet: while in and out the terrace-plants, and round one branch of tall datura, waxed and waned the lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower." scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain essential details. the final food for the imagination was found in a pamphlet of which he came into possession of in london, where several important matters were given which had no place in the volume he had picked up in florence. much, far the greater part, of the first "book" is--interesting! it is mere verse. as verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close--the passionate, out-welling lines to "the truest poet i have ever known," the beautiful soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the old florentine garden of the dead. "o lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,-- boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue, and sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- when the first summons from the darkling earth reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, and bared them of the glory--to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- this is the same voice: can thy soul know change? hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! never may i commence my song, my due to god who best taught song by gift of thee, except, with bent head and beseeching hand-- that still, despite the distance and the dark, what was, again may be; some interchange of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, some benediction anciently thy smile: --never conclude, but raising hand and head thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn for all hope, all sustainment, all reward, their utmost up and on,--so blessing back in those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, some whiteness which, i judge, thy face makes proud, some wanness where, i think, thy foot may fall!" * * * * * thereafter, for close upon five thousand words, the poem descends again to the level of a versified tale. it is saved from ruin by subtlety of intellect, striking dramatic verisimilitude, an extraordinary vigour, and occasional lines of real poetry. retrospectively, apart from the interest, often strained to the utmost, most readers, i fancy, will recall with lingering pleasure only the opening of "the other half rome," the description of pompilia, "with the patient brow and lamentable smile," with flower-like body, in white hospital array--a child with eyes of infinite pathos, "whether a flower or weed, ruined: who did it shall account to christ." in these three introductory books we have the view of the matter taken by those who side with count guido, of those who are all for pompilia, and of the "superior person," impartial because superciliously indifferent, though sufficiently interested to "opine." in the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. in the first, guido speaks; in the second, caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the "ring," is pompilia's narrative. here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. the sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. the extreme intellectual subtlety of guido's plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature. in comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. it would be obviously inappropriate to make count guido franceschini speak with the dignity of the pope, with the exquisite pathos of pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of caponsacchi. the self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries-- "no, sirs, i cannot have the lady dead! that erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, that voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)-- that vision of the pale electric sword angels go armed with--that was not the last o' the lady. come, i see through it, you find, know the manoeuvre! also herself said i had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false? let me see for myself if it be so!" than the poignant pathos and beauty of "pompilia," there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. it stands alone. here at last we have the poet who is the lancelot to shakspere's arthur. it takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. how marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, "o great, just, good god! miserable me!"--how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife-- "i am just seventeen years and five months old, and, if i lived one day more, three full weeks; 'tis writ so in the church's register, lorenzo in lucina, all my names at length, so many names for one poor child, --francesca camilla vittoria angela pompilia comparini--laughable!" only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women's own invision of themselves--robert browning and george meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "pompilia." the meeting and the swift uprising of love between lucy and richard, in "the ordeal of richard feveral," is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf. and as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. and infinitely tender is the poetry of "pompilia"-- "oh, how good god is that my babe was born, --better than born, baptised and hid away before this happened, safe from being hurt! that had been sin god could not well forgive: _he was too young to smile and save himself_----" or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span madonna of the church, but to the poor, dilapidated virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naïveté, where pompilia relates why she called her boy gaetano, because she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before-- "so, carefuller, perhaps, to guard a namesake than those old saints grow, tired out by this time,--see my own five saints!" or these-- "thus, all my life, i touch a fairy thing that fades and fades. --even to my babe! i thought, when he was born, something began for once that would not end, nor change into a laugh at me, but stay for evermore, eternally quite mine----" once more-- "one cannot judge of what has been the ill or well of life the day that one is dying.... now it is over, and no danger more ... to me at least was never evening yet but seemed far beautifuller than its day, for past is past----" lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's spring (ll. - ): or those, of the birth of her little one-- "a whole long fortnight; in a life like mine a fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. all women are not mothers of a boy.... i never realised god's birth before-- how he grew likest god in being born. this time i felt like mary, had my babe lying a little on my breast like hers." when she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words-- "god stooping shows sufficient of his light for us i' the dark to rise by. and i rise----" who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven? but the two succeeding "books" are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections--the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of "caponsacchi" and "pompilia." in the next "book" innocent xii. is revealed. all this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. it must be read from first to last for its full effect, but i may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse:-- "for the main criminal i have no hope except in such a suddenness of fate. i stood at naples once, a night so dark i could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. so may the truth be flashed out by one blow, and guido see, one instant, and be saved." finally comes that throbbing, terrible last "book" where the murderer finds himself brought to bay and knows that all is lost. who can forget its unparalleled close, when the wolf-like guido suddenly, in his supreme agony, transcends his lost manhood in one despairing cry-- "abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god, ... pompilia, will you let them murder me?" lastly, the epilogue rounds off the tale. but is this epilogue necessary? surely the close should have come with the words just quoted? it will not be after a first perusal that the reader will be able to arrive at a definite conviction. no individual or collective estimate of to-day can be accepted as final. those who come after us, perhaps not the next generation, nor the next again, will see "the ring and the book" free of all the manifold and complex considerations which confuse our judgment. meanwhile, each can only speak for himself. to me it seems that "the ring and the book" is, regarded as an artistic whole, the most magnificent failure in our literature. it enshrines poetry which no other than our greatest could have written; it has depths to which many of far inferior power have not descended. surely the poem must be judged by the balance of its success and failure? it is in no presumptuous spirit, but out of my profound admiration of this long-loved and often-read, this superb poem, that i, for one, wish it comprised but the prologue, the plea of guido, "caponsacchi," "pompilia," "the pope," and guido's last defence. i cannot help thinking that this is the form in which it will be read in the years to come. thus circumscribed, it seems to me to be rounded and complete, a great work of art void of the dross, the mere _débris_ which the true artist discards. but as it is, in all its lordly poetic strength and flagging impulse, is it not, after all, the true climacteric of browning's genius? "the inn album," a dramatic poem of extraordinary power, has so much more markedly the defects of his qualities that i take it to be, at the utmost, the poise of the first gradual refluence. this analogy of the tidal ebb and flow may be observed with singular aptness in browning's life-work--the tide that first moved shoreward in the loveliness of "pauline," and, with "long withdrawing roar," ebbed in slow, just perceptible lapse to the poet's penultimate volume. as for "asolando," i would rather regard it as the gathering of a new wave--nay, again rather, as the deep sound of ocean which the outward surge has reached. but for myself i do not accept "the inn album" as the first hesitant swing of the tide. i seem to hear the resilient undertone all through the long slow poise of "the ring and the book." where then is the full splendour and rush of the tide, where its culminating reach and power? i should say in "men and women"; and by "men and women" i mean not merely the poems comprised in the collection so entitled, but all in the "dramatic romances," "lyrics," and the "dramatis personæ," all the short pieces of a certain intensity of note and quality of power, to be found in the later volumes, from "pacchiarotto" to "asolando." and this because, in the words of the poet himself when speaking of shelley, i prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high--and, seeing it, to hold by it. yet i am not oblivious of the mass of browning's lofty achievement, "to be known enduringly among men,"--an achievement, even on its secondary level, so high, that around its imperfect proportions, "the most elaborated productions of ordinary art must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations." how am i to convey concisely that which it would take a volume to do adequately--an idea of the richest efflorescence of browning's genius in these unfading blooms which we will agree to include in "men and women"? how better--certainly it would be impossible to be more succinct--than by the enumeration of the contents of an imagined volume, to be called, say "transcripts from life"? it would be to some extent, but not rigidly, arranged chronologically. it would begin with that masterpiece of poetic concision, where a whole tragedy is burned in upon the brain in fifty-six lines, "my last duchess." then would follow "in a gondola," that haunting lyrical drama _in petto_, where the lover is stabbed to death as his heart is beating against that of his mistress; "cristina," with its keen introspection; those delightfully stirring pieces, the "cavalier-tunes," "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr," and "the pied piper of hamelin"; "the flower's name"; "the flight of the duchess"; "the tomb at st. praxed's," the poem which educed ruskin's enthusiastic praise for its marvellous apprehension of the spirit of the middle ages; "pictor ignotus," and "the lost leader." but as there is not space for individual detail, and as many of the more important are spoken of elsewhere in this volume, i must take the reader's acquaintance with the poems for granted. so, following those first mentioned, there would come "home thoughts from abroad"; "home thoughts from the sea"; "the confessional"; "the heretic's tragedy"; "earth's immortalities"; "meeting at night: parting at morning"; "saul"; "karshish"; "a death in the desert"; "rabbi ben ezra"; "a grammarian's funeral"; "love among the ruins"; _song_, "nay but you"; "a lover's quarrel"; "evelyn hope"; "a woman's last word"; "fra lippo lippi"; "by the fireside"; "any wife to any husband"; "a serenade at the villa"; "my star"; "a pretty woman"; "a light woman"; "love in a life"; "life in a love"; "the last ride together"; "a toccata of galuppi's"; "master hugues of saxe gotha"; "abt vogler"; "memorabilia"; "andrea del sarto"; "before"; "after"; "in three days"; "in a year"; "old pictures in florence"; "de gustibus"; "women and roses"; "the guardian angel"; "cleon"; "two in the campagna"; "one way of love"; "another way of love"; "misconceptions"; "may and death"; "james lee's wife"; "dîs aliter visum"; "too late"; "confessions"; "prospice"; "youth and art"; "a face"; "a likeness"; "apparent failure." epilogue to part i.--"o lyric voice," etc., from end of first part of "the ring and the book." part ii.--"hervé riel"; "amphibian"; "epilogue to fifine"; "pisgah sights"; "natural magic"; "magical nature"; "bifurcation"; "numpholeptos"; "appearances"; "st. martin's summer"; "a forgiveness"; epilogue to pacchiarotto volume; prologue to "la saisiaz"; prologue to "two poets of croisic"; "epilogue"; "pheidippides"; "halbert and hob"; "ivàn ivànovitch"; "echetlos"; "muléykeh"; "pan and luna"; "touch him ne'er so lightly"; prologue to "jocoseria"; "cristina and monaldeschi"; "mary wollstonecraft and fuseli"; "ixion"; "never the time and the place"; _song_, "round us the wild creatures "; _song_, "wish no word unspoken "; _song_, "you groped your way"; _song_:, "man i am"; _song_, "once i saw"; "verse-making"; "not with my soul love"; "ask not one least word of praise"; "why from the world"; "the round of day" (pts. , , , of gérard de lairesse); prologue to "asolando"; "rosny"; "now"; "poetics"; "summum bonum"; "a pearl"; "speculative"; "inapprehensiveness"; "the lady and the painter;" "beatrice signorini"; "imperante augusto"; "rephan"; "reverie"; epilogue to "asolando" (in all, ). but having drawn up this imaginary anthology, possibly with faults of commission and probably with worse errors of omission, i should like to take the reader into my confidence concerning a certain volume, originally compiled for my own pleasure, though not without thought of one or two dear kinsmen of a scattered brotherhood--a volume half the size of the projected transcripts, and rare as that star in the tip of the moon's horn of which coleridge speaks. _flower o' the vine_, so it is called, has for double-motto these two lines from the epilogue to the pacchiarotto volume-- "man's thoughts and loves and hates! earth is my vineyard, these grew there--" and these words, already quoted, from the shelley essay, "i prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high." . from "pauline"[ ]--i. "sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!" . the dawn of beauty; . andromeda; . morning. ii. "heap cassia, sandal-buds," etc. (song from "paracelsus"). iii. "over the sea our galleys went" (song from "paracelsus"). iv. the joy of the world ("paracelsus").[ ] v. from "sordello"-- . sunset;[ ] . the fugitive ethiop;[ ] . dante.[ ] vi. ottima and sebald (pt. i., "pippa passes"). vii. jules and phene (pt. ii., "pippa passes"). viii. my last duchess. ix. in a gondola. x. home thoughts from abroad (i. and ii.). xi. meeting at night: parting at morning. xii. a grammarian's funeral. xiii. saul. xiv. rabbi ben ezra. xv. love among the ruins. xvi. evelyn hope. xvii. my star. xviii. a toccata of galuppi's. xix. abt vogler. xx. memorabilia. xxi. andrea del sarto. xxi. two in the campagna. xxii. james lee's wife. xxiii. prospice. xxiv. from "the ring and the book"-- . o lyric love (the invocation: lines); . caponsacchi (ll. to ); . pompilia (ll. to ); . pompilia (ll. to ); . the pope (ll. to ); . count guido (book xi., ll. to ). xxv. prologue to "la saisiaz." xxvi. prologue to "two poets of croisic." xxvii. epilogue to "two poets of croisic." xxviii. never the time and place. xxix. "round us the wild creatures," etc. (song from "ferishtah's fancies"). xxx. "the walk" (pts. ix., x., xi., xii., of "gérard de lairesse.") xxxi. "one word more" (to e.b.b.).[ ] [footnote : the first, from the line quoted, extends through lines--"to see thee for a moment as thou art." no. consists of the xviii ll. beginning, "they came to me in my first dawn of life." no. , the xi ll. of the andromeda picture. no. , the lix ll. beginning, "night, and one single ridge of narrow path" (to "delight").] [footnote : no. iv. comprises the xxix ll. beginning, "the centre fire heaves underneath the earth," down to "ancient rapture."] [footnote : no. v. the vi. ll. beginning, "that autumn ere has stilled."] [footnote : the xxii ll. beginning, "as, shall i say, some ethiop."] [footnote : the xxix ll. beginning, "for he,--for he."] [footnote : to these xxxi selections there must now be added "now," "summum bonum," "reverie" and the "epilogue," from "asolando."] it is here--i will not say in _flower o' the vine_, nor even venture to restrictively affirm it of that larger and fuller compilation we have agreed, for the moment, to call "transcripts from life"--it is here, in the worthiest poems of browning's most poetic period, that, it seems to me, his highest greatness is to be sought. in these "men and women" he is, in modern times, an unparalleled dramatic poet. the influence he exercises through these, and the incalculably cumulative influence which will leaven many generations to come, is not to be looked for in individuals only, but in the whole thought of the age, which he has moulded to new form, animated anew, and to which he has imparted a fresh stimulus. for this a deep debt is due to robert browning. but over and above this shaping force, this manipulative power upon character and thought, he has enriched our language, our literature, with a new wealth of poetic diction, has added to it new symbols, has enabled us to inhale a more liberal if an unfamiliar air, has, above all, raised us to a fresh standpoint, a standpoint involving our construction of a new definition. here, at least, we are on assured ground: here, at any rate, we realise the scope and quality of his genius. but, let me hasten to add, he, at his highest, not being of those who would make imagination the handmaid of the understanding, has given us also a dorado of pure poetry, of priceless worth. tried by the severest tests, not merely of substance, but of form, not merely of the melody of high thinking, but of rare and potent verbal music, the larger number of his "men and women" poems are as treasurable acquisitions, in kind, to our literature, as the shorter poems of milton, of shelley, of keats, and of tennyson. but once again, and finally, let me repeat that his primary importance--not greatness, but importance--is in having forced us to take up a novel standpoint, involving our construction of a new definition. chapter vii. there are, in literary history, few _scènes de la vie privée_ more affecting than that of the greatest of english poetesses, in the maturity of her first poetic period, lying, like a fading flower, for hours, for days continuously, in a darkened room in a london house. so ill was miss elizabeth barrett, early in the second half of the forties, that few friends, herself even, could venture to hope for a single one of those springs which she previsioned so longingly. to us, looking back at this period, in the light of what we know of a story of singular beauty, there is an added pathos in the circumstance that, as the singer of so many exquisite songs lay on her invalid's sofa, dreaming of things which, as she thought, might never be, all that was loveliest in her life was fast approaching--though, like all joy, not without an equally unlooked-for sorrow. "i lived with visions for my company, instead of men and women ... nor thought to know a sweeter music than they played to me." this is not the occasion, and if it were, there would still be imperative need for extreme concision, whereon to dwell upon the early life of elizabeth barrett browning. the particulars of it are familiar to all who love english literature: for there is, in truth, not much to tell--not much, at least, that can well be told. it must suffice, here, that miss barrett was born on the th of march , and so was the senior, by three years, of robert browning. by , in remote herefordshire, the not yet eleven-year-old poetess had already "cried aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips" in various "nascent odes, epics, and didactics." at this time, she tells us, the greeks were her demi-gods, and she dreamt much of agamemnon. in the same year, in suburban camberwell, a little boy was often wont to listen eagerly to his father's narrative of the same hero, and to all the moving tale of troy. it is significant that these two children, so far apart, both with the light of the future upon their brows, grew up in familiarity with something of the antique beauty. it was a lifelong joy to both, that "serene air of greece." many an hour of gloom was charmed away by it for the poetess who translated the "prometheus bound" of Æschylus, and wrote "the dead pan": many a happy day and memorable night were spent in that "beloved environment" by the poet who wrote "balaustion's adventure" and translated the "agamemnon." the chief sorrow of her life, however, occurred in her thirty-first year. she never quite recovered from the shock of her well-loved brother edward's tragic death, a mysterious disaster, for the foundering of the little yacht _la belle sauvage_ is almost as inexplicable as that of the _ariel_ in the spezzian waters beyond lerici. not only through the ensuing winter, but often in the dreams of after years, "the sound of the waves rang in my ears like the moans of one dying." the removal of the barrett household to gloucester place, in western london, was a great event. here, invalid though she was, she could see friends occasionally and get new books constantly. her name was well known and became widely familiar when her "cry of the children" rang like a clarion throughout the country. the poem was founded upon an official report by richard hengist horne, the friend whom some years previously she had won in correspondence, and with whom she had become so intimate, though without personal acquaintance, that she had agreed to write a drama in collaboration with him, to be called "psyche apocalypté," and to be modelled on "greek instead of modern tragedy." horne--a poet of genius, and a dramatist of remarkable power--was one of the truest friends she ever had, and, so far as her literary life is concerned, came next in influence only to her poet-husband. among the friends she saw much of in the early forties was a distant "cousin," john kenyon--a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man, who acted the part of providence to many troubled souls, and, in particular, was "a fairy godfather" to elizabeth barrett and to "the other poet," as he used to call browning. it was to mr. kenyon--"kenyon, with the face of a bendectine monk, but the most jovial of good fellows," as a friend has recorded of him; "kenyon the magnificent," as he was called by browning--that miss barrett owed her first introduction to the poetry of her future husband. browning's poetry had for her an immediate appeal. with sure insight she discerned the special quality of the poetic wealth of the "bells and pomegranates," among which she then and always cared most for the penultimate volume, the "dramatic romances and lyrics." two years before she met the author she had written, in "lady geraldine's courtship"-- "or from browning some 'pomegranate' which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." a little earlier she had even, unwittingly on either side, been a collaborateur with "the author of 'paracelsus.'" she gave horne much aid in the preparation of his "new spirit of the age," and he has himself told us "that the mottoes, which are singularly happy and appropriate, were for the most part supplied by miss barrett and robert browning, then unknown to each other." one thing and another drew them nearer and nearer. now it was a poem, now a novel expression, now a rare sympathy. an intermittent correspondence ensued, and both poets became anxious to know each other. "we artists--how well praise agrees with us," as balzac says. a few months later, in , they came to know one another personally. the story of their first meeting, which has received a wide acceptance, is apocryphal. the meeting was brought about by kenyon. this common friend had been a schoolfellow of browning's father, and so it was natural that he took a more than ordinary interest in the brilliant young poet, perhaps all the more so that the reluctant tide of popularity which had promised to set in with such unparalleled sweep and weight had since experienced a steady ebb. and so the fates brought these two together. the younger was already far the stronger, but he had an unbounded admiration for miss barrett. to her, he was even then the chief living poet. she perceived his ultimate greatness; as early as had "a full faith in him as poet and prophet." as browning admitted to a friend, the love between them was almost instantaneous, a thing of the eyes, mind, and heart--each striving for supremacy, till all were gratified equally in a common joy. they had one bond of sterling union: passion for the art to which both had devoted their lives. to those who love love for love's sake, who _se passionnent pour la passion_, as prosper merimée says, there could scarce be a more sacred spot in london than that fiftieth house in unattractive wimpole street, where these two poets first met each other; and where, in the darkened room, "love quivered, an invisible flame." elizabeth barrett was indeed, in her own words, "as sweet as spring, as ocean deep." she, too, was always, as she wrote of harriet martineau, in a hopeless anguish of body and serene triumph of spirit. as george sand says, of one of her fictitious personages, she was an "artist to the backbone; that is, one who feels life with frightful intensity." to this too keen intensity of feeling must be attributed something of that longing for repose, that deep craving for rest from what is too exciting from within, which made her affirm the exquisite appeal to her of such biblical passages as "the lord of peace himself give you peace," and "he giveth his beloved sleep," which, as she says in one of her numerous letters to miss mitford, "strike upon the disquieted earth with such a _foreignness_ of heavenly music." nor was he whom she loved as a man, as well as revered as a poet, unworthy of her. his was the robustest poetic intellect of the century; his the serenest outlook; his, almost the sole unfaltering footsteps along the perilous ways of speculative thought. a fair life, irradiate with fairer ideals, conserved his native integrity from that incongruity between practice and precept so commonly exemplified. comely in all respects, with his black-brown wavy hair, finely-cut features, ready and winsome smile, alert luminous eyes, quick, spontaneous, expressive gestures--an inclination of the head, a lift of the eyebrows, a modulation of the lips, an assertive or deprecatory wave of the hand, conveying so much--and a voice at that time of a singular penetrating sweetness, he was, even without that light of the future upon his forehead which she was so swift to discern, a man to captivate any woman of kindred nature and sympathies. over and above these advantages, he possessed a rare quality of physical magnetism. by virtue of this he could either attract irresistibly or strongly repel. i have several times heard people state that a hand-shake from browning was like an electric shock. truly enough, it did seem as though his sterling nature rang in his genially dominant voice, and, again, as though his voice transmitted instantaneous waves of an electric current through every nerve of what, for want of a better phrase, i must perforce call his intensely alive hand. i remember once how a lady, afflicted with nerves, in the dubious enjoyment of her first experience of a "literary afternoon," rose hurriedly and, in reply to her hostess' inquiry as to her motive, explained that she could not sit any longer beside the elderly gentleman who was talking to mrs. so-and-so, as his near presence made her quiver all over, "like a mild attack of pins-and-needles," as she phrased it. she was chagrined to learn that she had been discomposed not by 'a too exuberant financier,' as she had surmised, but by, as "waring" called browning, the "subtlest assertor of the soul in song." with the same quick insight as she had perceived robert browning's poetic greatness, elizabeth barrett discerned his personal worth. he was essentially manly in all respects: so manly, that many frail souls of either sex philandered about his over-robustness. from the twilight gloom of an æesthetic clique came a small voice belittling the great man as "quite too 'loud,' painfully excessive." browning was manly enough to laugh at all ghoulish cries of any kind whatsoever. once in a way the lion would look round and by a raised breath make the jackals wriggle; as when the poet wrote to a correspondent, who had drawn his attention to certain abusive personalities in some review or newspaper: "dear sir--i am sure you mean very kindly, but i have had too long an experience of the inability of the human goose to do other than cackle when benevolent and hiss when malicious, and no amount of goose criticism shall make me lift a heel against what waddles behind it." herself one whose happiest experiences were in dreamland, miss barrett was keenly susceptible to the strong humanity of browning's song, nor less keenly attracted by his strenuous and fearless outlook, his poetic practicality, and even by his bluntness of insight in certain matters. it was no slight thing to her that she could, in mr. lowell's words, say of herself and of him-- "we, who believe life's bases rest beyond the probe of chemic test." she rejoiced, despite her own love for remote imaginings, to know that he was of those who (to quote again from the same fine poet) "... wasted not their breath in schemes of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, as if he must be other than he seems because he was not what he should be here, postponing time's slow proof to petulant dreams;" that, in a word, while 'he could believe the promise of to-morrow,' he was at the same time supremely conscious of 'the wondrous meaning of to-day.' both, from their youth onward, had travelled 'on trails divine of unimagined laws.' it was sufficient for her that he kept his eyes fixed on the goal beyond the way he followed: it did not matter that he was blind to the dim adumbrations of novel byways, of strange calvarys by the wayside, so often visible to her. their first meeting was speedily followed by a second--by a third--and then? when we know not, but ere long, each found that happiness was in the bestowal of the other. the secret was for some time kept absolutely private. from the first mr. barrett had been jealous of his beloved daughter's new friend. he did not care much for the man, he with all the prejudices and baneful conservatism of the slave-owning planter, the other with ardent democratic sentiments and a detestation of all forms of iniquity. nor did he understand the poet. he could read his daughter's flowing verse with pleasure, but there was to his ear a mere jumble of sound and sense in much of the work of the author of "the tomb at st. praxed's" and "sibrandus schafnaburgensis." of a selfishly genial but also of a violent and often sullen nature, he resented more and more any friendship which threatened to loosen the chain of affection and association binding his daughter to himself. both the lovers believed that an immediate marriage would, from every point of view, be best. it was not advisable that it should be long delayed, if to happen at all, for the health of miss barrett was so poor that another winter in london might, probably would, mean irretrievable harm. some time before this she had become acquainted with mrs. jameson, the eminent art-writer. the regard, which quickly developed to an affectionate esteem, was mutual. one september morning mrs. jameson called, and after having dwelt on the gloom and peril of another winter in london, dwelt on the magic of italy, and concluded by inviting miss barrett to accompany her in her own imminent departure for abroad. the poet was touched and grateful, but, pointing to her invalid sofa, and gently emphasising her enfeebled health and other difficult circumstances, excused herself from acceptance of mrs. jameson's generous offer. in the "memoirs of mrs. jameson" that lady's niece, mrs. macpherson, relates how on the eve of her and her aunt's departure, a little note of farewell arrived from miss barrett, "deploring the writer's inability to come in person and bid her friend good-bye, as she was 'forced to be satisfied with the sofa and silence.'" it is easy to understand, therefore, with what amazement mrs. jameson, shortly after her arrival in paris, received a letter from robert browning to the effect that he _and his wife_ had just come from london, on their way to italy. "my aunt's surprise was something almost comical," writes mrs. macpherson, "so startling and entirely unexpected was the news." and duly married indeed the two poets had been! from the moment the matter was mooted to mr. barrett, he evinced his repugnance to the idea. to him even the most foolish assertion of his own was a sacred pledge. he called it "pride in his word": others recognised it as the very arrogance of obstinacy. he refused to countenance the marriage in any way, refused to have browning's name mentioned in his presence, and even when his daughter told him that she had definitely made up her mind, he flatly declined to acknowledge as even possible what was indeed very imminent. nor did he ever step down from his ridiculous pinnacle of wounded self-love. favourite daughter though she had been, mr. barrett never forgave her, held no communication with her even when she became a mother, and did not mention her in his will. it is needless to say anything more upon this subject. what mr. and mrs. browning were invariably reticent upon can well be passed over with mere mention of the facts. at the last moment there had been great hurry and confusion. but nevertheless, on the forenoon of the th of september , robert browning and elizabeth barrett had unceremoniously stepped into st. maryle-bone church and there been married. so secret had the matter been kept that even such old friends as richard hengist horne and mr. kenyon were in ignorance of the event for some time after it had actually occurred. mrs. jameson made all haste to the hotel where the brownings were, and ultimately persuaded them to leave the hotel for the quieter _pension_ in the rue ville d'evêque, where she and mrs. macpherson were staying. thereafter it was agreed that, as soon as a fortnight had gone by, they should journey to italy together. truly enough, as mrs. macpherson says, the journey must have been "enchanting, made in such companionship." before departing from paris, mrs. jameson, in writing to a friend, alluded to her unexpected companions, and added, "both excellent: but god help them! for i know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world." this kindly friend was not the only person who experienced similar doubts. one acquaintance, no other than the poet-laureate, wordsworth, added: "so, robert browning and elizabeth barrett have gone off together! well, i hope they may understand each other--nobody else could!" as a matter of fact they did, and to such good intent that they seem never to have had one hour of dissatisfaction, never one jar in the music of their lives. what a happy wayfaring through france that must have been! the travelling had to be slow, and with frequent interruptions, on account of mrs. browning's health: yet she steadily improved, and was almost from the start able to take more exercise, and to be longer in the open air than had for long been her wont. they passed southward, and after some novel experiences in _diligences_, reached avignon, where they rested for a couple of days. thence a little expedition, a poetical pilgrimage, was made to vaucluse, sacred to the memory of petrarch and laura. there, as mrs. macpherson has told us, at the very source of the "chiare, fresche e dolce acque," browning took his wife up in his arms, and, carrying her across through the shallow curling waters, seated her on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. thus, indeed, did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot immortalised by petrarch's loving fancy. three weeks passed happily before pisa, the brownings' destination, was reached. but even then the friends were unwilling to part, and mrs. jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city for a score of days longer. so wonderful was the change wrought in mrs. browning by happiness, and by all the enfranchisement her marriage meant for her, that, as her friend wrote to miss mitford, "she is not merely improved but transformed." in the new sunshine which had come into her life, she blossomed like a flower-bud long delayed by gloom and chill. her heart, in truth, was like a lark when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind. at last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed for, and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius "like an arab bird slept floating in the wind," it was with that restful hush which precedes the creative storm. there is something deeply pathetic in her conscious joy. so little actual experience of life had been hers that in many respects she was as a child: and she had all the child's yearning for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed. but it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and brain that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted, how supreme a thing mere life is. it was in some such mood that she wrote the lovely forty-second of the "sonnets from the portuguese," closing thus-- "let us stay rather on earth, belovèd,--where the unfit contrarious moods of men recoil away and isolate pure spirits, and permit a place to stand and love in for a day, with darkness and the death-hour rounding it." as for browning's love towards his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance. it is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either. that love knew no soilure in the passage of the years. like the flame of oriental legend, it was perennially incandescent though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine. if it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as the uttered song fused in the deathless passion of sappho gleams star-like down the centuries from the high steep of leucadoe. it was here, in pisa, i have been told on indubitable authority, that browning first saw in manuscript those "sonnets from the portuguese" which no poet of portugal had ever written, which no man could have written, which no other woman than his wife could have composed. from the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers, and that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal, she had found expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems, which she thinly disguised from 'inner publicity' when she issued them as "from the portuguese." it is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate, flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable pisan evenings--with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of carrara, or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of arno along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays--showed her love-poems to her husband. with what love and pride he must have read those outpourings of the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met, vials of lovely thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against the coming of a golden day. "how do i love thee? let me count the ways. i love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace. i love thee to the level of every day's most quiet need, by sun and candle light. i love thee freely, as men strive for right; i love thee purely, as they turn from praise. i love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. i love thee with a love i seemed to lose with my lost saints,--i love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if god choose, i shall but love thee better after death!" even such heart-music as this cannot have thrilled him more than these two exquisite lines, with their truth almost too poignant to permit of serene joy-- "i yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange my near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee!" their pisan home was amid sacred associations. it was situate in an old palazzo built by vasari, within sight of the leaning tower and the duomo. there, in absolute seclusion, they wrote and planned. once and again they made a pilgrimage to the lanfranchi palace "to walk in the footsteps of byron and shelley": occasionally they went to vespers in the duomo, and listened, rapt, to the music wandering spirally through the vast solitary building: once they were fortunate in hearing the impressive musical mass for the dead, in the campo santo. they were even reminded often of their distant friend horne, for every time they crossed one of the chief piazzas they saw the statue of cosimo de medici looking down upon them. in this beautiful old city, so full of repose as it lies "asleep in the sun," mrs. browning's health almost leapt, so swift was her advance towards vigour. "she is getting better every day," wrote her husband, "stronger, better wonderfully, and beyond all our hopes." that happy first winter they passed "in the most secluded manner, reading vasari, and dreaming dreams of seeing venice in the summer." but early in april, when the swallows had flown inland above the pines of viareggio, and shelley's favourite little aziola was hooting silverly among the hollow vales of carrara, the two poets prepared to leave what the frailer of them called "this perch of pisa." but with all its charm and happy associations, the little city was dull. "even human faces divine are quite _rococo_ with me," mrs. browning wrote to a friend. the change to florence was a welcome one to both. browning had already been there, but to his wife it was as the fulfilment of a dream. they did not at first go to that romantic old palace which will be for ever sociate with the author of "casa guidi windows," but found accommodation in a more central locality. when the june heats came, husband and wife both declared for ancona, the picturesque little town which dreams out upon the adriatic. but though so close to the sea, ancona is in summer time almost insufferably hot. instead of finding it cooler than florence, it was as though they had leapt right into a cauldron. alluding to it months later, mrs. browning wrote to horne, "the heat was just the fiercest fire of your imagination, and i _seethe_ to think of it at this distance." it was a memorable journey all the same. they went to ravenna, and at four o'clock one morning stood by dante's tomb, moved deeply by the pathetic inscription and by all the associations it evoked. all along the coast from ravenna to loretto was new ground to both, and endlessly fascinating; in the passing and repassing of the apennines they had 'wonderful visions of beauty and glory.' at ancona itself, notwithstanding the heat, they spent a happy season. here browning wrote one of the loveliest of his short poems, "the guardian angel," which had its origin in guercino's picture in the chapel at fano. by the allusions in the sixth and eighth stanzas it is clear that the poem was inscribed to alfred domett, the poet's well-loved friend immortalised as "waring." doubtless it was written for no other reason than the urgency of song, for in it are the loving allusions to his wife, "_my_ angel with me too," and "my love is here." three times they went to the chapel, he tells us in the seventh stanza, to drink in to their souls' content the beauty of "dear guercino's" picture. browning has rarely uttered the purely personal note of his inner life. it is this that affords a peculiar value to "the guardian angel," over and above its technical beauty. in the concluding lines of the stanzas i am about to quote he gives the supreme expression to what was his deepest faith, his profoundest song-motive. "i would not look up thither past thy head because the door opes, like that child, i know, for i should have thy gracious face instead, thou bird of god! and wilt thou bend me low like him, and lay, like his, my hands together, and lift them up to pray, and gently tether me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread? * * * * * "how soon all worldly wrong would be repaired! i think how i should view the earth and skies and sea, when once again my brow was bared after thy healing, with such different eyes. o world, as god has made it! all is beauty: and knowing this, is love, and love is duty. what further may be sought for or declared?" after the adriatic coast was left, they hesitated as to returning to florence, the doctors having laid such stress on the climatic suitability of pisa for mrs. browning. but she felt so sure of herself in her new strength that it was decided to adventure upon at least one winter in the queen-city. they were fortunate in obtaining a residence in the old palace called casa guidi, in the via maggiore, over against the church of san felice, and here, with a few brief intervals, they lived till death separated them. on the little terrace outside there was more noble verse fashioned in the artist's creative silence than we can ever be aware of: but what a sacred place it must ever be for the lover of poetry! there, one ominous sultry eve, browning, brooding over the story of a bygone roman crime, foreshadowed "the ring and the book," and there, in the many years he dwelt in casa guidi, he wrote some of his finer shorter poems. there, also, "aurora leigh" was born, and many a lyric fresh with the dew of genius. who has not looked at the old sunworn house and failed to think of that night when each square window of san felice was aglow with festival lights, and when the summer lightnings fell silently in broad flame from cloud to cloud: or has failed to hear, down the narrow street, a little child go singing, 'neath casa guidi windows by the church, _o bella libertà, o bella!_ better even than these, for happy dwelling upon, is the poem the two poets lived. morning and day were full of work, study, or that pleasurable idleness which for the artist is so often his best inspiration. here, on the little terrace, they used to sit together, or walk slowly to and fro, in conversation that was only less eloquent than silence. here one day they received a letter from horne. there is nothing of particular note in mrs. browning's reply, and yet there are not a few of her poems we would miss rather than these chance words--delicate outlines left for the reader to fill in: "we were reading your letter, together, on our little terrace--walking up and down reading it--i mean the letter to robert--and then, at the end, suddenly turning, lo, just at the edge of the stones, just between the balustrades, and already fluttering in a breath of wind and about to fly away over san felice's church, we caught a glimpse of the feather of a note to e.b.b. how near we were to the loss of it, to be sure!" happier still must have been the quiet evenings in late spring and summer, when, the one shrouded against possible chills, the other bare-headed and with loosened coat, walked slowly to and fro in the dark, conscious of "a busy human sense" below, but solitary on their balcony beyond the lamplit room. "while in and out the terrace-plants, and round one branch of tall datura, waxed and waned the lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower." an american friend has put on record his impressions of the two poets, and their home at this time. he had been called upon by browning, and by him invited to take tea at casa guidi the same evening. there the visitor saw, "seated at the tea-table of the great room of the palace in which they were living, a very small, very slight woman, with very long curls drooping forward, almost across the eyes, hanging to the bosom, and quite concealing the pale, small face, from which the piercing inquiring eyes looked out sensitively at the stranger. rising from her chair, she put out cordially the thin white hand of an invalid, and in a few moments they were pleasantly chatting, while the husband strode up and down the room, joining in the conversation with a vigour, humour, eagerness, and affluence of curious lore which, with his trenchant thought and subtle sympathy, make him one of the most charming and inspiring of companions." in the autumn the same friend, joined by one or two other acquaintances, went with the brownings to vallombrosa for a couple of days, greatly to mrs. browning's delight, for whom the name had had a peculiar fascination ever since she had first encountered it in milton. she was conveyed up the steep way towards the monastery in a great basket, without wheels, drawn by two oxen: though, as she tells miss mitford, she did not get into the monastery after all, she and her maid being turned away by the monks "for the sin of womanhood." she was too much of an invalid to climb the steeper heights, but loved to lie under the great chestnuts upon the hill-slopes near the convent. at twilight they went to the little convent-chapel, and there browning sat down at the organ and played some of those older melodies he loved so well. it is, strangely enough, from americans that we have the best account of the brownings in their life at casa guidi: from r.h. stoddart, bayard taylor, nathaniel hawthorne, george stillman hillard, and w.w. story. i can find room, however, for but one excerpt:-- "those who have known casa guidi as it was, could hardly enter the loved rooms now, and speak above a whisper. they who have been so favoured, can never forget the square anteroom, with its great picture and pianoforte, at which the boy browning passed many an hour--the little dining-room covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of tennyson, carlyle, and robert browning--the long room filled with plaster-casts and studies, which was mrs. browning's retreat--and, dearest of all, the large drawing-room where _she_ always sat. it opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the iron-grey church of santa felice. there was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. the dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreary look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls, and the old pictures of saints that looked out sadly from their carved frames of black wood. large bookcases constructed of specimens of florentine carving selected by mr. browning were brimming over with wise-looking books. tables were covered with more gaily-bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. dante's grave profile, a cast of keats's face and brow taken after death, a pen-and-ink sketch of tennyson, the genial face of john kenyon, mrs. browning's good friend and relative, little paintings of the boy browning, all attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. a quaint mirror, easy-chairs and sofas, and a hundred nothings that always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room. but the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in a low arm-chair near the door. a small table, strewn with writing-materials, books, and newspapers, was always by her side.... after her death, her husband had a careful water-colour drawing made of this room, which has been engraved more than once. it still hangs in his drawing-room, where the mirror and one of the quaint chairs above named still are. the low arm-chair and small table are in browning's study--with his father's desk, on which he has written all his poems."--(_w.w. story_.) to mr. and mrs. hawthorne, mr. hillard, and mr. story, in particular, we are indebted for several delightful glimpses into the home-life of the two poets. we can see mrs. browning in her "ideal chamber," neither a library nor a sitting-room, but a happy blending of both, with the numerous old paintings in antique florentine frames, easy-chairs and lounges, carved bookcases crammed with books in many languages, bric-a-brac in any quantity, but always artistic, flowers everywhere, and herself the frailest flower of all. mr. hillard speaks of the happiness of the brownings' home and their union as perfect: he, full of manly power, she, the type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. this much-esteemed friend was fascinated by mrs. browning. again and again he alludes to her exceeding spirituality: "she is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl:" her frame "the transparent veil for a celestial and mortal spirit:" and those fine words which prove that he too was of the brotherhood of the poets, "her tremulous voice often flutters over her words like the flame of a dying candle over the wick." chapter viii. with the flower-tide of spring in came a new happiness to the two poets: the son who was born on the th of march. the boy was called robert wiedemann barrett, the second name, in remembrance of browning's much-loved mother, having been substituted for the "sarianna" wherewith the child, if a girl, was to have been christened. thereafter their "own young florentine" was an endless joy and pride to both: and he was doubly loved by his father for his having brought a renewal of life to her who bore him. that autumn they went to the country, to the neighbourhood of vallombrosa, and then to the bagni di lucca. there they wandered content in chestnut-forests, and gathered grapes at the vintage. early in the year browning's "poetical works" were published in two volumes. some of the most beautiful of his shorter poems are to be found therein. what a new note is struck throughout, what range of subject there is! among them all, are there any more treasurable than two of the simplest, "home thoughts from abroad" and "night and morning"? "oh, to be in england now that april's there, and whoever wakes in england sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough in england--now! and after april, when may follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge-- that's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!" a more significant note is struck in "meeting at night" and "parting at morning." meeting. i. the grey sea and the long black land; and the yellow half-moon large and low; and the startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep, as i gain the cove with pushing prow, and quench its speed i' the slushy sand. ii. then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; three fields to cross till a farm appears; a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch and blue spurt of a lighted match, and a voice lass loud, through its joys and fears, than the two hearts beating each to each! parting. round the cape of a sudden came the sea, and the sun looked over the mountain's rim: and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me. the following winter, when they were again at their florentine home, browning wrote his "christmas eve and easter day," that remarkable _apologia_ for christianity, and close-reasoned presentation of the religious thought of the time. it is, however, for this reason that it is so widely known and admired: for it is ever easier to attract readers by dogma than by beauty, by intellectual argument than by the seduction of art. coincidently, mrs. browning wrote the first portion of "casa guidi windows." in the spring of husband and wife spent a short stay in rome. i have been told that the poem entitled 'two in the campagna' was as actually personal as the already quoted "guardian angel." but i do not think stress should be laid on this and kindred localisations. exact or not, they have no literary value. to the poet, the dramatic poet above all, locality and actuality of experience are, so to say, merely fortunate coigns of outlook, for the winged genius to temporally inhabit. to the imaginative mind, truth is not simply actuality. as for 'two in the campagna': it is too universally true to be merely personal. there is a gulf which not the profoundest search can fathom, which not the strongest-winged love can overreach: the gulf of individuality. it is those who have loved most deeply who recognise most acutely this always pathetic and often terrifying isolation of the soul. none save the weak can believe in the absolute union of two spirits. if this were demonstratable, immortality would be a palpable fiction. the moment individuality can lapse to fusion, that moment the tide has ebbed, the wind has fallen, the dream has been dreamed. so long as the soul remains inviolate amid all shock of time and change, so long is it immortal. no man, no poet assuredly, could love as browning loved, and fail to be aware, often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of this insuperable isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in the touch of a kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other exquisite moment. the poem tells us how the lovers, straying hand in hand one may day across the campagna, sat down among the seeding grasses, content at first in the idle watching of a spider spinning her gossamer threads from yellowing fennel to other vagrant weeds. all around them "the champaign with its endless fleece of feathery grasses everywhere! silence and passion, joy and peace, an everlasting wash of air-- ... "such life here, through such length of hours, such miracles performed in play, such primal naked forms of flowers, such letting nature have her way." ... let us too be unashamed of soul, the poet-lover says, even as earth lies bare to heaven. nothing is to be overlooked. but all in vain: in vain "i drink my fill at your soul's springs." "just when i seemed about to learn! where is the thread now? off again! the old trick! only i discern-- infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." it was during this visit to rome that both were gratified by the proposal in the leading english literary weekly, that the poet-laureateship, vacant by the death of wordsworth, should be conferred upon mrs. browning: though both rejoiced when they learned that the honour had devolved upon one whom each so ardently admired as alfred tennyson. in a visit was paid to england, not one very much looked forward to by mrs. browning, who had never had cause to yearn for her old home in wimpole street, and who could anticipate no reconciliation with her father, who had persistently refused even to open her letters to him, and had forbidden the mention of her name in his home circle. bayard taylor, in his travel-sketches published under the title "at home and abroad," has put on record how he called upon the brownings one afternoon in september, at their rooms in devonshire street, and found them on the eve of their return to italy. in his cheerful alertness, self-possession, and genial suavity browning impressed him as an american rather than as an englishman, though there can be no question but that no more thorough englishman than the poet ever lived. it is a mistake, of course, to speak of him as a typical englishman: for typical he was not, except in a very exclusive sense. bayard taylor describes him in reportorial fashion as being apparently about seven-and-thirty (a fairly close guess), with his dark hair already streaked with grey about the temples: with a fair complexion, just tinged with faintest olive: eyes large, clear, and grey, and nose strong and well-cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not prominent: about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but slender at the waist, with movements expressive of a combination of vigour and elasticity. with due allowance for the passage of five-and-thirty years, this description would not be inaccurate of browning the septuagenarian. they did not return direct to italy after all, but wintered in paris with robert browning the elder, who had retired to a small house in a street leading off the champs Élysées. the pension he drew from the bank of england was a small one, but, with what he otherwise had, was sufficient for him to live in comfort. the old gentleman's health was superb to the last, for he died in without ever having known a day's illness. spring came out and found them still in paris, mrs. browning enthusiastic about napoleon iii. and interested in spiritualism: her husband serenely sceptical concerning both. in the summer they again went to london: but they appear to have seen more of kenyon and other intimate friends than to have led a busy social life. kenyon's friendship and good company never ceased to have a charm for both poets. mrs. browning loved him almost as a brother: her husband told bayard taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed--a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as taylor describes him--"there goes one of the most splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as kenyon the magnificent." in the early autumn a sudden move towards italy was again made, and after a few weeks in paris and on the way the brownings found themselves at home once more in casa guidi. but before this, probably indeed before they had left paris for london, mr. moxon had published the now notorious shelley forgeries. these were twenty-five spurious letters, but so cleverly manufactured that they at first deceived many people. in the preceding november browning had been asked to write an introduction to them. this he had gladly agreed to do, eager as he was for a suitable opportunity of expressing his admiration for shelley. when the letters reached him, he found that, genuine or not, though he never suspected they were forgeries, they contained nothing of particular import, nothing that afforded a just basis for what he had intended to say. pledged as he was, however, to write something for mr. moxon's edition of the letters, he set about the composition of an essay, of a general as much as of an individual nature. this he wrote in paris, and finished by the beginning of december. it dealt with the objective and subjective poet; on the relation of the latter's life to his work; and upon shelley in the light of his nature, art, and character. apart from the circumstance that it is the only independent prose writing of any length from browning's pen, this is an exceptionally able and interesting production. dr. furnivall deserves general gratitude for his obtaining the author's leave to re-issue it, and for having published it as one of the papers of the browning society. as that enthusiastic student and good friend of the poet says in his "foretalk" to the reprint, the essay is noteworthy, not merely as a signal service to shelley's fame and memory, but for browning's statement of his own aim in his own work, both as objective and subjective poet. the same clear-sightedness and impartial sympathy, which are such distinguishing characteristics of his dramatic studies of human thought and emotion, are obvious in browning's shelley essay. "it would be idle to enquire," he writes, "of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. if the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective in the strictest state must still retain its original value. for it is with this world, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves; the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and reclaimed." of its critical subtlety--the more remarkable as by a poet-critic who revered shelley the poet and loved and believed in shelley the man--the best example, perhaps, is in those passages where he alludes to the charge against the poet's moral nature--"charges which, if substantiated to their wide breadth, would materially disturb, i do not deny, our reception and enjoyment of his works, however wonderful the artistic qualities of these. for we are not sufficiently supplied with instances of genius of his order to be able to pronounce certainly how many of its constituent parts have been tasked and strained to the production of a given lie, and how high and pure a mood of the creative mind may be dramatically simulated as the poet's habitual and exclusive one." the large charity, the liberal human sympathy, the keen critical acumen of this essay, make one wish that the author had spared us a "sludge the medium" or a "pacchiarotto," or even a "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," and given us more of such honourable work in "the other harmony." glad as the brownings were to be home again at casa guidi, they could not enjoy the midsummer heats of florence, and so went to the baths of lucca. it was a delight for them to ramble among the chestnut-woods of the high tuscan forests, and to go among the grape-vines where the sunburnt vintagers were busy. once browning paid a visit to that remote hill-stream and waterfall, high up in a precipitous glen, where, more than three-score years earlier, shelley had been wont to amuse himself by sitting naked on a rock in the sunlight, reading _herodotus_ while he cooled, and then plunging into the deep pool beneath him--to emerge, further up stream, and then climb through the spray of the waterfall till he was like a glittering human wraith in the middle of a dissolving rainbow. those tuscan forests, that high crown of lucca, must always have special associations for lovers of poetry. here shelley lived, rapt in his beautiful dreams, and translated the _symposium_ so that his wife might share something of his delight in plato. here, ten years later, heine sneered, and laughed and wept, and sneered again--drank tea with "la belle irlandaise," flirted with francesca "la ballerina," and wrote alternately with a feathered quill from the breast of a nightingale and with a lancet steeped in aquafortis: and here, a quarter of a century afterward, robert and elizabeth browning also laughed and wept and "joyed i' the sun," dreamed many dreams, and touched chords of beauty whose vibration has become incorporated with the larger rhythm of all that is high and enduring in our literature. on returning to florence (browning with the ms. of the greater part of his splendid fragmentary tragedy, "in a balcony," composed mainly while walking alone through the forest glades), mrs. browning found that the chill breath of the _tramontana_ was affecting her lungs, so a move was made to rome, for the passing of the winter ( - ). in the spring their little boy, their beloved "pen,"[ ] became ill with malaria. this delayed their return to florence till well on in the summer. during this stay in rome mrs. browning rapidly proceeded with "aurora leigh," and browning wrote several of his "men and women," including the exquisite 'love among the ruins,' with its novel metrical music; 'fra lippo lippi,' where the painter, already immortalised by landor, has his third warrant of perpetuity; the 'epistle of karshish' (in part); 'memorabilia' (composed on the campagna); 'saul,' a portion of which had been written and published ten years previously, that noble and lofty utterance, with its trumpet-like note of the regnant spirit; the concluding part of "in a balcony;" and 'holy cross day'--besides, probably, one or two others. in the late spring (april th) also, he wrote the short dactylic lyric, 'ben karshook's wisdom.' this little poem was given to a friend for appearance in one of the then popular _keepsakes_--literally given, for browning never contributed to magazines. the very few exceptions to this rule were the result of a kindliness stronger than scruple: as when ( ), at request of lord houghton (then mr. monckton milnes), he sent 'tokay,' the 'flower's name,' and 'sibrandus schafnaburgensis,' to "help in making up some magazine numbers for poor hood, then at the point of death from hemorrhage of the lungs, occasioned by the enlargement of the heart, which had been brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil." as 'ben karshook's wisdom,' though it has been reprinted in several quarters, will not be found in any volume of browning's works, and was omitted from "men and women" by accident, and from further collections by forgetfulness, it may be fitly quoted here. karshook, it may be added, is the hebraic word for a thistle. [footnote : so-called, it is asserted, from his childish effort to pronounce a difficult name (wiedemann). but despite the good authority for this statement, it is impossible not to credit rather the explanation given by nathaniel hawthorne, who, moreover, affords the practically definite proof that the boy was at first, as a term of endearment, called "pennini," which was later abbreviated to "pen." the cognomen, hawthorne states, was a diminutive of "apennino," which was bestowed upon the boy in babyhood because he was very small, there being a statue in florence of colossal size called "apennino."] i. "'would a man 'scape the rod'?-- rabbi ben karshook saith, 'see that he turns to god the day before his death.' 'ay, could a man inquire when it shall come!' i say. the rabbi's eye shoots fire-- 'then let him turn to-day!' ii. quoth a young sadducee,-- 'reader of many rolls, is it so certain we have, as they tell us, souls?'-- 'son, there is no reply!' the rabbi bit his beard: 'certain, a soul have _i_-- _we_ may have none,' he sneer'd. thus karshook, the hiram's hammer, the right-hand temple column, taught babes their grace in grammar, and struck the simple, solemn." it was in this year ( ) that "men and women" was published. it is difficult to understand how a collection comprising poems such as "love among the ruins," "evelyn hope," "fra lippo lippi," "a toccata of galuppi's," "any wife to any husband," "master hugues of saxe-gotha," "andrea del sarto," "in a balcony," "saul," "a grammarian's funeral," to mention only ten now almost universally known, did not at once obtain a national popularity for the author. but lovers of literature were simply enthralled: and the two volumes had a welcome from them which was perhaps all the more ardent because of their disproportionate numbers. ears alert to novel poetic music must have thrilled to the new strain which sounded first--"love among the ruins," with its millet-like opening-- "where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, miles and miles on the solitary pastures where our sheep half asleep tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop as they crop-- was the site once of a city great and gay ..." soon after the return to florence, which, hot as it was, was preferable in july to rome, mrs. browning wrote to her frequent correspondent miss mitford, and mentioned that about four thousand lines of "aurora leigh" had been written. she added a significant passage: that her husband had not seen a single line of it up to that time--significant, as one of the several indications that the union of browning and his wife was indeed a marriage of true minds, wherein nothing of the common bane of matrimonial life found existence. moreover, both were artists, and, therefore, too full of respect for themselves and their art to bring in any way the undue influence of each other into play. by the spring of , however, the first six "books" were concluded: and these, at once with humility and pride, mrs. browning placed in her husband's hands. the remaining three books were written, in the summer, in john kenyon's london house. it was her best, her fullest answer to the beautiful dedicatory poem, "one word more," wherewith her husband, a few months earlier, sent forth his "men and women," to be for ever associated with "e.b.b." i. "there they are, my fifty men and women naming me the fifty poems finished! take them, love, the book and me together: where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. xviii. this i say of me, but think of you, love! this to you--yourself my moon of poets! ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder, thus they see you, praise you, think they know you! there, in turn i stand with them and praise you-- out of my own self, i dare to phrase it. but the best is when i glide from out them, cross a step or two of dubious twilight, come out on the other side, the novel silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, where i hush and bless myself with silence." the transference from florence to london was made in may. in the summer "aurora leigh" was published, and met with an almost unparalleled success: even landor, most exigent of critics, declared that he was "half drunk with it," that it had an imagination germane to that of shakspere, and so forth. the poem was dedicated to kenyon, and on their homeward way the brownings were startled and shocked to hear of his sudden death. by the time they had arrived at casa guidi again they learned that their good friend had not forgotten them in the disposition of his large fortune. to browning he bequeathed six thousand, to mrs. browning four thousand guineas. this loss was followed early in the ensuing year ( ) by the death of mr. barrett, steadfast to the last in his refusal of reconciliation with his daughter. winters and summers passed happily in italy--with one period of feverish anxiety, when the little boy lay for six weeks dangerously ill, nursed day and night by his father and mother alternately--with pleasant occasionings, as the companionship for a season of nathaniel hawthorne and his family, or of weeks spent at siena with valued and lifelong friends, w.w. story, the poet-sculptor, and his wife. so early as mrs. hawthorne believed she saw the heralds of death in mrs. browning's excessive pallor and the hectic flush upon the cheeks, in her extreme fragility and weakness, and in her catching, fluttering breath. even the motion of a visitor's fan perturbed her. but "her soul was mighty, and a great love kept her on earth a season longer. she was a seraph in her flaming worship of heart." "she lives so ardently," adds mrs. hawthorne, "that her delicate earthly vesture must soon be burnt up and destroyed by her soul of pure fire." yet, notwithstanding, she still sailed the seas of life, like one of those fragile argonauts in their shells of foam and rainbow-mist which will withstand the rude surge of winds and waves. but slowly, gradually, the spirit was o'erfretting its tenement. with the waning of her strength came back the old passionate longing for rest, for quiescence from that "excitement from within," which had been almost over vehement for her in the calm days of her unmarried life. it is significant that at this time browning's genius was relatively dormant. its wings were resting for the long-sustained flight of "the ring and the book," and for earlier and shorter though not less royal aerial journeyings. but also, no doubt, the prolonged comparatively unproductive period of eight or nine years ( - ), between the publication of "men and women" and "dramatis personæ," was due in some measure to the poet's incessant and anxious care for his wife, to the deep sorrow of witnessing her slow but visible passing away, and to the profound grief occasioned by her death. however, barrenness of imaginative creative activity can be only very relatively affirmed, even of so long a period, of years wherein were written such memorable and treasurable poems as 'james lee's wife,' among browning's writings what 'maud' is among lord tennyson's; 'gold hair: a legend of pornic;' 'dis aliter visum;' 'abt vogler,' the most notable production of its kind in the language; 'a death in the desert,' that singular and impressive study; 'caliban upon setebos,' in its strange potency of interest and stranger poetic note, absolutely unique; 'youth and art;' 'apparent failure;' 'prospice,' that noble lyrical defiance of death; and the supremely lofty and significant series of weighty stanzas, 'rabbi ben ezra,' the most quintessential of all the distinctively psychical monologues which browning has written. it seems to me that if these two poems only, "prospice" and "rabbi ben ezra," were to survive to the day of macaulay's new zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days," as the more acute among them could discern something of the real shelley, though time had preserved but the three lines-- "yet now despair itself is mild, even as the winds and waters are; i could lie down like a tired child" ... something of the real catullus, through the mists of remote antiquity, if there had not perished the single passionate cry-- "lesbia illa, illa lesbia, quam catullus unam plus quam se, atque suos amavit omnes!" at the beginning of july ( ), the brownings left florence for the summer and autumn, and by easy stages travelled to normandy. here the invalid benefited considerably at first: and here, i may add, browning wrote his 'legend of pornic,' 'gold-hair.' this poem of twenty-seven five-line stanzas (which differs only from that in more recent "collected works," and "selections," in its lack of the three stanzas now numbered xxi., xxii., and xxiii.) was printed for limited private circulation, though primarily for the purpose of securing american copyright. browning several times printed single poems thus, and for the same reasons--that is, either for transatlantic copyright, or when the verses were not likely to be included in any volume for a prolonged period. these leaflets or half-sheetlets of 'gold hair' and 'prospice,' of 'cleon' and 'the statue and the bust'--together with the "two poems by elizabeth barrett and robert browning," published, for benefit of a charity, in --are among the rarest "finds" for the collector, and are literally worth a good deal more than their weight in gold. in the tumultuous year of all italy was in a ferment. no patriot among the nationalists was more ardent in her hopes than the delicate, too fragile, dying poetess, whose flame of life burned anew with the great hopes that animated her for her adopted country. well indeed did she deserve, among the lines which the poet tommaseo wrote and the florence municipality caused to be engraved in gold upon a white marble slab, to be placed upon casa guidi, the words _fece del suo verso aureo anello fra italia e inghilterra_--"who of her verse made a golden link connecting england and italy." the victories of solferino and san martino made the bitterness of the disgraceful treaty of villafranca the more hard to bear. even had we not mr. story's evidence, it would be a natural conclusion that this disastrous ending to the high hopes of the italian patriots accelerated mrs. browning's death. the withdrawal of hope is often worse in its physical effects than any direct bodily ill. it was a miserable summer for both husband and wife, for more private sorrows also pressed upon them. not even the sweet autumnal winds blowing upon siena wafted away the shadow that had settled upon the invalid: nor was there medicine for her in the air of rome, where the winter was spent. a temporary relief, however, was afforded by the more genial climate, and in the spring of she was able, with browning's help, to see her italian patriotic poems through the press. it goes without saying that these "poems before congress" had a grudging reception from the critics, because they dared to hint that all was not roseate-hued in england. the true patriots are those who love despite blemishes, not those who cherish the blemishes along with the virtues. to hint at a flaw is "not to be an englishman." the autumn brought a new sadness in the death of miss arabella barrett--a dearly loved sister, the "arabel" of so many affectionate letters. once more a winter in rome proved temporally restorative. but at last the day came when she wrote her last poem--"north and south," a gracious welcome to hans christian andersen on the occasion of his first visit to the eternal city. early in june of the brownings were once more at casa guidi. but soon after their return the invalid caught a chill. for a few days she hovered like a tired bird--though her friends saw only the seemingly unquenchable light in the starry eyes, and did not anticipate the silence that was soon to be. by the evening of the th day of the month she was in sore peril of failing breath. all night her husband sat by her, holding her hand. two hours before dawn she realised that her last breath would ere long fall upon his tear-wet face. then, as a friend has told us, she passed into a state of ecstasy: yet not so rapt therein but that she could whisper many words of hope, even of joy. with the first light of the new day, she leaned against her lover. awhile she lay thus in silence, and then, softly sighing "_it is beautiful!_" passed like the windy fragrance of a flower. chapter ix. it is needless to dwell upon what followed. the world has all that need be known. to browning himself it was the abrupt, the too deeply pathetic, yet not wholly unhappy ending of a lovelier poem than any he or another should ever write, the poem of their married life. there is a rare serenity in the thought of death when it is known to be the gate of life. this conviction browning had, and so his grief was rather that of one whose joy has westered earlier. the sweetest music of his life had withdrawn: but there was still music for one to whom life in itself was a happiness. he had his son, and was not void of other solace: but even had it been otherwise he was of the strenuous natures who never succumb, nor wish to die--whatever accident of mortality overcome the will and the power. it was in the autumn following his wife's death that he wrote the noble poem to which allusion has already been made: "prospice." who does not thrill to its close, when all of gloom or terror "shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest." there are few direct allusions to his wife in browning's poems. of those prior to her death the most beautiful is "one word more," which has been already quoted in part: of the two or three subsequent to that event none surpasses the magic close of the first part of "the ring and the book." thereafter the details of his life are public property. he all along lived in the light, partly from his possession of that serenity which made goethe glad to be alive and to be able to make others share in that gladness. no poet has been more revered and more loved. his personality will long be a stirring tradition. in the presence of his simple manliness and wealth of all generous qualities one is inclined to pass by as valueless, as the mere flying spray of the welcome shower, the many honours and gratifications that befell him. even if these things mattered, concerning one by whose genius we are fascinated, while undazzled by the mere accidents pertinent thereto, their recital would be wearisome--of how he was asked to be lord rector of this university, or made a doctor of laws at that: of how letters and tributes of all kinds came to him from every district in our empire, from every country in the world: and so forth. all these things are implied in the circumstance that his life was throughout "a noble music with a golden ending." in his father died in paris, strenuous in life until the very end. after this event miss sarianna browning went to reside with her brother, and from that time onward was his inseparable companion, and ever one of the dearest and most helpful of friends. in latter years brother and sister were constantly seen together, and so regular attendants were they at such functions as the "private views" at the royal academy and grosvenor gallery, that these never seemed complete without them. a private view, a first appearance of joachim or sarasate, a first concert of richter or henschel or hallé, at each of these, almost to a certainty, the poet was sure to appear. the chief personal happiness of his later life was in his son. mr. r. barrett browning is so well known as a painter and sculptor that it would be superfluous for me to add anything further here, except to state that his successes were his father's keenest pleasures. two years after his father's death, that is in , the "poetical works of robert browning, m.a., honorary fellow of baliol college, oxford," were issued in six volumes. here the equator of browning's genius may be drawn. on the further side lie the "men and women" of the period anterior to "the ring and the book": midway is the transitional zone itself: on the hither side are the "men and women" of a more temperate if not colder clime. the first part of "the ring and the book" was not published till november. in september the poet was staying with his sister and son at le croisic, a picturesque village at the mouth of the loire, at the end of the great salt plains which stretch down from guérande to the bay of biscay. no doubt, in lying on the sand-dunes in the golden september glow, in looking upon the there somewhat turbid current of the loire, the poet brooded on those days when he saw its inland waters with her who was with him no longer save in dreams and memories. here he wrote that stirring poem, "hervé riel," founded upon the valorous action of a french sailor who frustrated the naval might of england, and claimed nothing as a reward save permission to have a holiday on land to spend a few hours with his wife, "la belle aurore." "hervé riel" (which has been translated into french, and is often recited, particularly in the maritime towns, and is always evocative of enthusiastic applause) is one of browning's finest action-lyrics, and is assured of the same immortality as "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," or the "pied piper" himself. in there was practical proof of the poet's growing popularity. baron tauchnitz issued two volumes of excellently selected poems, comprising some of the best of "men and women," "dramatis personæ," and "dramatic romances," besides the longer "soul's tragedy," "luria," "in a balcony," and "christmas eve and easter day"--the most christian poem of the century, according to one eminent cleric, the heterodox self-sophistication of a free-thinker, according to another: really, the reflex of a great crisis, that of the first movement of the tide of religious thought to a practically limitless freedom. this edition also contained "bishop blougram," then much discussed, apart from its poetic and intellectual worth, on account of its supposed verisimilitude in portraiture of cardinal wiseman. this composition, one of browning's most characteristic, is so clever that it is scarcely a poem. poetry and cleverness do not well agree, the muse being already united in perfect marriage to imagination. in his essay on truth, bacon says that one of the fathers called poetry _vinum dæmonum_, because it filleth the imagination. certainly if it be not _vinum dæmonum_ it is not poetry. in this year also appeared the first series of "selections" by the poet's latest publishers: "dedicated to alfred tennyson. in poetry--illustrious and consummate: in friendship--noble and sincere." it was in his preface to this selection that he wrote the often-quoted words: "nor do i apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh." at or about the date of these "selections" the poet wrote to a friend, on this very point of obscurity, "i can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many i should have been pleased to communicate with; but i never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. on the other hand, i never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. so perhaps, on the whole, i get my deserts, and something over--not a crowd, but a few i value more." in browning, ever restless for pastures new, went with his sister to spend the autumn at la saisiaz (savoyard for "the sun"), a villa among the mountains near geneva; this time with the additional company of miss anne egerton smith, an intimate and valued friend. but there was an unhappy close to the holiday. miss smith died on the night of the fourteenth of september, from heart complaint. "la saisiaz" is the direct outcome of this incident, and is one of the most beautiful of browning's later poems. its trochaics move with a tide-like sound. at the close, there is a line which might stand as epitaph for the poet-- "he, at least, believed in soul, was very sure of god." in the following year "la saisiaz" was published along with "the two poets of croisic," which was begun and partly written at the little french village ten years previously. there is nothing of the eight-score stanzas of the "two poets" to equal its delightful epilogue, or the exquisite prefatory lyric, beginning "such a starved bank of moss till that may-morn blue ran the flash across: violets were born." extremely interesting--and for myself i cannot find "the two poets of croisic" to be anything more than "interesting"--it is as a poem distinctly inferior to "la saisiaz." although detached lines are often far from truly indicative of the real poetic status of a long poem, where proportion and harmony are of more importance than casual exfoliations of beauty, yet to a certain extent they do serve as musical keys that give the fundamental tone. one certainly would have to search in vain to find in the croisic poem such lines as "five short days, scarce enough to bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain ash." or these of mont blanc, seen at sunset, towering over icy pinnacles and teeth-like peaks, "blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green, horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne." or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of jura-- "gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to gold." or, finally, this sounding verse-- "past the city's congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires." the other poems later than "the ring and the book" are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. on the one side may be ranged the groups which really cohere with "men and women." these are "the inn album," the miscellaneous poems of the "pacchiarotto" volume, the "dramatic idyls," some of "jocoseria," and some of "asolando." "ferishtah's fancies" and "parleyings" are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.[ ] they, and the classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that _nearness_ of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful "balaustion's adventure," "aristophanes' apology," and "the agamemnon of aeschylus," and the third group, which comprises "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," "red cotton nightcap country," and "fifine at the fair"--these three groups are of the second kind. [footnote : in a letter to a friend, browning wrote:--"i hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the poem [ferishtah's fancies] will make its sense clear enough. above all, pray allow for the poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few persian names and allusions. there was no such person as ferishtah--the stories are all inventions. ... the hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the old book, which the concocters of novel schemes of morality put forth as discoveries of their own."] remarkable as are the three last-named productions, it is extremely doubtful if the first and second will be read for pleasure by readers born after the close of this century. as it is impossible, in my narrow limits, to go into any detail about poems which personally i do not regard as essential to the truest understanding of browning, the truest because on the highest level, that of poetry--as distinct from dogma, or intellectual suasion of any kind that might, for all its æsthetic charm, be in prose--it would be presumptuous to assert anything derogatory of them without attempting adequate substantiation. i can, therefore, merely state my own opinion. to reiterate, it is that, for different reasons, these three long poems are foredoomed to oblivion--not, of course, to be lost to the student of our literature and of our age, a more wonderful one even than that of the renaissance, but to lapse from the general regard. that each will for a long time find appreciative readers is certain. they have a fascination for alert minds, and they have not infrequent ramifications which are worth pursuing for the glimpses afforded into an always evanishing promised land. "prince hohenstiel-schwangau" (the name, by the way, is not purely fanciful, being formed from hohen schwangau, one of the castles of the late king of bavaria) is browning's complement to his wife's "ode to napoleon iii." "red cotton nightcap country" is a true story, the narrative of the circumstances pertinent to the tragic death of one antonio mellerio, a paris jeweller, which occurred in at st. aubin in normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. it is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque zola. it has the fundamental weakness of "the ring and the book"--the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. it is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece of fiction. "fifine at the fair," on the other hand, is so powerful and often so beautiful a poem that one would be rash indeed were he, with the blithe critical assurance which is so generally snuffed out like a useless candle by a later generation, to prognosticate its inevitable seclusion from the high place it at present occupies in the estimate of the poet's most uncompromising admirers. but surely equally rash is the assertion that it will be the "poem of the future." however, our concern is not with problematical estimates, but with the poem as it appears to _us_. it is one of the most characteristic of browning's productions. it would be impossible for the most indolent reader or critic to attribute it, even if anonymous, to another parentage. coleridge alludes somewhere to certain verses of wordsworth's, with the declaration that if he had met them howling in the desert he would have recognised their authorship. "fifine" would not even have to howl. browning was visiting pornic one autumn, when he saw the gipsy who was the original of "fifine." in the words of mrs. orr, "his fancy was evidently set roaming by the gipsy's audacity, her strength--the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a pathetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. as he laid down the theory, mr. browning would be speaking in his own person. but he would turn into some one else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified don juan would grow up under his pen." one drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of balzac is that every now and again the student of the _comédie humaine_ resents the too obvious display of the forces that propel the effect--a lesser phase of the weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere "human documents" of the goncourt school of novelists. in the same way, we too often see browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the fulmination comes, we understand "just how it was produced," and, as illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which, like herrick's maids, continually do deceive. to me this is affirmable of "fifine at the fair." the poet seems to know so very well what he is doing. if he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be the greater. the poem would have a surer duration as one of the author's greater achievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged insistence on the note struck in the lines (§ lxxiii.) about the hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into the deep, "embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big thereby:" or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (§ cvi.): or in the windy spring freshness of "hence, when the earth began afresh its life in may, and fruit-trees bloomed, and waves would wanton, and the bay ruffle its wealth of weed, and stranger-birds arrive, and beasts take each a mate." ... but its chief fault seems to me to be its lack of that transmutive glow of rhythmic emotion without which no poem can endure. this rhythmic energy is, inherently, a distinct thing from intellectual emotion. metric music may be alien to the adequate expression of the latter, whereas rhythmic emotion can have no other appropriate issue. of course, in a sense, all creative art is rhythmic in kind: but here i am speaking only of that creative energy which evolves the germinal idea through the medium of language. the energy of the intellect under creative stimulus may produce lordly issues in prose: but poetry of a high intellectual order can be the outcome only of an intellect fused to white heat, of intellectual emotion on fire--as, in the fine saying of george meredith, passion is noble strength on fire. innumerable examples could be taken from any part of the poem, but as it would not be just to select the most obviously defective passages, here are two which are certainly fairly representative of the general level-- "and i became aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the carnival; _although the human stir continued just the same amid that shift of scene_." (no. cv.) "and where i' the world is all this wonder, you detail so trippingly, espied? my mirror would reflect a tall, thin, pale, deep-eyed personage, pretty once, it may be, doubtless still loving--certain grace yet lingers if you will--but all this wonder, where?" (no. xl.) here, and in a hundred other such passages, we have the rhythm, if not of the best prose, at least not that of poetry. will "fifine" and poems of its kind stand re-reading, re-perusal over and over? that is one of the most definite tests. in the pressure of life can we afford much time to anything but the very best--nay, to the vast mass even of that which closely impinges thereupon? for myself, in the instance of "fifine," i admit that if re-perusal be controlled by pleasure i am content (always excepting a few scattered noble passages) with the prologue and epilogue. a little volume of those summaries of browning's--how stimulating a companion it would be in those hours when the mind would fain breathe a more liberal air! as for "jocoseria,"[ ] it seems to me the poorest of browning's works, and i cannot help thinking that ultimately the only gold grain discoverable therein will be "ixion," the beautiful penultimate poem beginning-- "never the time and the place and the loved one altogether;" and the thrush-like overture, closing-- "what of the leafage, what of the flower? roses embowering with nought they embower! come then! complete incompletion, o comer, pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! breathe but one breath rose-beauty above, and all that was death grows life, grows love, grows love!" [footnote : in a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this book, browning stated that "the title is taken from the work of melander (_schwartzmann_), reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the _blackwood_ of this month. i referred to it in a note to 'paracelsus.' the two hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention) being translated amount to ( ) 'a collection of many lies': and ( ), an old saying, 'from moses to moses arose none like moses'......"] in the "browning society" was established. it is easy to ridicule any institution of the kind--much easier than to be considerate of other people's earnest convictions and aims, or to be helpful to their object. there is always a ridiculous side to excessive enthusiasm, particularly obvious to persons incapable of enthusiasm of any kind. with some mistakes, and not a few more or less grotesque absurdities, the members of the various english and american browning societies are yet to be congratulated on the good work they have, collectively, accomplished. their publications are most interesting and suggestive: ultimately they will be invaluable. the members have also done a good work in causing some of browning's plays to be produced again on the stage, and in miss alma murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some of the poet's most attractive _dramatis personæ_. there can be no question as to the powerful impetus given by the society to browning's steadily-increasing popularity. nothing shows his judicious good sense more than the letter he wrote, privately, to mr. edmund yates, at the time of the society's foundation. "the browning society, i need not say, as well as browning himself, are fair game for criticism. i had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn; and, as wilkes was no wilkeite, i am quite other than a browningite. but i cannot wish harm to a society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are busied about my books so disinterestedly. the exaggerations probably come of the fifty-years'-long charge of unintelligibility against my books; such reactions are possible, though i never looked for the beginning of one so soon. that there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain; but i have been surprised and touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, i think. anyhow, as i never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment: so enough of 'browning,'--except that he is yours very truly, 'while this machine is to him.'" the latter years of the poet were full of varied interest for himself, but present little of particular significance for specification in a monograph so concise as this must perforce be. every year he went abroad, to france or to italy, and once or twice on a yachting trip in the mediterranean.[ ] at home--for many years, at warwick crescent, in what some one has called the dreary mesopotamia of paddington, and for the last three or four years of his life at de vere gardens, kensington gore--his avocations were so manifold that it is difficult to understand where he had leisure for his vocation. everybody wished him to come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify everybody. he saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new french, german, and italian books of mark; read and translated euripides and Æschylus; knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was browning: the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since shakspere. his personal grace and charm of manner never failed. whether he was dedicating "balaustion's adventure" in terms of gracious courtesy, or handing a flower from some jar of roses, or lilies, or his favourite daffodils, with a bright smile or merry glance, to the lady of his regard, or when sending a copy of a new book of poetry with an accompanying letter expressed with rare felicity, or when generously prophesying for a young poet the only true success if he will but listen and act upon "the inner voice,"--he was in all these, and in all things, the ideal gentleman. there is so charming and characteristic a touch in the following note to a girl-friend, that i must find room for it:-- de vere gardens, w., _ th july_ . my beloved alma,--i had the honour yesterday of dining with the shah, whereupon the following dialogue:-- "vous êtes poëte?" "on s'est permis de me le dire quelquefois." "et vous avez fait des livres?" "trop de livres." "voulez-vous m'en donner un, afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de vous?" "avec plaisir." i have been accordingly this morning to town, where the thing is procurable, and as i chose a volume of which i judged the binding might take the imperial eye, i said to myself, "here do i present my poetry to a personage for whom i do not care three straws; why should i not venture to do as much for a young lady i love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?" so i was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or no, was always, my alma, your affectionate friend, robert browning. [footnote : it was on his first experience of this kind, more than a quarter of a century earlier, that he wrote the nobly patriotic lines of "home thoughts from the sea," and that flawless strain of bird-music, "home thoughts from abroad:" then, also, that he composed "how they brought the good news." concerning the last, he wrote, in (_vide the academy_, april nd), "there is no sort of historical foundation about [this poem]. i wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the african coast, after i had been at it long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse, 'york,' then in my stable at home. it was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of bartoli's _simboli_, i remember."] his look was a continual and serene gleam. lamartine, who remarks this of bossuet in his youth, adds a phrase which, as observant acquaintances of the poet will agree, might be written of browning--"his lips quivered often without utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech." except for the touching and beautiful letter which he wrote from asolo about two months before his death, to mr. wilfrid meynell, about a young writer to whom the latter wished to draw the poet's kindly attention--a letter which has a peculiar pathos in the words, "i shall soon depart for venice, on my way homeward"--except for this letter there is none so well worth repetition here as his last word to the poet-laureate. the friendship between these two great poets has in itself the fragrance of genius. the letter was written just before browning left london. de vere gardens, w., _august th_, . my dear tennyson,--to-morrow is your birthday--indeed, a memorable one. let me say i associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us--secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. and for my own part, let me further say, i have loved you dearly. may god bless you and yours. at no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have i had any other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter--that i am and ever shall be, my dear tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours, robert browning. shortly after this he was at asolo once more, the little hill-town in the veneto, which he had visited in his youth, and where he heard again the echo of pippa's song-- "god's in his heaven, all's right with the world!" mr. w.w. story writes to me that he spent three days with the poet at this time, and that the latter seemed, except for a slight asthma, to be as vigorous in mind and body as ever. thence, later in the autumn, he went to venice, to join his son and daughter-in-law at the home where he was "to have a corner for his old age," the beautiful palazzo rezzonico, on the grand canal. he was never happier, more sanguine, more joyous, than here. he worked for three or four hours each morning, walked daily for about two hours, crossed occasionally to the lido with his sister, and in the evenings visited friends or went to the opera. but for some time past, his heart--always phenomenally slow in its action, and of late ominously intermittent--had been noticeably weaker. as he suffered no pain and little inconvenience, he paid no particular attention to the matter. browning had as little fear of death as doubt in god. in a controlling providence he did indeed profoundly believe. he felt, with joubert, that "it is not difficult to believe in god, if one does not worry oneself to define him."[ ] [footnote : "browning's 'orthodoxy' brought him into many a combat with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe that he took his doctrine seriously. such was the fact, however; indeed, i have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his _incognito_, gave strenuous battle to the opinions uttered. to one who had spoken of an expected 'judgment day' as a superstition, i heard him say: 'i don't see that. why should there not be a settling day in the universe, as when a master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?' there was something in his tone and manner which suggested his dramatic conception of religious ideas and ideals."--moncure d. conway.] "how should externals satisfy my soul?" was his cry in "sordello," and it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental motive is expressible in "--a loving worm within its sod were diviner than a loveless god amid his worlds"-- love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the universe, of the soul, of all nature. he is as convinced of the two absolute facts of god and soul as cardinal newman in writing of "two and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator." most fervently he believes that "haply for us the ideal dawn shall break ... and set our pulse in tune with moods divine"-- though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of himself." ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in phosphor a vaunt-guard of night." yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which sainte-beuve uttered of pascal, "that lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood." no darkness, no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of 'the ideal dawn.' as the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether. he had that profound inquietude, which the great french critic says 'attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.' but, unlike pascal--who in sainte-beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses, "on one side an elevation toward god, toward the morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction of evil"--browning sees, believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all, toward an illustrious origin. the crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame. the silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest utterances. it seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death's vanity--a brave assertion of the glory of life. "death, death! it is this harping on death i despise so much," he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech--the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him---"this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! why should we not change like everything else? in fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, french as well as english, and, i am told, in american art and literature, the shadow of death--call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference--is upon us. but what fools who talk thus! why, _amico mio_, you know as well as i that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. for myself, i deny death as an end of everything. never say of me that i am dead!" on the evening of thursday, the th of december ( ), he was in bed, with exceeding weakness. in the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a painting by his son. it depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and is illustrative of a superb passage in shelley's "revolt of islam." what memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant, to us, the circumstance! but weak as the poet was, he yet did not see the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers. shortly before the great bell of san marco struck ten, he turned and asked if any news had come concerning "asolando," published that day. his son read him a telegram from the publishers, telling how great the demand was and how favourable were the advance-articles in the leading papers. the dying poet smiled and muttered, "how gratifying!" when the last toll of st. mark's had left a deeper stillness than before, those by the bedside saw a yet profounder silence on the face of him whom they loved. * * * * * it is needless to dwell upon the grief everywhere felt and expressed for the irreparable loss. the magnificent closing lines of shelley's "alastor" must have occurred to many a mourner; for gone, indeed, was "a surpassing spirit." the superb pomp of the venetian funeral, the solemn grandeur of the interment in westminster abbey, do not seem worth recording: so insignificant are all these accidents of death made by the supreme fact itself. yet it is fitting to know that venice has never in modern times afforded a more impressive sight, than those craped processional gondolas following the high flower-strewn funeral-barge through the thronged water-ways and out across the lagoon to the desolate isle of the dead: that london has rarely seen aught more solemn than the fog-dusked cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying upward the loved familiar words of the 'lyric voice' hushed so long before. yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends, lambeth artizans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of laurel before the hearse--by that desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again like the sea upon this lost wandering wave. who would not honour this mighty dead? all who could be present were there, somewhere in the ancient abbey. one of the greatest, loved and admired by the dead poet, had already put the mourning of many into the lofty dignity of his verse:-- "now dumb is he who waked the world to speak, and voiceless hangs the world beside his bier, our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear: we are the smitten mortal, we the weak. we see a spirit on earth's loftiest peak shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: see a great tree of life that never sere dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak: such ending is not death: such living shows what wide illumination brightness sheds from one big heart--to conquer man's old foes: the coward, and the tyrant, and the force of all those weedy monsters raising heads when song is murk from springs of turbid source."[ ] [footnote : george meredith.] one word more of "light and fleeting shadow." in the greatness of his nature he must be ranked with milton, defoe, and scott. his very shortcomings, such as they were, were never baneful growths, but mere weeds, with a certain pleasant though pungent savour moreover, growing upon a rich, an exuberant soil. pluck one of the least lovely--rather call it the unworthy arrow shot at the body of a dead comrade, so innocent of ill intent: yet it too has a beauty of its own, for the shaft was aflame from the fulness of a heart whose love had withstood the chill passage of the years. * * * * * on the night of browning's death a new star suddenly appeared in orion. the coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in that constellation-- "no more subjected to the change or chance of the unsteady planets----" gleam those other "abodes where the immortals are." certainly, a wandering fire has passed away from us. whither has it gone? to that new star in orion: or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost meteors? whence, and for how long, will its rays reach our storm and gloom-beleaguered earth? such questions cannot meanwhile be solved. our eyes are still confused with the light, with that ardent flame, as we knew it here. but this we know, it was indeed "a central fire descending upon many altars." these, though touched with but a spark of the immortal principle, bear enduring testimony. and what testimony! how heartfelt: happily also how widespread, how electrically stimulative! but the time must come when the poet's personality will have the remoteness of tradition: when our perplexed judgments will be as a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. it is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy robert browning will ultimately occupy. the commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet's fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence. to dogmatise were the height of presumption as well as of folly: but to forego speculation, based upon complete present knowledge, for an idle contentment with narrow horizons, were perhaps foolisher still. but assuredly each must perforce be content with his own prevision. none can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time. so, for myself, let me summarise what i have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of chapter vi. there, it will be remembered--after having found that browning's highest achievement is in his second period--emphasis was laid on the primary importance of his life-work in its having compelled us to the assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving the construction of a new definition. in the light of this new definition i think browning will ultimately be judged. as the sculptor in "pippa passes" was the predestinated novel thinker in marble, so browning himself appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in degree, not in kind. but i do not for a moment believe that his greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and the thinker are indissociable. many years ago sainte-beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: "venir nous dire que tout poëte de talent est, par essence, un grand _penseur_, et que tout vrai _penseur_ est nécessairement artiste et poëte, c'est une prétention insoutenable et que dément à chaque instant la réalité." when browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day--an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues--shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain. it is as the poet he will live: not merely as the "novel thinker in verse." logically, his attitude as 'thinker' is unimpressive. it is the attitude, as i think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality. in one of his _causeries_, the keen french critic quoted above has a remark upon the great bossuet, which may with singular aptness be repeated of browning:--"his is the hebrew genius extended, fecundated by christianity, and open to all the acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases." browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence. he is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this. he is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance. schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found annotations of his which are so characteristic and so acute, "that which is called 'mathematical certainty' is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or equilibrium in darkness." browning would sometimes have us accept the evidence of his 'cane' as all-sufficient. he does not entrench himself among conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified lines of convention, and remains there. thus is true what mr. mortimer says in a recent admirable critique--"his position in regard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent. he is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. his processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." browning's conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. they occasionally suggest that wisdom of gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire. it is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning. truth may ring regnant in the lines of abt vogler-- "and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days?"-- but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical. we are all familiar with, and in this book i have dwelt more than once upon, browning's habitual attitude towards death. it is not a novel one. the frontage is not so much that of the daring pioneer, as the sedate assurance of 'the oldest inhabitant.' it is of good hap, of welcome significance: none the less there is an aspect of our mortality of which the poet's evasion is uncompromising and absolute. i cannot do better than quote mr. mortimer's noteworthy words hereupon, in connection, moreover, with browning's artistic relation to sex, that other great protagonist in the relentless duel of humanity with circumstance. "the final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will. it is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of life. veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment that we ourselves have made. two facts thus carefully shrouded from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in our lives--the life-giving and life-destroying elements, sex and death. we are compelled to occasional physiologic and economic discussion of the one, but we shrink from recognising the full extent to which it bases the whole social fabric carefully concealing its insurrections, and ignoring or misreading their lessons. the other, in certain aspects, we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, from our cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave, purchasing a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity. we uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow death and the bacchanal sex, and we mumble prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other. on one only of these can browning be said to have spoken with novel force--the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since goethe. on the problem of death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic temperament never allowed him to dwell. he sentimentalised where shakspere thought." browning's whole attitude to the hereafter is different from that of tennyson only in that the latter 'faintly,' while he strenuously, "trusts the larger hope." to him all credit, that, standing upon the frontiers of the past, he can implicitly trust the future. "high-hearted surely he; but bolder they who first off-cast their moorings from the habitable past." the teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more, but a great poet's utterance is never temporal, having that in it which conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of literary ideals. what range, what extent of genius! as mr. frederick wedmore has well said, 'browning is not a book--he is a literature.' but that he will "stand out gigantic" in _mass_ of imperishable work, in that far-off day, i for one cannot credit. his poetic shortcomings seem too essential to permit of this. that fatal excess of cold over emotive thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. it is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled obscurity of much of browning's work--miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought. his is that "palace infinite which darkens with excess of light." but mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic. browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any writer. it is a ruinous process--for the poet. "he so well repays intelligent study." that is it, unfortunately. there are many, like the old scotch lady who attempted to read carlyle's _french revolution_, who think they have become "daft" when they encounter a passage such as, for example, "rivals, who ... tuned, from bocafoli's stark-naked psalms, to plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with, 'as knops that stud some almug to the pith 'prickèd for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse 'than pursèd eyelids of a river-horse 'sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze-- _gad-fly,_ that is." the old lady persevered with carlyle, and, after a few days, found "she was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author." what would even that indomitable student have said to the above quotation, and to the poem whence it comes? to many it is not the poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction. they rejoice, after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in remote depths, touch bottom. enough 'meaning' has been educed from 'childe roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a school of philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day. worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-room.'[ ] of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse: most obvious in "sordello," in portions of "the ring and the book," and in so many of the later poems. these inexcusable violations are like the larvæ within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the manner of poetry. in a letter of mrs. browning's she alludes to a friend's "melodious feeling" for poetry. possibly the phrase was accidental, but it is significant. to inhale the vital air of poetry we must love it, not merely find it "interesting," "suggestive," "soothing," "stimulative": in a word, we must have a "melodious feeling" for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it. browning, who has so often educed from his lyre melodies and harmonies of transcendent, though novel, beauty, was too frequently, during composition, without this melodious feeling of which his wife speaks. the distinction between literary types such as browning or balzac on the one hand, and keats or gustave flaubert on the other, is that with the former there exists a reverence for the vocation and a relative indifference to the means, in themselves--and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere means as well as for that to which they conduce. the poet who does not love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his palette, or as the musician any vagrant tone evoked by a sudden touch in idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the sons of apollo. the writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes literature and art, without this heed--without, rather, this creative anxiety: for it is certainly not enough, as some one has said, that language should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick. of course, browning is not persistently neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist. he is often as masterly in this as in other respects. but he is not always, not often enough, alive to the paramount need. he writes with "the verse being as the mood it paints:" but, unfortunately, the mood is often poetically unformative. he had no passion for the quest for seductive forms. too much of his poetry has been born prematurely. too much of it, indeed, has not died and been born again--for all immortal verse is a poetic resurrection. perfect poetry is the deathless part of mortal beauty. the great artists never perpetuate gross actualities, though they are the supreme realists. it is schiller, i think, who says in effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful that things should first die in reality. thus browning's dramatic method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in caliban's analytical reasoning--an initial absurdity, as mr. berdoe has pointed out, adding epigrammatically, 'caliban is a savage, with the introspective powers of a hamlet, and the theology of an evangelical churchman.' not only caliban, but several other of browning's personages (aprile, eglamour, etc.) are what goethe calls _schwankende gestalten_, mere "wavering images." [footnote : one account says 'childe roland' was written in three days; another, that it was composed in one. browning's rapidity in composition was extraordinary. "the return of the druses" was written in five days, an act a day; so, also, was the "blot on the 'scutcheon."] montaigne, in one of his essays, says that to stop gracefully is sure proof of high race in a horse: certainly to stop in time is imperative upon the poet. of browning may be said what poe wrote of another, that his genius was too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate _art_ so needful in the building up of monuments for immortality. but has not a greater than poe declared that "what distinguishes the artist from the amateur is _architectoniké_ in the highest sense; that power of execution which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration." assuredly, no "new definition" can be an effective one which conflicts with goethe's incontrovertible dictum. but this much having been admitted, i am only too willing to protest against the uncritical outcry against browning's musical incapacity. a deficiency is not incapacity, otherwise coleridge, at his highest the most perfect of our poets, would be lowly estimated. "bid shine what would, dismiss into the shade what should not be--and there triumphs the paramount surprise o' the master." ... browning's music is oftener harmonic than melodic: and musicians know how the general ear, charmed with immediately appellant melodies, resents, wearies of, or is deaf to the harmonies of a more remote, a more complex, and above all a more novel creative method. he is, among poets, what wagner is among musicians; as shakspere may be likened to beethoven, or shelley to chopin. the common assertion as to his incapacity for metric music is on the level of those affirmations as to his not being widely accepted of the people, when the people have the chance; or as to the indifference of the public to poetry generally--and this in an age when poetry has never been so widely understood, loved, and valued, and wherein it is yearly growing more acceptable and more potent! a great writer is to be adjudged by his triumphs, not by his failures: as, to take up montaigne's simile again, a famous race-horse is remembered for its successes and not for the races which it lost. the tendency with certain critics is to reverse the process. instead of saying with the archbishop in horne's "gregory vii.," "he owes it all to his memnonian voice! he has no genius:" or of declaring, as prospero says of caliban in "the tempest," "he is as disproportioned in his manners as in his shape:" how much better to affirm of him what ben jonson wrote of shakspere, "hee redeemed his vices with his vertues: there was ever more in him to bee praysed than to bee pardoned." in the balance of triumphs and failures, however, is to be sought the relative measure of genius--whose equipoise should be the first matter of ascertainment in comparative criticism. for those who would discriminate between what mr. traill succinctly terms his _generic_ greatness as thinker and man of letters, and his _specific_ power as poet, it is necessary to disabuse the mind of browning's "message." the question is not one of weighty message, but of artistic presentation. to praise a poem because of its optimism is like commending a peach because it loves the sunshine, rather than because of its distinguishing bloom and savour. the primary concern of the artist must be with his vehicle of expression. in the instance of a poet, this vehicle is language emotioned to the white-heat of rhythmic music by impassioned thought or sensation. schopenhauer declares it is all a question of style now with poetry; that everything has been sung, that everything has been duly cursed, that there is nothing left for poetry but to be the glowing forge of words. he forgets that in quintessential art there is nothing of the past, nothing old: even the future has part therein only in that the present is always encroaching upon, becoming, the future. the famous pessimistic philosopher has, in common with other critics, made, in effect, the same remark--that style exhales the odour of the soul: yet he himself has indicated that the strength of shakspere lay in the fact that 'he had no taste,' that 'he was not a man of letters.' whenever genius has displayed epic force it has established a new order. in the general disintegration and reconstruction of literary ideals thus involved, it is easier to be confused by the novel flashing of strange lights than to discern the central vivifying altar-flame. it may prove that what seem to us the regrettable accidents of browning's genius are no malfortunate flaws, but as germane thereto as his herculean ruggednesses are to shakspere, as the laboured inversions of his blank verse are to milton, as his austere concision is to dante. meanwhile, to the more exigent among us at any rate, the flaws seem flaws, and in nowise essential. but when we find weighty message and noble utterance in union, as we do in the magnificent remainder after even the severest ablation of the poor and mediocre portion of browning's life-work, how beneficent seem the generous gods! of this remainder most aptly may be quoted these lines from "the ring and the book," "gold as it was, is, shall be evermore; prime nature with an added artistry." how gladly, in this dubious hour--when, as an eminent writer has phrased it, a colossal hand, which some call the hand of destiny and others that of humanity, is putting out the lights of heaven one by one, like candles after a feast--how gladly we listen to this poet with his serene faith in god, and immortal life, and the soul's unending development! "hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit," he cries in the prologue to "pacchiarotto": and this, in manifold phrasing, is his _leit-motif_, his fundamental idea, in unbroken line from the "pauline" of his twenty-first to the "asolando" of his seventy-sixth year. this superb phalanx of faith--what shall prevail against it? how winsome it is, moreover: this, and the humanity of his song. profoundly he realised that there is no more significant study than the human heart. "the development of a soul: little else is worth study," he wrote in his preface to "sordello": so in his old age, in his last "reverie"-- "as the record from youth to age of my own, the single soul-- so the world's wide book: one page deciphered explains the whole of our common heritage." he had faith also that "the record from youth to age" of his own soul would outlast any present indifference or neglect--that whatever tide might bear him away from our regard for a time would ere long flow again. the reaction must come: it is, indeed, already at hand. but one almost fancies one can hear the gathering of the remote waters once more. we may, with strafford, "feel sure that time, who in the twilight comes to mend all the fantastic day's caprice, consign to the low ground once more the ignoble term, and raise the genius on his orb again,-- that time will do me right." ... indeed, browning has the grand manner, for all it is more that of the scandinavian jarl than of the italian count or spanish grandee. and ever, below all the stress and failure, below all the triumph of his toil, is the beauty of his dream. it was "a surpassing spirit" that went from out our midst. "one who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." "speed, fight on, fare ever there as here!" are the last words of this brave soul. in truth, "the air seems bright with his past presence yet." "sun-treader--life and light be thine for ever; thou art gone from us--years go by--and spring gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful, yet thy songs come not--other bards arise, but none like thee--they stand--thy majesties, like mighty works which tell some spirit there hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn, till, its long task completed, it hath risen and left us, never to return." * * * * * index. a. "abt vogler," , , "a face," "a forgiveness," "after," "agamemnon of Æschylus," "a grammarian's funeral," , "a likeness," alma ----, letter to, "amphibian," ancona, "andrea del sarto," , "andromeda," "another way of love," "any wife to any husband," , "a pearl," "apparent failure," , "appearances," appearance, browning's personal, , aprile, , , "aristophanes' apology," "ask not one least word of praise," "asolando," , , , , , , , asolo, , "a soul's tragedy," , , "athenæum, the," "a toccata of galuppi's," , "aurora leigh," , , , , b. bagni di lucca, , bailey's "festus," "balaustion's adventure," , balzac, , , , , , barrett, arabella, , barrett, edward, barrett, mr., , , "beatrice signorini," beautiful in verse, the, - beethoven, "before," "bells and pomegranates," , , "ben karshook's wisdom," berdoe, e., , , "bifurcations," "bishop blougram," , blake, william, "blot on the 'scutcheon, a," , , , , , bossuet and browning, browning, clara, browning, elizabeth barrett: browning's early influence on, ; born march , , ; her girlhood and early work, ; death of brother, ; residence in london, ; "the cry of the children," ; friendships with horne and kenyon, ; her appreciation of browning's poems, ; correspondence with him, ; engagement, ; acquaintance with mrs. jameson, ; marriage, ; mr. barrett's resentment, ; journey to paris, ; thence to pisa, ; browning's love for his wife, ; "sonnets from the portuguese," ; in spring to florence, ; to ancona, _via_ ravenna, in june, ; winter at casa guidi, ; "aurora leigh," ; description of poetess, , ; birth of son in , ; "casa guidi windows," ; , spring in rome; proposal to confer poet-laureateship on mrs. browning, , ; , visits england, ; winter in paris, ; she is enthusiastic about napoleon iii. and interested in spiritualism; summer in london, ; autumn at casa guidi, ; winter - in rome, "aurora leigh," death of kenyon, legacies, ; , death of mr. barrett, ; , delicacy of mrs. browning, ; july , brownings travel to normandy; "two poems by elizabeth barrett and robert browning," , ; , "poems before congress," and death of arabella barrett, ; "north and south," ; return to casa guidi, and death on th june , , browning, reuben, , , browning, robert: born in london in , , , ; his literary and artistic antecedents and contemporaries, - ; his parentage and ancestry, , - ; concerning traces of semitic origin, - ; his sisters, ; his father, ; his mother, , ; his uncle, reuben browning, ; the camberwell home, ; his childhood, ; early poems, ; translation of the odes of horace, ; goes to school at peckham, ; his holiday afternoons, ; "death of harold," ; criticisms of miss flower and mr. fox, ; he reads shelley's and keats's poems, , ; he has a tutor, ; attends gower street university college, ; he decides to be a poet, ; writes "pauline," , ; it is published in , ; "pauline," - ; criticisms thereon, ; rossetti and "pauline," studies at british museum, , ; travels in to russia, ; to italy, ; return to camberwell, , , and begins "paracelsus," sonnet signed "z," , ; love for venice, ; "paracelsus," , ; criticisms thereon, , ; he meets macready, ; "narses," ; he meets talfourd, wordsworth, landor, ; "strafford," ; his dramas, ; his love of the country, ; "pippa passes," , ; "sordello," ; origin of "the ring and the book," ; "the ring and the book," - ; "the inn album," ; "men and women," ; proposed "transcripts from life," ; "flower o' the vine," ; correspondence between him and miss barrett, ; meeting in , ; engagement, ; marriage, th september , ; sojourn in pisa, ; they go to florence, ; to ancona, _via_ ravenna, ; "the guardian angel," ; casa guidi, ; birth of son, march th, , ; they go to vallombrosa and bagni di lucca for the autumn, and winter at casa guidi, ; spring of in rome, ; "two in the campagna," ; , they visit england; description of browning, ; winter - in paris with robert browning, senior, ; browning writes prefatory essay to moxon's edition of shelley's letters, ; midsummer, baths of lucca, ; in florence, ; "in a balcony," ; winter in rome, - , ; the work written there, ; "ben karshook's wisdom," ; "men and women" published, ; kenyon's death, and legacies to the brownings, ; poems written between - , ; july , brownings go to normandy, ; "legend of pornic," "gold hair," ; autumn of in sienna; winter - in rome, ; death of mrs. browning, june , ; "prospice," ; , browning loses his father; miss sarianna resides with browning, ; his ways of life, ; first collected edition of his works, , ; first part of "the ring and the book" published, ; "hervé riel," ; tauchnitz edition, , ; "bishop blougram," ; "selections," ; "la saisiaz," , ; "the two poets of croisic," ; later works, ; "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," "red cotton nightcap country," , ; "fifine at the fair," , , - ; "jocoseria," ; , browning society established, ; his latter years, ; revisits asolo, ; palazzo rezzonico, ; religious belief, ; death, december th, , , ; funeral, ; to be estimated by a new definition, ; as poet, rather than as thinker, ; his love of life, ; his, like bossuet's, a hebrew genius fecundated by christianity, ; his artistic relations to death and sex, - ; where, in standpoint, he differs from tennyson, ; as to quality of his _mass_ of work, ; intellectually exploited, ; his difficulties, and their attraction to many, ; his attitude to the future, influence, and significance, - ; summary of his life-work, - . browning, robert wiedemann barrett, , , , , browning, robert (senior), , , , , , , , browning, sarianna (mrs.), , , , browning, sarianna (miss), , , browning society, the, , browning, william shergold, byron, "by the fireside," c. "caliban upon setebos," , , camberwell, , , , , , , carlyle, thomas, , , , , , casa guidi, , , , , , "cavalier-tunes," "childe roland," , chopin, "christmas eve and easter-day," , "cleon," coleridge, "colombe's birthday," - "confessional, the," "confessions," contemporaries, literary and artistic, of browning, - conway, moncure, , cristina, "cristina and manaldeschi," cunningham, allan, , d. dante, , , , death, browning on, , , "death of harold," "death in the desert, a," , defoe, "de gustibus," , , dickens, charles, , "dîs aliter visum," , domett, a. (waring), dramas, browning's, - "dramatic idyls," , "dramatic romances," , "dramatis personæ," , , dulwich wood, , , , - e. "earth's immortalities," "echetlos," epics, series of monodramatic, equator of browning's genius, the, "evelyn hope," , f. faucit, miss helen, "ferishtah's fancies," "fifine at the fair," , , , - flaubert, gustave, "flight of the duchess," , "flower's name, the," , _flower o' the vine_, flower, miss sarah (afterwards adams), , form, artistic, - forster, john, , , fox, mrs. bridell, fox, rev. william johnson, , , , , , "fra lippo lippi," , , furnivall, dr., , future, browning and the, - g. goethe, , , , "gold hair," , gordon, general, gosse, e.w., "grammarian's funeral, a," , "guardian angel, the," , h. "halburt and hob," hawthorne, n., - , "heap cassia," etc., heine, , "heretic's tragedy, the," "hervé riel," , hillard, g.s., - "holy cross day," "home thoughts from abroad," , , , "home thoughts from the sea," , , hood, thomas, horne, r.h., , , , , , houghton, lord, "how they brought the good news," etc., , , hugo, victor, , i. "imperante augusto," "in a balcony," , , , , "in a gondola," "inapprehensiveness," "in a year," "inn album, the," , , , , "instans tyrannus," "italian in england, the," italian art, music, etc.--influence of, on browning, italy, first visit to, - "ivàn ivànovitch," , "ixion," j. jameson, mrs., "james lee's wife," , , jerrold, douglas, "jocoseria," , , "johannes agricola," joubert, k. karshish, epistle to, , keats, , , , , , kenyon, john, , , "king victor and king charles," , l. "lady and the painter, the," lamartine on bossuet, landor, w.s., - , "la saisiaz," , "last ride together, the," le croisie, lehmann's, rudolf, portrait of browning, , _leit-motif_, browning's, letter to a girl friend, "life in a love," "light woman, a," "lost leader, the," , "love among the ruins," , , "love in a life," "lover's quarrel, a," lowell, j.r., "luria," , - , m. macpherson, mrs., - macready, - "magical nature," manner, browning's, marlowe, "mary wollstonecraft and fuseli," "master hugues of saxe-gotha," , "may and death," mazzini, "meeting at night," , "memorabilia," , "men and women," - , , , , , , , meredith, george, , , , meynell, wilfrid, montaigne, mortimer, - motive, browning's fundamental poetic, mill, john stuart, milsand, j., milton, , , , "misconceptions," mitford, mary, "muléykeh," murray, alma, music of browning's verse, - "my last duchess," "my star," n. "narses," "natural magic," nature, browning's observation of, nettleship, j., , "never the time and the place," , newman, cardinal, _new spirit of the age_, normandy, the brownings in, "now," "numpholeptos," o. obscurity, browning's, , "old pictures in florence," "o lyric love," , , "one way of love," "one word more," , optimism, browning's, (and _vide_ summary) orion, new star in, orr, mrs. sutherland, , , , orthodoxy, browning's, "over the seas our galleys went," p. "pacchiarotto," - , , , , palazzo rezzonico, "pan and luna," "paracelsus," , , - , , , paris, the brownings in, "parleyings," "parting at morning," pater, walter, "pauline," , , , - , - , , , , "pheidippides," "pictor ignotus," "pied piper of hamelin," , , "pippa passes," , , , , , , , - , pisa, "pisgah sights," plato, poe, e.a., poems, early, , , , , "poetical works," "poetics," pompilia, , - "pope, the," "popularity," "porphyria," , portraits of browning, , , "pretty woman, a," primary importance, browning's, "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," , , profundity, browning's, "prospice," , , r. rabbi ben ezra, , rawdon brown, sonnet to, "red cotton nightcap country," , - religious opinions, , etc. "rephan," "return of the druses, the," , - , "reverie," , , richmond, "ring and the book, the," , , - , , , , , romance, browning and, rome, the brownings in, , roscoe, w.c., "rosny," rossetti, dante gabriel, - , , "round of day, the," ruskin, j., , russia, visit to, s. sainte-beuve, , "saul," , , schiller, school, peckham, , schopenhauer, , shortcomings, browning's artistic, science, browning and, scott, david, scott, sir w., "serenade at the villa," sex, browning's artistic relation to, shakspere, , - , , , , , , shelley, , , , , , - , , , , , shelley letters, the, "sibrandus schafnaburgensis," , skelton, john, "sludge the medium," , _songs_--"nay but you," ; "round us the wild creatures," ; "once i saw," ; "man i am," ; "you groped your way," ; "wish me no wish unspoken," sonnets, browning's, "sonnets from the portuguese," , "sordello," , , , , , , , , - , , , soul, browning and the, - "soul's tragedy, a," , , "speculative," spiritual influence, browning's, "st. martin's summer," story, w.w., , , "strafford," , , - , , summary of criticism, - swinburne, a.c., t. talfourd, , tauchnitz edition, taylor, bayard, tennyson, lord, , , , , , "the statue and the bust," "the tomb at st. praxed's," , "there's a woman like a dew-drop," thinker, browning as, "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr," "tokay," "too late," "touch him ne'er so lightly," tour-de-force, poetry and, _transcripts from life_, - traill, h.d., "two in the campagna," , , "two poets of croisic," , u. university college, v. venice, , , "verse-making," w. wagner, wedmore, f., westminster abbey, "what of the leafage," etc., "why from the world," wiedemann, mr., "woman's last word, a," women, browning's, "women and roses," wonder spirit, browning and the, wordsworth, , , , work, browning's mass of, y. yates, e., letter from browning to, york, the horse, , "youth and art," , z. "z" signed sonnet, bibliography. by john p. anderson (_british museum_). i. works. ii. single works. iii. contributions to magazines. iv. printed letters. v. selections. vi. appendix-- biography, criticism, etc. magazine articles. vii. chronological list of works * * * * * i. works. poems. vols. a new edition. london, , mo. vol. i., paracelsus; pippa passes, a drama; king victor and king charles, a tragedy; colombe's birthday, a play. vol. ii., a blot in the 'scutcheon, a tragedy; the return of the druses, a tragedy; luria, a tragedy; a soul's tragedy; dramatic romances and lyrics. the poetical works of robert browning. third edition. vols. london, , vo. vol. i., lyrics; romances; men and women. vol. ii., tragedies and other plays. vol. iii., paracelsus; christmas eve and easter-day; sordello. the poetical works of robert browning. vols. london, , vo. vol. i., pauline; paracelsus; strafford. vol. ii., sordello; pippa passes. vol. iii., king victor and king charles; dramatic lyrics; the return of the druses. vol. iv., a blot in the 'scutcheon; colombe's birthday; dramatic romances. vol. v., a soul's tragedy; luria; christmas eve and easter-day; men and women. vol. vi., in a balcony; dramatis personæ. complete works of robert browning. a reprint from the latest english edition. chicago, - , vo. nos. - of the "official guide of the chicago and alton r.r. and monthly reprint and advertiser." the poetical works of robert browning. vols. leipzig, , vo. vols. , of the "tauchnitz collection of british authors." the poetical works of robert browning. vols. london, - , vo. vol. i. contains _pauline_ and _sordello_. vol. ii., _paracelsus_ and _strafford_. vol. iii., _pippa passes; king victor and king charles; the return of the druses; a soul's tragedy._ vol. iv., _a blot in the 'scutcheon; colombe's birthday; men and women_. vol. v., _dramatic romances; christmas eve and easter-day._ vol. vi., _dramatic lyrics; luria._ vol. vii., _in a balcony; dramatis personæ._ vols. viii.-x., _the ring and the book_, vols. vol. xi., _balaustion's adventure; prince hohenstiel-schwangau; fifine at the fair_. vol. xii., _red cotton night-cap country; the inn album._ vol. xiii., _aristophanes' apology; the agamemnon of Æschylus._ vol. xiv., _pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper, with other poems._ vol. xv., _dramatic idyls; jocoseria_. vol. xvi., _ferishtah's fancies; parleyings with certain people._ ii. single works. the agamemnon of Æschylus, transcribed by robert browning. london, , vo. aristophanes' apology, including a transcript from euripides, being the last adventure of balaustion. london, , vo. asolando: fancies and facts. london, [ ], vo. now in seventh edition. balaustion's adventure; including a transcript from euripides [i.e., a translation of the "alcestis"]. london, , vo. now in third edition. bells and pomegranates. nos. london, - , vo. no. i., _pippa passes_, . no. ii., _king victor and king charles_, . no. iii., _dramatic lyrics_, . no. iv., _the return of the druses_, . no. v., _a blot in the 'scutcheon_, . no. vi., _colombe's birthday_, . no. vii., _dramatic romances and lyrics_, . no. viii., _luria_; and _a soul's tragedy_, . christmas eve and easter-day. a poem. london, , mo. cleon. _moxon_: london, , vo. reprinted in _men and women_. dramatic idyls, series. london, - , vo. the first series now in nd edition. dramatis personæ. london, , vo. three poems in this book were reprinted from advance copies in the atlantic monthly in vol. , , viz., _gold hair_, pp. - ; prospice, p. ; _under the cliff_, pp. , . second edition. london, , vo. ferishtah's fancies. london, , vo. now in third edition. fifine at the fair. london, , vo. gold hair: a legend of pornic. [london], , vo. reprinted in _dramatis personæ_. gold hair appeared in the atlantic monthly, may , and _dramatis personæ_ was published on may , . the inn album. london, , vo. jocoseria. london, , vo. now in third edition. la saisiaz. the two poets of croisie. london, , vo. men and women. vols. london, , vo. pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper: with other poems. london, , vo. paracelsus. london, , vo. parleyings with certain people of importance in their day. introduced by a dialogue between apollo and the fates, etc. london, , vo. pauline, a fragment of a confession. london, , vo. there are only five known copies extant, two of which are in the british museum. a reprint of the original edition of . edited by t.j. wise. london, , mo. four copies were printed on vellum. the pied piper of hamelin, with illustrations by kate greenaway. london [ ], to. appeared originally in _dramatic lyrics_ (bells and pomegranates, no. iii.), . prince hohenstiel--schwangau: saviour of society. london, , vo. red cotton night-cap country; or turf and towers. london, , vo. the ring and the book. vols. london, - , vo. now in second edition. sordello. london, , vo. the statue and the bust. _moxon_: london, , vo. reprinted in _men and women_. strafford: an historical tragedy. london, , vo. [acting edition for the use of the north london collegiate school for girls.] [london, .] vo. another edition. with notes and preface by e.h. hickey, and an introduction by s.r. gardiner. london, , vo. two poems. by elizabeth barrett browning and robert browning. london, , vo. these two poems, "a plea for the ragged schools of london," by elizabeth b. browning, and "the twins," by robert browning, were printed by miss arabella barrett, for a bazaar in aid of a "refuge for young destitute girls." "the twins" was reprinted in "men and women," in . iii. contributions to magazines, etc. sonnet.--"eyes, calm beside thee, (lady couldst thou know!") dated august , ; signed "z." (_monthly repository_, vol. n.s., , p. .) the king.--"a king lived long ago." signed "z." (_monthly repository_, vol. n.s., , pp. , .) reprinted with six fresh lines and revised throughout, in pippa passes ( ). porphyria.--"the rain set early in to-night." signed "z." (_monthly repository_, vol. n.s., , pp. , .) johannes agricola.--"there's heaven above; and night by night." signed "z." (_monthly repository_, vol. n.s., , pp. , .) _porphyria_ and _johannes agricola_ were reprinted in "bells and pomegranates," no. iii., with the title _madhouse cells_. lines.--"still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no?" signed "z." (_monthly repository_, vol. n.s., , pp. , .) reprinted revised, in _dramatis personae_, , as the first six stanzas of vi. of "james lee." the laboratory (ancient régime). (_hood's magazine_, vol. , , pp. , .) reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ), as the first of two poems called "france and england." claret and tokay. (_hoofs magazine_, vol. , , p. .) reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). garden fancies. i. the flower's name; ii. sibrandus schafnaburgensis. (_hood's magazine_, vol. , , pp. - .) reprinted in _dramatis romances and lyrics_ ( ). the boy and the angel. (_hood's magazine_, vol. , , pp. - .) reprinted revised, and with five fresh couplets, in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). the tomb at st. praxed's (rome --). (_hood's magazine_, vol. , , pp. - .) reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). the flight of the duchess. (_hood's magazine_, vol. , , pp. - .) reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). letters of percy bysshe shelley. [a fabrication.] with an introductory essay, by robert browning. london, , vo. ---- on the poet, objective and subjective; on the latter's aim; on shelley as man and poet. [being a reprint of the introductory essay to "letters of percy bysshe shelley."] london, , vo. published for the browning society. ---- a reprint of the introductory essay prefixed to the volume of letters of shelley. edited by w. tyas harden. london, , vo. ben karshook's wisdom. (_the keepsake_, , p. .) may and death. (_the keepsake_, , p. .) reprinted in _dramatis personæ_ ( ). orpheus and eurydice. f. leighton. lines. (_royal academy exhibition catalogue_ , p. .) reprinted in _poetical works_, , where it is included in _dramatis personæ_. gold hair. _see_ note to _dramatis personæ_. prospice. _see_ note to _dramatis personæ_. under the cliff. _see_ note to _dramatis personæ_. a selection from the poetry of elizabeth barrett browning. [first series edited by robert browning.] series. london, - , vo. hervé riel. (_cornhill magazine_, vol , , pp. - .) reprinted in _pacchiarotto and other poems_, . "oh love, love:" the lyric of euripides in his hippolytus. (_euripides. by j.p. mahaffy_, p. .) london, , mo. "the blind man to the maiden said." (_the hour will come_, by _wilhelmine von hillern. from the german by clara bell_, vol. ii., p. .) london [ ], vo. printed anonymously; quoted with statement of authorship in the _whitehall review_, march , . reprinted in _browning society's papers_, pt. iv., p. . ten new lines to "touch him ne'er so lightly." (_dramatic idyls_, nd ser., , p. .) lines written in an autograph album, oct. , . (_century magazine_, vol. , , pp. , .) printed without mr. browning's consent. reprinted in the _browning society's papers_, pt. in., p. . sonnet on goldoni (dated "venice, nov. , "). written for the album of the committee of the goldoni monument at venice, and inserted on the first page. (_pall mall gazette_, dec. , .) reprinted in the browning society's papers, pt. v., p. . sonnet on rawdon brown (dated nov. , ). (_century magazine_, vol. , , p. .) reprinted in the browning society's papers, pt. v., p. . paraphrase from horace. four lines, written impromptu for mr. felix moscheles. (_pall mall gazette_, dec. , , p. .) reprinted in the browning society's papers, pt. v., p. . helen's tower: sonnet, dated "april , ." written for the earl of dufferin, who built a tower in memory of his mother, helen, countess of gifford, on his estate at clandeboye. (_pall mall gazette_, dec. , , p. .) reprinted in _sonnets of this century_, edited by william sharp, , and in the browning society's papers, pt. v., p. . the founder of the feast: sonnet. (dated "april , .") inscribed by mr. browning in the album presented to mr. arthur chappell, director of the st. james's hall concerts, etc. (_the world_, april , .) reprinted in the browning society's papers, pt. vii., p. . "the names." sonnet on shakespeare. contributed to the "shaksperian show-book" of the shaksperian show, held at the albert hall, on may - , . reprinted in the _pall mall gazette_, may , and in the browning society's papers, pt. v., p. . the divine order and other sermons and addresses, by the late thomas jones. edited by brynmor jones. with a short introduction by robert browning. london, , vo. why i am a liberal: sonnet. (_why i am a liberal_, edited by andrew reid. london, , p. .) reprinted in _sonnets of this century_, edited by william sharp, , and in the browning society's papers, pt. viii., p. . prefatory note to the _poetical works of elizabeth barrett browning_, , dated "dec. , ." to edward fitzgerald. "i chanced upon a new book yesterday." lines, dated "july , " (_athenæum_, july , , p. ). iv. printed letters. letter to laman blanchard [? april, ], dated "craven cottage, saturday." (_poetical works of laman blanchard_, pp. - .) london, , vo. letters to henry fothergill chorley on his novels pomfret ( ) and roccabella ( ). (_autobiography, memoir, and letters of henry fothergill chorley_, vol. ii., pp. , , - .) letter to r.h. horne, dated pisa, dec. [ ]. another dated london, sept. [ ], signed robert and elizabeth barrett browning. (_letters of elizabeth barrett browning to r.h. horne_, , vol. ii., pp. - , - .) londen, , vo. letter to william etty, r.a., dated "bagni di lucea, sept. , ." (_life of william etty, r.a. by alexander_ _gilchrist_, vol. ii., pp. - .) london, , vo. letter to leigh hunt (dated "bagni di lucca, th oct., "). (_correspondence of leigh hunt, edited by his eldest son_, vol. ii., pp. - .) london, , vo. letter to the editor of _the daily news_, dated " warwick crescent, w., feb. ," stating that his contribution to the french relief fund was his publishers' payment for a lyrical poem (hervé riel). (_daily news_, feb. , .) letter to the editor of _the daily news_, dated "nov. ." on line , "gave us the doctrine of the enclitic de" of the poem, _a grammarian's funeral_. (_daily news_, nov. , .) letter to the rev. alexander b. grosart, on the poem of _the lost leader_ and _wordsworth_, dated " warwick crescent, feb. , ." (_the prose works of william wordsworth. edited by the rev. a.b. grosart_, vol. i., p. xxxvii.) london, , vo. the lord rectorship of st. andrew's. letter to the editor of _the times_, dated " warwick crescent, nov. ." (_times_, nov. , .) letter to f.j. furnivall. (_academy_, dec. , .) letter to mr. j.o. halliwell-phillipps, and printed by the latter in . letter to mr. charles kent, dated " de vere gardens, w., august, ." accompanied by a presentation copy of the rd vol. of the new collective edition of "poems." (_athenaeum._. dec. , , p. ). in berdoe's "browning's message to his time," etc., london, , there are a number of letters from browning. in the new edition of kingsland's "robert browning," london, , there are several letters from browning. v. selections. selections from the poetical works of robert browning. [edited by j. forster and b.w. procter.] london, [ ], mo. moxon's miniature poets. a selection from the works of robert browning. london, , vo. selections from the poetical works of robert browning. series. london, - , vo. favourite poems. illustrated. boston, , mo. a selection from the works of robert browning. with a memoir of the author, and explanatory notes. edited by f.h. ahn. berlin, , vo. vol. viii. of ahn's "collection of british and american standard authors." stories from robert browning. by f.m. holland. with an introduction by mrs. sutherland orr. london, , vo. lyrical and dramatic poems selected from the works of robert browning. with an extract from stedman's "victorian poets." edited by e.t. mason. new york, , vo. selections from the poetry of robert browning. with an introduction by r.g. white. new york [ ], vo. pomegranates from an english garden: a selection from the poems of robert browning. with introduction and notes by j.m. gibson. new york, , vo. select poems of robert browning. edited, with notes, by william j. rolfe and heloise e. hersey. new york, , vo. lyrics, idyls, and romances from the poetic and dramatic works of robert browning. boston, , vo. good and true thoughts from robert browning. selected by amy cross. new york, , to. printed in blue ink, and on one side of the leaf. the browning reciter: poems for recitation, by robert browning and other writers. edited by a.h. miles. london, , vo. part of the "platform series." vi. appendix. biography, criticism, etc. alexander, william john. an introduction to the poetry of robert browning. boston, , vo. austin, alfred. the poetry of the period. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . appeared originally in _temple bar_, vol. , , pp. - . bagehot, walter. literary studies. vols. london, , vo. wordsworth, tennyson, and browning; or, pure, ornate, and grotesque art in english poetry, vol. ii., pp. - . appeared originally in the _national review_, vol. , , pp. - . barnett, professor. browning's jews and shakespeare's jew. read at the th meeting of the browning society, nov. th, . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp. - . beale, dorothea. the religious teaching of browning. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, oct. th, .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii., pp. - . berdoe, edward. browning as a scientific poet. (read at the meeting of the browning society, april th, .) london, , vo. the browning society's paper, pt. vii., pp. - . browning's estimate of life. (read at the meeting of the society, oct. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp. - . browning's message to his time: his religion, philosophy, and science. [with facsimile letters of browning and portrait.] london, , vo. birrell, augustine. obiter dicta. london, , vo. on the alleged obscurity of mr. browning's poetry, pp. - . browning, robert. robert browning's poetry. outline studies published for the chicago browning society. chicago, , vo. browning society. the browning society's papers. in progress. london, , etc., vo. buchanan, robert. master-spirits. london, , vo. browning's masterpiece, pp. - . a revised reprint of the athenæum reviews of the "ring and the book" in december and march . bulkeley, rev. j.h. james lee's wife. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, may , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . the reasonable rhythm of some of browning's poems. read at the nd meeting of the browning society, may , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . burt, mary k. browning's women, etc. chicago, , vo. bury, john b. browning's philosophy. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, april , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii, pp. - . on "aristophanes' apology." read at the th meeting of the browning society, jan. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . c.c.s., _i.e._, c.s. calverley. fly leaves. cambridge, , vo. "the cock and the bull," a parody on _the ring and the book,_ pp. - . cooke, bancroft. an introduction to robert browning. a criticism of the purpose and method of his earlier works. london [ ], vo. cooke, george willis. poets and problems. london [ ], vo. browning, pp. - . cooper, thompson. men of mark, etc. london, , to. robert browning, with photograph. fifth series, no. . corson, hiram. the idea of personality, as embodied in robert browning's poetry. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, june , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii. pp. - . an introduction to the study of robert browning's poetry. boston, , vo. courtney, w.l. studies new and old. london, , vo. robert browning, writer of plays, pp. - . devey, j. a comparative estimate of modern english poets. london, , vo. browning, pp. - . dowden, edward. mr. tennyson and mr. browning. (_the afternoon lectures on literature and art delivered in ... dublin,_ _and_ , pp. - .) dublin, , vo. reprinted in b. dowden's "studies in literature," , pp. - . studies in literature, - . london, , vo. mr. browning's place in recent literature, pp. - ; mr. tennyson and mr. browning, pp. - . transcripts and studies. london, , vo. mr. browning's "sordello," pp. - . eyles, f.a.h. popular poets of the period, etc. london, , etc., vo. robert browning, by alexander h. japp, no. , pp. - . fleming, albert. andrea del sarto. read at the th meeting of the browning society, feb. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . forman, h. buxton. our living poets. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . fotheringham, james. studies in the poetry of robert browning. london, , vo. second edition, revised and enlarged. london, , vo. friswell, j. hain. modern men of letters honestly criticised. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . fuller, s. margaret. papers on literature and art. parts. london, , vo. browning's poems, pt. ii., pp. - furnivall, frederick j. a bibliography of robert browning, from - . london, - , vo. the browning society's papers, - , pts. i. and ii. how the browning society came into being. with some words on the characteristics and contrasts of browning's early and late work. london, , vo. a grammatical analysis of "o lyric love." read at the th meeting of the browning society, feb. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ix., pp. - . galton, arthur. urbana scripta. studies of five living poets, etc. london, , vo. mr. browning, pp. - . gannon, nicholas j. an essay on the characteristic errors of our most distinguished living poets. dublin, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . glazebrook, mrs. m.g. "a death in the desert." read at the th meeting of the browning society, feb. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, vol. ix., pp. - . halliwell-phillipps, james o. copy of correspondence [between j.o. halliwell-phillipps and robert browning, concerning expressions respecting halliwell-phillipps, used by f.j. furnivall in the preface to a fac-simile of the second edition of hamlet, published in ]. [brighton ? ] fol. hamilton, walter. parodies of the works of english and american authors. london, , vo. robert browning, vol. vi., pp. - . haweis, rev. h r. poets in the pulpit. london, , vo. robert browning. new year's eve, pp. - . herford, c.h. prince hohenstiel-schwangau. london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . hodgkins, louise manning. nineteenth century authors. robert browning. boston [ ], vo. holland, f. may. sordello. a story from robert browning. new york, , vo. very scarce. horne, r.h. a new spirit of the age. vols. london, , vo. robert browning (with a portrait engraved by j.c. armytage) and j.w. marston, vol. ii., pp. - . hutton, richard holt. essays, theological and literary. vols. london, , vo. mr. browning, vol. ii., pp. - . johnson, rev. prof. edwin. on "bishop blougram's apology." (read at the th meeting of the browning society, may , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii., pp. - . conscience and art in browning. london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii., pp. - . on "mr. sludge the medium." read at the st meeting of the browning society, march , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. vii., pp. - . kingsland, william g. robert browning: chief poet of the age. an essay addressed primarily to beginners in the study of browning's poems. london, , vo. new edition, with biographical and other additions. london, , vo. landor, walter savage. the works of walter savage landor. vols. london, , vo. poem "to robert browning," vol. ii., p. . m'cormick, william s. three lectures on english literature. paisley, , vo. the poetry of robert browning, pp. - . macdonald, george orts. london, , vo. browning's "christmas eve," pp. - . the imagination and other essays. boston [ ], vo. browning's "christmas eve," pp. - . mcnicoll, thomas. essays on english literature. london, , vo. new poems of browning and landor ( ), pp. - . mccrie, george. the religion of our literature. essays upon thomas carlyle, robert browning, alfred tennyson, etc. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . macready, william charles. macready's reminiscences and selections from his diaries and letters. vols. london, , vo. numerous references to browning. mayor, joseph b. chapters on english metre. london, , vo. tennyson and browning, chap. xii., pp. - . morison, j. cotter. "caliban upon setebos," with some notes on browning's subtlety and humour. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, april , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. v., pp. - . morrison, jeanie. sordello. an outline analysis of mr. browning's poem. london, , vo. nettleship, john t. essays on robert browning's poetry. london, , vo. new edition. new york, , vo. on browning's "fifine at the fair." to be read at the th meeting of the browning society, feb. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ii., p. - . classification of browning's works. london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ii., pp. - . browning's intuition, specially in regard of music and the plastic arts. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, feb. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . on the development of browning's genius in his capacity as poet or maker. read at the th meeting of the browning society, oct. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii, pp. - . noel, hon. roden. essays on poetry and poets. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - ; robert browning's poetry, pp. - . notes and queries. notes and queries. series. london, - , to. numerous references to browning. o'byrne, george. robert browning. in memoriam. an epicedium. nottingham [ ], vo. o'conor, william anderson. essays in literature and ethics. manchester, , vo. browning's "childe roland," pp. - . ormerod, helen j. some notes on browning's poems referring to music. read at the st meeting of the browning society, may , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ix., pp. - . abt vogler, the man. read at the th meeting of the browning society, jan. th, . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp - . orr, mrs. sutherland. a handbook to the works of robert browning. london, , vo. second edition, revised. london, , vo. classification of browning's poems. london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ii., pp. - . outram, leonard s. love's value. colombe's birthday. act iv. (the avowal of valence.) read at the th meeting of the browning society, jan. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . pearson, howard s. on browning as a landscape painter. read at the st meeting of the browning society, april , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. viii., pp. - . pollock, frederick. leading cases done into english. by an apprentice of lincoln's inn [frederick pollock]. second edition. london, , vo. iv. "scott _v_. shepherd ( _sm. l.c._ ), any pleader to any student," pp. - . a parody on browning. portrait. the portrait. vol. i. london, , to. robert browning, by g. barnett smith, pages. the portrait is from a photograph by elliott & fry. portrait gallery. national portrait gallery. london [ ], to. robert browning (with portrait), th series, pp. - . powell, thomas. the living authors of england. new york, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . pictures of the living authors of britain. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . radford, ernest. illustrations to browning's poems; with a notice of the artists and the pictures, by e, radford. pts. london, - , fol. published for the _browning society._ raleigh, w.a. on some prominent points in browning's teaching. (read at the nd meeting of the browning society, feb. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. v., pp. - . reeve, lovell. portraits of men of eminence in literature, science, and art, with biographical memoirs, etc. vols. london, - , vo. robert browning, vol. i., pp. - . revell, william f. browning's poems on god and immortality as bearing on life here. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, march , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . browning's views of life. address on oct. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp. - . sharp, william. browning and the arts. london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iii., pp. - . sharpe, rev. john. on "pietro of abano" and the leading ideas of "dramatic idyls." second series, . (read at the nd meeting of the browning society, nov. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ii., pp. - . jocoseria. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, nov. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. v., pp. - . shirley, _pseud._ [_i.e._, john skelton]. a campaigner at home. london, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . appeared originally in fraser's magazine, vol. , , pp. - . stedman, edmund clarence. victorian poets. boston, , vo. robert browning, pp. - . another edition. boston, , vo. stoddart, anna m. "saul." read at the th meeting of the browning society, may , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp. - . swinburne, algernon c. the works of george chapman: poems and minor translations. london, , vo. on browning, pp. xiv.-xix. of the "essay on george chapman's poetical and dramatic works." specimens of modern poets. the heptalogia, or the seven against sense, etc. london, , vo. john jones, pp. - . a parody on james lee. symons, arthur. is browning dramatic? (read at the th meeting of the browning society, jan. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. vii., pp. - . an introduction to the study of browning. london, , vo. some notes on mr. browning's last volume. (on parleyings with certain people.) read at the th meeting of the browning society, april , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ix., pp. - . thomson, james. notes on the genius of robert browning. (read at the rd meeting of the browning society, jan. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ii., pp. - . todhunter, dr. john. "the ring and the book." (read at the th meeting of the browning society, oct. , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. v., pp. - . "strafford" at the strand theatre, dec. , . read at the th meeting of the browning society, jan. , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. ix., pp. - . turnbull, mrs. abt vogler. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, june , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . in a balcony. (read at the annual meeting of the browning society, july , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. v., pp. - . wall, annie. sordello's story retold in prose. boston, , vo. west, e.d. one aspect of browning's villains. (read at the th meeting of the browning society, april , .) london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . westcott, b.f. on some points in browning's view of life. a paper read before the cambridge browning society, november, . cambridge, , vo. printed also in the browning society's papers, pt. iv., pp. - . whitehead, miss c.m. browning as a teacher of the nineteenth century. read at the th meeting of the browning society, april , . london, , vo. the browning society's papers, pt. x., pp. - . magazine articles, etc. browning, robert. sharpe's london magazine, vol. , , pp. - , - . revue des deux mondes, by j. milsand, aug. , pp. - . london quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - , vol. , p. , etc. revue contemporaine, by j. milsand, vol. , , pp. - . fraser's magazine, by j. skelton, vol. , , pp. - ; reprinted in "a campaigner at home," . victoria magazine, by m.d. conway, vol. , , pp. - . contemporary review, vol. , , pp. - , - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. n.s., pp. - , - . revue des deux mondes, by louis etienne, tom. , , pp. - . appleton's journal (with portrait), by r.h. stoddard, vol. , , pp. - . once a week, vol. n.s., , pp. - . scribner's monthly, by e.c. stedman, vol. , , pp. - . galaxy, by j. h. browne, vol. , , pp. - . st. james's magazine, by t. bayne, vol. , , pp. - . dublin university magazine (with portrait), vol. n.s., , pp. - , - . gentleman's magazine, by a.n. mcnicoll, vol. , , pp. - . congregationalist, vol. , , pp. - . international review, by g. barnett smith, vol. , , pp. - . literary world (boston), by f. j. furnivall, h.e. scudder, etc., vol. , , pp. - . critic, by j.h. morse, vol. , , pp. , . contemporary review, by hon. roden noel, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . british quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . family friend, by j. fuller higgs, vol. , , pp. - . graphic, with portrait, jan, , . athenæum, dec. , , pp. - . atalanta, by edmund gosse, feb. , pp. - . atlantic monthly, feb. , pp. - . contemporary review, by the rev. stopford a. brooke, jan. , pp. - . universal review, by gabriel sarrazin, feb. , pp. - . art and literature, with portrait, feb. , pp. - . congregational review, by ruth j. pitt, jan. , pp. - . expository times, by the rev. professor salmond, feb. , pp. , . the speaker, by augustine birrell, jan. , , pp. , . national review, by h. d. traill, jan. , pp. - . scots magazine, jan. , pp. - . argosy, by e.f. bridell-fox, feb. , pp. - new church magazine, by c. e. rowe, feb. , pp. - . ---- agamemnon. edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - . athenæum, oct. , , pp. - . academy, by j.a. symonds, nov. , , pp. , . literary world (boston), vol. , , p. . ---- and elizabeth barrett browning. leisure hour (with portraits), , pp. - . manhattan, by k.m. rowland, june , pp. - . ---- and the edinburgh review. reader, by gerald massey, nov. , , pp. , . ---- and the epic of psychology. london quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- and the greek drama. manchester quarterly, by a.s. wilkins, vol. , , pp. - . ---- and james hussell lowell. new englander, vol. , , pp. - . ---- and tennyson. eclectic review, vol. n.s., , pp. - . leisure hour, feb. , pp. - . ---- another way of love. critic (new york), by f.l. turnbull, sept. , , pp. , . ---- aristophanes' apology. london quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . academy, by j. a. symonds, april , , pp. , . athenæum, april , , pp. , . ---- as a preacher. dark blue, by e.d. west, vol. , , pp. - , - ; same article, littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . ---- as a religious teacher. month, by the rev. john rickaby, feb. , pp. - good words, by r.h. hutton, feb. , pp. - . ---- as a teacher. in memoriam. gentlemen's magazine, by mrs. alexander ireland, feb. , pp. - . ---- as theologian. time, by h.w. massingham, jan. , pp. - . ---- as a writer of plays. fortnightly review, by w.l. courtney, vol. n.s., , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. n.s., pp. - . ---- balaustion's adventure. contemporary review, by matthew browne, vol. , , pp. - . nation, by j.r. dennett, vol. , , pp. , . fortnightly review, by sidney colvin, vol. n.s., , pp. - . edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - . london quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . athenaeum, aug. , , pp. , . penn monthly, by r.e. thompson, vol. , , pp. - . st. paul's magazine, by e.j. hasell, vol. , , pp. - ; vol. , pp. - . pioneer, oct. , pp. - . ---- bells and pomegranates. christian remembrancer, vol. n.s., , pp. - . people's journal, by h.f. chorley, vol. , , pp. - , - . ---- browning society. saturday review, vol. , , pp. , ; vol. , , pp. , . ---- childe roland. papers of the manchester literary club, by the rev. w.a. o'conor, vol. , , pp. - . critic (new york), by j.e. cooke, vol. , , pp. , , and by a. bates, pp. , . ---- ---- childe roland, childe harold, and the sangrail. papers of the manchester literary club, by john mortimer, vol. , , pp. - . ---- christmas eve and easter-day. prospective review, vol. , , pp. - . littell's living age (from the examiner), vol. , pp. - . the germ, no. , by w.m. rossetti, pp. - . day of rest, by george macdonald, vol. , , pp. - , , . ---- clubs in the united states. literary world (boston), by h. corson, vol. , , p. . ---- day with the brownings at pratolino. scribner's monthly, by e.c. kinney, vol. , , pp. - . ---- dead in venice. (verses.) athenaeum, dec. , , p. . ---- the "detachment" of. athenaeum, jan. , , pp. , . ---- dramatic idyls. fortnightly review, by grant allen, vol. n.s., , pp. - . contemporary review, by mrs. sutherland orr, vol. , , pp. - . saturday review, june , , pp. , . fraser's magazine, vol. n.s., , pp. - . st. james's magazine, by t. bayne, vol. , fourth series, , pp. - . athenaeum, may , , pp. - . academy, by frank wedmore, may , , pp. , . athenaeum, july , , pp. - . literary world, july , , pp. - . ---- dramatis personae. st. james's magazine, by r. bell, vol. , , pp. - . new monthly magazine, by t.f. wedmore, vol. , , pp. - . dublin university magazine, vol. , , pp. - . eclectic review, by e. paxton hood, vol. n.s., , pp. - . ---- early writings of. century, by e.w. gosse, vol. , , pp. - . ---- ferishtah's fancies. athenaeum, dec. , , pp. - . saturday review, vol. , , pp. , . spectator, dec. , , pp. - . academy, by h.c. beeching, dec. , , pp. , . critic (new york), dec. , p. . oxford magazine, vol. , , pp. , . ---- fifine at the fair. old and new, by c. c. everett, vol. , , pp. - . canadian monthly, by goldwin smith, vol. , , pp. - . temple bar, vol. , , pp. - . literary world, july , , pp. , , and july , pp. , . fortnightly review, by sidney colvin, vol. n.s., , pp. - . saturday review, vol. , , pp. , . ---- first poem of st. james's magazine, vol. n.s., , pp. - . ---- funeral of. scots magazine, by elizabeth r. chapman, feb. , pp. - . ---- handbook to the works of, orr's. academy, by j.t. nettleship, vol. , , pp. - . athenaeum, sept. , , pp. , . ---- in . cornhill magazine, vol. , , pp. - . ---- in a balcony. theatre, by h.l. mosely, may , , pp. - . ---- in memoriam. new review, by edmund w. gosse, jan. , pp. - . ---- inn album. macmillan's magazine, by a.c. bradley, vol. , , pp. - . nation, by henry james, junr., vol. , , pp. , . international review, by bayard taylor, vol. , , pp. - . athenaeum, nov. , , pp. , . academy, by j.a. symonds, nov. , , pp. , . spectator, december , , pp. - , examiner, dec. , , pp. - . ---- in westminster abbey. speaker, by henry james, jan. , , pp. - . ---- jocoseria. national review, by w.j. courtliope, vol. , , pp. - . atlantic monthly, vol. , , pp. - . cambridge review, vol. , , pp. , . gentleman's magazine, by r.h. shepherd, vol. , , pp. . academy, by j.a. symonds, vol. , , pp. , . athenaeum, march , , pp. , . saturday review, vol. , , pp. , . spectator, march , , pp. - . ---- kingsland's. literary opinion, may , . ---- la saisiaz. the two poets of croisic. academy, by g.a. simcox, vol. , , pp. - . athenaeum, may , , pp. - . saturday review, june , , pp. , . ---- love poems of. journal of education, by arthur sidgwick, may , , pp. - . ---- lyrical and dramatic poems. literary world (boston), feb. , , p. . ---- men and women. bentley's miscellany, vol. , , pp. - . british quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . rambler, vol. n.s., , pp. - . christian remembrancer, vol. n.s., , pp. - ; vol. n.s., , pp. - . dublin university magazine, vol. , , pp. - . fraser's magazine, by g. brimley, vol. , , pp. - . irish quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . westminster review, vol. n.s., , pp. - . ---- note on. art review, by w. mortimer, jan. , pp. - . ---- one way of love. literary world (boston), by c.r. corson, july , , pp. , . ---- pacchiarolto. academy, by edward dowden, july , , pp. , . athenæum, july , , pp. , . ---- paracelsus. new monthly magazine, by john forster, vol. , , pp. - . examiner, by john forster, sept. , , pp. - . theologian, vol. , , pp. - . monthly repository, by w.j. fox, vol. n.s., , pp. - . fraser's magazine, by j. heraud, vol. , , pp. - . leigh hunt's journal, vol. , , pp. - . revue des deux mondes, by philarète chasles, tom, xxii., , pp. - . ---- parleyings with certain people. literary opinion, march , . ---- pauline. monthly repository, by w. j. fox, vol. n.s., , pp. - . athenæum, april , , p. . ---- place of, in literature. contemporary review, by mrs. sutherland-orr, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . ---- plays and poems. north american review, by j. r. lowell, vol. , , pp. - . ---- poems. british quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . eclectic review, vol. n.s., , pp. - . eclectic magazine, vol. , , pp. - . christian examiner, by c. c. everett, vol. , , pp. - . massachusetts quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . fraser's magazine, vol. , , pp. - . putnam's monthly magazine, vol. , , pp. - . north british review, vol. , , pp. - . chambers's journal, vol. , , pp. - ; vol. , pp. - . national review, vol. , , pp. - . eclectic review, by e. p. hood, vol. n.s., , pp. - ; vol. n.s., , pp. - . edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - . christian examiner, by c. c. everett, vol. , , pp. - . quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, by enrico nencioni, july , pp. - . north british review, by j. hutchinson stirling, vol. , , pp. - . temple bar, by alfred austin, vol. , , pp. - ; vol. , pp. - ; vol. , pp. - . british quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . saint paul's magazine, by s.j. h[asell], vol. , , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. n.s., pp. - , and in littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . church quarterly review, by the hon. and rev. arthur lyttleton, vol. , , pp. - . cambridge review, vol. , , pp. , . scottish review, vol. , , pp. - . london quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- prince hohenstiel-schwangau. new englander, by j. s. sewall, vol. , , pp. - . examiner, dec. , , pp. , . academy, by g. a. simcox, jan. , , pp. - . literary world, jan. , , pp. , . ---- red cotton night-cap country. nation, by j.k. dennett, vol. , , pp. - . contemporary review, by mrs. sutherland-orr, vol. , , pp. - . penn monthly magazine, vol. , , pp. - . athenaeum, may , , pp. , . ---- ring and the book. athenaeum, dec. , , pp. , ; march , , pp. , . edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - . dublin review, vol. n.s., , pp. - . chambers's journal, july , , pp. - . fortnightly review, by john morley, vol. n.s., , pp. - . macmillan's magazine, by j.a. symonds, vol. , , pp. - , and by j.r. mozley, pp. - . north american review, by e.j. cutler, vol. , , pp. - . nation, by j.r. dennett, vol. , , pp. , . tinsley's magazine, vol. , , pp. - . christian examiner, by j.w. chadwick, vol. , , pp. - . gentleman's magazine, by james thomson, vol. , , pp. - . st. james's magazine, vol. n.s., , pp. - . saint paul's, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. n.s., pp. - , and in littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . north british review, vol. , , pp. - . quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- ---- some of the teaching of "the ring and the book." poet-lore, by f.b. hornbrooke, july , pp. - . ---- science of. poet-lore, by edward berdoe, aug. , , pp. - . ---- selections from. london quarterly review, by frank t. marzials, vol. , , pp. - . literary world, may , , p. . ---- sequence of sonnets on death of. fortnightly review, by algernon c. swinburne, jan. , pp. - . ---- some thoughts on. macmillan's magazine, by m.a. lewis, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . ---- sonnets to. macmillan's magazine, by aubrey de vere, feb. , p. . blackwood's edinburgh magazine, by sir theodore martin, jan. , p. . household words, vol. , , p. . ---- sonnets of. manchester quarterly, by benjamin sagar, vol. , , pp. - . ---- sordello. fraser's magazine, by e. dowden, vol. , pp. - . macmillan's magazine, by r.w. church, vol. , , pp. - . ---- ---- sordello at the east end. journal of education, july , , pp. - . ---- stories from, holland's. academy, by j. a. blaikie, vol. , , pp. , . ---- strafford: a tragedy. edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- study of. overland monthly, by caroline le conte, vol. , nd series, , pp. - . literary world (boston), vol. , , p. . ---- two sonnets to. new monthly magazine, vol. , , p. . ---- types of womanhood. woman's world, by annie e. ireland, nov. , pp. - . ---- verses on. art review (with portrait), by william sharp, feb. , pp. - . murray's magazine, by rev. h.d. rawnsley, feb. , pp. - . belford's magazine (poem of six-line stanzas), by william sharp, march . ---- wordsworth and tennyson. national review, by walter bagehot, vol. , , pp. - ; reprinted in "literary studies", ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. n.s., pp. - , - , and in littell's living age, vol. , pp. - . vii. chronological list of works, pauline paracelsus strafford sordello pippa passes (_bells and pomegranates_, no. i.). king victor and king charles (_bells and pomegranates_, no. ii.) dramatic lyrics (_bells and pomegranates_, no. iii). cavalier times. i. marching along. ii. give a rouse. iii. my wife gertrude. italy and france. i. italy. ii. france. camp and cloister. i. camp (french). ii. cloister (spanish). in a gondola. artemis prologuizes. waring. queen worship. i. eudel and the lady of tripoli. ii. christina. madhouse cells. i. johannes agricola. ii. porphyria. through the metidja. the pied piper of hamelin. the return of the druses (_bells and pomegranates_, no. iv.) a blot in the 'scutcheon (_bells and pomegranates_, no. v.) colombo's birthday (_bells and pomegranates_, no. vi.) dramatic romances and lyrics (_bells and pomegranates_, no. vii.) how they brought the good news. pictor ignotus. italy in england. england in italy. the lost leader. the lost mistress. home thoughts from abroad. the tomb at st. praxeil's. garden fancies. i. the flower's name. ii. sibrandus schafnaburgensis. france and spain. i. the laboratory. ii. the confessional. the flight of the duchess. earth's immortalities. song. the boy and the angel. night and morning. claret and tokay. saul. time's revenges. the glove. luria. } a soul's tragedy. } (_bells and pomegranates_, no. viii.) christmas eve and easter-day introductory essay to letters of percy bysshe shelley men and women vol. i. love among the ruins. a lover's quarrel. evelyn hope. up at a villa--down in the city. a woman's last word. fra lippo lippi. a toccata of galuppi's. by the fireside. any wife to any husband. an epistle of karshish, mesmerism. a serenade at the villa. my star. instans tyrannus. a pretty woman. "childe roland to the dark tower came." respectability. a light woman. the statue and the bust. love in a life. life in a love. how it strikes a contemporary. the last ride together. the patriot. master hugues of saxe-gotha. bishop blougram's apology. memorabilia. vol. ii. andrea del sarto. before. after. in three days. in a year. old pictures in florence. in a balcony. saul. "de gustibus ----" women and roses. protus. holy-cross day. the guardian-angel. cleon. the twins. popularity. the heretic's tragedy. two in the campagna. a grammarian's funeral. one way of love. another way of love. "transcendentalism." misconceptions. one word more. dramatis personæ james lee. gold hair. the worst of it. dis aliter visum. too late. abt vogler. rabbi ben ezra. a death in the desert. caliban upon setebos. confessions. may and death. prospice. youth and art. a face. a likeness. mr. sludge. apparent failure. epilogue. the ring and the book - balaustion's adventure prince hohenstiel-schwangau fifine at the fair red cotton night-cap country aristophanes' apology the inn album pacchiarotto, and other poems prologue. of pacchiarotto. at the "mermaid." house. shop. pisgah sights, i. and ii. fears and scruples. natural magic. magical nature. bifurcation. numpholeptos. appearances. st. martin's summer. hervé riel. (reprinted from cornhill magazine, march .) a forgiveness. cenciaja. filippo baldinucci. epilogue. the agamemnon of Æschylus la saisiaz the two poets of croisie dramatic idyls - series i. martin relph. pheidippides. halbert and hob. ivàn ivànovitch. tray. ned bratts. series ii. proem. echetlos. clive. muléykeh. pietro of abano. doctor ---- pan and luna. epilogue. jocoseria wanting is--what? donald. solomon and balkis. cristina and monaldeschi. mary wollstonecraft and fuseli. adam, lilith, and eve. ixion. jochanan hakkadosh. never the time and the place. pambo. ferishtah's fancies prologue. ferishtah's fancies . the eagle. . melon-seller. . shah abbas. . the family. . the sun. . mihrab shah. . a camel-driver. . two camels. . cherries. . plot-culture. . a pillar at sebzevah. . a bean-stripe; also apple-eating. epilogue. parleyings with certain people apollo and the fates--a prologue. i. with bernard de mandeville. ii. with daniel bartoli. iii. with christopher smart. iv. with george babb dodington. v. with francis furini vi. with gerard de lairesse. vii. with charles avison. fust and his friends--an epilogue. asolando prologue. rosny. dubiety. now. humility. poetics. summum bonum. a pearl, a girl. speculative. white witchcraft. bad dreams inapprehensiveness. which? the cardinal and the dog. the pope and the net. the bean-feast. muckle-mouth meg. arcades ambo. the lady and the painter. ponte dell' angelo, venice. beatrice signorini. flute-music, with an accompaniment. "imperante augusto natus est ----" development. rephan. reverie. epilogue. the canterbury poets. important additions. works by robert browning. vol. i. pippa passes, and other poetic dramas, by robert browning. with an introductory note by frank rinder. vol. ii. a blot in the 'scutcheon, and other poetic dramas, by robert browning. with an introductory note by frank rinder. vol. iii. dramatic romances and lyrics; and sordello, by robert browning. to which is prefixed an appreciation of browning by miss e. dixon. * * * * * bindings. the above volumes are supplied in the following bindings:-- in green roan, boxed, with frontispiece in photogravure, s. d. net. in art linen, with frontispiece in photogravure, s. in white linen, with frontispiece in photogravure, s. in brocade, vols., in shell case to match (each vol. with frontispiece), price s. per set, or vols. s. per set. and in the ordinary shilling bindings, green cloth, cut edges, and blue cloth, uncut edges (without photogravure). * * * * * the three volumes form an admirable and representative "set," including a great part of browning's best-known and most admired work, and (being each of about pages) are among the largest yet issued in the canterbury poets. the frontispiece of vol. i. consists of a reproduction of one of browning's last portraits; mr. rudolf lehmann has kindly given permission for his portrait of browning to be reproduced as a frontispiece of vol. ii.; while a reproduction of a drawing of a view of asolo forms the frontispiece of the third volume. new and enlarged edition, crown vo, cloth, s. modern painting, by george moore. * * * * * some press notices. "of the very few hooks on art that painters and critics should on no account leave unread this is surely one."--_the studio_. "his book is one of the best books about pictures that have come into our hands for some years."--_st. james's gazette_. "if there is an art critic who knows exactly what he means and says it with exemplary lucidity, it is 'g.m.'"--_the sketch_. "a more original, a better informed, a more suggestive, and let us add, a more amusing work on the art of to-day, we have never read than this volume."--_glasgow herald_. "impressionism, to use that word, in the absence of any fitter one,--the impressionism which makes his own writing on art in this volume so effective, is, in short, the secret both of his likes and dislikes, his hatred of what he thinks conventional and mechanic, together with his very alert and careful evaluation of what comes home to him as straightforward, whether in reynolds, or rubens, or ruysdael, in japan, in paris, or in modern england."--mr. pater in _the chronicle_. "as an art critic mr. george moore certainly has some signal advantages. he is never dull, he is frankly personal, he is untroubled by tradition."--_westminster gazette_. "mr. moore, in spite of the impediments that he puts in the way of his own effectiveness, is one of the most competent writers on painting that we have."--_manchester guardian_. "his [mr. moore's] book is one that cannot fail to be much talked about; and everyone who is interested in modern painting will do well to make acquaintance with its views."--_scottish leader_. "as everybody knows by this time, mr. moore is a person of strong opinions and strong dislikes, and has the gift of expressing both in pungent language."--_the times_. "of his [mr. moore's] sincerity, of his courage, and of his candour there can be no doubt.... one of the most interesting writers on art that we have."--_pall mall gazette_. the scott library. cloth, uncut edges, gilt top. price s. d. per volume. volumes already issued malory's romance of king arthur and the quest of the holy grail. edited by ernest rhys. thoreau's walden. with introductory note by will h. dircks. thoreau's "week." with prefatory note by will h. dircks. thoreau's essays. edited, with an introduction, by will h. dircks. confessions of an english opium-eater, etc. by thomas de quincey. with introductory note by william sharp. landor's imaginary conversations. selected, with introduction, by havelock ellis. plutarch's lives (langhorne). with introductory note by b. j. snell, m.a. browne's religio medici, etc. with introduction by j. addington symonds. shelley's essays and letters. edited, with introductory note, by ernest rhys. swift's prose writings. chosen and arranged, with introduction, by walter lewin. my study windows. by james russell lowell. with introduction by r, garnett, ll.d. lowell's essays on the english poets. with a new introduction by mr. lowell. the biglow papers. by james russell lowell. with a prefatory note by ernest rhys. great english painters. selected from cunningham's _lives_. edited by william sharp. byron's letters and journals. selected, with introduction, by mathilda blind. leigh hunt's essays. with introduction and notes by arthur symons. longfellow's "hyperion," "kavanagh," and "the trouveres." with introduction by w. tirebuck. great musical composers. by g.f. ferris. edited, with introduction, by mrs. william sharp. the meditations of marcus aurelius. edited by alice zimmern. the teaching of epictetus. translated from the greek, with introduction and notes, by t.w. rolleston. selections from seneca. with introduction by walter clode. specimen days in america. by walt whitman. revised by the author, with fresh preface. democratic vistas, and other papers. by walt whitman. (published by arrangement with the author.) white's natural history of selborne. with a preface by richard jefferies. defoe's captain singleton. edited, with introduction, by h. halliday sparling. mazzini's essays: literary, political, and religious. with introduction by william clarke. prose writings of heine. with introduction by havelock ellis. reynolds's discourses. with introduction by helen zimmern. papers of steele and addison. edited by walter lewin. burns's letters. selected and arranged, with introduction, by j. logie robertson, m.a. volsunga saga. william morris. with introduction by h.h. sparling. sartor resartus. by thomas carlyle. with introduction by ernest rhys. select writings of emerson. with introduction by percival chubb. autobiography of lord herbert. edited, with an introduction, by will h. dircks. english prose, from maundeville to thackeray. chosen and edited by arthur galton. the pillars of society, and other plays. by henrik ibsen. edited, with an introduction, by havelock ellis. irish fairy and folk tales. edited and selected by w.b. yeats. essays of dr. johnson. with biographical introduction and notes by stuart j. reid. essays of william hazlitt. selected and edited, with introduction and notes, by frank carr. landor's pentameron, and other imaginary conversations. edited, with a preface, by h. ellis. poe's tales and essays. edited, with introduction, by ernest rhys. vicar of wakefield. by oliver goldsmith. edited, with preface, by ernest rhys. political orations, from wentworth to macaulay. edited, with introduction, by william clarke. the autocrat of the breakfast-table. by oliver wendell holmes. the poet at the breakfast-table. by oliver wendell holmes. the professor at the breakfast-table. by oliver wendell holmes. lord chesterfield's letters to his son. selected, with introduction, by charles sayle. stories from carleton. selected, with introduction, by w. yeats. jane eyre. by charlotte bronté. edited by clement k. shorter. elizabethan england. edited by lothrop withington, with a preface by dr. furnivall. the prose writings of thomas davis. edited by t.w. rolleston. spence's anecdotes. a selection. edited, with an introduction and notes, by john underhill. more's utopia, and life of edward v. edited, with an introduction, by maurice adams. sadi's gulistan, or flower garden. translated, with an essay, by james boss. english fairy and folk tales. edited by e. sidney hartland. northern studies. by edmund gosse. with a note by ernest rhys. early reviews of great writers. edited by e. stevenson. aristotle's ethics. with george henry lewes's essay on aristotle prefixed. landor's pericles and aspasu. edited, with an introduction, by havelock ellis. annals of tacitus. thomas gordon's translation. edited, with an introduction, by arthur galton. essays of elia. by charles lamb. edited, with an introduction, by ernest rhys. balzac's shorter stories. translated by william wilson and the count stenbock. comedies of de musset. edited, with an introductory note, by s. l. gwynn. coral reefs. by charles darwin. edited, with an introduction, by dr. j.w. williams. sheridan's plays. edited, with an introduction, by eudolf dircks. our village. by miss mitford. edited, with an introduction, by ernest rhys. master humphrey's clock, and other stories. by charles dickens. with introduction by frank t. marzials. tales from wonderland. by rudolph baumbach. translated by helen b. dole. essays and papers by douglas jerrold. edited by walter jerrold. vindication of the rights of woman. by mary wollstonecraft. introduction by mrs. e. robins pennell. "the athenian oracle." a selection. edited by john underhill, with prefatory note by walter besant. essays of sainte-beuve. translated and edited, with an introduction, by elizabeth lee. selections from plato. from the translation of sydenham and taylor. edited by t.w. rolleston. heine's italian travel sketches, etc. translated by elizabeth a. sharp. with an introduction from the french of theophile gautier. schiller's maid of orleans. translated, with an introduction, by major-general patrick maxwell. selections from sydney smith. edited, with an introduction, by ernest rhys. the new spirit. by havelock ellis. the book of marvellous adventures. from the "morte d'arthur." edited by ernest rhys. [this, together with no. , forms the complete "morte d'arthur."] essays and aphorisms. by sir arthur helps. with an introduction by e.a. helps. essays of montaigne. selected, with a prefatory note, by percival chubb. the luck of barry lyndon. by w.m. thackeray. edited by f.t. marzials. schiller's william tell. translated, with an introduction, by major-general patrick maxwell. carlyle's essays on german literature. with an introduction by ernest rhys. plays and dramatic essays of charles lamb. edited, with an introduction, by rudolf dircks. the prose of wordsworth. selected and edited, with an introduction, by professor william knight. essays, dialogues, and thoughts of count giacomo leopardi. translated, with an introduction and notes, by major-general patrick maxwell. the inspector-general. a russian comedy. by nikolai v. gogol. translated from the original, with an introduction and notes, by arthur a. sykes. essays and apothegms of francis, lord bacon. edited, with an introduction, by john buchan. prose of milton. selected and edited, with an introduction, by richard garnett, ll.d. the republic of plato. translated by thomas taylor, with an introduction by theodore wratislaw. passages from froissart. with an introduction by frank t. marzials. the prose and table talk of coleridge. edited by will h. dircks. heine in art and letters. translated by elizabeth a. sharp. selected essays of de quincey. with an introduction by sir george douglas, bart. vasari's lives of italian painters. selected and prefaced by havelock ellis. laocoon, and other prose writings of lessing. a new translation by w. b. rönnfeldt. pelleas and melisanda, and the sightless. two plays by maurice maeterlinck. translated from the french by laurence alma tadema. the complete angler of walton and cotton. edited, with an introduction, by charles hill dick. lessing's nathan the wise. translated by major-general patrick maxwell. the poetry of the celtic races, and other essays of ernest renan. translated by w.g. hutchison. criticisms, reflections, and maxims of goethe. translated, with an introduction, by w.b. rönnfeldt. essays of schopenhauer. translated by mrs. rudolf dircks. with an introduction. renan's life of jesus. translated, with an introduction, by william g. hutchison. the confessions of saint augustine. edited, with an introduction, by arthur symons. the principles of success in literature. by george henry lewes. edited, with an introduction, by t. sharper knowlson. the lives of dr. john donne, sir henry wotton, mr. richard hooker, mr. george herbert, and dr. robert sanderson. by izaac walton. edited, with an introduction, by charles hill dick. what is art? by leo tolstoy. translated from the original russian ms., with an introduction, by aylmer maude. renan's antichrist. translated, with an introduction, by w.g. hutchison. orations of cicero. selected and edited, with an introduction, by fred. w. norris. reflections on the revolution in france. by edmund burke. with an introduction by george sampson. the letters of the younger pliny. series i. translated, with an introductory essay, by john b. firth, b.a., late scholar of queen's college, oxford. the letters of the younger pliny. series ii. translated by john b. firth, b.a. selected thoughts of blaise pascal. translated and edited, with an introduction and notes, by gertrude burford rawlings. scots essayists: from stirling to stevenson. edited, with an introduction, by oliphant smeaton. on liberty. by john stuart mill. with an introduction by w.l. courtney. the discourse on method and metaphysical meditations of rené descartes. translated, with introduction, by gertrude b. rawlings. kâlidâsa's sakuntalâ, etc. edited, with an introduction, by t. holme. newman's university sketches. edited, with introduction, by george sampson. newman's select essays. edited, with an introduction, by george sampson. manuals of employment for educated women. the object of this series of manuals will be to give to girls, more particularly to those belonging to the educated classes, who from inclination or necessity are looking forward to earning their own living, some assistance with reference to the choice of a profession, and to the best method of preparing for it when chosen. foolscap vo, stiff paper cover, price s.; or in limp cloth, s. d. i.--secondary teaching. this manual contains particulars of the qualifications necessary for a secondary teacher, with a list of the colleges and universities where training may be had, the cost of training, and the prospect of employment when trained. ii.--elementary teaching. this manual sums up clearly the chief facts which need to be known respecting the work to be done in elementary schools, and the conditions under which women may take a share in such work. iii.--sick nursing. this manual contains useful information with regard to every branch of nursing--hospital, district, private, and mental nursing, and nursing in the army and navy and in poor law institutions, with particulars of the best method of training, the usual salaries given, and the prospect of employment, with some account of the general advantages and drawbacks of the work. iv.--medicine. this manual gives particulars of all the medical qualifications recognised by the general medical council which are open to women, and of the methods by which they can be obtained, with full details of the different universities and colleges at which women can pursue their medical studies. ibsen's prose dramas. edited by william archer. complete in five vols. crown vo, cloth, price s. d. each. set of five vols., in case, s. d.; in half morocco, in case, s. d. vol. i. "a doll's house," "the league of youth," and "the pillars of society." with portrait of the author, and biographical introduction by william archer. vol. ii. "ghosts," "an enemy of the people," and "the wild duck." with an introductory note. vol. iii. "lady inger of ostrat," "the vikings at helgeland," "the pretenders." with an introductory note and portrait of ibsen. vol. iv. "emperor and galilean." with an introductory note by william archer. vol. v. "rosmersholm," "the lady from the sea," "hedda gabler." translated by william archer. with an introductory note. * * * * * an interesting and instructive gift book for every one musically inclined. in one volume. crown vo, cloth, richly gilt. price / . musicians' wit, humour, and anecdote. being _on dits_ of composers, singers, and instrumentalists of all times. by frederick j. crowest, author of "the great tone poets," "verdi: man and musician"; editor of "the master musicians series," etc., etc. profusely illustrated with quaint drawings by j. p. donne. compact and practical. in limp cloth; for the pocket. price one shilling. the european conversation books. french. italian. spanish. german. norwegian. * * * * * the makers of british art. square crown vo, cloth, s. d. net. with a photogravure portrait and half-tone reproductions of pictures, and valuable appendices. george romney. by sir herbert maxwell, m.p. john constable. by the right hon. lord windsor. sir john everett millais. by j. eadie reid, author of "the schools and methods of english art." sir david wilkie. by professor bayne. sir edwin landseer. by the editor. 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'scutcheon, etc. } with portrait. browning's dramatic lyrics. } mackay's lover's missal. with portrait. kirke white's poems. with portrait. lyra nicotiana. with portrait. aurora leigh. with portrait of e.b. browning. naval songs. with portrait of lord nelson. tennyson: in memoriam, maud, etc. with portrait. tennyson: english idyls, the princess, etc. with view of farringford house. war songs. with portrait of lord roberts. james thomson. with portrait. alexander smith. with portrait. companion series to "the makers of british art." an entirely fresh and novel series of literary-musical illustrated monographs, planned and edited by mr. frederick j. crowest, author of "the great tone poets," etc., etc. the music story series. the great aim with "the music story series" of books will be to make them indispensable volumes upon the subjects of which they treat. they will be authoritative, interesting, and educational books--furnished with appendices which will give them permanent value as works of reference, data, etc. each volume will tell all that the reader may want to know upon any of the aspects of musical art which the various works of the series will cover. the following volumes are ready or in course of production, and will be published at short intervals:-- the story of oratorio. by annie w. patterson, b.a., mus. doc. the story of notation. by c.f. abdy williams, m.a., mus. bac. the story of the pianoforte. by algernon s. rose, author of "talks with bandsmen." the story of harmony. by eustace j. breakspeare, author of "mozart," "musical Æsthetics," etc. the story of the organ. by c.f. abdy williams, author of "bach" and "handel" ("master musicians series"). the story of the orchestra. by stewart macpherson, fellow and professor, royal academy of music; conductor of the westminster orchestral society. the story of chamber music. by n. kilburn, mus. bac. (cantab.), conductor of the middlesbrough, sunderland, and bishop auckland musical societies. the story of bible music. by eleonore d'esterre-keeling, author of "the musicians' birthday book." the story of the violin. by a practical violinist. the story of church music. by the editor. etc., etc., etc. each volume will be produced in the highest style of typographical excellence, with choice illustrations in photogravure, collotype, line, and half-tone reproductions. the paper for the series will be specially made, deckle edge, with wide margins for readers' and students' notes. the size of the volumes will be square crown vo, richly gilt, and bound in extra cloth; price s. d. net. * * * * * now ready: the story of oratorio, pp., with a collotype portrait of handel, four half-tone portraits of the great composers of oratorios, numerous line reproductions in facsimile, and a splendid photogravure frontispiece of raphael's masterpiece--"st. cecilia"--after the painting in the academy of bologna. * * * * * the walter scott publishing company, ltd., london and newcastle-on-tyne the poetry of robert browning by stopford a. brooke author of "tennyson: his art and relation to modern life" * * * * * london isbister and company limited * * * * * printed by ballantyne, hanson & co. london & edinburgh _first edition, september _ _reprinted, october _ _reprinted, january _ * * * * * contents i. browning and tennyson ii. the treatment of nature iii. the treatment of nature iv. browning's theory of human life--pauline and paracelsus v. the poet of art vi. sordello vii. browning and sordello viii. the dramas ix. poems of the passion of love x. the passions other than love xi. imaginative representations xii. imaginative representations--renaissance xiii. womanhood in browning xiv. womanhood in browning--(the dramatic lyrics and pompilia) xv. balaustion xvi. the ring and the book xvii. later poems xviii. the last poems * * * * * the publishers are indebted to messrs. smith, elder & co. on behalf of the owner of the copyright for their permission to make extracts from copyright poems for use in this volume * * * * * chapter i _browning and tennyson_ parnassus, apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years, from to ,[ ] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty peaks became unchallenged. beneath them, during these years, on the lower knolls of the mount of song, many new poets sang; with diverse instruments, on various subjects, and in manifold ways. they had their listeners; the muses were also their visitants; but none of them ventured seriously to dispute the royal summits where browning and tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the vale between. both began together; and the impulses which came to them from the new and excited world which opened its fountains in and about continued to impel them till the close of their lives. while the poetic world altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools. there is nothing of arnold and clough, of swinburne, rossetti or morris, or of any of the others, in browning or tennyson. there is nothing even of mrs. browning in browning. what changes took place in them were wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly, by the natural development of their art-power; and thirdly, by the slow decaying of that power. they were, in comparison with the rest, curiously uninfluenced by the changes of the world around them. the main themes, with which they began, they retained to the end. their methods, their instruments, their way of feeling into the world of man and of nature, their relation to the doctrines of god and of man, did not, though on all these matters they held diverse views, alter with the alteration of the world. but this is more true of browning than of tennyson. the political and social events of those years touched tennyson, as we see from _maud_ and the _princess_, but his way of looking at them was not the way of a contemporary. it might have been predicted from his previous career and work. then the new movements of science and criticism which disturbed clough and arnold so deeply, also troubled tennyson, but not half so seriously. he staggered for a time under the attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded to it. he was angry with himself for every doubt that beset him, and angry with the science and criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was determined not to change. finally, he rested where he had been when he wrote _in memoriam_, nay more, where he had been when he began to write. there were no such intervals in browning's thought. one could scarcely say from his poetry, except in a very few places, that he was aware of the social changes of his time, or of the scientific and critical movement which, while he lived, so profoundly modified both theology and religion.[ ] _asolando_, in , strikes the same chords, but more feebly, which _paracelsus_ struck in . but though, in this lofty apartness and self-unity, browning and tennyson may fairly be said to be at one, in themselves and in their song they were different. there could scarcely be two characters, two musics, two minds, two methods in art, two imaginations, more distinct and contrasted than those which lodged in these men--and the object of this introduction is to bring out this contrast, with the purpose of placing in a clearer light some of the peculiar elements in the poetry of browning, and in his position as a poet. . their public fate was singularly different. in tennyson, with his two volumes of collected poems, made his position. the _princess_, in , increased his reputation. in , _in memoriam_ raised him, it was said, above all the poets of his time, and the book was appreciated, read and loved by the greater part of the english-speaking world. the success and popular fame which now followed were well deserved and wisely borne. they have endured and will endure. a host of imitators, who caught his music and his manner, filled the groves and ledges which led up to the peak on which he lived. his side of parnassus was thronged. it was quite otherwise with his brother-poet. only a few clear-eyed persons cared to read _paracelsus_, which appeared in . _strafford_, browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a while. when _sordello_, that strange child of genius, was born in , those who tried to read its first pages declared they were incomprehensible. it seems that critics in those days had either less intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive, for not only _sordello_ but even _in memoriam_ was said to be exceedingly obscure. then, from to , browning published at intervals a series of varied poems and dramas, under the title of _bells and pomegranates_. these, one might imagine, would have grasped the heart of any public which had a care for poetry. among them were such diverse poems as _pippa passes_; _a blot in the 'scutcheon_; _saul_; _the pied piper of hamelin_; _my last duchess_; _waring_. i only mention a few (all different in note, subject and manner from one another), in order to mark the variety and range of imaginative power displayed in this wonderful set of little books. the bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with the golden pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this high priest of song. rarely have imagination and intellect, ideal faith and the sense which handles daily life, passion and quietude, the impulse and self-mastery of an artist, the joy of nature and the fates of men, grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled together more fully--bells for the pleasure and fruit for the food of man. yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public. a few, however, loved them, and all the poems were collected in . _in memoriam_ and this collected edition of browning issued almost together; but with how different a fate and fame we see most plainly in the fact that browning can scarcely be said to have had any imitators. the groves and ledges of his side of apollo's mountain were empty, save for a few enchanted listeners, who said: "this is our music, and here we build our tent." as the years went on, these readers increased in number, but even when the volumes entitled _men and women_ were published in , and the _dramatis personæ_ in , his followers were but a little company. for all this neglect browning cared as a bird cares who sings for the love of singing, and who never muses in himself whether the wood is full or not of listeners. being always a true artist, he could not stop versing and playing; and not one grain of villain envy touched his happy heart when he looked across the valley to tennyson. he loved his mistress art, and his love made him always joyful in creating. at last his time came, but it was not till nearly twenty years after the collected poems of that _the ring and the book_ astonished the reading public so much by its intellectual _tour de force_ that it was felt to be unwise to ignore browning any longer. his past work was now discovered, read and praised. it was not great success or worldwide fame that he attained, but it was pleasant to him, and those who already loved his poems rejoiced with him. before he died he was widely read, never so much as tennyson, but far more than he had ever expected. it had become clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height with tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets. their public fate, then, was very different. tennyson had fifty years of recognition, browning barely ten. and to us who now know browning this seems a strange thing. had he been one of the smaller men, a modern specialist like arnold or rossetti, we could better understand it. but browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of human nature. he set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many diverse ages, nations and climates. he told us of times and folk as far apart as caliban and cleon, as karshish and waring, as balaustion and fifine, as st. john and bishop blougram. the range and the contrasts of his subjects are equally great. and he did this work with a searching analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous boldness, and an opulent imagination at once penetrative and passionate. when, then, we realise this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished that appreciation of him lingered so long. why did it not come at first, and why did it come in the end? the first answer to that question is a general one. during the years between and , and especially during the latter half of these years, science and criticism were predominant. their determination to penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life. analysis became dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination. doubtful questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone. the understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction. they, too, began to dissect the human heart. poets and writers of fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or felt in this or that fashion. in such analysis they seemed to touch the primal sources of life. they desired to dig about the tree of humanity and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres--not much caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy fruit. and this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. they became, on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. the close marriage between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. some of the parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products, freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was glorified. they made an impudent claim to the name of art, but they were nothing better than disagreeable science. but this was an extreme deviation of the tendency. the main line it took was not so detestable. it was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. the outward forms of things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making. the description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life, before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and easier, than any description of their final result in act. this was borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a comfortable reaction from it has arisen. in poetry it did not last so long. morris carried us out of it. but long before it began, long before its entrance into the arts, browning, who on another side of his genius delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual analysis of human nature. when he began it, no one cared for it; and _paracelsus, sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _bells and pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. but browning did not heed the unheeding of the world. he had the courage of his aims in art, and while he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of the inner life of men. and then, when the tendency of which i speak had collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous amazement, found him out. "here is a man," it said, "who has been doing in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. we will read him now." so browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having reached him, he became a favoured poet. however, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into which other writers carried it, _paracelsus_ is, indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but _sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and warlike action in which men and women, like salinguerra and palma, who live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while in poems like _pippa passes_ and some of the dramas, emotion and thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a lightning of swift deeds. nor are other poems wanting, in which, not long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity. . this second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the objective in art. the time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had brought to the point of eruption. impressionism was born in painting, poetry, sculpture and music. it was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in the art of poetry, we found that browning--who had in long poems done the very opposite of impressionism--had also, in a number of short poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. _porphyria's lover_, many a scene in _sordello_, _my last duchess_, _the laboratory_, _home thoughts from abroad_, are only a few out of many. it is pleasant to think of the ultimate appearance of waring, flashed out for a moment on the sea, only to disappear. in method, swiftness and colour, but done in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery as in colour. he did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul. that is another reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now. he was impressionist long before impressionism arrived. when it arrived he was found out. and he stood alone, for tennyson is never impressionist, and never could have been. neither was swinburne nor arnold, morris nor rossetti. . again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly, out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of travel and knowledge afforded to men, tennyson's smooth, melodious, simple development of art-subjects did not represent the clashing complexity of human life, whether inward in the passions, the intellect or the soul, or in the active movement of the world. and the other poets were equally incapable of representing this complexity of which the world became clearly conscious. arnold tried to express its beginnings, and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them. he wrote about them; he did not write them down. nor did he really belong to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased with its own excitement and entanglement. he was the child of a world which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was tired like obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. sometimes he felt, as in _the new age_, the pleasure of the coming life of the world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. but chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to realise that it was the trouble and wildness of youth, he mistook it for the trouble of decay. he painted it as such. but it was really young, and out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social, religious, philosophical and political thought, such as we have seen and read of for the last thirty years. art joined in the experiments of this youthful time. it opened a new fountain and sent forth from it another stream, to echo this attempting, clanging and complicated society; and this stream did not flow like a full river, making large or sweet melody, but like a mountain torrent thick with rocks, the thunderous whirlpools of whose surface were white with foam. changing and sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where it became dangerously navigable. strange boats, filled with outlandish figures, who played on unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and passions remote from common life, sailed by on its stormy waters. few were the concords, many the discords, and some of the discords were never resolved. but in one case at least--in the case of browning's poetry, and in very many cases in the art of music--out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows of the valley. these complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into which society had grown browning represented from almost the beginning of his work. when society became conscious of them--there it found him. and, amazed, it said, "here is a man who forty years ago lived in the midst of our present life and wrote about it." they saw the wild, loud complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled. for browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which, when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound, he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and where they were resolved. and this hope for the individual and the race was one of the deepest elements in browning's religion. it was also the hope of tennyson, but tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed the uncertainty. browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part resolved his discords. even when he did not resolve them, he firmly believed that they would be resolved. this, his essential difference from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his apartness from the self-ignorance of english society, and the self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life. in the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery, contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved. whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to the last poem he wrote. while the other poets were tossing on the sea of unresolved question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. he would have reversed the psalmist's cry. he would have said, "thou art not cast down, o my soul; thou art not disquieted within me. thou hast hoped in god, who is the light of thy countenance, and thy god." at first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased, like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that part of browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored his final melody. but of late it has begun, tired of the restless clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. and at this point many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and religious satisfaction in browning. at the very end, then, of the nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to themselves, "browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for, and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. no one cared then for him, but we care now." again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did not, like the other poets, change his view about nature, man and god. he conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. hence, he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time on these great matters. when _paracelsus_ was published in browning had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of god's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him, to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. it was a theory which was original, if any theory can be so called. at least, its form, as he expressed it, was clearly original. roughly sketched in _pauline_, fully rounded in _paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of his death. but tennyson had no clear theory about man or nature or god when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the last stanzas of _in memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city that has foundations. he believed in that city, but he could not always live in it. he grew into this or that opinion about the relations of god and man, and then grew out of it. he held now this, now that view of nature, and of man in contact with nature. there was always battle in his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of war. browning was at peace, firm-fixed. it is true the inward struggle of tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better than browning did. it is true this struggle enabled him to have great variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in god and in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface of this mortal life, which was one of browning's noblest legacies to that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging. . the danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost every poem of browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the borders of the land of weary-men. but he seems to have been aware of this danger, and to have conquered it. he meets it by the immense variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he places them. i do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples, though he always repeats his theory. and the pleasant result is that we can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the fresh examples alone. and they are likely to charm, at least by variety, for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern them; from many periods of the arts; from most of the countries of europe, from france, germany, spain, italy, (rarely from england,) with their specialised types of race and of landscape; and from almost every class of educated modern society. moreover, he had a guard within his own nature against the danger of this monotony. it was the youthful freshness with which, even in advanced age, he followed his rapid impulses to art-creation. no one was a greater child than he in the quickness with which he received a sudden call to poetry from passing events or scenes, and in the eagerness with which he seized them as subjects. he took the big subjects now and then which the world expects to be taken, and treated them with elaborate thought and steadfast feeling, but he was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic poem, whom the transient occurrences and sights of the day touched into song. he picked up his subjects as a man culls flowers in a mountain walk, moved by an ever-recurring joy and fancy in them--a book on a stall, a bust in an italian garden, a face seen at the opera, the market chatter of a tuscan town, a story told by the roadside in brittany, a picture in some accademia--so that, though the ground-thought might incur the danger of dulness through repetition, the joy of the artist so filled the illustration, and his freshness of invention was so delighted with itself, that even to the reader the theory seemed like a new star. in this way he kept the use of having an unwavering basis of thought which gave unity to his sixty years of work, and yet avoided the peril of monotony. an immense diversity animated his unity, filled it with gaiety and brightness, and secured impulsiveness of fancy. this also differentiates him from tennyson, who often wanted freshness; who very rarely wrote on a sudden impulse, but after long and careful thought; to whose seriousness we cannot always climb with pleasure; who played so little with the world. these defects in tennyson had the excellences which belong to them in art, just as these excellences in browning had, in art, their own defects. we should be grateful for the excellences, and not trouble ourselves about the defects. however, neither the excellences nor the defects concern us in the present discussion. it is the contrast between the two men on which we dwell. . the next point of contrast, which will further illustrate why browning was not read of old but is now read, has to do with historical criticism. there arose, some time ago, as part of the scientific and critical movement of the last forty years, a desire to know and record accurately the early life of peoples, pastoral, agricultural and in towns, and the beginning of their arts and knowledges; and not only their origins, but the whole history of their development. a close, critical investigation was made of the origins of each people; accurate knowledge, derived from contemporary documents, of their life, laws, customs and language was attained; the facts of their history were separated from their mythical and legendary elements; the dress, the looks of men, the climate of the time, the physical aspects of their country--all the skeleton of things was fitted together, bone to bone. and for a good while this merely critical school held the field. it did admirable and necessary work. but when it was done, art claimed its place in this work. the desire sprang up among historians to conceive all this history in the imagination, to shape vividly its scenery, to animate and individualise its men and women, to paint the life of the human soul in it, to clothe it in flesh and blood, to make its feet move and its eyes flash--but to do all these things within the limits of the accurate knowledge which historical criticism had defined. "let us saturate ourselves," said the historians, "with clear knowledge of the needful facts, and then, without violation of our knowledge, imagine the human life, the landscape, the thinking and feeling of a primæval man, of his early religion, of his passions; of athens when the persian came, of rome when the republic was passing into the empire, of a provincial in spain or britain, of a german town in the woods by the river. let us see in imagination as well as in knowledge an english settlement on the welsh border, an italian mediæval town when its art was being born, a jewish village when christ wandered into its streets, a musician or a painter's life at a time when greek art was decaying, or when a new impulse like the renaissance or the french revolution came upon the world." when that effort of the historians had established itself, and we have seen it from blossoming to fruitage, people began to wonder that no poet had ever tried to do this kind of work. it seemed eminently fitted for a poet's hand, full of subjects alluring to the penetrative imagination. it needed, of course, some scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its grasp of the main ideas of the time to be represented; but that being given, immense opportunities remained for pictures of human life, full of colour, thought and passions; for subtle and brilliant representations of the eternal desires and thinkings of human nature as they were governed by the special circumstances of the time in which the poem was placed; and for the concentration into a single poem, gathered round one person, of the ideas whose new arrival formed a crisis in the history of art. men looked for this in tennyson and did not find it. his greek and mediæval poems were modernised. their imaginative work was uncritical. but when the historians and the critics of art and of religious movements happened at last to look into browning, they discovered, to their delight and wonder, that he had been doing, with a curious knowledge, this kind of work for many years. he had anticipated the results of that movement of the imagination in historical work which did not exist when he began to write; he had worked that mine, and the discovery of this made another host of people readers of his poetry. we need scarcely give examples of this. _sordello_, in (long before the effort of which we speak began), was such a poem--the history of a specialised soul, with all its scenery and history vividly mediæval. think of the _spanish cloister_, _the laboratory_, _a grammarian's funeral_, the _bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church_, poems, each of which paints an historical period or a vivid piece of its life. think of _the ring and the book_, with all the world of rome painted to the life, and all the soul of the time! the same kind of work was done for phases and periods of the arts from greek times to the renaissance, i may even say, from the renaissance to the present day. _balaustion's prologue_ concentrates the passage of dramatic poetry from sophocles to euripides. _aristophanes' apology_ realises the wild licence in which art and freedom died in athens--their greatness in their ruin--and the passionate sorrow of those who loved what had been so beautiful. _cleon_ takes us into a later time when men had ceased to be original, and life and art had become darkened by the pain of the soul. we pass on to two different periods of the renaissance in _fra lippo lippi_ and in _andrea del sarto_, and are carried further through the centuries of art when we read _abt vogler_ and _a toccata of galuppi's_. each of these poems is a concentrated, accurate piece of art-history, with the addition to it of the human soul. periods and phases of religious history are equally realised. _caliban upon setebos_ begins the record--that philosophic savage who makes his god out of himself. then follows study after study, from _a death in the desert_ to _bishop blougram's apology_. some carry us from early christianity through the mediæval faith; others lead us through the paganism of the renaissance and strange shows of judaism to browning's own conception of religion in the present day contrasted with those of the popular religion in _christmas-day and easter-day_. never, in poetry, was the desire of the historical critic for accuracy of fact and portraiture, combined with vivid presentation of life, so fully satisfied. no wonder browning was not read of old; but it is no wonder, when the new history was made, when he was once found out, that he passed from a few to a multitude of readers. . another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career. tennyson, in his two earliest books in and , though clearly original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the rags of the past. he wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of the poets between and . browning, on the contrary, sprang at once into an original poetic life of his own. _pauline_ was unfinished, irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also entirely fresh and distinct. the influence of shelley echoes in it, but much more in admiration than in imitation of him. the matter, the spirit of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement was his own. had browning been an imitator, the first thing he would have imitated would have been the sweet and rippling movement of shelley's melodies. but the form of his verse, such as it was, arose directly out of his own nature and was as original as his matter. tennyson grew into originality, browning leaped into it; born, not of other poets, but of his own will. he begat himself. it had been better for his art, so far as technical excellence is concerned, had he studied and imitated at first the previous masters. but he did not; and his dominant individuality, whole in itself and creating its own powers, separates him at the very beginning from tennyson. . tennyson became fully original, but he always admitted, and sometimes encouraged in himself, a certain vein of conventionality. he kept the opinions of the past in the matter of caste. he clung to certain political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them. he sometimes expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct emanations from the deity of england. he belonged to a certain type of english society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry. he inhabited a certain park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical life beyond its palings. what had been, what was proper and recognised, somewhat enslaved in tennyson that distinctiveness and freedom of personality which is of so much importance in poetry, and which, had it had more liberty in tennyson, would have made him a still greater poet than he was. browning, on the other hand--much more a person in society than tennyson, much more a man of the world, and obeying in society its social conventions more than tennyson--never allowed this to touch his poems. as the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and class conventions of the past or the present. his poetry belongs to no special type of society, to no special nationality, to no separate creed or church, to no settled standard of social morality. what his own thought and emotion urged him to say, he said with an absolute carelessness of what the world would say. and in this freedom he preceded and prophesied the reaction of the last years of the nineteenth century against the tyranny of maxims and conventions in society, in morals, and in religion. that reaction has in many ways been carried beyond the proper limits of what is just and beautiful. but these excesses had to be, and the world is beginning to avoid them. what remains is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from the use of conventions, but from their tyranny and oppression, and lifted to a higher level, where the test of what is right and fitting in act, and just in thought, is not the opinion of society, but that law of love which gives us full liberty to develop our own nature and lead our own life in the way we think best independent of all conventions, provided we do not injure the life of others, or violate any of the great moral and spiritual truths by obedience to which the progress of mankind is promoted and secured. into that high and free region of thought and action browning brought us long ago. tennyson did not, save at intervals when the poet over-rode the man. this differentiates the men. but it also tells us why browning was not read fifty years ago, when social conventions were tyrannous and respectability a despot, and why he has been read for the last fifteen years and is read now. . there is another contrast between these poets. it is quite clear that tennyson was a distinctively english poet and a patriotic poet; at times too much of a patriot to judge tolerantly, or to write fairly, about other countries. he had, at least, a touch of national contempts, even of national hatreds. his position towards france was much that of the british sailor of nelson's time. his position towards ireland was that of the bishop, who has been a schoolmaster, to the naughty curate who has a will of his own. his position towards scotland was that of one who was aware that it had a geographical existence, and that a regiment in the english army which had a genius for fighting was drawn from its highlands. he condescends to write a poem at edinburgh, but then edinburgh was of english origin and name. even with that help he cannot be patient of the place. the poem is a recollection of an italian journey, and he forgets in memories of the south--though surely edinburgh might have awakened some romantic associations-- the clouded forth, the gloom which saddens heaven and earth, the bitter east, the misty summer and gray metropolis of the north. edinburgh is english in origin, but tennyson did not feel england beyond the border. there the celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the celt. the celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on him in its own way. it imposed on him, as his chief subject, a celtic tale and a celtic hero; and though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the vengeance lasts, for the more he did this the more he injured his work. however, being always a noble artist, he made a good fight for his insularity, and the expression of it harmonised with the pride of england in herself, alike with that which is just and noble in it, and with that which is neither the one nor the other. then, too, his scenery (with some exceptions, and those invented) was of his own land, and chiefly of the places where he lived. it was quite excellent, but it was limited. but, within the limit of england, it was steeped in the love of england; and so sweet and full is this love, and so lovely are its results in song, that every englishman has, for this reason if for no other, a deep and just affection for tennyson. nevertheless, in that point also his poetry was insular. a fault in the poet, not in the poetry. perhaps, from this passionate concentration, the poetry was all the lovelier. again, when tennyson took a great gest of war as his subject, he took it exclusively from the history of his own land. no one would know from his writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle had been done by other nations. he knew of them, but he did not care to write about them. nor can we trace in his work any care for national struggles or national life beyond this island--except in a few sonnets and short pieces concerning poland and montenegro--an isolation of interests which cannot be imputed to any other great poet of the first part of the nineteenth century, excepting keats, who had no british or foreign interests. keats had no country save the country of beauty. at all these points browning differed from tennyson. he never displayed a special patriotism. on the contrary, he is more italian than english, and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national characteristics of spain or france or germany, than he is with those of england. no insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners, or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. _strafford_ is the only play he wrote on an english subject, and it is rather a study of a character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an english character. even pym and hampden fail to be truly english, and it would have been difficult for any one but browning to take their eminent english elements out of them. _paracelsus_ and _sordello_ belong to germany and italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of the seven numbers of the _bells and pomegranates_ which even refer to england. italy is there, and chiefly italy. in _de gustibus_ he contrasts himself with his friend who loves england: your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (if our loves remain) in an english lane by a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. * * * what i love best in all the world is a castle, precipice-encurled, in a gash of the wind-grieved apennine. "look for me, old fellow of mine, if i get out of the grave, in a seaside house in south italy," and he describes the place and folk he loves, and ends: open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, "italy." such lovers old are i and she: so it always was, so shall ever be! it is a poem written out of his very heart. and then, the scenery? it is not of our country at all. it is of many lands, but, above all, it is vividly italian. there is no more minute and subtly-felt description of the scenery of a piece of village country between the mountains and the sea, with all its life, than in the poem called _the englishman in italy_. the very title is an outline of browning's position in this matter. we find this english poet in france, in syria, in greece, in spain, but not in england. we find rome, florence, venice, mantua, verona, and forgotten towns among the apennines painted with happy love in verse, but not an english town nor an english village. the flowers, the hills, the ways of the streams, the talk of the woods, the doings of the sea and the clouds in tempest and in peace, the aspects of the sky at noon, at sunrise and sunset, are all foreign, not english. the one little poem which is of english landscape is written by him in italy (in a momentary weariness with his daily adoration), and under a green impulse. delightful as it is, he would not have remained faithful to it for a day. every one knows it, but that we may realise how quick he was to remember and to touch a corner of early spring in england, on a soft and windy day--for all the blossoms are scattered--i quote it here. it is well to read his sole contribution (except in _pauline_ and a few scattered illustrations) to the scenery of his own country: oh, to be in england now that april's there, and whoever wakes in england sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough in england--now! and after april, when may follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge-- that's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture! and though the fields look rough with hoary dew, all will be gay, when noontide wakes anew the buttercups, the little children's dower; --far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! so it runs; but it is only a momentary memory; and he knew, when he had done it, and to his great comfort, that he was far away from england. but when tennyson writes of italy--as, for instance, in _mariana in the south_--how apart he is! how great is his joy when he gets back to england! then, again, when browning was touched by the impulse to write about a great deed in war, he does not choose, like tennyson, english subjects. the _cavalier tunes_ have no importance as patriot songs. they are mere experiments. the poem, _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, has twice their vigour. his most intense war-incident is taken from the history of the french wars under napoleon. the most ringing and swiftest poem of personal dash and daring--and at sea, as if he was tired of england's mistress-ship of the waves--a poem one may set side by side with the fight of _the revenge_, is _hervé riel_. it is a tale of a breton sailor saving the french fleet from the english, with the sailor's mockery of england embedded in it; and browning sent the hundred pounds he got for it to the french, after the siege of paris. it was not that he did not honour his country, but that, as an artist, he loved more the foreign lands; and that in his deepest life he belonged less to england than to the world of man. the great deeds of england did not prevent him from feeling, with as much keenness as tennyson felt those of england, the great deeds of france and italy. national self-sacrifice in critical hours, splendid courage in love and war, belonged, he thought, to all peoples. perhaps he felt, with tennyson's insularity dominating his ears, that it was as well to put the other side. i think he might have done a little more for england. there is only one poem, out of all his huge production, which recognises the great deeds of our empire in war; and this did not come of a life-long feeling, such as he had for italy, but from a sudden impulse which arose in him, as sailing by, he saw trafalgar and gibraltar, glorified and incarnadined by a battle-sunset: nobly, nobly cape saint vincent to the north-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into cadiz bay; bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face trafalgar lay; in the dimmest north-east distance dawned gibraltar grand and gray; "here and here did england help me: how can i help england?"--say. whoso turns as i, this evening, turn to god to praise and pray, while jove's planet rises yonder, silent over africa. it is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it is poor. and there is twice the fervour of its sunset in the description of the sunrise at asolo in _pippa passes_. again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of any vital interest in the changes of thought and feeling in england during the sixty years of his life, such as appear everywhere in tennyson. no one would know from his poetry (at least until the very end of his life, when he wrote _francis furini_) that the science of life and its origins had been revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save in _a death in the desert_, that the whole aspect of theology had been altered, or that the democratic movement had taken so many new forms. he showed to these english struggles neither attraction nor repulsion. they scarcely existed for him--transient elements of the world, merely national, not universal. nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him half so much as the literature and art of italy. he loved both. few were better acquainted with english poetry, or reverenced it more; but he loved it, not because it was english, but of that world of imagination which has no special country. he cared also for english art, but he gave all his personal love to the art of italy. nor does he write, as tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the english farmer, squire, miller and sailor, and of english sweet-hearting, nor of the english park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the work-girl at asolo, and the spanish monk in his garden, and the arab riding through the desert, and of the duchess and her servant flying through the mountains of moldavia, and of the poor painters at fano and florence, and of the threadbare poet at valladolid, and of the peasant-girl who fed the tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who died somewhere in germany (as i think browning meant it), and of the jews at rome, and of the girl at pornic with the gold hair and the peasant's hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are english. all his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these has the english note which sounds so soft and clear in tennyson. this is curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why english people for a long time would have so little to do with him. all the same, he was himself woven of england even more than of italy. the english elements in his character and work are more than the italian. his intellect was english, and had the english faults as well as the english excellences. his optimism was english; his steadfast fighting quality, his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of things, were english. his religion was the excellent english compromise or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make for their own life. his bold sense of personal freedom was english. his constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was english; his roughness of form was positively early teutonic. then his wit, his _esprit_,[ ] his capacity for induing he skin and the soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the celtic nature. but the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the fulfillment of perfection in love; his vision of nature as in colour, rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable beauty--these were all old italian. then i do not know whether browning had any jewish blood in his body by descent, but he certainly had jewish elements in his intellect, spirit and character. his sense of an ever-victorious righteousness at the centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled, was jewish, but he carried it forward with the new testament and made the righteousness identical with absolute love. yet, even in this, the old testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among christians. the appearance of christ as all-conquering love in _easter-day_ and the scenery which surrounds him are such as ezekiel might have conceived and written. then his intellectual subtlety, the metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis, the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as jewish as the talmud. there was also a jewish quality in his natural description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the jews were famous; and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of all kinds, another remarkable habit of the jewish poets. moreover, his pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of their colour--sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx, chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in the crimson of blood, is jewish. so also is his love of music, of music especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in god, of music with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases. it was this jewish element in browning, in all its many forms, which caused him to feel with and to write so much about the jews in his poetry. the two poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may be in the thought of god and as it ought to be conceived by us, are both in the mouth of jews, of _rabbi ben ezra_ and _jochanan hakkadosh_. in _filippo baldinucci_ the jew has the best of the battle; his courtesy, intelligence and physical power are contrasted with the coarseness, feeble brains and body of the christians. in _holy-cross day_, the jew, forced to listen to a christian sermon, begins with coarse and angry mockery, but passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase. no english poet, save perhaps shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even shylock unpitied, has spoken of the jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till browning wrote of him. the jew lay deep in browning. he was a complex creature; and who would understand or rather feel him rightly, must be able to feel something of the nature of all these races in himself. but tennyson was not complex. he was english and only english. but to return from this digression. browning does not stand alone among the poets in the apartness from his own land of which i have written. byron is partly with him. where byron differs from him is, first, in this--that byron had no poetic love for any special country as browning had for italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to greece. keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as i have said, the country of loveliness. wordsworth, coleridge and shelley were not exclusively english. shelley belonged partly to italy, but chiefly to that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided patriotisms are absorbed. wordsworth and coleridge, in their early days, were patriots of humanity; they actually for a time abjured their country. even in his later days wordsworth's sympathies reach far beyond england. but none of these were so distinctively english as tennyson, and none of them were so outside of england as browning. interesting as it is, the _completeness_ of this isolation from england was a misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry. there is another thing to say in this connection. the expansion of the interests of the english poets beyond england was due in wordsworth, coleridge, shelley, and partly in byron, to the great tidal-wave of feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the french revolution, was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in france of . special national sentiments were drowned in its waters. patriotism was the duty of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of as the only nation. in there was little left of that influence in england among the educated classes, and tennyson's insular patriotism represented their feeling for many years, and partly represents it now. but the ideas of the revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical form among the english democracy than they even had at their first outburst in france, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of internationalism. it grew among the propertied classes from the greater facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and especially of literary, intercommunication. literature, even more than commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of nations. on her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their quarrels die. the same idea grew up of itself among the working classes, not only in england, but in germany, italy, france, america. they began, and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring nationalities. to denationalise the nations into one nation only--the nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "we are all one; our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." and, for my part, i believe that in the full development of that conception the progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured. now, when all these classes in england, brought to much the same point by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do not find it in tennyson, but they do find browning writing, and quite naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own, even more than to his own. and they also find that he had been doing this for many years before their own international interests had been awakened. that, then, differentiates him completely from tennyson, and is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the present. . again, with regard to politics and social questions, tennyson made us know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or displeased men by his political position. the british constitution appears throughout his work seated like zeus on olympus, with all the world awaiting its nod. then, also, social problems raise their storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the woman's question; war; competition; the state of the poor; education; a state without religion; the marriage question; where freedom lies; and others. these are brought by tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given rooms in it. at both these points browning differed from tennyson. he was not the politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. no trace of the british constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it that he had any social views or politics at all. sixty years in close contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them! he records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. we know what they thought at rome or among the druses of these matters, but we do not know what browning thought. the art-representation, the _vorstellung_ of the thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. it is the same in social matters. what he says as a poet concerning the ideas which should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but browning is not on that plane. there are no poems directly applied to them. this means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. with steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the transient, of the changing elements of the world. he avoided the contemporary. for this high reserve we and the future of art will owe him gratitude. on the contrast between the theology we find in tennyson and browning, and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser not to speak in this introduction. these two contrasts would lead me too far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. moreover, browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology, philosophy and ethics. . i will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between them as artists. a great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they have said the sort of things i have been saying, that they have said either enough, or the most important things. the things are, indeed, useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and the elements of which his poetry is made. they place him in a clear relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken all together, they throw light upon his work. but they are not half enough, nor are they the most important. they leave out the essence of the whole matter; they leave out the poetry. they illuminate the surface of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of the beautiful and sublime matter of thought and feeling which arises out of nature and human nature, the two great subjects of song; which matter the poets represent in a form so noble and so lovely in itself that, when it is received into a heart prepared for it, it kindles in the receiver a love of beauty and sublimity similar to that which the poet felt before he formed, and while he formed, his poem. such a receiver, reading the poem, makes the poem, with an individual difference, in himself. and this is the main thing; the eternal, not the temporary thing. almost all i have already discussed with regard to tennyson and browning belongs to the temporary; and the varying judgments which their public have formed of them, chiefly based on their appeal to the tendencies of the time, do not at all predict what the final judgment on these men as poets is likely to be. that will depend, not on feelings which belong to the temporary elements of the passing day, but on how far the eternal and unchanging elements of art appear in their work. the things which fitted the poetry of tennyson to the years between and have already passed away; the things which, as i have explained, fitted the poetry of browning to the tendencies of the years after will also disappear, and are already disappearing. indeed, the excessive transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated society during the last ten years is that in them which most deeply impresses any man who sits somewhat apart from them. and, at any rate, none of these merely contemporary elements, which often seem to men the most important, will count a hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry either of tennyson or browning. they will be of historical interest, and no more. matters in their poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among their critics, will be laid aside as materials for judgment; and justly, for they are of quite impermanent value. whenever, then, we try to judge them as poets, we must do our best to discharge these temporary things, and consider their poetry as it will seem a hundred years hence to men who will think seriously and feel sensitively, even passionately, towards great and noble matter of imaginative thought and emotion concerning human life and the natural world, and towards lovely creation of such matter into form. their judgment will be made apart from the natural prejudices that arise from contemporary movements. they will not be wiser in their judgment of their own poets than we are about ours, but they will be wiser in their judgment of our poets, because, though they will have their own prejudices, they will not have ours. moreover, the long, growing, and incessantly corrected judgment of those best fitted to feel what is most beautiful in shaping and most enduring in thought and feeling penetrated and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time, have separated the permanent from the impermanent in the work of browning and tennyson. that judgment will partly depend on the answers, slowly, as it were unconsciously, given by the world to two questions. first, how far does their poetry represent truly and passionately what is natural and most widely felt in loving human nature, whether terrible or joyful, simple or complex, tragic or humorous? secondly, how far is the representation beautiful and noble in form, and true to the laws of their art. that poetry which is nearest to the most natural, the most universal elements of human life when they are suffused with love--in some at least of its various moods--and at the same time the most beautiful in form, is the best. it wins most affection from mankind, for it is about noble matters of thought which the greater number of men and women desire to contemplate, and about noble matters of passion which the greater number love and therefore enjoy. this poetry lasts from generation to generation, is independent of differences made by climate, by caste, by nationality, by religion, by politics, by knowledge, custom, tradition or morals. these universal, natural elements of human nature are, in all their infinite variety and striving, beloved by men, of undying interest in action, and of immortal pleasure in thought. the nearer a poet is to them, especially to what is lovable, and therefore beautiful in them, the greater and the more enduring is his work. it follows that this greater work will also be simple, that is, easy to feel with the heart though it may be difficult to grasp by the intelligence. were it not simple in feeling, the general answer of mankind to the call of love, in all its forms, for sympathy would be unheard. and if it be simple in feeling, it does not much matter if the deep waters of its thought are difficult for the understanding to fathom. it would be ridiculous to dogmatise on a matter which can only be fully answered a century hence, but this much is plain. of these two poets, taking into consideration the whole of their work, tennyson is the closest to human nature in its noble, common and loving forms, as browning is the closest to what is complex, subtle and uncommon in human nature. the representation both of the simple and of the complex is a good thing, and both poets have their place and honour. but the representation of the complex is plainly the more limited in range of influence, and appeals to a special class of minds rather than to mankind at large. there are some, indeed, who think that the appeal to the few, to thinkers alone or high-wrought specialists in various forms of culture, marks out the greater poet. it is the tendency of literary castes to think that specialised work is the greatest. "this man," they say, "is our poet, not the mob's. he stands apart, and his apartness marks his greatness." these are amusing persons, who practically say, "we alone understand him, therefore he is great." yet a phrase like "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. it relegates him at once to a lower place. the greatest poets are loved by all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. homer was loved by pericles and by the sausage-seller. vergil was read with joy by mæcenas and augustus, and by the vine-dressers of mantua. dante drew after him the greatest minds in italy, and yet is sung to-day by the shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of tuscany. shakespeare pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the strolling theatres. and though tennyson and browning are far below these mightier poets, yet when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of the greatest, tennyson answers its demand more closely than browning. the highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. in doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry, and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that which is to come. among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first principle in the judgment of the arts. indeed, the recovery of the natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay. browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not answer its demand. not only in early but also in later poems, he pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough. there is an entertaining sketch of naddo, the philistine critic, in the second book of _sordello_; and the view i speak of is expressed by him among a huddle of criticisms-- "would you have your songs endure? build on the human heart!--why, to be sure yours is one sort of heart.--but i mean theirs, ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares to build on! central peace, mother of strength, that's father of...." this is good fooling, and naddo is an ass. nevertheless, though naddo makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and browning as well as sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth. and, of course, browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his work. even in _sordello_ he tells us how he gave himself up to recording with pity and love the doings of the universal soul. he strove to paint the whole. it was a bold ambition. few have fulfilled it so well. none, since shakespeare, have had a wider range. his portraiture of life was so much more varied than that of tennyson, so much more extensive and detailed, that on this side he excels tennyson; but such portraiture is not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always in danger of tending to prose. and browning, picturing human life, deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex forms. it was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully. only, it is not to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet. for the representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet away from art. he loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes, and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose. again and again browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under the sway of another, cease to be a poet. at this point his inferiority to tennyson as a poet is plain. tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line which was not unmistakably poetry, while browning could write pages which were unmistakably not poetry. i do not mean, in saying all this, that browning did not appeal to that which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that he did not appeal to it as much as tennyson. browning is often simple, lovely and universal. and when he speaks out of that emotional imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the delight and love of the centuries to come. by work of this type he will be finally judged and finally endure; and, even now, every one who loves great poetry knows what these master-poems are. as to the others, the merely subtle, analytic poems in which intellect, not imagination, is supreme, especially those into which he drifted in his later life when the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less warmly--they will always appeal to a certain class of persons who would like to persuade themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and who, in finding out what browning means, imagine to their great surprise that they find out that they care for poetry. what they really care for is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away from poetry as sirius is from the sun. there are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic about these poems. and parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and imagination. they occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream of english poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier poems, which, being more "simple, sensuous and passionate," are nearer to the common love and life of man. when, then, we apply this test, the difference of rank between him and tennyson is not great, but it is plain. yet comparison, on this point, is difficult. both drew mankind. tennyson is closer to that which is most universal in the human heart, browning to the vast variety within it; and men in the future will find their poetic wants best satisfied by reading the work of both these poets. let us say then that in this matter they are equal. each has done a different part of that portraiture of human nature which is the chief work of a poet. but this is not the only test we may apply to these men as poets. the second question which tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work is this: "how far is any poet's representation of what is true and loving in itself lovely?" their stuff may be equally good. is their form equally good? is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first duty is to be true to beauty as the shape of love and truth, ought to make it? the judgment of the future will also be formed on that ground, and inevitably. what we call form in poetry may be said to consist of, or to depend on, three things: ( ) on a noble style; ( ) on a harmonious composition, varied but at unity; ( ) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in verse. these are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its whole. the other half is that the "matter"--that is, the deep substance of amalgamated thought and emotion--should be great, vital and fair. but both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble or thoughtless matter. there was, for example, a whole set of poets towards the end of the elizabethan period who were close and weighty thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but whom the poetical world does not read at all. and the reason is that their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in excellence their matter. their stuff is good, their form is bad. the judgment of the future gives them no high rank. they do not answer well to the test of which i speak. i do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to browning. he rises far above these poets in style, composition and melody, but he skirts their faults. and if we are asked to compare him to tennyson, he is inferior to tennyson at all these points of form. ( ) his composition was rarely sufficiently careful. it was broken up, overcrowded; minor objects of thought or feeling are made too remarkable for the whole; there is far too little of poetical perspective; the variety of the poem does not always grow out of the subject itself, but out of the external play of browning's mind upon things remotely connected with the subject; too many side-issues are introduced; everything he imagined is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of strengthening the main impression. a number of the poems have, that is, the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has gone to sleep. moreover, only too often, they have those faults of composition which naturally belong to a poet when he writes as if intellect rather than passion were the ultimate umpire of the work of his art. of course, there are many exceptions; and the study of those exceptions, as exceptions, would make an interesting essay. on the other hand, tennyson's composition was for the most part excellent, and always careful. ( ) then as to style. browning had a style of his own, wholly devoid of imitation, perfectly individual, and this is one of the marks of a good artist. it was the outcome of his poetic character, and represented it. at this point his style is more interesting than tennyson's. tennyson's style was often too much worked, too consciously subjected to the rules of his art, too worn down to smoothness of texture. moreover, the natural surprises of an unchartered individuality do not sufficiently appear in it (tennyson repressed the fantastic), though the whole weight of his character does magnificently appear. but if tennyson was too conscious of his style--a great misfortune especially in passionate song--browning did not take any deliberate pains with his style, and that is a greater misfortune. his freedom ran into undue licence; and he seems to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical way of writing. his individuality runs riot in his style. he paid little attention to the well-established rules of his art, in a revulsion, perhaps, from any imitation of the great models. he had not enough reverence for his art, and little for the public. he flung his diction at our heads and said: "this is myself; take it or leave it." none of the greater artists of the world have ever done this. they have not cared for what the world said, but they have cared for their art. there are certain limits to individual capriciousness in style, long since laid down, as it were, by beauty herself; which, transgressed, lessen, injure or lose beauty; and browning continually transgressed those limits. again, clearness is one of the first elements in style, and on poetry attaining clearness, depends, in great measure, its enduringness in the future. so far as clearness carries him, tennyson's poetry is sure to last. so far as browning's obscurity goes, his poetry will not last like tennyson's. it is all very well for his students to say that he is not obscure; he is. nor is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any specially profound analysis of the soul that browning is obscure. it is by his style. by that he makes what is easy difficult. the reader does not get at what he means as he gets at what homer, dante, and shakespeare mean. dante and shakespeare are often difficult through the depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness of style. but browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his expression of them. a poet has no right to be so indifferent, so careless of clearness in his art, i might almost say, so lazy. browning is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence. the great poets put the right words in the right places, and tennyson is with them in that. browning continually puts his words into the wrong places. he leaves out words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no reason except his fancy. he leaves his sentences half-finished and his meaning half-expressed. he begins a sentence, and having begun it, three or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all. this is irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than poetry; and it is quite needless. it is worse than needless, for it lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry. yet, there is something to say on the other side. it is said, and with a certain justice, that "the style is the man. strip his style away, and where is the man? where is the real browning if we get him to change a way of writing in which he naturally shaped his thought?" well, no one would ask him to impose on himself a style which did not fit his nature. that would be fatal. when he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his intellectual and poetic charm. just as carlyle when he wrote away from his natural style, as in the life of sterling and schiller, is not the great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with browning. were we savage satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of browning and carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style. we should be quite wrong. their style was the exact clothing of their thought. they wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their thought into other clothing, when they doctored their style, they did not represent what they really thought. no sensible person then would have asked browning to change his style, but would have asked him not to exaggerate it into its defects. it is plain he could have kept it within bounds. he has done so frequently. but as frequently he has allowed it to leap about as wildly as a young colt. he should have submitted it to the _manège_, and ridden it then where he pleased. a very little trouble on his part, a very little sacrifice of his unbridled fancifulness, would have spared us a great deal of unnecessary trouble, and made his poetry better and more enduring. another excuse may be made for his faults of style. it may be said that in one sense the faults are excellences. when a poet has to represent excessively subtle phases of thought and feeling, with a crowd of side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding on them; when he has to describe the excessive oddities, the curious turns of human emotion in strange inward conditions or outward circumstances or when he has to deal with rugged or even savage characters under the sway of the passions; he cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than browning did it, and, instead of being lazy, he used these quips and cranks of style deliberately. the excuse has something in it. but, all the same, an artist should have managed it otherwise. shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters, order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. a great artist, by his comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests, without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the play of character in the situations. and such an artist does this excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and melodious style. the excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not relieve browning of the charge. had he been a greater artist, he would have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a greater pleasurer of the future. had he taken more pains with his style, but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a poetic place as tennyson in the judgment of posterity. ( ) in one thing more--in this matter of form--the beauty of poetry lies. it is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. this part of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and style--for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is nothing but pleasant noise--secures also the continuous delight of men and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also tennyson, who gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet. browning was far too careless of his melody. he frequently sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought. he may have imagined that he strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. he did not, he injured it. he injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it, like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his parenthetic phrases. he breaks it sometimes into two with violent clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets. and in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme, in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates melody on the altar of his own cleverness. a great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry. and other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there, will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine melody which tennyson never disobeys. it is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the whole of his work; and i am equally far from saying that his faults of style and composition belong to all his poetry. there are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which, if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their close. there are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant, and capturing that their sound is never forgotten. there are others the subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart. and these will endure for the noble pleasure of man. there are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the subject, like the letter of karshish to his friend, in which browning has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make. there are others, like _abt vogler_, in which the style is extraordinarily noble, clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important poems, like _paracelsus_, where the joy and glory of the thought and passion of browning inform the verse with dignity, and make its march stately with solemn and beautiful music. where the style and melody are thus fine the composition is also good. the parts, in their variety, belong to one another and to the unity of the whole. style, melody and composition are always in the closest relation. and this nobleness of composition, style, and melody is chiefly found in those poems of his which have to do with the great matter of poetry--the representation of the universal and simple passions of human nature with their attendant and necessary thoughts. and there, in that part of his work, not in that other part for which he is unduly praised, and which belongs to the over-subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our self-conscious culture now is striving to resist its decay, and to prove that its disease is health, is the lasting power of browning. and then, beyond all these matters of form, there is the poet himself, alone among his fellows in his unique and individual power, who has fastened himself into our hearts, added a new world to our perceptions, developed our lives and enlarged our interests. and there are the separate and distinguished excellences of his work--the virtues which have no defects, the virtues, too, of his defects, all the new wonders of his realm--the many originalities which have justly earned for him that high and lonely seat on parnassus on which his noble shadow sits to-day, unchallenged in our time save by that other shadow with whom, in reverence and love, we have been perhaps too bold to contrast him. footnotes: [ ] i state it roughly. the _poems of two brothers_ appeared in , tennyson's first single volume in , his second in , his last in . browning's first poem was issued in , his last in . _paracelsus_, in which his genius clearly disclosed itself, was published in , while tennyson, seven years later, proved his mastership in the two volumes of . [ ] _a death in the desert_ touches on the doubts which, when it was written, had gathered from historical criticism round the subject matter of the gospels, but the prophetic answer of st. john is not critical. it is browning's personal reply to the critics, and is based on his own religious philosophy. the critical part of the argument is left untouched, and the answer is given from the poet's plane. it is the same when in the _parleyings with certain people_ furini is made to embody browning's belief in a personal god in contradistinction with the mere evolutionist. he does not argue the points. he places one doctrine over against the other and bids the reader choose. moreover, he claims his view as his own alone. he seeks to impose it on no one. [ ] much has been said of the humour of browning. but it is rather wit than humour which we perceive. the gentle pathos which belongs to humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon himself, his smile at his own follies and those of mankind, the half light, like that of evening, in which humour dwells, are wanting in browning. it is true he has the charity of humour, though not its pathetic power. but, all the same, he is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. the light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible things of life is too bright for humour. he is a wit--with charity--not a humourist. as for tennyson, save in his lincolnshire poems and _will waterproof's soliloquy_, he was strangely devoid either of humour or of wit. * * * * * chapter ii _the treatment of nature_ it is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of nature by browning. it is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation, his flashing way of description, his feeling for the breadth and freshness of nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape. this is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens, and the earth and all that therein is. others, like wordsworth, have stated this plainly: browning has nowhere defined his way. what his intellect held the natural world to be, in itself; what it meant for man; the relation in which it stood to god and god to it--these things are partly plain. they have their attraction for us. it is always interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such matters. but it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest. but what we want to discover is how browning, as a poet, felt the world of nature. we have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul when the universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its centre--and this is the real difficulty. sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we finally give up the quest. the best we can do is to try to find the two or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions browning had when nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "thou shall pursue me always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." and both these experiences are to be found in browning. nature and he are sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and generally the second. the natural world tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to illustrate his action, or sentimentalised by memorial associations of humanity, or, finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a distinct direction towards that subject. browning, with a few exceptions, does the exact opposite. his natural world is not made by our thought, nor does it reflect our passions. his illustrations, drawn from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the illustrating material were alien from our nature. nature, it is true, he thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. she exists independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of god, to urge us forward in humble pursuit to the infinite in him. the day browning climbs mont salève, at the beginning of his poem _la saisiaz_, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view. what does he see? himself in nature? or nature herself, like a living being? not at all. he sees what he thinks nature is there to teach us--not herself, but what is beyond herself. "i was stationed," he cries, deliberately making this point, "face to face with--nature?--rather with infinitude." we are not in nature: a part of god aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of god. and nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but to send us on to her source, of whom the universe is but a shred. the universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of nature as i speak of it here, is one form to browning of the creative joy of god: we are another form of the same joy. nor does browning conceive, as wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established harmony between us and the natural world, so that humanity and nature can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our thoughts and emotions in terms of nature; or so that nature can have, as it were, a human soul. this is not browning's conception. if he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in tennyson. i can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this in all the poetry of browning. even where it seems to occur, where nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur. take this passage from _james lee's wife_: oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, this autumn morning! how he sets his bones to bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet for the ripple to run over in its mirth; listening the while, where on the heap of stones the white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. the smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to nature: but the earth and the sea are plainly quite distinct from us. these are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: titans who live with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being images only of our mind. another passage will illustrate the same habit of browning's mind with nature. he describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in _fifine at the fair_, the course of a stormy sunset. the clouds, the sun, the night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. but this is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have nothing to do with us. they live their own vast, indifferent life; and we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what we see. the sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama, in which the clouds barricade the sun against his rest, and he plays with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till night, with her terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the sun from repose, repose which will make her queen of the world, beats them into ruin. this is the passage: for as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green of evening,--built about some glory of the west, to barricade the sun's departure,--manifest, he plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed they cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed the world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base o' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow, alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico i' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce, reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more by every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore no longer on the dull impoverished decadence of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence so lately. _fifine, cvi_. it is plain that browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. and what is true of these passages is true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. i need not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of tennyson. then tennyson, like coleridge--only tennyson is as vague and wavering in this belief as coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes speaks as if nature did not exist at all apart from our thought: her life the eddying of our living soul-- a possible, even a probable explanation. but it is not browning's view. there is a celebrated passage in _paracelsus_ which is quite inconsistent with it. all nature, from the beginning, is made to issue forth from the joy god has in making, in embodying his thought in form; and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still more lovely on the foundation of the last. so, joy after joy, the world was built, till, in the life of all he has made, god sees his ancient rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. i will not quote it here, but only mark that we and the "eddying of our living soul" have nothing to do with the making of this nature. it is not even the thoughts of god in us. god and nature are alone, and were alone together countless years before we were born. but man was the close of all. nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know himself to be its close--its seal--but not it. it is a separate, unhuman form of god. existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us, impressing us from without. the god in it speaks to the god in us. it may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a man. he even goes so far as to impute to nature, but rarely, such an interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being nature's end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in her which have come down to us--elements apart from the soul. and browning takes care, even when he represents nature as suddenly at one with us, to keep up the separateness. the interest spoken of is not a human interest, nor resembles it. it is like the interest ariel takes in prospero and miranda--an elemental interest, that of a creature whose nature knows its radical difference from human nature. if nature sees us in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of browning's poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. like ariel, she would be grieved with the grief of gonzalo, were her affections human. she has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. but sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which oberon has in the loves of helena and hermia. when we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. in his poem, _by the fireside_, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. it is a passage full of his peculiar view of nature. the place where the two lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. "it is silent and aware." but it is apart from them also: it has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, but that is its own affair. and its silence also is its own. those who linger there think that the place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. but when the two lovers were there, nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them and troubled them into speech: a moment after, and hands unseen were hanging the night around us fast; but we knew that a bar was broken between life and life: we were mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen. the forests had done it; there they stood; we caught for a moment the powers at play: they had mingled us so, for once and good, their work was done--we might go or stay, they relapsed to their ancient mood. not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion concerning nature. only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with the powers at play in nature. they took the two lovers up for a moment, made them one, and dropped them. "they relapsed to their ancient mood." the line is a whole lesson in browning's view of nature. but this special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of unselfconscious joy and love. when we are, on the other hand, self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or anxious for the transient things of the world--nature, unsympathetic wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun. when sordello climbs the ravine, thinking of himself as apollo, the wood, "proud of its observer," a mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, stratagems and games." or, our life is too small for her greatness. when we are unworthy our high lineage, noisy or mean, then we quail before a quiet sky or sea, too little for their quietude. that is a phrase which might fall in with wordsworth's theory of nature, but this which follows from _the englishman in italy_, is only browning's. the man has climbed to the top of calvano, and god's own profound was above me, and round me the mountains, and under, the sea, and within me, my heart to bear witness what was and shall be. he is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. wordsworth would then have made the soul of nature sympathise with his soul. but browning makes nature manifest her apartness from the man. the mountains know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even half angry with him for his intrusion--a foreigner who dares an entrance into their untrespassed world. tennyson could not have thought that way. it is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment. oh, those mountains, their infinite movement still moving with you; for, ever some new head and heart of them thrusts into view to observe the intruder; you see it if quickly you turn and, before they escape you surprise them. they grudge you should learn how the soft plains they look on, lean over and love (they pretend)-- cower beneath them. total apartness from us! nature mocking, surprising us; watching us from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. we may remember how the hills look grimly on childe roland when he comes to the tower. the very sunset comes back to see him die: before it left, the dying sunset kindled through a cleft: the hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.-- then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without one touch of sympathy: "now stab and end the creature--to the heft!" and once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case and refuses our pity. man cannot help her. the starved, ignoble country in _childe roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in browning, wicked, waste and leprous land, makes nature herself sick with peevish wrath. "i cannot help my case," she cries. "nothing but the judgment's fire can cure the place." on the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more, nature is alive in browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all at one with us. tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise her. the other poets of the century do make her alive, but they harmonise her in one way or another with us. browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man. but then he has observed that nature is expressed in terms of man, and he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to explain this. he does explain it in a passage in _paracelsus_. man once descried, imprints for ever his presence on all lifeless things; the winds are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, a querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, never a senseless gust now man is born. the herded pines commune and have deep thoughts a secret they assemble to discuss when the sun drops behind their trunks which glare like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph swims bearing high above her head: no bird whistles unseen, but through the gaps above that let light in upon the gloomy woods, a shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. the morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops with evening, triumph takes the sunset hour. voluptuous transport ripens with the corn beneath a warm moon like a happy face: --and this to fill us with regard for man. he does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune, or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the grades of inferior life which preceded him. it is browning's contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in his poetry. nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather, only joy. browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive nature as dead, as having no conscious being of any kind. he did not impute a personality like ours to nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play, even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of puck in _midsummer night's dream_. the life, then, of nature had no relation of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were conscious that we were its close and its completion. it follows from this idea of browning's that he was capable of describing nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and as vividly as tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary eye for colour. and nature, so described, is of great interest in browning's poetry. but, then, in any description of nature, we desire the entrance into such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete theme for poetry. browning does this in a different way from tennyson, who gives human feelings and thoughts to nature, or steeps it in human memories. browning catches nature up into himself, and the human element is not in nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. sometimes he even goes so far as to toss nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in comparison with humanity. that joy in nature herself, for her own sake, which was so distinguishing a mark of wordsworth, coleridge, shelley, byron and keats, is rarely, if ever, found in browning. this places him apart. what he loved was man; and save at those times of which i have spoken, when he conceives nature as the life and play and wrath and fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a background only for human life. she is of little importance unless man be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. take the first two verses of _a lovers' quarrel_, oh, what a dawn of day! how the march sun feels like may! all is blue again after last night's rain, and the south dries the hawthorn-spray. that is well done--he has liked what he saw. but what is it all, he thinks; what do i care about it? and he ends the verse: only, my love's away! i'd as lief that the blue were grey. then take the next verse: runnels, which rillets swell. must be dancing down the dell, with a foaming head on the beryl bed paven smooth as a hermit's cell. it is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion in browning's mind. each with a tale to tell-- could my love but attend as well. _by the fireside_ illustrates the same point. no description can be better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill; but it is mere scenery for the lovers. the real passion lies in their hearts. we have then direct description of nature; direct description of man sometimes as influenced by nature; sometimes nature used as the scenery of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. each is for ever distinct. the only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is that both have proceeded from the creative joy of god. of course this way of thinking permits of the things of nature being used to illustrate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in none of his poems is such illustration better used than in _sordello_. there is a famous passage, in itself a noble description of the opulent generativeness of a warm land like italy, in which he compares the rich, poetic soul of sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it, and still more labyrinthine buds the rose, holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. i quote the passage. it describes sordello, and it could not better describe italy: sordello foremost in the regal class nature has broadly severed from the mass of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames some happy lands, that have luxurious names, for loose fertility; a footfall there suffices to upturn to the warm air half-germinating spices; mere decay produces richer life; and day by day new pollen on the lily-petal grows, and still more labyrinthine buds the rose. that compares to the character of a whole country the character of a whole type of humanity. i take another of such comparisons, and it is as minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm. sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives. browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and audacious labour of the spider. he, that is, sordello, o'er-festooning every interval, as the adventurous spider, making light of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, from barbican to battlement: so flung fantasies forth and in their centre swung our architect,--the breezy morning fresh above, and merry,--all his waving mesh laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. it could not be better done. the description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth. again, in _a bean-stripe: also apple-eating_, ferishtah is asked--is life a good or bad thing, white or black? "good," says ferishtah, "if one keeps moving. i only move. when i stop, i may stop in a black place or a white. but everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and colour on them as i move. it is i who make life good or bad, black or white. i am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the illustration: mark the flying orb think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh at each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through this was and is and will be evermore coloured in permanence? the glory swims girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight by night's abysmal gloom, unglorified behind as erst before the advancer: gloom? faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds from the abandoned heaven a next surprise. and where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight, one glow and variegation! so, with me, who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white. the good, the bad, of life's environment. fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in browning image what is in man from that which is within nature--hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human. there is, however, one human passion which browning conceives as existing in nature--the passion of joy. but it is a different joy from ours. it is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter even for a brief hour into the rapture of nature. that rapture, in browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of god exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of nature. and its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into fuller and fuller being. no poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in nature more deeply than browning. his own rapture (the word is not too strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does, browning is not a man sympathising from without with nature. he is then a part of nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers of living. i might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to his mature manhood. it is part of the song of thamyris in _aristophanes' apology_. thamyris, going to meet the muses in rivalry, sings as he walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement. thamuris, marching, laughed "each flake of foam" (as sparklingly the ripple raced him by) "mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!" for autumn was the season; red the sky held morn's conclusive signet of the sun to break the mists up, bid them blaze and die. morn had the mastery as, one by one all pomps produced themselves along the tract from earth's far ending to near heaven begun. was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact with gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now, tempting to onset frost which late attacked. was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough, a fleecy thistle filched from by the wind, a weed, pan's trampling hoof would disallow? each, with a glory and a rapture twined about it, joined the rush of air and light and force: the world was of one joyous mind. say not the birds flew! they forebore their right-- swam, revelling onward in the roll of things. say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight-- how could the creatures leap, no lift of wings? such earth's community of purpose, such the ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,-- so did the near and far appear to touch i' the moment's transport,--that an interchange of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much; and had the rooted plant aspired to range with the snake's licence, while the insect yearned to glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange-- no more than if the fluttery tree-top turned to actual music, sang itself aloft; or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned the right to soar embodied in some soft fine form all fit for cloud companionship, and, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft. thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip born of the fiery transport; lyre and song were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip-- the next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of separate pieces of nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a certain aspect of the heavens. all the poets ought to be able to do this well, and i drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening fashion in which tennyson has done it. sometimes the poets describe what they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from nature. sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. shelley did this with great stateliness and subtlety. browning does not do it, except, perhaps, in _christmas-eve_, when he prepares the night for the appearance of christ. nevertheless, even in _christmas-eve_, the description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be; only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the thrill in browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet, through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. but there is no suggestion that any of this feeling exists in nature. the rainbow has no consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it would have had in wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy undimmed by any transference to nature of the soul of the poet. i quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work: but lo, what think you? suddenly the rain and the wind ceased, and the sky received at once the full fruition of the moon's consummate apparition. the black cloud barricade was riven, ruined beneath her feet, and driven deep in the west; while, bare and breathless, north and south and east lay ready for a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, sprang across them and stood steady. 'twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, from heaven to heaven extending, perfect as the mother-moon's self, full in face. it rose, distinctly at the base with its severe proper colours chorded which still, in the rising, were compressed, until at last they coalesced, and supreme the spectral creature lorded in a triumph of whitest white,-- above which intervened the night. but above night too, like only the next, the second of a wondrous sequence, reaching in rare and rarer frequence, till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, another rainbow rose, a mightier, fainter, flushier and flightier,-- rapture dying along its verge. oh, whose foot shall i see emerge, whose, from the straining topmost dark, on to the key-stone of that arc? this is only a piece of sky, though i have called it landscape work. but then the sky is frequently treated alone by browning; and is always present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. this is natural enough for one who lived so much in italy, where the scenery of the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, noble and surprising that when nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth. however, we find an abundance of true landscapes in browning. they are, with a few exceptions, italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth, that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to italy. i select a few of them: the morn when first it thunders in march the eel in the pond gives a leap, they say; as i leaned and looked over the aloed arch of the villa gate this warm march day, no flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled in the valley beneath where, white and wide washed by the morning water-gold, florence lay out on the mountain side river and bridge and street and square lay mine, as much at my beck and call, through the live translucent bath of air, as the sights in a magic crystal ball. here is the roman campagna and its very sentiment: the champaign with its endless fleece of feathery grasses everywhere! silence and passion, joy and peace, an everlasting wash of air-- rome's ghost since her decease. and this might be in the same place: where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, miles and miles on the solitary pastures where our sheep half-asleep tinkle homeward through the twilight-- this is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn: that autumn eve was stilled: a last remains of sunset dimly burned o'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned by the wind back upon its bearer's hand in one long flare of crimson; as a brand the woods beneath lay black. a single eye from all verona cared for the soft sky. and if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of _pippa passes_--a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned and rushing, the very upsoaring of apollo's head behind his furious steeds. it begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold. day! faster and more fast, o'er night's brim, day boils at last; boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim where spurting and suppressed it lay. for not a froth-flake touched the rim of yonder gap in the solid gray of the eastern cloud, an hour away; but forth one wavelet, then another, curled. till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, rose, reddened, and its seething breast flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world. this is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted poem, _the flight of the duchess_, brings before us, at great length, league after league of wide-spreading landscape. it is, first, of the great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines, dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up plain, over which we are carried for miles: till at the last, for a bounding belt, comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore. or we may read the _grammarian's funeral_, where we leave the city walls and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. as we ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. moreover, with a wonderful power, browning makes us feel the air grow keener, fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. that, too, is given by the verse; it is a triumph in nature-poetry. nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of small shut-in spaces of nature. there is the garden at the beginning of _paracelsus_; the ravine, step by step, in _pauline_; the sea-beach, and its little cabinet landscapes, in _james lee's wife_; the exquisite pictures of the path over the col di colma in _by the fireside_--for though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might stand as a small picture by itself. it is one of browning's favourite ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to combine the parts into the whole. but _his_ way of combination is to touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. the verses i quote do this. oh moment, one and infinite! the water slips o'er stock and stone; the west is tender, hardly bright; how grey at once is the evening grown-- one star, its chrysolite! we two stood there with never a third, but each by each, as each knew well: the sights we saw and the sounds we heard, the lights and the shades made up a spell till the trouble grew and stirred. oh, the little more, and how much it is! and the little less, and what worlds away! how a sound shall quicken content to bliss, or a breath suspend the blood's best play, and life be a proof of this! there are many such miniatures of nature in browning's poetry. sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. i give one instance of this, where the fierce italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being the messenger of god's vengeance on guilt. it is from _pippa passes_. the heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. the black-blue canopy descends close on ottima and sebald. buried in woods we lay, you recollect; swift ran the searching tempest overhead; and ever and anon some bright white shaft burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, as if god's messenger thro' the close wood-screen plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke the thunder like a whole sea overhead-- that is as splendid as the thing itself. again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the extraordinary love of colour, a love tennyson has in far fainter measure, but which browning seems to possess more than any other english poet. only sir walter scott approaches him in this. scott, knowing the highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. but browning's love of colour arose from his having lived so long in italy, where the light is so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land. sometimes, as ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in browning's verse at our eyes, and he only, in english poetry, has joy enough in it to be its full interpreter. he sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which, when the morn breaks, blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun; the woodland brake whose withered fern dawn feeds with gold; the moon carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink; the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred other passionate seizures of colour. and, for the last of these colour remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--i quote this lovely verse from _james lee's wife_: the swallow has set her six young on the rail, and looks seaward: the water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale to the leeward,-- on the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind. "good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"-- hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail! so, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in colour. they are painted as well as drawn. it is his love of colour which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into impressionism. good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. it is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record. and colour acted on browning in the same way. i said he had been impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before impressionism was born in modern art. he was so, because from the beginning he saw things in colour, more than in light and shade. it is well worth a reader's while to search him for colour-impressions. i take one, for example, with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of gold and green: fancy the pampas' sheen! miles and miles of gold and green where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow, and--to break now and then the screen-- black neck and eyeballs keen, up a wild horse leaps between! having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them, like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. this he has done specially in two poems: _the englishman in italy_, where the vast shell of the sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and truth. the second of these poems is _up at a villa--down in the city_, where a farm of the casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with the street-life of florence; and both are described through the delightful character whom he invents to see them. these poems are astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery. again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them. it is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the sunshine. i give a few examples. mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than karshish-- a black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear; lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls. and the very soul of the eagle is in this question-- ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once into the vast and unexplored abyss, what full-grown power informs her from the first, why she not marvels, strenuously beating the silent boundless regions of the sky! he has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly, but forced the earth his couch to make far inland, till his friend the tempest wake, on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity. in _caliban upon setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear in the few lines i quote: yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds; a certain badger brown he hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye. by moonlight. that is enough to prove his power. and the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for browning, with his curious self-transmuting power, has put himself into the skin of caliban. then again, in that lovely lyric in _paracelsus_, thus the mayne glideth, the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river. elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to venice--"that stout sea-farer"--the lark shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the imagination, the phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight: as the king-bird with ages on his plumes travels to die in his ancestral glooms. not less wonderful, and more unique in english poetry, is his painting of insects. he describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day. he strikes out the grasshopper at a touch-- chirrups the contumacious grasshopper. he has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood: child of the simmering quiet, there to die. he sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving their food from god when dawn awakes them, and the fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the edge of tombs. these are but a few things out of this treasure-house of animal observation and love. it is a love which animates and populates with life his landscapes. many of the points i have attempted here to make are illustrated in _saul_. in verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with david's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another into the meadows of night-- and now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!-- in verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by david's music. in verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose rapture browning loved so well. these fully reveal his poetic communion with animals. then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the mountain-side[ ]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on shelley in the _prometheus_--which illustrates what i have said of browning's conception of the separate life, as of giant titans, of the vaster things in nature. the mountain is alive and lives his life with his own grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when it pleases him. it is only david who thinks that the great creature lives to guard us from the tempests. and hebron, high on its crested hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion, for i wake in the grey dewy covert, while hebron upheaves the dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and kidron retrieves slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. then, at the end of the poem, browning represents all nature as full of emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by david's prophecy of the coming of immortal love in christ to man. this sympathy of nature with humanity is so rare a thought in browning, and so apart from his view of her, that i think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not nature herself who does this, but david, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. if that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought. there is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. browning, unlike tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. he drew directly from nature. the landscapes in _pauline_ and _sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the rock and the painted shell on the seashore. even the imaginative landscape of _childe roland_ is a memory, not an invention. i do not say he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in _oenone_ and the _lotos-eaters_, but it was not his way to do this. however, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. in _gerard de lairesse_, one of the poems in _parleyings with certain people_, he sets himself to rival the "walk" in lairesse's _art of painting_, and he invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. they may be compared with the walk in _pauline_, and indeed one of them with its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a similar pool in _pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is again used in _sordello_. these landscapes are some of his most careful natural description. they begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in which prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of zeus beside him. then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth and artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then noon with lyda and the satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the ghost of departing glory and beauty. the descriptions are too long to quote, but far too short to read. i would that browning had done more of this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. they are full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the central point of a landscape. they realise the glory of light, the force, fierceness, even the quiet of nature, but they have lost a great deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. nevertheless, the whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls the pictures of tintoret. they have his _furia_, his black, gold, and sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in his skies. nor are prometheus and artemis, and lyda on her heap of skins in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great venetian. they seem to stand forth from his canvas. the poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. i quote it to close this chapter: dance, yellows and whites and reds, lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads astir with the wind in the tulip-beds. there's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all disturbs starved grass and daisies small on a certain mound by a churchyard wall. daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows, on the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: dance you, reds and whites and yellows. footnotes: [ ] david could only have seen this on the upper slopes of hermon. but at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could scarcely have visited the north of palestine. indeed, he does not seem all his life long to have been near hermon. browning has transferred to david what he himself had seen in switzerland. * * * * * chapter iii _the treatment of nature_ in the previous chapter, some of the statements made on browning as a poet of nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other elements in his natural description which demand attention. the best way to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on which we have already touched. new points of interest will thus arise; and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to place his poetic development in a clearer light. i begin, therefore, with _pauline_. the descriptions of nature in that poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in browning's poetry. the first of them faintly recalls the manner of shelley in the _alastor_, and i have no doubt was influenced by him. the two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from shelley, and are almost pre-raphaelite, as much so as keats, in their detail. yet all the three are original, not imitative. they suggest shelley and keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of these poets that they suggest. browning became instantly original in this as in other modes of poetry. it was characteristic of him from the beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings. from one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. it is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality. from another point of view it was unfortunate. if he had begun by imitating a little; if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. he would have reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. this is plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps than by his work on humanity. the first natural description he published is in the beginning of _pauline_: thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter crept agèd from the earth, and spring's first breath blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs, so dark in the bare wood, when glistening in the sunshine were white with coming buds, like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks had violets opening from sleep like eyes. that is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have been better. we know what he means, but his words do not accurately or imaginatively convey this meaning. the best lines are the first three, but the peculiar note of shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not represent browning. what is special in them is his peculiar delight not only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. it was in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment. unlike tennyson, who was old when he was old, browning was young when he was old. only once in _asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt winter in his heart. and the lines in _pauline_ which i now quote, spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old: as life wanes, all its care and strife and toil seem strangely valueless, while the old trees which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, the morning swallows with their songs like words. all these seem clear and only worth our thoughts: so, aught connected with my early life, my rude songs or my wild imaginings, how i look on them--most distinct amid the fever and the stir of after years! the next description in _pauline_ is that in which he describes--to illustrate what shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a mighty river. shelley, as first conceived by browning, seemed to him like a sacred spring: scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross, and one small tree embowers droopingly-- joying to see some wandering insect won to live in its few rushes, or some locust to pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird stoop for its freshness from the trackless air. a piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough; needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in his work of his deliberate use of nature, not for love of herself only, (wordsworth, coleridge or byron would have described the spring in the woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. it is shelley--shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, shelley hidden in the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling upwards into personal poetry--of whom browning is now thinking. the image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain and left the insects and birds alone. it is shelley also of whom he thinks--shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and follows it to the sea: and then should find it but the fountain head, long lost, of some great river washing towns and towers, and seeing old woods which will live but by its banks untrod of human foot. which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering in light as some thing lieth half of life before god's foot, waiting a wondrous change; then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay its course in vain, for it does ever spread like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on, being the pulse of some great country--so wast thou to me, and art thou to the world! how good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! how much it needs thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! and the faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the needless, are faults of which browning never quite cleared his work. i do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them. the next description is not an illustration of man by means of nature. it is almost the only set description of nature, without reference to man, which occurs in the whole of browning's work. it is introduced by his declaration (for in this i think he speaks from himself) of his power of living in the life of all living things. he does not think of himself as living in the whole being of nature, as wordsworth or shelley might have done. there was a certain matter of factness in him which prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. but he does transfer himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which he knows is akin to his own. and this distinction is true of all his poetry of nature. "i can mount with the bird," he says, leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree, or like a fish breathe deep the morning air in the misty sun-warm water. this introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through various scenes of natural beauty. it is long and elaborate--the scenery he conceives round the home where he and pauline are to live. and it is so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later poetry, that i think it is drawn direct from nature; that it is here done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. it begins with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. here is a piece of it: morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods. how the sun brightens in the mist, and here, half in the air, like[ ] creatures of the place, trusting the elements, living on high boughs that sway in the wind--look at the silver spray flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract amid the broken rocks! shall we stay here with the wild hawks? no, ere the hot noon come dive we down--safe! see, this is our new retreat walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down to a small pool whose waters lie asleep, amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants: and tall trees overarch to keep us in, breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts, and in the dreamy water one small group of two or three strange trees are got together wondering at all around-- this is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes even more feeble. yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power, like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. the chief thing to say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as fast as he could. he never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two of its elements and flashing them into prominence. the rest was left to the imagination of the reader. he is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the clear air and open landscape: up for the glowing day, leave the old woods! see, they part like a ruined arch: the sky! blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden with light, like a dead whale that white birds pick, floating away in the sun in some north sea. air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air, the clear, dear breath of god that loveth us, where small birds reel and winds take their delight! the last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the sensational image of the dead whale. it does not fit the thing he desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it in without a question. alas, in after times, he only too often, both in the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just because it amused him to indulge his fancy. the finished artist could not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it. but browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one. nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power, splendid description, as indeed i have fully confessed; but, on the other hand, one is never sure of him. he is never quite "inevitable." the attempt at deliberate natural description in _pauline_, of which i have now spoken, is not renewed in _paracelsus_. by the time he wrote that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but quenched his interest in natural scenery. nature is only introduced as a background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of paracelsus. it is only at the beginning of part ii. that we touch a landscape: over the waters in the vaporous west the sun goes down as in a sphere of gold behind the arm of the city, which between; with all the length of domes and minarets, athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs like a turk verse along a scimitar. that is all; nothing but an introduction. paracelsus turns in a moment from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as browning was then doing in his own soul. nearly two thousand lines are then written before nature is again touched upon, and then festus and paracelsus are looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description browning's work on nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of _pauline_. this is close and clear: morn must be near. festus. best ope the casement: see, the night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars, is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep the tree-tops all together! like an asp[ ] the wind slips whispering from bough to bough. * * * paracelsus. see, morn at length. the heavy darkness seems diluted, grey and clear without the stars; the shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go his hold; and from the east, fuller and fuller, day, like a mighty river, flowing in; but clouded, wintry, desolate and cold. that is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the description should end. but browning, driven by some small demon, adds to it three lines of mere observant fancy. yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant, half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves, all thick and glistening with diamond dew. what is that for? to give local colour or reality? it does neither. it is mere childish artistry. tennyson could not have done it. he knew when to stay his hand.[ ] the finest piece of natural description in _paracelsus_ is of the coming of spring. it is full of the joy of life; it is inspired by a passionate thought, lying behind it, concerning man. it is still more inspired by his belief that god himself was eternal joy and filled the universe with rapture. nowhere did browning reach a greater height in his nature poetry than in these lines, yet they are more a description, as usual, of animal life than of the beauty of the earth and sea: then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: but spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes over its breast to waken it, rare verdure buds tenderly upon rough banks, between the withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; the grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms like chrysalids impatient for the air, the shining dorrs are busy, beetles run along the furrows, ants make their ado; above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark soars up and up, shivering for very joy; afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls flit where the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets; savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain--and god renews his ancient rapture. once more, in _paracelsus_, there is the lovely lyric about the flowing of the mayne. i have driven through that gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery. but, as before, browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the stream. he could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. he must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for life! thus the mayne glideth where my love abideth. sleep's no softer; it proceeds on through lawns, on through meads, on and on, whate'er befall, meandering and musical, though the niggard pasturage bears not on its shaven ledge aught but weeds and waving grasses to view the river as it passes, save here and there a scanty patch of primroses too faint to catch a weary bee. and scarce it pushes its gentle way through strangling rushes where the glossy kingfisher flutters when noon-heats are near, glad the shelving banks to shun red and steaming in the sun, where the shrew-mouse with pale throat burrows, and the speckled stoat; where the quick sandpipers flit in and out the marl and grit that seems to breed them, brown as they: naught disturbs its quiet way, save some lazy stork that springs, trailing it with legs and wings, whom the shy fox from the hill rouses, creep he ne'er so still. "my heart, they loose my heart, those simple words," cries paracelsus, and he was right. they tell of that which to see and love is better, wiser, than to probe and know all the problems of knowledge. but that is a truth not understood, not believed. and few there be who find it. and if browning had found the secret of how to live more outside of his understanding than he did, or having found it, had not forgotten it, he would not perhaps have spoken more wisely for the good of man, but he would have more continuously written better poetry. the next poem in which he may be said to touch nature is _sordello_. _strafford_ does not count, save for the charming song of the boat in music and moonlight, which the children sing. in _sordello_, the problem of life, as in _paracelsus_, is still the chief matter, but outward life, as not in _paracelsus_, takes an equal place with inward life. and naturally, nature, its changes and beauty, being outward, are more fully treated than in _paracelsus_. but it is never treated for itself alone. it is made to image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees it, or to illustrate a phase of his passion or his thought. but there is a closer grip upon it than before, a clearer definition, a greater power of concentrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller use of colour. browning paints nature now like a venetian; the very shadows of objects are in colour. this new power was a kind of revelation to him, and he frequently uses it with a personal joy in its exercise. things in nature blaze in his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in radiant blue, in dyes of earthquake and eclipse. then, when he has done his landscape thus in colour, he adds more; he places in its foreground one drop, one eye of still more flaming colour, to vivify and inflame the whole. the main landscape of _sordello_ is the plain and the low pine-clad hills around mantua; the half-circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the battlemented town; and the river mincio, seen by sordello when he comes out of the forest on the hill, as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and winds, a silver ribbon, through the plain. it is the landscape vergil must have loved. a long bridge of more than a hundred arches, with towers of defence, crosses the marsh from the towered gateway of the walls to the mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep river flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness. scarcely anywhere in north italy is the upper sky more pure at dawn and even, and there is no view now so mystic in its desolation. over the lagoon, and puffing from it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by sunrise and sunset, continually rise and disperse. the character and the peculiarities of this landscape browning has seized and enshrined in verse. but his descriptions are so arranged as to reflect certain moments of crisis in the soul of sordello. he does not describe this striking landscape for its own sake, but for the sake of his human subject. the lines i quote below describe noon-day on the lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines; and the vision of the plain, city and river, suddenly opening out from the wood, symbolises the soul of sordello opening out from solitude "into the veritable business of mankind." then wide opened the great morass, shot every side with flashing water through and through; a-shine, thick-steaming, all-alive. whose shape divine quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced athwart the flying herons? he advanced, but warily; though mincio leaped no more, each footfall burst up in the marish-floor a diamond jet. and then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing by a piece of detail too minute for the largeness of the impression. but how clear and how full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of palma rainbowed in the mist, and of sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful passion! here is the same view in the morning, when mincio has come down in flood and filled the marsh: mincio, in its place, laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face, and, where the mists broke up immense and white i' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light out of the crashing of a million stars. it were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey water-sunset at ferrara in the beginning of book vi. while eve slow sank down the near terrace to the farther bank, and only one spot left from out the night glimmered upon the river opposite-- breadth of watery heaven like a bay, a sky-like space of water, ray for ray, and star for star, one richness where they mixed as this and that wing of an angel, fixed, tumultuary splendours folded in to die. as usual, spring enchants him. the second book begins with her coming, and predicates the coming change in sordello's soul. the woods were long austere with snow; at last pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes, brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods our buried year, a witch, grew young again to placid incantations, and that stain about were from her cauldron, green smoke blent with those black pines. nor does he omit in _sordello_ to recall two other favourite aspects of nature, long since recorded in _pauline_, the ravine and the woodland spring. just as turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what he had first observed in it, so browning recalled in various poems the first impressions of his youth. he had a curious love for a ravine with overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round rocks. it occurs in the _fireside_, it is taken up in his later poems, and up such a ravine sordello climbs among the pines of goito: he climbed with (june at deep) some close ravine mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen, over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped elate with rains. then, in _sordello_, we come again across the fountain in the grove he draws in _pauline_, now greatly improved in clearness and word-brightness--a real vision. fate has given him here a fount of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail the silver globules and gold-sparkling grail at bottom-- where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary loveliness of nature that coleridge and tennyson have both drawn with a finer pencil than browning. the other examples of natural description in _sordello_, as well as those in _balaustion_ i shall reserve till i speak of those poems. as to the dramas, they are wholly employed with humanity. in them man's soul has so overmastered browning that they are scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived from nature. we now come, with _the ring and the book_, to a clear division in his poetry of nature. from this time forth nature decays in his verse. man masters it and drives it out. in _the ring and the book_, huge as it is, nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that it swallows up all browning's interest. there is a little forky flashing description of the entrance to the val d'ema in guido's first statement. caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single illustration from nature. the only person who does use illustrations from nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to think of nature at all. this is the pope. he illustrates with great vigour the way in which guido destroyed all the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile, by the burning of a nest-like hut in the campagna, with all its vines and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the malicious tower round which the hut had been built. he illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on caponsacchi's life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this vigorous description: as when a thundrous midnight, with black air that burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell, draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides immensity of sweetness. and the last illustration, in which the pope hopes that guido's soul may yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest pieces of natural description in browning, and reads like one of his own memories: i stood at naples once, a night so dark i could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. so may the truth be flashed out by one blow, and guido see, one instant, and be saved. after _the ring and the book_, poor nature, as one of browning's mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its smaller problems, like that contained in _fifine at the fair_, to its fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its commonplace crimes. these subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false and the stupid in mankind. this had been his attitude from the beginning. it differentiates him from tennyson, who did not maintain that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than tennyson. but he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these side-issues in human nature. and i think that he was left unprotected from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up nature in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. to love that great, solemn and beautiful creature, who even when she seems most merciless retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us eternal aspiration. those intimations of the ideal and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her quiet, order and beauty. when he wrote _prince hohenstiel-schwangau, red cotton nightcap country_, and _the inn album_, nature had ceased to awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss. its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in the large realm of tragic or joyous passion. he became the dissector of corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings. nevertheless, in _fifine at the fair_ there are several intercalated illustrations from nature, all of which are interesting and some beautiful. the sunset over sainte-marie and the lie noirmoutier, with the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill--the "infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to the sea is minute and delicate. there is also that magnificent description of a sunset which i have already quoted. it is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates. yet how few in this long poem, how remote from browning's heart, are these touches of nature. again, in _the inn album_ there is a description of an english elm-tree, as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to english scenery in the multitude of browning's verses. the first is in _pauline_, the second in that poem, "oh, to be in england," and this is the third. the woman has never ceased to gaze on the great elm-tree in the open, posed placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch, and leafage, one green plenitude of may. ... bosomful of lights and shades, murmurs and silences, sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird, high, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims "leave earth, there's nothing better till next step heavenward!" this, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with any of that passion which makes what a poet says completely right. browning could not stay altogether in this condition, in which, moreover, his humour was also in abeyance; and in his next book, _pacchiarotto, &c._, he broke away from these morbid subjects, and, with that recovery, recovered also some of his old love of nature. the prologue to that book is poetry; and nature (though he only describes an old stone wall in italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with his sorrow and his love. then, all through the book, even in its most fantastic humour, nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and the poetry, which browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has partly returned to him. that is also the case in _la saisiaz_, and i have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in that work. in the _dramatic idyls_, of which he was himself fond; and in _jocoseria_, there is very little natural description. the subjects did not allow of it, but yet nature sometimes glides in, and when she does, thrills the verse into a higher humanity. in _ferishtah's fancies_, a book full of flying charm, nature has her proper place, and in the lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through his landscape of human nature. he loved, indeed, that landscape of mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when he watered it with the great river of nature his best work was done. now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his poetry. it was not that he had not the power to describe nature if he cared. but he did not care. i have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon and sunset in gerard de lairesse in the book which preceded _asolando_. they have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced nature from humanity, he never could bring them together again. nor is this a mere theory. the prologue to _asolando_ supports it. that sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died ( ), reveals his position towards nature when he had lost the power of youth to pour fire on the world. it is full of his last thinking. "the poet's age is sad," he says. "in youth his eye lent to everything in the natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of imagination: and now a flower is just a flower: man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man-- simply themselves, uncinct by dower of dyes which, when life's day began, round each in glory ran." "ah! what would you have?" he says. "what is the best: things draped in colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or falsehood's fancy haze? i choose the first." it is an old man's effort to make the best of age. for my part, i do not see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives them. the things themselves are indifferent. but as seen by the soul, they are seen in god, and the colour and light which imagination gives them are themselves divine. nor is their colour or light only in our imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of god. a flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. and so browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of nature as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. it is a sad business. he has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the flaming walls, to find god in his heaven. he has not lost the great hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. he has not lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in the fulness of the world to come. the _rêverie_ and the _epilogue_ to _asolando_ are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. there is nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. but there is sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he clothed the world of nature; and he ought to have retained it. he would have done so had he not forgotten nature in anatomising man. however, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things, and though he has lost his rapture in nature, he has not lost his main theory of man's life and of the use of the universe. the end of this _prologue_ puts it as clearly as it was put in _paracelsus_. nothing is changed in that. "at asolo," he continues, "my asolo, when i was young, all natural objects were palpably clothed with fire. they mastered me, not i them. terror was in their beauty. i was like moses before the bush that burned. i adored the splendour i saw. then i was in danger of being content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. to be satisfied--that was the peril. now i see the natural world as it is, without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. is that well? in one sense yes. and now? the lambent flame is--where? lost from the naked world: earth, sky, hill, vale, tree, flower--italia's rare o'er-running beauty crowds the eye-- but flame?--the bush is bare. all is distinct, naked, clear, nature and nothing else. have i lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? have i shut my eyes in pain--pain for disillusion? no--now i know that my home is not in nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love which transcends her: no, for the purged ear apprehends earth's import, not the eye late dazed: the voice said "call my works thy friends! at nature dost thou shrink amazed? god is it who transcends." all browning is in that way of seeing the matter; but he forgets that he could see it in the same fashion while he still retained the imaginative outlook on the world of nature. and the fact is that he did do so in _paracelsus_, in _easter-day_, in a host of other poems. there was then no need for him to reduce to naked fact the glory with which young imagination clothed the world, in order to realise that god transcended nature. he had conceived that truth and believed it long ago. and this explanation, placed here, only tells us that he had lost his ancient love of nature, and it is sorrowful to understand it of him. finally, the main contentions of this chapter, which are drawn from a chronological view of browning's treatment of nature, are perhaps worth a summary. the first is that, though the love of nature was always less in him than his love of human nature, yet for the first half of his work it was so interwoven with his human poetry that nature suggested to him humanity and humanity nature. and these two, as subjects for thought and feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned, illustrated and developed, by this intercommunion. that was a true and high position. humanity was first, nature second in browning's poetry, but both were linked together in a noble marriage; and at that time he wrote his best poetry. the second thing this chronological treatment of his nature-poetry shows, is that his interest in human nature pushed out his love of nature, gradually at first, but afterwards more swiftly, till nature became almost non-existent in his poetry. with that his work sank down into intellectual or ethical exercises, in which poetry decayed. it shows, thirdly, how the love of nature, returning, but returning with diminished power, entered again into his love of human nature, and renewed the passion of his poetry, its singing, and its health. but reconciliations of this kind do not bring back all the ancient affection and happiness. nature and humanity never lived together in his poetry in as vital a harmony as before, nor was the work done on them as good as it was of old. a broken marriage is not repaired by an apparent condonation. nature and humanity, though both now dwelt in him, kept separate rooms. their home-life was destroyed. browning had been drawn away by a fifine of humanity. he never succeeded in living happily again with elvire; and while our intellectual interest in his work remained, our poetic interest in it lessened. we read it for mental and ethical entertainment, not for ideal joy. no; if poetry is to _be_ perfectly written; if the art is to be brought to its noblest height; if it is to continue to lift the hearts of men into the realm where perfection lives; if it is to glow, an unwearied fire, in the world; the love of nature must be justly mingled in it with the love of humanity. the love of humanity must be first, the love of nature second, but they must not be divorced. when they are, when the love of nature forms the only subject, or when the love of man forms the only subject, poetry decays and dies. footnotes: [ ] creatures accordant with the place? [ ] browning, even more than shelley, was fond of using the snake in his poetry. italy is in that habit. [ ] there is a fine picture of the passing of a hurricane in _paracelsus_ (p. , vol i.) which illustrates this inability to stop when he has done all he needs. paracelsus speaks: the hurricane is spent, and the good boat speeds through the brightening weather; but is it earth or sea that heaves below? the gulf rolls like a meadow-swell, o'erstrewn with ravaged boughs and remnants of the shore; and now, some islet, loosened from the land, swims past with all its trees, sailing to ocean: _and now the air is full of uptorn canes._ _light strippings from the fan-trees, tamarisks_ _unrooted, with their birds still clinging to them,_ _all high in the wind_. even so my varied life drifts by me. i think that the lines i have italicised should have been left out. they weaken what he has well done. * * * * * chapter iv _browning's theory of human life_ _pauline and paracelsus_ to isolate browning's view of nature, and to leave it behind us, seemed advisable before speaking of his work as a poet of mankind. we can now enter freely on that which is most distinctive, most excellent in his work--his human poetry; and the first thing that meets us and in his very first poems, is his special view of human nature, and of human life, and of the relation of both to god. it marks his originality that this view was entirely his own. ancient thoughts of course are to be found in it, but his combination of them is original amongst the english poets. it marks his genius that he wrought out this conception while he was yet so young. it is partly shaped in _pauline_; it is fully set forth in _paracelsus_. and it marks his consistency of mind that he never changed it. i do not think he ever added to it or developed it. it satisfied him when he was a youth, and when he was an old man. we have already seen it clearly expressed in the _prologue_ to _asolando_. that theory needs to be outlined, for till it is understood browning's poetry cannot be understood or loved as fully as we should desire to love it. it exists in _pauline_, but all its elements are in solution; uncombined, but waiting the electric flash which will mix them, in due proportions, into a composite substance, having a lucid form, and capable of being used. that flash was sent through the confused elements of _pauline_, and the result was _paracelsus_. i will state the theory first, and then, lightly passing through _pauline_ and _paracelsus_, re-tell it. it is fitting to apologise for the repetition which this method of treatment will naturally cause; but, considering that the theory underlies every drama and poem that he wrote during sixty years, such repetition does not seem unnecessary. there are many who do not easily grasp it, or do not grasp it at all, and they may be grateful. as to those who do understand it, they will be happy in their anger with any explanation of what they know so well. he asks what is the secret of the world: "of man and man's true purpose, path and fate." he proposes to understand "god-and his works and all god's intercourse with the human soul." we are here, he thinks, to grow enough to be able to take our part in another life or lives. but we are surrounded by limitations which baffle and retard our growth. that is miserable, but not so much as we think; for the failures these limitations cause prevent us--and this is a main point in browning's view--from being content with our condition on the earth. there is that within us which is always endeavouring to transcend those limitations, and which believes in their final dispersal. this aspiration rises to something higher than any possible actual on earth. it is never worn out; it is the divine in us; and when it seems to decay, god renews it by spiritual influences from without and within, coming to us from nature as seen by us, from humanity as felt by us, and from himself who dwells in us. but then, unless we find out and submit to those limitations, and work within them, life is useless, so far as any life is useless. but while we work within them, we see beyond them an illimitable land, and thirst for it. this battle between the dire necessity of working in chains and longing for freedom, between the infinite destiny of the soul and the baffling of its effort to realise its infinitude on earth, makes the storm and misery of life. we may try to escape that tempest and sorrow by determining to think, feel, and act only within our limitations, to be content with them as goethe said; but if we do, we are worse off than before. we have thrown away our divine destiny. if we take this world and are satisfied with it, cease to aspire, beyond our limits, to full perfection in god; if our soul should ever say, "i want no more; what i have here--the pleasure, fame, knowledge, beauty or love of this world--is all i need or care for," then we are indeed lost. that is the last damnation. the worst failure, the deepest misery, is better than contentment with the success of earth; and seen in this light, the failures and misery of earth are actually good things, the cause of a chastened joy. they open to us the larger light. they suggest, and in browning's belief they proved, that this life is but the threshold of an infinite life, that our true life is beyond, that there is an infinite of happiness, of knowledge, of love, of beauty which we shall attain. our failures are prophecies of eternal successes. to choose the finite life is to miss the infinite life! o fool, to claim the little cup of water earth's knowledge offers to thy thirst, or the beauty or love of earth, when the immeasurable waters of the knowledge, beauty and love of the eternal paradise are thine beyond the earth. two things are then clear: ( ) the attainment of our desires for perfection, the satisfaction of our passion for the infinite, is forbidden to us on earth by the limitations of life. we are made imperfect; we are kept imperfect here; and we must do all our work within the limits this natural imperfection makes. ( ) we must, nevertheless, not cease to strive towards the perfection unattainable on earth, but which shall be attained hereafter. our destiny, the god within us, demands that. and we lose it, if we are content with our earthly life, even with its highest things, with knowledge, beauty, or with love. hence, the foundation of browning's theory is a kind of original sin in us, a natural defectiveness deliberately imposed on us by god, which prevents us attaining any absolute success on earth. and this defectiveness of nature is met by the truth, which, while we aspire, we know--that god will fulfil all noble desire in a life to come. we must aspire then, but at the same time all aspiring is to be conterminous with steady work within our limits. aspiration to the perfect is not to make us idle, indifferent to the present, but to drive us on. its passion teaches us, as it urges into action all our powers, what we can and what we cannot do. that is, it teaches us, through the action it engenders, what our limits are; and when we know them, the main duties of life rise clear. the first of these is, to work patiently within our limits; and the second is the apparent contradiction of the first, never to be satisfied with our limits, or with the results we attain within them. then, having worked within them, but always looked beyond them, we, as life closes, learn the secret. the failures of earth prove the victory beyond: "for-- what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonised? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized? sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and the woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason, and welcome: 'tis we musicians know." _abt vogler_. finally, the root and flower of this patient but uncontented work is love for man because of his being in god, because of his high and immortal destiny. all that we do, whether failure or not, builds up the perfect humanity to come, and flows into the perfection of god in whom is the perfection of man. this love, grounded on this faith, brings joy into life; and, in this joy of love, we enter into the eternal temple of the life to come. love opens heaven while earth closes us round. at last limitations cease to trouble us. they are lost in the vision, they bring no more sorrow, doubt or baffling. therefore, in this confused chaotic time on earth-- earn the means first. god surely will contrive use for our earning. others mistrust, and say: "but time escapes; live now or never!" he said, "what's time? leave now for dogs and apes! man has forever." _a grammarian's funeral_. this is a sketch of his explanation of life. the expression of it began in _pauline_. had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside. but though, as he said, "good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time," though "with repugnance and purely of necessity" he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right. it was crude and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful stuff for a young man. the first design of it was huge. _pauline_ is but a fragment of a poem which was to represent, not one but various types of human life. it became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch of the youth of sordello. the other types conceived were worked up into other poems. the hero in _pauline_ hides in his love for pauline from a past he longed to forget. he had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness, and the end was vanity and vexation. the shame of this failure beset him from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true to the aspirations which took him beyond himself. when he returned to self, the glory departed. and a fine simile of his soul as a young witch whose blue eyes, as she stood naked by the river springs, drew down a god, who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship. but one love and reverence remained--that for shelley, the sun-treader, and kept him from being "wholly lost." to strengthen this one self-forgetful element, the love of pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back something of the ancient joy. "let me take it," he cries, "and sing on again fast as fancies come; rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints,"-- a line which tells us how browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. this is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life--the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment. god has sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again. then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare. what am i? what have i done? where am i going? the first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality, linked to a principle of restlessness, which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all. and this would plunge him into the depths of self were it not for that imagination in him whose power never fails to bear him beyond himself; and is finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after god; whom, even when he is most lost, he feels is always acting on him, and at every point of life transcending him. and imagination began to create, and made him at one with all men and women of whom he had read (the same motive is repeated in _sordello_), but especially at one with those out of the greek world he loved--"a god wandering after beauty"--a high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to tenedos. never was anything more clear than these lives he lived beyond himself; and the lines in which he records the vision have all the sharpness and beauty of his after-work-- i had not seen a work of lofty art. nor woman's beauty nor sweet nature's face, yet, i say, never morn broke clear as those on the dim-clustered isles in the blue sea, the deep groves and white temples and wet caves: and nothing ever will surprise me now-- who stood beside the naked swift-footed, who bound my forehead with proserpine's hair. yet, having this infinite world of beauty, he aimed low; lost in immediate wants, striving only for the mortal and the possible, while all the time there lived in him, breathing with keen desire, powers which, developed, would make him at one with the infinite life of god. but having thus been untrue to his early aspiration, he fell into the sensual life, like paracelsus, and then, remorseful, sought peace in self-restraint; but no rest, no contentment was gained that way. it is one of browning's root-ideas that peace is not won by repression of the noble passions, but by letting them loose in full freedom to pursue after their highest aims. not in restraint, but in the conscious impetuosity of the soul towards the divine realities, is the wisdom of life. many poems are consecrated to this idea. so, cleansing his soul by ennobling desire, he sought to realise his dreams in the arts, in the creation and expression of pure beauty. and he followed poetry and music and painting, and chiefly explored passion and mind in the great poets. fed at these deep springs, his soul rose into keen life; his powers burst forth, and gazing on all systems and schemes of philosophy and government, he heard ineffable things unguessed by man. all plato entered into him; he vowed himself to liberty and the new world where "men were to be as gods and earth us heaven." thus, yet here on earth, not only beyond the earth, he would attain the perfect. man also shall attain it; and so thinking, he turned, like sordello, to look at and learn mankind, pondering "how best life's end might be attained--an end comprising every joy." and even as he believed, the glory vanished; everything he had hoped for broke to pieces: first went my hopes of perfecting mankind, next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self and virtue's self, then my own motives, ends and aims and loves, and human love went last. and then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world, and success in it. all the powers of the mere intellect, that grey-haired deceiver whose name is archimago, were his;--wit, mockery, analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the understanding's absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. god, too, had vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his soul, where he had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and hailed him as king. the position he describes is like that wordsworth states in the _prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the french revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was destroyed thereby. it is the same position which paracelsus attains and which is followed by the same ruin. it is also, so far as its results are concerned, the position of the soul described by tennyson in _the palace of art_. love, emotion, god are shut out. intellect and knowledge of the world's work take their place. and the result is the slow corrosion of the soul by pride. "i have nursed up energies," says browning, "they will prey on me." he feels this and breaks away from its death. "my heart must worship," he cries. the "shadows" know this feeling is against them, and they shout in answer: "thyself, thou art our king!" but the end of that is misery. therefore he begins to aspire again, but still, not for the infinite of perfection beyond, but for a finite perfection on, the earth. "i will make every joy here my own," he cries, "and then i will die." "i will have one rapture to fill all the soul." "all knowledge shall be mine." it is the aspiration of paracelsus. "i will live in the whole of beauty, and here it shall be mine." it is the aspiration of aprile. "then, having this perfect human soul, master of all powers, i shall break forth, at some great crisis in history, and lead the world." it is the very aspiration of sordello. but when he tries for this, he finds failure at every point. everywhere he is limited; his soul demands what his body refuses to fulfil; he is always baffled, falling short, chained down and maddened by restrictions; unable to use what he conceives, to grasp as a tool what he can reach in thought; hating himself; imagining what might be, and driven back from it in despair. even in his love for pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and known that his soul cannot accept finality--he finds that in him which is still unsatisfied. what does this puzzle mean? "it means," he answers, "that this earth's life is not my only sphere, can i so narrow sense but that in life soul still exceeds it?" yet, he will try again. he has lived in all human life, and his craving is still athirst. he has not yet tried nature herself. she seems to have undying beauty, and his feeling for her is now, of course, doubled by his love for pauline. "come with me," he cries to her, "come out of the world into natural beauty"; and there follows a noble description of a lovely country into which he passes from a mountain glen--morning, noon, afternoon and evening all described--and the emotion of the whole rises till it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when, suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished-- i am concentrated--i feel; but my soul saddens when it looks beyond: i cannot be immortal, taste all joy. o god, where do they tend--these struggling aims? what would i have? what is this "sleep" which seems to bound all? can there be a "waking" point of crowning life? * * * and what is that i hunger for but god? so, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy of a perfection to come. he claims the infinite beyond. "i believe," he cries, "in god and truth and love. know my last state is happy, free from doubt or touch of fear." that is browning all over. these are the motives of a crowd of poems, varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the trenchant and magnificent end of _easter-day_, where the questions and answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars. out of the same quarry from which _pauline_ was hewn the rest were hewn. they are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone is the same. few have been so consistent as browning, few so true to their early inspiration. he is among those happy warriors who, when brought among the tasks of real life, have wrought upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought. this, then, is _pauline_; i pass on to _paracelsus_. _paracelsus_, in order to give the poem a little local colour, opens at würzburg in a garden, and in the year . but it is not a poem which has to do with any place or any time. it belongs only to the country of the human soul. the young student paracelsus is sitting with his friends festus and michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the whole world by knowledge. they make a last effort to retain him, but even as he listens to their arguments his eyes are far away-- as if where'er he gazed there stood a star, so strong, so deep is desire to attain his aim. for paracelsus aims to know the whole of knowledge. quiet and its charms, this homelike garden of still work, make their appeal in vain. "god has called me," he cries; "these burning desires to know all are his voice in me; and if i stay and plod on here, i reject his call who has marked me from mankind. i must reach pure knowledge. that is my only aim, my only reward." then festus replies: "in this solitariness of aim, all other interests of humanity are left out. will knowledge, alone, give you enough for life? you, a man!" and again: "you discern your purpose clearly; have you any security of attaining it? is it not more than mortal power is capable of winning?" or again: "have you any knowledge of the path to knowledge?" or, once more, "is anything in your mind so clear as this, your own desire to be singly famous?" "all this is nothing," paracelsus answers; "the restless force within me will overcome all difficulties. god does not give that fierce energy without giving also that which it desires. and, i am chosen out of all the world to win this glory." "why not then," says festus, "make use of knowledge already gained? work here; what knowledge will you gain in deserts?" "i have tried all the knowledge of the past," paracelsus replies, "and found it a contemptible failure. others were content with the scraps they won. not i! i want the whole; the source and sum of divine and human knowledge, and though i craze as even one truth expands its infinitude before me, i go forth alone, rejecting all that others have done, to prove my own soul. i shall arrive at last. and as to mankind, in winning perfect knowledge i shall serve them; but then, all intercourse ends between them and me. i will not be served by those i serve." "oh," answers festus, "is that cause safe which produces carelessness of human love? you have thrown aside all the helps of human knowledge; now you reject all sympathy. no man can thrive who dares to claim to serve the race, while he is bound by no single tie to the race. you would be a being knowing not what love is--a monstrous spectacle!" "that may be true," paracelsus replies, "but for the time i will have nothing to do with feeling. my affections shall remain at rest, and then, _when_ i have attained my single aim, when knowledge is all mine, my affections will awaken purified and chastened by my knowledge. let me, unhampered by sympathy, win my victory. and i go forth certain of victory." are there not, festus, are there not, dear michal, two points in the adventure of the diver: one--when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge; one--when, a prince, he rises with his pearl? festus, i plunge! festus. we wait you when you rise. so ends the first part, and the second opens ten years afterwards in a greek conjurer's house in constantinople, with paracelsus writing down the result of his work. and the result is this: "i have made a few discoveries, but i could not stay to use them. nought remains but a ceaseless, hungry pressing forward, a vision now and then of truth; and i--i am old before my hour: the adage is true-- time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream; and now i would give a world to rest, even in failure! "this is all my gain. was it for this," he cries, "i subdued my life, lost my youth, rooted out love; for the sake of this wolfish thirst of knowledge?" no dog, said faust, in goethe's poem, driven to the same point by the weariness of knowledge, no dog would longer live this life. my tyrant aim has brought me into a desert; worse still, the purity of my aim is lost. can i truly say that i have worked for man alone? sadder still, if i had found that which i sought, should i have had power to use it? o god, thou who art pure mind, spare my mind. thus far, i have been a man. let me conclude, a man! give me back one hour of my young energy, that i may use and finish what i know. "and god is good: i started sure of that; and he may still renew my heart. true, i am worn; but who clothes summer, who is life itself? god, that created all things, can renew!" at this moment the voice of aprile is heard singing the song of the poets, who, having great gifts, refused to use them, or abused them, or were too weak; and who therefore live apart from god, mourning for ever; who gaze on life, but live no more. he breaks in on paracelsus, and, in a long passage of overlapping thoughts, aprile--who would love infinitely and be loved, aspiring to realise every form of love, as paracelsus has aspired to realise the whole of knowledge--makes paracelsus feel that love is what he wants. and then, when paracelsus realises this, aprile in turn realises that he wants knowledge. each recognises that he is the complement of the other, that knowledge is worthless without love, and love incapable of realising its aspirations without knowledge--as if love did not contain the sum of knowledge necessary for fine being. both have failed; and it seems, at first, that they failed because they did not combine their aims. but the chief reason of their failure--and this is, indeed, browning's main point--is that each of them tried to do more than our limits on earth permit. paracelsus would have the whole sum of knowledge, aprile nothing less than the whole of love, and, in this world. it is impossible; yet, were it possible, could they have attained the sum of knowledge and of love on earth and been satisfied therewith, they would have shut out the infinite of knowledge and love beyond them in the divine land, and been, in their satisfaction, more hopelessly lost than they are in their present wretchedness. failure that leaves an unreached ideal before the soul is in reality a greater boon than success which thinks perfect satisfaction has been reached. their aim at perfection is right: what is wrong is their view that failure is ruin, and not a prophecy of a greater glory to come. could they have thought perfection were attained on earth--were they satisfied with anything this world can give, no longer stung with hunger for the infinite--all paradise, with the illimitable glories, were closed to them! few passages are more beautiful in english poetry than that in which aprile narrates his youthful aspiration: how, loving all things infinitely, he wished to throw them into absolute beauty of form by means of all the arts, for the love of men, and receive from men love for having revealed beauty, and merge at last in god, the eternal love. this was his huge aim, his full desire. few passages are more pathetic than that in which he tells his failure and its cause. "time is short; the means of life are limited; we have no means answering to our desires. now i am wrecked; for the multitudinous images of beauty which filled my mind forbade my seizing upon one which i could have shaped. i often wished to give one to the world, but the others came round and baffled me; and, moreover, i could not leave the multitude of beauty for the sake of one beauty. unless i could embody all i would embody none. "and, afterwards, when a cry came from man, 'give one ray even of your hoarded light to us,' and i tried for man's sake to select one, why, then, mists came--old memories of a thousand sweetnesses, a storm of images--till it was impossible to choose; and so i failed, and life is ended. "but could i live i would do otherwise. i would give a trifle out of beauty, as an example by which men could guess the rest and love it all; one strain from an angel's song; one flower from the distant land, that men might know that such things were. then, too, i would put common life into loveliness, so that the lowest hind would find me beside him to put his weakest hope and fear into noble language. and as i thus lived with men, and for them, i should win from them thoughts fitted for their progress, the very commonest of which would come forth in beauty, for they would have been born in a soul filled full of love. this should now be my aim: no longer that desire to embrace the whole of beauty which isolates a man from his fellows; but to realise enough of loveliness to give pleasure to men who desire to love. therefore, i should live, still aspiring to the whole, still uncontent, but waiting for another life to gain the whole; but at the same time content, for man's sake, to work within the limitations of life; not grieving either for failure, because love given and received makes failure pleasure. in truth, the failure to grasp all on earth makes, if we love, the certainty of a success beyond the earth." and paracelsus listening and applying what aprile says to his old desire to grasp, apart from men, the whole of knowledge as aprile had desired to grasp the whole of love, learns the truth at last, and confesses it: love me henceforth, aprile, while i learn to love; and, merciful god, forgive us both! we wake at length from weary dreams; but both have slept in fairy-land: though dark and drear appears the world before us, we no less wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still. i too have sought to know as thou to love-- excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge. we are halves of a dissevered world, and we must never part till the knower love, and thou, the lover, know, and both are saved. "no, no; that is not all," aprile answers, and dies. "our perfection is not in ourselves but in god. not our strength, but our weakness is our glory. not in union with me, with earthly love alone, will you find the perfect life. i am not that you seek. it is god the king of love, his world beyond, and the infinite creations love makes in it." but paracelsus does not grasp that last conclusion. he only understands that he has left out love in his aim, and therefore failed. he does not give up the notion of attainment upon earth. he cannot lose the first imprint of his idea of himself--his lonely grasp of the whole of knowledge. the next two parts of the poem do not strengthen much the main thoughts. paracelsus tries to work out the lesson learnt from aprile--to add love to knowledge, to aspire to that fulness in god. but he does not love enough. he despises those who follow him for the sake of his miracles, yet he desires their worship. moreover, the pride of knowledge still clings to him; he cannot help thinking it higher than love; and the two together drive him into the thought that this world must give him satisfaction. so, he puts aside the ideal aim. but here also he is baffled. those who follow him as the great teacher ask of him signs. he gives these; and he finds at basel that he has sunk into the desire of vulgar fame, and prostituted his knowledge; and, sick of this, beaten back from his noble ambitions, he determines to have something at least out of earth, and chooses at colmar the life of sensual pleasure. "i still aspire," he cries. "i will give the night to study, but i will keep the day for the enjoyment of the senses. thus, intellect and sense woven together, i shall at least have attained something. if i do not gain knowledge i shall have gained sensual pleasure. man i despise and hate, and god has deceived me. i take the world." but, even while he says this, his ancient aspiration lives so much in him that he scorns himself for his fall as much as he scorns the crowd. then comes the last scene, when, at salzburg, he returns to find his friend festus, and to die. in the hour of his death he reviews his whole life, his aims, their failure and the reason of it, and yet dies triumphant for he has found the truth. i pass over the pathetic delirium in which paracelsus thinks that aprile is present, and cries for his hand and sympathy while festus is watching by the couch. at last he wakes, and knows his friend, and that he is dying. "i am happy," he cries; "my foot is on the threshold of boundless life; i see the whole whirl and hurricane of life behind me; all my life passes by, and i know its purpose, to what end it has brought me, and whither i am going. i will tell you all the meaning of life. festus, my friend, tell it to the world. "there was a time when i was happy; the secret of life was in that happiness." "when, when was that?" answers festus, "all i hope that answer will decide." par. when, but the time i vowed myself to man? fest. great god, thy judgments are inscrutable! then he explains. "there are men, so majestical is our nature, who, hungry for joy and truth, win more and more of both, and know that life is infinite progress in god. this they win by long and slow battle. but there are those, of whom i was one"--and here browning draws the man of genius--"who are born at the very point to which these others, the men of talent, have painfully attained. by intuition genius knows, and i knew at once, what god is, what we are, what life is. alas! i could not use the knowledge aright. there is an answer to the passionate longings of the heart for fulness, and i knew it. and the answer is this: live in all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy. that is the life of god; it ought to be our life. in him it is accomplished and perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly against difficulty. "thus i knew the truth, but i was led away from it. i broke down from thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world. i had not love enough, and i lost the truth for a time. but whatever my failures were, i never lost sight of it altogether. i never was content with myself or with the earth. out of my misery i cried for the joy god has in living outside of himself in love of all things." then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble description--new in english poetry, new in feeling and in thought, enough of itself to lift browning on to his lofty peak--first of the joy of god in the universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in god. "where dwells enjoyment there is he." but every realised enjoyment looks forward, even in god, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is reached, to another sphere beyond-- thus climbs pleasure its heights for ever and for ever. creation is god's joyous self-giving. the building of the frame of earth was god's first joy in earth. that made him conceive a greater joy--the joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein--of the love which in animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever. so there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before his coming have--in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of love and trust in the animals--had prophecies of him which man has realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. but the law of progress does not cease now man has come. none of his faculties are perfect. they also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in which as all that was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and form. man's self is not yet man. we learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life, and from our sense of imperfection. we learn it also when we look back on the whole of nature that was before we were. we illustrate and illuminate all that has been. nature is humanised, spiritualised by us. we have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it, as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be. we are the end of nature but not the end of ourselves. we learn the same truth when among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness. we do not say--these stand alone; we never can become as they. on the contrary, we cry: all are to be what these are, and more. they longed for more, and we and they shall have it. all shall be perfected; and then, and not till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new joy. this is the ultimate truth. "and as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man--and here browning repeats himself--so in man there are prognostics of the future and loftier humanity. august anticipations, symbols, types of a dim splendour ever on before in that eternal cycle life pursues. for men begin to pass their nature's bound-- ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual life--and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it. "i, paracelsus," he cries--and now browning repeats the whole argument of the poem--"was one of these. to do this i vowed myself, soul and limb. "but i mistook my means, i took the wrong path, led away by pride. i gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. this i thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done. i rejected all the past. i despised it as a record of weakness and disgrace. man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring him to maturity. he has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one leap. "in that, i mistook the conditions of life. i did not see our barriers; nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. i strove to laugh down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. at last i knew that the power i sought was only god's, and then i prayed to die. all my life was failure. "at this crisis i met aprile, and learned my deep mistake. i had left love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go together. and aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and rejected knowledge. life can only move when both are hand in hand: love preceding power, and with much power, always much more love: love still too straitened in its present means, and earnest for new power to set love free. i learned this, and supposed the whole was learned. "but to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. i taught the simple truth, but men would not have it. they sought the complex, the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. and for this knowledge they praised me. i loathed and despised their praise; and when i would not give them more of the signs and wonders i first gave them, they avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. then i was tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. then i sought for wild pleasure in the senses, and i hated myself still more. and hating myself i came to hate men; and then all that aprile taught to me was lost. "but now i know that i did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of men their love. i did not love enough to see in their follies the grain of divine wisdom. to see a good in evil, and a hope in ill-success; to sympathise, be proud of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts; all with a touch of nobleness, despite their error, upward tending all though weak. "i did not see this, i did not love enough to see this, and i failed. "therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's sake; and regard aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power, shall mingle into one, and lead man up to god, in whom all these four are one. in god alone is the goal. "meanwhile i die in peace, secure of attainment. what i have failed in here i shall attain there. i have never, in my basest hours, ceased to aspire; god will fulfil my aspiration: if i stoop into a dark tremendous sea of cloud. it is but for a time; i press god's lamp close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, will pierce the gloom: i shall emerge one day. you understand me? i have said enough? aprile! hand in hand with you, aprile!" and so he dies. * * * * * chapter v _the poet of art_ the theory of human life which browning conceived, and which i attempted in the last chapter to explain out of _pauline_ and _paracelsus_, underlies the poems which have to do with the arts. browning as the poet of art is as fascinating a subject as browning the poet of nature; even more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal of his poetry to the various arts, especially to music and painting. nor has he neglected to write about his own art. the lover in pauline is a poet. paracelsus and aprile have both touched that art. sordello is a poet, and so are many others in the poems. moreover, he treats continually of himself as a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work. all through this work on the arts, the theory of which we have written appears continuously. it emerges fully in the close of _easter-day_. it is carefully wrought into poems like _abt vogler_ and _a grammarian's funeral_, in which the pursuit of grammar is conceived of as the pursuit of an art. it is introduced by the way in the midst of subjects belonging to the art of painting, as in _old pictures in florence_ and _andrea del sarto_. finally, in those poems which represent in vivid colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in a wood to a poet passing by. i shall be obliged then to touch again and again on this theory of his in discussing browning as the poet of the arts. this is a repetition which cannot be helped, but for which i request the pardon of my readers. the subject of the arts, from the time when caliban "fell to make something" to the re-birth of naturalism in florence, from the earliest music and poetry to the latest, interested browning profoundly; and he speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of them, as an artist. he is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth century till we come to rossetti, who has celebrated painting and sculpture by the art of poetry; and rossetti did not link these arts to human life and character with as much force and penetration as browning. morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other arts, their schools or history. he liked to describe in verse the beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. nor did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or how he built up a pattern. what he did as artist was to _make_, and when he had made one thing to make another. he ran along like pheidippides to his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his running. and all his life long this was his way. rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so admirable that we say to ourselves--"give me the picture or the sonnet, not both. they blot out one another." but to describe a picture is not to write about art. the one place where he does go down to its means and soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _hand and soul_, in which we see the path, the goal, the passion, but not the power of art. but he never, in thought, got, like browning, to the bottom-joy of it. he does not seem to see, as clearly as browning saw, that the source of all art was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of self-forgetfulness. this story of rossetti's was in prose. in poetry, rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of it, are isolated in english poetry, and separate him from other poets. i cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts than poetry. but i do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. a strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet. it was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till browning got weary of his guest and threw him out of the window. these reversions to some far off browning in the past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life, enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. moreover, he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. at least so i read what he means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece of analysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution of the question by passion and imagination. nevertheless the charm of this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination; and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and natural truth of youth. it is the melancholy tendency of some artists, as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal temptation it is. there is one poem of his in which he puts the whole matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive title, "_transcendentalism_: a poem in twelve books." he speaks to a young poet who will give to men "naked thought, good, true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery, without emotion." thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse. boys seek for images and melody, men must have reason--so, you aim at men. it is "quite otherwise," browning tells him, and he illustrates the matter by a story. jacob böhme did not care for plants. all he cared for was his mysticism. but one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved them and knew what they meant. imagination had done more for him than all his metaphysics. so we give up our days to collating theory with theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake "and find life's summer past." what remedy? what hope? why, a brace of rhymes! and then, in life, that miracle takes place which john of halberstadt did by his magic. we feel like a child; the world is new; every bit of life is run over and enchanted by the wild rose. and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side, nay, in and out the tables and the chairs and musty volumes, boehme's book and all--buries us with a glory, young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. so come, the harp back to your heart again! i return, after this introduction, to browning's doctrine of life as it is connected with the arts. it appears with great clearness in _easter-day_. he tells of an experience he had when, one night, musing on life, and wondering how it would be with him were he to die and be judged in a moment, he walked on the wild common outside the little dissenting chapel he had previously visited on christmas-eve and thought of the judgment. and common-sense said: "you have done your best; do not be dismayed; you will only be surprised, and when the shock is over you will smile at your fear." and as he thought thus the whole sky became a sea of fire. a fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame ran across it, and the universe was burned away. "and i knew," thought browning, "now that judgment had come, that i had chosen this world, its beauty, its knowledge, its good--that, though i often looked above, yet to renounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man was too hard for me." and a voice came: "eternity is here, and thou art judged." and then christ stood before him and said: "thou hast preferred the finite when the infinite was in thy power. earthly joys were palpable and tainted. the heavenly joys flitted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless. thou hast chosen those of this world. they are thine." "o rapture! is this the judgment? earth's exquisite treasures of wonder and delight for me!" "so soon made happy," said the voice. "the loveliness of earth is but like one rose flung from the eden whence thy choice has excluded thee. the wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the ante-chamber in the royal house thou hast abandoned. all partial beauty was a pledge of beauty in its plenitude: but since the pledge sufficed thy mood, retain it! plenitude be theirs who looked above! "o sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, i take art. art gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man. i'll take the greek sculpture, the perfect painting of italy--that world is mine!" "then obtain it," said the voice: "the one abstract form, the one face with its one look--all they could manage. shall i, the illimitable beauty, be judged by these single forms? what of that perfection in their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all they did? what of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty was before them? what of michael angelo now, who did not choose the world's success or earth's perfection, and who now is on the breast of the divine? all the beauty of art is but furniture for life's first stage. take it then. but there are those, my saints, who were not content, like thee, with earth's scrap of beauty, but desired the whole. they are now filled with it. take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach; lose all i had for thee in the boundless ocean." "then i take mind; earth's knowledge carries me beyond the finite. through circling sciences, philosophies and histories i will spin with rapture; and if these fail to inspire, i will fly to verse, and in its dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;--nay, answer me not, i know what thou wilt say: what is highest in knowledge, even those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which are best put in noble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them, sparks from the sum of the whole. i give that world up also, and i take love. all i ask is leave to love." "ah," said the voice, "is this thy final choice? love is the best; 'tis somewhat late. yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love. through them infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth's love as all. it is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of earth into the boundless love of god in me." at last, beaten to his last fortress, all broken down, he cries: thou love of god! or let me die, or grant what shall seem heaven almost. let me not know that all is lost, though lost it be--leave me not tied to this despair--this corpse-like bride! let that old life seem mine--no more-- with limitation as before, with darkness, hunger, toil, distress: be all the earth a wilderness! only let me go on, go on, still hoping ever and anon to reach one eve the better land! this is put more strongly, as in the line: "be all the earth a wilderness!" than browning himself would have put it. but he is in the passion of the man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into an extreme. but the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the love of beauty and therefore to the arts. the illustrations are taken from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry. only in dwelling too exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of this world's successes, he has left out that part of his theory which demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them always in the desire of infinite perfection. in _rabbi ben ezra_, a masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative passion--such a poem as only browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised, when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material for poetry--he applies this view of his to the whole of man's life here and in the world to come, when the rabbi in the quiet of old age considers what his life has been, and how god has wrought him through it for eternity. but i leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art, for _abt vogler_, which is dedicated to music. "when solomon pronounced the name of god, all the spirits, good and bad, assembled to do his will and build his palace. and when i, abt vogler, touched the keys, i called the spirits of sound to me, and they have built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the great dead came back, till in the vision i made a perfect music. nay, for a moment, i touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; i cannot bring it back. had i painted it, had i written it, i might have explained it. but in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing i touched and lost. i took the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay, not a sound--but a star. this was a flash of god's will which opened the eternal to me for a moment; and i shall find it again in the eternal life. therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, i turn to god, and in him i see that every image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty--which, coming whence we know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to die in their immediate passage. their music has its home in the will of god and we shall find them completed there. all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity affirms the conception of an hour. the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by. * * * well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: i will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. give me the keys. i feel for the common chord again, sliding by semitones, till i sink to the minor,--yes, and i blunt it into a ninth, and i stand on alien ground, surveying awhile the heights i rolled from into the deep; which, hark, i have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, the c major of this life: so, now i will try to sleep." with that he returns to human life, content to labour in its limits--the common chord is his. but he has been where he shall be, and he is not likely to be satisfied with the c major of life. this, in browning's thought, is the true comfort and strength of the life of the artist, to whom these fallings from us, vanishings, these transient visits of the infinite divine, like swallows that pass in full flight, are more common than to other men. they tell him of the unspeakable beauty; they let loose his spirit to fly into the third heaven. so much for the theory in this poem. as to the artist and his art in it, that is quite a different matter; and as there are few of browning's poems which reach a higher level than this both in form, thought, and spiritual passion, it may be worth while, for once, to examine a poem of his at large. browning's imagination conceived in a moment the musician's experience from end to end; and the form of the experience arose along with the conception. he saw abt vogler in the silent church, playing to himself before the golden towers of the organ, and slipping with sudden surprise into a strain which is less his than god's. he saw the vision which accompanied the music, and the man's heart set face to face with the palace of music he had built. he saw him live in it and then pass to heaven with it and lose it. and he saw the close of the experience, with all its scenery in the church and in abt vogler's heart, at the same time, in one vision. in this unconscious shaping of his thought into a human incident, with its soul and scenery, is the imagination creating, like a god, a thing unknown, unseen before. having thus shaped the form, the imagination passed on to make the ornament. it creates that far-off image of solomon and his spirits building their palace for the queen of sheba which exalts the whole conception and enlarges the reader's imagination through all the legends of the great king--and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms of the noble dead to walk in it. this is the imagination at play with its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression, but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream--for so the conception demanded. and then, to fill the conception with the spirit of humanity, the personal passion of the poet rises and falls through the description, as the music rises and falls. we feel his breast beating against ours; till the time comes when, like a sudden change in a great song, his emotion changes into ecstasy in the outburst of the th verse: therefore to whom turn i but to thee, the ineffable name? it almost brings tears into the eyes. this is art-creation--this is what imagination, intense emotion, and individuality have made of the material of thought--poetry, not prose. even at the close, the conception, the imagination, and the personal passion keep their art. the rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies slowly away; it is as evanescent as the vision of the palace, but it dies into another picture of humanity which even more deeply engages the human heart. browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark, and the silent figure in it, alone and bowed over the keys. the church is still, but aware of what has been. the golden pipes of the organ are lost in the twilight and the music is over--all the double vision of the third heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. the form of the thing rightly fits the idea. then, when the form is shaped, the poet fills it with the deep emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his own emotion; and close as the air to the earth are the sorrow and exultation of abt vogler and browning to the human heart--sorrow for the vanishing and the failure, exultant joy because what has been is but an image of the infinite beauty they will have in god. in the joy they do not sorrow for the failure. it is nothing but an omen of success. their soul, greater than the vision, takes up common life with patience and silent hope. we hear them sigh and strike the chord of c. this is lyric imagination at work in lyric poetry. there are two kinds of lyrics among many others. one is where the strong emotion of the poet, fusing all his materials into one creation, comes to a height and then breaks off suddenly. it is like a thunderstorm, which, doubling and redoubling its flash and roar, ends in the zenith with the brightest flash and loudest clang of thunder. there is another kind. it is when the storm of emotion reaches, like the first, its climax, but does not end with it. the lyric passion dies slowly away from the zenith to the horizon, and ends in quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and gentle sounds; like the thunderstorm which faints with the sunset and gathers its clouds to be adorned with beauty. this lyric of browning's is a noble example of the second type. i take another poem, the _grammarian's funeral_, to illustrate his art. the main matter of thought in it is the same as that of _abt vogler_, with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and that he is not a modern, like abt vogler, but one of the renaissance folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the new learning. the matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done. we see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown--the group of sorrowing students carrying their master's corpse to the high platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul as of the students' enthusiasm. this thrills us into creation, with the poet, as we read. then the imagination which has made the conception into form adorns it. it creates the plain, the encircling mountains, one cloudy peak higher than the rest; as we mount we look on the plain below; we reach the city on the hill, pass it, and climb the hill-top; there are all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the lightnings, the thickest dew. and we lay our dead on the peak, above the plain. this is the scenery, the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are made to hear the chant of the students; and so lifting is the melody of the verse we seem to taste the air, fresher and fresher as we climb. then, finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager intensity of the scholar. dead as he is, we feel him to be alive; never resting, pushing on incessantly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it the step for further search for the infinite, resolute to live in the dull limits of the present work, but never content save in waiting for that eternity which will fulfil the failure of earth; which, missing earth's success, throws itself on god, dying to gain the highest. this is the passion of the poem, and browning is in it like a fire. it was his own, his very life. he pours it into the students who rejoice in the death of their master, and he gives it to us as we read the poem. and then, because conception, imagination, and intensity of thought and emotion all here work together, as in _abt vogler_, the melody of the poem is lovely, save in one verse which ought to be out of the poem. as to the conclusion, it is priceless. such a conclusion can only emerge when all that precedes it finely contains it, and i have often thought that it pictures browning himself. i wish he had been buried on a mountain top, all italy below him. well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: hail to your purlieus, all ye high-flyers of the feathered race, swallows and curlews! here's the top-peak; the multitude below live, for they can, there: this man decided not to live but know-- bury this man there? here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightenings are loosened. stars come and go! let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send! lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying. this is the artist at work, and i doubt whether all the laborious prose written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a new scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very centre of the universe. another poem on the arts which is mixed up with browning's theory of life is _andrea del sarto_. into it the theory slips, like an uninvited guest into a dinner-party of whom it is felt that he has some relation to some one of the guests, but for whom no cover is laid. the faulty and broken life of andrea, in its contrast with his flawless drawing, has been a favourite subject with poets. alfred de musset and others have dramatised it, and it seems strange that none of our soul-wrecking and vivisecting novelists have taken it up for their amusement. browning has not left out a single point of the subject. the only criticism i should make of this admirable poem is that, when we come to the end, we dislike the woman and despise the man more than we pity either of them; and in tragic art-work of a fine quality, pity for human nature with a far-off tenderness in it should remain as the most lasting impression. all the greater artists, even while they went to the bottom of sorrow and wickedness, have done this wise and beautiful thing, and browning rarely omits it. the first art-matter in the poem is browning's sketch of the sudden genesis of a picture. andrea is sitting with his wife on the window-seat looking out to fiesole. as he talks she smiles a weary, lovely, autumn smile, and, born in that instant and of her smile, he sees his picture, knows its atmosphere, realises its tone of colour, feels its prevailing sentiment. how he will execute it is another question, and depends on other things; but no better sketch could be given of the sudden spiritual fashion in which great pictures are generated. here are the lines, and they also strike the keynote of andrea's soul--that to which his life has brought him. you smile? why, there's my picture ready made, there's what we painters call our harmony! a common greyness silvers everything,-- all in a twilight, you and i alike--, you at the point of your first pride in me (that's gone, you know),--but i, at every point; my youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down to yonder sober pleasant fiesole. there's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; that length of convent-wall across the way holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; the last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, and autumn grows, autumn in everything. eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape as if i saw alike my work and self and all that i was born to be and do, a twilight piece. love, we are in god's hand. in god's hand? yes, but why being free are we so fettered? and here slips in the unbidden guest of the theory. andrea has chosen earthly love; lucrezia is all in all; and he has reached absolute perfection in drawing-- i do what many dream of, all their lives. he can reach out beyond himself no more. he has got the earth, lost the heaven. he makes no error, and has, therefore, no impassioned desire which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it greater art than his faultless work. "the soul is gone from me, that vext, suddenly-impassioned, upward-rushing thing, with its play, insight, broken sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life. these men reach a heaven shut out from me, though they cannot draw like me. no praise or blame affects me. i know my handiwork is perfect. but there burns a truer light of god in them. lucrezia, i am judged." ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? all is silver-grey placid and perfect with my art:--the worse "here," he says, "is a piece of rafael. the arm is out of drawing, and i could make it right. but the passion, the soul of the thing is not in me. had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and god, i might have been uncontent; i might have done it for you. no," and again he sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, "perhaps not, 'incentives come from the soul's self'; and mine is gone. i've chosen the love of you, lucrezia, earth's love, and i cannot pass beyond my faultless drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul conceives." that is the meaning of browning. the faultless, almost mechanical art, the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science and art, is of little value to men. not in the flawless painter is true art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures breathe infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn. in this incessant strife to create new worlds, and in their creation, which, always ending in partial failure, forces fresh effort, lies, browning might have said, the excuse for god having deliberately made us defective. had we been made good, had we no strife with evil; had we the power to embody at once the beauty we are capable of seeing; could we have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her without the desperate struggle we have to win one fruit from her tree; had we had no strong crying and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own passions and their work, against false views of things--we might have been angels; but we should not have had humanity and all its wild history, and all its work; we should not have had that which, for all i know, may be unique in the universe; no, nor any of the great results of the battle and its misery. had it not been for the defectiveness, the sin and pain, we should have had nothing of the interest of the long evolution of science, law and government, of the charm of discovery, of pursuit, of the slow upbuilding of moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy. above all, we should have had none of the great art men love so well, no _odyssey_, _divine comedy_ no _hamlet_, no _oedipus_, no handel, no beethoven, no painting or sculpture where the love and sorrow of the soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble and bronze, no, nor any of the great and loving lives who suffered and overcame, from christ to the poor woman who dies for love in a london lane. all these are made through the struggle and the sorrow. we should not have had, i repeat, humanity; and provided no soul perishes for ever but lives to find union with undying love, the game, with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the candle. we may find out, some day, that the existence and work of humanity, crucified as it has been, are of untold interest and use to the universe--which things the angels desire to look into. if browning had listened to that view, he would, i think, have accepted it. _old pictures in florence_ touches another side of his theory. in itself, it is one of browning's half-humorous poems; a pleasantly-composed piece, glancing here and glancing there, as a man's mind does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a sunny morning in florence. i have elsewhere quoted its beginning. it is a fine example of his nature-poetry: it creates the scenery and atmosphere of the poem; and the four lines with which the fourth verse closes sketch what browning thought to be one of his poetic gifts-- and mark through the winter afternoons. by a gift god grants me now and then, in the mild decline of those suns like moons. who walked in florence, besides her men. this, then, is a poem of many moods, beginning with giotto's tower; then wondering why giotto did not tell the poet who loved him so much that one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where some one else picked it up; then, thinking of all giotto's followers, whose ghosts he imagines are wandering through florence, sorrowing for the decay of their pictures. "but at least they have escaped, and have their holiday in heaven, and do not care one straw for our praise or blame. they did their work, they and the great masters. we call them old masters, but they were new in their time; their old masters were the greeks. they broke away from the greeks and revolutionised art into a new life. in our turn we must break away from them." and now glides in the theory. "when greek art reached its perfection, the limbs which infer the soul, and enough of the soul to inform the limbs, were faultlessly represented. men said the best had been done, and aspiration and growth in art ceased. content with what had been done, men imitated, but did not create. but man cannot remain without change in a past perfection; for then he remains in a kind of death. even with failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new things, and in making, to be alive and feel his life. therefore giotto and the rest began to create a fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect in form, would suggest an infinite perfection. the greek perfection ties us down to earth, to a few forms, and the sooner, if it forbid us to go on, we reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art and for mankind. 'tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven-- the better! what's come to perfection perishes. things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven: works done least rapidly, art most cherishes. "the great campanile is still unfinished;" so he shapes his thoughts into his scenery. shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised joy of apollo, or the petrified grief of niobe, when there are a million more expressions of joy and grief to render? in that way felt giotto and his crew. "we will paint the whole of man," they cried, "paint his new hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite succeed. we will paint the soul in all its infinite variety--bring the invisible full into play. of course we shall miss perfection--who can get side by side with infinitude?--but we shall grow out of the dead perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being. let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?" thus art began again. its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world rejoiced. and that is what has happened again and again in the history of art. browning has painted a universal truth. it was that which took place when wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the finished perfection, as men thought, of the augustan age, determined to write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities. what we shall see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect. what we shall write will not have the conventional perfection of pope and gray, which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests content--growth and movement dead--but it will be true, natural, alive, running onwards to a far-off goal. and we who write--our loins are accinct, our lights burning, as men waiting for the revelation of the bridegroom. wordsworth brought back the soul to poetry. she made her failures, but she was alive. spring was blossoming around her with dews and living airs, and the infinite opened before her. so, too, it was when turner recreated landscape art. there was the perfect claudesque landscape, with all its parts arranged, its colours chosen, the composition balanced, the tree here, the river there, the figures in the foreground, the accurate distribution and gradation of the masses of light and shade. "there," the critics said, "we have had perfection. let us rest in that." and all growth in landscape-art ceased. then came turner, who, when he had followed the old for a time and got its good, broke away from it, as if in laughter. "what," he felt, "the infinite of nature is before me; inconceivable change and variety in earth, and sky, and sea--and shall i be tied down to one form of painting landscape, one arrangement of artistic properties? let the old perfection go." and we had our revolution in landscape art: nothing, perhaps, so faultless as claude's composition, but life, love of nature, and an illimitable range; incessant change, movement, and aspiration which have never since allowed the landscape artist to think that he has attained. on another side of the art of painting, rossetti, millais, hunt arose; and they said, "we will paint men as they actually were in the past, in the moments of their passion, and with their emotions on their faces, and with the scenery around them as it was; and whatever background of nature there was behind them, it shall be painted direct from the very work of nature herself, and in her very colours. in doing this our range will become infinite. no doubt we shall fail. we cannot grasp the whole of nature and humanity, but we shall be _in_ their life: aspiring, alive, and winning more and more of truth." and the world of art howled at them, as the world of criticism howled at wordsworth. but a new life and joy began to move in painting. its winter was over, its spring had begun, its summer was imagined. their drawing was faulty; their colour was called crude; they seemed to know little or nothing of composition; but the spirit of life was in them, and their faults were worth more than the best successes of the school that followed rafael; for their faults proved that passion, aspiration and originality were again alive: give these, i exhort you, their guerdon and glory for daring so much, before they well did it. if ever the artist should say to himself, "what i desire has been attained: i can but imitate or follow it"; or if the people who care for any art should think, "the best has been reached; let us be content to rest in that perfection"; the death of art has come. the next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of _pippa passes_. what concerns us here is that jules, the french artist, loves phene; and on his return from his marriage pours out his soul to her concerning his art. in his work, in his pursuit of beauty through his aspiration to the old greek ideal, he has found his full content--his heaven upon earth. but now, living love of a woman has stolen in. how can he now, he asks, pursue that old ideal when he has the real? how carve tydeus, with her about the room? he is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent a new ideal rises. how can he now bid each conception stand while, trait by trait, my hand transfers its lineaments to stone? will my mere fancies live near you, their truth-- the live truth, passing and repassing me, sitting beside me? before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of nature, every material in her workshop, tended to one form of beauty, to the human archetype. but now she, phene, represents the archetype; and though browning does not express this, we feel that if jules continue in that opinion, his art will die. then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he passes, through a statement that nature suggests in all her doings man and his life and his beauty--a statement browning himself makes in _paracelsus_--to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs in nature under the sculptor's hand, and especially of marble as having in it the capabilities of all the other stuffs and also something more a living spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even does some of his work. this is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic of browning's thinking about painting, music, poetry, or sculpture. i believe he felt, and if he did not, it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought something out of itself into the work of the artist. abt vogler feels this as he plays on the instrument he made. any musician who plays on two instruments knows that the distinct instrument does distinct work, and loves each instrument for its own spirit; because each makes his art, expressed in it, different from his art expressed in another. even the same art-creation is different in two instruments: the vehicle does its own part of the work. any painter will say the same, according as he works in fresco or on canvas, in water-colour or in oil. even a material like charcoal makes him work the same conception in a different way. i will quote the passage; it goes to the root of the matter; and whenever i read it, i seem to hear a well-known sculptor as he talked one night to me of the spiritual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm, answered like living material to his tool, sending flame into it, and then seemed, as with a voice, to welcome the emotion which, flowing from him through the chisel, passed into the stone. but of the stuffs one can be master of, how i divined their capabilities! from the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk that yields your outline to the air's embrace, half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom: down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure to cut its one confided thought clean out of all the world. but marble!--'neath my tools more pliable than jelly--as it were some clear primordial creature dug from depths in the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself. and whence all baser substance may be worked; refine it off to air, you may--condense it down to the diamond;--is not metal there, when o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips? --not flesh, as flake off flake i scale, approach, lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep? lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised by the swift implement sent home at once, flushes and glowings radiate and hover about its track? but jules finds that phene, whom he has been deceived into believing an intelligence equal to his own, does not understand one word he has said, is nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream of perfection in the marriage of art and love vanishes away, and with the deception the aims and hopes of his art as it has been. and browning makes this happen of set purpose, in order that, having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal, and then his satisfaction in that ideal realised in a woman--having failed in art and love--he may pass on into a higher aim, with a higher conception, both of art and love, and make a new world, in the woman and in the art. he is about to accept the failure, to take only to revenge on his deceivers, when pippa sings as she is passing, and the song touches him into finer issues of thought. he sees that phene's soul is, like a butterfly, half-loosed from its chrysalis, and ready for flight. the sight and song awake a truer love, for as yet he has loved phene only through his art. now he is impassioned with pity for a human soul, and his first new sculpture will be the creation of her soul. shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff be art--and further, to evoke a soul from form be nothing? this new soul is mine! at last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by love, and finds a man's salvation. and in that loss of self he drinks of the deep fountain of art. aprile found that out. sordello dies as he discovers it, and jules, the moment he has touched its waters with his lip, sees a new realm of art arise, and loves it with such joy that he knows he will have power to dwell in its heart, and create from its joy. one may do whate'er one likes in art; the only thing is, to make sure that one does like it--which takes pains to know. he breaks all his models up. they are paltry, dead things belonging to a dead past. "i begin," he cries, "art afresh, in a fresh world, some unsuspected isle in far-off seas." the ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal. the very centre of browning as an artist is there: held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake! sordello is another example of his theory, of a different type from aprile, or that poet in _pauline_ who gave browning the sketch from which sordello was conceived. but browning, who, as i have said, repeated his theory, never repeated his examples: and sordello is not only clearly varied from aprile and the person in _pauline_, but the variations themselves are inventively varied. the complex temperament of sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to manhood, but as circumstances meet him. they give him a shock, as a slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind changes. but as with the bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the elements of bordello's mind remain the same. it is only towards the end of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of new elements from the outward world, that his character radically changes, and his soul is born. he wins that which he has been without from the beginning. he wins, as we should say, a heart. he not only begins to love palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that love the love of man arises--for, in characters like sordello, personal love, once really stirred, is sure to expand beyond itself--and then, following on the love of man, conscience is quickened into life, and for the first time recognises itself and its duties. in this new light of love and conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an artist, or rather, browning means us to do so; and we understand that he has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of imagination has been without the fire of true passion. his aspirations, his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold, and left the world cold. he has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men which flows from these. he is, in this aspiration, paracelsus and aprile in one. but he has neither the sincerity of paracelsus nor the passion of aprile. he lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience, and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself. he fails, that is, to create anything which will please or endure; fails in the first aim, the first duty of an artist. he comes again and again to the verge of creating something which may give delight to men, but only once succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited impulse, caused partly by his own vanity, and partly by the waves of humanity at palma's _court of love_ beating on his soul, he breaks for a passing hour into the song which conquers eglamor. when, at the end, he does try to shape himself without for the sake of men he is too late for this life. he dies of the long struggle, of the revelation of his failure and the reasons of it, of the supreme light which falls on his wasted life; and yet not wasted, since even in death he has found his soul and all it means. his imagination, formerly only intellectual, has become emotional as well; he loves mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge to its welfare. he no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself, the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to higher things. this--the true way of life--he finds out as he dies. to have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art. to pass for ever out of and beyond one's self is to the artist the lesson of bordello's story. it is hardly learnt. the self in sordello, the self of imagination unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange miseries, battles and despairs, and these browning describes with such inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the pitiful irony of christ, "this kind goeth not forth but with prayer and fasting." the position in the poem is at root the same as that in tennyson's _palace of art_. these two poets found, about the same time, the same idea, and, independently, shaped it into poems. tennyson put it into the form of a vision, the defect of which was that it was too far removed from common experience. browning put it into the story of a man's life. tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness, simplicity, and with a wealth of lovely ornament, so rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the main lines of his conception. browning expressed it with extraordinary complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of diction. but when we take the trouble of getting to the bottom of _sordello_, we find ourselves where we do not find ourselves in _the palace of art_--we find ourselves in close touch and friendship with a man, living with him, sympathising with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him, amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied when he dies. at the back of this, and complicating it still more--but, when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original, when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning. of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in tennyson, and browning could not have got on without it. of course, it made his poetry difficult. we cannot get excellences without their attendant defects. we have a great deal to forgive in _sordello_. but for the sake of the vivid humanity we forgive it all. sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near mantua, built in a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which _sordello_ is so full. there, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the contemplation of his own imaginings. at first it is nature from whom sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he draws from her. but he never shapes his emotion into actual song. then tired of nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the great men of whom he has read. he becomes them in himself, as pauline's lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into apollo, the lord of poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all the woods and streams and sunshine round goito are infinitely amused. thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to mantua and make song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers, all of whom are but himself in other forms. even when he aims at perfection, and, making himself apollo, longs for a daphne to double his life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes one morning to ask himself: "when will this dream be truth?" this is the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of the greater qualities of genius--his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife of life, god's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind. but sordello will not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find his soul, not only in love of his daphne but in love of man. and the first thing he will have to do is that which sordello does not care to do--to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within himself. nor can sordello's imagination reach true passion, for it ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of mankind. only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of goito, and then we find that he has ceased to be the artist. thus, the poem is the history of the failure of a man with an artistic temperament to be an artist. or rather, that is part of the story of the poem, and, as browning was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest interest. sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied of dreams. even in his solitude, the limits of life begin to oppress him. time fleets, fate is tardy, life will be over before he lives. then an accident helps him-- which breaking on sordello's mixed content opened, like any flash that cures the blind, the veritable business of mankind. this accident is the theme of the second book. it belongs to the subject of this chapter, for it contrasts two types of the artist, eglamor and sordello, and it introduces naddo, the critic, with a good knowledge of poetry, with a great deal of common sense, with an inevitable sliding into the opinion that what society has stamped must be good--a mixed personage, and a sketch done with browning's humorous and pitying skill. the contrast between eglamor and sordello runs through the whole poem. sordello recalls eglamor at the last, and naddo appears again and again to give the worldly as well as the common-sense solution of the problems which sordello makes for himself. eglamor is the poet who has no genius, whom one touch of genius burns into nothing, but who, having a charming talent, employs it well; and who is so far the artist that what he feels he is able to shape gracefully, and to please mankind therewith; who, moreover loves, enjoys, and is wholly possessed with what he shapes in song. this is good; but then he is quite satisfied with what he does; he has no aspiration, and all the infinitude of beauty is lost to him. and when sordello takes up his incomplete song, finishes it, inspires, expands what eglamor thought perfect, he sees at last that he has only a graceful talent, that he has lived in a vain show, like a gnome in a cell of the rock of gold. genius, momentarily realising itself in sordello, reveals itself to eglamor with all its infinities; heaven and earth and the universe open on eglamor, and the revelation of what he is, and of the perfection beyond, kills him. that is a fine, true, and piteous sketch. but sordello, who is the man of possible genius, is not much better off. there has been one outbreak into reality at palma's _court of love_. every one, afterwards, urges him to sing. the critics gather round him. he makes poems, he becomes the accepted poet of northern italy. but he cannot give continuous delight to the world. his poems are not like his song before palma. they have no true passion, being woven like a spider's web out of his own inside. his case then is more pitiable, his failure more complete, than eglamor's. eglamor could shape something; he had his own enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men. sordello, lured incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in their contemplation, is smitten, like aprile, into helplessness by the multitudinousness of the images he sees, refuses to descend into real life and submit to its limitations, is driven into the slothfulness of that dreaming imagination which is powerless to embody its images in the actual song. sometimes he tries to express himself, longing for reality. when he tries he fails, and instead of making failure a step to higher effort, he falls back impatiently on himself, and is lost in himself. moreover, he tries always within himself, and with himself for judge. he does not try the only thing which would help him--the submission of his work to the sympathy and judgment of men. out of touch with any love save love of his own imaginings, he cannot receive those human impressions which kindle the artist into work, nor answer the cry which comes from mankind, with such eagerness, to genius--"express for us in clear form that which we vaguely feel. make us see and admire and love." then he ceases even to love song, because, though he can imagine everything, he can do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he despises man. finally he asks himself, like so many young poets who have followed his way, what is the judgment of the world worth? nothing at all, he answers. with that ultimate folly, the favourite resort of minor poets, sordello goes altogether wrong. he pleases nobody, not even himself; spends his time in arguing inside himself why he has not succeeded; and comes to no conclusion, except that total failure is the necessity of the world. at last one day, wandering from mantua, he finds himself in his old environment, in the mountain cup where goito and the castle lie. and the old dream, awakened by the old associations, that he was apollo, lord of song, rushed back upon him and enwrapped him wholly. he feels, in the blessed silence, that he is no longer what he has been of late, a pettish minstrel meant to wear away his soul in discontent, brooding on fortune's malice, but himself once more, freed from the world of mantua; alone again, but in his loneliness really more lost than he was at mantua, as we soon find out in the third book. i return, in concluding this chapter, to the point which bears most clearly on browning as the poet of art. the only time when sordello realises what it is to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the kindled emotion of the crowd at the _court of love_ and inspired also by the true emotion of eglamor's song, which has been made because he loved it--his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for man the thing within him, outside of himself, and to sing for the joy of singing--having forgotten himself in mankind, in their joy and in his own. but it was little good to him. when he stole home to goito in a dream, he sat down to think over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how he was better than eglamor; and at last, having missed the whole use of the experience (which was to draw him into the service of man within the limits of life but to always transcend the limits in aspiration), he falls away from humanity into his own self again; and perfectly happy for the moment, but lost as an artist and a man, lies lazy, filleted and robed on the turf, with a lute beside him, looking over the landscape below the castle and fancying himself apollo. this is to have the capacity to be an artist, but it is not to be an artist. and we leave sordello lying on the grass enjoying himself, but not destined on that account to give any joy to man. * * * * * chapter vi _sordello_ the period in which the poem of _sordello_ opens is at the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, at the time when the guelf cities allied themselves against the ghibellines in northern italy. they formed the lombard league, and took their private quarrels up into one great quarrel--that between the partisans of the empire and those of the pope. sordello is then a young man of thirty years. he was born in , when the fierce fight in the streets of vicenza took place which salinguerra describes, as he looks back on his life, in the fourth canto of this poem. the child is saved in that battle, and brought from vicenza by adelaide, the second wife of ezzelino da romano ii.,[ ] to goito. he is really the son of salinguerra and retrude, a connection of frederick ii., but adelaide conceals this, and brings him up as her page, alleging that he is the son of elcorte, an archer. palma (or cunizza), ezzelino's daughter by agnes este, his first wife, is also at goito in attendance on adelaide. sordello and she meet as girl and boy, and she becomes one of the dreams with which his lonely youth at goito is adorned. at adelaide's death palma discovers the real birth of sordello. she has heard him sing some time before at a love-court, where he won the prize; where she, admiring, began to love him; and this love of hers has been increased by his poetic fame which has now filled north italy. she summons him to her side at verona, makes him understand that she loves him, and urges him, as salinguerra's son, to take the side of the ghibellines to whose cause salinguerra, the strongest military adventurer in north italy, has now devoted himself. when the poem begins, salinguerra has received from the emperor the badge which gives him the leadership of the ghibelline party in north italy. then palma, bringing sordello to see salinguerra, reveals to the great partisan that sordello is his son, and that she loves him. salinguerra, seeing in the union of palma, daughter of the lord of romano, with his son, a vital source of strength to the emperor's party, throws the emperor's badge on his son's neck, and offers him the leadership of the ghibellines. palma urges him to accept it; but sordello has been already convinced that the guelf side is the right one to take for the sake of mankind. rome, he thinks, is the great uniting power; only by rome can the cause of peace and the happiness of the people be in the end secured. that cause--the cause of a happy people--is the one thing for which, after many dreams centred in self, sordello has come to care. he is sorely tempted by the love of palma and by the power offered him to give up that cause or to palter with it; yet in the end his soul resists the temptation. but the part of his life, in which he has neglected his body, has left him without physical strength; and now the struggle of his soul to do right in this spiritual crisis gives the last blow to his weakened frame. his heart breaks, and he dies at the moment when he dimly sees the true goal of life. this is a masterpiece of the irony of the fate-goddess; and a faint suspicion of this irony, underlying life, even though browning turns it round into final good, runs in and out of the whole poem in a winding thread of thought. this is the historical background of the poem, and in front of it are represented sordello, his life, his development as an individual soul, and his death. i have, from one point of view, slightly analysed the first two books of the poem, but to analyse the whole would be apart from the purpose of this book. my object in this and the following chapter is to mark out, with here and there a piece of explanation, certain characteristics of the poem in relation, first, to the time in which it is placed; secondly, to the development of sordello in contact with that time; and thirdly, to our own time; then to trace the connection of the poem with the poetic evolution of browning; and finally, to dwell throughout the whole discussion on its poetic qualities. . the time in which the poem's thought and action are placed is the beginning of the thirteenth century in north italy, a period in which the religious basis of life, laid so enthusiastically in the eleventh century, and gradually weakening through the twelfth, had all but faded away for the mediæval noble and burgher, and even for the clergy. religion, it is true, was confessed and its dogmas believed in; the cistercian revival had restored some of its lost influence, but it did not any longer restrain the passions, modify the wickedness, control the ambitions or subdue the world, in the heart of men, as it had done in the eleventh century. there was in italy, at least, an unbridled licence of life, a fierce individuality, which the existence of a number of small republics encouraged; and, in consequence, a wild confusion of thought and act in every sphere of human life. moreover, all through the twelfth century there had been a reaction among the artistic and literary men against the theory of life laid down by the monks, and against the merely saintly aims and practice of the religious, of which that famous passage in _aucassin and nicolete_ is an embodiment. then, too, the love poetry (a poetry which tended to throw monkish purity aside) started in the midst of the twelfth century; then the troubadours began to sing; and then the love-songs of germany arose. and italian poetry, a poetry which tended to repel the religion of the spirit for the religion of enjoyment, had begun in sicily and siena in - , and was nurtured in the sicilian court of frederick ii., while sordello was a youth. all over europe, poetry drifted into a secular poetry of love and war and romance. the religious basis of life had lost its strength. as to north italy, where our concern lies, humanity there was weltering like a sea, tossing up and down, with no direction in its waves. it was not till francis of assisi came that a new foundation for religious life, a new direction for it, began to be established. as to law, government, literature, and art, all their elements were in equal confusion. every noble, every warrior who reached ascendency, or was born to it, made his own laws and governed as he liked. every little city had its own fashions and its own aims; and was continually fighting, driven by jealousy, envy, hatred, or emulation, with its neighbours. war was the incessant business of life, and was carried on not only against neighbouring cities, but by each city in its own streets, from its own towers, where noble fought against noble, citizen with citizen, and servant with servant. literature was only trying to begin, to find its form, to find its own italian tongue, to understand what it desired. it took more than a century after sordello's youth to shape itself into the poetry of dante and petrarch, into their prose and the prose of boccaccio. the _vita nuova_ was set forth in , , the _decameron_ in , , and petrarch was crowned at rome in . and the arts of sculpture and painting were in the same condition. they were struggling towards a new utterance, but as yet they could not speak. it is during this period of impassioned confusion and struggle towards form, during this carnival of individuality, that sordello, as conceived by browning, a modern in the midst of mediævalism, an exceptional character wholly unfitted for the time, is placed by browning. and the clash between himself and his age is too much for him. he dies of it; dies of the striving to find an anchorage for life, and of his inability to find it in this chartless sea. but the world of men, incessantly recruited by new generations, does not die like the individual, and what sordello could not do, it did. it emerged from this confusion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with s. francis, dante, petrarch and boccaccio, the pisani, giotto, and the commonwealth of florence. religion, poetry, prose, sculpture, painting, government and law found new foundations. the renaissance began to dawn, and during its dawn kept, among the elect of mankind, all or nearly all the noble impulses and faith of mediævalism. this dawn of the renaissance is nearly a hundred years away at the time of this poem, yet two of its characteristics vitally moved through this transition period; and, indeed, while they continued even to the end of the renaissance, were powers which brought it about. the first of these was a boundless curiosity about life, and the second was an intense individuality. no one can read the history of the italian republics in the thirteenth century without incessantly coming into contact with both these elements working fiercely, confusedly, without apparently either impulse or aim, but producing a wonderful activity of life, out of which, by command as it were of the gods, a new-created world might rise into order. it was as if chaos were stirred, like a cauldron with a stick, that suns and planets, moving by living law, might emerge in beauty. sordello lived in the first whirling of these undigested elements, and could only dream of what might be; but it was life in which he moved, disorderly life, it is true, but not the dread disorder of decay. browning paints it with delight. this unbridled curiosity working in men of unbridled individuality produced a tumbling confusion in life. men, full of eagerness, each determined to fulfil his own will, tried every kind of life, attempted every kind of pursuit, strove to experience all the passions, indulged their passing impulses to the full, and when they were wearied of any experiment in living passed on to the next, not with weariness but with fresh excitement. cities, small republics, did the same collectively--ferrara, padua, verona, mantua, milan, parma, florence, pisa, siena, perugia. both cities and citizens lived in a nervous storm, and at every impulse passed into furious activity. in five minutes a whole town was up in the market-place, the bells rang, the town banner was displayed, and in an hour the citizens were marching out of the gates to attack the neighbouring city. a single gibe in the streets, or at the church door, interchanged between one noble and another of opposite factions, and the gutters of the streets ran red with the blood of a hundred men. this then was the time of _sordello_, and splendidly has browning represented it. . sordello is the image of this curiosity and individuality, but only inwardly. in the midst of this turbulent society browning creates him with the temperament of a poet, living in a solitary youth, apart from arms and the wild movement of the world. his soul is full of the curiosity of the time. the inquisition of his whole life is, "what is the life most worth living? how shall i attain it, in what way make it mine?" and then, "what sort of lives are lived by other men?" and, finally, "what is the happiest life for the whole?" the curiosity does not drive him, like the rest of the world, into action in the world. it expands only in thought and dreaming. but however he may dream, however wrapt in self he may be, his curiosity about these matters never lessens for a moment. even in death it is his ruling passion. along with this he shares fully in the impassioned individuality of the time. browning brings that forward continually. all the dreams of his youth centre in himself; nature becomes the reflection of himself; all histories of great men he represents as in himself; finally, he becomes to himself apollo, the incarnation of poetry. but he does not seek to realise his individuality, any more than his curiosity, in action. when he is drawn out of himself at mantua and sings for a time to please men, he finds that the public do not understand him, and flies back to his solitude, back to his own soul. and mantua, and love, and adventure all die within him. "i have all humanity," he says, "within myself--why then should i seek humanity?" this is the way the age's passion for individuality shows itself in him. other men put it into love, war, or adventure. he does not; he puts it into the lonely building-up of his own soul. even when he is brought into the midst of the action of the time we see that he is apart from it. as he wanders through the turmoil of the streets of ferrara in book iv., he is dreaming still of his own life, of his own soul. his curiosity, wars and adventures are within. the various lives he is anxious to live are lived in lonely imaginations. the individuality he realises is in thought. at this point then he is apart from his century--an exceptional temperament set in strong contrast to the world around him--the dreamer face to face with a mass of men all acting with intensity. and the common result takes place; the exceptional breaks down against the steady and terrible pull of the ordinary. it is hamlet over again, and when sordello does act it is just as hamlet does, by a sudden impulse which lifts him from dreaming into momentary action, out of which, almost before he has realised he is acting, he slips back again into dreams. and his action seems to him the dream, and his dream the activity. that saying of hamlet's would be easy on the lips of sordello, if we take "bad dreams" to mean for him what they meant for hamlet the moment he is forced to action in the real world--"i could be bounded in a nut-shell and think myself king of infinite space, had i not bad dreams." when he is surprised into action at the court of love at mantua, and wins the prize of song, he seems to slip back into a sleepy cloud. but palma, bending her beautiful face over him and giving him her scarf, wins him to stay at mantua; and for a short time he becomes the famous poet. but he is disappointed. that which he felt himself to be (the supernal greatness of his individuality) is not recognised, and at last he feels that to act and fight his way through a world which appreciates his isolated greatness so little as to dare to criticise him, is impossible. we have seen in the last chapter how he slips back to goito, to his contemplation of himself in nature, to his self-communion, to the dreams which do not contradict his opinion of himself. the momentary creator perishes in the dreamer. he gives up life, adventure, love, war, and he finally surrenders his art. no more poetry for him. it is thus that a character feeble for action, but mystic in imagination, acts in the petulance of youth when it is pushed into a clashing, claiming world. in this mood a year passes by in vague content. yet a little grain of conscience makes him sour. he is vexed that his youth is gone with all its promised glow, pleasure and action; and the vexation is suddenly deepened by seeing a great change in the aspect of nature. "what," he thinks, when he sees the whole valley filled with mincio in flood, "can nature in this way renew her youth, and not i? alas! i cannot so renew myself; youth is over." but if youth be dead, manhood remains; and the curiosity and individuality of the age stir in him again. "i must find," he thinks, "the fitting kind of life. i must make men feel what i am. but how; what do i want for this? i want some outward power to draw me forth and upward, as the moon draws the waters; to lead me to a life in which i may know mankind, in order that i may take out of men all i need to make _myself_ into perfect form--a full poet, able to impose my genius on mankind, and to lead them where i will. what force can draw me out of these dreaming solitudes in which i fail to realise my art? why, there is none so great as love. palma who smiled on me, she shall be my moon." at that moment, when he is again thrilled with curiosity concerning life, again desirous to realise his individuality in the world of men, a message comes from palma. "come, there is much for you to do--come to me at verona." she lays a political career before him. "take the kaiser's cause, you and i together; build a new italy under the emperor." and sordello is fired by the thought, not as yet for the sake of doing good to man, but to satisfy his curiosity in a new life, and to edify his individual soul into a perfection unattained as yet. "i will go," he thinks, "and be the spirit in this body of mankind, wield, animate, and shape the people of italy, make them the form in which i shall express myself. it is not enough to act, in imagination, all that man is, as i have done. i will now make men act by the force of my spirit: north italy shall be my body, and thus i shall realise myself"--as if one could, with that self-contemplating motive, ever realise personality. this, then, is the position of sordello in the period of history i have pictured, and it carries him to the end of the third book of the poem. it has embodied the history of his youth--of his first contact with the world; of his retreat from it into thought over what he has gone through; and of his reawakening into a fresh questioning--how he shall realise life, how manifest himself in action. "what shall i do as a poet, and a man?" . the next thing to be said of _sordello_ is its vivid realisation of certain aspects of mediæval life. behind this image of the curious dreamer lost in abstractions, and vividly contrasted with it, is the fierce activity of mediæval cities and men in incessant war; each city, each man eager to make his own individuality supreme; and this is painted by browning at the very moment when the two great parties were formed, and added to personal war the intensifying power of two ideals. this was a field for imagination in which browning was sure to revel, like a wild creature of the woods on a summer day. he had the genius of places, of portraiture, and of sudden flashes of action and passion; and the time of which he wrote supplied him with full matter for these several capacities of genius. when we read in _sordello_ of the fierce outbursts of war in the cities of north italy, we know that browning saw them with his eyes and shared their fury and delight. verona is painted in the first book just as the news arrives that her prince is captive in ferrara. it is evening, a still and flaming sunset, and soft sky. in dreadful contrast to this burning silence of nature is the wrath and hate which are seething in the market-place. group talked with restless group, and not a face but wrath made livid, for among them were death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care to feast him. fear had long since taken root in every breast, and now these crushed its fruit, the ripe hate, like a wine; to note the way it worked while each grew drunk! men grave and grey stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro, letting the silent luxury trickle slow about the hollows where a heart should be; but the young gulped with a delirious glee some foretaste of their first debauch in blood at the fierce news. step by step the varying passions, varying with the men of the varied cities of the league assembled at verona, are smitten out on the anvil of browning's imagination. better still is the continuation of the same scene in the third book, when the night has come, and the raging of the people, reaching its height, declares war. palma and sordello, who are in the palace looking on the square, lean out to see and hear. on the black balcony beneath them, in the still air, amid a gush of torch-fire, the grey-haired counsellors harangue the people; then sea-like that people surging to and fro shouted, "hale forth the carroch--trumpets, ho, a flourish! run it in the ancient grooves! back from the bell! hammer--that whom behoves may hear the league is up!" then who will may read the dazzling account of the streets of ferrara thick with corpses; of padua, of bassano streaming blood; of the wells chokeful of carrion, of him who catches in his spur, as he is kicking his feet when he sits on the well and singing, his own mother's face by the grey hair; of the sack of vicenza in the fourth book; of the procession of the envoys of the league through the streets of ferrara, with ensigns, war-cars and clanging bells; of the wandering of sordello at night through the squares blazing with fires, and the soldiers camped around them singing and shouting; of his solitary silent thinking contrasted with their noise and action--and he who reads will know, as if he lived in them, the fierce italian towns of the thirteenth century. nor is his power less when he describes the solitary silent places of mediæval castles, palaces, and their rooms; of the long, statue-haunted, cypress-avenued gardens, a waste of flowers and wild undergrowth. we wander, room by room, through adelaide's castle at goito, we see every beam in the ceiling, every figure on the tapestry; we walk with browning through the dark passages into the dim-lighted chambers of the town palace at verona, and hang over its balconies; we know the gardens at goito, and the lonely woods; and we keep pace with sordello through those desolate paths and ilex-groves, past the fountains lost in the wilderness of foliage, climbing from terrace to terrace where the broken statues, swarming with wasps, gleam among the leering aloes and the undergrowth, in the garden that salinguerra made for his sicilian wife at ferrara. the words seem as it were to flare the ancient places out before the eyes. mixed up with all this painting of towns, castles and gardens there is some natural description. browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that within the mediæval sentiment. but that he should succeed in that was impossible. the mediæval folk had little of our specialised sentiment for landscape, and browning could not get rid of it. the modern philosophies of nature do not, however, appear in _sordello_ as they did in _pauline_ or _paracelsus_. only once in the whole of _sordello_ is nature conceived as in analogy with man, and browning says this in a parenthesis. "life is in the tempest," he cries, "thought "clothes the keen hill-top; mid-day woods are fraught with fervours": but, in spite of the mediæval environment, the modern way of seeing nature enters into all his descriptions. they are none the worse for it, and do not jar too much with the mediæval _mise-en-scène_. we expect our modern sentiment, and sordello himself, being in many ways a modern, seems to license these descriptions. most of them also occur when he is on the canvas, and are a background to his thought. moreover, they are not set descriptions; they are flashed out, as it were, in a few lines, as if they came by chance, and are not pursued into detail. indeed, they are not done so much for the love of nature herself, as for passing illustrations of sordello's ways of thought and feeling upon matters which are not nature. as such, even in a mediæval poem, they are excusable. and vivid they are in colour, in light, in reality. some i have already isolated. here are a few more, just to show his hand. this is the castle and its scenery, described in book i.: in mantua territory half is slough, half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks breed o'er the river-beds; even mincio chokes with sand the summer through: but 'tis morass in winter up to mantua's walls. there was, some thirty years before this evening's coil, one spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil, goito; just a castle built amid a few low mountains; firs and larches hid their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound the rest. some captured creature in a pound, whose artless wonder quite precludes distress, secure beside in its own loveliness, so peered, with airy head, below, above the castle at its toils, the lapwings love to glean among at grape time. and this is the same place from the second book: and thus he wandered, dumb till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent on a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went, yielding himself up as to an embrace. the moon came out; like features of a face, a querulous fraternity of pines, sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines also came out, made gradually up the picture; 'twas goito's mountain-cup and castle. and here, from book iii., is spring when palma, dreaming of the man she can love, cries that the waking earth is in a thrill to welcome him-- "waits he not the waking year? his almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe by this; to welcome him fresh runnels stripe the thawed ravines; because of him the wind walks like a herald." this is may from book ii.; and afterwards, in the third book, the months from spring to summer-- my own month came; 'twas a sunrise of blossoming and may. beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay sordello; each new sprinkle of white stars that smell fainter of wine than massic jars dug up at baiæ, when the south wind shed the ripest, made him happier. not any strollings now at even-close down the field path, sordello! by thorn-rows alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire and dew, outlining the black cypress-spire she waits you at, elys, who heard you first woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst answer 'twas april. linden-flower-time long her eyes were on the ground; 'tis july, strong now; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm the woodside, here, or by the village elm that holds the moon, she meets you, somewhat pale. and here are two pieces of the morning, one of the wide valley of naples; another with which the poem ends, pure modern, for it does not belong to sordello's time, but to our own century. this is from the fourth book. broke morning o'er earth; he yearned for all it woke-- from the volcano's vapour-flag, winds hoist black o'er the spread of sea,--down to the moist dale's silken barley-spikes sullied with rain, swayed earthwards, heavily to rise again. and this from the last book-- lo, on a heathy brown and nameless hill by sparkling asolo, in mist and chill, morning just up, higher and higher runs a child barefoot and rosy. see! the sun's on the square castle's inner-court's low wall like the chine of some extinct animal half-turned to earth and flowers; and through the haze, (save where some slender patches of grey maize are to be over-leaped) that boy has crossed the whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost matting the balm and mountain camomile. up and up goes he, singing all the while some unintelligible words to beat the lark, god's poet, swooning at his feet. as alive, and even clearer in outline than these natural descriptions, are the portraits in _sordello_ of the people of the time. no one can mistake them for modern folk. i do not speak of the portrait of sordello--that is chiefly of the soul, not of the body--but of the personages who fill the background, the heads of noble houses, the warriors, priests, soldiers, singers, the women, and chiefly adelaide and palma. these stand before us as tintoret or veronese might have painted them had they lived on into the great portrait-century. their dress, their attitudes, their sudden gestures, their eyes, hair, the trick of their mouths, their armour, how they walked and talked and read and wrote, are all done in quick touches and jets of colour. each is distinct from the others, each a type. a multitude of cabinet sketches of men are made in the market-places, in castle rooms, on the roads, in the gardens, on the bastions of the towns. take as one example the pope's legate: with eyes, like fresh-blown thrush-eggs on a thread, faint-blue and loosely floating in his head, large tongue, moist open mouth; and this long while that owner of the idiotic smile serves them! nor does browning confine himself to personages of sordello's time. there are admirable portraits, but somewhat troubled by unnecessary matter, of dante, of charlemagne, of hildebrand. one elaborate portrait is continued throughout the poem. it is that of salinguerra, the man of action as contrasted with sordello the dreamer. much pains are spent on this by browning. we see him first in the streets of ferrara. men understood living was pleasant to him as he wore his careless surcoat, glanced some missive o'er, propped on his truncheon in the public way. then at the games at mantua, when he is told sordello will not come to sing a welcome to him. what cares he for poet's whims? the easy-natured soldier smiled assent, settled his portly person, smoothed his chin, and nodded that the bull-bait might begin. then mad with fighting frenzy in the sacking of vicenza, then in his palace nursing his scheme to make the emperor predominant, then pacing like a lion, hot with hope of mastering all italy, when he finds out that sordello is his son: "hands clenched, head erect, pursuing his discourse--crimson ear, eyeballs suffused, temples full fraught." then in the fourth book there is a long portrait of him which i quote as a full specimen of the power with which browning could paint a partisan of the thirteenth century. though sixty years old, salinguerra looked like a youth-- so agile, quick and graceful turned the head on the broad chest encased in pliant steel, his constant vest, whence split the sun off in a spray of fire across the room; and, loosened of its tire of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown large massive locks discoloured as if a crown encircled them, so frayed the basnet where a sharp white line divided clean the hair; glossy above, glossy below, it swept curling and fine about a brow thus kept calm, laid coat upon coat, marble and sound: this was the mystic mark the tuscan found, mused of, turned over books about. square-faced, no lion more; two vivid eyes, enchased in hollows filled with many a shade and streak settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek. nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed a lip supremely perfect else--unwarmed, unwidened, less or more; indifferent whether on trees or men his thoughts were bent, thoughts rarely, after all, in trim and train as now a period was fulfilled again: of such, a series made his life, compressed in each, one story serving for the rest. this is one example of a gallery of vivid portraiture in all browning's work, such as carlyle only in the nineteenth century has approached in england. it is not a national, but an international gallery of portraits. the greater number of the portraits are italian, and they range over all classes of society from the pope to the peasant. even bishop blougram has the italian subtlety, and, like the monsignore in _pippa passes_, something of the politic morality of machiavelli. but israel, greece, france, spain, germany, and the days before the world was brought together, furnish him with men drawn as alive. he has painted their souls, but others have done this kind of painting as well, if not so minutely. but no others have painted so livingly the outside of men--their features one by one, their carriage, their gestures, their clothing, their walk, their body. all the colours of their dress and eyes and lips are given. we see them live and move and have their being. it is the same with his women, but i keep these for further treatment. . the next thing i have to say about _sordello_ concerns what i call its illustrative episodes. browning, wishing to illuminate his subject, sometimes darts off from it into an elaborate simile as homer does. but in homer the simile is carefully set, and explained to be a comparison. it is not mixed up with the text. it is short, rarely reaching more than ten lines. in browning, it is glided into without any preparation, and at first seems part of the story. nor are we always given any intimation of its end. and browning is led away by his imaginative pleasure in its invention to work it up with adventitious ornament of colour and scenery; having, in his excitement of invention, lost all power of rejecting any additional touch which occurs to him, so that the illustration, swelling out into a preposterous length, might well be severed from the book and made into a separate poem. moreover, these long illustrations are often but faintly connected with the subject they are used to illumine; and they delay the movement of the poem while they confuse the reader. the worst of these, worst as an illustration, but in itself an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem, is the illustration of the flying slave who seeks his tribe beyond the mountains of the moon. it is only to throw light on a moment of salinguerra's discursive thought, and is far too big for that. it is more like an episode than an illustration. i quote it not only to show what i mean, but also for its power. it is in bk. iv. "as, shall i say, some ethiop, past pursuit of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black enormous watercourse which guides him back to his own tribe again, where he is king; and laughs because he guesses, numbering the yellower poison-wattles on the pouch of the first lizard wrested from its couch under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips to cure his nostril with, and festered lips, and eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast) that he has reached its boundary, at last may breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the south sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth, eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried in fancy, puts them soberly aside for truth, projects a cool return with friends, the likelihood of winning mere amends ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently, then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he, hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon off-striding for the mountains of the moon." the best of these is where he illustrates the restless desire of a poet for the renewal of energy, for finding new worlds to sing. the poet often seems to stop his work, to be satisfied. "here i will rest," he says, "and do no more." but he only waits for a fresh impulse. 'tis but a sailor's promise, weather-bound: "strike sail, slip cable, here the bark be moored for once, the awning stretched, the poles assured! noontide above; except the wave's crisp dash, or buzz of colibri, or tortoise' splash, the margin's silent: out with every spoil made in our tracking, coil by mighty coil, this serpent of a river to his head i' the midst! admire each treasure, as we spread the bank, to help us tell our history aright; give ear, endeavour to descry the groves of giant rushes, how they grew like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through, what mountains yawned, forests to give us vent opened, each doleful side, yet on we went till ... may that beetle (shake your cap) attest the springing of a land-wind from the west!" --wherefore? ah yes, you frolic it to-day! to-morrow, and the pageant moved away down to the poorest tent-pole, we and you part company: no other may pursue eastward your voyage, be informed what fate intends, if triumph or decline await the tempter of the everlasting steppe! this, from book iii., is the best because it is closer than the rest to the matter in hand; but how much better it might have been! how curiously overloaded it is, how difficult what is easy has been made! the fault of these illustrations is the fault of the whole poem. _sordello_ is obscure, browning's idolaters say, by concentration of thought. it is rather obscure by want of that wise rejection of unnecessary thoughts which is the true concentration. it is obscure by a reckless misuse of the ordinary rules of language. it is obscure by a host of parentheses introduced to express thoughts which are only suggested, half-shaped, and which are frequently interwoven with parentheses introduced into the original parentheses. it is obscure by the worst punctuation i ever came across, but this was improved in the later editions. it is obscure by multitudinous fancies put in whether they have to do with the subject or not, and by multitudinous deviations within those fancies. it is obscure by browning's effort to make words express more than they are capable of expressing. it is no carping criticism to say this of browning's work in _sordello_, because it is the very criticism his after-practice as an artist makes. he gave up these efforts to force, like procrustes, language to stretch itself or to cut itself down into forms it could not naturally take; and there is no more difficulty in most of his earlier poems than there is in _paracelsus_. only a little of the sordellian agonies remains in them, only that which was natural to browning's genius. the interwoven parentheses remain, the rushes of invention into double and triple illustrations, the multiplication of thought on thought; but for these we may even be grateful. opulence and plenitude of this kind are not common; we are not often granted a man who flings imaginations, fancies and thoughts from him as thick and bright as sparks from a grinder's wheel. it is not every poet who is unwilling to leave off, who finds himself too full to stop. "these bountiful wits," as lamb said, "always give full measure, pressed down, and running over." footnotes: [ ] browning spells this name _ecelin_, probably for easier use in verse. * * * * * chapter vii _browning and sordello_ there are certain analogies between browning as a poet and the sordello of the poem; between his relation to the world of his time and that of sordello to his time; and finally, between browning's language in this poem and the change in the italian language which he imputes to the work of sordello. this chapter will discuss these analogies, and close with an appreciation of browning's position between the classic and romantic schools of poetry. the analogies of which i write may be denied, but i do not think they can be disproved. browning is, no doubt, separate from sordello in his own mind, but underneath the young poet he is creating, he is continually asking himself the same question which sordello asks--what shall i do as an artist? to what conclusion shall i come with regard to my life as a poet? it is no small proof of this underlying personal element in the first three books of the poem that at the end of the third book browning flings himself suddenly out of the mediæval world and the men he has created, and waking into - at venice, asks himself--what am i writing, and why? what is my aim in being a poet? is it worth my while to go on with sordello's story, and why is it worth the telling? in fact, he allows us to think that he has been describing in sordello's story a transitory phase of his own career. and then, having done this, he tells how he got out of confusion into clearer light. the analogy between browning's and sordello's time is not a weak one. the spirit of the world, between and in england, resembled in many ways the spirit abroad at the beginning of the thirteenth century. the country had awakened out of a long sleep, and was extraordinarily curious not only with regard to life and the best way to live it, but also with regard to government, law, the condition of the people, the best kind of religion and how best to live it, the true aims of poetry and how it was to be written, what subjects it should work on, what was to be the mother-motive of it, that is, what was the mother-motive of all the arts. and this curiosity deepened from year to year for fifty years. but even stronger than the curiosity was the eager individualism of this time, which extended into every sphere of human thought and action, and only began about to be balanced by an equally strong tendency towards collectivism. these two elements in the time-spirit did not produce, in a settled state like england, the outward war and confusion they produced in the thirteenth century, though they developed after , in ' , into a european storm--but they did produce a confused welter of mingled thoughts concerning the sources and ends of human life, the action it should take, and why it should take it. the poetry of arnold and clough represents with great clearness the further development in the soul of man of this confusion. i think that browning has represented in the first three books of _sordello_ his passage through this tossing sea of thought. he had put into _paracelsus_ all that he had worked out with clearness during his youth; his theory of life is stated with lucidity in that poem. but when it was finished, and he had entered, like sordello from goito into mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having published _pauline_ and _paracelsus_, he had, like sordello, met criticism and misunderstanding, his paracelsian theory did not seem to explain humanity as clearly as he imagined. it was only a theory; would it stand the test of life among mankind, be a saving and healing prophecy? life lay before him, now that the silent philosophising of poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable, hurried, tormented, involved, and multitudinously varied movement. he had built up a transcendental building[ ] in _paracelsus_. was it all to fall in ruin? no answer came when he looked forth on humanity over whose landscape the irony of the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood. at what then shall he aim as a poet? what shall be his subject-matter? how is life to be lived? then he thought that he would, as a poet, describe his own time and his own soul under the character of sordello, and place sordello in a time more stormy than his own. and he would make sordello of an exceptional temper like himself, and to clash with _his_ time as he was then clashing with his own. with these thoughts he wrote the first books of _sordello_, and naddo, the critic of sordello's verses, represents the critics of paracelsus and the early poems. i have experienced, he says of himself in _sordello_, something of the spite of fate. then, having done this, he leaves sordello at the end of the third book, and turns, beset with a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a personal digression. reclining on a ruined palace-step at venice, he thinks of eglamor who made a flawless song, the type of those who reach their own perfection here; and then of sordello who made a song which stirred the world far more than eglamor's, which yet was not flawless, not perfect; but because of its imperfection looked forward uncontented to a higher song. shall he, browning the poet, choose eglamor or sordello; even though sordello perish without any achievement? and he chooses to sail for ever towards the infinite, chooses the imperfection which looks forward. a sailor who loves voyaging may say, when weather-bound, "here rest, unlade the ship, sleep on this grassy bank." 'tis but a moment on his path; let the wind change, and he is away again, whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever the tempter of the everlasting steppe. that much is then settled for life and for poetry. and in that choice of endless aspiration browning confirms all that he thought, with regard to half of his theory of life, in _paracelsus_. this is his first thought for life, and it is embodied in the whole of sordello's career. sordello is never content with earth, either when he is young, or when he passes into the world, or when he dies not having attained or been already perfect--a thought which is as much at the root of romanticism as of christianity. then comes the further question: to whom shall i dedicate the service of my art? who shall be my motive, the queen whom i shall love and write of; and he thinks of sordello who asks that question and who, for the time, answers "palma," that is, the passion of love. "but now, shall i, browning, take as my queen"--and he symbolises his thought in the girls he sees in the boats from his palace steps--"that girl from bassano, or from asolo, or her from padua; that is, shall i write of youth's love, of its tragic or its comedy, of its darkness, joy and beauty only? no, he answers, not of that stuff shall i make my work, but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl, half in rags, with eyes inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing, piteous, and pitiful humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded love in the street corners. she shall be my queen, the subject of my song, the motive of my poetry. she may be guilty, warped awry from her birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and i shall comfort her. she is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her errors prove that she has another world in which, the errors being worked through, she will develop into perfectness. slowly she moves, step by step; but not a millionth part is here done of what she will do at last. that is the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite change and hopes, i shall express in my work. i shall see it, say what i have seen, and it may be impart the gift of seeing to the rest. therefore i have made sordello, thus far, with all his weakness and wrong-- moulded, made anew a man, and give him to be turned and tried, be angry with or pleased at." and then browning severs himself from sordello. after this retirement of thought into himself, described as taking place in venice during an hour, but i dare say ranging over half a year in reality, he tells the rest of sordello's story from the outside, as a spectator and describer. browning has now resolved to dedicate his art, which is his life, to love of humanity, of that pale dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely, evil and good; and to tell the story of individual men and women, and of as many as possible; to paint the good which is always mixed with their evil; to show that their failures and sins point to a success and goodness beyond, because they emerged from aspiration and aspiration from the divinity at the root of human nature. but to do this, a poet must not live like sordello, in abstractions, nor shrink from the shock of men and circumstance, nor refuse to take men and life as they are--but throw himself into the vital present, with its difficulties, baffling elements and limitations; take its failures for his own; go through them while he looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease to fight his way onward. and, to support him in this, there is but one thing--infinite love, pity, and sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure and despairs of men. this is browning's second thought for life. but this is the very thing sordello, as conceived by browning, did not and could not do. he lived in abstractions and in himself; he tried to discard his human nature, or to make it bear more than it could bear. he threw overboard the natural physical life of the body because it limited, he thought, the outgoings of the imaginative soul, and only found that in weakening the body he enfeebled the soul. at every point he resented the limits of human life and fought against them. neither would he live in the world allotted to him, nor among the men of his time, nor in its turmoil; but only in imagination of his own inner world, among men whom he created for himself, of which world he was to be sole king. he had no love for men; they wearied, jarred, and disturbed his ideal world. all he wanted was their applause or their silence, not their criticism, not their affection. and of course human love and sympathy for men and insight into them, departed from him, and with them his art departed. he never became a true poet. it is this failure, passing through several phases of life in which action is demanded of sordello, that browning desired to record in the last three books of the poem. and he thinks it worth doing because it is human, and the record of what is human is always of worth to man. he paints sordello's passage through phase after phase of thought and act in the outside world, in all of which he seems for the moment to succeed or to touch the verge of success, but in which his neglect of the needs of the body and the uncontentment of his soul produce failure. at last, at the very moment of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as through a glass darkly, the failure making the success of the world to come. the revelation bursts his heart. and now what is the end, what is the result for man of this long striving of sordello? nothing! nothing has been done. yet no, there is one result. the imperfect song he made when he was young at goito, in the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of nature--that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill. this is the outcome of sordello's life, and it sounds like irony on browning's lips. it is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and is of another kind. here, the conclusion is,--that the poem, or any work of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and makes happy the world. and it has its divine origin in the artist's loss of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with humanity, in union with god the eternal poet. in this is hidden the life of an artist's greatness. and here the little song, which gives joy to a child, and fits in with and enhances its joy, is greater in the eyes of the immortal judges than all the glory of the world which sordello sought so long for himself alone. it is a truth browning never failed to record, the greatness and power of the things of love; for, indeed, love being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest expression the glory of all its qualities. the second of these analogies between browning and sordello relates to browning's treatment of the english language in the poem of _sordello_ and what he pictures sordello as doing for the italian language in the poem. the passage to which i refer is about half-way in the second book. as there is no real ground for representing sordello as working any serious change in the italian tongue of literature except a slight phrase in a treatise of dante's, the representation is manifestly an invention of browning's added to the character of sordello as conceived by himself. as such it probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own experience. the sordello who acts thus with language represents the action of browning himself at the time he was writing the poem. if so, the passage is full of interest. all we know about sordello as a poet is that he wrote some italian poems. those by which he was famous were in provençal. in dante's treatise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests that sordello was one of the pioneers of literary italian. so, at least, browning seems to infer from the passage, for he makes it the motive of his little "excursus" on sordello's presumed effort to strike out a new form and method in poetic language. nothing was more needed than such an effort if any fine literature were to arise in italy. in this unformed but slowly forming thirteenth century the language was in as great a confusion--and, i may say, as individual (for each poet wrote in his own dialect) as the life of the century. what does browning make sordello do? he has brought him to mantua as the accepted master of song; and sordello burns to be fully recognised as the absolute poet. he has felt for some time that while he cannot act well he can imagine action well. and he sings his imaginations. but there is at the root of his singing a love of the applause of the people more than a love of song for itself. and he fails to please. so sordello changes his subject and sings no longer of himself in the action of the heroes he imagines, but of abstract ideas, philosophic dreams and problems. the very critics cried that he had left human nature behind him. vexed at his failure, and still longing to catch the praise of men, that he may confirm his belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he makes another effort to amaze the world. "i'll write no more of imaginary things," he cries; "i will catch the crowd by reorganising the language of poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words, by elaborate phraseology, especially by careful concentration of thought into the briefest possible frame of words. i will take the stuff of thought--that is, the common language--beat it on the anvil into new shapes, break down the easy flow of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe of the original words i have written to see the light, welding words into the crude mass from the new speech round him, till a rude armour was hammered out, in time to be approved beyond the roman panoply melted to make it." that is, he dissolved the roman dialect to beat out of it an italian tongue. and in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts. but the language broke away from his thoughts: neither expressed them nor made them clear. the people failed to understand his thought, and at the new ways of using language the critics sneered. "do get back," they said, "to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple language of the people." i do not think that the analogy can be missed. browning is really describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _sordello_ for the language in which his poetry was to be written. i have said that when he came to write _sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory of life laid down in _paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled thoughts; and _sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down, now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone is blowing. or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing of _sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. that partly accounts for the confused recklessness of the language of the poem. but a great many of the tricks browning now played with his poetic language were deliberately done. he had tried--like sordello at the court of love--a love-poem in _pauline_. it had not succeeded. he had tried in _paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as sordello had tried writing on abstract imaginings. that also had failed. now he determined--as he represents sordello doing--to alter his whole way of writing. "i will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say i am too loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all i write, and leave out every word i can possibly omit. i will not express completely what i think; i shall only suggest it by an illustration. and if anything occur to me likely to illuminate it, i shall not add it afterwards but insert it in a parenthesis. i will make a new tongue for my poetry." and the result was the style and the strange manner in which _sordello_ was written. this partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an excuse for a bad manner in literature. malice prepense does not excuse a murder, though it makes it more interesting. finally, the manner in which _sordello_ was written did not please him. he left it behind him, and _pippa passes_, which followed _sordello_, is as clear and simple as its predecessor is obscure in style. thirdly, the language of _sordello_, and, in a lesser degree, that of all browning's poetry, proves--if his whole way of thought and passion did not also prove it--that browning was not a classic, that he deliberately put aside the classic traditions in poetry. in this he presents a strong contrast to tennyson. tennyson was possessed by those traditions. his masters were homer, vergil, milton and the rest of those who wrote with measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose poetry proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity, of clearness, of simplicity; who were reticent in ornament, in illustration, and stern in rejection of unnecessary material. none of these classic excellences belong to browning, nor did he ever try to gain them, and that was, perhaps, a pity. but, after all, it would have been of no use had he tried for them. we cannot impose from without on ourselves that which we have not within; and browning was, in spirit, a pure romantic, not a classic. tennyson never allowed what romanticism he possessed to have its full swing. it always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to the classic traditions, used the classic forms. in the _idylls of the king_ he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the morality, and the conduct of the poem. the arthurian poets, malory himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with indignation, had they read it. and a great deal of this oddity, this unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions. of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem, but that was one, and not the least of them. browning had none of these classic traditions. he had his own matter, quite new stuff it was; and he made his own manner. he did not go back to the old stories, but, being filled with the romantic spirit, embodied it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took them from ancient, mediæval, renaissance, or modern life. he felt, and truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs, the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to which besets the classic literature. browning had the natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most remarkable when such a poet is young. the faults are the opposites of the classic poet's excellences: want of measure, want of proportion, want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop. and these frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition, huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity, sought-out even desperate strangeness of subject and expression, uncompromising individuality, crude ornament, and fierce colour. many examples of these faults are to be found in _sordello_ and throughout the work of browning. they are the extremes into which the romantic is frequently hurried. but, then, browning has the natural gifts and excellences of the romantic poet, and these elements make him dearer than the mere classic to a multitude of imaginative persons. one of them is endless and impassioned curiosity, for ever unsatisfied, always finding new worlds of thought and feeling into which to make dangerous and thrilling voyages of discovery--voyages that are filled from end to end with incessantly changing adventure, or delight in that adventure. this enchants the world. and it is not only in his subjects that the romantic poet shows his curiosity. he is just as curious of new methods of tragedy, of lyric work, of every mode of poetry; of new ways of expressing old thoughts; new ways of treating old metres; of the invention of new metres and new ways of phrasing; of strange and startling word-combinations, to clothe fittingly the strange and startling things discovered in human nature, in one's own soul, or in the souls of others. in ancient days such a temper produced the many tales of invention which filled the romantic cycles. again and again, from century to century, this romantic spirit has done its re-creating work in the development of poetry in france, germany, italy, spain, and england. and in , and for many years afterwards, it produced in browning, and for our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he called them; his psychological studies, which i may well call excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats, discoveries of the soul; for in the soul of man lay, for browning, the forest of broceliande, the wild country of morgan le fay, the cliffs and moors of lyonnesse. it was there, over that unfooted country, that childe roland rode to the dark tower. nor can anything be more in the temper of old spiritual romance--though with a strangely modern _mise-en-scène_--than the great adventure on the dark common with christ in _christmas-eve and easter-day_. another root of the romantic spirit was the sense of, and naturally the belief in, a world not to be felt of the senses or analysed by the understanding; which was within the apparent world as its substance or soul, or beyond it as the power by which it existed; and this mystic belief took, among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors and the common people, a thousand forms, ranging from full-schemed philosophies to the wildest superstitions. it tended, in its extremes, to make this world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a real life when it habitually dwelt in the mystic region mortal eye could not see, whose voices mortal ear could not receive. out of this root, which shot its first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance. out of it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even now arising among the poets of to-day. in browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of man it scarcely appears. nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic. he had too much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism. but one part of its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work. it is that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all ages ran up, as into a goal--the conception of a perfect world, beyond this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of humanity--baffled, limited, and ruined here--should be fulfilled and satisfied. the greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though plato outreached towards it; the romans had it not, though vergil seems to have touched it in hours of inspiration. the teutonic folk did not possess it till christianity invaded them. of course, it was alive like a beating heart in christianity, that most romantic of all religions. but the celtic peoples did conceive it before christianity and with a surprising fulness, and wherever they went through europe they pushed it into the thought, passions and action of human life. and out of this conception, which among the irish took form as the land of eternal youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in romance which is perhaps the strongest in it--the hunger for eternity, for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting pursuit of it; and among christian folk for a life here which should fit them for perfect life to come. christian romance threw itself with fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the holy grail is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection. browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work. from _pauline_ to _asolando_ it reigns supreme. it is the fountain-source of _sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem consists. immortal life in god's perfection! into that cry the romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of browning. his heroes, in drama and lyric, in _paracelsus_ and _sordello_, pass into the infinite, there to be completed. and if i may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we ought to take up the _purgatorio_, and see sordello as dante saw him in that flowery valley of the ante-purgatory when he talked with dante and vergil. he is there a very different person from the wavering creature browning drew. he is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in god which browning desired for him and all mankind. nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, browning, in his full idea of life, was not altogether a romantic. he saw there was a great danger that the romantic mysticism might lead its pursuers to neglect the duties of life, or lessen their interest in the drama of mankind. therefore he added to his cry for eternity and perfection, his other cry: "recognise your limitations, and work within them, while you must never be content with them. give yourself in love and patience to the present labour of mankind; but never imagine for a moment that it ends on earth." he thus combined with the thirst of the romantic for eternity the full ethical theory of life, as well as the classic poet's determination to represent the complete aspect of human life on earth. at this point, but with many fantastic deviations due to his prevailing romanticism, he was partly of the classic temper. the poem of _sordello_ is not without an image of this temper, set vigorously in contrast with sordello himself. this is salinguerra, who takes the world as it is, and is only anxious to do what lies before him day by day. his long soliloquy, in which for the moment he indulges in dreams, ends in the simple resolution to fight on, hour by hour, as circumstances call on him. browning's position, then, is a combination of the romantic and classical, of the christian and ethical, of the imaginative and scientific views of human life; of the temper which says, "here only is our life, here only our concern," and that which says, "not here, but hereafter is our life." "here, and hereafter," answered browning. "live within earth's limits with all your force; never give in, fight on; but always transcend your fullest action in aspiration, faith and love." it amuses me sometimes the way he is taken by his readers. the romantic and the christian folk often claim him as the despiser of this world, as one who bids us live wholly for the future, or in the mystic ranges of thought and passion. the scientific, humanitarian, and ethical folk accept that side of him which agrees with their views of human life--views which exclude god, immortality, and a world beyond--that is, they take as the whole of browning the lesser part of his theory of life. this is not creditable to their understanding, though it is natural enough. we may accept it as an innocent example of the power of a strong bias in human nature. but it is well to remember that the romantic, christian, mystic elements of human life are more important in browning's eyes than the ethical or scientific; that the latter are nothing to him without the former; that the best efforts of the latter for humanity are in his belief not only hopeless, but the stuff that dreams are made of, without the former. in the combination of both is browning's message to mankind. footnotes: [ ] he makes a simile of this in _sordello_. see book iii. before his waking up in venice, the lines beginning "rather say my transcendental platan!" * * * * * chapter viii _the dramas_ of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to write dramas in poetry, browning was the most persevering. i suppose that, being conscious of his remarkable power in the representation of momentary action and of states of the soul, he thought that he could harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a number of persons, and of their passions in sword-play with one another; and then conduct to a catastrophe their interaction. but a man may be capable of writing dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances without being capable of writing a drama. indeed, so different are the two capabilities that i think the true dramatist could not write such a lyric or romance as browning calls dramatic; his genius would carry one or the other beyond the just limits of this kind of poetry into his own kind. and the writer of excellent lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real drama. i wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term "dramatic" were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself. i have heard chaucer called dramatic. it is a complete misnomer. his genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama. had he lived in elizabeth's time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one, but he must have failed. the genius for story-telling is just the genius which is incapable of being a fine dramatist. and the opposite is also true. shakespeare, great as his genius was, would not have been able to write a single one of the canterbury tales. he would have been driven into dramatising them. neither tennyson nor browning had dramatic genius--that is, the power to conceive, build, co-ordinate and finish a drama. but they thought they had, and we may pardon them for trying their hand. i can understand the hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men, succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the serious drama, written in poetry. it is a legitimate ambition; but poets should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well. that men like tennyson and browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the master-tragedians of greece have done; who knew their shakespeare, to say nothing of the other elizabethan dramatists; who had seen molière on the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed, and versed; that they, having written a play like _harold_ or _strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so curiously liable to self-deceit. the writing of the first drama is not to be blamed. it would be unnatural not to try one's hand. it is the writing of the others which is amazing in men like tennyson and browning. they ought to have felt, being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic capacity. other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves better. byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have them represented on the stage. he felt they were not fit for that; and, moreover, such scenic poems as _manfred_ and _cain_ were not intended for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense. to write things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a poet's work, and among them, in browning's work, might be classed _in a balcony_, which i suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely call a drama. walter scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most likely to write a drama well--had self-knowledge enough to understand, after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power. wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama. coleridge tried, and staged _remorse_. it failed and deserved to fail. to read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist. even its purple patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it. shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious. one would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least likely of men to write a true drama. yet the _cenci_ approaches that goal, and the fragment of _charles the first_ makes so great a grip on the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature that it should have been finished. yet shelley himself gave it up. he knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power. tennyson and browning did not so easily recognise their limits. they went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural and legitimate, but for the stage. this is a curious psychological problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is browning himself. i wish, having in his mature age read _strafford_ over, and then read his other dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as _strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a dramatist and could not." indeed, it is a pity he did not do this. he was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if he were another man; a thing of which tennyson, who took himself with awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a druid might have walked in the sacred grove of mona, was quite incapable. however, the three important dramas of tennyson are better, as dramas, than browning's. that is natural enough. for browning's dramas were written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed. tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the drama was great, and when his intellect had undergone years of careful training. he studied the composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced songs, like shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and at the same time strove hard to make his own original. he laboured at the history, and _becket_ and _harold_ are painfully historical. history should not master a play, but the play the history. the poet who is betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and _harold_ and _becket_ both suffer from tennyson falling into the hands of those critical historians whom tennyson consulted. nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the imagination, not by dramatic genius, tennyson arrived at a relative success. he did better in these long dramas than coleridge, wordsworth, scott or byron. _queen mary_, _harold_, and _becket_ get along in one's mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire. some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill. we cannot forget the pathetic image of queen mary, which dwells in the mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in _becket_ of the mighty and overshadowing power of rome, claiming as its own possession the soul of the world. but the minor characters; the action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action and circumstance together towards the catastrophe--these things were out of tennyson's reach, and still more out of browning's. they could both build up characters, and browning better than tennyson; they could both set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king's palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and browning more incapable than tennyson. there is another thing to say. the three long dramas of tennyson are better as dramas than the long ones of browning. but the smaller dramatic pieces of browning are much better than the smaller ones of tennyson. _the promise of may_ is bad in dialogue, bad in composition, bad in delineation of character, worst of all in its subject, in its plot, and in its motives. _the cup_, and _the falcon_, a beautiful story beautifully written by boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised, by tennyson. the _robin hood_ play has gracious things in it, but as a drama it is worthless, and it is impossible to forgive tennyson for his fairies. all these small plays are dreadful examples of what a great poet may do when he works in a vehicle--if i may borrow a term from painting--for which he has no natural capacity, but for which he thinks he has. he is then like those sailors, and meets justly the same fate, who think that because they can steer a boat admirably, they can also drive a coach and four. the love scene in _becket_ between rosamund and henry illustrates my meaning. it was a subject in itself that tennyson ought to have done well, and would probably have done well in another form of poetry; but, done in a form for which he had no genius, he did it badly. it is the worst thing in the play. once, however, he did a short drama fairly well. _the cup_ has some dramatic movement, its construction is clear, its verse imaginative, its scenery well conceived; and its motives are simple and easily understood. but then, as in _becket_, irving stood at his right hand, and advised him concerning dramatic changes and situations. its passion is, however, cold; it leaves us unimpressed. on the contrary, browning's smaller dramatic pieces--i cannot call them dramas--are much better than those of tennyson. _pippa passes_, _a soul's tragedy_, _in a balcony_, stand on a much higher level, aim higher, and reach their aim more fully than tennyson's shorter efforts. they have not the qualities which fit them for representation, but they have those which fit them for thoughtful and quiet reading. no one thinks much of the separate personalities; our chief interest is in following browning's imagination as it invents new phases of his subject, and plays like a sword in sunlight, in and out of these phases. as poems of the soul in severe straits, made under a quasi-dramatic form, they reach a high excellence, but all that we like best in them, when we follow them as situations of the soul, we should most dislike when represented on the stage. * * * * * _strafford_ is, naturally, the most immature of the dramas, written while he was still writing _paracelsus_, and when he was very young. it is strange to compare the greater part of its prosaic verse with the rich poetic verse of _paracelsus_; and this further illustrates how much a poet suffers when he writes in a form which is not in his genius. there are only a very few passages in _strafford_ which resemble poetry until we come to the fifth act, where browning passes from the jerky, allusive but rhythmical prose of the previous acts into that talk between strafford and his children which has poetic charm, clearness and grace. the change does not last long, and when hollis, charles and lady carlisle, followed by pym, come in, the whole act is in confusion. nothing is clear, except absence of the clearness required for a drama. but the previous acts are even more obscure; not indeed for their readers, but for hearers in a theatre who--since they are hurried on at once to new matter--are forced to take in on the instant what the dramatist means. it would be impossible to tell at first hearing what the chopped-up sentences, the interrupted phrases, the interjected "nots" and "buts" and "yets" are intended to convey. the conversation is mangled. this vice does not prevail in the other dramas to the same extent as in _strafford_. browning had learnt his lesson, i suppose, when he saw _strafford_ represented. but it sorely prevails in _colombe's birthday_. strafford is brought before us as a politician, as the leader of the king's side in an austere crisis of england's history. the first scene puts the great quarrel forward as the ground on which the drama is to be wrought. an attempt is made to represent the various elements of the popular storm in the characters of pym, hampden, the younger vane and others, and especially in the relations between pym and strafford, who are set over, one against the other, with some literary power. but the lines on which the action is wrought are not simple. no audience could follow the elaborate network of intrigue which, in browning's effort to represent too much of the history, he has made so confused. strong characterisation perishes in this effort to write a history rather than a drama. what we chiefly see of the crisis is a series of political intrigues at the court carried out by base persons, of whom the queen is the basest, to ruin strafford; the futility of strafford's sentimental love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; strafford's blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the parliament house, and the contemptible meanness of charles. the low intrigues of the court leave the strongest impression on the mind, not the mighty struggle, not the fate of the monarchy and its dark supporter. browning tries--as if he had forgotten that which should have been first in his mind--to lift the main struggle into importance in the last act, but he fails. that which ought to be tragic is merely sentimental. indeed, sentimentality is the curse of the play. strafford's love of the king is almost maudlin. the scenes between strafford and pym in which their ancient friendship is introduced are over-sentimentalised, not only for their characters, but for the great destinies at stake. even at the last, when pym and strafford forgive each other and speak of meeting hereafter, good sense is violated, and the natural dignity of the scene, and the characters of the men. strafford is weaker here, if that were possible, than he is in the rest of the drama. nothing can be more unlike the man. pym is intended to be especially strong. he is made a blusterer. he was a gentleman, but in this last scene he is hateful. as to charles, he was always a selfish liar, but he was not a coward, and a coward he becomes in this play. he, too, is sentimentalised by his uxoriousness. lady carlisle is invented. i wish she had not been. stratford's misfortunes were deep enough without having her in love with him. i do not believe, moreover, that any woman in the whole world from the very beginning was ever so obscure in her speech to the man she loves as lady carlisle was to strafford. and the motive of her obscurity--that if she discloses the king's perfidy she robs strafford of that which is dearest to him--his belief in the king's affection for him--is no doubt very fine, but the woman was either not in love who argued in that way, or a fool; for strafford knew, and lets her understand that he knew, the treachery of the king. but browning meant her to be in love, and to be clever. * * * * * the next play browning wrote, undeterred by the fate of _strafford_, was _king victor and king charles_. the subject is historical, but it is modified by browning, quite legitimately, to suit his own purposes. in itself the plot is uninteresting. king victor, having brought the kingdom to the verge of ruin, abdicates and hands the crown to his son, believing him to be a weak-minded person whose mistakes will bring him--victor--back to the throne, when he can throw upon the young king the responsibility of the mess he has himself made of the kingdom. charles turns out to be a strong character, sets right the foreign affairs of the kingdom, and repairs his father's misgovernment. then victor, envious and longing for power, conspires to resume the throne, and taken prisoner, begs back the crown. charles, touched as a son, and against his better judgment, restores his father, who immediately and conveniently dies. it is a play of court intrigue and of politics, and these are not made interesting by any action, such as we call dramatic, in the play. from end to end there is no inter-movement of public passion. there are only four characters. d'ormea, the minister, is a mere stick in a prime-minister's robes and serves victor and charles with equal ease, in order to keep his place. he is not even subtle in his _rôle_. when we think what browning would have made of him in a single poem, and contrast it with what he has made of him here, we are again impressed with browning's strange loss of power when he is writing drama. victor and charles are better drawn than any characters in _strafford_; and polyxena is a great advance on lady carlisle. but this piece is not a drama; it is a study of soul-situations, and none of them are of any vital importance. there is far too great an improbability in the conception of charles. a weak man in private becomes a strong man in public life. to represent him, having known and felt his strength, as relapsing into his previous weakness when it endangers all his work, is quite too foolish. he did not do it in history. browning, with astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it. and the reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental one--a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as strafford is supposed to have for charles i.--the kind of love which intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it. even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing. * * * * * the return of the druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry. browning, having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected conversations, political intrigue. things are in this play as the logic of imaginative passion wills, as browning's conception drove him. but, unfortunately for its success as a true drama, browning doubles and redoubles the motives which impel his characters. djabal, anael, loys, have all of them, two different and sometimes opposite aims working in them. they are driven now by one, now by the other, and the changes of speech and action made by the different motives surging up, alternately or together, within their will, are so swift and baffling that an audience would be utterly bewildered. it is amusing to follow the prestidigitation of browning's intellect creating this confused battle in souls as long as one reads the play at home, though even then we wonder why he cannot, at least in a drama, make a simple situation. if he loved difficult work, this would be much more difficult to do well than the confused situation he has not done well. moreover, the simplified situation would be effective on the stage; and it would give a great opportunity for fine poetry. as it is, imaginative work is replaced by intellectual exercises, poetry is lost in his analysis of complex states of feeling. however, this involved in-and-out of thought is entertaining to follow in one's study if not on the stage. it is done with a loose power no one else in england possessed, and our only regret is that he did not bridle and master his power. finally, with regard to this play, i should like to isolate from it certain imaginative representations of characters which embody types of the men of the time, such as the prefect and the nuncio. the last interview between loys and the prefect, taken out of the drama, would be a little masterpiece of characterisation. * * * * * _the blot in the scutcheon_ is the finest of all these dramas. it might well be represented on the stage as a literary drama before those who had already read it, and who would listen to it for its passion and poetry; but its ill-construction and the unnaturalness of its situations will always prevent, and justly, its public success as a drama. it is full of pathetic and noble poetry; its main characters are clearly outlined and of a refreshing simplicity. it has few obtrusive metaphysical or intellectual subtleties--things which browning could not keep out of his dramas, but which only a genius like shakespeare can handle on the stage. it has real intensity of feeling, and the various passions interlock and clash together with some true dramatic interaction. their presentation awakens our pity, and wonder for the blind fates of men. the close leaves us in sorrow, yet in love with human nature. the pathos of the catastrophe is the most pathetic thing in browning. i do not even except the lovely record of pompilia. the torture of the human heart, different but equal, of tresham and mildred in the last scene, is exceedingly bitter in its cry--too cruel almost to hear and know, were it not relieved by the beauty of their tenderness and forgiveness in the hour of death. they die of their pain, but die loving, and are glad to die. they have all of them--mildred, tresham, and mertoun--sinned as it were by error. death unites them in righteousness, loveliness and love. a fierce, swift storm sweeps out of a clear heaven upon them, destroys them, and saves them. it is all over in three days. they are fortunate; their love deserved that the ruin should be brief, and the reparation be transferred, in a moment, to the grave justice of eternity. the first two acts bear no comparison with the third. the first scene, with all the servants, only shows how browning failed in bringing a number of characters together, and in making them talk with ease and connectedly. then, in two acts, the plot unfolds itself. it is a marvel of bad construction, grossly improbable, and offends that popular common sense of what is justly due to the characters concerned and to human nature itself, to which a dramatist is bound to appeal. mildred and mertoun have loved and sinned. mertoun visits her every night. gerard, an old gamekeeper, has watched him climbing to her window, and he resolves to tell this fatal tale to tresham, mildred's brother, whose strongest feeling is pride in the unblemished honour of his house. meantime mertoun has asked tresham for mildred's hand in marriage, and these lovers, receiving his consent, hope that their sin will be purged. then gerard tells his story. tresham summons mildred. she confesses the lover, and tresham demands his name. to reveal the name would have saved the situation, as we guess from tresham's character. his love would have had time to conquer his pride. but mildred will not tell the name, and when tresham says: "then what am i to say to mertoun?" she answers, "i will marry him." this, and no wonder, seems the last and crowning dishonour to tresham, and he curses, as if she were a harlot, the sister whom he passionately loves. this is a horrible situation which browning had no right to make. the natural thing would be for mildred to disclose that her lover and lord mertoun, whom she was to marry, were one and the same. there is no adequate reason, considering the desperate gravity of the situation, for her silence; it ought to be accounted for and it is not, nor could it be. her refusal to tell her lover's name, her confession of her dishonour and at the same time her acceptance of mertoun as a husband at her brother's hands, are circumstances which shock probability and common human nature. then it is not only this which irritates a reader; it is also the stupidity of tresham. that also is most unnatural. he believes that the girl whom he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity was as a star to him, will accept mertoun while she was sinning with another! he should have felt that this was incredible, and immediately understood, as guendolen does, that her lover and mertoun were the same. dulness and blindness so improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does the passion of his overwhelming pride excuse him. the central situation is a protracted irritation. browning was never a good hand at construction, even in his poems. his construction is at its very worst in this drama. but now, when we have, with wrath, accepted this revolting situation--which, of course, browning made in order to have his tragic close, but which a good dramatist would have arranged so differently--we pass into the third act, the tragic close; and that is simple enough in its lines, quite naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of exquisite tenderness. rashness of wrath and pride begin it; mertoun is slain by tresham as he climbs to mildred's window, though why he should risk her honour any more when she is affianced to him is another of browning's maddening improbabilities. and then wrath and pride pass away, and sorrow and love and the joy of death are woven together in beauty. if we must go through the previous acts to get to this, we forgive, for its sake, their wrongness. it has turns of love made exquisitely fair by inevitable death, unfathomable depths of feeling. we touch in these last scenes the sacred love beyond the world in which forgiveness is forgotten. * * * * * _colombe's birthday_ is of all these plays the nearest to a true drama. it has been represented in america as well as in england, and its skilful characterisation of valence, colombe, and berthold has won deserved praise; but it could not hold the stage. the subject is too thin. colombe finds out on her birthday that she is not the rightful heir to the duchy; but as there is some doubt, she resolves to fight the question. in her perplexities she is helped and supported by valence, an advocate from one of the cities of the duchy, who loves her, but whom she believes to serve her from loyalty alone. berthold, the true heir, to avoid a quarrel, offers to marry colombe, not because he loves her, but as a good piece of policy. she then finds out that she loves valence, and refusing the splendid alliance, leaves the court a private person, with love and her lover. this slight thing is spun out into five acts by browning's metaphysics of love and friendship. there is but little action, or pressure of the characters into one another. the intriguing courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit together. the only thing alive in them is their universal meanness. that meanness, it is true, enhances the magnanimity of valence and berthold, but its dead level in so many commonplace persons lowers the dramatic interest of the piece. the play is rather an interesting conversational poem about the up-growing of love between two persons of different but equally noble character; who think love is of more worth than power or wealth, and who are finally brought together by a bold, rough warrior who despises love in comparison with policy. its real action takes place in the hearts of valence and colombe, not in the world of human life; and what takes place in their hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so curiously apart from the simplicities of human love, so complicated, even beyond the complexity of the situation--for browning loved to pile complexity on complexity--that it makes the play unfit for public representation but all the more interesting for private reading. but, even in the quiet of our room, we ask why browning put his subject into a form which did not fit it; why he overloaded the story of two souls with a host of characters who have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are extremely wearisome? it might have been far more successfully done in the form of _in a balcony_, which browning himself does not class as a drama. * * * * * _luria_, the last of the dramas in date of composition, may be said to have no outward action, except in one scene where tiburzio breaks in suddenly to defend luria, who, like a wounded stag, stands at bay among the dogs and hunters who suspect his fidelity to florence. it is a drama of inward action, of changes in the souls of men. the full purification of luria is its one aim, and the motive of luria himself is a single motive. the play occupies one day only, and passes in one place. luria is a noble moor who commands the armies of florence against pisa, and conquers pisa. he is in love with the city of florence as a man is with a woman. its beauty, history, great men, and noble buildings attract his eastern nature, by their northern qualities, as much as they repel his friend and countryman husain. he lives for her with unbroken faithfulness, and he dies for her with piteous tenderness when he finds out that florence distrusts him. when he is suspected of treachery, his heart breaks, and to explain his broken heart, he dies. there is no other way left to show to florence that he has always been true to her. and at the moment of his death, all who spied on him, distrusted and condemned him, are convinced of his fidelity. even before he dies, his devotion to his ideal aim, his absolute unselfishness, have won over and ennobled all the self-interested characters which surround him--puccio, the general who is jealous of him; domizia, the woman who desires to use him as an instrument of her hate to florence; even braccio, the macchiavellian florentine who thinks his success must be dangerous to the state. luria conquers them all. it is the triumph of self-forgetfulness. and the real aim of the play is not dramatic. it is too isolated an aim to be dramatic. it is to build up and image the noble character of luria, and it reaches that end with dignity. the other characters are but foils to enhance the solitary greatness of luria. braccio is a mere voice, a theory who talks, and, at the end, when he becomes more human, he seems to lose his intelligence. the secretaries have no individuality. domizia causes nothing, and might with advantage be out of the play. however, when, moved by the nobleness of luria, she gives up her revenge on florence, she speaks well, and her outburst is poetical. puccio is a real personage, but a poor fellow. tiburzio is a pale reflection of luria. husain alone has some personality, but even his easternness, which isolates him, is merged in his love of luria. all of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means of which luria's character is built into magnificence, and they disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is finished. there are fine things in the poem: the image of florence; its men, its streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of luria; the contrast between the eastern and the latin nature; the picture of hot war; the sudden friendship of luria and tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of two high hearts by one another; the picture of tiburzio fighting at the ford, of luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in puccio, and, chief of all, the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of italian character at the time of the republics. * * * * * the first part of _a soul's tragedy_ is written in poetry and the second in prose. the first part is dull but the second is very lively and amusing; so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a good deal of browning's dramas had been written in prose. and the prose itself, unlike his more serious prose in his letters and essays, is good, clear, and of an excellent style. the time of the play is in the sixteenth century; but there is nothing in it which is special to that time: no scenery, no vivid pictures of street life, no distinct atmosphere of the period. it might just as well be of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. the character of chiappino may be found in any provincial town. this compound of envy, self-conceit, superficial cleverness and real silliness is one of our universal plagues, and not uncommon among the demagogues of any country. and he contrasts him with ogniben, the pope's legate, another type, well known in governments, skilled in affairs, half mocking, half tolerant of the "foolish people," the alluring destroyer of all self-seeking leaders of the people. he also is as common as chiappino, as modern as he is ancient. both are representative types, and admirably drawn. they are done at too great length, but browning could not manage them as well in drama as he would have done in a short piece such as he placed in _men and women_. why this little thing is called _a soul's tragedy_ i cannot quite understand. that title supposes that chiappino loses his soul at the end of the play. but it is plain from his mean and envious talk at the beginning with eulalia that his soul is already lost. he is not worse at the end, but perhaps on the way to betterment. the tragedy is then in the discovery by the people that he who was thought to be a great soul is a fraud. but that conclusion was not browning's intention. finally, if this be a tragedy it is clothed with comedy. browning's humour was never more wise, kindly, worldly and biting than in the second act, and ogniben may well be set beside bishop blougram. it would be a privilege to dine with either of them. every one is in love with _pippa passes_, which appeared immediately after _sordello_. it may have been a refreshment to browning after the complexities and metaphysics of _sordello_, to live for a time with the soft simplicity of pippa, with the clear motives of the separate occurrences at asolo, with the outside picturesque world, and in a lyric atmosphere. it certainly is a refreshment to us. it is a pity so little was done by browning in this pleasant, graceful, happy way. the substance of thought in it and its intellectual force are just as strong as in _sordello_ or _paracelsus_, and are concerned, especially in the first two pieces, with serious and weighty matters of human life. beyond the pleasure the poem gives, its indirect teaching is full of truth and beauty; and the things treated of belong to many phases of human life, and touch their problems with poetic light and love. pippa herself, in her affectionate, natural goodness, illuminates the greater difficulties of life in a single day more than sordello or paracelsus could in the whole course of their lives. it may be that there are persons who think lightly of _pippa passes_ in comparison with _fifine at the fair_, persons who judge poetry by the difficulties they find in its perusal. but _pippa passes_ fulfils the demands of the art of poetry, and produces in the world the high results of lovely and noble poetry. the other only does these things in part; and when _fifine at the fair_ and even _sordello_ are in the future only the study of pedants, _pippa passes_ will be an enduring strength and pleasure to all who love tenderly and think widely. and those portions of it which belong to pippa herself, the most natural, easy and simplest portions, will be the sources of the greatest pleasure and the deepest thought. like sordello's song, they will endure for the healing, comforting, exalting and impelling of the world. i have written of her and of other parts of the poem elsewhere. it only remains to say that nowhere is the lyric element in browning's genius more delightfully represented than in this little piece of mingled song and action. there is no better love-lyric in his work than you'll love me yet!--and i can tarry your love's protracted growing; and the two snatches of song which pippa sings when she is passing under ottima's window and the monsignore's--"the year's at the spring" and "overhead the tree-tops meet"--possess, independent of the meaning of the words and their poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal. they are filled with youth and its delight, alike of the body and the soul. what browning's spirit felt and lived when he was young and his heart beating with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is their greatest charm. * * * * * chapter ix _poems of the passion of love_ when we leave _paracelsus_, _sordello_ and the _dramas_ behind, and find ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _dramatic lyrics_ and _romances_, in _men and women_, in _dramatis personæ_, and in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unencumbered sea for one studded with a thousand islands. every island is worth a visit and different from the rest. their variety, their distinct scenery, their diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the pacific. but while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands in the pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems. to treat them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book. to treat them zoologically, if i may borrow that term, is possible, and may be profitable. this chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate to love. commonly speaking, the term _love poems_ does not mean poems concerning the absolute love, or the love of ideas, such as truth or beauty, or love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home, or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially bound up, as it is in browning's poem of _by the fireside_, with ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral. these celebrate the joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense and half of the spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the spirit. it began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous than the stars of heaven or the sand of the seashore; and yet whose multitudinous changes and histories have their source in two things only--in the desire to generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another, which is spiritual. the union of both these desires into one passion of thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love; but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of mankind, of ideas, and of god. with regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in history when they are most written are those in which a nation or mankind renews its youth. their production in the days of elizabeth was enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate, their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody. as that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded in song during the caroline period, passion in english love-poetry slowly decayed till the ideas of the revolution, before the french outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world. the same career is run by the individual poet. the subject of his youth is the passion of love, as it was in browning's _pauline_. the subjects of his manhood are serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy with another happiness. they traverse a wider range of human feeling and thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser, steadier, graver and less selfish forms. it was so with browning, who far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of youthful passion. it is curious to think that so young a creature as he was in should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind him, and only written of the love which his _paracelsus_ images in aprile. it seems a little insensitive in so young a man. but i do not think browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far as to make him forget everything but itself. perhaps once or twice, as in _the last ride together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption, but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a companion. even in _by the fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment. even after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth supreme, would scarcely have done that. on the whole, his poetry, like that of wordsworth, but not so completely, is destitute of the love-poem in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to class them in that species of literature. however, this is not altogether true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and personal history. those who read _asolando_, the last book of poems he published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first poems in it described the passion of sexual love. they are fully charged with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude upon them. moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. it is impossible, unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written when he was about eighty years of age. i believe, though i do not know, that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on looking over his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure in reading and publishing them in his old age. he mentions in the preface that the book contains both old and new poems. the new are easily isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of the date of the book. the rest belong to different periods of his life. the four poems to which i refer are _now_, _summum bonum_, _a pearl--a girl_, and _speculative_. they are beautiful with a beauty of their own; full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel. i should have been sorry if browning had not shaped into song this abandonment. he loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness; and he had, as i might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed into wrong. he was the last man in the world to think that the passion of noble sexual love was to be despised. and it is pleasant to find, at the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age, he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their pre-eminence. the two first of these, _now_ and _summum bonum_, must belong to his youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it seems that browning worked on them at the time he published them. i quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is ruthlessly broken, all the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: all the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: in the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and --how far above them-- truth, that's brighter than gem, trust, that's purer than pearl,-- brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me in the kiss of one girl. the next two poems are knit to this and to _now_ by the strong emotion of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman; but they differ in the period at which they were written. the first, _a pearl--a girl_, recalls that part of the poem _by the fireside_, when one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to browning. if written when he was young, it has been revised in after life. a simple ring with a single stone to the vulgar eye no stone of price: whisper the right word, that alone-- forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice, and lo, you are lord (says an eastern scroll) of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole through the power in a pearl. a woman ('tis i this time that say) with little the world counts worthy praise utter the true word--out and away escapes her soul: i am wrapt in blaze, creation's lord, of heaven and earth lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth-- through the love in a girl! the second--_speculative_--also describes a moment of love-longing, but has the characteristics of his later poetry. it may be of the same date as the book, or not much earlier. it may be of his later manhood, of the time when he lost his wife. at any rate, it is intense enough. it looks back on the love he has lost, on passion with the woman he loved. and he would surrender all--heaven, nature, man, art--in this momentary fire of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary. momentariness is the essence of the poem. "even in heaven i will cry for the wild hours now gone by--give me back the earth and thyself." _speculative_, he calls it, in an after irony. others may need new life in heaven-- man, nature, art--made new, assume! man with new mind old sense to leaven, nature--new light to clear old gloom, art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room. i shall pray: "fugitive as precious-- minutes which passed,--return, remain! let earth's old life once more enmesh us, you with old pleasure, me--old pain, so we but meet nor part again!" nor was this reversion to the passion of youthful love altogether a new departure. the lyrics in _ferishtah's fancies_ are written to represent, from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out in the poems. the greater number of them are beautiful, and they would gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems. some are plainly of the same date as the poems. others, i think, were written in browning's early time, and the preceding poems are made to fit them. but whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love, and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as if that--as if the love of the body, even alone--were not apart from the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human nature. browning, when he wished to make a thought or a fact quite plain, frequently stated it without any of its modifications, trusting to his readers not to mistake him; knowing indeed, that if they cared to find the other side--in this case the love which issues from the senses and the spirit together, or from the spirit alone--they would find it stated just as soundly and clearly. he meant us to combine both statements, and he has done so himself with regard to love. when, however, we have considered these exceptions, it still remains curious how little the passionate love-poem, with its strong personal touch, exists in browning's poetry. one reason may be that love-poems of this kind are naturally lyrical, and demand a sweet melody in the verse, and browning's genius was not especially lyrical, nor could he inevitably command a melodious movement in his verse. but the main reason is that he was taken up with other and graver matters, and chiefly with the right theory of life; with the true relation of god and man; and with the picturing--for absolute love's sake, and in order to win men to love one another by the awakening of pity--of as much of humanity as he could grasp in thought and feeling. isolated and personal love was only a small part of this large design. one personal love, however, he possessed fully and intensely. it was his love for his wife, and three poems embody it. the first is _by the fireside_. it does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long, too many-motived for a lyric. it is a meditative poem of recollective tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married love in england is more beautiful. the poet, sitting silent in the room where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses on what has been, and is, since she came to bless his life, or what will be, since she continues to bless it; and all the fancies and musings which, in a usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the intensity of love-passion in youth, exactly fit in with the peace and satisfied joy of a married life at home with god and nature and itself. the poem is full of personal charm. quiet thought, profound feeling and sweet memory like a sunlit mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image of his wife, and all the thoughts, emotions and scenery described. it is a finished piece of art. the second of these poems is the epilogue to the volumes of _men and women_, entitled _one word more_. it also is a finished piece of art, carefully conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by touch, each separate thought with its own emotion, each adding something to the whole, each pushing browning's emotion and picture into our souls, till the whole impression is received. it is full, and full to the brim, with the long experience of peaceful joy in married love. and the subtlety of the close of it, and of browning's play with his own fancy about the moon, do not detract from the tenderness of it; for it speaks not of transient passion but of the love of a whole life lived from end to end in music. the last of these is entitled _prospice_. when he wrote it he had lost his wife. it tells what she had made of him; it reveals alike his steadfast sadness that she had gone from him and the steadfast resolution, due to her sweet and enduring power, with which, after her death, he promised, bearing with him his sorrow and his memory of joy, to stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a fighter to the close--and well he kept his word. it ends with the expression of his triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart alike rejoice. browning at his best, browning in the central fire of his character, is in it. fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face, when the snows begin, and the blasts denote i am nearing the place, the power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe; where he stands, the arch fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go: for the journey is done and the summit attained and the barriers fall, though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, the reward of it all. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. no! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers the heroes of old, bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness and cold. for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minute's at end, and the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest! leaving now these personal poems on love, we come to those we may call impersonal. they are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in its subtle moments--moments that browning loved to analyse, and which he informed not so much with the passion of love, as with his profound love of human nature. he describes in them, with the seriousness of one who has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries, certainties, failures and conquests. it is a man writing, not of the love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life. love does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other grave matters. as such it is a more interesting subject for browning. for love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts, impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with, and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. i shall give examples of these separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which the poem arises. in some of them the love is finally absorbed in the idea. in all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak. _love among the ruins_ tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart. there are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song, and no motive has been written of with greater emotion. if we are to believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she delays, what it will be when she comes--a thousand things, each like white fire round her image. but browning's lover, through nine verses, cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world--the lonely land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city. it is only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is waiting for him in the ruined tower. even then his imagination cannot stay with her, but glances from her instantly--thinking that the ancient king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the high tower on his splendid city. when he has elaborated this second excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl. then is the hour of passion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of the scenery and the ruins. "splendour of arms, triumph of wealth, centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. love is best." it is a general, not a particular conclusion. in a true love-poem it would be particular. another poem of waiting love is _in three days_. and this has the spirit of a true love lyric in it. it reads like a personal thing; it breathes exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. the delicate fears of chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. it is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in love, not the excluding mastery of passion. _two in the campagna_ is another poem in which love passes away into a deeper thought than love--a strange and fascinating poem of twofold desire. the man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in love, but there is a more imperative passion in his soul--to rest in the infinite, in accomplished perfection. and his livelong and vain pursuit of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise earthly love. is it possible that she who now walks with him in the campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he desires, and if not, why--where is the fault? for a moment he seems to catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it. in a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish, it is gone--and nothing is left, save infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn. least of all is the woman left. she has quite disappeared. this is not a love-poem at all, it is the cry of browning's hunger for eternity in the midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to dust. the rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure. there are many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as _in a balcony_; and even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded, not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct studies introduced by chance or caprice. in the short poems called "dramatic" these studies are numerous, and i group a few of them together according to their motives, leaving out some which i shall hereafter treat of when i come to discuss the women in browning. _evelyn hope_ has nothing to do with the passion of love. the physical element of love is entirely excluded by the subject. it is a beautiful expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred. the thought is noble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear. it is, moreover, close to truth--there are hundreds of men who live quietly in love of that kind, and die in its embrace. in _cristina_ the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem is not one, as in _evelyn hope_, but two. the woman is not dead, and she has missed her chance. but the lover has not. he has seen her and in a moment loved her. she also looked on him and felt her soul matched by his as they "rushed together." but the world carried her away and she lost the fulness of life. he, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever, and with it, her and all she might have been with him. her soul's mine: and thus grown perfect, i shall pass my life's remainder. this is not the usual love-poem. it is a love as spiritual, as mystic, even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for evelyn hope. the second motive in _cristina_ of the lover who meets the true partner of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with browning. he repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved analysis. moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from without. and in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how the moment was held and life was therefore conquest. then in _youth and art_, in _dis aliter visum_, in _bifurcation_, in _the lost mistress_, and in _too late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous. these are studies of the might-have-beens of love. another motive, used with varied circumstance in three or four poems, but fully expanded in _james lee's wife_, is the discovery, after years of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. another motive is, that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their reason, or their liberty. this sacrifice, of all that makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of personal love itself. another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play with itself. true love makes in the soul an unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love, serious, infinite, and divine. but on its surface the light of jewelled fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying thoughts and dancing feelings. a poet would be certain to have often seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. so browning does in his poem, _in a gondola_. the two lovers, with the dark shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately, imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love; playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began, the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well purchased by an hour of love. finally, the lover is stabbed and slain, and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love's fancies a cloud of tears. this is the stuff of life that browning loved to paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as nausicaa and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death. just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _a lovers' quarrel_, and the quarrel is the dark element in it. browning always feels that mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy. the lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. every separate picture is done in browning's impressionist way. and when the glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out-- it is twelve o'clock: i shall hear her knock in the worst of a storm's uproar, i shall pull her through the door, i shall have her for evermore! this is partly a study of the memory of love; and browning has represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety of characters under different circumstances, so that, though the subject is the same, the treatment varies. a charming instance of this is _the flowers name_; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the character of the girl who is remembered--a good example of browning's power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live in our world for ever. _meeting at night--parting at morning_ is another reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of passion, and then the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity. i quote it for the fine impassioned way in which human feeling and natural scenery are fused together. meeting at night. the grey sea and the long black land; and the yellow half-moon large and low; and the startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep, as i gain the cove with pushing prow. and quench its speed i' the slushy sand. then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; three fields to cross till a farm appears; a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch and blue spurt of a lighted match, and a voice less loud, through its joys and fears. than the two hearts beating each to each! parting at morning. round the cape of a sudden came the sea, and the sun looked over the mountain's rim: and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me. the poem entitled _confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a girl one happy june, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though he thinks-- how sad and bad and mad it was. few but browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this vital piece of truth. it represents a whole type of character--those who in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever. the wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes degradation. we see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory-- do i view the world as a vale of tears? ah, reverend sir, not i. it might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory of love in _st. martin's summer_. a much less interesting and natural motive rules it than _confessions_; and the characters, though more "in society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the old sorrow dies or is transformed. there is no humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony. but there is humour in an earlier poem--_a serenade at the villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _st. martin's summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. the night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she gave no sign. he wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only half in love, flings away-- oh how dark your villa was, windows fast and obdurate! how the garden grudged me grass where i stood--the iron gate ground its teeth to let me pass! it is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form, together, a book of transient phases of the passion in almost every class of society. and they show how browning, passing through the world, from the quartier latin to london drawing-rooms, was continually on the watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry which his memory held and his imagination shaped. there is only one more poem, which i cannot pass by in this group of studies. it is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. it rises into that highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their multitude. i quote it, i cannot comment on it. never the time and the place and the loved one all together! this path--how soft to pace! this may--what magic weather! where is the loved one's face? in a dream that loved one's face meets mine but the house is narrow, the place is bleak where, outside, rain and wind combine with a furtive ear, if i strive to speak, with a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, with a malice that marks each word, each sign! o enemy sly and serpentine, uncoil thee from the waking man! do i hold the past thus firm and fast yet doubt if the future hold i can? this path so soft to pace shall lead through the magic of may to herself indeed! or narrow if needs the house must be, outside are the storms and strangers: we-- oh, close, safe, warm sleep i and she, --i and she! that, indeed, is passionate enough. then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _count gismond_ is one of these. it is too long, and wants browning's usual force. the outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a serpent.[ ] _the glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant fashion in which browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. the world has had the tale before it for a very long time. every one had said the woman was wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, browning makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of centuries. the best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the thing. it is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she and browning meet, will she find herself comprehended. finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is god himself; the breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose vision is beauty, and whose activity is creation--these, united in god, or divided among men into their three great entities--love of ideas for their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is god's garment; love of humanity, which is god's child--these pervade the whole of browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every little grain upon it. they make its warmth and life, strength and beauty. they are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like _paracelsus_. but they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or subject to death. this is the supreme thing in his work. to him love is the conqueror, and love is god. footnotes: [ ] there is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably, _the pied piper of hamelin_. but then, that story, if it is not troubled by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. it is told by a poet who becomes a child for children. * * * * * chapter x _the passions other than love_ the poems on which i have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love. they do not illustrate the evil or ignoble passions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness. browning took some of these terrible powers and made them subjects in his poetry. short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems. there is no closer image in literature of long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the lines which seal guido's pleading in the _the ring and the book_. life is all! i was just stark mad,--let the madman live pressed by as many chains as you please pile! don't open! hold me from them! i am yours, i am the grand duke's--no, i am the pope's! abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god, ... pompilia, will you let them murder me? but there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and evil things in browning. he was not one of our modern realists who love to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. not only was he too healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as jealousy and envy are in shakespeare's treatment of the story of othello; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the passion. the combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on vengeance in _the laboratory_ is too intense for any pity to intrude, but browning realises not only the evil passions in the woman but the historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens the malignant element. the same, but of course with the difference browning's variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless--the _instans tyrannus_. a faint vein of humour runs through it. the king describes what has been; his hatred has passed. he sees how small and fanciful it was, and the illustrations he uses to express it tell us that; though they carry with them also the contemptuous intensity of his past hatred. the swell of the hatred remains, though the hatred is past. so we are not left face to face with absolute evil, with the corruption hate engenders in the soul. god has intervened, and the worst of it has passed away. then there is the study of hatred in the _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_. the hatred is black and deadly, the instinctive hatred of a brutal nature for a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be too vile for the art of poetry. but it is relieved, not only by the scenery, the sketch of the monks in the refectory, the garden of flowers, the naughty girls seated on the convent bank washing their black hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples like laughter through the hopes of his hatred, and by the brilliant sketching of the two men. we see them, know them, down to their little tricks at dinner, and we end by realising hatred, it is true, but in too agreeable a fashion for just distress. in other poems of the evil passions the relieving element is pity. there are the two poems entitled _before_ and _after_, that is, before and after the duel. _before_ is the statement of one of the seconds, with curious side-thoughts introduced by browning's mental play with the subject, that the duel is absolutely necessary. the challenger has been deeply wronged; and he cannot and will not let forgiveness intermit his vengeance. the man in us agrees with that; the christian in us says, "forgive, let god do the judgment." but the passion for revenge has here its way and the guilty falls. and now let browning speak--forgiveness is right and the vengeance-fury wrong. the dead man has escaped, the living has not escaped the wrath of conscience; pity is all. take the cloak from his face, and at first let the corpse do its worst! how he lies in his rights of a man! death has done all death can. and, absorbed in the new life he leads, he recks not, he heeds nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike on his senses alike, and are lost in the solemn and strange surprise of the change. ha, what avails death to erase his offence, my disgrace? i would we were boys as of old in the field, by the fold: his outrage, god's patience, man's scorn were so easily borne! i stand here now, he lies in his place; cover the face. again, there are few studies in literature of contempt, hatred and revenge more sustained and subtle than browning's poem entitled _a forgiveness_; and the title marks how, though the justice of revenge was accomplished on the woman, yet that pity, even love for her, accompanied and followed the revenge. our natural revolt against the cold-blooded work of hatred is modified, when we see the man's heart and the woman's soul, into pity for their fate. the man tells his story to a monk in the confessional, who has been the lover of his wife. he is a statesman absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife makes his home a heaven, and he carries her presence with him all the day. his wife takes the first lover she meets, and, discovered, tells her husband that she hates him. "kill me now," she cries. but he despises her too much to hate her; she is not worth killing. three years they live together in that fashion, till one evening she tells him the truth. "i was jealous of your work. i took my revenge by taking a lover, but i loved you, you only, all the time, and lost you-- i thought you gave your heart and soul away from me to slave at statecraft. since my right in you seemed lost, i stung myself to teach you, to your cost, what you rejected could be prized beyond life, heaven, by the first fool i threw a fond look on, a fatal word to. "ah, is that true, you loved and still love? then contempt perishes, and hate takes its place. write your confession, and die by my hand. vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which hate can act. i pardon you, for as i slay hate departs--and now, sir," and he turns to the monk-- she sleeps, as erst beloved, in this your church: ay, yours! and drives the poisoned dagger through the grate of the confessional into the heart of her lover. this is browning's closest study of hate, contempt, and revenge. but bitter and close as it is, what is left with us is pity for humanity, pity for the woman, pity for the lover, pity for the husband. again, in the case of sebald and ottima in _pippa passes_, pity also rules. love passing into lust has led to hate, and these two have slaked their hate and murdered luca, ottima's husband. they lean out of the window of the shrub-house as the morning breaks. for the moment their false love is supreme. their crime only creeps like a snake, half asleep, about the bottom of their hearts; they recall their early passion and try to brazen it forth in the face of their murder, which now rises, dreadful and more dreadful, into threatening life in their soul. they reanimate their hate of luca to lower their remorse, but at every instant his blood stains their speech. at last, while ottima loves on, sebald's dark horror turns to hatred of her he loved, till she lures him back into desire of her again. the momentary lust cannot last, but browning shoots it into prominence that the outburst of horror and repentance may be the greater. i kiss you now, dear ottima, now and now! this way? will you forgive me--be once more my great queen? at that moment pippa passes by, singing: the year's at the spring and day's at the morn; morning's at seven; the hill-side's dew-pearled; the lark's on the wing; the snail's on the thorn; god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world! something in it smites sebald's heart like a hammer of god. he repents, but in the cowardice of repentance curses her. that baseness i do not think browning should have introduced, no, nor certain carnal phrases which, previously right, now jar with the spiritual passion of repentance. but his fury with her passes away into the passion of despair-- my brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all i feel is ... is, at swift recurring intervals, a hurry-down within me, as of waters loosened to smother up some ghastly pit: there they go--whirls from a black fiery sea! lines which must have been suggested to browning by verses, briefer and more intense, in webster's _duchess of malfi_. even ottima, lifted by her love, which purifies itself in wishing to die for her lover, repents. not me,--to him, o god, be merciful! thus into this cauldron of sin browning steals the pity of god. we know they will be saved, so as by fire. then there is the poem on the story of _cristina and monaldeschi_; a subject too odious, i think, to be treated lyrically. it is a tale of love turned to hatred, and for good cause, and of the pitiless vengeance which followed. browning has not succeeded in it; and it may be so because he could get no pity into it. the queen had none. monaldeschi deserved none--a coward, a fool, and a traitor! nevertheless, more might have been made of it by browning. the poem is obscure and wandering, and the effort he makes to grip the subject reveals nothing but the weakness of the grip. it ought not to have been published. * * * * * and now i turn to passions more delightful, that this chapter may close in light and not in darkness--passions of the imagination, of the romantic regions of the soul. there is, first, the longing for the mystic world, the world beneath appearance, with or without reference to eternity. secondly, bound up with that, there is the longing for the unknown, for following the gleam which seems to lead us onward, but we know not where. then, there is the desire, the deeper for its constant suppression, for escape from the prison of a worldly society, from its conventions and maxims of morality, its barriers of custom and rule, into liberty and unchartered life. lastly, there is that longing to discover and enjoy the lands of adventure and romance which underlies and wells upwards through so much of modern life, and which has never ceased to send its waters up to refresh the world. these are romantic passions. on the whole, browning does not often touch them in their earthly activities. his highest romance was beyond this world. it claimed eternity, and death was the entrance into its enchanted realm. when he did bring romantic feeling into human life, it was for the most part in the hunger and thirst, which, as in _abt vogler_, urged men beyond the visible into the invisible. but now and again he touched the romantic of earth. _childe roland_, _the flight of the duchess_, and some others, are alive with the romantic spirit. but before i write of these, there are a few lyrical poems, written in the freshness of his youth, which are steeped in the light of the story-telling world; and might be made by one who, in the morning of imagination, sat on the dewy hills of the childish world. they are full of unusual melody, and are simple and wise enough to be sung by girls knitting in the sunshine while their lovers bend above them. one of these, a beautiful thing, with that touch of dark fate at its close which is so common in folk-stories, is hidden away in _paracelsus_. "over the sea," it begins: over the sea our galleys went, with cleaving prows in order brave to a speeding wind and a bounding wave, a gallant armament: each bark built out of a forest-tree left leafy and rough as first it grew, and nailed all over the gaping sides, within and without, with black bull-hides, seethed in fat, and suppled with flame, to bear the playful billows' game. it is made in a happy melody, and the curious mingling in the tale, as it continues, of the rudest ships, as described above, with purple hangings, cedar tents, and noble statues, a hundred shapes of lucid stone, and with gentle islanders from græcian seas, is characteristic of certain folk-tales, especially those of gascony. that it is spoken by paracelsus as a parable of the state of mind he has reached, in which he clings to his first fault with haughty and foolish resolution, scarcely lessens the romantic element in it. that is so strong that we forget that it is meant as a parable. there is another song which touches the edge of romance, in which paracelsus describes how he will bury in sweetness the ideal aims he had in youth, building a pyre for them of all perfumed things; and the last lines of the verse i quote leave us in a castle of old romance-- and strew faint sweetness from some old egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud which breaks to dust when once unrolled; or shredded perfume, like a cloud from closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung, mouldering her lute and books among, as when a queen, long dead, was young. the other is a song, more than a song, in _pippa passes_, a true piece of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of greek story, wedded to eastern and mediæval elements, in its roving imaginations. it is admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of the golden age. i quote a great part of it: a king lived long ago, in the morning of the world, when earth was nigher heaven than now: and the king's locks curled, disparting o'er a forehead full as the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn of some sacrificial bull-- only calm as a babe new-born: for he was got to a sleepy mood, so safe from all decrepitude, age with its bane, so sure gone by, (the gods so loved him while he dreamed) that, having lived thus long, there seemed no need the king should ever die. luigi. no need that sort of king should ever die! among the rocks his city was: before his palace, in the sun, he sat to see his people pass, and judge them every one from its threshold of smooth stone they haled him many a valley-thief caught in the sheep-pens, robber chief swarthy and shameless, beggar, cheat, spy-prowler, or rough pirate found on the sea-sand left aground; * * * these, all and every one, the king judged, sitting in the sun. luigi. that king should still judge sitting in the sun! his councillors, on left and right, looked anxious up,--but no surprise disturbed the king's old smiling eyes where the very blue had turned to white. 'tis said, a python scared one day the breathless city, till he came, with forty tongue and eyes on flame, where the old king sat to judge alway; but when he saw the sweepy hair girt with a crown of berries rare which the god will hardly give to wear to the maiden who singeth, dancing bare in the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights, at his wondrous forest rites,-- seeing this, he did not dare approach the threshold in the sun, assault the old king smiling there. such grace had kings when the world begun! then there are two other romantic pieces, not ringing with this early note, but having in them a wafting scent of the provençal spirit. one is the song sung by pippa when she passes the room where jules and phene are talking--the song of kate, the queen. the other is the cry rudel, the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the lady of tripoli whom he never saw, but loved. the subject is romantic, but that, i think, is all the romance in it. it is not rudel who speaks but browning. it is not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that analysis and over-worked illustration. there remain, on this matter, _childe roland_ and the _flight of the duchess_. i believe that _childe roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the sea-born queen; that browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim in it. it was not even born of his will. nor does he seem to be acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form in northern england. the impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in him by that line out of an old song the fool quotes in _king lear_. there is another tag of a song in _lear_ which stirs a host of images in the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic lyric: still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind. but it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _childe roland to the dark tower came_. browning has made that his own, and what he has done is almost romantic. almost romantic, i say, because the peculiarities of browning's personal genius appear too strongly in _childe roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. the scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal. moreover, browning's poem is too much in the vague. the romantic tales are clear in outline; this is not. but the elements in the original story entered, as it were of their own accord, into browning. there are several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept into his work like living things which, seeing browning engaged on a story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and without his knowledge. the wretched cripple who points the way; the blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream; the giant mountain range, all the peaks alive, as if in a nature myth; the crowd of roland's predecessors turned to stone by their failure; the sudden revealing of the tower where no tower had been, might all be matched out of folk-stories. i think i have heard that browning wrote the poem at a breath one morning; and it reads as if, from verse to verse, he did not know what was coming to his pen. this is very unlike his usual way; but it is very much the way in which tales of this kind are unconsciously up-built. men have tried to find in the poem an allegory of human life; but browning had no allegorising intention. however, as every story which was ever written has at its root the main elements of human nature, it is always possible to make an allegory out of any one of them. if we like to amuse ourselves in that fashion, we may do so; but we are too bold and bad if we impute allegory to browning. _childe roland_ is nothing more than a gallop over the moorlands of imagination; and the skies of the soul, when it was made, were dark and threatening storm. but one thing is plain in it: it is an outcome of that passion for the mystical world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies at the root of the romantic tree. the _flight of the duchess_ is full of the passion of escape from the conventional; and no where is browning more original or more the poet. its manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the character and condition of the narrator, who is the duke's huntsman. its metrical movement is excellent, and the changes of that movement are in harmony with the things and feelings described. it is astonishingly swift, alive, and leaping; and it delays, as a stream, with great charm, when the emotion of the subject is quiet, recollective, or deep. the descriptions of nature in the poem are some of the most vivid and true in browning's work. the sketches of animal life--so natural on the lips of the teller of the story--are done from the keen observation of a huntsman, and with his love for the animals he has fed, followed and slain. and, through it all, there breathes the romantic passion--to be out of the world of custom and commonplace, set free to wander for ever to an unknown goal; to drink the air of adventure and change; not to know to-day what will take place to-morrow, only to know that it will be different; to ride on the top of the wave of life as it runs before the wind; to live with those who live, and are of the same mind; to be loved and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world. but let browning tell the end: so, at the last shall come old age. decrepit as befits that stage; how else would'st thou retire apart with the hoarded memories of thy heart, and gather all to the very least of the fragments of life's earlier feast, let fall through eagerness to find the crowning dainties yet behind? ponder on the entire past laid together thus at last, when the twilight helps to fuse the first fresh with the faded hues. and the outline of the whole grandly fronts for once thy soul. and then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam of yet another morning breaks, and, like the hand which ends a dream, death, with the might of his sunbeam, touches the flesh, and the soul awakes, then---- then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond. but even in that world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life. she will be, like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity. this romantic passion which never dies even in our modern society, is embodied in the gipsy crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life, suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as in a society, where romance seems old or dead, it springs into fresh and lovely life. this is the heart of the poem, and it is made to beat the more quickly by the wretched attempt of the duke and his mother to bring back the observances of the middle ages without their soul. nor even then does browning leave his motive. the huntsman has heard the gipsy's song; he has seen the light on his mistress' face as she rode away--the light which is not from sun or star--and the love of the romantic world is born in him. he will not leave his master; there his duty lies. "i must see this fellow his sad life through." but then he will go over the mountains, after his lady, leaving the graves of his wife and children, into the unknown, to find her, or news of her, in the land of the wanderers. and if he never find her, if, after pleasant journeying, earth cannot give her to his eyes, he will still pursue his quest in a world where romance and formality are not married together. so i shall find out some snug corner, under a hedge, like orson the wood-knight, turn myself round and bid the world good night; and sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen) to a world where will be no further throwing pearls before swine that can't value them. amen. * * * * * chapter xi _imaginative representations_ all poems might be called "imaginative representations." but the class of poems in browning's work to which i give that name stands apart. it includes such poems as _cleon, caliban on setebos, fra lippo lippi_, the _epistle of karshish_, and they isolate themselves, not only in browning's poetry, but in english poetry. they have some resemblance in aim and method to the monologues of tennyson, such as the _northern farmer_ or _rizpah_, but their aim is much wider than tennyson's, and their method far more elaborate and complex. what do they represent? to answer this is to define within what limits i give them the name of "imaginative representations." they are not only separate studies of individual men as they breathed and spoke; face, form, tricks of body recorded; intelligence, character, temper of mind, spiritual aspiration made clear--tennyson did that; they are also studies of these individual men--cleon, karshish and the rest--as general types, representative images, of the age in which they lived; or of the school of art to which they belonged; or of the crisis in theology, religion, art, or the social movement which took place while the men they paint were alive, and which these men led, on formed, or followed. that is their main element, and it defines them. they are not dramatic. their action and ideas are confined to one person, and their circumstance and scenery to one time and place. but browning, unlike tennyson, filled the background of the stage on which he placed his single figure with a multitude of objects, or animals, or natural scenery, or figures standing round or in motion; and these give additional vitality and interest to the representation. again, they are short, as short as a soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a street. shortness belongs to this form of poetic work--a form to which browning gave a singular intensity. it follows that they must not be argumentative beyond what is fitting. nor ought they to glide into the support of a thesis, or into didactic addresses, as _bishop blougram_ and _mr. sludge_ do. these might be called treatises, and are apart from the kind of poem of which i speak. they begin, indeed, within its limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration of the age into one man's mind, which mark out these poems from the rest, and isolate them into a class of their own. the voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of browning; nor is the mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator. there are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, browning has, in writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality. he had, by creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them into their own age. they talk their minds out in character with their age. browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his hands and became men. that is the impression they make, and it predicates a singular power of imagination. like the prometheus of goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then endowing them with life. but he cannot tell, any more than prometheus, what they will say and do after he has made them. he does tell, of course, but that is not our impression. our impression is that they live and talk of their own accord, so vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery, and the thinking of the place and time in which he has imagined them. great knowledge seems required for this, and browning had indeed an extensive knowledge not so much of the historical facts, as of the tendencies of thought which worked in the times wherein he placed his men. but the chief knowledge he had, through his curious reading, was of a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, dress, popular talk and scenery of the towns and country of italy from the thirteenth century up to modern times. to every one of these details--such as are found in _sordello_, in _fra lippo lippi_, in the _bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_--his vivid and grasping imagination gave an uncommon reality. but even without great knowledge such poems may be written, if the poet have imagination, and the power to execute in metrical words what has been imagined. _theology in the island_ and the prologue to a _death in the desert_ are examples of this. browning knew nothing of that island in the undiscovered seas where prosper dwelt, but he made all the scenery of it and all its animal life, and he re-created caliban. he had never seen the cave in the desert where he placed john to die, nor the sweep of rocky hills and sand around it, nor the bactrian waiting with the camels. other poets, of course, have seen unknown lands and alien folks, but he has seen them more vividly, more briefly, more forcibly. his imagination was objective enough. but it was as subjective as it was objective. he saw the soul of fra lippo lippi and the soul of his time as vividly as he saw the streets of florence at night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace of the medici round the corner. it was a remarkable combination, and it is by this combination of the subjective and objective imagination that he draws into some dim approach to shakespeare; and nowhere closer than in these poems. again, not only the main character of each of these poems, but all the figures introduced (sometimes only in a single line) to fill up the background, are sketched with as true and vigorous a pencil as the main figure; are never out of place or harmony with the whole, and are justly subordinated. the young men who stand round the bishop's bed when he orders his tomb, the watchmen in _fra lippo lippi_, the group of st. john's disciples, are as alive, and as much in tune with the whole, as the servants and tenants of justice shallow. again, it is not only the lesser figures, but the scenery of these poems which is worth our study. that also is closely fitted to the main subject. the imagination paints it for that, and nothing else. it would not fit any other subject. for imagination, working at white heat, cannot do what is out of harmony; no more than a great musician can introduce a false chord. all goes together in these poems--scenery, characters, time, place and action. then, also, the extent of their range is remarkable. their subjects begin with savage man making his god out of himself. they pass through greek mythology to early christian times; from artemis and pan to st. john dying in the desert. then, still in the same period, while paul was yet alive, he paints another aspect of the time in cleon the rich artist, the friend of kings, who had reached the top of life, included all the arts in himself, yet dimly craved for more than earth could give. from these times the poems pass on to the early and late renaissance, and from that to the struggle for freedom in italy, and from that to modern life in europe. this great range illustrates the penetration and the versatility of his genius. he could place us with ease and truth at corinth, athens or rome, in paris, vienna or london; and wherever we go with him we are at home. one word more must be said about the way a great number of these poems arose. they leaped up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a single touch from the outside. _caliban upon setebos_ took its rise from a text in the bible which darted into his mind as he read the _tempest_. _cleon_ arose as he read that verse in st. paul's speech at athens, "as certain also of your own poets have said." i fancy that _an epistle of karshish_ was born one day when he read those two stanzas in _in memoriam_ about lazarus, and imagined how the subject would come to him. _fra lippo lippi_ slipped into his mind one day at the belle arti at florence as he stood before the picture described in the poem, and walked afterwards at night through the streets of florence. these fine things are born in a moment, and come into our world from poet, painter, and musician, full-grown; built, like aladdin's palace, with all their jewels, in a single night. they are inexplicable by any scientific explanation, as inexplicable as genius itself. when have the hereditarians explained shakespeare, mozart, turner? when has the science of the world explained the birth of a lyric of burns, a song of beethoven's, or a drawing of raffaelle? let these gentlemen veil their eyes, and confess their inability to explain the facts. for it is fact they touch. "full fathom five thy father lies"--that song of shakespeare exists. the overture to don giovanni is a reality. we can see the bacchus and ariadne at the national gallery and the theseus at the museum. these are facts; but they are a million million miles beyond the grasp of any science. nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the slightest water-colour sketch of turner, a half-finished clay sketch of donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding. these things are in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or the understanding, browning led them all at last. the first of these poems is _natural theology on the island; or, caliban upon setebos_. caliban, with the instincts and intelligence of an early savage, has, in an hour of holiday, set himself to conceive what setebos, his mother's god, is like in character. he talks out the question with himself, and because he is in a vague fear lest setebos, hearing him soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and swing a thunder-bolt at him, he not only hides himself in the earth, but speaks in the third person, as if it was not he that spoke; hoping in that fashion to trick his god. browning, conceiving in himself the mind and temper of an honest, earthly, imaginative savage--who is developed far enough to build nature-myths in their coarse early forms--architectures the character of setebos out of the habits, caprices, fancies, likes and dislikes, and thoughts of caliban; and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination it is. browning has done nothing better, though he has done as well. but browning's caliban is not a single personage. no one savage, at no one time, would have all these thoughts of his god. he is the representative of what has been thought, during centuries, by many thousands of men; the concentration into one mind of the ground-thoughts of early theology. at one point, as if browning wished to sketch the beginning of a new theological period, caliban represents a more advanced thought than savage man conceives. this is caliban's imagination of a higher being than setebos who is the capricious creator and power of the earth--of the "quiet," who is master of setebos and whose temper is quite different; who also made the stars, things which caliban, with a touch of browning's subtle thought, separates from the sun and moon and earth. it is plain from this, and from the whole argument which is admirably conducted, that caliban is an intellectual personage, too long neglected; and prospero, could he have understood his nature, would have enjoyed his conversation. renan agreed with browning in this estimate of his intelligence, and made him the foundation of a philosophical play. there is some slight reason for this in shakespeare's invention. he lifts caliban in intellect, even in feeling, far above trinculo, stephano, the boatswain and the rest of the common men. the objection, however, has been made that browning makes him too intelligent. the answer is that browning is not drawing caliban only, but embodying in an imagined personage the thoughts about god likely to be invented by early man during thousands of years--and this accounts for the insequences in caliban's thinking. they are not the thoughts of one but of several men. yet a certain poetic unity is given to them by the unity of place. the continual introduction of the landscape to be seen from his refuge knits the discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of unity. we watch him lying in the thick water-slime of the hollow, his head on the rim of it propped by his hands, under the cave's mouth, hidden by the gadding gourds and vines; looking out to sea and watching the wild animals that pass him by--and out of this place he does not stir. in shakespeare's _tempest_ caliban is the gross, brutal element of the earth and is opposed to ariel, the light, swift, fine element of the air. caliban curses prospero with the evils of the earth, with the wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the sea-marsh. browning's caliban does not curse at all. when he is not angered, or in a caprice, he is a good-natured creature, full of animal enjoyment. he loves to lie in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard, shivering with earthy pleasure when his spine is tickled by the small eft-things that course along it, run in and out each arm, and make him laugh. the poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisations of the brown prolific earth. browning had his own sympathy with caliban nor does shakespeare make him altogether brutish. he has been so educated by his close contact with nature that his imagination has been kindled. his very cursing is imaginative: as wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both; a south-west blow on you and blister you all o'er. stephano and trinculo, vulgar products of civilisation, could never have said that. moreover, shakespeare's caliban, like browning's, has the poetry of the earth-man in him. when ariel plays, trinculo and stephano think it must be the devil, and trinculo is afraid: but caliban loves and enjoys the music for itself: be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices that, if i then had waked after long sleep. will make me sleep again. stephano answers, like a modern millionaire: this will prove a brave kingdom for me, where i shall have my music for nothing. browning's caliban is also something of a poet, and loves the nature of whom he is a child. we are not surprised when he looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a spider web (meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times) though the phrase is full of a poet's imagination, for so the living earth would see and feel the sea. it belongs also to caliban's nearness to the earth that he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and that poetic pleasure in watching their life which, having seen them vividly, could describe them vividly. i quote one example from the poem; there are many others: 'thinketh, he made thereat the sun, this isle, trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds; a certain badger brown he hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that build a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole-- there are two more remarks to make about this poem. first, that browning makes caliban create a dramatic world in which miranda, ariel, and he himself play their parts, and in which he assumes the part of prosper. that is, caliban invents a new world out of the persons he knows, but different from them, and a second self outside himself. no lower animal has ever conceived of such a creation. secondly, browning makes caliban, in order to exercise his wit and his sense of what is beautiful, fall to making something--a bird, an insect, or a building which he ornaments, which satisfies him for a time, and which he then destroys to make a better. this is art in its beginning; and the highest animal we know of is incapable of it. we know that the men of the caves were capable of it. when they made a drawing, a piece of carving, they were unsatisfied until they had made a better. when they made a story out of what they knew and saw, they went on to make more. creation, invention, art--this, independent entirely of the religious desire, makes the infinite gulf which divides man from the highest animals. i do not mean, in this book, to speak of the theology of caliban, though the part of the poem which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well worth our attention. but the poem may be recommended to those theological persons who say there is no god; and to that large class of professional theologians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous, suddenly-angered god, without any conscience except his sense of power to do as he pleases, is quite in harmony with caliban's idea of setebos. the next of these "imaginative representations" is the poem called _cleon_. cleon is a rich and famous artist of the grecian isles, alive while st. paul was still making his missionary journeys, just at the time when the græco-roman culture had attained a height of refinement, but had lost originating power; when it thought it had mastered all the means for a perfect life, but was, in reality, trembling in a deep dissatisfaction on the edge of its first descent into exhaustion. then, as everything good had been done in the art of the past, cultivated men began to ask "was there anything worth doing?" "was life itself worth living?"; questions never asked by those who are living. or "what is life in its perfection, and when shall we have it?"; a question also not asked by those who live in the morning of a new æra, when the world--as in elizabeth's days, as in , as perhaps it may be in a few years--is born afresh; but which is asked continually in the years when a great movement of life has passed its culminating point and has begun to decline. again and again the world has heard these questions; in cleon's time, and when the renaissance had spent its force, and at the end of the reign of louis xiv., and before elizabeth's reign had closed, and about in england, and of late years also in our society. this is the temper and the time that browning embodies in cleon, who is the incarnation of a culture which is already feeling that life is going out of it. protus, the king, has written to him, and the poem is cleon's answer to the king. browning takes care, as usual, to have his background of scenery quite clear and fair. it is a courtyard to cleon's house in one of the sprinkled isles-- lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea, and laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "greece." i quote it; it marks the man and the age of luxurious culture. they give thy letter to me, even now; i read and seem as if i heard thee speak. the master of thy galley still unlades gift after gift; they block my court at last and pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought of thee; and one white she-slave from the group dispersed of black and white slaves (like the chequer work pavement, at once my nation's work and gift, now covered with this settle-down of doves), one lyric woman, in her crocus vest woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands commends to me the strainer and the cup thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine. but he is more than luxurious. he desires the highest life, and he praises the king because he has acknowledged by his gifts the joy that art gives to life; and most of all he praises him, because he too aspires, building a mighty tower, not that men may look at it, but that he may gaze from its height on the sun, and think what higher he may attain. the tower is the symbol of the cry of the king's soul. then he answers the king's letter. "it is true, o king, i am poet, sculptor, painter, architect, philosopher, musician; all arts are mine. have i done as well as the great men of old? no, but i have combined their excellences into one man, into myself. "i have not chanted verse like homer, no-- nor swept string like terpander--no--nor carved and painted men like phidias and his friend: i am not great as they are, point by point. but i have entered into sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate, ignored each other's art. say, is it nothing that i know them all? "this, since the best in each art has already been done, was the only progress possible, and i have made it. it is not unworthy, king! "well, now thou askest, if having done this, 'i have not attained the very crown of life; if i cannot now comfortably and fearlessly meet death?' 'i, cleon, leave,' thou sayest, 'my life behind me in my poems, my pictures; i am immortal in my work. what more can life desire?'" it is the question so many are asking now, and it is the answer now given. what better immortality than in one's work left behind to move in men? what more than this can life desire? but cleon does not agree with that. "if thou, o king, with the light now in thee, hadst looked at creation before man appeared, thou wouldst have said, 'all is perfect so far.' but questioned if anything more perfect in joy might be, thou wouldst have said, 'yes; a being may be made, unlike these who do not know the joy they have, who shall be conscious of himself, and know that he is happy. then his life will be satisfied with daily joy.'" o king, thou wouldst have answered foolishly. the higher the soul climbs in joy the more it sees of joy, and when it sees the most, it perishes. vast capabilities of joy open round it; it craves for all it presages; desire for more deepening with every attainment. and then the body intervenes. age, sickness, decay, forbid attainment. life is inadequate to joy. what have the gods done? it cannot be their malice, no, nor carelessness; but--to let us see oceans of joy, and only give us power to hold a cupful--is that to live? it is misery, and the more of joy my artist nature makes me capable of feeling, the deeper my misery. "but then, o king, thou sayest 'that i leave behind me works that will live; works, too, which paint the joy of life.' yes, but to show what the joy of life is, is not to have it. if i carve the young phoebus, am i therefore young? i can write odes of the delight of love, but grown too grey to be beloved, can i have its delight? that fair slave of yours, and the rower with the muscles all a ripple on his back who lowers the sail in the bay, can write no love odes nor can they paint the joy of love; but they can have it--not i." the knowledge, he thinks, of what joy is, of all that life can give, which increases in the artist as his feebleness increases, makes his fate the deadlier. what is it to him that his works live? he does not live. the hand of death grapples the throat of life at the moment when he sees most clearly its infinite possibilities. decay paralyses his hand when he knows best how to use his tools. it is accomplished wretchedness. i quote his outburst. it is in the soul of thousands who have no hope of a life to come. "but," sayest thou--(and i marvel, i repeat, to find thee trip on such a mere word) "what thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: sappho survives, because we sing her songs, and Æschylus, because we read his plays!" why, if they live still, let them come and take thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, speak in my place! "thou diest while i survive?"-- say rather that my fate is deadlier still, in this, that every day my sense of joy grows more acute, my soul (intensified by power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; while every day my hairs fall more and more, my hand shakes, and the heavy years increase-- the horror quickening still from year to year, the consummation coming past escape when i shall know most, and yet least enjoy-- when all my works wherein i prove my worth, being present still to mock me in men's mouths, alive still, in the praise of such as thou, i, i the feeling, thinking, acting man, the man who loved his life so overmuch, sleep in my urn. it is so horrible i dare at times imagine to my need some future state revealed to us by zeus, unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire of joy, --to seek which the joy-hunger forces us: that, stung by straitness of our life, made strait on purpose to make prized the life at large-- freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, we burst there as the worm into the fly. who, while a worm still, wants his wings. but no! zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, he must have done so, were it possible! this is one only of browning's statements of what he held to be the fierce necessity for another life. without it, nothing is left for humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness--nothing in the end but cleon's cry--sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle--to protus, live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad for what was. farewell. but for those who are not cleon and protus, not kings in comfort or poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end--what is to be said of them? i will not stay to speak of _a death in the desert_, which is another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with questions of modern theology. st. john awakes into clear consciousness just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few disciples. he foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them as he can. the bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is browning's exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative representation of what st. john actually would have said. it does not therefore come into my subject. what does come into it is the extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description given by john's disciple of the place where they were, and the fate of his companions. this is invented in browning's most excellent way. it could not be better done. the next poem is the _epistle of karshish, the arab physician_, to his master, concerning his strange medical experience. the time is just before the last siege of jerusalem, and karshish, journeying through jericho, and up the pass, stays for a few days at bethany and meets lazarus. his case amazes him, and though he thinks his interest in it unworthy of a man of science in comparison with the new herbs and new diseases he has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and gives a full account of it to his master. i do not think that browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he more enjoyed. the creation of karshish suited his humour and his quaint play with recondite knowledge. he describes the physician till we see him alive and thinking, in body and soul. the creation of lazarus is even a higher example of the imaginative power of browning; and that it is shaped for us through the mind of karshish, and in tune with it, makes the imaginative effort the more remarkable. then the problem--how to express the condition of a man's body and soul, who, having for three days according to the story as browning conceives it lived consciously in the eternal and perfect world, has come back to dwell in this world--was so difficult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses, that it delighted him. of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to give a true semblance to the whole. karshish comes up the flinty pass from jericho; he is attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild beasts endanger his path; a black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear, lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls; i cried and threw my staff and he was gone, and then, at the end of the pass, he met lazarus. see how vividly the scenery is realised-- i crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills like an old lion's cheek-teeth. out there came a moon made like a face with certain spots, multiform, manifold and menacing: then a wind rose behind me. so we met in this old sleepy town at unaware the man and i. and the weird evening, karshish thinks, had something to do with the strange impression the man has made on him. then we are placed in the dreamy village of bethany. we hear of its elders, its diseases, its flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine-- there is a spider here weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back; and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of vespasian marching into judæa. so we have the place, the village, the hills, the animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of karshish. the inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal with lazarus. this is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the soul. "the syrian," he tells his master, "has had catalepsy, and a learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and brought him back to life after three days. he says he was dead, and made alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough. at any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and i. but the mind and soul of the man, that is the strange matter, and in that he is entirely unlike other men. whatever he has gone through has rebathed him as in clear water of another life, and penetrated his whole being. he views the world like a child, he scarcely listens to what goes on about him, yet he is no fool. if one could fancy a man endowed with perfect knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man is he. his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. he has lost all sense of our values of things. vespasian besieging jerusalem and a mule passing with gourds awaken the same interest. but speak of some little fact, little as we think, and he stands astonished with its prodigious import. if his child sicken to death it does not seem to matter to him, but a gesture, a glance from the child, starts him into an agony of fear and anger, as if the child were undoing the universe. he lives like one between two regions, one of distracting glory, of which he is conscious but must not enter yet; and the other into which he has been exiled back again--and between this region where his soul moves and the earth where his body is, there is so little harmony of thought or feeling that he cannot undertake any human activity, nor unite the demands of the two worlds. he knows that what ought to be cannot be in the world he has returned to, so that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant perplexity he falls back on prone submission to the heavenly will. the time will come when death will restore his being to equilibrium; but now he is out of harmony, for the soul knows more than the body and the body clouds the soul." "i probed this seeming indifference. 'beast, to be so still and careless when rome is at the gates of thy town.' he merely looked with his large eyes at me. yet the man is not apathetic, but loves old and young, the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. his only impatience is with wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience." at last karshish tells, with many apologies for his foolishness, the strangest thing of all. lazarus thinks that his curer was god himself who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out among them healing and teaching, and then died. "it is strange, but why write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for remark? forget it, my master, pardon me and farewell." then comes the postscript, that impression which, in spite of all his knowledge, is left in karshish's mind-- the very god! think, abib; dost thou think? so, the all-great were the all-loving too-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying: "o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee!"-- the madman saith he said so; it is strange. * * * * * chapter xii _imaginative representations renaissance_ the imaginative representations to be discussed in this chapter are those which belong to the time of the renaissance. we take a great leap when we pass from karshish and cleon to fra lippo lippi, from early christian times to the early manhood of the renaissance. but these leaps are easy to a poet, and browning is even more at his ease and in his strength in the fifteenth century than in the first. we have seen with what force in _sordello_ he realised the life and tumult of the thirteenth century. the fourteenth century does not seem to have attracted him much, though he frequently refers to its work in florence; but when the renaissance in the fifteenth century took its turn with decision towards a more open freedom of life and thought, abandoning one after another the conventions of the past; when the moral limits, which the church still faintly insisted on, were more and more withdrawn and finally blotted out; when, as the century passed into the next, the church led the revolt against decency, order, and morality; when scepticism took the place of faith, even of duty, and criticism the place of authority, then browning became interested, not of course in the want of faith and in immorality, but in the swift variety and intensity of the movement of intellectual and social life, and in the interlacing changes of the movement. this was an enchanting world for him, and as he was naturally most interested in the arts, he represented the way in which the main elements of the renaissance appeared to him in poems which were concerned with music, poetry, painting and the rest of the arts, but chiefly with painting. of course, when the renaissance began to die down into senile pride and decay, browning, who never ceased to choose and claim companionship with vigorous life, who abhorred decay either in nature or nations, in societies or in cliques of culture, who would have preferred a blood-red pirate to the daintiest of decadents--did not care for it, and in only one poem, touched with contemptuous pity and humour, represented its disease and its disintegrating elements, with so much power, however, with such grasping mastery, that it is like a painting by velasquez. ruskin said justly that the _bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_ concentrated into a few lines all the evil elements of the renaissance. but this want of care for the decaying renaissance was contrasted by the extreme pleasure with which he treated its early manhood in _fra lippo lippi_. the renaissance had a life and seasons, like those of a human being. it went through its childhood and youth like a boy of genius under the care of parents from whose opinions and mode of life he is sure to sever himself in the end; but who, having made a deep impression on his nature, retain power over, and give direction to, his first efforts at creation. the first art of the renaissance, awakened by the discovery of the classic remnants, retained a great deal of the faith and superstition, the philosophy, theology, and childlike _naïveté_ of the middle ages. its painting and sculpture, but chiefly the first of these, gave themselves chiefly to the representation of the soul upon the face, and of the untutored and unconscious movements of the body under the influence of religious passion; that is, such movements as expressed devotion, fervent love of christ, horror of sin, were chosen, and harmonised with the expression of the face. painting dedicated its work to the representation of the heavenly life, either on earth in the story of the gospels and in the lives of the saints, or in its glory in the circles of heaven. then, too, it represented the thought, philosophy, and knowledge of its own time and of the past in symbolic series of quiet figures, in symbolic pictures of the struggle of good with evil, of the church with the world, of the virtues with their opposites. naturally, then, the expression on the face of secular passions, the movement of figures in war and trade and social life and the whole vast field of human life in the ordinary world, were neglected as unworthy of representation; and the free, full life of the body, its beauty, power and charm, the objects which pleased its senses, the frank representation of its movement under the influence of the natural as contrasted with the spiritual passions, were looked upon with religious dismay. such, but less in sculpture than in painting, was the art of the renaissance in its childhood and youth, and browning has scarcely touched that time. he had no sympathy with a neglect of the body, a contempt of the senses or of the beauty they perceived. he claimed the physical as well as the intellectual and spiritual life of man as by origin and of right divine. when, then, in harmony with a great change in social and literary life, the art of the renaissance began to turn, in its early manhood, from the representation of the soul to the representation of the body in natural movement and beauty; from the representation of saints, angels and virtues to the representation of actual men and women in the streets and rooms of florence; from symbolism to reality--browning thought, "this suits me; this is what i love; i will put this mighty change into a poem." and he wrote _fra lippo lippi_. as long as this vivid representation of actual human life lasted, the art of the renaissance was active, original, and interesting; and as it moved on, developing into higher and finer forms, and producing continually new varieties in its development, it reached its strong and eager manhood. in its art then, as well as in other matters, the renaissance completed its new and clear theory of life; it remade the grounds of life, of its action and passion; and it reconstituted its aims. browning loved this summer time of the renaissance, which began with the midst of the fifteenth century. but he loved its beginnings even more than its fulness. that was characteristic. i have said that even when he was eighty years old, his keenest sympathies were with spring rather than summer, with those times of vital change when fresh excitements disturbed the world, when its eyes were smiling with hope, and its feet eager with the joy of pursuit. he rejoiced to analyse and embody a period which was shaking off the past, living intensely in the present, and prophesying the future. it charms us, as we read him, to see his intellect and his soul like two hunting dogs, and with all their eagerness, questing, roving, quartering, with the greatest joy and in incessant movement, over a time like this, where so many diverse, clashing, and productive elements mingled themselves into an enchanting confusion and glory of life. out of that pleasure of hunting in a morning-tide of humanity, was born _fra lippo lippi_; and there is scarcely an element of the time, except the political elements, which it does not represent; not dwelt on, but touched for the moment and left; unconsciously produced as two men of the time would produce them in conversation. the poem seems as easy as a chat in pall mall last night between some intelligent men, which, read two hundred years hence, would inform the reader of the trend of thought and feeling in this present day. but in reality to do this kind of thing well is to do a very difficult thing. it needs a full knowledge, a full imagination and a masterly execution. yet when we read the poem, it seems as natural as the breaking out of blossoms. this is that divine thing, the ease of genius. the scenery of the poem is as usual clear. we are in fifteenth-century florence at night. there is no set description, but the slight touches are enough to make us see the silent lonely streets, the churches, the high walls of the monastic gardens, the fortress-palaces. the sound of the fountains is in our ears; the little crowds of revelling men and girls appear and disappear like ghosts; the surly watch with their weapons and torches bustle round the corner. nor does browning neglect to paint by slight enlivening touches, introduced into lippo lippi's account of himself as a starving boy, the aspect by day and the character of the florence of the fifteenth century. this painting of his, slight as it is, is more alive than all the elaborate descriptions in _romola_. as to the poem itself, browning plunges at once into his matter; no long approaches, no elaborate porches belong to his work. the man and his character are before us in a moment-- i am poor brother lippo, by your leave! you need not clap your torches to my face. zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk! what, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds, and here you catch me at an alley's end where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar? for three weeks he has painted saints, and saints, and saints again, for cosimo in the medici palace; but now the time of blossoms has come. florence is now awake at nights; the secret of the spring moves in his blood; the man leaps up, the monk retires. ouf! i leaned out of window for fresh air. there came a hurry of feet and little feet, a sweep of lute-strings, laughs and whifts of song,-- _flower o' the broom._ _take away love, and our earth is a tomb!_ _flower of the quince,_ _i let lisa go, and what good in life since?_ _flower of the thyme_--and so on. round they went. scarce had they turned the corner when a titter, like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,--three slim shapes, and a face that looked up ... zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all i'm made of! into shreds it went, curtain and counterpane and coverlet, all the bed furniture--a dozen knots, there was a ladder! down i let myself, hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped, and after them. i came up with the fun hard by st. laurence, hail fellow, well met,-- _flower o' the rose,_ _if i've been merry, what matter who knows?_ it is a picture, not only of the man, but of the time and its temper, when religion and morality, as well as that simplicity of life which dante describes, had lost their ancient power over society in florence; when the claim to give to human nature all it desired had stolen into the church itself. even in the monasteries, the long seclusion from natural human life had produced a reaction, which soon, indulging itself as fra lippo lippi did, ran into an extremity of licence. nevertheless, something of the old religious life lasted at the time of this poem. it stretched one hand back to the piety of the past, and retained, though faith and devotion had left them, its observances and conventions; so that, at first, when lippo was painting, the new only peeped out of the old, like the saucy face of a nymph from the ilexes of a sacred grove. this is the historical moment browning illustrates. lippo lippi was forced to paint the worn religious subjects: jerome knocking his breast, the choirs of angels and martyrs, the scenes of the gospel; but out of all he did the eager modern life began to glance! natural, quaint, original faces and attitudes appeared; the angels smiled like florentine women; the saints wore the air of bohemians. there is a picture by lippo lippi in the national gallery of some nine of them sitting on a bench under a hedge of roses, and it is no paradox to say that they might fairly represent the florentines who tell the tales of the _decameron_. the transition as it appeared in art is drawn in this poem. lippo lippi became a monk by chance; it was not his vocation. a starving boy, he roamed the streets of florence; and the widespread intelligence of the city is marked by browning's account of the way in which the _boy_ observed all the life of the streets for eight years. then the coming change of the aims of art is indicated by the way in which, when he was allowed to paint, he covered the walls of the carmine, not with saints, virgins, and angels, but with the daily life of the streets--the boy patting the dog, the murderer taking refuge at the altar, the white wrath of the avenger coming up the aisle, the girl going to market, the crowd round the stalls in the market, the monks, white, grey, and black--things as they were, as like as two peas to the reality; flesh and blood now painted, not skin and bone; not the expression on the face alone, but the whole body in speaking movement; nothing conventional, nothing imitative of old models, but actual life as it lay before the painter's eyes. into this fresh æra of art lippo lippi led the way with the joy of youth. but he was too soon. the prior, all the representatives of the conservative elements in the convent, were sorely troubled. "why, this will never do: faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true; life as it is; nature as she is; quite impossible." and browning, in lippo's defence of himself, paints the conflict of the past with the coming art in a passage too long to quote, too admirable to shorten. the new art conquered the old. the whole life of florence was soon painted as it was: the face of the town, the streets, the churches, the towers, the winding river, the mountains round about it; the country, the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing, sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the tradesmen's wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their friends; the interior of the houses. we may see this art of human life in the apse of santa maria novella, painted by the hand of ghirlandajo: in the riccardi palace, painted by benozzo gozzoli; in more than half the pictures of the painters who succeeded fra lippo lippi. only, so much of the old clings that all this actual florentine life is painted into the ancient religious subjects--the life of the baptist and the virgin, the embassage of the wise men, the life of christ, the legends of the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, jerusalem and its life painted as if it were florence and its life--all the spiritual religion gone out of it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion budding in it--the religion, not of the monastery, but of daily common life. the world --the beauty and the wonder and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades. changes, surprises--and god made it all! who paints these things as if they were alive, and loves them while he paints, paints the garment of god; and men not only understand their own life better because they see, through the painting, what they did not see before; but also the movement of god's spirit in the beauty of the world and in the life of men. art interprets to man all that is, and god in it. oh, oh, it makes me mad to think what men shall do and we in our graves! this world's no blot for us, no blank; it means intensely, and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink. he could not do it; the time was not ripe enough. but he began it. and the spirit of its coming breaks out in all he did. we take a leap of more than half a century when we pass from _fra lippo lippi_ to _andrea del sarto_. that advance in art to which lippo lippi looked forward with a kind of rage at his own powerlessness had been made. in its making, the art of the renaissance had painted men and women, both body and soul, in every kind of life, both of war and peace; and better than they had ever been painted before. having fulfilled that, the painters asked, "what more? what new thing shall we do? what new aim shall we pursue?" and there arose among them a desire to paint all that was paintable, and especially the human body, with scientific perfection. "in our desire to paint the whole of life, we have produced so much that we were forced to paint carelessly or inaccurately. in our desire to be original, we have neglected technique. in our desire to paint the passions on the face and in the movements of men, we have lost the calm and harmony of the ancient classic work, which made its ethical impression of the perfect balance of the divine nature by the ideal arrangement, in accord with a finished science, of the various members of the body to form a finished whole. let the face no longer then try to represent the individual soul. one type of face for each class of art-representation is enough. let our effort be to represent beauty by the perfect drawing of the body in repose and in action, and by chosen attitudes and types. let our composition follow certain guiding lines and rules, in accordance with whose harmonies all pictures shall be made. we will follow the greek; compose as he did, and by his principles; and for that purpose make a scientific study of the body of man; observing in all painting, sculpture, and architecture the general forms and proportions that ancient art, after many experiments, selected as the best. and, to match that, we must have perfect drawing in all we do." this great change, which, as art's adulterous connection with science deepened, led to such unhappy results, browning represents, when its aim had been reached, in his poem, _andrea del sarto_; and he tells us--through andrea's talk with his wife lucretia--what he thought of it; and what andrea himself, whose broken life may have opened his eyes to the truth of things, may himself have thought of it. on that element in the poem i have already dwelt, and shall only touch on the scenery and tragedy, of the piece: we sit with andrea, looking out to fiesole. sober, pleasant fiesole. there's the bell clinking from the chapel top; that length of convent-wall across the way holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; the last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, and autumn grows, autumn in everything. as the poem goes on, the night falls, falls with the deepening of the painter's depression; the owls cry from the hill, florence wears the grey hue of the heart of andrea; and browning weaves the autumn and the night into the tragedy of the painter's life. that tragedy was pitiful. andrea del sarto was a faultless painter and a weak character; and it fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless woman. his natural weakness was doubled by the weakness engendered by unconquerable passion; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour, to please his wife. he wearied her, as women are wearied, by passion unaccompanied by power; and she endured him only while he could give her money and pleasures. she despised him for that endurance, and all the more that he knew she was guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave him. browning fills his main subject--his theory of the true aim of art--with this tragedy; and his treatment of it is a fine example of his passionate humanity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play. it is worth a reader's while to read, along with this poem, alfred de musset's short play, _andré del sarto_. the tragedy of the situation is deepened by the french poet, and the end is told. unlike browning, only a few lines sketch the time, its temper, and its art. it is the depth of the tragedy which de musset paints, and that alone; and in order to deepen it, andrea is made a much nobler character than he is in browning's poem. the betrayal is also made more complete, more overwhelming. lucretia is false to andrea with his favourite pupil, with cordiani, to whom he had given all he had, whom he loved almost as much as he loved his wife. terrible, inevitable fate broods over this brief and masterly little play. the next of these imaginative representations of the renaissance is, _the bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_. we are placed in the full decadence of the renaissance. its total loss of religion, even in the church; its immorality--the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every kind of iniquity--its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-paganism; its imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the common people; its exhaustion--are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing poem. these are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life. one of these is the _pictor ignotus_. there must have been many men, during the vital time of the renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a pain they knew they could not bear. these men are common at a period when life is racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city like florence. the general intensity of the life lifts them to a height they would never reach in a dull and sleepy age. the life they have is not their own, but the life of the whole town. and this keen perception of life outside of them persuades them that they can do all that men of real power can do. in reality, they can do nothing and make nothing worth a people's honour. browning, who himself was compact of boldness, who loved experiment in what was new, and who shaped what he conceived without caring for criticism, felt for these men, of whom he must have met many; and, asking himself "how they would think; what they would do; and how life would seem to them," wrote this poem. in what way will poor human nature excuse itself for failure? how will the weakness in the man try to prove that it was power? how, having lost the joy of life, will he attempt to show that his loss is gain, his failure a success; and, being rejected of the world, approve himself within? this was a subject to please browning; meat such as his soul loved: a nice, involved, dædalian, labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real sentiment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with his pity for its human weakness. "i could have painted any picture that i pleased," cries this painter; "represented on the face any passion, any virtue." if he could he would have done it, or tried it. genius cannot hold itself in. "i have dreamed of sending forth some picture which should enchant the world (and he alludes to cimabue's picture)-- "bound for some great state, or glad aspiring little burgh, it went-- flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight, through old streets named afresh from the event. "that would have been, had i willed it. but mixed with the praisers there would have been cold, critical faces; judges who would press on me and mock. and i--i could not bear it." alas! had he had genius, no fear would have stayed his hand, no judgment of the world delayed his work. what stays a river breaking from its fountain-head? so he sank back, saying the world was not worthy of his labours. "what? expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls! no, i will rather paint the same monotonous round of virgin, child, and saints in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's gloom. no merchant then will traffic in my heart. my pictures will moulder and die. let them die. i have not vulgarised myself or them." brilliant and nobly wrought as the first three poems are of which i have written, this quiet little piece needed and received a finer workmanship, and was more difficult than they. then there is _how it strikes a contemporary_--the story of the gossip of a spanish town about a poor poet, who, because he wanders everywhere about the streets observing all things, is mistaken for a spy of the king. the long pages he writes are said to be letters to the king; the misfortunes of this or that man are caused by his information. the world thinks him a wonder of cleverness; he is but an inferior poet. it imagines that he lives in assyrian luxury; he lives and dies in a naked garret. this imaginative representation might be of any time in a provincial town of an ignorant country like spain. it is a slight study of what superstitious imagination and gossip will work up round any man whose nature and manners, like those of a poet, isolate him from the common herd. force is added to this study by its scenery. the moorish windows, the shops, the gorgeous magistrates pacing down the promenade, are touched in with a flying pencil; and then, moving through the crowd, the lean, black-coated figure, with his cane and dog and his peaked hat, clear flint eyes and beaked nose, is seen, as if alive, in the vivid sunshine of valladolid. but what browning wished most to describe in this poem was one of the first marks of a poet, even of a poor one like this gentleman--the power of seeing and observing everything. nothing was too small, nothing uninteresting in this man's eyes. his very hat was scrutinising. he stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, the man who slices lemons into drink, the coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys that volunteer to help him turn its winch. he glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye, and fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string, and broad-edged bold-print posters by the wall. he took such cognisance of man and things, if any beat a horse you felt he saw; if any cursed a woman, he took note; yet stared at nobody, you stared at him, and found, less to your pleasure than surprise, he seemed to know you and expect as much. that is the artist's way. it was browning's way. he is describing himself. in that fashion he roamed through venice or florence, stopping every moment, attracted by the smallest thing, finding a poem in everything, lost in himself yet seeing all that surrounded him, isolated in thinking, different from and yet like the rest of the world. another poem--_my last duchess_--must be mentioned. it is plainly placed in the midst of the period of the renaissance by the word _ferrara_, which is added to its title. but it is rather a picture of two temperaments which may exist in any cultivated society, and at any modern time. there are numbers of such men as the duke and such women as the duchess in our midst. both are, however, drawn with mastery. browning has rarely done his work with more insight, with greater keenness of portraiture, with happier brevity and selection. as in _the flight of the duchess_, untoward fate has bound together two temperaments sure to clash with each other--and no gipsy comes to deliver the woman in this case. the man's nature kills her. it happens every day. the renaissance society may have built up more men of this type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it. germany, not italy, is, i think, the country in which browning intended to place two other poems which belong to the time of the renaissance--_johannes agricola in meditation_ and _a grammarian's funeral_. their note is as different from that of the italian poems as the national temper of germany is from that of italy. they have no sense of beauty for beauty's sake alone. their atmosphere is not soft or gay but somewhat stern. the logical arrangement of them is less one of feeling than of thought. there is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer view of life. the sense of duty to god and man, but little represented in the italian poems of the renaissance, does exist in these two german poems. moreover, there is in them a full representation of aspiration to the world beyond. but the italian renaissance lived for the earth alone, and its loveliness; too close to earth to care for heaven. it pleased browning to throw himself fully into the soul of johannes agricola; and he does it with so much personal fervour that it seems as if, in one of his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the moment of his writing, was dominated by him. the mystic-passion fills the poetry with keen and dazzling light, and it is worth while, from this point of view, to compare the poem with tennyson's _sir galahad_, and on another side, with _st. simeon stylites_. johannes agricola was one of the products of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth century in germany, one of its wild extremes. he believes that god had chosen him among a few to be his for ever and for his own glory from the foundation of the world. he did not say that all sin was permitted to the saints, that what the flesh did was no matter, like those wild fanatics, one of whom scott draws in _woodstock_; but he did say, that if he sinned it made no matter to his election by god. nay, the immanence of god in him turned the poison to health, the filth to jewels. goodness and badness make no matter; god's choice is all. the martyr for truth, the righteous man whose life has saved the world, but who is not elected, is damned for ever in burning hell. "i am eternally chosen; for that i praise god. i do not understand it. if i did, could i praise him? but i know my settled place in the divine decrees." i quote the beginning. it is pregnant with superb spiritual audacity, and kindled with imaginative pride. there's heaven above, and night by night i look right through its gorgeous roof; no suns and moons though e'er so bright avail to stop me; splendour-proof keep the broods of stars aloof: for i intend to get to god, for 'tis to god i speed so fast, for in god's breast, my own abode, those shoals of dazzling glory, passed, i lay my spirit down at last. i lie where i have always lain, god smiles as he has always smiled; ere suns and moons could wax and wane, ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled the heavens, god thought on me his child; ordained a life for me, arrayed its circumstances every one to the minutest; ay, god said this head this hand should rest upon thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. and having thus created me, thus rooted me, he bade me grow, guiltless for ever, like a tree that buds and blooms, nor seeks to know the law by which it prospers so: but sure that thought and word and deed all go to swell his love for me, me, made because that love had need of something irreversibly pledged solely its content to be. as to _a grammarian's funeral_, that poem also belongs to the german rather than to the italian spirit. the renaissance in italy lost its religion; at the same time, in germany, it added a reformation of religion to the new learning. the renaissance in italy desired the fulness of knowledge in this world, and did not look for its infinities in the world beyond. in germany the same desire made men call for the infinities of knowledge beyond the earth. a few italians, like savonarola, like m. angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their world; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of every german who had gained a religion. in italy, as the renaissance rose to its luxury and trended to its decay, the pull towards personal righteousness made by belief in an omnipotent goodness who demands the subjection of our will to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars and cultivated society. a man's will was his only law. on the other hand, the life of the new learning in germany and england was weighted with a sense of duty to an eternal righteousness. the love of knowledge or beauty was modified into seriousness of life, carried beyond this life in thought, kept clean, and, though filled with incessant labour on the earth, aspired to reach its fruition only in the life to come. this is the spirit and the atmosphere of the _grammarian's funeral_, and browning's little note at the beginning says that its time "was shortly after the revival of learning in europe." i have really no proof that browning laid the scene of his poem in germany, save perhaps the use of such words as "thorp" and "croft," but there is a clean, pure morning light playing through the verse, a fresh, health-breathing northern air, which does not fit in with italy; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in the song and march of the students who carry their master with gay strength up the mountain to the very top, all of them filled with his aspiring spirit, all of them looking forward with gladness and vigour to life--which has no relation whatever to the temper of florentine or roman life during the age of the medici. the bold brightness, moral earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity, reverence for good work and for the man who did it, which breathe in the poem, differ by a whole world from the atmosphere of life in _andrea del sarto_. this is a crowd of men who are moving upwards, who, seizing the renaissance elements, knitted them through and through with reformation of life, faith in god, and hope for man. they had a future and knew it. the semi-paganism of the renaissance had not, and did not know it had not. we may close this series of renaissance representations by _a toccata of galuppi's_. it cannot take rank with the others as a representative poem. it is of a different class; a changeful dream of images and thoughts which came to browning as he was playing a piece of eighteenth-century venetian music. but in the dream there is a sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was dishonourable poverty, into which venetian society had fallen in the eighteenth century. to this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in italy. that part of the poem is representative. it is the end of such a society as is drawn in _the bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_. that tomb is placed in rome, but it is in venice that this class of tombs reached their greatest splendour of pride, opulence, folly, debasement and irreligion. finally, there are a few poems which paint the thoughts, the sorrows, the pleasures, and the political passions of modern italy. there is the _italian in england_, full of love for the italian peasant and of pity for the patriot forced to live and die far from his motherland. mazzini used to read it to his fellow-exiles to show them how fully an english poet could enter into the temper of their soul. so far it may be said to represent a type. but it scarcely comes under the range of this chapter. but _up in a villa, down in the city_, is so vivid a representation of all that pleased a whole type of the city-bred and poor nobles of italy at the time when browning wrote the _dramatic lyrics_ that i cannot omit it. it is an admirable piece of work, crowded with keen descriptions of nature in the casentino, and of life in the streets of florence. and every piece of description is so filled with the character of the "italian person of quality" who describes them--a petulant, humorous, easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman--that browning entirely disappears. the poem retains for us in its verse, and indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the _naïveté_, the simple pleasures, the ignorance, and the honest boredom with the solitudes of nature--of a whole class of italians, not only of the time when it was written, but of the present day. it is a delightful, inventive piece of gay and pictorial humour. * * * * * chapter xiii _womanhood in browning_ the first woman we meet in browning's poetry is pauline; a twofold person, exceedingly unlike the woman usually made by a young poet. she is not only the pauline idealised and also materialised by the selfish passion of her lover, but also the real woman whom browning has conceived underneath the lover's image of her. this doubling of his personages, as seen under two diverse aspects or by two different onlookers, in the same poem, is not unfrequent in his poetry, and it pleased his intellect to make these efforts. when the thing was well done, its cleverness was amazing, even imaginative; when it was ill done, it was confusing. tennyson never did this; he had not analytic power enough. what he sees of his personages is all one, quite clearly drawn and easy to understand. but we miss in them, and especially in his women, the intellectual play, versatility and variety of browning. tennyson's women sometimes border on dulness, are without that movement, change and surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil or for good. if tennyson had had a little more of browning's imaginative analysis, and browning a little less of it, both would have been better artists. the pauline of the lover is the commonplace woman whom a young man so often invents out of a woman for his use and pleasure. she is to be his salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys and pains, to give him everything, with herself, and to live for him and him alone. nothing can be more _naïf_ and simple than this common selfishness which forgets that a woman has her own life, her own claim on the man, and her own individuality to develop; and this element in the poem, which never occurs again in browning's poetry, may be the record of an early experience. if so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much. it is excusable and natural in the young. his contempt for this kind of love is embodied in the second pauline. she is not the woman her lover imagines her to be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience, criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited. there is a dim perception in the lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress' character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the patronising piece of criticism in french which browning has put into her mouth. the first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the poem. and if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the making of the second and critical pauline was his record, when his love had passed, of what he thought about it all. this mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs to browning as an artist. he seems, while he wrote, as if half of him sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the unity of their personality. this is a weakness in his work when he has to create characters in a drama who may be said, like shakespeare's, to have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the poet. his spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of browning more than the individuality of the characters. we follow him at this work with keen intellectual pleasure, but we do not always follow him with a passionate humanity. on the contrary, this habit, which was one cause of his weakness as an artist in the drama, increased his strength as an artist when he made single pictures of men and women at isolated crises in their lives; or when he pictured them as they seemed at the moment to one, two, or three differently tempered persons--pictorial sketches and studies which we may hang up in the chambers of the mind for meditation or discussion. their intellectual power and the emotional interest they awaken, the vivid imaginative lightning which illuminates them in flashes, arise out of that part of his nature which made him a weak dramatist. had he chosen, for example, to paint lady carlisle as he conceived her, in an isolated portrait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama of _strafford_, we should have had a clear and intimate picture of her moving, alive at every point, amidst the decay and shipwreck of the court. but in the play she is a shade who comes and goes, unoutlined, confused and confusing, scarcely a woman at all. the only clear hints of what browning meant her to be are given in the _asides_ of strafford. browning may have been content with _strafford_ as a whole, but, with his passion for vitality, he could not have been content with either lady carlisle or the queen as representatives of women. indeed, up to this point, when he had written _pauline_, _paracelsus_ and _strafford_, he must have felt that he had left out of his poetry one half of the human race; and his ambition was to represent both men and women. pauline's chief appearance is in french prose. michel, in _paracelsus_, is a mere silhouette of the sentimental german frau, a soft sympathiser with her husband and with the young eagle paracelsus, who longs to leave the home she would not leave for the world--an excellent and fruitful mother. she is set in a pleasant garden landscape. twice browning tries to get more out of her and to lift her into reality. but the men carry him away from her, and she remains undrawn. these mere images, with the exception of the woman in _porphyria's lover_, who, with a boldness which might have astonished even byron but is characteristic of browning in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the cottage in the garden--are all that he had made of womanhood in , four years after he had begun to publish poetry. it was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life and affairs. so, in _sordello_, he created palma. she runs through the poem, and her appearances mark turning points in sordello's development; but thrice she appears in full colour and set in striking circumstances--first, in the secret room of the palace at verona with sordello when she expounds her policy, and afterwards leans with him amid a gush of torch-fire over the balcony, whence the grey-haired councillors spoke to the people surging in the square and shouting for the battle. the second time is in the streets of ferrara, full of camping men and fires; and the third is when she waits with taurello in the vaulted room below the chamber where sordello has been left to decide what side he shall take, for the emperor or the pope. he dies while they wait, but there is no finer passage in the poem than this of palma and taurello talking in the dim corridor of the new world they would make for north italy with sordello. it is not dramatic characterisation, but magnificent individualisation of the woman and the man. we see palma first as a girl at goito, where she fills sordello with dreams, and browning gives her the beauty of the venetians titian painted. how the tresses curled into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound about her like a glory! even the ground was bright as with spilt sunbeams: full consciousness of her beauty is with her, frank triumph in it; but she is still a child. at the court of love she is a woman, not only conscious of her loveliness, but able to use it to bind and loose, having sensuous witchery and intellectual power, that terrible combination. she lays her magic on sordello. but she is not only the woman of personal magic and beauty. being of high rank and mixed with great events, she naturally becomes the political woman, a common type in the thirteenth century. and browning gives her the mental power to mould and direct affairs. she uses her personal charm to lure sordello into politics. her wise and lulling words are yet about the room, her presence wholly poured upon the gloom down even to her vesture's creeping stir. and so reclines he, saturate with her. * * * but when she felt she held her friend indeed safe, she threw back her curls, began implant her lessons; her long discourse on the state of parties, and how sordello may, in mastering them, complete his being, fascinates him and us by the charm of her intelligence. but the political woman has often left love behind. politics, like devotion, are a woman's reaction from the weariness of loving and being loved. but palma is young, and in the midst of her politics she retains passion, sentiment, tenderness and charm. she dreams of some soul beyond her own, who, coming, should call on all the force in her character; enable her, in loving him, to give consummation to her work for italy; and be himself the hand and sword of her mind. therefore she held herself in leash till the right man came, till she loved. "waits he not," her heart cries, and mixes him with coming spring: waits he not the waking year? his almond blossoms must be honey-ripe by this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe the thawed ravines; because of him, the wind walks like a herald. i shall surely find him now. she finds him in sordello, and summons him, when the time is ripe, to verona. love and ambition march together in her now. in and out of all her schemes sordello moves. the glory of her vision of north italian rule is like a halo round his brow. not one political purpose is lost, but all are transfigured in her by love. softness and strength, intellect and feeling meet in her. this is a woman nobly carved, and the step from michel, pauline and lady carlisle to her is an immense one. by exercise of his powers browning's genius had swiftly developed. there comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe. and with this revelation of man and nature, a tidal wave of creative power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where last he rested. it came to browning now. the creation of palma would be enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in _sordello_ which does not also prove it. * * * * * in this new outrush of his genius he created a very different woman from palma. he created pippa, the asolan girl, at the other end of society from palma, at the other end of feminine character. owing to the host of new thoughts which in this early summer of genius came pouring into his soul--all of which he tried to express, rejecting none, choosing none out of the rest, expressing only half of a great number of them; so delighted with them all that he could leave none out--he became obscure in _sordello_. owing also to the great complexity of the historical _mise-en-scène_ in which he placed his characters in that poem, he also became obscure. had he been an experienced artist he would have left out at least a third of the thoughts and scenes he inserted. as it was, he threw all his thoughts and all the matters he had learnt about the politics, cities, architecture, customs, war, gardens, religion and poetry of north italy in the thirteenth century, pell-mell into this poem, and left them, as it were, to find their own places. this was very characteristic of a young man when the pot of his genius was boiling over. nothing bolder, more incalculable, was ever done by a poet in the period of his storm and stress. the boundless and to express it, was never sought with more audacity. it was impossible, in this effort, for him to be clear, and we need not be vexed with him. the daring, the rush, the unconsciousness and the youth of it all, are his excuse, but not his praise. and when the public comes to understand that the dimness and complexity of _sordello_ arise from plenteousness not scarcity of thought, and that they were not a pose of the poet's but the natural leaping of a full fountain just let loose from its mountain chamber, it will have a personal liking, not perhaps for the poem but for browning. "i will not read the book," it will say, "but i am glad he had it in him." still it was an artistic failure, and when browning understood that the public could not comprehend him--and we must remember that he desired to be comprehended, for he loved mankind--he thought he would use his powers in a simpler fashion, and please the honest folk. so, in the joy of having got rid in _sordello_ of so many of his thoughts by expression and of mastering the rest; and determined, since he had been found difficult, to be the very opposite--loving contrast like a poet--he wrote _pippa passes_. i need not describe its plan. our business is with the women in it. ottima, alive with carnal passion, in the fire of which the murder of her husband seems a mere incident, is an audacious sketch, done in splashes of ungradated colour. had browning been more in the woman's body and soul he would not have done her in jerks as he has done. her trick of talking of the landscape, as if she were on a holiday like pippa, is not as subtly conceived or executed as it should be, and is too far away from her dominant carnality to be natural. and her sensualism is too coarse for her position. a certain success is attained, but the imagination is frequently jarred. the very outburst of unsensual love at the end, when her love passes from the flesh into the spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon her and she begins to suffer the first agonies of redemption, is plainly more due to the poet's pity than to the woman's spirit. again, sebald is the first to feel remorse after the murder. ottima only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is ceasing to love her. i am not sure that to reverse the whole situation would not be nearer to the truth of things; but that is matter of discussion. then the subject-matter is sordid. nothing relieves the coarseness of sebald, ottima and luca and their relations to one another but the few descriptions of nature and the happy flash of innocence when pippa passes by. nor are there any large fates behind the tale or large effects to follow which might lift the crime into dignity. this mean, commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange attraction for browning, as we see in _the inn album_, in _red cotton nightcap country_, and elsewhere. i may add that it is curious to find him, in , writing exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this kind had begun. and this illustrates what i have said of the way in which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the literary world should come. the whole scene between sebald and ottima might have been written by a powerful, relentless modern novelist. we have more of this realism, but done with great skill, humanity, even tenderness, in the meeting and talk of the young harlotry on the steps of the duomo near the fountain. when we think of this piece of bold, clear, impressionist reality cast into the midst of the proprieties of literature in , it is impossible not to wonder and smile. the girls are excellently drawn and varied from each other. browning's pity gathers round them, and something of underlying purity, of natural grace of soul, of tenderness in memory of their youth emerges in them; and the charm of their land is round their ways. there was also in his mind, i think, a sense of picturesqueness in their class when they were young, which, mingling with his pity for them, attracted his imagination, or touched into momentary life that roving element in a poet which resents the barriers made by social and domestic purity. _fifine at the fair_ is partly a study of that temper which comes and goes, goes and comes in the life not only of poets but of ordinary men and women. then, to illustrate this further, there is in _sordello_ a brilliant sketch of girls of this kind at venice, full of sunlight, colour and sparkling water, in which he has seen these butterflies of women as a painter would see them, or as a poet who, not thinking then of moral questions or feeling pity for their fate, is satisfied for the flying moment with the picture they make, with the natural freedom of their life. but he does not leave that picture without a representation of the other side of this class of womanhood. it was a daring thing, when he wished to say that he would devote his whole work to the love and representation of humanity to symbolise it by a sorrowful street-girl in venice who wistfully asks an alms; worn and broken with sorrow and wrong; whose eyes appeal for pity, for comprehension of her good and for his love; and whose fascination and beauty are more to him than those of her unsuffering companions. the other side of that class of women is here given with clear truth and just compassion, and the representation is lifted into imaginative strength, range and dignity of thought and feeling by her being made the image of the whole of humanity. "this woman," he thought, "is humanity, whom i love, who asks the poet in me to reveal her as she is, a divine seed of god to find some day its flowering--the broken harlot of the universe, who will be, far off, the magdalen redeemed by her ineradicable love. that, and with every power i have, i will, as poet, love and represent." this is the imagination working at its best, with its most penetrative and passionate power, and browning is far greater as a poet in this thing of his, where thought and love are knit into union to give birth to moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty, than he is in those lighter and cleverer poems in which he sketches with a facile but too discursive a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of the lives of women. yet this and they show his range, his variety, the embracing of his sympathy. over against these girls in the market-place, against ottima in her guilt, and phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor is too plainly browning's analysis of the moment, not her own thinking--no girl of fourteen brought up by natalia would talk in that fashion) is set pippa, the light, life and love of the day, the town, the people and the poem. she passes like an angel by and touches with her wing events and persons and changes them to good. she has some natural genius, and is as unconscious of her genius as she is of the good she does. in her unconsciousness is the fountain of her charm. she lives like a flower of the field that knows not it has blest and comforted with its beauty the travellers who have passed it by. she has only one day in the whole year for her own, and for that day she creates a fresh personality for herself. she clothes her soul, intellect, imagination, and spiritual aspiration in holiday garments for the day, becoming for the time a new poetic self, and able to choose any other personality in asolo from hour to hour--the queen and spirit of the town; not wishing to be, actually, the folk she passes by, but only, since she is so isolated, to be something in their lives, to touch them for help and company. the world of nature speaks to her and loves her. she sees all that is beautiful, feeds on it, and grasps the matter of thought that underlies the beauty. and so much is she at home with nature that she is able to describe with ease in words almost as noble as the thing itself the advent of the sun. when she leaps out of her bed to meet the leap of the sun, the hymn of description she sings might be sung by the hours themselves as they dance round the car of the god. she can even play with the great mother as with an equal, or like her child. the charming gaiety with which she speaks to the sunlights that dance in her room, and to the flowers which are her sisters, prove, however isolated her life may be, that she is never alone. along with this brightness she has seriousness, the sister of her gaiety; the deep seriousness of imagination, the seriousness also of the evening when meditation broods over the day and its doings before sleep. these, with her sweet humanity, natural piety, instinctive purity, compose her of soft sunshine and soft shadow. nor does her sadness at the close, which is overcome by her trust in god, make her less but more dear to us. she is a beautiful creation. there are hosts of happy women like her. they are the salt of the earth. but few poets have made so much of them and so happily, or sung about these birds of god so well as browning has in _pippa passes_. that was in . pleased with his success in this half-lyrical, half-dramatic piece, he was lured towards the drama again, and also to try his hand at those short lyrics--records of transient emotion on fanciful subjects--or records of short but intense moments of thought or feeling. it is a pity that he did not give to dramatic lyrics (in which species of poetry he is quite our first master) the time he gave to dramas, in which he is not much better than an amateur. nevertheless, we cannot omit the women in the dramas. i have already written of lady carlisle. polyxena, in _king victor and king charles_, is partly the political woman and partly the sensible and loving wife of a strangely tempered man. she is fairly done, but is not interesting. good womanly intelligence in affairs, good womanly support of her man; clear womanly insight into men and into intrigue--a woman of whom there are hundreds of thousands in every rank of life. in her, as in so much of browning's work, the intellect of the woman is of a higher quality than the intellect of the man. next, among his women, is anael in the _return of the druses_, she is placed in too unnatural a situation to allow her nature to have fair play. in the preternatural world her superstition creates, she adores djabal, murders the prefect, and dies by her own hand. she is, in that world, a study of a young girl's enthusiasm for her faith and her country, and for the man she thinks divine; and were the subject, so far as it relates to her character, well or clearly wrought, she might be made remarkable. as it is wrought, it is so intertwisted with complex threads of thought and passion that any clear outline of her character is lost. both djabal and she are like clouds illuminated by flashes of sheet lightning which show an infinity of folds and shapes of vapour in each cloud, but show them only for an instant; and then, when the flashes come again, show new folds, new involutions. the characters are not allowed by browning to develop themselves. anael, when she is in the preternatural world, loves djabal as an incarnation of the divine, but in the natural world of her girlhood her heart goes out to the knight of malta who loves her. the in-and-out of these two emotional states--one in the world of religious enthusiasm, and one in her own womanhood, as they cross and re-cross one another--is elaborated with merciless analysis; and anael's womanhood appears, not as a whole, but in bits and scraps. how will this young girl, divided by two contemporaneous emotions, one in the supernatural and one in the natural world, act in a crisis of her life? well, the first, conquering the second, brings about her death the moment she tries to transfer the second into the world of the first--her dim, half-conscious love for lois into her conscious adoration of djabal. mildred and guendolen are the two women in _a blot in the 'scutcheon_. guendolen is the incarnation of high-hearted feminine commonsense, of clear insight into the truth of things, born of the power of love in her. amid all the weaknesses of the personages and the plot; in the wildered situation made by a confused clashing of pride and innocence and remorse, in which browning, as it were on purpose to make a display of his intellectual ability, involves those poor folk--guendolen is the rock on which we can rest in peace; the woman of the world, yet not worldly; full of experience, yet having gained by every experience more of love; just and strong yet pitiful, and with a healthy but compassionate contempt for the intelligence of the men who belong to her. contrasted with her, and the quality of her love contrasted also, is mildred, the innocent child girl who loves for love's sake, and continues to be lost in her love. but browning's presentation of her innocence, her love, is spoiled by the over-remorse, shame and fear under whose power he makes her so helpless. they are in the circumstances so unnaturally great that they lower her innocence and love, and the natural courage of innocence and love. these rise again to their first level, but it is only the passion of her lover's death which restores them. and when they recur, she is outside of girlhood. one touch of the courage she shows in the last scene would have saved in the previous scene herself, her lover, and her brother. the lie she lets her brother infer when she allows him to think that the lover she has confessed to is not the earl, yet that she will marry the earl, degrades her altogether and justly in her brother's eyes, and is so terribly out of tune with her character that i repeat i cannot understand how browning could invent that situation. it spoils the whole presentation of the girl. it is not only out of her character, it is out of nature. indeed, in spite of the poetry, in spite of the pathetic beauty of the last scene, mildred and tresham are always over-heightened, over-strained beyond the concert-pitch of nature. but the drawing of the woman's character suffers more from this than the man's, even though tresham, in the last scene, is half turned into a woman. sex seems to disappear in that scene. a different person is colombe, the duchess in _colombe's birthday_. that play, as i have said, gets on, but it gets on because colombe moves every one in the play by her own motion. from beginning to end of the action she is the fire and the soul of it. innocent, frank and brave, simple and constant among a group of false and worldly courtiers, among whom she moves like the white truth, untouched as yet by love or by the fates of her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirlpool of affairs and of love; and her simplicity, clearness of intelligence, unconscious rightness of momentary feeling, which comes of her not thinking about her feelings--that rare and precious element in character--above all, her belief in love as the one worthy thing in the world, bring her out of the whirlpool, unshipwrecked, unstained by a single wave of ill-feeling or mean thinking, into a quiet harbour of affection and of power. for she will influence berthold all his life long. she is herself lovely. valence loves her at sight. her love for valence is born before she knows it, and the touch of jealousy, which half reveals it to her, is happily wrought by browning. when she finds out that valence did for love of her what she thought was done for loyalty alone to her, she is a little revolted; her single-heartedness is disappointed. she puts aside her growing love, which she does not know as yet is love, and says she will find out if berthold wishes to marry her because he loves her, or for policy. berthold is as honest as she is, and tells her love has nothing to do with the matter. the thought of an untrue life with berthold then sends her heart with a rush back to valence, and she chooses love and obscurity with valence. it is the portrait of incarnate truth, in vivid contrast to constance, who is a liar in grain. constance is the heroine of the fragment of a drama called _in a balcony_. norbert, a young diplomat, has served the queen, who is fifty years old, for a year, all for the love of constance, a cousin and dependent of the queen. he tells constance he will now, as his reward, ask the queen for her hand. constance says, "no; that will ruin us both; temporise; tell the queen, who is hungry for love, that you love her; and that, as she cannot marry a subject, you will be content with me, whom the queen loves." norbert objects, and no wonder, to this lying business, but he does it; and the queen runs to constance, crying, "i am loved, thank god! i will throw everything aside and marry him. i thought he loved you, but he loves me." then constance, wavering from truth again, says that the queen is right. norbert does love her. and this is supposed by some to be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for the queen. it is much more like jealousy. then, finding that all norbert's future depends on the queen, she is supposed to sacrifice herself again, this time for norbert's sake. she will give him up to the queen, for the sake of his career; and she tells the queen, before norbert, that he has confessed to her his love for the queen--another lie! norbert is indignant--he may well be--and throws down all this edifice of falsehood. the queen knows then the truth, and leaves them in a fury. constance and norbert fly into each other's arms, and the tramp of the soldiers who come to arrest them is heard as the curtain falls. i do not believe that browning meant to make self-sacrifice the root of constance's doings. if he did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole thing. he was much too clear-headed a moralist to link self-sacrifice to systematic lying. self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice at all when it sacrifices truth. it may wear the clothes of love, but, in injuring righteousness, it injures the essence of love. it has a surface beauty, for it imitates love, but if mankind is allured by this beauty, mankind is injured. it is the false florimel of self-sacrifice. browning, who had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in constance. there is something else at the root of her actions, and i believe he meant it to be jealousy. the very first lie she urges her lover to tell (that is, to let the queen imagine he loves her) is just the thing a jealous woman would invent to try her lover and the queen, if she suspected the queen of loving him, and him of being seduced from her by the worldly advantage of marrying the queen. and all the other lies are best explained on the supposition of jealous experiments. at the last she is satisfied; the crowning test had been tried. through a sea of lying she had made herself sure of norbert's love, and she falls into his arms. had browning meant constance to be an image of self-sacrifice, he would scarcely have written that line when norbert, having told the truth of the matter to the queen, looks at both women, and cries out, "you two glare, each at each, like panthers now." a woman, filled with the joy and sadness of pure self-sacrifice, would not have felt at this moment like a panther towards the woman for whom she had sacrificed herself. even as a study of jealousy, constance is too subtle. jealousy has none of these labyrinthine methods; it goes straight with fiery passion to its end. it may be said, then, that constance is not a study of jealousy. but it may be a study by browning of what he thought in his intellect jealousy would be. at any rate, constance, as a study of self-sacrifice, is a miserable failure. moreover, it does not make much matter whether she is a study of this or that, because she is eminently wrong-natured. her lying is unendurable, only to be explained or excused by the madness of jealousy, and she, though jealous, is not maddened enough by jealousy to excuse her lies. the situations she causes are almost too ugly. whenever the truth is told, either by the queen or norbert, the situations break up in disgrace for her. it is difficult to imagine how norbert could go on loving her. his love would have departed if they had come to live together. he is radically true, and she is radically false. a fatal split would have been inevitable. nothing could be better for them both--after their momentary outburst of love at the end--than death. from the point of view of art, constance is interesting. it is more than we can say of domizia in _luria_. she is nothing more than a passing study whom browning uses to voice his theories. eulalia in _a soul's tragedy_ is also a transient thing, only she is more colourless, more a phantom than domizia. by this time, by the year , browning had found out that he could not write dramas well, or even such dramatic proverbs as _in a balcony_. and he gave himself up to another species of his art. the women he now draws (some of which belong to the years during which he wrote dramas) are done separately, in dramatic lyrics as he called them, and in narrative and philosophical poems. some are touched only at moments of their lives, and we are to infer from the momentary action and feeling the whole of the woman. others are carefully and lovingly drawn from point to point in a variety of action, passion and circumstance. in these we find browning at his best in the drawing of women. i know no women among the second-rate poets so sweetly, nobly, tenderly and wisely drawn as pompilia and balaustion. * * * * * chapter xiv _womanhood in browning_ (_the dramatic lyrics and pompilia_) no modern poet has written of women with such variety as browning. coleridge, except in a few love-poems, scarcely touched them. wordsworth did not get beyond the womanhood of the home affections, except in a few lovely and spiritual sketches of girlhood which are unique in our literature, in which maidenhood and the soul of nature so interchange their beauty that the girl seems born of the lonely loveliness of nature and lives with her mother like a child. what motherhood in its deep grief and joy, what sisterhood and wifehood may be, have never been sung with more penetration and exquisiteness than wordsworth sang them. but of the immense range, beyond, of womanhood he could not sing. byron's women are mostly in love with byron under various names, and he rarely strays beyond the woman who is loved or in love. the woman who is most vital, true and tender is haidée in _don juan_. shelley's women melt into philosophic mist, or are used to build up a political or social theory, as if they were "properties" of literature. cythna, rosalind, asia, emilia are ideas, not realities. beatrice is alive, but she was drawn for him in the records of her trial. even the woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh and blood. keats let women alone, save in isabella, and all that is of womanhood in her is derived from boccaccio. madeline is nothing but a picture. it is curious that his remarkable want of interest in the time in which he lived should be combined with as great a want of interest in women, as if the vivid life of any period in the history of a people were bound up with the vivid life of women in that period. when women awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the time, as in the case of keats, awakes little emotion in him. he will fly to the past for his subjects. moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the poets cease to write well about women, the phase of poetry they represent, however beautiful it be, is beginning to decay. when poetry is born into a new life, women are as living in it as men. womanhood became at once one of its dominant subjects in tennyson and browning. among the new political, social, religious, philosophic and artistic ideas which were then borne like torches through england, the idea of the free development of women was also born; and it carried with it a strong emotion. they claimed the acknowledgment of their separate individuality, of their distinct use and power in the progress of the world. this was embodied with extraordinary fulness in _aurora leigh_, and its emotion drove itself into the work of tennyson and browning. how tennyson treated the subject in the _princess_ is well known. his representation of women in his other poems does not pass beyond a few simple, well-known types both of good and bad women. but the particular types into which the variety of womanhood continually throws itself, the quick individualities, the fantastic simplicities and subtleties, the resolute extremes, the unconsidered impulses, the obstinate good and evil, the bold cruelties and the bold self-sacrifices, the fears and audacities, the hidden work of the thoughts and passions of women in the far-off worlds within them where their soul claims and possesses its own desires--these were beyond the power of tennyson to describe, even, i think, to conceive. but they were in the power of browning, and he made them, at least in lyric poetry, a chief part of his work. in women he touched great variety and great individuality; two things each of which includes the other, and both of which were dear to his imagination. with his longing for variety of representation, he was not content to pile womanhood up into a few classes, or to dwell on her universal qualities. he took each woman separately, marking out the points which differentiated her from, not those which she shared with, the rest of her sex. he felt that if he dwelt only on the deep-seated roots of the tree of womanhood, he would miss the endless play, fancy, movement, interaction and variety of its branches, foliage and flowers. therefore, in his lyrical work, he leaves out for the most part the simpler elements of womanhood and draws the complex, the particular, the impulsive and the momentary. each of his women is distinct from the rest. that is a great comfort in a world which, through laziness, wishes to busy itself with classes rather than with personalities. i do not believe that browning ever met man or woman without saying to himself--here is a new world; it may be classed, but it also stands alone. what distinguishes it from the rest--that i will know and that describe. when women are not enslaved to conventions--and the new movement towards their freedom of development which began shortly after had enfranchised and has continued ever since to enfranchise a great number from this slavery--they are more individual and various than men are allowed to be. they carry their personal desires, aspirations and impulses into act, speech, and into extremes with much greater licence than is possible to men. one touches with them much more easily the original stuff of humanity. it was this original, individual and various thing in women on which browning seized with delight. he did not write half as much as other poets had done of woman as being loved by man or as loving him. i have said that the mere love-poem is no main element in his work. he wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in pompilia; but for the most part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer the ill. he did not exalt her above man. he thought her as vital, interesting and important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or important. he neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural humanity. she stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality of value to the present and future of mankind. and he has wrought this out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as tennyson did in the _princess_ with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by unconscious representation of it in the multitude of women whom he invented. but though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of life. it was their intensity of life which most attracted him. he loved nothing so much as life--in plant or animal or man. his longer poems are records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in quiet verse as in _paracelsus_, or the clashing together in abrupt verse as in _sordello_, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of the living soul of humanity. when he, this archangel of reality, got into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was enchanted. and this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the _ring and the book_-- do you see this square old yellow book i toss i' the air, and catch again, and twirl about by the crumpled vellum covers--pure crude fact secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard and brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence? give it me back. the thing's restorative i' the touch and sight. but in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action which broke through the commonplace of existence. men and women, and chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his darling lyric subjects. and he did this work in lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment. there was one of these critical moments which attracted him greatly--that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of the soul. i have already mentioned some of these poems--those concerned with love, such as _by the fireside_ or _cristina_--and the woman is more prominent in them than the man. one of the best of them, so far as the drawing of a woman is concerned, is _dis aliter visum_. we see the innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her. but the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world. and she recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not. he feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their chance of the eternities of love. "fool! who ruined four lives--mine and your opera-dancer's, your own and my husband's!" whether her outburst now be quite true to her whole self or not browning does not let us know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry of the moment she recalls. moreover, these thirty short verses paint as no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society. i quote her outburst. it is full of browning's keen poetry; and the first verse of it may well be compared with a similar moment in _by the fireside_, where nature is made to play the same part, but succeeds as here she fails: now i may speak: you fool, for all your lore! who made things plain in vain? what was the sea for? what, the grey sad church, that solitary day, crosses and graves and swallows' call? was there nought better than to enjoy? no feat which, done, would make time break, and let us pent-up creatures through into eternity, our due? no forcing earth teach heaven's employ? no wise beginning, here and now, what cannot grow complete (earth's feat) and heaven must finish, there and then? no tasting earth's true food for men, its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet? no grasping at love, gaining a share o' the sole spark from god's life at strife with death, so, sure of range above the limits here? for us and love. failure; but, when god fails, despair. this you call wisdom? thus you add good unto good again, in vain? you loved, with body worn and weak; i loved, with faculties to seek: were both loves worthless since ill-clad? let the mere star-fish in his vault crawl in a wash of weed, indeed, rose-jacynth to the finger tips: he, whole in body and soul, outstrips man, found with either in default. but what's whole, can increase no more, is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere. the devil laughed at you in his sleeve! you knew not? that i well believe; or you had saved two souls: nay, four. for stephanie sprained last night her wrist, ankle or something. "pooh," cry you? at any rate she danced, all say, vilely; her vogue has had its day. here comes my husband from his whist. here the woman speaks for herself. it is characteristic of browning's boldness that there are a whole set of poems in which he imagines the unexpressed thoughts which a woman revolves in self-communion under the questionings and troubles of the passions, and chiefly of the passion of love. the most elaborate of these is _james lee's wife_, which tells what she thinks of when after long years she has been unable to retain her husband's love. finally, she leaves him. the analysis of her thinking is interesting, but the woman is not. she is not the quick, natural woman browning was able to paint so well when he chose. his own analytic excitement, which increases in mere intellectuality as the poem moves on, enters into her, and she thinks more through browning the man than through her womanhood. women are complex enough, more complex than men, but they are not complex in the fashion of this poem. under the circumstances browning has made, her thought would have been quite clear at its root, and indeed in its branches. she is represented as in love with her husband. were she really in love, she would not have been so involved, or able to argue out her life so anxiously. love or love's sorrow knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause and aim are simple. but browning has unconsciously made the woman clear enough for us to guess the real cause of her departure. that departure is believed by some to be a self-sacrifice. there are folk who see self-sacrifice in everything browning wrote about women. browning may have originally intended her action to be one of self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he went on, was taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a different matter. the woman really leaves her husband because her love for him was tired out. she talks of leaving her husband free, and perhaps, in women's way, persuades herself that she is sacrificing herself; but she desires in reality to set herself free from an unavailing struggle to keep his love. there comes a time when the striving for love wearies out love itself. and james lee's wife had reached that moment. her departure, thus explained, is the most womanly thing in the poem, and i should not wonder if browning meant it so. he knew what self-sacrifice really was, and this departure of the woman was not a true self-sacrifice. another of these poems in which a woman speaks out her heart is _any wife to any husband_. she is dying, and she would fain claim his undying fidelity to his love of her; but though she believes in his love, she thinks, when her presence is not with him, that his nature will be drawn towards other women. then what he brings her, when he meets her again, will not be perfect. womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful nature, she says nothing which is not kind and true, and the picture she draws of faithfulness, without one stain of wavering, is natural and lovely. but, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the desire to claim all for one's self. "thou art mine, and mine only"--that fine selfishness which injures love so deeply in the end, because it forbids its expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of love to act. that may be pardoned, unless in its extremes, during life, if the pardon does not increase it; but this is in the hour of death, and it is unworthy of the higher world. to carry jealousy beyond the grave is a phase of that selfish passion over which this hour, touched by the larger thought of the infinite world, should have uplifted the woman. still, what she says is in nature, and browning's imagination has closed passionately round his subject. but he has left us with pity for the woman rather than with admiration of her. perhaps the subtlest part of the poem is the impression left on us that the woman knows all her pleading will be in vain, that she has fathomed the weakness of her husband's character. he will not like to remember that knowledge of hers; and her letting him feel it is a kind of vengeance which will not help him to be faithful. it is also her worst bitterness, but if her womanhood were perfect, she would not have had that bitterness. in these two poems, and in others, there is to be detected the deep-seated and quiet half-contempt--contempt which does not damage love, contempt which is half pity--which a woman who loves a man has for his weakness under passion or weariness. both the wives in these poems feel that their husbands are inferior to themselves in strength of character and of intellect. to feel this is common enough in women, but is rarely confessed by them. a man scarcely ever finds it out from his own observation; he is too vain for that. but browning knew it. a poet sees many things, and perhaps his wife told him this secret. it was like his audacity to express it. this increased knowledge of womanhood was probably due to the fact that browning possessed in his wife a woman of genius who had studied her own sex in herself and in other women. it is owing to her, i think, that in so many poems the women are represented as of a finer, even a stronger intellect than the men. many poets have given them a finer intuition; that is a common representation. but greater intellectual power allotted to women is only to be found in browning. the instances of it are few, but they are remarkable. it was owing also to his wife, whose relation to him was frank on all points, that browning saw so much more clearly than other poets into the deep, curious or remote phases of the passions, thoughts and vagaries of womanhood. i sometimes wonder what women themselves think of the things browning, speaking through their mouth, makes them say; but that is a revelation of which i have no hope, and for which, indeed, i have no desire. moreover, he moved a great deal in the society where women, not having any real work to do, or if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those of their sex who sit at the loom of duty. tennyson withdrew from this society, and his women are those of a retired poet--a few real types tenderly and sincerely drawn, and a few more worked out by thinking about what he imagined they would be, not by knowing them. browning, roving through his class and other classes of society, and observing while he seemed unobservant, drew into his inner self the lives of a number of women, saw them living and feeling in a great diversity of circumstances; and, always on the watch, seized the moment into which he thought the woman entered with the greatest intensity, and smote that into a poem. such poems, naturally lyrics, came into his head at the opera, at a ball, at a supper after the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when he walked in the park; and they record, not the whole of a woman's character, but the vision of one part of her nature which flashed before him and vanished in an instant. among these poems are _a light woman_, _a pretty woman_, _solomon and balkis_, _gold hair_, and, as a fine instance of this sheet-lightning poem about women--_adam, lilith and eve. too late_ and _the worst of it_ do not belong to these slighter poems; they are on a much higher level. but they are poems of society and its secret lives. the men are foremost in them, but in each of them a different woman is sketched, through the love of the men, with a masterly decision. among all these women he did not hesitate to paint the types farthest removed from goodness and love. the lowest woman in the poems is she who is described in _time's revenges_-- so is my spirit, as flesh with sin, filled full, eaten out and in with the face of her, the eyes of her, the lips, the little chin, the stir of shadow round her mouth; and she --i'll tell you--calmly would decree that i should roast at a slow fire, if that would compass her desire and make her one whom they invite to the famous ball to-morrow night contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal nature civilisation has stripped away the honour and passion of the savage, the woman of _in a laboratory_ shines like a fallen angel. she at least is natural, and though the passions she feels are the worst, yet she is capable of feeling strongly. neither have any conscience, but we can conceive that one of these women might attain it, but the other not. both are examples of a thing i have said is exceedingly rare in browning's poetry--men or women left without some pity of his own touched into their circumstances or character. _in a laboratory_ is a full-coloured sketch of what womanhood could become in a court like that of francis i.; in which every shred of decency, gentlehood and honour had disappeared. browning's description, vivid as it is, is less than the reality. had he deepened the colours of iniquity and indecency instead of introducing so much detailed description of the laboratory, detail which weakens a little our impression of the woman, he had done better, but all the same there is no poet in england, living or dead, who could have done it so well. one of the best things in the poem is the impression made on us that it is not jealousy, but the hatred of envy which is the motive of the woman. jealousy supposes love or the image of love, but among those who surrounded francis, love did not exist at all, only lust, luxury and greed of power; and in the absence of love and in the scorn of it, hate and envy reign unchallenged. this is what browning has realised in this poem, and, in this differentiation, he has given us not only historical but moral truth. apart from these lighter and momentary poems about women there are those written out of his own ideal of womanhood, built up not only from all he knew and loved in his wife, but also out of the dreams of his heart. they are the imaginings of the high honour and affection which a man feels for noble, natural and honest womanhood. they are touched here and there by complex thinking, but for the most part are of a beloved simplicity and tenderness, and they will always be beautiful. there is the sketch of the woman in _the italian in england_, a never to be forgotten thing. it is no wonder the exile remembered her till he died. there is the image we form of the woman in _the flowers name_. he does not describe her; she is far away, but her imagined character and presence fill the garden with an incense sweeter than all the flowers, and her beauty irradiates all beauty, so delicately and so plenteously does the lover's passion make her visible. there is _evelyn hope_, and surely no high and pure love ever created a more beautiful soul in a woman than hers who waits her lover in the spiritual world. there are those on whom we have already dwelt--pippa, colombe, mildred, guendolen. there is the woman in the _flight of the duchess_; not a sketch, but a completed picture. we see her, just emerged from her convent, thrilling with eagerness to see the world, believing in its beauty, interested in everything, in the movement of the leaves on the trees, of the birds in the heaven, ready to speak to every one high or low, desirous to get at the soul of all things in nature and humanity, herself almost a creature of the element, akin to air and fire. she is beaten into silence, but not crushed; overwhelmed by dry old people, by imitation of dead things, but the life in her is not slain. when the wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her whole nature blossoms into beauty and joy. she will have troubles great and deep, but every hour will make her conscious of more and more of life. and when she dies, it will be the beginning of an intenser life. finally, there is his wife. she is painted in these lyric poems with a simplicity of tenderness, with a reticence of worship as sacred as it is fair and delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal and the real that we never separate them, and with so much passion in remembrance of the past and in longing for the future, that no comment can enhance the picture browning draws of her charm, her intellect and her spirit. these pictures of womanhood were set forth before , when a collected edition of his poems was published in six volumes. they were chiefly short, even impressionist studies, save those in the dramas, and palma in _sordello_. those in the dramas were troubled by his want of power to shape them in that vehicle. it would have then been a pity if, in his matured strength, he had not drawn into clear existence, with full and careful, not impressionist work, and with unity of conception, some women who should, standing alone, become permanent personages in poetry; whom men and women in the future, needing friends, should love, honour and obey, and in whom, when help and sympathy and wisdom were wanted, these healing powers should be found. browning did this for us in _pompilia_ and _balaustion_, an italian and a greek girl--not an english girl. it is strange how to the very end he lived as a poet outside of his own land. in , pompilia appeared before the world, and she has captured ever since the imagination, the conscience and the sentiment of all who love womanhood and poetry. her character has ennobled and healed mankind. born of a harlot, she is a star of purity; brought up by characters who love her, but who do not rise above the ordinary meanness and small commercial honesty of their class, she is always noble, generous, careless of wealth, and of a high sense of honour. it is as if browning disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment; and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in spite of them. the miracle of the unrelated birth of genius--that out of the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the saint--was an article of faith with him. nature's or god's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly and saintly was ever made than pompilia, the daughter of a vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in mean and vulgar circumstances. the only hatred she earns is the hatred of count guido her husband, the devil who has tortured and murdered her--the hatred of evil for good. when count guido, condemned to death, bursts into the unrestrained expression of his own nature, he cannot say one word about pompilia which is not set on fire by a hell of hatred. nothing in browning's writing is more vivid, more intense, than these sudden outbursts of tiger fierceness against his wife. they lift and enhance the image of pompilia. when she comes into contact with other characters such as the archbishop and the governor, men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of convention, she wins a vague pity from them, but her simplicity, naturalness and saintliness are nearly as repugnant to social convention as her goodness is to villany; and browning has, all through the poem, individualised in pompilia the natural simplicity of goodness in opposition to the artificial moralities of conservative society. but when pompilia touches characters who have any good, however hidden, in them, she draws forth that good. her so-called parents pass before they die out of meanness into nobility of temper. conti, her husband's cousin, a fat, waggish man of the world, changes into seriousness, pity and affection under her silent influence. the careless folk she meets on her flight to rome recognise, even in most suspicious circumstances, her innocence and nobleness; and change at a touch their ordinary nature for a higher. and when she meets a fine character like caponsacchi, who has been led into a worldly, immoral and indifferent life, he is swept in a moment out of it by the sight alone of this star of innocence and spiritual beauty, and becomes her true mate, daily self-excelled. the monk who receives her dying confession, the pope, far set by his age above the noise of popular rome, almost at one with the world beyond death and feeling what the divine judgment would be, both recognise with a fervour which carries them beyond the prejudices of age and of their society the loveliness of heaven in the spirit of this girl of seventeen years, and claim her as higher than themselves. it is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child, when she rests before her death, the cruel life she had led for four years should seem a dream; and the working out of that thought, and of the two checks of reality it received in the coming of her child and the coming of caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and most delicate pieces of work that browning ever accomplished. she was so innocent and so simple-hearted--and the development of that part of her character in the stories told of her childhood is exquisitely touched into life--so loving, so born to be happy in being loved, that when she was forced into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty, baseness and guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of unreality. when the pain became too deep to be dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream by the approach of death. as she lay dying there, all she had suffered passed again into unreality. nothing remained but love and purity, the thrill when first she felt her child, the prayer to god which brought caponsacchi to her rescue so that her child might be born, and lastly the vision of perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who, not her lover on earth, would be her lover in eternity. even her boy, who had brought her, while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and browning's whole treatment of her motherhood, from the moment she knew she was in child, till the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true and tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he wrote), even her boy fades away into the dream. it is true she was dying, and there is no dream so deep as dying. yet it was bold of browning, and profoundly imagined by him, to make the child disappear, and to leave the woman at last alone with the thought and the spiritual passion of her union with caponsacchi-- o lover of my life, o soldier saint, no work begun shall ever pause for death. it is the love of percival's sister for galahad. it is not that she is naturally a dreamer, that she would not have felt and enjoyed the realities of earth. her perceptions are keen, her nature expansive. browning, otherwise, would not have cared for her. it was only when she was involved in evil, like an angel in hell (a wolfs arm round her throat and a snake curled over her feet), that she seemed to be dreaming, not living. it was incredible to her that such things should be reality. yet even the dream called the hidden powers of her soul into action. in realising these as against evil she is not the dreamer. her fortitude is unbroken; her moral courage never fails, though she is familiar with fear; her action, when the babe has leaped in her womb, is prompt, decisive and immediate; her physical courage, when her husband overtakes her and befouls her honour, is like a man's. she seizes his sword and would have slain the villain. then, her natural goodness, the genius of her goodness, gives her a spiritual penetration which is more than an equivalent in her for an educated intelligence. her intuition is so keen that she sees through the false worldliness of caponsacchi to the real man beneath, and her few words call it into goodness and honour for ever. her clear sense of truth sees all the threads of the net of villany in which she has been caught, and the only means to break through it, to reveal and bring it into condemnation. fortitude, courage, intuition and intelligence are all made to arise out of her natural saintliness and love. she is always the immortal child. for a time she has passed on earth through the realms of pain; and now, stabbed to her death, she looks back on the passage, and on all who have been kind and unkind to her--on the whole of the falsehood and villany. and the royal love in her nature is the master of the moment. she makes excuses for violante's lie. "she meant well, and she did, as i feel now, little harm." "i am right now, quite happy; dying has purified me of the evil which touched me, and i colour ugly things with my own peace and joy. every one that leaves life sees all things softened and bettered." as to her husband, she finds that she has little to forgive him at the last. step by step she goes over all he did, and even finds excuses for him, and, at the end, this is how she speaks, a noble utterance of serene love, lofty intelligence, of spiritual power and of the forgiveness of eternity. for that most woeful man my husband once, who, needing respite, still draws vital breath, i--pardon him? so far as lies in me, i give him for his good the life he takes, praying the world will therefore acquiesce. let him make god amends,--none, none to me who thank him rather that, whereas strange fate mockingly styled him husband and me wife, himself this way at least pronounced divorce, blotted the marriage bond: this blood of mine flies forth exultingly at any door, washes the parchment white, and thanks the blow we shall not meet in this world nor the next, but where will god be absent? in his face is light, but in his shadow healing too: let guido touch the shadow and be healed! and as my presence was importunate,-- my earthly good, temptation and a snare,-- nothing about me but drew somehow down his hate upon me,--somewhat so excused therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,-- may my evanishment for evermore help further to relieve the heart that cast such object of its natural loathing forth! so he was made; he nowise made himself: i could not love him, but his mother did. his soul has never lain beside my soul: but for the unresisting body,--thanks! he burned that garment spotted by the flesh. whatever he touched is rightly ruined: plague it caught, and disinfection it had craved still but for guido; i am saved through him so as by fire; to him--thanks and farewell! thus, pure at heart and sound of head, a natural, true woman in her childhood, in her girlhood, and when she is tried in the fire--by nature gay, yet steady in suffering; brave in a hell of fears and shame; clear-sighted in entanglements of villany; resolute in self-rescue; seeing and claiming the right help and directing it rightly; rejoicing in her motherhood and knowing it as her crown of glory, though the child is from her infamous husband; happy in her motherhood for one fortnight; slain like a martyr; loving the true man with immortal love; forgiving all who had injured her, even her murderer; dying in full faith and love of god, though her life had been a crucifixion; pompilia passes away, and england's men and women will be always grateful to browning for her creation. * * * * * chapter xv _balaustion_ among the women whom browning made, balaustion is the crown. so vivid is her presentation that she seems with us in our daily life. and she also fills the historical imagination. one would easily fall in love with her, like those sensitive princes in the _arabian nights_, who, hearing only of the charms of a princess, set forth to find her over the world. of all browning's women, she is the most luminous, the most at unity with herself. she has the greek gladness and life, the greek intelligence and passion, and the greek harmony. all that was common, prattling, coarse, sensual and spluttering in the greek, (and we know from aristophanes how strong these lower elements were in the athenian people), never shows a trace of its influence in balaustion. made of the finest clay, exquisite and delicate in grain, she is yet strong, when the days of trouble come, to meet them nobly and to change their sorrows into spiritual powers. and the _mise-en-scène_ in which she is placed exalts her into a heroine, and adds to her the light, colour and humanity of greek romance. born at rhodes, but of an athenian mother, she is fourteen when the news arrives that the athenian fleet under nikias, sent to subdue syracuse, has been destroyed, and the captive athenians driven to labour in the quarries. all rhodes, then in alliance with athens, now cries, "desert athens, side with sparta against athens." balaustion alone resists the traitorous cry. "what, throw off athens, be disloyal to the source of art and intelligence-- to the life and light of the whole world worth calling world at all!" and she spoke so well that her kinsfolk and others joined her and took ship for athens. now, a wind drove them off their course, and behind them came a pirate ship, and in front of them loomed the land. "is it crete?" they thought; "crete, perhaps, and safety." but the oars flagged in the hands of the weary men, and the pirate gained. then balaustion, springing to the altar by the mast, white, rosy, and uplifted, sang on high that song of Æschylus which saved at salamis-- 'o sons of greeks, go, set your country free, free your wives, free your children, free the fanes o' the gods, your fathers founded,--sepulchres they sleep in! or save all, or all be lost.' the crew, impassioned by the girl, answered the song, and drove the boat on, "churning the black water white," till the land shone clear, and the wide town and the harbour, and lo, 'twas not crete, but syracuse, luckless fate! out came a galley from the port. "who are you; sparta's friend or foe?" "of rhodes are we, rhodes that has forsaken athens!" "how, then, that song we heard? all athens was in that Æschylus. your boat is full of athenians--back to the pirate; we want no athenians here.... yet, stay, that song was Æschylus; every one knows it--how about euripides? might you know any of his verses?" for nothing helped the poor athenians so much if any of them had his mouth stored with old glory, great plays that had long ago made themselves wings to fly about the world,-- but most of all those were cherished who could recite euripides to syracuse, so mighty was poetry in the ancient days to make enemies into friends, to build, beyond the wars and jealousies of the world, a land where all nations are one. at this the captain cried: "praise the god, we have here the very girl who will fill you with euripides," and the passage brings balaustion into full light. therefore, at mention of euripides, the captain crowed out, "euoi, praise the god! oöp, boys, bring our owl-shield to the fore! out with our sacred anchor! here she stands, balaustion! strangers, greet the lyric girl! euripides? babai! what a word there 'scaped your teeth's enclosure, quoth my grandsire's song why, fast as snow in thrace, the voyage through, has she been falling thick in flakes of him! frequent as figs at kaunos, kaunians said. balaustion, stand forth and confirm my speech! now it was some whole passion of a play; now, peradventure, but a honey-drop that slipt its comb i' the chorus. if there rose a star, before i could determine steer southward or northward--if a cloud surprised heaven, ere i fairly hollaed 'furl the sail!'-- she had at fingers' end both cloud and star some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable, fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew, 'so sang euripides,' she said, 'so sang the meteoric poet of air and sea, planets and the pale populace of heaven, the mind of man, and all that's made to soar!' and so, although she has some other name, we only call her wild-pomegranate-flower, balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns i' the dull dark verdure of the bounteous tree, dethroning, in the rosy isle, the rose, you shall find food, drink, odour, all at once; cool leaves to bind about an aching brow. and, never much away, the nightingale. sing them a strophe, with the turn-again, down to the verse that ends all, proverb like. and save us, thou balaustion, bless the name" and she answered: "i will recite the last play he wrote from first to last--_alkestis_--his strangest, saddest, sweetest song." then because greeks are greeks, and hearts are hearts. and poetry is power,--they all outbroke in a great joyous laughter with much love: "thank herakles for the good holiday! make for the harbour! row, and let voice ring, 'in we row, bringing more euripides!'" all the crowd, as they lined the harbour now, "more of euripides!"--took up the cry. we landed; the whole city, soon astir, came rushing out of gates in common joy to the suburb temple; there they stationed me o' the topmost step; and plain i told the play, just as i saw it; what the actors said, and what i saw, or thought i saw the while, at our kameiros theatre, clean scooped out of a hill side, with the sky above and sea before our seats in marble row: told it, and, two days more, repeated it until they sent us on our way again with good words and great wishes. so, we see balaustion's slight figure under the blue sky, and the white temple of herakles from the steps of which she spoke; and among the crowd, looking up to her with rapture, the wise and young sicilian who took ship with her when she was sent back to athens, wooed her, and found answer before they reached piræus. and there in athens she and her lover saw euripides, and told the master how his play had redeemed her from captivity. then they were married; and one day, with four of her girl friends, under the grape-vines by the streamlet side, close to the temple, baccheion, in the cool afternoon, she tells the tale; interweaving with the play (herself another chorus) what she thinks, how she feels concerning its personages and their doings, and in the comment discloses her character. the woman is built up in this way for us. the very excuse she makes for her inserted words reveals one side of her delightful nature--her love of poetry, her love of beauty, her seeing eye, her delicate distinction, her mingled humility and self-knowledge. look at baccheion's beauty opposite, the temple with the pillars at the porch! see you not something beside masonry? what if my words wind in and out the stone as yonder ivy, the god's parasite? though they leap all the way the pillar leads, festoon about the marble, foot to frieze, and serpentiningly enrich the roof, toy with some few bees and a bird or two,-- what then? the column holds the cornice up. as the ivy is to the pillar that supports the cornice, so are her words to the _alkestis_ on which she comments. that is her charming way. she also is, like pompilia, young. but no contrast can be greater than that between pompilia at seventeen years of age and balaustion at fifteen. in greece, as in italy, women mature quickly. balaustion is born with that genius which has the experience of age in youth and the fire of youth in age. pompilia has the genius of pure goodness, but she is uneducated, her intelligence is untrained, and her character is only developed when she has suffered. balaustion, on the contrary, has all the greek capacity, a thorough education, and that education also which came in the air of that time to those of the athenian temper. she is born into beauty and the knowledge of it, into high thinking and keen feeling; and she knows well why she thought and how she felt. so finely wrought is she by passion and intelligence alike, with natural genius to make her powers tenfold, that she sweeps her kinsfolk into agreement with her, subdues the sailors to her will, enchants the captain, sings the whole crew into energy, would have, i believe, awed and enthralled the pirate, conquers the syracusans, delights the whole city, draws a talent out of the rich man which she leaves behind her for the prisoners, is a dear friend of sombre euripides, lures aristophanes, the mocker, into seriousness, mates herself with him in a whole night's conversation, and wrings praise and honour from the nimblest, the most cynical, and the most world-wise intellect in athens. thus, over against pompilia, she is the image of fine culture, held back from the foolishness and vanity of culture by the steadying power of genius. then her judgment is always balanced. each thing to her has many sides. she decides moral and intellectual questions and action with justice, but with mercy to the wrong opinion and the wrong thing, because her intellect is clear, tolerant and forgiving through intellectual breadth and power. pompilia is the image of natural goodness and of its power. a spotless soul, though she is passed through hell, enables her, without a trained intellect, with ignorance of all knowledge, and with as little vanity as balaustion, to give as clear and firm a judgment of right and wrong. she is as tolerant, as full of excuses for the wrong thing, as forgiving, as balaustion, but it is by the power of goodness and love in her, not by that of intellect. browning never proved his strength more than when he made these two, in vivid contrast, yet in their depths in harmony; both equal, though so far apart, in noble womanhood. both are beyond convention; both have a touch of impulsive passion, of natural wildness, of flower-beauty. both are, in hours of crisis, borne beyond themselves, and mistress of the hour. both mould men, for their good, like wax in their fingers. but pompilia is the white rose, touched with faint and innocent colour; and balaustion is the wild pomegranate flower, burning in a crimson of love among the dark green leaves of steady and sure thought, her powers latent till needed, but when called on and brought to light, flaming with decision and revelation. in this book we see her in her youth, her powers as yet untouched by heavy sorrow. in the next, in _aristophanes' apology_, we first find her in matured strength, almost mastering aristophanes; and afterwards in the depth of grief, as she flies with her husband over the seas to rhodes, leaving behind her athens, the city of her heart, ruined and enslaved. the deepest passion in her, the patriotism of the soul, is all but broken-hearted. yet, she is the life and support of all who are with her; even a certain gladness breaks forth in her, and she secures for all posterity the intellectual record of athenian life and the images, wrought to vitality, of some of the greater men of athens. so we possess her completely. her life, her soul, its growth and strength, are laid before us. to follow her through these two poems is to follow their poetry. whenever we touch her we touch imagination. _aristophanes' apology_ is illuminated by balaustion's eyes. a glimpse here and there of her enables us to thread our way without too great weariness through a thorny undergrowth of modern and ancient thought mingled together on the subject of the apology. in _balaustion's adventure_ she tells her tale, and recites, as she did at syracuse, the _alkestis_ to her four friends. but she does more; she comments on it, as she did not at syracuse. the comments are, of course, browning's, but he means them to reveal balaustion. they are touched throughout with a woman's thought and feeling, inflamed by the poetic genius with which browning has endowed her. balaustion is his deliberate picture of genius the great miracle. the story of the _alkestis_ begins before the play. apollo, in his exile, having served king admetos as shepherd, conceives a friendship for the king, helps him to his marriage, and knowing that he is doomed to die in early life, descends to hell and begs the fates to give him longer life. that is a motive, holding in it strange thoughts of life and death and fate, which pleased browning, and he treats it separately, and with sardonic humour, in the prologue to one of his later volumes. the fates refuse to lengthen admetos' life, unless some one love him well enough to die for him. they must have their due at the allotted time. the play opens when that time arrives. we see, in a kind of prologue, apollo leaving the house of admetos and death coming to claim his victim. admetos has asked his father, mother, relations and servants to die instead of him. none will do it; but his wife, alkestis, does. admetos accepts her sacrifice. her dying, her death, the sorrow of admetos is described with all the poignant humanity of euripides. in the meantime herakles has come on the scene, and admetos, though steeped in grief, conceals--his wife's death and welcomes his friend to his house. as alkestis is the heroine of self-sacrifice, admetos is the hero of hospitality. herakles feasts, but the indignant bearing of an old servant attracts his notice, and he finds out the truth. he is shocked, but resolves to attack death himself, who is bearing away alkestis. he meets and conquers death and brings back alkestis alive to her husband. so the strong man conquers the fates, whom even apollo could not subdue. this is a fine subject. every one can see in how many different ways it may be treated, with what different conceptions, how variously the characters may be built up, and what different ethical and emotional situations may be imaginatively treated in it. racine himself thought it the finest of the greek subjects, and began a play upon it. but he died before he finished it, and ordered his manuscript to be destroyed. we may well imagine how the quiet, stately genius of racine would have conceived and ordered it; with the sincere passion, held under restraint by as sincere a dignity, which characterised his exalted style. balaustion treats it with an equal moral force, and also with that modern moral touch which racine would have given it; which, while it removed the subject at certain points from the greek morality, would yet have exalted it into a more spiritual world than even the best of the greeks conceived. the commentary of balaustion is her own treatment of the subject. it professes to explain euripides: it is in reality a fresh conception of the characters and their motives, especially of the character of herakles. her view of the character of alkestis, especially in her death, is not, i think, the view which euripides took. her condemnation of admetos is unmodified by those other sides of the question which euripides suggests. the position balaustion takes up with regard to self-sacrifice is far more subtle, with its half-christian touches, than the greek simplicity would have conceived. finally, she feels so strongly that the subject has not been adequately conceived that, at the end, she recreates it for herself. even at the beginning she rebuilds the euripidean matter. when apollo and death meet, balaustion conceives the meeting for herself. she images the divine apollo as somewhat daunted, and images the dread meeting of these two with modern, not greek imagination. it is like the meeting, she thinks, of a ruined eagle, caught as he swooped in a gorge, half heedless, yet terrific, with a lion, the haunter of the gorge, the lord of the ground, who pauses, ere he try the worst with the frightful, unfamiliar creature, known in the shadows and silences of the sky but not known here. it is the first example we have of balaustion's imaginative power working for itself. there is another, farther on, where she stays her recitation to describe death's rush in on alkestis when the dialogue between him and apollo is over-- and, in the fire-flash of the appalling sword, the uprush and the outburst, the onslaught of death's portentous passage through the door, apollon stood a pitying moment-space: i caught one last gold gaze upon the night, nearing the world now: and the god was gone, and mortals left to deal with misery. so she speaks, as if she saw more than euripides, as if to her the invisible were visible--as it was. to see the eternal unseen is the dower of imagination in its loftiest mood. she is as much at home with the hero of earth, the highest manhood, as she is with the gods. when herakles comes on the scene she cannot say enough about him; and she conceives him apart from the herakles of euripides. she paints in him, and browning paints through her, the idea of the full, the perfect man; and it is not the ideal of the cultivated, of the sensitive folk. it is more also a woman's than a man's ideal. for, now, suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house, every one wailing, life full of penury and inactivity, there leaps the "gay cheer of a great voice," the full presence of the hero, his "weary happy face, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more." his very voice, which smiled at sorrow, and his look, which, saying sorrow was to be conquered, proclaimed to all the world "my life is in my hand to give away, to make men glad," seemed to dry up all misery at its source, for his love of man makes him always joyful. when admetos opened the house to him, and did not tell him of his wife's death, balaustion comments "the hero, all truth, took him at his word, and then strode off to feast." he takes, she thought, the present rest, the physical food and drink as frankly as he took the mighty labours of his fate. and she rejoices as much in his jovial warmth, his joy in eating and drinking and singing, and festivity, as in his heroic soul. they go together, these things, in a hero. making the most o' the minute, that the soul and body, strained to height a minute since, might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space, for man's sake more than ever; he slew the pest of the marish, yesterday; to-day he takes his fill of food, wine, song and flowers; to-morrow he will slay another plague of mankind. so she sings, praising aloud the heroic temper, as mighty in the natural joys of natural life, in the strength and honour of the body, as in the saving of the world from pain and evil. but this pleasure of the senses, though in the great nature, is in it under rule, and the moment herakles hears of alkestis dead, he casts aside, in "a splendour of resolve," the feast, wine, song, and garlands, and girds himself to fight with death for her rescue and balaustion, looking after him as he goes, cries out the judgment of her soul on all heroism. it is browning's judgment also, one of the deepest things in his heart; a constant motive in his poetry, a master-thought in his life. gladness be with thee, helper of our world! i think this is the authentic sign and seal of godship, that it ever waxes glad, and more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts into a rage to suffer for mankind, and recommence at sorrow: drops like seed after the blossom, ultimate of all. say, does the seed scorn earth and seek the sun? surely it has no other end and aim than to drop, once more die into the ground, taste cold and darkness and oblivion there: and thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy, more joy and most joy,--do man good again. that is the truth browning makes this woman have the insight to reveal. gladness of soul, becoming at one with sorrow and death and rising out of them the conqueror, but always rejoicing, in itself, in the joy of the universe and of god, is the root-heroic quality. then there is the crux of the play--alkestis is to die for admetos, and does it. what of the conduct of admetos? what does balaustion, the woman, think of that? she thinks admetos is a poor creature for having allowed it. when alkestis is brought dying on the stage, and admetos follows, mourning over her, balaustion despises him, and she traces in the speech of alkestis, which only relates to her children's fate and takes no notice of her husband's protestations, that she has judged her husband, that love is gone in sad contempt, that all admetos has given her is now paid for, that her death is a business transaction which has set her free to think no more about him, only of her children. for, what seems most pertinent for him to say, if he loved, "take, o fates, your promise back, and take my life, not hers," he does not say. that is not really the thought of euripides. then, and this is subtly but not quite justly wrought into euripides by balaustion, she traces through the play the slow awakening of the soul of admetos to the low-hearted thing he had done. he comes out of the house, having disposed all things duteously and fittingly round the dead, and balaustion sees in his grave quietude that the truth is dawning on him; when suddenly pheres, his father, who had refused to die for him, comes to lay his offering on the bier. this, balaustion thinks, plucks admetos back out of unselfish thought into that lower atmosphere in which he only sees his own advantage in the death of alkestis; and in which he now bitterly reproaches his father because he did not die to save alkestis. and the reproach is the more bitter because--and this balaustion, with her subtle morality, suggests--an undernote of conscience causes him to see his own baser self, now prominent in his acceptance of alkestis' sacrifice, finished and hardened in the temper of his father--young admetos in old pheres. he sees with dread and pain what he may become when old. this hatred of himself in his father is, balaustion thinks, the source of his extreme violence with his father. she, with the greek sense of what was due to nature, seeks to excuse this unfitting scene. euripides has gone too far for her. she thinks that, if sophocles had to do with the matter, he would have made the chorus explain the man. but the unnatural strife would not have been explained by sophocles as balaustion explains it. that fine ethical twist of hers--"that admetos hates himself in his father," is too modern for a greek. it has the casuistical subtlety which the over-developed conscience of the christian church encouraged. it is intellectual, too, rather than real, metaphysical more than moral, browning rather than sophocles. nor do i believe that a rhodian girl, even with all athens at the back of her brain, would have conceived it at all. then balaustion makes another comment on the situation, in which there is more of browning than of herself. "admetos," she says, "has been kept back by the noisy quarrel from seeing into the truth of his own conduct, as he was on the point of doing, for 'with the low strife comes the little mind.'" but when his father is gone, and alkestis is borne away, then, in the silence of the house and the awful stillness in his own heart, he sees the truth. his shame, the whole woe and horror of his failure in love, break, like a toppling wave, upon him, and the drowned truth, so long hidden from him by self, rose to the surface, and appalled him by its dead face. his soul in seeing true, is saved, yet so las by fire. at this moment herakles comes in, leading alkestis, redeemed from death; and finding, so balaustion thinks, her husband restored to his right mind. but, then, we ask, how alkestis, having found him fail, will live with him again, how she, having topped nobility, will endure the memory of the ignoble in him? that would be the interesting subject, and the explanation euripides suggests does not satisfy balaustion. the dramatic situation is unfinished. balaustion, with her fine instinct, feels that, to save the subject, it ought to be otherwise treated, and she invents a new admetos, a new alkestis. she has heard that sophocles meant to make a new piece of the same matter, and her balanced judgment, on which browning insists so often, makes her say, "that is well. one thing has many sides; but still, no good supplants a good, no beauty undoes another; still i will love the _alkestis_ which i know. yet i have so drunk this poem, so satisfied with it my heart and soul, that i feel as if i, too, might make a new poem on the same matter." ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world! they give no gift that bounds itself and ends i' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds i' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes the man who only was a man before, that he grows godlike in his turn, can give-- he also: share the poet's privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty, from the old. and she gives her conception of the subject, and it further unfolds her character. when apollo served admetos, the noble nature of the god so entered into him that all the beast was subdued in the man, and he became the ideal king, living for the ennoblement of his people. yet, while doing this great work, he is to die, still young, and he breaks out, in a bitter calm, against the fate which takes him from the work of his life. "not so," answers alkestis, "i knew what was coming, and though apollo urged me not to disturb the course of things, and not to think that any death prevents the march of good or ends a life, yet he yielded; and i die for you--all happiness." "it shall never be," replies admetos; "our two lives are one. but i am the body, thou art the soul; and the body shall go, and not the soul. i claim death." "no," answered alkestis; "the active power to rule and weld the people into good is in the man. thou art the acknowledged power. and as to the power which, thou sayest, i give thee, as to the soul of me--take it, i pour it into thee. look at me." and as he looks, she dies, and the king is left--still twofold as before, with the soul of alkestis in him--himself and her. so is fate cheated, and alkestis in admetos is not dead. a passage follows of delicate and simple poetry, written by browning in a manner in which i would he had oftener written. to read it is to regret that, being able to do this, he chose rather to write, from time to time, as if he were hewing his way through tangled underwood. no lovelier image of proserpina has been made in poetry, not even in tennyson's _demeter_, than this-- and even while it lay, i' the look of him, dead, the dimmed body, bright alkestis' soul had penetrated through the populace of ghosts, was got to koré,--throned and crowned the pensive queen o' the twilight, where she dwells forever in a muse, but half away from flowery earth she lost and hankers for,-- and there demanded to become a ghost before the time. whereat the softened eyes of the lost maidenhood that lingered still straying among the flowers in sicily, sudden was startled back to hades' throne by that demand: broke through humanity into the orbed omniscience of a god, searched at a glance alkestis to the soul and said ... "hence, thou deceiver! this is not to die, if, by the very death which mocks me now, the life, that's left behind and past my power, is formidably doubled ..." and so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, the lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; and lo, alkestis was alive again, and of admetos' rapture who shall speak? the old conception has more reality. this is in the vague world of modern psychical imagination. nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges browning's picture of the character of balaustion. her character is still further enlarged in _aristophanes' apology_. that poem, if we desire intellectual exercise, illuminated by flashings of imagination, is well worth reading, but to comprehend it fully, one must know a great deal of athenian life and of the history of the comic drama. it is the defence by aristophanes of his idea of the business, the method, and the use of comedy. how far what he says is browning speaking for aristophanes, and how far it is browning speaking for himself, is hard to tell. and it would please him to leave that purposely obscure. what is alive and intense in the poem is, first, the realisation of athenian life in several scenes, pictured with all browning's astonishing force of presentation, as, for instance, the feast after the play, and the grim entrance of sophocles, black from head to foot, among the glittering and drunken revellers, to announce the death of euripides. secondly, there is the presentation of aristophanes. browning has created him for us-- and no ignoble presence! on the bulge of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,-- true, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged a red from cheek to temple,--then retired as if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,-- was never nursed by temperance or health. but huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire, imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout aggressive, while the beak supreme above, while the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, beard whitening under like a vinous foam, there made a glory, of such insolence-- i thought,--such domineering deity hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine for his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path which, purpling, recognised the conqueror. impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, but that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: still, sensuality was grown a rite. we see the man, the natural man, to the life. but as the poem goes on, we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who indulging the appetites and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a moment, their master. the coarse chambers of his nature are laid bare, his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw the sensual man away. then, we are made to know the power he has to rise above this--without losing it--into the higher imaginative region where, for the time, he feels the genius of sophocles, euripides, the moral power of balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world. indeed, in that last we find him in his extant plays. few of the greeks could write with greater exquisiteness of natural beauty than this wild poet who loved the dunghill. and browning does not say this, but records in this _apology_ how when aristophanes is touched for an instant by balaustion's reading of the _herakles_, and seizing the psalterion sings the song of thamuris marching to his trial with the muses through a golden autumn morning--it is the glory and loveliness of nature that he sings. this portraiture of the poet is scattered through the whole poem. it is too minute, too full of detail to dwell on here. it has a thousand touches of life and intimacy. and it is perhaps the finest thing browning has done in portraiture of character. but then there was a certain sympathy in browning for aristophanes. the natural man was never altogether put aside by browning. lastly, there is the fresh presentation of balaustion, of the matured and experienced woman whom we have known as a happy girl. euthycles and she are married, and one night, as she is sitting alone, he comes in, bringing the grave news that euripides is dead, but had proved at the court of archelaos of macedonia his usefulness as counsellor to king and state, and his power still to sing-- clashed thence _alkaion_, maddened _pentheus'_ up; then music sighed itself away, one moan iphigeneia made by aulis' strand; with her and music died euripides. and athens, hearing, ceased to mock and cried "bury euripides in peiraios, bring his body back." "ah," said balaustion, "death alters the point of view. but our tribute is in our hearts; and more, his soul will now for ever teach and bless the world. is not that day come? what if you and i re-sing the song, inaugurate the fame? for, like herakles, in his own _alkestis_, he now strides away (and this is the true end of the _alkestis_) to surmount all heights of destiny." while she spoke thus, the chorus of the comedy, girls, boys, and men, in drunken revel and led by aristophanes, thundered at the door and claimed admittance. balaustion is drawn confronting them--tall and superb, like victory's self; her warm golden eyes flashing under her black hair, "earth flesh with sun fire," statuesque, searching the crowd with her glance. and one and all dissolve before her silent splendour of reproof, all save aristophanes. she bids him welcome. "glory to the poet," she cries. "light, light, i hail it everywhere; no matter for the murk, that never should have been such orb's associate." aristophanes changes as he sees her; a new man confronts her. "so!" he smiled, "piercing to my thought at once, you see myself? balaustion's fixed regard can strip the proper aristophanes of what our sophists, in their jargon, style his accidents?" he confesses her power to meet him in discourse, unfolds his views and plans to her, and having contrasted himself with euripides, bids her use her thrice-refined refinement, her rosy strength, to match his argument. she claims no equality with him, the consummate creator; but only, as a woman, the love of all things lovable with which to meet him who has degraded comedy. she appeals to the high poet in the man, and finally bids him honour the deep humanity in euripides. to prove it, and to win his accord, she reads the _herakles_, the last of euripides. it is this long night of talk which balaustion dictates to euthycles as she is sailing, day after day, from athens back to rhodes. the aspect of sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for balaustion uses its changes as illustrations, and the clear descriptions tell, even more fully than before, how quick this woman was to observe natural beauty and to correlate it with humanity. here is one example. in order to describe a change in the temper of aristophanes from wild license to momentary gravity, balaustion seizes on a cloud-incident of the voyage--euthycles, she cries, ... "o'er the boat side, quick, what change, watch--in the water! but a second since, it laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea, ray fused with wave, to never disunite. now, sudden, all the surface hard and black, lies a quenched light, dead motion: what the cause? look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport! just so, some overshadow, some new care stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face." her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are woven together. all her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to them by her ideal sorrow for athens, the country of her soul, where high intelligence and imagination had created worlds. she leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of balaustion into spiritual splendour. athens, "hearted in her heart," has perished ignobly. not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when the acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean. this she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, "oh," she cries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" but browning does not leave balaustion with only this deep emotion in her heart. he gives her the spiritual passion of genius. she is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods, with the pure ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see euripides. in these high thoughts she will outlive her sorrow. why should despair be? since, distinct above man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind and floats the cloud, free transport for our soul out of its fleshly durance dim and low,-- since disembodied soul anticipates (thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint) above all crowding, crystal silentness, above all noise, a silver solitude:-- surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time may permanently bide, "assert the wise," there live in peace, there work in hope once more-- o nothing doubt, philemon! greed and strife, hatred and cark and care, what place have they in yon blue liberality of heaven? how the sea helps! how rose-smit earth will rise breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be rhodes! heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name, believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered, o'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world extends that realm where, "as the wise assert," philemon, thou shalt see euripides clearer than mortal sense perceived the man! we understand that she has drunk deep of socrates, that her spiritual sense reached onward to the platonic socrates. in this supersensuous world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her miserable over the fall of athens; and in the quiet, browning, who will lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers from the facts of history. in spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth that there was justice in the doom of athens. let justice have its way. let the folk die who pulled her glory down. this is her prophetic strain, the strength of the hebrew in the greek. and then the prophet in the woman passes, and the poet in her takes the lyre. she sees the splendid sunset. why should its extravagance of glory run to waste? let me build out of it a new athens, quarry out the golden clouds and raise the acropolis, and the rock-hewn place of assembly, whence new orators may thunder over greece; and the theatre where Æschylus, sophocles, euripides, godlike still, may contend for the prize. yet--and there is a further change of thought--yet that may not be. to build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the true use of it. the tragedy is there--irrevocable. let it sink deep in us till we see rhodes shining over the sea. so great, so terrible, so piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their hearers. it will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness and littleness of life. our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our petty passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow. what else in life seems piteous any more after such pity, or proves terrible beside such terror; this is the woman--the finest creature browning drew, young and fair and stately, with her dark hair and amber eyes, lovely--the wild pomegranate flower of a girl--as keen, subtle and true of intellect as she is lovely, able to comment on and check euripides, to conceive a new play out of his subject, to be his dearest friend, to meet on equality aristophanes; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager impulse that she thrills the despairing into action, enslaves a city with her eloquence, charms her girl-friends by the ilissus, and so sends her spirit into her husband that, when the spartans advise the razing of athens to the ground he saves the city by those famous lines of euripides, of which milton sang; so at one with natural beauty, with all beauty, that she makes it live in the souls of men; so clear in judgment that she sees the right even when it seems lost in the wrong, that she sees the justice of the gods in the ruin of the city she most loved; so poetic of temper that everything speaks to her of life, that she acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the foulness she hates in aristophanes, that she loves all humanity, bad or good, and euripides chiefly because of his humanity; so spiritual, that she can soar out of her most overwhelming sorrow into the stormless world where the gods breathe pure thought and for ever love; and, abiding in its peace, use the griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of men, because in all her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. nay, from her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in splendid prophecy. it is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of sibyl and pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both roman and greek, that she cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men; bearing their action, thought and feeling beyond man to god in man-- speak to the infinite intelligence, sing to the everlasting sympathy! * * * * * chapter xvi _the ring and the book_ when browning published _the ring and the book_, he was nearly fifty years old. all his powers (except those which create the lyric) are used therein with mastery; and the ease with which he writes is not more remarkable than the exultant pleasure which accompanies the ease. he has, as an artist, a hundred tools in hand, and he uses them with certainty of execution. the wing of his invention does not falter through these twelve books, nor droop below the level at which he began them; and the epilogue is written with as much vigour as the prologue. the various books demand various powers. in each book the powers are proportionate to the subject; but the mental force behind each exercise of power is equal throughout. he writes as well when he has to make the guilty soul of guido speak, as when the innocence of pompilia tells her story. the gain-serving lawyers, each distinctly isolated, tell their worldly thoughts as clearly as caponsacchi reveals his redeemed and spiritualised soul. the parasite of an aristocratic and thoughtless society in _tertium quid_ is not more vividly drawn than the pope, who has left in his old age the conventions of society behind him, and speaks in his silent chamber face to face with god. and all the minor characters--of whom there are a great number, ranging from children to old folk, from the peasant to the cardinal, through every class of society in italy--are drawn, even when they are slashed out in only three lines, with such force, certainty, colour and life that we know them better than our friends. the variousness of the product would seem to exclude an equality of excellence in drawing and invention. but it does not. it reveals and confirms it. the poem is a miracle of intellectual power. this great length, elaborate detail, and the repetition so many times of the same story, would naturally suggest to an intending reader that the poem might be wearisome. browning, suspecting this, and in mercy to a public who does not care for a work of _longue haleine_, published it at first in four volumes, with a month's interval between each volume. he thought that the story told afresh by characters widely different would strike new, if each book were read at intervals of ten days. there were three books in each volume. and if readers desire to realise fully the intellectual _tour de force_ contained in telling the same story twelve times over, and making each telling interesting, they cannot do better than read the book as browning wished it to be read. "give the poem four months, and let ten days elapse between the reading of each book," is what he meant us to understand. moreover, to meet this possible weariness, browning, consciously, or probably unconsciously, since genius does the right thing without asking why, continually used a trick of his own which, at intervals, stings the reader into wakefulness and pleasure, and sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy. after fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat dry analysis, a vivid illustration, which concentrates all the matter of the previous lines, flashes on the reader as a snake might flash across a traveller's dusty way: or some sudden description of an italian scene in the country or in the streets of rome enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity. or a new character leaps up out of the crowd, and calls us to note his ways, his dress, his voice, his very soul in some revealing speech, and then passes away from the stage, while we turn, refreshed (and indeed at times we need refreshment), to the main speaker, the leading character. but to dwell on the multitude of portraits with which browning's keen observation, memory and love of human nature have embellished _the ring and the book_ belongs to another part of this chapter. at present the question rises: "what place does _the ring and the book_ hold in browning's development?" it holds a central place. there was always a struggle in browning between two pleasures; pleasure in the exercise of his intellect--his wit, in the fullest sense of the word; pleasure in the exercise of his poetic imagination. sometimes one of these had the upper hand in his poems, sometimes the other, and sometimes both happily worked together. when the exercise of his wit had the upper hand, it tended to drive out both imagination and passion. intellectual play may be without any emotion except its delight in itself. then its mere cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased pleasure. when a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure, imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he produces resembles, but is not, poetry. and browning, who had got perilously near to the absence of poetry in _bishop blougram's apology_, succeeded in _mr. sludge, the medium_, in losing poetry altogether. in _the ring and the book_ there are whole books, and long passages in its other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion, no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these qualities into the glow of poetry. the indefinable difference which makes imaginative work into poetry is not there. there is abundance of invention; but that, though a part of imagination, belongs as much to the art of prose as to the art of poetry. browning could write thus, out of his intellect alone. none of the greater poets could. their genius could not work without fusing into their intellectual work intensity of feeling; and that combination secured poetic treatment of their subject. it would have been totally impossible for milton, shakespeare, dante, vergil, or even the great mass of second-rate poets, to have written some of browning's so-called poetry--no matter how they tried. there was that in browning's nature which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet. and his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with dazzling power in part of _the ring and the book_, he was carried away by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever analysis to tyrannise over him--_prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, _the inn album_, _red cotton nightcap country_, and a number of shorter poems in the volumes which followed. in these, what milton meant by passion, simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only as it exists in a prose writer. this condition was slowly arrived at. it had not been fully reached when he wrote _the ring and the book_. his poetic powers resisted their enemies for many years, and had the better in the struggle. if it takes a long time to cast a devil out, it takes a longer time to depose an angel. and the devil may be utterly banished, but the angel never. and though the devil of mere wit and the little devils of analytic exercise--devils when they usurp the throne in a poet's soul and enslave imaginative emotion--did get the better of browning, it was only for a time. towards the end of his life he recovered, but never as completely as he had once possessed them, the noble attributes of a poet. the evils of the struggle clung to him; the poisonous pleasure he had pursued still affected him; he was again and again attacked by the old malaria. he was as a brand plucked from the burning. _the ring and the book_ is the central point of this struggle. it is full of emotion and thought concentrated on the subject, and commingled by imagination to produce beauty. and whenever this is the case, as in the books which treat of caponsacchi and pompilia, we are rejoiced by poetry. in their lofty matter of thought and feeling, in their simplicity and nobleness of spiritual beauty, poetry is dominant. in them also his intellectual powers, and his imaginative and passionate powers, are fused into one fire. nor is the presentation of guido franceschini under two faces less powerful, or that of the pope, in his meditative silence. but in these books the poetry is less, and is mingled, as would naturally indeed be the case, with a searching analysis, which intrudes too much into their imaginative work. over-dissection makes them cold. in fact, in fully a quarter of this long poem, the analysing understanding, that bustling and self-conscious person, who plays only on the surface of things and separates their elements from one another instead of penetrating to their centre; who is incapable of seeing the whole into which the various elements have combined--is too masterful for the poetry. it is not, then, imaginative, but intellectual pleasure which, as we read, we gain. then again there is throughout a great part of the poem a dangerous indulgence of his wit; the amusement of remote analogies; the use of far-fetched illustrations; quips and cranks and wanton wiles of the reasoning fancy in deviating self-indulgence; and an allusiveness which sets commentators into note-making effervescence. all these, and more, which belong to wit, are often quite ungoverned, allowed to disport themselves as they please. such matters delight the unpoetic readers of browning, and indeed they are excellent entertainment. but let us call them by their true name; let us not call them poetry, nor mistake their art for the art of poetry. writing them in blank verse does not make them poetry. in _half-rome_, in _the other half-rome_, and in _tertium quid_, these elements of analysis and wit are exhibited in three-fourths of the verse; but the other fourth--in description of scenes, in vivid portraiture, in transient outbursts out of which passion, in glimpses, breaks--rises into the realm of poetry. in the books which sketch the lawyers and their pleadings, there is wit in its finest brilliancy, analysis in its keenest veracity, but they are scarcely a poet's work. the whole book is then a mixed book, extremely mixed. all that was poetical in browning's previous work is represented in it, and all the unpoetical elements which had gradually been winning power in him, and which showed themselves previously in _bishop blougram_ and _mr. sludge_, are also there in full blast. it was, as i have said, the central battlefield of two powers in him. and when _the ring and the book_ was finished, the inferior power had for a time the victory. to sum up then, there are books in the poem where matter of passion and matter of thought are imaginatively wrought together. there are others where psychological thought and metaphysical reasoning are dominant, but where passionate feeling has also a high place. there are others where analysis and wit far excel the elements of imaginative emotion; and there are others where every kind of imagination is absent, save that which is consistent throughout and which never fails--the power of creating men and women into distinct individualities. that is left, but it is a power which is not special to a poet. a prose writer may possess it with the same fulness as a poet. carlyle had it as remarkably as browning, or nearly as remarkably. he also had wit--a heavier wit than browning's, less lambent, less piercing, but as forcible. one thing more may be said. the poem is far too long, and the subject does not bear its length. the long poems of the world (i do not speak of those by inferior poets) have a great subject, are concerned with manifold fates of men, and are naturally full of various events and varied scenery. they interest us with new things from book to book. in _the ring and the book_ the subject is not great, the fates concerned are not important, and the same event runs through twelve books and is described twelve times. however we may admire the intellectual force which actually makes the work interesting, and the passion which often thrills us in it--this is more than the subject bears, and than we can always endure. each book is spun out far beyond what is necessary; a great deal is inserted which would be wisely left out. no one could be more concise than browning when he pleased. his power of flashing a situation or a thought into a few words is well known. but he did not always use this power. and in _the ring and the book_, as in some of the poems that followed it, he seems now and then to despise that power. and now for the poem itself. browning tells the story eight times by different persons, each from a different point of view, and twice more by the same person before and after his condemnation and, of course, from two points of view. then he practically tells it twice more in the prologue and the epilogue--twelve times in all--and in spite of what i have said about the too great length of the poem, this is an intellectual victory that no one else but browning could have won against its difficulties. whether it was worth the creation by himself of the difficulty is another question. he chose to do it, and we had better submit to him and get the good of his work. at least we may avoid some of the weariness he himself feared by reading it in the way i have mentioned, as browning meant it to be read. poems--being the highest product of the highest genius of which man is capable--ought to be approached with some reverence. and a part of that reverence is to read them in accordance with the intention and desire of the writer. we ought not to forget the date of the tale when we read the book. it is just two hundred years ago. the murder of pompilia took place in ; and the book completes his studies of the renaissance in its decay. if _sordello_ is worth our careful reading as a study of the thirteenth century in north italy, this book is as valuable as a record of the society of its date. it is, in truth, a mine of gold; pure crude ore is secreted from man's life, then moulded into figures of living men and women by the insight and passion of the poet. in it is set down rome as she was--her customs, opinions, classes of society; her dress, houses, streets, lanes, byeways and squares; her architecture, fountains, statues, courts of law, convents, gardens; her fashion and its drawing-rooms, the various professions and their habits, high life and middle class, tradesmen and beggars, priest, friar, lay-ecclesiastic, cardinal and pope. nowhere is this pictorial and individualising part of browning's genius more delighted with its work. every description is written by a lover of humanity, and with joy. nor is he less vivid in the _mise-en-scène_ in which he places this multitude of personages. in _half-rome_ we mingle with the crowd between palazzo fiano and ruspoli, and pass into the church of lorenzo in lucina where the murdered bodies are exposed. the mingled humours of the crowd, the various persons and their characters are combined with and enhanced by the scenery. then there is the market place by the capucin convent of the piazza barberini, with the fountains leaping; then the _réunion_ at a palace, and the fine fashionable folk among the mirrors and the chandeliers, each with their view of the question; then the courthouse, with all its paraphernalia, where guido and caponsacchi plead; then, the sketches, as new matters turn up, of the obscure streets of rome, of the country round arezzo, of arezzo itself, of the post road from arezzo to rome and the country inn near rome, of the garden house in the suburbs, of the households of the two advocates and their different ways of living; of the pope in his closet and of guido in the prison cell; and last, the full description of the streets and the piazza del popolo on the day of the execution--all with a hundred vivifying, illuminating, minute details attached to them by this keen-eyed, observant, questing poet who remembered everything he saw, and was able to use each detail where it was most wanted. memories are good, but good usage of them is the fine power. the _mise-en-scène_ is then excellent, and browning was always careful to make it right, fitting and enlivening. nowhere is this better done than in the introduction where he finds the book on a stall in the square of san lorenzo, and describes modern florence in his walk from the square past the strozzi, the pillar and the bridge to casa guidi on the other side of the arno opposite the little church of san felice. during the walk he read the book through, yet saw everything he passed by. the description will show how keen were his eyes, how masterly his execution. that memorable day, (june was the month, lorenzo named the square) i leaned a little and overlooked my prize by the low railing round the fountain-source close to the statue, where a step descends: while clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place for marketmen glad to pitch basket down, dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet, and whisk their faded fresh. and on i read presently, though my path grew perilous between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes and swathe of tuscan hair, on festas fine: through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves, skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape, rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,-- and worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun: none of them took my eye from off my prize. still read i on, from written title page to written index, on, through street and street, at the strozzi, at the pillar, at the bridge; till, by the time i stood at home again in casa guidi by felice church, under the doorway where the black begins with the first stone-slab of the staircase cold, i had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth gathered together, bound up in this book, print three-fifths, written supplement the rest. this power, combined with his power of portraiture, makes this long poem alive. no other man of his century could paint like him the to and fro of a city, the hurly-burly of humanity, the crowd, the movement, the changing passions, the loud or quiet clash of thoughts, the gestures, the dress, the interweaving of expression on the face, the whole play of humanity in war or peace. as we read, we move with men and women; we are pressed everywhere by mankind. we listen to the sound of humanity, sinking sometimes to the murmur we hear at night from some high window in london; swelling sometimes, as in _sordello_, into a roar of violence, wrath, revenge, and war. and it was all contained in that little body, brain and heart; and given to us, who can feel it, but not give it. this is the power which above all endears him to us as a poet. we feel in each poem not only the waves of the special event of which he writes, but also the large vibration of the ocean of humanity. he was not unaware of this power of his. we are told in _sordello_ that he dedicated himself to the picturing of humanity; and he came to think that a power beyond ours had accepted this dedication, and directed his work. he declares in the introduction that he felt a hand ("always above my shoulder--mark the predestination"), that pushed him to the stall where he found the fated book in whose womb lay his child--_the ring and the book_. and he believed that he had certain god-given qualities which fitted him for this work. these he sets forth in this introduction, and the self-criticism is of the greatest interest. the first passage is, when he describes how, having finished the book and got into him all the gold of its fact, he added from himself that to the gold which made it workable--added to it his live soul, informed, transpierced it through and through with imagination; and then, standing on his balcony over the street, saw the whole story from the beginning shape itself out on the night, alive and clear, not in dead memory but in living movement; saw right away out on the roman road to arezzo, and all that there befell; then passed to rome again with the actors in the tragedy, a presence with them who heard them speak and think and act. the "life in him abolished the death of things--deep calling unto deep." for "a spirit laughed and leaped through his every limb, and lit his eye, and lifted him by the hair, and let him have his will" with pompilia, guido, caponsacchi, the lawyers, the pope, and the whole of rome. and they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage again at the magician's command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded to a ring by art. but the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in a passionate cry to his dead wife--a lovely spell where high thinking and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers. whoso reads it feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his masterpiece: o lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,-- boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue, and sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- when the first summons from the darkling earth reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, and bared them of the glory--to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- this is the same voice: can thy soul know change hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! never may i commence my song, my due to god who best taught song by gift of thee, except with bent head and beseeching hand-- that still, despite the distance and the dark, what was, again may be; some interchange of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, some benediction anciently thy smile: --never conclude, but raising hand and head thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn for all hope, all sustainment, all reward, their utmost up and on,--so blessing back in those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, some whiteness which, i judge, thy face makes proud, some wanness where, i think, thy foot may fall! the poem begins with the view that one half of rome took of the events. at the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the book, the incidental characters. guido, caponsacchi, pompilia, the pope, and, in a lesser degree, violante and pietro, are the chief characters, and the main interest contracts around them. but, through all they say and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor characters move to and fro; and browning, whose eye sees every face, and through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. most of them are types of a class, a profession or a business, yet there is always a touch or two which isolates each of them so that they do not only represent a class but a personal character. he hated, like morris, the withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor any man who knows and feels mankind, that by that the world grew more and more. the poem is full of such individualities. it were well, as one example, to read the whole account of the people who come to see the murdered bodies laid out in the church of lorenzo. the old, curious, doddering gossip of the roman street is not less alive than the cardinal, and the clever pushing curato; and around them are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the crowd. the church, the square are humming with humanity. he does the same clever work at the deathbed of pompilia. she lies in the house of the dying, and certain folk are allowed to see her. each one is made alive by this creative pencil; and all are different, one from the other--the augustinian monk, old mother baldi chattering like a jay who thought that to touch pompilia's bedclothes would cure her palsy, cavalier carlo who fees the porter to paint her face just because she was murdered and famous, the folk who argue on theology over her wounded body. elsewhere we possess the life-history of pietro and violante, pompilia's reputed parents; several drawings of the retired tradesmen class, with their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor quarter in rome; then, the governor and archbishop of arezzo, the friar who is kindly but fears the world and all the busy-bodies of this provincial town. arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear light. the most vivid of these sketches is dominus hyacinthus, the lawyer who defends guido. i do not know anything better done, and more amusingly, than this man and his household--a paternal creature, full of his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at home with them and his fat wife. browning was so fond of this sketch that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue. these represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters, whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast. of these the whitest, simplest, loveliest is pompilia, of whom i have already written. the other chief characters are count guido and giuseppe caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters browning gives all his powers. they are contrasted types of the spirit of good and the spirit of evil conquering in man. up to a certain point in life their conduct is much alike. both belong to the church--one as a priest, one as a layman affiliated to the church. the lust of money and self, when the character of pompilia forces act, turns guido into a beast of greed and hate. the same character, when it forces act, lifts caponsacchi into almost a saint. this was a piece of contrasted psychology in which the genius of browning revelled, and he followed all the windings of it in both these hearts with the zest of an explorer. they were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the better he was pleased. guido's first speech is made before the court in his defence. we see disclosed the outer skin of the man's soul, all that he would have the world know of him--cynical, mocking, not cruel, not affectionate, a man of the world whom life had disappointed, and who wishing to establish himself in a retired life by marriage had been deceived and betrayed, he pleads, by his wife and her parents--an injured soul who, stung at last into fury at having a son foisted on him, vindicates his honour. and in this vindication his hypocrisy slips at intervals from him, because his hatred of his wife is too much for his hypocrisy. this is the only touch of the wolf in the man--his cruel teeth shown momentarily through the smooth surface of his defence. a weaker poet would have left him there, not having capacity for more. but browning, so rich in thought he was, had only begun to draw him. guido is not only painted by three others--by caponsacchi, by pompilia, by the pope--but he finally exposes his real self with his own hand. he is condemned to death. two of his friends visit him the night before his execution, in his cell. then, exalted into eloquence by the fierce passions of fear of death and hatred of pompilia, he lays bare as the night his very soul, mean, cruel, cowardly, hungry for revenge, crying for life, black with hate--a revelation such as in literature can best be paralleled by the soliloquies of iago. baseness is supreme in his speech, hate was never better given; the words are like the gnashing of teeth; prayers for life at any cost were never meaner, and the outburst of terror and despair at the end is their ultimate expression. over against him is set caponsacchi, of noble birth, of refined manner, one of those polished and cultivated priests of whom rome makes such excellent use, and of whom browning had drawn already a different type in bishop blougram. he hesitated, being young and gay, to enter the church. but the archbishop of that easy time, two hundred years ago, told him the church was strong enough to bear a few light priests, and that he would be set free from many ecclesiastical duties if, by assiduity in society and with women, he strengthened the social weight of the church. in that way, making his madrigals and confessing fine ladies, he lived for four years. this is an admirable sketch of a type of church society of that date, indeed, of any date in any church; it is by no means confined to rome. on this worldly, careless, indifferent, pleasure-seeking soul pompilia, in her trouble and the pity of it, rises like a pure star seen through mist that opens at intervals to show her excelling brightness; and in a moment, at the first glimpse of her in the theatre, the false man drops away; his soul breaks up, stands clear, and claims its divine birth. he is born again, and then transfigured. the life of convention, of indifference, dies before pompilia's eyes; and on the instant he is true to himself, to her, and to god. the fleeting passions which had absorbed him, and were of the senses, are burned up, and the spiritual love for her purity, and for purity itself--that eternal, infinite desire--is now master of his life. not as miranda and ferdinand changed eyes in youthful love, but as dante and beatrice look on one another in paradise, did pompilia and caponsacchi change eyes, and know at once that both were true, and see without speech the central worth of their souls. they trusted one another and they loved for ever. so, when she cried to him in her distress, he did her bidding and bore her away to rome. he tells the story of their flight, and tells it with extraordinary beauty and vehemence in her defence. so noble is the tale that he convinces the judges who at first had disbelieved him; and the pope confesses that his imprudence was a higher good than priestly prudence would have been. when he makes his defence he has heard that pompilia has been murdered. then we understand that in his conversion to goodness he has not lost but gained passion. scorn of the judges, who could not see that neither he was guilty nor pompilia; fiery indignation with the murderer; infinite grief for the lamb slain by the wolf, and irrevocable love for the soul of pompilia, whom he will dwell with eternally when they meet in heaven, a love which pompilia, dying, declares she has for him, and in which, growing and abiding, she will wait for him--burn on his lips. he is fully and nobly a man; yet, at the end--and he is no less a man for it--the wild sorrow at his heart breaks him down into a cry: o great, just, good god! miserable me! pompilia ends her words more quietly, in the faith that comes with death. caponsacchi has to live on, to bear the burden of the world. but pompilia has borne all she had to bear. all pain and horror are behind her, as she lies in the stillness, dying. and in the fading of this life, she knows she loves caponsacchi in the spiritual world and will love him for ever. each speaks according to the circumstance, but she most nobly: he is ordained to call and i to come! do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for god? say,--i am all in flowers from head to foot! say,--not one flower of all he said and did, might seem to flit unnoticed, fade unknown, but dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree whereof the blossoming perfumes the place at this supreme of moments! he is a priest; he cannot marry therefore, which is right: i think he would not marry if he could. marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, mere imitation of the inimitable: in heaven we have the real and true and sure. 'tis there they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the angels: right, oh how right that is, how like jesus christ to say that! marriage-making for the earth, with gold so much,--birth, power, repute so much, or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! be as the angels rather, who, apart, know themselves into one, are found at length married, but marry never, no, nor give in marriage; they are man and wife at once when the true time is; here we have to wait not so long neither! could we by a wish have what we will and get the future now, would we wish aught done undone in the past? so, let him wait god's instant men call years; meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, do out the duty! through such souls alone god stooping shows sufficient of his light for us i' the dark to rise by. and i rise. last of these main characters, the pope appears. guido, condemned to death by the law, appeals from the law to the head of the church, because, being half an ecclesiastic, his death can only finally be decreed by the ecclesiastical arm. an old, old man, with eyes clear of the quarrels, conventions, class prejudices of the world, the pope has gone over all the case during the day, and now night has fallen. far from the noise of rome, removed from the passions of the chief characters, he is sitting in the stillness of his closet, set on his decision. we see the whole case now, through his mind, in absolute quiet. he has been on his terrace to look at the stars, and their solemn peace is with him. he feels that he is now alone with god and his old age. and being alone, he is not concise, but garrulous and discursive. browning makes him so on purpose. but discursive as his mind is, his judgment is clear, his sentence determined. only, before he speaks, he will weigh all the characters, and face any doubts that may shoot into his conscience. he passes guido and the rest before his spiritual tribunal, judging not from the legal point of view, but from that which his master would take at the judgment day. how have they lived; what have they made of life? when circumstances invaded them with temptation, how did they meet temptation? did they declare by what they did that they were on god's side or the devil's? and on these lines he delivers his sentence on pompilia, caponsacchi, guido, pietro, violante, and the rest. he feels he speaks as the vicegerent of god. this solemn, silent, lonely, unworldly judgment of the whole case, done in god's presence, is, after the noisy, crowded, worldly judgment of it by rome, after the rude humours of the law, and the terrible clashing of human passions, most impressive; and it rises into the majesty of old age in the summing up of the characters of pompilia, caponsacchi, and guido. i wish browning had left it there. but he makes a sudden doubt invade the pope with a chill. has he judged rightly in thinking that divine truth is with him? is there any divine truth on which he may infallibly repose? and then for many pages we are borne away into a theological discussion, which i take leave to say is wearisome; and which, after all, lands the pope exactly at the point from which he set out--a conclusion at which, as we could have told him beforehand, he would be certain to arrive. we might have been spared this. it is an instance of browning's pleasure in intellectual discourse which had, as i have said, such sad results on his imaginative work. however, at the end, the pope resumes his interest in human life. he determines; and quickly--"let the murderer die to-morrow." then comes the dreadful passion of guido in the condemned cell, of which i have spoken. and then, one would think the poem would have closed. but no, the epilogue succeeds, in which, after all the tragedy, humour reigns supreme. it brings us into touch with all that happened in this case after the execution of guido; the letters written by the spectators, the lawyer's view of the deed, the gossip of rome upon the interesting occasion. no piece of humour in browning's poetry, and no portrait-sketching, is better than the letter written by a venetian gentleman in rome giving an account of the execution. it is high comedy when we are told that the austrian ambassador, who had pleaded for guido's life, was so vexed by the sharp "no" of the pope (even when he had told the pope that he had probably dined at the same table with guido), that he very nearly refused to come to the execution, and would scarcely vouchsafe it more than a glance when he did come--as if this conduct of his were a slight which the pope would feel acutely. nor does browning's invention stop with this inimitable letter. he adds two other letters which he found among the papers; and these give to the characters of the two lawyers, new turns, new images of their steady professional ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world. one would think, after this, that invention would be weary. not at all! the augustinian monk who attended pompilia has not had attention enough; and this is the place, browning thinks, to show what he thought of the case, and how he used it in his profession. so, we are given a great part of the sermon he preached on the occasion, and the various judgments of rome upon it. it is wonderful, after invention has been actively at work for eleven long books, pouring forth its waters from an unfailing fountain, to find it, at the end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever. this, i repeat, is the excellence of browning's genius--fulness of creative power, with imagination in it like a fire. it does not follow that all it produces is poetry; and what it has produced in _the ring and the book_ is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing better than prose. but this is redeemed by the noble poetry of a great part of it. the book is, as i have said, a mixed book--the central arena of that struggle in browning between prose and poetry with a discussion of which this chapter began, and with the mention of which i finish it. * * * * * chapter xvii _later poems_ a just appreciation of the work which browning published after _the ring and the book_ is a difficult task. the poems are of various kinds, on widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat of balaustion, they have no connection with one another. many of them must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to possess. these, when we come across them among their middle-aged companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book i have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which they were born. i will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later poems they must be discarded. the struggle to which i have drawn attention between the imaginative and intellectual elements in browning, and which was equally balanced in _the ring and the book_, continued after its publication, but with a steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the intellectual elements. one poem, however, written before the publication of _the ring and the book_, does not belong to this struggle. this is _hervé riel_, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph. it is curiously french in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is plainly french, not english in feeling. nor is it only french; it is breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward, and in loyalty to country, to love and to home. if browning had been all english, this transference of himself into the soul of another nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible. as it is, it is wonderful enough; and this self-transference--one of his finest poetic powers--is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as was natural to browning, of the breton soul of hervé riel. in _balaustion's adventure_ ( ) which next appeared, the imaginative elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they only emerge at intervals in its continuation, _aristophanes' apology_ ( ), yet they do emerge. meanwhile, between _balaustion's adventure_ and the end of , he produced four poems--_prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society_; _fifine at the fair_; _red cotton nightcap country_, or _turf and towers_; and _the inn album_. they are all long, and were published in four separate volumes. in them the intellectual elements have all but completely conquered the imaginative. they are, however, favourite "exercise-places" for some of his admirers, who think that they derive poetic pleasures from their study. the pleasure these poems give, when they give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure. it is chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called to solve with excitement a huddle of metaphysical problems. they have the name but not the nature of poetry. they are the work of my lord intelligence--attended by wit and fancy--who sits at the desk of poetry, and with her pen in his hand. he uses the furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room. yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber. in the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks. the poems are, it is true, original. we cannot class them with any previous poetry. they cannot be called didactic or satirical. the didactic and satirical poems of england are, for the most part, artificial, concise, clear. these poems are not artificial, clear or concise. nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured, intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of dryden and pope addressed. the natural man is in them--the crude, dull, badly-baked man--what the later nineteenth century called the real man. we see his ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for salinguerra, or lippo lippi, or even caliban. the representations are then human enough, with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose. poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art. realism of this kind is not art, it is science. yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument. their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on league after league of high grasslands. when one has a fancy to follow them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there are livelier employments. their chief interest is the impression they give us of a certain side of browning's character. they are his darling debauch of cleverness, of surface-psychology. the analysis follows no conventional lines, does not take or oppose any well-known philosophical side. it is not much more than his own serious or fantastic thinking indulging itself with reckless abandon--amusing itself with itself. and this gives them a humanity--a browning humanity--outside of their subjects. the subjects too, though not delightful, are founded on facts of human life. _bishop blougram_ was conceived from cardinal wiseman's career, _mr. sludge_ from mr. home's. _prince hohenstiel schwangau_ explains and defends the expediency by which napoleon iii. directed his political action. _the inn album_, _red cotton nightcap country_, are taken from actual stories that occurred while browning was alive, and _fifine at the fair_ analyses a common crisis in the maturer lives of men and women. the poems thus keep close to special cases, yet--and in this the poet appears--they have an extension which carries them beyond the particular subjects into the needs and doings of a wider humanity. their little rivers run into the great sea. they have then their human interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion, imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics, curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with argument, and honest human ugliness. moreover, the method browning attempts to use in them for the discovery of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts. it is almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that truth--and a very curious arrangement it seems to be. it is this method browning pursues in these poems. he represents one after another various false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that fashion to clear the way to the truth. but he fails to convince partly because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for philosophy or science, but not for poetry. poetry claims to see and feel the truth at once. when the poet does not assert that claim, and act on it, he is becoming faithless to his art. browning's method in these poems is the method of a scientific philosopher, not of an artist. he gets his man into a debateable situation; the man debates it from various points of view; persons are introduced who take other aspects of the question, or personified abstractions such as _sagacity, reason, fancy_ give their opinions. not satisfied with this, browning discusses it again from his own point of view. he is then like the chess-player who himself plays both red and white; who tries to keep both distinct in his mind, but cannot help now and again taking one side more than the other; and who is frequently a third person aware of himself as playing red, and also of himself as playing white; and again of himself as outside both the players and criticising their several games. this is no exaggerated account of what is done in these poems. three people, even when the poems are monologues, are arguing in them, and browning plays all their hands, even in _the inn album_, which is not a monologue. in _red cotton nightcap country_, when he has told the story of the man and woman in all its sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own, he brings the victim of mean pleasure and mean superstition to the top of the tower whence he throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence into the soul of the man, explains his own view of the situation. in _prince hohenstiel schwangau_, we have sometimes what browning really thinks, as in the beginning of the poem, about the matter in hand, and then what he thinks the prince would think, and then, to complicate the affair still more, the prince divides himself, and makes a personage called _sagacity_ argue with him on the whole situation. as to _fifine at the fair_--a poem it would not be fair to class altogether with these--its involutions resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water. don juan changes his personality and his views like a player on the stage who takes several parts; elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding opinions; fifine is real, but she remains outside of this shifting scenery of the mind; and browning, who continually intrudes, is sometimes don juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together, and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain. and after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is settled in the end. i do not say that the leaving of the questions unsettled is not like life. it is very like life, but not like the work of poetry, whose high office it is to decide questions which cannot be solved by the understanding. bishop blongram thinks he has proved his points. gigadibs is half convinced he has. but the bishop, on looking back, thinks he has not been quite sincere, that his reasonings were only good for the occasion. he has evaded the centre of the thing. what he has said was no more than intellectual fencing. it certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest kind. both the bishop and his companion are drawn to the life; yet, and this is the cleverest thing in the poem, we know that the bishop is in reality a different man from the picture he makes of himself. and the truth which in his talk underlies its appearance acts on gigadibs and sends him into a higher life. the discussion--as it may be called though the bishop only speaks--concerning faith and doubt is full of admirable wisdom, and urges me to modify my statement that browning took little or no interest in the controversies of his time. yet, all through the fencing, nothing is decided. the button is always on the bishop's foil. he never sends the rapier home. and no doubt that is the reason that his companion, with "his sudden healthy vehemence" did drive his weapon home into life--and started for australia. mr. sludge, the medium, excuses his imposture, and then thinks "it may not altogether be imposture. for all he knows there may really be spirits at the bottom of it. he never meant to cheat; yet he did cheat. yet, even if he lied, lies help truth to live; and he must live himself; and god may have made fools for him to live on;" and many other are the twists of his defence. the poem is as lifelike in its insight into the mind of a supple cheat as it is a brilliant bit of literature; but browning leaves the matter unconcluded, as he would not have done, i hold, had he been writing poetry. prince hohenstiel's defence of expediency in politics is made by browning to seem now right, now wrong, because he assumes at one time what is true as the ground of his argument, and then at another what is plainly false, and in neither case do the assumptions support the arguments. what really is concluded is not the question, but the slipperiness of the man who argues. and at the end of the poem browning comes in again to say that words cannot be trusted to hit truth. language is inadequate to express it. browning was fond of saying this. it does not seem worth saying. in one sense it is a truism; in another it resembles nonsense. words are the only way by which we can express truth, or our nearest approach to what we think it is. at any rate, silence, in spite of maeterlinck, does not express it. moreover, with regard to the matter in hand, browning knew well enough how a poet would decide the question of expediency he has here brought into debate. he has decided it elsewhere; but here he chooses not to take that view, that he may have the fun of exercising his clever brain. there is no reason why he should not entertain himself and us in this way; but folk need not call this intellectual jumping to and fro a poem, or try to induce us to believe that it is the work of art. when he had finished these products of a time when he was intoxicated with his intellect, and of course somewhat proud of it, the poet in him began to revive. this resurrection had begun in _fifine at the fair_. i have said it would not be just to class this poem with the other three. it has many an oasis of poetry where it is a happiness to rest. but the way between their palms and wells is somewhat dreary walking, except to those who adore minute psychology. the poem is pitilessly long. if throughout its length it were easy to follow we might excuse the length, but it is rendered difficult by the incessant interchange of misty personalities represented by one personality. elvire, fifine only exist in the mind of don juan; their thoughts are only expressed in his words; their outlines not only continually fade into his, but his thought steals into his presentation of their thought, till it becomes impossible to individualise them. the form in which browning wrote the poem, by which he made don juan speak for them, makes this want of clearness and sharpness inevitable. the work is done with a terrible cleverness, but it is wearisome at the last. the length also might be excused if the subject were a great one or had important issues for mankind. but, though it has its interest and is human enough, it does not deserve so many thousand lines nor so much elaborate analysis. a few lyrics or a drama of two acts might say all that is worth saying on the matter. what browning has taken for subject is an every-day occurrence. we are grateful to him for writing on so universal a matter, even though it is unimportant; and he has tried to make it uncommon and important by weaving round it an intricate lace-work of psychology; yet, when we get down to its main lines, it is the ordinary event, especially commonplace in any idle society which clings to outward respectability and is dreadfully wearied of it. our neighbours across the channel call it _la crise_ when, after years of a quiet, not unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeeding day in unbroken continuity of easy affection and limited experience, the man or the woman, in full middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent monotony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching tide of the commonplace, and looks on these as fetters on their freedom, as walls which shut them in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from the gipsy roving of the passions. the time arrives, when this becomes, they think, too great for endurance, and their impatience shows itself in a daily irritability quite new in the household, apparently causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of thought and act which turn the peaceful into a tempestuous home. it is not that the husband or the wife are inconstant by nature--to call _fifine at the fair_ a defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth of the matter--but it is the desire of momentary change, of a life set free from conventional barriers, of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for new experiences, for something which will bring into play those parts of their nature of which they are vaguely conscious but which are as yet unused--new elements in their senses, intellect, imagination, even in their spirit, but not always in their conscience. that, for the time being, as in this poem, is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice cannot be heard. this is, as i said, a crisis of common occurrence. it may be rightly directed, its evil controlled, and a noble object chosen for the satisfaction of the impulse. here, that is not the case; and browning describes its beginning with great freshness and force as juan walks down to the fair with elvire. nor has he omitted to treat other forms of it in his poetry. he knew how usual it was, but he has here made it unusual by putting it into the heart of a man who, before he yielded to it, was pleased to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysical analysis; who sees not only how it appears to himself in three or four moods, but how it looks to the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so rude while he strives to be courteous, and to the bold, free, conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom, after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety. it may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his talk; but what we ask is--was the matter worth the trouble of more than two thousand lines of long-winded verse? was it worth an artist's devotion? or, to ask a question i would not ask if the poem were good art, is it of any real importance to mankind? is it, finally, anything more than an intellectual exercise of browning on which solitary psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat intelligence? this poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect. i may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of don juan is a mistake. every one knows don juan, and to imagine him arguing in the fashion of this poem is absurd. he would instantly, without a word, have left elvire, and abandoned fifine in a few days. the connection then of the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of unreality over the whole of it. the don juan of the poem had much better have stayed with elvire, who endured him with weary patience. i have no doubt that he bored fifine to extinction. the poems that follow these four volumes are mixed work, half imaginative, half intellectual. sometimes both kinds are found, separated, in the same poem; sometimes in one volume half the poems will be imaginative and the other half not. could the imaginative and intellectual elements have now been fused as they were in his earlier work, it were well; but they were not. they worked apart. his witful poems are all wit, his analytical poems are all analysis, and his imaginative poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not the same intellectual strength they had in other days. _numpholeptos_, for instance, an imaginative poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion, is curiously wanting in intellectual foundation. the _numpholeptos_ is in the volume entitled _pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_. part of the poems in it are humorous, such as _pacchiarotto_ and _filippo baldinucci_, excellent pieces of agreeable wit, containing excellent advice concerning life. one reads them, is amused by them, and rarely desires to read them again. in the same volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. in the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of naddo in _sordello_. but now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. for that sort of poetry does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness the imagination has of its absolute rightness. he expresses his needless soreness with plenty of wit in _pacchiarotto_ and in the _epilogue_, criticises his critics, and displays his good opinion of his work--no doubt of these later poems, like _the inn album_ and the rest--with a little too much of self-congratulation. "the poets pour us wine," he says, "and mine is strong--the strong wine of the loves and hates and thoughts of man. but it is not sweet as well, and my critics object. were it so, it would be more popular than it is. sweetness and strength do not go together, and i have strength." but that is not the real question. the question is--is the strength poetical? has it imagination? it is rough, powerful, full of humanity, and that is well. but is it half prose, or wholly prose? or is it poetry, or fit to be called so? he thinks that _prince hohenstiel_, or _red cotton nightcap country_, are poetry. they are, it is true, strong; and they are not sweet. but have they the strength of poetry in them, and not the strength of something else altogether? that is the question he ought to have answered, and it does not occur to him. yet, he was, in this very book, half-way out of this muddle. there are poems in it, just as strong as _the inn album_, but with the ineffable spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces he thought, being deceived by the understanding, were more strong than the poems of old. in _bifurcation_, in _st. martin's summer_, the diviner spirit breathes. there is that other poem called _forgiveness_ of which i have already spoken--one of his masterpieces. _cenciaja_, which may be classed with _forgiveness_ as a study of the passion of hatred, is not so good as its comrade, but its hatred is shown in a mean character and for a meaner motive. and the _prologue_, in its rhythm and pleasure, its subtlety of thought, its depth of feeling, and its close union of both, recalls his earlier genius. the first of the _pisgah sights_ is a jewel. it is like a poem by goethe, only goethe would have seen the "sight" not when he was dying, but when he was alive to his finger-tips. the second is not like goethe's work, nor browning's; but it is a true picture of what many feel and are. so is _fears and scruples_. as to _natural magic_, surely it is the most charming of compliments, most enchantingly expressed. the next volume of original poems was _la saisiaz_ and the _two poets of croisic_. the _croisic poets_ are agreeable studies, written with verve and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace poets suddenly into fame. they do well to amuse an idle hour. the end of both is interesting. that of the first, which begins with stanza lix., discusses the question: "who cares, how such a mediocrity as rené lived after the fame of his prophecy died out?"[ ] and browning answers-- well, i care--intimately care to have experience how a human creature felt in after life, who bore the burthen grave of certainly believing god had dealt for once directly with him: did not rave --a maniac, did not find his reason melt --an idiot, but went on, in peace or strife, the world's way, lived an ordinary life. the solution browning offers is interesting, because it recalls a part of the experiences of lazarus in the _epistle to karshish_. rené, like lazarus, but only for a moment, has lived in the eternal. are such revelations possible, is his second question. yes, he answers; and the form of the answer belongs to the theory of life laid down in _paracelsus_. such sudden openings of the greater world are at intervals, as to abt vogler, given by god to men. the end of the second asks what is the true test of the greater poet, when people take on them to weigh the worth of poets--who was better, best, this, that or the other bard? when i read this i trembled, knowing that i had compared him with tennyson. but when i heard the answer i trembled no more. "the best poet of any two is the one who leads the happier life. the strong and joyful poet is the greater." but this is a test of the greatness of a man, not necessarily of a poet. and, moreover, in this case, tennyson and browning both lived equally happy lives. both were strong to the end, and imaginative joy was their companion. but the verse in which browning winds up his answer is one of the finest in his poetry. so, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force; what then? since swiftness gives the charioteer the palm, his hope be in the vivid horse whose neck god clothed with thunder, not the steer sluggish and safe! yoke hatred, crime, remorse, despair; but ever mid the whirling fear, let, through the tumult, break the poet's face radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race! _la saisiaz_ is a more important poem: it describes the sudden death of his friend, ann egerton smith, and passes from that, and all he felt concerning it, into an argument on the future life of the soul, with the assumption that god is, and the soul. the argument is interesting, but does not concern us here. what does concern us is that browning has largely recovered his poetical way of treating a subject. he is no longer outside of it, but in it. he does not use it as a means of exercising his brains only. it is steeped in true and vital feeling, and the deep friendship he had for his friend fills even the theological argument with a passionate intensity. nevertheless, the argument is perilously near the work of the understanding alone--as if a question like that of immortality could receive any solution from the hands of the understanding. only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit with god, can solve that question for himself, and not for another. that is browning's position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written more positively on the subject. but when he submits the question to reasoning, he wavers, as he does here, and leaves the question more undecided than anywhere else in his work. this is a pity, but it is the natural penalty of his partial abandonment of the poetic for the prosaic realm, of the imagination for the understanding, of the reason for reasoning. footnotes: [ ] rené gentilhomme, page to prince condé, heir of france since louis xiii. and his brother gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown. he thinks this a revelation from god, and he prophecies that a dauphin will be born to the childless queen. the dauphin was born, and rené pushed suddenly into fame. * * * * * chapter xviii _the last poems_ two volumes of dramatic idyls, one in , the other in , followed _la saisiaz_ and _the two poets of croisic_. these are also mixed books, composed, partly of studies of character written in rhythmical prose, and partly of poems wrought out of the pure imagination. three of them--if they were written at this time--show how the greek legends still dwelt with browning; and they brought with them the ocean-scent, heroic life, and mythical charm of athenian thought. it would be difficult, if one could write of them at all, not to write of them poetically; and _pheidippides, echetlos, pan and luna_ are alive with force, imaginative joy, and the victorious sense the poet has of having conquered his material. _pheidippides_ is as full of fire, of careless heroism as _hervé riel_, and told in as ringing verse. the versing of _echetlos_, its rugged, rousing sound, its movement, are in most excellent harmony with the image of the rude, giant "holder of the ploughshare," who at marathon drove his furrows through the persians and rooted up the mede. browning has gathered into one picture and one sound the whole spirit of the story. _pan and luna_ is a bold re-rendering of the myth that vergil enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such poetic freshness that i think it must be a waif from the earlier years of his poetry. nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud--fleece on fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient--where pan lay in ambush for her beauty. among these more gracious idyls, one of singular rough power tells the ghastly tale of the mother who gave up her little children to the wolves to save herself. browning liked this poem, and the end he added to the story--how the carpenter, ivan, when the poor frightened woman confessed, lifted his axe and cut off her head; how he knew that he did right, and was held to have done right by the village and its pope. the sin by which a mother sacrificed the lives of her children to save her own was out of nature: the punishment should be outside of ordinary law. it is a piteous tale, and few things in browning equal the horror of the mother's vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it. nor does he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader. the other idyls in these two volumes are full of interest for those who care for psychological studies expressed in verse. what the vehicle of verse does for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness in the rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected turns of thought and feeling, and especially of conscience. yet the poems themselves cannot be called concise. their subjects are not large enough, nor indeed agreeable enough, to excuse their length. goethe would have put them into a short lyrical form. it is impossible not to regret, as we read them, the browning of the _dramatic lyrics_. moreover, some of them are needlessly ugly. _halbert and hob_--and in _jocoseria_--_donald_, are hateful subjects, and their treatment does not redeem them; unlike the treatment of _ivan ivanovitch_ which does lift the pain of the story into the high realms of pity and justice. death, swift death, was not only the right judgment, but also the most pitiful. had the mother lived, an hour's memory would have been intolerable torture. nevertheless, if browning, in his desire to represent the whole of humanity, chose to treat these lower forms of human nature, i suppose we must accept them as an integral part of his work; and, at least, there can be no doubt of their ability, and of the brilliancy of their psychological surprises. _ned bratts_ is a monument of cleverness, as well as of fine characterisation of a momentary outburst of conscience in a man who had none before; and who would have lost it in an hour, had he not been hanged on the spot. the quick, agile, unpremeditated turns of wit in this poem, as in some of the others, are admirably easy, and happily expressed. indeed, in these later poems of character and event, ingenuity or nimbleness of intellect is the chief element, and it is accompanied by a facile power which is sometimes rude, often careless, always inventive, fully fantastical, and rarely imaginative in the highest sense of the word. moreover, as was not the case of old, they have, beyond the story, a direct teaching aim, which, while it lowers them as art, is very agreeable to the ethical psychologist. _jocoseria_ has poems of a higher quality, some of which, like the lovely _never the time and place_, i have been already quoted. _ixion_ is too obscurely put to attain its end with the general public. but it may be recommended, though vainly, to those theologians who, hungry for the divine right of torture, build their god, like caliban, out of their own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that the everlasting endurance of evil is a necessary guarantee of the everlasting endurance of good, are still bold and bad enough to proclaim the abominable lie of eternal punishment. they need that spirit the little child whom christ placed in the midst of his disciples; and in gaining which, after living the life of the lover, the warrior, the poet, the statesman, _jochanan hakkadosh_ found absolute peace and joy. few poems contain more of browning's matured theory of life than this of the jewish rabbi; and its seriousness is happily mingled with imaginative illustrations and with racy wit. the sketch of tsaddik, who puts us in mind of wagner in the _faust_, is done with a sarcastic joy in exposing the philistine, and with a delight in its own cleverness which is fascinating. _ferishtah's fancies_ and _parleyings with certain people_ followed _jocoseria_ in and . the first of these books is much the better of the two. a certain touch of romance is given by the dervish, by the fables with which he illustrates his teaching, and by the eastern surroundings. some of the stories are well told, and their scenery is truthfully wrought and in good colour. the subjects are partly theological, with always a reference to human life; and partly of the affections and their working. it is natural to a poet, and delightful in browning, to find him in his old age dwelling from poem to poem on the pre-eminence of love, on love as the ultimate judge of all questions. he asserts this again and again; with the greatest force in _a pillar at sebzevar_, and, more lightly, in _cherries_. yet, and this is a pity, he is not satisfied with the decision of love, but spends pages in argumentative discussions which lead him away from that poetical treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the master, would have enabled him to give. however, the treatment that love gives we find in the lyrics at the end of each _fancy_; and some of these lyrics are of such delicate and subtle beauty that i am tempted to think that they were written at an earlier period, and their _fancies_ composed to fit them. if they were written now, it is plain that age had not disenabled him from walking with pleasure and power among those sweet, enamelled meadows of poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did not grow. and when we read the lyrics, our regret is all the more deep that he chose the thorn-clad and desert lands, where barren argument goes round and round its subjects without ever finding the true path to their centre. he lost himself more completely in this error in _parleyings with certain people_, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in _gerard de lairesse_, and some few passages in _francis furini_ and _charles avison_, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted browning. he feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in _gerard de lairesse_ if he has lost the poetic touch, the poetic spirit, because he writes of the soul, of facts, of things invisible--not of fancy's feignings, not of the things perceived by the senses? "i can do this," he answers, "if i like, as well as you," and he paints the landscape of a whole day filled with mythological figures. the passage is poetry; we see that he has not lost his poetic genius. but, he calls it "fooling," and then contrasts the spirit of greek lore with the spirit of immortal hope and cheer which he possesses, with his faith that there is for man a certainty of spring. but that is not the answer to his question. it only says that the spirit which animates him now is higher than the greek spirit. it does not answer the question--whether _daniel bartoli_ or _charles avison_ or any of these _parleyings_ even approach as poetry _paracelsus_, the _dramatic lyrics_, or _men and women_. they do not. nor has their intellectual work the same force, unexpectedness and certainty it had of old. nevertheless, these _parleyings_, at the close of the poet's life, and with biographical touches which give them vitality, enshrine browning's convictions with regard to some of the greater and lesser problems of human life. and when his personality is vividly present in them, the argument, being thrilled with passionate feeling, rises, but heavily like a wounded eagle, into an imaginative world. the sub-consciousness in browning's mind to which i have alluded--that these later productions of his were not as poetical as his earlier work and needed defence--is the real subject of a remarkable little poem at the end of the second volume of the _dramatic idyls_. he is thinking of himself as poet, perhaps of that double nature in him which on one side was quick to see and love beauty; and on the other, to see facts and love their strength. sometimes the sensitive predominated. he was only the lover of beauty whom everything that touched him urged into song. "touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke vitalising virtue: song would song succeed sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!" this, which browning puts on the lips of another, is not meant, we are told, to describe himself. but it does describe one side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems. but now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that--as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men. he was curiously mistaken. indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet grows? "rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage." in this sharp division, as in his _epilogue_ to _pacchiarotto_, he misses the truth. it is almost needless to say that a poet can be sensitive to beauty, and also to the stern facts of the moral and spiritual struggle of mankind through evil to good. all the great poets have been sensitive to both and mingled them in their work. they were ideal and real in both the flower and the pine. they are never forced to choose one or other of these aims or lives in their poetry. they mingled facts and fancies, the intellectual and the imaginative. they lived in the whole world of the outward and the inward, of the senses and the soul. truth and beauty were one to them. this division of which browning speaks was the unfortunate result of that struggle between his intellect and his imagination on which i have dwelt. in old days it was not so with him. his early poetry had sweetness with strength, stern thinking with tender emotion, love of beauty with love of truth, idealism with realism, nature with humanity, fancy with fact. and this is the equipment of the great poet. when he divides these qualities each from the other, and is only æsthetic or only severe in his realism; only the worshipper of nature or only the worshipper of human nature; only the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere fact; only the idealist or only the realist; only of the senses or only of the soul--he may be a poet, but not a great poet. and as the singular pursuit of the realistic is almost always bound up with pride, because realism does not carry us beyond ourselves into the infinite where we are humbled, the realistic poetry loses imagination; its love of love tends to become self-love, or love of mere cleverness. and then its poetic elements slowly die. there was that, as i have said, in browning which resisted this sad conclusion, but the resistance was not enough to prevent a great loss of poetic power. but whatever he lost, there was one poetic temper of mind which never failed him, the heroic temper of the faithful warrior for god and man; there was one ideal view of humanity which dominated all his work; there was one principle which directed all his verse to celebrate the struggle of humanity towards the perfection for which god, he believed, had destined it. these things underlie all the poems in _ferishtah's fancies_ and the _parleyings with certain people_, and give to them the uplifted, noble trumpet note with which at times they are animated. the same temper and principle, the same view of humanity emerge in that fine lyric which is the epilogue to _ferishtah's fancies_, and in the epilogue to _asolando_. the first sees a vision of the present and the future in which all the battle of our life passes into a glorious end; nor does the momentary doubt that occurs at the close of the poem--that his belief in a divine conclusion of our strife may only have been caused by his own happiness in love--really trouble his conviction. that love itself is part of the power which makes the noble conclusion sure. the certainty of this conclusion made his courage in the fight unwavering, despair impossible, joy in battle, duty; and to be "ever a fighter" in the foremost rank the highest privilege of man. then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under, wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success: all the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less. and for that reason, because of the perfectness to come, browning lived every hour of his life for good and against wrong. he said with justice of himself, and with justice he brought the ideal aim and the real effort together: i looked beyond the world for truth and beauty: sought, found, and did my duty. nor, almost in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. he kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets like carlyle and ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his herakles in _balaustion_. he left us that temper as his last legacy, and he could not have left us a better thing. we may hear it in his last poem, and bind it about our hearts in sorrow and joy, in battle and peace, in the hour of death and the days of judgment. at the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time when you set your fancies free, will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so --pity me? oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken what had i on earth to do with the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did i drivel --being--who? one who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. no, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time greet the unseen with a cheer! bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "strive and thrive!" cry "speed,--fight on, fare ever there as here!" with these high words he ended a long life, and his memory still falls upon us, like the dew which fell on paradise. it was a life lived fully, kindly, lovingly, at its just height from the beginning to the end. no fear, no vanity, no lack of interest, no complaint of the world, no anger at criticism, no villain fancies disturbed his soul. no laziness, no feebleness in effort, injured his work, no desire for money, no faltering of aspiration, no pandering of his gift and genius to please the world, no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy lucre, no falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism, no slavery to science yet no boastful ignorance of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to the false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no retreat from men into a world of sickly or vain beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas or disbelief in their mastery, no enfeeblement of reason such as at this time walks hand in hand with the worship of the mere discursive intellect, no lack of joy and healthy vigour and keen inquiry and passionate interest in humanity. scarcely any special bias can be found running through his work; on the contrary, an incessant change of subject and manner, combined with a strong but not overweening individuality, raced, like blood through the body, through every vein of his labour. creative and therefore joyful, receptive and therefore thoughtful, at one with humanity and therefore loving; aspiring to god and believing in god, and therefore steeped to the lips in radiant hope; at one with the past, passionate with the present, and possessing by faith an endless and glorious future--this was a life lived on the top of the wave, and moving with its motion from youth to manhood, from manhood to old age. there is no need to mourn for his departure. nothing feeble has been done, nothing which lowers the note of his life, nothing we can regret as less than his native strength. his last poem was like the last look of the phoenix to the sun before the sunlight lights the odorous pyre from which the new-created bird will spring. and as if the muse of poetry wished to adorn the image of his death, he passed away amid a world of beauty, and in the midst of a world endeared to him by love. italy was his second country. in florence lies the wife of his heart. in every city he had friends, friends not only among men and women, but friends in every ancient wall, in every fold of apennine and alp, in every breaking of the blue sea, in every forest of pines, in every church and palace and town hall, in every painting that great art had wrought, in every storied market place, in every great life which had adorned, honoured and made romantic italy; the great mother of beauty, at whose breasts have hung and whose milk have sucked all the arts and all the literatures of modern europe. venice saw and mourned his death. the sea and sky and mountain glory of the city he loved so well encompassed him with her beauty; and their soft graciousness, their temperate power of joy and life made his departure peaceful. strong and tender in life, his death added a new fairness to his life. mankind is fortunate to have so noble a memory, so full and excellent a work to rest upon and love. index of passages relating to the poems a andré del sarto (a. de musset) animal studies arnold, matthew art, poems dealing with romantic revival in during the renaissance art, browning's poetic, compared with that of tennyson compared with that of morris and rossetti in abt vogler in the grammarian's funeral in the ring and the book art, browning's theory of, in andrea del sarto in pippa passes in sordello aurora leigh (e.b. browning) b balaustion's adventures and aristophanes' apology, character of the heroine contrast between balaustion and pompilia balaustion's prologue the story of alkestis representation of aristophanes becket (tennyson) boccaccio browning, elizabeth barrett poems relating to browning-- his relation to his age his artistic development his art poems his minor characters his sense of colour his composition his cosmopolitan sympathies as a dramatist as poet of humanity his imagination the influence of shelley intellectual analysis his love poems his lyrical poems his methods his treatment of nature his obscurity his originality his treatment of the renaissance romantic and classic elements in his spontaneity his style compared with tennyson his theory of life his wideness of range his wit and humour byron c cain (byron) carlyle cenci, the (shelley) charles the first (shelley) chaucer clough coleridge colour-sense in browning cup, the (tennyson) d dante decameron (boccaccio) dramas, the absence of nature pictures in defects in browning's dramatic treatment dramas separately considered dramatic poems duchess of malfi (webster) e english scenery in browning f falcon, the (tennyson) form in poetry french revolution, its influence in england h hand and soul (rossetti) harold (tennyson) history, imaginative study of homer humanity, browning's treatment of humour, browning's hunt, holman i imagination in browning imaginative representations definition of term their inception theological studies renaissance studies poems on modern italy in memoriam (tennyson) k keats king lear l landscapes, browning's later poems more intellectual than imaginative subjects generally founded on fact show sensitiveness to criticism last poems psychological studies in lotos-eaters, the (tennyson) love poetry, what it is and when produced rare in browning love poems, the poems of passion poems to elizabeth barrett browning impersonal poems poems embodying phases of love lyrical element in browning m malory manfred (byron) mariana in the south (tennyson) maud (tennyson) mazzini midsummer night's dream, a millais milton morris musset, alfred de n nature, browning's treatment of separate from and subordinate to man joy in nature god and nature the pathetic fallacy illustrations drawn from nature browning's view compared with that of other poets his treatment illustrated in saul faults in his treatment nature pictures later indifference to nature new age, the (arnold) northern farmer, the (tennyson) o oenone (tennyson) originality, browning's p palace of art, the (tennyson) paracelsus nature-description in theory of life in sketch of argument passions, poems of the fiercer poems of the romantic pathetic fallacy, the pauline theory of life in nature-description in mental development of hero character of pauline petrarch pippa passes nature-description in theory of art in lyrics in studies of women in plato poems, passages relating to, abt vogler adam, lilith and eve after andrea del sarto any wife to any husband aristophanes' apology asolando balaustion's adventure bean stripe, a before bells and pomegranates bifurcation bishop blougram bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church, the blot in the 'scutcheon, a by the fireside caliban upon setebos cavalier tunes cenciaja charles avison cherries childe ronald christmas eve cleon colombe's birthday confessions count gismond cristina cristina and monaldeschi daniel bartoli death in the desert, a de gustibus dis aliter visum donald dramas, the strafford king victor and king charles the return of the druses a blot in the 'scutcheon colombe's birthday luria a soul's tragedy pippa passes dramatic idylls dramatic lyrics dramatic romances dramatis personæ easter day echetlos englishman in italy, the epilogue to asolando, in epilogue to ferishtah's fancies epilogue to pacchiarotto epistle of karshish, an evelyn hope fears and scruples ferishtah's fancies fifine at the fair filippo baldinucci flight of the duchess, the flower's name, the forgiveness, a fra lippo lippi francis furini gerard de lairesse glove, the gold hair grammarian's funeral, a halbert and hob hervé riel holy cross day home thoughts from abroad home thoughts from the sea how it strikes a contemporary how they brought the good news from ghent to aix in a balcony in a gondola inn album, the instans tyrannus in three days italian in england, the ivan ivanovitch ixion james lee's wife jochanan hakkadosh jocoseria johannes agricola in meditation king victor and king charles laboratory, the last ride together, the light woman, a lost mistress, the love among the ruins lovers' quarrel, a luria meeting at night--parting at morning men and women mr. sludge, the medium my last duchess natural magic natural theology on the island ned bratts never the time and the place now numpholeptos old pictures in florence one word more pacchiarotto pacchiarotto prologue to pacchiarotto epilogue to pan and luna paracelsus parleyings with certain people pauline pearl--a girl, a pheidippides pictor ignotus pied piper of hamelin, the pillar at sebzevar, a pippa passes pisgah sights porphyria's lover pretty woman, a rabbi ben ezra red cotton nightcap country return of the druses, the rêverie rudel and the lady of tripoli st. martin's summer saisiaz, la saul serenade at the villa, a soliloquy of the spanish cloister, a solomon and balkis sordello soul's tragedy, a speculative strafford summum bonum time's revenges toccata of galuppi's, a too late transcendentalism two in the campagna two poets of croisic up in a villa--down in the city waring worst of it, the youth and art poet, characteristics of a poetry grounds of judgment on characteristics of best form in matter in thought and emotion in portraiture, browning's power of minute prelude, the (wordsworth) princess, the (tennyson) promise of may, the (tennyson) purgatorio, the (dante) q queen mary (tennyson) r racine realism in browning religious phases, poems dealing with renaissance, the renaissance, poems dealing with the renan revenge, the (tennyson) ring and the book, the nature-description in its position among browning's works its plan humour and wit in partly intellectual, partly imaginative study of renaissance in scenery and human background browning's imaginative method in minor characters in principal characters guido caponsacchi pompilia the pope the conclusion rizpah (tennyson) robin hood (tennyson) romantic spirit in browning rossetti ruskin s st. simeon stylites (tennyson) scott shakespeare shelley sir galahad (tennyson) sordello landscape in the temperament of the hero his artistic development the argument historical background to the story nature pictures portraiture illustrative episodes analogy between sordello and browning theory of art in theory of life in character of the heroine style in browning swinburne t tempest, the (shakespeare) tennyson turner theory of life, browning's its main features in pauline in paracelsus in easter day in abt vogler in andrea del sarto in old pictures in florence in sordello v vergil vita nuova, la (dante) w will waterproof's monologue (tennyson) womanhood, studies of in the early poems pauline lady carlisle palma in the dramas, &c. ottima pippa anael mildred and guendolen colombe constance in the dramatic lyrics characteristics of browning's women poems to mrs. browning pompilia balaustion womanhood in the modern poets wordsworth the letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett barrett - _with portraits and facsimiles_ in two volumes vol. i. fourth impression london smith, elder, & co., waterloo place [illustration: robert browning from an oil painting by gordigiani] note in considering the question of publishing these letters, which are all that ever passed between my father and mother, for after their marriage they were never separated, it seemed to me that my only alternatives were to allow them to be published or to destroy them. i might, indeed, have left the matter to the decision of others after my death, but that would be evading a responsibility which i feel that i ought to accept. ever since my mother's death these letters were kept by my father in a certain inlaid box, into which they exactly fitted, and where they have always rested, letter beside letter, each in its consecutive order and numbered on the envelope by his own hand. my father destroyed all the rest of his correspondence, and not long before his death he said, referring to these letters: 'there they are, do with them as you please when i am dead and gone!' a few of the letters are of little or no interest, but their omission would have saved only a few pages, and i think it well that the correspondence should be given in its entirety. i wish to express my gratitude to my father's friend and mine, mrs. miller morison, for her unfailing sympathy and assistance in deciphering some words which had become scarcely legible owing to faded ink. r.b.b. . advertisement the correspondence contained in these volumes is printed exactly as it appears in the original letters, without alteration, except in respect of obvious slips of the pen. even the punctuation, with its characteristic dots and dashes, has for the most part been preserved. the notes in square brackets [] have been added mainly in order to translate the greek phrases, and to give the references to greek poets. for these, thanks are due to mr. f.g. kenyon, who has revised the proofs with the assistance of mr. roger ingpen, the latter being responsible for the index. illustrations portrait of robert browning _frontispiece_ _after the picture by gordigiani_ facsimile of letter of robert browning _to face p. _ the letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett barrett - _r.b. to e.b.b._ new cross, hatcham, surrey. [post-mark, january , .] i love your verses with all my heart, dear miss barrett,--and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that i shall write,--whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing. since the day last week when i first read your poems, i quite laugh to remember how i have been turning and turning again in my mind what i should be able to tell you of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight i thought i would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when i do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration--perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter!--but nothing comes of it all--so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew--oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and put away ... and the book called a 'flora,' besides! after all, i need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, i can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought; but in this addressing myself to you--your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. i do, as i say, love these books with all my heart--and i love you too. do you know i was once not very far from seeing--really seeing you? mr. kenyon said to me one morning 'would you like to see miss barrett?' then he went to announce me,--then he returned ... you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and i feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if i had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and i might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and i went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be? well, these poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which i feel myself, yours ever faithfully, robert browning. miss barrett,[ ] wimpole st. r. browning. [footnote : with this and the following letter the addresses on the envelopes are given; for all subsequent letters the addresses are the same. the correspondence passed through the post.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ wimpole street: jan. , . i thank you, dear mr. browning, from the bottom of my heart. you meant to give me pleasure by your letter--and even if the object had not been answered, i ought still to thank you. but it is thoroughly answered. such a letter from such a hand! sympathy is dear--very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me! will you take back my gratitude for it?--agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from tyre to carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing! for the rest you draw me on with your kindness. it is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure--_that_ is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. what i was going to say--after a little natural hesitation--is, that if ever you emerge without inconvenient effort from your 'passive state,' and will _tell_ me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important in my poems, (for of course, i do not think of troubling you with criticism in detail) you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and one which i shall value so much, that i covet it at a distance. i do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is possible enough that i might not be altogether obedient to yours. but with my high respect for your power in your art and for your experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a general observation of yours on what appear to you my master-faults, without being the better for it hereafter in some way. i ask for only a sentence or two of general observation--and i do not ask even for _that_, so as to tease you--but in the humble, low voice, which is so excellent a thing in women--particularly when they go a-begging! the most frequent general criticism i receive, is, i think, upon the style,--'if i _would_ but change my style'! but _that_ is an objection (isn't it?) to the writer bodily? buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel, that '_le style c'est l'homme_'; a fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics. is it indeed true that i was so near to the pleasure and honour of making your acquaintance? and can it be true that you look back upon the lost opportunity with any regret? _but_--you know--if you had entered the 'crypt,' you might have caught cold, or been tired to death, and _wished_ yourself 'a thousand miles off;' which would have been worse than travelling them. it is not my interest, however, to put such thoughts in your head about its being 'all for the best'; and i would rather hope (as i do) that what i lost by one chance i may recover by some future one. winters shut me up as they do dormouse's eyes; in the spring, _we shall see_: and i am so much better that i seem turning round to the outward world again. and in the meantime i have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry but from the kindness in it. mr. kenyon often speaks of you--dear mr. kenyon!--who most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my eyes,--has been my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper! critic and sympathiser, true friend of all hours! you know him well enough, i think, to understand that i must be grateful to him. i am writing too much,--and notwithstanding that i am writing too much, i will write of one thing more. i will say that i am your debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest: and i will say that while i live to follow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, i must be a devout admirer and student of your works. this is in my heart to say to you--and i say it. and, for the rest, i am proud to remain your obliged and faithful elizabeth b. barrett. robert browning, esq. new cross, hatcham, surrey. _r.b. to e.b.b._ new cross, hatcham, surrey. jan. , . dear miss barrett,--i just shall say, in as few words as i can, that you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, i dare say i shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly as felicitously brought out, as a certain tribute to no less a personage than tasso, which i was amused with at rome some weeks ago, in a neat pencilling on the plaister-wall by his tomb at sant'onofrio--'alla cara memoria--di--(please fancy solemn interspaces and grave capital letters at the new lines) di--torquato tasso--il dottore bernardini--offriva--il seguente carme--_o tu_'--and no more,--the good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload of love here! but my 'o tu'--was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after. only,--and which is why i write now--it looks as if i have introduced some phrase or other about 'your faults' so cleverly as to give exactly the opposite meaning to what i meant, which was, that in my first ardour i had thought to tell you of _everything_ which impressed me in your verses, down, even, to whatever 'faults' i could find,--a good earnest, when i had got to _them_, that i had left out not much between--as if some mr. fellows were to say, in the overflow of his first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure: 'i will describe you all the outer life and ways of these lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs,' whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins--'shall i get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? yes, and a little about the 'olympian horses,' and god-charioteers as well! what 'struck me as faults,' were not matters on the removal of which, one was to have--poetry, or high poetry,--but the very highest poetry, so i thought, and that, to universal recognition. for myself, or any artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time, peculiar artist's pleasure--for an instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow; for these 'too muches' for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. and all of the titian's naples magdalen must have once been golden in its degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands--the _only_ gold effected now! but about this soon--for night is drawing on and i go out, yet cannot, quiet at conscience, till i report (to _myself_, for i never said it to you, i think) that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you--for you _do_ what i always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. you speak out, _you_,--i only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but i am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak, melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for i have begun)--yet i don't think i shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about popes and imaginative religions that i must say. see how i go on and on to you, i who, whenever now and then pulled, by the head and hair, into letter-writing, get sorrowfully on for a line or two, as the cognate creature urged on by stick and string, and then come down 'flop' upon the sweet haven of page one, line last, as serene as the sleep of the virtuous! you will never more, i hope, talk of 'the honour of my acquaintance,' but i will joyfully wait for the delight of your friendship, and the spring, and my chapel-sight after all! ever yours most faithfully, r. browning. for mr. kenyon--i have a convenient theory about _him_, and his otherwise quite unaccountable kindness to me; but 'tis quite night now, and they call me. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wimpole street: jan. , . dear mr. browning,--the fault was clearly with me and not with you. when i had an italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an unpronounceable english word which absolutely expressed me, and which he would say in his own tongue, as he could not in mine--'_testa lunga_.' of course, the signor meant _headlong_!--and now i have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. but you see i do not. headlong i was at first, and headlong i continue--precipitously rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briars instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary--tearing open letters, and never untying a string,--and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. and so, at your half word i flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read. our common friend, as i think he is, mr. horne, is often forced to entreat me into patience and coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by letter. and, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his stay in germany _he_ has been 'headlong' (out of a metaphor) twice; once, in falling from the drachenfels, when he only just saved himself by catching at a vine; and once quite lately, at christmas, in a fall on the ice of the elbe in skating, when he dislocated his left shoulder in a very painful manner. he is doing quite well, i believe, but it was sad to have such a shadow from the german christmas tree, and he a stranger. in art, however, i understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious--and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature. i apprehend what you mean in the criticism you just intimate, and shall turn it over and over in my mind until i get practical good from it. what no mere critic sees, but what you, an artist, know, is the difference between the thing desired and the thing attained, between the idea in the writer's mind and the [greek: eidôlon] cast off in his work. all the effort--the quick'ning of the breath and beating of the heart in pursuit, which is ruffling and injurious to the general effect of a composition; all which you call 'insistency,' and which many would call superfluity, and which _is_ superfluous in a sense--_you_ can pardon, because you understand. the great chasm between the thing i say, and the thing i would say, would be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours, if the desire did not master the despondency. 'oh for a horse with wings!' it is wrong of me to write so of myself--only you put your finger on the root of a fault, which has, to my fancy, been a little misapprehended. i do not _say everything i think_ (as has been said of me by master-critics) but i _take every means to say what i think_, which is different!--or i fancy so! in one thing, however, you are wrong. why should you deny the full measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? i could tell you why you should not. you have in your vision two worlds, or to use the language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and objective in the habits of your mind. you can deal both with abstract thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. thus, you have an immense grasp in art; and no one at all accustomed to consider the usual forms of it, could help regarding with reverence and gladness the gradual expansion of your powers. then you are 'masculine' to the height--and i, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond me far! and the more admirable for being beyond. of your new work i hear with delight. how good of you to tell me. and it is not dramatic in the strict sense, i am to understand--(am i right in understanding so?) and you speak, in your own person 'to the winds'? no--but to the thousand living sympathies which will awake to hear you. a great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in the formal drama; and i have been guilty of wishing, before this hour (for reasons which i will not thrust upon you after all my tedious writing), that you would give the public a poem unassociated directly or indirectly with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart. i reverence the drama, but-- _but_ i break in on myself out of consideration for you. i might have done it, you will think, before. i vex your 'serene sleep of the virtuous' like a nightmare. do not say 'no.' i am _sure_ i do! as to the vain parlance of the world, i did not talk of the 'honour of your acquaintance' without a true sense of honour, indeed; but i shall willingly exchange it all (and _now_, if you please, at this moment, for fear of worldly mutabilities) for the 'delight of your friendship.' believe me, therefore, dear mr. browning, faithfully yours, and gratefully, elizabeth b. barrett. for mr. kenyon's kindness, as _i_ see it, no theory will account. i class it with mesmerism for that reason. _r.b. to e.b.b._ new cross, hatcham, monday night. [post-mark, january , .] dear miss barrett,--your books lie on my table here, at arm's length from me, in this old room where i sit all day: and when my head aches or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, i take my chance for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil to feel in one's hands this winter-time,--and round i turn, and, putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with 'bells' of mine, read, read, read, and just as i have shut up the book and walked to the window, i recollect that you wanted me to find faults there, and that, in an unwise hour, i engaged to do so. meantime, the days go by (the whitethroat is come and sings now) and as i would not have you 'look down on me from your white heights' as promise breaker, evader, or forgetter, if i could help: and as, if i am very candid and contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again--who knows?--i shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must be _somewhere_, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they turn up,--as people tell one of missing matters. i am rather exacting, myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation--but really, _really_--could i be quite sure that anybody as good as--i must go on, i suppose, and say--as myself, even, were honestly to feel towards me as i do, towards the writer of 'bertha,' and the 'drama,' and the 'duchess,' and the 'page' and--the whole two volumes, i should be paid after a fashion, i know. one thing i can do--pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate upon that i love most and least--i think i can do it, that is. here an odd memory comes--of a friend who,--volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the first, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse, worst'--made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of his epithets, 'worser, worserer, worserest' pay off the second terzet in full--no 'badder, badderer, badderest' fell to the _second's_ allowance, and 'worser' &c. answered the demands of the third; 'worster, worsterer, worsterest' supplied the emergency of the fourth; and, bestowing his last 'worserestest and worstestest' on lines and , my friend (slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box) frankly declared himself bankrupt, and honourably incompetent, to satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series! what an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest opposite, and contrary images come together! see now, how, of that 'friendship' you offer me (and here juliet's word rises to my lips)--i feel sure once and for ever. i have got already, i see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone else's) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and bradbury and evans' reader were not! but you shall get something better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with me--hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real relief, to write. after all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me. spring is to come, however! if you hate writing to me as i hate writing to nearly everybody, i pray you never write--if you do, as you say, care for anything i have done. i will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep earnest, _begin_ without affectation, god knows,--i do not know what will help me more than hearing from you,--and therefore, if you do not so very much hate it, i know i _shall_ hear from you--and very little more about your 'tiring me.' ever yours faithfully, robert browning. _e.b.b. to r.b._ walpole street: feb. , . [transcriber's note: so in original. should be "wimpole street."] why how could i hate to write to you, dear mr. browning? could you believe in such a thing? if nobody likes writing to everybody (except such professional letter writers as you and i are _not_), yet everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and contradictory if i were not always delighted both to hear from _you_ and to write to _you_, this talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened. as for me, i have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. not that i write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our friend mr. horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to by me without a sense of injury. dear miss mitford, for instance. you do not know her, i think, personally, although she was the first to tell me (when i was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the world except poetry), of the grand scene in 'pippa passes.' _she_ has filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature (if sunshine could drift like snow), and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing, into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with benedictine editions of the fathers, [greek: k.t.l.]. i write this to you to show how i can have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little 'pet hands.' i can read any ms. except the writing on the pyramids. and if you will only promise to treat me _en bon camarade_, without reference to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your printer--why, _then_, i am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to rejoice in being 'articled' as your correspondent. only _don't_ let us have any constraint, any ceremony! _don't_ be civil to me when you feel rude,--nor loquacious when you incline to silence,--nor yielding in the manners when you are perverse in the mind. see how out of the world i am! suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and i, on each side. you will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst. and we have great sympathies in common, and i am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of everything as you will teach me. on the other hand you must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive--will you? while i throw off the ceremony, i hold the faster to the kindness. is it true, as you say, that i 'know so "little"' of you? and is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature, ... that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of god? it is _not_ true, to my mind--and therefore it is not true that i know little of you, except in as far as it is true (which i believe) that your greatest works are to come. need i assure you that i shall always hear with the deepest interest every word you will say to me of what you are doing or about to do? i hear of the 'old room' and the '"bells" lying about,' with an interest which you may guess at, perhaps. and when you tell me besides, of _my poems being there_, and of your caring for them so much beyond the tide-mark of my hopes, the pleasure rounds itself into a charm, and prevents its own expression. overjoyed i am with this cordial sympathy--but it is better, i feel, to try to justify it by future work than to thank you for it now. i think--if i may dare to name myself with you in the poetic relation--that we both have high views of the art we follow, and stedfast purpose in the pursuit of it, and that we should not, either of _us_, be likely to be thrown from the course, by the casting of any atalanta-ball of speedy popularity. but i do not know, i cannot guess, whether you are liable to be pained deeply by hard criticism and cold neglect, such as original writers like yourself are too often exposed to--or whether the love of art is enough for you, and the exercise of art the filling joy of your life. not that praise must not always, of necessity, be delightful to the artist, but that it may be redundant to his content. do you think so? or not? it appears to me that poets who, like keats, are highly susceptible to criticism, must be jealous, in their own persons, of the future honour of their works. because, if a work is worthy, honour must follow it, though the worker should not live to see that following overtaking. now, is it not enough that the work be honoured--enough i mean, for the worker? and is it not enough to keep down a poet's ordinary wearing anxieties, to think, that if his work be worthy it will have honour, and, if not, that 'sparta must have nobler sons than he'? i am writing nothing applicable, i see, to anything in question, but when one falls into a favourite train of thought, one indulges oneself in thinking on. i began in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution you had, being determined, as you may observe (with a sarcastic smile at the impertinence), to set about knowing as much as possible of you immediately. then you spoke of your 'gentle audience' (_you began_), and i, who know that you have not one but many enthusiastic admirers--the 'fit and few' in the intense meaning--yet not the _diffused_ fame which will come to you presently, wrote on, down the margin of the subject, till i parted from it altogether. but, after all, we are on the proper matter of sympathy. and after all, and after all that has been said and mused upon the 'natural ills,' the anxiety, and wearing out experienced by the true artist,--is not the _good_ immeasurably greater than the _evil_? is it not great good, and great joy? for my part, i wonder sometimes--i surprise myself wondering--how without such an object and purpose of life, people find it worth while to live at all. and, for happiness--why, my only idea of happiness, as far as my personal enjoyment is concerned, (but i have been straightened in some respects and in comparison with the majority of livers!) lies deep in poetry and its associations. and then, the escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness--when you throw off _yourself_--what you feel to be _yourself_--into another atmosphere and into other relations where your life may spread its wings out new, and gather on every separate plume a brightness from the sun of the sun! is it possible that imaginative writers should be so fond of depreciating and lamenting over their own destiny? possible, certainly--but reasonable, not at all--and grateful, less than anything! my faults, my faults--shall i help you? ah--you see them too well, i fear. and do you know that _i_ also have something of your feeling about 'being about to _begin_,' or i should dare to praise you for having it. but in you, it is different--it is, in you, a virtue. when prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be endured by io, and declared at last that he was [greek: mêdepô en prooimiois],[ ] poor io burst out crying. and when the author of 'paracelsus' and the 'bells and pomegranates' says that he is only 'going to begin' we may well (to take 'the opposite idea,' as you write) rejoice and clap our hands. yet i believe that, whatever you may have done, you _will_ do what is greater. it is my faith for you. and how i should like to know what poets have been your sponsors, 'to promise and vow' for you,--and whether you have held true to early tastes, or leapt violently from them, and what books you read, and what hours you write in. how curious i could prove myself!--(if it isn't proved already). but this is too much indeed, past all bearing, i suspect. well, but if i ever write to you again--i mean, if you wish it--it may be in the other extreme of shortness. so do not take me for a born heroine of richardson, or think that i sin always to this length, else,--you might indeed repent your quotation from juliet--which i guessed at once--and of course-- i have no joy in this contract to-day! it is too unadvised, too rash and sudden. ever faithfully yours, elizabeth b. barrett. [footnote : 'not yet reached the prelude' (aesch. _prom._ ).] _r.b. to e.b.b._ hatcham, tuesday. [post-mark, february , .] dear miss barrett,--people would hardly ever tell falsehoods about a matter, if they had been let tell truth in the beginning, for it is hard to prophane one's very self, and nobody who has, for instance, used certain words and ways to a mother or a father _could_, even if by the devil's help he _would_, reproduce or mimic them with any effect to anybody else that was to be won over--and so, if 'i love you' were always outspoken when it might be, there would, i suppose, be no fear of its desecration at any after time. but lo! only last night, i had to write, on the part of mr. carlyle, to a certain ungainly, foolish gentleman who keeps back from him, with all the fussy impotence of stupidity (not bad feeling, alas! for _that_ we could deal with) a certain ms. letter of cromwell's which completes the collection now going to press; and this long-ears had to be 'dear sir'd and obedient servanted' till i _said_ (to use a mild word) 'commend me to the sincerities of this kind of thing.'! when i spoke of you knowing little of me, one of the senses in which i meant so was this--that i would not well vowel-point my common-place letters and syllables with a masoretic _other_ sound and sense, make my 'dear' something intenser than 'dears' in ordinary, and 'yours ever' a thought more significant than the run of its like. and all this came of your talking of 'tiring me,' 'being too envious,' &c. &c., which i should never have heard of had the plain truth looked out of my letter with its unmistakable eyes. _now_, what you say of the 'bowing,' and convention that is to be, and _tant de façons_ that are not to be, helps me once and for ever--for have i not a right to say simply that, for reasons i know, for other reasons i don't exactly know, but might if i chose to think a little, and for still other reasons, which, most likely, all the choosing and thinking in the world would not make me know, i had rather hear from you than see anybody else. never you care, dear noble carlyle, nor you, my own friend alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!--are not their fates written? there! don't you answer this, please, but, mind it is on record, and now then, with a lighter conscience i shall begin replying to your questions. but then--what i have printed gives _no_ knowledge of me--it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will--and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion ... _that_ i think--but i never have begun, even, what i hope i was born to begin and end--'r.b. a poem'--and next, if i speak (and, god knows, feel), as if what you have read were sadly imperfect demonstrations of even mere ability, it is from no absurd vanity, though it might seem so--these scenes and song-scraps _are_ such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy mediterranean phares i have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you; and, no doubt, _then_, precisely, does the poor drudge that carries the cresset set himself most busily to trim the wick--for don't think i want to say i have not worked hard--(this head of mine knows better)--but the work has been _inside_, and not when at stated times i held up my light to you--and, that there is no self-delusion here, i would prove to you (and nobody else), even by opening this desk i write on, and showing what stuff, in the way of wood, i _could_ make a great bonfire with, if i might only knock the whole clumsy top off my tower! of course, every writing body says the same, so i gain nothing by the avowal; but when i remember how i have done what was published, and half done what may never be, i say with some right, you can know but little of me. still, i _hope_ sometimes, though phrenologists will have it that i _cannot_, and am doing better with this darling 'luria'--so safe in my head, and a tiny slip of paper i cover with my thumb! then you inquire about my 'sensitiveness to criticism,' and i shall be glad to tell you exactly, because i have, more than once, taken a course you might else not understand. i shall live always--that is for me--i am living here this , that is for london. i write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, i do my best, all things considered--that is for _me_, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, i hope, in nowise affect me. but of course i must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this , its ways and doings, and something i do know, as that for a dozen cabbages, if i pleased to grow them in the garden here, i might demand, say, a dozen pence at covent garden market,--and that for a dozen scenes, of the average goodness, i may challenge as many plaudits at the theatre close by; and a dozen pages of verse, brought to the rialto where verse-merchants most do congregate, ought to bring me a fair proportion of the reviewers' gold currency, seeing the other traders pouch their winnings, as i do see. well, when they won't pay me for my cabbages, nor praise me for my poems, i may, if i please, say 'more's the shame,' and bid both parties 'decamp to the crows,' in greek phrase, and _yet_ go very lighthearted back to a garden-full of rose-trees, and a soul-full of comforts. if they had bought my greens i should have been able to buy the last number of _punch_, and go through the toll-gate of waterloo bridge, and give the blind clarionet-player a trifle, and all without changing my gold. if they had taken to my books, my father and mother would have been proud of this and the other 'favourable critique,' and--at least so folks hold--i should have to pay mr. moxon less by a few pounds, whereas--but you see! indeed i force myself to say ever and anon, in the interest of the market-gardeners regular, and keatses proper, 'it's nothing to _you_, critics, hucksters, all of you, if i _have_ this garden and this conscience--i might go die at rome, or take to gin and the newspaper, for what _you_ would care!' so i don't quite lay open my resources to everybody. but it does so happen, that i have met with much more than i could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. i never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers--and no bad reviewers--i am quite content with my share. no--what i laughed at in my 'gentle audience' is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place--enough to make an apostle swear. _that_ does make me savage--_never_ the other kind of people; why, think now--take your own 'drama of exile' and let _me_ send it to the first twenty men and women that shall knock at your door to-day and after--of whom the first five are the postman, the seller of cheap sealing-wax, mr. hawkins junr, the butcher for orders, and the tax-gatherer--will you let me, by cornelius agrippa's assistance, force these five and these fellows to read, and report on, this 'drama'--and, when i have put these faithful reports into fair english, do you believe they would be better than, if as good, as, the general run of periodical criticisms? not they, i will venture to affirm. but then--once again, i get these people together and give them your book, and persuade them, moreover, that by praising it, the postman will be helping its author to divide long acre into two beats, one of which she will take with half the salary and all the red collar,--that a sealing-wax vendor will see red wafers brought into vogue, and so on with the rest--and won't you just wish for your _spectators_ and _observers_ and newcastle-upon-tyne--hebdomadal _mercuries_ back again! you see the inference--i do sincerely esteem it a perfectly providential and miraculous thing that they are so well-behaved in ordinary, these critics; and for keats and tennyson to 'go softly all their days' for a gruff word or two is quite inexplicable to me, and always has been. tennyson reads the _quarterly_ and does as they bid him, with the most solemn face in the world--out goes this, in goes that, all is changed and ranged. oh me! out comes the sun, in comes the _times_ and eleven strikes (it _does_) already, and i have to go to town, and i have no alternative but that this story of the critic and poet, 'the bear and the fiddle,' should 'begin but break off in the middle'; yet i doubt--nor will you henceforth, i know, say, 'i vex you, i am sure, by this lengthy writing.' mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know me for yours ever faithfully, r. browning. i don't dare--yet i will--ask _can_ you read this? because i _could_ write a little better, but not so fast. do you keep writing just as you do now! _e.b.b. to r.b._ wimpole street, february , . dear mr. browning,--to begin with the end (which is only characteristic of the perverse like myself), i assure you i read your handwriting as currently as i could read the clearest type from font. if i had practised the art of reading your letters all my life, i couldn't do it better. and then i approve of small ms. upon principle. think of what an immense quantity of physical energy must go to the making of those immense sweeping handwritings achieved by some persons ... mr. landor, for instance, who writes as if he had the sky for a copybook and dotted his _i_'s in proportion. people who do such things should wear gauntlets; yes, and have none to wear; or they wouldn't waste their time so. people who write--by profession--shall i say?--never should do it, or what will become of them when most of their strength retires into their head and heart, (as is the case with some of us and may be the case with all) and when they have to write a poem twelve times over, as mr. kenyon says i should do if i were virtuous? not that i do it. does anybody do it, i wonder? do _you_, ever? from what you tell me of the trimming of the light, i imagine not. and besides, one may be laborious as a writer, without copying twelve times over. i believe there are people who will tell you in a moment what three times six is, without 'doing it' on their fingers; and in the same way one may work one's verses in one's head quite as laboriously as on paper--i maintain it. i consider myself a very patient, laborious writer--though dear mr. kenyon laughs me to scorn when i say so. and just see how it could be otherwise. if i were netting a purse i might be thinking of something else and drop my stitches; or even if i were writing verses to please a popular taste, i might be careless in it. but the pursuit of an ideal acknowledged by the mind, _will_ draw and concentrate the powers of the mind--and art, you know, is a jealous god and demands the whole man--or woman. i cannot conceive of a sincere artist who is also a careless one--though one may have a quicker hand than another, in general,--and though all are liable to vicissitudes in the degree of facility--and to entanglements in the machinery, notwithstanding every degree of facility. you may write twenty lines one day--or even three like euripides in three days--and a hundred lines in one more day--and yet on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the twenty and the three. and also, as you say, the lamp is trimmed behind the wall--and the act of utterance is the evidence of foregone study still more than it is the occasion to study. the deep interest with which i read all that you had the kindness to write to me of yourself, you must trust me for, as i find it hard to express it. it is sympathy in one way, and interest every way! and now, see! although you proved to me with admirable logic that, for reasons which you know and reasons which you don't know, i couldn't possibly know anything about you; though that is all true--and proven (which is better than true)--i really did understand of you before i was told, exactly what you told me. yes, i did indeed. i felt sure that as a poet you fronted the future--and that your chief works, in your own apprehension, were to come. oh--i take no credit of sagacity for it; as i did not long ago to my sisters and brothers, when i professed to have knowledge of all their friends whom i never saw in my life, by the image coming with the name; and threw them into shouts of laughter by giving out all the blue eyes and black eyes and hazel eyes and noses roman and gothic ticketed aright for the mr. smiths and miss hawkinses,--and hit the bull's eye and the true features of the case, ten times out of twelve! but _you_ are different. _you_ are to be made out by the comparative anatomy system. you have thrown out fragments of _os_ ... _sublime_ ... indicative of soul-mammothism--and you live to develop your nature,--_if_ you live. that is easy and plain. you have taken a great range--from those high faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality ... to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature, 'gr-r-r- you swine'; and when these are thrown into harmony, as in a manner they are in 'pippa passes' (which i could find in my heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of your works--), the combinations of effect must always be striking and noble--and you must feel yourself drawn on to such combinations more and more. but i do not, you say, know yourself--you. i only know abilities and faculties. well, then, teach me yourself--you. i will not insist on the knowledge--and, in fact, you have not written the r.b. poem yet--your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. i see you only in your moon. do tell me all of yourself that you can and will ... before the r.b. poem comes out. and what is 'luria'? a poem and not a drama? i mean, a poem not in the dramatic form? well! i have wondered at you sometimes, not for daring, but for bearing to trust your noble works into the great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse, to be ground to pieces between the teeth of vulgar actors and actresses. i, for one, would as soon have 'my soul among lions.' 'there is a fascination in it,' says miss mitford, and i am sure there must be, to account for it. publics in the mass are bad enough; but to distil the dregs of the public and baptise oneself in that acrid moisture, where can be the temptation? i could swear by shakespeare, as was once sworn 'by those dead at marathon,' that i do not see where. i love the drama too. i look to our old dramatists as to our kings and princes in poetry. i love them through all the deeps of their abominations. but the theatre in those days was a better medium between the people and the poet; and the press in those days was a less sufficient medium than now. still, the poet suffered by the theatre even then; and the reasons are very obvious. how true--how true ... is all you say about critics. my convictions follow you in every word. and i delighted to read your views of the poet's right aspect towards criticism--i read them with the most complete appreciation and sympathy. i have sometimes thought that it would be a curious and instructive process, as illustrative of the wisdom and apprehensiveness of critics, if anyone would collect the critical soliloquies of every age touching its own literature, (as far as such may be extant) and _confer_ them with the literary product of the said ages. professor wilson has begun something of the kind apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last _blackwood_ number on critics, beginning with dryden--but he seems to have no design in his notice--it is a mere critique on the critic. and then, he should have begun earlier than dryden--earlier even than sir philip sydney, who in the noble 'discourse on poetry,' gives such singular evidence of being stone-critic-blind to the gods who moved around him. as far as i can remember, he saw even shakespeare but indifferently. oh, it was in his eyes quite an unillumed age, that period of elizabeth which _we_ see full of suns! and few can see what is close to the eyes though they run their heads against it; the denial of contemporary genius is the rule rather than the exception. no one counts the eagles in the nest, till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown. and here we speak of understanding men, such as the sydneys and the drydens. of the great body of critics you observe rightly, that they are better than might be expected of their badness, only the fact of their _influence_ is no less undeniable than the reason why they should not be influential. the brazen kettles will be taken for oracles all the world over. but the influence is for to-day, for this hour--not for to-morrow and the day after--unless indeed, as you say, the poet do himself perpetuate the influence by submitting to it. do you know tennyson?--that is, with a face to face knowledge? i have great admiration for him. in execution, he is exquisite,--and, in music, a most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine airs. that such a poet should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics, (i do not say that suggestions from without may not be accepted with discrimination sometimes, to the benefit of the acceptor), blindly and implicitly to the suggestions of his critics, is much as if babbage were to take my opinion and undo his calculating machine by it. napoleon called poetry _science creuse_--which, although he was not scientific in poetry himself, is true enough. but anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. it is not so in chymistry and mathematics. nor is it so, i believe, in whist and the polka. but then these are more serious things. yes--and it does delight me to hear of your garden full of roses and soul full of comforts! you have the right to both--you have the key to both. you have written enough to live by, though only beginning to write, as you say of yourself. and this reminds me to remind you that when i talked of coveting most the authorship of your 'pippa,' i did not mean to call it your finest work (you might reproach me for _that_), but just to express a personal feeling. do you know what it is to covet your neighbour's poetry?--not his fame, but his poetry?--i dare say not. you are too generous. and, in fact, beauty is beauty, and, whether it comes by our own hand or another's, blessed be the coming of it! _i_, besides, feel _that_. and yet--and yet, i have been aware of a feeling within me which has spoken two or three times to the effect of a wish, that i had been visited with the vision of 'pippa,' before you--and _confiteor tibi_--i confess the baseness of it. the conception is, to my mind, most exquisite and altogether original--and the contrast in the working out of the plan, singularly expressive of various faculty. is the poem under your thumb, emerging from it? and in what metre? may i ask such questions? and does mr. carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all 'singing' to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing? and have you told mr. carlyle that song is work, and also the condition of work? i am a devout sitter at his feet--and it is an effort to me to think him wrong in anything--and once when he told me to write prose and not verse, i fancied that his opinion was i had mistaken my calling,--a fancy which in infinite kindness and gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. i never shall forget the grace of that kindness--but then! for _him_ to have thought ill of _me_, would not have been strange--i often think ill of myself, as god knows. but for carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season, the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my thoughts ever since. i do not know him personally at all. but as his disciple i ventured (by an exceptional motive) to send him my poems, and i heard from him as a consequence. 'dear and noble' he is indeed--and a poet unaware of himself; all but the sense of music. you feel it so--do you not? and the 'dear sir' has let him have the 'letter of cromwell,' i hope; and satisfied 'the obedient servant.' the curious thing in this world is not the stupidity, but the upper-handism of the stupidity. the geese are in the capitol, and the romans in the farmyard--and it seems all quite natural that it should be so, both to geese and romans! but there are things you say, which seem to me supernatural, for reasons which i know and for reasons which i don't know. you will let me be grateful to you,--will you not? you must, if you will or not. and also--i would not wait for more leave--if i could but see your desk--as i do your death's heads and the spider-webs appertaining; but the soul of cornelius agrippa fades from me. ever faithfully yours, elizabeth b. barrett. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning--spring! [post-mark, february , .] real warm spring, dear miss barrett, and the birds know it; and in spring i shall see you, surely see you--for when did i once fail to get whatever i had set my heart upon? as i ask myself sometimes, with a strange fear. i took up this paper to write a great deal--now, i don't think i shall write much--'i shall see you,' i say! that 'luria' you enquire about, shall be my last play--for it is but a play, woe's me! i have one done here, 'a soul's tragedy,' as it is properly enough called, but _that_ would not do to end with (end i will), and luria is a moor, of othello's country, and devotes himself to something he thinks florence, and the old fortune follows--all in my brain yet, but the bright weather helps and i will soon loosen my braccio and puccio (a pale discontented man), and tiburzio (the pisan, good true fellow, this one), and domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be), golden-hearted luria, all these with their worldly-wisdom and tuscan shrewd ways; and, for me, the misfortune is, i sympathise just as much with these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer, and 'luria' and the other sadder ruin of one chiappino--these got rid of, i will do as you bid me, and--say first i have some romances and lyrics, all dramatic, to dispatch, and _then_, i shall stoop of a sudden under and out of this dancing ring of men and women hand in hand, and stand still awhile, should my eyes dazzle, and when that's over, they will be gone and you will be there, _pas vrai_? for, as i think i told you, i always shiver involuntarily when i look--no, glance--at this first poem of mine to be. '_now_,' i call it, what, upon my soul,--for a solemn matter it is,--what is to be done _now_, believed _now_, so far as it has been revealed to me--solemn words, truly--and to find myself writing them to any one else! enough now. i know tennyson 'face to face,'--no more than that. i know carlyle and love him--know him so well, that i would have told you he had shaken that grand head of his at 'singing,' so thoroughly does he love and live by it. when i last saw him, a fortnight ago, he turned, from i don't know what other talk, quite abruptly on me with, 'did you never try to write a _song_? of all things in the world, _that_ i should be proudest to do.' then came his definition of a song--then, with an appealing look to mrs. c., 'i always say that some day in _spite of nature and my stars_, i shall burst into a song' (he is not mechanically 'musical,' he meant, and the music is the poetry, he holds, and should enwrap the thought as donne says 'an amber-drop enwraps a bee'), and then he began to recite an old scotch song, stopping at the first rude couplet, 'the beginning words are merely to set the tune, they tell me'--and then again at the couplet about--or, to the effect that--'give me' (but in broad scotch) 'give me but my lass, i care not for my cogie.' '_he says_,' quoth carlyle magisterially, 'that if you allow him the love of his lass, you may take away all else, even his cogie, his cup or can, and he cares not,' just as a professor expounds lycophron. and just before i left england, six months ago, did not i hear him croon, if not certainly sing, 'charlie is my darling' ('my _darling_' with an adoring emphasis), and then he stood back, as it were, from the song, to look at it better, and said 'how must that notion of ideal wondrous perfection have impressed itself in this old jacobite's "young cavalier"--("they go to save their land, and the _young cavalier_!!")--when i who care nothing about such a rag of a man, cannot but feel as he felt, in speaking his words after him!' after saying which, he would be sure to counsel everybody to get their heads clear of all singing! don't let me forget to clap hands, we got the letter, dearly bought as it was by the 'dear sirs,' &c., and insignificant scrap as it proved, but still it is got, to my encouragement in diplomacy. who told you of my sculls and spider webs--horne? last year i petted extraordinarily a fine fellow, (a _garden_ spider--there was the singularity,--the thin clever-even-for-a-spider-sort, and they are _so_ 'spirited and sly,' all of them--this kind makes a long cone of web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as i wrote, and i remember speaking to horne about his good points. phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope, in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. he looks quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. i have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. how some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits obliged to face each other for ever,--prints put together in portfolios. my polidoro's perfect andromeda along with 'boors carousing,' by ostade,--where i found her,--my own father's doing, or i would say more. and when i have said i like 'pippa' better than anything else i have done yet, i shall have answered all you bade me. and now may _i_ begin questioning? no,--for it is all a pure delight to me, so that you do but write. i never was without good, kind, generous friends and lovers, so they say--so they were and are,--perhaps they came at the wrong time--i never wanted them--though that makes no difference in my gratitude i trust,--but i know myself--surely--and always have done so, for is there not somewhere the little book i first printed when a boy, with john mill, the metaphysical head, _his_ marginal note that 'the writer possesses a deeper self-consciousness than i ever knew in a sane human being.' so i never deceived myself much, nor called my feelings for people other than they were. and who has a right to say, if i have not, that i had, but i said that, supernatural or no. pray tell me, too, of your present doings and projects, and never write yourself 'grateful' to me, who _am_ grateful, very grateful to you,--for none of your words but i take in earnest--and tell me if spring _be not_ coming, come, and i will take to writing the gravest of letters, because this beginning is for gladness' sake, like carlyle's song couplet. my head aches a little to-day too, and, as poor dear kirke white said to the moon, from his heap of mathematical papers, 'i throw aside the learned sheet; i cannot choose but gaze, she looks so--mildly sweet.' out on the foolish phrase, but there's hard rhyming without it. ever yours faithfully, robert browning. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wimpole street: feb. , . yes, but, dear mr. browning, i want the spring according to the new 'style' (mine), and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets. to me unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as the snow--it feels as cold underfoot--and i have grown sceptical about 'the voice of the turtle,' the east winds blow so loud. april is a parthian with a dart, and may (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. _that_ is my idea of what you call spring; mine, in the _new style_! a little later comes my spring; and indeed after such severe weather, from which i have just escaped with my life, i may thank it for coming at all. how happy you are, to be able to listen to the 'birds' without the commentary of the east wind, which, like other commentaries, spoils the music. and how happy i am to listen to you, when you write such kind open-hearted letters to me! i am delighted to hear all you say to me of yourself, and 'luria,' and the spider, and to do him no dishonour in the association, of the great teacher of the age, carlyle, who is also yours and mine. he fills the office of a poet--does he not?--by analysing humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions of the hour. that is--strictly speaking--the office of the poet, is it not?--and he discharges it fully, and with a wider intelligibility perhaps as far as the contemporary period is concerned, than if he did forthwith 'burst into a song.' but how i do wander!--i meant to say, and i will call myself back to say, that spring will really come some day i hope and believe, and the warm settled weather with it, and that then i shall be probably fitter for certain pleasures than i can appear even to myself now. and, in the meantime, i seem to see 'luria' instead of you; i have visions and dream dreams. and the 'soul's tragedy,' which sounds to me like the step of a ghost of an old drama! and you are not to think that i blaspheme the drama, dear mr. browning; or that i ever thought of exhorting you to give up the 'solemn robes' and tread of the buskin. it is the theatre which vulgarises these things; the modern theatre in which we see no altar! where the thymelé is replaced by the caprice of a popular actor. and also, i have a fancy that your great dramatic power would work more clearly and audibly in the less definite mould--but you ride your own faculty as oceanus did his sea-horse, 'directing it by your will'; and woe to the impertinence, which would dare to say 'turn this way' or 'turn from that way'--it should not be _my_ impertinence. do not think i blaspheme the drama. i have gone through 'all such reading as should never be read' (that is, by women!), through my love of it on the contrary. and the dramatic faculty is strong in you--and therefore, as 'i speak unto a wise man, judge what i say.' for myself and my own doings, you shall hear directly what i have been doing, and what i am about to do. some years ago, as perhaps you may have heard, (but i hope not, for the fewer who hear of it the better)--some years ago, i translated or rather _undid_ into english, the 'prometheus' of Æschylus. to speak of this production moderately (not modestly), it is the most miserable of all miserable versions of the class. it was completed (in the first place) in thirteen days--the iambics thrown into blank verse, the lyrics into rhymed octosyllabics and the like,--and the whole together as cold as caucasus, and as flat as the nearest plain. to account for this, the haste may be something; but if my mind had been properly awakened at the time, i might have made still more haste and done it better. well,--the comfort is, that the little book was unadvertised and unknown, and that most of the copies (through my entreaty of my father) are shut up in the wardrobe of his bedroom. if ever i get well i shall show my joy by making a bonfire of them. in the meantime, the recollection of this sin of mine has been my nightmare and daymare too, and the sin has been the 'blot on my escutcheon.' i could look in nobody's face, with a 'thou canst not say i did it'--i know, i did it. and so i resolved to wash away the transgression, and translate the tragedy over again. it was an honest straightforward proof of repentance--was it not? and i have completed it, except the transcription and last polishing. if Æschylus stands at the foot of my bed now, i shall have a little breath to front him. i have done my duty by him, not indeed according to his claims, but in proportion to my faculty. whether i shall ever publish or not (remember) remains to be considered--that is a different side of the subject. if i do, it _may_ be in a magazine--or--but this is another ground. and then, i have in my head to associate with the version, a monodrama of my own,--not a long poem, but a monologue of Æschylus as he sate a blind exile on the flats of sicily and recounted the past to his own soul, just before the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone. but my chief _intention_ just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem--a poem as completely modern as 'geraldine's courtship,' running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as i conceive of it out plainly. that is my intention. it is not mature enough yet to be called a plan. i am waiting for a story, and i won't take one, because i want to make one, and i like to make my own stories, because then i can take liberties with them in the treatment. who told me of your skulls and spiders? why, couldn't i know it without being told? did cornelius agrippa know nothing without being told? mr. horne never spoke it to my ears--(i never saw him face to face in my life, although we have corresponded for long and long), and he never wrote it to my eyes. perhaps he does not know that i know it. well, then! if i were to say that _i heard it from you yourself_, how would you answer? _and it was so._ why, are you not aware that these are the days of mesmerism and clairvoyance? are you an infidel? i have believed in your skulls for the last year, for my part. and i have some sympathy in your habit of feeling for chairs and tables. i remember, when i was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, i used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because i had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when i was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. this, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude. other books i used to treat in a like manner--and to talk to the trees and the flowers, was a natural inclination--but between me and that time, the cypresses grow thick and dark. is it true that your wishes fulfil themselves? and when they _do_, are they not bitter to your taste--do you not wish them _un_fulfilled? oh, this life, this life! there is comfort in it, they say, and i almost believe--but the brightest place in the house, is the leaning out of the window--at least, for me. of course you are _self-conscious_--how could you be a poet otherwise? tell me. ever faithfully yours, e.b.b. and was the little book written with mr. mill, pure metaphysics, or what? _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday night, march [ ]. dear miss barrett,--i seem to find of a sudden--surely i knew before--anyhow, i _do_ find now, that with the octaves on octaves of quite new golden strings you enlarged the compass of my life's harp with, there is added, too, such a tragic chord, that which you touched, so gently, in the beginning of your letter i got this morning, 'just escaping' &c. but if my truest heart's wishes avail, as they have hitherto done, you shall laugh at east winds yet, as i do! see now, this sad feeling is so strange to me, that i must write it out, _must_, and you might give me great, the greatest pleasure for years and yet find me as passive as a stone used to wine libations, and as ready in expressing my sense of them, but when i am pained, i find the old theory of the uselessness of communicating the circumstances of it, singularly untenable. i have been 'spoiled' in this world--to such an extent, indeed, that i often _reason_ out--make clear to myself--that i might very properly, so far as myself am concerned, take any step that would peril the whole of my future happiness--because the past is gained, secure, and on record; and, though not another of the old days should dawn on me, i shall not have lost my life, no! out of all which you are--please--to make a sort of sense, if you can, so as to express that i have been deeply struck to find a new real unmistakable sorrow along with these as real but not so new joys you have given me. how strangely this connects itself in my mind with another subject in your note! i looked at that translation for a minute, not longer, years ago, knowing nothing about it or you, and i _only_ looked to see what rendering a passage had received that was often in my thoughts.[ ] i forget your version (it was not _yours_, my _'yours' then_; i mean i had no extraordinary interest about it), but the original makes prometheus (telling over his bestowments towards human happiness) say, as something [greek: peraiterô tônde], that he stopped mortals [greek: mê proderkesthai moron--to poion eurôn], asks the chorus, [greek: têsde pharmakon nosou]? whereto he replies, [greek: tuphlas en autois elpidas katôkisa] (what you hear men dissertate upon by the hour, as proving the immortality of the soul apart from revelation, undying yearnings, restless longings, instinctive desires which, unless to be eventually indulged, it were cruel to plant in us, &c. &c.). but, [greek: meg' ôphelêma tout' edôrêsô brotois]! concludes the chorus, like a sigh from the admitted eleusinian Æschylus was! you cannot think how this foolish circumstance struck me this evening, so i thought i would e'en tell you at once and be done with it. are you not my dear friend already, and shall i not use you? and pray you not to 'lean out of the window' when my own foot is only on the stair; do wait a little for yours _ever_, r.b. [footnote : the following is the version of the passage in mrs. browning's later translation of the 'prometheus' (ii. - of the original): _prom._ i did restrain besides my mortals from premeditating death. _cho._ how didst thou medicine the plague-fear of death? _prom._ i set blind hopes to inhabit in their house. _cho._ by that gift thou didst help thy mortals well.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ march , . but i did not mean to strike a 'tragic chord'; indeed i did not! sometimes one's melancholy will be uppermost and sometimes one's mirth,--the world goes round, you know--and i suppose that in that letter of mine the melancholy took the turn. as to 'escaping with my life,' it was just a phrase--at least it did not signify more than that the sense of mortality, and discomfort of it, is peculiarly strong with me when east winds are blowing and waters freezing. for the rest, i am _essentially better_, and have been for several winters; and i feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and i am reconciled to the feeling. yes! i am satisfied to 'take up' with the blind hopes again, and have them in the house with me, for all that i sit by the window. by the way, did the chorus utter scorn in the [greek: meg' ôphelêma]. i think not. it is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not? there is an obscurer passage, on which i covet your thoughts, where prometheus, after the sublime declaration that, with a full knowledge of the penalty reserved for him, he had sinned of free will and choice--goes on to say--or to seem to say--that he had _not_, however, foreseen the extent and detail of the torment, the skiey rocks, and the friendless desolation. see v. . the intention of the poet might have been to magnify to his audience the torment of the martyrdom--but the heroism of the martyr diminishes in proportion--and there appears to be a contradiction, and oversight. or is my view wrong? tell me. and tell me too, if Æschylus not the divinest of all the divine greek souls? people say after quintilian, that he is savage and rude; a sort of poetic orson, with his locks all wild. but i will not hear it of my master! he is strong as zeus is--and not as a boxer--and tender as power itself, which always is tenderest. but to go back to the view of life with the blind hopes; you are not to think--whatever i may have written or implied--that i lean either to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through darkness instead of light, and speaks of it wailingly. now, may god forbid that it should be so with me. i am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, i come out with two learnt lessons (as i sometimes say and oftener feel),--the wisdom of cheerfulness--and the duty of social intercourse. anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in society; it has been a wholesome and not unnatural reaction. and altogether, i may say that the earth looks the brighter to me in proportion to my own deprivations. the laburnum trees and rose trees are plucked up by the roots--but the sunshine is in their places, and the root of the sunshine is above the storms. what we call life is a condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault. these tears in our eyes, these faintings of the flesh, will not hinder such improvement. and i do like to hear testimonies like yours, to _happiness_, and i feel it to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one. still, it is obvious too that you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle--or your step would not be 'on the stair' quite so lightly. and so, we turn to you, dear mr. browning, for comfort and gentle spiriting! remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to god, you should pay it back to his world. and i thank you for some of it already. also, writing as from friend to friend--as you say rightly that we are--i ought to confess that of one class of griefs (which has been called too the bitterest), i know as little as you. the cruelty of the world, and the treason of it--the unworthiness of the dearest; of these griefs i have scanty knowledge. it seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions, and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the moralists. people have been kind to _me_, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me:--nay, have not the very critics tamed their beardom for me, and roared delicately as sucking doves, on behalf of me? i have no harm to say of your world, though i am not of it, as you see. and i have the cream of it in your friendship, and a little more, and i do not envy much the milkers of the cows. how kind you are!--how kindly and gently you speak to me! some things you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although i am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what i can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend. may god bless you! faithfully yours, elizabeth b. barrett. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, march , .] your letter made me so happy, dear miss barrett, that i have kept quiet this while; is it too great a shame if i begin to want more good news of you, and to say so? because there has been a bitter wind ever since. will you grant me a great favour? always when you write, though about your own works, not greek plays merely, put me in, _always_, a little official bulletin-line that shall say 'i am better' or 'still better,' will you? that is done, then--and now, what do i wish to tell you first? the poem you propose to make, for the times; the fearless fresh living work you describe, is the _only_ poem to be undertaken now by you or anyone that _is_ a poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered god and man; it is what i have been all my life intending to do, and now shall be much, much nearer doing, since you will along with me. and you _can_ do it, i know and am sure--so sure, that i could find in my heart to be jealous of your stopping in the way even to translate the prometheus; though the accompanying monologue will make amends too. or shall i set you a task i meant for myself once upon a time?--which, oh, how you would fulfil! restore the prometheus [greek: purphoros] as shelley did the [greek: lyomenos]; when i say 'restore,' i know, or very much fear, that the [greek: purphoros] was the same with the [greek: purkaeus] which, by a fragment, we sorrowfully ascertain to have been a satyric drama; but surely the capabilities of the subject are much greater than in this, we now wonder at; nay, they include all those of this last--for just see how magnificently the story unrolls itself. the beginning of jupiter's dynasty, the calm in heaven after the storm, the ascending--(stop, i will get the book and give the words), [greek: opôs tachista ton patrôon eis thronon kathezet', euthus daimosin nemei gera alloisin alla--k.t.l.],[ ] all the while prometheus being the first among the first in honour, as [greek: kaitoi theoisi tois neois toutois gera tis allos, ê 'gô, pantelôs diôrise]?[ ] then the one black hand-cloudlet storming the joyous blue and gold everywhere, [greek: brotôn de tôn talaipôrôn logon ouk eschen oudena],[ ] and the design of zeus to blot out the whole race, and plant a new one. and prometheus with his grand solitary [greek: egô d' etolmêsa],[ ] and his saving them, as the _first_ good, from annihilation. then comes the darkening brow of zeus, and estrangement from the benign circle of grateful gods, and the dissuasion of old confederates, and all the right that one may fancy in might, the strongest reasons [greek: pauesthai tropou philanthrôpou][ ] coming from the own mind of the titan, if you will, and all the while he shall be proceeding steadily in the alleviation of the sufferings of mortals whom, [greek: nêpious ontas to prin, ennous kai phrenôn epêbolous ethêke],[ ] while still, in proportion, shall the doom he is about to draw on himself, manifest itself more and more distinctly, till at the last, he shall achieve the salvation of man, body (by the gift of fire) and soul (by even those [greek: tuphlai elpides],[ ] hopes of immortality), and so having rendered him utterly, according to the mythos here, _independent_ of jove--for observe, prometheus in the play never talks of helping mortals more, of fearing for them more, of even benefiting them more by his sufferings. the rest is between jove and himself; he will reveal the master-secret to jove when he shall have released him, &c. there is no stipulation that the gifts to mortals shall be continued; indeed, by the fact that it is prometheus who hangs on caucasus while 'the ephemerals possess fire,' one sees that somehow mysteriously _they_ are past jove's harming now. well, this wholly achieved, the price is as wholly accepted, and off into the darkness passes in calm triumphant grandeur the titan, with strength and violence, and vulcan's silent and downcast eyes, and then the gold clouds and renewed flushings of felicity shut up the scene again, with might in his old throne again, yet with a new element of mistrust, and conscious shame, and fear, that writes significantly enough above all the glory and rejoicing that all is not as it was, nor will ever be. such might be the framework of your drama, just what cannot help striking one at first glance, and would not such a drama go well before your translation? do think of this and tell me--it nearly writes itself. you see, i meant the [greek: meg' ôphelêma][ ] to be a deep great truth; if there were no life beyond this, i think the hope in one would be an incalculable blessing _for_ this life, which is melancholy for one like Æschylus to feel, if he could _only_ hope, because the argument as to the ulterior good of those hopes is cut clean away, and what had he left? i do not find it take away from my feeling of the magnanimity of prometheus that he should, in truth, complain (as he does from beginning to end) of what he finds himself suffering. he could have prevented all, and can stop it now--of that he never thinks for a moment. that was the old greek way--they never let an antagonistic passion neutralise the other which was to influence the man to his praise or blame. a greek hero fears exceedingly and battles it out, cries out when he is wounded and fights on, does not say his love or hate makes him see no danger or feel no pain. Æschylus from first word to last ([greek: idesthe me, oia paschô][ ] to [greek: esoras me, hôs ekdika paschô][ ]) insists on the unmitigated reality of the punishment which only the sun, and divine ether, and the godhead of his mother can comprehend; still, still that is only what i suppose Æschylus to have done--in your poem you shall make prometheus our way. and now enough of greek, which i am fast forgetting (for i never look at books i loved once)--it was your mention of the translation that brought out the old fast fading outlines of the poem in my brain--the greek poem, that is. you think--for i must get to _you_--that i 'unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.' now, you don't know what _that_ is, nor can i very well tell you, because the language with which i talk to myself of these matters is spiritual attic, and 'loves contractions,' as grammarians say; but i read it myself, and well know what it means, that's why i told you i was self-conscious--i meant that i never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another--there! of what use is talking? only do you stay here with me in the 'house' these few short years. do you think i shall see you in two months, three months? i may travel, perhaps. so you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? for me, i always hated it--have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it i should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that i have done most of what is to be done, _any_ lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me! i don't even care about reading now--the world, and pictures of it, rather than writings about the world! but you must read books in order to get words and forms for 'the public' if you _write_, and _that_ you needs must do, if you fear god. i have no pleasure in writing myself--none, in the mere act--though all pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if i have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other! but i think you like the operation of writing as i should like that of painting or making music, do you not? after all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work--but--i don't know why--my heart sinks whenever i open this desk, and rises when i shut it. yet but for what i have written you would never have heard of me--and _through_ what you have written, not properly _for_ it, i love and wish you well! now, will you remember what i began my letter by saying--how you have promised to let me know if my wishing takes effect, and if you still continue better? and not even ... (since we are learned in magnanimity) don't even tell me that or anything else, if it teases you,--but wait your own good time, and know me for ... if these words were but my own, and fresh-minted for this moment's use!... yours ever faithfully, r. browning. [footnote : aeschylus, _prometheus_, ff.: 'when at first he filled his father's throne, he instantly made various gifts of glory to the gods.'] [footnote : _ib._ , : 'for see--their honours to these new-made gods, what other gave but i?'] [footnote : _ib._ , : 'alone of men, of miserable men, he took no count.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'but i dared it.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'leave off his old trick of loving man.'] [footnote : _ib._ , : 'being fools before, i made them wise and true in aim of soul.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'blind hopes.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'a great benefit.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'behold what i suffer.'] [footnote : _ib._ : 'dost see how i suffer this wrong?'] _e.b.b. to r.b._ wimpole street: march , . whenever i delay to write to you, dear mr. browning, it is not, be sure, that i take my 'own good time,' but submit to my own bad time. it was kind of you to wish to know how i was, and not unkind of me to suspend my answer to your question--for indeed i have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so. this implacable weather! this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon! who can be well in such a wind? yet for me, i should not grumble. there has been nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be--i only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner--and then all this must end! april is coming. there will be both a may and a june if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. and as to seeing _you_ besides, i observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which i am not accustomed, i shrink and grow pale in the spirit. do you? you are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine--notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like--well--if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, i cannot say, but i do say that i will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth 'to rights' again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible. for if you think that i shall not _like_ to see you, you are wrong, for all your learning. but i shall be afraid of you at first--though i am not, in writing thus. you are paracelsus, and i am a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely--quivering at a step and breath. and what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. you seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. i have lived only inwardly; or with _sorrow_, for a strong emotion. before this seclusion of my illness, i was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than i, who am scarcely to be called young now. i grew up in the country--had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. my sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle--and but for _one_, in my own house--but of this i cannot speak. it was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. books and dreams were what i lived in--and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. and so time passed, and passed--and afterwards, when my illness came and i seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, i turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that i had stood blind in this temple i was about to leave--that i had seen no human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were _names_ to me, that i had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. i was as a man dying who had not read shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? and do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? why, if i live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that i labour under signal disadvantages--that i am, in a manner, as a _blind poet_? certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. i have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, i make great guesses at human nature in the main. but how willingly i would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some.... but all grumbling is a vile thing. we should all thank god for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. i write so, that you may not mistake what i wrote before in relation to society, although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may understand what i mean fully when i say, that i have lived all my chief _joys_, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone. like to write? of course, of course i do. i seem to live while i write--it is life, for me. why, what is to live? not to eat and drink and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully. and thus, one lives in composition surely--not always--but when the wheel goes round and the procession is uninterrupted. is it not so with you? oh--it must be so. for the rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular case, whenever i see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly transcribed, the reaction is most painful. the pleasure, the sense of power, without which i could not write a line, is gone in a moment; and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. i never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment! i have a _seasonable_ humility, i do assure you. how delightful to talk about oneself; but as you 'tempted me and i did eat,' i entreat your longsuffering of my sin, and ah! if you would but sin back so in turn! you and i seem to meet in a mild contrarious harmony ... as in the 'si no, si no' of an italian duet. i want to see more of men, and you have seen too much, you say. i am in ignorance, and you, in satiety. 'you don't even care about reading now.' is it possible? and i am as 'fresh' about reading, as ever i was--as long as i keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries and of theological controversies, and the like. shall i whisper it to you under the memory of the last rose of last summer? _i am very fond of romances_; yes! and i read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for the sake of the eloquence here and the sentiment there, and the graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story! just as little children would, sitting on their papa's knee. my childish love of a story never wore out with my love of plum cake, and now there is not a hole in it. i make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the romances that other people are kind enough to write--and woe to the miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth. have you in you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy? if you do, i will forgive you, only smiling to myself--i give you notice,--with a smile of superior pleasure! mr. chorley made me quite laugh the other day by recommending mary hewitt's 'improvisatore,' with a sort of deprecating reference to the _descriptions_ in the book, just as if i never read a novel--_i!_ i wrote a confession back to him which made him shake his head perhaps, and now i confess to _you_, unprovoked. i am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to boccaccio's stories; and i am not ashamed of it. i do not even 'see the better part,' i am so silly. ah! you tempt me with a grand vision of prometheus! _i_, who have just escaped with my life, after treading milton's ground, you would send me to Æschylus's. no, _i do not dare_. and besides ... i am inclined to think that we want new _forms_, as well as thoughts. the old gods are dethroned. why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical moulds, as they are so improperly called? if it is a necessity of art to do so, why then those critics are right who hold that art is exhausted and the world too worn out for poetry. i do not, for my part, believe this: and i believe the so-called necessity of art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. let us all aspire rather to _life_, and let the dead bury their dead. if we have but courage to face these conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it instead of losing it; and of that, i am intimately persuaded. for there is poetry _everywhere_; the 'treasure' (see the old fable) lies all over the field. and then christianity is a worthy _myth_, and poetically acceptable. i had much to say to you, or at least something, of the 'blind hopes' &c., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet. if you mean 'to travel,' why, i shall have to miss you. do you really mean it? how is the play going on? and the poem? may god bless you! ever and truly yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, march , .] when you read don quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly squire of him of the moon, or the looking glasses, (i forget which) passes to sancho's dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning)--a plump wine-skin,--and do you admire dear brave miguel's knowledge of thirsty nature when he tells you that the drinker, having seriously considered for a space the pleiads, or place where they should be, fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a deep musing of an hour's length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ... only _then_, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of rabelais and the teian (if he wasn't a byzantine monk, alas!) and our mr. kenyon's stately self--(since my own especial poet _à moi_, that can do all with anybody, only 'sips like a fly,' she says, and so cares not to compete with these behemoths that drink up jordan)--well, then ... (oh, i must get quick to the sentence's end, and be brief as an oracle-explainer!)--the giver is you and the taker is i, and the letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and the brown study is--how shall i deserve and be grateful enough to this new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among men, that have each and all their friend, so they say (... not that i believe all they say--they boast too soon sometimes, no doubt,--i once was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion 'dere smith,--i calls you "_dere_" ... because you are so in your shop!')--and the great sigh is,--there is no deserving nor being grateful at all,--and the breaking silence is, and the praise is ... ah, there, enough of it! this sunny morning is as if i wished it for you-- strikes by the clock now--tell me if at this morning you feel any good from my heart's wishes for you--i would give you all you want out of my own life and gladness and yet keep twice the stock that should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making anyone afraid ... and now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that when its owner 'travels' next, he will leave off miss barrett along with port wine--_dii meliora piis_, and, among them to yours every where, and at all times yours r. browning. i have all to say yet--next letter. r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday night. [post-mark, april , .] i heard of you, dear miss barrett, between a polka and a cellarius the other evening, of mr. kenyon--how this wind must hurt you! and yesterday i had occasion to go your way--past, that is, wimpole street, the end of it,--and, do you know, i did not seem to have leave from you to go down it yet, much less count number after number till i came to yours,--much least than less, look up when i did come there. so i went on to a viperine she-friend of mine who, i think, rather loves me she does so hate me, and we talked over the chances of certain other friends who were to be balloted for at the 'athenæum' last night,--one of whom, it seems, was in a fright about it--'to such little purpose' said my friend--'for he is so inoffensive--now, if one were to style _you_ that--' 'or you'--i said--and so we hugged ourselves in our grimness like tiger-cats. then there is a deal in the papers to-day about maynooth, and a meeting presided over by lord mayor gibbs, and the reverend mr. somebody's speech. and mrs. norton has gone and book-made at a great rate about the prince of wales, pleasantly putting off till his time all that used of old to be put off till his mother's time;--altogether, i should dearly like to hear from you, but not till the wind goes, and sun comes--because i shall see mr. kenyon next week and get him to tell me some more. by the way, do you suppose anybody else looks like him? if you do, the first room full of real london people you go among you will fancy to be lighted up by a saucer of burning salt and spirits of wine in the back ground. monday--last night when i could do nothing else i began to write to you, such writing as you have seen--strange! the proper time and season for good sound sensible and profitable forms of speech--when ought it to have occurred, and how did i evade it in these letters of mine? for people begin with a graceful skittish levity, lest you should be struck all of a heap with what is to come, and _that_ is sure to be the stuff and staple of the man, full of wisdom and sorrow,--and then again comes the fringe of reeds and pink little stones on the other side, that you may put foot on land, and draw breath, and think what a deep pond you have swum across. but _you_ are the real deep wonder of a creature,--and i sail these paper-boats on you rather impudently. but i always mean to be very grave one day,--when i am in better spirits and can go _fuori di me_. and one thing i want to persuade you of, which is, that all you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas--or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be. you get, too, a little ... perhaps a considerable, good, in finding the world's accepted _moulds_ everywhere, into which you may run and fix your own fused metal,--but not a grain troy-weight do you get of new gold, silver or brass. after this, you go boldly on your own resources, and are justified to yourself, that's all. three scratches with a pen,[ ] even with this pen,--and you have the green little syrenusa where i have sate and heard the quails sing. one of these days i shall describe a country i have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds and all. ever yours, dear miss barrett, r. browning. [footnote : a rough sketch follows in the original.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, april , .] if you did but know dear mr. browning how often i have written ... not this letter i am about to write, but another better letter to you, ... in the midst of my silence, ... you would not think for a moment that the east wind, with all the harm it does to me, is able to do the great harm of putting out the light of the thought of you to my mind; for this, indeed, it has no power to do. i had the pen in my hand once to write; and why it fell out, i cannot tell you. and you see, ... all your writing will not change the wind! you wished all manner of good to me one day as the clock struck ten; yes, and i assure you i was better that day--and i must not forget to tell you so though it is so long since. and _therefore_, i was logically bound to believe that you had never thought of me since ... unless you thought east winds of me! _that_ was quite clear; was it not? or would have been; if it had not been for the supernatural conviction, i had above all, of your kindness, which was too large to be taken in the hinge of a syllogism. in fact i have long left off thinking that logic proves anything--it _doesn't_, you know. but your lamia has taught you some subtle 'viperine' reasoning and _motiving_, for the turning down one street instead of another. it was conclusive. ah--but you will never persuade me that i am the better, or as well, for the thing that i have not. we look from different points of view, and yours is the point of attainment. not that you do not truly say that, when all is done, we must come home to place our engines, and act by our own strength. i do not want material as material; no one does--but every life requires a full experience, a various experience--and i have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? you do not _directly_, i know--but you do indirectly and by a rebound. whatever acts upon you, becomes _you_--and whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you and becomes _you_. have you read the 'improvisatore'? or will you? the writer seems to feel, just as i do, the good of the outward life; and he is a poet in his soul. it is a book full of beauty and had a great charm to me. as to the polkas and cellariuses i do not covet them of course ... but what a strange world you seem to have, to me at a distance--what a strange husk of a world! how it looks to me like mandarin-life or something as remote; nay, not mandarin-life but mandarin _manners_, ... life, even the outer life, meaning something deeper, in my account of it. as to dear mr. kenyon i do not make the mistake of fancying that many can look like him or talk like him or _be_ like him. i know enough to know otherwise. when he spoke of me he should have said that i was better notwithstanding the east wind. it is really true--i am getting slowly up from the prostration of the severe cold, and feel stronger in myself. but mrs. norton discourses excellent music--and for the rest, there are fruits in the world so over-ripe, that they will fall, ... without being gathered. let maynooth witness to it! _if you think it worth while_! ever yours, elizabeth b. barrett. and _is it_ nothing to be 'justified to one's self in one's resources?' '_that's all_,' indeed! for the 'soul's country' we will have it also--and i know how well the birds sing in it. how glad i was by the way to see your letter! _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, april , .] if you did but know, dear miss barrett, how the 'full stop' after 'morning' just above, has turned out the fullest of stops,--and how for about a quarter of an hour since the ink dried i have been reasoning out the why and wherefore of the stopping, the wisdom of it, and the folly of it.... by this time you see what you have got in me--you ask me questions, 'if i like novels,' 'if the "improvisatore" is not good,' 'if travel and sightseeing do not effect this and that for one,' and 'what i am devising--play or poem,'--and i shall not say i could not answer at all manner of lengths--but, let me only begin some good piece of writing of the kind, and ... no, you shall have it, have what i was going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings,--in a parallel case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the meaning--there is a story of d'israeli's, an old one, with an episode of strange interest, or so i found it years ago,--well, you go breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last the end _must_ come, you feel--and the tangled threads draw to one, and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you ... that is, helps them, the people, wonderfully on,--and, lo, dinner is done, and vivian grey is here, and violet fane there,--and a detachment of the party is drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop behind. at this moment, mr. somebody, a good man and rather the lady's uncle, 'in answer to a question from violet, drew from his pocket a small neatly written manuscript, and, seating himself on an inverted wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the characteristics of the moeso-gothic literature'--this ends the page,--which you don't turn at once! but when you _do_, in bitterness of soul, turn it, you read--'on consideration, i' (ben, himself) 'shall keep them for mr. colburn's _new magazine_'--and deeply you draw thankful breath! (note this 'parallel case' of mine is pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings--you will ask what it means--and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and reasoning and all,--that i am naturally earnest, in earnest about whatever thing i do, and little able to write about one thing while i think of another)-- i think i will really write verse to you some day--_this_ day, it is quite clear i had better give up trying. no, spite of all the lines in the world, i will make an end of it, as ophelia with her swan's-song,--for it grows too absurd. but remember that i write letters to nobody but you, and that i want method and much more. that book you like so, the danish novel, must be full of truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts i have seen in reviews. that a dane should write so, confirms me in an old belief--that italy is stuff for the use of the north, and no more--pure poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in dante even--material for poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their thousands, on the contrary--strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them! alfieri, with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden glass with matting over it--as free, that is, from local colouring, touches of the soil they are said to spring from,--think of 'saulle,' and his greek attempts! i expected to see mr. kenyon, at a place where i was last week, but he kept away. here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky. i am sure i never knew till now whether the east or west or south were the quarter to pray for--but surely the weather was a little better last week, and you, were you not better? and do you know--but it's all self-flattery i believe,--still i cannot help fancying the east wind does my head harm too! ever yours faithfully, r. browning. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, may , .] people say of you and of me, dear mr. browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from 'vivian grey.' once i sate up all night to read 'vivian grey'; but i never drew such an argument from him. not that i give it up (nor _you_ up) for a mere mystery. nor that i can '_see what you have got in you_,' from a mere guess. but just observe! if i ask questions about novels, is it not because i want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our sympathies ... and whether there is room for my loose sleeves, and the lace lappets, as well as for my elbows; and because i want to see _you_ by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones; and because i am willing for you to know _me_ from the beginning, with all my weaknesses and foolishnesses, ... as they are accounted by people who say to me 'no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you were so and so.' now if i send all my idle questions to _colburn's magazine_, with other gothic literature, and take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman's needle, in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right--why the end would be that _you_ would take to 'running after the butterflies,' for change of air and exercise. and then ... oh ... then, my 'small neatly written manuscripts' might fall back into my desk...! (_not_ a 'full stop'!.) indeed ... i do assure you ... i never for a moment thought of 'making conversation' about the 'improvisatore' or novels in general, when i wrote what i did to you. i might, to other persons ... perhaps. certainly not to _you_. i was not dealing round from one pack of cards to you and to others. that's what you meant to reproach me for you know,--and of that, i am not guilty at all. i never could think of 'making conversation' in a letter to _you_--never. women are said to partake of the nature of children--and my brothers call me 'absurdly childish' sometimes: and i am capable of being childishly 'in earnest' about novels, and straws, and such 'puppydogs' tails' as my flush's! also i write more letters than you do, ... i write in fact almost as you pay visits, ... and one has to 'make conversation' in turn, of course. _but_--give me something to vow by--whatever you meant in the 'vivian grey' argument, you were wrong in it! and you never can be much more wrong--which is a comfortable reflection. yet you leap very high at dante's crown--or you do not leap, ... you simply extend your hand to it, and make a rustling among the laurel leaves, which is somewhat prophane. dante's poetry only materials for the northern rhymers! i must think of that ... if you please ... before i agree with you. dante's poetry seems to come down in hail, rather than in rain--but count me the drops congealed in one hailstone! oh! the 'flight of the duchess'--do let us hear more of her! are you (i wonder) ... not a 'self-flatterer,' ... but ... a flatterer. ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, may , .] now shall you see what you shall see--here shall be 'sound speech not to be reproved,'--for this morning you are to know that the soul of me has it all her own way, dear miss barrett, this green cool nine-in-the-morning time for my chestnut tree over there, and for me who only coaxed my good-natured--(really)--body up, after its three-hours' night-rest on condition it should lounge, or creep about, incognito and without consequences--and so it shall, all but my right-hand which is half-spirit and 'cuts' its poor relation, and passes itself off for somebody (that is, some soul) and is doubly active and ready on such occasions--now i shall tell you all about it, first what last letter meant, and then more. you are to know, then that for some reason, that looked like an instinct, i thought i ought not to send shaft on shaft, letter-plague on letter, with such an uninterrupted clanging ... that i ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before i shot down your dogs--but not being exactly phoibos apollon, you are to know further that when i _did_ think i might go modestly on, ... [greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from _you_, but from you in your special capacity of being _written_-to, not spoken-to) when i turned again you had grown formidable somehow--though that's not the word,--nor are you the person, either,--it was my fortune, my privilege of being your friend this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of than taking it up with talk about books and i don't know what. write what i will, you would read for once, i think--well, then,--what i shall write shall be--something on this book, and the other book, and my own books, and mary hewitt's books, and at the end of it--good bye, and i hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent. so the thought of what i should find in my heart to say, and the contrast with what i suppose i ought to say ... all these things are against me. but this is very foolish, all the same, i need not be told--and is part and parcel of an older--indeed primitive body of mine, which i shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when i cannot do all; seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no seeing and getting and enjoying _wholly_--and in this case, moreover, you are _you_, and know something about me, if not much, and have read bos on the art of supplying ellipses, and (after, particularly, i have confessed all this, why and how it has been) you will _subaudire_ when i pull out my mediæval-gothic-architectural-manuscript (so it was, i remember now,) and instruct you about corbeils and ogives ... though, after all, it was none of vivian's doing, that,--all the uncle kind or man's, which i never professed to be. now you see how i came to say some nonsense (i very vaguely think _what_) about dante--some desperate splash i know i made for the beginning of my picture, as when a painter at his wits' end and hunger's beginning says 'here shall the figure's hand be'--and spots _that_ down, meaning to reach it naturally from the other end of his canvas,--and leaving off tired, there you see the spectral disjoined thing, and nothing between it and rationality. i intended to shade down and soften off and put in and leave out, and, before i had done, bring italian poets round to their old place again in my heart, giving new praise if i took old,--anyhow dante is out of it all, as who knows but i, with all of him in my head and heart? but they do fret one, those tantalizing creatures, of fine passionate class, with such capabilities, and such a facility of being made pure mind of. and the special instance that vexed me, was that a man of sands and dog-roses and white rock and green sea-water just under, should come to italy where my heart lives, and discover the sights and sounds ... certainly discover them. and so do all northern writers; for take up handfuls of sonetti, rime, poemetti, doings of those who never did anything else,--and try and make out, for yourself, what ... say, what flowers they tread on, or trees they walk under,--as you might bid _them_, those tree and flower loving creatures, pick out of _our_ north poetry a notion of what _our_ daisies and harebells and furze bushes and brambles are--'odorosi fioretti, rose porporine, bianchissimi gigli.' and which of you eternal triflers was it called yourself 'shelley' and so told me years ago that in the mountains it was a feast when one should find those globes of deep red gold-- which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear, suspended in their emerald atmosphere. so that when my uncle walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer over monte calvano, and i felt the fruit against my face, the little ragged bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so well--'niursi--sorbi!' no, no,--does not all naples-bay and half sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the piedigrotta fête only to see the blessed king's volanti, or livery servants all in their best; as though heaven opened; and would not i engage to bring the whole of the piano (of sorrento) in likeness to a red velvet dressing gown properly spangled over, before the priest that held it out on a pole had even begun his story of how noah's son shem, the founder of sorrento, threw it off to swim thither, as the world knows he did? oh, it makes one's soul angry, so enough of it. but never enough of telling you--bring all your sympathies, come with loosest sleeves and longest lace-lappets, and you and yours shall find 'elbow room,' oh, shall you not! for never did man, woman or child, greek, hebrew, or as danish as our friend, like a thing, not to say love it, but i liked and loved it, one liking neutralizing the rebellious stir of its fellow, so that i don't go about now wanting the fixed stars before my time; this world has not escaped me, thank god; and--what other people say is the best of it, may not escape me after all, though until so very lately i made up my mind to do without it;--perhaps, on that account, and to make fair amends to other people, who, i have no right to say, complain without cause. i have been surprised, rather, with something not unlike illness of late--i have had a constant pain in the head for these two months, which only very rough exercise gets rid of, and which stops my 'luria' and much besides. i thought i never could be unwell. just now all of it is gone, thanks to polking all night and walking home by broad daylight to the surprise of the thrushes in the bush here. and do you know i said 'this must _go_, cannot mean to stay, so i will not tell miss barrett why this and this is not done,'--but i mean to tell you all, or more of the truth, because you call me 'flatterer,' so that my eyes widened again! i, and in what? and of whom, pray? not of _you_, at all events,--of whom then? _do_ tell me, because i want to stand with you--and am quite in earnest there. and 'the flight of the duchess,' to leave nothing out, is only the beginning of a story written some time ago, and given to poor hood in his emergency at a day's notice,--the true stuff and story is all to come, the 'flight,' and what you allude to is the mere introduction--but the magazine has passed into other hands and i must put the rest in some 'bell' or other--it is one of my dramatic romances. so is a certain 'saul' i should like to show you one day--an ominous liking--for nobody ever sees what i do till it is printed. but as you _do_ know the printed little part of me, i should not be sorry if, in justice, you knew all i have _really_ done,--written in the portfolio there,--though that would be far enough from _this_ me, that wishes to you now. i should like to write something in concert with you, how i would try! i have read your letter through again. does this clear up all the difficulty, and do you see that i never dreamed of 'reproaching you for dealing out one sort of cards to me and everybody else'--but that ... why, '_that_' which i have, i hope, said, so need not resay. i will tell you--sydney smith laughs somewhere at some methodist or other whose wont was, on meeting an acquaintance in the street, to open at once on him with some enquiry after the state of his soul--sydney knows better now, and sees that one might quite as wisely ask such questions as the price of illinois stock or condition of glebe-land,--and i _could_ say such--'could,'--the plague of it! so no more at present from your loving.... or, let me tell you i am going to see mr. kenyon on the th inst.--that you do not tell me how you are, and that yet if you do not continue to improve in health ... i shall not see you--not--not--not--what 'knots' to untie! surely the wind that sets my chestnut-tree dancing, all its baby-cone-blossoms, green now, rocking like fairy castles on a hill in an earthquake,--that is south west, surely! god bless you, and me in that--and do write to me soon, and tell me who was the 'flatterer,' and how he never was yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday--and tuesday. [post-mark, may , .] so when wise people happen to be ill, they sit up till six o'clock in the morning and get up again at nine? do tell me how lurias can ever be made out of such ungodly imprudences. if the wind blows east or west, where can any remedy be, while such evil deeds are being committed? and what is to be the end of it? and what is the reasonableness of it in the meantime, when we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others, ... throwing over and buckling in that fold of death, to stroke the life-purple smoother. you have to live your own personal life, and also luria's life--and therefore you should sleep for both. it is logical indeed--and rational, ... which logic is not always ... and if i had 'the tongue of men and of angels,' i would use it to persuade you. polka, for the rest, may be good; but sleep is better. i think better of sleep than i ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies. and besides, ... praise your 'goodnatured body' as you like, ... it is only a seeming goodnature! bodies bear malice in a terrible way, be very sure!--appear mild and smiling for a few short years, and then ... out with a cold steel; and the _soul has it_, 'with a vengeance,' ... according to the phrase! you will not persist, (will you?) in this experimental homicide. or tell me if you will, that i may do some more tearing. it really, really is wrong. exercise is one sort of rest and you feel relieved by it--and sleep is another: one being as necessary as the other. this is the first thing i have to say. the next is a question. _what do you mean about your manuscripts ... about 'saul' and the portfolio?_ for i am afraid of hazardously supplying ellipses--and your 'bos' comes to [greek: bous epi glôssê].[ ] i get half bribed to silence by the very pleasure of fancying. but if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me.... can it be? or am i reading this 'attic contraction' quite the wrong way? you see i am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered; the fatal difference. and now will you understand that i should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the 'portfolio,' ... however incarnated with blots and pen-scratches, ... to be able to ask impudently of them now? is that plain? it must be, ... at any rate, ... that if _you_ would like to 'write something together' with me, _i_ should like it still better. i should like it for some ineffable reasons. and i should not like it a bit the less for the grand supply of jests it would administer to the critical board of trade, about visible darkness, multiplied by two, mounting into palpable obscure. we should not mind ... should we? _you_ would not mind, if you had got over certain other considerations deconsiderating to your coadjutor. yes--but i dare not do it, ... i mean, think of it, ... just now, if ever: and i will tell you why in a mediæval-gothic-architectural manuscript. the only poet by profession (if i may say so,) except yourself, with whom i ever had much intercourse even on paper, (if this is near to 'much') has been mr. horne. we approached each other on the point of one of miss mitford's annual editorships; and ever since, he has had the habit of writing to me occasionally; and when i was too ill to write at all, in my dreary devonshire days, i was his debtor for various little kindnesses, ... for which i continue his debtor. in my opinion he is a truehearted and generous man. do you not think so? well--long and long ago, he asked me to write a drama with him on the greek model; that is, for me to write the choruses, and for him to do the dialogue. just then it was quite doubtful in my own mind, and worse than doubtful, whether i ever should write again; and the very doubtfulness made me speak my 'yes' more readily. then i was desired to make a subject, ... to conceive a plan; and my plan was of a man, haunted by his own soul, ... (making her a separate personal psyche, a dreadful, beautiful psyche)--the man being haunted and terrified through all the turns of life by her. did you ever feel afraid of your own soul, as i have done? i think it is a true wonder of our humanity--and fit subject enough for a wild lyrical drama. i should like to write it by myself at least, well enough. but with him i will not now. it was delayed ... delayed. he cut the plan up into scenes ... i mean into a list of scenes ... a sort of ground-map to work on--and there it lies. nothing more was done. it all lies in one sheet--and i have offered to give up my copyright of idea in it--if he likes to use it alone--or i should not object to work it out alone on my own side, since it comes from me: only i will not consent now to a _double work_ in it. there are objections--none, be it well understood, in mr. horne's disfavour,--for i think of him as well at this moment, and the same in all essential points, as i ever did. he is a man of fine imagination, and is besides good and generous. in the course of our acquaintance (on paper--for i never saw him) i never was angry with him except once; and then, _i_ was quite wrong and had to confess it. but this is being too 'mediæval.' only you will see from it that i am a little entangled on the subject of compound works, and must look where i tread ... and you will understand (if you ever hear from mr. kenyon or elsewhere that i am going to write a compound-poem with mr. horne) how it _was_ true, and isn't true any more. yes--you are going to mr. kenyon's on the th--and yes--my brother and sister are going to meet you and your sister there one day to dinner. shall i have courage to see you soon, i wonder! if you ask me, i must ask myself. but oh, this make-believe may--it can't be may after all! if a south-west wind sate in your chestnut tree, it was but for a few hours--the east wind 'came up this way' by the earliest opportunity of succession. as the old 'mysteries' showed 'beelzebub with a bearde,' even so has the east wind had a 'bearde' of late, in a full growth of bristling exaggerations--the english spring-winds have excelled themselves in evil this year; and i have not been down-stairs yet.--_but_ i am certainly stronger and better than i was--that is undeniable--and i _shall_ be better still. you are not going away soon--are you? in the meantime you do not know what it is to be ... a little afraid of paracelsus. so right about the italians! and the 'rose porporine' which made me smile. how is the head? ever yours, e.b.b. is the 'flight of the duchess' in the portfolio? of course you must ring the bell. that poem has a strong heart in it, to begin _so_ strongly. poor hood! and all those thoughts fall mixed together. may god bless you. [footnote : aeschylus, _agamemnon_ : 'an ox hath trodden on my tongue'--a greek proverb implying silence.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday--in the last hour of it. [post-mark, may , .] may i ask how the head is? just under the bag? mr. kenyon was here to-day and told me such bad news that i cannot sleep to-night (although i did think once of doing it) without asking such a question as this, dear mr. browning. let me hear how you are--will you? and let me hear (if i can) that it was prudence or some unchristian virtue of the sort, and not a dreary necessity, which made you put aside the engagement for tuesday--for monday. i had been thinking so of seeing you on tuesday ... with my sister's eyes--for the first sight. and now if you have done killing the mules and the dogs, let me have a straight quick arrow for myself, if you please. just a word, to say how you are. i ask for no more than a word, lest the writing should be hurtful to you. may god bless you always. your friend, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday. [post-mark, may , .] my dear, own friend, i am quite well now, or next to it--but this is how it was,--i have gone out a great deal of late, and my head took to ringing such a literal alarum that i wondered what was to come of it; and at last, a few evenings ago, as i was dressing for a dinner somewhere, i got really bad of a sudden, and kept at home to my friend's heartrending disappointment. next morning i was no better--and it struck me that i should be really disappointing dear kind mr. kenyon, and wasting his time, if that engagement, too, were broken with as little warning,--so i thought it best to forego all hopes of seeing him, at such a risk. and that done, i got rid of every other promise to pay visits for next week and next, and told everybody, with considerable dignity, that my london season was over for this year, as it assuredly is--and i shall be worried no more, and let walk in the garden, and go to bed at ten o'clock, and get done with what is most expedient to do, and my 'flesh shall come again like a little child's,' and one day, oh the day, i shall see you with my own, own eyes ... for, how little you understand me; or rather, yourself,--if you think i would dare see you, without your leave, that way! do you suppose that your power of giving and refusing ends when you have shut your room-door? did i not tell you i turned down another street, even, the other day, and why not down yours? and often as i see mr. kenyon, have i ever dreamed of asking any but the merest conventional questions about you; your health, and no more? i will answer your letter, the last one, to-morrow--i have said nothing of what i want to say. ever yours r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, may , .] did i thank you with any effect in the lines i sent yesterday, dear miss barrett? i know i felt most thankful, and, of course, began reasoning myself into the impropriety of allowing a 'more' or a 'most' in feelings of that sort towards you. i am thankful for you, all about you--as, do you not know? thank you, from my soul. now, let me never pass occasion of speaking well of horne, who deserves your opinion of him,--it is my own, too.--he has unmistakable genius, and is a fine, honest, enthusiastic chivalrous fellow--it is the fashion to affect to sneer at him, of late, i think--the people he has praised fancying that they 'pose' themselves sculpturesquely in playing the greatly indifferent, and the other kind shaking each other's hands in hysterical congratulations at having escaped such a dishonour: _i_ feel grateful to him, i know, for his generous criticism, and glad and proud of in any way approaching such a man's standard of poetical height. and he might be a disappointed man too,--for the players trifled with and teased out his very nature, which has a strange aspiration for the horrible tin-and-lacquer 'crown' they give one from their clouds (of smooth shaven deal done over blue)--and he don't give up the bad business yet, but thinks a 'small' theatre would somehow not be a theatre, and an actor not quite an actor ... i forget in what way, but the upshot is, he bates not a jot in that rouged, wigged, padded, empty-headed, heartless tribe of grimacers that came and canted me; not i, them;--a thing he cannot understand--_so_, i am not the one he would have picked out to praise, had he not been _loyal_. i know he admires your poetry properly. god help him, and send some great artist from the country, (who can read and write beside comprehending shakspeare, and who 'exasperates his h's' when the feat is to be done)--to undertake the part of cosmo, or gregory, or what shall most soothe his spirit! the subject of your play is tempting indeed--and reminds one of that wild drama of calderon's which frightened shelley just before his death--also, of fuseli's theory with reference to his own picture of macbeth in the witches' cave ... wherein the apparition of the armed head from the cauldron is macbeth's own. 'if you ask me, i must ask myself'--that is, when i am to see you--i will _never_ ask you! you do _not_ know what i shall estimate that permission at,--nor do i, quite--but you do--do not you? know so much of me as to make my 'asking' worse than a form--i do not 'ask' you to write to me--not _directly_ ask, at least. i will tell you--i ask you _not_ to see me so long as you are unwell, or mistrustful of-- no, no, that is being too grand! do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself yours r.b. a kind, so kind, note from mr. kenyon came. we, i and my sister, are to go in june instead.... i shall go nowhere till then; i am nearly well--all save one little wheel in my head that keeps on its [illustration: music: bass clef, b-flat, _sostenuto_] that you are better i am most thankful. 'next letter' to say how you must help me with all my new romances and lyrics, and lays and plays, and read them and heed them and end them and mend them! _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, may , .] but how 'mistrustfulness'? and how 'that way?' what have i said or done, _i_, who am not apt to _be_ mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if i began with _you_! what can i have said, i say to myself again and again. one thing, at any rate, i have done, 'that way' or this way! i have made what is vulgarly called a 'piece of work' about little; or seemed to make it. forgive me. i am shy by nature:--and by position and experience, ... by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, ... by these things together and by others besides, i have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. only not mistrustful. you could not mean to judge me so. mistrustful people do not write as i write, surely! for wasn't it a richelieu or mazarin (or who?) who said that with five lines from anyone's hand, he could take off his head for a corollary? i think so. well!--but this is to prove that i am not mistrustful, and to say, that if you care to come to see me you can come; and that it is my gain (as i feel it to be) and not yours, whenever you do come. you will not talk of having come afterwards i know, because although i am 'fast bound' to see one or two persons this summer (besides yourself, whom i receive of choice and willingly) i _cannot_ admit visitors in a general way--and putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar's hat for sympathy. i should blame it in another woman--and the sense of it has had its weight with me sometimes. for the rest, ... when you write, that _i_ do not know how you would value, &c. _nor yourself quite_, you touch very accurately on the truth ... and _so_ accurately in the last clause, that to read it, made me smile 'tant bien que mal.' certainly you cannot 'quite know,' or know at all, whether the least straw of pleasure can go to you from knowing me otherwise than on this paper--and i, for my part, 'quite know' my own honest impression, dear mr. browning, that none is likely to go to you. there is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me--i never learnt to talk as you do in london; although i can admire that brightness of carved speech in mr. kenyon and others. if my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. i have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark. and if i write all this egotism, ... it is for shame; and because i feel ashamed of having made a fuss about what is not worth it; and because you are extravagant in caring so for a permission, which will be nothing to you afterwards. not that i am not touched by your caring so at all! i am deeply touched now; and presently, ... i shall understand. come then. there will be truth and simplicity for you in any case; and a friend. and do not answer this--i do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. your spider would scorn me for it too much. also, ... as to the how and when. you are not well now, and it cannot be good for you to do anything but be quiet and keep away that dreadful musical note in the head. i entreat you not to think of coming until _that_ is all put to silence satisfactorily. when it is done, ... you must choose whether you would like best to come with mr. kenyon or to come alone--and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and i will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, ... any day after two, or before six. and my sister will bring you up-stairs to me; and we will talk; or _you_ will talk; and you will try to be indulgent, and like me as well as you can. if, on the other hand, you would rather come with mr. kenyon, you must wait, i imagine, till june,--because he goes away on monday and is not likely immediately to return--no, on saturday, to-morrow. in the meantime, why i should be '_thanked_,' is an absolute mystery to me--but i leave it! you are generous and impetuous; _that_, i can see and feel; and so far from being of an inclination to mistrust you or distrust you, i do profess to have as much faith in your full, pure loyalty, as if i had known you personally as many years as i have appreciated your genius. believe this of me--for it is spoken truly. in the matter of shakespeare's 'poor players' you are severe--and yet i was glad to hear you severe--it is a happy excess, i think. when men of intense reality, as all great poets must be, give their hearts to be trodden on and tied up with ribbons in turn, by men of masks, there will be torture if there is not desecration. not that i know much of such things--but i have _heard_. heard from mr. kenyon; heard from miss mitford; who however is passionately fond of the theatre as a writer's medium--_not at all_, from mr. horne himself, ... except what he has printed on the subject. yes--he has been infamously used on the point of the 'new spirit'--only he should have been prepared for the infamy--it was leaping into a gulph, ... not to 'save the republic,' but '_pour rire_': it was not merely putting one's foot into a hornet's nest, but taking off a shoe and stocking to do it. and to think of dickens being dissatisfied! to think of tennyson's friends grumbling!--he himself did not, i hope and trust. for you, you certainly were not adequately treated--and above all, you were not placed with your _peers_ in that chapter--but that there was an intention to do you justice, and that there _is_ a righteous appreciation of you in the writer, i know and am sure,--and that _you_ should be sensible to this, is only what i should know and be sure of _you_. mr. horne is quite above the narrow, vicious, hateful jealousy of contemporaries, which we hear reproached, too justly sometimes, on men of letters. i go on writing as if i were not going to see you--soon perhaps. remember that the how and the when rest with you--except that it cannot be before next week at the soonest. you are to decide. always your friend, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday night. [post-mark, may , .] my friend is not 'mistrustful' of me, no, because she don't fear i shall make mainprize of the stray cloaks and umbrellas down-stairs, or turn an article for _colburn's_ on her sayings and doings up-stairs,--but spite of that, she does mistrust ... _so_ mistrust my common sense,--nay, uncommon and dramatic-poet's sense, if i am put on asserting it!--all which pieces of mistrust i could detect, and catch struggling, and pin to death in a moment, and put a label in, with name, genus and species, just like a horrible entomologist; only i won't, because the first visit of the northwind will carry the whole tribe into the red sea--and those horns and tails and scalewings are best forgotten altogether. and now will i say a cutting thing and have done. have i trusted _my_ friend so,--or said even to myself, much less to her, she is even as--'mr. simpson' who desireth the honour of the acquaintance of mr. b. whose admirable works have long been his, simpson's, especial solace in private--and who accordingly is led to that personage by a mutual friend--simpson blushing as only adorable ingenuousness can, and twisting the brim of his hat like a sailor giving evidence. whereupon mr. b. beginneth by remarking that the rooms are growing hot--or that he supposes mr. s. has not heard if there will be another adjournment of the house to-night--whereupon mr. s. looketh up all at once, brusheth the brim smooth again with his sleeve, and takes to his assurance once more, in something of a huff, and after staying his five minutes out for decency's sake, noddeth familiarly an adieu, and spinning round on his heel ejaculateth mentally--'well, i _did_ expect to see something different from that little yellow commonplace man ... and, now i come to think, there _was_ some precious trash in that book of his'--have _i_ said 'so will miss barrett ejaculate?' dear miss barrett, i thank you for the leave you give me, and for the infinite kindness of the way of giving it. i will call at on tuesday--not sooner, that you may have time to write should any adverse circumstances happen ... not that they need inconvenience you, because ... what i want particularly to tell you for now and hereafter--do not mind my coming in the least, but--should you be unwell, for instance,--just send or leave word, and i will come again, and again, and again--my time is of _no_ importance, and i have acquaintances thick in the vicinity. now if i do not seem grateful enough to you, _am_ i so much to blame? you see it is high time you _saw_ me, for i have clearly written myself _out_! ever yours, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, may , .] i shall be ready on tuesday i hope, but i hate and protest against your horrible 'entomology.' beginning to explain, would thrust me lower and lower down the circles of some sort of an 'inferno'; only with my dying breath i would maintain that i never could, consciously or unconsciously, mean to distrust you; or, the least in the world, to simpsonize you. what i said, ... it was _you_ that put it into my head to say it--for certainly, in my usual disinclination to receive visitors, such a feeling does not enter. there, now! there, i am a whole 'giro' lower! now, you will say perhaps that i distrust _you_, and nobody else! so it is best to be silent, and bear all the 'cutting things' with resignation! _that_ is certain. still i must really say, under this dreadful incubus-charge of simpsonism, ... that you, who know everything, or at least make awful guesses at everything in one's feelings and motives, and profess to be able to pin them down in a book of classified inscriptions, ... should have been able to understand better, or misunderstand less, in a matter like this--yes! i think so. i think you should have made out the case in some such way as it was in nature--viz. that you had lashed yourself up to an exorbitant wishing to see me, ... (you who could see, any day, people who are a hundredfold and to all social purposes, my superiors!) because i was unfortunate enough to be shut up in a room and silly enough to make a fuss about opening the door; and that i grew suddenly abashed by the consciousness of this. how different from a distrust of _you_! how different! ah--if, after this day, you ever see any interpretable sign of distrustfulness in me, you may be 'cutting' again, and i will not cry out. in the meantime here is a fact for your 'entomology.' i have not so much _distrust_, as will make a _doubt_, as will make a _curiosity_ for next tuesday. not the simplest modification of _curiosity_ enters into the state of feeling with which i wait for tuesday:--and if you are angry to hear me say so, ... why, you are more unjust than ever. (let it be three instead of two--if the hour be as convenient to yourself.) before you come, try to forgive me for my 'infinite kindness' in the manner of consenting to see you. is it 'the cruellest cut of all' when you talk of infinite kindness, yet attribute such villainy to me? well! but we are friends till tuesday--and after perhaps. ever yours, e.b.b. if on tuesday you should be not well, _pray do not come_--now, that is my request to your kindness.[ ] [footnote : envelope endorsed by robert browning:--tuesday, may , , - - / p.m.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, may , .] i trust to you for a true account of how you are--if tired, if not tired, if i did wrong in any thing,--or, if you please, _right_ in any thing--(only, not one more word about my 'kindness,' which, to get done with, i will grant is exceptive)--but, let us so arrange matters if possible,--and why should it not be--that my great happiness, such as it will be if i see you, as this morning, from time to time, may be obtained at the cost of as little inconvenience to you as we can contrive. for an instance--just what strikes me--they all say here i speak very loud--(a trick caught from having often to talk with a deaf relative of mine). and did i stay too long? i will tell _you_ unhesitatingly of such 'corrigenda'--nay, i will again say, do not humiliate me--_do not_ again,--by calling me 'kind' in that way. i am proud and happy in your friendship--now and ever. may god bless you! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, may , .] indeed there was nothing wrong--how could there be? and there was everything right--as how should there not be? and as for the 'loud speaking,' i did not hear any--and, instead of being worse, i ought to be better for what was certainly (to speak it, or be silent of it,) happiness and honour to me yesterday. which reminds me to observe that you are so restricting our vocabulary, as to be ominous of silence in a full sense, presently. first, one word is not to be spoken--and then, another is not. and why? why deny me the use of such words as have natural feelings belonging to them--and how can the use of such be 'humiliating' to _you_? if my heart were open to you, you could see nothing offensive to you in any thought there or trace of thought that has been there--but it is hard for you to understand, with all your psychology (and to be reminded of it i have just been looking at the preface of some poems by some mr. gurney where he speaks of 'the reflective wisdom of a wordsworth and the profound psychological utterances of a browning') it is hard for you to understand what my mental position is after the peculiar experience i have suffered, and what [greek: ti emoi kai soi][ ] a sort of feeling is irrepressible from me to you, when, from the height of your brilliant happy sphere, you ask, as you did ask, for personal intercourse with me. what words but 'kindness' ... but 'gratitude'--but i will not in any case be _un_kind and _un_grateful, and do what is displeasing to you. and let us both leave the subject with the words--because we perceive in it from different points of view; we stand on the black and white sides of the shield; and there is no coming to a conclusion. but you will come really on tuesday--and again, when you like and can together--and it will not be more 'inconvenient' to me to be pleased, i suppose, than it is to people in general--will it, do you think? ah--how you misjudge! why it must obviously and naturally be delightful to me to receive you here when you like to come, and it cannot be necessary for me to say so in set words--believe it of your friend, e.b.b. [mr. browning's letter, to which the following is in answer was destroyed, see page of the present volume.] [footnote : 'what have i to do with thee?'] _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, may , .] i intended to write to you last night and this morning, and could not,--you do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly. and if i disobey you, my dear friend, in speaking, (i for my part) of your wild speaking, i do it, not to displease you, but to be in my own eyes, and before god, a little more worthy, or less unworthy, of a generosity from which i recoil by instinct and at the first glance, yet conclusively; and because my silence would be the most disloyal of all means of expression, in reference to it. listen to me then in this. you have said some intemperate things ... fancies,--which you will not say over again, nor unsay, but _forget at once_, and _for ever, having said at all_; and which (so) will die out between _you and me alone_, like a misprint between you and the printer. and this you will do _for my sake_ who am your friend (and you have none truer)--and this i ask, because it is a condition necessary to our future liberty of intercourse. you remember--surely you do--that i am in the most exceptional of positions; and that, just _because of it_, i am able to receive you as i did on tuesday; and that, for me to listen to 'unconscious exaggerations,' is as unbecoming to the humilities of my position, as unpropitious (which is of more consequence) to the prosperities of yours. now, if there should be one word of answer attempted to this; or of reference; _i must not_ ... i _will not see you again_--and you will justify me later in your heart. so for my sake you will not say it--i think you will not--and spare me the sadness of having to break through an intercourse just as it is promising pleasure to me; to me who have so many sadnesses and so few pleasures. you will!--and i need not be uneasy--and i shall owe you that tranquillity, as one gift of many. for, that i have much to receive from you in all the free gifts of thinking, teaching, master-spirits, ... _that_, i know!--it is my own praise that i appreciate you, as none can more. your influence and help in poetry will be full of good and gladness to me--for with many to love me in this house, there is no one to judge me ... _now_. your friendship and sympathy will be dear and precious to me all my life, if you indeed leave them with me so long or so little. your mistakes in me ... which _i_ cannot mistake (--and which have humbled me by too much honouring--) i put away gently, and with grateful tears in my eyes; because _all that hail_ will beat down and spoil crowns, as well as 'blossoms.' if i put off next tuesday to the week after--i mean your visit,--shall you care much? for the relations i named to you, are to be in london next week; and i am to see one of my aunts whom i love, and have not met since my great affliction--and it will all seem to come over again, and i shall be out of spirits and nerves. on tuesday week you can bring a tomahawk and do the criticism, and i shall try to have my courage ready for it--oh, you will do me so much good--and mr. kenyon calls me 'docile' sometimes i assure you; when he wants to flatter me out of being obstinate--and in good earnest, i believe i shall do everything you tell me. the 'prometheus' is done--but the monodrama is where it was--and the novel, not at all. but i think of some half promises half given, about something i read for 'saul'--and the 'flight of the duchess'--where is she? you are not displeased with me? _no, that_ would be hail and lightning together--i do not write as i might, of some words of yours--but you know that i am not a stone, even if silent like one. and if in the _un_silence, i have said one word to vex you, pity me for having had to say it--and for the rest, may god bless you far beyond the reach of vexation from my words or my deeds! your friend in grateful regard, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, may , .] don't you remember i told you, once on a time that you 'knew nothing of me'? whereat you demurred--but i meant what i said, and knew it was so. to be grand in a simile, for every poor speck of a vesuvius or a stromboli in my microcosm there are huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water--and i make the most of my two or three fire-eyes, because i know by experience, alas, how these tend to extinction--and the ice grows and grows--still this last is true part of me, most characteristic part, _best_ part perhaps, and i disown nothing--only,--when you talked of '_knowing_ me'! still, i am utterly unused, of these late years particularly, to dream of communicating anything about _that_ to another person (all my writings are purely dramatic as i am always anxious to say) that when i make never so little an attempt, no wonder if i _bungle_ notably--'language,' too is an organ that never studded this heavy heavy head of mine. will you not think me very brutal if i tell you i could almost smile at your misapprehension of what i meant to write?--yet i _will_ tell you, because it will undo the bad effect of my thoughtlessness, and at the same time exemplify the point i have all along been honestly earnest to set you right upon ... my real inferiority to you; just that and no more. i wrote to you, in an unwise moment, on the spur of being again 'thanked,' and, unwisely writing just as if thinking to myself, said what must have looked absurd enough as seen apart from the horrible counterbalancing never-to-be-written _rest of me_--by the side of which, could it be written and put before you, my note would sink to its proper and relative place, and become a mere 'thank you' for your good opinion--which i assure you is far too generous--for i really believe you to be my superior in many respects, and feel uncomfortable till _you_ see that, too--since i hope for your sympathy and assistance, and 'frankness is everything in such a case.' i do assure you, that had you read my note, _only_ having '_known_' so much of me as is implied in having inspected, for instance, the contents, merely, of that fatal and often-referred-to 'portfolio' there (_dii meliora piis!_), you would see in it, (the note not the portfolio) the blandest utterance ever mild gentleman gave birth to. but i forgot that one may make too much noise in a silent place by playing the few notes on the 'ear-piercing fife' which in othello's regimental band might have been thumped into decent subordination by his 'spirit-stirring drum'--to say nothing of gong and ophicleide. will you forgive me, on promise to remember for the future, and be more considerate? not that you must too much despise me, neither; nor, of all things, apprehend i am attitudinizing à la byron, and giving you to understand unutterable somethings, longings for lethe and all that--far from it! i never committed murders, and sleep the soundest of sleeps--but 'the heart is desperately wicked,' that is true, and though i dare not say 'i know' mine, yet i have had signal opportunities, i who began life from the beginning, and can forget nothing (but names, and the date of the battle of waterloo), and have known good and wicked men and women, gentle and simple, shaking hands with edmund kean and father mathew, you and--ottima! then, i had a certain faculty of self-consciousness, years and years ago, at which john mill wondered, and which ought to be improved by this time, if constant use helps at all--and, meaning, on the whole, to be a poet, if not _the_ poet ... for i am vain and ambitious some nights,--i do myself justice, and dare call things by their names to myself, and say boldly, this i love, this i hate, this i would do, this i would not do, under all kinds of circumstances,--and talking (thinking) in this style _to myself_, and beginning, however tremblingly, in spite of conviction, to write in this style _for myself_--on the top of the desk which contains my 'songs of the poets--no. i m.p.', i wrote,--what you now forgive, i know! because i am, from my heart, sorry that by a foolish fit of inconsideration i should have given pain for a minute to you, towards whom, on every account, i would rather soften and 'sleeken every word as to a bird' ... (and, not such a bird as my black self that go screeching about the world for 'dead horse'--corvus (picus)--mirandola!) i, too, who have been at such pains to acquire the reputation i enjoy in the world,--(ask mr. kenyon,) and who dine, and wine, and dance and enhance the company's pleasure till they make me ill and i keep house, as of late: mr. kenyon, (for i only quote where you may verify if you please) _he_ says my common sense strikes him, and its contrast with my muddy metaphysical poetry! and so it shall strike you--for though i am glad that, since you _did_ misunderstand me, you said so, and have given me an opportunity of doing by another way what i wished to do in _that_,--yet, if you had _not_ alluded to my writing, as i meant you should not, you would have certainly understood _something_ of its drift when you found me next tuesday precisely the same quiet (no, for i feel i speak too loudly, in spite of your kind disclaimer, but--) the same mild man-about-town you were gracious to, the other morning--for, indeed, my own way of worldly life is marked out long ago, as precisely as yours can be, and i am set going with a hand, winker-wise, on each side of my head, and a directing finger before my eyes, to say nothing of an instinctive dread i have that a certain whip-lash is vibrating somewhere in the neighbourhood in playful readiness! so 'i hope here be proofs,' dogberry's satisfaction that, first, i am but a very poor creature compared to you and entitled by my wants to look up to you,--all i meant to say from the first of the first--and that, next, i shall be too much punished if, for this piece of mere inconsideration, you deprive me, more or less, or sooner or later, of the pleasure of seeing you,--a little over boisterous gratitude for which, perhaps, caused all the mischief! the reasons you give for deferring my visits next week are too cogent for me to dispute--that is too true--and, being now and henceforward 'on my good behaviour,' i will at once cheerfully submit to them, if needs must--but should your mere kindness and forethought, as i half suspect, have induced you to take such a step, you will now smile with me, at this new and very unnecessary addition to the 'fears of me' i have got so triumphantly over in your case! wise man, was i not, to clench my first favourable impression so adroitly ... like a recent cambridge worthy, my sister heard of; who, being on his theological (or rather, scripture-historical) examination, was asked by the tutor, who wished to let him off easily, 'who was the first king of israel?'--'saul' answered the trembling youth. 'good!' nodded approvingly the tutor. 'otherwise called _paul_,' subjoined the youth in his elation! now i have begged pardon, and blushingly assured you _that_ was only a slip of the tongue, and that i did really _mean_ all the while, (paul or no paul), the veritable son of kish, he that owned the asses, and found listening to the harp the best of all things for an evil spirit! pray write me a line to say, 'oh ... if _that's_ all!' and remember me for good (which is very compatible with a moment's stupidity) and let me not for one fault, (and that the only one that shall be), lose _any pleasure_ ... for your friendship i am sure i have not lost--god bless you, my dear friend! r. browning. and by the way, will it not be better, as co-operating with you more effectually in your kind promise to forget the 'printer's error' in my blotted proof, to send me back that same 'proof,' if you have not inflicted proper and summary justice on it? when mephistopheles last came to see us in this world outside here, he counselled sundry of us 'never to write a letter,--and never to burn one'--do you know that? but i never mind what i am told! seriously, i am ashamed.... i shall next ask a servant for my paste in the 'high fantastical' style of my own 'luria.' _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday [may , ]. i owe you the most humble of apologies dear mr. browning, for having spent so much solemnity on so simple a matter, and i hasten to pay it; confessing at the same time (as why should i not?) that i am quite as much ashamed of myself as i ought to be, which is not a little. you will find it difficult to believe me perhaps when i assure you that i never made such a mistake (i mean of over-seriousness to indefinite compliments), no, never in my life before--indeed my sisters have often jested with me (in matters of which they were cognizant) on my supernatural indifference to the superlative degree in general, as if it meant nothing in grammar. i usually know well that 'boots' may be called for in this world of ours, just as you called for yours; and that to bring '_bootes_,' were the vilest of mal-à-pro-pos-ities. also, i should have understood 'boots' where you wrote it, in the letter in question; if it had not been for _the relation of two things_ in it--and now i perfectly seem to see _how_ i mistook that relation; ('_seem to see_'; because i have not looked into the letter again since your last night's commentary, and will not--) inasmuch as i have observed before in my own mind, that a good deal of what is called obscurity in you, arises from a habit of very subtle association; so subtle, that you are probably unconscious of it, ... and the effect of which is to throw together on the same level and in the same light, things of likeness and unlikeness--till the reader grows confused as i did, and takes one for another. i may say however, in a poor justice to myself, that i wrote what i wrote so unfortunately, _through reverence for you_, and not at all from vanity in my own account ... although i do feel palpably while i write these words here and now, that i might as well leave them unwritten; for that no man of the world who ever lived in the world (not even _you_) could be expected to believe them, though said, sung, and sworn. for the rest, it is scarcely an apposite moment for you to talk, even 'dramatically,' of my 'superiority' to you, ... unless you mean, which perhaps you do mean, my superiority in _simplicity_--and, verily, to some of the 'adorable ingenuousness,' sacred to the shade of simpson, i may put in a modest claim, ... 'and have my claim allowed.' 'pray do not mock me' i quote again from your shakespeare to you who are a dramatic poet; ... and i will admit anything that you like, (being humble just now)--even that i _did not know you_. i was certainly innocent of the knowledge of the 'ice and cold water' you introduce me to, and am only just shaking my head, as flush would, after a first wholesome plunge. well--if i do not know you, i shall learn, i suppose, in time. i am ready to try humbly to learn--and i may perhaps--if you are not done in sanscrit, which is too hard for me, ... notwithstanding that i had the pleasure yesterday to hear, from america, of my profound skill in 'various languages less known than hebrew'!--a liberal paraphrase on mr. horne's large fancies on the like subject, and a satisfactory reputation in itself--as long as it is not necessary to deserve it. so i here enclose to you your letter back again, as you wisely desire; although you never could doubt, i hope, for a moment, of its safety with me in the completest of senses: and then, from the heights of my superior ... stultity, and other qualities of the like order, ... i venture to advise you ... however (to speak of the letter critically, and as the dramatic composition it is) it is to be admitted to be very beautiful, and well worthy of the rest of its kin in the portfolio, ... 'lays of the poets,' or otherwise, ... i venture to advise you to burn it at once. and then, my dear friend, i ask you (having some claim) to burn at the same time the letter i was fortunate enough to write to you on friday, and this present one--don't send them back to me; i hate to have letters sent back--but burn them for me and never mind mephistopheles. after which friendly turn, you will do me the one last kindness of forgetting all this exquisite nonsense, and of refraining from mentioning it, by breath or pen, _to me or another_. now i trust you so far:--you will put it with the date of the battle of waterloo--and i, with every date in chronology; seeing that i can remember none of them. and we will shuffle the cards and take patience, and begin the game again, if you please--and i shall bear in mind that you are a dramatic poet, which is not the same thing, by any means, with _us_ of the primitive simplicities, who don't tread on cothurns nor shift the mask in the scene. and i will reverence you both as 'a poet' and as '_the_ poet'; because it is no false 'ambition,' but a right you have--and one which those who live longest, will see justified to the uttermost.... in the meantime i need not ask mr. kenyon if you have any sense, because i have no doubt that you have quite sense enough--and even if i had a doubt, i shall prefer judging for myself without interposition; which i can do, you know, as long as you like to come and see me. and you can come this week if you do like it--because our relations don't come till the end of it, it appears--not that i made a pretence 'out of kindness'--pray don't judge me so outrageously--but if you like to come ... not on tuesday ... but on wednesday at three o'clock, i shall be very glad to see you; and i, for one, shall have forgotten everything by that time; being quick at forgetting my own faults usually. if wednesday does not suit you, i am not sure that i _can_ see you this week--but it depends on circumstances. only don't think yourself _obliged_ to come on wednesday. you know i _began_ by entreating you to be open and sincere with me--and no more--i _require_ no 'sleekening of every word.' i love the truth and can bear it--whether in word or deed--and those who have known me longest would tell you so fullest. well!--may god bless you. we shall know each other some day perhaps--and i am always and faithfully your friend, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, may , .] nay--i _must_ have last word--as all people in the wrong desire to have--and then, no more of the subject. you said i had given you _great pain_--so long as i stop _that_, think anything of me you choose or can! but _before_ your former letter came, i saw the pre-ordained uselessness of mine. speaking is to some _end_, (apart from foolish self-relief, which, after all, i can do without)--and where there is _no_ end--you see! or, to finish characteristically--since the offering to cut off one's right-hand to save anybody a headache, is in vile taste, even for our melodramas, seeing that it was never yet believed in on the stage or off it,--how much worse to really make the ugly chop, and afterwards come sheepishly in, one's arm in a black sling, and find that the delectable gift had changed aching to nausea! there! and now, 'exit, prompt-side, nearest door, luria'--and enter r.b.--next wednesday,--as boldly as he suspects most people do just after they have been soundly frightened! i shall be most happy to see you on the day and at the hour you mention. god bless you, my dear friend, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, may , .] you will think me the most changeable of all the changeable; but indeed it is _not_ my fault that i cannot, as i wished, receive you on wednesday. there was a letter this morning; and our friends not only come to london but come to this house on tuesday (to-morrow) to pass two or three days, until they settle in an hotel for the rest of the season. therefore you see, it is doubtful whether the two days may not be three, and the three days four; but if they go away in time, and if saturday should suit you, i will let you know by a word; and you can answer by a yea or nay. while they are in the house, i must give them what time i can--and indeed, it is something to dread altogether. tuesday. i send you the note i had begun before receiving yours of last night, and also a fragment[ ] from mrs. hedley's herein enclosed, a full and complete certificate, ... that you may know ... quite _know_, ... what the real and only reason of the obstacle to wednesday is. on saturday perhaps, or on monday more certainly, there is likely to be no opposition, ... at least not on the 'côté gauche' (_my_ side!) to our meeting--but i will let you know more. for the rest, we have both been a little unlucky, there's no denying, in overcoming the embarrassments of a first acquaintance--but suffer me to say as one other last word, (and _quite, quite the last this time_!) in case there should have been anything approaching, however remotely, to a distrustful or unkind tone in what i wrote on sunday, (and i have a sort of consciousness that in the process of my self-scorning i was not in the most sabbatical of moods perhaps--) that i do recall and abjure it, and from my heart entreat your pardon for it, and profess, notwithstanding it, neither to 'choose' nor 'to be able' to think otherwise of you than i have done, ... as of one _most_ generous and _most_ loyal; for that if i chose, i could not; and that if i could, i should not choose. ever and gratefully your friend, e.b.b. --and now we shall hear of 'luria,' shall we not? and much besides. and miss mitford has sent me the most high comical of letters to read, addressed to her by 'r.b. haydon historical painter' which has made me quite laugh; and would make _you_; expressing his righteous indignation at the 'great fact' and gross impropriety of any man who has 'thoughts too deep for tears' agreeing to wear a 'bag-wig' ... the case of poor wordsworth's going to court, you know.--mr. haydon being infinitely serious all the time, and yet holding the doctrine of the divine right of princes in his left hand. how is your head? may i be hoping the best for it? may god bless you. [footnote : ... me on tuesday, or wednesday? if on tuesday, i shall come by the three o'clock train; if on wednesday, _early_ in the morning, as i shall be anxious to secure rooms ... so that your uncle and arabel may come up on thursday.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, may , .] saturday, monday, as you shall appoint--no need to say that, or my thanks--but this note troubles you, out of my bounden duty to help you, or miss mitford, to make the painter run violently down a steep place into the sea, if that will amuse you, by further informing him, what i know on the best authority, that wordsworth's 'bag-wig,' or at least, the more important of his court-habiliments, were considerately furnished for the nonce by _mr. rogers_ from his own wardrobe, to the manifest advantage of the laureate's pocket, but more problematic improvement of his person, when one thinks on the astounding difference of 'build' in the two poets:--the fact should be put on record, if only as serving to render less chimerical a promise sometimes figuring in the columns of provincial newspapers--that the two apprentices, some grocer or other advertises for, will be 'boarded and _clothed_ like _one_ of the family.' may not your unfinished (really good) head of the great man have been happily kept waiting for the body which can now be added on, with all this picturesqueness of circumstances. precept on precept ... but then, _line upon line_, is allowed by as good authority, and may i not draw _my_ confirming black line after yours, yet not break pledge? i am most grateful to you for doing me justice--doing yourself, your own judgment, justice, since even the play-wright of theseus and the amazon found it one of his hardest devices to 'write me a speech, lest the lady be frightened, wherein it shall be said that i, pyramus, am not pyramus, but &c. &c.' god bless you--one thing more, but one--you _could never have_ misunderstood the _asking for the letter again_, i feared you might refer to it 'pour constater le fait'-- and now i am yours-- r.b. my head is all but well now; thank you. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, may , .] just one word to say that if saturday, to-morrow, should be fine--because in the case of its raining i _shall not expect you_; you will find me at three o'clock. yes--the circumstances of the costume were mentioned in the letter; mr. rogers' bag-wig and the rest, and david wilkie's sword--and also that the laureate, so equipped, fell down upon both knees in the superfluity of etiquette, and had to be picked up by two lords-in-waiting. it is a large exaggeration i do not doubt--and then i never sympathised with the sighing kept up by people about that acceptance of the laureateship which drew the bag-wig as a corollary after it. not that the laureateship honoured _him_, but that he honoured it; and that, so honouring it, he preserves a symbol instructive to the masses, who are children and to be taught by symbols now as formerly. isn't it true? or at least may it not be true? and won't the court laurel (such as it is) be all the worthier of _you_ for wordsworth's having worn it first? and in the meantime i shall see you to-morrow perhaps? or if it should rain, on monday at the same hour. ever yours, my dear friend, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, june , .] when i see all you have done for me in this 'prometheus,' i feel more than half ashamed both of it and of me for using your time so, and forced to say in my own defence (not to you but myself) that i never thought of meaning to inflict such work on you who might be doing so much better things in the meantime both for me and for others--because, you see, it is not the mere reading of the ms., but the 'comparing' of the text, and the melancholy comparisons between the english and the greek, ... quite enough to turn you from your [greek: philanthrôpou tropou][ ] that i brought upon you; and indeed i did not mean so much, nor so soon! yet as you have done it for me--for me who expected a few jottings down with a pencil and a general opinion; it is of course of the greatest value, besides the pleasure and pride which come of it; and i must say of the translation, (before putting it aside for the nonce), that the circumstance of your paying it so much attention and seeing any good in it, is quite enough reward for the writer and quite enough motive for self-gratulation, if it were all torn to fragments at this moment--which is a foolish thing to say because it is so obvious, and because you would know it if i said it or not. and while you were doing this for me, you thought it unkind of me not to write to you; yes, and you think me at this moment the very princess of apologies and excuses and depreciations and all the rest of the small family of distrust--or of hypocrisy ... who knows? well! but you are wrong ... wrong ... to think so; and you will let me say one word to show where you are wrong--not for you to controvert, ... because it must relate to myself especially, and lies beyond your cognizance, and is something which i _must know best_ after all. and it is, ... that you persist in putting me into a false position, with respect to _fixing days_ and the like, and in making me feel somewhat as i did when i was a child, and papa used to put me up on the chimney-piece and exhort me to stand up straight like a hero, which i did, straighter and straighter, and then suddenly 'was 'ware' (as we say in the ballads) of the walls' growing alive behind me and extending two stony hands to push me down that frightful precipice to the rug, where the dog lay ... dear old havannah, ... and where he and i were likely to be dashed to pieces together and mix our uncanonised bones. now my present false position ... which is not the chimney-piece's, ... is the necessity you provide for me in the shape of my having to name this day, or that day, ... and of your coming because i name it, and of my having to think and remember that you come because i name it. through a weakness, perhaps, or morbidness, or one knows not how to define it, i _cannot help_ being uncomfortable in having to do this,--it is impossible. not that i distrust _you_--you are the last in the world i could distrust: and then (although you may be sceptical) i am naturally given to trust ... to a fault ... as some say, or to a sin, as some reproach me:--and then again, if i were ever such a distruster, it could not be of _you_. but if you knew me--! i will tell you! if one of my brothers omits coming to this room for two days, ... i never ask why it happened! if my own father omits coming up-stairs to say 'good night,' i never say a word; and not from indifference. do try to make out these readings of me as a _dixit casaubonus_; and don't throw me down as a corrupt text, nor convict me for an infidel which i am not. on the contrary i am grateful and happy to believe that you like to come here; and even if you came here as a pure act of charity and pity to me, as long as you _chose to come_ i should not be too proud to be grateful and happy still. i could not be proud to _you_, and i hope you will not fancy such a possibility, which is the remotest of all. yes, and _i_ am anxious to ask you to be wholly generous and leave off such an interpreting philosophy as you made use of yesterday, and forgive me when i beg you to fix your own days for coming for the future. will you? it is the same thing in one way. if you like to come really every week, there is no hindrance to it--you can do it--and the privilege and obligation remain equally mine:--and if you name a day for coming on any week, where there is an obstacle on my side, you will learn it from me in a moment. why i might as well charge _you_ with distrusting _me_, because you persist in making me choose the days. and it is not for me to do it, but for you--i must feel that--and i cannot help chafing myself against the thought that for me to begin to fix days in this way, just because you have quick impulses (like all imaginative persons), and wish me to do it now, may bring me to the catastrophe of asking you to come when you would rather not, ... which, as you say truly, would not be an important vexation to you; but to me would be worse than vexation; to _me_--and therefore i shrink from the very imagination of the possibility of such a thing, and ask you to bear with me and let it be as i prefer ... left to your own choice of the moment. and bear with me above all--because this shows no want of faith in you ... none ... but comes from a simple fact (with its ramifications) ... that you know little of me personally yet, and that _you guess_, even, but very little of the influence of a peculiar experience over me and out of me; and if i wanted a proof of this, we need not seek further than the very point of discussion, and the hard worldly thoughts you thought i was thinking of you yesterday,--i, who thought not one of them! but i am so used to discern the correcting and ministering angels by the same footsteps on the ground, that it is not wonderful i should look down there at any approach of a [greek: philia taxis] whatever to this personal _me_. have i not been ground down to browns and blacks? and is it my fault if i am not green? not that it is my _complaint_--i should not be justified in complaining; i believe, as i told you, that there is more gladness than sadness in the world--that is, generally: and if some natures have to be refined by the sun, and some by the furnace (the less genial ones) both means are to be recognised as _good_, ... however different in pleasurableness and painfulness, and though furnace-fire leaves scorched streaks upon the fruit. i assured you there was nothing i had any power of teaching you: and there _is_ nothing, except grief!--which i would not teach you, you know, if i had the occasion granted. it is a multitude of words about nothing at all, ... this--but i am like mariana in the moated grange and sit listening too often to the mouse in the wainscot. be as forbearing as you can--and believe how profoundly it touches me that you should care to come here at all, much more, so often! and try to understand that if i did not write as you half asked, it was just because i failed at the moment to get up enough pomp and circumstance to write on purpose to certify the important fact of my being a little stronger or a little weaker on one particular morning. that i am always ready and rejoiced to write to you, you know perfectly well, and i have proved, by 'superfluity of naughtiness' and prolixity through some twenty posts:--and this, and therefore, you will agree altogether to attribute no more to me on these counts, and determine to read me no more backwards with your hebrew, putting in your own vowel points without my leave! shall it be so? here is a letter grown from a note which it meant to be--and i have been interrupted in the midst of it, or it should have gone to you earlier. let what i have said in it of myself pass unquestioned and unnoticed, because it is of _me_ and not of _you_, ... and, if in any wise lunatical, all the talking and writing in the world will not put the implied moon into another quarter. only be patient with me a little, ... and let us have a smooth ground for the poems which i am foreseeing the sight of with such pride and delight--such pride and delight! and one thing ... which is chief, though it seems to come last!... you _will_ have advice (will you not?) if that pain does not grow much better directly? it cannot be prudent or even _safe_ to let a pain in the head go on so long, and no remedy be attempted for it, ... and you cannot be sure that it is a merely nervous pain and that it may not have consequences; and this, quite apart from the consideration of suffering. so you will see some one with an opinion to give, and take it? _do_, i beseech you. you will not say 'no'? also ... if on wednesday you should be less well than usual, you will come on thursday instead, i hope, ... seeing that it must be right for you to be quiet and silent when you suffer so, and a journey into london can let you be neither. otherwise, i hold to my day, ... wednesday. and may god bless you my dear friend. ever yours, e.b.b. you are right i see, nearly everywhere, if not quite everywhere in the criticisms--but of course i have not looked very closely--that is, i have read your papers but not in connection with a _my_ side of the argument--but i shall lose the post after all. [footnote : aeschylus, _prometheus_ ii.: 'trick of loving men,' see note , on p. above.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning, [post-mark, june , .] i ventured to hope this morning might bring me news of you--first east-winds on you, then myself, then those criticisms!--i do assure you i am properly apprehensive. how are you? may i go on wednesday without too much [greek: anthadia]. pray remember what i said and wrote, to the effect that my exceptions were, in almost every case, to the 'reading'--not to your version of it: but i have not specified the particular ones--not written down the greek, of my suggested translations--have i? and if you do not find them in the margin of your copy, how you must wonder! thus, in the last speech but one, of hermes, i prefer porson and blomfield's [greek: ei mêd' atychôn ti chala maniôn];--to the old combinations that include [greek: eutychê]--though there is no ms. authority for emendation, it seems. but in what respect does prometheus 'fare _well_,' or 'better' even, since the beginning? and is it not the old argument over again, that when a man _fails_ he should repent of his ways?--and while thinking of hermes, let me say that '[greek: mêde moi diplas odous prosbalês]' is surely--'don't subject me to the trouble of a second journey ... by paying no attention to the first.' so says scholiast a, and so backs him scholiast b, especially created, it should appear, to show there could be _in rerum naturâ_ such another as his predecessor. a few other remarks occur to me, which i will tell you if you please; _now_, i really want to know how you are, and write for that. ever yours, r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, june , .] just after my note left, yours came--i will try so to answer it as to please you; and i begin by promising cheerfully to do all you bid me about naming days &c. i do believe we are friends now and for ever. there can be no reason, therefore, that i should cling tenaciously to any one or other time of meeting, as if, losing that, i lost everything--and, for the future, i will provide against sudden engagements, outrageous weather &c., to your heart's content. nor am i going to except against here and there a little wrong i could get up, as when you _imply_ from my quick impulses and the like. no, my dear friend--for i seem sure i shall have quite, quite time enough to do myself justice in your eyes--let time show! perhaps i feel none the less sorely, when you 'thank' me for such company as mine, that i cannot avoid confessing to myself that it would not be so absolutely out of my power, perhaps, to contrive really and deserve thanks in a certain acceptation--i _might_ really _try_, at all events, and amuse you a little better, when i do have the opportunity,--and i _do not_--but there is the thing! it is all of a piece--i _do not_ seek your friendship in order to do you good--any good--only to do myself good. though i _would_, god knows, do that too. enough of this. i am much better, indeed,--but will certainly follow your advice should the pain return. and you--you have tried a new journey from your room, have you not? do recollect, at any turn, any chance so far in my favour,--that i am here and yours should you want any fetching and carrying in this outside london world. your brothers may have their own business to mind, mr. kenyon is at new york, we will suppose; here am i--what else, _what else_ makes me count my cleverness to you, as i know i have done more than once, by word and letter, but the real wish to be set at work? i should have, i hope, better taste than to tell any everyday acquaintance, who could not go out, one single morning even, on account of a headache, that the weather was delightful, much less that i had been walking five miles and meant to run ten--yet to you i boasted once of polking and waltzing and more--but then would it not be a very superfluous piece of respect in the four-footed bird to keep his wings to himself because his master oceanos could fly forsooth? whereas he begins to wave a flap and show how ready they are to be off--for what else were the good of him? think of this--and know me for yours r.b. for good you are, to those notes--you shall have more,--that is, the rest--on wednesday then, at , except as you except. god bless you. oh, let me tell you--i suppose mr. horne must be in town--as i received a letter two days ago, from the contriver of some literary society or other who had before written to get me to belong to it, protesting _against_ my reasons for refusing, and begging that 'at all events i would suspend my determination till i had been visited by mr. h. on the subject'--and, as they can hardly mean to bring him express from the drachenfels for just that, he is returned no doubt--and as he is your friend, i take the opportunity of mentioning the course i shall pursue with him or any other friend of yours i may meet,--(and everybody else, i may add--) the course i understand you to desire, with respect to our own intimacy. while i may acknowledge, i believe, that i correspond with you, i shall not, in any case, suffer it to be known that i see, or have seen you. this i just remind you of, lest any occasion of embarrassment should arise, for a moment, from your not being quite sure how _i_ had acted in any case.--con che, le bacio le mani--a rivederla! _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, june , .] i must thank you by one word for all your kindness and consideration--which could not be greater; nor more felt by me. in the first place, afterwards (if that should not be irish dialect) do understand that my letter passed from my hands to go to yours on _friday_, but was thrown aside carelessly down stairs and 'covered up' they say, so as not to be seen until late on saturday; and i can only humbly hope to have been cross enough about it (having conscientiously tried) to secure a little more accuracy another time.--and then, ... if ever i should want anything done or found, ... (a roc's egg or the like) you may believe me that i shall not scruple to ask you to be the finder; but at this moment i want nothing, indeed, except your poems; and that is quite the truth. now do consider and think what i could possibly want in your 'outside london world'; you, who are the 'genius of the lamp'!--why if you light it and let me read your romances, &c., by it, is not that the best use for it, and am i likely to look for another? only i shall remember what you say, gratefully and seriously; and if ever i should have a good fair opportunity of giving you trouble (as if i had not done it already!), you may rely upon my evil intentions; even though dear mr. kenyon should not actually be at new york, ... which he is not, i am glad to say, as i saw him on saturday. which reminds me that _he_ knows of your having been here, of course! and will not mention it; as he understood from me that _you_ would not.--thank you! also there was an especial reason which constrained me, on pain of appearing a great hypocrite, to tell miss mitford the bare fact of my having seen you--and reluctantly i did it, though placing some hope in her promise of discretion. and how necessary the discretion is, will appear in the awful statistical fact of our having at this moment, as my sisters were calculating yesterday, some forty relations in london--to say nothing of the right wing of the enemy. for mr. horne, i could have told you, and really i thought i _had_ told you of his being in england. last paragraph of all is, that i _don't want to be amused_, ... or rather that i _am_ amused by everything and anything. why surely, surely, you have some singular ideas about me! so, till to-morrow, e.b.b. instead of writing this note to you yesterday, as should have been, i went down-stairs--or rather was carried--and am not the worse. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, june , .] yes, the poem _is_ too good in certain respects for the prizes given in colleges, (when all the pure parsley goes naturally to the rabbits), and has a great deal of beauty here and there in image and expression. still i do not quite agree with you that it reaches the tennyson standard any wise; and for the blank verse, i cannot for a moment think it comparable to one of the grand passages in 'oenone,' and 'arthur' and the like. in fact i seem to hear more in that latter blank verse than you do, ... to hear not only a 'mighty line' as in marlowe, but a noble full orbicular wholeness in complete passages--which always struck me as the mystery of music and great peculiarity in tennyson's versification, inasmuch as he attains to these complete effects without that shifting of the pause practised by the masters, ... shelley and others. a 'linked music' in which there are no links!--_that_, you would take to be a contradiction--and yet something like that, my ear has always seemed to perceive; and i have wondered curiously again and again how there could be so much union and no fastening. only of course it is not model versification--and for dramatic purposes, it must be admitted to be bad. which reminds me to be astonished for the second time how you could think such a thing of me as that i wanted to read only your lyrics, ... or that i 'preferred the lyrics' ... or something barbarous in that way? you don't think me 'ambidexter,' or 'either-handed' ... and both hands open for what poems you will vouchsafe to me; and yet if you would let me see anything you may have in a readable state by you, ... 'the flight of the duchess' ... or act or scene of 'the soul's tragedy,' ... i shall be so glad and grateful to you! oh--if you change your mind and choose to be _bien prié_, i will grant it is your right, and begin my liturgy directly. but this is not teazing (in the intention of it!) and i understand all about the transcription, and the inscrutableness of rough copies,--that is, if you write as i do, so that my guardian angel or m. champollion cannot read what is written. only whatever they can, (remember!) _i_ can: and you are not to mind trusting me with the cacistography possible to mortal readers. the sun shines so that nobody dares complain of the east wind--and indeed i am better altogether. may god bless you, my dear friend. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, june , .] when i ask my wise self what i really do remember of the prize poem, the answer is--both of chapman's lines a-top, quite worth any prize for their quoter--then, the good epithet of 'green europe' contrasting with africa--then, deep in the piece, a picture of a vestal in a vault, where i see a dipping and winking lamp plainest, and last of all the ominous 'all was dark' that dismisses you. i read the poem many years ago, and never since, though i have an impression that the versification is good, yet from your commentary i see i must have said a good deal more in its praise than that. but have you not discovered by this time that i go on talking with my thoughts away? i know, i have always been jealous of my own musical faculty (i can write music).--now that i see the uselessness of such jealousy, and am for loosing and letting it go, it may be cramped possibly. your music is more various and exquisite than any modern writer's to my ear. one should study the mechanical part of the art, as nearly all that there is to be studied--for the more one sits and thinks over the creative process, the more it confirms itself as 'inspiration,' nothing more nor less. or, at worst, you write down old inspirations, what you remember of them ... but with _that_ it begins. 'reflection' is exactly what it names itself--a _re_-presentation, in scattered rays from every angle of incidence, of what first of all became present in a great light, a whole one. so tell me how these lights are born, if you can! but i can tell anybody how to make melodious verses--let him do it therefore--it should be exacted of all writers. you do not understand what a new feeling it is for me to have someone who is to like my verses or i shall not ever like them after! so far differently was i circumstanced of old, that i used rather to go about for a subject of offence to people; writing ugly things in order to warn the ungenial and timorous off my grounds at once. i shall never do so again at least! as it is, i will bring all i dare, in as great quantities as i can--if not next time, after then--certainly. i must make an end, print this autumn my last four 'bells,' lyrics, romances, 'the tragedy,' and 'luna,' and then go on with a whole heart to my own poem--indeed, i have just resolved not to begin any new song, even, till this grand clearance is made--i will get the tragedy transcribed to bring-- 'to bring!' next wednesday--if you know how happy you make me! may i not say _that_, my dear friend, when i feel it from my soul? i thank god that you are better: do pray make fresh endeavours to profit by this partial respite of the weather! all about you must urge that: but even from my distance some effect might come of such wishes. but you _are_ better--look so and speak so! god bless you. r.b. you let 'flowers be sent you in a letter,' every one knows, and this hot day draws out our very first yellow rose. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, june , .] yes, i quite believe as you do that what is called the 'creative process' in works of art, is just inspiration and no less--which made somebody say to me not long since; and so you think that shakespeare's 'othello' was of the effluence of the holy ghost?'--rather a startling deduction, ... only not quite as final as might appear to somebodies perhaps. at least it does not prevent my going on to agree with the saying of _spiridion_, ... do you remember?... 'tout ce que l'homme appelle inspiration, je l'appelle aussi revelation,' ... if there is not something too self-evident in it after all--my sole objection! and is it not true that your inability to analyse the mental process in question, is one of the proofs of the fact of inspiration?--as the gods were known of old by not being seen to move their feet,--coming and going in an equal sweep of radiance.--and still more wonderful than the first transient great light you speak of, ... and far beyond any work of _re_flection, except in the pure analytical sense in which you use the word, ... appears that gathering of light on light upon particular points, as you go (in composition) step by step, till you get intimately near to things, and see them in a fullness and clearness, and an intense trust in the truth of them which you have not in any sunshine of noon (called _real_!) but which you have _then_ ... and struggle to communicate:--an ineffectual struggle with most writers (oh, how ineffectual!) and when effectual, issuing in the 'pippa passes,' and other master-pieces of the world. you will tell me what you mean exactly by being jealous of your own music? you said once that you had had a false notion of music, or had practised it according to the false notions of other people: but did you mean besides that you ever had meant to despise music altogether--because _that_, it is hard to set about trying to believe of you indeed. and then, you _can_ praise my verses for music?--why, are you aware that people blame me constantly for wanting harmony--from mr. boyd who moans aloud over the indisposition of my 'trochees' ... and no less a person than mr. tennyson, who said to somebody who repeated it, that in the want of harmony lay the chief defect of the poems, 'although it might verily be retrieved, as he could fancy that i had an ear by nature.' well--but i am pleased that you should praise me--right or wrong--i mean, whether i am right or wrong in being pleased! and i say so to you openly, although my belief is that you are under a vow to our lady of loretto to make giddy with all manner of high vanities, some head, ... not too strong for such things, but too low for them, ... before you see again the embroidery on her divine petticoat. only there's a flattery so far beyond praise ... even _your_ praise--as where you talk of your verses being liked &c., and of your being happy to bring them here, ... that is scarcely a lawful weapon; and see if the madonna may not signify so much to you!--seriously, you will not hurry too uncomfortably, or uncomfortably at all, about the transcribing? another day, you know, will do as well--and patience is possible to me, if not 'native to the soil.' also i am behaving very well in going out into the noise; not quite out of doors yet, on account of the heat--and i am better as you say, without any doubt at all, and stronger--only my looks are a little deceitful; and people are apt to be heated and flushed in this weather, one hour, to look a little more ghastly an hour or two after. not that it _is_ not true of me that i am better, mind! because i am. the 'flower in the letter' was from one of my sisters--from arabel (though many of these poems are _ideal_ ... will you understand?) and your rose came quite alive and fresh, though in act of dropping its beautiful leaves, because of having to come to me instead of living on in your garden, as it intended. but i thank you--for this, and all, my dear friend. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, june , .] when i next see you, do not let me go on and on to my confusion about matters i am more or less ignorant of, but always ignorant. i tell you plainly i only trench on them, and intrench in them, from gaucherie, pure and respectable ... i should certainly grow instructive on the prospects of hay-crops and pasture-land, if deprived of this resource. and now here is a week to wait before i shall have any occasion to relapse into greek literature when i am thinking all the while, 'now i will just ask simply, what flattery there was,' &c. &c., which, as i had not courage to say then, i keep to myself for shame now. this i will say, then--wait and know me better, as you will one long day at the end. why i write now, is because you did not promise, as before, to let me know how you are--this morning is miserably cold again--will you tell me, at your own time? god bless you, my dear friend. r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, june , .] if on greek literature or anything else it is your pleasure to cultivate a reputation for ignorance, i will respect your desire--and indeed the point of the deficiency in question being far above my sight i am not qualified either to deny or assert the existence of it; so you are free to have it all your own way. about the 'flattery' however, there is a difference; and i must deny a little having ever used such a word ... as far as i can recollect, and i have been trying to recollect, ... as that word of flattery. perhaps i said something about your having vowed to make me vain by writing this or that of my liking your verses and so on--and perhaps i said it too lightly ... which happened because when one doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry, it is far best, as a general rule, to laugh. but the serious truth is that it was all nonsense together what i wrote, and that, instead of talking of your making me vain, i should have talked (if it had been done sincerely) of your humbling me--inasmuch as nothing does humble anybody so much as being lifted up too high. you know what vaulting ambition did once for himself? and when it is done for him by another, his fall is still heavier. and one moral of all this general philosophy is, that if when your poems come, you persist in giving too much importance to what i may have courage to say of this or of that in them, you will make me a dumb critic and i shall have no help for my dumbness. so i tell you beforehand--nothing extenuating nor exaggerating nor putting down in malice. i know so much of myself as to be sure of it. even as it is, the 'insolence' which people blame me for and praise me for, ... the 'recklessness' which my friends talk of with mitigating countenances ... seems gradually going and going--and really it would not be very strange (without that) if _i_ who was born a hero worshipper and have so continued, and who always recognised your genius, should find it impossible to bring out critical doxies on the workings of it. well--i shall do what i can--as far as _impressions_ go, you understand--and _you_ must promise not to attach too much importance to anything said. so that is a covenant, my dear friend!-- and i am really gaining strength--and i will not complain of the weather. as long as the thermometer keeps above sixty i am content for one; and the roses are not quite dead yet, which they would have been in the heat. and last and not least--may i ask if you were told that the pain in the head was not important (or was) in the causes, ... and was likely to be well soon? or was not? i am at the end. e.b.b. upon second or third thoughts, isn't it true that you are a little suspicious of me? suspicious at least of suspiciousness? _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday afternoon. [post-mark, june , .] and if i am 'suspicious of your suspiciousness,' who gives cause, pray? the matter was long ago settled, i thought, when you first took exception to what i said about higher and lower, and i consented to this much--that you should help seeing, if you could, our true intellectual and moral relation each to the other, so long as you would allow _me_ to see what _is_ there, fronting me. 'is my eye evil because yours is not good?' my own friend, if i wished to 'make you vain,' if having 'found the bower' i did really address myself to the wise business of spoiling its rose-roof,--i think that at least where there was such a will, there would be also something not unlike a way,--that i should find a proper hooked stick to tear down flowers with, and write you other letters than these--quite, quite others, i feel--though i am far from going to imagine, even for a moment, what might be the precise prodigy--like the notable son of zeus, that _was_ to have been, and done the wonders, only he did not, because &c. &c. but i have a restless head to-day, and so let you off easily. well, you ask me about it, that head, and i am not justified in being positive when my doctor is dubious; as for the causes, they are neither superfluity of study, nor fancy, nor care, nor any special naughtiness that i know how to amend. so if i bring you 'nothing to signify' on wednesday ... though i hope to do more than that ... you will know exactly why it happens. i will finish and transcribe the 'flight of the duchess' since you spoke of that first. i am truly happy to hear that your health improves still. for me, going out does me good--reading, writing, and, what is odd,--infinitely most of all, _sleeping_ do me the harm,--never any very great harm. and all the while i am yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, june , .] i had begun to be afraid that i did not deserve to have my questions answered; and i was afraid of asking them over again. but it is worse to be afraid that you are not better at all in any essential manner (after all your assurances) and that the medical means have failed so far. did you go to somebody who knows anything?--because there is no excuse, you see, in common sense, for not having the best and most experienced opinion when there is a choice of advice--and i am confident that that pain should not be suffered to go on without something being done. what i said about _nerves_, related to what you had told me of your mother's suffering and what you had fancied of the relation of it to your own, and not that i could be thinking about imaginary complaints--i wish i could. not (either) that i believe in the relation ... because such things are not hereditary, are they? and the bare coincidence is improbable. well, but, i wanted particularly to say this--_don't bring the 'duchess' with you on wednesday._ i shall not expect anything, i write distinctly to tell you--and i would far far rather that you did not bring it. you see it is just as i thought--for that whether too much thought or study did or did not bring on the illness, ... yet you admit that reading and writing increase it ... as they would naturally do any sort of pain in the head--therefore if you will but be in earnest and try to get well _first_, we will do the 'bells' afterwards, and there will be time for a whole peal of them, i hope and trust, before the winter. now do admit that this is reasonable, and agree reasonably to it. and if it does you good to go out and take exercise, why not go out and take it? nay, why not go _away_ and take it? why not try the effect of a little change of air--or even of a great change of air--if it should be necessary, or even expedient? anything is better, you know ... or if you don't know, _i_ know--than to be ill, really, seriously--i mean for _you_ to be ill, who have so much to do and to enjoy in the world yet ... and all those bells waiting to be hung! so that if you will agree to be well first, i will promise to be ready afterwards to help you in any thing i can do ... transcribing or anything ... to get the books through the press in the shortest of times--and i am capable of a great deal of that sort of work without being tired, having the habit of writing in any sort of position, and the long habit, ... since, before i was ill even, i never used to write at a table (or scarcely ever) but on the arm of a chair, or on the seat of one, sitting myself on the floor, and calling myself a lollard for dignity. so you will put by your 'duchess' ... will you not? or let me see just that one sheet--if one should be written--which is finished? ... up to this moment, you understand? finished _now_. and if i have tired and teazed you with all these words it is a bad opportunity to take--and yet i will persist in saying through good and bad opportunities that i never did 'give cause' as you say, to your being 'suspicious of my suspiciousness' as i believe i said before. i deny my 'suspiciousness' altogether--it is not one of my faults. nor is it quite my fault that you and i should always be quarrelling about over-appreciations and under-appreciations--and after all i have no interest nor wish, i do assure you, to depreciate myself--and you are not to think that i have the remotest claim to the monthyon prize for good deeds in the way of modesty of self-estimation. only when i know you better, as you talk of ... and when _you_ know _me_ too well, ... the right and the wrong of these conclusions will appear in a fuller light than ever so much arguing can produce now. is it unkindly written of me? _no_--i _feel_ it is not!--and that 'now and ever we are friends,' (just as you think) _i_ think besides and am happy in thinking so, and could not be distrustful of you if i tried. so may god bless you, my ever dear friend--and mind to forget the 'duchess' and to remember every good counsel!--not that i do particularly confide in the medical oracles. they never did much more for _me_ than, when my pulse was above a hundred and forty with fever, to give me digitalis to make me weak--and, when i could not move without fainting (with weakness), to give me quinine to make me feverish again. yes--and they could tell from the stethoscope, how very little was really wrong in me ... if it were not on a vital organ--and how i should certainly live ... if i didn't die sooner. but then, nothing _has_ power over affections of the chest, except god and his winds--and i do hope that an obvious quick remedy may be found for your head. but _do_ give up the writing and all that does harm!-- ever yours, my dear friend, e.b.b. miss mitford talked of spending wednesday with me--and i have put it off to thursday:--and if you should hear from mr. chorley that he is coming to see _her and me together on any day_, do understand that it was entirely her proposition and not mine, and that certainly it won't be acceded to, as far as _i_ am concerned; as i have explained to her finally. i have been vexed about it--but she can see him down-stairs as she has done before--and if she calls me perverse and capricious (which she will do) i shall stop the reflection by thanking her again and again (as i can do sincerely) for her kindness and goodness in coming to see me herself, so far!-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning, [post-mark, june , .] (so my friend did not in the spirit see me write that _first_ letter, on friday, which was too good and true to send, and met, five minutes after, its natural fate accordingly. then on saturday i thought to take health by storm, and walked myself half dead all the morning--about town too: last post-hour from this thule of a suburb-- p.m. on saturdays, next expedition of letters, a.m. on mondays;--and then my real letter set out with the others--and, it should seem, set at rest a 'wonder whether thy friend's questions deserved answering'--de-served--answer-ing--!) parenthetically so much--i want most, though, to tell you--(leaving out any slightest attempt at thanking you) that i am much better, quite well to-day--that my doctor has piloted me safely through two or three illnesses, and knows all about me, i do think--and that he talks confidently of getting rid of all the symptoms complained of--and _has_ made a good beginning if i may judge by to-day. as for going abroad, that is just the thing i most want to avoid (for a reason not so hard to guess, perhaps, as why my letter was slow in arriving). so, till to-morrow,--my light through the dark week. god ever bless you, dear friend, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, june , .] what will you think when i write to ask you _not_ to come to-morrow, wednesday; but ... on friday perhaps, instead? but do see how it is; and judge if it is to be helped. i have waited hour after hour, hoping to hear from miss mitford that she would agree to take thursday in change for wednesday,--and just as i begin to wonder whether she can have received my letter at all, or whether she may not have been vexed by it into taking a vengeance and adhering to her own devices; (for it appealed to her esprit de sexe on the undeniable axiom of women having their way ... and she might choose to act it out!) just as i wonder over all this, and consider what a confusion of the elements it would be if you came and found her here, and mr. chorley at the door perhaps, waiting for some of the light of her countenance;--comes a note from mr. kenyon, to the effect that _he_ will be here at four o'clock p.m.--and comes a final note from my aunt mrs. hedley (supposed to be at brighton for several months) to the effect that _she_ will be here at twelve o'clock, m.!! so do observe the constellation of adverse stars ... or the covey of 'bad birds,' as the romans called them, and that there is no choice, but to write as i am writing. it can't be helped--can it? for take away the doubt about miss mitford, and mr. kenyon remains--and take away mr. kenyon, and there is mrs. hedley--and thus it _must be for friday_ ... which will learn to be a fortunate day for the nonce--unless saturday should suit you better. i do not speak of thursday, because of the doubt about miss mitford--and if any harm should happen to friday, i will write again; but if you do not hear again, and are able to come then, you _will_ come perhaps then. in the meantime i thank you for the better news in your note--if it is really, really to be trusted in--but you know, you have said so often that you were better and better, without being really better, that it makes people ... 'suspicious.' yet it is full amends for the disappointment to hope ... here i must break off or be too late. may god bless you my dear friend. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ . wednesday. [post-mark, june , .] pomegranates you may cut deep down the middle and see into, but not hearts,--so why should i try and speak? friday is best day because nearest, but saturday is next best--it is next near, you know: if i get no note, therefore, friday is my day. now is post-time,--which happens properly. god bless you, and so your own r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, june , .] after all it must be for saturday, as mrs. hedley comes again on friday, to-morrow, from _new cross_,--or just beyond it, eltham park--to london for a few days, on account of the illness of one of her children. i write in the greatest haste after miss mitford has left me ... and _so_ tired! to say this, that if you can and will come on saturday, ... or if not on monday or tuesday, there is no reason against it. your friend always, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, june , .] let me make haste and write down _to-morrow_, saturday, and not later, lest my selfishness be thoroughly got under in its struggle with a better feeling that tells me you must be far too tired for another visitor this week. what shall i decide on? well--saturday is said--but i will stay not quite so long, nor talk nearly so loud as of old-times; nor will you, if you understand anything of me, fail to send down word should you be at all indisposed. i should not have the heart to knock at the door unless i really believed you would do that. still saying this and providing against the other does not amount, i well know, to the generosity, or justice rather, of staying away for a day or two altogether. but--what 'a day or two' may not bring forth! change to you, change to me-- not all of me, however, can change, thank god-- yours ever r.b. or, write, as last night, if needs be: monday, tuesday is not so long to wait. will you write? _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, june , .] you are very kind and always--but really _that_ does not seem a good reason against your coming to-morrow--so come, if it should not rain. if it rains, it _concludes_ for monday ... or tuesday; whichever may be clear of rain. i was tired on wednesday by the confounding confusion of more voices than usual in this room; but the effect passed off, and though miss mitford was with me for hours yesterday i am not unwell to-day. and pray speak _bona verba_ about the awful things which are possible between this now and wednesday. you continue to be better, i do hope? i am forced to the brevity you see, by the post on one side, and my friends on the other, who have so long overstayed the coming of your note--but it is enough to assure you that you will do no harm by coming--only give pleasure. ever yours, my dear friend, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [june , .] i send back the prize poems which have been kept far too long even if i do not make excuses for the keeping--but our sins are not always to be measured by our repentance for them. then i am well enough this morning to have thought of going out till they told me it was not at all a right day for it ... too windy ... soft and delightful as the air seems to be--particularly after yesterday, when we had some winter back again in an episode. and the roses do not die; which is quite magnanimous of them considering their reverses; and their buds are coming out in most exemplary resignation--like birds singing in a cage. now that the windows may be open, the flowers take heart to live a little in this room. and think of my forgetting to tell you on saturday that i had known of a letter being received by somebody from miss martineau, who is at ambleside at this time and so entranced with the lakes and mountains as to be dreaming of taking or making a house among them, to live in for the rest of her life. mrs. trollope, you may have heard, had something of the same nympholepsy--no, her daughter was 'settled' in the neighbourhood--_that_ is the more likely reason for mrs. trollope! and the spirits of the hills conspired against her the first winter and almost slew her with a fog and drove her away to your italy where the oreadocracy has gentler manners. and miss martineau is practising mesmerism and miracles on all sides she says, and counts on archbishop whately as a new adherent. i even fancy that he has been to see her in the character of a convert. all this from mr. kenyon. there's a strange wild book called the autobiography of heinrich stilling ... one of those true devout deep-hearted germans who believe everything, and so are nearer the truth, i am sure, than the wise who believe nothing; but rather over-german sometimes, and redolent of sauerkraut--and _he_ gives a tradition ... somewhere between mesmerism and mysticism, ... of a little spirit with gold shoebuckles, who was his familiar spirit and appeared only in the sunshine i think ... mottling it over with its feet, perhaps, as a child might snow. take away the shoebuckles and i believe in the little spirit--don't _you_? but these english mesmerists make the shoebuckles quite conspicuous and insist on them broadly; and the archbishops whately may be drawn by _them_ (who can tell?) more than by the little spirit itself. how is your head to-day? now really, and nothing extenuating? i will not ask of poems, till the 'quite well' is _authentic_. may god bless you always! my dear friend! e.b.b. after all the book must go another day. i live in chaos do you know? and i am too hurried at this moment ... yes it is here. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. how are you--may i hope to hear soon? i don't know exactly what possessed me to set my next day so far off as saturday--as it was said, however, so let it be. and i will bring the rest of the 'duchess'--four or five hundred lines,--'heu, herba mala crescit'--(as i once saw mournfully pencilled on a white wall at asolo)--but will you tell me if you quite remember the main of the _first_ part--(_parts_ there are none except in the necessary process of chopping up to suit the limits of a magazine--and i gave them as much as i could transcribe at a sudden warning)--because, if you please, i can bring the whole, of course. after seeing _you_, that saturday, i was caught up by a friend and carried to see vidocq--who did the honours of his museum of knives and nails and hooks that have helped great murderers to their purposes--he scarcely admits, i observe, an implement with only one attestation to its efficacy; but the one or two exceptions rather justify his latitude in their favour--thus one little sort of dessert knife _did_ only take _one_ life.... 'but then,' says vidocq, 'it was the man's own mother's life, with fifty-two blows, and all for' (i think) 'fifteen francs she had got?' so prattles good-naturedly vidocq--one of his best stories of that lacénaire--'jeune homme d'un caractère fort avenant--mais c'était un poète,' quoth he, turning sharp on _me_ out of two or three other people round him. here your letter breaks in, and sunshine too. why do you send me that book--not let me take it? what trouble for nothing! an old french friend of mine, a dear foolish, very french heart and soul, is coming presently--his poor brains are whirling with mesmerism in which he believes, as in all other unbelief. he and i are to dine alone (i have not seen him these two years)--and i shall never be able to keep from driving the great wedge right through his breast and descending lower, from riveting his two foolish legs to the wintry chasm; for i that stammer and answer hap-hazard with you, get proportionately valiant and voluble with a mere cupful of diderot's rinsings, and a man into the bargain. if you were prevented from leaving the house yesterday, assuredly to-day you will never attempt such a thing--the wind, rain--all is against it: i trust you will not make the first experiment except under really favourable auspices ... for by its success you will naturally be induced to go on or leave off--still you are _better_! i fully believe, dare to believe, _that_ will continue. as for me, since you ask--find me but something _to do_, and see if i shall not be well!--though i _am_ well now almost. how good you are to my roses--they are not of my making, to be sure. never, by the way, did miss martineau work such a miracle as i now witness in the garden--i gathered at rome, close to the fountain of egeria, a handful of _fennel_-seeds from the most indisputable plant of fennel i ever chanced upon--and, lo, they are come up ... hemlock, or something akin! in two places, moreover. wherein does hemlock resemble fennel? how could i mistake? no wonder that a stone's cast off from that egeria's fountain is the temple of the god ridiculus. well, on saturday then--at three: and i will certainly bring the verses you mention--and trust to find you still better. vivi felice--my dear friend, god bless you! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday-thursday evening [post-mark, july , .] yes--i know the first part of the 'duchess' and have it here--and for the rest of the poem, don't mind about being very legible, or even legible in the usual sense; and remember how it is my boast to be able to read all such manuscript writing as never is read by people who don't like caviare. now you won't mind? really i rather like blots than otherwise--being a sort of patron-saint of all manner of untidyness ... if mr. kenyon's reproaches (of which there's a stereotyped edition) are justified by the fact--and he has a great organ of order, and knows 'disorderly persons' at a glance, i suppose. but you won't be particular with _me_ in the matter of transcription? _that_ is what i want to make sure of. and even if you are not particular, i am afraid you are not well enough to be troubled by writing, and writing and the thinking that comes with it--it would be wiser to wait till you are quite well--now wouldn't it?--and my fear is that the 'almost well' means 'very little better.' and why, when there is no motive for hurrying, run any risk? don't think that i will help you to make yourself ill. that i refuse to do even so much work as the 'little dessert-knife' in the way of murder, ... _do_ think! so upon the whole, i expect nothing on saturday from this distance--and if it comes unexpectedly (i mean the duchess and not saturday) _let_ it be at no cost, or at the least cost possible, will you? i am delighted in the meanwhile to hear of the quantity of 'mala herba'; and hemlock does not come up from every seed you sow, though you call it by ever such bad names. talking of poetry, i had a newspaper 'in help of social and political progress' sent to me yesterday from america--addressed to--just my name ... _poetess, london_! think of the simplicity of those wild americans in 'calculating' that 'people in general' here in england know what a poetess is!--well--the post office authorities, after deep meditation, i do not doubt, on all probable varieties of the chimpanzee, and a glance to the surrey gardens on one side, and the zoological department of regent's park on the other, thought of 'poet's corner,' perhaps, and wrote at the top of the parcel, 'enquire at paternoster row'! whereupon the paternoster row people wrote again, 'go to mr. moxon'--and i received my newspaper. and talking of poetesses, i had a note yesterday (again) which quite touched me ... from mr. hemans--charles, the son of felicia--written with so much feeling, that it was with difficulty i could say my perpetual 'no' to his wish about coming to see me. his mother's memory is surrounded to him, he says, 'with almost a divine lustre'--and 'as it cannot be to those who knew the writer alone and not the woman.' do you not like to hear such things said? and is it not better than your tradition about shelley's son? and is it not pleasant to know that that poor noble pure-hearted woman, the vittoria colonna of our country, should be so loved and comprehended by some ... by one at least ... of her own house? not that, in naming shelley, i meant for a moment to make a comparison--there is not equal ground for it. vittoria colonna does not walk near dante--no. and if you promised never to tell mrs. jameson ... nor miss martineau ... i would confide to you perhaps my secret profession of faith--which is ... which is ... that let us say and do what we please and can ... there _is_ a natural inferiority of mind in women--of the intellect ... not by any means, of the moral nature--and that the history of art and of genius testifies to this fact openly. oh--i would not say so to mrs. jameson for the world. i believe i was a coward to her altogether--for when she denounced carpet work as 'injurious to the mind,' because it led the workers into 'fatal habits of reverie,' i defended the carpet work as if i were striving _pro aris et focis_, (_i_, who am so innocent of all that knowledge!) and said not a word for the poor reveries which have frayed away so much of silken time for me ... and let her go away repeating again and again ... 'oh, but _you_ may do carpet work with impunity--yes! _because_ you can be writing poems all the while.'! think of people making poems and rugs at once. there's complex machinery for you! i told you that i had a sensation of cold blue steel from her eyes!--and yet i really liked and like and shall like her. she is very kind i believe--and it was my mistake--and i correct my impressions of her more and more to perfection, as _you_ tell me who know more of her than i. only i should not dare, ... _ever_, i think ... to tell her that i believe women ... all of us in a mass ... to have minds of quicker movement, but less power and depth ... and that we are under your feet, because we can't stand upon our own. not that we should either be quite under your feet! so you are not to be too proud, if you please--and there is certainly some amount of wrong--: but it never will be righted in the manner and to the extent contemplated by certain of our own prophetesses ... nor ought to be, i hold in intimate persuasion. one woman indeed now alive ... and only _that_ one down all the ages of the world--seems to me to justify for a moment an opposite opinion--that wonderful woman george sand; who has something monstrous in combination with her genius, there is no denying at moments (for she has written one book, leila, which i could not read, though i am not easily turned back,) but whom, in her good and evil together, i regard with infinitely more admiration than all other women of genius who are or have been. such a colossal nature in every way,--with all that breadth and scope of faculty which women want--magnanimous, and loving the truth and loving the people--and with that 'hate of hate' too, which you extol--so eloquent, and yet earnest as if she were dumb--so full of a living sense of beauty, and of noble blind instincts towards an ideal purity--and so proving a right even in her wrong. by the way, what you say of the vidocq museum reminds me of one of the chamber of masonic trial scenes in 'consuelo.' could you like to see those knives? i began with the best intentions of writing six lines--and see what is written! and all because i kept my letter back ... from a _doubt about saturday_--but it has worn away, and the appointment stands good ... for me: i have nothing to say against it. but belief in mesmerism is not the same thing as general unbelief--to do it justice--now is it? it may be super-belief as well. not that there is not something ghastly and repelling to me in the thought of dr. elliotson's great bony fingers seeming to 'touch the stops' of a whole soul's harmonies--as in phreno-magnetism. and i should have liked far better than hearing and seeing _that_, to have heard _you_ pour the 'cupful of diderot's rinsings,' out,--and indeed i can fancy a little that you and how you could do it--and break the cup too afterwards! another sheet--and for what? what is written already, if you read, you do so meritoriously--and it's an example of bad writing, if you want one in the poems. i am ashamed, you may see, of having written too much, (besides)--which is _much_ worse--but one writes and writes: _i_ do at least--for _you_ are irreproachable. ever yours my dear friend, as if i had not written ... or _had_! e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday afternoon. [post-mark july , .] while i write this,-- o'clock you may be going out, i will hope, for the day is very fine, perhaps all the better for the wind: yet i got up this morning sure of bad weather. i shall not try to tell you how anxious i am for the result and to know it. you will of course feel fatigued at first--but persevering, as you mean to do, do you not?--persevering, the event must be happy. i thought, and still think, to write to you about george sand, and the vexed question, a very bermoothes of the 'mental claims of the sexes relatively considered' (so was called the, ... i do believe, ... worst poem i ever read in my life), and mrs. hemans, and all and some of the points referred to in your letter--but 'by my fay, i cannot reason,' to-day: and, by a consequence, i feel the more--so i say how i want news of you ... which, when they arrive, i shall read 'meritoriously'--do you think? my friend, what ought i to tell you on that head (or the reverse rather)--of your discourse? i should like to match you at a fancy-flight; if i could, give you nearly as pleasant an assurance that 'there's no merit in the case,' but the hot weather and lack of wit get the better of my good will--besides, i remember once to have admired a certain enticing simplicity in the avowal of the treasurer of a charitable institution at a dinner got up in its behalf--the funds being at lowest, debt at highest ... in fact, this dinner was the last chance of the charity, and this treasurer's speech the main feature in the chance--and our friend, inspired by the emergency, went so far as to say, with a bland smile--'do not let it be supposed that we--_despise_ annual contributors,--we _rather_--solicit their assistance.' all which means, do not think that i take any 'merit' for making myself supremely happy, i rather &c. &c. always rather mean to deserve it a little better--but never shall: so it should be, for you and me--and as it was in the beginning so it is still. you are the--but you know and why should i tease myself with words? let me send this off now--and to-morrow some more, because i trust to hear you have made the first effort and with success. ever yours, my dear friend, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, july , .] well--i have really been out; and am really alive after it--which is more surprising still--alive enough i mean, to write even _so_, to-night. but perhaps i say so with more emphasis, to console myself for failing in my great ambition of getting into the park and of reaching mr. kenyon's door just to leave a card there vaingloriously, ... all which i did fail in, and was forced to turn back from the gates of devonshire place. the next time it will be better perhaps--and this time there was no fainting nor anything very wrong ... not even cowardice on the part of the victim (be it recorded!) for one of my sisters was as usual in authority and ordered the turning back just according to her own prudence and not my selfwill. only you will not, any of you, ask me to admit that it was all delightful--pleasanter work than what you wanted to spare me in taking care of your roses on saturday! don't ask _that_, and i will try it again presently. i ought to be ashamed of writing this i and me-ism--but since your kindness made it worth while asking about i must not be over-wise and silent on my side. _tuesday._--was it fair to tell me to write though, and be silent of the 'duchess,' and when i was sure to be so delighted--and _you knew it_? _i_ think not indeed. and, to make the obedience possible, i go on fast to say that i heard from mr. horne a few days since and that _he_ said--'your envelope reminds me of'--_you_, he said ... and so, asked if you were in england still, and meant to write to you. to which i have answered that i believe you to be in england--thinking it strange about the envelope; which, as far as i remember, was one of those long ones, used, the more conveniently to enclose to him back again a ms. of his own i had offered with another of his, by his desire, to _colburn's magazine_, as the productions of a friend of mine, when he was in germany and afraid of his proper fatal onymousness, yet in difficulty how to approach the magazines as a nameless writer (you will not mention this of course). and when he was in germany, i remember, ... writing just as your first letter came ... that i mentioned it to him, and was a little frankly proud of it! but since, your name has not occurred once--not once, certainly!--and it is strange.... only he _can't_ have heard of your having been here, and it _must_ have been a chance-remark--altogether! taking an imaginary emphasis from my evil conscience perhaps. talking of evils, how wrong of you to make that book for me! and how ill i thanked you after all! also, i couldn't help feeling more grateful still for the duchess ... who is under ban: and for how long i wonder? my dear friend, i am ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, july , .] you are all that is good and kind: i am happy and thankful the beginning (and worst of it) is over and so well. the park and mr. kenyon's all in good time--and your sister was most prudent--and you mean to try again: god bless you, all to be said or done--but, as i say it, no vain word. no doubt it was a mere chance-thought, and _à propos de bottes_ of horne--neither he or any other _can_ know or even fancy how it is. indeed, though on other grounds i should be all so proud of being known for your friend by everybody, yet there's no denying the deep delight of playing the eastern jew's part here in this london--they go about, you know by travel-books, with the tokens of extreme destitution and misery, and steal by blind ways and by-paths to some blank dreary house, one obscure door in it--which being well shut behind them, they grope on through a dark corridor or so, and then, a blaze follows the lifting a curtain or the like, for they are in a palace-hall with fountains and light, and marble and gold, of which the envious are never to dream! and i, too, love to have few friends, and to live alone, and to see you from week to week. do you not suppose i am grateful? and you do like the 'duchess,' as much as you have got of it? that delights me, too--for every reason. but i fear i shall not be able to bring you the rest to-morrow--thursday, my day--because i have been broken in upon more than one morning; nor, though much better in my head, can i do anything at night just now. all will come right eventually, i hope, and i shall transcribe the other things you are to judge. to-morrow then--only (and that is why i would write) do, do _know_ me for what i am and treat me as i deserve in that _one_ respect, and _go out_, without a moment's thought or care, if to-morrow should suit you--leave word to that effect and i shall be as glad as if i saw you or more--_reasoned_ gladness, you know. or you can write--though that is not necessary at all,--do think of all this! i am yours ever, dear friend, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, july , .] you understand that it was not a resolution passed in favour of formality, when i said what i did yesterday about not going out at the time you were coming--surely you do; whatever you might signify to a different effect. if it were necessary for me to go out every day, or most days even, it would be otherwise; but as it is, i may certainly keep the day you come, free from the fear of carriages, let the sun shine its best or worst, without doing despite to you or injury to me--and that's all i meant to insist upon indeed and indeed. you see, jupiter tonans was good enough to come to-day on purpose to deliver me--one evil for another! for i confess with shame and contrition, that i never wait to enquire whether it thunders to the left or the right, to be frightened most ingloriously. isn't it a disgrace to anyone with a pretension to poetry? dr. chambers, a part of whose office it is, papa says, 'to reconcile foolish women to their follies,' used to take the side of my vanity, and discourse at length on the passive obedience of some nervous systems to electrical influences; but perhaps my faint-heartedness is besides traceable to a half-reasonable terror of a great storm in herefordshire, where great storms most do congregate, (such storms!) round the malvern hills, those mountains of england. we lived four miles from their roots, through all my childhood and early youth, in a turkish house my father built himself, crowded with minarets and domes, and crowned with metal spires and crescents, to the provocation (as people used to observe) of every lightning of heaven. once a storm of storms happened, and we all thought the house was struck--and a tree was so really, within two hundred yards of the windows while i looked out--the bark, rent from the top to the bottom ... torn into long ribbons by the dreadful fiery hands, and dashed out into the air, over the heads of other trees, or left twisted in their branches--torn into shreds in a moment, as a flower might be, by a child! did you ever see a tree after it has been struck by lightning? the whole trunk of that tree was bare and peeled--and up that new whiteness of it, ran the finger-mark of the lightning in a bright beautiful rose-colour (none of your roses brighter or more beautiful!) the fever-sign of the certain death--though the branches themselves were for the most part untouched, and spread from the peeled trunk in their full summer foliage; and birds singing in them three hours afterwards! and, in that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were killed on the malvern hills--each sealed to death in a moment with a sign on the chest which a common seal would cover--only the sign on them was not rose-coloured as on our tree, but black as charred wood. so i get 'possessed' sometimes with the effects of these impressions, and so does one, at least, of my sisters, in a lower degree--and oh!--how amusing and instructive all this is to you! when my father came into the room to-day and found me hiding my eyes from the lightning, he was quite angry and called 'it disgraceful to anybody who had ever learnt the alphabet'--to which i answered humbly that 'i knew it was'--but if i had been impertinent, i _might_ have added that wisdom does not come by the alphabet but in spite of it? don't you think so in a measure? _non obstantibus_ bradbury and evans? there's a profane question--and ungrateful too ... after the duchess--i except the duchess and her peers--and be sure she will be the world's duchess and received as one of your most striking poems. full of various power the poem is.... i cannot say how deeply it has impressed me--but though i want the conclusion, i don't _wish_ for it; and in this, am reasonable for once! you will not write and make yourself ill--will you? or read 'sybil' at unlawful hours even? are you better at all? what a letter! and how very foolishly to-day i am yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday morning. [post-mark, july , .] very well--i shall say no more on the subject--though it was not any piece of formality on your part that i deprecated; nor even your over-kindness exactly--i rather wanted you to be really, wisely kind, and do me a greater favour then the next great one in degree; but you must understand this much in me, how you can lay me under deepest obligation. i daresay you think you have some, perhaps many, to whom your well-being is of deeper interest than to me. well, if that be so, do for their sakes make every effort with the remotest chance of proving serviceable to you; nor _set yourself against_ any little irksomeness these carriage-drives may bring with them just at the beginning; and you may say, if you like, 'how i shall delight those friends, if i can make this newest one grateful'--and, as from the known quantity one reasons out the unknown, this newest friend will be one glow of gratitude, he knows that, if you can warm your finger-tips and so do yourself that much real good, by setting light to a dozen 'duchesses': why ought i not to say this when it is so true? besides, people profess as much to their merest friends--for i have been looking through a poem-book just now, and was told, under the head of album-verses alone, that for a. the writer would die, and for b. die too but a crueller death, and for c. too, and d. and so on. i wonder whether they have since wanted to borrow money of him on the strength of his professions. but you must remember we are in july; the th it is, and summer will go and cold weather stay ('_come_' forsooth!)--and now is the time of times. still i feared the rain would hinder you on friday--but the thunder did not frighten me--for you: your father must pardon me for holding most firmly with dr. chambers--his theory is quite borne out by my own experience, for i have seen a man it were foolish to call a coward, a great fellow too, all but die away in a thunderstorm, though he had quite science enough to explain why there was no immediate danger at all--whereupon his younger brother suggested that he should just go out and treat us to a repetition of franklin's experiment with the cloud and the kite--a well-timed proposition which sent the explainer down with a white face into the cellar. what a grand sight your tree was--_is_, for i see it. my father has a print of a tree so struck--torn to ribbons, as you describe--but the rose-mark is striking and new to me. we had a good storm on our last voyage, but i went to bed at the end, as i thought--and only found there had been lightning next day by the bare poles under which we were riding: but the finest mountain fit of the kind i ever saw has an unfortunately ludicrous association. it was at possagno, among the euganean hills, and i was at a poor house in the town--an old woman was before a little picture of the virgin, and at every fresh clap she lighted, with the oddest sputtering muttering mouthful of prayer imaginable, an inch of guttery candle, which, the instant the last echo had rolled away, she as constantly blew out again for saving's sake--having, of course, to _light the smoke_ of it, about an instant after that: the expenditure in wax at which the elements might be propitiated, you see, was a matter for curious calculation. i suppose i ought to have bought the whole taper for some four or five centesimi ( of which make d. english) and so kept the countryside safe for about a century of bad weather. leigh hunt tells you a story he had from byron, of kindred philosophy in a jew who was surprised by a thunderstorm while he was dining on bacon--he tried to eat between-whiles, but the flashes were as pertinacious as he, so at last he pushed his plate away, just remarking with a compassionate shrug, 'all this fuss about a piece of pork!' by the way, what a characteristic of an italian _late_ evening is summer-lightning--it hangs in broad slow sheets, dropping from cloud to cloud, so long in dropping and dying off. the 'bora,' which you only get at trieste, brings wonderful lightning--you are in glorious june-weather, fancy, of an evening, under green shock-headed acacias, so thick and green, with the cicalas stunning you above, and all about you men, women, rich and poor, sitting standing and coming and going--and through all the laughter and screaming and singing, the loud clink of the spoons against the glasses, the way of calling for fresh 'sorbetti'--for all the world is at open-coffee-house at such an hour--when suddenly there is a stop in the sunshine, a blackness drops down, then a great white column of dust drives straight on like a wedge, and you see the acacia heads snap off, now one, then another--and all the people scream 'la bora, la bora!' and you are caught up in their whirl and landed in some interior, the man with the guitar on one side of you, and the boy with a cageful of little brown owls for sale, on the other--meanwhile, the thunder claps, claps, with such a persistence, and the rain, for a finale, falls in a mass, as if you had knocked out the whole bottom of a huge tank at once--then there is a second stop--out comes the sun--somebody clinks at his glass, all the world bursts out laughing, and prepares to pour out again,--but _you_, the stranger, _do_ make the best of your way out, with no preparation at all; whereupon you infallibly put your foot (and half your leg) into a river, really that, of rainwater--that's a _bora_ (and that comment of yours, a justifiable pun!) such things you get in italy, but better, better, the best of all things you do not (_i_ do not) get those. and i shall see you on wednesday, please remember, and bring you the rest of the poem--that you should like it, gratifies me more than i will try to say, but then, do not you be tempted by that pleasure of pleasing which i think is your besetting sin--may it not be?--and so cut me off from the other pleasure of being profited. as i told you, i like so much to fancy that you see, and will see, what i do as _i_ see it, while it is doing, as nobody else in the world should, certainly, even if they thought it worth while to want--but when i try and build a great building i shall want you to come with me and judge it and counsel me before the scaffolding is taken down, and while you have to make your way over hods and mortar and heaps of lime, and trembling tubs of size, and those thin broad whitewashing brushes i always had a desire to take up and bespatter with. and now goodbye--i am to see you on wednesday i trust--and to hear you say you are better, still better, much better? god grant that, and all else good for you, dear friend, and so for r.b. ever yours. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, july , .] i suppose nobody is ever expected to acknowledge his or her 'besetting sin'--it would be unnatural--and therefore you will not be surprised to hear me deny the one imputed to me for mine. i deny it quite and directly. and if my denial goes for nothing, which is but reasonable, i might call in a great cloud of witnesses, ... a thundercloud, ... (talking of storms!) and even seek no further than this table for a first witness; this letter, i had yesterday, which calls me ... let me see how many hard names ... 'unbending,' ... 'disdainful,' ... 'cold hearted,' ... 'arrogant,' ... yes, 'arrogant, as women always are when men grow humble' ... there's a charge against all possible and probable petticoats beyond mine and through it! not that either they or mine deserve the charge--we do not; to the lowest hem of us! for i don't pass to the other extreme, mind, and adopt besetting sins 'over the way' and in antithesis. it's an undeserved charge, and unprovoked! and in fact, the very flower of self-love self-tormented into ill temper; and shall remain unanswered, for _me_, ... and _should_, ... even if i could write mortal epigrams, as your lamia speaks them. only it serves to help my assertion that people in general who know something of me, my dear friend, are not inclined to agree with you in particular, about my having an 'over-pleasure in pleasing,' for a besetting sin. if you had spoken of my sister henrietta indeed, you would have been right--_so_ right! but for _me_, alas, my sins are not half as amiable, nor given to lean to virtue's side with half such a grace. and then i have a pretension to speak the truth like a roman, even in matters of literature, where mr. kenyon says falseness is a fashion--and really and honestly i should not be afraid ... i should have no reason to be afraid, ... if all the notes and letters written by my hand for years and years about presentation copies of poems and other sorts of books were brought together and 'conferred,' as they say of manuscripts, before my face--i should not shrink and be ashamed. not that i always tell the truth as i see it--_but_ i _never do_ speak falsely with intention and consciousness--never--and i do not find that people of letters are sooner offended than others are, by the truth told in gentleness;--i do not remember to have offended anyone in this relation, and by these means. well!--but _from me to you_; it is all different, you know--you must know how different it is. i can tell you truly what i think of this thing and of that thing in your 'duchess'--but i must of a necessity hesitate and fall into misgiving of the adequacy of my truth, so called. to judge at all of a work of yours, i must _look up to it_, and _far up_--because whatever faculty _i_ have is included in your faculty, and with a great rim all round it besides! and thus, it is not at all from an over-pleasure in pleasing _you_, not at all from an inclination to depreciate myself, that i speak and feel as i do and must on some occasions; it is simply the consequence of a true comprehension of you and of me--and apart from it, i should not be abler, i think, but less able, to assist you in anything. i do wish you would consider all this reasonably, and understand it as a third person would in a moment, and consent not to spoil the real pleasure i have and am about to have in your poetry, by nailing me up into a false position with your gold-headed nails of chivalry, which won't hold to the wall through this summer. now you will not answer this?--you will only understand it and me--and that i am not servile but sincere, but earnest, but meaning what i say--and when i say i am afraid, you will believe that i am afraid; and when i say i have misgivings, you will believe that i have misgivings--you will _trust_ me so far, and give me liberty to breathe and feel naturally ... according to my own nature. probably, or certainly rather, i have one advantage over you, ... one, of which women are not fond of boasting--that of _being older by years_--for the 'essay on mind,' which was the first poem published by me (and rather more printed than published after all), the work of my earliest youth, half childhood, half womanhood, was published in i see. and if i told mr. kenyon not to let you see that book, it was not for the date, but because coleridge's daughter was right in calling it a mere 'girl's exercise'; because it is just _that_ and no more, ... no expression whatever of my nature as it ever was, ... pedantic, and in some things pert, ... and such as altogether, and to do myself justice (which i would fain do of course), i was not in my whole life. bad books are never like their writers, you know--and those under-age books are generally bad. also i have found it hard work to _get into expression_, though i began rhyming from my very infancy, much as you did (and this, with no sympathy near to me--i have had to do without sympathy in the full sense--), and even in my 'seraphim' days, my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth,--from leading so conventual recluse a life, perhaps--and all my better poems were written last year, the very best thing to come, if there should be any life or courage to come; i scarcely know. sometimes--it is the real truth--i have haste to be done with it all. it is the real truth; however to say so may be an ungrateful return for your kind and generous words, ... which i _do_ feel gratefully, let me otherwise feel as i will, ... or must. but then you know you are liable to such prodigious mistakes about besetting sins and even besetting virtues--to such a set of small delusions, that are sure to break one by one, like other bubbles, as you draw in your breath, ... as i see by the law of my own star, my own particular star, the star i was born under, the star _wormwood_, ... on the opposite side of the heavens from the constellations of 'the lyre and the crown.' in the meantime, it is difficult to thank you, or _not_ to thank you, for all your kindnesses--[greek: algos de sigan]. only mrs. jameson told me of lady byron's saying 'that she knows she is burnt every day in effigy by half the world, but that the effigy is so unlike herself as to be inoffensive to her,' and just so, or rather just in the converse of _so_, is it with me and your kindnesses. they are meant for quite another than i, and are too far to be so near. the comfort is ... in seeing you throw all those ducats out of the window, (and how many ducats go in a figure to a 'dozen duchesses,' it is profane to calculate) the comfort is that you will not be the poorer for it in the end; since the people beneath, are honest enough to push them back under the door. rather a bleak comfort and occupation though!--and you may find better work for your friends, who are (some of them) weary even unto death of the uses of this life. and now, you who are generous, _be_ generous, and take no notice of all this. i speak of myself, not of you so there is nothing for you to contradict or discuss--and if there were, you would be really kind and give me my way in it. also you may take courage; for i promise not to vex you by thanking you against _your_ will,--more than may be helped. some of this letter was written before yesterday and in reply of course to yours--so it is to pass for two letters, being long enough for just six. yesterday you must have wondered at me for being in such a maze altogether about the poems--and so now i rise to explain that it was assuredly the wine song and no other which i read of yours in _hood's_. and then, what did i say of the dante and beatrice? because what i referred to was the exquisite page or two or three on that subject in the 'pentameron.' i do not remember anything else of landor's with the same bearing--do you? as to montaigne, with the threads of my thoughts smoothly disentangled, i can see nothing coloured by him ... nothing. do bring all the _hood_ poems of your own--inclusive of the 'tokay,' because i read it in such haste as to whirl up all the dust you saw, from the wheels of my chariot. the 'duchess' is past speaking of here--but you will see how i am delighted. and we must make speed--only taking care of your head--for i heard to-day that papa and my aunt are discussing the question of sending me off either to alexandria or malta for the winter. oh--it is quite a passing talk and thought, i dare say! and it would not _be_ in any case, until september or october; though in every case, i suppose, _i_ should not be much consulted ... and all cases and places would seem better to me (if i were) than madeira which the physicians used to threaten me with long ago. so take care of your headache and let us have the 'bells' rung out clear before the summer ends ... and pray don't say again anything about clear consciences or unclear ones, in granting me the privilege of reading your manuscripts--which is all clear privilege to me, with pride and gladness waiting on it. may god bless you always my dear friend! e.b.b. you left behind your sister's little basket--but i hope you did not forget to thank her for my carnations. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [no date] i shall just say, at the beginning of a note as at the end, i am yours _ever_, and not till summer ends and my nails fall out, and my breath breaks bubbles,--ought you to write thus having restricted me as you once did, and do still? you tie me like a shrove-tuesday fowl to a stake and then pick the thickest cudgel out of your lot, and at my head it goes--i wonder whether you remembered having predicted exactly the same horror once before. 'i was to see you--and you were to understand'--_do_ you? do you understand--my own friend--with that superiority in years, too! for i confess to that--you need not throw that in my teeth ... as soon as i read your 'essay on mind'--(which of course i managed to do about hours after mr. k's positive refusal to keep his promise, and give me the book) from preface to the 'vision of fame' at the end, and reflected on my own doings about that time, --i did indeed see, and wonder at, your advance over me in years--what then? i have got nearer you considerably--(if only nearer)--since then--and prove it by the remarks i make at favourable times--such as this, for instance, which occurs in a poem you are to see--written some time ago--which advises nobody who thinks nobly of the soul, to give, if he or she can help, such a good argument to the materialist as the owning that any great choice of that soul, which it is born to make and which--(in its determining, as it must, the whole future course and impulses of that soul)--which must endure for ever, even though the object that induced the choice should disappear--owning, i say, that such a choice may be scientifically determined and produced, at any operator's pleasure, by a definite number of ingredients, so much youth, so much beauty, so much talent &c. &c., with the same certainty and precision that another kind of operator will construct you an artificial volcano with so much steel filings and flower of sulphur and what not. there is more in the soul than rises to the surface and meets the eye; whatever does _that_, is for this world's immediate uses; and were this world _all, all_ in us would be producible and available for use, as it _is_ with the body now--but with the soul, what is to be developed _afterward_ is the main thing, and instinctively asserts its rights--so that when you hate (or love) you shall not be so able to explain 'why' ('you' is the ordinary creature enough of my poem--_he_ might not be so able.) there, i will write no more. you will never drop _me_ off the golden hooks, i dare believe--and the rest is with god--whose finger i see every minute of my life. alexandria! well, and may i not as easily ask leave to come 'to-morrow at the muezzin' as next wednesday at three? god bless you--do not be otherwise than kind to this letter which it costs me pains, great pains to avoid writing better, as truthfuller--this you get is not the first begun. come, you shall not have the heart to blame me; for, see, i will send all my sins of commission with _hood_,--blame _them_, tell me about them, and meantime let me be, dear friend, yours, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, july , .] but i never _did_ strike you or touch you--and you are not in earnest in the complaint you make--and this is really all i am going to say to-day. what i said before was wrung from me by words on your part, while you know far too well how to speak so as to make them go deepest, and which sometimes it becomes impossible, or over-hard to bear without deprecation:--as when, for instance, you talk of being 'grateful' to _me_!!--well! i will try that there shall be no more of it--no more provocation of generosities--and so, (this once) as you express it, i 'will not have the heart to blame' you--except for reading my books against my will, which was very wrong indeed. mr. kenyon asked me, i remember, (he had a mania of sending my copybook literature round the world to this person and that person, and i was roused at last into binding him by a vow to do so no more) i remember he asked me ... 'is mr. browning to be excepted?'; to which i answered that nobody was to be excepted--and thus he was quite right in resisting to the death ... or to dinner-time ... just as you were quite wrong after dinner. now, could a woman have been more curious? could the very author of the book have done worse? but i leave my sins and yours gladly, to get into the _hood_ poems which have delighted me so--and first to the st. praxed's which is of course the finest and most powerful ... and indeed full of the power of life ... and of death. it has impressed me very much. then the 'angel and child,' with all its beauty and significance!--and the 'garden fancies' ... some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, and grace of every kind--and with that beautiful and musical use of the word 'meandering,' which i never remember having seen used in relation to _sound_ before. it does to mate with your '_simmering_ quiet' in sordello, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it. then i like your burial of the pedant so much!--you have quite the damp smell of funguses and the sense of creeping things through and through it. and the 'laboratory' is hideous as you meant to make it:--only i object a little to your tendency ... which is almost a habit, and is very observable in this poem i think, ... of making lines difficult for the reader to read ... see the opening lines of this poem. not that music is required everywhere, nor in _them_ certainly, but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader's mind off the _rail_ ... and interrupts his progress with you and your influence with him. where we have not direct pleasure from rhythm, and where no peculiar impression is to be produced by the changes in it, we should be encouraged by the poet to _forget it altogether_; should we not? i am quite wrong perhaps--but you see how i do not conceal my wrongnesses where they mix themselves up with my sincere impressions. and how could it be that no one within my hearing ever spoke of these poems? because it is true that i never saw one of them--never!--except the 'tokay,' which is inferior to all; and that i was quite unaware of your having printed so much with hood--or at all, except this 'tokay,' and this 'duchess'! the world is very deaf and dumb, i think--but in the end, we need not be afraid of its not learning its lesson. could you come--for i am going out in the carriage, and will not stay to write of your poems even, any more to-day--could you come on thursday or friday (the day left to your choice) instead of on wednesday? if i could help it i would not say so--it is not a caprice. and i leave it to you, whether thursday or friday. and alexandria seems discredited just now for malta--and 'anything but madeira,' i go on saying to myself. these _hood_ poems are all to be in the next 'bells' of course--of necessity? may god bless you my dear friend, my ever dear friend!-- e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, july , .] i will say, with your leave, thursday (nor attempt to say anything else without your leave). the temptation of reading the 'essay' was more than i could bear: and a wonderful work it is every way; the other poems and their music--wonderful! and you go out still--so continue better! i cannot write this morning--i should say too much and have to be sorry and afraid--let me be safely yours ever, my own dear friend-- r.b. i am but too proud of your praise--when will the blame come--at malta? _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, july , .] are you any better to-day? and will you say just the truth of it? and not attempt to do any of the writing which does harm--nor of the reading even, which may do harm--and something does harm to you, you see--and you told me not long ago that you knew how to avoid the harm ... now, did you not? and what could it have been last week which you did not avoid, and which made you so unwell? beseech you not to think that i am going to aid and abet in this wronging of yourself, for i will not indeed--and i am only sorry to have given you my querulous queries yesterday ... and to have omitted to say in relation to them, too, how they were to be accepted in any case as just passing thoughts of mine for _your_ passing thoughts, ... some right, it may be ... some wrong, it must be ... and none, insisted on even by the thinker! just impressions, and by no means pretending to be judgments--now _will_ you understand? also, i intended (as a proof of my fallacy) to strike out one or two of my doubts before i gave the paper to you--so _whichever strikes you as the most foolish of them, of course must be what i meant to strike out_--(there's ingenuity for you!). the poem did, for the rest, as will be suggested to you, give me the very greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways ... by the versification, mechanically considered; and by the successful evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the sin of the boar-pinner--successfully evolved, without softening one hoarse accent of his voice. but there is to be a pause now--you will not write any more--no, nor come here on wednesday, if coming into the roar of this london should make the pain worse, as i cannot help thinking it must--and you were not well yesterday morning, you admitted. you _will_ take care? and if there should be a wisdom in going away...! was it very wrong of me, doing what i told you of yesterday? very imprudent, i am afraid--but i never knew how to be prudent--and then, there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker, ... just as i might give away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer. i did not do--and would not have done, ... one of those papers singly. it would have been unbecoming of me in every way. it was simply a writing of notes ... of slips of paper ... now on one subject, and now on another ... which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed a need for it. and i am not much afraid of being ever guessed at--except by those oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and were after all, i hope, baffled by the sphinx--or ever betrayed; because besides the black stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the editor, he has some interest, even as i have the greatest, in being silent and secret. and nothing _is mine_ ... if something is _of me_ ... or _from_ me, rather. yet it was wrong and foolish, i see plainly--wrong in all but the motives. how dreadful to write against time, and with a side-ways running conscience! and then the literature of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round! and the booksellers were barking distraction on every side!--i had some of the mottos to find too! but the paper relating to you i never was consulted about--or in _one particular way_ it would have been better,--as easily it might have been. may god bless you, my dear friend, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, july , .] you would let me _now_, i dare say, call myself grateful to you--yet such is my jealousy in these matters--so do i hate the material when it puts down, (or tries) the immaterial in the offices of friendship; that i could almost tell you i was _not_ grateful, and try if that way i could make you see the substantiality of those other favours you refuse to recognise, and reality of the other gratitude you will not admit. but truth is truth, and you are all generosity, and will draw none but the fair inference, so i thank you as well as i can for this _also_--this last kindness. and you know its value, too--how if there were another _you_ in the world, who had done all you have done and whom i merely admired for that; if such an one had sent me such a criticism, so exactly what i want and can use and turn to good; you know how i would have told you, my _you_ i saw yesterday, all about it, and been sure of your sympathy and gladness:--but the two in one! for the criticism itself, it is all true, except the over-eating--all the suggestions are to be adopted, the improvements accepted. i so thoroughly understand your spirit in this, that, just in this beginning, i should really like to have found some point in which i could coöperate with your intention, and help my work by disputing the effect of any alteration proposed, if it ought to be disputed--_that_ would answer your purpose exactly as well as agreeing with you,--so that the benefit to me were apparent; but this time i cannot dispute one point. all is for best. so much for this 'duchess'--which i shall ever rejoice in--wherever was a bud, even, in that strip of may-bloom, a live musical bee hangs now. i shall let it lie (my poem), till just before i print it; and then go over it, alter at the places, and do something for the places where i (really) wrote anyhow, almost, to get done. it is an odd fact, yet characteristic of my accomplishings one and all in this kind, that of _the poem_, the real conception of an evening (two years ago, fully)--of _that_, not a line is written,--though perhaps after all, what i am going to call the accessories in the story are real though indirect reflexes of the original idea, and so supersede properly enough the necessity of its personal appearance, so to speak. but, as i conceived the poem, it consisted entirely of the gipsy's description of the life the lady was to lead with her future gipsy lover--a _real_ life, not an unreal one like that with the duke. and as i meant to write it, all their wild adventures would have come out and the insignificance of the former vegetation have been deducible only--as the main subject has become now; of course it comes to the same thing, for one would never show half by half like a cut orange.-- will you write to me? caring, though, so much for my best interests as not to write if you can work for yourself, or save yourself fatigue. i _think_ before writing--or just after writing--such a sentence--but reflection only justifies my first feeling; i _would_ rather go without your letters, without seeing you at all, if that advantaged you--my dear, first and last friend; my friend! and now--surely i might dare say you may if you please get well through god's goodness--with persevering patience, surely--and this next winter abroad--which you must get ready for now, every sunny day, will you not? if i venture to weary you again with all this, is there not the cause of causes, and did not the prophet write that 'there was a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the e.b.b.' led on to the fortune of your r.b. oh, let me tell you in the bitterness of my heart, that it was only o'clock--that clock i enquired about--and that, ... no, i shall never say with any grace what i want to say ... and now dare not ... that you all but owe me an extra quarter of an hour next time: as in the east you give a beggar something for a few days running--then you miss him; and next day he looks indignant when the regular dole falls and murmurs--'and, for yesterday?'--do i stay too long, i _want_ to know,--too long for the voice and head and all but the spirit that may not so soon tire,--knowing the good it does. if you would but tell me. god bless you-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, july , ] you say too much indeed in this letter which has crossed mine--and particularly as there is not a word in it of what i most wanted to know and want to know ... _how you are_--for you must observe, if you please, that the very paper you pour such kindness on, was written after your own example and pattern, when, in the matter of my 'prometheus' (such different wearying matter!), you took trouble for me and did me good. judge from this, if even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me!--or rather, do not judge--but listen when i say that i am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as i wrote; only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again, you must come to the admission of it. one of the thistles is the suggestion about the line was it singing, was it saying, which you wrote so, and which i proposed to amend by an intermediate 'or.' thinking of it at a distance, it grows clear to me that you were right, and that there should be and must be no 'or' to disturb the listening pause. now _should_ there? and there was something else, which i forget at this moment--and something more than the something else. your account of the production of the poem interests me very much--and proves just what i wanted to make out from your statements the other day, and they refused, i thought, to let me, ... that you are more faithful to your first _idea_ than to your first _plan_. is it so? or not? 'orange' is orange--but _which half_ of the orange is not predestinated from all eternity--: is it _so_? _sunday._--i wrote so much yesterday and then went out, not knowing very well how to speak or how to be silent (is it better to-day?) of some expressions of yours ... and of your interest in me--which are deeply affecting to my feelings--whatever else remains to be said of them. and you know that you make great mistakes, ... of fennel for hemlock, of four o'clocks for five o'clocks, and of other things of more consequence, one for another; and may not be quite right besides as to my getting well '_if i please_!' ... which reminds me a little of what papa says sometimes when he comes into this room unexpectedly and convicts me of having dry toast for dinner, and declares angrily that obstinacy and dry toast have brought me to my present condition, and that if i _pleased_ to have porter and beefsteaks instead, i should be as well as ever i was, in a month!... but where is the need of talking of it? what i wished to say was this--that if i get better or worse ... as long as i live and to the last moment of life, i shall remember with an emotion which cannot change its character, all the generous interest and feeling you have spent on me--_wasted_ on me i was going to write--but i would not provoke any answering--and in one obvious sense, it need not be so. i never shall forget these things, my dearest friend; nor remember them more coldly. god's goodness!--i believe in it, as in his sunshine here--which makes my head ache a little, while it comes in at the window, and makes most other people gayer--it does _me_ good too in a different way. and so, may god bless you! and me in this ... just this, ... that i may never have the sense, ... intolerable in the remotest apprehension of it ... of being, in any way, directly or indirectly, the means of ruffling your smooth path by so much as one of my flint-stones!--in the meantime you do not tire me indeed even when you go later for sooner ... and i do not tire myself even when i write longer and duller letters to you (if the last is possible) than the one i am ending now ... as the most grateful (leave me that word) of your friends. e.b.b. how could you think that i should speak to mr. kenyon of the book? all i ever said to him has been that you had looked through my 'prometheus' for me--and that i was _not disappointed in you_, these two things on two occasions. i do trust that your head is better. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, july , .] how must i feel, and what can, or could i say even if you let me say all? i am most grateful, most happy--most happy, come what will! will you let me try and answer your note to-morrow--before wednesday when i am to see you? i will not hide from you that my head aches now; and i have let the hours go by one after one--i am better all the same, and will write as i say--'am i better' you ask! yours i am, ever yours my dear friend r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday. [post-mark, july , .] in all i say to you, write to you, i know very well that i trust to your understanding me almost beyond the warrant of any human capacity--but as i began, so i shall end. i shall believe you remember what i am forced to remember--you who do me the superabundant justice on every possible occasion,--you will never do me injustice when i sit by you and talk about italy and the rest. --to-day i cannot write--though i am very well otherwise--but i shall soon get into my old self-command and write with as much 'ineffectual fire' as before: but meantime, _you_ will write to me, i hope--telling me how you are? i have but one greater delight in the world than in hearing from you. god bless you, my best, dearest friend--think what i would speak-- ever yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, august , .] let me write one word ... not to have it off my mind ... because it is by no means heavily _on_ it; but lest i should forget to write it at all by not writing it at once. what could you mean, ... i have been thinking since you went away ... by applying such a grave expression as having a thing 'off your mind' to that foolish subject of the stupid book (mine), and by making it worth your while to account logically for your wish about my not mentioning it to mr. kenyon? you could not fancy for one moment that i was vexed in the matter of the book? or in the other matter of your wish? now just hear me. i explained to you that i had been silent to mr. kenyon, first because the fact was so; and next and a little, because i wanted to show how i anticipated your wish by a wish of my own ... though from a different motive. _your_ motive i really did take to be (never suspecting my dear kind cousin of treason) to be a natural reluctancy of being convicted (forgive me!) of such an arch-womanly curiosity. for my own motive ... motives ... they are more than one ... you must trust me; and refrain as far as you can from accusing me of an over-love of eleusinian mysteries when i ask you to say just as little about your visits here and of me as you find possible ... _even to mr. kenyon_ ... as _to every other person whatever_. as you know ... and yet more than you know ... i am in a peculiar position--and it does not follow that you should be ashamed of my friendship or that i should not be proud of yours, if we avoid making it a subject of conversation in high places, or low places. there! _that_ is my request to you--or commentary on what you put 'off your mind' yesterday--probably quite unnecessary as either request or commentary; yet said on the chance of its not being so, because you seemed to mistake my remark about mr. kenyon. and your head, how is it? and do consider if it would not be wise and right on that account of your health, to go with mr. chorley? you can neither work nor enjoy while you are subject to attacks of the kind--and besides, and without reference to your present suffering and inconvenience, you _ought not_ to let them master you and gather strength from time and habit; i am sure you ought not. worse last week than ever, you see!--and no prospect, perhaps, of bringing out your "bells" this autumn, without paying a cost too heavy!--therefore ... the _therefore_ is quite plain and obvious!-- _friday._--just as it is how anxious flush and i are, to be delivered from you; by these sixteen heads of the discourse of one of us, written before your letter came. ah, but i am serious--and you will consider--will you not? what is best to be done? and do it. you could write to me, you know, from the end of the world; if you could take the thought of me so far. and _for_ me, no, and yet yes,--i _will_ say this much; that i am not inclined to do you injustice, but justice, when you come here--the justice of wondering to myself how you can possibly, possibly, care to come. which is true enough to be _unanswerable_, if you please--or i should not say it. '_as i began, so i shall end_--' did you, as i hope you did, thank your sister for flush and for me? when you were gone, he graciously signified his intention of eating the cakes--brought the bag to me and emptied it without a drawback, from my hand, cake after cake. and i forgot the basket once again. and talking of italy and the cardinals, and thinking of some cardinal points you are ignorant of, did you ever hear that i was one of 'those schismatiques of amsterdam' whom your dr. donne would have put into the dykes? unless he meant the baptists, instead of the independents, the holders of the independent church principle. no--not '_schismatical_,' i hope, hating as i do from the roots of my heart all that rending of the garment of christ, which christians are so apt to make the daily week-day of this christianity so called--and caring very little for most dogmas and doxies in themselves--too little, as people say to me sometimes, (when they send me 'new testaments' to learn from, with very kind intentions)--and believing that there is only one church in heaven and earth, with one divine high priest to it; let exclusive religionists build what walls they please and bring out what chrisms. but i used to go with my father always, when i was able, to the nearest dissenting chapel of the congregationalists--from liking the simplicity of that praying and speaking without books--and a little too from disliking the theory of state churches. there is a narrowness among the dissenters which is wonderful; an arid, grey puritanism in the clefts of their souls: but it seems to me clear that they know what the 'liberty of christ' _means_, far better than those do who call themselves 'churchmen'; and stand altogether, as a body, on higher ground. and so, you see, when i talked of the sixteen points of my discourse, it was the foreshadowing of a coming event, and you have had it at last in the whole length and breadth of it. but it is not my fault if the wind began to blow so that i could not go out--as i intended--as i shall do to-morrow; and that you have received my dulness in a full libation of it, in consequence. my sisters said of the roses you blasphemed, yesterday, that they 'never saw such flowers anywhere--anywhere here in london--' and therefore if i had thought so myself before, it was not so wrong of me. i put your roses, you see, against my letter, to make it seem less dull--and yet i do not forget what you say about caring to hear from me--i mean, i do not _affect_ to forget it. may god bless you, far longer than i can say so. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday evening. [post-mark, august , .] i said what you comment on, about mr. kenyon, because i feel i _must_ always tell you the simple truth--and not being quite at liberty to communicate the whole story (though it would at once clear me from the charge of over-curiosity ... if i much cared for _that_!)--i made my first request in order to prevent your getting at any part of it from _him_ which should make my withholding seem disingenuous for the moment--that is, till my explanation came, if it had an opportunity of coming. and then, when i fancied you were misunderstanding the reason of that request--and supposing i was ambitious of making a higher figure in _his_ eyes than your own,--i then felt it 'on my mind' and so spoke ... a natural mode of relief surely! for, dear friend, i have _once_ been _untrue_ to you--when, and how, and why, you know--but i thought it pedantry and worse to hold by my words and increase their fault. you have forgiven me that one mistake, and i only refer to it now because if you should ever make _that_ a precedent, and put any least, most trivial word of mine under the same category, you would wrong me as you never wronged human being:--and that is done with. for the other matter,--the talk of my visits, it is impossible that any hint of them can ooze out of the only three persons in the world to whom i ever speak of them--my father, mother and sister--to whom my appreciation of your works is no novelty since some years, and whom i made comprehend exactly your position and the necessity for the absolute silence i enjoined respecting the permission to see you. you may depend on them,--and miss mitford is in your keeping, mind,--and dear mr. kenyon, if there should be never so gentle a touch of 'garrulous god-innocence' about those kind lips of his. come, let me snatch at _that_ clue out of the maze, and say how perfect, absolutely perfect, are those three or four pages in the 'vision' which present the poets--a line, a few words, and the man there,--one twang of the bow and the arrowhead in the white--shelley's 'white ideal all statue-blind' is--perfect,--how can i coin words? and dear deaf old hesiod--and--all, all are perfect, perfect! but 'the moon's regality will hear no praise'--well then, will she hear blame? can it be you, my own you past putting away, _you_ are a schismatic and frequenter of independent dissenting chapels? and you confess this to _me_--whose father and mother went this morning to the very independent chapel where they took me, all those years back, to be baptised--and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion! now will you be particularly encouraged by this successful instance to bring forward any other point of disunion between us that may occur to you? please do not--for so sure as you begin proving that there is a gulf fixed between us, so sure shall i end proving that ... anne radcliffe avert it!... that you are just my sister: not that i am much frightened, but there are such surprises in novels!--blame the next,--yes, now this _is_ to be real blame!--and i meant to call your attention to it before. why, why, do you blot out, in that unutterably provoking manner, whole lines, not to say words, in your letters--(and in the criticism on the 'duchess')--if it is a fact that you have a second thought, does it cease to be as genuine a fact, that first thought you please to efface? why give a thing and take a thing? is there no significance in putting on record that your first impression was to a certain effect and your next to a certain other, perhaps completely opposite one? if any proceeding of yours could go near to deserve that harsh word 'impertinent' which you have twice, in speech and writing, been pleased to apply to your observations on me; certainly _this_ does go as near as can be--as there is but one step to take from southampton pier to new york quay, for travellers westward. now will you lay this to heart and perpend--lest in my righteous indignation i [some words effaced here]! for my own health--it improves, thank you! and i shall go abroad all in good time, never fear. for my 'bells,' mr. chorley tells me there is no use in the world of printing them before november at earliest--and by that time i shall get done with these romances and certainly one tragedy (_that_ could go to press next week)--in proof of which i will bring you, if you let me, a few more hundreds of lines next wednesday. but, 'my poet,' if i would, as is true, sacrifice all my works to do your fingers, even, good--what would i not offer up to prevent you staying ... perhaps to correct my very verses ... perhaps read and answer my very letters ... staying the production of more 'berthas' and 'caterinas' and 'geraldines,' more great and beautiful poems of which i shall be--how proud! do not be punctual in paying tithes of thyme, mint, anise and cummin, and leaving unpaid the real weighty dues of the law; nor affect a scrupulous acknowledgment of 'what you owe me' in petty manners, while you leave me to settle such a charge, as accessory to the hiding the talent, as best i can! i have thought of this again and again, and would have spoken of it to you, had i ever felt myself fit to speak of any subject nearer home and me and you than rome and cardinal acton. for, observe, you have not done ... yes, the 'prometheus,' no doubt ... but with that exception _have_ you written much lately, as much as last year when 'you wrote all your best things' you said, i think? yet you are better now than then. dearest friend, _i_ intend to write more, and very likely be praised more, now i care less than ever for it, but still more do i look to have you ever before me, in your place, and with more poetry and more praise still, and my own heartfelt praise ever on the top, like a flower on the water. i have said nothing of yesterday's storm ... _thunder_ ... may you not have been out in it! the evening draws in, and i will walk out. may god bless you, and let you hold me by the hand till the end--yes, dearest friend! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, august , .] just to show what may be lost by my crossings out, i will tell you the story of the one in the 'duchess'--and in fact it is almost worth telling to a metaphysician like you, on other grounds, that you may draw perhaps some psychological good from the absurdity of it. hear, then. when i had done writing the sheet of annotations and reflections on your poem i took up my pencil to correct the passages reflected on with the reflections, by the crosses you may observe, just glancing over the writing as i did so. well! and, where that erasure is, i found a line purporting to be extracted from your 'duchess,' with sundry acute criticisms and objections quite undeniably strong, following after it; only, to my amazement, as i looked and looked, the line so acutely objected to and purporting, as i say, to, be taken from the 'duchess,' was by no means to be found in the 'duchess,' ... nor anything like it, ... and i am certain indeed that, in the 'duchess' or out of it, you never wrote such a bad line in your life. and so it became a proved thing to me that i had been enacting, in a mystery, both poet and critic together--and one so neutralizing the other, that i took all that pains you remark upon to cross myself out in my double capacity, ... and am now telling the story of it notwithstanding. and there's an obvious moral to the myth, isn't there? for critics who bark the loudest, commonly bark at their own shadow in the glass, as my flush used to do long and loud, before he gained experience and learnt the [greek: gnôthi seauton] in the apparition of the brown dog with the glittering dilating eyes, ... and as _i_ did, under the erasure. and another moral springs up of itself in this productive ground; for, you see, ... '_quand je m'efface il n'ya pas grand mal_.' and i am to be made to work very hard, am i? but you should remember that if i did as much writing as last summer, i should not be able to do much else, ... i mean, to go out and walk about ... for really i think i _could_ manage to read your poems and write as i am writing now, with ever so much head-work of my own going on at the same time. but the bodily exercise is different, and i do confess that the novelty of living more in the outer life for the last few months than i have done for years before, make me idle and inclined to be idle--and everybody is idle sometimes--even _you_ perhaps--are you not? for me, you know, i do carpet-work--ask mrs. jameson--and i never pretend to be in a perpetual motion of mental industry. still it may not be quite as bad as you think: i have done some work since 'prometheus'--only it is nothing worth speaking of and not a part of the romance-poem which is to be some day if i live for it--lyrics for the most part, which lie written illegibly in pure egyptian--oh, there is time enough, and too much perhaps! and so let me be idle a little now, and enjoy your poems while i can. it is pure enjoyment and must be--but you do not know how much, or you would not talk as you do sometimes ... so wide of any possible application. and do _not_ talk again of what you would 'sacrifice' for _me_. if you affect me by it, which is true, you cast me from you farther than ever in the next thought. _that_ is true. the poems ... yours ... which you left with me,--are full of various power and beauty and character, and you must let me have my own gladness from them in my own way. now i must end this letter. did you go to chelsea and hear the divine philosophy? _tell me the truth always_ ... will you? i mean such truths as may be painful to me _though_ truths.... may god bless you, ever dear friend. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday afternoon. [post-mark, august , .] then there is one more thing 'off my mind': i thought it might be with you as with _me_--not remembering how different are the causes that operate against us; different in kind as in degree:--_so_ much reading hurts me, for instance,--whether the reading be light or heavy, fiction or fact, and _so_ much writing, whether my own, such as you have seen, or the merest compliment-returning to the weary tribe that exact it of one. but your health--that before all!... as assuring all eventually ... and on the other accounts you must know! never, pray, _pray_, never lose one sunny day or propitious hour to 'go out or walk about.' but do not surprise _me_, one of these mornings, by 'walking' up to me when i am introduced' ... or i shall infallibly, in spite of all the after repentance and begging pardon--i shall [words effaced]. so here you learn the first 'painful truth' i have it in my power to tell you! i sent you the last of our poor roses this morning--considering that i fairly owed that kindness to them. yes, i went to chelsea and found dear carlyle alone--his wife is in the country where he will join her as soon as his book's last sheet returns corrected and fit for press--which will be at the month's end about. he was all kindness and talked like his own self while he made me tea--and, afterward, brought chairs into the little yard, rather than garden, and smoked his pipe with apparent relish; at night he would walk as far as vauxhall bridge on my way home. if i used the word 'sacrifice,' you do well to object--i can imagine nothing ever to be done by me worthy such a name. god bless you, dearest friend--shall i hear from you before tuesday? ever your own r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, august , .] it is very kind to send these flowers--too kind--why are they sent? and without one single word ... which is not too kind certainly. i looked down into the heart of the roses and turned the carnations over and over to the peril of their leaves, and in vain! not a word do i deserve to-day, i suppose! and yet if i don't, i don't deserve the flowers either. there should have been an equal justice done to my demerits, o zeus with the scales! after all i do thank you for these flowers--and they are beautiful--and they came just in a right current of time, just when i wanted them, or something like them--so i confess _that_ humbly, and do thank you, at last, rather as i ought to do. only you ought not to give away all the flowers of your garden to _me_; and your sister thinks so, be sure--if as silently as you sent them. now i shall not write any more, not having been written to. what with the wednesday's flowers and these, you may think how i in this room, look down on the gardens of damascus, let _your jew_[ ] say what he pleases of _them_--and the wednesday's flowers are as fresh and beautiful, i must explain, as the new ones. they were quite supererogatory ... the new ones ... in the sense of being flowers. now, the sense of what i am writing seems questionable, does it not?--at least, more so, than the nonsense of it. not a word, even under the little blue flowers!!!-- e.b.b. [footnote : 'r. benjamin of tudela' added in robert browning's handwriting.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday afternoon. [post-mark, august , .] how good you are to the smallest thing i try and do--(to show i _would_ please you for an instant if i could, rather than from any hope such poor efforts as i am restricted to, can please you or ought.) and that you should care for the note that was not there!--but i was surprised by the summons to seal and deliver, since time and the carrier were peremptory--and so, i dared divine, almost, i should hear from you by our mid-day post--which happened--and the answer to _that_, you received on friday night, did you not? i had to go to holborn, of all places,--not to pluck strawberries in the bishop's garden like richard crouchback, but to get a book--and there i carried my note, thinking to expedite its delivery: this notelet of yours, quite as little in its kind as my blue flowers,--this came last evening--and here are my thanks, dear e.b.b.--dear friend. in the former note there is a phrase i must not forget to call on you to account for--that where it confesses to having done 'some work--only nothing worth speaking of.' just see,--will you be first and only compact-breaker? nor misunderstand me here, please, ... as i said, i am quite rejoiced that you go out now, 'walk about' now, and put off the writing that will follow thrice as abundantly, all because of the stopping to gather strength ... so i want no new word, not to say poem, not to say the romance-poem--let the 'finches in the shrubberies grow restless in the dark'--_i_ am inside with the lights and music: but what is done, is done, _pas vrai_? and 'worth' is, dear my friend, pardon me, not in your arbitration quite. let me tell you an odd thing that happened at chorley's the other night. i must have mentioned to you that i forget my own verses so surely after they are once on paper, that i ought, without affectation, to mend them infinitely better, able as i am to bring fresh eyes to bear on them--(when i say 'once on paper' that is just what i mean and no more, for after the sad revising begins they do leave their mark, distinctly or less so according to circumstances). well, miss cushman, the new american actress (clever and truthful-looking) was talking of a new novel by the dane andersen, he of the 'improvisatore,' which will reach us, it should seem, in translation, _viâ_ america--she had looked over two or three proofs of the work in the press, and chorley was anxious to know something about its character. the title, she said, was capital--'only a fiddler!'--and she enlarged on that word, 'only,' and its significance, so put: and i quite agreed with her for several minutes, till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another and at last i was obliged to stop my praises and say 'but, now i think of it, _i_ seem to have written something with a similar title--nay, a play, i believe--yes, and in five acts--'only an actress'--and from that time, some two years or more ago to this, i have been every way relieved of it'!--and when i got home, next morning, i made a dark pocket in my russet horror of a portfolio give up its dead, and there fronted me 'only a player-girl' (the real title) and the sayings and doings of her, and the others--such others! so i made haste and just tore out one sample-page, being scene the first, and sent it to our friend as earnest and proof i had not been purely dreaming, as might seem to be the case. and what makes me recall it now is, that it was russian, and about a fair on the neva, and booths and droshkies and fish-pies and so forth, with the palaces in the back ground. and in chorley's _athenæum_ of yesterday you may read a paper of _very_ simple moony stuff about the death of alexander, and that sir james wylie i have seen at st. petersburg (where he chose to mistake me for an italian--'m. l'italien' he said another time, looking up from his cards).... so i think to tell you. now i may leave off--i shall see you start, on tuesday--hear perhaps something definite about your travelling. do you know, 'consuelo' wearies me--oh, wearies--and the fourth volume i have all but stopped at--there lie the three following, but who cares about consuelo after that horrible evening with the venetian scamp, (where he bullies her, and it does answer, after all she says) as we say? and albert wearies too--it seems all false, all writing--not the first part, though. and what easy work these novelists have of it! a dramatic poet has to _make_ you love or admire his men and women,--they must _do_ and _say_ all that you are to see and hear--really do it in your face, say it in your ears, and it is wholly for _you_, in _your_ power, to _name_, characterize and so praise or blame, _what_ is so said and done ... if you don't perceive of yourself, there is no standing by, for the author, and telling you. but with these novelists, a scrape of the pen--out blurting of a phrase, and the miracle is achieved--'consuelo possessed to perfection this and the other gift'--what would you more? or, to leave dear george sand, pray think of bulwer's beginning a 'character' by informing you that lone, or somebody in 'pompeii,' 'was endowed with _perfect_ genius'--'genius'! what though the obliging informer might write his fingers off before he gave the pitifullest proof that the poorest spark of that same, that genius, had ever visited _him_? _ione_ has it '_perfectly_'--perfectly--and that is enough! zeus with the scales? with the false weights! and now--till tuesday good-bye, and be willing to get well as (letting me send _porter_ instead of flowers--and beefsteaks too!) soon as may be! and may god bless you, ever dear friend. r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, august , .] but if it 'hurts' you to read and write ever so little, why should i be asked to write ... for instance ... 'before tuesday?' and i did mean to say before to-day, that i wish you never would write to me when you are not _quite well_, as once or twice you have done if not much oftener; because there is not a necessity, ... and i do not choose that there should ever be, or _seem_ a necessity, ... do you understand? and as a matter of personal preference, it is natural for me to like the silence that does not hurt you, better than the speech that does. and so, remember. and talking of what may 'hurt' you and me, you would smile, as i have often done in the midst of my vexation, if you knew the persecution i have been subjected to by the people who call themselves (_lucus a non lucendo_) 'the faculty,' and set themselves against the exercise of other people's faculties, as a sure way to death and destruction. the modesty and simplicity with which one's physicians tell one not to think or feel, just as they would tell one not to walk out in the dew, would be quite amusing, if it were not too tryingly stupid sometimes. i had a doctor once who thought he had done everything because he had carried the inkstand out of the room--'now,' he said, 'you will have such a pulse to-morrow.' he gravely thought poetry a sort of disease--a sort of fungus of the brain--and held as a serious opinion, that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art--which was true (he maintained) even of men--he had studied the physiology of poets, 'quotha'--but that for women, it was a mortal malady and incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances. and then came the damnatory clause in his experience ... that he had never known 'a system' approaching mine in 'excitability' ... except miss garrow's ... a young lady who wrote verses for lady blessington's annuals ... and who was the only other female rhymer he had had the misfortune of attending. and she was to die in two years, though she was dancing quadrilles then (and has lived to do the same by the polka), and _i_, of course, much sooner, if i did not ponder these things, and amend my ways, and take to reading 'a course of history'!! indeed i do not exaggerate. and just so, for a long while i was persecuted and pestered ... vexed thoroughly sometimes ... my own family, instructed to sing the burden out all day long--until the time when the subject was suddenly changed by my heart being broken by that great stone that fell out of heaven. afterwards i was let do anything i could best ... which was very little, until last year--and the working, last year, did much for me in giving me stronger roots down into life, ... much. but think of that absurd reasoning that went before!--the _niaiserie_ of it! for, granting all the premises all round, it is not the _utterance_ of a thought that _can_ hurt anybody; while only the utterance is dependent on the will; and so, what can the taking away of an inkstand do? those physicians are such metaphysicians! it's curious to listen to them. and it's wise to leave off listening: though i have met with excessive kindness among them, ... and do not refer to dr. chambers in any of this, of course. i am very glad you went to chelsea--and it seemed finer afterwards, on purpose to make room for the divine philosophy. which reminds me (the going to chelsea) that my brother henry confessed to me yesterday, with shame and confusion of face, to having mistaken and taken your umbrella for another belonging to a cousin of ours then in the house. he saw you ... without conjecturing, just at the moment, who you were. do _you_ conjecture sometimes that i live all alone here like mariana in the moated grange? it is not quite so--: but where there are many, as with us, every one is apt to follow his own devices--and my father is out all day and my brothers and sisters are in and out, and with too large a public of noisy friends for me to bear, ... and i see them only at certain hours, ... except, of course, my sisters. and then as you have 'a reputation' and are opined to talk generally in blank verse, it is not likely that there should be much irreverent rushing into this room when you are known to be in it. the flowers are ... so beautiful! indeed it was wrong, though, to send me the last. it was not just to the lawful possessors and enjoyers of them. that it was kind to _me_ i do not forget. you are too teachable a pupil in the art of obliterating--and _omne ignotum pro terrifico_ ... and therefore i won't frighten you by walking to meet you for fear of being frightened myself. so good-bye until tuesday. i ought not to make you read all this, i know, whether you like to read it or not: and i ought not to have written it, having no better reason than because i like to write on and on. _you_ have better reasons for thinking me very weak--and i, too good ones for not being able to reproach you for that natural and necessary opinion. may god bless you my dearest friend. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, august , .] what can i say, or hope to say to you when i see what you do for me? _this_--for myself, (nothing for _you_!)--_this_, that i think the great, great good i get by your kindness strikes me less than that kindness. all is right, too-- come, i will have my fault-finding at last! so you can decypher my _utterest_ hieroglyphic? now droop the eyes while i triumph: the plains cower, cower beneath the mountains their masters--and the priests stomp over the clay ridges, (a palpable plagiarism from two lines of a legend that delighted my infancy, and now instruct my maturer years in pretty nearly all they boast of the semi-mythologic era referred to--'in london town, when reigned king lud, his lords went stomping thro' the mud'--would all historic records were half as picturesque!) but you know, yes, _you_ know you are too indulgent by far--and treat these roughnesses as if they were advanced to many a stage! meantime the pure gain is mine, and better, the kind generous spirit is mine, (mine to profit by)--and best--best--best, the dearest friend is mine, so be happy r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, august , .] yes, i admit that it was stupid to read that word so wrong. i thought there was a mistake somewhere, but that it was _yours_, who had written one word, meaning to write another. 'cower' puts it all right of course. but is there an english word of a significance different from 'stamp,' in 'stomp?' does not the old word king lud's men stomped withal, claim identity with our 'stamping.' the _a_ and _o_ used to 'change about,' you know, in the old english writers--see chaucer for it. still the 'stomp' with the peculiar significance, is better of course than the 'stamp' even with a rhyme ready for it, and i dare say you are justified in daring to put this old wine into the new bottle; and we will drink to the health of the poem in it. it _is_ 'italy in england'--isn't it? but i understand and understood perfectly, through it all, that it is _unfinished_, and in a rough state round the edges. i could not help seeing _that_, even if i were still blinder than when i read 'lower' for 'cower.' but do not, i ask of you, speak of my 'kindness' ... my kindness!--mine! it is 'wasteful and ridiculous excess' and mis-application to use such words of me. and therefore, talking of 'compacts' and the 'fas' and 'nefas' of them, i entreat you to know for the future that whatever i write of your poetry, if it isn't to be called 'impertinence,' isn't to be called 'kindness,' any more, ... _a fortiori_, as people say when they are sure of an argument. now, will you try to understand? and talking still of compacts, how and where did i break any compact? i do not see. it was very curious, the phenomenon about your 'only a player-girl.' what an un-godlike indifference to your creatures though--your worlds, breathed away from you like soap bubbles, and dropping and breaking into russet portfolios unobserved! only a god for the epicurean, at best, can you be? that miss cushman went to three mile cross the other day, and visited miss mitford, and pleased her a good deal, i fancied from what she said, ... and with reason, from what _you_ say. and 'only a fiddler,' as i forgot to tell you yesterday, is announced, you may see in any newspaper, as about to issue from the english press by mary howitt's editorship. so we need not go to america for it. but if you complain of george sand for want of art, how could you bear andersen, who can see a thing under his eyes and place it under yours, and take a thought separately into his soul and express it insularly, but has no sort of instinct towards wholeness and unity; and writes a book by putting so many pages together, ... just so!--for the rest, there can be no disagreeing with you about the comparative difficulty of novel-writing and drama-writing. i disagree a little, lower down in your letter, because i could not deny (in my own convictions) a certain proportion of genius to the author of 'ernest maltravers,' and 'alice' (did you ever read those books?), even if he had more impotently tried (supposing it to be possible) for the dramatic laurel. in fact his poetry, dramatic or otherwise, is 'nought'; but for the prose romances, and for 'ernest maltravers' above all, i must lift up my voice and cry. and i read the _athenæum_ about your sir james wylie who took you for an italian.... 'poi vi dirò signor, che ne fu causa ch' avio fatto al scriver debita pausa.'-- ever your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, august , .] do you know, dear friend, it is no good policy to stop up all the vents of my feeling, nor leave one for safety's sake, as you will do, let me caution you never so repeatedly. i know, quite well enough, that your 'kindness' is not _so_ apparent, even, in this instance of correcting my verses, as in many other points--but on such points, you lift a finger to me and i am dumb.... am i not to be allowed a word here neither? i remember, in the first season of german opera here, when 'fidelio's' effects were going, going up to the gallery in order to get the best of the last chorus--get its oneness which you do--and, while perched there an inch under the ceiling, i was amused with the enormous enthusiasm of an elderly german (we thought,--i and a cousin of mine)--whose whole body broke out in billow, heaved and swayed in the perfection of his delight, hands, head, feet, all tossing and striving to utter what possessed him. well--next week, we went again to the opera, and again mounted at the proper time, but the crowd was _greater_, and our mild great faced white haired red cheeked german was not to be seen, not at first--for as the glory was at its full, my cousin twisted me round and made me see an arm, only an arm, all the body of its owner being amalgamated with a dense crowd on each side, before, and--not behind, because they, the crowd, occupied the last benches, over which we looked--and this arm waved and exulted as if 'for the dignity of the whole body,'--relieved it of its dangerous accumulation of repressed excitability. when the crowd broke up all the rest of the man disengaged itself by slow endeavours, and there stood our friend confessed--as we were sure! --now, you would have bade him keep his arm quiet? 'lady geraldine, you _would_!' i have read those novels--but i must keep that word of words, 'genius'--for something different--'talent' will do here surely. there lies 'consuelo'--done with! i shall tell you frankly that it strikes me as precisely what in conventional language with the customary silliness is styled a _woman's_ book, in its merits and defects,--and supremely timid in all the points where one wants, and has a right to expect, some _fruit_ of all the pretence and george sand_ism_. these are occasions when one does say, in the phrase of her school, 'que la femme parle!' or what is better, let her act! and how does consuelo comfort herself on such an emergency? why, she bravely lets the uninspired people throw down one by one their dearest prejudices at her feet, and then, like a very actress, picks them up, like so many flowers, returning them to the breast of the owners with a smile and a courtesy and trips off the stage with a glance at the pit. count christian, baron frederic, baroness--what is her name--all open their arms, and consuelo will not consent to entail disgrace &c. &c. no, you say--she leaves them in order to solve the problem of her true feeling, whether she can really love albert; but remember that this is done, (that is, so much of it as ever _is_ done, and as determines her to accept his hand at the very last)--this is solved sometime about the next morning--or earlier--i forget--and in the meantime, albert gets that 'benefit of the doubt' of which chapter the last informs you. as for the hesitation and self examination on the matter of that anzoleto--the writer is turning over the leaves of a wrong dictionary, seeking help from psychology, and pretending to forget there is such a thing as physiology. then, that horrible porpora:--if george sand gives _him_ to a consuelo for an absolute master, in consideration of his services specified, and is of opinion that _they_ warrant his conduct, or at least, oblige submission to it,--then, i find her objections to the fatherly rule of frederic perfectly impertinent--he having a few claims upon the gratitude of prussia also, in his way, i believe! if the strong ones _will make_ the weak ones lead them--then, for heaven's sake, let this dear old all-abused world keep on its course without these outcries and tearings of hair, and don't be for ever goading the karls and other trodden-down creatures till they get their carbines in order (very rationally) to abate the nuisance--when you make the man a long speech against some enormity he is about to commit, and adjure and beseech and so forth, till he throws down the aforesaid carbine, falls on his knees, and lets the frederic go quietly on his way to keep on killing his thousands after the fashion that moved your previous indignation. now is that right, consequential--that is, _inferential_; logically deduced, going straight to the end--_manly_? the accessories are not the principal, the adjuncts--the essence, nor the ornamental incidents the book's self, so what matters it if the portraits are admirable, the descriptions eloquent, (eloquent, there it is--that is her characteristic--what she _has_ to speak, she _speaks out_, speaks volubly _forth_, too well, inasmuch as you say, advancing a step or two, 'and now speak as completely _here_'--and she says nothing)--but all _that_, another could do, as others have done--but 'la femme qui parle'--ah, that, is _this_ all? so i am not george sand's--she teaches me nothing--i look to her for nothing. i am ever yours, dearest friend. how i write to you--page on page! but tuesday--who could wait till then! shall i not hear from you? god bless you ever r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, august , .] but what likeness is there between opposites; and what has 'm. l'italien' to do with the said 'elderly german'? see how little! for to bring your case into point, somebody should have been playing on a jew's harp for the whole of the orchestra; and the elderly german should have quoted something about 'harp of judah' to the venetian behind him! and there, you would have proved your analogy!--because you see, my dear friend, it was not the expression, but the thing expressed, i cried out against--the exaggeration in your mind. i am sorry when i write what you do not like--but i have instincts and impulses too strong for me when you say things which put me into such a miserably false position in respect to you--as for instance, when in this very last letter (oh, i _must_ tell you!) you talk of my 'correcting your verses'! my correcting your verses!!!--now is _that_ a thing for you to say?--and do you really imagine that if i kept that happily imagined phrase in my thoughts, i should be able to tell you one word of my impressions from your poetry, ever, ever again? do you not see at once what a disqualifying and paralysing phrase it must be, of simple necessity? so it is _i_ who have reason to complain, ... it appears to _me_, ... and by no means _you_--and in your 'second consideration' you become aware of it, i do not at all doubt. as to 'consuelo' i agree with nearly all that you say of it--though george sand, we are to remember, is greater than 'consuelo,' and not to be depreciated according to the defects of that book, nor classified as 'femme qui parle' ... she who is man and woman together, ... judging her by the standard of even that book in the nobler portions of it. for the inconsequency of much in the book, i admit it of course--and _you_ will admit that it is the rarest of phenomena when men ... men of logic ... follow their own opinions into their obvious results--nobody, you know, ever thinks of doing such a thing: to pursue one's own inferences is to rush in where angels ... perhaps ... do _not_ fear to tread, ... but where there will not be much other company. so the want of practical logic shall be a human fault rather than a womanly one, if you please: and you must please also to remember that 'consuelo' is only 'half the orange'; and that when you complain of its not being a whole one, you overlook that hand which is holding to you the 'comtesse de rudolstadt' in three volumes! not that i, who have read the whole, profess a full satisfaction about albert and the rest--and consuelo is made to be happy by a mere clap-trap at last: and mme. dudevant has her specialities,--in which, other women, i fancy, have neither part nor lot, ... even _here_!--altogether, the book is a sort of rambling 'odyssey,' a female 'odyssey,' if you like, but full of beauty and nobleness, let the faults be where they may. and then, i like those long, long books, one can live away into ... leaving the world and above all oneself, quite at the end of the avenue of palms--quite out of sight and out of hearing!--oh, i have felt something like _that_ so often--so often! and _you_ never felt it, and never will, i hope. but if bulwer had written nothing but the 'ernest maltravers' books, you would think perhaps more highly of him. do you _not_ think it possible now? it is his most impotent struggling into poetry, which sets about proving a negative of genius on him--_that_, which the _athenæum praises_ as 'respectable attainment in various walks of literature'--! _like_ the _athenæum_, isn't it? and worthy praise, to be administered by professed judges of art? what is to be expected of the public, when the teachers of the public teach _so_?-- when you come on tuesday, do not forget the ms. if any is done--only don't let it be done so as to tire and hurt you--mind! and good-bye until tuesday, from e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, august , .] i am going to propose to you to give up tuesday, and to take your choice of two or three other days, say friday, or saturday, or to-morrow ... monday. mr. kenyon was here to-day and talked of leaving london on friday, and of visiting me again on 'tuesday' ... he said, ... but that is an uncertainty, and it may be tuesday or wednesday or thursday. so i thought (wrong or right) that out of the three remaining days you would not mind choosing one. and if you do choose the monday, there will be no need to write--nor time indeed--; but if the friday or saturday, i shall hear from you, perhaps. above all things remember, my dear friend, that i shall not expect you to-morrow, except as by a _bare possibility_. in great haste, signed and sealed this sunday evening by e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday, p.m. [post-mark, august , .] i this moment get your note--having been out since the early morning--and i must write just to catch the post. you are pure kindness and considerateness, _no_ thanks to you!--(since you will have it so--). i choose friday, then,--but i shall hear from you before thursday, i dare hope? i have all but passed your house to-day--with an italian friend, from rome, whom i must go about with a little on weariful sight seeing, so i shall earn friday. bless you r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, august , .] i fancied it was just _so_--as i did not hear and did not see you on monday. not that you were expected particularly--but that you would have written your own negative, it appeared to me, by some post in the day, if you had received my note in time. it happened well too, altogether, as you have a friend with you, though mr. kenyon does not come, and will not come, i dare say; for he spoke like a doubter at the moment; and as this tuesday wears on, i am not likely to have any visitors on it after all, and may as well, if the rain quite ceases, go and spend my solitude on the park a little. flush wags his tail at that proposition when i speak it loud out. and i am to write to you before friday, and so, am writing, you see ... which i should not, should not have done if i had not been told; because it is not my turn to write, ... did you think it was? not a word of malta! except from mr. kenyon who talked homilies of it last sunday and wanted to speak them to papa--but it would not do in any way--now especially--and in a little time there will be a decision for or against; and i am afraid of _both_ ... which is a happy state of preparation. did i not tell you that early in the summer i did some translations for miss thomson's 'classical album,' from bion and theocritus, and nonnus the author of that large (not great) poem in some forty books of the 'dionysiaca' ... and the paraphrases from apuleius? well--i had a letter from her the other day, full of compunction and ejaculation, and declaring the fact that mr. burges had been correcting all the proofs of the poems; leaving out and emending generally, according to his own particular idea of the pattern in the mount--is it not amusing? i have been wicked enough to write in reply that it is happy for her and all readers ... _sua si bona norint_ ... if during some half hour which otherwise might have been dedicated by mr. burges to patting out the lights of sophocles and his peers, he was satisfied with the humbler devastation of e.b.b. upon nonnus. you know it is impossible to help being amused. this correcting is a mania with that man! and then i, who wrote what i did from the 'dionysiaca,' with no respect for 'my author,' and an arbitrary will to 'put the case' of bacchus and ariadne as well as i could, for the sake of the art-illustrations, ... those subjects miss thomson sent me, ... and did it all with full liberty and persuasion of soul that nobody would think it worth while to compare english with greek and refer me back to nonnus and detect my wanderings from the text!! but the critic was not to be cheated so! and i do not doubt that he has set me all 'to rights' from beginning to end; and combed ariadne's hair close to her cheeks for me. have _you_ known nonnus, ... _you_ who forget nothing? and have known everything, i think? for it is quite startling, i must tell you, quite startling and humiliating, to observe how you combine such large tracts of experience of outer and inner life, of books and men, of the world and the arts of it; curious knowledge as well as general knowledge ... and deep thinking as well as wide acquisition, ... and you, looking none the older for it all!--yes, and being besides a man of genius and working your faculty and not wasting yourself over a surface or away from an end. dugald stewart said that genius made naturally a lop-sided mind--did he not? he ought to have known _you_. and _i_ who do ... a little ... (for i grow more loth than i was to assume the knowledge of you, my dear friend)--_i_ do not mean to use that word 'humiliation' in the sense of having felt the thing myself in any _painful_ way, ... because i never for a moment did, or _could_, you know,--never could ... never did ... except indeed when you have over praised me, which forced another personal feeling in. otherwise it has always been quite pleasant to me to be 'startled and humiliated'--and more so perhaps than to be startled and exalted, if i might choose.... only i did not mean to write all this, though you told me to write to you. but the rain which keeps one in, gives one an example of pouring on ... and you must endure as you can or will. also ... as you have a friend with you 'from italy' ... 'from rome,' and commended me for my 'kindness and considerateness' in changing tuesday to friday ... (wasn't it?...) shall i still be more considerate and put off the visit-day to next week? mind, you let it be as you like it best to be--i mean, as is most convenient 'for the nonce' to you and your friend--because all days are equal, as to that matter of convenience, to your other friend of this ilk, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, august , .] mauvaise, mauvaise, mauvaise, you know as i know, just as much, that your 'kindness and considerateness' consisted, not in putting off tuesday for another day, but in caring for my coming at all; for my coming and being told at the door that you were engaged, and _i_ might call another time! and you are not, not my 'other friend,' any more than this head of mine is my _other_ head, seeing that i have got a violin which has a head too! all which, beware lest you get fully told in the letter i will write this evening, when i have done with my romans--who are, it so happens, here at this minute; that is, have left the house for a few minutes with my sister--but are not 'with me,' as you seem to understand it,--in the house to stay. they were kind to me in rome, (husband and wife), and i am bound to be of what use i may during their short stay. let me lose no time in begging and praying you to cry 'hands off' to that dreadful burgess; have not i got a ... but i will tell you to-night--or on friday which is my day, please--friday. till when, pray believe me, with respect and esteem, your most obliged and disobliged at these blank endings--what have i done? god bless you ever dearest friend. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday, o'clock. [post-mark, august , .] i feel at home, this blue early morning, now that i sit down to write (or, _speak_, as i try and fancy) to you, after a whole day with those 'other friends'--dear good souls, whom i should be so glad to serve, and to whom service must go by way of last will and testament, if a few more hours of 'social joy,' 'kindly intercourse,' &c., fall to my portion. my friend the countess began proceedings (when i first saw her, not yesterday) by asking 'if i had got as much money as i expected by any works published of late?'--to which i answered, of course, 'exactly as much'--_è grazioso_! (all the same, if you were to ask her, or the like of her, 'how much the stone-work of the coliseum would fetch, properly burned down to lime?'--she would shudder from head to foot and call you 'barbaro' with good trojan heart.) now you suppose--(watch my rhetorical figure here)--you suppose i am going to congratulate myself on being so much for the better, _en pays de connaissance_, with my 'other friend,' e.b.b., number --or , why not?--whereas i mean to 'fulmine over greece,' since thunder frightens you, for all the laurels,--and to have reason for your taking my own part and lot to yourself--i do, will, must, and _will_, again, wonder at _you_ and admire _you_, and so on to the climax. it is a fixed, immovable thing: so fixed that i can well forego talking about it. but if to talk you once begin, 'the king shall enjoy (or receive quietly) his own again'--i wear no bright weapon out of that panoply ... or panoplite, as i think you call nonnus, nor ever, like leigh hunt's 'johnny, ever blythe and bonny, went singing nonny, nonny' and see to-morrow, what a vengeance i will take for your 'mere suspicion in that kind'! but to the serious matter ... nay, i said yesterday, i believe--keep off that burgess--he is stark staring mad--mad, do you know? the last time i met him he told me he had recovered i forget how many of the lost books of thucydides--found them imbedded in suidas (i think), and had disengaged them from _his_ greek, without loss of a letter, 'by an instinct he, burgess, had'--(i spell his name wrongly to help the proper _hiss_ at the end). then, once on a time, he found in the 'christus patiens,' an odd dozen of lines, clearly dropped out of the 'prometheus,' and proving that Æschylus was aware of the invention of gunpowder. he wanted to help dr. leonhard schmitz in his 'museum'--and scared him, as schmitz told me. what business has he, burges, with english verse--and what on earth, or under it, has miss thomson to do with _him_. if she must displease one of two, why is mr. b. not to be thanked and 'sent to feed,' as the french say prettily? at all events, do pray see what he has presumed to alter ... you can alter at sufficient warrant, profit by suggestion, i should think! but it is all miss thomson's shame and fault: because she is quite in her propriety, saying to such intermeddlers, gently for the sake of their poor weak heads, 'very good, i dare say, very desirable emendations, only the work is not mine, you know, but my friend's, and you must no more alter it without her leave, than alter this sketch, this illustration, because you think you could mend ariadne's face or figure,--fecit tizianus, scripsit e.b.b.' dear friend, you will tell miss thomson to stop further proceedings, will you not? there! only, do mind what i say? and now--till to-morrow! it seems an age since i saw you. i want to catch our first post ... (this phrase i ought to get stereotyped--i need it so constantly). the day is fine ... you will profit by it, i trust. 'flush, wag your tail and grow restless and scratch at the door!' god bless you,--my one friend, without an 'other'--bless you ever-- r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, august , .] but what have _i_ done that you should ask what have _you_ done? i have not brought any accusation, have i ... no, nor _thought_ any, i am sure--and it was only the 'kindness and considerateness'--argument that was irresistible as a thing to be retorted, when your thanks came so naturally and just at the corner of an application. and then, you know, it is gravely true, seriously true, sadly true, that i am always expecting to hear or to see how tired you are at last of me!--sooner or later, you know!--but i did not mean any seriousness in that letter. no, nor did i mean ... (to pass to another question ...) to provoke you to the mister hayley ... so are _you_.... reply complimentary. all i observed concerning yourself, was the _combination_--which not an idiom in chivalry could treat grammatically as a thing common to _me_ and you, inasmuch as everyone who has known me for half a day, may know that, if there is anything peculiar in me, it lies for the most part in an extraordinary deficiency in this and this and this, ... there is no need to describe what. only nuns of the strictest sect of the nunneries are rather wiser in some points, and have led less restricted lives than i have in others. and if it had not been for my 'carpet-work'-- well--and do you know that i have, for the last few years, taken quite to despise book-knowledge and its effect on the mind--i mean when people _live by it_ as most readers by profession do, ... cloistering their souls under these roofs made with heads, when they might be under the sky. such people grow dark and narrow and low, with all their pains. _friday._--i was writing you see before you came--and now i go on in haste to speak 'off my mind' some things which are on it. first ... of yourself; how can it be that you are unwell again, ... and that you should talk (now did you not?--did i not hear you say so?) of being 'weary in your soul' ... _you_? what should make _you_, dearest friend, weary in your soul; or out of spirits in any way?--do ... tell me.... i was going to write without a pause--and almost i might, perhaps, ... even as one of the two hundred of your friends, ... almost i might say out that 'do tell me.' or is it (which i am inclined to think most probable) that you are tired of a same life and want change? it may happen to anyone sometimes, and is independent of your will and choice, you know--and i know, and the whole world knows: and would it not therefore be wise of you, in that case, to fold your life new again and go abroad at once? what can make you weary in your soul, is a problem to me. you are the last from whom i should have expected such a word. and you did say so, i _think_. i _think_ that it was not a mistake of mine. and _you_, ... with a full liberty, and the world in your hand for every purpose and pleasure of it!--or is it that, being unwell, your spirits are affected by _that_? but then you might be more unwell than you like to admit--. and i am teasing you with talking of it ... am i not?--and being disagreeable is only one third of the way towards being useful, it is good to remember in time. and then the next thing to write off my mind is ... that you must not, you must not, make an unjust opinion out of what i said to-day. i have been uncomfortable since, lest you should--and perhaps it would have been better if i had not said it apart from all context in that way; only that you could not long be a friend of mine without knowing and seeing what so lies on the surface. but then, ... as far as i am concerned, ... no one cares less for a 'will' than i do (and this though i never had one, ... in clear opposition to your theory which holds generally nevertheless) for a will in the common things of life. every now and then there must of course be a crossing and vexation--but in one's mere pleasures and fantasies, one would rather be crossed and vexed a little than vex a person one loves ... and it is possible to get used to the harness and run easily in it at last; and there is a side-world to hide one's thoughts in, and 'carpet-work' to be immoral on in spite of mrs. jameson, ... and the word 'literature' has, with me, covered a good deal of liberty as you must see ... real liberty which is never enquired into--and it has happened throughout my life by an accident (as far as anything is accident) that my own sense of right and happiness on any important point of overt action, has never run contrariwise to the way of obedience required of me ... while in things not exactly _overt_, i and all of us are apt to act sometimes up to the limit of our means of acting, with shut doors and windows, and no waiting for cognisance or permission. ah--and that last is the worst of it all perhaps! to be forced into concealments from the heart naturally nearest to us; and forced away from the natural source of counsel and strength!--and then, the disingenuousness--the cowardice--the 'vices of slaves'!--and everyone you see ... all my brothers, ... constrained _bodily_ into submission ... apparent submission at least ... by that worst and most dishonouring of necessities, the necessity of _living_, everyone of them all, except myself, being dependent in money-matters on the inflexible will ... do you see? but what you do _not_ see, what you _cannot_ see, is the deep tender affection behind and below all those patriarchal ideas of governing grown up children 'in the way they _must_ go!' and there never was (under the strata) a truer affection in a father's heart ... no, nor a worthier heart in itself ... a heart loyaller and purer, and more compelling to gratitude and reverence, than his, as i see it! the evil is in the system--and he simply takes it to be his duty to rule, and to make happy according to his own views of the propriety of happiness--he takes it to be his duty to rule like the kings of christendom, by divine right. but he loves us through and through it--and _i_, for one, love _him_! and when, five years ago, i lost what i loved best in the world beyond comparison and rivalship ... far better than himself as he knew ... for everyone who knew _me_ could not choose but know what was my first and chiefest affection ... when i lost _that_, ... i felt that he stood the nearest to me on the closed grave ... or by the unclosing sea ... i do not know which nor could ask. and i will tell you that not only he has been kind and patient and forbearing to me through the tedious trial of this illness (far more trying to standers by than you have an idea of perhaps) but that he was generous and forbearing in that hour of bitter trial, and never reproached me as he might have done and as my own soul has not spared--never once said to me then or since, that if it had not been for _me_, the crown of his house would not have fallen. he _never did_ ... and he might have said it, and more--and i could have answered nothing. nothing, except that i had paid my own price--and that the price i paid was greater than his _loss_ ... his!! for see how it was; and how, 'not with my hand but heart,' i was the cause or occasion of that misery--and though not with the intention of my heart but with its weakness, yet the _occasion_, any way! they sent me down you know to torquay--dr. chambers saying that i could not live a winter in london. the worst--what people call the worst--was apprehended for me at that time. so i was sent down with my sister to my aunt there--and he, my brother whom i loved so, was sent too, to take us there and return. and when the time came for him to leave me, _i_, to whom he was the dearest of friends and brothers in one ... the only one of my family who ... well, but i cannot write of these things; and it is enough to tell you that he was above us all, better than us all, and kindest and noblest and dearest to _me_, beyond comparison, any comparison, as i said--and when the time came for him to leave me _i_, weakened by illness, could not master my spirits or drive back my tears--and my aunt kissed them away instead of reproving me as she should have done; and said that _she_ would take care that i should not be grieved ... _she_! ... and so she sate down and wrote a letter to papa to tell him that he would 'break my heart' if he persisted in calling away my brother--as if hearts were broken _so_! i have thought bitterly since that my heart did not break for a good deal more than _that_! and papa's answer was--burnt into me, as with fire, it is--that 'under such circumstances he did not refuse to suspend his purpose, but that he considered it to be _very wrong in me to exact such a thing_.' so there was no separation _then_: and month after month passed--and sometimes i was better and sometimes worse--and the medical men continued to say that they would not answer for my life ... they! if i were agitated--and so there was no more talk of a separation. and once _he_ held my hand, ... how i remember! and said that he 'loved me better than them all and that he _would not_ leave me ... till i was well,' he said! how i remember _that_! and ten days from that day the boat had left the shore which never returned; never--and he _had_ left me! gone! for three days we waited--and i hoped while i could--oh--that awful agony of three days! and the sun shone as it shines to-day, and there was no more wind than now; and the sea under the windows was like this paper for smoothness--and my sisters drew the curtains back that i might see for myself how smooth the sea was, and how it could hurt nobody--and other boats came back one by one. remember how you wrote in your 'gismond' what says the body when they spring some monstrous torture-engine's whole strength on it? no more says the soul, and you never wrote anything which _lived_ with me more than _that_. it is such a dreadful truth. but you knew it for truth, i hope, by your genius, and not by such proof as mine--i, who could not speak or shed a tear, but lay for weeks and months half conscious, half unconscious, with a wandering mind, and too near to god under the crushing of his hand, to pray at all. i expiated all my weak tears before, by not being able to shed then one tear--and yet they were forbearing--and no voice said 'you have done this.' do not notice what i have written to you, my dearest friend. i have never said so much to a living being--i never _could_ speak or write of it. i asked no question from the moment when my last hope went: and since then, it has been impossible for me to speak what was in me. i have borne to do it to-day and to you, but perhaps if you were to write--so do not let this be noticed between us again--_do not_! and besides there is no need! i do not reproach myself with such acrid thoughts as i had once--i _know_ that i would have died ten times over for _him_, and that therefore though it was wrong of me to be weak, and i have suffered for it and shall learn by it i hope; _remorse_ is not precisely the word for me--not at least in its full sense. still you will comprehend from what i have told you how the spring of life must have seemed to break within me _then_; and how natural it has been for me to loathe the living on--and to lose faith (even without the loathing), to lose faith in myself ... which i have done on some points utterly. it is not from the cause of illness--no. and you will comprehend too that i have strong reasons for being grateful to the forbearance.... it would have been _cruel_, you think, to reproach me. perhaps so! yet the kindness and patience of the desisting from reproach, are positive things all the same. shall i be too late for the post, i wonder? wilson tells me that you were followed up-stairs yesterday (i write on saturday this latter part) by somebody whom you probably took for my father. which is wilson's idea--and i hope not yours. no--it was neither father nor other relative of mine, but an old friend in rather an ill temper. and so good-bye until tuesday. perhaps i shall ... not ... hear from you to-night. don't let the tragedy or aught else do you harm--will you? and try not to be 'weary in your soul' any more--and forgive me this gloomy letter i half shrink from sending you, yet will send. may god bless you. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning, [post-mark, august , .] on the subject of your letter--quite irrespective of the injunction in it--i would not have dared speak; now, at least. but i may permit myself, perhaps, to say i am _most_ grateful, _most grateful_, dearest friend, for this admission to participate, in my degree, in these feelings. there is a better thing than being happy in your happiness; i feel, now that you teach me, it is so. i will write no more now; though that sentence of 'what you are _expecting_,--that i shall be tired of you &c.,'--though i _could_ blot that out of your mind for ever by a very few words _now_,--for you _would believe_ me at this moment, close on the other subject:--but i will take no such advantage--i will wait. i have many things (indifferent things, after those) to say; will you write, if but a few lines, to change the associations for that purpose? then i will write too.-- may god bless you,--in what is past and to come! i pray that from my heart, being yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday morning, [post-mark, august , .] but your 'saul' is unobjectionable as far as i can see, my dear friend. he was tormented by an evil spirit--but how, we are not told ... and the consolation is not obliged to be definite, ... is it? a singer was sent for as a singer--and all that you are called upon to be true to, are the general characteristics of david the chosen, standing between his sheep and his dawning hereafter, between innocence and holiness, and with what you speak of as the 'gracious gold locks' besides the chrism of the prophet, on his own head--and surely you have been happy in the tone and spirit of these lyrics ... broken as you have left them. where is the wrong in all this? for the right and beauty, they are more obvious--and i cannot tell you how the poem holds me and will not let me go until it blesses me ... and so, where are the 'sixty lines' thrown away? i do beseech you ... you who forget nothing, ... to remember them directly, and to go on with the rest ... _as_ directly (be it understood) as is not injurious to your health. the whole conception of the poem, i like ... and the execution is exquisite up to this point--and the sight of saul in the tent, just struck out of the dark by that sunbeam, 'a thing to see,' ... not to say that afterwards when he is visibly 'caught in his fangs' like the king serpent, ... the sight is grander still. how could you doubt about this poem.... at the moment of writing which, i receive your note. do _you_ receive my assurances from the deepest of my heart that i never did otherwise than _'believe' you_ ... never did nor shall do ... and that you completely misinterpreted my words if you drew another meaning from them. believe _me_ in this--will you? i could not believe _you_ any more for anything you could say, now or hereafter--and so do not avenge yourself on my unwary sentences by remembering them against me for evil. i did not mean to vex you ... still less to suspect you--indeed i did not! and moreover it was quite your fault that i did not blot it out after it was written, whatever the meaning was. so you forgive me (altogether) for your own sins: you must:-- for my part, though i have been sorry since to have written you such a gloomy letter, the sorrow unmakes itself in hearing you speak so kindly. your sympathy is precious to me, i may say. may god bless you. write and tell me among the 'indifferent things' something not indifferent, how you are yourself, i mean ... for i fear you are not well and thought you were not looking so yesterday. dearest friend, i remain yours, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, august , ]. i do not hear; and come to you to ask the alms of just one line, having taken it into my head that something is the matter. it is not so much exactingness on my part, as that you spoke of meaning to write as soon as you received a note of mine ... which went to you five minutes afterwards ... which is three days ago, or will be when you read this. are you not well--or what? though i have tried and _wished_ to remember having written in the last note something very or even a little offensive to you, i failed in it and go back to the worse fear. for you could not be vexed with me for talking of what was 'your fault' ... 'your own fault,' viz. in having to read sentences which, but for your commands, would have been blotted out. you could not very well take _that_ for serious blame! from _me_ too, who have so much reason and provocation for blaming the archangel gabriel.--no--you could not misinterpret so,--and if you could not, and if you are not displeased with me, you must be unwell, i think. i took for granted yesterday that you had gone out as before--but to-night it is different--and so i come to ask you to be kind enough to write one word for me by some post to-morrow. now remember ... i am not asking for a letter--but for a _word_ ... or line strictly speaking. ever yours, dear friend, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, august , .] this sweet autumn evening, friday, comes all golden into the room and makes me write to you--not think of you--yet what shall i write? it must be for another time ... after monday, when i am to see you, you know, and hear if the headache be gone, since your note would not round to the perfection of kindness and comfort, and tell me so. god bless my dearest friend. r.b. i am much better--well, indeed--thank you. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, august , .] can you understand me _so_, dearest friend, after all? do you see me--when i am away, or with you--'taking offence' at words, 'being vexed' at words, or deeds of yours, even if i could not immediately trace them to their source of entire, pure kindness; as i have hitherto done in every smallest instance? i believe in _you_ absolutely, utterly--i believe that when you bade me, that time, be silent--that such was your bidding, and i was silent--dare i say i think you did not know at that time the power i have over myself, that i could sit and speak and listen as i have done since? let me say now--_this only once_--that i loved you from my soul, and gave you my life, so much of it as you would take,--and all that is _done_, not to be altered now: it was, in the nature of the proceeding, wholly independent of any return on your part. i will not think on extremes you might have resorted to; as it is, the assurance of your friendship, the intimacy to which you admit me, _now_, make the truest, deepest joy of my life--a joy i can never think fugitive while we are in life, because i know, as to me, i _could_ not willingly displease you,--while, as to you, your goodness and understanding will always see to the bottom of involuntary or ignorant faults--always help me to correct them. i have done now. if i thought you were like other women i have known, i should say so much!--but--(my first and last word--i _believe_ in you!)--what you could and would give me, of your affection, you would give nobly and simply and as a giver--you would not need that i tell you--(_tell_ you!)--what would be supreme happiness to me in the event--however distant-- i repeat ... i call on your justice to remember, on your intelligence to believe ... that this is merely a more precise stating the _first_ subject; to put an end to any possible misunderstanding--to prevent your henceforth believing that because i _do not write_, from thinking too deeply of you, i am offended, vexed &c. &c. i will never recur to this, nor shall you see the least difference in my manner next monday: it is indeed, always before me ... how i know nothing of you and yours. but i think i ought to have spoken when i did--and to speak clearly ... or more clearly what i do, as it is my pride and duty to fall back, now, on the feeling with which i have been in the meantime--yours--god bless you-- r.b. let me write a few words to lead into monday--and say, you have probably received my note. i am much better--with a little headache, which is all, and fast going this morning. of yours you say nothing--i trust you see your ... dare i say your _duty_ in the pisa affair, as all else _must_ see it--shall i hear on monday? and my 'saul' that you are so lenient to. bless you ever-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [august , .] i did not think you were angry--i never said so. but you might reasonably have been wounded a little, if you had suspected me of blaming you for any bearing of yours towards myself; and this was the amount of my fear--or rather hope ... since i conjectured most that you were not well. and after all you did think ... do think ... that in some way or for some moment i blamed you, disbelieved you, distrusted you--or why this letter? how have i provoked this letter? can i forgive myself for having even seemed to have provoked it? and will you believe me that if for the past's sake you sent it, it was unnecessary, and if for the future's, irrelevant? which i say from no want of sensibility to the words of it--your words always make themselves felt--but in fulness of purpose not to suffer you to hold to words because they have been said, nor to say them as if to be holden by them. why, if a thousand more such words were said by you to me, how could they operate upon the future or present, supposing me to choose to keep the possible modification of your feelings, as a probability, in my sight and yours? can you help my sitting with the doors all open if i think it right? i do attest to you--while i trust you, as you must see, in word and act, and while i am confident that no human being ever stood higher or purer in the eyes of another, than you do in mine,--that you would still stand high and remain unalterably my friend, if the probability in question became a fact, as now at this moment. and this i must say, since you have said other things: and this alone, which _i_ have said, concerns the future, i remind you earnestly. my dearest friend--you have followed the most _generous_ of impulses in your whole bearing to me--and i have recognised and called by its name, in my heart, each one of them. yet i cannot help adding that, of us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part ... i mean, to a generous nature like your own, to which every sort of nobleness comes easily. mine has been more difficult--and i have sunk under it again and again: and the sinking and the effort to recover the duty of a lost position, may have given me an appearance of vacillation and lightness, unworthy at least of _you_, and perhaps of both of us. notwithstanding which appearance, it was right and just (only just) of you, to believe in me--in my truth--because i have never failed to you in it, nor been capable of _such_ failure: the thing i have said, i have meant ... always: and in things i have not said, the silence has had a reason somewhere different perhaps from where you looked for it. and this brings me to complaining that you, who profess to believe in me, do yet obviously believe that it was only merely silence, which i required of you on one occasion--and that if i had 'known your power over yourself,' i should not have minded ... no! in other words you believe of me that i was thinking just of my own (what shall i call it for a motive base and small enough?) my own scrupulousness ... freedom from embarrassment! of myself in the least of me; in the tying of my shoestrings, say!--so much and no more! now this is so wrong, as to make me impatient sometimes in feeling it to be your impression: i asked for silence--but _also_ and chiefly for the putting away of ... you know very well what i asked for. and this was sincerely done, i attest to you. you wrote once to me ... oh, long before may and the day we met: that you 'had been so happy, you should be now justified to yourself in taking any step most hazardous to the happiness of your life'--but if you were justified, could _i_ be therefore justified in abetting such a step,--the step of wasting, in a sense, your best feelings ... of emptying your water gourds into the sand? what i thought then i think now--just what any third person, knowing you, would think, i think and feel. i thought too, at first, that the feeling on your part was a mere generous impulse, likely to expand itself in a week perhaps. it affects me and has affected me, very deeply, more than i dare attempt to say, that you should persist _so_--and if sometimes i have felt, by a sort of instinct, that after all you would not go on to persist, and that (being a man, you know) you might mistake, a little unconsciously, the strength of your own feeling; you ought not to be surprised; when i felt it was more advantageous and happier for you that it should be so. _in any case_, i shall never regret my own share in the events of this summer, and your friendship will be dear to me to the last. you know i told you so--not long since. and as to what you say otherwise, you are right in thinking that i would not hold by unworthy motives in avoiding to speak what you had any claim to hear. but what could i speak that would not be unjust to you? your life! if you gave it to me and i put my whole heart into it; what should i put but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to? what could i give you, which it would not be ungenerous to give? therefore we must leave this subject--and i must trust you to leave it without one word more; (too many have been said already--but i could not let your letter pass quite silently ... as if i had nothing to do but to receive all as matter of course _so_!) while you may well trust _me_ to remember to my life's end, as the grateful remember; and to feel, as those do who have felt sorrow (for where these pits are dug, the water will stand), the full price of your regard. may god bless you, my dearest friend. i shall send this letter after i have seen you, and hope you may not have expected to hear sooner. ever yours, e.b.b. _monday, p.m._--i send in _dis_obedience to your commands, mrs. shelley's book--but when books accumulate and when besides, i want to let you have the american edition of my poems ... famous for all manner of blunders, you know; what is to be done but have recourse to the parcel-medium? you were in jest about being at pisa _before or as soon as we were_?--oh no--that must not be indeed--we must wait a little!--even if you determine to go at all, which is a question of doubtful expediency. do take more exercise, this week, and make war against those dreadful sensations in the head--now, will you? _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, september , .] i rather hoped ... with no right at all ... to hear from you this morning or afternoon--to know how you are--that, 'how are you,' there is no use disguising, is,--vary it how one may--my own life's question.-- i had better write no more, now. will you not tell me something about you--the head; and that too, _too_ warm hand ... or was it my fancy? surely the report of dr. chambers is most satisfactory,--all seems to rest with yourself: you know, in justice to me, you _do_ know that _i_ know the all but mockery, the absurdity of anyone's counsel 'to be composed,' &c. &c. but try, dearest friend! god bless you-- i am yours r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday night. [post-mark, september , .] before you leave london, i will answer your letter--all my attempts end in nothing now-- dearest friend--i am yours ever r.b. but meantime, you will tell me about yourself, will you not? the parcel came a few minutes after my note left--well, i can thank you for _that_; for the poems,--though i cannot wear them round my neck--and for the too great trouble. my heart's friend! bless you-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, september , .] indeed my headaches are not worth enquiring about--i mean, they are not of the slightest consequence, and seldom survive the remedy of a cup of coffee. i only wish it were the same with everybody--i mean, with every _head_! also there is nothing the matter otherwise--and i am going to prove my right to a 'clean bill of health' by going into the park in ten minutes. twice round the inner enclosure is what i can compass now--which is equal to once round the world--is it not? i had just time to be afraid that the parcel had not reached you. the reason why i sent you the poems was that i had a few copies to give to my personal friends, and so, wished you to have one; and it was quite to please myself and not to please _you_ that i made you have it; and if you put it into the 'plum-tree' to hide the errata, i shall be pleased still, if not rather more. only let me remember to tell you this time in relation to those books and the question asked of yourself by your noble romans, that just as i was enclosing my sixty-pounds debt to mr. moxon, i did actually and miraculously receive a remittance of fourteen pounds from the selfsame bookseller of new york who agreed last year to print my poems at his own risk and give me 'ten per cent on the profit.' not that i ever asked for such a thing! they were the terms offered. and i always considered the 'per centage' as quite visionary ... put in for the sake of effect, to make the agreement look better! but no--you see! one's poetry has a real 'commercial value,' if you do but take it far away enough from the 'civilization of europe.' when you get near the backwoods and the red indians, it turns out to be nearly as good for something as 'cabbages,' after all! do you remember what you said to me of cabbages _versus_ poems, in one of the first letters you ever wrote to me?--of selling cabbages and buying _punches_? people complain of dr. chambers and call him rough and unfeeling--neither of which _i_ ever found him for a moment--and i like him for his truthfulness, which is the nature of the man, though it is essential to medical morality never to let a patient think himself mortal while it is possible to prevent it, and even dr. chambers may incline to this on occasion. still he need not have said all the good he said to me on saturday--he _used_ not to say any of it; and he must have thought some of it: and, any way, the pisa-case is strengthened all round by his opinion and injunction, so that all my horror and terror at the thoughts of his visit, (and it's really true that i would rather _suffer_ to a certain extent than be _cured_ by means of those doctors!) had some compensation. how are you? do not forget to say! i found among some papers to-day, a note of yours which i asked mr. kenyon to give me for an autograph, two years ago. may god bless you, dearest friend. and i have a dispensation from 'beef and porter' [greek: eis tous aiônas]. 'on no account' was the answer! _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday afternoon. [post-mark, september , .] what you tell me of dr. chambers, 'all the good of you' he said, and all i venture to infer; this makes me most happy and thankful. do you use to attach our old [greek: tuphlas elpidas] (and the practice of instilling them) to that medical science in which prometheus boasted himself proficient? i had thought the 'faculty' dealt in fears, on the contrary, and scared you into obedience: but i know most about the doctors in molière. however the joyous truth is--must be, that you are better, and if one could transport you quietly to pisa, save you all worry,--what might one not expect! when i know your own intentions--measures, i should say, respecting your journey--mine will of course be submitted to you--it will just be 'which day next--month'?--not week, alas. i can thank you now for this edition of your poems--i have not yet taken to read it, though--for it does not, each volume of it, open obediently to a thought, here, and here, and here, like my green books ... no, my sister's they are; so these you give me are really mine. and america, with its ten per cent., shall have my better word henceforth and for ever ... for when you calculate, there must have been a really extraordinary circulation; and in a few months: it is what newspapers call 'a great fact.' have they reprinted the 'seraphim'? quietly, perhaps! i shall see you on monday, then-- and my all-important headaches are tolerably kept under--headaches proper they are not--but the noise and slight turning are less troublesome--will soon go altogether. bless you ever--ever dearest friend. r.b. _oh, oh, oh!_ as many thanks for that precious card-box and jewel of a flower-holder as are consistent with my dismay at finding you _only_ return _them_ ... and not the costly brown paper wrappages also ... to say nothing of the inestimable pins with which my sister uses to fasten the same! _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, september , .] i am in the greatest difficulty about the steamers. will you think a little for me and tell me what is best to do? it appears that the direct leghorn steamer will not sail on the third, and may not until the middle of october, and if forced to still further delay, which is possible, will not at all. one of my brothers has been to mr. andrews of st. mary axe and heard as much as this. what shall i do? the middle of october, say my sisters ... and i half fear that it may prove so ... is too late for me--to say nothing for the uncertainty which completes the difficulty. on the th of september (on the other hand) sails the malta vessel; and i hear that i may go in it to gibraltar and find a french steamer there to proceed by. is there an objection to this--except the change of steamers ... repeated ... for i must get down to southampton--and the leaving england so soon? is any better to be done? do think for me a little. and now that the doing comes so near ... and in this dead silence of papa's ... it all seems impossible, ... and i seem to see the stars _constellating_ against me, and give it as my serious opinion to you that i shall not go. now, mark. but i have had the kindest of letters from dear mr. kenyon, urging it--. well--i have no time for writing any more--and this is only a note of business to bespeak your thoughts about the steamers. my wisdom looks back regretfully ... only rather too late ... on the leghorn vessel of the third of september. it would have been wise if i had gone _then_. may god bless you, dearest friend. e.b.b. but if your head turns still, ... _do_ you walk enough? is there not fault in your not walking, by your own confession? think of this first--and then, if you please, of the steamers. so, till monday!-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, september , .] one reason against printing the tragedies now, is your not being well enough for the necessary work connected with them, ... a sure reason and strong ... nay, chiefest of all. plainly you are unfit for work now--and even to complete the preparation of the lyrics, and take them through the press, may be too much for you, i am afraid; and if so, why you will not do it--will you?--you will wait for another year,--or at least be satisfied for this, with bringing out a number of the old size, consisting of such poems as are fairly finished and require no retouching. 'saul' for instance, you might leave--! you will not let me hear when i am gone, of your being ill--you will take care ... will you not? because you see ... or rather _i_ see ... you are _not_ looking well at all--no, you are not! and even if you do not care for that, you should and must care to consider how unavailing it will be for you to hold those golden keys of the future with a more resolute hand than your contemporaries, should you suffer yourself to be struck down before the gate ... should you lose the physical power while keeping the heart and will. heart and will are great things, and sufficient things in your case--but after all we carry a barrow-full of clay about with us, and we must carry it a little carefully if we mean to keep to the path and not run zigzag into the border of the garden. a figure which reminds me ... and i wanted no figure to remind me ... to ask you to thank your sister for me and from me for all her kindness about the flowers. now you will not forget? you must not. when i think of the repeated trouble she has taken week after week, and all for a stranger, i must think again that it has been very kind--and i take the liberty of saying so moreover ... _as i am not thanking you_. also these flowers of yesterday, which yesterday you disdained so, look full of summer and are full of fragrance, and when they seem to say that it is not september, i am willing to be lied to just _so_. for i wish it were not september. i wish it were july ... or november ... two months before or after: and that this journey were thrown behind or in front ... anywhere to be out of sight. you do not know the courage it requires to hold the intention of it fast through what i feel sometimes. if it (the courage) had been prophesied to me only a year ago, the prophet would have been laughed to scorn. well!--but i want you to see. george's letter, and how he and mrs. hedley, when she saw papa's note of consent to me, give unhesitating counsel. burn it when you have read it. it is addressed to me ... which you will doubt from the address of it perhaps ... seeing that it goes [greek: ba ... rbarizôn]. we are famous in this house for what are called nick-names ... though a few of us have escaped rather by a caprice than a reason: and i am never called anything else (never at all) except by the nom de _paix_ which you find written in the letter:--proving as mr. kenyon says, that i am just 'half a ba-by' ... no more nor less;--and in fact the name has that precise definition. burn the note when you have read it. and then i take it into my head, as you do not distinguish my sisters, you say, one from the other, to send you my own account of them in these enclosed 'sonnets' which were written a few weeks ago, and though only pretending to be 'sketches,' pretend to be like, as far as they go, and _are_ like--my brothers thought--when i 'showed them against' a profile drawn in pencil by alfred, on the same subjects. i was laughing and maintaining that mine should be as like as his--and he yielded the point to me. so it is mere portrait-painting--and you who are in 'high art,' must not be too scornful. henrietta is the elder, and the one who brought you into this room first--and arabel, who means to go with me to pisa, has been the most with me through my illness and is the least wanted in the house here, ... and perhaps ... perhaps--is my favourite--though my heart smites me while i write that unlawful word. they are both affectionate and kind to me in all things, and good and lovable in their own beings--very unlike, for the rest; one, most caring for the polka, ... and the other for the sermon preached at paddington chapel, ... _that_ is arabel ... so if ever you happen to know her you must try not to say before her how 'much you hate &c.' henrietta always 'managed' everything in the house even before i was ill, ... because she liked it and i didn't, and i waived my right to the sceptre of dinner-ordering. i have been thinking much of your 'sordello' since you spoke of it--and even, i _had_ thought much of it before you spoke of it yesterday; feeling that it might be thrown out into the light by your hand, and greatly justify the additional effort. it is like a noble picture with its face to the wall just now--or at least, in the shadow. and so worthy as it is of you in all ways! individual all through: you have _made_ even the darkness of it! and such a work as it might become if you chose ... if you put your will to it! what i meant to say yesterday was not that it wanted more additional verses than the 'ten per cent' you spoke of ... though it does perhaps ... so much as that (to my mind) it wants drawing together and fortifying in the connections and associations ... which hang as loosely every here and there, as those in a dream, and confound the reader who persists in thinking himself awake. how do you mean that i am 'lenient'? do you not believe that i tell you what i think, and as i think it? i may _think wrong_, to be sure--but _that_ is not my fault:--and so there is no use reproaching me generally, unless you can convict me definitely at the same time:--is there, now? and i have been reading and admiring these letters of mr. carlyle, and receiving the greatest pleasure from them in every way. he is greatly _himself always_--which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps. and what his appreciation of you is, it is easy to see--and what he expects from you--notwithstanding that prodigious advice of his, to write your next work in prose! also mrs. carlyle's letter--thank you for letting me see it. i admire _that_ too! it is as ingenious 'a case' against poor keats, as could well be drawn--but nobody who knew very deeply what poetry _is_, _could_, you know, draw any case against him. a poet of the senses, he may be and is, just as she says--but then it is of the senses idealized; and no dream in a 'store-room' would ever be like the 'eve of st. agnes,' unless dreamed by some 'animosus infans,' like keats himself. still it is all true ... isn't it?... what she observes of the want of thought as thought. he was a _seer_ strictly speaking. and what noble oppositions--(to go back to carlyle's letters) ... he writes to the things you were speaking of yesterday! these letters are as good as milton's picture for convicting and putting to shame. is not the difference between the men of our day and 'the giants which were on the earth,' less ... far less ... in the faculty ... in the gift, ... or in the general intellect, ... than in the stature of the soul itself? our inferiority is not in what we can do, but in what we are. we should write poems like milton if [we] lived them like milton. i write all this just to show, i suppose, that i am not industrious as you did me the honour of apprehending that i was going to be ... packing trunks perhaps ... or what else in the way of 'active usefulness.' say how you are--will you? and do take care, and walk and do what is good for you. i shall be able to see you twice before i go. and oh, this going! pray for me, dearest friend. may god bless you. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, september , .] here are your beautiful, and i am sure _true_ sonnets; they look true--i remember the light hair, i find. and who paints, and dares exhibit, e.b.b.'s self? and surely 'alfred's' pencil has not foregone its best privilege, not left _the_ face unsketched? italians call such an 'effect defective'--'l'andar a roma senza vedere il papa.' he must have begun by seeing his holiness, i know, and ... _he_ will not trust me with the result, that my sister may copy it for me, because we are strangers, he and i, and i could give him nothing, nothing like the proper price for it--but _you_ would lend it to me, i think, nor need i do more than thank you in my usual effective and very eloquent way--for i have already been allowed to visit you seventeen times, do you know; and this last letter of yours, fiftieth is the same! so all my pride is gone, pride in that sense--and i mean to take of you for ever, and reconcile myself with my lot in this life. could, and would, you give me such a sketch? it has been on my mind to ask you ever since i knew you if nothing in the way of _good_ portrait existed--and this occasion bids me speak out, i dare believe: the more, that you have also quieted--have you not?--another old obstinate and very likely impertinent questioning of mine--as to the little name which was neither orinda, nor sacharissa (for which thank providence) and is never to appear in books, though you write them. now i know it and write it--'ba'--and thank you, and your brother george, and only burned his kind letter because you bade me who know best. so, wish by wish, one gets one's wishes--at least i do--for one instance, you will go to italy [illustration: music followed by ?] why, 'lean and harken after it' as donne says-- don't expect neapolitan scenery at pisa, quite in the north, remember. mrs. shelley found italy for the first time, real italy, at sorrento, she says. oh that book--does one wake or sleep? the 'mary dear' with the brown eyes, and godwin's daughter and shelley's wife, and who surely was something better once upon a time--and to go through rome and florence and the rest, after what i suppose to be lady londonderry's fashion: the intrepidity of the commonplace quite astounds me. and then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new--of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying 'who shall describe _that_ sight!'--not _you_, we very well see--but why don't you tell us that at rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest. but once she travelled the country with shelley on arm; now she plods it, rogers in hand--to such things and uses may we come at last! her remarks on art, once she lets go of rio's skirts, are amazing--fra angelico, for instance, only painted martyrs, virgins &c., she had no eyes for the divine _bon-bourgeoisie_ of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the saint--and the children, and women,--divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets and market place--but she is wrong every where, that is, not right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear--i quarrel with her, for ever, i think. i am much better, and mean to be well as you desire--shall correct the verses you have seen, and make them do for the present. saturday, then! and one other time only, do you say? god bless you, my own, best friend. yours ever r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, september , .] will you come on friday ... to-morrow ... instead of saturday--will it be the same thing? because i have heard from mr. kenyon, who is to be in london on friday evening he says, and therefore may mean to visit me on saturday i imagine. so let it be friday--if you should not, for any reason, prove monday to be better still. may god bless you-- ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, september , .] now, dearest, i will try and write the little i shall be able, in reply to your letter of last week--and first of all i have to entreat you, now more than ever, to help me and understand from the few words the feelings behind them--(should _speak_ rather more easily, i think--but i dare not run the risk: and i know, after all, you will be just and kind where you can.) i have read your letter again and again. i will tell you--no, not _you_, but any imaginary other person, who should hear what i am going to avow; i would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall i call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment i never dreamed of winning your _love_. i can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply--nor, next to that, though long after, _would_ i, if i _could_, supplant one of any of the affections that i know to have taken root in you--_that_ great and solemn one, for instance. i feel that if i could get myself _remade_, as if turned to gold, i would not even then desire to become more than the mere setting to _that_ diamond you must always wear. the regard and esteem you now give me, in this letter, and which i press to my heart and bow my head upon, is all i can take and all too embarrassing, using _all_ my gratitude. and yet, with that contented pride in being infinitely your debtor as it is, bound to you for ever as it is; when i read your letter with all the determination to be just to us both; i dare not so far withstand the light i am master of, as to refuse seeing that whatever is recorded as an objection to your disposing of that life of mine i would give you, has reference to some supposed good in that life which your accepting it would destroy (of which fancy i shall speak presently)--i say, wonder as i may at this, i cannot but find it there, surely there. i could no more 'bind _you_ by words,' than you have bound me, as you say--but if i misunderstand you, one assurance to that effect will be but too intelligible to me--but, as it _is_, i have difficulty in imagining that while one of so many reasons, which i am not obliged to repeat to myself, but which any one easily conceives; while _any one_ of those reasons would impose silence on me _for ever_ (for, as i observed, i love you as you now are, and _would_ not remove one affection that is already part of you,)--_would_ you, being able to speak _so_, only say _that you_ desire not to put 'more sadness than i was born to,' into my life?--that you 'could give me only what it were ungenerous to give'? have i your meaning here? in so many words, is it on my account that you bid me 'leave this subject'? i think if it were so, i would for once call my advantages round me. i am not what your generous self-forgetting appreciation would sometimes make me out--but it is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that i began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss--and i _know_, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me _supremely happy_, as i said, and say, and feel. my whole suit to you is, in that sense, _selfish_--not that i am ignorant that _your_ nature would most surely attain happiness in being conscious that it made another happy--but _that best, best end of all_, would, like the rest, come from yourself, be a reflection of your own gift. dearest, i will end here--words, persuasion, arguments, if they were at my service i would not use them--i believe in you, altogether have faith in you--in you. i will not think of insulting by trying to reassure you on one point which certain phrases in your letter might at first glance seem to imply--you do not understand me to be living and labouring and writing (and _not_ writing) in order to be successful in the world's sense? i even convinced the people _here_ what was my true 'honourable position in society,' &c. &c. therefore i shall not have to inform _you_ that i desire to be very rich, very great; but not in reading law gratis with dear foolish old basil montagu, as he ever and anon bothers me to do;--much less--enough of this nonsense. 'tell me what i have a claim to hear': i can hear it, and be as grateful as i was before and am now--your friendship is my pride and happiness. if you told me your love was bestowed elsewhere, and that it was in my power to serve you _there_, to serve you there would still be my pride and happiness. i look on and on over the prospect of my love, it is all _on_wards--and all possible forms of unkindness ... i quite laugh to think how they are _behind_ ... cannot be encountered in the route we are travelling! i submit to you and will obey you implicitly--obey what i am able to conceive of your least desire, much more of your expressed wish. but it was necessary to make this avowal, among other reasons, for one which the world would recognize too. my whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated--and it supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible--because in calculating one goes upon _chances_, not on providence--how could i expect you? so for my own future way in the world i have always refused to care--any one who can live a couple of years and more on bread and potatoes as i did once on a time, and who prefers a blouse and a blue shirt (such as i now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment, and who can, if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed mr. fitzroy kelly in the solicitor-generalship,--such an one need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow. but now i see you near this life, all changes--and at a word, i will do all that ought to be done, that every one used to say could be done, and let 'all my powers find sweet employ' as dr. watts sings, in getting whatever is to be got--not very much, surely. i would print these things, get them away, and do this now, and go to you at pisa with the news--at pisa where one may live for some £ a year--while, lo, i seem to remember, i _do_ remember, that charles kean offered to give me of those pounds for any play that might suit him--to say nothing of mr. colburn saying confidentially that he wanted more than his dinner 'a novel on the subject of _napoleon_'! so may one make money, if one does not live in a house in a row, and feel impelled to take the princess's theatre for a laudable development and exhibition of one's faculty. take the sense of all this, i beseech you, dearest--all you shall say will be best--i am yours-- yes, yours ever. god bless you for all you have been, and are, and will certainly be to me, come what he shall please! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, september , .] i scarcely know how to write what is to be written nor indeed why it is to be written and to what end. i have tried in vain--and you are waiting to hear from me. i am unhappy enough even where i am happy--but ungrateful nowhere--and i thank you from my heart--profoundly from the depths of my heart ... which is nearly all i can do. one letter i began to write and asked in it how it could become me to speak at all if '_from the beginning and at this moment you never dreamed of_' ... and there, i stopped and tore the paper; because i felt that you were too loyal and generous, for me to bear to take a moment's advantage of the same, and bend down the very flowering branch of your generosity (as it might be) to thicken a little the fence of a woman's caution and reserve. you will not say that you have not acted as if you 'dreamed'--and i will answer therefore to the general sense of your letter and former letters, and admit at once that i _did_ state to you the difficulties most difficult to myself ... though not all ... and that if i had been worthier of you i should have been proportionably less in haste to 'bid you leave that subject.' i do not understand how you can seem at the same moment to have faith in my integrity and to have doubt whether all this time i may not have felt a preference for another ... which you are ready 'to serve,' you say. which is generous in you--but in _me_, where were the integrity? could you really hold me to be blameless, and do you think that truehearted women act usually so? can it be necessary for me to tell you that i could not have acted so, and did not? and shall i shrink from telling you besides ... you, who have been generous to me and have a right to hear it ... and have spoken to me in the name of an affection and memory most precious and holy to me, in this same letter ... that neither now nor formerly has any man been to my feelings what you are ... and that if i were different in some respects and free in others by the providence of god, i would accept the great trust of your happiness, gladly, proudly, and gratefully; and give away my own life and soul to that end. i _would_ do it ... _not, i do_ ... observe! it is a truth without a consequence; only meaning that i am not all stone--only proving that i am not likely to consent to help you in wrong against yourself. you see in me what is not:--_that_, i know: and you overlook in me what is unsuitable to you ... _that_ i know, and have sometimes told you. still, because a strong feeling from some sources is self-vindicating and ennobling to the object of it, i will not say that, if it were proved to me that you felt this for me, i would persist in putting the sense of my own unworthiness between you and me--not being heroic, you know, nor pretending to be so. but something worse than even a sense of unworthiness, _god_ has put between us! and judge yourself if to beat your thoughts against the immovable marble of it, can be anything but pain and vexation of spirit, waste and wear of spirit to you ... judge! the present is here to be seen ... speaking for itself! and the best future you can imagine for me, what a precarious thing it must be ... a thing for making burdens out of ... only not for your carrying, as i have vowed to my own soul. as dear mr. kenyon said to me to-day in his smiling kindness ... 'in ten years you may be strong perhaps'--or 'almost strong'! that being the encouragement of my best friends! what would he say, do you think, if he could know or guess...! what _could_ he say but that you were ... a poet!--and i ... still worse! _never_ let him know or guess! and so if you are wise and would be happy (and you have excellent practical sense after all and should exercise it) you must leave me--these thoughts of me, i mean ... for if we might not be true friends for ever, i should have less courage to say the other truth. but we may be friends always ... and cannot be so separated, that your happiness, in the knowledge of it, will not increase mine. and if you will be persuaded by me, as you say, you will be persuaded _thus_ ... and consent to take a resolution and force your mind at once into another channel. perhaps i might bring you reasons of the class which you tell me 'would silence you for ever.' i might certainly tell you that my own father, if he knew that you had written to me _so_, and that i had answered you--_so_, even, would not forgive me at the end of ten years--and this, from none of the causes mentioned by me here and in no disrespect to your name and your position ... though he does not over-value poetry even in his daughter, and is apt to take the world's measures of the means of life ... but for the singular reason that he never _does_ tolerate in his family (sons or daughters) the development of one class of feelings. such an objection i could not bring to you of my own will--it rang hollow in my ears--perhaps i thought even too little of it:--and i brought to you what i thought much of, and cannot cease to think much of equally. worldly thoughts, these are not at all, nor have been: there need be no soiling of the heart with any such:--and i will say, in reply to some words of yours, that you cannot despise the gold and gauds of the world more than i do, and should do even if i found a use for them. and if i _wished_ to be very poor, in the world's sense of poverty, i _could not_, with three or four hundred a year of which no living will can dispossess me. and is it not the chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it? it seems so to me. the obstacles then are of another character, and the stronger for being so. believe that i am grateful to you--_how_ grateful, cannot be shown in words nor even in tears ... grateful enough to be truthful in all ways. you know i might have hidden myself from you--but i would not: and by the truth told of myself, you may believe in the earnestness with which i tell the other truths--of you ... and of this subject. the subject will not bear consideration--it breaks in our hands. but that god is stronger than we, cannot be a bitter thought to you but a holy thought ... while he lets me, as much as i can be anyone's, be only yours. e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, september , .] i do not know whether you imagine the precise effect of your letter on me--very likely you do, and write it just for that--for i conceive _all_ from your goodness. but before i tell you what is that effect, let me say in as few words as possible what shall stop any fear--though only for a moment and on the outset--that you have been misunderstood, that the goodness _outside_, and round and over all, hides all or any thing. i understand you to signify to me that you see, at this present, insurmountable obstacles to that--can i speak it--entire gift, which i shall own, was, while i dared ask it, above my hopes--and wishes, even, so it seems to me ... and yet could not but be asked, so plainly was it dictated to me, by something quite out of those hopes and wishes. will it help me to say that once in this aladdin-cavern i knew i ought to stop for no heaps of jewel-fruit on the trees from the very beginning, but go on to the lamp, _the_ prize, the last and best of all? well, i understand you to pronounce that at present you believe this gift impossible--and i acquiesce entirely--i submit wholly to you; repose on you in all the faith of which i am capable. those obstacles are solely for _you_ to see and to declare ... had _i_ seen them, be sure i should never have mocked you or myself by affecting to pass them over ... what _were_ obstacles, i mean: but you _do_ see them, i must think,--and perhaps they strike me the more from my true, honest unfeigned inability to imagine what they are,--not that i shall endeavour. after what you _also_ apprise me of, i know and am joyfully confident that if ever they cease to be what you now consider them, you who see now _for me_, whom i implicitly trust in to see for me; you will _then_, too, see and remember me, and how i trust, and shall then be still trusting. and until you so see, and so inform me, i shall never utter a word--for that would involve the vilest of implications. i thank god--i _do_ thank him, that in this whole matter i have been, to the utmost of my power, not unworthy of his introducing you to me, in this respect that, being no longer in the first freshness of life, and having for many years now made up my mind to the impossibility of loving any woman ... having wondered at this in the beginning, and fought not a little against it, having acquiesced in it at last, and accounted for it all to myself, and become, if anything, rather proud of it than sorry ... i say, when real love, making itself at once recognized as such, _did_ reveal itself to me at last, i _did_ open my heart to it with a cry--nor care for its overturning all my theory--nor mistrust its effect upon a mind set in ultimate order, so i fancied, for the few years more--nor apprehend in the least that the new element would harm what was already organized without its help. nor have i, either, been guilty of the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the pedantic fashions and instances of the world. i have not spoken when _it_ did not speak, because 'one' might speak, or has spoken, or _should_ speak, and 'plead' and all that miserable work which, after all, i may well continue proud that i am not called to attempt. _here_ for instance, _now_ ... 'one' should despair; but 'try again' first, and work blindly at removing those obstacles (--if i saw them, i should be silent, and only speak when a month hence, ten years hence, i could bid you look where they _were_)--and 'one' would do all this, not for the _play-acting's_ sake, or to 'look the character' ... (_that_ would be something quite different from folly ...) but from a not unreasonable anxiety lest by too sudden a silence, too complete an acceptance of your will; the earnestness and endurance and unabatedness ... the _truth_, in fact, of what had already been professed, should get to be questioned--but i believe that you believe me--and now that all is clear between us i will say, what you will hear, without fearing for me or yourself, that i am utterly contented ... ('grateful' i have done with ... it must go--) i accept what you give me, what those words deliver to me, as--not all i asked for ... as i said ... but as more than i ever hoped for,--_all_, in the best sense, that i deserve. that phrase in my letter which you objected to, and the other--may stand, too--i never attempted to declare, describe my feeling for you--one word of course stood for it all ... but having to put down some one _point_, so to speak, of it--you could not wonder if i took any extreme one _first_ ... never minding all the untold portion that _led_ up to it, made it possible and natural--it is true, 'i could not dream of _that_'--that i was eager to get the horrible notion away from never so flitting a visit to you, that you were thus and thus to me _on condition_ of my proving just the same to you--just as if we had waited to acknowledge that the moon lighted us till we ascertained within these two or three hundred years that the earth happens to light the moon as well! but i felt that, and so said it:--now you have declared what i should never have presumed to hope--and i repeat to you that i, with all to be thankful for to god, am most of all thankful for this the last of his providences ... which is no doubt, the natural and inevitable feeling, could one always see clearly. your regard for me is _all_ success--let the rest come, or not come. in my heart's thankfulness i would ... i am sure i would promise anything that would gratify you ... but it would _not_ do that, to agree, in words, to change my affections, put them elsewhere &c. &c. that would be pure foolish talking, and quite foreign to the practical results which you will attain in a better way from a higher motive. i will cheerfully promise you, however, to be 'bound by no words,' blind to no miracle; in sober earnest, it is not because i renounced once for all oxen and the owning and having to do with them, that i will obstinately turn away from any unicorn when such an apparition blesses me ... but meantime i shall walk at peace on our hills here nor go looking in all corners for the bright curved horn! and as for you ... if i did not dare 'to dream of that'--, now it is mine, my pride and joy prevent in no manner my taking the whole consolation of it at once, _now_--i will be confident that, if i obey you, i shall get no wrong for it--if, endeavouring to spare you fruitless pain, i do not eternally revert to the subject; do indeed 'quit' it just now, when no good can come of dwelling on it to you; you will never say to yourself--so i said--'the "generous impulse" _has_ worn itself out ... time is doing his usual work--this was to be expected' &c. &c. you will be the first to say to me 'such an obstacle has ceased to exist ... or is now become one palpable to _you_, one _you_ may try and overcome'--and i shall be there, and ready--ten years hence as now--if alive. one final word on the other matters--the 'worldly matters'--i shall own i alluded to them rather ostentatiously, because--because _that would be_ the _one_ poor sacrifice i could make you--one i would cheerfully make, but a sacrifice, and the only one: this careless 'sweet habitude of living'--this absolute independence of mine, which, if i had it not, my heart would starve and die for, i feel, and which i have fought so many good battles to preserve--for that has happened, too--this light rational life i lead, and know so well that i lead; this i could give up for nothing less than--what you know--but i _would_ give it up, not for you merely, but for those whose disappointment might re-act on you--and i should break no promise to myself--the money getting would not be for the sake of _it_; 'the labour not for that which is nought'--indeed the necessity of doing this, if at all, _now_, was one of the reasons which make me go on to that _last request of all_--at once; one must not be too old, they say, to begin their ways. but, in spite of all the babble, i feel sure that whenever i make up my mind to that, i can be rich enough and to spare--because along with what you have thought _genius_ in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognizes as such; and i have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that i _was_ a little magnanimous in never intending to use it. thus, in more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my 'paracelsus' to scorn ten years ago--in the same column, often, of these reviews, would follow a most laudatory notice of an elementary french book, on a new plan, which i '_did_' for my old french master, and he published--'_that_ was really an useful work'!--so that when the only obstacle is only that there is so much _per annum_ to be producible, you will tell me. after all it would be unfair in me not to confess that this was always intended to be _my_ own single stipulation--'an objection' which i could see, certainly,--but meant to treat myself to the little luxury of removing. so, now, dearest--let me once think of that, and of you as my own, my dearest--this once--dearest, i have done with words for the present. i will wait. god bless you and reward you--i kiss your hands _now_. this is my comfort, that if you accept my feeling as all but _un_expressed now, more and more will become spoken--or understood, that is--we both live on--you will know better _what_ it was, how much and manifold, what one little word had to give out. god bless you-- your r.b. on thursday,--you remember? this is tuesday night-- i called on saturday at the office in st. mary axe--all uncertainty about the vessel's sailing again for leghorn--it could not sail before the middle of the month--and only then _if_ &c. but if i would leave my card &c. &c. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, september , .] i write one word just to say that it is all over with pisa; which was a probable evil when i wrote last, and which i foresaw from the beginning--being a prophetess, you know. i cannot tell you now how it has all happened--_only do not blame me_, for i have kept my ground to the last, and only yield when mr. kenyon and all the world see that there is no standing. i am ashamed almost of having put so much earnestness into a personal matter--and i spoke face to face and quite firmly--so as to pass with my sisters for the 'bravest person in the house' without contestation. sometimes it seems to me as if it _could not_ end so--i mean, that the responsibility of such a negative must be reconsidered ... and you see how mr. kenyon writes to me. still, as the matter lies, ... no pisa! and, as i said before, my prophetic instincts are not likely to fail, such as they have been from the beginning. if you wish to come, it must not be until saturday at soonest. i have a headache and am weary at heart with all this vexation--and besides there is no haste now: and when you do come, _if you do_, i will trust to you not to recur to one subject, which must lie where it fell ... must! i had begun to write to you on saturday, to say how i had forgotten to give you your mss. which were lying ready for you ... the _hood_ poems. would it not be desirable that you made haste to see them through the press, and went abroad with your roman friends at once, to try to get rid of that uneasiness in the head? do think of it--and more than think. for me, you are not to fancy me unwell. only, not to be worn a little with the last week's turmoil, were impossible--and mr. kenyon said to me yesterday that he quite wondered how i could bear it at all, do anything reasonable at all, and confine my misdoings to sending letters addressed to him at brighton, when he was at dover! if anything changes, you shall hear from-- e.b.b. mr. kenyon returns to dover immediately. his kindness is impotent in the case. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday evening. [post-mark, september , .] but one word before we leave the subject, and then to leave it finally; but i cannot let you go on to fancy a mystery anywhere, in obstacles or the rest. you deserve at least a full frankness; and in my letter i meant to be fully frank. i even told you what was an absurdity, so absurd that i should far rather not have told you at all, only that i felt the need of telling you all: and no mystery is involved in that, except as an 'idiosyncrasy' is a mystery. but the 'insurmountable' difficulty is for you and everybody to see; and for me to feel, who have been a very byword among the talkers, for a confirmed invalid through months and years, and who, even if i were going to pisa and had the best prospects possible to me, should yet remain liable to relapses and stand on precarious ground to the end of my life. now that is no mystery for the trying of 'faith'; but a plain fact, which neither thinking nor speaking can make less a fact. but _don't_ let us speak of it. i must speak, however, (before the silence) of what you said and repeat in words for which i gratefully thank you--and which are _not_ 'ostentatious' though unnecessary words--for, if i were in a position to accept sacrifices from you, i would not accept _such_ a sacrifice ... amounting to a sacrifice of duty and dignity as well as of ease and satisfaction ... to an exchange of higher work for lower work ... and of the special work you are called to, for that which is work for anybody. i am not so ignorant of the right uses and destinies of what you have and are. you will leave the solicitor-generalships to the fitzroy kellys, and justify your own nature; and besides, do me the little right, (_over_ the _over_-right you are always doing me) of believing that i would not bear or dare to do _you_ so much wrong, if i were in the position to do it. and for all the rest i thank you--believe that i thank you ... and that the feeling is not so weak as the word. that _you_ should care at all for _me_ has been a matter of unaffected wonder to me from the first hour until now--and i cannot help the pain i feel sometimes, in thinking that it would have been better for you if you never had known me. may god turn back the evil of me! certainly i admit that i cannot expect you ... just at this moment, ... to say more than you say, ... and i shall try to be at ease in the consideration that you are as accessible to the 'unicorn' now as you ever could be at any former period of your life. and here i have done. i had done _living_, i thought, when you came and sought me out! and why? and to what end? _that_, i cannot help thinking now. perhaps just that i may pray for you--which were a sufficient end. if you come on saturday i trust you to leave this subject untouched,--as it must be indeed henceforth. i am yours, e.b.b. no word more of pisa--i shall not go, i think. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, september , .] words!--it was written i should hate and never use them to any purpose. i will not say one word here--very well knowing neither word nor deed avails--from me. my letter will have reassured you on the point you seem undecided about--whether i would speak &c. i will come whenever you shall signify that i may ... whenever, acting in my best interests, you feel that it will not hurt you (weary you in any way) to see me--but i fear that on saturday i must be otherwhere--i enclose the letter from my old foe. which could not but melt me for all my moroseness and i can hardly go and return for my sister in time. will you tell me? it is dark--but i want to save the post-- ever yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, september , .] of course you cannot do otherwise than go with your sister--or it will be 'every man _out_ of his humour' perhaps--and you are not so very 'savage' after all. on monday then, if you do not hear--to the contrary. papa has been walking to and fro in this room, looking thoughtfully and talking leisurely--and every moment i have expected i confess, some word (that did not come) about pisa. mr. kenyon thinks it cannot end so--and i do sometimes--and in the meantime i do confess to a little 'savageness' also--at heart! all i asked him to say the other day, was that he was not displeased with me--_and he wouldn't_; and for me to walk across his displeasure spread on the threshold of the door, and moreover take a sister and brother with me, and do such a thing for the sake of going to italy and securing a personal advantage, were altogether impossible, obviously impossible! so poor papa is quite in disgrace with me just now--if he would but care for _that_! may god bless you. amuse yourself well on saturday. i could not see you on thursday any way, for mr. kenyon is here every day ... staying in town just on account of this pisa business, in his abundant kindness.... on monday then. ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, september , .] but you, too, will surely want, if you think me a rational creature, _my_ explanation--without which all that i have said and done would be pure madness, i think. it _is_ just 'what i see' that i _do_ see,--or rather it has proved, since i first visited you, that the reality was infinitely worse than i know it to be ... for at, and after the writing of _that first letter_, on my first visit, i believed--through some silly or misapprehended talk, collected at second hand too--that your complaint was of quite another nature--a spinal injury irremediable in the nature of it. had it been _so_--now speak for _me_, for what you hope i am, and say how _that_ should affect or neutralize what you _were_, what i wished to associate with myself in you? but _as you now are_:--then if i had married you seven years ago, and this visitation came now first, i should be 'fulfilling a pious duty,' i suppose, in enduring what could not be amended--a pattern to good people in not running away ... for where were _now_ the use and the good and the profit and-- i desire in this life (with very little fluctuation for a man and too weak a one) to live and just write out certain things which are in me, and so save my soul. i would endeavour to do this if i were forced to 'live among lions' as you once said--but i should best do this if i lived quietly with myself and with you. that you cannot dance like cerito does not materially disarrange this plan--nor that i might (beside the perpetual incentive and sustainment and consolation) get, over and above the main reward, the incidental, particular and unexpected happiness of being allowed when not working to rather occupy myself with watching you, than with certain other pursuits i might be otherwise addicted to--_this_, also, does not constitute an obstacle, as i see obstacles. but _you_ see them--and i see _you_, and know my first duty and do it resolutely if not cheerfully. as for referring again, till leave by word or letter--you will see-- and very likely, the tone of this letter even will be misunderstood--because i studiously cut out all vain words, protesting &c.:--no--will it? i said, unadvisedly, that saturday was taken from me ... but it was dark and i had not looked at the tickets: the hour of the performance is later than i thought. if to-morrow does not suit you, as i infer, let it be saturday--at --and i will leave earlier, a little, and all will be quite right here. one hint will apprise me. god bless you, dearest friend. r.b. something else just heard, makes me reluctantly strike out _saturday_-- _monday_ then? _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, september , .] it is not 'misunderstanding' you to know you to be the most generous and loyal of all in the world--you overwhelm me with your generosity--only while you see from above and i from below, we cannot see the same thing in the same light. moreover, if we _did_, i should be more beneath you in one sense, than i am. do me the justice of remembering this whenever you recur in thought to the subject which ends here in the words of it. i began to write last saturday to thank you for all the delight i had had in shelley, though you beguiled me about the pencil-marks, which are few. besides the translations, some of the original poems were not in my copy and were, so, quite new to me. 'marianne's dream' i had been anxious about to no end--i only know it now.-- on monday at the usual hour. as to coming twice into town on saturday, that would have been quite foolish if it had been possible. dearest friend, i am yours, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, september , .] i have nothing to say about pisa, ... but a great deal (if i could say it) about _you_, who do what is wrong by your own confession and are ill because of it and make people uneasy--now _is_ it right altogether? is it right to do wrong?... for it comes to _that_:--and is it kind to do so much wrong?... for it comes almost to _that_ besides. ah--you should not indeed! i seem to see quite plainly that you will be ill in a serious way, if you do not take care and take exercise; and so you must consent to be teazed a little into taking both. and if you will not take them here ... or not so effectually as in other places; _why not go with your italian friends_? have you thought of it at all? _i_ have been thinking since yesterday that it might be best for you to go at once, now that the probability has turned quite against me. if i were going, i should ask you not to do so immediately ... but you see how unlikely it is!--although i mean still to speak my whole thoughts--i _will do that_ ... even though for the mere purpose of self-satisfaction. george came last night--but there is an adverse star this morning, and neither of us has the opportunity necessary. only both he and i _will speak_--that is certain. and arabel had the kindness to say yesterday that if i liked to go, she would go with me at whatever hazard--which is very kind--but you know i could not--it would not be right of me. and perhaps after all we may gain the point lawfully; and if not ... at the worst ... the winter may be warm (it is better to fall into the hands of god, as the jew said) and i may lose less strength than usual, ... having more than usual to lose ... and altogether it may not be so bad an alternative. as to being the cause of any anger against my sister, you would not advise me into such a position, i am sure--it would be untenable for one moment. but _you_ ... in that case, ... would it not be good for your head if you went at once? i praise myself for saying so to you--yet if it really is good for you, i don't deserve the praising at all. and how was it on saturday--that question i did not ask yesterday--with ben jonson and the amateurs? i thought of you at the time--i mean, on that saturday evening, nevertheless. you shall hear when there is any more to say. may god bless you, dearest friend! i am ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday evening. [post-mark, september , .] i walked to town, this morning, and back again--so that when i found your note on my return, and knew what you had been enjoining me in the way of exercise, i seemed as if i knew, too, why that energetic fit had possessed me and why i succumbed to it so readily. you shall never have to intimate twice to me that such an insignificant thing, even, as the taking exercise should be done. besides, i have many motives now for wishing to continue well. but italy _just now_--oh, no! my friends would go through pisa, too. on that subject i must not speak. and you have 'more strength to lose,' and are so well, evidently so well; that is, so much better, so sure to be still better--can it be that you will not go! here are your new notes on my verses. where are my words for the thanks? but you know what i feel, and shall feel--ever feel--for these and for all. the notes would be beyond price to me if they came from some dear phemius of a teacher--but from you! the theatricals 'went off' with great éclat, and the performance was really good, really clever or better. forster's 'kitely' was very emphatic and earnest, and grew into great interest, quite up to the poet's allotted tether, which is none of the longest. he pitched the character's key note too gravely, i thought; _beginning_ with certainty, rather than mere suspicion, of evil. dickens' 'bobadil' _was_ capital--with perhaps a little too much of the consciousness of entire cowardice ... which i don't so willingly attribute to the noble would-be pacificator of europe, besieger of strigonium &c.--but the end of it all was really pathetic, as it should be, for bobadil is only too clever for the company of fools he makes wonderment for: having once the misfortune to relish their society, and to need but too pressingly their 'tobacco-money,' what can he do but suit himself to their capacities?--and d. jerrold was very amusing and clever in his 'country gull'--and mr. leech superb in the town master mathew. all were good, indeed, and were voted good, and called on, and cheered off, and praised heartily behind their backs and before the curtain. stanfield's function had exercise solely in the touching up (very effectively) sundry 'scenes'--painted scenes--and the dresses, which were perfect, had the advantage of mr. maclise's experience. and--all is told! and now; i shall hear, you promise me, if anything occurs--with what feeling, i wait and hope, you know. if there is _no_ best of reasons against it, saturday, you remember, is my day--this fine weather, too! may god bless my dearest friend-- ever yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, september , .] i have spoken again, and the result is that we are in precisely the same position; only with bitterer feelings on one side. if i go or stay they _must_ be bitter: words have been said that i cannot easily forget, nor remember without pain; and yet i really do almost smile in the midst of it all, to think how i was treated this morning as an undutiful daughter because i tried to put on my gloves ... for there was no worse provocation. at least he complained of the undutifulness and rebellion (!!!) of everyone in the house--and when i asked if he meant that reproach for _me_, the answer was that he meant it for all of us, one with another. and i could not get an answer. he would not even grant me the consolation of thinking that i sacrificed what i supposed to be good, to _him_. i told him that my prospects of health seemed to me to depend on taking this step, but that through my affection for him, i was ready to sacrifice those to his pleasure if he exacted it--only it was necessary to my self-satisfaction in future years, to understand definitely that the sacrifice _was_ exacted by him and _was_ made to him, ... and not thrown away blindly and by a misapprehension. and he would not answer _that_. i might do my own way, he said--_he_ would not speak--_he_ would not say that he was not displeased with me, nor the contrary:--i had better do what i liked:--for his part, he washed his hands of me altogether. and so i have been very wise--witness how my eyes are swelled with annotations and reflections on all this! the best of it is that now george himself admits i can do no more in the way of speaking, ... i have no spell for charming the dragons, ... and allows me to be passive and enjoins me to be tranquil, and not 'make up my mind' to any dreadful exertion for the future. moreover he advises me to go on with the preparations for the voyage, and promises to state the case himself at the last hour to the 'highest authority'; and judge finally whether it be possible for me to go with the necessary companionship. and it seems best to go to malta on the rd of october--if at all ... from steam-packet reasons ... without excluding pisa ... remember ... by any means. well!--and what do you think? might it be desirable for me to give up the whole? tell me. i feel aggrieved of course and wounded--and whether i go or stay that feeling must last--i cannot help it. but my spirits sink altogether at the thought of leaving england _so_--and then i doubt about arabel and stormie ... and it seems to me that i _ought not_ to mix them up in a business of this kind where the advantage is merely personal to myself. on the other side, george holds that if i give up and stay even, there will be displeasure just the same, ... and that, when once gone, the irritation will exhaust and smooth itself away--which however does not touch my chief objection. would it be better ... more _right_ ... to give it up? think for me. even if i hold on to the last, at the last i shall be thrown off--_that_ is my conviction. but ... shall i give up _at once_? do think for me. and i have thought that if you like to come on friday instead of saturday ... as there is the uncertainty about next week, ... it would divide the time more equally: but let it be as you like and according to circumstances as you see them. perhaps you have decided to go at once with your friends--who knows? i wish i could know that you were better to-day. may god bless you ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, september , .] you have said to me more than once that you wished i might never know certain feelings _you_ had been forced to endure. i suppose all of us have the proper place where a blow should fall to be felt most--and i truly wish _you_ may never feel what i have to bear in looking on, quite powerless, and silent, while you are subjected to this treatment, which i refuse to characterize--so blind is it _for_ blindness. i think i ought to understand what a father may exact, and a child should comply with; and i respect the most ambiguous of love's caprices if they give never so slight a clue to their all-justifying source. did i, when you signified to me the probable objections--you remember what--to myself, my own happiness,--did i once allude to, much less argue against, or refuse to acknowledge those objections? for i wholly sympathize, however it go against me, with the highest, wariest, pride and love for you, and the proper jealousy and vigilance they entail--but now, and here, the jewel is not being over guarded, but ruined, cast away. and whoever is privileged to interfere should do so in the possessor's own interest--all common sense interferes--all rationality against absolute no-reason at all. and you ask whether you ought to obey this no-reason? i will tell you: all passive obedience and implicit submission of will and intellect is by far too easy, if well considered, to be the course prescribed by god to man in this life of probation--for they _evade_ probation altogether, though foolish people think otherwise. chop off your legs, you will never go astray; stifle your reason altogether and you will find it is difficult to reason ill. 'it is hard to make these sacrifices!'--not so hard as to lose the reward or incur the penalty of an eternity to come; 'hard to effect them, then, and go through with them'--_not_ hard, when the leg is to be _cut off_--that it is rather harder to keep it quiet on a stool, i know very well. the partial indulgence, the proper exercise of one's faculties, there is the difficulty and problem for solution, set by that providence which might have made the laws of religion as indubitable as those of vitality, and revealed the articles of belief as certainly as that condition, for instance, by which we breathe so many times in a minute to support life. but there is no reward proposed for the feat of breathing, and a great one for that of believing--consequently there must go a great deal more of voluntary effort to this latter than is implied in the getting absolutely rid of it at once, by adopting the direction of an infallible church, or private judgment of another--for all our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief, and there is but one law, however modified, for the greater and the less. in your case i do think you are called upon to do your duty to yourself; that is, to god in the end. your own reason should examine the whole matter in dispute by every light which can be put in requisition; and every interest that appears to be affected by your conduct should have its utmost claims considered--your father's in the first place; and that interest, not in the miserable limits of a few days' pique or whim in which it would seem to express itself; but in its whole extent ... the _hereafter_ which all momentary passion prevents him seeing ... indeed, the _present_ on either side which everyone else must see. and this examination made, with whatever earnestness you will, i do think and am sure that on its conclusion you should act, in confidence that a duty has been performed ... _difficult_, or how were it a duty? will it _not_ be infinitely harder to act so than to blindly adopt his pleasure, and die under it? who can _not_ do that? i fling these hasty rough words over the paper, fast as they will fall--knowing to whom i cast them, and that any sense they may contain or point to, will be caught and understood, and presented in a better light. the hard thing ... this is all i want to say ... is to act on one's own best conviction--not to abjure it and accept another will, and say '_there_ is my plain duty'--easy it is, whether plain or no! how 'all changes!' when i first knew you--you know what followed. i supposed you to labour under an incurable complaint--and, of course, to be completely dependent on your father for its commonest alleviations; the moment after that inconsiderate letter, i reproached myself bitterly with the selfishness apparently involved in any proposition i might then have made--for though i have never been at all frightened of the world, nor mistrustful of my power to deal with it, and get my purpose out of it if once i thought it worth while, yet i could not but feel the consideration, of _what_ failure would _now_ be, paralyse all effort even in fancy. when you told me lately that 'you could never be poor'--all my solicitude was at an end--i had but myself to care about, and i told you, what i believed and believe, that i can at any time amply provide for that, and that i could cheerfully and confidently undertake the removing _that_ obstacle. now again the circumstances shift--and you are in what i should wonder at as the veriest slavery--and i who _could_ free you from it, i am here scarcely daring to write ... though i know you must feel for me and forgive what forces itself from me ... what retires so mutely into my heart at your least word ... what _shall not_ be again written or spoken, if you so will ... that i should be made happy beyond all hope of expression by. now while i _dream_, let me once dream! i would marry you now and thus--i would come when you let me, and go when you bade me--i would be no more than one of your brothers--'_no more_'--that is, instead of getting to-morrow for saturday, i should get saturday as well--two hours for one--when your head ached i should be _here_. i deliberately choose the realization of that dream (--of sitting simply by you for an hour every day) rather than any other, excluding you, i am able to form for this world, or any world i know--and it will continue but a dream. god bless my dearest e.b.b. r.b. you understand that i see you to-morrow, friday, as you propose. i am better--thank you--and will go out to-day. you know what i am, what i would speak, and all i would do. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, september , .] i had your letter late last night, everyone almost, being out of the house by an accident, so that it was left in the letter-box, and if i had wished to answer it before i saw you, it had scarcely been possible. but it will be the same thing--for you know as well as if you saw my answer, what it must be, what it cannot choose but be, on pain of sinking me so infinitely below not merely your level but my own, that the depth cannot bear a glance down. yet, though i am not made of such clay as to admit of my taking a base advantage of certain noble extravagances, (and that i am not i thank god for your sake) i will say, i must say, that your words in this letter have done me good and made me happy, ... that i thank and bless you for them, ... and that to receive such a proof of attachment from _you_, not only overpowers every present evil, but seems to me a full and abundant amends for the merely personal sufferings of my whole life. when i had read that letter last night i _did_ think so. i looked round and round for the small bitternesses which for several days had been bitter to me, and i could not find one of them. the tear-marks went away in the moisture of new, happy tears. why, how else could i have felt? how else do you think i could? how would any woman have felt ... who could feel at all ... hearing such words said (though 'in a dream' indeed) by such a speaker? and now listen to me in turn. you have touched me more profoundly than i thought even _you_ could have touched me--my heart was full when you came here to-day. henceforward i am yours for everything but to do you harm--and i am yours too much, in my heart, ever to consent to do you harm in that way. if i could consent to do it, not only should i be less loyal ... but in one sense, less yours. i say this to you without drawback and reserve, because it is all i am able to say, and perhaps all i _shall_ be able to say. however this may be, a promise goes to you in it that none, except god and your will, shall interpose between you and me, ... i mean, that if he should free me within a moderate time from the trailing chain of this weakness, i will then be to you whatever at that hour you shall choose ... whether friend or more than friend ... a friend to the last in any case. so it rests with god and with you--only in the meanwhile you are most absolutely free ... 'unentangled' (as they call it) by the breadth of a thread--and if i did not know that you considered yourself so, i would not see you any more, let the effort cost me what it might. you may force me _feel_: ... but you cannot force me to _think_ contrary to my first thought ... that it were better for you to forget me at once in one relation. and if better for _you_, can it be bad for _me_? which flings me down on the stone-pavement of the logicians. and now if i ask a boon of you, will you forget afterwards that it ever was asked? i have hesitated a great deal; but my face is down on the stone-pavement--no--i will not ask to-day--it shall be for another day--and may god bless you on this and on those that come after, my dearest friend. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, september , .] think for me, speak for me, my dearest, _my own_! you that are all great-heartedness and generosity, do that one more generous thing? god bless you for r.b. what can it be you ask of me!--'a boon'--once my answer to _that_ had been the plain one--but now ... when i have better experience of--no, now i have best experience of how you understand my interests; that at last we _both_ know what is my true good--so ask, ask! _my own_, now! for there it is!--oh, do not fear i am '_entangled_'--my crown is loose on my head, not nailed there--my pearl lies in my hand--i may return it to the sea, if i will! what is it you ask of me, this first asking? _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, september , .] then _first_, ... first, i ask you not to misunderstand. because we do not ... no, we do not ... agree (but disagree) as to 'what is your true good' ... but disagree, and as widely as ever indeed. the other asking shall come in its season ... some day before i go, if i go. it only relates to a restitution--and you cannot guess it if you try ... so don't try!--and perhaps you can't grant it if you try--and i cannot guess. cabins and berths all taken in the malta steamer for both third and twentieth of october! see what dark lanterns the stars hold out, and how i shall stay in england after all as i think! and thus we are thrown back on the old gibraltar scheme with its shifting of steamers ... unless we take the dreary alternative of madeira!--or cadiz! even suppose madeira, ... why it were for a few months alone--and there would be no temptation to loiter as in italy. _don't_ think too hardly of poor papa. you have his wrong side ... his side of peculiar wrongness ... to you just now. when you have walked round him you will have other thoughts of him. are you better, i wonder? and taking exercise and trying to be better? may god bless you! tuesday need not be the last day if you like to take one more besides--for there is no going until the fourth or seventh, ... and the seventh is the more probable of those two. but now you have done with me until tuesday. ever yours, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, october , .] i have read to the last line of your 'rosicrucian'; and my scepticism grew and grew through hume's process of doubtful doubts, and at last rose to the full stature of incredulity ... for i never could believe shelley capable of such a book (call it a book!), not even with a flood of boarding-school idiocy dashed in by way of dilution. altogether it roused me to deny myself so far as to look at the date of the book, and to get up and travel to the other end of the room to confront it with other dates in the 'letters from abroad' ... (i, who never think of a date except the 'a.d.,' and am inclined every now and then to write _that_ down as ...) well! and on comparing these dates in these two volumes before my eyes, i find that your rosicrucian was 'printed for stockdale' in _ _, and that shelley _died in the july of the same year_!!--there, is a vindicating fact for you! and unless the 'rosicrucian' went into more editions than one, and dates here from a later one, ... which is not ascertainable from this fragment of a titlepage, ... the innocence of the great poet stands proved--now doesn't it? for nobody will say that he published such a book in the last year of his life, in the maturity of his genius, and that godwin's daughter helped him in it! that 'dripping dew' from the skeleton is the only living word in the book!--which really amused me notwithstanding, from the intense absurdity of the whole composition ... descriptions ... sentiments ... and morals. judge yourself if i had not better say 'no' about the cloak! i would take it if you wished such a kindness to me--and although you might find it very useful to yourself ... or to your mother or sister ... still if you _wished_ me to take it i should like to have it, and the mantle of the prophet might bring me down something of his spirit! but do you remember ... do you consider ... how many talkers there are in this house, and what would be talked--or that it is not worth while to provoke it all? and papa, knowing it, would not like it--and altogether it is far better, believe me, that you should keep your own cloak, and i, the thought of the kindness you meditated in respect to it. i have heard nothing more--nothing. i was asked the other day by a very young friend of mine ... the daughter of an older friend who once followed you up-stairs in this house ... mr. hunter, an independent minister ... for 'mr. browning's autograph.' she wants it for a collection ... for her album--and so, will you write out a verse or two on one side of note paper ... not as you write for the printers ... and let me keep my promise and send it to her? i forgot to ask you before. or one verse will do ... anything will do ... and don't let me be bringing you into vexation. it need not be of ms. rarity. you are not better ... really ... i fear. and your mother's being ill affects you more than you like to admit, i fear besides. will you, when you write, say how _both_ are ... nothing extenuating, you know. may god bless you, my dearest friend. ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday. [post-mark, october , .] well, let us hope against hope in the sad matter of the novel--yet, yet,--it _is_ by shelley, if you will have the truth--as i happen to _know_--proof _last_ being that leigh hunt told me he unearthed it in shelley's own library at marlow once, to the writer's horror and shame--'he snatched it out of my hands'--said h. yet i thrust it into yours ... so much for the subtle fence of friends who reach your heart by a side-thrust, as i told you on tuesday, after the enemy has fallen back breathless and baffled. as for the date, that stockdale was a notorious pirate and raker-up of rash publications ... and, do you know, i suspect the _title-page_ is all that boasts such novelty,--see if the _book_, the inside leaves, be not older evidently!--a common trick of the 'trade' to this day. the history of this and 'justrozzi,' as it is spelt,--the other novel,--may be read in medwin's 'conversations'--and, as i have been told, in lady ch. bury's 'reminiscences' or whatever she calls them ... the 'guistrozzi' was _certainly_ 'written in concert with'--somebody or other ... for i confess the whole story grows monstrous and even the froth of wine strings itself in bright bubbles,--ah, but this was the scum of the fermenting vat, do you see? i am happy to say i forget the novel entirely, or almost--and only keep the exact impression which you have gained ... through me! 'the fair cross of gold _he dashed on the floor_'--(_that_ is my pet-line ... because the 'chill dew' of a place not commonly supposed to favour humidity is a plagiarism from lewis's 'monk,' it now flashes on me! yes, lewis, too, puts the phrase into intense italics.) and now, please read a chorus in the 'prometheus unbound' or a scene from the 'cenci'--and join company with shelley again! --from 'chill dew' i come to the _cloak_--you are quite right--and i give up that fancy. will you, then, take one more precaution when _all_ proper safe-guards have been adopted; and, when _everything_ is sure, contrive some one sureness besides, against cold or wind or sea-air; and say '_this_--for the cloak which is not here, and to help the heart's wish which is,'--so i shall be there _palpably_. will you do this? tell me you will, to-morrow--and tell me all good news. my mother suffers still.... i hope she is no worse--but a little better--certainly better. i am better too, in my unimportant way. now i will write you the verses ... some easy ones out of a paper-full meant to go between poem and poem in my next number, and break the shock of collision. let me kiss your hand--dearest! my heart and life--all is yours, and forever--god make you happy as i am through you--bless you r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, october , .] tuesday is given up in full council. the thing is beyond doubting of, as george says and as you thought yesterday. and then george has it in his head to beguile the duke of palmella out of a smaller cabin, so that i might sail from the thames on the twentieth--and whether he succeeds or not, i humbly confess that one of the chief advantages of the new plan if not the very chief (as _i_ see it) is just in the _delay_. your spring-song is full of beauty as you know very well--and 'that's the wise thrush,' so characteristic of you (and of the thrush too) that i was sorely tempted to ask you to write it 'twice over,' ... and not send the first copy to mary hunter notwithstanding my promise to her. and now when you come to print these fragments, would it not be well if you were to stoop to the vulgarism of prefixing some word of introduction, as other people do, you know, ... a title ... a name? you perplex your readers often by casting yourself on their intelligence in these things--and although it is true that readers in general are stupid and can't understand, it is still more true that they are lazy and won't understand ... and they don't catch your point of sight at first unless you think it worth while to push them by the shoulders and force them into the right place. now these fragments ... you mean to print them with a line between ... and not one word at the top of it ... now don't you! and then people will read oh, to be in england and say to themselves ... 'why who is this? ... who's out of england?' which is an extreme case of course; but you will see what i mean ... and often i have observed how some of the very most beautiful of your lyrics have suffered just from your disdain of the usual tactics of writers in this one respect. and you are not better, still--you are worse instead of better ... are you not? tell me--and what can you mean about 'unimportance,' when you were worse last week ... this expiring week ... than ever before, by your own confession? and now?--and your mother? yes--i promise! and so, ... _elijah_ will be missed instead of his mantle ... which will be a losing contract after all. but it shall be as you say. may you be able to say that you are better! god bless you. ever yours. never think of the 'white slave.' i had just taken it up. the trash of it is prodigious--far beyond mr. smythe. not that i can settle upon a book just now, in all this wind, to judge of it fairly. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, october , .] i should certainly think that the duke of palmella may be induced, and with no great difficulty, to give up a cabin under the circumstances--and _then_ the plan becomes really objection-proof, so far as mortal plans go. but now you must think all the boldlier about whatever difficulties remain, just because they are so much the fewer. it _is_ cold already in the mornings and evenings--cold and (this morning) foggy--i did not ask if you continue to go out from time to time.... i am sure you _should_,--you would so prepare yourself properly for the fatigue and change--yesterday it was very warm and fine in the afternoon, nor is this noontime so bad, if the requisite precautions are taken. and do make 'journeys across the room,' and out of it, meanwhile, and _stand_ when possible--get all the strength ready, now that so much is to be spent. oh, if i were by you! thank you, thank you--i will devise titles--i quite see what you say, now you do say it. i am (this monday morning, the prescribed day for efforts and beginnings) looking over and correcting what you read--to press they shall go, and then the plays can follow gently, and then ... 'oh to be in pisa. now that e.b.b. is there!'--and i _shall_ be there!... i am much better to-day; and my mother better--and to-morrow i shall see you--so come good things together! dearest--till to-morrow and ever i am yours, wholly yours--may god bless you! r.b. you do not ask me that 'boon'--why is that?--besides, i have my own _real_ boons to ask too, as you will inevitably find, and i shall perhaps get heart by your example. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, october , .] ah but the good things do _not_ come together--for just as your letter comes i am driven to asking you to leave tuesday for wednesday. on tuesday mr. kenyon is to be here or not to be here, he says--there's a doubt; and you would rather go to a clear day. so if you do not hear from me again i shall expect you on _wednesday_ unless i hear to the contrary from you:--and if anything happens to wednesday you shall hear. mr. kenyon is in town for only two days, or three. i never could grumble against him, so good and kind as he is--but he may not come after all to-morrow--so it is not grudging the obolus to belisarius, but the squandering of the last golden days at the bottom of the purse. do i 'stand'--do i walk? yes--most uprightly. i 'walk upright every day.' do i go out? no, never. and i am not to be scolded for _that_, because when you were looking at the sun to-day, i was marking the east wind; and perhaps if i had breathed a breath of it ... farewell pisa. people who can walk don't always walk into the lion's den as a consequence--do they? should they? are you 'sure that they should?' i write in great haste. so wednesday then ... perhaps! and yours every day. you understand. wednesday--if nothing to the contrary. _r.b. to e.b.b._ --wednesday. [post-mark, october , .] well, dearest, at all events i get up with the assurance i shall see you, and go on till the fatal - / p.m. believing in the same, and _then_, if after all there _does_ come such a note as this with its instructions, why, first, it _is_ such a note and such a gain, and next it makes a great day out of to-morrow that was to have been so little of a day, that is all. only, only, i am suspicious, now, of a real loss to me in the end; for, _putting_ off yesterday, i dared put off (on your part) friday to saturday ... while _now_ ... what shall be said to that? dear mr. kenyon to be the smiling inconscious obstacle to any pleasure of mine, if it were merely pleasure! but i want to catch our next post--to-morrow, then, excepting what is to be excepted! bless you, my dearest-- your own r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday evening. [post-mark, october , .] mr. kenyon never came. my sisters met him in the street, and he had been 'detained all day in the city and would certainly be here to-morrow,' wednesday! and so you see what has happened to wednesday! moreover he may come besides on thursday, ... i can answer for nothing. only if i do not write and if you find thursday admissible, will you come then? in the case of an obstacle, you shall hear. and it is not (in the meantime) my fault--now is it? i have been quite enough vexed about it, indeed. did the monday work work harm to the head, i wonder? i do fear so that you won't get through those papers with impunity--especially if the plays are to come after ... though ever so 'gently.' and if you are to suffer, it would be right to tongue-tie that silver bell, and leave the congregations to their selling of cabbages. which is unphilanthropic of me perhaps, ... [greek: ô philtate]. be sure that i shall be 'bold' when the time for going comes--and both bold and capable of the effort. i am desired to keep to the respirator and the cabin for a day or two, while the cold can reach us; and midway in the bay of biscay some change of climate may be felt, they say. there is no sort of danger for me; except that i shall _stay in england_. and why is it that i feel to-night more than ever almost, as if i should stay in england? who can tell? _i_ can tell one thing. _if_ i stay, it will not be from a failure in my resolution--_that will_ not be--_shall_ not be. yes--and mr. kenyon and i agreed the other day that there was something of the tigress-nature very distinctly cognisable under what he is pleased to call my 'ba-lambishness.' then, on thursday!... unless something happens to _thursday_ ... and i shall write in that case. and i trust to you (as always) to attend to your own convenience--just as you may trust to me to remember my own 'boon.' ah--you are curious, i think! which is scarcely wise of you--because it _may_, you know, be the roc's egg after all. but no, it _isn't_--i will say just so much. and besides i _did_ say that it was a 'restitution,' which limits the guesses if it does not put an end to them. unguessable, i choose it to be. and now i feel as if i should _not_ stay in england. which is the difference between one five minutes and another. may god bless you. ever yours, e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, october , .] dear mr. kenyon has been here again, and talking so (in his kindness too) about the probabilities as to pisa being against me ... about all depending 'on one throw' and the 'dice being loaded' &c. ... that i looked at him aghast as if he looked at the future through the folded curtain and was licensed to speak oracles:--and ever since i have been out of spirits ... oh, out of spirits--and must write myself back again, or try. after all he may be wrong like another--and i should tell you that he reasons altogether from the delay ... and that 'the cabins will therefore be taken' and the 'circular bills' out of reach! he _said_ that one of his purposes in staying in town, was to '_knout_' me every day--didn't he? well--george will probably speak before _he_ leaves town, which will be on monday! and now that the hour approaches, i do feel as if the house stood upon gunpowder, and as if i held guy fawkes's lantern in my right hand. and no: i shall not go. the obstacles will not be those of mr. kenyon's finding--and what their precise character will be i do not see distinctly. only that they will be sufficient, and thrown by one hand just where the wheel should turn, ... _that_, i see--and you will, in a few days. did you go to moxon's and settle the printing matter? tell me. and what was the use of telling mr. kenyon that you were 'quite well' when you know you are not? will you say to me how you are, saying the truth? and also how your mother is? to show the significance of the omission of those evening or rather night visits of papa's--for they came sometimes at eleven, and sometimes at twelve--i will tell you that he used to sit and talk in them, and then _always_ kneel and pray with me and for me--which i used of course to feel as a proof of very kind and affectionate sympathy on his part, and which has proportionably pained me in the withdrawing. they were no ordinary visits, you observe, ... and he could not well throw me further from him than by ceasing to pay them--the thing is quite expressively significant. not that i pretend to complain, nor to have reason to complain. one should not be grateful for kindness, only while it lasts: _that_ would be a short-breathed gratitude. i just tell you the fact, proving that it cannot be accidental. did you ever, ever tire me? indeed no--you never did. and do understand that i am not to be tired 'in that way,' though as mr. boyd said once of his daughter, one may be so 'far too effeminate.' no--if i were put into a crowd i should be tired soon--or, apart from the crowd, if you made me discourse orations de coronâ ... concerning your bag even ... i should be tired soon--though peradventure not very much sooner than you who heard. but on the smooth ground of quiet conversation (particularly when three people don't talk at once as my brothers do ... to say the least!) i last for a long while:--not to say that i have the pretension of being as good and inexhaustible a listener to your own speaking as you could find in the world. so please not to accuse me of being tired again. i can't be tired, and won't be tired, you see. and now, since i began to write this, there is a new evil and anxiety--a worse anxiety than any--for one of my brothers is ill; had been unwell for some days and we thought nothing of it, till to-day saturday: and the doctors call it a fever of the typhoid character ... not typhus yet ... but we are very uneasy. you must not come on wednesday if an infectious fever be in the house--_that_ must be out of the question. may god bless you--i am quite heavy-hearted to-day, but never less yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday. [post-mark, october , ]. these are bad news, dearest--all bad, except the enduring comfort of your regard; the illness of your brother is worst ... that _would_ stay you, and is the first proper obstacle. i shall not attempt to speak and prove my feelings,--you know what even flush is to me through you: i wait in anxiety for the next account. if after all you do _not_ go to pisa; why, we must be cheerful and wise, and take courage and hope. i cannot but see with your eyes and from your place, you know,--and will let this all be one surprizing and deplorable mistake of mere love and care ... but no such another mistake ought to be suffered, if you escape the effects of this. i will not cease to believe in a better event, till the very last, however, and it is a deep satisfaction that all has been made plain and straight up to this strange and sad interposition like a bar. you have done _your_ part, at least--with all that forethought and counsel from friends and adequate judges of the case--so, if the bar _will_ not move, you will consider--will you not, dearest?--where one may best encamp in the unforbidden country, and wait the spring and fine weather. would it be advisable to go where mr. kenyon suggested, or elsewhere? oh, these vain wishes ... the will here, and no means! my life is bound up with yours--my own, first and last love. what wonder if i feared to tire you--i who, knowing you as i do, admiring what is so admirable (let me speak), loving what must needs be loved, fain to learn what you only can teach; proud of so much, happy in so much of you; i, who, for all this, neither come to admire, nor feel proud, nor be taught,--but only, only to live with you and be by you--that is love--for i _know_ the rest, as i say. i know those qualities are in you ... but at them i could get in so many ways.... i have your books, here are my letters you give me; you would answer my questions were _i_ in pisa--well, and it all would amount to nothing, infinitely much as i know it is; to nothing if i could not sit by you and see you.... i can stop at that, but not before. and it seems strange to me how little ... less than little i have laid open of my feelings, the nature of them to you--i smile to think how if all this while i had been acting with the profoundest policy in intention, so as to pledge myself to nothing i could not afterwards perform with the most perfect ease and security, i should have done not much unlike what i _have_ done--to be sure, one word includes many or all ... but i have not said ... what i will not even now say ... you will _know_--in god's time to which i trust. i will answer your note now--the questions. i did go--(it may amuse you to write on)--to moxon's. first let me tell you that when i called there the saturday before, his brother (in his absence) informed me, replying to the question when it came naturally in turn with a round of like enquiries, that your poems continued to sell 'singularly well'--they would 'end in bringing a clear profit,' he said. i thought to catch him, and asked if they _had_ done so ... 'oh; not at the beginning ... it takes more time--he answered. on thursday i saw moxon--he spoke rather encouragingly of my own prospects. i send him a sheetful to-morrow, i believe, and we are 'out' on the st of next month. tennyson, by the way, has got his pension, £ per annum--by the other way, moxon has bought the mss. of keats in the possession of taylor the publisher, and is going to bring out a complete edition; which is pleasant to hear. after settling with moxon i went to mrs. carlyle's--who told me characteristic quaintnesses of carlyle's father and mother over the tea she gave me. and all yesterday, you are to know, i was in a permanent mortal fright--for my uncle came in the morning to intreat me to go to paris in _the evening_ about some urgent business of his,--a five-minutes matter with his brother there,--and the affair being really urgent and material to his and the brother's interest, and no substitute being to be thought of, i was forced to promise to go--in case a letter, which would arrive in town at noon, should not prove satisfactory. so i calculated times, and found i could be at paris to-morrow, and back again, _certainly_ by wednesday--and so not lose you on that day--oh, the fear i had!--but i was sure then and now, that the th would not see you depart. but night came, and the last dover train left, and i drew breath freely--this morning i find the letter was all right--so may it be with all worse apprehensions! what you fear, precisely that, never happens, as napoleon observed and thereon grew bold. i had stipulated for an hour's notice, if go i must--and that was to be wholly spent in writing to you--for in quiet consternation my mother cared for my carpet bag. and so, i shall hear from you to-morrow ... that is, you will write _then_, telling me _all_ about your brother. as for what you say, with the kindest intentions, 'of fever-contagion' and keeping away on wednesday on _that_ account, it is indeed 'out of the question,'--for a first reason (which dispenses with any second) because i disbelieve altogether in contagion from fevers, and especially from typhus fevers--as do much better-informed men than myself--i speak quite advisedly. if there should be only _that_ reason, therefore, you will not deprive me of the happiness of seeing you next wednesday. i am not well--have a cold, influenza or some unpleasant thing, but am better than yesterday--my mother is much better, i think (she and my sister are resolute non-contagionists, mind you that!) god bless you and all you love! dearest, i am your r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, october , .] it was the merest foolishness in me to write about fevers and the rest as i did to-day, just as if it could do any good, all the wringing of hands in the world. and there is no typhus _yet_ ... and no danger of any sort i hope and trust!--and how weak it is that habit of spreading the cloud which is in you all around you, how weak and selfish ... and unlike what _you_ would do ... just as you are unlike mr. kenyon. and you _are_ unlike him--and you were right on thursday when you said so, and i was wrong in setting up a phrase on the other side ... only what i said came by an instinct because you seemed to be giving him all the sunshine to use and carry, which should not be after all. but you are unlike him and must be ... seeing that the producers must differ from the 'nati consumere fruges' in the intellectual as in the material. you create and he enjoys, and the work makes you pale and the pleasure makes him ruddy, and it is so of a necessity. so differs the man of genius from the man of letters--and then dear mr. kenyon is not even a man of letters in a full sense ... he is rather a sybarite of letters. do you think he ever knew what mental labour is? i fancy not. not more than he has known what mental inspiration is! and not more than he has known what the strife of the heart is ... with all his tenderness and sensibility. he seems to me to _evade_ pain, and where he suffers at all to do so rather negatively than positively ... if you understand what i mean by that ... rather by a want than by a blow: the secret of all being that he has a certain latitudinarianism (not indifferentism) in his life and affections, and has no capacity for concentration and intensity. partly by temperament and partly by philosophy he contrives to keep the sunny side of the street--though never inclined to forget the blind man at the corner. ah, dear mr. kenyon: he is magnanimous in toleration, and excellent in sympathy--and he has the love of beauty and the reverence of genius--but the faculty of _worship_ he has not: he will not worship aright either your heroes or your gods ... and while you do it he only 'tolerates' the act in you. once he said ... not to me ... but i heard of it: 'what, if genius should be nothing but scrofula?' and he doubts (i very much fear) whether the world is not governed by a throw of those very same 'loaded dice,' and no otherwise. yet he reveres genius in the acting of it, and recognizes a god in creation--only it is but 'so far,' and not farther. at least i think not--and i have a right to think what i please of him, holding him as i do, in such true affection. one of the kindest and most indulgent of human beings has he been to me, and i am happy to be grateful to him. _sunday._--the duke of palmella takes the whole vessel for the th and therefore if i go it must be on the th. therefore (besides) as george must be on sessions to-morrow, he will settle the question with papa to-night. in the meantime our poor occy is not much better, though a little, and is ordered leeches on his head, and is confined to his bed and attended by physician and surgeon. it is not decided typhus, but they will not answer for its not being infectious; and although he is quite at the top of the house, two stories above me, i shall not like you to come indeed. and then there will be only room for a farewell, and i who am a coward shrink from the saying of it. no--not being able to see you to-morrow, (mr. kenyon is to be here to-morrow, he says) let us agree to throw away wednesday. i will write, ... you will write perhaps--and above all things you will promise to write by the 'star' on monday, that the captain may give me your letter at gibraltar. you promise? but i shall hear from you before then, and oftener than once, and you will acquiesce about wednesday and grant at once that there can be no gain, no good, in that miserable good-bye-ing. i do not want the pain of it to remember you by--i shall remember very well without it, be sure. still it shall be as you like--as you shall chose--and if you are _disappointed_ about wednesday (if it is not vain in me to talk of disappointments) why do with wednesday as you think best ... always understanding that there's no risk of infection. _monday._--all this i had written yesterday--and to-day it all is worse than vain. do not be angry with me--do not think it my fault--but _i do not go to italy_ ... it has ended as i feared. what passed between george and papa there is no need of telling: only the latter said that i 'might go if i pleased, but that going it would be under his heaviest displeasure.' george, in great indignation, pressed the question fully: but all was vain ... and i am left in this position ... to go, if i please, with his displeasure over me, (which after what you have said and after what mr. kenyon has said, and after what my own conscience and deepest moral convictions say aloud, i would unhesitatingly do at this hour!) and necessarily run the risk of exposing my sister and brother to that same displeasure ... from which risk i shrink and fall back and feel that to incur it, is impossible. dear mr. kenyon has been here and we have been talking--and he sees what i see ... that i am justified in going myself, but not in bringing others into difficulty. the very kindness and goodness with which they desire me (both my sisters) 'not to think of them,' naturally makes me think more of them. and so, tell me that i am not wrong in taking up my chain again and acquiescing in this hard necessity. the bitterest 'fact' of all is, that i had believed papa to have loved me more than he obviously does: but i never regret knowledge ... i mean i never would _un_know anything ... even were it the taste of the apples by the dead sea--and this must be accepted like the rest. in the meantime your letter comes--and if i could seem to be very unhappy after reading it ... why it would be 'all pretence' on my part, believe me. can you care for me so much ... _you_? then _that_ is light enough to account for all the shadows, and to make them almost unregarded--the shadows of the life behind. moreover dear occy is somewhat better--with a pulse only at ninety: and the doctors declare that visitors may come to the house without any manner of danger. or i should not trust to your theories--no, indeed: it was not that i expected you to be afraid, but that _i_ was afraid--and if i am not ashamed for _that_, why at least i am, for being _lâche_ about wednesday, when you thought of hurrying back from paris only for it! you _could_ think _that_!--you _can_ care for me so much!--(i come to it again!) when i hold some words to my eyes ... such as these in this letter ... i can see nothing beyond them ... no evil, no want. there _is_ no evil and no want. am i wrong in the decision about italy? could i do otherwise? i had courage and to spare--but the question, you see, did not regard myself wholly. for the rest, the 'unforbidden country' lies within these four walls. madeira was proposed in vain--and any part of england would be as objectionable as italy, and not more advantageous to _me_ than wimpole street. to take courage and be cheerful, as you say, is left as an alternative--and (the winter may be mild!) to fall into the hands of god rather than of man: _and i shall be here for your november, remember_. and now that you are not well, will you take care? and not come on wednesday unless you are better? and never again bring me _wet flowers_, which probably did all the harm on thursday? i was afraid for you then, though i said nothing. may god bless you. ever yours i am--your own. ninety is not a high pulse ... for a fever of this kind--is it? and the heat diminishes, and his spirits are better--and we are all much easier ... have been both to-day and yesterday indeed. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning, [post-mark, october , .] be sure, my own, dearest love, that this is for the best; will be seen for the best in the end. it is hard to bear now--but _you_ have to bear it; any other person could not, and you will, i know, knowing you--_will_ be well this one winter if you can, and then--since i am _not_ selfish in this love to you, my own conscience tells me,--i desire, more earnestly than i ever knew what desiring was, to be yours and with you and, as far as may be in this life and world, you--and no hindrance to that, but one, gives me a moment's care or fear; but that one is just your little hand, as i could fancy it raised in any least interest of yours--and before that, i am, and would ever be, still silent. but now--what is to make you raise that hand? i will not speak _now_; not seem to take advantage of your present feelings,--we will be rational, and all-considering and weighing consequences, and foreseeing them--but first i will prove ... if _that_ has to be done, why--but i begin speaking, and i should not, i know. bless you, love! r.b. to-morrow i see you, without fail. i am rejoiced as you can imagine, at your brother's improved state. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday, [post-mark, october , .] will this note reach you at the 'fatal hour' ... or sooner? at any rate it is forced to ask you to take thursday for wednesday, inasmuch as mr. kenyon in his exceeding kindness has put off his journey just for _me_, he says, because he saw me depressed about the decision, and wished to come and see me again to-morrow and talk the spirits up, i suppose. it is all so kind and good, that i cannot find a voice to grumble about the obligation it brings of writing thus. and then, if you suffer from cold and influenza, it will be better for you not to come for another day, ... i think _that_, for comfort. shall i hear how you are to-night, i wonder? dear occy 'turned the corner,' the physician said, yesterday evening, and, although a little fluctuating to-day, remains on the whole considerably better. they were just in time to keep the fever from turning to typhus. how fast you print your book, for it is to be out on the first of november! why it comes out suddenly like the sun. mr. kenyon asked me if i had seen anything you were going to print; and when i mentioned the second part of the 'duchess' and described how your perfect rhymes, perfectly new, and all clashing together as by natural attraction, had put me at once to shame and admiration, he began to praise the first part of the same poem (which i had heard him do before, by the way) and extolled it as one of your most striking productions. and so until thursday! may god bless you-- and as the heart goes, ever yours. i am glad for tennyson, and glad for keats. it is well to be able to be glad about something--is is it not? about something out of ourselves. and (_in_ myself) i shall be most glad, if i have a letter to-night. shall i? _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, october , .] thanks, my dearest, for the good news--of the fever's abatement--it is good, too, that you write cheerfully, on the whole: what is it to _me_ that you write is of _me_ ... i shall never say _that_! mr. kenyon is all kindness, and one gets to take it as not so purely natural a thing, the showing kindness to those it concerns, and belongs to,--well! on thursday, then,--to-morrow! did you not get a note of mine, a hurried note, which was meant for yesterday-afternoon's delivery? mr. forster came yesterday and was very profuse of graciosities: he may have, or must have meant well, so we will go on again with the friendship, as the snail repairs his battered shell. my poems went duly to press on monday night--there is not much _correctable_ in them,--you make, or you spoil, one of these things; that is, _i_ do. i have adopted all your emendations, and thrown in lines and words, just a morning's business; but one does not write plays so. you may like some of my smaller things, which stop interstices, better than what you have seen; i shall wonder to know. i am to receive a _proof_ at the end of the week--will you help me and over-look it. ('yes'--she says ... my thanks i do not say!--) while writing this, the _times_ catches my eye (it just came in) and something from the _lancet_ is extracted, a long article against quackery--and, as i say, this is the first and only sentence i read--'there is scarcely a peer of the realm who is not the patron of some quack pill or potion: and the literati too, are deeply tainted. we have heard of barbarians who threw quacks and their medicines into the sea: but here in england we have browning, a prince of poets, touching the pitch which defiles and making paracelsus the hero of a poem. sir e.l. bulwer writes puffs for the water doctors in a style worthy of imitation by the scribe that does the poetical for moses and son. miss martineau makes a finessing servant girl her physician-general: and richard howitt and the lady aforesaid stand god-father and mother to the contemptible mesmeric vagaries of spencer hall.'--even the sweet incense to me fails of its effect if paracelsus is to figure on a level with priessnitz, and 'jane'! what weather, now at last! think for yourself and for me--could you not go out on such days? i am quite well now--cold, over and gone. did i tell you my uncle arrived from paris on monday, as they hoped he would--so my travel would have been to great purpose! bless my dearest--my own! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, october , .] your letter which should have reached me in the morning of yesterday, i did not receive until nearly midnight--partly through the eccentricity of our new postman whose good pleasure it is to make use of the letter-box without knocking; and partly from the confusion in the house, of illness in different ways ... the very servants being ill, ... one of them breaking a blood-vessel--for there is no new case of fever; ... and for dear occy, he grows better slowly day by day. and just so late last night, five letters were found in the letter-box, and mine ... yours ... among them--which accounts for my beginning to answer it only now. what am i to say but this ... that i know what you are ... and that i know also what you are to _me_,--and that i should accept that knowledge as more than sufficient recompense for worse vexations than these late ones. therefore let no more be said of them: and no more _need_ be said, even if they were not likely to prove their own end good, as i believe with you. you may be quite sure that i shall be well this winter, if in any way it should be possible, and that i _will not_ be beaten down, if the will can do anything. i admire how, if all had happened so but a year ago, (yet it could not have happened quite _so_!), i should certainly have been beaten down--and how it is different now, ... and how it is only gratitude to you, to _say_ that it is different now. my cage is not worse but better since you brought the green groundsel to it--and to dash oneself against the wires of it will not open the door. we shall see ... and god will oversee. and in the meantime you will not talk of extravagances; and then nobody need hold up the hand--because, as i said and say, i am yours, your own--only not to _hurt you_. so now let us talk of the first of november and of the poems which are to come out then, and of the poems which are to come after then--and of the new avatar of 'sordello,' for instance, which you taught me to look for. and let us both be busy and cheerful--and you will come and see me throughout the winter, ... if you do not decide rather on going abroad, which may be better ... better for your health's sake?--in which case i shall have your letters. and here is another ... just arrived. how i thank you. think of the _times_! still it was very well of them to recognise your principality. oh yes--do let me see the proof--i understand too about the 'making and spoiling.' almost you forced me to smile by thinking it worth while to say that you are '_not selfish_.' did sir percival say so to sir gawaine across the round table, in those times of chivalry to which you belong by the soul? certainly you are not selfish! may god bless you. ever your e.b.b. the fever may last, they say, for a week longer, or even a fortnight--but it _decreases_. yet he is hot still, and very weak. to to-morrow! _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, october , .] do tell me what you mean precisely by your 'bells and pomegranates' title. i have always understood it to refer to the hebraic priestly garment--but mr. kenyon held against me the other day that your reference was different, though he had not the remotest idea how. and yesterday i forgot to ask, for not the first time. tell me too why you should not in the new number satisfy, by a note somewhere, the davuses of the world who are in the majority ('davi sumus, non oedipi') with a solution of this one sphinx riddle. is there a reason against it? occy continues to make progress--with a pulse at only eighty-four this morning. are you learned in the pulse that i should talk as if you were? _i_, who have had my lessons? he takes scarcely anything yet but water, and his head is very hot still--but the progress is quite sure, though it may be a lingering case. your beautiful flowers!--none the less beautiful for waiting for water yesterday. as fresh as ever, they were; and while i was putting them into the water, i thought that your visit went on all the time. other thoughts too i had, which made me look down blindly, quite blindly, on the little blue flowers, ... while i thought what i could not have said an hour before without breaking into tears which would have run faster then. to say now that i never can forget; that i feel myself bound to you as one human being cannot be more bound to another;--and that you are more to me at this moment than all the rest of the world; is only to say in new words that it would be a wrong against _myself_, to seem to risk your happiness and abuse your generosity. for _me_ ... though you threw out words yesterday about the testimony of a 'third person,' ... it would be monstrous to assume it to be necessary to vindicate my trust of you--_i trust you implicitly_--and am not too proud to owe all things to you. but now let us wait and see what this winter does or undoes--while god does his part for good, as we know. i will never fail to you from any human influence whatever--_that_ i have promised--but you must let it be different from the other sort of promise which it would be a wrong to make. may god bless you--you, whose fault it is, to be too generous. you _are_ not like other men, as i could see from the beginning--no. shall i have the proof to-night, i ask myself. and if you like to come on monday rather than tuesday, i do not see why there should be a 'no' to that. judge from your own convenience. only we must be wise in the general practice, and abstain from too frequent meetings, for fear of difficulties. i am cassandra you know, and smell the slaughter in the bath-room. it would make no difference in fact; but in comfort, much. ever your own-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday. [post-mark, october , .] i must not go on tearing these poor sheets one after the other,--the proper phrases _will not_ come,--so let them stay, while you care for my best interests in their best, only way, and say for _me_ what i would say if i could--dearest,--say it, as i feel it! i am thankful to hear of the continued improvement of your brother. so may it continue with him! pulses i know very little about--i go by your own impressions which are evidently favourable. i will make a note as you suggest--or, perhaps, keep it for the closing number (the next), when it will come fitly in with two or three parting words i shall have to say. the rabbis make bells and pomegranates symbolical of pleasure and profit, the gay and the grave, the poetry and the prose, singing and sermonizing--such a mixture of effects as in the original hour (that is quarter of an hour) of confidence and creation. i meant the whole should prove at last. well, it _has_ succeeded beyond my most adventurous wishes in one respect--'blessed eyes mine eyes have been, if--' if there was any sweetness in the tongue or flavour in the seeds to _her_. but i shall do quite other and better things, or shame on me! the proof has not yet come.... i should go, i suppose, and enquire this afternoon--and probably i will. i weigh all the words in your permission to come on monday ... do not think _i_ have not seen _that_ contingency from the first! let it be tuesday--no sooner! meanwhile you are never away--never from your place here. god bless my dearest. ever yours r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday morning. [in the same envelope with the preceding letter.] this arrived on saturday night--i just correct it in time for this our first post--will it do, the new matter? i can take it to-morrow--when i am to see you--if you are able to glance through it by then. the 'inscription,' how does that read? there is strange temptation, by the way, in the space they please to leave for the presumable 'motto'--'they but remind me of mine own conception' ... but one must give no clue, of a silk's breadth, to the '_bower_,' _yet_, one day! --which god send you, dearest, and your r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, october , .] even at the risk of teazing you a little i must say a few words, that there may be no misunderstanding between us--and this, before i sleep to-night. to-day and before to-day you surprised me by your manner of receiving my remark about your visits, for i believed i had sufficiently made clear to you long ago how certain questions were ordered in this house and how no exception was to be expected for my sake or even for yours. surely i told you this quite plainly long ago. i only meant to say in my last letter, in the same track ... (fearing in the case of your wishing to come oftener that you might think it unkind in me not to seem to wish the same) ... that if you came too often and it was _observed_, difficulties and vexations would follow as a matter of course, and it would be wise therefore to run no risk. that was the head and front of what i meant to say. the weekly one visit is a thing established and may go on as long as you please--and there is no objection to your coming twice a week _now_ and _then_ ... if now and then merely ... if there is no habit ... do you understand? i may be prudent in an extreme perhaps--and certainly everybody in the house is not equally prudent!--but i did shrink from running any risk with that calm and comfort of the winter as it seemed to come on. and was it more than i said about the cloak? was there any newness in it? anything to startle you? still i do perfectly see that whether new or old, what it _involves_ may well be unpleasant to you--and that (however old) it may be apt to recur to your mind with a new increasing unpleasantness. we have both been carried too far perhaps, by late events and impulses--but it is never too late to come back to a right place, and i for my part come back to mine, and entreat you my dearest friend, first, _not to answer this_, and next, to weigh and consider thoroughly 'that particular contingency' which (i tell you plainly, i who know) the tongue of men and of angels would not modify so as to render less full of vexations to you. let pisa prove the excellent hardness of some marbles! judge. from motives of self-respect, you may well walk an opposite way ... _you_.... when i told you once ... or twice ... that 'no human influence should' &c. &c., ... i spoke for myself, quite over-looking you--and now that i turn and see you, i am surprised that i did not see you before ... _there_. i ask you therefore to consider 'that contingency' well--not forgetting the other obvious evils, which the late decision about pisa has aggravated beyond calculation ... for as the smoke rolls off we see the harm done by the fire. and so, and now ... is it not advisable for you to go abroad at once ... as you always intended, you know ... now that your book is through the press? what if you go next week? i leave it to you. in any case _i entreat you not to answer this_--neither let your thoughts be too hard on me for what you may call perhaps vacillation--only that i stand excused (i do not say justified) before my own moral sense. may god bless you. if you go, i shall wait to see you till your return, and have letters in the meantime. i write all this as fast as i can to have it over. what i ask of you is, to consider alone and decide advisedly ... for both our sakes. if it should be your choice not to make an end now, ... why i shall understand _that_ by your not going ... or you may say '_no_' in a word ... for i require no '_protestations_' indeed--and _you_ may trust to _me_ ... it shall be as you choose. _you will consider my happiness most by considering your own_ ... and that is my last word. _wednesday morning._--i did not say half i thought about the poems yesterday--and their various power and beauty will be striking and surprising to your most accustomed readers. 'st. praxed'--'pictor ignotus'--'the ride'--'the duchess'!--of the new poems i like supremely the first and last ... that 'lost leader' which strikes so broadly and deep ... which nobody can ever forget--and which is worth all the journalizing and pamphleteering in the world!--and then, the last 'thought' which is quite to be grudged to that place of fragments ... those grand sea-sights in the long lines. should not these fragments be severed otherwise than by numbers? the last stanza but one of the 'lost mistress' seemed obscure to me. is it so really? the end you have put to 'england in italy' gives unity to the whole ... just what the poem wanted. also you have given some nobler lines to the middle than met me there before. 'the duchess' appears to me more than ever a new-minted golden coin--the rhythm of it answering to your own description, 'speech half asleep, or song half awake?' you have right of trove to these novel effects of rhythm. now if people do not cry out about these poems, what are we to think of the world? may god bless you always--send me the next proof _in any case_. your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, october , .] but i _must_ answer you, and be forgiven, too, dearest. i was (to begin at the beginning) surely not '_startled_' ... only properly aware of the deep blessing i have been enjoying this while, and not disposed to take its continuance as pure matter of course, and so treat with indifference the first shadow of a threatening intimation from without, the first hint of a possible abstraction from the quarter to which so many hopes and fears of mine have gone of late. in this case, knowing you, i was sure that if any imaginable form of displeasure could touch you without reaching me, i should not hear of it too soon--so i spoke--so _you_ have spoken--and so now you get 'excused'? no--wondered at, with all my faculty of wonder for the strange exalting way you will persist to think of me; now, once for all, i _will_ not pass for what i make no least pretence to. i quite understand the grace of your imaginary self-denial, and fidelity to a given word, and noble constancy; but it all happens to be none of mine, none in the least. i love you because i _love_ you; i see you 'once a week' because i cannot see you all day long; i think of you all day long, because i most certainly could not think of you once an hour less, if i tried, or went to pisa, or 'abroad' (in every sense) in order to 'be happy' ... a kind of adventure which you seem to suppose you have in some way interfered with. do, for this once, think, and never after, on the impossibility of your ever (you know i must talk your own language, so i shall say--) hindering any scheme of mine, stopping any supposable advancement of mine. do you really think that before i found you, i was going about the world seeking whom i might devour, that is, be devoured by, in the shape of a wife ... do you suppose i ever dreamed of marrying? what would it mean for me, with my life i am hardened in--considering the rational chances; how the land is used to furnish its contingent of shakespeare's women: or by 'success,' 'happiness' &c. &c. you never never can be seeing for a moment with the world's eyes and meaning 'getting rich' and all that? yet, put that away, and what do you meet at every turn, if you are hunting about in the dusk to catch my good, but yourself? _i_ know who has got it, caught it, and means to keep it on his heart--the person most concerned--_i_, dearest, who cannot play the disinterested part of bidding _you_ forget your 'protestation' ... what should i have to hold by, come what will, through years, through this life, if god shall so determine, if i were not sure, _sure_ that the first moment when you can suffer me with you 'in that relation,' you will remember and act accordingly. i will, as you know, conform my life to _any_ imaginable rule which shall render it possible for your life to move with it and possess it, all the little it is worth. for your friends ... whatever can be 'got over,' whatever opposition may be rational, will be easily removed, i suppose. you know when i spoke lately about the 'selfishness' i dared believe i was free from, i hardly meant the low faults of ... i shall say, a different organization to mine--which has vices in plenty, but not those. besides half a dozen scratches with a pen make one stand up an apparent angel of light, from the lawyer's parchment; and doctors' commons is one bland smile of applause. the selfishness i deprecate is one which a good many women, and men too, call 'real passion'--under the influence of which, i ought to say 'be mine, what ever happens to _you_'--but i know better, and you know best--and you know me, for all this letter, which is no doubt in me, i feel, but dear entire goodness and affection, of which god knows whether i am proud or not--and now you will let me be, will not you. let me have my way, live my life, love my love. when i am, praying god to bless her ever, r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, october , .] '_and be forgiven_' ... yes! and be thanked besides--if i knew how to thank you worthily and as i feel ... only that i do not know it, and cannot say it. and it was not indeed 'doubt' of you--oh no--that made me write as i did write; it was rather because i felt you to be surely noblest, ... and therefore fitly dearest, ... that it seemed to me detestable and intolerable to leave you on this road where the mud must splash up against you, and never cry 'gare.' yet i was quite enough unhappy yesterday, and before yesterday ... i will confess to-day, ... to be too gratefully glad to 'let you be' ... to 'let you have your way'--you who overcome always! always, but where you tell me not to think of you so and so!--as if i could help thinking of you _so_, and as if i should not take the liberty of persisting to think of you just so. 'let me be'--let me have my way.' i am unworthy of you perhaps in everything except one thing--and _that_, you cannot guess. may god bless you-- ever i am yours. the proof does not come! _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, october , .] i wrote briefly yesterday not to make my letter longer by keeping it; and a few last words which belong to it by right, must follow after it ... must--for i want to say that you need not indeed talk to me about squares being not round, and of _you_ being not 'selfish'! you know it is foolish to talk such superfluities, and not a compliment. i won't say to my knowledge of you and faith in you ... but to my understanding generally. why should you say to me at all ... much less for this third or fourth time ... 'i am not selfish?' to _me_ who never ... when i have been deepest asleep and dreaming, ... never dreamed of attributing to you any form of such a fault? promise not to say so again--now promise. think how it must sound to my ears, when really and truly i have sometimes felt jealous of myself ... of my own infirmities, ... and thought that you cared for me only because your chivalry touched them with a silver sound--and that, without them, you would pass by on the other side:--why twenty times i have thought _that_ and been vexed--ungrateful vexation! in exchange for which too frank confession, i will ask for another silent promise ... a silent promise--no, but first i will say another thing. first i will say that you are not to fancy any the least danger of my falling under displeasure through your visits--there is no sort of risk of it _for the present_--and if i ran the risk of making you uncomfortable about _that_, i did foolishly, and what i meant to do was different. i wish you also to understand that _even if you came here every day_, my brothers and sisters would simply care to know if i liked it, and then be glad if i was glad:--the caution referred to one person alone. in relation to _whom_, however, there will be no 'getting over'--you might as well think to sweep off a third of the stars of heaven with the motion of your eyelashes--this, for matter of fact and certainty--and this, as i said before, the keeping of a general rule and from no disrespect towards individuals: a great peculiarity _in the individual_ of course. but ... though i have been a submissive daughter, and this from no effort, but for love's sake ... because i loved him tenderly (and love him), ... and hoped that he loved me back again even if the proofs came untenderly sometimes--yet i have reserved for myself _always_ that right over my own affections which is the most strictly personal of all things, and which involves principles and consequences of infinite importance and scope--even though i _never_ thought (except perhaps when the door of life was just about to open ... before it opened) never thought it probable or possible that i should have occasion for the exercise; from without and from within at once. i have too much need to look up. for friends, i can look any way ... round, and _down_ even--the merest thread of a sympathy will draw me sometimes--or even the least look of kind eyes over a dyspathy--'cela se peut facilement.' but for another relation--it was all different--and rightly so--and so very different--'cela ne se peut nullement'--as in malherbe. and now we must agree to 'let all this be,', and set ourselves to get as much good and enjoyment from the coming winter (better spent at pisa!) as we can--and i begin my joy by being glad that you are not going since i am not going, and by being proud of these new green leaves in your bay which came out with the new number. and then will come the tragedies--and then, ... what beside? we shall have a happy winter after all ... _i_ shall at least; and if pisa had been better, london might be worse: and for _me_ to grow pretentious and fastidious and critical about various sorts of _purple_ ... i, who have been used to the _brun foncé_ of mme. de sévigné, (_foncé_ and _enfoncé_ ...)--would be too absurd. but why does not the proof come all this time? i have kept this letter to go back with it. i had a proposition from the new york booksellers about six weeks ago (the booksellers who printed the poems) to let them re-print those prose papers of mine in the _athenæum_, with additional matter on american literature, in a volume by itself--to be published at the same time both in america and england by wiley and putnam in waterloo place, and meaning to offer liberal terms, they said. now what shall i do? those papers are not fit for separate publication, and i am not inclined to the responsibility of them; and in any case, they must give as much trouble as if they were re-written (trouble and not poetry!), before i could consent to such a thing. well!--and if i do not ... these people are just as likely to print them without leave ... and so without correction. what do you advise? what shall i do? all this time they think me sublimely indifferent, they who pressed for an answer by return of packet--and now it is past six ... eight weeks; and i must say something. am i not 'femme qui parle' to-day? and let me talk on ever so, the proof won't come. may god bless you--and me as i am yours, e.b.b. and the silent promise i would have you make is this--that if ever you should leave me, it shall be (though you are not 'selfish') for your sake--and not for mine: for your good, and not for mine. i ask it--not because i am disinterested; but because one class of motives would be valid, and the other void--simply for that reason. then the _femme qui parle_ (looking back over the parlance) did not mean to say on the first page of this letter that she was ever for a moment _vexed in her pride_ that she should owe anything to her adversities. it was only because adversities are accidents and not essentials. if it had been prosperities, it would have been the same thing--no, not the same thing!--but far worse. occy is up to-day and doing well. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, october , .] how does one make 'silent promises' ... or, rather, how does the maker of them communicate that fact to whomsoever it may concern? i know, there have been many, very many unutterable vows and promises made,--that is, _thought_ down upon--the white slip at the top of my notes,--such as of this note; and not trusted to the pen, that always comes in for the shame,--but given up, and replaced by the poor forms to which a pen is equal; and a glad minute i should account _that_, in which you collected and accepted _those_ 'promises'--because they would not be all so unworthy of me--much less you! i would receive, in virtue of _them_, the ascription of whatever worthiness is supposed to lie in deep, truest love, and gratitude-- read my silent answer there too! all your letter is one comfort: we will be happy this winter, and after, do not fear. i am most happy, to begin, that your brother is so much better: he must be weak and susceptible of cold, remember. it was on my lip, i do think, _last_ visit, or the last but one, to beg you to detach those papers from the _athenæum's gâchis_. certainly this opportunity is _most_ favourable, for every reason: you cannot hesitate, surely. at present those papers are lost--_lost_ for practical purposes. do pray reply without fail to the proposers; no, no harm of these really fine fellows, who _could_ do harm (by printing incorrect copies, and perhaps eking out the column by suppositious matter ... ex-gr. they strengthened and lengthened a book of dickens', in paris, by adding quant. suff. of thackeray's 'yellowplush papers' ... as i discovered by a parisian somebody praising the latter to me as dickens' best work!)--and who _do_ really a good straightforward un-american thing. you will encourage 'the day of small things'--though this is not small, nor likely to have small results. i shall be impatient to hear that you have decided. i like the progress of these americans in taste, their amazing leaps, like grasshoppers up to the sun--from ... what is the '_from_,' what depth, do you remember, say, ten or twelve years back?--_to_--carlyle, and tennyson, and you! so children leave off jack of cornwall and go on just to homer. i can't conceive why my proof does not come--i must go to-morrow and see. in the other, i have corrected all the points you noted, to their evident improvement. yesterday i took out 'luria' and read it through--the skeleton--i shall hope to finish it soon now. it is for a purely imaginary stage,--very simple and straightforward. would you ... no, act by act, as i was about to propose that you should read it; that process would affect the oneness i most wish to preserve. on tuesday--at last, i am with you. till when be with me ever, dearest--god bless you ever-- r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday a.m. [in the same envelope with the preceding letter.] i got this on coming home last night--have just run through it this morning, and send it that time may not be lost. faults, faults; but i don't know how i have got tired of this. the tragedies will be better, at least the second-- at this day! bless you-- r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ i write in haste, not to lose time about the proof. you will see on the papers here my doubtfulnesses such as they are--but silence swallows up the admirations ... and there is no time. 'theocrite' overtakes that wish of mine which ran on so fast--and the 'duchess' grows and grows the more i look--and 'saul' is noble and must have his full royalty some day. would it not be well, by the way, to print it in the meanwhile as a fragment confessed ... sowing asterisks at the end. because as a poem of yours it stands there and wants unity, and people can't be expected to understand the difference between incompleteness and defect, unless you make a sign. for the new poems--they are full of beauty. you throw largesses out on all sides without counting the coins: how beautiful that 'night and morning' ... and the 'earth's immortalities' ... and the 'song' too. and for your 'glove,' all women should be grateful,--and ronsard, honoured, in this fresh shower of music on his old grave ... though the chivalry of the interpretation, as well as much beside, is so plainly yours, ... could only be yours perhaps. and even _you_ are forced to let in a third person ... close to the doorway ... before you can do any good. what a noble lion you give us too, with the 'flash on his forehead,' and 'leagues in the desert already' as we look on him! and then, with what a 'curious felicity' you turn the subject 'glove' to another use and strike de lorge's blow back on him with it, in the last paragraph of your story! and the versification! and the lady's speech--(to return!) so calm, and proud--yet a little bitter! am i not to thank you for all the pleasure and pride in these poems? while you stand by and try to talk them down, perhaps. tell me how your mother is--tell me how you are ... you who never were to be told twice about walking. gone the way of all promises, is that promise? ever yours, e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday night. [post-mark, october , .] like your kindness--too, far too generous kindness,--all this trouble and correcting,--and it is my proper office now, by this time, to sit still and receive, by right _human_ (as opposed to divine). when you see the pamphlet's self, you will find your own doing,--but where will you find the proofs of the best of all helping and counselling and inciting, unless in new works which shall justify the _unsatisfaction_, if i may not say shame, at these, these written before your time, my best love? are you doing well to-day? for i feel well, have walked some eight or nine miles--and my mother is very much better ... is singularly better. you know whether you rejoiced me or no by that information about the exercise _you_ had taken yesterday. think what telling one that you grow stronger would mean! 'vexatious' with you! ah, prudence is all very right, and one ought, no doubt, to say, 'of course, we shall not expect a life exempt from the usual proportion of &c. &c.--' but truth is still more right, and includes the highest prudence besides, and i do believe that we shall be happy; that is, that _you_ will be happy: you see i dare confidently expect _the_ end to it all ... so it has always been with me in my life of wonders--absolute wonders, with god's hand over all.... and this last and best of all would never have begun so, and gone on so, to break off abruptly even here, in this world, for the little time. so try, try, dearest, every method, take every measure of hastening such a consummation. why, we shall see italy together! i could, would, _will_ shut myself in four walls of a room with you and never leave you and be most of all _then_ 'a lord of infinite space'--but, to travel with you to italy, or greece. very vain, i know that, all such day dreaming! and ungrateful, too; with the real sufficing happiness here of being, and knowing that you know me to be, and suffer me to tell you i am yours, ever your own. god bless you, my dearest-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, november , .] all to-day, friday, miss mitford has been here! she came at two and went away at seven--and i feel as if i had been making a five-hour speech on the corn laws in harriet martineau's parliament; ... so tired i am. not that dear miss mitford did not talk both for me and herself, ... for that, of course she did. but i was forced to answer once every ten minutes at least--and flush, my usual companion, does not exact so much--and so i am tired and come to rest myself on this paper. your name was not once spoken to-day; a little from my good fencing: when i saw you at the end of an alley of associations, i pushed the conversation up the next--because i was afraid of questions such as every moment i expected, with a pair of woman's eyes behind them; and those are worse than mr. kenyon's, when he puts on his spectacles. so your name was not once spoken--not thought of, i do not say--perhaps when i once lost her at chevy chase and found her suddenly with isidore the queen's hairdresser, my thoughts might have wandered off to you and your unanswered letter while she passed gradually from that to this--i am not sure of the contrary. and isidore, they say, reads béranger, and is supposed to be the most literary person at court--and wasn't at chevy chase one must needs think. one must needs write nonsense rather--for i have written it there. the sense and the truth is, that your letter went to the bottom of my heart, and that my thoughts have turned round it ever since and through all the talking to-day. yes indeed, dreams! but what _is_ not dreaming is this and this--this reading of these words--this proof of this regard--all this that you are to me in fact, and which you cannot guess the full meaning of, dramatic poet as you are ... cannot ... since you do not know what my life meant before you touched it, ... and my angel at the gate of the prison! my wonder is greater than your wonders, ... i who sate here alone but yesterday, so weary of my own being that to take interest in my very poems i had to lift them up by an effort and separate them from myself and cast them out from me into the sunshine where i was not--feeling nothing of the light which fell on them even--making indeed a sort of pleasure and interest about that factitious personality associated with them ... but knowing it to be all far on the outside of _me_ ... _myself_ ... not seeming to touch it with the end of my finger ... and receiving it as a mockery and a bitterness when people persisted in confounding one with another. morbid it was if you like it--perhaps very morbid--but all these heaps of letters which go into the fire one after the other, and which, because i am a woman and have written verses, it seems so amusing to the letter-writers of your sex to write and see 'what will come of it,' ... some, from kind good motives i know, ... well, ... how could it all make for me even such a narrow strip of sunshine as flush finds on the floor sometimes, and lays his nose along, with both ears out in the shadow? it was not for _me_ ... _me_ ... in any way: it was not within my reach--i did not seem to touch it as i said. flush came nearer, and i was grateful to him ... yes, grateful ... for not being tired! i have felt grateful and flattered ... yes flattered ... when he has chosen rather to stay with me all day than go down-stairs. grateful too, with reason, i have been and am to my own family for not letting me see that i was a burthen. these are facts. and now how am i to feel when you tell me what you have told me--and what you 'could would and will' do, and _shall not_ do?... but when you tell me? only remember that such words make you freer and freer--if you can be freer than free--just as every one makes me happier and richer--too rich by you, to claim any debt. may god bless you always. when i wrote that letter to let you come the first time, do you know, the tears ran down my cheeks.... i could not tell why: partly it might be mere nervousness. and then, i was vexed with you for wishing to come as other people did, and vexed with myself for not being able to refuse you as i did them. when does the book come out? not on the first, i begin to be glad. ever yours, e.b.b. i trust that you go on to take exercise--and that your mother is still better. occy's worst symptom now is too great an appetite ... a monster-appetite indeed. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, november , .] only a word to tell you moxon promises the books for to-morrow, wednesday--so towards evening yours will reach you--'parve liber, sine me ibis' ... would i were by you, then and ever! you see, and know, and understand why i can neither talk to you, nor write to you _now_, as we are now;--from the beginning, the personal interest absorbed every other, greater or smaller--but as one cannot well,--or should not,--sit quite silently, the words go on, about horne, or what chances--while you are in my thought. but when i have you ... so it seems ... _in_ my very heart; when you are entirely with me--oh, the day--then it will all go better, talk and writing too. love me, my own love; not as i love you--not for--but i cannot write that. nor do i ask anything, with all your gifts here, except for the luxury of asking. withdraw nothing, then, dearest, from your r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, november , .] i had your note last night, and am waiting for the book to-day; a true living breathing book, let the writer say of it what he will. also when it comes it won't certainly come 'sine te.' which is my comfort. and now--not to make any more fuss about a matter of simple restitution--may i have my letter back?... i mean the letter which if you did not destroy ... did not punish for its sins long and long ago ... belongs to me--which, if destroyed, i must lose for my sins, ... but, if undestroyed, which i may have back; may i not? is it not my own? must i not?--that letter i was made to return and now turn to ask for again in further expiation. now do i ask humbly enough? and send it at once, if undestroyed--do not wait till saturday. i have considered about mr. kenyon and it seems best, in the event of a question or of a remark equivalent to a question, to confess to the visits 'generally once a week' ... because he may hear, one, two, three different ways, ... not to say the other reasons and chaucer's charge against 'doubleness.' i fear ... i fear that he (not chaucer) will wonder a little--and he has looked at me with scanning spectacles already and talked of its being a mystery to him how you made your way here; and _i_, who though i can _bespeak_ self-command, have no sort of presence of mind (not so much as one would use to play at jack straws) did not help the case at all. well--it cannot be helped. did i ever tell you what he said of you once--'_that you deserved to be a poet_--being one in your heart and life:' he said _that_ of you to me, and i thought it a noble encomium and deserving its application. for the rest ... yes: you know i do--god knows i do. whatever i can feel is for you--and perhaps it is not less, for not being simmered away in too much sunshine as with women accounted happier. _i_ am happy besides now--happy enough to die now. may god bless you, dear--dearest-- ever i am yours-- the book does not come--so i shall not wait. mr. kenyon came instead, and comes again on _friday_ he says, and saturday seems to be clear still. _r.b. to e.b.b._ _just_ arrived!--(mind, the _silent writing_ overflows the page, and laughs at the black words for mr. kenyon to read!)--but your note arrived earlier--more of that, when i write after this dreadful dispatching-business that falls on me--friend a. and b. and c. must get their copy, and word of regard, all by next post!-- could you think _that_ that untoward letter lived one _moment_ after it returned to me? i burned it and cried 'serve it right'! poor letter,--yet i should have been vexed and offended _then_ to be told i _could_ love you better than i did already. 'live and _learn_!' live and love you--dearest, as loves you r.b. you will write to reassure me about saturday, if not for other reasons. see your corrections ... and understand that in one or two instances in which they would seem not to be adopted, they _are_ so, by some modification of the previous, or following line ... as in one of the sorrento lines ... about a 'turret'--see! (can you give me horne's address--i would send then.) _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, november , .] i see and know; read and mark; and only hope there is no harm done by my meddling; and lose the sense of it all in the sense of beauty and power everywhere, which nobody could kill, if they took to meddling more even. and now, what will people say to this and this and this--or 'o seclum insipiens et inficetum!' or rather, o ungrateful right hand which does not thank you first! i do thank you. i have been reading everything with new delight; and at intervals remembering in inglorious complacency (for which you must try to forgive me) that mr. forster is no longer anything like an enemy. and yet (just see what contradiction!) the _british quarterly_ has been abusing me so at large, that i can only take it to be the achievement of a very particular friend indeed,--of someone who positively never reviewed before and tries his new sword on me out of pure friendship. only i suppose it is not the general rule, and that there are friends 'with a difference.' not that you are to fancy me pained--oh no!--merely surprised. i was prepared for anything almost from the quarter in question, but scarcely for being hung 'to the crows' so publicly ... though within the bounds of legitimate criticisms, mind. but oh--the creatures of your sex are not always magnanimous--_that_ is true. and to put _you_ between me and all ... the thought of _you_ ... in a great eclipse of the world ... _that_ is happy ... only, too happy for such as i am; as my own heart warns me hour by hour. 'serve _me_ right'--i do not dare to complain. i wished for the safety of that letter so much that i finished by persuading myself of the probability of it: but 'serve _me_ right' quite clearly. and yet--but no more 'and yets' about it. 'and yets' fray the silk. i see how the 'turret' stands in the new reading, triumphing over the 'tower,' and unexceptionable in every respect. also i do hold that nobody with an ordinary understanding has the slightest pretence for attaching a charge of obscurity to this new number--there are lights enough for the critics to scan one another's dull blank of visage by. one verse indeed in that expressive lyric of the 'lost mistress,' does still seem questionable to me, though you have changed a word since i saw it; and still i fancy that i rather leap at the meaning than reach it--but it is my own fault probably ... i am not sure. with that one exception i _am quite_ sure that people who shall complain of darkness are blind ... i mean, that the construction is clear and unembarrassed everywhere. subtleties of thought which are not directly apprehensible by minds of a common range, are here as elsewhere in your writings--but if to utter things 'hard to understand' from _that_ cause be an offence, why we may begin with 'our beloved brother paul,' you know, and go down through all the geniuses of the world, and bid them put away their inspirations. you must descend to the level of critic a or b, that he may look into your face.... ah well!--'let them rave.' you will live when all _those_ are under the willows. in the meantime there is something better, as you said, even than your poetry--as the giver is better than the gift, and the maker than the creature, and _you_ than _yours_. yes--_you_ than _yours_.... (i did not mean it so when i wrote it first ... but i accept the 'bona verba,' and use the phrase for the end of my letter) ... as _you_ are better than _yours_; even when so much yours as your own e.b.b. may i see the first act first? let me!--and you walk? mr. horne's address is hill side, fitzroy park, highgate. there is no reason against saturday so far. mr. kenyon comes to-morrow, friday, and therefore--!--and if saturday should become impracticable, i will write again. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday evening. [post-mark, november , .] when i come back from seeing you, and think over it all, there never is a least word of yours i could not occupy myself with, and wish to return to you with some ... not to say, all ... the thoughts and fancies it is sure to call out of me. there is nothing in you that does not draw out all of me. you possess me, dearest ... and there is no help for the expressing it all, no voice nor hand, but these of mine which shrink and turn away from the attempt. so you must go on, patiently, knowing me more and more, and your entire power on me, and i will console myself, to the full extent, with your knowledge--penetration, intuition--_somehow_ i must believe you can get to what is here, in me, without the pretence of my telling or writing it. but, because i give up the great achievements, there is no reason i should not secure any occasion of making clear one of the less important points that arise in our intercourse ... if i fancy i can do it with the least success. for instance, it is on my mind to explain what i meant yesterday by trusting that the entire happiness i feel in the letters, and the help in the criticising might not be hurt by the surmise, even, that those labours to which you were born, might be suspended, in any degree, through such generosity to _me_. dearest, i believed in your glorious genius and knew it for a true star from the moment i saw it; long before i had the blessing of knowing it was my star, with my fortune and futurity in it. and, when i draw back from myself, and look better and more clearly, then i _do_ feel, with you, that the writing a few letters more or less, reading many or few rhymes of any other person, would not interfere in any material degree with that power of yours--that you might easily make one so happy and yet go on writing 'geraldines' and 'berthas'--but--how can i, dearest, leave my heart's treasures long, even to look at your genius?... and when i come back and find all safe, find the comfort of you, the traces of you ... _will_ it do--tell me--to trust all that as a light effort, an easy matter? yet, if you can lift me with one hand, while the other suffices to crown you--there is queenliness in _that_, too! well, i have spoken. as i told you, your turn comes now. how have you determined respecting the american edition? you tell me nothing of yourself! it is all me you help, me you do good to ... and i take it all! now see, if this goes on! i have not had _every_ love-luxury, i now find out ... where is the proper, rationally to-be-expected--'_lovers' quarrel_'? _here_, as you will find! 'iræ; amantium'.... i am no more 'at a loss with my naso,' than peter ronsard. ah, but then they are to be _reintegratio amoris_--and to get back into a thing, one must needs get for a moment first out of it ... trust me, no! and now, the natural inference from all this? the consistent inference ... the 'self-denying ordinance'? why--do you doubt? even this,--you must just put aside the romance, and tell the americans to wait, and make my heart start up when the letter is laid to it; the letter full of your news, telling me you are well and walking, and working for my sake towards _the time_--informing me, moreover, if thursday or friday is to be my day--. may god bless you, my own love. i will certainly bring you an act of the play ... for this serpent's reason, in addition to the others ... that--no, i will _tell_ you that--i can tell you now more than even lately! ever your own r.b. [illustration: facsimile of letter of robert browning (see vol. i., p. )] _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, november , .] if it were possible that you could do me harm in the way of work, (but it isn't) it would be possible, not through writing letters and reading manuscripts, but because of a reason to be drawn from your own great line what man is strong until he stands alone? what man ... what woman? for have i not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when i made my poems?--of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?--_that_ made me what dear mr. kenyon calls 'insolent,'--untimid, and unconventional in my degree; and not so much by strength, you see, as by separation. _you_ touch your greater ends by mere strength; breaking with your own hands the hampering threads which, in your position would have hampered _me_. still ... when all is changed for me now, and different, it is not possible, ... for all the changing, nor for all your line and my speculation, ... that i should not be better and stronger for being within your influences and sympathies, in this way of writing as in other ways. we shall see--you will see. yet i have been idle lately i confess; leaning half out of some turret-window of the castle of indolence and watching the new sunrise--as why not?--do i mean to be idle always?--no!--and am i not an industrious worker on the average of days? indeed yes! also i have been less idle than you think perhaps, even this last year, though the results seem so like trifling: and i shall set about the prose papers for the new york people, and the something rather better besides we may hope ... may _i_ not hope, if _you_ wish it? only there is no 'crown' for me, be sure, except what grows from this letter and such letters ... this sense of being anything to _one_! there is no room for another crown. have i a great head like goethe's that there should be room? and mine is bent down already by the unused weight--and as to bearing it, ... 'will it do,--tell me; to treat _that_ as a light effort, an easy matter?' now let me remember to tell you that the line of yours i have just quoted, and which has been present with me since you wrote it, mr. chorley has quoted too in his new novel of 'pomfret.' you were right in your identifying of servant and waistcoat--and wilson waited only till you had gone on saturday, to give me a parcel and note; the novel itself in fact, which mr. chorley had the kindness to send me 'some days or weeks,' said the note, 'previous to the publication.' very goodnatured of him certainly: and the book seems to me his best work in point of sustainment and vigour, and i am in process of being interested in it. not that he is a _maker_, even for this prose. a feeler ... an observer ... a thinker even, in a certain sphere--but a maker ... no, as it seems to me--and if i were he, i would rather herd with the essayists than the novelists where he is too good to take inferior rank and not strong enough to 'go up higher.' only it would be more right in me to be grateful than to talk so--now wouldn't it? and here is mr. kenyon's letter back again--a kind good letter ... a letter i have liked to read (so it was kind and good in you to let me!)--and he was with me to-day and praising the 'ride to ghent,' and praising the 'duchess,' and praising you altogether as i liked to hear him. the ghent-ride was 'very fine'--and the into the midnight they galloped abreast drew us out into the night as witnesses. and then, the 'duchess' ... the conception of it was noble, and the vehicle, rhythm and all, most characteristic and individual ... though some of the rhymes ... oh, some of the rhymes did not find grace in his ears--but the incantation-scene, 'just trenching on the supernatural,' _that_ was taken to be 'wonderful,' ... 'showing extraordinary power, ... as indeed other things did ... works of a highly original writer and of such various faculty!'--am i not tired of writing your praises as he said then? so i shall tell you, instead of any more, that i went down to the drawing-room yesterday (because it was warm enough) by an act of supererogatory virtue for which you may praise _me_ in turn. what weather it is! and how the year seems to have forgotten itself into april. but after all, how have i answered your letter? and how _are_ such letters to be answered? do we answer the sun when he shines? may god bless you ... it is my answer--with one word besides ... that i am wholly and ever your e.b.b. on thursday as far as i know yet--and you shall hear if there should be an obstacle. _will you walk?_ if you will not, you know, you must be forgetting me a little. will you remember me too in the act of the play?--but above all things in taking the right exercise, and in not overworking the head. and this for no serpent's reason. _e.b.b. to r.b._ two letters in one--wednesday. [post-mark, november , .] i shall see you to-morrow and yet am writing what you will have to read perhaps. when you spoke of 'stars' and 'geniuses' in that letter, i did not seem to hear; i was listening to those words of the letter which were of a better silver in the sound than even your praise could be; and now that at last i come to hear them in their extravagance (oh such pure extravagance about 'glorious geniuses'--) i can't help telling you they were heard last, and deserved it. shall i tell you besides?--the first moment in which i seemed to admit to myself in a flash of lightning the _possibility_ of your affection for me being more than dream-work ... the first moment was _that_ when you intimated (as you have done since repeatedly) that you cared for me not for a reason, but because you cared for me. now such a 'parceque' which reasonable people would take to be irrational, was just the only one fitted to the uses of my understanding on the particular question we were upon ... just the 'woman's reason' suitable to the woman ...; for i could understand that it might be as you said, and, if so, that it was altogether unanswerable ... do you see? if a fact includes its own cause ... why there it stands for ever--one of 'earth's immortalities'--_as long as it includes it_. and when unreasonableness stands for a reason, it is a promising state of things, we may both admit, and proves what it would be as well not too curiously to enquire into. but then ... to look at it in a brighter aspect, ... i do remember how, years ago, when talking the foolishnesses which women will talk when they are by themselves, and not forced to be sensible, ... one of my friends thought it 'safest to begin with a little aversion,' and another, wisest to begin with a great deal of esteem, and how the best attachments were produced so and so, ... i took it into my head to say that the best was where there was no cause at all for it, and the more wholly unreasonable, the better still; that the motive should lie in the feeling itself and not in the object of it--and that the affection which could (if it could) throw itself out on an idiot with a goître would be more admirable than abelard's. whereupon everybody laughed, and someone thought it affected of me and no true opinion, and others said plainly that it was immoral, and somebody else hoped, in a sarcasm, that i meant to act out my theory for the advantage of the world. to which i replied quite gravely that i had not virtue enough--and so, people laughed as it is fair to laugh when other people are esteemed to talk nonsense. and all this came back to me in the south wind of your 'parceque,' and i tell it as it came ... now. which proves, if it proves anything, ... while i have every sort of natural pleasure in your praises and like you to like my poetry just as i should, and perhaps more than i should; yet _why_ it is all behind ... and in its place--and _why_ i have a tendency moreover to sift and measure any praise of yours and to separate it from the superfluities, far more than with any other person's praise in the world. _friday evening._--shall i send this letter or not? i have been 'tra 'l si e 'l no,' and writing a new beginning on a new sheet even--but after all you ought to hear the remote echo of your last letter ... far out among the hills, ... as well as the immediate reverberation, and so i will send it,--and what i send is not to be answered, remember! i read luria's first act twice through before i slept last night, and feel just as a bullet might feel, not because of the lead of it but because shot into the air and suddenly arrested and suspended. it ('luria') is all life, and we know (that is, the reader knows) that there must be results here and here. how fine that sight of luria is upon the lynx hides--how you see the moor in him just in the glimpse you have by the eyes of another--and that laugh when the horse drops the forage, what wonderful truth and character you have in _that_!--and then, when _he_ is in the scene--: 'golden-hearted luria' you called him once to me, and his heart shines already ... wide open to the morning sun. the construction seems to me very clear everywhere--and the rhythm, even over-smooth in a few verses, where you invert a little artificially--but that shall be set down on a separate strip of paper: and in the meantime i am snatched up into 'luria' and feel myself driven on to the ends of the poet, just as a reader should. but _you_ are not driven on to any ends? so as to be tired, i mean? you will not suffer yourself to be overworked because you are 'interested' in this work. i am so certain that the sensations in your head _demand_ repose; and it must be so injurious to you to be perpetually calling, calling these new creations, one after another, that you must consent to be called _to_, and not hurry the next act, no, nor any act--let the people have time to learn the last number by heart. and how glad i am that mr. fox should say what he did of it ... though it wasn't true, you know ... not exactly. still, i do hold that as far as construction goes, you never put together so much unquestionable, smooth glory before, ... not a single entanglement for the understanding ... unless 'the snowdrops' make an exception--while for the undeniableness of genius it never stood out before your readers more plainly than in that same number! also you have extended your sweep of power--the sea-weed is thrown farther (if not higher) than it was found before; and one may calculate surely now how a few more waves will cover the brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. the rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure. then 'the ride'--with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was driven through all that suffering ... yes, and how that one touch of softness acts back upon the energy and resolution and exalts both, instead of weakening anything, as might have been expected by the vulgar of writers or critics. and then 'saul'--and in a first place 'st. praxed'--and for pure description, 'fortú' and the deep 'pictor ignotus'--and the noble, serene 'italy in england,' which grows on you the more you know of it--and that delightful 'glove'--and the short lyrics ... for one comes to _'select' everything_ at last, and certainly i do like these poems better and better, as your poems are made to be liked. but you will be tired to hear it said over and over so, ... and i am going to 'luria,' besides. when you write will you say exactly how you are? and will you write? and i want to explain to you that although i don't make a profession of equable spirits, (as a matter of temperament, my spirits were always given to rock a little, up and down) yet that i did not mean to be so ungrateful and wicked as to complain of low spirits now and to you. it would not be true either: and i said 'low' to express a merely bodily state. my opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and fainting ... to give the right composure and point of balance to the nervous system. i don't take it for 'my spirits' in the usual sense; you must not think such a thing. the medical man who came to see me made me take it the other day when he was in the room, before the right hour and when i was talking quite cheerfully, just for the need he observed in the pulse. 'it was a necessity of my position,' he said. also i do not suffer from it in any way, as people usually do who take opium. i am not even subject to an opium-headache. as to the low spirits i will not say that mine _have not_ been low enough and with cause enough; but _even then_, ... why if you were to ask the nearest witnesses, ... say, even my own sisters, ... everybody would tell you, i think, that the 'cheerfulness' even _then_, was the remarkable thing in me--certainly it has been remarked about me again and again. nobody has known that it was an effort (a habit of effort) to throw the light on the outside,--i do abhor so that ignoble groaning aloud of the 'groans of testy and sensitude'--yet i may say that for three years i never was conscious of one movement of pleasure in anything. think if i could mean to complain of 'low spirits' now, and to you. why it would be like complaining of not being able to see at noon--which would simply prove that i was very blind. and you, who are not blind, cannot make out what is written--so you _need not try_. may god bless you long after you have done blessing me! your own e.b.b. now i am half tempted to tear this letter in two (and it is long enough for three) and to send you only the latter half. but you will understand--you will not think that there is a contradiction between the first and last ... you _cannot_. one is a truth of me--and the other a truth of you--and we two are different, you know. you are not over-working in 'luria'? that you _should not_, is a truth, too. i observed that mr. kenyon put in '_junior_' to your address. ought that to be done? or does my fashion of directing find you without hesitation? mr. kenyon asked me for mr. chorley's book, or you should have it. shall i send it to you presently? _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday morning. [post-mark, november , .] at last your letter comes--and the deep joy--(i know and use to analyse my own feelings, and be sober in giving distinctive names to their varieties; this is _deep_ joy,)--the true love with which i take this much of you into my heart, ... _that_ proves what it is i wanted so long, and find at last, and am happy for ever. i must have more than 'intimated'--i must have spoken plainly out the truth, if i do myself the barest justice, and told you long ago that the admiration at your works went _away_, quite another way and afar from the love of you. if i could fancy some method of what i shall say happening without all the obvious stumbling-blocks of falseness, &c. which no foolish fancy dares associate with you ... if you could tell me when i next sit by you--'i will undeceive you,--i am not _the_ miss b.--she is up-stairs and you shall see her--i only wrote those letters, and am what you see, that is all now left you' (all the misapprehension having arisen from _me_, in some inexplicable way) ... i should not begin by _saying_ anything, dear, dearest--but _after that_, i should assure you--soon make you believe that i did not much wonder at the event, for i have been all my life asking what connection there is between the satisfaction at the display of power, and the sympathy with--ever-increasing sympathy with--all imaginable weakness? look now: coleridge writes on and on,--at last he writes a note to his 'war-eclogue,' in which he avers himself to have been actuated by a really--on the whole--_benevolent_ feeling to mr. pitt when he wrote that stanza in which 'fire' means to 'cling to him everlastingly'--where is the long line of admiration now that the end snaps? and now--here i refuse to fancy--you know whether, if you never write another line, speak another intelligible word, recognize me by a look again--whether i shall love you less or _more_ ... more; having a right to expect more strength with the strange emergency. and it is because i know this, build upon this entirely, that as a reasonable creature, i am bound to look first to what hangs farthest and most loosely from me ... what _might_ go from you to your loss, and so to mine, to say the least ... because i want all of you, not just so much as i could not live without--and because i see the danger of your entirely generous disposition and cannot quite, yet, bring myself to profit by it in the quiet way you recommend. always remember, i never wrote to you, all the years, on the strength of your poetry, though i constantly heard of you through mr. k. and was near seeing you once, and might have easily availed myself of his intervention to commend any letter to your notice, so as to reach you out of the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... who come and eat their bread and cheese on the high-altar, and talk of reverence without one of its surest instincts--never quiet till they cut their initials on the cheek of the medicean venus to prove they worship her. my admiration, as i said, went its natural way in silence--but when on my return to england in december, late in the month, mr. k. sent those poems to my sister, and i read my name there--and when, a day or two after, i met him and, beginning to speak my mind on them, and getting on no better than i should now, said quite naturally--'if i were to _write_ this, now?'--and he assured me with his perfect kindness, you would be even 'pleased' to hear from me under those circumstances ... nay,--for i will tell you all, in this, in everything--when he wrote me a note soon after to reassure me on that point ... then i _did_ write, on _account of my purely personal obligation_, though of course taking that occasion to allude to the general and customary delight in your works: i did write, on the whole, unwillingly ... with consciousness of having to _speak_ on a subject which i _felt_ thoroughly concerning, and could not be satisfied with an imperfect expression of. as for expecting then what has followed ... i shall only say i was scheming how to get done with england and go to my heart in italy. and now, my love--i am round you ... my whole life is wound up and down and over you.... i feel you stir everywhere. i am not conscious of thinking or feeling but _about_ you, with some reference to you--so i will live, so may i die! and you have blessed me _beyond_ the _bond_, in more than in giving me yourself to love; inasmuch as you believed me from the first ... what you call 'dream-work' _was_ real of its kind, did you not think? and now you believe me, _i_ believe and am happy, in what i write with my heart full of love for you. why do you tell me of a doubt, as now, and bid me not clear it up, 'not answer you?' have i done wrong in thus answering? never, never do _me_ direct _wrong_ and hide for a moment from me what a word can explain as now. you see, you thought, if but for a moment, i loved your intellect--or what predominates in your poetry and is most distinct from your heart--better, or as well as you--did you not? and i have told you every thing,--explained everything ... have i not? and now i will dare ... yes, dearest, kiss you back to my heart again; my own. there--and there! and since i wrote what is above, i have been reading among other poems that sonnet--'past and future'--which affects me more than any poem i ever read. how can i put your poetry away from you, even in these ineffectual attempts to concentrate myself upon, and better apply myself to what remains?--poor, poor work it is; for is not that sonnet to be loved as a true utterance of yours? i cannot attempt to put down the thoughts that rise; may god bless me, as you pray, by letting that beloved hand shake the less ... i will only ask, _the less_ ... for being laid on mine through this life! and, indeed, you write down, for me to calmly read, that i make you happy! then it is--as with all power--god through the weakest instrumentality ... and i am past expression proud and grateful--my love, i am your r.b. i must answer your questions: i am better--and will certainly have your injunction before my eyes and work quite moderately. your letters come _straight_ to me--my father's go to town, except on extraordinary occasions, so that _all_ come for my first looking-over. i saw mr. k. last night at the amateur comedy--and heaps of old acquaintances--and came home tired and savage--and _yearned_ literally, for a letter this morning, and so it came and i was well again. so, i am not even to have your low spirits leaning on mine? it was just because i always find you alike, and _ever_ like yourself, that i seemed to discern a depth, when you spoke of 'some days' and what they made uneven where all is agreeable to _me_. do not, now, deprive me of a right--a right ... to find you as you _are_; get no habit of being cheerful with me--i have universal sympathy and can show you a side of me, a true face, turn as you may. if you _are_ cheerful ... so will i be ... if sad, my cheerfulness will be all the while _behind_, and propping up, any sadness that meets yours, if that should be necessary. as for my question about the opium ... you do not misunderstand _that_ neither: i trust in the eventual consummation of my--shall i not say, _our_--hopes; and all that bears upon your health immediately or prospectively, affects me--how it affects me! will you write again? _wednesday_, remember! mr. k. wants me to go to him one of the three next days after. i will bring you some letters ... one from landor. why should i trouble you about 'pomfret.' and luria ... does it so interest you? better is to come of it. how you lift me up!-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, november , .] how you overcome me as always you do--and where is the answer to anything except too deep down in the heart for even the pearl-divers? but understand ... what you do not quite ... that i did not mistake you as far even as you say here and even 'for a moment.' i did not write any of that letter in a 'doubt' of you--not a word.... i was simply looking back in it on my own states of feeling, ... looking back from that point of your praise to what was better ... (or i should not have looked back)--and so coming to tell you, by a natural association, how the completely opposite point to that of any praise was the one which struck me first and most, viz. the no-reason of your reasoning ... acknowledged to be yours. of course i acknowledge it to be yours, ... that high reason of no reason--i acknowledged it to be yours (didn't i?) in acknowledging that it made an impression on me. and then, referring to the traditions of my experience such as i told them to you, i meant, so, farther to acknowledge that i would rather be cared for in _that_ unreasonable way, than for the best reason in the world. but all _that_ was history and philosophy simply--was it not?--and not _doubt of you_. the truth is ... since we really are talking truths in this world ... that i never have doubted you--ah, you _know_!--i felt from the beginning so sure of the nobility and integrity in you that i would have trusted you to make a path for my soul--_that_, you _know_. i felt certain that you believed of yourself every word you spoke or wrote--and you must not blame me if i thought besides sometimes (it was the extent of my thought) that you were self-deceived as to the nature of your own feelings. if you could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book, you would see nothing there offensive to the least of your feelings ... not even to the outside fringes of your man's vanity ... should you have any vanity like a man; which i _do_ doubt. i never wronged you in the least of things--never ... i thank god for it. but 'self-deceived,' it was so easy for you to be: see how on every side and day by day, men are--and women too--in this sort of feelings. 'self-deceived,' it was so possible for you to be, and while i thought it possible, could i help thinking it _best_ for you that it should be so--and was it not right in me to persist in thinking it possible? it was my reverence for you that made me persist! what was _i_ that i should think otherwise? i had been shut up here too long face to face with my own spirit, not to know myself, and, so, to have lost the common illusions of vanity. all the men i had ever known could not make your stature among them. so it was not distrust, but reverence rather. i sate by while the angel stirred the water, and i called it _miracle_. do not blame me now, ... _my_ angel! nor say, that i 'do not lean' on you with all the weight of my 'past' ... because i do! you cannot guess what you are to me--you cannot--it is not possible:--and though i have said _that_ before, i must say it again ... for it comes again to be said. it is something to me between dream and miracle, all of it--as if some dream of my earliest brightest dreaming-time had been lying through these dark years to steep in the sunshine, returning to me in a double light. _can_ it be, i say to myself, that _you_ feel for me _so_? can it be meant for me? this from _you_? if it is your 'right' that i should be gloomy at will with you, you exercise it, i do think--for although i cannot promise to be very sorrowful when you come, (how could that be?) yet from different motives it seems to me that i have written to you quite superfluities about my 'abomination of desolation,'--yes indeed, and blamed myself afterwards. and now i must say this besides. when grief came upon grief, i never was tempted to ask 'how have i deserved this of god,' as sufferers sometimes do: i always felt that there must be cause enough ... corruption enough, needing purification ... weakness enough, needing strengthening ... _nothing_ of the chastisement could come to me without cause and need. but in this different hour, when joy follows joy, and god makes me happy, as you say, _through_ you ... i cannot repress the ... 'how have i deserved _this_ of him?'--i know i have not--i know i do not. could it be that heart and life were devastated to make room for you?--if so, it was well done,--dearest! they leave the ground fallow before the wheat. 'were you wrong in answering?' surely not ... unless it is wrong to show all this goodness ... and too much, it may be for _me_. when the plants droop for drought and the copious showers fall suddenly, silver upon silver, they die sometimes of the reverse of their adversities. but no--_that_, even, shall not be a danger! and if i said 'do not answer,' i did not mean that i would not have a doubt removed--(having _no_ doubt!--) but i was simply unwilling to seem to be asking for golden words ... going down the aisles with that large silken purse, as _quêteuse_. try to understand. on wednesday then!--george is invited to meet you on thursday at mr. kenyon's. the _examiner_ speaks well, upon the whole, and with allowances ... oh, that absurdity about metaphysics apart from poetry!--'can such things be' in one of the best reviews of the day? mr. kenyon was here on sunday and talking of the poems with real living tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. but i will tell you. 'luria' is to climb to the place of a great work, i see. and if i write too long letters, is it not because you spoil me, and because (being spoilt) i cannot help it?--may god bless you always-- your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. here is the copy of landor's verses. you know thoroughly, do you not, why i brought all those good-natured letters, desperate praise and all? not, _not_ out of the least vanity in the world--nor to help myself in your sight with such testimony: would it seem very extravagant, on the contrary, if i said that perhaps i laid them before your eyes in a real fit of compunction at not being, in my heart, thankful enough for the evident motive of the writers,--and so was determined to give them the 'last honours' if not the first, and not make them miss _you_ because, through my fault, they had missed _me_? does this sound too fantastical? because it is strictly true: the most laudatory of all, i _skimmed_ once over with my flesh _creeping_--it seemed such a death-struggle, that of good nature over--well, it is fresh ingratitude of me, so here it shall end. i am not ungrateful to _you_--but you must wait to know that:--i can speak less than nothing with my living lips. i mean to ask your brother how you are to-night ... so quietly! god bless you, my dearest, and reward you. your r.b. mrs. shelley--with the 'ricordi.' of course, landor's praise is altogether a different gift; a gold vase from king hiram; beside he has plenty of conscious rejoicing in his own riches, and is not left painfully poor by what he sends away. _that_ is the unpleasant point with some others--they spread you a board and want to gird up their loins and wait on you there. landor says 'come up higher and let us sit and eat together.' is it not that? now--you are not to turn on me because the first is my proper feeling to _you_, ... for poetry is not the thing given or taken between us--it is heart and life and _my_self, not _mine_, i give--give? that you glorify and change and, in returning then, give _me_! _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, november , .] thank you! and will you, if your sister made the copy of landor's verses for _me_ as well as for you, thank _her_ from me for another kindness, ... not the second nor the third? for my own part, be sure that if i did not fall on the right subtle interpretation about the letters, at least i did not 'think it vain' of you! vain: when, supposing you really to have been over-gratified by such letters, it could have proved only an excess of humility!--but ... besides the subtlety,--you meant to be kind to _me_, you know,--and i had a pleasure and an interest in reading them--only that ... mind. sir john hanmer's, i was half angry with! now _is_ he not cold?--and is it not easy to see _why_ he is forced to write his own scenes five times over and over? he might have mentioned the 'duchess' i think; and he a poet! mr. chorley speaks some things very well--but what does he mean about 'execution,' _en revanche_? but i liked his letter and his candour in the last page of it. will mr. warburton review you? does he mean _that_? now do let me see any other letters you receive. _may_ i? of course landor's 'dwells apart' from all: and besides the reason you give for being gratified by it, it is well that one prophet should open his mouth and prophesy and give his witness to the inspiration of another. see what he says in the letter.... '_you may stand quite alone if you will--and i think you will.' that_ is a noble testimony to a _truth_. and he discriminates--he understands and discerns--they are not words thrown out into the air. the 'profusion of imagery covering the depth of thought' is a true description. and, in the verses, he lays his finger just on your characteristics--just on those which, when you were only a poet to me, (only a poet: does it sound irreverent? almost, i think!) which, when you were only a poet to me, i used to study, characteristic by characteristic, and turn myself round and round in despair of being ever able to approach, taking them to be so essentially and intensely masculine that like effects were unattainable, even in a lower degree, by any female hand. did i not tell you so once before? or oftener than once? and must not these verses of landor's be printed somewhere--in the _examiner_? and again in the _athenæum_? if in the _examiner_, certainly again in the _athenæum_--it would be a matter of course. oh those verses: how they have pleased me! it was an act worthy of him--and of _you_. george has been properly 'indoctrinated,' and, we must hope, will do credit to my instructions. just now ... just as i was writing ... he came in to say good-morning and good-night (he goes to chambers earlier than i receive visitors generally), and to ask with a smile, if i had 'a message for my friend' ... _that_ was you ... and so he was indoctrinated. he is good and true, honest and kind, but a little over-grave and reasonable, as i and my sisters complain continually. the great law lime-kiln dries human souls all to one colour--and he is an industrious reader among law books and knows a good deal about them, i have heard from persons who can judge; but with a sacrifice of impulsiveness and liberty of spirit, which _i_ should regret for him if he sate on the woolsack even. oh--that law! how i do detest it! i hate it and think ill of it--i tell george so sometimes--and he is good-natured and only thinks to himself (a little audibly now and then) that i am a woman and talking nonsense. but the morals of it, and the philosophy of it! and the manners of it! in which the whole host of barristers looks down on the attorneys and the rest of the world!--how long are these things to last! theodosia garrow, i have seen face to face once or twice. she is very clever--very accomplished--with talents and tastes of various kinds--a musician and linguist, in most modern languages i believe--and a writer of fluent graceful melodious verses, ... you cannot say any more. at least _i_ cannot--and though i have not seen this last poem in the 'book of beauty,' i have no more trust ready for it than for its predecessors, of which mr. landor said as much. it is the personal feeling which speaks in him, i fancy--simply the personal feeling--and, _that_ being the case, it does not spoil the discriminating appreciation on the other page of this letter. i might have the modesty to admit besides that i may be wrong and he, right, all through. but ... 'more intense than sappho'!--more intense than intensity itself!--to think of _that_!--also the word 'poetry' has a clear meaning to me, and all the fluency and facility and quick ear-catching of a tune which one can find in the world, do not answer to it--no. how is the head? will you tell me? i have written all this without a word of it, and yet ever since yesterday i have been uneasy, ... i cannot help it. you see you are not better but worse. 'since you were in italy'--then is it england that disagrees with you? and is it change away from england that you want? ... _require_, i mean. if so--why what follows and ought to follow? you must not be ill indeed--_that_ is the first necessity. tell me how you are, exactly how you are; and remember to walk, and not to work too much--for my sake--if you care for me--if it is not too bold of me to say so. i had fancied you were looking better rather than otherwise: but those sensations in the head are frightful and ought to be stopped by whatever means; even by the worst, as they would seem to _me_. well--it was bad news to hear of the increase of pain; for the amendment was a 'passing show' i fear, and not caused even by thoughts of mine or it would have appeared before; while on the other side (the sunny side of the way) i heard on that same yesterday, what made me glad as good news, a whole gospel of good news, and from _you_ too who profess to say 'less than nothing,' and _that_ was that '_the times seemed longer to you_':--do you remember saying it? and it made me glad ... happy--perhaps too glad and happy--and surprised: yes, surprised!--for if you had told me (but you would not have told me) if you had let me guess ... just the contrary, ... '_that the times seemed shorter_,' ... why it would have seemed to _me_ as natural as nature--oh, believe me it would, and i could not have thought hardly of you for it in the most secret or silent of my thoughts. how am i to feel towards you, do you imagine, ... who have the world round you and yet make me this to you? i never can tell you how, and you never can know it without having my heart in you with all its experiences: we measure by those weights. may god bless you! and save _me_ from being the cause to you of any harm or grief!... i choose it for _my_ blessing instead of another. what should i be if i could fail willingly to you in the least thing? but i _never will_, and you know it. i will not move, nor speak, nor breathe, so as willingly and consciously to touch, with one shade of wrong, that precious deposit of 'heart and life' ... which may yet be recalled. and, so, may god bless you and your e.b.b. remember to say how you are. i sent 'pomfret'--and shelley is returned, and the letters, in the same parcel--but my letter goes by the post as you see. is there contrast enough between the two rival female personages of 'pomfret.' _i_ fancy not. helena should have been more 'demonstrative' than she appeared in italy, to secure the 'new modulation' with walter. but you will not think it a strong book, i am sure, with all the good and pure intention of it. the best character ... most life-like ... as conventional life goes ... seems to _me_ 'mr. rose' ... beyond all comparison--and the best point, the noiseless, unaffected manner in which the acting out of the 'private judgment' in pomfret himself is made no heroic virtue but simply an integral part of the love of truth. as to grace she is too good to be interesting, i am afraid--and people say of her more than she expresses--and as to 'generosity,' she could not do otherwise in the last scenes. but i will not tell you the story after all. at the beginning of this letter i meant to write just one page; but my generosity is like grace's, and could not help itself. there were the letters to write of, and the verses! and then, you know, 'femme qui parle' never has done. _let_ me hear! and i will be as brisk as a monument next time for variety. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday night. [post-mark, november , .] how good and kind to send me these books! (the letter i say nothing of, according to convention: if i wrote down 'best and kindest' ... oh, what poorest words!) i shall tell you all about 'pomfret,' be sure. chorley talked of it, as we walked homewards together last night,--modestly and well, and spoke of having given away two copies only ... to his mother one, and the other to--miss barrett, and 'she seemed interested in the life of it, entered into his purpose in it,' and i listened to it all, loving chorley for his loveability which is considerable at other times, and saying to myself what might run better in the child's couplet--'not more than others i deserve, though god has given me more'!--given me the letter which expresses surprise that i shall feel these blanks between the days when i see you longer and longer! so am _i_ surprised--that i should have mentioned so obvious a matter at all; or leave unmentioned a hundred others its correlatives which i cannot conceive you to be ignorant of, you! when i spread out my riches before me, and think _what_ the hour and more means that you endow one with, i _do_--not to say _could_--i _do_ form resolutions, and say to myself--'if next time i am bidden stay away a fortnight, i will not reply by a word beyond the grateful assent.' i _do_, god knows, lay up in my heart these priceless treasures,--shall i tell you? i never in my life kept a journal, a register of sights, or fancies, or feelings; in my last travel i put down on a slip of paper a few dates, that i might remember in england, on such a day i was on vesuvius, in pompeii, at shelley's grave; all that should be kept in memory is, with _me_, best left to the brain's own process. but i have, from the first, recorded the date and the duration of every visit to you; the numbers of minutes you have given me ... and i put them together till they make ... nearly two days now; four-and-twenty-hour-long-days, that i have been _by you_--and i enter the room determining to get up and go sooner ... and i go away into the light street repenting that i went so soon by i don't know how many minutes--for, love, what is it all, this love for you, but an earnest desiring to include you in myself, if that might be; to feel you in my very heart and hold you there for ever, through all chance and earthly changes! there, i had better leave off; the words! i was very glad to find myself with your brother yesterday; i like him very much and mean to get a friend in him--(to supply the loss of my friend ... miss barrett--which is gone, the friendship, so gone!) but i did not ask after you because i heard moxon do it. now of landor's verses: i got a note from forster yesterday telling me that he, too, had received a copy ... so that there is no injunction to be secret. so i got a copy for dear mr. kenyon, and, lo! what comes! i send the note to make you smile! i shall reply that i felt in duty bound to apprise you; as i did. you will observe that i go to that too facile gate of his on tuesday, _my day_ ... from your house directly. the worst is that i have got entangled with invitations already, and must go out again, _hating_ it, to more than one place. i am _very_ well--quite well; yes, dearest! the pain is quite gone; and the inconvenience, hard on its trace. you will write to me again, will you not? and be as brief as your heart lets you, to me who hoard up your words and get remote and imperfect ideas of what ... shall it be written?... anger at you could mean, when i see a line blotted out; a _second-thoughted_ finger-tip rapidly put forth upon one of my gold pieces! i rather think if warburton reviews me it will be in the _quarterly_, which i know he writes for. hanmer is a very sculpturesque passionless high-minded and amiable man ... this coldness, as you see it, is part of him. i like his poems, i think, better than you--'the sonnets,' do you know them? not 'fra cipolla.' see what is here, since you will not let me have only you to look at--this is landor's first opinion--expressed to forster--see the date! and last of all, see me and know me, beloved! may god bless you! _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, november , .] mr. kenyon came yesterday--and do you know when he took out those verses and spoke his preface and i understood what was to follow, i had a temptation from my familiar devil not to say i had read them before--i had the temptation strong and clear. for he (mr. k.) told me that your sister let him see them--. but no--my 'vade retro' prevailed, and i spoke the truth and shamed the devil and surprised mr. kenyon besides, as i could observe. not an observation did he make till he was just going away half an hour afterwards, and then he said rather dryly ... 'and now may i ask how long ago it was when you first read these verses?--was it a fortnight ago?' it was better, i think, that i should not have made a mystery of such a simple thing, ... and yet i felt half vexed with myself and with him besides. but the verses,--how he praised them! more than i thought of doing ... as verses--though there is beauty and music and all that ought to be. do you see clearly now that the latter lines refer to the combination in you,--the qualities over and above those held in common with chaucer? and i have heard this morning from two or three of the early readers of the _chronicle_ (i never care to see it till the evening) that the verses are there--so that my wishes have fulfilled themselves _there_ at least--strangely, for wishes of mine ... which generally 'go by contraries' as the soothsayers declare of dreams. how kind of you to send me the fragment to mr. forster! and how i like to read it. was the hebrew yours _then_ ... _written then_, i mean ... or written _now_? mr. kenyon told me that you were to dine with him on tuesday, and i took for granted, at first hearing, that you would come on wednesday perhaps to me--and afterwards i saw the possibility of the two ends being joined without much difficulty. still, i was not sure, before your letter came, how it might be. that you really are better is the best news of all--thank you for telling me. it will be wise not to go out _too_ much--'aequam servare mentem' as landor quotes, ... in this as in the rest. perhaps that worst pain was a sort of crisis ... the sharp turn of the road about to end ... oh, i do trust it may be so. mr. k. wrote to landor to the effect that it was not because he (mr. k.) held you in affection, nor because the verses expressed critically the opinion entertained of you by all who could judge, nor because they praised a book with which his own name was associated ... but for the abstract beauty of those verses ... for _that_ reason he could not help naming them to mr. landor. all of which was repeated to me yesterday. also i heard of you from george, who admired you--admired you ... as if you were a chancellor in _posse_, a great lawyer in _esse_--and then he thought you ... what he never could think a lawyer ... '_unassuming_.' and _you_ ... you are so kind! only _that_ makes me think bitterly what i have thought before, but cannot write to-day. it was good-natured of mr. chorley to send me a copy of his book, and he sending so few--very! george who admires _you_, does not tolerate mr. chorley ... (did i tell ever?) declares that the affectation is 'bad,' and that there is a dash of vulgarity ... which i positively refuse to believe, and _should_, i fancy, though face to face with the most vainglorious of waistcoats. how can there be vulgarity even of manners, with so much mental refinement? i never could believe in those combinations of contradictions. 'an obvious matter,' you think! as obvious, as your 'green hill' ... which i cannot see. for the rest ... my thought upon your 'great _fact_' of the 'two days,' is quite different from yours ... for i think directly, 'so little'! so dreadfully little! what shallow earth for a deep root! what can be known of me in that time? 'so _there_, is the only good, you see, that comes from making calculations on a slip of paper! it is not and it cannot come to good.' i would rather look at my seventy-five letters--there is room to breathe in them. and this is my idea (_ecce_!) of monumental brevity--and _hic jacet_ at last your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday night. [post-mark, november , .] but a word to-night, my love--for my head aches a little,--i had to write a long letter to my friend at new zealand, and now i want to sit and think of you and get well--but i must not quite lose the word i counted on. so, _that_ way you will take my two days and turn them against me? _oh, you!_ did i say the 'root' had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, _they_ had been planted then--and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete dodona-grove,--when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys? but this shall do--i am not going to prove what _may_ be, when here it _is_, to my everlasting happiness. --and 'i am kind'--there again! do i not know what you mean by that? well it is some comfort that you make all even in some degree, and take from my faculties here what you give them, spite of my protesting, in other directions. so i could not when i first saw you admire you very much, and wish for your friendship, and be willing to give you mine, and desirous of any opportunity of serving you, benefiting you; i could not think the finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but i must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy i do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,--should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! that i should do this, and think it a piece of kindness does.... now, i'll tell you what it _does_ deserve, and what it shall get. give me, dearest beyond expression, what i have always dared to think i would ask you for ... one day! give me ... wait--for your own sake, not mine who never, never dream of being worth such a gift ... but for your own sense of justice, and to _say_, so as my heart shall hear, that you were wrong and are no longer so, give me so much of you--all precious that you are--as may be given in a lock of your hair--i will live and die with it, and with the memory of you--this _at_ the _worst_! if you give me what i beg,--shall i say next tuesday ... when i leave you, i will not speak a word. if you do not, i will not think you unjust, for all my light words, but i will pray you to wait and remember me one day--when the power to deserve more may be greater ... never the will. god supplies all things: may he bless you, beloved! so i can but pray, kissing your hand. r.b. now pardon me, dearest, for what is written ... what i cannot cancel, for the love's sake that it grew from. the _chronicle_ was through moxon, i believe--landor had sent the verses to forster at the same time as to me, yet they do not appear. i never in my life less cared about people's praise or blame for myself, and never more for its influence on _other people_ than now--i would stand as high as i could in the eyes of all about you--yet not, after all, at poor chorley's expense whom your brother, i am sure, unintentionally, is rather hasty in condemning; i have told you of my own much rasher opinion and how i was ashamed and sorry when i corrected it after. c. is of a different species to your brother, differently trained, looking different ways--and for some of the peculiarities that strike at first sight, c. himself gives a good reason to the enquirer on better acquaintance. for 'vulgarity'--no! but your kind brother will alter his view, i know, on further acquaintance ... and,--woe's me--will find that 'assumption's' pertest self would be troubled to exercise its quality at such a house as mr. k.'s, where every symptom of a proper claim is met half way and helped onward far too readily. good night, now. am i not yours--are you not mine? and can that make _you_ happy too? bless you once more and for ever. that scrap of landor's being for no other eye than mine--i made the foolish comment, that there was no blotting out--made it some four or five years ago, when i could read what i only guess at now, through my idle opening the hand and letting the caught bird go--but there used to be a real satisfaction to me in writing those grand hebrew characters--the noble languages! _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, november , .] but what unlawful things have i said about 'kindness'? i did not mean any harm--no, indeed! and as to thinking ... as to having ever thought, that you could 'imitate' (can this word be 'imitate'?) an unfelt feeling or a feeling unsupposed to be felt ... i may solemnly assure you that i never, never did so. 'get up'--'imitate'!! but it was the contrary ... _all_ the contrary! from the beginning, now _did_ i not believe you too much? did i not believe you even in your contradiction of yourself ... in your _yes_ and _no_ on the same subject, ... and take the world to be turning round backwards and myself to have been shut up here till i grew mad, ... rather than disbelieve you either way? well!--you know it as well as i can tell you, and i will not, any more. if i have been 'wrong,' it was not _so_ ... nor indeed _then_ ... it is not _so_, though it is _now_, perhaps. therefore ... but wait! i never gave away what you ask me to give _you_, to a human being, except my nearest relatives and once or twice or thrice to female friends, ... never, though reproached for it; and it is just three weeks since i said last to an asker that i was 'too great a prude for such a thing'! it was best to anticipate the accusation!--and, prude or not, i could not--i never could--_something_ would not let me. and now ... what am i to do ... 'for my own sake and not yours?' should you have it, or not? why i suppose ... _yes_. i suppose that 'for my own sense of justice and in order to show that i was wrong' (which is wrong--you wrote a wrong word there ... 'right,' you meant!) 'to show that i was _right_ and am no longer so,' ... i suppose you must have it, 'oh, _you_,' ... who have your way in everything! which does not mean ... oh, vous, qui avez toujours raison--far from it. also ... which does not mean that i shall give you what you ask for, _to-morrow_,--because i shall not--and one of my conditions is (with others to follow) that _not a word be said to-morrow_, you understand. some day i will send it perhaps ... as you _knew_ i should ... ah, as you knew i should ... notwithstanding that 'getting up' ... that 'imitation' ... of humility: as you knew _too_ well i should! only i will not teaze you as i might perhaps; and now that your headache has begun again--the headache again: the worse than headache! see what good my wishes do! and try to understand that if i speak of my being 'wrong' now in relation to you ... of my being right before, and wrong now, ... i mean wrong for your sake, and not for mine ... wrong in letting you come out into the desert here to me, you whose place is by the waters of damascus. but i need not tell you over again--you _know_. may god bless you till to-morrow and past it for ever. mr. kenyon brought me your note yesterday to read about the 'order in the button-hole'--ah!--or 'oh, _you_,' may i not re-echo? it enrages me to think of mr. forster; publishing too as he does, at a moment, the very sweepings of landor's desk! is the motive of the reticence to be looked for somewhere among the cinders?--too bad it is. so, till to-morrow! and you shall not be 'kind' any more. your e.b.b. but how, 'a _foolish_ comment'? good and true rather! and i admired the _writing_[ ] ... worthy of the reeds of jordan! [footnote : mr. browning's letter is written in an unusually bold hand.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, november , .] how are you? and miss bayley's visit yesterday, and mr. k.'s to-day--(he told me he should see you this morning--and _i_ shall pass close by, having to be in town and near you,--but only the thought will reach you and be with you--) tell me all this, dearest. how kind mr. kenyon was last night and the day before! he neither wonders nor is much vexed, i dare believe--and i write now these few words to say so--my heart is set on next thursday, remember ... and the prize of saturday! oh, dearest, believe for truth's sake, that i would most frankly own to any fault, any imperfection in the beginning of my love of you; in the pride and security of this present stage it has reached--i _would_ gladly learn, by the full lights now, what an insufficient glimmer it grew from, ... but there _never has been change_, only development and increased knowledge and strengthened feeling--i was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours for ever. god bless you, and make me thankful! and you _will_ give me _that_? what shall save me from wreck: but truly? how must i feel to you! yours r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday evening. [post-mark, november , .] now you must not blame me--you must not. to make a promise is one thing, and to keep it, quite another: and the conclusion you see 'as from a tower.' suppose i had an oath in heaven somewhere ... near to 'coma berenices,' ... never to give you what you ask for! ... would not such an oath be stronger than a mere half promise such as i sent you a few hours ago? admit that it would--and that i am not to blame for saying now ... (listen!) that i _never can_ nor _will give you this thing_;--only that i will, if you please, exchange it for another thing--you understand. _i_ too will avoid being 'assuming'; i will not pretend to be generous, no, nor 'kind.' it shall be pure merchandise or nothing at all. therefore determine!--remembering always how our 'ars poetica,' after horace, recommends 'dare et petere vicissim'--which is making a clatter of pedantry to take advantage of the noise ... because perhaps i ought to be ashamed to say this to you, and perhaps i _am_! ... yet say it none the less. and ... less lightly ... if you have right and reason on your side, may i not have a little on mine too? and shall i not care, do you think?... think! then there is another reason for me, entirely mine. you have come to me as a dream comes, as the best dreams come ... dearest--and so there is need to me of 'a sign' to know the difference between dream and vision--and _that_ is my completest reason, my own reason--you have none like it; none. a ticket to know the horn-gate from the ivory, ... ought i not to have it? therefore send it to me before i send you anything, and if possible by that lewisham post which was the most frequent bringer of your letters until these last few came, and which reaches me at eight in the evening when all the world is at dinner and my solitude most certain. everything is so still then, that i have heard the footsteps of a letter of yours ten doors off ... or more, perhaps. now beware of imagining from this which i say, that there is a strict police for my correspondence ... (it is not so--) nor that i do not like hearing from you at any and every hour: it _is_ so. only i would make the smoothest and sweetest of roads for ... and you _understand_, and do not _imagine_ beyond. _tuesday evening._--what is written is written, ... all the above: and it is forbidden to me to write a word of what i could write down here ... forbidden for good reasons. so i am silent on _conditions_ ... those being ... first ... that you never do such things again ... no, you must not and shall not.... i _will not let it be_: and secondly, that you try to hear the unspoken words, and understand how your gift will remain with me while _i_ remain ... they need not be said--just as _it_ need not have been so beautiful, for that. the beauty drops 'full fathom five' into the deep thought which covers it. so i study my machiavelli to contrive the possibility of wearing it, without being put to the question violently by all the curiosity of all my brothers;--the questions 'how' ... 'what' ... 'why' ... put round and edgeways. they are famous, some of them, for asking questions. i say to them--'well: how many more questions?' and now ... for _me_--_have_ i said a word?--_have_ i not been obedient? and by rights and in justice, there should have been a reproach ... if there could! because, friendship or more than friendship, pisa or no pisa, it was unnecessary altogether from you to me ... but i have done, and you shall not be teazed. _wednesday._--only ... i persist in the view of the _other_ question. this will not do for the '_sign_,' ... this, which, so far from being qualified for disproving a dream, is the beautiful image of a dream in itself ... _so_ beautiful: and with the very shut eyelids, and the "little folding of the hands to sleep." you see at a glance it will not do. and so-- just as one might be interrupted while telling a fairy-tale, ... in the midst of the "and so's" ... just _so_, i have been interrupted by the coming in of miss bayley, and here she has been sitting for nearly two hours, from twelve to two nearly, and i like her, do you know. not only she talks well, which was only a thing to expect, but she seems to _feel_ ... to have great sensibility--_and_ her kindness to me ... kindness of manner and words and expression, all together ... quite touched me.--i did not think of her being so loveable a person. yet it was kind and generous, her proposition about italy; (did i tell you how she made it to me through mr. kenyon long ago--when i was a mere stranger to her?) the proposition to go there with me herself. it was quite a grave, earnest proposal of hers--which was one of the reasons why i could not even _wish_ not to see her to-day. because you see, it was a tremendous degree of experimental generosity, to think of going to italy by sea with an invalid stranger, "seule _à_ seule." and she was wholly in earnest, wholly. is there not good in the world after all? tell me how you are, for i am not at ease about you--you were not well even yesterday, i thought. if this goes on ... but it mustn't go on--oh, it must not. may god bless us more! do not fancy, in the meantime, that you stay here 'too long' for any observation that can be made. in the first place there is nobody to 'observe'--everybody is out till seven, except the one or two who will not observe if i tell them not. my sisters are glad when you come, because it is a gladness of mine, ... they observe. i have a great deal of liberty, to have so many chains; we all have, in this house: and though the liberty has melancholy motives, it saves some daily torment, and _i_ do not complain of it for one. may god bless you! do not forget me. say how you are. what good can i do you with all my thoughts, when you keep unwell? see!--facts are against fancies. as when i would not have the lamp lighted yesterday because it seemed to make it later, and you proved directly that it would not make it _earlier_, by getting up and going away! wholly and ever your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, november , .][ ] take it, dearest; what i am forced to think you mean--and take _no more_ with it--for i gave all to give long ago--i am all yours--and now, _mine_; give me _mine_ to be happy with! you will have received my note of yesterday.--i am glad you are satisfied with miss bayley, whom i, too, thank ... that is, sympathize with, ... (not wonder at, though)--for her intention.... well, may it all be for best--here or at pisa, you are my blessing and life. ... how all considerate you are, _you_ that are the kind, kind one! the post arrangement i will remember--to-day, for instance, will this reach you at ? i shall be with you then, in thought. 'forget you!'--_what_ does that mean, dearest? and i might have stayed longer and you let me go. what does _that_ mean, also tell me? why, i make up my mind to go, always, like a man, and praise myself as i get through it--as when one plunges into the cold water--only ... ah, _that_ too is no more a merit than any other thing i do ... there is the reward, the last and best! or is it the 'lure'? i would not be ashamed of my soul if it might be shown you,--it is wholly grateful, conscious of you. but another time, do not let me wrong myself _so_! say, 'one minute more.' on monday?--i am _much_ better--and, having got free from an engagement for saturday, shall stay quietly here and think the post never intending to come--for you will not let me wait longer? shall i dare write down a grievance of my heart, and not offend you? yes, trusting in the right of my love--you tell me, sweet, here in the letter, 'i do not look so well'--and sometimes, i 'look better' ... _how do you know_? when i first saw you--_i saw your eyes_--since then, _you_, it should appear, see mine--but i only _know_ yours are there, and have to use that memory as if one carried dried flowers about when fairly inside the garden-enclosure. and while i resolve, and hesitate, and resolve again to complain of this--(kissing your foot ... not boldly complaining, nor rudely)--while i have this on my mind, on my heart, ever since that may morning ... can it be? --no, nothing _can be_ wrong now--you will never call me 'kind' again, in that sense, you promise! nor think 'bitterly' of my kindness, that word! shall i _see_ you on monday? god bless you my dearest--i see her now--and _here_ and _now_ the eyes open, wide _enough_, and i will kiss them--_how_ gratefully! your own r.b. [footnote : envelope endorsed by e.b.b. 'hair.'] _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, december , .] it comes at eight o'clock--the post says eight ... _i_ say nearer half past eight ... it _comes_--and i thank you, thank you, as i can. do you remember the purple lock of a king on which hung the fate of a city? _i_ do! and i need not in conscience--because this one here did not come to me by treason--'ego et rex meus,' on the contrary, do fairly give and take. i meant at first only to send you what is in the ring ... which, by the way, will not fit you i know--(not certainly in the finger which it was meant for ...) as it would not napoleon before you--but can easily be altered to the right size.... i meant at first to send you only what was in the ring: but your fashion is best so you shall have it both ways. now don't say a word on monday ... nor at all. as for the ring, recollect that i am forced to feel blindfold into the outer world, and take what is nearest ... by chance, not choice ... or it might have been better--a little better--perhaps. the _best_ of it is that it's the colour of your blue flowers. now you will not say a word--i trust to you. it is enough that you should have said these others, i think. now _is_ it just of you? isn't it hard upon me? and if the charge is true, whose fault is it, pray? i have been ashamed and vexed with myself fifty times for being so like a little girl, ... for seeming to have 'affectations'; and all in vain: 'it was stronger than i,' as the french say. and for _you_ to complain! as if haroun alraschid after cutting off a head, should complain of the want of an obeisance!--well!--i smile notwithstanding. nobody can help smiling--both for my foolishness which is great, i confess, though somewhat exaggerated in your statement--(because if it was quite as bad as you say, you know, i never should have _seen you_ ... and _i have_!) and also for yours ... because you take such a very preposterously wrong way for overcoming anybody's shyness. do you know, i have laughed ... really laughed at your letter. no--it has not been so bad. i have seen you at every visit, as well as i could with both eyes wide open--only that by a supernatural influence they won't stay open with _you_ as they are used to do with other people ... so now i tell you. and for the rest i promise nothing at all--as how can i, when it is quite beyond my control--and you have not improved my capabilities ... do you think you have? why what nonsense we have come to--we, who ought to be 'talking greek!' said mr. kenyon. yes--he came and talked of you, and told me how you had been speaking of ... me; and i have been thinking how i should have been proud of it a year ago, and how i could half scold you for it now. ah yes--and mr. kenyon told me that you had spoken exaggerations--such exaggerations!--now should there not be some scolding ... some? but how did you expect mr. kenyon to 'wonder' at _you_, or be 'vexed' with _you_? that would have been strange surely. you are and always have been a chief favourite in that quarter ... appreciated, praised, loved, i think. while i write, a letter from america is put into my hands, and having read it through with shame and confusion of face ... not able to help a smile though notwithstanding, ... i send it to you to show how you have made me behave!--to say nothing of my other offences to the kind people at boston--and to a stray gentleman in philadelphia who is to perform a pilgrimage next year, he says, ... to visit the holy land and your e.b.b. i was naughty enough to take _that_ letter to be a circular ... for the address of various 'europ_a_ians.' in any case ... just see how i have behaved! and if it has not been worse than ... not opening one's eyes!--judge. really and gravely i am ashamed--i mean as to mr. mathews, who has been an earnest, kind friend to me--and i do mean to behave better. i say _that_ to prevent your scolding, you know. and think of mr. poe, with that great roman justice of his (if not rather american!), dedicating a book to one and abusing one in the preface of the same. he wrote a review of me in just that spirit--the two extremes of laudation and reprehension, folded in on one another. you would have thought that it had been written by a friend and foe, each stark mad with love and hate, and writing the alternate paragraphs--a most curious production indeed. and here i shall end. i have been waiting ... waiting for what does not come ... the ring ... sent to have the hair put in; but it won't come (now) until too late for the post, and you must hear from me before monday ... you ought to have heard to-day. it has not been my fault--i have waited. oh these people--who won't remember that it is possible to be out of patience! so i send you my letter now ... and what is in the paper now ... and the rest, you shall have after monday. and you _will not say a word_ ... not then ... not at all!--i trust you. and may god bless you. if ever you care less for me--i do not say it in distrust of you ... i trust you wholly--but you are a man, and free to care less, ... and if ever you _do_ ... why in that case you will destroy, burn, ... do all but send back ... enough is said for you to understand. may god bless you. you are _best_ to me--best ... as i see ... in the world--and so, dearest aright to your e.b.b. finished on saturday evening. oh--this thread of silk--and to post!! after all you must wait till tuesday. i have no silk within reach and shall miss the post. do forgive me. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday evening. this is the mere postscript to the letter i have just sent away. by a few minutes too late, comes what i have all day been waiting for, ... and besides (now it is just too late!) now i may have a skein of silk if i please, to make that knot with, ... for want of which, two locks meant for you, have been devoted to the infernal gods already ... fallen into a tangle and thrown into the fire ... and all the hair of my head might have followed, for i was losing my patience and temper fast, ... and the post to boot. so wisely i shut my letter, (after unwisely having driven everything to the last moment!)--and now i have silk to tie fast with ... to tie a 'nodus' ... 'dignus' of the celestial interposition--and a new packet shall be ready to go to you directly. at last i remember to tell you that the first letter you had from me this week, was forgotten, (not by _me_) forgotten, and detained, so, from the post--a piece of carelessness which wilson came to confess to me too frankly for me to grumble as i should have done otherwise. for the staying longer, i did not mean to say you were wrong not to stay. in the first place you were keeping your father 'in a maze,' as you said yourself--and then, even without that, i never know what o'clock it is ... never. mr. kenyon tells me that i must live in a dream--which i do--time goes ... seeming to go round rather than go forward. the watch i have, broke its spring two years ago, and there i leave it in the drawer--and the clocks all round strike out of hearing, or at best, when the wind brings the sound, one upon another in a confusion. so you know more of time than i do or can. till monday then! i send the 'ricordi' to take care of the rest ... of mine. it is a touching story--and there is an impracticable nobleness from end to end in the spirit of it. how _slow_ (to the ear and mind) that italian rhetoric is! a language for dreamers and declaimers. yet dante made it for action, and machiavelli's prose can walk and strike as well as float and faint. the ring is smaller than i feared at first, and may perhaps-- now you will not say a word. my excuse is that you had nothing to remember me by, while i had this and this and this and this ... how much too much! if i could be too much your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, december , .] i was happy, so happy before! but i am happier and richer now. my love--no words could serve here, but there is life before us, and to the end of it the vibration now struck will extend--i will live and die with your beautiful ring, your beloved hair--comforting me, blessing me. let me write to-morrow--when i think on all you have been and are to me, on the wonder of it and the deliciousness, it makes the paper words that come seem vainer than ever--to-morrow i will write. may god bless you, my own, my precious-- i am all your own r.b. i have thought again, and believe it will be best to select the finger _you_ intended ... as the alteration will be simpler, i find; and one is less liable to observation and comment. was not that mr. kenyon last evening? and did he ask, or hear, or say anything? _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, december , .] see, dearest, what the post brings me this minute! now, is it not a good omen, a pleasant inconscious prophecy of what is to be? be it well done, or badly--there are you, leading me up and onward, in his review as everywhere, at every future time! and our names will go together--be read together. in itself this is nothing to _you_, dear poet--but the unexpectedness, unintended significance of it has pleased me very much--_does_ it not please you?--i thought i was to figure in that cold _quarterly_ all by myself, (for he writes for it)--but here you are close by me; it cannot but be for good. he has no knowledge whatever that i am even a friend of yours. say you are pleased! there was no writing yesterday for me--nor will there be much to-day. in some moods, you know, i turn and take a thousand new views of what you say ... and find fault with you to your surprise--at others, i rest on you, and feel _all_ well, all _best_ ... now, for one instance, even that phrase of the _possibility_ 'and what is to follow,'--even _that_ i cannot except against--i am happy, contented; too well, too prodigally blessed to be even able to murmur just sufficiently loud to get, in addition to it all, a sweetest stopping of the mouth! i will say quietly and becomingly 'yes--i do promise you'--yet it is some solace to--no--i will _not_ even couple the promise with an adjuration that you, at the same time, see that they care for me properly at hanwell asylum ... the best by all accounts: yet i feel so sure of _you_, so safe and confident in you! if any of it had been _my_ work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is _yours_--you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work? wood enough to choose from in the first instance, but the choice once made!... so i rest on you, for life, for death, beloved--beside you do stand, in my solemn belief, the direct miraculous gift of god to me--that is my solemn belief; may i be thankful! i am anxious to hear from you ... when am i not?--but _not_ before the american letter is written and sent. is that done? and who was the visitor on monday--and if &c. _what_ did he remark?--and what is right or wrong with saturday--is it to be mine? bless you, dearest--now and for ever--words cannot say how much i am your own. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, december , .] no mr. kenyon after all--not yesterday, not to-day; and the knock at the door belonged perhaps to the post, which brought me a kind letter from mrs. jameson to ask how i was, and if she might come--but she won't come on saturday.... i shall 'provide'--she may as well (and better) come on a free day. on the other side, are you sure that mr. procter may not stretch out his hand and seize on saturday (he was to dine with you, you said), or that some new engagement may not start up suddenly in the midst of it? i trust to you, in such a case, to alter _our_ arrangement, without a second thought. monday stands close by, remember, and there's a saturday to follow monday ... and i should understand at a word, or apart from a word. just as _you_ understand how to 'take me with guile,' when you tell me that anything in me can have any part in making you happy ... you, who can say such words and call them 'vain words.' ah, well! if i only knew certainly, ... more certainly than the thing may be known by either me or you, ... that nothing in me could have any part in making you _un_happy, ... ah, would it not be enough ... _that_ knowledge ... to content me, to overjoy me? but _that_ lies too high and out of reach, you see, and one can't hope to get at it except by the ladder jacob saw, and which an archangel helped to hide away behind the gate of heaven afterwards. _wednesday._--in the meantime i had a letter from you yesterday, and am promised another to-day. how ... i was going to say 'kind' and pull down the thunders ... how _un_kind ... will _that_ do? ... how good you are to me--how dear you must be! dear--dearest--if i feel that you love me, can i help it if, without any other sort of certain knowledge, the world grows lighter round me? being but a mortal woman, can i help it? no--certainly. i comfort myself by thinking sometimes that i can at least understand you, ... comprehend you in what you are and in what you possess and combine; and that, if doing this better than others who are better otherwise than i, i am, so far, worthier of the ... i mean that to understand you is something, and that i account it something in my own favour ... mine. yet when you tell me that i ought to know some things, though untold, you are wrong, and speak what is impossible. my imagination sits by the roadside [greek: apedilos] like the startled sea nymph in Æschylus, but never dares to put one unsandalled foot, unbidden, on a certain tract of ground--never takes a step there unled! and never (i write the simple truth) even as the alternative of the probability of your ceasing to care for me, have i touched (untold) on the possibility of your caring _more_ for me ... never! that you should _continue_ to care, was the utmost of what i saw in that direction. so, when you spoke of a 'strengthened feeling,' judge how i listened with my heart--judge! 'luria' is very great. you will avenge him with the sympathies of the world; that, i foresee.... and for the rest, it is a magnanimity which grows and grows, and which will, of a worldly necessity, fall by its own weight at last; nothing less being possible. the scene with tiburzio and the end of the act with its great effects, are more pathetic than professed pathos. when i come to criticise, it will be chiefly on what i take to be a little occasional flatness in the versification, which you may remove if you please, by knotting up a few lines here and there. but i shall write more of 'luria,'--and well remember in the meanwhile, that you wanted smoothness, you said. may god bless you. i shall have the letter to-night, i think gladly. yes,--i thought of the greater safety from 'comment'--it is best in every way. i lean on you and trust to you, and am always, as to one who is all to me, your own-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, december , .] why of course i am pleased--i should have been pleased last year, for the vanity's sake of being reviewed in your company. now, as far as that vice of vanity goes ... shall i tell you?... i would infinitely prefer to see you set before the public in your own right solitude, and supremacy, apart from me or any one else, ... this, as far as my vice of vanity goes, ... and because, vainer i am of my poet than of my poems ... _pour cause_. but since, according to the _quarterly_ régime, you were to be not apart but with somebody of my degree, i am glad, pleased, that it should be with myself:--and since i was to be there at all, i am pleased, very much pleased that it should be with _you_,--oh, of course i am pleased!--i am pleased that the 'names should be read together' as you say, ... and am happily safe from the apprehension of that ingenious idea of yours about 'my leading _you_' &c. ... quite happily safe from the apprehension of that idea's occurring to any mind in the world, except just your own. now if i 'find fault' with you for writing down such an extravagance, such an ungainly absurdity, (oh, i shall abuse it just as i shall choose!) _can_ it be 'to your surprise?' _can_ it? ought you to say such things, when in the first place they are unfit in themselves and inapplicable, and in the second place, abominable in my eyes? the qualification for hanwell asylum is different peradventure from what you take it to be--we had better not examine it too nearly. you never will say such words again? it is your promise to me? not those words--and not any in their likeness. also ... nothing is _my_ work ... if you please! what an omen you take in calling anything my work! if it is my work, woe on it--for everything turns to evil which i touch. let it be god's work and yours, and i may take breath and wait in hope--and indeed i exclaim to myself about the miracle of it far more even than you can do. it seems to me (as i say over and over ... i say it to my own thoughts oftenest) it seems to me still a dream how you came here at all, ... the very machinery of it seems miraculous. why did i receive you and only you? can i tell? no, not a word. last year i had such an escape of seeing mr. horne; and in this way it was. he was going to germany, he said, for an indefinite time, and took the trouble of begging me to receive him for ten minutes before he went. i answered with my usual 'no,' like a wild indian--whereupon he wrote me a letter so expressive of mortification and vexation ... 'mortification' was one of the words used, i remember, ... that i grew ashamed of myself and told him to come any day (of the last five or six days he had to spare) between two and five. well!--he never came. either he was overcome with work and engagements of various sorts and had not a moment, (which was his way of explaining the matter and quite true i dare say) or he was vexed and resolved on punishing me for my caprices. if the latter was the motive, i cannot call the punishment effective, ... for i clapped my hands for joy when i felt my danger to be passed--and now of course, i have no scruples.... i may be as capricious as i please, ... may i not? not that i ask you. it is a settled matter. and it is useful to keep out mr. chorley with mr. horne, and mr. horne with mr. chorley, and the rest of the world with those two. only the miracle is that _you_ should be behind the enclosure--within it ... and so!-- _that_ is _my_ side of the wonder! of the machinery of the wonder, ... as _i_ see it!--but there are greater things than these. speaking of the portrait of you in the 'spirit of the age' ... which is not like ... no!--which has not your character, in a line of it ... something in just the forehead and eyes and hair, ... but even _that_, thrown utterly out of your order, by another bearing so unlike you...! speaking of that portrait ... shall i tell you?--mr. horne had the goodness to send me all those portraits, and i selected the heads which, in right hero-worship, were anything to me, and had them framed after a rough fashion and hung up before my eyes; harriet martineau's ... because she was a woman and admirable, and had written me some kind letters--and for the rest, wordsworth's, carlyle's, tennyson's and yours. the day you paid your first visit here, i, in a fit of shyness not quite unnatural, ... though i have been cordially laughed at for it by everybody in the house ... pulled down your portrait, ... (there is the nail, under wordsworth--) and then pulled down tennyson's in a fit of justice,--because i would not have his hung up and yours away. it was the delight of my brothers to open all the drawers and the boxes, and whatever they could get access to, and find and take those two heads and hang them on the old nails and analyse my 'absurdity' to me, day after day; but at last i tired them out, being obstinate; and finally settled the question one morning by fastening the print of you inside your paracelsus. oh no, it is not like--and i knew it was not, before i saw you, though mr. kenyon said, 'rather like!' by the way mr. kenyon does not come. it is strange that he should not come: when he told me that he could not see me 'for a week or a fortnight,' he meant it, i suppose. so it is to be on saturday? and i will write directly to america--the letter will be sent by the time you get this. may god bless you ever. it is not so much a look of 'ferocity,' ... as you say, ... in that head, as of _expression by intention_. several people have said of it what nobody would say of you ... 'how affected-looking.' which is too strong--but it is not like you, in any way, and there's the truth. so until saturday. i read 'luria' and feel the life in him. but _walk_ and do not _work_! do you? wholly your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday night. [post-mark, december , .] well, i did see your brother last night ... and very wisely neither spoke nor kept silence in the proper degree, but said that 'i hoped you were well'--from the sudden feeling that i must say _something_ of you--not pretend indifference about you _now_ ... and from the impossibility of saying the _full_ of what i might; because other people were by--and after, in the evening, when i should have remedied the first imperfect expression, i had not altogether the heart. so, you, dearest, will clear me with him if he wonders, will you not? but it all hangs together; speaking of you,--to you,--writing to you--all is helpless and sorrowful work by the side of what is in my soul to say and to write--or is it not the natural consequence? if these vehicles of feelings sufficed--_there_ would be the end!--and that my feeling for you should end!... for the rest, the headache which kept away while i sate with you, made itself amends afterward, and as it is unkind to that warm talfourd to look blank at his hospitable endeavours, all my power of face went _à qui de droit_-- did your brother tell you ... yes, i think ... of the portentous book, lettered ii, and thick as a law-book, of congratulatory letters on the appearance of 'ion'?--but how under the b's in the index came 'miss barrett' and, woe's me, 'r.b.'! i don't know when i have had so ghastly a visitation. there was the utterly _forgotten_ letter, in the as thoroughly disused hand-writing, in the ... i fear ... still as completely obsolete feeling--no, not so bad as that--but at first there was all the novelty, and social admiration at the friend--it is truly not right to pluck all the rich soil from the roots and hold them up clean and dry as if they came _so_ from all you now see, which is nothing at all ... like the chinese air-plant! do you understand this? and surely 'ion' is a _very_, very beautiful and noble conception, and finely executed,--a beautiful work--what has come after, has lowered it down by grade after grade ... it don't stand apart on the hill, like a wonder, now it is _built up_ to by other attempts; but the great difference is in myself. another maker of another 'ion,' finding me out and behaving as talfourd did, would not find _that me_, so to be behaved to, so to be honoured--though he should have all the good will! ten years ago! and ten years hence! always understand that you do _not_ take me as i was at the beginning ... with a crowd of loves to give to _something_ and so get rid of their pain and burden. i have _known_ what that ends in--a handful of anything may be as sufficient a sample, serve your purposes and teach you its nature, as well as whole heaps--and i know what most of the pleasures of this world are--so that i _can_ be surer of myself, and make you surer, on calm demonstrated grounds, than if i had a host of objects of admiration or ambition _yet_ to become acquainted with. you say, 'i am a man and may change'--i answer, yes--but, while i hold my senses, only change for the _presumable_ better ... not for the _experienced worst_. here is my uncle's foot on the stair ... his knock hurried the last sentence--here he is by me!--understand what this would have led to, how you would have been _proved logically_ my own, best, extreme want, my life's end--yes; dearest! bless you ever-- r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, december , .] let me hear how you are, and that you are better instead of worse for the exertions of last night. after you left me yesterday i considered how we might have managed it more conveniently for you, and had the lamp in, and arranged matters so as to interpose less time between the going and the dining, even if you and george did not go together, which might have been best, but which i did not like quite to propose. now, supposing that on thursday you dine in town, remember not to be unnecessarily 'perplext in the extreme' where to spend the time before ... _five_, ... shall i say, at any rate? we will have the lamp, and i can easily explain if an observation should be made ... only it will not be, because our goers-out here never come home until six, and the head of the house, not until seven ... as i told you. george thought it worth while going to mr. talfourd's yesterday, just to see the author of 'paracelsus' dance the polka ... should i not tell you? i am vexed by another thing which he tells _me_--vexed, if amused a little by the absurdity of it. i mean that absurd affair of the 'autography'--now _isn't_ it absurd? and for neither you nor george to have the chivalry of tearing out that letter of mine, which was absurd too in its way, and which, knowing less of the world than i know now, i wrote as if writing for my private conscience, and privately repented writing in a day, and have gone on repenting ever since when i happened to think enough of it for repentance! because if mr. serjeant talfourd sent then his 'ion' to _me_, he did it in mere good-nature, hearing by chance of me through the publisher of my 'prometheus' at the moment, and of course caring no more for my 'opinion' than for the rest of me--and it was excessively bad taste in me to say more than the briefest word of thanks in return, even if i had been competent to say it. ah well!--you see how it is, and that i am vexed _you_ should have read it, ... as george says you did ... he laughing to see me so vexed. so i turn round and avenge myself by crying aloud against the editor of the 'autography'! surely such a thing was never done before ... even by an author in the last stage of a mortal disease of self-love. to edit the common parlance of conventional flatteries, ... lettered in so many volumes, bound in green morocco, and laid on the drawing-room table for one's own particular private public,--is it not a miracle of vanity ... neither more nor less? i took the opportunity of the letter to mr. mathews (talking of vanity ... _mine_!) to send landor's verses to america ... yours--so they will be in the american papers.... i know mr. mathews. i was speaking to him of your last number of 'bells and pomegranates,' and the verses came in naturally; just as my speaking did, for it is not the first time nor the second nor the third even that i have written to him of you, though i admire how in all those previous times i did it in pure disinterestedness, ... purely because your name belonged to my country and to her literature, ... and how i have a sort of reward at this present, in being able to write what i please without anyone's saying 'it is a new fancy.' as for the americans, they have 'a zeal without knowledge' for poetry. there is more love for _verse_ among them than among the english. but they suffer themselves to be led in their choice of poets by english critics of average discernment; this is said of them by their own men of letters. tennyson is idolized deep down in the bush woods (to their honour be it said), but to understand _you_ sufficiently, they wait for the explanations of the critics. so i wanted them to see what landor says of you. the comfort in these questions is, that there can be _no_ question, except between the sooner and the later--a little sooner, and a little later: but when there is real love and zeal it becomes worth while to try to ripen the knowledge. they love tennyson so much that the colour of his waistcoats is a sort of minor oregon question ... and i like that--do not _you_? _monday._--now i have your letter: and you will observe, without a finger post from me, how busily we have both been preoccupied in disavowing our own letters of old on 'ion'--mr. talfourd's collection goes to prove too much, i think--and you, a little too much, when you draw inferences of no-changes, from changes like these. oh yes--i perfectly understand that every sort of inconstancy of purpose regards a 'presumably better' thing--but i do not so well understand how any presumable doubt is to be set to rest by that fact, ... i do not indeed. have you seen all the birds and beasts in the world? have you seen the 'unicorns'?--which is only a pebble thrown down into your smooth logic; and we need not stand by to watch the bubbles born of it. and as to the 'ion' letters, i am delighted that you have anything to repent, as i have everything. certainly it is a noble play--there is the moral sublime in it: but it is not the work of a poet, ... and if he had never written another to show what was _not_ in him, this might have been 'predicated' of it as surely, i hold. still, it is a noble work--and even if you over-praised it, (i did not read your letter, though you read mine, alas!) you, under the circumstances, would have been less noble yourself not to have done so--only, how i agree with you in what you say against the hanging up of these dry roots, the soil shaken off! such abominable taste--now isn't it? ... though you do not use that word. i thought mr. kenyon would have come yesterday and that i might have something to tell you, of him at least. and george never told me of the thing you found to say to him of me, and which makes me smile, and would have made him wonder if he had not been suffering probably from some legal distraction at the moment, inasmuch as _he knew perfectly that you had just left me_. my sisters told him down-stairs and he came into this room just before he set off on saturday, with a, ... '_so_ i am to meet mr. browning?' but he made no observation afterwards--none: and if he heard what you said at all (which i doubt), he referred it probably to some enforced civility on 'yorick's' part when the 'last chapter' was too much with him. i have written about 'luria' in another place--you shall have the papers when i have read through the play. how different this living poetry is from the polished rhetoric of 'ion.' the man and the statue are not more different. after all poetry is a distinct thing--it is here or it is not here ... it is not a matter of '_taste_,' but of sight and feeling. as to the 'venice' it gives proof (does it not?) rather of poetical sensibility than of poetical faculty? or did you expect me to say more?--of the perception of the poet, rather than of his conception. do you think more than this? there are fine, eloquent expressions, and the tone of sentiment is good and high everywhere. do not write 'luria' if your head is uneasy--and you cannot say that it is not ... can you? or will you if you can? in any case you will do what you can ... take care of yourself and not suffer yourself to be tired either by writing or by too much going out, and take the necessary exercise ... this, you will do--i entreat you to do it. may god bless and make you happy, as ... you will lose nothing if i say ... as i am yours-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, december , .] well, then, i am no longer sorry that i did _not_ read _either_ of your letters ... for there were two in the collection. i did not read one word of them--and hear why. when your brother and i took the book between us in wonderment at the notion--we turned to the index, in large text-hand, and stopped at 'miss b.'--and _he_ indeed read them, or some of them, but holding the volume at a distance which defied my short-sighted eye--all _i_ saw was the _faint_ small characters--and, do you know ... i neither trusted myself to ask a nearer look ... nor a second look ... as if i were studying unduly what i had just said was most unfairly exposed to view!--so i was silent, and lost you (in that)--then, and for ever, i promise you, now that you speak of vexation it would give you. _all_ i know of the notes, that _one_ is addressed to talfourd in the third person--and when i had run through my own ... not far off ... (ba-br)--i was sick of the book altogether. you are generous to me--but, to say the truth, i might have remembered the most justifying circumstance in my case ... which was, that my own 'paracelsus,' printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure as 'ion' a brilliant success--for, until just before.... ah, really i forget!--but i know that until forster's notice in the _examiner_ appeared, _every_ journal that thought worth while to allude to the poem at all, treated it with entire contempt ... beginning, i think, with the _athenæum_ which _then_ made haste to say, a few days after its publication, 'that it was not without talent but spoiled by obscurity and only an imitation of--shelley'!--something to this effect, in a criticism of about three lines among their 'library table' notices. and that first taste was a most flattering sample of what the 'craft' had in store for me--since my publisher and i had fairly to laugh at _his_ 'book'--(quite of another kind than the serjeant's)--in which he was used to paste extracts from newspapers and the like--seeing that, out of a long string of notices, one vied with its predecessor in disgust at my 'rubbish,' as their word went: but forster's notice altered a good deal--which i have to recollect for his good. still, the contrast between myself and talfourd was so _utter_--you remember the world's-wonder 'ion' made,--that i was determined not to pass for the curious piece of neglected merit i really _was not_--and so!-- but, dearest, why should you leave your own especial sphere of doing me good for another than yours? does the sun rake and hoe about the garden as well as thine steadily over it? _why_ must you, who give me heart and power, as nothing else did or could, to do well--concern yourself with what might be done by any good, kind ministrant _only_ fit for such offices? not that i _feel_, even, more bound to you for them--they have their weight, i _know_ ... but _what_ weight beside the divine gift of yourself? do not, dear, dearest, care for making me known: _you_ know me!--and _they_ know so little, after all your endeavour, who are ignorant of what _you_ are to me--if you ... well, but that _will_ follow; if i do greater things one day--what shall they serve for, what range themselves under of right?-- mr. mathews sent me two copies of his poems--and, i believe, a newspaper, 'when time was,' about the 'blot in the scutcheon'--and also, through moxon--(i _believe_ it was mr. m.)--a proposition for reprinting--to which i assented of course--and there was an end to the matter. and might i have stayed _till five_?--dearest, i will never ask for more than you give--but i feel every single sand of the gold showers ... spite of what i say above! i _have_ an invitation for thursday which i had no intention of remembering (it admitted of such liberty)--but _now_.... something i will _say_! 'polka,' forsooth!--one lady whose _head_ could not, and another whose feet could not, dance!--but i talked a little to your brother whom i like more and more: it comforts me that he is yours. so, _thursday_,--thank you from the heart! i am well, and about to go out. this week i have done nothing to 'luria'--is it that my _ring_ is gone? there surely _is_ something to forgive in me--for that shameful business--or i should not feel as i do in the matter: but you _did_ forgive me. god bless my own, only love--ever-- yours wholly r.b. n.b. an antiquarian friend of mine in old days picked up a nondescript wonder of a coin. i just remember he described it as rhomboid in shape--cut, i fancy, out of church-plate in troubled times. what did my friend do but get ready a box, lined with velvet, and properly _compartmented_, to have always about him, so that the _next such coin he picked_ up, say in cheapside, he might at once transfer to a place of safety ... his waistcoat pocket being no happy receptacle for the same. i saw the box--and encouraged the man to keep a vigilant eye. _parallel._ r.b. having found an unicorn.... do you forgive these strips of paper? i could not wait to send for more--having exhausted my stock. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening [post-mark, december , .] it was right of you to write ... (now see what jangling comes of not using the fit words.... i said 'right,' not to say 'kind') ... right of you to write to me to-day--and i had begun to be disappointed already because the post _seemed_ to be past, when suddenly the knock brought the letter which deserves all this praising. if not 'kind' ... then _kindest_ ... will that do better? perhaps. mr. kenyon was here to-day and asked when you were coming again--and i, i answered at random ... 'at the end of the week--thursday or friday'--which did not prevent another question about 'what we were consulting about.' he said that he 'must have you,' and had written to beg you to go to his door on days when you came here; only murmuring something besides of neither thursday nor friday being disengaged days with him. oh, my disingenuousness!--then he talked again of 'saul.' a true impression the poem has made on him! he reads it every night, he says, when he comes home and just before he goes to sleep, to put his dreams into order, and observed very aptly, i thought, that it reminded him of homer's shield of achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life. quite ill he took it of me the 'not expecting him to like it so much' and retorted on me with most undeserved severity (as i felt it), that i 'never understood anybody to have any sensibility except myself.' wasn't it severe, to come from dear mr. kenyon? but he has caught some sort of evil spirit from your 'saul' perhaps; though admiring the poem enough to have a good spirit instead. and do _you_ remember of the said poem, that it is there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work--now remember. and forget 'luria' ... if you are better forgetting. and forget _me_ ... _when_ you are happier forgetting. i say _that_ too. so your idea of an unicorn is--one horn broken off. and you a poet!--one horn broken off--or hid in the blackthorn hedge!-- such a mistake, as our enlightened public, on their part, made, when they magnified the divinity of the brazen chariot, just under the thunder-cloud! i don't remember the _athenæum_, but can well believe that it said what you say. the _athenæum_ admires only what gods, men and columns reject. it applauds nothing but mediocrity--mark it, as a general rule! the good, they see--the great escapes them. dare to breathe a breath above the close, flat conventions of literature, and you are 'put down' and instructed how to be like other people. by the way, see by the very last number, that you never think to write 'peoples,' on pain of writing what is obsolete--and these the teachers of the public! if the public does not learn, where is the marvel of it? an imitation of shelley!--when if 'paracelsus' was anything it was the expression of a new mind, as all might see--as _i_ saw, let me be proud to remember, and i was not overdazzled by 'ion.' ah, indeed if i could 'rake and hoe' ... or even pick up weeds along the walk, ... which is the work of the most helpless children, ... if i could do any of this, there would be some good of me: but as for 'shining' ... shining ... when there is not so much light in me as to do 'carpet work' by, why let anyone in the world, _except you_, tell me to shine, and it will just be a mockery! but you have studied astronomy with your favourite snails, who are apt to take a dark-lanthorn for the sun, and so.-- and so, you come on thursday, and i only hope that mrs. jameson will not come too, (the carpet work makes me think of her; and, not having come yet, she may come on thursday by a fatal cross-stitch!) for i do not hear from her, and my precautions are 'watched out,' may god bless you always. your own-- but no--i did not forgive. where was the fault to be forgiven, except in _me_, for not being right in my meaning? _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday. [post-mark, december , .] and now, my heart's love, i am waiting to hear from you; my heart is _full_ of you. when i try to remember what i said yesterday, _that_ thought, of what fills my heart--only _that_ makes me bear with the memory.... i know that even such imperfect, poorest of words _must_ have come _from_ thence if not bearing up to you all that is there--and i know you are ever above me to receive, and help, and forgive, and _wait_ for the one day which i will never say to myself cannot come, when i shall speak what i feel--more of it--or _some_ of it--for now nothing is spoken. my all-beloved-- ah, you opposed very rightly, i dare say, the writing that paper i spoke of! the process should be so much simpler! i most earnestly _expect_ of you, my love, that in the event of any such necessity as was then alluded to, you accept at once in my name _any_ conditions possible for a human will to submit to--there is no imaginable condition to which you allow me to accede that i will not joyfully bend all my faculties to comply with. and you know this--but so, also do you know _more_ ... and yet 'i may tire of you'--'may forget you'! i will write again, having the long, long week to wait! and one of the things i must say, will be, that with my love, i cannot lose my pride in you--that nothing _but_ that love could balance that pride--and that, blessing the love so divinely, you must minister to the pride as well; yes, my own--i shall follow your fame,--and, better than fame, the good you do--in the world--and, if you please, it shall all be mine--as your hand, as your eyes-- i will write and pray it from you into a promise ... and your promises i live upon. may god bless you! your r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, december , .] do not blame me in your thoughts for what i said yesterday or wrote a day before, or think perhaps on the dark side of some other days when i cannot help it ... always when i cannot help it--you could not blame me if you saw the full motives as i feel them. if it is distrust, it is not of _you_, dearest of all!--but of myself rather:--it is not doubt _of_ you, but _for_ you. from the beginning i have been subject to the too reasonable fear which rises as my spirits fall, that your happiness might suffer in the end through your having known me:--it is for _you_ i fear, whenever i fear:--and if you were less to me, ... _should_ i fear do you think?--if you were to me only what i am to myself for instance, ... if your happiness were only as precious as my own in my own eyes, ... should i fear, do you think, _then_? think, and do not blame me. to tell you to 'forget me when forgetting seemed happiest for you,' ... (was it not _that_, i said?) proved more affection than might go in smoother words.... i could prove the truth of _that_ out of my heart. and for the rest, you need not fear any fear of mine--my fear will not cross a wish of yours, be sure! neither does it prevent your being all to me ... all: more than i used to take for all when i looked round the world, ... almost more than i took for all in my earliest dreams. you stand in between me and not merely the living who stood closest, but between me and the closer graves, ... and i reproach myself for this sometimes, and, so, ask you not to blame me for a different thing. as to unfavourable influences, ... i can speak of them quietly, having foreseen them from the first, ... and it is true, i have been thinking since yesterday, that i might be prevented from receiving you here, and _should_, if all were known: but with that act, the adverse power would end. it is not my fault if i have to choose between two affections; only my pain; and i have not to choose between two duties, i feel, ... since i am yours, while i am of any worth to you at all. for the plan of the sealed letter, it would correct no evil,--ah, you do not see, you do not understand. the danger does not come from the side to which a reason may go. only one person holds the thunder--and i shall be thundered at; i shall not be reasoned with--it is impossible. i could tell you some dreary chronicles made for laughing and crying over; and you know that if i once thought i might be loved enough to be spared above others, i cannot think so now. in the meanwhile we need not for the present be afraid. let there be ever so many suspectors, there will be no informers. i suspect the suspectors, but the informers are out of the world, i am very sure:--and then, the one person, by a curious anomaly, _never_ draws an inference of this order, until the bare blade of it is thrust palpably into his hand, point outwards. so it has been in other cases than ours--and so it is, at this moment in the house, with others than ourselves. i have your letter to stop me. if i had my whole life in my hands with your letter, could i thank you for it, i wonder, at all worthily? i cannot believe that i could. yet in life and in death i shall be grateful to you.-- but for the paper--no. now, observe, that it would seem like a prepared apology for something wrong. and besides--the apology would be nothing but the offence in another form--unless you said it was all a mistake--(_will_ you, again?)--that it was all a mistake and you were only calling for your boots! well, if you said _that_, it would be worth writing, but anything less would be something worse than nothing: and would not save me--which you were thinking of, i know--would not save me the least of the stripes. for 'conditions'--now i will tell you what i said once in a jest.... 'if a prince of eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest independent chapel, in the other'--? 'why even _then_,' said my sister arabel, 'it would not _do_.' and she was right, and we all agreed that she was right. it is an obliquity of the will--and one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying. poor henrietta has suffered silently, with that softest of possible natures, which hers is indeed; beginning with implicit obedience, and ending with something as unlike it as possible: but, you see, where money is wanted, and where the dependence is total--see! and when once, in the case of the one dearest to me; when just at the last he was involved in the same grief, and i attempted to make over my advantages to him; (it could be no sacrifice, you know--_i_ did not want the money, and could buy nothing with it so good as his happiness,--) why then, my hands were seized and tied--and then and there, in the midst of the trouble, came the end of all! i tell you all this, just to make you understand a little. did i not tell you before? but there is no danger at present--and why ruffle this present with disquieting thoughts? why not leave that future to itself? for me, i sit in the track of the avalanche quite calmly ... so calmly as to surprise myself at intervals--and yet i know the reason of the calmness well. for mr. kenyon--dear mr. kenyon--he will speak the softest of words, if any--only he will think privately that you are foolish and that i am ungenerous, but i will not say so any more now, so as to teaze you. there is another thing, of more consequence than _his_ thoughts, which is often in my mind to ask you of--but there will be time for such questions--let us leave the winter to its own peace. if i should be ill again you will be reasonable and we both must submit to god's necessity. not, you know, that i have the least intention of being ill, if i can help it--and in the case of a tolerably mild winter, and with all this strength to use, there are probabilities for me--and then i have sunshine from _you_, which is better than pisa's. and what more would you say? do i not hear and understand! it seems to me that i do both, or why all this wonder and gratitude? if the devotion of the remainder of my life could prove that i hear, ... would it be proof enough? proof enough perhaps--but not gift enough. may god bless you always. i have put _some_ of the hair into a little locket which was given to me when i was a child by my favourite uncle, papa's only brother, who used to tell me that he loved me better than my own father did, and was jealous when i was not glad. it is through him in part, that i am richer than my sisters--through him and his mother--and a great grief it was and trial, when he died a few years ago in jamaica, proving by his last act that i was unforgotten. and now i remember how he once said to me: 'do you beware of ever loving!--if you do, you will not do it half: it will be for life and death.' so i put the hair into his locket, which i wear habitually, and which never had hair before--the natural use of it being for perfume:--and this is the best perfume for all hours, besides the completing of a prophecy. your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, december , .] every word you write goes to my heart and lives there: let us live so, and die so, if god will. i trust many years hence to begin telling you what i feel now;--that the beam of the light will have _reached_ you!--meantime it _is_ here. let me kiss your forehead, my sweetest, dearest. wednesday i am waiting for--how waiting for! after all, it seems probable that there was no intentional mischief in that jeweller's management of the ring. the divided gold must have been exposed to fire--heated thoroughly, perhaps,--and what became of the contents then! well, all is safe now, and i go to work again of course. my next act is just done--that is, _being_ done--but, what i did not foresee, i cannot bring it, copied, by wednesday, as my sister went this morning on a visit for the week. on the matters, the others, i will not think, as you bid me,--if i can help, at least. but your kind, gentle, good sisters! and the provoking sorrow of the _right_ meaning at bottom of the wrong doing--wrong to itself and its plain purpose--and meanwhile, the real tragedy and sacrifice of a life! if you should see mr. kenyon, and can find if he will be disengaged on wednesday evening, i shall be glad to go in that case. but i have been writing, as i say, and will leave off this, for the better communing with you. don't imagine i am unwell; i feel quite well, but a little tired, and the thought of you waits in such readiness! so, may god bless you, beloved! i am all your own r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, december , .] mr. kenyon has not come--he does not come so often, i think. did he _know_ from _you_ that you were to see me last thursday? if he did it might be as well, do you not think? to go to him next week. will it not seem frequent, otherwise? but if you did _not_ tell him of thursday distinctly (_i_ did not--remember!), he might take the wednesday's visit to be the substitute for rather than the successor of thursday's: and in that case, why not write a word to him yourself to propose dining with him as he suggested? he really wishes to see you--of that, i am sure. but you will know what is best to do, and he may come here to-morrow perhaps, and ask a whole set of questions about you; so my right hand may forget its cunning for any good it does. only don't send messages by _me_, please! how happy i am with your letter to-night. when i had sent away my last letter i began to remember, and could not help smiling to do so, that i had totally forgotten the great subject of my 'fame,' and the oath you administered about it--totally! now how do you read that omen? if i forget myself, who is to remember me, do you think?--except _you_?--which brings me where i would stay. yes--'yours' it must be, but _you_, it had better be! but, to leave the vain superstitions, let me go on to assure you that i did mean to answer that part of your former letter, and do mean to behave well and be obedient. your wish would be enough, even if there could be likelihood without it of my doing nothing ever again. oh, certainly i have been idle--it comes of lotus-eating--and, besides, of sitting too long in the sun. yet 'idle' may not be the word! silent i have been, through too many thoughts to speak just _that_!--as to writing letters and reading manuscripts' filling all my time, why i must lack 'vital energy' indeed--you do not mean seriously to fancy such a thing of me! for the rest.... tell me--is it your opinion that when the apostle paul saw the unspeakable things, being snatched up into the third heavens 'whether in the body or out of the body he could not tell,'--is it your opinion that, all the week after, he worked particularly hard at the tent-making? for my part, i doubt it. i would not speak profanely or extravagantly--it is not the best way to thank god. but to say only that i was in the desert and that i am among the palm-trees, is to say nothing ... because it is easy to _understand how_, after walking straight on ... on ... furlong after furlong ... dreary day after dreary day, ... one may come to the end of the sand and within sight of the fountain:--there is nothing miraculous in _that_, you know! yet even in that case, to doubt whether it may not all be _mirage_, would be the natural first thought, the recurring dream-fear! now would it not? and you can reproach me for _my_ thoughts, as if _they_ were unnatural! never mind about the third act--the advantage is that you will not tire yourself perhaps the next week. what gladness it is that you should really seem better, and how much better _that_ is than even 'luria.' mrs. jameson came to-day--but i will tell you. may god bless you now and always. your e.b.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, december , .] henrietta had a note from mr. kenyon to the effect that he was 'coming to see _ba_' to-day if in any way he found it possible. now he has not come--and the inference is that he will come to-morrow--in which case you will be convicted of not wishing to be with him perhaps. so ... would it not be advisable for you to call at his door for a moment--and _before_ you come here? think of it. you know it would not do to vex him--would it? your e.b.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, december , .] i ought to have written yesterday: so to-day when i need a letter and get none, there is my own fault besides, and the less consolation. a letter from you would light up this sad day. shall i fancy how, if a letter lay _there_ where i look, rain might fall and winds blow while i listened to you, long after the _words_ had been laid to heart? but here you are in your place--with me who am your own--your own--and so the rhyme joins on, she shall speak to me in places lone with a low and holy tone-- ay: when i have lit my lamp at night she shall be present with my sprite: and i will say, whate'er it be, every word she telleth me! now, is that taken from your book? no--but from _my_ book, which holds my verses as i write them; and as i open it, i read that. and speaking of verse--somebody gave me a few days ago that mr. lowell's book you once mentioned to me. anyone who 'admires' _you_ shall have my sympathy at once--even though he _do_ change the laughing wine-_mark_ into a 'stain' in that perfectly beautiful triplet--nor am i to be indifferent to his good word for myself (though not very happily connected with the criticism on the epithet in that 'yorkshire tragedy'--which has better things, by the way--seeing that 'white boy,' in old language, meant just 'good boy,' a general epithet, as johnson notices in the life of dryden, whom the schoolmaster busby was used to class with his 'white boys'--this is hypercriticism, however). but these american books should not be reprinted here--one asks, what and where is the class to which they address themselves? for, no doubt, we have our congregations of ignoramuses that enjoy the profoundest ignorance imaginable on the subjects treated of; but _these_ are evidently not the audience mr. lowell reckons on; rather, if one may trust the manner of his setting to work, he would propound his doctrine to the class. always to be found, of spirits instructed up to a certain height and there resting--vines that run up a prop and there tangle and grow to a knot--which want supplying with fresh poles; so the provident man brings his bundle into the grounds, and sticks them in laterally or a-top of the others, as the case requires, and all the old stocks go on growing again--but here, with us, whoever _wanted_ chaucer, or chapman, or ford, got him long ago--what else have lamb, and coleridge, and hazlitt and hunt and so on to the end of their generations ... what else been doing this many a year? what one passage of all these, cited with the very air of a columbus, but has been known to all who know anything of poetry this many, many a year? the others, who don't know anything, are the stocks that have got to _shoot_, not climb higher--_compost_, they want in the first place! ford's and crashaw's rival nightingales--why they have been dissertated on by wordsworth and coleridge, then by lamb and hazlitt, then worked to death by hunt, who printed them entire and quoted them to pieces again, in every periodical he was ever engaged upon; and yet after all, here 'philip'--'must read' (out of a roll of dropping papers with yellow ink tracings, so old!) something at which 'john' claps his hands and says 'really--that these ancients should own so much wit &c.'! the _passage_ no longer looks its fresh self after this veritable passage from hand to hand: as when, in old dances, the belle began the figure with her own partner, and by him was transferred to the next, and so to the next--_they_ ever _beginning_ with all the old alacrity and spirit; but she bearing a still-accumulating weight of tokens of gallantry, and none the better for every fresh pushing and shoving and pulling and hauling--till, at the bottom of the room-- to which mr. lowell might say, that--no, i will say the true thing against myself--and it is, that when i turn from what is in my mind, and determine to write about anybody's book to avoid writing that i love and love and love again my own, dearest love--because of the cuckoo-song of it,--_then_, i shall be in no better humour with that book than with mr. lowell's! but i _have_ a new thing to say or sing--you never before heard me love and bless and send my heart after--'ba'--did you? ba ... and that is you! i tried ... (more than _wanted_) to call you _that_, on wednesday! i have a flower here--rather, a tree, a mimosa, which must be turned and turned, the side to the light changing in a little time to the _leafy_ side, where all the fans lean and spread ... so i turn your name to me, that side i have not last seen: you cannot tell how i feel glad that you will not part with the name--barrett--seeing you have two of the same--and must always, moreover, remain my ebb! dearest 'e.b.c.'--no, no! and so it will never be! have you seen mr. kenyon? i did not write ... knowing that such a procedure would draw the kind sure letter in return, with the invitation &c., as if i had asked for it! i had perhaps better call on him some morning very early. bless you, my own sweetest. you will write to me, i know in my heart! ever may god bless you! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, december , .] dearest, you know how to say what makes me happiest, you who never think, you say, of making me happy! for my part i do not think of it either; i simply understand that you _are_ my happiness, and that therefore you could not make another happiness for me, such as would be worth having--not even _you_! why, how could you? _that_ was in my mind to speak yesterday, but i could not speak it--to write it, is easier. talking of happiness--shall i tell you? promise not to be angry and i will tell you. i have thought sometimes that, if i considered myself wholly, i should choose to die this winter--now--before i had disappointed you in anything. but because you are better and dearer and more to be considered than i, i do _not_ choose it. i _cannot_ choose to give you any pain, even on the chance of its being a less pain, a less evil, than what may follow perhaps (who can say?), if i should prove the burden of your life. for if you make me happy with some words, you frighten me with others--as with the extravagance yesterday--and seriously--_too_ seriously, when the moment for smiling at them is past--i am frightened, i tremble! when you come to know me as well as i know myself, what can save me, do you think, from disappointing and displeasing you? i ask the question, and find no answer. it is a poor answer, to say that i can do one thing well ... that i have one capacity largely. on points of the general affections, i have in thought applied to myself the words of mme. de stael, not fretfully, i hope, not complainingly, i am sure (i can thank god for most affectionate friends!) not complainingly, yet mournfully and in profound conviction--those words--'_jamais je n'ai pas été aimée comme j'aime_.' the capacity of loving is the largest of my powers i think--i thought so before knowing you--and one form of feeling. and although any woman might love you--_every_ woman,--with understanding enough to discern you by--(oh, do not fancy that i am unduly magnifying mine office) yet i persist in persuading myself that! because i have the capacity, as i said--and besides i owe more to you than others could, it seems to me: let me boast of it. to many, you might be better than all things while one of all things: to me you are instead of all--to many, a crowning happiness--to me, the happiness itself. from out of the deep dark pits men see the stars more gloriously--and _de profundis amavi_-- it is a very poor answer! almost as poor an answer as yours could be if i were to ask you to teach me to please you always; or rather, how not to displease you, disappoint you, vex you--what if all those things were in my fate? and--(to begin!)--_i_ am disappointed to-night. i expected a letter which does not come--and i had felt so sure of having a letter to-night ... unreasonably sure perhaps, which means doubly sure. _friday._--remember you have had two notes of mine, and that it is certainly not my turn to write, though i am writing. scarcely you had gone on wednesday when mr. kenyon came. it seemed best to me, you know, that you should go--i had the presentiment of his footsteps--and so near they were, that if you had looked up the street in leaving the door, you must have seen him! of course i told him of your having been here and also at his house; whereupon he enquired eagerly if you meant to dine with him, seeming disappointed by my negative. 'now i had told him,' he said ... and murmured on to himself loud enough for me to hear, that 'it would have been a peculiar pleasure &c.' the reason i have not seen him lately is the eternal 'business,' just as you thought, and he means to come 'oftener now,' so nothing is wrong as i half thought. as your letter does not come it is a good opportunity for asking what sort of ill humour, or (to be more correct) bad temper, you most particularly admire--sulkiness?--the divine gift of sitting aloof in a cloud like any god for three weeks together perhaps--pettishness? ... which will get you up a storm about a crooked pin or a straight one either? obstinacy?--which is an agreeable form of temper i can assure you, and describes itself--or the good open passion which lies on the floor and kicks, like one of my cousins?--certainly i prefer the last, and should, i think, prefer it (as an evil), even if it were not the born weakness of my own nature--though i humbly confess (to _you_, who seem to think differently of these things) that never since i was a child have i upset all the chairs and tables and thrown the books about the room in a fury--i am afraid i do not even 'kick,' like my cousin, now. those demonstrations were all done by the 'light of other days'--not a very full light, i used to be accustomed to think:--but _you_,--_you_ think otherwise, _you_ take a fury to be the opposite of 'indifference,' as if there could be no such thing as self-control! now for my part, i do believe that the worst-tempered persons in the world are less so through sensibility than selfishness--they spare nobody's heart, on the ground of being themselves pricked by a straw. now see if it isn't so. what, after all, is a good temper but generosity in trifles--and what, without it, is the happiness of life? we have only to look round us. i _saw_ a woman, once, burst into tears, because her husband cut the bread and butter too thick. i saw _that_ with my own eyes. was it _sensibility_, i wonder! they were at least real tears and ran down her cheeks. 'you _always_ do it'! she said. why how you must sympathize with the heroes and heroines of the french romances (_do_ you sympathize with them very much?) when at the slightest provocation they break up the tables and chairs, (a degree beyond the deeds of my childhood!--_i_ only used to upset them) break up the tables and chairs and chiffoniers, and dash the china to atoms. the men _do_ the furniture, and the women the porcelain: and pray observe that they always set about this as a matter of course! when they have broken everything in the room, they sink down quite (and very naturally) _abattus_. i remember a particular case of a hero of frederic soulié's, who, in the course of an 'emotion,' takes up a chair _unconsciously_, and breaks it into very small pieces, and then proceeds with his soliloquy. well!--the clearest idea this excites in _me_, is of the low condition in paris, of moral government and of upholstery. because--just consider for yourself--how _you_ would succeed in breaking to pieces even a three-legged stool if it were properly put together--as stools are in england--just yourself, without a hammer and a screw! you might work at it _comme quatre_, and find it hard to finish, i imagine. and then as a demonstration, a child of six years old might demonstrate just so (in his sphere) and be whipped accordingly. how i go on writing!--and you, who do not write at all!--two extremes, one set against the other. but i must say, though in ever such an ill temper (which you know is just the time to select for writing a panegyric upon good temper) that i am glad you do not despise my own right name too much, because i never was called elizabeth by any one who loved me at all, and i accept the omen. so little it seems my name that if a voice said suddenly 'elizabeth,' i should as soon turn round as my sisters would ... no sooner. only, my own right name has been complained of for want of euphony ... _ba_ ... now and then it has--and mr. boyd makes a compromise and calls me _elibet_, because nothing could induce him to desecrate his organs accustomed to attic harmonies, with a _ba_. so i am glad, and accept the omen. but i give you no credit for not thinking that i may forget you ... i! as if you did not see the difference! why, _i_ could not even forget to _write_ to _you_, observe!-- whenever you write, say how you are. were you wet on wednesday? your own-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday. [post-mark, december , .] i do not, nor will not think, dearest, of ever 'making you happy'--i can imagine no way of working that end, which does not go straight to my own truest, only true happiness--yet in every such effort there is implied some distinction, some supererogatory grace, or why speak of it at all? _you_ it is, are my happiness, and all that ever can be: you--dearest! but never, if you would not, what you will not do i know, never revert to _that_ frightful wish. 'disappoint me?' 'i speak what i know and testify what i have seen'--you shall 'mystery' again and again--i do not dispute that, but do not _you_ dispute, neither, that mysteries are. but it is simply because i do most justice to the mystical part of what i feel for you, because i consent to lay most stress on that fact of facts that i love you, beyond admiration, and respect, and esteem and affection even, and do not adduce any reason which stops short of accounting for _that_, whatever else it would account for, because i do this, in pure logical justice--_you_ are able to turn and wonder (if you _do ... now_) what causes it all! my love, only wait, only believe in me, and it cannot be but i shall, little by little, become known to you--after long years, perhaps, but still one day: i _would_ say _this_ now--but i will write more to-morrow. god bless my sweetest--ever, love, i am your r.b. but my letter came last night, did it not? another thing--no, _to-morrow_--for time presses, and, in all cases, _tuesday_--remember! _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, december , .] i have your letter now, and now i am sorry i sent mine. if i wrote that you had 'forgotten to write,' i did not mean it; not a word! if i had meant it i should not have written it. but it would have been better for every reason to have waited just a little longer before writing at all. a besetting sin of mine is an impatience which makes people laugh when it does not entangle their silks, pull their knots tighter, and tear their books in cutting them open. how right you are about mr. lowell! he has a refined fancy and is graceful for an american critic, but the truth is, otherwise, that he knows nothing of english poetry or the next thing to nothing, and has merely had a dream of the early dramatists. the amount of his reading in that direction is an article in the _retrospective review_ which contains extracts; and he re-extracts the extracts, re-quotes the quotations, and, 'a pede herculem,' from the foot infers the man, or rather from the sandal-string of the foot, infers and judges the soul of the man--it is comparative anatomy under the most speculative conditions. how a writer of his talents and pretensions could make up his mind to make up a book on such slight substratum, is a curious proof of the state of literature in america. do you not think so? why a lecturer on the english dramatists for a 'young ladies' academy' here in england, might take it to be necessary to have better information than he could gather from an odd volume of an old review! and then, mr. lowell's naïveté in showing his authority,--as if the elizabethan poets lay mouldering in inaccessible manuscript somewhere below the lowest deep of shakespeare's grave,--is curious beyond the rest! altogether, the fact is an epigram on the surface-literature of america. as you say, their books do not suit us:--mrs. markham might as well send her compendium of the history of france to m. thiers. if they _knew_ more they could not give parsley crowns to their own native poets when there is greater merit among the rabbits. mrs. sigourney has just sent me--just this morning--her 'scenes in my native land' and, peeping between the uncut leaves, i read of the poet hillhouse, of 'sublime spirit and miltonic energy,' standing in 'the temple of fame' as if it were built on purpose for him. i suppose he is like most of the american poets, who are shadows of the true, as flat as a shadow, as colourless as a shadow, as lifeless and as transitory. mr. lowell himself is, in his verse-books, poetical, if not a poet--and certainly this little book we are talking of is grateful enough in some ways--you would call it a _pretty book_--would you not? two or three letters i have had from him ... all very kind!--and _that_ reminds me, alas! of some ineffable ingratitude on my own part! when one's conscience grows too heavy, there is nothing for it but to throw it away!-- do you remember how i tried to tell you what he said of you, and how you would not let me? mr. mathews said of _him_, having met him once in society, that he was the concentration of conceit in appearance and manner. but since then they seem to be on better terms. where is the meaning, pray, of e.b._c._? _your_ meaning, i mean? my true initials are e.b.m.b.--my long name, as opposed to my short one, being elizabeth barrett moulton barrett!--there's a full length to take away one's breath!--christian name ... elizabeth barrett:--surname, moulton barrett. so long it is, that to make it portable, i fell into the habit of doubling it up and packing it closely, ... and of forgetting that i was a _moulton_, altogether. one might as well write the alphabet as all four initials. yet our family-name is _moulton barrett_, and my brothers reproach me sometimes for sacrificing the governorship of an old town in norfolk with a little honourable verdigris from the heralds' office. as if i cared for the _retrospective review_! nevertheless it is true that i would give ten towns in norfolk (if i had them) to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave! cursed we are from generation to generation!--i seem to hear the 'commination service.' may god bless you always, always! beyond the always of this world!-- your e.b.b. mr. dickens's 'cricket' sings repetitions, and, with considerable beauty, is extravagant. it does not appear to me by any means one of his most successful productions, though quite free from what was reproached as bitterness and one-sidedness, last year. you do not say how you are--not a word! and you are wrong in saying that you 'ought to have written'--as if 'ought' could be in place _so_! you _never 'ought' to write to me you know_! or rather ... if you ever think you ought, you ought not! which is a speaking of mysteries on my part! _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday night. [post-mark, december , .] now, '_ought_' you to be 'sorry you sent that letter,' which made, and makes me so happy--so happy--can you bring yourself to turn round and tell one you have so blessed with your bounty that there was a mistake, and you meant only half that largess? if you are not sensible that you _do_ make me most happy by such letters, and do not warm in the reflection of your own rays, then i _do_ give up indeed the last chance of procuring _you_ happiness. my own 'ought,' which you object to, shall be withdrawn--being only a pure bit of selfishness; i felt, in missing the letter of yours, next day, that i _might_ have drawn it down by one of mine,--if i had begged never so gently, the gold would have fallen--_there_ was my omitted duty to myself which you properly blame. i should stand silently and wait and be sure of the ever-remembering goodness. let me count my gold now--and rub off any speck that stays the full shining. first--_that thought_ ... i told you; i pray you, pray you, sweet--never that again--or what leads never so remotely or indirectly to it! on _your own fancied ground_, the fulfilment would be of necessity fraught with every woe that can fall in this life. i am yours for ever--if you are not _here_, with me--what then? say, you take all of yourself away but just enough to live on; then, _that_ defeats every kind purpose ... as if you cut away all the ground from my feet but so much as serves for bare standing room ... why still, i _stand_ there--and is it the better that i have no broader space, when off _that_ you cannot force me? i have your memory, the knowledge of you, the idea of you printed into my heart and brain,--on that, i can live my life--but it is for you, the dear, utterly generous creature i know you, to give me more and more beyond mere life--to extend life and deepen it--as you do, and will do. oh, _how_ i love you when i think of the entire truthfulness of your generosity to me--how, meaning and willing to _give_, you gave _nobly_! do you think i have not seen in this world how women who _do_ love will manage to confer that gift on occasion? and shall i allow myself to fancy how much alloy such pure gold as _your_ love would have rendered endurable? yet it came, virgin ore, to complete my fortune! and what but this makes me confident and happy? _can_ i take a lesson by your fancies, and begin frightening myself with saying ... 'but if she saw all the world--the worthier, better men there ... those who would' &c. &c. no, i think of the great, dear _gift_ that it was; how i '_won_' nothing (the hateful word, and _french_ thought)--did nothing by my own arts or cleverness in the matter ... so what pretence have the _more_ artful or more clever for:--but i cannot write out this folly--i am yours for ever, with the utmost sense of gratitude--to say i would give you my life joyfully is little.... i would, i hope, do that for two or three other people--but i am not conscious of any imaginable point in which i would not implicitly devote my whole self to you--be disposed of by you as for the best. there! it is not to be spoken of--let me _live_ it into proof, beloved! and for 'disappointment and a burden' ... now--let us get quite away from ourselves, and not see one of the filaments, but only the _cords_ of love with the world's horny eye. have we such jarring tastes, then? does your inordinate attachment to gay life interfere with my deep passion for society? 'have they common sympathy in each other's pursuits?'--always asks mrs. tomkins! well, here was i when you knew me, fixed in my way of life, meaning with god's help to write what may be written and so die at peace with myself so far. can you help me or no? do you _not_ help me so much that, if you saw the more likely peril for poor human nature, you would say, 'he will be jealous of all the help coming from me,--none from him to me!'--and _that would_ be a consequence of the help, all-too-great for hope of return, with any one less possessed than i with the exquisiteness of being _transcended_ and the _blest_ one. but--'here comes the selah and the voice is hushed'--i will speak of other things. when we are together one day--the days i believe in--i mean to set about that reconsidering 'sordello'--it has always been rather on my mind--but yesterday i was reading the 'purgatorio' and the first speech of the group of which sordello makes one struck me with a new significance, as well describing the man and his purpose and fate in my own poem--see; one of the burthened, contorted souls tells virgil and dante-- noi fummo già tutti per forza morti, e _peccatori infin' all' ultim' ora_: quivi--_lume del ciel ne fece accorti si chè, pentendo e perdonando, fora di vita uscimmo a dio pacificati che del disio di se veder n'accora._[ ] which is just my sordello's story ... could i '_do_' it off hand, i wonder-- and sinners were we to the extreme hour; _then_, light from heaven fell, making us aware, so that, repenting us and pardoned, out of life we passed to god, at peace with him who fills the heart with yearning him to see. there were many singular incidents attending my work on that subject--thus, quite at the end, i found out there _was printed_ and not published, a little historical tract by a count v---- something, called 'sordello'--with the motto 'post fata resurgam'! i hope he prophesied. the main of this--biographical notices--is extracted by muratori, i think. last year when i set foot in naples i found after a few minutes that at some theatre, that night, the opera was to be 'one act of sordello' and i never looked twice, nor expended a couple of carlines on the _libretto_! i wanted to tell you, in last letter, that when i spoke of people's tempers _you_ have no concern with 'people'--i do not glance obliquely at _your_ temper--either to discover it, or praise it, or adapt myself to it. i speak of the relation one sees in other cases--how one opposes passionate foolish people, but hates cold clever people who take quite care enough of themselves. i myself am born supremely passionate--so i was born with light yellow hair: all changes--that is the passion changes its direction and, taking a channel large enough, looks calmer, perhaps, than it should--and all my sympathies go with quiet strength, of course--but i know what the other kind is. as for the breakages of chairs, and the appreciation of parisian _meubles_; manibus, pedibusque descendo in tuam sententiam, ba, mi ocelle! ('what was e.b. c?' why, the first letter after, and _not_, e.b. _b_, my own _b_! there was no latent meaning in the c--but i had no inclination to go on to d, or e, for instance). and so, love, tuesday is to be our day--one day more--and then! and meanwhile '_care_' for me! a good word for you--but _my_ care, what is that! one day i aspire to _care_, though! i shall not go away at any dear mr. k.'s coming! they call me down-stairs to supper--and my fire is out, and you keep me from feeling cold and yet ask if i am well? yes, well--yes, happy--and your own ever--i must bid god bless you--dearest! r.b. [footnote : 'purg.' v. .] _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday night. [post-mark, december , .] but did i dispute? surely not. surely i believe in you and in 'mysteries.' surely i prefer the no-reason to ever so much rationalism ... (rationalism and infidelity go together they say!). all which i may do, and be afraid sometimes notwithstanding, and when you overpraise me (_not_ over_love_) i must be frightened as i told you. it is with me as with the theologians. i believe in you and can be happy and safe _so_; but when my 'personal merits' come into question in any way, even the least, ... why then the position grows untenable: it is no more 'of grace.' do i tease you as i tease myself sometimes? but do not wrong me in turn! do not keep repeating that 'after long years' i shall know you--know you!--as if i did not without the years. if you are forced to refer me to those long ears, i must deserve the thistles besides. the thistles are the corollary. for it is obvious--manifest--that i cannot doubt of you, that i may doubt of myself, of happiness, of the whole world,--but of _you_--_not_: it is obvious that if i could doubt of you and _act so_ i should be a very idiot, or worse indeed. and _you_ ... you think i doubt of you whenever i make an interjection!--now do you not? and is it reasonable?--of _you_, i mean? _monday._--for my part, you must admit it to be too possible that you may be, as i say, 'disappointed' in me--it _is_ too possible. and if it does me good to say so, even now perhaps ... if it is mere weakness to say so and simply torments you, why do _you_ be magnanimous and forgive _that_ ... let it pass as a weakness and forgive it _so_. often i think painful things which i do not tell you and.... while i write, your letter comes. kindest of you it was, to write me such a letter, when i expected scarcely the shadow of one!--this makes up for the other letter which i expected unreasonably and which you '_ought not_' to have written, as was proved afterwards. and now why should i go on with that sentence? what had i to say of 'painful things,' i wonder? all the painful things seem gone ... vanished. i forget what i had to say. only do you still think of this, dearest beloved; that i sit here in the dark but for _you_, and that the light you bring me (from _my_ fault!--from the nature of _my_ darkness!) is not a settled light as when you open the shutters in the morning, but a light made by candles which burn some of them longer and some shorter, and some brighter and briefer, at once--being 'double-wicks,' and that there is an intermission for a moment now and then between the dropping of the old light into the socket and the lighting of the new. every letter of yours is a new light which burns so many hours ... and _then_!--i am morbid, you see--or call it by what name you like ... too wise or too foolish. 'if the light of the body is darkness, how great is that darkness.' yet even when i grow too wise, i admit always that while you love me it is an answer to all. and i am never so much too foolish as to wish to be worthier for my own sake--only for yours:--not for my own sake, since i am content to owe all things to you. and it could be so much to you to lose me!--and you say so,--and _then_ think it needful to tell me not to think the other thought! as if _that_ were possible! do you remember what you said once of the flowers?--that you 'felt a respect for them when they had passed out of your hands.' and must it not be so with my life, which if you choose to have it, must be respected too? much more with my life! also, see that i, who had my warmest affections on the other side of the grave, feel that it is otherwise with me now--quite otherwise. i did not like it at first to be so much otherwise. and i could not have had any such thought through a weariness of life or any of my old motives, but simply to escape the 'risk' i told you of. should i have said to you instead of it ... '_love me for ever_'? well then, ... i _do_. as to my 'helping' you, my help is in your fancy; and if you go on with the fancy, i perfectly understand that it will be as good as deeds. we _have_ sympathy too--we walk one way--oh, i do not forget the advantages. only mrs. tomkins's ideas of happiness are below my ambition for you. so often as i have said (it reminds me) that in this situation i should be more exacting than any other woman--so often i have said it: and so different everything is from what i thought it would be! because if i am exacting it is for _you_ and not for _me_--it is altogether for _you_--you understand _that_, dearest of all ... it is for _you wholly_. it never crosses my thought, in a lightning even, the question whether i may be happy so and so--_i_. it is the other question which comes always--too often for peace. people used to say to me, 'you expect too much--you are too romantic.' and my answer always was that 'i could not expect too much when i expected nothing at all' ... which was the truth--for i never thought (and how often i have _said that_!) i never thought that anyone whom _i_ could love, would stoop to love _me_ ... the two things seemed clearly incompatible to my understanding. and now when it comes in a miracle, you wonder at me for looking twice, thrice, four times, to see if it comes through ivory or _horn_. you wonder that it should seem to me at first all illusion--illusion for you,--illusion for me as a consequence. but how natural. it is true of me--very true--that i have not a high appreciation of what passes in the world (and not merely the tomkins-world!) under the name of love; and that a distrust of the thing had grown to be a habit of mind with me when i knew you first. it has appeared to me, through all the seclusion of my life and the narrow experience it admitted of, that in nothing men--and women too--were so apt to mistake their own feelings, as in this one thing. putting _falseness_ quite on one side, quite out of sight and consideration, an honest mistaking of feeling appears wonderfully common, and no mistake has such frightful results--none can. self-love and generosity, a mistake may come from either--from pity, from admiration, from any blind impulse--oh, when i look at the histories of my own female friends--to go no step further! and if it is true of the _women_, what must the other side be? to see the marriages which are made every day! worse than solitudes and more desolate! in the case of the two happiest i ever knew, one of the husbands said in confidence to a brother of mine--not much in confidence or i should not have heard it, but in a sort of smoking frankness,--that he had 'ruined his prospects by marrying'; and the other said to himself at the very moment of professing an extraordinary happiness, ... 'but i should have done as well if i had not married _her_.' then for the falseness--the first time i ever, in my own experience, heard that word which rhymes to glove and comes as easily off and on (on some hands!)--it was from a man of whose attentions to another woman i was at that _time her confidante_. i was bound so to silence for her sake, that i could not even speak the scorn that was in me--and in fact my uppermost feeling was a sort of horror ... a terror--for i was very young then, and the world did, at the moment, look ghastly! the falseness and the calculations!--why how can you, who are _just_, _blame women_ ... when you must know what the 'system' of man is towards them,--and of men not ungenerous otherwise? why are women to be blamed if they act as if they had to do with swindlers?--is it not the mere instinct of preservation which makes them do it? these make women what they are. and your 'honourable men,' the most loyal of them, (for instance) is it not a rule with them (unless when taken unaware through a want of self-government) to force a woman (trying all means) to force a woman to stand committed in her affections ... (they with their feet lifted all the time to trample on her for want of delicacy) before _they_ risk the pin-prick to their own personal pitiful vanities? oh--to see how these things are set about by _men_! to see how a man carefully holding up on each side the skirts of an embroidered vanity to keep it quite safe from the wet, will contrive to tell you in so many words that he ... might love you if the sun shone! and women are to be blamed! why there are, to be sure, cold and heartless, light and changeable, ungenerous and calculating women in the world!--that is sure. but for the most part, they are only what they are made ... and far better than the nature of the making ... of that i am confident. the loyal make the loyal, the disloyal the disloyal. and i give no more discredit to those women you speak of, than i myself can take any credit in this thing--i. because who could be disloyal with _you_ ... with whatever corrupt inclination? _you_, who are the noblest of all? if you judge me so, ... it is my privilege rather than my merit ... as i feel of myself. _wednesday._--all but the last few lines of all this was written before i saw you yesterday, ever dearest--and since, i have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. it seems to me too that the language is freer--there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. it just strikes me so for the first impression. at any rate the interest grows and grows. you have a secret about domizia, i guess--which will not be told till the last perhaps. and that poor, noble luria, who will be equal to the leap ... as it is easy to see. it is full, altogether, of magnanimities;--noble, and nobly put. i will go on with my notes, and those, you shall have at once ... i mean together ... presently. and don't hurry and chafe yourself for the fourth act--now that you are better! to be ill again--think what that would be! luria will be great now whatever you do--or whatever you do _not_. will he not? and never, never for a moment (i quite forgot to tell you) did i fancy that you were talking at _me_ in the temper-observations--never. it was the most unprovoked egotism, all that i told you of my temper; for certainly i never suspected you of asking questions so. i was simply amused a little by what you said, and thought to myself (if you _will_ know my thoughts on that serious subject) that you had probably lived among very good-tempered persons, to hold such an opinion about the innocuousness of ill-temper. it was all i thought, indeed. now to fancy that i was capable of suspecting you of such a manoeuvre! why you would have _asked_ me directly;--if you had wished 'curiously to enquire.' an excellent solemn chiming, the passage from dante makes with your 'sordello,' and the 'sordello' _deserves_ the labour which it needs, to make it appear the great work it is. i think that the principle of association is too subtly in movement throughout it--so that _while_ you are going straight forward you go at the same time round and round, until the progress involved in the motion is lost sight of by the lookers on. or did i tell you that before? you have heard, i suppose, how dickens's 'cricket' sells by nineteen thousand copies at a time, though he takes michael angelo to be 'a humbug'--or for 'though' read 'because.' tell me of mr. kenyon's dinner and moxon? is not this an infinite letter? i shall hear from you, i hope.... i _ask_ you to let me hear soon. i write all sorts of things to you, rightly and wrongly perhaps; when wrongly forgive it. i think of you always. may god bless you. 'love me for ever,' as your _ba_ _r.b. to e.b.b._ th dec. [ .] my dear christmas gift of a letter! i will write back a few lines, (all i can, having to go out now)--just that i may forever,--certainly during our mortal 'forever'--mix my love for you, and, as you suffer me to say, your love for me ... dearest! ... these shall be mixed with the other loves of the day and live therein--as i write, and trust, and know--forever! while i live i will remember what was my feeling in reading, and in writing, and in stopping from either ... as i have just done ... to kiss you and bless you with my whole heart.--yes, yes, bless you, my own! all is right, all of your letter ... admirably right and just in the defence of the women i _seemed_ to speak against; and only seemed--because that is a way of mine which you must have observed; that foolish concentrating of thought and feeling, for a moment, on some one little spot of a character or anything else indeed, and in the attempt to do justice and develop whatever may seem ordinarily to be overlooked in it,--that over vehement _insisting_ on, and giving an undue prominence to, the same--which has the effect of taking away from the importance of the rest of the related objects which, in truth, are not considered at all ... or they would also rise proportionally when subjected to the same (that is, correspondingly magnified and dilated) light and concentrated feeling. so, you remember, the old divine, preaching on 'small sins,' in his zeal to expose the tendencies and consequences usually made little account of, was led to maintain the said small sins to be 'greater than great ones.' _but then_ ... if you look on the world _altogether_, and accept the small natures, in their usual proportion with the greater ... things do not look _quite_ so bad; because the conduct which _is_ atrocious in those higher cases, of proposal and acceptance, _may_ be no more than the claims of the occasion justify (wait and hear) in certain other cases where the thing sought for and granted is avowedly less by a million degrees. it shall all be traffic, exchange (counting spiritual gifts as only coin, for our purpose), but surely the formalities and policies and decencies all vary with the nature of the thing trafficked for. if a man makes up his mind during half his life to acquire a pitt-diamond or a pilgrim-pearl--[he] gets witnesses and testimony and so forth--but, surely, when i pass a shop where oranges are ticketed up seven for sixpence i offend no law by sparing all words and putting down the piece with a certain authoritative ring on the counter. if instead of diamonds you want--(being a king or queen)--provinces with live men on them ... there is so much more diplomacy required; new interests are appealed to--high motives _supposed_, at all events--whereas, when, in naples, a man asks leave to black your shoe in the dusty street 'purely for the honour of serving your excellency' you laugh and would be sorry to find yourself without a 'grano' or two--(six of which, about, make a farthing)--now do you not see! where so little is to be got, why offer much more? if a man knows that ... but i am teaching you! all i mean is, that, in benedick's phrase, 'the world must go on.' he who honestly wants his wife to sit at the head of his table and carve ... that is be his _help-meat_ (not 'help mete for him')--he shall assuredly find a girl of his degree who wants the table to sit at; and some dear friend to mortify, who _would_ be glad of such a piece of fortune; and if that man offers that woman a bunch of orange-flowers and a sonnet, instead of a buck-horn-handled sabre-shaped knife, sheathed in a 'every lady her own _market-woman_, being a table of' &c. &c.--_then_, i say he is-- bless you, dearest--the clock strikes--and time is none--but--bless you! your own r.b. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday . p.m. [post-mark, december , .] i was forced to leave off abruptly on christmas morning--and now i have but a few minutes before our inexorable post leaves. i hoped to return from town earlier. but i can say something--and monday will make amends. 'for ever' and for ever i _do_ love you, dearest--love you with my whole heart--in life, in death-- yes; i did go to mr. kenyon's--who had a little to forgive in my slack justice to his good dinner, but was for the rest his own kind self--and i went, also, to moxon's--who said something about my number's going off 'rather heavily'--so let it! too good, too, too indulgent you are, my own ba, to 'acts' first or last; but all the same, i am glad and encouraged. _let_ me get done with these, and better things will follow. now, bless you, ever, my sweetest--i have you ever in my thoughts--and on monday, remember, i am to see you. your own r.b. see what i cut out of a _cambridge advertiser_[ ] of the th--to make you laugh! [footnote : the cutting enclosed is:--'a few rhymes for the present christmas' by j. purchas, esq., b.a. it is headed by several quotations, the first of which is signed 'elizabeth b. barrett:' 'this age shows to my thinking, still more infidels to adam, than directly, by profession, simple infidels to god.' this is followed by extracts from pindar, 'lear,' and the hon. mrs. norton.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, december , .] yes, indeed, i have 'observed that way' in you, and not once, and not twice, and not twenty times, but oftener than any,--and almost every time ... do you know, ... with an uncomfortable feeling from the reflection that _that_ is the way for making all sorts of mistakes dependent on and issuing in exaggeration. it is the very way!--the highway. for what you say in the letter here otherwise, i do not deny the truth--as partial truth:--i was speaking generally quite. admit that i am not apt to be extravagant in my _esprit de sexe_: the martineau doctrines of intellectual equality &c., i gave them up, you remember, like a woman--most disgracefully, as mrs. jameson would tell me. but we are not on that ground now--we are on ground worth holding a brief for!--and when women fail _here_ ... it is not so much our fault. which was all i meant to say from the beginning. it reminds me of the exquisite analysis in your 'luria,' this third act, of the worth of a woman's sympathy,--indeed of the exquisite double-analysis of unlearned and learned sympathies. nothing could be better, i think, than this:-- to the motive, the endeavour,--the heart's self-- your quick sense looks; you crown and call aright the soul of the purpose ere 'tis shaped as act, takes flesh i' the world, and clothes itself a king; except the characterizing of the 'learned praise,' which comes afterwards in its fine subtle truth. what would these critics do to you, to what degree undo you, who would deprive you of the exercise of the discriminative faculty of the metaphysicians? as if a poet could be great without it! they might as well recommend a watchmaker to deal only in faces, in dials, and not to meddle with the wheels inside! you shall tell mr. forster so. and speaking of 'luria,' which grows on me the more i read, ... how fine he is when the doubt breaks on him--i mean, when he begins ... 'why then, all is very well.' it is most affecting, i think, all that process of doubt ... and that reference to the friends at home (which at once proves him a stranger, and intimates, by just a stroke, that he will not look home for comfort out of the new foreign treason) is managed by you with singular dramatic dexterity.... ... 'so slight, so slight, and yet it tells you they are dead and gone'-- and then, the direct approach.... you now, so kind here, all you florentines, what is it in your eyes?-- do you not feel it to be success, ... '_you_ now?' _i_ do, from my low ground as reader. the whole breaking round him of the cloud, and the manner in which he _stands_, facing it, ... i admire it all thoroughly. braccio's vindication of florence strikes me as almost too _poetically_ subtle for the man--but nobody could have the heart to wish a line of it away--_that_ would be too much for critical virtue! i had your letter yesterday morning early. the post-office people were so resolved on keeping their christmas, that they would not let me keep mine. no post all day, after that general post before noon, which never brings me anything worth the breaking of a seal! am i to see you on monday? if there should be the least, least crossing of that day, ... anything to do, anything to see, anything to listen to,--remember how tuesday stands close by, and that another monday comes on the following week. now i need not say _that_ every time, and you will please to remember it--eccellenza!-- may god bless you-- your e.b.b. from the _new monthly magazine_. 'the admirers of robert browning's poetry, and they are now very numerous, will be glad to hear of the issue by mr. moxon of a seventh series of the renowned "bells" and delicious "pomegranates," under the title of "dramatic romances and lyrics."' _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, december , .] when you are gone i find your flowers; and you never spoke of nor showed them to me--so instead of yesterday i thank you to-day--thank you. count among the miracles that your flowers live with me--i accept _that_ for an omen, dear--dearest! flowers in general, all other flowers, die of despair when they come into the same atmosphere ... used to do it so constantly and observably that it made me melancholy and i left off for the most part having them here. now you see how they put up with the close room, and condescend to me and the dust--it is true and no fancy! to be sure they know that i care for them and that i stand up by the table myself to change their water and cut their stalk freshly at intervals--_that_ may make a difference perhaps. only the great reason must be that they are yours, and that you teach them to bear with me patiently. do not pretend even to misunderstand what i meant to say yesterday of dear mr. kenyon. his blame would fall as my blame of myself has fallen: he would say--will say--'it is ungenerous of her to let such a risk be run! i thought she would have been more generous.' there, is mr. kenyon's opinion as i foresee it! not that it would be spoken, you know! he is too kind. and then, he said to me last summer, somewhere _à propos_ to the flies or butterflies, that he had 'long ceased to wonder at any extreme of foolishness produced by--_love_.' he will of course think you very very foolish, but not ungenerously foolish like other people. never mind. i do not mind indeed. i mean, that, having said to myself worse than the worst perhaps of what can be said against me by any who regard me at all, and feeling it put to silence by the fact that you _do_ feel so and so for me; feeling that fact to be an answer to all,--i cannot mind much, in comparison, the railing at second remove. there will be a nine days' railing of it and no more: and if on the ninth day you should not exactly wish never to have known me, the better reason will be demonstrated to stand with us. on this one point the wise man cannot judge for the fool his neighbour. if you _do_ love me, the inference is that you would be happier with than without me--and whether you do, you know better than another: so i think of _you_ and not of _them_--always of _you_! when i talked of being afraid of dear mr. kenyon, i just meant that he makes me nervous with his all-scrutinizing spectacles, put on for great occasions, and his questions which seem to belong to the spectacles, they go together so:--and then i have no presence of mind, as you may see without the spectacles. my only way of hiding (when people set themselves to look for me) would be the old child's way of getting behind the window curtains or under the sofa:--and even _that_ might not be effectual if i had recourse to it now. do you think it would? two or three times i fancied that mr. kenyon suspected something--but if he ever _did_, his only reproof was a reduplicated praise of _you_--he praises you always and in relation to every sort of subject. what a _misomonsism_ you fell into yesterday, you who have much great work to do which no one else can do except just yourself!--and you, too, who have courage and knowledge, and must know that every work, with the principle of life in it, _will_ live, let it be trampled ever so under the heel of a faithless and unbelieving generation--yes, that it will live like one of your toads, for a thousand years in the heart of a rock. all men can teach at second or third hand, as you said ... by prompting the foremost rows ... by tradition and translation:--all, _except_ poets, who must preach their own doctrine and sing their own song, to be the means of any wisdom or any music, and therefore have stricter duties thrust upon them, and may not lounge in the [greek: stoa] like the conversation-teachers. so much i have to say to you, till we are in the siren's island--and _i_, jealous of the siren!-- the siren waits thee singing song for song, says mr. landor. a prophecy which refuses to class you with the 'mute fishes,' precisely as i do. and are you not my 'good'--all my good now--my only good ever? the italians would say it better without saying more. i had a letter from miss martineau this morning who accounts for her long silence by the supposition,--put lately to an end by scarcely credible information from mr. moxon, she says--that i was out of england; gone to the south from the th of september. she calls herself the strongest of women, and talks of 'walking fifteen miles one day and writing fifteen pages another day without fatigue,'--also of mesmerizing and of being infinitely happy except in the continued alienation of two of her family who cannot forgive her for getting well by such unlawful means. and she is to write again to tell me of wordsworth, and promises to send me her new work in the meanwhile--all very kind. so here is my letter to you, which you asked for so 'against the principles of universal justice.' yes, very unjust--very unfair it was--only, you make me do just as you like in everything. now confess to your own conscience that even if i had not a lawful claim of a debt against you, i might come to ask charity with another sort of claim, oh 'son of humanity.' think how much more need of a letter _i_ have than you can have; and that if you have a giant's power, ''tis tyrannous to use it like a giant.' who would take tribute from the desert? how i grumble. _do_ let me have a letter directly! remember that no other light comes to my windows, and that i wait 'as those who watch for the morning'--'lux mea!' may god bless you--and mind to say how you are _exactly_, and don't neglect the walking, _pray_ do not. your own and after all, those women! a great deal of doctrine commends and discommends itself by the delivery: and an honest thing may be said so foolishly as to disprove its very honesty. now after all, what did she mean by that very silly expression about books, but that she did not feel as she considered herself capable of feeling--and that else but _that_ was the meaning of the other woman? perhaps it should have been spoken earlier--nay, clearly it should--but surely it was better spoken even in the last hour than not at all ... surely it is always and under all circumstances, better spoken at whatever cost--i have thought so steadily since i could think or feel at all. an entire openness to the last moment of possible liberty, at whatever cost and consequence, is the most honourable and most merciful way, both for men and women! perhaps for men in an especial manner. but i shall send this letter away, being in haste to get change for it. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday, december , . i have been properly punished for so much treachery as went to that re-urging the prayer that _you_ would begin writing, when all the time (after the first of those words had been spoken which bade _me_ write) i was full of purpose to send my own note last evening; one which should do its best to thank you: but see, the punishment! at home i found a note from mr. horne--on the point of setting out for ireland, too unwell to manage to come over to me; anxious, so he said, to see me before leaving london, and with only tuesday or to-day to allow the opportunity of it, if i should choose to go and find him out. so i considered all things and determined to go--but not till so late did i determine on tuesday, that there was barely time to get to highgate--wherefore no letter reached you to beg pardon ... and now this undeserved--beyond the usual undeservedness--this last-day-of-the-year's gift--do you think or not think my gratitude weighs on me? when i lay this with the others, and remember what you have done for me--i do bless you--so as i cannot but believe must reach the all-beloved head all my hopes and fancies and cares fly straight to. dearest, whatever change the new year brings with it, we are together--i can give you no more of myself--indeed, you give me now (back again if you choose, but changed and renewed by your possession) the powers that seemed most properly mine. i could only mean that, by the expressions to which you refer--only could mean that you were my crown and palm branch, now and for ever, and so, that it was a very indifferent matter to me if the world took notice of that fact or no. yes, dearest, that _is_ the meaning of the prophecy, which i was stupidly blind not to have read and taken comfort from long ago. you are the veritable siren--and you 'wait me,' and will sing 'song for song.' and this is my first song, my true song--this love i bear you--i look into my heart and then let it go forth under that name--love. i am more than mistrustful of many other feelings in me: they are not earnest enough; so far, not true enough--but this is all the flower of my life which you call forth and which lies at your feet. now let me say it--what you are to remember. that if i had the slightest doubt, or fear, i would utter it to you on the instant--secure in the incontested stability of the main _fact_, even though the heights at the verge in the distance should tremble and prove vapour--and there would be a deep consolation in your forgiveness--indeed, yes; but i tell you, on solemn consideration, it does seem to me that--once take away the broad and general words that admit in their nature of any freight they can be charged with,--put aside love, and devotion, and trust--and _then_ i seem to have said _nothing_ of my feeling to you--nothing whatever. i will not write more now on this subject. believe you are my blessing and infinite reward beyond possible desert in intention,--my life has been crowned by you, as i said! may god bless you ever--through you i shall be blessed. may i kiss your cheek and pray this, my own, all-beloved? i must add a word or two of other things. i am very well now, quite well--am walking and about to walk. horne, or rather his friends, reside in the very lane keats loved so much--millfield lane. hunt lent me once the little copy of the first poems dedicated to him--and on the title-page was recorded in hunt's delicate characters that 'keats met him with this, the presentation-copy, or whatever was the odious name, in m---- lane--called poets' lane by the gods--keats came running, holding it up in his hand.' coleridge had an affection for the place, and shelley '_knew_' it--and i can testify it is green and silent, with pleasant openings on the grounds and ponds, through the old trees that line it. but the hills here are far more open and wild and hill-like; not with the eternal clump of evergreens and thatched summer house--to say nothing of the 'invisible railing' miserably visible everywhere. you very well know _what_ a vision it is you give me--when you speak of _standing up by the table_ to care for my flowers--(which i will never be ashamed of again, by the way--i will say for the future; 'here are my best'--in this as in other things.) now, do you remember, that once i bade you not surprise me out of my good behaviour by standing to meet me unawares, as visions do, some day--but now--_omne ignotum_? no, dearest! ought i to say there will be two days more? till saturday--and if one word comes, _one_ line--think! i am wholly yours--yours, beloved! r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ january , [ ]. how good you are--how best! it is a favourite play of my memory to take up the thought of what you were to me (to my mind gazing!) years ago, as the poet in an abstraction--then the thoughts of you, a little clearer, in concrete personality, as mr. kenyon's friend, who had dined with him on such a day, or met him at dinner on such another, and said some great memorable thing 'on wednesday last,' and enquired kindly about _me_ perhaps on thursday,--till i was proud! and so, the thoughts of you, nearer and nearer (yet still afar!) as the mr. browning who meant to do me the honour of writing to me, and who did write; and who asked me once in a letter (does he remember?) 'not to lean out of the window while his foot was on the stair!'--to take up all those thoughts, and more than those, one after another, and tie them together with all _these_, which cannot be named so easily--which cannot be classed in botany and greek. it is a nosegay of mystical flowers, looking strangely and brightly, and keeping their may-dew through the christmases--better than even _your_ flowers! and i am not 'ashamed' of mine, ... be very sure! no! for the siren, i never suggested to you any such thing--why you do not pretend to have read such a suggestion in my letter certainly. _that_ would have been most exemplarily modest of me! would it not, o ulysses? and you meant to write, ... you _meant_! and went to walk in 'poet's lane' instead, (in the 'aonius of highgate') which i remember to have read of--does not hunt speak of it in his memoirs?--and so now there is another track of light in the traditions of the place, and people may talk of the pomegranate-smell between the hedges. so you really have _hills_ at new cross, and not hills by courtesy? i was at hampstead once--and there was something attractive to me in that fragment of heath with its wild smell, thrown down ... like a sicilian rose from proserpine's lap when the car drove away, ... into all that arid civilization, 'laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,' as you say!--and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with its witness against nature! people grew severely in jest about cockney landscape--but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off, where human creatures ruminate stupidly as the cows do, the 'county families' es-_chewing_ all men who are not 'landed proprietors,' and the farmers never looking higher than to the fly on the uppermost turnip-leaf! do you know at all what english country-life is, which the english praise so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest, purest, noblest thing in the world--the purely english and excellent thing? it is to my mind simply and purely abominable, and i would rather live in a street than be forced to live it out,--that english country-life; for i don't mean life in the country. the social exigencies--why, nothing _can_ be so bad--nothing! that is the way by which englishmen grow up to top the world in their peculiar line of respectable absurdities. think of my talking so as if i could be vexed with any one of them! _i!_--on the contrary i wish them all a happy new year to abuse one another, or visit each of them his nearest neighbour whom he hates, three times a week, because 'the distance is so convenient,' and give great dinners in noble rivalship (venison from the lord lieutenant against turbot from london!), and talk popularity and game-law by turns to the tenantry, and beat down tithes to the rector. this glorious england of ours; with its peculiar glory of the rural districts! and _my_ glory of patriotic virtue, who am so happy in spite of it all, and make a pretence of talking--talking--while i think the whole time of your letter. i think of your letter--i am no more a patriot than _that_! may god bless you, best and dearest! you say things to me which i am not worthy to listen to for a moment, even if i was deaf dust the next moment.... i confess it humbly and earnestly as before god. yet he knows,--if the entireness of a gift means anything,--that i have not given with a reserve, that i am yours in my life and soul, for this year and for other years. let me be used _for_ you rather than _against_ you! and that unspeakable, immeasurable grief of feeling myself a stone in your path, a cloud in your sky, may i be saved from it!--pray it for _me_ ... for _my_ sake rather than _yours_. for the rest, i thank you, i thank you. you will be always to me, what to-day you are--and that is all!--! i am your own-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday night. [post-mark, january , .] yesterday, nearly the last thing, i bade you 'think of me'--i wonder if you could misunderstand me in that?--as if my words or actions or any of my ineffectual outside-self _should_ be thought of, unless to be forgiven! but i do, dearest, feel confident that while i am in your mind--cared for, rather than thought about--no great harm can happen to me; and as, for great harm to reach me, it must pass through you, you will care for yourself; _my_self, best self! come, let us talk. i found horne's book at home, and have had time to see that fresh beautiful things are there--i suppose 'delora' will stand alone still--but i got pleasantly smothered with that odd shower of wood-spoils at the end, the dwarf-story; cup-masses and fern and spotty yellow leaves,--all that, i love heartily--and there is good sailor-speech in the 'ben capstan'--though he does knock a man down with a 'crow-bar'--instead of a marling-spike or, even, a belaying-pin! the first tale, though good, seems least new and individual, but i must know more. at one thing i wonder--his not reprinting a quaint clever _real_ ballad, published before 'delora,' on the 'merry devil of edmonton'--the first of his works i ever read. no, the very first piece was a single stanza, if i remember, in which was this line: 'when bason-crested quixote, lean and bold,'--good, is it not? oh, while it strikes me, good, too, _is_ that 'swineshead monk' ballad! only i miss the old chronicler's touch on the method of concocting the poison: 'then stole this monk into the garden and under a certain herb found out a toad, which, squeezing into a cup,' &c. something to that effect. i suspect, _par parenthèse_, you have found out by this time my odd liking for 'vermin'--you once wrote '_your_ snails'--and certainly snails are old clients of mine--but efts! horne traced a line to me--in the rhymes of a ''prentice-hand' i used to look over and correct occasionally--taxed me (last week) with having altered the wise line 'cold as a _lizard_ in a _sunny_ stream' to 'cold as a newt hid in a shady brook'--for 'what do _you_ know about newts?' he asked of the author--who thereupon confessed. but never try and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in italy, love, and you see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his winter-house--because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him and stay in your fingers--and though you afterwards learn that there is more desperation in it and glorious determination to be free, than positive pain (so people say who have no tails to be twisted off)--and though, moreover, the tail grows again after a sort--_yet_ ... don't do it, for it will give you a thrill! what a fine fellow our english water-eft is; 'triton paludis linnaei'--_e come guizza_ (_that_ you can't say in another language; cannot preserve the little in-and-out motion along with the straightforwardness!)--i always loved all those wild creatures god '_sets up for themselves_' so independently of us, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them; while we run about and against each other with our great cressets and fire-pots. i once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, perhaps--'safe as oedipus's grave-place, 'mid colone's olives swart'--(kiss me, my siren!)--well, it seemed awful to watch that bee--he seemed so _instantly_ from the teaching of god! Ælian says that ... a _frog_, does he say?--some animal, having to swim across the nile, never fails to provide himself with a bit of reed, which he bites off and holds in his mouth transversely and so puts from shore gallantly ... because when the water-serpent comes swimming to meet him, there is the reed, wider than his serpent's jaws, and no hopes of a swallow that time--now fancy the two meeting heads, the frog's wide eyes and the vexation of the snake! now, see! do i deceive you? never say i began by letting down my dignity 'that with no middle flight intends to soar above the aonian mount'!-- my best, dear, dear one,--may you be better, less _depressed_, ... i can hardly imagine frost reaching you if i could be by you. think what happiness you mean to give me,--what a life; what a death! 'i may change'--too true; yet, you see, as an eft was to me at the beginning so it continues--i _may_ take up stones and pelt the next i see--but--do you much fear that?--now, _walk_, move, _guizza, anima mia dolce_. shall i not know one day how far your mouth will be from mine as we walk? may i let that stay ... dearest, (the _line_ stay, not the mouth)? i am not very well to-day--or, rather, have not been so--_now_, i am well and _with you_. i just say that, very needlessly, but for strict frankness' sake. now, you are to write to me soon, and tell me all about your self, and to love me ever, as i love you ever, and bless you, and leave you in the hands of god--my own love!-- tell me if i do wrong to send _this_ by a morning post--so as to reach you earlier than the evening--when you will ... write to me? don't let me forget to say that i shall receive the _review_ to-morrow, and will send it directly. _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, january , .] when you get mr. horne's book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, i could not help speaking coldly a little of it--and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, i did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty. but last night i read the 'monk of swineshead abbey' and the 'three knights of camelott' and 'bedd gelert' and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration. do you remember this application, among the countless ones of shadow to the transiency of life? i give the first two lines for clearness-- like to the cloud upon the hill we are a moment seen or the _shadow of the windmill-sail across yon sunny slope of green_. new or not, and i don't remember it elsewhere, it is just and beautiful i think. think how the shadow of the windmill-sail just touches the ground on a bright windy day! the shadow of a bird flying is not faster! then the 'three knights' has beautiful things, with more definite and distinct images than he is apt to show--for his character is a vague grand massiveness,--like stonehenge--or at least, if 'towers and battlements he sees' they are 'bosomed high' in dusky clouds ... it is a 'passion-created imagery' which has no clear outline. in this ballad of the 'knights,' and in the monk's too, we may _look at_ things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, 'while, _holding beards_, they dance in pairs--and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan festivals, 'in orion.' but now tell me if you like altogether 'ben capstan' and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because i do not indeed. on the same principle we may have yorkshire and somersetshire 'sweet doric'; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the blowsibella heroines. then for the elf story ... why should such things be written by men like mr. horne? i am vexed at it. shakespeare and fletcher did not write so about fairies:--drayton did not. look at the exquisite 'nymphidia,' with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse ... '_machina intersit_' ... grandmama grey!--to say nothing of the 'small dog' that isn't the 'small boy.' mr. horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics. he cannot make a fine stroke. he wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression. remember, i admire him honestly and earnestly. no one has admired more than i the 'death of marlowe,' scenes in 'cosmo,' and 'orion' in much of it. but now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems? i am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly. who combines different faculties as you do, striking the whole octave? no one, at present in the world. dearest, after you went away yesterday and i began to consider, i found that there was nothing to be so over-glad about in the matter of the letters, for that, sunday coming next to saturday, the best now is only as good as the worst before, and i can't hear from you, until monday ... monday! did you think of _that_--you who took the credit of acceding so meekly! i shall not praise you in return at any rate. i shall have to wait ... till what o'clock on monday, tempted in the meanwhile to fall into controversy against the 'new moons and sabbath days' and the pausing of the post in consequence. you never guessed perhaps, what i look back to at this moment in the physiology of our intercourse, the curious double feeling i had about you--you personally, and you as the writer of these letters, and the crisis of the feeling, when i was positively vexed and jealous of myself for not succeeding better in making a unity of the two. i could not! and moreover i could not help but that the writer of the letters seemed nearer to me, long ... long ... and in spite of the postmark, than did the personal visitor who confounded me, and left me constantly under such an impression of its being all dream-work on his side, that i have stamped my feet on this floor with impatience to think of having to wait so many hours before the 'candid' closing letter could come with its confessional of an illusion. 'people say,' i used to think, 'that women _always_ know, and certainly i do not know, and therefore ... therefore.'--the logic crushed on like juggernaut's car. but in the letters it was different--the dear letters took me on the side of my own ideal life where i was able to stand a little upright and look round. i could read such letters for ever and answer them after a fashion ... that, i felt from the beginning. but _you_--! _monday._--never too early can the light come. thank you for my letter! yet you look askance at me over 'newt and toad,' and praise so the elf-story that i am ashamed to send you my ill humour on the same head. and you really like _that_? admire it? grandmama grey and the night cap and all? and 'shoetye and blue sky?' and is it really wrong of me to like certainly some touches and images, but not the whole, ... not the poem as a whole? i can take delight in the fantastical, and in the grotesque--but here there is a want of life and consistency, as it seems to me!--the elf is no elf and speaks no elf-tongue: it is not the right key to touch, ... this, ... for supernatural music. so i fancy at least--but i will try the poem again presently. you must be right--unless it should be your over-goodness opposed to my over-badness--i will not be sure. or you wrote perhaps in an accidental mood of most excellent critical smoothness, such as mr. forster did his last _examiner_ in, when he gave the all-hail to mr. harness as one of the best dramatists of the age!! ah no!--not such as mr. forster's. your soul does not enter into his secret--there can be nothing in common between you. for him to say such a word--he who knows--or ought to know!--and now let us agree and admire the bowing of the old ministrel over bedd gelert's unfilled grave-- the _long_ beard _fell_ like _snow_ into the grave with solemn grace a poet, a friend, a generous man mr. horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies. i have this moment a parcel of books via mr. moxon--miss martineau's two volumes--and mr. bailey sends his 'festus,' very kindly, ... and 'woman in the nineteenth century' from america from a mrs. or a miss fuller--how i hate those 'women of england,' 'women and their mission' and the rest. as if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs. your letter would be worth them all, if _you_ were less _you_! i mean, just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your own pedant's book in the tree. and do you know, i think i like frogs too--particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds. i remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other. but for the toad!--why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom i, for one, never dared approach too nearly. that he 'wore a jewel in his head' i doubted nothing at all. you must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. and on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, i never looked steadily; i would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad's head to spit at me i should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the medici. oh--and i had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat's nest if i had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and blue-bottle flies i used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much. my aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding _bat_; and even now, i think, i could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor. if you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing--the wing never waves! a bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! it is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. and then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound--and go ... you cannot guess where!--fade with the night-blackness! you have not been well--which is my first thought if not my first word. do walk, and do not work; and think ... what i could be thinking of, if i did not think of _you_ ... dear--dearest! 'as the doves fly to the windows,' so i think of you! as the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of heaven, so i think of you. when i look up straight to god ... nothing, no one, used to intercept me--now there is _you_--only you under him! do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so. you are to be thought of every way. you must know what you are to me if you know at all what _i_ am,--and what i should be but for you. so ... love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts--and i will believe in _you_ as you believe ... in Ælian--will _that_ do? your own-- say how you are when you write--_and write_. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. i this minute receive the review--a poor business, truly! is there a reason for a man's wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical high-place to hold forth?--i have only glanced over the article however. well, one day _i_ am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better than _that_! i am forced to send now what is to be sent at all. bless you, dearest. i am trusting to hear from you-- your r.b. and i find by a note from a fairer friend and favourer of mine that in the _new quarterly_ 'mr. browning' figures pleasantly as 'one without any sympathy for a human being!'--then, for newts and efts at all events! _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday night. [post-mark, january , .] but, my sweet, there is safer going in letters than in visits, do you not see? in the letter, one may go to the utmost limit of one's supposed tether without danger--there is the distance so palpably between the most audacious step _there_, and the next ... which is nowhere, seeing it is not in the letter. quite otherwise in personal intercourse, where any indication of turning to a certain path, even, might possibly be checked not for its own fault but lest, the path once reached and proceeded in, some other forbidden turning might come into sight, we will say. in the letter, all ended _there_, just there ... and you may think of that, and forgive; at all events, may avoid speaking irrevocable words--and when, as to me, those words are intensely _true, doom-words_--think, dearest! because, as i told you once, what most characterizes my feeling for you is the perfect _respect_ in it, the full _belief_ ... (i shall get presently to poor robert's very avowal of 'owing you all esteem'!). it is on that i build, and am secure--for how should i know, of myself, how to serve you and be properly yours if it all was to be learnt by my own interpreting, and what you professed to dislike you were to be considered as wishing for, and what liking, as it seemed, you were loathing at your heart, and if so many 'noes' made a 'yes,' and 'one refusal no rebuff' and all that horrible bestiality which stout gentlemen turn up the whites of their eyes to, when they rise after dinner and pressing the right hand to the left side say, 'the toast be dear woman!' now, love, with this feeling in me from the beginning,--i do believe,--_now_, when i am utterly blest in this gift of your love, and least able to imagine what i should do without it,--i cannot but believe, i say, that had you given me once a 'refusal'--clearly derived from your own feelings, and quite apart from any fancied consideration for my interests; had this come upon me, whether slowly but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by any step of mine; i should, _believing you_, have never again renewed directly or indirectly such solicitation; i should have begun to count how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to you ... but from _the outside_, now, and not in your livery! now, if i should have acted thus under _any_ circumstances, how could i but redouble my endeavours at precaution after my own foolish--you know, and forgave long since, and i, too, am forgiven in my own eyes, for the cause, though not the manner--but could i do other than keep 'farther from you' than in the letters, dearest? for your own part in that matter, seeing it with all the light you have since given me (and _then_, not inadequately by my own light) i could, i do kiss your feet, kiss every letter in your name, bless you with my whole heart and soul if i could pour them out, from me, before you, to stay and be yours; when i think on your motives and pure perfect generosity. it was the plainness of _that_ which determined me to wait and be patient and grateful and your own for ever in any shape or capacity you might please to accept. do you think that because i am so rich now, i could not have been most rich, too, _then_--in what would seem little only to _me_, only with this great happiness? i should have been proud beyond measure--happy past all desert, to call and be allowed to see you simply, speak with you and be spoken to--what am i more than others? don't think this mock humility--_it is not_--you take me in your mantle, and we shine together, but i know my part in it! all this is written breathlessly on a sudden fancy that you _might_--if not now, at some future time--give other than this, the true reason, for that discrepancy you see, that nearness in the letters, that early farness in the visits! and, love, all love is but a passionate _drawing closer_--i would be one with you, dearest; let my soul press close to you, as my lips, dear life of my life. _wednesday._--you are entirely right about those poems of horne's--i spoke only of the effect of the first glance, and it is a principle with me to begin by welcoming any strangeness, intention of originality in men--the other way of safe copying precedents being _so_ safe! so i began by praising all that was at all questionable in the form ... reserving the ground-work for after consideration. the elf-story turns out a pure mistake, i think--and a common mistake, too. fairy stories, the good ones, were written for men and women, and, being true, pleased also children; now, people set about writing for children and miss them and the others too,--with that detestable irreverence and plain mocking all the time at the very wonder they profess to want to excite. all obvious bending down to the lower capacity, determining not to be the great complete man one is, by half; any patronizing minute to be spent in the nursery over the books and work and healthful play, of a visitor who will presently bid good-bye and betake himself to the beefsteak club--keep us from all that! the sailor language is good in its way; but as wrongly used in art as real clay and mud would be, if one plastered them in the foreground of a landscape in order to attain to so much truth, at all events--the true thing to endeavour is the making a golden colour which shall do every good in the power of the dirty brown. well, then, what a veering weathercock am i, to write so and now, _so_! not altogether,--for first it was but the stranger's welcome i gave, the right of every new comer who must stand or fall by his behaviour once admitted within the door. and then--when i know what horne thinks of--you, dearest; how he knew you first, and from the soul admired you; and how little he thinks of my good fortune ... i _could_ not begin by giving you a bad impression of anything he sends--he has such very few rewards for a great deal of hard excellent enduring work, and _none_, no reward, i do think, would he less willingly forego than your praise and sympathy. but your opinion once expressed--truth remains the truth--so, at least, i excuse myself ... and quite as much for what i say _now_ as for what was said _then_! 'king john' is very fine and full of purpose; 'the noble heart,' sadly faint and uncharacteristic. the chief incident, too, turns on that poor conventional fallacy about what constitutes a proper wrong to resist--a piece of morality, after a different standard, is introduced to complete another fashioned morality--a segment of a circle of larger dimensions is fitted into a smaller one. now, you may have your own standard of morality in this matter of resistance to wrong, how and when if at all. and you may quite understand and sympathize with quite different standards innumerable of other people; but go from one to the other abruptly, you cannot, i think. 'bear patiently all injuries--revenge in no case'--that is plain. 'take what you conceive to be god's part, do his evident work, stand up for good and destroy evil, and co-operate with this whole scheme here'--_that_ is plain, too,--but, call otto's act _no_ wrong, or being one, not such as should be avenged--and then, call the remark of a stranger that one is a 'recreant'--just what needs the slight punishment of instant death to the remarker--and ... where is the way? what _is_ clear? --not my letter! which goes on and on--'dear letters'--sweetest? because they cost all the precious labour of making out? well, i shall see you to-morrow, i trust. bless you, my own--i have not half said what was to say even in the letter i thought to write, and which proves only what you see! but at a thought i fly off with you, 'at a cock-crow from the grange.'--ever your own. last night, i received a copy of the _new quarterly_--now here is popular praise, a sprig of it! instead of the attack i supposed it to be, from my foolish friend's account, the notice is outrageously eulogistical, a stupidly extravagant laudation from first to last--and in _three other_ articles, as my sister finds by diligent fishing, they introduce my name with the same felicitous praise (except one instance, though, in a good article by chorley i am certain); and _with_ me i don't know how many poetical _crétins_ are praised as noticeably--and, in the turning of a page, somebody is abused in the richest style of scavengering--only carlyle! and i love him enough not to envy him nor wish to change places, and giving him mine, mount into his. all which, let me forget in the thoughts of to-morrow! bless you, my ba. _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, january , .] but some things are indeed said very truly, and as i like to read them--of _you_, i mean of course,--though i quite understand that it is doing no manner of good to go back so to 'paracelsus,' heading the article 'paracelsus and other poems,' as if the other poems could not front the reader broadly by a divine right of their own. 'paracelsus' is a great work and will _live_, but the way to do you good with the stiffnecked public (such good as critics can do in their degree) would have been to hold fast and conspicuously the gilded horn of the last living crowned creature led by you to the altar, saying 'look _here_.' what had he to do else, as a critic? was he writing for the _retrospective review_? and then, no attempt at analytical criticism--or a failure, at the least attempt! all slack and in sentences! still these are right things to say, true things, worthy things, said of you as a poet, though your poems do not find justice: and i like, for my own part, the issuing from my cathedral into your great world--the outermost temple of divinest consecration. i like that figure and association, and none the worse for its being a sufficient refutation of what he dared to impute, of your poetical sectarianism, in another place--_yours_! for me, it is all quite kind enough--only i object, on my own part also, to being reviewed in the 'seraphim,' when my better books are nearer: and also it always makes me a little savage when people talk of tennysonianisms! i have faults enough as the muses know,--but let them be _my_ faults! when i wrote the 'romaunt of margret,' i had not read a line of tennyson. i came from the country with my eyes only half open, and he had not penetrated where i had been living and sleeping: and in fact when i afterwards tried to reach him here in london, nothing could be found except one slim volume, so that, till the collected works appeared ... _favente_ moxon, ... i was ignorant of his best _early_ productions; and not even for the rhythmetical form of my 'vision of the poets,' was i indebted to the 'two voices,'--three pages of my 'vision' having been written several years ago--at the beginning of my illness--and thrown aside, and taken up again in the spring of . ah, well! there's no use talking! in a solitary review which noticed my 'essay on mind,' somebody wrote ... 'this young lady imitates darwin'--and i never could _read_ darwin, ... was stopped always on the second page of the 'loves of the plants' when i tried to read him to 'justify myself in having an opinion'--the repulsion was too strong. yet the 'young lady imitated darwin' of course, as the infallible critic said so. and who are mr. helps and miss emma fisher and the 'many others,' whose company brings one down to the right plebeianism? the 'three poets in three distant ages born' may well stare amazed! after all you shall not by any means say that i upset the inkstand on your review in a passion--because pray mark that the ink has over-run some of your praises, and that if i had been angry to the overthrow of an inkstand, it would not have been precisely _there_. it is the second book spoilt by me within these two days--and my fingers were so dabbled in blackness yesterday that to wring my hands would only have made matters worse. holding them up to mr. kenyon they looked dirty enough to befit a poetess--as black 'as bard beseemed'--and he took the review away with him to read and save it from more harm. how could it be that you did not get my letter which would have reached you, i thought, on monday evening, or on tuesday at the very very earliest?--and how is it that i did not hear from you last night again when i was unreasonable enough to expect it? is it true that you _hate_ writing to me? at that word, comes the review back from dear mr. kenyon, and the letter which i enclose to show you how it accounts reasonably for the ink--i did it 'in a pet,' he thinks! and i ought to buy you a new book--certainly i ought--only it is not worth doing justice for--and i shall therefore send it back to you spoilt as it is; and you must forgive me as magnanimously as you can. 'omne ignotum pro magnifico'--do you think _so_? i hope not indeed! _vo quietando_--and everything else that i ought to do--except of course, _that_ thinking of you which is so difficult. may god bless you. till to-morrow! your own always. mr. kenyon refers to 'festus'--of which i had said that the fine things were worth looking for, in the design manqué. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, january , .] you never think, ever dearest, that i 'repent'--why what a word to use! you never could _think_ such a word for a moment! if you were to leave me even,--to decide that it is best for you to do it, and do it,--i should accede at once of course, but never should i nor could i 'repent' ... regret anything ... be sorry for having known you and loved you ... no! which i say simply to prove that, in _no_ extreme case, could i repent for my own sake. for yours, it might be different. _not_ out of 'generosity' certainly, but from the veriest selfishness, i choose here, before god, any possible present evil, rather than the future consciousness of feeling myself less to you, on the whole, than another woman might have been. oh, these vain and most heathenish repetitions--do i not vex you by them, _you_ whom i would always please, and never vex? yet they force their way because you are the best noblest and dearest in the world, and because your happiness is so precious a thing. cloth of frieze, be not too bold, though thou'rt matched with cloth of gold! --_that_, beloved, was written for _me_. and you, if you would make me happy, _always_ will look at yourself from my ground and by my light, as i see you, and consent to be selfish in all things. observe, that if i were _vacillating_, i should not be so weak as to tease you with the process of the vacillation: i should wait till my pendulum ceased swinging. it is precisely because i am your own, past any retraction or wish of retraction,--because i belong to you by gift and ownership, and am ready and willing to prove it before the world at a word of yours,--it is precisely for this, that i remind you too often of the necessity of using this right of yours, not to your injury, of being wise and strong for both of us, and of guarding your happiness which is mine. i have said these things ninety and nine times over, and over and over have you replied to them,--as yesterday!--and now, do not speak any more. it is only my preachment for general use, and not for particular application,--only to be _ready_ for application. i love you from the deepest of my nature--the whole world is nothing to me beside you--and what is so precious, is not far from being terrible. 'how _dreadful_ is this place.' to hear you talk yesterday, is a gladness in the thought for to-day,--it was with such a full assent that i listened to every word. it is true, i think, that we see things (things apart from ourselves) under the same aspect and colour--and it is certainly true that i have a sort of instinct by which i seem to know your views of such subjects as we have never looked at together. i know _you_ so well (yes, i boast to myself of that intimate knowledge), that i seem to know also the _idola_ of all things as they are in your eyes--so that never, scarcely, i am curious,--never anxious, to learn what your opinions may be. now, _have_ i been curious or anxious? it was enough for me to know _you_. more than enough! you have 'left undone'--do you say? on the contrary, you have done too much,--you _are_ too much. my cup,--which used to hold at the bottom of it just the drop of heaven dew mingling with the absinthus,--has overflowed all this wine: and _that_ makes me look out for the vases, which would have held it better, had you stretched out your hand for them. say how you are--and do take care and exercise--and write to me, dearest! ever your own-- ba. how right you are about 'ben capstan,'--and the illustration by the _yellow clay_. that is precisely what i meant,--said with more precision than i could say it. art without an ideal is neither nature nor art. the question involves the whole difference between madame tussaud and phidias. i have just received mr. edgar poe's book--and i see that the deteriorating preface which was to have saved me from the vanity-fever produceable by the dedication, is cut down and away--perhaps in this particular copy only! tuesday is so near, as men count, that i caught myself just now being afraid lest the week should have no chance of appearing long to you! try to let it be long to you--will you? my consistency is wonderful. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. as if i could deny you anything! here is the review--indeed it was foolish to mind your seeing it at all. but now, may i stipulate?--you shall not send it back--but on your table i shall find and take it next tuesday--_c'est convenu_! the other precious volume has not yet come to hand (nor to foot) all through your being so sure that to carry it home would have been the death of me last evening! i cannot write my feelings in this large writing, begun on such a scale for the review's sake; and just now--there is no denying it, and spite of all i have been incredulous about--it does seem that the fact _is_ achieved and that i _do_ love you, plainly, surely, more than ever, more than any day in my life before. it is your secret, the why, the how; the experience is mine. what are you doing to me?--in the heart's heart. rest--dearest--bless you-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, january , .] kindest and dearest you are!--that is 'my secret' and for the others, i leave them to you!--only it is no secret that i should and must be glad to have the words you sent with the book,--which i should have seen at all events be sure, whether you had sent it or not. should i not, do you think? and considering what the present generation of critics really is, the remarks on you may stand, although it is the dreariest impotency to complain of the want of flesh and blood and of human sympathy in general. yet suffer them to say on--it is the stamp on the critical knife. there must be something eminently stupid, or farewell criticdom! and if anything more utterly untrue could be said than another, it is precisely that saying, which mr. mackay stands up to catch the reversion of! do you indeed suppose that heraud could have done this? i scarcely can believe it, though some things are said rightly as about the 'intellectuality,' and how you stand first by the brain,--which is as true as truth can be. then, i _shall have 'pauline' in a day or two_--yes, i shall and must, and _will_. the 'ballad poems and fancies,' the article calling itself by that name, seems indeed to be mr. chorley's, and is one of his very best papers, i think. there is to me a want of colour and thinness about his writings in general, with a grace and _savoir faire_ nevertheless, and always a rightness and purity of intention. observe what he says of 'many-sidedness' seeming to trench on opinion and principle. that, he means for himself i know, for he has said to me that through having such largeness of sympathy he has been charged with want of principle--yet 'many-sidedness' is certainly no word for him. the effect of general sympathies may be evolved both from an elastic fancy and from breadth of mind, and it seems to me that he rather _bends_ to a phase of humanity and literature than contains it--than comprehends it. every part of a truth implies the whole; and to accept truth all round, does not mean the recognition of contradictory things: universal sympathies cannot make a man inconsistent, but, on the contrary, sublimely consistent. a church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast: but the willow-tree at the gable-end, blown now toward the north and now toward the south while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ... _as_ different as a willow-tree from a church tower. ah, what nonsense! there is only one truth for me all this time, while i talk about truth and truth. and do you know, when you have told me to think of you, i have been feeling ashamed of thinking of you so much, of thinking of only you--which _is_ too much, perhaps. shall i tell you? it seems to me, to myself, that no man was ever before to any woman what you are to me--the fulness must be in proportion, you know, to the vacancy ... and only _i_ know what was behind--the long wilderness _without_ the blossoming rose ... and the capacity for happiness, like a black gaping hole, before this silver flooding. is it wonderful that i should stand as in a dream, and disbelieve--not _you_--but my own fate? was ever any one taken suddenly from a lampless dungeon and placed upon the pinnacle of a mountain, without the head turning round and the heart turning faint, as mine do? and you love me _more_, you say?--shall i thank you or god? both,--indeed--and there is no possible return from me to either of you! i thank you as the unworthy may ... and as we all thank god. how shall i ever prove what my heart is to you? how will you ever see it as i feel it? i ask myself in vain. have so much faith in me, my only beloved, as to use me simply for your own advantage and happiness, and to your own ends without a thought of any others--_that_ is all i could ask you with any disquiet as to the granting of it--may god bless you!-- your ba. but you have the review _now_--surely? the _morning chronicle_ attributes the authorship of 'modern poets' (_our_ article) to lord john manners--so i hear this morning. i have not yet looked at the paper myself. the _athenæum_, still abominably dumb!-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday. [post-mark, january , .] this is _no_ letter--love,--i make haste to tell you--to-morrow i will write. for here has a friend been calling and consuming my very destined time, and every minute seemed the last that was to be; and an old, old friend he is, beside--so--you must understand my defection, when only this scrap reaches you to-night! ah, love,--you are my unutterable blessing,--i discover you, more of you, day by day,--hour by hour, i do think!--i am entirely yours,--one gratitude, all my soul becomes when i see you over me as now--god bless my dear, dearest. my 'act fourth' is done--but too roughly this time! i will tell you-- one kiss more, dearest! thanks for the review. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday. [post-mark, january , .] i have no words for you, my dearest,--i shall never have. you are mine, i am yours. now, here is one sign of what i said ... that i must love you more than at first ... a little sign, and to be looked narrowly for or it escapes me, but then the increase it shows _can_ only be little, so very little now--and as the fine french chemical analysts bring themselves to appreciate matter in its refined stages by _millionths_, so--! at first i only thought of being _happy_ in you,--in your happiness: now i most think of you in the dark hours that must come--i shall grow old with you, and die with you--as far as i can look into the night i see the light with me. and surely with that provision of comfort one should turn with fresh joy and renewed sense of security to the sunny middle of the day. i am in the full sunshine now; and _after_, all seems cared for,--is it too homely an illustration if i say the day's visit is not crossed by uncertainties as to the return through the wild country at nightfall?--now keats speaks of 'beauty, that must _die_--and joy whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding farewell!' and _who_ spoke of--looking up into the eyes and asking 'and _how long_ will you love us'?--there is a beauty that will not die, a joy that bids no farewell, dear dearest eyes that will love for ever! and _i_--am to love no longer than i can. well, dear--and when i _can_ no longer--you will not blame me? you will do only as ever, kindly and justly; hardly more. i do not pretend to say i have chosen to put my fancy to such an experiment, and consider how _that_ is to happen, and what measures ought to be taken in the emergency--because in the 'universality of my sympathies' i certainly number a very lively one with my own heart and soul, and cannot amuse myself by such a spectacle as their supposed extinction or paralysis. there is no doubt i should be an object for the deepest commiseration of you or any more fortunate human being. and i hope that because such a calamity does not obtrude itself on me as a thing to be prayed against, it is no less duly implied with all the other visitations from which no humanity can be altogether exempt--just as god bids us ask for the continuance of the 'daily bread'!--'battle, murder and sudden death' lie behind doubtless. i repeat, and perhaps in so doing only give one more example of the instantaneous conversion of that indignation we bestow in another's case, into wonderful lenity when it becomes our own, ... that i only contemplate the _possibility_ you make me recognize, with pity, and fear ... no anger at all; and imprecations of vengeance, _for what_? observe, i only speak of cases _possible_; of sudden impotency of mind; that _is_ possible--there _are_ other ways of '_changing_,' 'ceasing to love' &c. which it is safest not to think of nor believe in. a man _may_ never leave his writing desk without seeing safe in one corner of it the folded slip which directs the disposal of his papers in the event of his reason suddenly leaving him--or he may never go out into the street without a card in his pocket to signify his address to those who may have to pick him up in an apoplectic fit--but if he once begins to fear he is growing a glass bottle, and, _so_, liable to be smashed,--do you see? and now, love, dear heart of my heart, my own, only ba--see no more--see what i _am_, what god in his constant mercy ordinarily grants to those who have, as i, received already so much; much, past expression! it is but--if you will so please--at worst, forestalling the one or two years, for my sake; but you _will_ be as sure of me _one_ day as i can be now of myself--and why not _now_ be sure? see, love--a year is gone by--we were in one relation when you wrote at the end of a letter 'do not say i do not tire you' (by writing)--'_i am sure i do_.' a year has gone by--_did you tire me then?_ _now_, you tell me what is told; for my sake, sweet, let the few years go by; we are married, and my arms are round you, and my face touches yours, and i am asking you, '_were you not_ to me, in that dim beginning of , a joy behind all joys, a life added to and transforming mine, the good i choose from all the possible gifts of god on this earth, for which i seemed to have lived; which accepting, i thankfully step aside and let the rest get what they can; what, it is very likely, they esteem more--for why should my eye be evil because god's is good; why should i grudge that, giving them, i do believe, infinitely less, he gives them a content in the inferior good and belief in its worth? i should have wished _that_ further concession, that illusion as i believe it, for their sakes--but i cannot undervalue my own treasure and so scant the only tribute of mere gratitude which is in my power to pay. hear this said _now before_ the few years; and believe in it _now for then_, dearest! must you see 'pauline'? at least then let me wait a few days; to correct the misprints which affect the sense, and to write you the history of it; what is necessary you should know before you see it. that article i suppose to be by heraud--about two thirds--and the rest, or a little less, by that mr. powell--whose unimaginable, impudent vulgar stupidity you get some inkling of in the 'story from boccaccio'--of which the _words_ quoted were _his_, i am sure--as sure as that he knows not whether boccaccio lived before or after shakspeare, whether florence or rome be the more northern city,--one word of italian in general, or letter of boccaccio's in particular. when i took pity on him once on a time and helped his verses into a sort of grammar and sense, i did not think he was a _buyer_ of other men's verses, to be printed as his own; thus he _bought_ two modernisations of chaucer--'ugolino' and another story from leigh hunt--and one, 'sir thopas' from horne, and printed them as his own, as i learned only last week. he paid me extravagant court and, seeing no harm in the mere folly of the man, i was on good terms with him, till ten months ago he grossly insulted a friend of mine who had written an article for the review--(which is as good as _his_, he being a large proprietor of the delectable property, and influencing the voices of his co-mates in council)--well, he insulted my friend, who had written that article at my special solicitation, and did all he could to avoid paying the price of it--why?--because the poor creature had actually taken the article to the editor _as one by his friend serjeant talfourd contributed for pure love of him, powell the aforesaid_,--cutting, in consequence, no inglorious figure in the eyes of printer and publisher! now i was away all this time in italy or he would never have ventured on such a piece of childish impertinence. and my friend being a true gentleman, and quite unused to this sort of 'practice,' in the american sense, held his peace and went without his 'honorarium.' but on my return, i enquired, and made him make a proper application, which mr. powell treated with all the insolence in the world--because, as the event showed, the having to write a cheque for 'the author of _the_ article'--that author's name _not_ being talfourd's ... _there_ was certain disgrace! since then (ten months ago) i have never seen him--and he accuses _himself_, observe, of 'sucking my plots while i drink his tea'--one as much as the other! and now why do i tell you this, all of it? ah,--now you shall hear! because, it has often been in my mind to ask you what _you_ know of this mr. powell, or ever knew. for he, (being profoundly versed in every sort of untruth, as every fresh experience shows me, and the rest of his acquaintance) he told me long ago, 'he used to correspond with you, and that he quarrelled with you'--which i supposed to mean that he began by sending you his books (as with one and everybody) and that, in return to your note of acknowledgment, he had chosen to write again, and perhaps, again--is it so? do not write one word in answer to me--the name of such a miserable nullity, and husk of a man, ought not to have a place in your letters--and _that way_ he would get near to me again; near indeed this time!--so _tell_ me, in a word--or do not tell me. how i never say what i sit down to say! how saying the little makes me want to say the more! how the least of little things, once taken up as a thing to be imparted to you, seems to need explanations and commentaries; all is of importance to me--every breath you breathe, every little fact (like this) you are to know! i was out last night--to see the rest of frank talfourd's theatricals; and met dickens and his set--so my evenings go away! if i do not bring the _act_ you must forgive me--yet i shall, i think; the roughness matters little in this stage. chorley says very truly that a tragedy implies as much power _kept back_ as brought out--very true that is. i do not, on the whole, feel dissatisfied--as was to be but expected--with the effect of this last--the _shelve_ of the hill, whence the end is seen, you continuing to go down to it, so that at the very last you may pass off into a plain and so away--not come to a stop like your horse against a church wall. it is all in long speeches--the _action, proper_, is in them--they are no descriptions, or amplifications--but here, in a drama of this kind, all the _events_, (and interest), take place in the _minds_ of the actors ... somewhat like 'paracelsus' in that respect. you know, or don't know, that the general charge against me, of late, from the few quarters i thought it worth while to listen to, has been that of abrupt, spasmodic writing--they will find some fault with this, of course. how you know chorley! that is precisely the man, that willow blowing now here now there--precisely! i wish he minded the _athenæum_, its silence or eloquence, no more nor less than i--but he goes on painfully plying me with invitation after invitation, only to show me, i feel confident, that _he_ has no part nor lot in the matter: i have _two_ kind little notes asking me to go on thursday and saturday. see the absurd position of us both; he asks more of my presence than he can want, just to show his own kind feeling, of which i do not doubt; and i must try and accept more hospitality than suits me, only to prove my belief in that same! for myself--if i have vanity which such journals can raise; would the praise of them raise it, they who praised mr. mackay's own, own 'dead pan,' quite his own, the other day?--by the way, miss cushman informed me the other evening that the gentleman had written a certain 'song of the bell' ... 'singularly like schiller's; _considering that mr. m. had never_ seen it!' i am told he writes for the _athenæum_, but don't know. would that sort of praise be flattering, or his holding the tongue--which forster, deep in the mysteries of the craft, corroborated my own notion about--as pure willingness to hurt, and confessed impotence and little clever spite, and enforced sense of what may be safe at the last? you shall see they will not notice--unless a fresh publication alters the circumstances--until some seven or eight months--as before; and then they _will_ notice, and _praise_, and tell anybody who cares to enquire, '_so_ we noticed the work.' so do not you go expecting justice or injustice till i tell you. it answers me to be found writing so, so anxious to prove i understand the laws of the game, when that game is only 'thimble-rig' and for prizes of gingerbread-nuts--prize or no prize, mr. dilke _does_ shift the pea, and so did from the beginning--as charles lamb's pleasant _sobriquet_ (mr. _bilk_, he would have it) testifies. still he behaved kindly to that poor frances brown--let us forget him. and now, my audience, my crown-bearer, my path-preparer--i am with you again and out of them all--there, _here_, in my arms, is my _proved palpable success_! my life, my poetry, gained nothing, oh no!--but this found them, and blessed them. on tuesday i shall see you, dearest--am much better; well to-day--are you well--or 'scarcely to be called an invalid'? oh, when i _have_ you, am by you-- bless you, dearest--and be very sure you have your wish about the length of the week--still tuesday must come! and with it your own, happy, grateful r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday night. [post-mark, january , .] ah mr. kenyon!--how he vexed me to-day. to keep away all the ten days before, and to come just at the wrong time after all! it was better for you, i suppose--believe--to go with him down-stairs--yes, it certainly was better: it was disagreeable enough to be very wise! yet i, being addicted to every sort of superstition turning to melancholy, did hate so breaking off in the middle of that black thread ... (do you remember what we were talking of when they opened the door?) that i was on the point of saying 'stay one moment,' which i should have repented afterwards for the best of good reasons. oh, i _should_ have liked to have 'fastened off' that black thread, and taken one stitch with a blue or a green one! you do not remember what we were talking of? what _you_, rather, were talking of? and what _i_ remember, at least, because it is exactly the most unkind and hard thing you ever said to me--ever dearest, so i remember it by that sign! that you should say such a thing to me--! think what it was, for indeed i will not write it down here--it would be worse than mr. powell! only the foolishness of it (i mean, the foolishness of it alone) saves it, smooths it to a degree!--the foolishness being the same as if you asked a man where he would walk when he lost his head. why, if you had asked st. denis _beforehand_, he would have thought it a foolish question. and you!--you, who talk so finely of never, never doubting; of being such an example in the way of believing and trusting--it appears, after all, that you have an imagination apprehensive (or comprehensive) of 'glass bottles' like other sublunary creatures, and worse than some of them. for mark, that i never went any farther than to the stone-wall hypothesis of your forgetting me!--_i_ always stopped there--and never climbed, to the top of it over the broken-bottle fortification, to see which way you meant to walk afterwards. and you, to ask me so coolly--think what you asked me. that you should have the heart to ask such a question! and the reason--! and it could seem a reasonable matter of doubt to you whether i would go to the south for my health's sake!--and i answered quite a common 'no' i believe--for you bewildered me for the moment--and i have had tears in my eyes two or three times since, just through thinking back of it all ... of your asking me such questions. now did i not tell you when i first knew you, that i was leaning out of the window? true, _that_ was--i was tired of living ... unaffectedly tired. all i cared to live for was to do better some of the work which, after all, was out of myself, and which i had to reach across to do. but i told you. then, last year, for duty's sake i would have _consented_ to go to italy! but if you really fancy that i would have struggled in the face of all that difficulty--or struggled, indeed, anywise, to compass such an object as _that_--except for the motive of your caring for it and me--why you know nothing of me after all--nothing! and now, take away the motive, and i am where i was--leaning out of the window again. to put it in plainer words (as you really require information), i should let them do what they liked to me till i was dead--only i _wouldn't go to italy_--if anybody proposed italy out of contradiction. in the meantime i do entreat you never to talk of such a thing to me any more. you know, if you were to leave me by your choice and for your happiness, it would be another thing. it would be very lawful to talk of _that_. and observe! i perfectly understand that you did not think of _doubting me_--so to speak! but you thought, all the same, that if such a thing happened, i should be capable of doing so and so. well--i am not quarrelling--i am uneasy about your head rather. that pain in it--what can it mean? i do beseech you to think of me just so much as will lead you to take regular exercise every day, never missing a day; since to walk till you are tired on tuesday and then not to walk at all until friday is _not_ taking exercise, nor the thing required. ah, if you knew how dreadfully natural every sort of evil seems to my mind, you would not laugh at me for being afraid. i do beseech you, dearest! and then, sir john hanmer invited you, besides mr. warburton, and suppose you went to _him_ for a very little time--just for the change of air? or if you went to the coast somewhere. will you consider, and do what is right, _for me_? i do not propose that you should go to italy, observe, nor any great thing at which you might reasonably hesitate. and--did you ever try smoking as a remedy? if the nerves of the head chiefly are affected it might do you good, i have been thinking. or without the smoking, to breathe where tobacco is burnt,--_that_ calms the nervous system in a wonderful manner, as i experienced once myself when, recovering from an illness, i could not sleep, and tried in vain all sorts of narcotics and forms of hop-pillow and inhalation, yet was tranquillized in one half hour by a _pinch_ of _tobacco_ being burnt in a shovel near me. should you mind it very much? the trying i mean? _wednesday._--for '_pauline_'--when i had named it to you i was on the point of sending for the book to the booksellers--then suddenly i thought to myself that i should wait and hear whether you very, very much would dislike my reading it. see now! many readers have done virtuously, but _i_, (in this virtue i tell you of) surpassed them all!--and now, because i may, i '_must_ read it':--and as there are misprints to be corrected, will you do what is necessary, or what you think is necessary, and bring me the book on monday? do not send--bring it. in the meanwhile i send back the review which i forgot to give to you yesterday in the confusion. perhaps you have not read it in your house, and in any case there is no use in my keeping it. shall i hear from you, i wonder! oh my vain thoughts, that will not keep you well! and, ever since you have known me, you have been worse--_that_, you confess!--and what if it should be the crossing of my bad star? _you_ of the 'crown' and the 'lyre,' to seek influences from the 'chair of cassiopeia'! i hope she will forgive me for using her name so! i might as well have compared her to a professorship of poetry in the university of oxford, according to the latest election. you know, the qualification, there, is,--_not to be a poet_. how vexatious, yesterday! the stars (talking of _them_) were out of spherical tune, through the damp weather, perhaps, and that scarlet sun was a sign! first mr. chorley!--and last, dear mr. kenyon; who _will_ say tiresome things without any provocation. did you walk with him his way, or did he walk with you yours? or did you only walk down-stairs together? write to me! remember that it is a month to monday. think of your very own, who bids god bless you when she prays best for herself!-- e.b.b. say particularly how you are--now do not omit it. and will you have miss martineau's books when i can lend them to you? just at this moment i _dare_ not, because they are reading them here. let mr. mackay have his full proprietary in his 'dead pan'--which is quite a different conception of the subject, and executed in blank verse too. i have no claims against him, i am sure! but for the _man_!--to call him a poet! a prince and potentate of commonplaces, such as he is!--i have seen his name in the _athenæum_ attached to a lyric or two ... poems, correctly called fugitive,--more than usually fugitive--but i never heard before that his hand was in the prose department. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, january , .] was i in the wrong, dearest, to go away with mr. kenyon? i _well knew and felt_ the price i was about to pay--but the thought _did_ occur that he might have been informed my probable time of departure was that of his own arrival--and that he would not know how very soon, alas, i should be _obliged_ to go--so ... to save you any least embarrassment in the world, i got--just that shake of the hand, just that look--and no more! and was it all for nothing, all needless after all? so i said to myself all the way home. when i am away from you--a crowd of things press on me for utterance--'i will say them, not write them,' i think:--when i see you--all to be said seems insignificant, irrelevant,--'they can be written, at all events'--i think _that_ too. so, feeling so much, i say so little! i have just returned from town and write for the post--but _you_ mean to write, i trust. _that_ was not obtained, that promise, to be happy with, as last time! how are you?--tell me, dearest; a long week is to be waited now! bless you, my own, sweetest ba. i am wholly your r. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday. [post-mark, january , .] dearest, dearer to my heart minute by minute, i had no wish to give you pain, god knows. no one can more readily consent to let a few years more or less of life go out of account,--be lost--but as i sate by you, you so full of the truest life, for this world as for the next,--and was struck by the possibility, all that might happen were i away, in the case of your continuing to acquiesce--dearest, it _is_ horrible--could not but speak. if in drawing you, all of you, closer to my heart, i hurt you whom i would--_outlive_ ... yes,--cannot speak here--forgive me, ba. my ba, you are to consider now for me. your health, your strength, it is all wonderful; that is not my dream, you know--but what all see. now, steadily care for us both--take time, take counsel if you choose; but at the end tell me what you will do for your part--thinking of me as utterly devoted, soul and body, to you, living wholly in your life, seeing good and ill only as you see,--being yours as your hand is,--or as your flush, rather. then i will, on my side, prepare. when i say 'take counsel'--i reserve my last right, the man's right of first speech. _i_ stipulate, too, and require to say my own speech in my own words or by letter--remember! but this living without you is too tormenting now. so begin thinking,--as for spring, as for a new year, as for a new life. i went no farther than the door with mr. kenyon. he must see the truth; and--you heard the playful words which had a meaning all the same. no more of this; only, think of it for me, love! one of these days i shall write a long letter--on the omitted matters, unanswered questions, in your past letters. the present joy still makes me ungrateful to the previous one; but i remember. we are to live together one day, love! will you let mr. poe's book lie on the table on monday, if you please, that i may read what he _does_ say, with my own eyes? _that_ i meant to ask, too! how too, too kind you are--how you care for so little that affects me! i am very much better--i went out yesterday, as you found: to-day i shall walk, beside seeing chorley. and certainly, certainly i would go away for a week, if so i might escape being ill (and away from you) a fortnight; but i am _not_ ill--and will care, as you bid me, beloved! so, you will send, and take all trouble; and all about that crazy review! now, you should not!--i will consider about your goodness. i hardly know if i care to read that kind of book just now. will you, and must you have 'pauline'? if i could pray you to revoke that decision! for it is altogether foolish and _not_ boylike--and i shall, i confess, hate the notion of running over it--yet commented it must be; more than mere correction! i was unluckily _precocious_--but i had rather you _saw_ real infantine efforts (verses at six years old, and drawings still earlier) than this ambiguous, feverish--why not wait? when you speak of the 'bookseller'--i smile, in glorious security--having a whole bale of sheets at the house-top. he never knew my name even!--and i withdrew these after a very little time. and now--here is a vexation. may i be with you (for this once) next monday, at _two_ instead of _three_ o'clock? forster's business with the new paper obliges him, he says, to restrict his choice of days to _monday_ next--and give up _my_ part of monday i will never for fifty forsters--now, sweet, mind that! monday is no common day, but leads to a _saturday_--and if, as i ask, i get leave to call at --and to stay till - / --though i then lose nearly half an hour--yet all will be comparatively well. if there is any difficulty--one word and i re-appoint our party, his and mine, for the day the paper breaks down--not so long to wait, it strikes me! now, bless you, my precious ba--i am your own-- --your own r. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, january , .] our letters have crossed; and, mine being the longest, i have a right to expect another directly, i think. i have been calculating: and it seems to me--now what i am going to say may take its place among the paradoxes,--that i gain most by the short letters. last week the only long one came last, and i was quite contented that the 'old friend' should come to see you on saturday and make you send me two instead of the single one i looked for: it was a clear gain, the little short note, and the letter arrived all the same. i remember, when i was a child, liking to have two shillings and sixpence better than half a crown--and now it is the same with this fairy money, which will never turn all into pebbles, or beans, whatever the chronicles may say of precedents. arabel did tell mr. kenyon (she told me) that 'mr. browning would soon go away'--in reply to an observation of his, that 'he would not stay as i had company'; and altogether it was better,--the lamp made it look late. but you do not appear in the least remorseful for being tempted of my black devil, my familiar, to ask such questions and leave me under such an impression--'mens conscia recti' too!!-- and mr. kenyon will not come until next monday perhaps. how am i? but i am too well to be asked about. is it not a warm summer? the weather is as 'miraculous' as the rest, i think. it is you who are unwell and make people uneasy, dearest. say how you are, and promise me to do what is right and try to be better. the walking, the changing of the air, the leaving off luria ... do what is right, i earnestly beseech you. the other day, i heard of tennyson being ill again, ... too ill to write a simple note to his friend mr. venables, who told george. a little more than a year ago, it would have been no worse a thing to me to hear of your being ill than to hear of his being ill!--how the world has changed since then! to _me_, i mean. did i say _that_ ever ... that 'i knew you must be tired?' and it was not even so true as that the coming event threw its shadow before? _thursday night._--i have begun on another sheet--i could not write here what was in my heart--yet i send you this paper besides to show how i was writing to you this morning. in the midst of it came a female friend of mine and broke the thread--the visible thread, that is. and now, even now, at this safe eight o'clock, i could not be safe from somebody, who, in her goodnature and my illfortune, must come and sit by me--and when my letter was come--'why wouldn't i read it? what wonderful politeness on my part.' she would not and could not consent to keep me from reading my letter. she would stand up by the fire rather. no, no, three times no. brummel got into the carriage before the regent, ... (didn't he?) but i persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend. a notice on my punctiliousness may be put down to-night in her 'private diary.' i kept the letter in my hand and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. not _all_, however, happily for me! or my friend would have seen in my eyes what _they_ did not see. may god bless you! did i ever say that i had an objection to read the verses at six years old--or see the drawings either? i am reasonable, you observe! only, 'pauline,' i must have _some day_--why not without the emendations? but if you insist on them, i will agree to wait a little--if you promise _at last_ to let me see the book, which i will not show. some day, then! you shall not be vexed nor hurried for the day--some day. am i not generous? and _i_ was 'precocious' too, and used to make rhymes over my bread and milk when i was nearly a baby ... only really it was mere echo-verse, that of mine, and had nothing of mark or of indication, such as i do not doubt that yours had. i used to write of virtue with a large 'v,' and 'oh muse' with a harp, and things of that sort. at nine years old i wrote what i called 'an epic'--and at ten, various tragedies, french and english, which we used to act in the nursery. there was a french 'hexameter' tragedy on the subject of regulus--but i cannot even smile to think of it now, there are so many grave memories--which time has made grave--hung around it. how i remember sitting in 'my house under the sideboard,' in the dining-room, concocting one of the soliloquies beginning que suis je? autrefois un général remain: maintenant esclave de carthage je souffre en vain. poor regulus!--can't you conceive how fine it must have been altogether? and these were my 'maturer works,' you are to understand, ... and 'the moon was bright at ten o'clock at night' years before. as to the gods and goddesses, i believed in them all quite seriously, and reconciled them to christianity, which i believed in too after a fashion, as some greater philosophers have done--and went out one day with my pinafore full of little sticks (and a match from the housemaid's cupboard) to sacrifice to the blue-eyed minerva who was my favourite goddess on the whole because she cared for athens. as soon as i began to doubt about my goddesses, i fell into a vague sort of general scepticism, ... and though i went on saying 'the lord's prayer' at nights and mornings, and the 'bless all my kind friends' afterwards, by the childish custom ... yet i ended this liturgy with a supplication which i found in 'king's memoirs' and which took my fancy and met my general views exactly.... 'o god, if there be a god, save my soul if i have a soul.' perhaps the theology of many thoughtful children is scarcely more orthodox than this: but indeed it is wonderful to myself sometimes how i came to escape, on the whole, as well as i have done, considering the commonplaces of education in which i was set, with strength and opportunity for breaking the bonds all round into liberty and license. papa used to say ... 'don't read gibbon's history--it's not a proper book. don't read "tom jones"--and none of the books on _this_ side, mind!' so i was very obedient and never touched the books on _that_ side, and only read instead tom paine's 'age of reason,' and voltaire's 'philosophical dictionary,' and hume's 'essays,' and werther, and rousseau, and mary wollstonecraft ... books, which i was never suspected of looking towards, and which were not 'on _that_ side' certainly, but which did as well. how i am writing!--and what are the questions you did not answer? i shall remember them by the answers i suppose--but your letters always have a fulness to me and i never seem to wish for what is not in them. but this is the end _indeed_. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday night. [in the same envelope with the preceding letter.] ever dearest--how you can write touching things to me; and how my whole being vibrates, as a string, to these! how have i deserved from god and you all that i thank you for? too unworthy i am of all! only, it was not, dearest beloved, what you feared, that was 'horrible,' it was what you _supposed_, rather! it was a mistake of yours. and now we will not talk of it any more. _friday morning._--for the rest, i will think as you desire: but i have thought a great deal, and there are certainties which i know; and i hope we _both_ are aware that nothing can be more hopeless than our position in some relations and aspects, though you do not guess perhaps that the very approach to the subject is shut up by dangers, and that from the moment of a suspicion entering _one_ mind, we should be able to meet never again in this room, nor to have intercourse by letter through the ordinary channel. i mean, that letters of yours, addressed to me here, would infallibly be stopped and destroyed--if not opened. therefore it is advisable to hurry on nothing--on these grounds it is advisable. what should i do if i did not see you nor hear from you, without being able to feel that it was for your happiness? what should i do for a month even? and then, i might be thrown out of the window or its equivalent--i look back shuddering to the dreadful scenes in which poor henrietta was involved who never offended as i have offended ... years ago which seem as present as to-day. she had forbidden the subject to be referred to until that consent was obtained--and at a word she gave up all--at a word. in fact she had no true attachment, as i observed to arabel at the time--a child never submitted more meekly to a revoked holiday. yet how she was made to suffer. oh, the dreadful scenes! and only because she had seemed to feel a little. i told you, i think, that there was an obliquity--an eccentricity, or something beyond--on one class of subjects. i hear how her knees were made to ring upon the floor, now! she was carried out of the room in strong hysterics, and i, who rose up to follow her, though i was quite well at that time and suffered only by sympathy, fell flat down upon my face in a fainting-fit. arabel thought i was dead. i have tried to forget it all--but now i must remember--and throughout our intercourse _i have remembered_. it is necessary to remember so much as to avoid such evils as are inevitable, and for this reason i would conceal nothing from you. do _you_ remember, besides, that there can be no faltering on my 'part,' and that, if i should remain well, which is not proved yet, i will do for you what you please and as you please to have it done. but there is time for considering! only ... as you speak of 'counsel,' i will take courage to tell you that my _sisters know_, arabel is in most of my confidences, and being often in the room with me, taxed me with the truth long ago--she saw that i was affected from some cause--and i told her. we are as safe with both of them as possible ... and they thoroughly understand that _if there should be any change it would not be your fault_.... i made them understand that thoroughly. from themselves i have received nothing but the most smiling words of kindness and satisfaction (i thought i might tell you so much), they have too much tenderness for me to fail in it now. my brothers, it is quite necessary not to draw into a dangerous responsibility. i have felt that from the beginning, and shall continue to feel it--though i hear and can observe that they are full of suspicions and conjectures, which are never unkindly expressed. i told you once that we held hands the faster in this house for the weight over our heads. but the absolute _knowledge_ would be dangerous for my brothers: with my sisters it is different, and i could not continue to conceal from _them_ what they had under their eyes; and then, henrietta is in a like position. it was not wrong of me to let them know it?--no? yet of what consequence is all this to the other side of the question? what, if _you_ should give pain and disappointment where you owe such pure gratitude. but we need not talk of these things now. only you have more to consider than _i_, i imagine, while the future comes on. dearest, let me have my way in one thing: let me see you on _tuesday_ instead of on monday--on tuesday at the old hour. be reasonable and consider. tuesday is almost as near as the day before it; and on monday, i shall be hurried at first, lest papa should be still in the house, (no harm, but an excuse for nervousness: and i can't quote a noble roman as you can, to the praise of my conscience!) and _you_ will be hurried at last, lest you should not be in time for mr. forster. on the other hand, i will not let you be rude to the _daily news_, ... no, nor to the _examiner_. come on tuesday, then, instead of monday, and let us have the usual hours in a peaceable way,--and if there is no obstacle,--that is, if mr. kenyon or some equivalent authority should not take note of your being here on tuesday, why you can come again on the saturday afterwards--i do not see the difficulty. are we agreed? on tuesday, at three o'clock. consider, besides, that the monday arrangement would hurry you in every manner, and leave you fagged for the evening--no, i will not hear of it. not on my account, not on yours! think of me on monday instead, and write before. are not these two lawful letters? and do not they deserve an answer? my life was ended when i knew you, and if i survive myself it is for your sake:--_that_ resumes all my feelings and intentions in respect to you. no 'counsel' could make the difference of a grain of dust in the balance. it _is so_, and not otherwise. if you changed towards me, it would be better for you i believe--and i should be only where i was before. while you do _not_ change, i look to you for my first affections and my first duty--and nothing but your bidding me, could make me look away. in the midst of this, mr. kenyon came and i felt as if i could not talk to him. no--he does not 'see how it is.' he may have passing thoughts sometimes, but they do not stay long enough to produce--even an opinion. he asked if you had been here long. it may be wrong and ungrateful, but i do wish sometimes that the world were away--even the good kenyon-aspect of the world. and so, once more--may god bless you! i am wholly yours-- _tuesday_, remember! and say that you agree. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday. [post-mark, january , .] did my own ba, in the prosecution of her studies, get to a book on the forb--no, _un_forbidden shelf--wherein voltaire pleases to say that 'si dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer'? i feel, after reading these letters,--as ordinarily after seeing you, sweetest, or hearing from you,--that if _marriage_ did not exist, i should infallibly _invent_ it. i should say, no words, no _feelings_ even, do justice to the whole conviction and _religion_ of my soul--and though they may be suffered to represent some one minute's phase of it, yet, in their very fulness and passion they do injustice to the _unrepresented, other minute's_, depth and breadth of love ... which let my whole life (i would say) be devoted to telling and proving and exemplifying, if not in one, then in another way--let me have the plain palpable power of this; the assured time for this ... something of the satisfaction ... (but for the fantasticalness of the illustration) ... something like the earnestness of some suitor in chancery if he could once get lord lyndhurst into a room with him, and lock the door on them both, and know that his whole story _must_ be listened to now, and the 'rights of it,'--dearest, the love unspoken now you are to hear 'in all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth ... at the hour of death, and'-- if i did not _know_ this was so,--nothing would have been said, or sought for. your friendship, the perfect pride in it, the wish for, and eager co-operation in, your welfare, all that is different, and, seen now, nothing. i will care for it no more, dearest--i am wedded to you now. i believe no human being could love you more--that thought consoles me for my own imperfection--for when _that_ does strike me, as so often it will, i turn round on my pursuing self, and ask 'what if it were a claim then, what is in her, demanded rationally, equitably, in return for what were in you--do you like _that_ way!'--and i do _not_, ba--you, even, might not--when people everyday buy improveable ground, and eligible sites for building, and don't want every inch filled up, covered over, done to their hands! so take me, and make me what you can and will--and though never to be _more_ yours, yet more _like_ you, i may and must be--yes, indeed--best, only love! and am i not grateful to your sisters--entirely grateful for that crowning comfort; it is 'miraculous,' too, if you please--for _you_ shall know me by finger-tip intelligence or any art magic of old or new times--but they do not see me, know me--and must moreover be jealous of you, chary of you, as the daughters of hesperus, of wonderers and wistful lookers up at the gold apple--yet instead of 'rapidly levelling eager eyes'--they are indulgent? then--shall i wish capriciously they were _not_ your sisters, not so near you, that there might be a kind of grace in loving them for it'--but what grace can there be when ... yes, i will tell you--_no_, i will not--it is foolish!--and it is _not_ foolish in me to love the table and chairs and vases in your room. let me finish writing to-morrow; it would not become me to utter a word against the arrangement--and saturday promised, too--but though all concludes against the early hour on monday, yet--but this is wrong--on tuesday it shall be, then,--thank you, dearest! you let me keep up the old proper form, do you not?--i shall continue to thank, and be gratified &c. as if i had some untouched fund of thanks at my disposal to cut a generous figure with on occasion! and so, now, for your kind considerateness thank _you ... that i say_, which, god knows, _could_ not say, if i died ten deaths in one to do you good, 'you are repaid'-- to-morrow i will write, and answer more. i am pretty well, and will go out to-day--to-night. my act is done, and copied--i will bring it. do you see the _athenæum_? by chorley surely--and kind and satisfactory. i did not expect any notice for a long time--all that about the 'mist,' 'unchanged manner' and the like is politic concession to the powers that be ... because he might tell me that and much more with his own lips or unprofessional pen, and be thanked into the bargain, yet he does not. but i fancy he saves me from a rougher hand--the long extracts answer every purpose-- there is all to say yet--to-morrow! and ever, ever your own; god bless you! r. admire the clean paper.... i did not notice that i have been writing in a desk where a candle fell! see the bottoms of the other pages! _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday evening. [post-mark, january , .] you may have seen, i put off all the weighty business part of the letter--but i shall do very little with it now. to be sure, a few words will serve, because you understand me, and believe in _enough_ of me. first, then, i am wholly satisfied, thoroughly made happy in your assurance. i would build up an infinity of lives, if i could plan them, one on the other, and all resting on you, on your word--i fully believe in it,--of my feeling, the gratitude, let there be no attempt to speak. and for 'waiting'; 'not hurrying',--i leave all with you henceforth--all you say is most wise, most convincing. on the saddest part of all,--silence. you understand, and i can understand through you. do you know, that i never _used_ to dream unless indisposed, and rarely then--(of late i dream of you, but quite of late)--and _those_ nightmare dreams have invariably been of _one_ sort. i stand by (powerless to interpose by a word even) and see the infliction of tyranny on the unresisting man or beast (generally the last)--and i wake just in time not to die: let no one try this kind of experiment on me or mine! though i have observed that by a felicitous arrangement, the man with the whip puts it into use with an old horse commonly. i once knew a fine specimen of the boilingly passionate, desperately respectable on the eastern principle that reverences a madman--and this fellow, whom it was to be death to oppose, (some bloodvessel was to break)--he, once at a dinner party at which i was present, insulted his wife (a young pretty simple believer in his awful immunities from the ordinary terms that keep men in order)--brought the tears into her eyes and sent her from the room ... purely to 'show off' in the eyes of his guests ... (all males, law-friends &c., he being a lawyer.) this feat accomplished, he, too, left us with an affectation of compensating relentment, to 'just say a word and return'--and no sooner was his back to the door than the biggest, stupidest of the company began to remark 'what a fortunate thing it was that mr. so-and-so had such a submissive wife--not one of the women who would resist--that is, attempt to resist--and so exasperate our gentleman into ... heaven only knew what!' i said it _was_, in one sense, a fortunate thing; because one of these women, without necessarily being the lion-tressed bellona, would richly give him his desert, i thought--'oh, indeed?' no--_this_ man was not to be opposed--wait, you might, till the fit was over, and then try what kind argument would do--and so forth to unspeakable nausea. presently we went up-stairs--there sate the wife with dried eyes, and a smile at the tea-table--and by her, in all the pride of conquest, with her hand in his, our friend--disposed to be very good-natured of course. i listened _arrectis auribus_, and in a minute he said he did not know somebody i mentioned. i told him, _that_ i easily conceived--such a person would never condescend to know _him_, &c., and treated him to every consequence ingenuity could draw from that text--and at the end marched out of the room; and the valorous man, who had sate like a post, got up, took a candle, followed me to the door, and only said in unfeigned wonder, 'what _can_ have possessed you, my _dear_ b?'--all which i as much expected beforehand, as that the above mentioned man of the whip keeps quiet in the presence of an ordinary-couraged dog. all this is quite irrelevant to _the_ case--indeed, i write to get rid of the thought altogether. but i do hold it the most stringent duty of all who can, to stop a condition, a relation of one human being to another which god never allowed to exist between him and ourselves. _trees_ live and die, if you please, and accept will for a law--but with us, all commands surely refer to a previously-implanted conviction in ourselves of their rationality and justice. or why declare that 'the lord _is_ holy, just and good' unless there is recognised and independent conception of holiness and goodness, to which the subsequent assertion is referable? 'you know what _holiness_ is, what it is to be good? then, he _is_ that'--not, '_that_ is _so_--because _he_ is that'; though, of course, when once the converse is demonstrated, this, too, follows, and may be urged for practical purposes. all god's urgency, so to speak, is on the _justice_ of his judgments, _rightness_ of his rule: yet why? one might ask--if one does believe that the rule _is_ his; why ask further?--because, his is a 'reasonable service,' once for all. understand why i turn my thoughts in this direction. if it is indeed as you fear, and no endeavour, concession, on my part will avail, under any circumstances--(and by endeavour, i mean all heart and soul could bring the flesh to perform)--in that case, you will not come to me with a shadow past hope of chasing. the likelihood is, i over frighten myself for you, by the involuntary contrast with those here--you allude to them--if i went with this letter downstairs and said simply 'i want this taken to the direction to-night, and am unwell and unable to go, will you take it now?' my father would not say a word, or rather would say a dozen cheerful absurdities about his 'wanting a walk,' 'just having been wishing to go out' &c. at night he sits studying my works--illustrating them (i will bring you drawings to make you laugh)--and _yesterday_ i picked up a crumpled bit of paper ... 'his notion of what a criticism on this last number ought to be,--none, that have appeared, satisfying him!'--so judge of what he will say! and my mother loves me just as much more as must of necessity be. once more, understand all this ... for the clock scares me of a sudden--i meant to say more--far more. but may god bless you ever--my own dearest, my ba-- i am wholly your r. _(tuesday)_ _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, january , .] your letter came just after the hope of one had past--the latest saturday post had gone, they said, and i was beginning to be as vexed as possible, looking into the long letterless sunday. then, suddenly came the knock--the postman redivivus--just when it seemed so beyond hoping for--it was half past eight, observe, and there had been a post at nearly eight--suddenly came the knock, and your letter with it. was i not glad, do you think? and you call the _athenæum_ 'kind and satisfactory'? well--i was angry instead. to make us wait so long for an 'article' like _that_, was not over-kind certainly, nor was it 'satisfactory' to class your peculiar qualities with other contemporary ones, as if they were not peculiar. it seemed to me cold and cautious, from the causes perhaps which you mention, but the extracts will work their own way with everybody who knows what poetry is, and for others, let the critic do his worst with them. for what is said of 'mist' i have no patience because i who know when you are obscure and never think of denying it in some of your former works, do hold that this last number is as clear and self-sufficing to a common understanding, as far as the expression and medium goes, as any book in the world, and that mr. chorley was bound in verity to say so. if i except that one stanza, you know, it is to make the general observation stronger. and then 'mist' is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. you never _are_ misty, not even in 'sordello'--never vague. your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always--and there is an extra-distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape. so that to talk of a 'mist,' when you are obscurest, is an impotent thing to do. indeed it makes me angry. but the suggested virtue of 'self-renunciation' only made me smile, because it is simply nonsense ... nonsense which proves itself to be nonsense at a glance. so genius is to renounce itself--_that_ is the new critical doctrine, is it? now is it not foolish? to recognize the poetical faculty of a man, and then to instruct him in 'self-renunciation' in that very relation--or rather, to hint the virtue of it, and hesitate the dislike of his doing otherwise? what atheists these critics are after all--and how the old heathens understood the divinity of gifts better, beyond any comparison. we may take shame to ourselves, looking back. now, shall i tell you what i did yesterday? it was so warm, so warm, the thermometer at in this room, that i took it into my head to call it april instead of january, and put on a cloak and walked down-stairs into the drawing-room--walked, mind! before, i was carried by one of my brothers,--even to the last autumn-day when i went out--i never walked a step for fear of the cold in the passages. but yesterday it was so wonderfully warm, and i so strong besides--it was a feat worthy of the day--and i surprised them all as much as if i had walked out of the window instead. that kind dear stormie, who with all his shyness and awkwardness has the most loving of hearts in him, said that he was '_so_ glad to see me'! well!--setting aside the glory of it, it would have been as wise perhaps if i had abstained; our damp detestable climate reaches us otherwise than by cold, and i am not quite as well as usual this morning after an uncomfortable feverish night--not very unwell, mind, nor unwell at all in the least degree of consequence--and i tell you, only to show how susceptible i really am still, though 'scarcely an invalid,' say the complimenters. what a way i am from your letter--that letter--or seem to be rather--for one may think of one thing and yet go on writing distrustedly of other things. so you are 'grateful' to my sisters ... _you_! now i beseech you not to talk such extravagances; i mean such extravagances as words like these _imply_--and there are far worse words than these, in the letter ... such as i need not put my finger on; words which are sense on my lips, but no sense at all on yours, and which make me disquietedly sure that you are under an illusion. observe!--_certainly_ i should not choose to have a '_claim_,' see! only, what i object to, in 'illusions,' 'miracles,' and things of that sort, is the want of continuity common to such. when joshua caused the sun to stand still, it was not for a year even!--ungrateful, i am! and 'pretty well' means 'not well' i am afraid--or i should be gladder still of the new act. you will tell me on tuesday what 'pretty well' means, and if your mother is better--or i may have a letter to-morrow--dearest! may god bless you! to-morrow too, at half past three o'clock, how joyful i shall be that my 'kind considerateness' decided not to receive you until tuesday. my very kind considerateness, which made me eat my dinner to-day! your own ba. a hundred letters i have, by this last, ... to set against napoleon's hundred days--did you know _that_? so much better i am to-night: it was nothing but a little chill from the damp--the fog, you see! _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, january , .] love, if you knew but how vexed i was, so very few minutes after my note left last night; how angry with the unnecessary harshness into which some of the phrases might be construed--you would forgive me, indeed. but, when all is confessed and forgiven, the fact remains--that it would be the one trial i _know_ i should not be able to bear; the repetition of these 'scenes'--intolerable--not to be written of, even my mind _refuses_ to form a clear conception of them. my own loved letter is come--and the news; of which the reassuring postscript lets the interrupted joy flow on again. well, and i am not to be grateful for that; nor that you _do_ 'eat your dinner'? indeed you will be ingenious to prevent me! i fancy myself meeting you on 'the stairs'--stairs and passages generally, and galleries (ah, thou indeed!) all, with their picturesque _accidents_, of landing-places, and spiral heights and depths, and sudden turns and visions of half open doors into what quarles calls 'mollitious chambers'--and above all, _landing-places_--they are my heart's delight--i would come upon you unaware in a landing-place in my next dream! one day we may walk on the galleries round and over the inner court of the doges' palace at venice; and read, on tablets against the wall, how such an one was banished for an 'enormous dig (intacco) into the public treasure'--another for ... what you are not to know because his friends have got chisels and chipped away the record of it--underneath the 'giants' on their stands, and in the midst of the _cortile_ the bronze fountains whence the girls draw water. so _you_ too wrote french verses?--mine were of less lofty argument--one couplet makes me laugh now for the reason of its false quantity--i translated the ode of alcæus; and the last couplet ran thus.... harmodius, et toi, cher aristogiton! * * * * * * * * * * comme l'astre du jour, brillera votre nom! the fact was, i could not bear to hurt my french master's feelings--who inveterately maltreated 'ai's and oi's' and in this instance, an 'ei.' but 'pauline' is altogether of a different sort of precocity--you shall see it when i can master resolution to transcribe the explanation which i know is on the fly-leaf of a copy here. of that work, the _athenæum_ said [several words erased] now, what outrageous folly! i care, and you care, precisely nothing about its sayings and doings--yet here i talk! now to you--ba! when i go through sweetness to sweetness, at 'ba' i stop last of all, and lie and rest. that is the quintessence of them all,--they all take colour and flavour from that. so, dear, dear ba, be glad as you can to see me to-morrow. god knows how i embalm every such day,--i do not believe that one of the _forty_ is confounded with another in my memory. so, _that_ is gained and sure for ever. and of letters, this makes my th and, like donne's bride, ... i take, my jewels from their boxes; call my diamonds, pearls, and emeralds, and make myself a constellation of them all! bless you, my own beloved! i am much better to-day--having been not so well yesterday--whence the note to you, perhaps! i put that to your charity for construction. by the way, let the foolish and needless story about my whilome friend be of this use, that it records one of the traits in that same generous love, of me, i once mentioned, i remember--one of the points in his character which, i told you, _would_ account, if you heard them, for my parting company with a good deal of warmth of attachment to myself. what a day! but you do not so much care for rain, i think. my mother is no worse, but still suffering sadly. ever your own, dearest ever-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, january , .] ever since i ceased to be with you--ever dearest,--have been with your 'luria,' if _that_ is ceasing to be with you--which it _is_, i feel at last. yet the new act is powerful and subtle, and very affecting, it seems to me, after a grave, suggested pathos; the reasoning is done on every hand with admirable directness and adroitness, and poor luria's iron baptism under such a bright crossing of swords, most miserably complete. still ... is he to die _so_? can you mean it? oh--indeed i foresaw _that_--not a guess of mine ever touched such an end--and i can scarcely resign myself to it as a necessity, even now ... i mean, to the act, as luria's act, whether it is final or not--the act of suicide being so unheroical. but you are a dramatic poet and right perhaps, where, as a didactic poet, you would have been wrong, ... and, after the first shock, i begin to see that your luria is the man luria and that his 'sun' lights him so far and not farther than so, and to understand the natural reaction of all that generous trust and hopefulness, what naturally it would be. also, it is satisfactory that domizia, having put her woman's part off to the last, should be too late with it--it will be a righteous retribution. i had fancied that her object was to isolate him, ... to make his military glory and national recompense ring hollowly to his ears, and so commend herself, drawing back the veil. puccio's scornful working out of the low work, is very finely given, i think, ... and you have 'a cunning right hand,' to lift up luria higher in the mind of your readers, by the very means used to pull down his fortunes--you show what a man he is by the very talk of his rivals ... by his 'natural godship' over puccio. then husain is nobly characteristic--i like those streaks of moorish fire in his speeches. 'why 'twas all fighting' &c. ... _that_ passage perhaps is over-subtle for a husain--but too nobly right in the abstract to be altered, if it is so or not. domizia talks philosophically besides, and how eloquently;--and very noble she is where she proclaims the angel in thee and rejects the sprites that ineffectual crowd about his strength, and mingle with his work and claim a share!-- but why not 'spirits' rather than 'sprites,' which has a different association by custom? 'spirits' is quite short enough, it seems to me, for a last word--it sounds like a monosyllable that trembles--or thrills, rather. and, do you know, i agree with yourself a little when you say (as did you _not_ say?) that some of the speeches--domizia's for instance--are too lengthy. i think i should like them to coil up their strength, here and there, in a few passages. luria ... poor luria ... is great and pathetic when he stands alone at last, and 'all his waves have gone over him.' poor luria!--and now, i wonder where mr. chorley will look, in this work,--along all the edges of the hills,--to find, or prove, his favourite 'mist!' on the glass of his own opera-lorgnon, perhaps:--shall we ask him to try _that_? but first, i want to ask _you_ something--i have had it in my head a long time, but it might as well have been in a box--and indeed if it had been in the box with your letters, i should have remembered to speak of it long ago. so now, at last, tell me--how do you write, o my poet? with steel pens, or bramah pens, or goose-quills or crow-quills?--because i have a penholder which was given to me when i was a child, and which i have used both then and since in the production of various great epics and immortal 'works,' until in these latter years it has seemed to me too heavy, and i have taken into service, instead of it, another two-inch-long instrument which makes mr. kenyon laugh to look at--and so, my fancy has run upon your having the heavier holder, which is not very heavy after all, and which will make you think of me whether you choose it or not, besides being made of a splinter from the ivory gate of old, and therefore not unworthy of a true prophet. will you have it, dearest? yes--because you can't help it. when you come ... on saturday!-- and for 'pauline,' ... i am satisfied with the promise to see it some day ... when we are in the isle of the sirens, or ready for wandering in the doges' galleries. i seem to understand that you would really rather wish me not to see it now ... and as long as i _do_ see it! so _that shall_ be!--am i not good now, and not a teazer? if there is any poetical justice in 'the seven worlds,' i shall have a letter to-night. by the way, you owe me two letters by your confession. a hundred and four of mine you have, and i, only a hundred and two of yours ... which is a 'deficit' scarcely creditable to me, (now is it?) when, according to the law and ordinance, a woman's hundred and four letters would take two hundred and eight at least, from the other side, to justify them. well--i feel inclined to wring out the legal per centage to the uttermost farthing; but fall into a fit of gratitude, notwithstanding, thinking of monday, and how the second letter came beyond hope. always better, you are, than i guess you to be,--and it was being _best_, to write, as you did, for me to hear twice on one day!--best and dearest! but the first letter was not what you feared--i know you too well not to know how that letter was written and with what intention. _do you_, on the other hand, endeavour to comprehend how there may be an eccentricity and obliquity in certain relations and on certain subjects, while the general character stands up worthily of esteem and regard--even of yours. mr. kenyon says broadly that it is monomania--neither more nor less. then the principle of passive filial obedience is held--drawn (and quartered) from scripture. he _sees_ the law and the gospel on his side. only the other day, there was a setting forth of the whole doctrine, i hear, down-stairs--'passive obedience, and particularly in respect to marriage.' one after the other, my brothers all walked out of the room, and there was left for sole auditor, captain surtees cook, who had especial reasons for sitting it out against his will,--so he sate and asked 'if children were to be considered slaves' as meekly as if he were asking for information. i could not help smiling when i heard of it. he is just _succeeding_ in obtaining what is called an 'adjutancy,' which, with the half pay, will put an end to many anxieties. dearest--when, in the next dream, you meet me in the 'landing-place,' tell me why i am to stand up to be reviewed again. what a fancy, _that_ is of yours, for 'full-lengths'--and what bad policy, if a fancy, to talk of it so! because you would have had the glory and advantage, and privilege, of seeing me on my feet twenty times before now, if you had not impressed on me, in some ineffable manner, that to stand on my head would scarcely be stranger. nevertheless you shall have it your own way, as you have everything--which makes you so very, very, exemplarily submissive, you know! mr. kenyon does not come--puts it off to _saturday_ perhaps. the _daily news_ i have had a glance at. a weak leading article, i thought ... and nothing stronger from ireland:--but enough advertisements to promise a long future. what do you think? or have you not seen the paper? no broad principles laid down. a mere newspaper-support of the 'league.' may god bless you. say how you are--and _do_ walk, and 'care' for yourself, and, so, for your own _ba_. have i expressed to you at all how 'luria' impresses _me_ more and more? you shall see the 'remarks' with the other papers--the details of what strikes me. _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, january , .] but you did _not_ get the letter last evening--no, for all my good intentions--because somebody came over in the morning and forced me to go out ... and, perhaps, i _knew_ what was coming, and had all my thoughts _there_, that is, _here_ now, with my own letters from you. i think so--for this punishment, i will tell you, came for some sin or other last night. i woke--late, or early--and, in one of those lucid moments when all things are thoroughly _perceived_,--whether suggested by some forgotten passage in the past sleep itself, i don't know--but i seem to _apprehend_, comprehend entirely, for the first time, what would happen if i lost you--the whole sense of that _closed door_ of catarina's came on me at once, and it was _i_ who said--not as quoting or adapting another's words, but spontaneously, unavoidably, '_in that door, you will not enter, i have_'.... and, dearest, the unwritten it must remain. what is on the other leaf, no ill-omen, after all,--because i strengthened myself against a merely imaginary evil--as i do always; and _thus_--i know i never can lose you,--you surely are more mine, there is less for the future to give or take away than in the ordinary cases, where so much less is known, explained, possessed, as with us. understand for me, my dearest-- and do you think, sweet, that there _is_ any free movement of my soul which your penholder is to secure? well, try,--it will be yours by every right of discovery--and i, for my part, will religiously report to you the first time i think of you 'which, but for your present i should not have done'--or is it not a happy, most happy way of ensuring a better fifth act to luria than the foregoing? see the absurdity i write--when it will be more probably the ruin of the whole--for was it not observed in the case of a friend of mine once, who wrote his own part in a piece for private theatricals, and had ends of his own to serve in it,--that he set to work somewhat after this fashion: 'scene st. a breakfast chamber--lord and lady a. at table--lady a./ no more coffee my dear?--lord a./ one more cup! (_embracing her_). lady a./ i was thinking of trying the ponies in the park--are you engaged? lord a./ why, there's that bore of a committee at the house till . (_kissing her hand_).' and so forth, to the astonishment of the auditory, who did not exactly see the 'sequitur' in either instance. well, dearest, whatever comes of it, the 'aside,' the bye-play, the digression, will be the best, and only true business of the piece. and though i must smile at your notion of securing _that_ by any fresh appliance, mechanical or spiritual, yet i do thank you, dearest, thank you from my heart indeed--(and i write with bramahs _always_--not being able to make a pen!) if you have gone so far with 'luria,' i fancy myself nearly or altogether safe. i must not tell you, but i wished just these feelings to be in your mind about domizia, and the death of luria: the last act throws light back on all, i hope. observe only, that luria _would_ stand, if i have plied him effectually with adverse influences, in such a position as to render any other end impossible without the hurt to florence which his religion is, to avoid inflicting--passively awaiting, for instance, the sentence and punishment to come at night, would as surely inflict it as taking part with her foes. his aim is to prevent the harm she will do herself by striking him, so he moves aside from the blow. but i know there is very much to improve and heighten in this fourth act, as in the others--but the right aspect of things seems obtained and the rest of the work is plain and easy. i am obliged to leave off--the rest to-morrow--and then dear, saturday! i love you utterly, my own best, dearest-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday night. [post-mark, january , .] yes, i understand your 'luria'--and there is to be more light; and i open the window to the east and wait for it--a little less gladly than for _you_ on saturday, dearest. in the meanwhile you have 'lucid moments,' and 'strengthen' yourself into the wisdom of learning to love me--and, upon consideration, it does not seem to be so hard after all ... there is 'less for the future to take away' than you had supposed--so _that_ is the way? ah, 'these lucid moments, in which all things are thoroughly _perceived_';--what harm they do me!--and i am to 'understand for you,' you say!--am i? on the other side, and to make the good omen complete, i remembered, after i had sealed my last letter, having made a confusion between the ivory and horn gates, the gates of false and true visions, as i am apt to do--and my penholder belongs to the ivory gate, ... as you will perceive in your lucid moments--poor holder! but, as you forget me on wednesdays, the post testifying, ... the sinecure may not be quite so certain as the thursday's letter says. and _i_ too, in the meanwhile, grow wiser, ... having learnt something which you cannot do,--you of the 'bells and pomegranates': _you cannot make a pen._ yesterday i looked round the world in vain for it. mr. kenyon does not come--_will_ not perhaps until saturday! which reminds me--mr. kenyon told me about a year ago that he had been painfully employed that morning in _parting_ two--dearer than friends--and he had done it he said, by proving to either, that he or she was likely to mar the prospects of the other. 'if i had spoken to each, of himself or herself,' he said, 'i _never could have done it_.' was not _that_ an ingenious cruelty? the remembrance rose up in me like a ghost, and made me ask you once to promise what you promised ... (you recollect?) because i could not bear to be stabbed with my own dagger by the hand of a third person ... _so_! when people have lucid moments themselves, you know, it is different. and _shall_ i indeed have a letter to-morrow? or, not having the penholder yet, will you.... goodnight. may god bless you-- ever and wholly your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, january , .] now, of all perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to have been, commend me to this of ba's--after i bade her generosity 'understand me,' too!--which meant, 'let her pick out of my disjointed sentences a general meaning, if she can,--which i very well know their imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of my whole heart's-mystery'--and ba, with the key in her hand, to pretend and poke feathers and penholders into the key-hole, and complain that the wards are wrong! so--when the poor scholar, one has read of, uses not very dissimilar language and argument--who being threatened with the deprivation of his virgil learnt the Æneid by heart and then said 'take what you can now'!--_that_ ba calls 'feeling the loss would not be so hard after all'!--_i_ do not, at least. and if at any future moment i should again be visited--as i earnestly desire may never be the case--with a sudden consciousness of the entire inutility of all earthly love (since of _my_ love) to hold its object back from the decree of god, if such should call it away; one of those known facts which, for practical good, we treat as supremely common-place, but which, like those of the uncertainty of life--the very existence of god, i may say--if they were _not_ common-place, and could they be thoroughly apprehended (except in the chance minutes which make one grow old, not the mere years)--the business of the world would cease; but when you find chaucer's graver at his work of 'graving smale seles' by the sun's light, you know that the sun's self could not have been _created_ on that day--do you 'understand' that, ba? and when i am with you, or here or writing or walking--and perfectly happy in the sunshine of you, i very well know i am no wiser than is good for me and that there seems no harm in feeling it impossible this should change, or fail to go on increasing till this world ends and we are safe, i with you, for ever. but when--if only _once_, as i told you, recording it for its very strangeness, i _do_ feel--in a flash--that words are words, and could not alter _that_ decree ... will you tell me how, after all, that conviction and the true woe of it are better met than by the as thorough conviction that, for one blessing, the extreme woe is _impossible_ now--that you _are_, and have been, _mine_, and _me_--one with me, never to be parted--so that the complete separation not being to be thought of, such an incomplete one as is yet in fate's power may be the less likely to attract her notice? and, dearest, in all emergencies, see, i go to you for help; for your gift of better comfort than is found in myself. or ought i, if i could, to add one more proof to the greek proverb 'that the half is greater than the whole'--and only love you for myself (it is absurd; but if i _could_ disentwine you from my soul in that sense), only see my own will, and good (not in _your_ will and good, as i now see them and shall ever see) ... should you say i _did_ love you then? perhaps. and it would have been better for me, i know--i should not have _written_ this or the like--there being no post in the siren's isle, as you will see. and the end of the whole matter is--what? not by any means what my ba expects or ought to expect; that i say with a flounce 'catch me blotting down on paper, again, the first vague impressions in the weakest words and being sure i have only to bid her "understand"!--when i can get "blair on rhetoric," and the additional chapter on the proper conduct of a letter'! on the contrary i tell you, ba, my own heart's dearest, i will provoke you tenfold worse; will tell you all that comes uppermost, and what frightens me or reassures me, in moments lucid or opaque--and when all the pen-stumps and holders refuse to open the lock, out will come the key perforce; and once put that knowledge--of the entire love and worship of my heart and soul--to its proper use, and all will be clear--tell me to-morrow that it will be clear when i call you to account and exact strict payment for every word and phrase and full-stop and partial stop, and no stop at all, in this wicked little note which got so treacherously the kisses and the thankfulness--written with no penholder that is to belong to me, i hope--but with the feather, possibly, which sycorax wiped the dew from, as caliban remembered when he was angry! all but--(that is, all was wrong but)--to be just ... the old, dear, so dear ending which makes my heart beat now as at first ... and so, pays for all! wherefore, all is right again, is it not? and you are my own priceless ba, my very own--and i will have you, if you like that style, and want you, and must have you every day and all day long--much less see you to-morrow _stand_-- ... now, there breaks down my new spirit--and, shame or no, i must pray you, in the old way, _not_ to _receive me standing_--i should not remain master of myself i do believe! you have put out of my head all i intended to write--and now i slowly begin to remember the matters they seem strangely unimportant--that poor impotency of a newspaper! no--nothing of that for the present. to-morrow my dearest! ba's first comment--'_to-morrow?_ _to-day_ is too soon, it seems--yet it is wise, perhaps, to avoid the satiety &c. &c. &c. &c. &c.' does she feel how i kissed that comment back on her dear self as fit punishment? _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, january , .] i must begin by invoking my own stupidity! to forget after all the penholder! i had put it close beside me too on the table, and never once thought of it afterwards from first to last--just as i should do if i had a common-place book, the memoranda all turning to obliviscenda as by particular contact. so i shall send the holder with miss martineau's books which you can read or not as you like ... they have beauty in passages ... but, trained up against the wall of a set design, want room for branching and blossoming, great as her skill is. i like her 'playfellow' stories twice as well. do you know _them_? written for children, and in such a fine heroic child-spirit as to be too young and too old for nobody. oh, and i send you besides a most frightful extract from an american magazine sent to me yesterday ... no, the day before ... on the subject of mesmerism--and you are to understand, if you please, that the mr. edgar poe who stands committed in it, is my dedicator ... whose dedication i forgot, by the way, with the rest--so, while i am sending, you shall have his poems with his mesmeric experience and decide whether the outrageous compliment to e.b.b. or the experiment on m. vandeleur [valdemar] goes furthest to prove him mad. there is poetry in the man, though, now and then, seen between the great gaps of bathos.... 'politian' will make you laugh--as the 'raven' made _me_ laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people such as mr. n.p. willis and his peers--it was sent to me from _four_ different quarters besides the author himself, before its publication in this form, and when it had only a newspaper life. some of the other lyrics have power of a less questionable sort. for the author, i do not know him at all--never heard from him nor wrote to him--and in my opinion, there is more faculty shown in the account of that horrible mesmeric experience (mad or not mad) than in his poems. now do read it from the beginning to the end. that '_going out_' of the hectic, struck me very much ... and the writhing _away_ of the upper lip. most horrible!--then i believe so much of mesmerism, as to give room for the full acting of the story on me ... without absolutely giving full credence to it, understand. ever dearest, you could not think me in earnest in that letter? it was because i understood you so perfectly that i felt at liberty for the jesting a little--for had i not thought of _that_ before, myself, and was i not reproved for speaking of it, when i said that i was content, for my part, even _so_? surely you remember--and i should not have said it if i had not felt with you, felt and known, that 'there is, with us, less for the future to give or take away than in the ordinary cases.' so much less! all the happiness i have known has come to me through you, and it is enough to live for or die in--therefore living or dying i would thank god, and use that word '_enough_' ... being yours in life and death. and always understanding that if either of us should go, you must let it be this one here who was nearly gone when she knew you, since i could not bear-- now see if it is possible to write on this subject, unless one laughs to stop the tears. i was more wise on friday. let me tell you instead of my sister's affairs, which are so publicly talked of in this house that there is no confidence to be broken in respect to them--yet my brothers only see and hear, and are told nothing, to keep them as clear as possible from responsibility. i may say of henrietta that her only fault is, her virtues being written in water--i know not of one other fault. she has too much softness to be able to say 'no' in the right place--and thus, without the slightest levity ... perfectly blameless in that respect, ... she says half a yes or a quarter of a yes, or a yes in some sort of form, too often--but i will tell you. two years ago, three men were loving her, as they called it. after a few months, and the proper quantity of interpretations, one of them consoled himself by giving nick-names to his rivals. perseverance and despair he called them, and so, went up to the boxes to see out the rest of the play. despair ran to a crisis, was rejected in so many words, but appealed against the judgment and had his claim admitted--it was all silence and mildness on each side ... a tacit gaining of ground,--despair 'was at least a gentleman,' said my brothers. on which perseverance came on with violent re-iterations,--insisted that she loved him without knowing it, or _should_--elbowed poor despair into the open streets, who being a gentleman wouldn't elbow again--swore that 'if she married another he would wait till she became a widow, trusting to providence' ... _did_ wait every morning till the head of the house was out, and sate day by day, in spite of the disinclination of my sisters and the rudeness of all my brothers, four hours in the drawing-room ... let himself be refused once a week and sate all the longer ... allowed everybody in the house (and a few visitors) to see and hear him in fits of hysterical sobbing, and sate on unabashed, the end being that he sits now sole regnant, my poor sister saying softly, with a few tears of remorse for her own instability, that she is 'taken by storm and cannot help it.' i give you only the _résumé_ of this military movement--and though i seem to smile, which it was impossible to avoid at some points of the evidence as i heard it from first one person and then another, yet i am woman enough rather to be glad that the decision is made _so_. he is sincerely attached to her, i believe; and the want of refinement and sensibility (for he understood her affections to be engaged to another at one time) is covered in a measure by the earnestness,--and justified too by the event--everybody being quite happy and contented, even to despair, who has a new horse and takes lessons in music. that's love--is it not? and that's my answer (if you look for it) to the question you asked me yesterday. yet do not think that i am turning it all to game. i could not do so with any real earnest sentiment ... i never could ... and now least, and with my own sister whom i love so. one may smile to oneself and yet wish another well--and so i smile to _you_--and it is all safe with you i know. he is a second or third cousin of ours and has golden opinions from all his friends and fellow-officers--and for the rest, most of these men are like one another.... i never could see the difference between fuller's earth and common clay, among them all. what do you think he has said since--to _her_ too?--'i always persevere about everything. once i began to write a farce--which they told me was as bad as could be. well!--i persevered!--_i finished it_.' perfectly unconscious, both he and she were of there being anything mal à propos in _that_--and no kind of harm was meant,--only it expresses the man. dearest--it had better be thursday i think--_our_ day! i was showing to-day your father's drawings,--and my brothers, and arabel besides, admired them very much on the right grounds. say how you are. you did not seem to me to answer frankly this time, and i was more than half uneasy when you went away. take exercise, dear, dearest ... think of me enough for it,--and do not hurry 'luria.' may god bless you! your own _ba._ _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday evening. [post-mark, january , .] i will not try and write much to-night, dearest, for my head gives a little warning--and i have so much to think of!--spite of my penholder being kept back from me after all! now, ought i to have asked for it? or did i not seem grateful enough at the promise? this last would be a characteristic reason, seeing that i reproached myself with feeling _too_ grateful for the 'special symbol'--the 'essential meaning' of which was already in my soul. well then, i will--i do pray for it--next time; and i will keep it for that one yesterday and all its memories--and it shall bear witness against me, if, on the siren's isle, i grow forgetful of wimpole street. and when is 'next time' to be--wednesday or thursday? when i look back on the strangely steady widening of my horizon--how no least interruption has occurred to visits or letters--oh, care _you_, sweet--care for us both! that remark of your sister's delights me--you remember?--that the anger would not be so formidable. i have exactly the fear of encountering _that_, which the sense of having to deal with a ghost would induce: there's no striking at it with one's partizan. well, god is above all! it is not my fault if it so happens that by returning my love you make me exquisitely blessed; i believe--more than hope, i am _sure_ i should do all i ever _now_ can do, if you were never to know it--that is, my love for you was in the first instance its own reward--if one must use such phrases--and if it were possible for that ... not _anger_, which is of no good, but that _opposition_--that adverse will--to show that your good would be attained by the-- but it would need to be _shown_ to me. you have said thus to me--in the very last letter, indeed. but with me, or any _man_, the instincts of happiness develop themselves too unmistakably where there is anything like a freedom of will. the man whose heart is set on being rich or influential after the worldly fashion, may be found far enough from the attainment of either riches or influence--but he will be in the presumed way to them--pumping at the pump, if he is really anxious for water, even though the pump be dry--but not sitting still by the dusty roadside. i believe--first of all, you--but when that is done, and i am allowed to call your heart _mine_,--i cannot think you would be happy if parted from me--and _that_ belief, coming to add to my own feeling in _that_ case. so, this will _be_--i trust in god. in life, in death, i am your own, _my_ own! my head has got well already! it is so slight a thing, that i make such an ado about! do not reply to these bodings--they are gone--they seem absurd! all steps secured but the last, and that last the easiest! yes--far easiest! for first you had to be created, only that; and then, in my time; and then, not in timbuctoo but wimpole street, and then ... the strange hedge round the sleeping palace keeping the world off--and then ... all was to begin, all the difficulty only _begin_:--and now ... see where is reached! and i kiss you, and bless you, my dearest, in earnest of the end! _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday. [post-mark, january , .] you have had my letter and heard about the penholder. your fancy of 'not seeming grateful enough,' is not wise enough for _you_, dearest; when you know that _i_ know your common fault to be the undue magnifying of everything that comes from me, and i am always complaining of it outwardly and inwardly. that suddenly i should set about desiring you to be more grateful,--even for so great a boon as an old penholder,--would be a more astounding change than any to be sought or seen in a prime minister. another mistake you made concerning henrietta and her opinion--and there's no use nor comfort in leaving you in it. henrietta says that the 'anger would not be so formidable after all'! poor dearest henrietta, who trembles at the least bending of the brows ... who has less courage than i, and the same views of the future! what she referred to, was simply the infrequency of the visits. 'why was i afraid,' she said--'where was the danger? who would be the _informer_?'--well! i will not say any more. it is just natural that you, in your circumstances and associations, should be unable to see what i have seen from the beginning--only you will not hereafter reproach me, in the most secret of your thoughts, for not having told you plainly. if i could have told you with greater plainness i should blame myself (and i do not) because it is not an opinion i have, but a perception. i see, i know. the result ... the end of all ... perhaps now and then i see _that_ too ... in the 'lucid moments' which are not the happiest for anybody. remember, in all cases, that i shall not repent of any part of our past intercourse; and that, therefore, when the time for decision comes, you will be free to look at the question as if you saw it then for the first moment, without being hampered by considerations about 'all those yesterdays.' for _him_ ... he would rather see me dead at his foot than yield the point: and he will say so, and mean it, and persist in the meaning. do you ever wonder at me ... that i should write such things, and have written others so different? _i have thought that in myself very often._ insincerity and injustice may seem the two ends, while i occupy the straight betwixt two--and i should not like you to doubt how this may be! sometimes i have begun to show you the truth, and torn the paper; i _could_ not. yet now again i am borne on to tell you, ... to save you from some thoughts which you cannot help perhaps. there has been no insincerity--nor is there injustice. i believe, i am certain, i have loved him better than the rest of his children. i have heard the fountain within the rock, and my heart has struggled in towards him through the stones of the rock ... thrust off ... dropping off ... turning in again and clinging! knowing what is excellent in him well, loving him as my only parent left, and for himself dearly, notwithstanding that hardness and the miserable 'system' which made him appear harder still, i have loved him and been proud of him for his high qualities, for his courage and fortitude when he bore up so bravely years ago under the worldly reverses which he yet felt acutely--more than you and i could feel them--but the fortitude was admirable. then came the trials of love--then, i was repulsed too often, ... made to suffer in the suffering of those by my side ... depressed by petty daily sadnesses and terrors, from which it is possible however for an elastic affection to rise again as past. yet my friends used to say 'you look broken-spirited'--and it was true. in the midst, came my illness,--and when i was ill he grew gentler and let me draw nearer than ever i had done: and after that great stroke ... you _know_ ... though _that_ fell in the middle of a storm of emotion and sympathy on my part, which drove clearly against him, god seemed to strike our hearts together by the shock; and i was grateful to him for not saying aloud what i said to myself in my agony, '_if it had not been for you_'...! and comparing my self-reproach to what i imagined his self-reproach must certainly be (for if _i_ had loved selfishly, _he_ had not been kind), i felt as if i could love and forgive him for two ... (i knowing that serene generous departed spirit, and seeming left to represent it) ... and i did love him better than all those left to _me_ to love in the world here. i proved a little my affection for him, by coming to london at the risk of my life rather than diminish the comfort of his home by keeping a part of my family away from him. and afterwards for long and long he spoke to me kindly and gently, and of me affectionately and with too much praise; and god knows that i had as much joy as i imagined myself capable of again, in the sound of his footstep on the stairs, and of his voice when he prayed in this room; my best hope, as i have told him since, being, to die beneath his eyes. love is so much to me naturally--it is, to all women! and it was so much to _me_ to feel sure at last that _he_ loved me--to forget all blame--to pull the weeds up from that last illusion of life:--and this, till the pisa-business, which threw me off, far as ever, again--farther than ever--when george said 'he could not flatter me' and i dared not flatter myself. but do _you_ believe that i never wrote what i did not feel: i never did. and i ask one kindness more ... do not notice what i have written here. let it pass. we can alter nothing by ever so many words. after all, he is the victim. he isolates himself--and now and then he feels it ... the cold dead silence all round, which is the effect of an incredible system. if he were not stronger than most men, he could not bear it as he does. with such high qualities too!--so upright and honourable--you would esteem him, you would like him, i think. and so ... dearest ... let _that_ be the last word. i dare say you have asked yourself sometimes, why it was that i never managed to draw you into the house here, so that you might make your own way. now _that_ is one of the things impossible to me. i have not influence enough for _that_. george can never invite a friend of his even. do you see? the people who do come here, come by particular license and association ... capt. surtees cook being one of them. once ... when i was in high favour too ... i asked for mr. kenyon to be invited to dinner--he an old college friend, and living close by and so affectionate to me always--i felt that he must be hurt by the neglect, and asked. _it was in vain._ now, you see-- may god bless you always! i wrote all my spirits away in this letter yesterday, and kept it to finish to-day ... being yours every day, glad or sad, ever beloved!-- your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, january , .] why will you give me such unnecessary proofs of your goodness? why not leave the books for me to take away, at all events? no--you must fold up, and tie round, and seal over, and be at all the pains in the world with those hands i see now. but you only threaten; say you 'shall send'--as yet, and nothing having come, i do pray you, if not too late, to save me the shame--add to the gratitude you never can now, i think ... only _think_, for you are a siren, and i don't know certainly to what your magic may not extend. thus, in not so important a matter, i should have said, the day before yesterday, that no letter from you could make my heart rise within me, more than of old ... unless it should happen to be of twice the ordinary thickness ... and _then_ there's a fear at first lest the over-running of my dealt-out measure should be just a note of mr. kenyon's, for instance! but yesterday the very seal began with 'ba'--now, always seal with that seal my letters, dearest! do you recollect donne's pretty lines about seals? quondam fessus amor loquens amato, tot et tanta loquens amica, scripsit: tandem et fessa manus dedit sigillum. and in his own english, when love, being weary, made an end of kind expressions to his friend, he writ; when hand could write no more, he gave the seal--and so left o'er. (by the way, what a mercy that he never noticed the jingle _in posse_ of ending 'expressions' and beginning 'impressions.') how your account of the actors in the 'love's labour lost' amused me! i rather like, though, the notion of that steady, business-like pursuit of love under difficulties; and the _sobbing_ proves something surely! serjt. talfourd says--is it not he who says it?--'all tears are not for sorrow.' i should incline to say, from my own feeling, that no tears were. they only express joy in me, or sympathy with joy--and so is it with you too, i should think. understand that i do _not_ disbelieve in mesmerism--i only object to insufficient evidence being put forward as quite irrefragable. i keep an open sense on the subject--ready to be instructed; and should have refused such testimony as miss martineau's if it had been adduced in support of something i firmly believed--'non _tali_ auxilio'--indeed, so has truth been harmed, and only so, from the beginning. so, i shall read what you bid me, and learn all i can. i am not quite so well this week--yesterday some friends came early and kept me at home--for which i seem to suffer a little; less, already, than in the morning--so i will go out and walk away the whirring ... which is all the mighty ailment. as for 'luria' i have not looked at it since i saw you--which means, saw you in the body, because last night i saw you; as i wonder if you know! thursday, and again i am with you--and you will forget nothing ... how the farewell is to be returned? ah, my dearest, sweetest ba; how entirely i love you! may god bless you ever-- r. . p.m. your parcel arrives ... the penholder; now what shall i say? how am i to use so fine a thing even in writing to you? i will give it you again in our isle, and meantime keep it where my other treasures are--my letters and my dear ringlet. thank you--all i can thank. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday. [post-mark, january , .] ever dearest--i will say, as you desire, nothing on that subject--but this strictly for myself: you engaged me to consult my own good in the keeping or breaking our engagement; not _your_ good as it might even seem to me; much less seem to another. my only good in this world--that against which all the world goes for nothing--is to spend my life with you, and be yours. you know that when i _claim_ anything, it is really yourself in me--you _give_ me a right and bid me use it, and i, in fact, am most obeying you when i appear most exacting on my own account--so, in that feeling, i dare claim, once for all, and in all possible cases (except that dreadful one of your becoming worse again ... in which case i wait till life ends with both of us), i claim your promise's fulfilment--say, at the summer's end: it cannot be for your good that this state of things should continue. we can go to italy for a year or two and be happy as day and night are long. for me, i adore you. this is all unnecessary, i feel as i write: but you will think of the main fact as _ordained_, granted by god, will you not, dearest?--so, not to be put in doubt _ever again_--then, we can go quietly thinking of after matters. till to-morrow, and ever after, god bless my heart's own, own ba. all my soul follows you, love--encircles you--and i live in being yours. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, january , .] let it be this way, ever dearest. if in the time of fine weather, i am not ill, ... _then_ ... _not now_ ... you shall decide, and your decision shall be duty and desire to me, both--i will make no difficulties. remember, in the meanwhile, that i _have_ decided to let it be as you shall choose ... _shall_ choose. that i love you enough to give you up 'for your good,' is proof (to myself at least) that i love you enough for any other end:--but you thought _too much of me in the last letter_. do not mistake me. i believe and trust in all your words--only you are generous unawares, as other men are selfish. more, i meant to say of this; but you moved me as usual yesterday into the sunshine, and then i am dazzled and cannot see clearly. still i see that you love me and that i am bound to you:--and 'what more need i see,' you may ask; while i cannot help looking out to the future, to the blue ridges of the hills, to the _chances_ of your being happy with me. well! i am yours as _you_ see ... and not yours to teaze you. you shall decide everything when the time comes for doing anything ... and from this to then, i do not, dearest, expect you to use 'the liberty of leaping out of the window,' unless you are sure of the house being on fire! nobody shall push you out of the window--least of all, _i_. for italy ... you are right. we should be nearer the sun, as you say, and further from the world, as i think--out of hearing of the great storm of gossiping, when 'scirocco is loose.' even if you liked to live altogether abroad, coming to england at intervals, it would be no sacrifice for me--and whether in italy or england, we should have sufficient or more than sufficient means of living, without modifying by a line that 'good free life' of yours which you reasonably praise--which, if it had been necessary to modify, _we must have parted_, ... because i could not have borne to see you do it; though, that you once offered it for my sake, i never shall forget. mr. kenyon stayed half an hour, and asked, after you went, if you had been here long. i reproached him with what they had been doing at his club (the athenæum) in blackballing douglas jerrold, for want of something better to say--and he had not heard of it. there were more black than white balls, and dickens was so enraged at the repulse of his friend that he gave in his own resignation like a privy councillor. but the really bad news is of poor tennyson--i forgot to tell you--i forget everything. he is seriously ill with an internal complaint and confined to his bed, as george heard from a common friend. which does not prevent his writing a new poem--he has finished the second book of it--and it is in blank verse and a fairy tale, and called the 'university,' the university-members being all females. if george has not diluted the scheme of it with some law from the inner temple, i don't know what to think--it makes me open my eyes. now isn't the world too old and fond of steam, for blank verse poems, in ever so many books, to be written on the fairies? i hope they may cure him, for the best deed they can do. he is not precisely in danger, understand--but the complaint may _run_ into danger--so the account went. and you? how are you? mind to tell me. may god bless you. is monday or tuesday to be _our_ day? if it were not for mr. kenyon i should take courage and say monday--but tuesday and saturday would do as well--would they not? your own ba. shall i have a letter? _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday. [post-mark, january , .] it is a relief to me this time to obey your wish, and reserve further remark on _that_ subject till by and bye. and, whereas some people, i suppose, have to lash themselves up to the due point of passion, and choose the happy minutes to be as loving in as they possibly can ... (that is, in _expression_; the just correspondency of word to fact and feeling: for _it_--the love--may be very truly _there_, at the bottom, when it is got at, and spoken out)--quite otherwise, i do really have to guard my tongue and set a watch on my pen ... that so i may say as little as can well be likely to be excepted to by your generosity. dearest, _love_ means _love_, certainly, and adoration carries its sense with it--and _so_, you may have received my feeling in that shape--but when i begin to hint at the merest putting into practice one or the other profession, you 'fly out'--instead of keeping your throne. so let this letter lie awhile, till my heart is more used to it, and after some days or weeks i will find as cold and quiet a moment as i can, and by standing as far off you as i shall be able, see more--'si _minus propè_ stes, te capiet magis.' meanwhile, silent or speaking, i am yours to dispose of as that _glove_--not that hand. i must think that mr. kenyon sees, and knows, and ... in his goodness ... hardly disapproves--he knows i could not avoid--escape you--for he knows, in a manner, what you are ... like your american; and, early in our intercourse, he asked me (did i tell you?) 'what i thought of his young relative'--and i considered half a second to this effect--'if he asked me what i thought of the queen-diamond they showed me in the crown of the czar--and i answered truly--he would not return; "then of course you mean to try and get it to keep."' so i _did_ tell the truth in a very few words. well, it is no matter. i am sorry to hear of poor tennyson's condition. the projected book--title, scheme, all of it,--_that_ is astounding;--and fairies? if 'thorpes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies--_this_ maketh that there ben no fairies'--locomotives and the broad or narrow gauge must keep the very ghosts of them away. but how the fashion of this world passes; the forms its beauty and truth take; if _we_ have the making of such! i went last night, out of pure shame at a broken promise, to hear miss cushman and her sister in 'romeo and juliet.' the whole play goes ... horribly; 'speak' bids the poet, and so m. walladmir [valdemar] moves his tongue and dispenses with his jaws. whatever is slightly touched in, indicated, to give relief to something actually insisted upon and drawn boldly ... _here_, you have it gone over with an unremitting burnt-stick, till it stares black forever! romeo goes whining about verona by broad daylight. yet when a schoolfellow of mine, i remember, began translating in class virgil after this mode, 'sic fatur--so said Æneas; lachrymans--_a-crying_' ... our pedagogue turned on him furiously--'d'ye think Æneas made such a noise--as _you_ shall, presently?' how easy to conceive a boyish half-melancholy, smiling at itself. then _tuesday_, and not monday ... and saturday will be the nearer afterward. i am singularly well to-day--head quite quiet--and yesterday your penholder began its influence and i wrote about half my last act. writing is nothing, nor praise, nor blame, nor living, nor dying, but you are all my true life; may god bless you ever-- r. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, february , .] something, you said yesterday, made me happy--'that your liking for me did not come and go'--do you remember? because there was a letter, written at a crisis long since, in which you showed yourself awfully, as a burning mountain, and talked of 'making the most of your fire-eyes,' and of having at intervals 'deep black pits of cold water'!--and the lava of that letter has kept running down into my thoughts of you too much, until quite of late--while even yesterday i was not too well instructed to be 'happy,' you see! do not reproach me! i would not have 'heard your enemy say so'--it was your own word! and the other long word _idiosyncrasy_ seemed long enough to cover it; and it might have been a matter of temperament, i fancied, that a man of genius, in the mystery of his nature, should find his feelings sometimes like dumb notes in a piano ... should care for people at half past eleven on tuesday, and on wednesday at noon prefer a black beetle. how you frightened me with your 'fire-eyes'! 'making the most of them' too! and the 'black pits,' which gaped ... _where_ did they gape? who could tell? oh--but lately i have not been crossed so, of course, with those fabulous terrors--lately that horror of the burning mountain has grown more like a superstition than a rational fear!--and if i was glad ... happy ... yesterday, it was but as a tolerably sensible nervous man might be glad of a clearer moonlight, showing him that what he had half shuddered at for a sheeted ghoule, was only a white horse on the moor. such a great white horse!--call it the 'mammoth horse'--the '_real_ mammoth,' this time! dearest, did i write you a cold letter the last time? almost it seems so to me! the reason being that my feelings were near to overflow, and that i had to hold the cup straight to prevent the possible dropping on your purple underneath. _your_ letter, the letter i answered, was in my heart ... _is_ in my heart--and all the yeses in the world would not be too many for such a letter, as i felt and feel. also, perhaps, i gave you, at last, a merely formal distinction--and it comes to the same thing practically without any doubt! but i shrank, with a sort of instinct, from appearing (to myself, mind) to take a security from your words now (said too on an obvious impulse) for what should, would, _must_, depend on your deliberate wishes hereafter. you understand--you will not accuse me of over-cautiousness and the like. on the contrary, you are all things to me, ... instead of all and better than all! you have fallen like a great luminous blot on the whole leaf of the world ... of life and time ... and i can see nothing beyond you, nor wish to see it. as to all that was evil and sadness to me, i do not feel it any longer--it may be raining still, but i am in the shelter and can scarcely tell. if you _could_ be _too dear_ to me you would be now--but you could not--i do not believe in those supposed excesses of pure affections--god cannot be too great. therefore it is a conditional engagement still--all the conditions being in your hands, except the necessary one, of my health. and shall i tell you what is 'not to be put in doubt _ever_'?--your goodness, _that_ is ... and every tie that binds me to you. 'ordained, granted by god' it is, that i should owe the only happiness in my life to you, and be contented and grateful (if it were necessary) to stop with it at this present point. still i _do not_--there seems no necessity yet. may god bless you, ever dearest:-- your own ba. _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [in the same envelope with the preceding letter.] well i have your letter--and i send you the postscript to my last one, written yesterday you observe ... and being simply a postscript in some parts of it, _so_ far it is not for an answer. only i deny the 'flying out'--perhaps you may do it a little more ... in your moments of starry centrifugal motion. so you think that dear mr. kenyon's opinion of his 'young relative'--(neither young nor his relative--not very much of either!) is to the effect that you couldn't possibly 'escape' her--? it looks like the sign of the red dragon, put _so_ ... and your burning mountain is not too awful for the scenery. seriously ... gravely ... if it makes me three times happy that you should love me, yet i grow uneasy and even saddened when you say infatuated things such as this and this ... unless after all you mean a philosophical sarcasm on the worth of czar diamonds. no--do not say such things! if you do, i shall end by being jealous of some ideal czarina who must stand between you and me.... i shall think that it is not _i_ whom you look at ... and _pour cause_. 'flying out,' _that_ would be! and for mr. kenyon, i only know that i have grown the most ungrateful of human beings lately, and find myself almost glad when he does not come, certainly uncomfortable when he does--yes, _really_ i would rather not see him at all, and when you are not here. the sense of which and the sorrow for which, turn me to a hypocrite, and make me ask why he does not come &c. ... questions which never came to my lips before ... till i am more and more ashamed and sorry. will it end, i wonder, by my ceasing to care for any one in the world, except, except...? or is it not rather that i feel trodden down by either his too great penetration or too great unconsciousness, both being overwhelming things from him to me. from a similar cause i hate writing letters to any of my old friends--i feel as if it were the merest swindling to attempt to give the least account of myself to anybody, and when their letters come and i know that nothing very fatal has happened to them, scarcely i can read to an end afterwards through the besetting care of having to answer it all. then i am ignoble enough to revenge myself on people for their stupidities ... which never in my life i did before nor felt the temptation to do ... and when they have a distaste for your poetry through want of understanding, i have a distaste for _them_ ... cannot help it--and you need not say it is wrong, because i know the whole iniquity of it, persisting nevertheless. as for dear mr. kenyon--with whom we began, and who thinks of you as appreciatingly and admiringly as one man can think of another,--do not imagine that, if he _should_ see anything, he can 'approve' of either your wisdom or my generosity, ... _he_, with his large organs of caution, and his habit of looking right and left, and round the corner a little way. because, you know, ... if i should be ill _before_ ... why there, is a conclusion!--but if _afterward_ ... what? you who talk wildly of my generosity, whereas i only and most impotently tried to be generous, must see how both suppositions have their possibility. nevertheless you are the master to run the latter risk. you have overcome ... to your loss perhaps--unless the judgment is revised. as to taking the half of my prison ... i could not even smile at _that_ if it seemed probable ... i should recoil from your affection even under a shape so fatal to you ... dearest! no! there is a better probability before us i hope and believe--in spite of the _possibility_ which it is impossible to deny. and now we leave this subject for the present. _sunday._--you are 'singularly well.' you are very seldom quite well, i am afraid--yet 'luria' seems to have done no harm this time, as you are singularly well the day _after_ so much writing. yet do not hurry that last act.... i won't have it for a long while yet. here i have been reading carlyle upon cromwell and he is very fine, very much himself, it seems to me, everywhere. did mr. kenyon make you understand that i had said there was nothing in him but _manner_ ... i thought he said so--and i am confident that he never heard such an opinion from me, for good or for evil, ever at all. i may have observed upon those vulgar attacks on account of the so-called _mannerism_, the obvious fact, that an individuality, carried into the medium, the expression, is a feature in all men of genius, as buffon teaches ... 'le style, c'est _l'homme_.' but if the _whole man_ were style, if all carlyleism were manner--why there would be no man, no carlyle worth talking of. i wonder that mr. kenyon should misrepresent me so. euphuisms there may be to the end of the world--affected parlances--just as a fop at heart may go without shoestrings to mimic the distractions of some great wandering soul--although _that_ is a bad comparison, seeing that what is called carlyle's mannerism, is not his dress, but his physiognomy--or more than _that_ even. but i do not forgive him for talking here against the 'ideals of poets' ... opposing their ideal by a mis-called _reality_, which is another sort, a baser sort, of ideal after all. he sees things in broad blazing lights--but he does not analyse them like a philosopher--do you think so? then his praise for dumb heroic action as opposed to speech and singing, what is _that_--when all earnest thought, passion, belief, and their utterances, are as much actions surely as the cutting off of fifty heads by one right hand. as if shakespeare's actions were not greater than cromwell's!-- but i shall write no more. once more, may god bless you. wholly and only your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, february , .] you ought hardly,--ought you, my ba?--to refer to _that_ letter or any expression in it; i had--and _have_, i trust--your forgiveness for what i wrote, meaning to be generous or at least just, god knows. that, and the other like exaggerations were there to serve the purpose of what you properly call a _crisis_. i _did_ believe,--taking an expression, in the note that occasioned mine, in connection with an excuse which came in the postscript for not seeing me on the day previously appointed, i did fully believe that you were about to deny me admittance again unless i blotted out--not merely softened down--the past avowal. all was wrong, foolish, but from a good notion, i dare to say. and then, that particular exaggeration you bring most painfully to my mind--_that_ does not, after all, disagree with what i said and you repeat--does it, if you will think? i said my other '_likings_' (as you rightly set it down) _used_ to 'come and go,' and that my love for you _did not_, and that is true; the first clause as the last of the sentence, for my sympathies are very wide and general,--always have been--and the natural problem has been the giving unity to their object, concentrating them instead of dispersing. i seem to have foretold, _foreknown_ you in other likings of mine--now here ... when the liking '_came_' ... and now elsewhere ... when as surely the liking '_went_': and if they had stayed before the time would that have been a comfort to refer to? on the contrary, i am as little likely to be led by delusions as can be,--for romeo _thinks_ he loves rosaline, and is excused on all hands--whereas i saw the plain truth without one mistake, and 'looked to like, if looking liking moved--and no more deep _did_ i endart mine eye'--about which, first i was very sorry, and after rather proud--all which i seem to have told you before.--and now, when my whole heart and soul find you, and fall on you, and fix forever, i am to be dreadfully afraid the joy cannot last, seeing that --it is so baseless a fear that no illustration will serve! is it gone now, dearest, ever-dearest? and as you amuse me sometimes, as now, by seeming surprised at some chance expression of a truth which is grown a veriest commonplace to _me_--like charles lamb's 'letter to an elderly man whose education had been neglected'--when he finds himself involuntarily communicating truths above the capacity and acquirements of his friend, and stops himself after this fashion--'if you look round the world, my dear sir--for it _is_ round!--so i will make you laugh at me, if you will, for _my_ inordinate delight at hearing the success of your experiment with the opium. i never dared, nor shall dare inquire into your use of that--for, knowing you utterly as i do, i know you only bend to the most absolute necessity in taking more or less of it--so that increase of the quantity must mean simply increased weakness, illness--and diminution, diminished illness. and now there _is_ diminution! dear, dear ba--you speak of my silly head and its ailments ... well, and what brings on the irritation? a wet day or two spent at home; and what ends it all directly?--just an hour's walk! so with _me_: now,--fancy me shut in a room for seven years ... it is--no, _don't_ see, even in fancy, what is left of me then! but _you_, at the end; this is _all_ the harm: i wonder ... i confirm my soul in its belief in perpetual miraculousness ... i bless god with my whole heart that it is thus with you! and so, i will not even venture to say--so superfluous it were, though with my most earnest, most loving breath (i who _do_ love you more at every breath i draw; indeed, yes dearest,)--i _will not_ bid you--that is, pray you--to persevere! you have all my life bound to yours--save me from _my 'seven years'_--and god reward you! your own r. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, february , .] but i did not--dear, dearest--no indeed, i did not mean any harm about the letter. i wanted to show you how you had given me pleasure--and so,--did i give you pain? was _that_ my ingenuity? forgive my unhappiness in it, and let it be as if it had not been. only i will just say that what made me talk about 'the thorn in the flesh' from that letter so long, was a sort of conviction of your having put into it as much of the truth, _your_ truth, as admitted of the ultimate purpose of it, and not the least, slightest doubt of the key you gave me to the purpose in question. and so forgive me. why did you set about explaining, as if i were doubting you? when you said once that it 'did not come and go,'--was it not enough? enough to make me feel happy as i told you? did i require you to write a letter like this? now think for a moment, and know once for all, how from the beginning to these latter days and through all possible degrees of crisis, you have been to my apprehension and gratitude, the best, most consistent, most noble ... the words falter that would speak of it all. in nothing and at no moment have you--i will not say--failed to _me_, but spoken or acted unworthily of yourself at the highest. what have you ever been to me except too generous? ah--if i had been only half as generous, it is true that i never could have seen you again after that first meeting--it was the straight path perhaps. but i had not courage--i shrank from the thought of it--and then ... besides ... i could not believe that your mistake was likely to last,--i concluded that i might keep my friend. why should any remembrance be painful to _you_? i do not understand. unless indeed i should grow painful to you ... i myself!--seeing that every remembered separate thing has brought me nearer to you, and made me yours with a deeper trust and love. and for that letter ... do you fancy that in _my_ memory the sting is not gone from it?--and that i do not carry the thought of it, as the roman maidens, you speak of, their cool harmless snakes, at my heart always? so let the poor letter be forgiven, for the sake of the dear letter that was burnt, forgiven by _you_--until you grow angry with me instead--just till then. and that you should care so much about the opium! then _i_ must care, and get to do with less--at least. on the other side of your goodness and indulgence (a very little way on the other side) it might strike you as strange that i who have had no pain--no acute suffering to keep down from its angles--should need opium in any shape. but i have had restlessness till it made me almost mad: at one time i lost the power of sleeping quite--and even in the day, the continual aching sense of weakness has been intolerable--besides palpitation--as if one's life, instead of giving movement to the body, were imprisoned undiminished within it, and beating and fluttering impotently to get out, at all the doors and windows. so the medical people gave me opium--a preparation of it, called morphine, and ether--and ever since i have been calling it my amreeta draught, my elixir,--because the tranquillizing power has been wonderful. such a nervous system i have--so irritable naturally, and so shattered by various causes, that the need has continued in a degree until now, and it would be dangerous to leave off the calming remedy, mr. jago says, except very slowly and gradually. but slowly and gradually something may be done--and you are to understand that i never _increased_ upon the prescribed quantity ... prescribed in the first instance--no! now think of my writing all this to you!-- and after all the lotus-eaters are blessed beyond the opium-eaters; and the best of lotuses are such thoughts as i know. dear miss mitford comes to-morrow, and i am not glad enough. shall i have a letter to make me glad? she will talk, talk, talk ... and i shall be hoping all day that not a word may be talked of ... _you_:--a forlorn hope indeed! there's a hope for a day like thursday which is just in the middle between a tuesday and a saturday! your head ... is it ... _how_ is it? tell me. and consider again if it could be possible that i could ever desire to reproach _you_ ... in what i said about the letter. may god bless you, best and dearest. if you are the _compensation_ blessed is the evil that fell upon me: and _that_, i can say before god. your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday. [post-mark, february , .] if i said you 'gave me pain' in anything, it was in the only way ever possible for you, my dearest--by giving _yourself_, in me, pain--being unjust to your own right and power as i feel them at my heart: and in that way, i see you will go on to the end, i getting called--in this very letter--'generous' &c. well, let me fancy you see very, very deep into future chances and how i should behave on occasion. i shall hardly imitate you, i whose sense of the present and its claims of gratitude already is beyond expression. all the kind explaining about the opium makes me happier. 'slowly and gradually' what may _not_ be done? then see the bright weather while i write--lilacs, hawthorn, plum-trees all in bud; elders in leaf, rose-bushes with great red shoots; thrushes, whitethroats, hedge sparrows in full song--there can, let us hope, be nothing worse in store than a sharp wind, a week of it perhaps--and then comes what shall come-- and miss mitford yesterday--and has she fresh fears for you of my evil influence and origenic power of 'raying out darkness' like a swart star? why, the common sense of the world teaches that there is nothing people at fault in any faculty of expression are so intolerant of as the like infirmity in others--whether they are unconscious of, or indulgent to their own obscurity and fettered organ, the hindrance from the fettering of their neighbours' is redoubled. a man may think he is not deaf, or, at least, that you need not be so much annoyed by his deafness as you profess--but he will be quite aware, to say the least of it, when another man can't hear _him_; he will certainly not encourage him to stop his ears. and so with the converse; a writer who fails to make himself understood, as presumably in my case, may either believe in his heart that it is _not_ so ... that only as much attention and previous instructedness as the case calls for, would quite avail to understand him; or he may open his eyes to the fact and be trying hard to overcome it: but on which supposition is he led to confirm another in his unintelligibility? by the proverbial tenderness of the eye with the mote for the eye with the beam? if that beam were just such another mote--_then_ one might sympathize and feel no such inconvenience--but, because i have written a 'sordello,' do i turn to just its _double_, sordello the second, in your books, and so perforce see nothing wrong? 'no'--it is supposed--'but something _as_ obscure in its way.' then down goes the bond of union at once, and i stand no nearer to view your work than the veriest proprietor of one thought and the two words that express it without obscurity at all--'bricks and mortar.' of course an artist's whole problem must be, as carlyle wrote to me, 'the expressing with articulate clearness the thought in him'--i am almost inclined to say that _clear expression_ should be his only work and care--for he is born, ordained, such as he is--and not born learned in putting what was born in him into words--what ever _can_ be clearly spoken, ought to be. but 'bricks and mortar' is very easily said--and some of the thoughts in 'sordello' not so readily even if miss mitford were to try her hand on them. i look forward to a real life's work for us both. _i_ shall do all,--under your eyes and with your hand in mine,--all i was intended to do: may but _you_ as surely go perfecting--by continuing--the work begun so wonderfully--'a rose-tree that beareth seven-times seven'-- i am forced to dine in town to-day with an old friend--'to-morrow' always begins half the day before, like a jewish sabbath. did your sister tell you that i met her on the stairs last time? she did _not_ tell you that i had almost passed by her--the eyes being still elsewhere and occupied. now let me write out that--no--i will send the old ballad i told you of, for the strange coincidence--and it is very charming beside, is it not? now goodbye, my sweetest, dearest--and tell me good news of yourself to-morrow, and be but half a quarter as glad to see me as i shall be blessed in seeing you. god bless you ever. your own r. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, february , .] dearest, to my sorrow i must, i fear, give up the delight of seeing you this morning. i went out unwell yesterday, and a long noisy dinner with speech-making, with a long tiresome walk at the end of it--these have given me such a bewildering headache that i really see some reason in what they say here about keeping the house. will you forgive me--and let me forget it all on monday? on _monday_--unless i am told otherwise by the early post--and god bless you ever your own-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday. [post-mark, february , .] i felt it must be so ... that something must be the matter, ... and i had been so really unhappy for half an hour, that your letter which comes now at four, seems a little better, with all its bad news, than my fancies took upon themselves to be, without instruction. now _was_ it right to go out yesterday when you were unwell, and to a great dinner?--but i shall not reproach you, dearest, dearest--i have no heart for it at this moment. as to monday, of course it is as you like ... if you are well enough on monday ... if it should be thought wise of you to come to london through the noise ... if ... you understand all the _ifs_ ... and among them the greatest if of all, ... for if you do love me ... _care_ for me even, you will not do yourself harm or run any risk of harm by going out _anywhere too soon_. on monday, in case you are _considered well enough_, and otherwise tuesday, wednesday--i leave it to you. still i _will_ ask one thing, whether you come on monday or not. _let_ me have a single line by the nearest post to say how you are. perhaps for to-night it is not possible--oh no, it is nearly five now! but a word written on sunday would be with me early on monday morning, and i know you will let me have it, to save some of the anxious thoughts ... to break them in their course with some sort of certainty! may god bless you dearest of all!--i thought of you on thursday, but did not speak of you, not even when miss mitford called hood the greatest poet of the age ... she had been depreciating carlyle, so i let you lie and wait on the same level, ... that shelf of the rock which is above tide mark! i was glad even, that she did not speak of you; and, under cover of her speech of others, i had my thoughts of you deeply and safely. when she had gone at half past six, moreover, i grew over-hopeful, and made up my fancy to have a letter at eight! the branch she had pulled down, sprang upward skyward ... to that high possibility of a letter! which did not come that day ... no!--and i revenged myself by writing a letter to _you_, which was burnt afterwards because i would not torment you for letters. last night, came a real one--dearest! so we could not keep our sabbath to-day! it is a fast day instead, ... on my part. how should i feel (i have been thinking to myself), if i did not see you on saturday, and could not hope to see you on monday, nor on tuesday, nor on wednesday, nor thursday nor friday, nor saturday again--if all the sabbaths were gone out of the world for me! may god bless you!--it has grown to be enough prayer!--as _you_ are enough (and all, besides) for your own ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, february , .] the clock strikes--_three_; and i am here, not with you--and my 'fractious' headache at the very worst got suddenly better just now, and is leaving me every minute--as if to make me aware, with an undivided attention, that at this present you are waiting for me, and soon will be wondering--and it would be so easy now to dress myself and walk or run or ride--do anything that led to you ... but by no haste in the world could i reach you, i am forced to see, before a quarter to five--by which time i think my letter must arrive. dear, dearest ba, did you but know how vexed i am--with myself, with--this is absurd, of course. the cause of it all was my going out last night--yet that, neither, was to be helped, the party having been twice put off before--once solely on my account. and the sun shines, and you would shine-- monday is to make all the amends in its power, is it not? still, still i have lost my day. bless you, my ever-dearest. your r. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday morning. [post-mark, february , .] my dearest--there are no words,--nor will be to-morrow, nor even in the island--i know that! but i do love you. my arms have been round you for many minutes since the last word-- i am quite well now--my other note will have told you when the change began--i think i took too violent a shower bath, with a notion of getting better in as little time as possible,--and the stimulus turned mere feverishness to headache. however, it was no sooner gone, in a degree, than a worse plague came. i sate thinking of you--but i knew my note would arrive at about four o'clock or a little later--and i thought the visit for the quarter of an hour would as effectually prevent to-morrow's meeting as if the whole two hours' blessing had been laid to heart--to-morrow i shall see you, ba--my sweetest. but there are cold winds blowing to-day--how do you bear them, my ba? '_care_' you, pray, pray, care for all _i_ care about--and be well, if god shall please, and bless me as no man ever was blessed! now i kiss you, and will begin a new thinking of you--and end, and begin, going round and round in my circle of discovery,--_my_ lotos-blossom! because they _loved_ the lotos, were lotos-lovers,--[greek: lôtou t' erôtes], as euripides writes in the [greek: trôades]. your own p.s. see those lines in the _athenæum_ on pulci with hunt's translation--all wrong--'_che non si sente_,' being--'that one does not _hear_ him' i.e. the ordinarily noisy fellow--and the rest, male, pessime! sic verte, meo periculo, mî ocelle! where's luigi pulci, that one don't the man see? he just now yonder in the copse has '_gone it_' (_n_'andò) because across his mind there came a fancy; he'll wish to fancify, perhaps, a sonnet! now ba thinks nothing can be worse than that? then read _this_ which i really told hunt and got his praise for. poor dear wonderful persecuted pietro d'abano wrote this quatrain on the people's plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him--he helped to build padua cathedral, wrote a treatise on magic still extant, and passes for a conjuror in his country to this day--when there is a storm the mothers tell the children that he is in the air; his pact with the evil one obliged him to drink no _milk_; no natural human food! you know tieck's novel about him? well, this quatrain is said, i believe truly, to have been discovered in a well near padua some fifty years ago. studiando le mie cifre, col compasso rilevo, che presto sarò sotterra-- perchè del mio saper si fa gran chiasso, e gl'ignoranti m'hanno mosso guerra. affecting, is it not, in its simple, child like plaining? now so, if i remember, i turned it--word for word-- studying my ciphers, with the compass i reckon--who soon shall be below ground, because of my lore they make great 'rumpus,' and against me war makes each dull rogue round. say that you forgive me to-morrow! [the following is in e.b.b.'s handwriting.] with my compass i take up my ciphers, poor scholar; who myself shall be taken down soon under the ground ... since the world at my learning roars out in its choler, and the blockheads have fought me all round. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, february , .] ever dearest, i have been possessed by your 'luria' just as you would have me, and i should like you to understand, not simply how fine a conception the whole work seems to me, so developed, but how it has moved and affected me, without the ordinary means and dialect of pathos, by that calm attitude of moral grandeur which it has--it is very fine. for the execution, _that_ too is worthily done--although i agree with you, that a little quickening and drawing in closer here and there, especially towards the close where there is no time to lose, the reader feels, would make the effect stronger--but you will look to it yourself--and such a conception _must_ come in thunder and lightning, as a chief god would--_must_ make its own way ... and will not let its poet go until he speaks it out to the ultimate syllable. domizia disappoints me rather. you might throw a flash more of light on her face--might you not? but what am i talking? i think it a magnificent work--a noble exposition of the ingratitude of men against their 'heroes,' and (what is peculiar) an _humane_ exposition ... not misanthropical, after the usual fashion of such things: for the return, the remorse, saves it--and the 'too late' of the repentance and compensation covers with its solemn toll the fate of persecutors and victim. we feel that husain himself could only say afterward ... '_that is done._' and now--surely you think well of the work as a whole? you cannot doubt, i fancy, of the grandeur of it--and of the _subtilty_ too, for it is subtle--too subtle perhaps for stage purposes, though as clear, ... as to expression ... as to medium ... as 'bricks and mortar' ... shall i say? 'a people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life of one.' there is one of the fine thoughts. and how fine _he_ is, your luria, when he looks back to his east, through the half-pardon and half-disdain of domizia. ah--domizia! would it hurt her to make her more a woman ... a little ... i wonder! so i shall begin from the beginning, from the first act, and read _through_ ... since i have read the fifth twice over. and remember, please, that i am to read, besides, the 'soul's tragedy,' and that i shall dun you for it presently. because you told me it was finished, otherwise i would not speak a word, feeling that you want rest, and that i, who am anxious about you, would be crossing my own purposes by driving you into work. it is the overwork, the overwear of mind and heart (for the feelings come as much into use as the thoughts in these productions), that makes you so pale, dearest, that distracts your head, and does all the harm on saturdays and so many other days besides. to-day--how are you? it _was_ right and just for me to write this time, after the two dear notes ... the one on saturday night which made me praise you to myself and think you kinder than kindest, and the other on monday morning which took me unaware--such a note, _that_ was! oh it _was_ right and just that i should not teaze you to send me another after those two others,--yet i was very near doing it--yet i should like infinitely to hear to-day how you are--unreasonable!--well! you will write now--you will answer what i am writing, and mention yourself particularly and sincerely--remember! above all, you will care for your head. i have been thinking since yesterday that, coming out of the cold, you might not have refused as usual to take something ... hot wine and water, or coffee? will you have coffee with me on saturday? 'shunning the salt,' will you have the sugar? and do tell me, for i have been thinking, are you careful as to diet--and will such sublunary things as coffee and tea and cocoa affect your head--_for_ or _against_! then you do not touch wine--and perhaps you ought. surely something may be found or done to do you good. if it had not been for me, you would be travelling in italy by this time and quite well perhaps. this morning i had a letter from miss martineau and really read it to the end without thinking it too long, which is extraordinary for me just now, and scarcely ordinary in the letter, and indeed it is a delightful letter, as letters go, which are not yours! you shall take it with you on saturday to read, and you shall see that it is worth reading, and interesting for wordsworth's sake and her own. mr. kenyon has it now, because he presses on to have her letters, and i should not like to tell him that you had it first from me.... also saturday will be time enough. oh--poor mr. horne! shall i tell you some of his offences? that he desires to be called at four in the morning, and does not get up till eight. that he pours libations on his bare head out of the water-glasses at great dinners. that being in the midst of sportsmen--rural aristocrats--lords of soil--and all talking learnedly of pointers' noses and spaniels' ears; he has exclaimed aloud in a mocking paraphrase--'if i were to hold up a horse by the tail.' the wit is certainly doubtful!--that being asked to dinner on tuesday, he will go on wednesday instead.--that he throws himself at full length with a gesture approaching to a 'summerset' on satin sofas. that he giggles. that he only _thinks_ he can talk. that his ignorance on all subjects is astounding. that he never read the old ballads, nor saw percy's collection. that he asked _who_ wrote 'drink to me only with thine eyes.' that after making himself ridiculous in attempting to speak at a public meeting, he said to a compassionate friend 'i got very well out of _that_.' that, in writing his work on napoleon, he employed a man to study the subject for him. that he cares for nobody's poetry or fame except his own, and considers tennyson chiefly illustrious as being his contemporary. that, as to politics, he doesn't care '_which_ side.' that he is always talking of 'my shares,' 'my income,' as if he were a kilmansegg. lastly (and understand, this is _my_ 'lastly' and not miss mitford's, who is far from being out of breath so soon) that he has a mania for heiresses--that he has gone out at half past five and 'proposed' to miss m or n with fifty thousand pounds, and being rejected (as the lady thought fit to report herself) came back to tea and the same evening 'fell in love' with miss o or p ... with forty thousand--went away for a few months, and upon his next visit, did as much to a miss q or w, on the promise of four blood horses--has a prospect now of a miss r or s--with hounds, perhaps. too, too bad--isn't it? i would repeat none of it except to you--and as to the worst part, the last, why some may be coincidence, and some, exaggeration, for i have not the least doubt that every now and then a fine poetical compliment was turned into a serious thing by the listener, and then the poor poet had critics as well as listeners all round him. also, he rather 'wears his heart on his sleeve,' there is no denying--and in other respects he is not much better, perhaps, than other men. but for the base traffic of the affair--i do not believe a word. he is too generous--has too much real sensibility. i fought his battle, poor orion. 'and so,' she said 'you believe it possible for a disinterested man to become really attached to two women, heiresses, on the same day?' i doubted the _fact_. and then she showed me a note, an autograph note from the poet, confessing the m or n part of the business--while miss o or p confessed herself, said miss mitford. but i persisted in doubting, notwithstanding the lady's confessions, or convictions, as they might be. and just think of mr. horne not having tact enough to keep out of these multitudinous scrapes, for those few days which on three separate occasions he paid miss mitford in a neighbourhood where all were strangers to him,--and never outstaying his week! he must have been _foolish_, read it all how we may. and so am _i_, to write this 'personal talk' to you when you will not care for it--yet you asked me, and it may make you smile, though wordsworth's tea-kettle outsings it all. when your monday letter came, i was reading the criticism on hunt and his italian poets, in the _examiner_. how i liked to be pulled by the sleeve to your translations!--how i liked everything!--pulci, pietro ... and you, best! yet here's a naiveté which i found in your letter! i will write it out that you may read it-- 'however it' (the headache) 'was no sooner gone in a degree, than a worse plague came--_i sate thinking of you_.' very satisfactory _that_ is, and very clear. may god bless you dearest, dearest! be careful of yourself. the cold makes me _languid_, as heat is apt to make everybody; but i am not unwell, and keep up the fire and the thoughts of you. your worse ... worst plague your own ba. i shall hear? yes! and admire my obedience in having written 'a long letter' _to_ the letter! _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, february , .] my sweetest 'plague,' _did_ i really write that sentence so, without gloss or comment in close vicinity? i can hardly think it--but you know well, well where the real plague lay,--that i thought of you as thinking, in your infinite goodness, of untoward chances which had kept me from you--and if i did not dwell more particularly on that thinking of _yours_, which became as i say, in the knowledge of it, a plague when brought before me _with_ the thought of you,--if i passed this slightly over it was for pure unaffected shame that i should take up the care and stop the 'reverie serene' of--ah, the rhyme _lets_ me say--'sweetest eyes were ever seen'--were _ever_ seen! and yourself confess, in the saturday's note, to having been 'unhappy for half an hour till' &c. &c.--and do not i feel _that_ here, and am not i plagued by it? well, having begun at the end of your letter, dearest, i will go back gently (that is backwards) and tell you i 'sate thinking' too, and with no greater comfort, on the cold yesterday. the pond before the window was frozen ('so as to bear sparrows' somebody said) and i knew you would feel it--'but you are not unwell'--really? thank god--and the month wears on. beside i have got a reassurance--you asked me once if i were superstitious, i remember (as what do i forget that you say?). however that may be, yesterday morning as i turned to look for a book, an old fancy seized me to try the 'sortes' and dip into the first page of the first i chanced upon, for my fortune; i said 'what will be the event of my love for her'--in so many words--and my book turned out to be--'cerutti's italian grammar!'--a propitious source of information ... the best to be hoped, what could it prove but some assurance that you were in the dative case, or i, not in the ablative absolute? i do protest that, with the knowledge of so many horrible pitfalls, or rather spring guns with wires on every bush ... such dreadful possibilities of stumbling on 'conditional moods,' 'imperfect tenses,' 'singular numbers,'--i should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as 'conjunction,' 'possessive pronoun--,' secure so far from poor tippet's catastrophe. well, i ventured, and what did i find? _this_--which i copy from the book now--'_if we love in the other world as we do in this, i shall love thee to eternity_'--from 'promiscuous exercises,' to be translated into italian, at the end. and now i reach horne and his characteristics--of which i can tell you with confidence that they are grossly misrepresented where not altogether false--whether it proceed from inability to see what one may see, or disinclination, i cannot say. i know very little of horne, but my one visit to him a few weeks ago would show the uncandidness of those charges: for instance, he talked a good deal about horses, meaning to ride in ireland, and described very cleverly an old hunter he had hired once,--how it galloped and could not walk; also he propounded a theory of the true method of behaving in the saddle when a horse rears, which i besought him only to practise in fancy on the sofa, where he lay telling it. so much for professing his ignorance in that matter! on a sofa he does throw himself--but when thrown there, he can talk, with miss mitford's leave, admirably,--i never heard better stories than horne's--some spanish-american incidents of travel want printing--or have been printed, for aught i know. that he cares for nobody's poetry is _false_, he praises more unregardingly of his own retreat, more unprovidingly for his own fortune,--(do i speak clearly?)--less like a man who himself has written somewhat in the 'line' of the other man he is praising--which 'somewhat' has to be guarded in its interests, &c., less like the poor professional praise of the 'craft' than any other i ever met--instance after instance starting into my mind as i write. to his income i never heard him allude--unless one should so interpret a remark to me this last time we met, that he had been on some occasion put to inconvenience by somebody's withholding ten or twelve pounds due to him for an article, and promised in the confidence of getting them to a tradesman, which does not look like 'boasting of his income'! as for the heiresses--i don't believe one word of it, of the succession and transition and trafficking. altogether, what miserable 'set-offs' to the achievement of an 'orion,' a 'marlowe,' a 'delora'! miss martineau understands him better. now i come to myself and my health. i am quite well now--at all events, much better, just a little turning in the head--since you appeal to my sincerity. for the coffee--thank you, indeed thank you, but nothing after the '_oenomel_' and before half past six. _i_ know all about that song and its greek original if horne does not--and can tell you--, how truly...! the thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine-- but might i of jove's nectar sup i would not change for thine! _no, no, no!_ and by the bye, i have misled you as my wont is, on the subject of wine, 'that i do not touch it'--not habitually, nor so as to feel the loss of it, that on a principle; but every now and then of course. and now, 'luria', so long as the parts cohere and the whole is discernible, all will be well yet. i shall not look at it, nor think of it, for a week or two, and then see what i have forgotten. domizia is all wrong; i told you i knew that her special colour had faded,--it was but a bright line, and the more distinctly deep that it was so narrow. one of my half dozen words on my scrap of paper 'pro memoria' was, under the 'act v.' '_she loves_'--to which i could not bring it, you see! yet the play requires it still,--something may yet be effected, though.... i meant that she should propose to go to pisa with him, and begin a new life. but there is no hurry--i suppose it is no use publishing much before easter--i will try and remember what my whole character _did_ mean--it was, in two words, understood at the time by 'panther's-beauty'--on which hint i ought to have spoken! but the work grew cold, and you came between, and the sun put out the fire on the hearth _nec vult panthera domari_! for the 'soul's tragedy'--_that_ will surprise you, i think. there is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the black face of _it_--it is all sneering and _disillusion_--and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word--now wait and see and then say! i will bring the first of the two parts next saturday. and now, dearest, i am with you--and the other matters are forgotten already. god bless you, i am ever your own r. you will write to me i trust? and tell me how to bear the cold. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, february , .] ah, the 'sortes'! is it a double oracle--'swan and shadow'--do you think? or do my eyes see double, dazzled by the light of it? 'i shall love thee to eternity'--i _shall_. and as for the wine, i did not indeed misunderstand you 'as my wont is,' because i understood simply that 'habitually' you abstained from wine, and i meant exactly that perhaps it would be better for your health to take it habitually. it _might_, you know--not that i pretend to advise. only when you look so much too pale sometimes, it comes into one's thoughts that you ought not to live on cresses and cold water. strong coffee, which is the nearest to a stimulant that i dare to take, as far as ordinary diet goes, will almost always deliver _me_ from the worst of headaches, but there is no likeness, no comparison. and your 'quite well' means that dreadful 'turning' still ... still! now do not think any more of the domizias, nor 'try to remember,' which is the most wearing way of thinking. the more i read and read your 'luria,' the grander it looks, and it will make its own road with all understanding men, you need not doubt, and still less need you try to make me uneasy about the harm i have done in 'coming between,' and all the rest of it. i wish never to do you greater harm than just _that_, and then with a white conscience 'i shall love thee to eternity!... dearest! you have made a golden work out of your 'golden-hearted luria'--as once you called him to me, and i hold it in the highest admiration--_should_, if you were precisely nothing to me. and still, the fifth act _rises_! that is certain. nevertheless i seem to agree with you that your hand has vacillated in your domizia. we do not know her with as full a light on her face, as the other persons--we do not see the _panther_,--no, certainly we do not--but you will do a very little for her which will be everything, after a time ... and i assure you that if you were to ask for the manuscript before, you should not have a page of it--_now_, you are only to rest. what a work to rest upon! do consider what a triumph it is! the more i read, the more i think of it, the greater it grows--and as to 'faded lines,' you never cut a pomegranate that was redder in the deep of it. also, no one can say 'this is not clearly written.' the people who are at 'words of one syllable' may be puzzled by you and wordsworth together this time ... as far as the expression goes. subtle thoughts you always must have, in and out of 'sordello'--and the objectors would find even plato (though his medium is as lucid as the water that ran beside the beautiful plane-tree!) a little difficult perhaps. to-day mr. kenyon came, and do you know, he has made a beatific confusion between last saturday and next saturday, and said to me he had told miss thomson to mind to come on friday if she wished to see me ... 'remembering' (he added) 'that mr. browning took _saturday_!!' so i let him mistake the one week for the other--'mr. browning took saturday,' it was true, both ways. well--and then he went on to tell me that he had heard from mrs. jameson who was at brighton and unwell, and had written to say this and that to him, and to enquire besides--now, what do you think, she enquired besides? 'how you and ... browning were' said mr. kenyon--i write his words. he is coming, perhaps to-morrow, or perhaps sunday--saturday is to have a twofold safety. that is, if you are not ill again. dearest, you will not think of coming if you are ill ... unwell even. i shall not be frightened next time, as i told you--i shall have the precedent. before, i had to think! 'it has never happened _so_--there must be a cause--and if it is a very, very, bad cause, why no one will tell _me_ ... it will not seem _my_ concern'--_that_ was my thought on saturday. but another time ... only, if it is possible to keep well, do keep well, beloved, and think of me instead of domizia, and let there be no other time for your suffering ... my waiting is nothing. i shall remember for the future that you may have the headache--and do you remember it too! for mr. horne i take your testimony gladly and believingly. _she blots_ with her _eyes_ sometimes. she hates ... and loves, in extreme degrees. we have, once or twice or thrice, been on the border of mutual displeasure, on this very subject, for i grew really vexed to observe the trust on one side and the _dyspathy_ on the other--using the mildest of words. you see, he found himself, down in berkshire, in quite a strange element of society,--he, an artist in his good and his evil,--and the people there, 'county families,' smoothly plumed in their conventions, and classing the ringlets and the aboriginal way of using water-glasses among offences against the moral law. then, meaning to be agreeable, or fascinating perhaps, made it twenty times worse. writing in albums about the graces, discoursing meditated impromptus at picnics, playing on the guitar in fancy dresses,--all these things which seemed to poor orion as natural as his own stars i dare say, and just the things suited to the _genus_ poet, and to himself specifically,--were understood by the natives and their 'rural deities' to signify, that he intended to marry one half the county, and to run away with the other. but miss mitford should have known better--_she_ should. and she _would_ have known better, if she had liked him--for the liking could have been unmade by no such offences. she is too fervent a friend--she can be. generous too, she can be without an effort; and i have had much affection from her--and accuse myself for seeming to have less--but-- may god bless you!--i end in haste after this long lingering. your ba. not unwell--_i_ am not! i forgot it, which proves how i am not. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, february , .] two nights ago i read the 'soul's tragedy' once more, and though there were not a few points which still struck me as successful in design and execution, yet on the whole i came to a decided opinion, that it will be better to postpone the publication of it for the present. it is not a good ending, an auspicious wind-up of this series; subject-matter and style are alike unpopular even for the literary _grex_ that stands aloof from the purer _plebs_, and uses that privilege to display and parade an ignorance which the other is altogether unconscious of--so that, if 'luria' is _clearish_, the 'tragedy' would be an unnecessary troubling the waters. whereas, if i printed it first in order, my readers, according to custom, would make the (comparatively) little they did not see into, a full excuse for shutting their eyes at the rest, and we may as well part friends, so as not to meet enemies. but, at bottom, i believe the proper objection is to the immediate, _first_ effect of the whole--its moral effect--which is dependent on the contrary supposition of its being really understood, in the main drift of it. yet i don't know; for i wrote it with the intention of producing the best of all effects--perhaps the truth is, that i am tired, rather, and desirous of getting done, and 'luria' will answer my purpose so far. will not the best way be to reserve this unlucky play and in the event of a second edition--as moxon seems to think such an apparition possible--might not this be quietly inserted?--in its place, too, for it was written two or three years ago. i have lost, of late, interest in dramatic writing, as you know, and, perhaps, occasion. and, dearest, i mean to take your advice and be quiet awhile and let my mind get used to its new medium of sight; seeing all things, as it does, through you: and then, let all i have done be the prelude and the real work begin. i felt it would be so before, and told you at the very beginning--do you remember? and you spoke of io 'in the proem.' how much more should follow now! and if nothing follows, i have _you_. i shall see you to-morrow and be happy. to-day--is it the weather or what?--something depresses me a little--to-morrow brings the remedy for it all. i don't know why i mention such a matter; except that i tell you everything without a notion of after-consequence; and because your dearest, dearest presence seems under any circumstances as if created just to help me _there_; if my spirits rise they fly to you; if they fall, they hold by you and cease falling--as now. bless you, ba--my own best blessing that you are! but a few hours and i am with you, beloved! your own _e.b.b. to r.b._ saturday evening. [post-mark, february , .] ever dearest, though you wanted to make me say one thing displeasing to you to-day, i had not courage to say two instead ... which i might have done indeed and indeed! for i am capable of thinking both thoughts of 'next year,' as you suggested them:--because while you are with me i see only _you_, and you being you, i cannot doubt a power of yours nor measure the deep loving nature which i feel to be so deep--so that there may be ever so many 'mores,' and no 'more' wonder of mine!--but afterwards, when the door is shut and there is no 'more' light nor speaking until thursday, why _then_, that i do not see _you_ but _me_,--_then_ comes the reaction,--the natural lengthening of the shadows at sunset,--and _then_, the 'less, less, less' grows to seem as natural to my fate, as the 'more' seemed to your nature--i being i! _sunday._--well!--you are to try to forgive it all! and the truth, over and under all, is, that i scarcely ever do think of the future, scarcely ever further than to your next visit, and almost never beyond, except for your sake and in reference to that view of the question which i have vexed you with so often, in fearing for your happiness. once it was a habit of mind with me to live altogether in what i called the future--but the tops of the trees that looked towards troy were broken off in the great winds, and falling down into the river beneath, where now after all this time they grow green again, i let them float along the current gently and pleasantly. can it be better i wonder! and if it becomes worse, can i help it? also the future never seemed to belong to me so little--never! it might appear wonderful to most persons, it is startling even to myself sometimes, to observe how free from anxiety i am--from the sort of anxiety which might be well connected with my own position _here_, and which is personal to myself. _that_ is all thrown behind--into the bushes--long ago it was, and i think i told you of it before. agitation comes from indecision--and _i_ was decided from the first hour when i admitted the possibility of your loving me really. now,--as the euphuists used to say,--i am 'more thine than my own' ... it is a literal truth--and my future belongs to you; if it was mine, it was mine to give, and if it was mine to give, it was given, and if it was given ... beloved.... so you see! then i will confess to you that all my life long i have had a rather strange sympathy and dyspathy--the sympathy having concerned the genus _jilt_ (as vulgarly called) male and female--and the dyspathy--the whole class of heroically virtuous persons who make sacrifices of what they call 'love' to what they call 'duty.' there are exceptional cases of course, but, for the most part, i listen incredulously or else with a little contempt to those latter proofs of strength--or weakness, as it may be:--people are not usually praised for giving up their religion, for unsaying their oaths, for desecrating their 'holy things'--while believing them still to be religious and sacramental! on the other side i have always and shall always understand how it is possible for the most earnest and faithful of men and even of women perhaps, to err in the convictions of the heart as well as of the mind, to profess an affection which is an illusion, and to recant and retreat loyally at the eleventh hour, on becoming aware of the truth which is in them. such men are the truest of men, and the most courageous for the truth's sake, and instead of blaming them i hold them in honour, for me, and always did and shall. and while i write, you are 'very ill'--very ill!--how it looks, written down _so_! when you were gone yesterday and my thoughts had tossed about restlessly for ever so long, i was wise enough to ask wilson how _she_ thought you were looking, ... and she 'did not know' ... she 'had not observed' ... 'only certainly mr. browning ran up-stairs instead of walking as he did the time before.' now promise me dearest, dearest--not to trifle with your health. not to neglect yourself ... not to tire yourself ... and besides to take the advice of your medical friend as to diet and general treatment:--because there must be a wrong and a right in everything, and the right is very important under your circumstances ... if you have a tendency to illness. it may be right for you to have wine for instance. did you ever try the putting your feet into hot water at night, to prevent the recurrence of the morning headache--for the affection of the head comes on early in the morning, does it not? just as if the sleeping did you harm. now i have heard of such a remedy doing good--and could it _increase_ the evil?--mustard mixed with the water, remember. everything approaching to _congestion_ is full of fear--i tremble to think of it--and i bring no remedy by this teazing neither! but you will not be 'wicked' nor 'unkind,' nor provoke the evil consciously--you will keep quiet and forswear the going out at nights, the excitement and noise of parties, and the worse excitement of composition--you promise. if you knew how i keep thinking of you, and at intervals grow so frightened! think _you_, that you are three times as much to me as i can be to you at best and greatest,--because you are more than three times the larger planet--and because too, you have known other sources of light and happiness ... but i need not say this--and i shall hear on monday, and may trust to you every day ... may i not? yet i would trust my soul to you sooner than your own health. may god bless you, dear, dearest. if the first part of the 'soul's tragedy' should be written out, i can read _that_ perhaps, without drawing you in to think of the second. still it may be safer to keep off altogether for the present--and let it be as you incline. i do not speak of 'luria.' your own ba. if it were not for mr. kenyon, i should say, almost, wednesday, instead of thursday--i want to see you so much, and to see for myself about the looks and spirits, only it would not do if he found you here on wednesday. let him come to-morrow or on tuesday, and wednesday will be safe--shall we consider? what do you think? _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday afternoon. [post-mark, february , .] here is the letter again, dearest: i suppose it gives me the same pleasure, in reading, as you--and mr. k. as me, and anybody else as him; if all the correspondence which was claimed again and burnt on some principle or other some years ago be at all of the nature of this sample, the measure seems questionable. burn anybody's _real_ letters, well and good: they move and live--the thoughts, feelings, and expressions even,--in a self-imposed circle limiting the experience of two persons only--_there_ is the standard, and to _that_ the appeal--how should a third person know? his presence breaks the line, so to speak, and lets in a whole tract of country on the originally inclosed spot--so that its trees, which were from side to side there, seem left alone and wondering at their sudden unimportance in the broad land; while its 'ferns such as i never saw before' and which have been petted proportionably, look extravagant enough amid the new spread of good honest grey grass that is now the earth's general wear. so that the significance is lost at once, and whole value of such letters--the cypher changed, the vowel-points removed: but how can that affect clever writing like this? what do you, to whom it is addressed, see in it more than the world that wants to see it and shan't have it? one understands shutting an unprivileged eye to the ineffable mysteries of those 'upper-rooms,' now that the broom and dust pan, stocking-mending and gingerbread-making are invested with such unforeseen reverence ... but the carriage-sweep and quarry, together with jane and our baskets, and a pleasant shadow of wordsworth's sunday hat preceding his own rapid strides in the direction of miss fenwick's house--surely, 'men's eyes were made to see, so let them gaze' at all _this_! and so i, gazing with a clear conscience, am very glad to hear so much good of a very good person and so well told. she plainly sees the proper use and advantage of a country-life; and _that_ knowledge gets to seem a high point of attainment doubtless by the side of the wordsworth she speaks of--for _mine_ he shall not be as long as i am able! was ever such a '_great_' poet before? put one trait with the other--the theory of rural innocence--alternation of 'vulgar trifles' with dissertating with style of 'the utmost grandeur that _even you_ can conceive' (speak for yourself, miss m.!)--and that amiable transition from two o'clock's grief at the death of one's brother to three o'clock's happiness in the 'extraordinary mesmeric discourse' of one's friend. all this, and the rest of the serene and happy inspired daily life which a piece of 'unpunctuality' can ruin, and to which the guardian 'angel' brings as crowning qualification the knack of poking the fire adroitly--of this--what can one say but that--no, best hold one's tongue and read the 'lyrical ballads' with finger in ear. did not shelley say long ago 'he had no more _imagination_ than a pint-pot'--though in those days he used to walk about france and flanders like a man? _now_, he is 'most comfortable in his worldly affairs' and just this comes of it! he lives the best twenty years of his life after the way of his own heart--and when one presses in to see the result of the rare experiment ... what the _one_ alchemist whom fortune has allowed to get all his coveted materials and set to work at last in earnest with fire and melting-pot--what _he_ produces after all the talk of him and the like of him; why, you get _pulvis et cinis_--a man at the mercy of the tongs and shovel! well! let us despair at nothing, but, wishing success to the newer aspirant, expect better things from miss m. when the 'knoll,' and 'paradise,' and their facilities, operate properly; and that she will make a truer estimate of the importance and responsibilities of 'authorship' than she does at present, if i understand rightly the sense in which she describes her own life as it means to be; for in one sense it is all good and well, and quite natural that she should like 'that sort of strenuous handwork' better than book-making; like the play better than the labour, as we are apt to do. if she realises a very ordinary scheme of literary life, planned under the eye of god not 'the public,' and prosecuted under the constant sense of the night's coming which ends it good or bad--then, she will be sure to 'like' the rest and sport--teaching her maids and sewing her gloves and making delicate visitors comfortable--so much more rational a resource is the worst of them than gin-and-water, for instance. but if, as i rather suspect, these latter are to figure as a virtual _half_ duty of the whole man--as of equal importance (on the ground of the innocence and utility of such occupations) with the book-making aforesaid--always supposing _that_ to be of the right kind--_then_ i respect miss m. just as i should an archbishop of canterbury whose business was the teaching a.b.c. at an infant-school--he who might set on the tens to instruct the hundreds how to convince the thousands of the propriety of doing that and many other things. of course one will respect him only the more if when _that_ matter is off his mind he relaxes at such a school instead of over a chess-board; as it will increase our love for miss m. to find that making 'my good jane (from tyne-mouth)'--'happier and--i hope--wiser' is an amusement, or more, after the day's progress towards the 'novel for next year' which is to inspire thousands, beyond computation, with the ardour of making innumerable other janes and delicate relatives happier and wiser--who knows but as many as burns did, and does, so make happier and wiser? only, _his quarry_ and after-solace was that 'marble bowl often replenished with whiskey' on which dr. curry discourses mournfully, 'oh, be wiser thou!'--and remember it was only _after_ lord bacon had written to an end _his_ book--given us for ever the art of inventing--whether steam-engine or improved dust-pan--that he took on himself to do a little exemplary 'hand work'; got out on that cold st. alban's road to stuff a fowl with snow and so keep it fresh, and got into his bed and died of the cold in his hands ('strenuous _hand_ work'--) before the snow had time to melt. he did not begin in his youth by saying--'i have a horror of merely writing 'novum organums' and shall give half my energies to the stuffing fowls'! all this it is _my_ amusement, of an indifferent kind, to put down solely on the pleasant assurance contained in that postscript, of the one way of never quarrelling with miss m.--'by joining in her plan and practice of plain speaking'--could she but 'get people to do it!' well, she gets me for a beginner: the funny thing would be to know what chorley's desperate utterance amounted to! did you ever hear of the plain speaking of some of the continental lottery-projectors? an estate on the rhine, for instance, is to be disposed of, and the holder of the lucky ticket will find himself suddenly owner of a mediæval castle with an unlimited number of dependencies--vineyards, woods, pastures, and so forth--all only waiting the new master's arrival--while inside, all is swept and garnished (not to say, varnished)--the tables are spread, the wines on the board, all is ready for the reception _but_ ... here 'plain speaking' becomes necessary--it prevents quarrels, and, could the projector get people to practise it as he does all would be well; so he, at least, will speak plainly--you hear what _is_ provided but, he cannot, dares not withhold what is _not_--there is then, to speak plainly,--no night cap! you _will_ have to bring your own night cap. the projector furnishes somewhat, as you hear, but not _all_--and now--the worst is heard,--will you quarrel with him? will my own dear, dearest ba please and help me here, and fancy chorley's concessions, and tributes, and recognitions, and then, at the very end, the 'plain words,' to counterbalance all, that have been to overlook and pardon? oh, my own ba, hear _my_ plain speech--and how this is _not_ an attempt to frighten you out of your dear wish to '_hear_ from me'--no, indeed--but a whim, a caprice,--and now it is out! over, done with! and now i am with you again--it is to _you_ i shall write next. bless you, ever--my beloved. i am much better, indeed--and mean to be well. and you! but i will write--this goes for nothing--or only _this_, that i am your very own-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ monday. [post-mark, february , .] my long letter is with you, dearest, to show how serious my illness was 'while you wrote': unless you find that letter too foolish, as i do on twice thinking--or at all events a most superfluous bestowment of handwork while the heart was elsewhere, and with you--never more so! dear, dear ba, your adorable goodness sinks into me till it nearly pains,--so exquisite and strange is the pleasure: _so_ you care for me, and think of me, and write to me!--i shall never die for you, and if it could be so, what would death prove? but i can live on, your own as now,--utterly your own. dear ba, do you suppose we differ on so plain a point as that of the superior wisdom, and generosity, too, of announcing such a change &c. at the eleventh hour? there can be no doubt of it,--and now, what of it to me? but i am not going to write to-day--only this--that i am better, having not been quite so well last night--so i shut up books (that is, of my own) and mean to think about nothing but you, and you, and still you, for a whole week--so all will come right, i hope! _may_ i take wednesday? and do you say that,--hint at the possibility of that, because you have been reached by my own remorse at feeling that if i had kept my appointment _last_ saturday (but one)--thursday would have been my day this past week, and this very monday had been gained? shall i not lose a day for ever unless i get wednesday and saturday?--yet ... care ... dearest--let nothing horrible happen. if i do not hear to the contrary to-morrow--or on wednesday early-- but write and bless me dearest, most dear ba. god bless you ever-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday morning. [post-mark, february , .] _méchant comme quatre!_ you are, and not deserving to be let see the famous letter--is there any grammar in _that_ concatenation, can you tell me, now that you are in an arch-critical humour? and remember (turning back to the subject) that personally she and i are strangers and that therefore what she writes for me is naturally scene-painting to be looked at from a distance, done with a masterly hand and most amiable intention, but quite a different thing of course from the intimate revelations of heart and mind which make a living thing of a letter. if she had sent such to me, i should not have sent it to mr. kenyon, but then, she would not have sent it to me in any case. what she _has_ sent me might be a chapter in a book and has the life proper to itself, and i shall not let you try it by another standard, even if you wished, but you don't--for i am not so _bête_ as not to understand how the jest crosses the serious all the way you write. well--and mr. kenyon wants the letter the second time, not for himself, but for mr. crabb robinson who promises to let me have a new sonnet of wordsworth's in exchange for the loan, and whom i cannot refuse because he is an intimate friend of miss martineau's and once allowed me to read a whole packet of letters from her to him. she does not object (as i have read under her hand) to her letters being shown about in ms., notwithstanding the anathema against all printers of the same (which completes the extravagance of the unreason, i think) and people are more anxious to see them from their presumed nearness to annihilation. i, for my part, value letters (to talk literature) as the most vital part of biography, and for any rational human being to put his foot on the traditions of his kind in this particular class, does seem to me as wonderful as possible. who would put away one of those multitudinous volumes, even, which stereotype voltaire's wrinkles of wit--even voltaire? i can read book after book of such reading--or could! and if her principle were carried out, there would be an end! death would be deader from henceforth. also it is a wrong selfish principle and unworthy of her whole life and profession, because we should all be ready to say that if the secrets of our daily lives and inner souls may instruct other surviving souls, let them be open to men hereafter, even as they are to god now. dust to dust, and soul-secrets to humanity--there are natural heirs to all these things. not that i do not intimately understand the shrinking back from the idea of publicity on any terms--not that i would not myself destroy papers of mine which were sacred to _me_ for personal reasons--but then i never would call this natural weakness, virtue--nor would i, as a teacher of the public, announce it and attempt to justify it as an example to other minds and acts, i hope. how hard you are on the mending of stockings and the rest of it! why not agree with me and like that sort of homeliness and simplicity in combination with such large faculty as we must admit _there_? lord bacon did a great deal of trifling besides the stuffing of the fowl you mention--which i did not remember: and in fact, all the great work done in the world, is done just by the people who know how to trifle--do you not think so? when a man makes a principle of 'never losing a moment,' he is a lost man. great men are eager to find an hour, and not to avoid losing a moment. 'what are you doing' said somebody once (as i heard the tradition) to the beautiful lady oxford as she sate in her open carriage on the race-ground--'only a little algebra,' said she. people who do a little algebra on the race-ground are not likely to do much of anything with ever so many hours for meditation. why, you must agree with me in all this, so i shall not be sententious any longer. mending stockings is not exactly the sort of pastime _i_ should choose--who do things quite as trifling without the utility--and even your seigneurie peradventure.... i stop there for fear of growing impertinent. the _argumentum ad hominem_ is apt to bring down the _argumentum ad baculum_, it is as well to remember in time. for wordsworth ... you are right in a measure and by a standard--but i have heard such really desecrating things of him, of his selfishness, his love of money, his worldly _cunning_ (rather than prudence) that i felt a relief and gladness in the new chronicle;--and you can understand how _that_ was. miss mitford's doctrine is that everything put into the poetry, is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him. her general doctrine about poets, quite amounts to that--i do not say it too strongly. and knowing that such opinions are held by minds not feeble, it is very painful (as it would be indeed in any case) to see them apparently justified by royal poets like wordsworth. ah, but i know an answer--i see one in my mind! so again for the letters. now ought i not to know about letters, i who have had so many ... from chief minds too, as society goes in england and america? and _your_ letters began by being first to my intellect, before they were first to my heart. all the letters in the world are not like yours ... and i would trust them for that verdict with any jury in europe, if they were not so far too dear! mr. kenyon wanted to make me show him your letters--i did show him the first, and resisted gallantly afterwards, which made him say what vexed me at the moment, ... 'oh--you let me see only _women's_ letters,'--till i observed that it was a breach of confidence, except in some cases, ... and that _i_ should complain very much, if anyone, man or woman, acted so by myself. but nobody in the world writes like you--not so _vitally_--and i have a right, if you please, to praise my letters, besides the reason of it which is as good. ah--you made me laugh about mr. chorley's free speaking--and, without the personal knowledge, i can comprehend how it could be nothing very ferocious ... some 'pardonnez moi, vous êtes un ange.' the amusing part is that by the same post which brought me the ambleside document, i heard from miss mitford 'that it was an admirable thing of chorley to have persisted in not allowing harriet martineau to quarrel with him' ... so that there are laurels on both sides, it appears. and i am delighted to hear from you to-day just _so_, though i reproach you in turn just _so_ ... because you were not 'depressed' in writing all this and this and this which has made me laugh--you were not, dearest--and you call yourself better, 'much better,' which means a very little perhaps, but is a golden word, let me take it as i may. may god bless you. wednesday seems too near (now that this is monday and you are better) to be _our_ day ... perhaps it does,--and thursday _is_ close beside it at the worst. dearest i am your own ba. _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday evening. [in the same envelope with the preceding letter.] now forgive me, dearest of all, but i must teaze you just a little, and entreat you, if only for the love of me, to have medical advice and follow it _without further delay_. i like to have recourse to these medical people quite as little as you can--but i am persuaded that it is necessary--that it is at least _wise_, for you to do so now, and, you see, you were 'not quite so well' again last night! so will you, for me? would _i_ not, if you wished it? and on wednesday, yes, on wednesday, come--that is, if coming on wednesday should really be not bad for you, for you _must_ do what is right and kind, and i doubt whether the omnibus-driving and the noises of every sort betwixt us, should not keep you away for a little while--i trust you to do what is best for both of us. and it is not best ... it is not good even, to talk about 'dying for me' ... oh, i do beseech you never to use such words. you make me feel as if i were choking. also it is nonsense--because nobody puts out a candle for the light's sake. write _one line_ to me to-morrow--literally so little--just to say how you are. i know by the writing here, what _is_. let me have the one line by the eight o'clock post to-morrow, tuesday. for the rest it may be my 'goodness' or my badness, but the world seems to have sunk away beneath my feet and to have left only you to look to and hold by. am i not to _feel_, then, any trembling of the hand? the least trembling? may god bless both of us--which is a double blessing for me notwithstanding my badness. _i trust you about wednesday_--and if it should be wise and kind not to come quite so soon, we will take it out of other days and lose not one of them. and as for anything 'horrible' being likely to happen, do not think of that either,--there can be nothing horrible while you are not ill. so be well--try to be well--use the means and, well or ill, let me have the one line to-morrow ... tuesday. i send you the foolish letter i wrote to-day in answer to your too long one--too long, was it not, as you felt? and i, the writer of the foolish one, am twice-foolish, and push poor 'luria' out of sight, and refuse to finish my notes on him till the harm he has done shall have passed away. in my badness i bring false accusation, perhaps, against poor luria. so till wednesday--or as you shall fix otherwise. your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ - / tuesday evening. my dearest, your note reaches me only _now_, with an excuse from the postman. the answer you expect, you shall have the only way possible. i must make up a parcel so as to be able to knock and give it. i shall be with you to-morrow, god willing--being quite well. bless you ever-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday morning. [post-mark, february , .] my sweetest, best, dearest ba i _do_ love you less, much less already, and adore you more, more by so much more as i see of you, think of you--i am yours just as much as those flowers; and you may pluck those flowers to pieces or put them in your breast; it is not because you so bless me now that you may not if you please one day--you will stop me here; but it is the truth and i live in it. i am quite well; indeed, this morning, _noticeably_ well, they tell me, and well i mean to keep if i can. when i got home last evening i found this note--and i have _accepted_, that i might say i could also keep an engagement, if so minded, at harley street--thereby insinuating that other reasons _may_ bring me into the neighbourhood than _the_ reason--but i shall either not go there, or only for an hour at most. i also found a note headed 'strictly private and confidential'--so here it goes from my mouth to my heart--pleasantly proposing that i should start in a few days for st. petersburg, as secretary to somebody going there on a 'mission of humanity'--_grazie tante_! did you hear of my meeting someone at the door whom i take to have been one of your brothers? one thing vexed me in your letter--i will tell you, the praise of _my_ letters. now, one merit they have--in language mystical--that of having _no_ merit. if i caught myself trying to write finely, graphically &c. &c., nay, if i found myself conscious of having in my own opinion, so written, all would be over! yes, over! i should be respecting you inordinately, paying a proper tribute to your genius, summoning the necessary collectedness,--plenty of all that! but the feeling with which i write to you, not knowing that it is writing,--with _you_, face and mouth and hair and eyes opposite me, touching me, knowing that all _is_ as i say, and helping out the imperfect phrases from your own intuition--_that_ would be gone--and _what_ in its place? 'let us eat and drink for to-morrow we write to ambleside.' no, no, love, nor can it ever be so, nor should it ever be so if--even if, preserving all that intimate relation, with the carelessness, _still_, somehow, was obtained with no effort in the world, graphic writing and philosophic and what you please--for i _will_ be--_would_ be, better than my works and words with an infinite stock beyond what i put into convenient circulation whether in fine speeches fit to remember, or fine passages to quote. for the rest, i had meant to tell you before now, that you often put me 'in a maze' when you particularize letters of mine--'such an one was kind' &c. i know, sometimes i seem to give the matter up in despair, i take out paper and fall thinking on you, and bless you with my whole heart and then begin: 'what a fine day this is?' i distinctly remember having done that repeatedly--but the converse is not true by any means, that (when the expression may happen to fall more consentaneously to the mind's motion) that less is felt, oh no! but the particular thought at the time has not been of the _insufficiency_ of expression, as in the other instance. now i will leave off--to begin elsewhere--for i am always with you, beloved, best beloved! now you will write? and walk much, and sleep more? bless you, dearest--ever-- your own, _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-marks, mis-sent to mitcham. february and , .] best and kindest of all that ever were to be loved in dreams, and wondered at and loved out of them, you are indeed! i cannot make you feel how i felt that night when i knew that to save me an anxious thought you had come so far so late--it was almost too much to feel, and _is_ too much to speak. so let it pass. you will never act so again, ever dearest--you shall not. if the post sins, why leave the sin to the post; and i will remember for the future, will be ready to remember, how postmen are fallible and how you live at the end of a lane--and not be uneasy about a silence if there should be one unaccounted for. for the tuesday coming, i shall remember that too--who could forget it?... i put it in the niche of the wall, one golden lamp more of your giving, to throw light purely down to the end of my life--i do thank you. and the truth is, i _should_ have been in a panic, had there been no letter that evening--i was frightened the day before, then reasoned the fears back and waited: and if there had been no letter after all--. but you are supernaturally good and kind. how can i ever 'return' as people say (as they might say in their ledgers) ... any of it all? how indeed can i who have not even a heart left of my own, to love you with? i quite trust to your promise in respect to the medical advice, if walking and rest from work do not prevent at once the recurrence of those sensations--it was a promise, remember. and you will tell me the very truth of how you are--and you will try the music, and not be nervous, dearest. would not _riding_ be good for you--consider. and why should you be 'alone' when your sister is in the house? how i keep thinking of you all day--you cannot really be alone with so many thoughts ... such swarms of thoughts, if you could but see them, drones and bees together! george came in from westminster hall after we parted yesterday and said that he had talked with the junior counsel of the wretched plaintiffs in the ferrers case, and that the belief was in the mother being implicated, although not from the beginning. it was believed too that the miserable girl had herself taken step after step into the mire, involved herself gradually, the first guilt being an extravagance in personal expenses, which she lied and lied to account for in the face of her family. 'such a respectable family,' said george, 'the grandfather in court looking venerable, and everyone indignant upon being so disgraced by her!' but for the respectability in the best sense, i do not quite see. that all those people should acquiesce in the indecency (according to every standard of english manners in any class of society) of thrusting the personal expenses of a member of their family on lord ferrers, she still bearing their name--and in those peculiar circumstances of her supposed position too--where is the respectability? and they are furious with her, which is not to be wondered at after all. her counsel had an interview with her previous to the trial, to satisfy themselves of her good faith, and she was quite resolute and earnest, persisting in every statement. on the coming out of the anonymous letters, fitzroy kelly said to the juniors that if anyone could suggest a means of explanation, he would be eager to carry forward the case, ... but for him he saw no way of escaping from the fact of the guilt of their client. not a voice could speak for her. so george was told. there is no ground for a prosecution for a conspiracy, he says, but she is open to the charge for _forgery_, of course, and to the dreadful consequences, though it is not considered at all likely that lord ferrers could wish to disturb her beyond the ruin she has brought on her own life. think of miss mitford's growing quite cold about mr. chorley who has spent two days with her lately, and of her saying in a letter to me this morning that he is very much changed and grown to be 'a presumptuous coxcomb.' he has displeased her in some way--that is clear. what changes there are in the world. should i ever change to _you_, do you think, ... even if you came to 'love me less'--not that i meant to reproach you with that possibility. may god bless you, dear dearest. it is another miracle (beside the many) that i get nearer to the mountains yet still they seem more blue. is not _that_ strange? ever and wholly your ba. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, february , .] and i offended you by praising your letters--or rather _mine_, if you please--as if i had not the right! still, you shall not, shall not fancy that i meant to praise them in the way you seem to think--by calling them 'graphic,' 'philosophic,'--why, did i ever use such words? i agree with you that if i could play critic upon your letters, it would be an end!--but no, no ... i did not, for a moment. in what i said i went back to my first impressions--and they were _vital_ letters, i said--which was the résumé of my thoughts upon the early ones you sent me, because i felt your letters to be _you_ from the very first, and i began, from the beginning, to read every one several times over. nobody, i felt, nobody of all these writers, did write as you did. well!--and had i not a right to say _that_ now at last, and was it not natural to say just _that_, when i was talking of other people's letters and how it had grown almost impossible for me to read them; and do i deserve to be scolded? no indeed. and if i had the misfortune to think now, when you say it is a fine day, that _that_ is said in more music than it could be said in by another--where is the sin against _you_, i should like to ask. it is yourself who is the critic, i think, after all. but over all the brine, i hold my letters--just as camoens did his poem. they are _best to me_--and they are _best_. i knew what _they_ were, before i knew what _you_ were--all of you. and i like to think that i never fancied anyone on a level with you, even in a letter. what makes you take them to be so bad, i suppose, is just feeling in them how near we are. _you say that!_--not i. bad or good, you _are_ better--yes, 'better than the works and words'!--though it was very shameful of you to insinuate that i talked of fine speeches and passages and graphical and philosophical sentences, as if i had proposed a publication of 'elegant extracts' from your letters. see what blasphemy one falls into through a beginning of light speech! it is wiser to talk of st. petersburg; for all voltaire's ... '_ne disons pas de mal de nicolas_.' wiser--because you will not go. if you were going ... well!--but there is no danger--it would not do you good to go, i am so happy this time as to be able to think--and your 'mission of humanity' lies nearer--'strictly private and confidential'? but not in harley street--so if you go _there_, dearest, keep to the 'one hour' and do not suffer yourself to be tired and stunned in those hot rooms and made unwell again--it is plain that you cannot bear that sort of excitement. for mr. kenyon's note, ... it was a great temptation to make a day of friday--but i resist both for monday's sake and for yours, because it seems to me safer not to hurry you from one house to another till you are tired completely. i shall think of you so much the nearer for mr. kenyon's note--which is something gained. in the meanwhile you are better, which is everything, or seems so. ever dearest, do you remember what it is to me that you should be better, and keep from being worse again--i mean, of course, _try_ to keep from being worse--be wise ... and do not stay long in those hot harley street rooms. ah--now you will think that i am afraid of the unicorns!-- through your being ill the other day i forgot, and afterwards went on forgetting, to speak of and to return the ballad--which is delightful; i have an unspeakable delight in those suggestive ballads, which seem to make you touch with the end of your finger the full warm life of other times ... so near they bring you, yet so suddenly all passes in them. certainly there is a likeness to your duchess--it is a curious crossing. and does it not strike you that a verse or two must be wanting in the ballad--there is a gap, i fancy. tell mr. kenyon (if he enquires) that you come here on monday instead of saturday--and if you can help it, do not mention wednesday--it will be as well, not. you met alfred at the door--he came up to me afterwards and observed that 'at last he had seen you!' 'virgilium tantum vidi!' as to the thing which you try to say in the first page of this letter, and which you 'stop' yourself in saying ... _i_ need not stop you in it.... and now there is no time, if i am to sleep to-night. may god bless you, dearest, dearest. i must be your own while he blesses _me_. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday afternoon. [post-mark, february , .] here is my ba's dearest _first_ letter come four hours after the second, with '_mis-sent to mitcham_' written on its face as a reason,--one more proof of the negligence of somebody! but i _do_ have it at last--what should i say? what do you expect me to say? and the first note seemed quite as much too kind as usual! let me write to-morrow, sweet? i am quite well and sure to mind all you bid me. i shall do no more than look in at that place (they are the cousins of a really good friend of mine, dr. white--i go for _him_) if even that--for to-morrow night i must go out again, i fear--to pay the ordinary compliment for an invitation to the r.s.'s _soirée_ at lord northampton's. and then comes monday--and to-night any unicorn i may see i will not find myself at liberty to catch. (n.b.--should you meditate really an addition to the 'elegant extracts'--mind this last joke is none of mine but my father's; when walking with me when a child, i remember, he bade a little urchin we found fishing with a stick and a string for sticklebacks in a ditch--'to mind that he brought any sturgeon he might catch to the king'--he having a claim on such a prize, by courtesy if not right). as for chorley, he is neither the one nor the other of those ugly things. one remembers regan's 'oh heaven--so you will rail at _me_, when you are in the mood.' but what a want of self-respect such judgments argue, or rather, want of knowledge what true self-respect is: 'so i believed yesterday, and _so_ now--and yet am neither hasty, nor inapprehensive, nor malevolent'--what then? --but i will say more of my mind--(not of that)--to-morrow, for time presses a little--so bless you my ever ever dearest--i love you wholly. r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, february , .] as my sisters did not dine at home yesterday and i see nobody else in the evening, i never heard till just now and _from papa himself_, that 'george was invited to meet mr. browning and mr. procter.' how surprised you will be. it must have been a sudden thought of mr. kenyon's. and i have been thinking, thinking since last night that i wrote you then a letter all but ... insolent ... which, do you know, i feel half ashamed to look back upon this morning--particularly what i wrote about 'missions of humanity'--now was it not insolent of me to write so? if i could take my letter again i would dip it into lethe between the lilies, instead of the post office:--but i can't--so if you wondered, you must forget as far as possible, and understand how it was, and that i was in brimming spirits when i wrote, from two causes ... first, because i had your letter which was a pure goodness of yours, and secondly because you were 'noticeably' better you said, or 'noticeably well' rather, to mind my quotations. so i wrote what i wrote, and gave it to arabel when she came in at midnight, to give it to henrietta who goes out before eight in the morning and often takes charge of my letters, and it was too late, at the earliest this morning, to feel a little ashamed. miss thomson told me that she had determined to change the type of the few pages of her letterpress which had been touched, and that therefore mr. burges's revisions of my translations should be revised back again. she appears to be a very acute person, full of quick perceptions--naturally quick, and carefully trained--a little over anxious perhaps about mental lights, and opening her eyes still more than she sees, which is a common fault of clever people, if one must call it a fault. i like her, and she is kind and cordial. will she ask you to help her book with a translation or two, i wonder. perhaps--if the courage should come. dearest, how i shall think of you this evening, and how near you will seem, not to be here. i had a letter from mr. mathews the other day, and smiled to read in it just what i had expected, that he immediately sent landor's verses on you to a _few editors_, friends of his, in order to their communication to the public. he received my apology for myself with the utmost graciousness. a kind good man he is. after all, do you know, i am a little vexed that i should have even _seemed_ to do wrong in my speech about the letters. it must have been wrong, if it seemed so to you, i fancy now. only i really did no more mean to try your letters ... mine ... such as they are to me now, by the common critical measure, than the shepherds praised the pure tenor of the angels who sang 'peace upon earth' to them. it was enough that they knew it for angels' singing. so do _you_ forgive me, beloved, and put away from you the thought that i have let in between us any miserable stuff 'de métier,' which i hate as you hate. and i will not say any more about it, not to run into more imprudences of mischief. on the other hand i warn you against saying again what you began to say yesterday and stopped. do not try it again. what may be quite good sense from me, is from _you_ very much the reverse, and pray observe that difference. or did you think that i was making my own road clear in the the thing i said about--'jilts'? no, you did not. yet i am ready to repeat of myself as of others, that if i ceased to love you, i certainly would act out the whole consequence--but _that_ is an impossible 'if' to my nature, supposing the conditions of it otherwise to be probable. i never loved anyone much and ceased to love that person. ask every friend of mine, if i am given to change even in friendship! _and to you...!_ ah, but you never think of such a thing seriously--and you are conscious that you did not say it very sagely. you and i are in different positions. now let me tell you an apologue in exchange for your wednesday's stories which i liked so, and mine perhaps may make you 'a little wiser'--who knows? it befell that there stood in hall a bold baron, and out he spake to one of his serfs ... 'come thou; and take this baton of my baronie, and give me instead thereof that sprig of hawthorn thou holdest in thine hand.' now the hawthorn-bough was no larger a thing than might be carried by a wood-pigeon to the nest, when she flieth low, and the baronial baton was covered with fine gold, and the serf, turning it in his hands, marvelled greatly. and he answered and said, 'let not my lord be in haste, nor jest with his servant. is it verily his will that i should keep his golden baton? let him speak again--lest it repent him of his gift.' and the baron spake again that it was his will. 'and i'--he said once again--'shall it be lawful for me to keep this sprig of hawthorn, and will it not repent thee of thy gift?' then all the servants who stood in hall, laughed, and the serf's hands trembled till they dropped the baton into the rushes, knowing that his lord did but jest.... which mine did not. only, _de te fabula narratur_ up to a point. and i have your letter. 'what did i expect?' why i expected just _that_, a letter in turn. also i am graciously pleased (yes, and very much pleased!) to '_let_ you write to-morrow.' how you spoil me with goodness, which makes one 'insolent' as i was saying, now and then. the worst is, that i write 'too kind' letters--i!--and what does that criticism mean, pray? it reminds me, at least, of ... now i will tell you what it reminds me of. a few days ago henrietta said to me that she was quite uncomfortable. she had written to somebody a not kind enough letter, she thought, and it might be taken ill. 'are _you_ ever uncomfortable, ba, after you have sent letters to the post?' she asked me. 'yes,' i said, 'sometimes, but from a reason just the very reverse of your reason, _my_ letters, when they get into the post, seem too kind,--rather.' and my sisters laughed ... laughed. but if _you_ think so beside, i must seriously set to work, you see, to correct that flagrant fault, and shall do better in time _dis faventibus_, though it will be difficult. mr. kenyon's dinner is a riddle which i cannot read. _you_ are invited to meet miss thomson and mr. bayley and '_no one else_.' george is invited to meet mr. browning and mr. procter and '_no one else_'--just those words. the '_absolu_' (do you remember balzac's beautiful story?) is just _you_ and 'no one else,' the other elements being mere uncertainties, shifting while one looks for them. am i not writing nonsense to-night? i am not 'too _wise_' in any case, which is some comfort. it puts one in spirits to hear of your being 'well,' ever and ever dearest. keep so for _me_. may god bless you hour by hour. in every one of mine i am your own ba. for miss mitford ... but people are not angels quite ... and she sees the whole world in stripes of black and white, it is her way. i feel very affectionately towards her, love her sincerely. she is affectionate to _me_ beyond measure. still, always i feel that if i were to vex her, the lower deep below the lowest deep would not be low enough for _me_. i always feel _that_. she would advertise me directly for a wretch proper. then, for all i said about never changing, i have ice enough over me just now to hold the sparrows!--in respect to a great crowd of people, and she is among them--for reasons--for reasons. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, february , .] so all was altered, my love--and, instead of miss t. and the other friend, i had your brother and procter--to my great pleasure. after, i went to that place, and soon got away, and am very well this morning in the sunshine; which i feel with you, do i not? yesterday after dinner we spoke of mrs. jameson, and, as my wont is--(here your letter reaches me--let me finish this sentence now i have finished kissing you, dearest beyond all dearness--my own heart's ba!)--oh, as i am used, i left the talking to go on by itself, with the thought busied elsewhere, till at last my own voice startled me for i heard my tongue utter 'miss barrett ... that is, mrs. jameson says' ... or 'does ... or does not.' i forget which! and if anybody noticed the _gaucherie_ it must have been just your brother! now to these letters! i do solemnly, unaffectedly wonder how you can put so much pure felicity into an envelope so as that i shall get it as from the fount head. this to-day, those yesterday--there is, i see, and know, thus much goodness in line after line, goodness to be scientifically appreciated, _proved there_--but over and above, is it in the writing, the dots and traces, the seal, the paper--here does the subtle charm lie beyond all rational accounting for? the other day i stumbled on a quotation from j. baptista porta--wherein he avers that any musical instrument made out of wood possessed of medicinal properties retains, being put to use, such virtues undiminished,--and that, for instance, a sick man to whom you should pipe on a pipe of elder-tree would so receive all the advantage derivable from a decoction of its berries. from whence, by a parity of reasoning, i may discover, i think, that the very ink and paper were--ah, what were they? curious thinking won't do for me and the wise head which is mine, so i will lie and rest in my ignorance of content and understand that without any magic at all you simply wish to make one person--which of your free goodness proves to be your r.b.--to make me supremely happy, and that you have your wish--you _do_ bless me! more and more, for the old treasure is piled undiminished and still the new comes glittering in. dear, dear heart of my heart, life of my life, _will this last_, let _me_ begin to ask? can it be meant i shall live this to the end? then, dearest, care also for the life beyond, and put in my mind how to testify here that i have felt, if i could not deserve that a gift beyond all gifts! i hope to work hard, to prove i do feel, as i say--it would be terrible to accomplish nothing now. with which conviction--renewed conviction time by time, of your extravagance of kindness to me unworthy,--will it seem characteristically consistent when i pray you not to begin frightening me, all the same, with threats of writing _less_ kindly? that must not be, love, for _your_ sake now--if you had not thrown open those windows of heaven i should have no more imagined than that syrian lord on whom the king leaned 'how such things might be'--but, once their influence showered, i should know, too soon and easily, if they shut up again! you have committed your dear, dearest self to that course of blessing, and blessing on, on, for ever--so let all be as it is, pray, _pray_! no--not _all_. no more, ever, of that strange suspicion--'insolent'--oh, what a word!--nor suppose i shall particularly wonder at its being fancied applicable to _that_, of all other passages of your letter! it is quite as reasonable to suspect the existence of such a quality _there_ as elsewhere: how _can_ such a thing, _could_ such a thing come from you to me? but, dear ba, _do_ you know me better! _do_ feel that i know you, i am bold to believe, and that if you were to run at me with a pointed spear i should be sure it was a golden sanative, machaon's touch, for my entire good, that i was opening my heart to receive! as for words, written or spoken--i, who sin forty times in a day by light words, and untrue to the thought, i am certainly not used to be easily offended by other peoples' words, people in the world. but _your_ words! and about the 'mission'; if it had not been a thing to jest at, i should not have begun, as i did--as you felt i did. i know now, what i only suspected then, and will tell you all the matter on monday if you care to hear. the 'humanity' however, would have been unquestionable if i had chosen to exercise it towards the poor weak incapable creature that wants _somebody_, and urgently, i can well believe. as for your apologue, it is naught--as you felt, and so broke off--for the baron knew well enough it was a spray of the magical tree which once planted in his domain would shoot up, and out, and all round, and be glorious with leaves and musical with birds' nests, and a fairy safeguard and blessing thenceforward and for ever, when the foolish baton had been broken into ounces of gold, even if gold it _were_, and spent and vanished: for, he said, such gold lies in the highway, men pick it up, more of it or less; but this one slip of the flowering tree is all of it on this side paradise. whereon he laid it to his heart and was happy--in spite of his disastrous chase the night before, when so far from catching an unicorn, he saw not even a respectable prize-heifer, worth the oil-cake and rape-seed it had doubtless cost to rear her--'insolence!' i found no opportunity of speaking to mr. k. about monday, but nothing was said of last wednesday, and he must know i did not go yesterday. so, monday is laughing in sunshine surely! bless you, my sweetest. i love you with my whole heart; ever shall love you. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, february , .] ever dearest, it is only when you go away, when you are quite gone, out of the house and the street, that i get up and think properly, and with the right gratitude of your flowers. such beautiful flowers you brought me this time too! looking like summer itself, and smelling! doing the 'honour due' to the flowers, makes your presence a little longer with me, the sun shines back over the hill just by that time, and then drops, till the next letter. if i had had the letter on saturday as ought to have been, no, i could _not_ have answered it so that you should have my answer on sunday--no, i should still have had to write first. now you understand that i do not object to the writing first, but only to the hearing second. i would rather write than not--i! but to be written to is the chief gladness of course; and with all you say of liking to have my letters (which i like to hear quite enough indeed) you cannot pretend to think that _yours_ are not more to _me_, most to _me_! ask my guardian-angel and hear what he says! yours will look another way for shame of measuring joys with him! because as i have said before, and as he says now, you are all to me, all the light, all the life; i am living for you now. and before i knew you, what was i and where? what was the world to me, do you think? and the meaning of life? and now, when you come and go, and write and do not write, all the hours are chequered accordingly in so many squares of white and black, as if for playing at fox and goose ... only there is no fox, and i will not agree to be goose for one ... _that_ is _you_ perhaps, for being 'too easily' satisfied. so my claim is that you are more to me than i can be to you at any rate. mr. fox said on sunday that i was a 'religious hermit' who wrote 'poems which ought to be read in a gothic alcove'; and religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better, they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places. st. theresa, for instance, saw a clearer glory by such means, than your sir moses montefiore through his hundred-guinea telescope. think then, how every shadow of my life has helped to throw out into brighter, fuller significance, the light which comes to me from you ... think how it is the one light, seen without distractions. _i_ was thinking the other day that certainly and after all (or rather before all) i had loved you all my life unawares, that is, the idea of you. women begin for the most part, (if ever so very little given to reverie) by meaning, in an aside to themselves, to love such and such an ideal, seen sometimes in a dream and sometimes in a book, and forswearing their ancient faith as the years creep on. i say a book, because i remember a friend of mine who looked everywhere for the original of mr. ward's 'tremaine,' because nothing would do for _her_, she insisted, except just _that_ excess of so-called refinement, with the book-knowledge and the conventional manners, (_loue qui peut_, tremaine), and ended by marrying a lieutenant in the navy who could not spell. such things happen every day, and cannot be otherwise, say the wise:--and _this_ being otherwise with _me_ is miraculous compensation for the trials of many years, though such abundant, overabundant compensation, that i cannot help fearing it is too much, as i know that you are too good and too high for me, and that by the degree in which i am raised up you are let down, for us two to find a level to meet on. one's ideal must be above one, as a matter of course, you know. it is as far as one can reach with one's eyes (soul-eyes), not reach to touch. and here is mine ... shall i tell you? ... even to the visible outward sign of the black hair and the complexion (why you might ask my sisters!) yet i would not tell you, if i could not tell you afterwards that, if it had been red hair quite, it had been the same thing, only i prove the coincidence out fully and make you smile half. yet indeed i did not fancy that i was to love _you_ when you came to see me--no indeed ... any more than i did your caring on your side. my ambition when we began our correspondence, was simply that you should forget i was a woman (being weary and _blasée_ of the empty written gallantries, of which i have had my share and all the more perhaps from my peculiar position which made them so without consequence), that you should forget _that_ and let us be friends, and consent to teach me what you knew better than i, in art and human nature, and give me your sympathy in the meanwhile. i am a great hero-worshipper and had admired your poetry for years, and to feel that you liked to write to me and be written to was a pleasure and a pride, as i used to tell you i am sure, and then your letters were not like other letters, as i must not tell you again. also you _influenced_ me, in a way in which no one else did. for instance, by two or three half words you made me see you, and other people had delivered orations on the same subject quite without effect. i surprised everybody in this house by consenting to see you. then, when you came, you never went away. i mean i had a sense of your presence constantly. yes ... and to prove how free that feeling was from the remotest presentiment of what has occurred, i said to papa in my unconsciousness the next morning ... 'it is most extraordinary how the idea of mr. browning does beset me--i suppose it is not being used to see strangers, in some degree--but it haunts me ... it is a persecution.' on which he smiled and said that 'it was not grateful to my friend to use such a word.' when the letter came.... do you know that all that time i was frightened of you? frightened in this way. i felt as if you had a power over me and meant to use it, and that i could not breathe or speak very differently from what you chose to make me. as to my thoughts, i had it in my head somehow that you read _them_ as you read the newspaper--examined them, and fastened them down writhing under your long entomological pins--ah, do you remember the entomology of it all? but the power was used upon _me_--and i never doubted that you had mistaken your own mind, the strongest of us having some exceptional weakness. turning the wonder round in all lights, i came to what you admitted yesterday ... yes, i saw _that_ very early ... that you had come here with the intention of trying to love whomever you should find, ... and also that what i had said about exaggerating the amount of what i could be to you, had just operated in making you more determined to justify your own presentiment in the face of mine. well--and if that last clause was true a little, too ... why should i be sorry now ... and why should you have fancied for a moment, that the first could make me sorry. at first and when i did not believe that you really loved me, when i thought you deceived yourself, _then_, it was different. but now ... now ... when i see and believe your attachment for me, do you think that any cause in the world (except what diminished it) could render it less a source of joy to me? i mean as far as i myself am considered. now if you ever fancy that i am _vain_ of your love for me, you will be unjust, remember. if it were less dear, and less above me, i might be vain perhaps. but i may say _before_ god and you, that of all the events of my life, inclusive of its afflictions, nothing has humbled me so much as your love. right or wrong it may be, but true it _is_, and i tell you. your love has been to me like god's own love, which makes the receivers of it kneelers. why all this should be written, i do not know--but you set me thinking yesterday in that backward line, which i lean back to very often, and for once, as you made me write directly, why i wrote, as my thoughts went, that way. say how you are, beloved--and do not brood over that 'soul's tragedy,' which i wish i had here with 'luria,' because, so, you should not see it for a month at least. and take exercise and keep well--and remember how many letters i must have before saturday. may god bless you. do you want to hear me say i cannot love you less...? _that_ is a doubtful phrase. and i cannot love you more is doubtful too, for reasons i could give. more or less, i really love you, but it does not sound right, even _so_, does it? i know what it ought to be, and will put it into the 'seal' and the 'paper' with the ineffable other things. dearest, do not go to st. petersburg. do not think of going, for fear it should come true and you should go, and while you were helping the jews and teaching nicholas, what (in that case) would become of your ba? _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, february , .] ah, sweetest, in spite of our agreement, here is the note that sought not to go, but must--because, if there is no speaking of mrs. jamesons and such like without bringing in your dear name (not _dearest_ name, my ba!) what is the good of not writing it down, now, when i, though possessed with the love of it no more than usual, yet _may_ speak, and to a hearer? and i have to thank you with all my heart for the good news of the increasing strength and less need for the opium--how i do thank you, my dearest--and desire to thank god through whose goodness it all is! this i could not but say now, to-morrow i will write at length, having been working a little this morning, with whatever effect. so now i will go out and see your elm-trees and gate, and think the thoughts over again, and coming home i shall perhaps find a letter. dearest, dearest--my perfect blessing you are! may god continue his care for us. r. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, february , .] once you were pleased to say, my own ba, that 'i made you do as i would.' i am quite sure, you make me _speak_ as you would, and not at all as i mean--and for one instance, i never surely spoke anything half so untrue as that 'i came with the intention of loving whomever i should find'--no! wreathed shells and hollows in ruins, and roofs of caves may transform a voice wonderfully, make more of it or less, or so change it as to almost alter, but turn a 'no' into a 'yes' can no echo (except the irish one), and i said 'no' to such a charge, and still say 'no.' i _did_ have a presentiment--and though it is hardly possible for me to look back on it now without lending it the true colours given to it by the event, yet i _can_ put them aside, if i please, and remember that i not merely hoped it would not be so (_not_ that the effect i expected to be produced would be _less_ than in anticipation, certainly i did not hope _that_, but that it would range itself with the old feelings of simple reverence and sympathy and friendship, that i should love you as much as i supposed i _could_ love, and no more) but in the confidence that nothing could occur to divert me from my intended way of life, i made--went on making arrangements to return to italy. you know--did i not tell you--i wished to see you before i returned? and i had heard of you just so much as seemed to make it impossible such a relation could ever exist. i know very well, if you choose to refer to my letters you may easily bring them to bear a sense in parts, more agreeable to your own theory than to mine, the true one--but that was instinct, providence--anything rather than foresight. now i will convince you! yourself have noticed the difference between the _letters_ and the _writer_; the greater 'distance of the latter from you,' why was that? why, if not because the conduct _began_ with _him_, with one who had now seen you--was no continuation of the conduct, as influenced by the feeling, of the letters--else, they, if _near_, should have enabled him, if but in the natural course of time and with increase of familiarity, to become _nearer_--but it was not so! the letters began by loving you after their way--but what a world-wide difference between _that_ love and the true, the love from seeing and hearing and feeling, since you make me resolve, what now lies blended so harmoniously, into its component parts. oh, i know what is old from what is new, and how chrystals may surround and glorify other vessels meant for ordinary service than lord n's! but i _don't_ know that handling may not snap them off, some of the more delicate ones; and if you let me, love, i will not again, ever again, consider how it came and whence, and when, so curiously, so pryingly, but believe that it was always so, and that it all came at once, all the same; the more unlikelinesses the better, for they set off the better the truth of truths that here, ('how begot? how nourished?')--here is the whole wondrous ba filling my whole heart and soul; and over-filling it, because she is in all the world, too, where i look, where i fancy. at the same time, because all is so wondrous and so sweet, do you think that it would be _so_ difficult for me to analyse it, and give causes to the effects in sufficiently numerous instances, even to 'justify my presentiment?' ah, dear, dearest ba, i could, could indeed, could account for all, or enough! but you are unconscious, i do believe, of your power, and the knowledge of it would be no added grace, perhaps! so let us go on--taking a lesson out of the world's book in a different sense. you shall think i love you for--(tell me, you must, what for) while in my secret heart i know what my 'mission of humanity' means, and what telescopic and microscopic views it procures me. enough--wait, one word about the 'too kind letters'--could not the same montefiore understand that though he deserved not one of his thousand guineas, yet that he is in disgrace if they bate him of his next gift by merely _ten_? it _is_ all too kind--but i shall feel the diminishing of the kindness, be very sure! of that there is, however, not too alarming a sign in this dearest, because last of all--dearest letter of all--till the next! i looked yesterday over the 'tragedy,' and think it will do after all. i will bring one part at least next time, and 'luria' take away, if you let me, so all will be off my mind, and april and may be the welcomer? don't think i am going to take any extraordinary pains. there are some things in the 'tragedy' i should like to preserve and print now, leaving the future to spring as it likes, in any direction, and these half-dead, half-alive works fetter it, if left behind. yet one thing will fetter it worse, only one thing--if _you_, in any respect, stay behind? you that in all else help me and will help me, beyond words--beyond dreams--if, because i find you, your own works _stop_--'then comes the selah and the voice is hushed.' oh, no, no, dearest, _so_ would the help cease to be help--the joy to be joy, ba herself to be _quite_ ba, and my own siren singing song for song. dear love, will that be kind, and right, and like the rest? write and promise that all shall be resumed, the romance-poem chiefly, and i will try and feel more yours than ever now. am i not with you in the world, proud of you--and _vain_, too, very likely, which is all the sweeter if it is a sin as you teach me. indeed dearest, i have set my heart on your fulfilling your mission--my heart is on it! bless you, my ba-- your r.b. i am so well as to have resumed the shower-bath (this morning)--and i walk, especially near the elms and stile--and mean to walk, and be very well--and you, dearest? _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, february , .] i confess that while i was writing those words i had a thought that they were not quite yours as you said them. still it comes to something in their likeness, but we will not talk of it and break off the chrystals--they _are_ so brittle, then? do you know _that_ by an 'instinct.' but i agree that it is best not to talk--i 'gave it up' as a riddle long ago. let there be 'analysis' even, and it will not be solution. i have my own thoughts of course, and you have yours, and the worst is that a third person looking down on us from some snow-capped height, and free from personal influences, would have _his_ thoughts too, and _he_ would think that if you had been reasonable as usual you would have gone to italy. i have by heart (or by head at least) what the third person would think. the third person thundered to me in an abstraction for ever so long, and at intervals i hear him still, only you shall not to-day, because he talks 'damnable iterations' and teazes you. nay, the first person is teazing you now perhaps, without going any further, and yet i must go a little further, just to say (after accepting all possible unlikelinesses and miracles, because everything was miraculous and impossible) that it was agreed between us long since that you did not love me for anything--your having no reason for it is the only way of your not seeming unreasonable. also _for my own sake_. i like it to be so--i cannot have peace with the least change from it. dearest, take the baron's hawthorn bough which, in spite of his fine dream of it is dead since the other day, and so much the worse than when i despised it last--take that dead stick and push it upright into the sand as the tide rises, and the whole blue sea draws up its glittering breadth and length towards and around it. but what then? what does _that prove_? ... as the philosopher said of the poem. so we ought not to talk of such things; and we get warned off even in the accidental illustrations taken up to light us. still, the stick certainly did not draw the sea. dearest and best you were yesterday, to write me the little note! you are better than the imaginations of my heart, and _they_, as far as they relate to you (not further) are _not_ desperately wicked, i think. i always expect the kindest things from you, and you always are doing some kindness beyond what is expected, and this is a miracle too, like the rest, now isn't it? when the knock came last night, i knew it was your letter, and not another's. just another little leaf of my koran! how i thank you ... thank you! if i write too kind letters, as you say, why they may be too kind for me to send, but not for you to receive; and i suppose i think more of you than of me, which accounts for my writing them, accounts and justifies. and _that_ is my reflection not now for the first time. for we break rules very often--as that exegetical third person might expound to you clearly out of the ninety-sixth volume of the 'code of conventions,' only you are not like another, nor have you been to me like another--you began with most improvident and (will you let me say?) _unmasculine_ generosity, and queen victoria does not sit upon a mat after the fashion of queen pomare, nor should. but ... but ... you know very fully that you are breaking faith in the matter of the 'tragedy' and 'luria'--you promised to rest--and _you rest for three days_. is it _so_ that people get well? or keep well? indeed i do not think i shall let you have 'luria.' ah--be careful, i do beseech you--be careful. there is time for a pause, and the works will profit by it themselves. and _you_! and i ... if you are ill!-- for the rest i will let you walk in my field, and see my elms as much as you please ... though i hear about the shower bath with a little suspicion. why, if it did you harm before, should it not again? and why should you use it, if it threatens harm? now tell me if it hasn't made you rather unwell since the new trial!--tell me, dear, dearest. as for myself, i believe that you set about exhorting me to be busy, just that i might not reproach _you_ for the over-business. confess that _that_ was the only meaning of the exhortation. but no, you are quite serious, you say. you even threaten me in a sort of underground murmur, which sounds like a nascent earthquake; and if i do not write so much a day directly, your stipendiary magistrateship will take away my license to be loved ... i am not to be ba to you any longer ... you say! and is _this_ right? now i ask you. ever so many chrystals fell off by that stroke of the baton, i do assure you. only you did not mean quite what you said so too articulately, and you will unsay it, if you please, and unthink it near the elms. as for the writing, i will write ... i have written ... i am writing. you do not fancy that i have given up writing?--no. only i have certainly been more loitering and distracted than usual in what i have done, which is not my fault--nor yours directly--and i feel an indisposition to setting about the romance, the hand of the soul shakes. i am too happy and not calm enough, i suppose, to have the right inclination. well--it will come. but all in blots and fragments there are verses enough, to fill a volume done in the last year. and if there were not ... if there were none ... i hold that i should be ba, and also _your_ ba ... which is 'insolence' ... will you say? _r.b. to e.b.b._ thursday. [post-mark, february , .] as for the 'third person,' my sweet ba, he was a wise speaker from the beginning; and in our case he will say, turning to me--'the late robert hall--when a friend admired that one with so high an estimate of the value of intellectuality in woman should yet marry some kind of cook-maid animal, as did the said robert; wisely answered, "you can't kiss mind"! may _you_ not discover eventually,' (this is to me) 'that mere intellectual endowments--though incontestably of the loftiest character--mere mind, though that mind be miss b's--cannot be _kissed_--nor, repent too late the absence of those humbler qualities, those softer affections which, like flowerets at the mountain's foot, if not so proudly soaring as, as, as!...' and so on, till one of us died, with laughing or being laughed at! so judges the third person! and if, to help him, we let him into your room at wimpole street, suffered him to see with flush's eyes, he would say with just as wise an air 'true, mere personal affections may be warm enough, but does it augur well for the durability of an attachment that it should be _wholly, exclusively_ based on such perishable attractions as the sweetness of a mouth, the beauty of an eye? i could wish, rather, to know that there was something of less transitory nature co-existent with this--some congeniality of mental pursuit, some--' would he not say that? but i can't do his platitudes justice because here is our post going out and i have been all the morning walking in the perfect joy of my heart, with your letter, and under its blessing--dearest, dearest ba--let me say more to-morrow--only this now, that you--ah, what are you not to me! my dearest love, bless you--till to-morrow when i will strengthen the prayer; (no, _lengthen_ it!) ever your own. 'hawthorn'[ ]--to show how spring gets on! [footnote : sprig of hawthorn enclosed with letter.] _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday evening. [post-mark, february , .] if all third persons were as foolish as this third person of yours, ever dearest, first and second persons might follow their own devices without losing much in the way of good counsel. but you are unlucky in your third person as far as the wits go, he talks a great deal of nonsense, and flush, who is sensible, will have nothing to do with him, he says, any more than you will with sir moses:--he is quite a third person _singular_ for the nonsense he talks! so, instead of him, you shall hear what i have been doing to-day. the sun, which drew out you and the hawthorns, persuaded me that it was warm enough to go down-stairs--and i put on my cloak as if i were going into the snow, and went into the drawing-room and took henrietta by surprise as she sate at the piano singing. well, i meant to stay half an hour and come back again, for i am upon 'tinkler's ground' in the drawing-room and liable to whole droves of morning visitors--and henrietta kept me, kept me, because she wanted me, besought me, to stay and see the great sight of capt. surtees cook--_plus_ his regimentals--fresh from the royal presence at st. james's, and i never saw him in my life, though he is a sort of cousin. so, though i hated it as you may think, ... not liking to be unkind to my sister, i stayed and stayed one ten minutes after another, till it seemed plain that he wasn't coming at all (as i told her) and that victoria had kept him to dinner, enchanted with the regimentals. and half laughing and half quarrelling, still she kept me by force, until a knock came most significantly ... and '_there_ is surtees' said she ... 'now you must and shall stay! so foolish,' (i had my hand on the door-handle to go out) 'he, your own cousin too! who always calls you ba, except before papa.' which might have encouraged me perhaps, but i can't be sure of it, as the very next moment apprized us both that no less a person than mrs. jameson was standing out in the passage. the whole th. regiment could scarcely have been more astounding to me. as to staying to see her in that room, with the prospect of the military descent in combination, i couldn't have done it for the world! so i made henrietta, who had drawn me into the scrape, take her up-stairs, and followed myself in a minute or two--and the corollary of this interesting history is, that being able to talk at all after all that 'fuss,' and after walking 'up-stairs and down-stairs' like the ancestor of your spider, proves my gigantic strength--now doesn't it? for the rest, 'here be proofs' that the first person can be as foolish as any third person in the world. what do you think? and mrs. jameson was kind beyond speaking of, and talked of taking me to italy. what do you say? it is somewhere about the fifth or sixth proposition of the sort which has come to me. i shall be embarrassed, it seems to me, by the multitude of escorts to italy. but the kindness, one cannot laugh at so much kindness. i wanted to hear her speak of you, and was afraid. i _could not_ name you. yet i _did_ want to hear the last 'bell' praised. she goes to ireland for two months soon, but prints a book first, a collection of essays. i have not seen mr. kenyon, with whom she dined yesterday. the macreadys were to be there, and he told me a week ago that he very nearly committed himself in a 'social mistake' by inviting you to meet them. ah my hawthorn spray! do you know, i caught myself pitying it for being gathered, with that green promise of leaves on it! there is room too on it for the feet of a bird! still i shall keep it longer than it would have stayed in the hedge, _that_ is certain! the first you ever gave me was a yellow rose sent in a letter, and shall i tell you what _that_ means--the yellow rose? '_infidelity_,' says the dictionary of flowers. you see what an omen, ... to begin with! also you see that i am not tired with the great avatar to-day--the 'fell swoop' rather--mine, into the drawing-room, and mrs. jameson's on _me_. and i shall hear to-morrow again, really? i '_let_' you. and you are best, kindest, dearest, every day. did i ever tell you that you made me do what you choose? i fancied that i only _thought_ so. may god bless you. i am your own. shall i have the 'soul's tragedy' on saturday?--any of it? but _do not work_--i beseech you to take care. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, february , .] to be sure my 'first person' was nonsensical, and, in that respect made speak properly, i hope, only he was cut short in the middle of his performance by the exigencies of the post. so, never mind what such persons say, my sweetest, because they know nothing at all--_quod erat demonstrandum_. but you, love, you speak roses, and hawthorn-blossoms when you tell me of the cloak put on, and the descent, and the entry, and staying and delaying. i will have had a hand in all that; i know what i wished all the morning, and now this much came true! but you should have seen the regimentals, if i could have so contrived it, for i confess to a chinese love for bright red--the very names 'vermilion' 'scarlet' warm me, yet in this cold climate nobody wears red to comfort one's eye save soldiers and fox hunters, and old women fresh from a parish christmas distribution of cloaks. to dress in floating loose crimson silk, i almost understand being a cardinal! do you know anything of nat lee's tragedies? in one of them a man angry with a cardinal cries-- stand back, and let me mow this poppy down, this rank red weed that spoils the churches' corn. is not that good? and presently, when the same worthy is poisoned (that is the cardinal)--they bid him--'now, cardinal, lie down and roar!' think of thy scarlet sins! of the justice of all which, you will judge with no mrs. jameson for guide when we see the sistina together, i trust! by the way, yesterday i went to dulwich to see some pictures, by old teniers, murillo, gainsborough, raphael!--then twenty names about, and last but one, as if just thought of, 'correggio.' the whole collection, including 'a _divine_ picture by murillo,' and titian's daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the louvre)--the whole i would, i think, have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing--so execrable as sign-paintings even! 'are there worse poets in their way than painters?' yet the melancholy business is here--that the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards--but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? this short minute of life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and conies out after a dozen years with 'titian's daughter' and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try! i have tried--my trial is made too! to-morrow you shall tell me, dearest, that mrs. jameson wondered to see you so well--did she not wonder? ah, to-morrow! there is a lesson from all this writing and mistaking and correcting and being corrected; and what, but that a word goes safely only from lip to lip, dearest? see how the cup slipped from the lip and snapped the chrystals, you say! but the writing is but for a time--'a time and times and half a time!'--would i knew when the prophetic weeks end! still, one day, as i say, no more writing, (and great scandalization of the third person, peeping through the fringes of flush's ears!) meanwhile, i wonder whether if i meet mrs. jameson i may practise diplomacy and say carelessly 'i should be glad to know what miss b. is like--' no, that i must not do, something tells me, 'for reasons, for reasons'-- i do not know--you may perhaps have to wait a little longer for my 'divine murillo' of a tragedy. my sister is copying it as i give the pages, but--in fact my wise head does ache a little--it is inconceivable! as if it took a great storm to topple over some stone, and once the stone pushed from its right place, any bird's foot, which would hardly bend the hawthorn spray, may set it trembling! the aching begins with reading the presentation-list at the drawing-room quite naturally, and with no shame at all! but it is gentle, well-behaved aching now, so i _do_ care, as you bid me, ba, my ba, whom i call ba to my heart but could not, i really believe, call so before another, even your sister, if--if-- but ba, i call you boldly here, and i dare kiss your dear, dear eyes, till to-morrow--bless you, my own. _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, march , .] you never could think that i meant any insinuation against you by a word of what was said yesterday, or that i sought or am likely to seek a 'security'! do you know it was not right of you to use such an expression--indeed no. you were angry with me for just one minute, or you would not have used it--and why? now what did i say that was wrong or unkind even by construction? if i did say anything, it was three times wrong, and unjust as well as unkind, and wronged my own heart and consciousness of all that you are to me, more than it could _you_. but you began speaking of yourself just as a woman might speak under the same circumstances (you remember what you said), and then _i_, remembering that all the men in the world would laugh such an idea to scorn, said something to that effect, you _know_. i once was in company with a man, however, who valued himself very much on his constancy to a woman who was so deeply affected by it that she became his wife at last ... and the whole neighbourhood came out to stare at him on that ground as a sort of monster. and can you guess what the constancy meant? seven years before, he loved that woman, he said, and she repulsed him. 'and in the meantime, _how many_?' i had the impertinence to ask a female friend who told me the tale. 'why,' she answered with the utmost simplicity, 'i understand that miss a. and miss b. and mrs. c. would not listen to him, but he took miss d.'s rejection most to heart.' that was the head and front of his 'constancy' to miss e., who had been loved, she boasted, for seven years ... that is, once at the beginning and once at the end. it was just a coincidence of the 'premier pas' and the 'pis aller.' beloved, i could not mean this for you; you are not made of such stuff, as we both know. and for myself, it was my compromise with my own scruples, that you should not be 'chained' to me, not in the merest metaphor, that you should not seem to be bound, in honour or otherwise, so that if you stayed with me it should be your free choice to stay, not the _consequence_ of a choice so many months before. that was my compromise with my scruples, and not my doubt of your affection--and least of all, was it an intention of trifling with you sooner or later that made me wish to suspend all _decisions_ as long as possible. i have decided (for me) to let it be as you shall please--now i told you that before. either we will live on as we are, until an obstacle arises,--for indeed i do not look for a 'security' where you suppose, and the very appearance of it _there_, is what most rebuts me--or i will be yours in the obvious way, to go out of england the next half-hour if possible. as to the steps to be taken (or not taken) before the last step, we must think of those. the worst is that the only question is about a _form_. virtually the evil is the same all round, whatever we do. dearest, it was plain to see yesterday evening when he came into this room for a moment at seven o'clock, before going to his own to dress for dinner ... plain to see, that he was not altogether pleased at finding you here in the morning. there was no pretext for objecting gravely--but it was plain that he was not pleased. do not let this make you uncomfortable, he will forget all about it, and i was not _scolded_, do you understand. it was more manner, but my sisters thought as i did of the significance:--and it was enough to prove to me (if i had not known) what a desperate game we should be playing if we depended on a yielding nerve _there_. and to-day i went down-stairs (to prove how my promises stand) though i could find at least ten good excuses for remaining in my own room, for our cousin, sam barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday and put me out of humour (it wasn't the fault of the dear little cousin, lizzie ... my 'portrait' ... who was '_so_ sorry,' she said, dear child, to have missed papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin who should have been in brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so i had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair. yet, the field being clear at _half-past two_! i went for half an hour, just--just for _you_. did you think of me, i wonder? it was to meet your thoughts that i went, dear dearest. how clever these sketches are. the expression produced by such apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and i have been making my brothers admire them, and they 'wonder you don't think of employing them in an illustrated edition of your works.' which might be, really! ah, you did not ask for 'luria'! not that i should have let you have it!--i think i should not indeed. dearest, you take care of the head ... and don't make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting it make you ill. beware too of the shower-bath--it plainly does not answer for you at this season. and walk, and think of me for _your_ good, if such a combination should be possible. and _i_ think of _you_ ... if i do not of italy. yet i forget to speak to you of the dulwich gallery. i never saw those pictures, but am astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them. 'divine' is a bad word for murillo in any case--because he is intensely human in his most supernatural subjects. his beautiful trinity in the national gallery, which i saw the last time i went out to look at pictures, has no deity in it--and i seem to see it now. and do you remember the visitation of the angels to abraham (the duke of sutherland's picture--is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of god? but i always understood that that dulwich gallery was famous for great works--you surprise me! and for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets--they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge. for the rest, however, i very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their vocation in poetry do. there is a mechanism in poetry as in the other art--and, to men not native to the way of it, it runs hard and heavily. the 'cudgelling of the brain' is as good labour as the grinding of the colours, ... do you not think? if ever i am in the sistine chapel, it will not be with mrs. jameson--no. if ever i should be there, what teaching i shall want, _i_ who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do, with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring. wonderfully ignorant i am, to have had eyes and ears so long! there is music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, i feel it so much, ... yet all i know of it as art, all i have heard of the works of the masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the private piano may give. i never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my life--judge by _that_! it is a guess, i make, at all the greatness and divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a composer like beethoven _must_ stand above the divinest painter in soul-godhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists. and this i felt in my guess, long before i knew you. but observe how, if i had died in this illness, i should have left a sealed world behind me! _you_, unknown too--unguessed at, _you_, ... in many respects, wonderfully unguessed at! lately i have learnt to despise my own instincts. and apart from those--and _you_, ... it was right for me to be melancholy, in the consciousness of passing blindfolded under all the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation, with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation, unread! how the thought of it used to depress me sometimes! talking of music, i had a proposition the other day from certain of mr. russell's (the singer's) friends, about his setting to music my 'cry of the children.' his programme exhibits all the horrors of the world, i see! lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers' wives ... all done to the right sort of moaning. his audiences must go home delightfully miserable, i should fancy. he has set the 'song of the shirt' ... and my 'cry of the children' will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a climax of agony. do you know this mr. russell, and what sort of music he suits to his melancholy? but to turn my 'cry' to a 'song,' a burden, it is said, is required--he can't sing it without a burden! and behold what has been sent 'for my approval'.... i shall copy it _verbatim_ for you.... and the threads twirl, twirl, twirl, before each boy and girl; and the wheels, big and little, still whirl, whirl, whirl. ... accompaniment _agitato_, imitating the roar of the machinery! this is not endurable ... ought not to be ... should it now? do tell me. may god bless you, very dearest! let me hear how you are--and think how i am your own.... _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, march , .] dearest, i have been kept in town and just return in time to say why you have _no_ note ... to-morrow i will write ... so much there is to say on the subject of this letter i find. bless you, all beloved-- r.b. oh, do not sleep another night on that horrible error i have led you into! the 'dulwich gallery'!--!!!--oh, no. only some pictures to be sold at the greyhound inn, dulwich--'the genuine property of a gentleman deceased.' _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday evening. [post-mark, march , .] one or two words, if no more, i must write to dearest ba, the night would go down in double blackness if i had neither written nor been written to! so here is another piece of 'kindness' on my part, such as i have received praise for of late! my own sweetest, there is just this good in such praise, that by it one comes to something pleasantly definite amid the hazy uncertainties of mere wishes and possibilities--while my whole heart does, _does_ so yearn, love, to do something to prove its devotion for you; and, now and then, amuses itself with foolish imaginings of real substantial services to which it should be found equal if fortune so granted; suddenly you interpose with thanks, in such terms as would all too much reward the highest of even those services which are never to be; and for what?--for a note, a going to town, a ----! well, there are definite beginnings certainly, if you will recognise them--i mean, that since you _do_ accept, far from 'despising this day of small things,' then i may take heart, and be sure that even though none of the great achievements should fall to my happy chance, still the barrenest, flattest life will--_must_ of needs produce in its season better fruits than these poor ones--i keep it, value it, now, that it may produce such. also i determine never again to 'analyse,' nor let you analyse if the sweet mouth can be anyway stopped: the love shall be one and indivisible--and the loves we used to know from one another huddled lie ... close beside her tenderly-- (which is surely the next line). now am i not anxious to know what your father said? and if anybody else said or wondered ... how should i know? of all fighting--the warfare with shadows--what a work is _there_. but tell me,--and, with you for me-- bless me dearest ever, as the face above mine blesses me-- your own sir moses set off this morning, i hear--somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! so much for this 'wandering jew.' _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday evening. [post-mark, march , .] upon the whole, i think, i am glad when you are kept in town and prevented from writing what you call 'much' to me. because in the first place, the little from _you_, is always much to _me_--and then, besides, _the letter comes_, and with it the promise of another! two letters have i had from you to-day, ever dearest! how i thank you!--yes, _indeed_! it was like yourself to write yesterday ... to remember what a great gap there would have been otherwise, as it looked on this side--here. the worst of saturday is (when you come on it) that sunday follows--saturday night bringing no letter. well, it was very good of you, best of you! for the 'analyzing' i give it up willingly, only that i must say what altogether i forgot to say in my last letter, that it was not _i_, if you please, who spoke of the chrystals breaking away! and you, to quote me with that certainty! "the chrystals are broken off," _you say_.' _i_ say!! when it was in your letter, and not at all in mine!! the truth is that i was stupid, rather, about the dulwich collection--it was my fault. i caught up the idea of the gallery out of a heap of other thoughts, and really might have known better if i had given myself a chance, by considering. mr. kenyon came to-day, and has taken out a licence, it seems to me, for praising you, for he praised and praised. somebody has told him (who had spent several days with you in a house with a large library) that he came away 'quite astounded by the versatility of your learning'--and that, to complete the circle, you discoursed as scientifically on the training of greyhounds and breeding of ducks as if you had never done anything else all your life. then dear mr. kenyon talked of the poems; and hoped, very earnestly i am sure, that you would finish 'saul'--which you ought to do, must do--_only not now_. by the way mrs. coleridge had written to him to enquire whether you had authority for the 'blue lilies,' rather than white. then he asked about 'luria' and 'whether it was obscure'; and i said, not unless the people, who considered it, began by blindfolding themselves. and where do you think mr. kenyon talks of going next february--a long while off to be sure? to italy of course. everybody i ever heard of seems to be going to italy next winter. he visits his brother at vienna, and 'may cross the alps and get to pisa'--it is the shadow of a scheme--nothing certain, so far. i did not go down-stairs to-day because the wind blew and the thermometer fell. to-morrow, perhaps i may. and _you_, dearest dearest, might have put into the letters how you were when you wrote them. you might--but you did not feel well and would not say so. confess that that was the reason. reason or no reason, mention yourself to-morrow, and for the rest, do not write a long letter so as to increase the evil. there was nothing which i can remember as requiring an answer in what i wrote to you, and though i _will_ have my letter of course, it shall be as brief as possible, if briefness is good for you--_now always remember that_. why if i, who talk against 'luria,' should work the mischief myself, what should i deserve? i should be my own jury directly and not recommend to mercy ... not to mine. do take care--care for _me_ just so much. and, except that taking care of your health, what would you do for me that you have not done? you have given me the best of the possible gifts of one human soul to another, you have made my life new, and am i to count these things as small and insufficient? ah, you _know_, you _know_ that i cannot, ought not, will not. may god bless you. he blesses me in letting me be grateful to you as your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, march , .] first and most important of all,--dearest, 'angry'--with you, and for _that_! it is just as if i had spoken contemptuously of that gallery i so love and so am grateful to--having been used to go there when a child, far under the age allowed by the regulations--those two guidos, the wonderful rembrandt of jacob's vision, such a watteau, the triumphant three murillo pictures, a giorgione music-lesson group, all the poussins with the 'armida' and 'jupiter's nursing'--and--no end to 'ands'--i have sate before one, some _one_ of those pictures i had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ... it used to be a green half-hour's walk over the fields. so much for one error, now for the second like unto it; what i meant by charging you with _seeing_, (not, _not_ '_looking_ for')--_seeing_ undue 'security' in _that_, in the form,--i meant to say 'you talk about me being 'free' now, free till _then_, and i am rather jealous of the potency attributed to the _form_, with all its solemnity, because it _is_ a form, and no more--yet you frankly agree with me that _that_ form complied with, there is no redemption; yours i am _then_ sure enough, to repent at leisure &c. &c.' so i meant to ask, 'then, all _now_ said, all short of that particular form of saying it, all goes for comparatively nothing'? here it is written down--you 'wish to _suspend_ all decisions as long as possible'--_that_ form effects the decision, then,--till then, 'where am i'? which is just what lord chesterfield cautions people against asking when they tell stories. love, ba, my own heart's dearest, if all is _not_ decided _now_--why--hear a story, à propos of storytelling, and deduce what is deducible. a very old unitarian minister met a still older evangelical brother--john clayton (from whose son's mouth i heard what you shall hear)--the two fell to argument about the true faith to be held--after words enough, 'well,' said the unitarian, as winding up the controversy with an amicable smile--'at least let us hope we are both engaged in the _pursuit_ of truth!'--'_pursuit_ do you say?' cried the other, 'here am i with my years eighty and odd--if i haven't _found_ truth by this time where is my chance, pray?' my own ba, if i have not already _decided_, alas for me and the solemn words that are to help! though in another point of view there would be some luxurious feeling, beyond the ordinary, in knowing one was kept safe to one's heart's good by yet another wall than the hitherto recognised ones. is there any parallel in the notion i once heard a man deliver himself of in the street--a labourer talking with his friends about '_wishes_'--and this one wished, if he might get his wish, 'to have a nine gallon cask of strong ale set running that minute and his own mouth to be _tied_ under it'--the exquisiteness of the delight was to be in the security upon security,--the being 'tied.' now, ba says i shall not be 'chained' if she can help! but now--here all the jesting goes. you tell me what was observed in the 'moment's' visit; by you, and (after, i suppose) by your sisters. first, i _will_ always see with your eyes _there_--next, what i see i will _never_ speak, if it pain you; but just this much truth i ought to say, i think. i always give myself to you for the worst i am,--full of faults as you will find, if you have not found them. but i _will_ not affect to be so bad, so wicked, as i count wickedness, as to call that conduct other than intolerable--_there_, in my conviction of _that_, is your real 'security' and mine for the future as the present. that a father choosing to give out of his whole day some five minutes to a daughter, supposed to be prevented from participating in what he, probably, in common with the whole world of sensible men, as distinguished from poets and dreamers, consider _every_ pleasure of life, by a complete foregoing of society--that he, after the pisa business and the enforced continuance, and as he must believe, permanence of this state in which any other human being would go mad--i do dare say, for the justification of god, who gave the mind to be _used_ in this world,--where it saves us, we are taught, or destroys us,--and not to be sunk quietly, overlooked, and forgotten; that, under these circumstances, finding ... what, you say, unless he thinks he _does_ find, he would close the door of his house instantly; a mere sympathizing man, of the same literary tastes, who comes good-naturedly, on a proper and unexceptionable introduction, to chat with and amuse a little that invalid daughter, once a month, so far as is known, for an hour perhaps,--that such a father should show himself '_not pleased_ plainly,' at such a circumstance ... my ba, it is shocking! see, i go _wholly_ on the supposition that the real relation is not imagined to exist between us. i so completely could understand a repugnance to trust you to me were the truth known, that, i will confess, i have several times been afraid the very reverse of this occurrence would befall; that your father would have at some time or other thought himself obliged, by the usual feeling of people in such cases, to see me for a few minutes and express some commonplace thanks after the customary mode (just as capt. domett sent a heap of unnecessary thanks to me not long ago for sending now a letter now a book to his son in new zealand--keeping up the spirits of poor dear alfred now he is cut off from the world at large)--and if _this_ had been done, i shall not deny that my heart would have accused me--unreasonably i _know_ but still, suppression, and reserve, and apprehension--the whole of _that is_ horrible always! but this way of looking on the endeavour of anybody, however humble, to just preserve your life, remedy in some degree the first, if it _was_ the first, unjustifiable measure,--this being 'displeased'--is exactly what i did _not_ calculate upon. observe, that in this _only_ instance i am able to do as i shall be done by; to take up the arms furnished by the world, the usages of society--this is monstrous on the _world's_ showing! i say this now that i may never need recur to it--that you may understand why i keep _such_ entire silence henceforth. get but well, keep but _as_ well, and all is easy now. this wonderful winter--the spring--the summer--you will take exercise, go up and down stairs, get strong. _i pray you, at your feet, to do this, dearest!_ then comes autumn, with the natural expectations, as after _rouge_ one expects _noir_: the _likelihood_ of a _severe_ winter after this mild one, which to prevent, you reiterate your demand to go and save your life in italy, ought you not to do that? and the matters brought to issue, (with even, if possible, less shadow of ground for a refusal than before, if you are _well_, plainly well enough to bear the voyage) _there_ i _will_ bid you 'be mine in the obvious way'--if you shall preserve your belief in me--and you _may_ in much, in all important to you. mr. kenyon's praise is undeserved enough, but yesterday milnes said i was the only literary man he ever knew, _tenax propositi_, able to make out a life for himself and abide in it--'for,' he went on, 'you really do live without any of this _titillation_ and fussy dependence upon adventitious excitement of all kinds, they all say they can do without.' that is _more_ true--and i _intend_ by god's help to live wholly for you; to spend my whole energies in reducing to practice the feeling which occupies me, and in the practical operation of which, the other work i had proposed to do will be found included, facilitated--i shall be able--but of this there is plenty time to speak hereafter--i shall, i believe, be able to do this without even allowing the world to _very much_ misinterpret--against pure lying there is no defence, but all up to that i hope to hinder or render unimportant--as you shall know in time and place. i have written myself grave, but write to _me_, dear, dearest, and i will answer in a lighter mood--even now i can say how it was yesterday's hurry happened. i called on milnes--who told me hanmer had broken a bone in his leg and was laid up, so i called on him too--on moxon, by the way, (his brother telling me strangely cheering news, from the grimmest of faces, about my books selling and likely to sell ... your wishes, ba!)--then in bond street about some business with somebody, then on mrs. montagu who was out walking all the time, and home too. i found a letter from mr. kenyon, perfectly kind, asking me to go on monday to meet friends, and with yours to-day comes another confirming the choice of the day. how entirely kind he is! i am very well, much better, indeed--taking that bath with sensibly good effect, to-night i go to montagu's again; for shame, having kept away too long. and the rest shall answer _yours_--dear! not 'much to answer?' and beethoven, and painting and--what _is_ the rest and shall be answered! bless you, now, my darling--i love you, ever shall love you, ever be your own. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, march , .] yes, but, dearest, you mistake me, or you mistake yourself. i am sure i do not over-care for forms--it is not my way to do it--and in this case ... no. still you must see that here is a fact as well as a form, and involving a frightful quantity of social inconvenience (to use the mildest word) if too hastily entered on. i deny altogether looking for, or 'seeing' any 'security' in it for myself--it is a mere form for the heart and the happiness: illusions may pass after as before. still the truth is that if they were to pass with you now, you stand free to act according to the wide-awakeness of your eyes, and to reform your choice ... see! whereas afterward you could not carry out such a reformation while i was alive, even if i helped you. all i could do for you would be to walk away. and you pretend not to see this broad distinction?--ah. for me i have seen just this and no more, and have felt averse to forestall, to seem to forestall even by an hour, or a word, that stringency of the legal obligation from which there _is_ in a certain sense no redemption. tie up your drinker under the pour of his nine gallons, and in two minutes he will moan and writhe (as you perfectly know) like a brinvilliers under the water-torture. that he _asked_ to be tied up, was unwise on his own principle of loving ale. and _you_ sha'n't be 'chained' up, if you were to ask twenty times: if you have found truth or not in the water-well. you do not see aright what i meant to tell you on another subject. if he was displeased, (and it was expressed by a shadow a mere negation of pleasure) it was not with you as a visitor and my friend. you must not fancy such a thing. it was a sort of instinctive indisposition towards seeing you here--unexplained to himself, i have no doubt--of course unexplained, or he would have desired me to receive you never again, _that_ would have been done at once and unscrupulously. but without defining his own feeling, he rather disliked seeing you here--it just touched one of his vibratory wires, brushed by and touched it--oh, we understand in this house. he is not a nice observer, but, at intervals very wide, he is subject to lightnings--call them fancies, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. certainly it was not in the character of a 'sympathising friend' that you made him a very little cross on monday. and yet you never were nor will be in danger of being _thanked_, he would not think of it. for the reserve, the apprehension--dreadful those things are, and desecrating to one's own nature--but we did not make this position, we only endure it. the root of the evil is the miserable misconception of the limits and character of parental rights--it is a mistake of the intellect rather than of the heart. then, after using one's children as one's chattels for a time, the children drop lower and lower toward the level of the chattels, and the duties of human sympathy to them become difficult in proportion. and (it seems strange to say it, yet it is true) _love_, he does not conceive of at all. he has feeling, he can be moved deeply, he is capable of affection in a peculiar way, but _that_, he does not understand, any more than he understands chaldee, respecting it less of course. and you fancy that i could propose italy again? after saying too that i never would? oh no, no--yet there is time to think of this, a superfluity of time, ... 'time, times and half a time' and to make one's head swim with leaning over a precipice is not wise. the roar of the world comes up too, as you hear and as i heard from the beginning. there will be no lack of 'lying,' be sure--'pure lying' too--and nothing you can do, dearest dearest, shall hinder my being torn to pieces by most of the particularly affectionate friends i have in the world. which i do not think of much, any more than of italy. you will be mad, and i shall be bad ... and _that_ will be the effect of being poets! 'till when, where are you?'--why in the very deepest of my soul--wherever in it is the fountain head of loving! beloved, _there_ you are! some day i shall ask you 'in form,'--as i care so much for forms, it seems,--what your 'faults' are, these immense multitudinous faults of yours, which i hear such talk of, and never, never, can get to see. will you give me a catalogue raisonnée of your faults? i should like it, i think. in the meantime they seem to be faults of obscurity, that is, invisible faults, like those in the poetry which do not keep it from selling as i am _so, so_ glad to understand. i am glad too that mr. milnes knows you a little. now i must end, there is no more time to-night. god bless you, very dearest! keep better ... try to be well--as _i_ do for you since you ask me. did i ever think that _you_ would think it worth while to ask me _that_? what a dream! reaching out into the morning! to-day however i did not go down-stairs, because it was colder and the wind blew its way into the passages:--if i can to-morrow without risk, i will, ... be sure ... be sure. till thursday then!--till eternity! 'till when, where am i,' but with you? and what, but yours your ba. i have been writing 'autographs' (save my _mark_) for the north and the south to-day ... the fens, and golden square. somebody asked for a verse, ... from either 'catarina' or 'flush' ... 'those poems' &c. &c.! such a concatenation of criticisms. so i preferred flush of course--i.e. gave him the preferment. _r.b. to e.b.b._ wednesday morning. [post-mark, march , .] ah, sweetest, don't mind people and their lies any more than i shall; if the toad _does_ 'take it into his toad's head to spit at you'--you will not 'drop dead,' i warrant. all the same, if one may make a circuit through a flower-bed and see the less of his toad-habits and general ugliness, so much the better--no words can express my entire indifference (far below _contempt_) for what can be said or done. but one thing, only one, i choose to hinder being said, if i can--the others i would not if i could--why prevent the toad's puffing himself out thrice his black bigness if it amuses him among those wet stones? we shall be in the sun. i dare say i am unjust--hasty certainly, in the other matter--but all faults are such inasmuch as they are 'mistakes of the intellect'--toads may spit or leave it alone,--but if i ever see it right, exercising my intellect, to treat any human beings like my 'chattels'--i shall pay for that mistake one day or another, i am convinced--and i very much fear that you would soon discover what one fault of mine is, if you were to hear anyone assert such a right in my presence. well, i shall see you to-morrow--had i better come a little later, i wonder?--half-past three, for instance, staying, as last time, till ... ah, it is ill policy to count my treasure aloud! or shall i come at the usual time to-morrow? if i do _not_ hear, at the usual time!--because, i think you would--am sure you would have considered and suggested it, were it necessary. bless you, dearest--ever your own. i said nothing about that mr. russell and his proposition--by all means, yes--let him do more good with that noble, pathetic 'lay'--and do not mind the 'burthen,' if he is peremptory--so that he duly specify '_by the singer_'--with _that_ precaution nothing but good can come of his using it. _e.b.b. to r.b._ thursday. [post-mark, march , .] ever dearest i lose no time in writing, you see, so as to be written to at the soonest--and there is another reason which makes me hasten to write ... it is not all mercantile calculation. i want you to understand me. now listen! i seem to understand myself: it seems to me that every word i ever said to you on one subject, is plainly referable to a class of feelings of which you could not complain ... could not. but this is _my_ impression; and yours is different:--you do not understand, you do not see by my light, and perhaps it is natural that you should not, as we stand on different steps of the argument. still i, who said what i did, _for you_, and from an absorbing consideration of what was best _for you_, cannot consent, even out of anxiety for your futurity, to torment you now, to vex you by a form of speech which you persist in translating into a want of trust in you ... (_i_, want trust in you!!) into a need of more evidence about you from others ... (_could_ you say so?) and even into an indisposition on my part to fulfil my engagement--no, dearest dearest, it is not right of you. and therefore, as you have these thoughts reasonably or unreasonably, i shall punish you for them at once, and 'chain' you ... (as you wish to be chained), chain you, rivet you--do you feel how the little fine chain twists round and round you? do you hear the stroke of the riveting? and you may _feel that_ too. now, it is done--now, you are chained--_bia_ has finished the work--i, _ba_! (observe the anagram!) and not a word do you say, of prometheus, though you have the conscience of it all, i dare say. well! you must be pleased, ... as it was 'the weight of too much liberty' which offended you: and now you believe, perhaps, that i trust you, love you, and look to you over the heads of the whole living world, without any one head needing to stoop; you _must_, if you please, because you belong to me now and shall believe as i choose. there's a ukase for you! cry out ... repent ... and i will loose the links, and let you go again--_shall_ it be '_my dear miss barrett_?' seriously, you shall not think of me such things as you half said, if not whole said, to-day. if all men were to speak evil of you, my heart would speak of you the more good--_that_ would be the one result with _me_. do i not know you, soul to soul? should i believe that any of them could know you as i know you? then for the rest, i am not afraid of 'toads' now, not being a child any longer. i am not inclined to mind, if _you_ do not mind, what may be said about us by the benevolent world, nor will other reasons of a graver kind affect me otherwise than by the necessary pain. therefore the whole rests with you--unless illness should intervene--and you will be kind and good (will you not?) and not think hard thoughts of me ever again--no. it wasn't the sense of being less than you had a right to pretend to, which made me speak what you disliked--for it is _i_ who am 'unworthy,' and not another--not certainly that other! i meant to write more to-night of subjects farther off us, but my sisters have come up-stairs and i must close my letter quickly. beloved, take care of your head! ah, do not write poems, nor read, nor neglect the walking, nor take that shower-bath. _will_ you, instead, try the warm bathing? surely the experiment is worth making for a little while. dearest beloved, do it for your own ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ friday morning. [post-mark, march , .] i am altogether your own, dearest--the words were only words and the playful feelings were play--while the _fact_ has always been so irresistibly obvious as to make them _break_ on and off it, fantastically like water turning to spray and spurts of foam on a great solid rock. _now_ you call the rock, a rock, but you must have known what chance you had of pushing it down when you sent all those light fancies and free-leaves, and refusals-to-hold-responsible, to do what they could. it _is_ a rock; and may be quite barren of good to you,--not large enough to build houses on, not small enough to make a mantelpiece of, much less a pedestal for a statue, but it is real rock, that is all. it is always _i_ who 'torment' _you_--instead of taking the present and blessing you, and leaving the future to its own cares. i certainly am not apt to look curiously into what next week is to bring, much less next month or six months, but you, the having you, my own, dearest beloved, _that_ is as different in kind as in degree from any other happiness or semblance of it that even seemed possible of realization. then, now, the health is all to stay, or retard us--oh, be well, my ba! let me speak of that letter--i am ashamed at having mentioned those circumstances, and should not have done so, but for their insignificance--for i knew that if you ever _did_ hear of them, all any body _would_ say would not amount to enough to be repeated to me and so get explained at once. now that the purpose is gained, it seems little worth gaining. you bade me not send the letter: i will not. as for 'what people say'--ah--here lies a book, bartoli's 'simboli' and this morning i dipped into his chapter xix. his 'symbol' is 'socrate fatto ritrar su' boccali' and the theme of his dissertating, 'l'indegnità del mettere in disprezzo i più degni filosofi dell'antichità.' he sets out by enlarging on the horror of it--then describes the character of socrates, then tells the story of the representation of the 'clouds,'and thus gets to his 'symbol'--'le pazzie fatte spacciare a socrate in quella commedia ... il misero in tanto scherno e derisione del pubblico, che perfino i vasai dipingevano il suo ritratto sopra gli orci, i fiaschi, i boccali, e ogni vasellamento da più vile servigio. così quel sommo filosofo ... fu condotto a far di se par le case d'atene una continua commedia, con solamente vederlo comparir così scontraffatto e ridicolo, come i vasai sel formavano d'invenzione'-- there you have what a very clever man can say in choice tuscan on a passage in Ælian which he takes care not to quote nor allude to, but which is the sole authority for the fact. Ælian, speaking of socrates' magnanimity, says that on the first representation, a good many foreigners being present who were at a loss to know 'who could be this socrates'--the sage himself stood up that he might be pointed out to them by the auditory at large ... 'which' says Ælian--'was no difficulty for them, to whom his features were most familiar,--_the very potters being in the habit of decorating their vessels with his likeness_'--no doubt out of a pleasant and affectionate admiration. yet see how 'people' can turn this out of its sense,--'say' their say on the simplest, plainest word or deed, and change it to its opposite! 'god's great gift of speech abused' indeed! but what shall we hear of it _there_, my siren? on monday--is it not? _who_ was it looked into the room just at our leave-taking? bless you, my ever dearest,--remember to walk, to go down-stairs--and be sure that i will endeavour to get well for my part. to-day i am very well--with this letter! your own. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday evening. [post-mark, march , .] always _you_, is it, who torments me? always _you_? well! i agree to bear the torments as socrates his persecution by the potters:--and by the way he liked those potters, as plato shows, and was fain to go to them for his illustrations ... as i to you for all my light. also, while we are on the subject, i will tell you another fault of your bartoli ... his 'choice tuscan' filled one of my pages, in the place of my english better than tuscan. for the letter you mentioned, i meant to have said in mine yesterday, that i was grateful to you for telling me of it--_that_ was one of the prodigalities of your goodness to me ... not thrown away, in one sense, however superfluous. do you ever think how i must feel when you overcome me with all this generous tenderness, only beloved! i cannot say it. because it is colder to-day i have not been down-stairs but let to-morrow be warm enough--_facilis descensus_. there's something infernal to me really, in the going down, and now too that our cousin is here! think of his beginning to attack henrietta the other day.... '_so_ mr. c. has retired and left the field to surtees cook. oh ... you needn't deny ... it's the news of all the world except your father. and as to _him_, i don't blame you--he never will consent to the marriage of son or daughter. only you should consider, you know, because he won't leave you a shilling, &c. &c....' you hear the sort of man. and then in a minute after ... 'and what is this about ba?' 'about ba' said my sisters, 'why who has been persuading you of such nonsense?' 'oh, my authority is very good,--perfectly unnecessary for you to tell any stories, arabel,--a literary friendship, is it?' ... and so on ... after that fashion! this comes from my brothers of course, but we need not be afraid of its passing _beyond_, i think, though i was a good deal vexed when i heard first of it last night and have been in cousinly anxiety ever since to get our orestes safe away from those furies his creditors, into brittany again. he is an intimate friend of my brothers besides the relationship, and they talk to him as to each other, only they oughtn't to have talked _that_, and without knowledge too. i forgot to tell you that mr. kenyon was in an immoderate joy the day i saw him last, about mr. poe's 'raven' as seen in the _athenæum_ extracts, and came to ask what i knew of the poet and his poetry, and took away the book. it's the rhythm which has taken him with 'glamour' i fancy. now you will stay on monday till the last moment, and go to him for dinner at six. who 'looked in at the door?' nobody. but arabel a little way opened it, and hearing your voice, went back. there was no harm--_is_ no fear of harm. nobody in the house would find his or her pleasure in running the risk of giving me pain. i mean my brothers and sisters would not. are you trying the music to charm the brain to stillness? tell me. and keep from that 'soul's tragedy' which did so much harm--oh, that i had bound you by some stygian oath not to touch it. so my rock ... may the birds drop into your crevices the seeds of all the flowers of the world--only it is not for _those_, that i cling to you as the single rock in the salt sea. ever i am your own. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, march , .] you call me 'kind'; and by this time i have no heart to call you such names--i told you, did i not once? that 'ba' had got to convey infinitely more of you to my sense than 'dearest,' 'sweetest,' all or any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees--to say you are 'kind,' you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless me,--it will never do now, 'ba.' all the same, one way there is to make even 'ba' dearer,--'_my_ ba,' i say to myself! about my _fears_--whether of opening doors or entering people--one thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any misconception--i desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to _increase_ them, far from diminishing--they relate, of course, entirely to _you_--and only through _you_ affect me the least in the world. put your well-being out of the question, so far as i can understand it to be involved,--and the pleasure and pride i should immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position. what pleasure, what pride! but i endeavour to remember on all occasions--and perhaps succeed in too few--that it is very easy for me to go away and leave you who cannot go. i only allude to this because some people are 'naturally nervous' and all that--and i am quite of another kind. last evening i went out--having been kept at home in the afternoon to see somebody ... went walking for hours. i am quite well to-day and, now your letter comes, my ba, most happy. and, as the sun shines, you are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while i write--oh, to meet you on the stairs! and i shall really see you on monday, dearest? so soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get to go between our days! for music, i made myself melancholy just now with some 'concertos for the harpsichord by mr. handel'--brought home by my father the day before yesterday;--what were light, modern things once! now i read not very long ago a french memoir of 'claude le jeune' called in his time the prince of musicians,--no, '_phoenix_'--the unapproachable wonder to all time--that is, twenty years after his death about--and to this pamphlet was prefixed as motto this startling axiom--'in music, the beau ideal changes every thirty years'--well, is not that _true_? the _idea_, mind, changes--the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as ever--they were _not_ according to the ideal of their own time--just now, they drop into the ready ear,--next hundred years, who will be the rossini? who is no longer the rossini even i remember--his early overtures are as purely rococo as cimarosa's or more. the sounds remain, keep their character perhaps--the scale's proportioned notes affect the same, that is,--the major third, or minor seventh--but the arrangement of these, the sequence the law--for them, if it _should_ change every thirty years! to corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in heaven or earth as this [illustration: music] i don't believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does not do duty. in these things of handel that seems replaced by [illustration: music] --that was the only true consummation! then,--to go over the hundred years,--came rossini's unanswerable coda: [illustration: music] which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone--_so_ gone by! from all of which ba draws _this_ 'conclusion' that these may be worse things than bartoli's tuscan to cover a page with!--yet, yet the pity of it! le jeune, the phoenix, and rossini who directed his letters to his mother as 'mother of the famous composer'--and henry lawes, and dowland's lute, ah me! well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and i trust elsewhere--i am your own, my ba, ever your r. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, march , .] now i shall know what to believe when you talk of very bad and very indifferent doings of yours. dearest, i read your 'soul's tragedy' last night and was quite possessed with it, and fell finally into a mute wonder how you could for a moment doubt about publishing it. it is very vivid, i think, and vital, and impressed me more than the first act of 'luria' did, though i do not mean to compare such dissimilar things, and for pure nobleness 'luria' is unapproachable--will prove so, it seems to me. but this 'tragedy' shows more heat from the first, and then, the words beat down more closely ... well! i am struck by it all as you see. if you keep it up to this passion, if you justify this high key-note, it is a great work, and worthy of a place next 'luria.' also do observe how excellently balanced the two will be, and how the tongue of this next silver bell will swing from side to side. and _you_ to frighten me about it. yes, and the worst is (because it was stupid in me) the worst is that i half believed you and took the manuscript to be something inferior--for _you_--and the adviseableness of its publication, a doubtful case. and yet, after all, the really worst is, that you should prove yourself such an adept at deceiving! for can it be possible that the same 'robert browning' who (i heard the other day) said once that he could 'wait three hundred years,' should not feel the life of centuries in this work too--can it be? why all the pulses of the life of it are beating in even _my_ ears! tell me, beloved, how you are--i shall hear it to-night--shall i not? to think of your being unwell, and forced to go here and go there to visit people to whom your being unwell falls in at best among the secondary evils!--makes me discontented--which is one shade more to the uneasiness i feel. will you take care, and not give away your life to these people? because i have a better claim than they ... and shall put it in, if provoked ... _shall_. then you will not use the shower-bath again--you promise? i dare say mr. kenyon observed yesterday how unwell you were looking--tell me if he didn't! now do not work, dearest! do not think of chiappino, leave him behind ... he has a good strong life of his own, and can wait for you. oh--but let me remember to say of him, that he and the other personages appear to me to articulate with perfect distinctness and clearness ... you need not be afraid of having been obscure in this first part. it is all as lucid as noon. shall i go down-stairs to-day? 'no' say the privy-councillors, 'because it is cold,' but i _shall_ go peradventure, because the sun brightens and brightens, and the wind has gone round to the west. george had come home yesterday before you left me, but the stars were favourable to us and kept him out of this room. now he is at worcester--went this morning, on those never ending 'rounds,' poor fellow, which weary him i am sure. and why should music and the philosophy of it make you 'melancholy,' ever dearest, more than the other arts, which each has the seal of the age, modifying itself after a fashion and _to_ one? because it changes more, perhaps. yet all the arts are mediators between the soul and the infinite, ... shifting always like a mist, between the breath on this side, and the light on that side ... shifted and coloured; mediators, messengers, projected from the soul, to go and feel, for her, _out there_! you don't call me 'kind' i confess--but then you call me 'too kind' which is nearly as bad, you must allow on your part. only you were not in earnest when you said _that_, as it appeared afterward. _were_ you, yesterday, in pretending to think that i owed you nothing ... _i_? may god bless you. he knows that to give myself to you, is not to pay you. such debts are not so paid. yet i am your ba. _people's journal_ for march th. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday morning. [post-mark, march , .] dear, dear ba, if you were here i should not much _speak_ to you, not at first--nor, indeed, at last,--but as it is, sitting alone, only words can be spoken, or (worse) written, and, oh how different to look into the eyes and imagine what _might_ be said, what ought to be said, though it never can be--and to sit and say and write, and only imagine who looks above me, looks down, understanding and pardoning all! my love, my ba, the fault you found once with some expressions of mine about the amount of imperishable pleasures already hoarded in my mind, the indestructible memories of you; that fault, which i refused to acquiesce under the imputation of, at first, you remember--well, _what_ a fault it was, by this better light! if all stopped here and now; horrible! complete oblivion were the thing to be prayed for, rather! as it is, _now_, i must go on, must live the life out, and die yours. and you are doing your utmost to advance the event of events,--the exercise, and consequently (is it not?) necessarily improved sleep, and the projects for the fine days, the walking ... a pure bliss to think of! well, now--i think i shall show seamanship of a sort, and 'try another tack'--do not be over bold, my sweetest; the cold _is_ considerable,--taken into account the previous mildness. one ill-advised (i, the _adviser_, i should remember!) too early, or too late descent to the drawing-room, and all might be ruined,--thrown back so far ... seeing that our flight is to be prayed for 'not in the winter'--and one would be called on to wait, wait--in this world where nothing waits, rests, as can be counted on. now think of this, too, dearest, and never mind the slowness, for the sureness' sake! how perfectly happy i am as you stand by me, as yesterday you stood, as you seem to stand now! i will write to-morrow more: i came home last night with a head rather worse; which in the event was the better, for i took a little medicine and all is very much improved to-day. i shall go out presently, and return very early and take as much care as is proper--for i thought of ba, and the sublimities of duty, and that gave myself airs of importance, in short, as i looked at my mother's inevitable arrow-root this morning. so now i am well; so now, is dearest ba well? i shall hear to-night ... which will have its due effect, that circumstance, in quickening my retreat from forster's rooms. all was very pleasant last evening--and your letter &c. went _à qui de droit_, and mr. w. _junior_ had to smile good-naturedly when mr. burges began laying down this general law, that the sons of all men of genius were poor creatures--and chorley and i exchanged glances after the fashion of two augurs meeting at some street-corner in cicero's time, as he says. and mr. kenyon was kind, kinder, kindest, as ever, 'and thus ends a wooing'!--no, a dinner--my wooing ends never, never; and so prepare to be asked to give, and give, and give till all is given in heaven! and all i give _you_ is just my heart's blessing; god bless you, my dearest, dearest ba! _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, march , .] you find my letter i trust, for it was written this morning in time; and if these two lines should not be flattery ... oh, rank flattery! ... why happy letter is it, to help to bring you home ten minutes earlier, when you never ought to have left home--no, indeed! i knew how it would be yesterday, and how you would be worse and not better. you are not fit to go out, dear dearest, to sit in the glare of lights and talk and listen, and have the knives and forks to rattle all the while and remind you of the chains of necessity. oh--should i bear it, do you think? i was thinking, when you went away--_after_ you had quite gone. you would laugh to see me at my dinner--flush and me--flush placing in me such an heroic confidence, that, after he has cast one discriminating glance on the plate, and, in the case of 'chicken,' wagged his tail with an emphasis, ... he goes off to the sofa, shuts his eyes and allows a full quarter of an hour to pass before he returns to take his share. did you ever hear of a dog before who did not persecute one with beseeching eyes at mealtimes? and remember, this is not the effect of _discipline_. also if another than myself happens to take coffee or break bread in the room here, he teazes straightway with eyes and paws, ... teazes like a common dog and is put out of the door before he can be quieted by scolding. but with _me_ he is sublime! moreover he has been a very useful dog in his time (in the point of capacity), causing to disappear supererogatory dinners and impossible breakfasts which, to do him justice, is a feat accomplished without an objection on his side, always. so, when you write me such a letter, i write back to you about flush. dearest beloved, but i have read the letter and felt it in my heart, through and through! and it is as wise to talk of flush foolishly, as to fancy that i _could say how_ it is felt ... this letter! only when you spoke last of breaking off with such and such recollections, it was the melancholy of the breaking off which i protested against, was it not? and _not_ the insufficiency of the recollections. there might have been something besides in jest. ah, but _you_ remember, if you please, that _i_ was the first to wish (wishing for my own part, if i could wish exclusively) to break off in the middle the silken thread, and you told me, not--you forbade me--do you remember? for, as happiness goes, the recollections were enough, ... _are_ enough for _me_! i mean that i should acknowledge them to be full compensation for the bitter gift of life, _such as it was_, to me! if that subject-matter were broken off here! 'bona verba' let me speak nevertheless. you mean, you say, to run all risks with me, and i don't mean to draw back from my particular risk of ... what am i to do to you hereafter to make you vexed with me? what is there in marriage to make all these people on every side of us, (who all began, i suppose, by talking of love,) look askance at one another from under the silken mask ... and virtually hate one another through the tyranny of the stronger and the hypocrisy of the weaker party. it never could be so with _us_--_i know that_. but you grow awful to me sometimes with the very excess of your goodness and tenderness, and still, i think to myself, if you do not keep lifting me up quite off the ground by the strong faculty of love in you, i shall not help falling short of the hope you have placed in me--it must be 'supernatural' of you, to the end! or i fall short and disappoint you. consider this, beloved. now if i could put my soul out of my body, just to stand up before you and make it clear. i did go to the drawing-room to-day ... would ... should ... did. the sun came out, the wind changed ... where was the obstacle? i spent a quarter of an hour in a fearful solitude, listening for knocks at the door, as a ghost-fearer might at midnight, and 'came home' none the worse in any way. be sure that i shall 'take care' better than you do, and there, is the worst of it all--for _you_ let people make you ill, and do it yourself upon occasion. you know from my letter how i found you out in the matter of the 'soul's tragedy.' oh! so bad ... so weak, so unworthy of your name! if some other people were half a quarter as much the contrary! and so, good-night, dear dearest. in spite of my fine speeches about 'recollections,' i should be unhappy enough to please you, with _only those_ ... without you beside! i could not take myself back from being your own-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, march , .] dear, dear ba, but indeed i _did_ return home earlier by two or three good hours than the night before--and to find _no_ letter,--none of yours! _that_ was reserved for this morning early, and then a rest came, a silence, over the thoughts of you--and now again, comes this last note! oh, my love--why--what is it you think to do, or become 'afterward,' that you may fail in and so disappoint me? it is not very unfit that you should thus punish yourself, and that, sinning by your own ambition of growing something beyond my ba even, you should 'fear' as you say! for, sweet, why wish, why think to alter ever by a line, change by a shade, turn better if that were possible, and so only rise the higher above me, get further from instead of nearer to my heart? what i expect, what i build my future on, am quite, quite prepared to 'risk' everything for,--is that one belief that you _will not alter_, will just remain as you are--meaning by '_you_,' the love in you, the qualities i have _known_ (for you will stop me, if i do not stop myself) what i have evidence of in every letter, in every word, every look. keeping these, if it be god's will that the body passes,--what is that? write no new letters, speak no new words, look no new looks,--only tell me, years hence that the present is alive, that what was once, still is--and i am, must needs be, blessed as ever! you speak of my feeling as if it were a pure speculation--as if because i _see somewhat_ in you i make a calculation that there must be more to see somewhere or other--where bdellium is found, the onyx-stone may be looked for in the mystic land of the four rivers! and perhaps ... ah, poor human nature!--perhaps i _do_ think at times on what _may_ be to find! but what is that to you? i _offer_ for the _bdellium_--the other may be found or not found ... what i see glitter on the ground, _that_ will suffice to make me rich as--rich as-- so bless you my own ba! i would not wait for paper, and you must forgive half-sheets, instead of a whole celestial quire to my love and praise. are you so well? so adventurous? thank you from my heart of hearts. and i am quite well to-day (and have received a note from procter _just_ this _minute_ putting off his dinner on account of the death of his wife's sister's husband abroad). observe _this_ sheet i take as i find--i mean, that the tear tells of no improper speech repented of--what english, what sense, what a soul's tragedy! but then, what real, realest love and more than love for my ever dearest ba possesses her own-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, march , .] when my orpheus writes '[greek: peri lithôn]' he makes a great mistake about onyxes--there is more true onyx in this letter of his that i have just read, than he will ever find in the desert land he goes to. and for what 'glitters on the ground,' it reminds me of the yellow metal sparks found in the malvern hills, and how we used to laugh years ago at one of our geological acquaintances, who looked mole-hills up that mountain-range in the scorn of his eyes, saying ... 'nothing but mica!!' is anybody to be rich through 'mica', i wonder? through 'nothing but mica?' 'as rich as--as rich as' ... _walter the pennyless_? dearest, best you are nevertheless, and it is a sorry jest which i can break upon your poverty, with that golden heart of yours so apprehended of mine! why if i am 'ambitious'--is it not because you love me as if i were worthier of your love, and that, _so_, i get frightened of the opening of your eyelids to the _un_worthiness? 'a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep'--_there_, is my 'ambition for afterward.' oh--you do not understand how with an unspeakable wonder, an astonishment which keeps me from drawing breath, i look to this dream, and 'see your face as the face of an angel,' and fear for the vanishing, ... because dreams and angels _do_ pass away in this world. but _you_, _i_ understand _you_, and all your goodness past expression, past belief of mine, if i had not known you ... just _you_. if it will satisfy you that i should know you, love you, love you--why then indeed--because i never bowed down to any of the false gods i know the gold from the mica, ... i! 'my own beloved'--you should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher. yet you shall not call me 'ambitious.' to-day i went down-stairs again, and wished to know whether you were walking in your proportion--and your letter does call you 'better,' whether you walked enough or not, and it bears the deptford post-mark. on saturday i shall see how you are looking. so pale you were last time! i know mr. kenyon must have observed it, (dear mr. kenyon ... for being 'kinder and kindest') and that one of the 'augurs' marvelled at the other! by the way i forgot yesterday to tell you how mr. burges's 'apt remark' did amuse me. and mr. kenyon who said much the same words to me last week in relation to this very wordsworth junior, writhed, i am sure, and wished the ingenious observer with the lost plays of Æschylus--oh, i seem to see mr. kenyon's face! he was to have come to tell me how you all behaved at dinner that day, but he keeps away ... you have given him too much to think of perhaps. i heard from miss mitford to-day that mr. chorley's hope is at an end in respect to the theatre, and (i must tell you) she praises him warmly for his philosophy and fortitude under the disappointment. how much philosophy does it take,--please to instruct me,--in order to the decent bearing of such disasters? can i fancy one, shorter than you by a whole head of the soul, condescending to '_bear_' such things? no, indeed. be good and kind, and do not work at the 'tragedy' ... do not. so you and i have written out all the paper in london! at least, i send and send in vain to have more envelopes 'after my kind,' and the last answer is, that a 'fresh supply will arrive in eight days from paris, and that in the meanwhile they are quite _out_ in the article.' an awful sign of the times, is this famine of envelopes ... not to speak of the scarcity of little sheets:--and the augurs look to it all of course. for _my_ part i think more of chiappino--chiappino holds me fast. but i must let _you_ go--it is too late. this dearest letter, which you sent me! i thank you for it with ever so much dumbness. may god bless you and keep you, and make you happy for me. your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, march , .] how i get to understand this much of law--that prior possession is nine points of it! just because your infinite adroitness got first hold of the point of view whence our connection looks like 'a dream' ... i find myself shut out of my very own, unable to say what is oftenest in my thought; whereas the dear, miraculous dream _you_ were, and are, my ba! only, _vanish_--_that_ you will never! my own, and for ever! yesterday i read the poor, inconceivably inadequate notice in the _people's journal_. how curiously wrong, too, in the personal guesses! sad work truly. for my old friend mrs. adams--no, i must be silent: the lyrics seem doggerel in its utter purity. and so the people are to be instructed in the new age of gold! i _heard_ two days ago precisely what i told you--that there was a quarrel, &c. which this service was to smooth over, no doubt. chorley told me, in a hasty word only, that all was over, mr. webster would not have anything to do with his play. the said w. is one of the poorest of poor creatures, and as chorley was certainly forewarned, forearmed i will hope him to have been likewise--still it is very disappointing--he was apparently nearer than most aspirants to the prize,--having the best will of the actresses on whose shoulder the burthen was to lie. i hope they have been quite honest with him--knowing as i do the easy process of transferring all sorts of burthens, in that theatrical world, from responsible to irresponsible members of it, actors to manager, manager to actors, as the case requires. and it is a 'hope deferred' with chorley; not for the second or third time. i am very glad that he cares no more than you tell me. still you go down-stairs, and still return safely, and every step leads us nearer to _my_ 'hope.' how unremittingly you bless me--a visit promises a letter, a letter brings such news, crowns me with such words, and speaks of another visit--and so the golden links extend. dearest words, dearest letters--as i add each to my heap, i say--i _do_ say--'i was _poor_, it now seems, a minute ago, when i had not _this_!' bless you, dear, dear ba. on saturday i shall be with you, i trust--may god bless you! ever your own _e.b.b. to r.b._ sunday. [post-mark, march , .] ever dearest i am going to say one word first of all lest i should forget it afterward, of the two or three words which you said yesterday and so passingly that you probably forget to-day having said them at all. we were speaking of mr. chorley and his house, and you said that you did not care for such and such things for yourself, but that for others--now you remember the rest. and i just want to say what it would have been simpler to have said at the time--only not so easy--(i _couldn't_ say it at the time) that you are not if you please to fancy that because i am a woman i have not the pretension to do with as little in any way as you yourself ... no, it is not _that_ i mean to say.... i mean that you are not, if you please, to fancy that, because i am a woman, i look to be cared for in those outside things, or should have the slightest pleasure in any of them. so never wish nor regret in your thoughts to be able or not to be able to care this and this for _me_; for while you are thinking so, our thoughts go different ways, which is wrong. mr. fox did me a great deal too much honour in calling me 'a religious hermit'; he was 'curiously' in fault, as you saw. it is not my vocation to sit on a stone in a cave--i was always too fond of lolling upon sofas or in chairs nearly as large,--and this, which i sit in, was given to me when i was a child by my uncle, the uncle i spoke of to you once, and has been lolled in nearly ever since ... when i was well enough. well--_that_ is a sort of luxury, of course--but it is more idle than expensive, as a habit, and i do believe that it is the 'head and foot of my offending' in that matter. yes--'confiteor tibi' besides, that i do hate white dimity curtains, which is highly improper for a religious hermit of course, but excusable in _me_ who would accept brown serge as a substitute with ever so much indifference. it is the white light which comes in the dimity which is so hateful to me. to 'go mad in white dimity' seems perfectly natural, and consequential even. set aside these foibles, and one thing is as good as another with me, and the more simplicity in the way of living, the better. if i saw mr. chorley's satin sofas and gilded ceilings i should call them very pretty i dare say, but never covet the possession of the like--it would never enter my mind to do so. then papa has not kept a carriage since i have been grown up (they grumble about it here in the house, but when people have once had great reverses they get nervous about spending money) so i shall not miss the clarence and greys ... and i do entreat you _not_ to put those two ideas together again of _me_ and the finery which has nothing to do with me. i have talked a great deal too much of all this, you will think, but i want you, once for all, to apply it broadly to the whole of the future both in the general view and the details, so that we need not return to the subject. judge for me as for yourself--_what is good for you is good for me_. otherwise i shall be humiliated, you know; just as far as i know your thoughts. mr. kenyon has been here to-day--and i have been down-stairs--two great events! he was in brilliant spirits and sate talking ever so long, and named you as he always does. something he asked, and then said suddenly ... 'but i don't see why i should ask _you_, when i ought to know him better than you can.' on which i was wise enough to change colour, as i felt, to the roots of my hair. there is the effect of a bad conscience! and it has happened to me before, with mr. kenyon, three times--once particularly, when i could have cried with vexation (to complete the effects!), he looked at me with such infinite surprise in a dead pause of any speaking. _that_ was in the summer; and all to be said for it now, is, that it couldn't be helped: couldn't! mr. kenyon asked of 'saul.' (by the way, you never answered about the blue lilies.) he asked of 'saul' and whether it would be finished in the new number. he hangs on the music of your david. did you read in the _athenæum_ how jules janin--no, how the critic on jules janin (was it the critic? was it jules janin? the glorious confusion is gaining on me i think) has magnificently confounded places and persons in robert southey's urn by the adriatic and devoted friendship for lord byron? and immediately the english observer of the phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on mme. charles reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of romances third and fourth rate, of questionable purity enough, too. it does certainly appear wonderful that we should not sufficiently stand abreast here in europe, to justify and necessitate the establishment of an european review--journal rather--(the 'foreign review,' so called, touching only the summits of the hills) a journal which might be on a level with the intelligent readers of all the countries of europe, and take all the rising reputations of each, with the national light on them as they rise, into observation and judgment. if nobody can do this, it is a pity i think to do so much less--both in france and england--to snatch up a french book from over the channel as ever and anon they do in the _athenæum_, and say something prodigiously absurd of it, till people cry out 'oh oh' as in the house of commons. oh--oh--and how wise i am to-day, as if i were a critic myself! yesterday i was foolish instead--for i couldn't get out of my head all the evening how you said that you would come 'to see a candle held up at the window.' well! but i do not mean to love you any more just now--so i tell you plainly. certainly i will not. i love you already too much perhaps. i feel like the turning dervishes turning in the sun when you say such words to me--and i _never shall_ love you any 'less,' because it is too much to be made less of. and you write to-morrow? and will tell me how you are? honestly will tell me? may god bless you, most dear! i am yours--'tota tua est' ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday. [post-mark, march , .] how will the love my heart is full of for you, let me be silent? insufficient speech is better than no speech, in one regard--the speaker had _tried_ words, and if they fail, hereafter he needs not reflect that he did not even try--so with me now, that loving you, ba, with all my heart and soul, all my senses being lost in one wide wondering gratitude and veneration, i press close to you to say so, in this imperfect way, my dear dearest beloved! why do you not help me, rather than take my words, my proper word, from me and call them yours, when yours they are not? you said lately love of you 'made you humble'--just as if to hinder _me_ from saying that earnest truth!--entirely true it is, as i feel ever more convincingly. you do not choose to understand it should be so, nor do i much care, for the one thing you must believe, must resolve to believe in its length and breadth, is that i do love you and live only in the love of you. i will rest on the confidence that you do so believe! you _know_ by this that it is no shadowy image of you and _not_ you, which having attached myself to in the first instance, i afterward compelled my fancy to see reproduced, so to speak, with tolerable exactness to the original idea, in you, the dearest real _you_ i am blessed with--you _know_ what the eyes are to me, and the lips and the hair. and i, for my part, know _now_, while fresh from seeing you, certainly _know_, whatever i may have said a short time since, that _you_ will go on to the end, that the arm round me will not let me go,--over such a blind abyss--i refuse to think, to fancy, _towards_ what it would be to loose you now! so i give my life, my soul into your hand--the giving is a mere form too, it is yours, ever yours from the first--but ever as i see you, sit with you, and come away to think over it all, i find more that seems mine to give; you give me more life and it goes back to you. i shall hear from you to-morrow--then, i will go out early and get done with some calls, in the joy and consciousness of what waits me, and when i return i will write a few words. are these letters, these merest attempts at getting to talk with you through the distance--yet always with the consolation of feeling that you will know all, interpret all and forgive it and put it right--can such things be cared for, expected, as you say? then, ba, my life _must_ be better ... with the closeness to help, and the 'finding out the way' for which love was always noted. if you begin making in fancy a lover to your mind, i am lost at once--but the one quality of _affection_ for you, which would sooner or later have to be placed on his list of component graces; _that_ i will dare start supply--the entire love you could dream of _is_ here. you think you see some of the other adornments, and only too many; and you will see plainer one day, but with that i do not concern myself--you shall admire the true heroes--but me you shall love for the love's sake. let me kiss you, you, my dearest, dearest--god bless you ever-- _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, march , .] indeed i would, dearest ba, go with entire gladness and pride to see a light that came from your room--why should that surprise you? well, you will _know_ one day. we understand each other too about the sofas and gilding--oh, i know you, my own sweetest! for me, if i had set those matters to heart, i should have turned into the obvious way of getting them--not _out_ of it, as i did resolutely from the beginning. all i meant was, to express a very natural feeling--if one could give you diamonds for flowers, and if you liked diamonds,--then, indeed! as it is, wherever we are found shall be, if you please, 'for the love's sake found therein--sweetest _house_ was ever seen!' mr. kenyon must be merciful. lilies are of all colours in palestine--one sort is particularized as _white_ with a dark blue spot and streak--the water lily, lotos, which i think i meant, is _blue_ altogether. i have walked this morning to town and back--i feel much better, 'honestly'! the head better--the spirits rising--as how should they not, when _you_ think all will go well in the end, when you write to me that you go down-stairs and are stronger--and when the rest is written? not more now, dearest, for time is pressing, but you will answer this,--the love that is not here,--not the idle words, and i will reply to-morrow. thursday is so far away yet! bless you, my very own, only dearest! _e.b.b. to r.b._ monday evening. [post-mark, march , .] dearest, you are dearest always! talk of sirens, ... there must be some masculine ones 'rari nantes,' i fancy, (though we may not find them in unquestionable authorities like your Ælian!) to justify this voice i hear. ah, how you speak, with that pretension, too, to dumbness! what should people be made of, in order to bear such words, do you think? will all the wax from all the altar-candles in the sistine chapel, keep the piercing danger from their ears? being tied up a good deal tighter than ulysses did not save _me_. dearest dearest: i laugh, you see, as usual, not to cry! but deep down, deeper than the sirens go, deep underneath the tides, _there_, i bless and love you with the voice that makes no sound. other human creatures (how often i do think it to myself!) have their good things scattered over their lives, sown here and sown there, down the slopes, and by the waysides. but with me ... i have mine all poured down on one spot in the midst of the sands!--if you knew what i feel at moments, and at half-hours, when i give myself up to the feeling freely and take no thought of red eyes. a woman once was killed with gifts, crushed with the weight of golden bracelets thrown at her: and, knowing myself, i have wondered more than a little, how it was that i could _bear_ this strange and unused gladness, without sinking as the emotion rose. only i was incredulous at first, and the day broke slowly ... and the gifts fell like the rain ... softly; and god gives strength, by his providence, for sustaining blessings as well as stripes. dearest-- for the rest i understand you perfectly--perfectly. it was simply to your _thoughts_, that i replied ... and that you need not say to yourself any more, as you did once to me when you brought me flowers, that you wished they were diamonds. it was simply to prevent the accident of such a _thought_, that i spoke out mine. you would not wish accidentally that you had a double-barrelled gun to give me, or a cardinal's hat, or a snuff box, and i meant to say that you _might as well_--as diamonds and satin sofas à la chorley. thoughts are something, and _your_ thoughts are something more. to be sure they are! you are better you say, which makes me happy of course. and you will not make the 'better' worse again by doing wrong things--_that_ is my petition. it was the excess of goodness to write those two letters for me in one day, and i thank you, thank you. beloved, when you write, _let_ it be, if you choose, ever so few lines. do not suffer me (for my own sake) to tire you, because two lines or three bring _you_ to me ... remember ... just as a longer letter would. but where, pray, did i say, and when, that 'everything would end well?' was _that_ in the dream, when we two met on the stairs? i did not really say so i think. and 'well' is how you understand it. if you jump out of the window you succeed in getting to the ground, somehow, dead or alive ... but whether _that_ means 'ending well,' depends on your way of considering matters. i am seriously of opinion nevertheless, that if 'the arm,' you talk of, _drops_, it will not be for weariness nor even for weakness, but because it is cut off at the shoulder. _i_ will not fail to you,--may god so deal with me, so bless me, so leave me, as i live only for you and _shall_. do you doubt _that_, my only beloved! ah, you know well--_too well_, people would say ... but i do not think it 'too well' myself, ... knowing _you_. your ba. here is a gossip which mr. kenyon brought me on sunday--disbelieving it himself, he asseverated, though lady chantrey said it 'with authority,'--that mr. harness had offered his hand heart and ecclesiastical dignities to miss burdett coutts. it is lady chantrey's and mr. kenyon's _secret_, remember. and ... will you tell me? how can a man spend four or five successive months on the sea, most cheaply--at the least pecuniary expense, i mean? because miss mitford's friend mr. buckingham is ordered by his medical adviser to complete his cure by these means; and he is not rich. could he go with sufficient comfort by a merchant's vessel to the mediterranean ... and might he drift about among the greek islands? _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday. 'out of window' would be well, as i see the leap, if it ended (_so far as i am concerned_) in the worst way imaginable--i would i 'run the risk' (ba's other word) rationally, deliberately,--knowing what the ordinary law of chances in this world justifies in such a case; and if the result after all _was_ unfortunate, it would be far easier to undergo the extremest penalty with so little to reproach myself for,--than to put aside the adventure,--waive the wondrous probability of such best fortune, in a fear of the barest possibility of an adverse event, and so go to my grave, walter the penniless, with an eternal recollection that miss burdett coutts once offered to wager sundry millions with me that she could throw double-sixes a dozen times running--which wager i wisely refused to accept because it was not written in the stars that such a sequence might never be. i had rather, rather a thousand-fold lose my paltry stake, and be the one recorded victim to such an unexampled unluckiness that half a dozen mad comets, suns gone wrong, and lunatic moons must have come laboriously into conjunction for my special sake to bring it to pass, which were no slight honour, properly considered!--and this is _my_ way of laughing, dearest ba, when the excess of belief in you, and happiness with you, runs over and froths if it don't sparkle--underneath is a deep, a sea not to be moved. but chance, chance! there is _no_ chance here! i _have_ gained enough for my life, i can only put in peril the gaining more than enough. you shall change altogether my dear, dearest love, and i will be happy to the last minute on what i can remember of this past year--i _could_ do that. _now_, jump with me out, ba! if you feared for yourself--all would be different, sadly different--but saying what you do say, promising 'the strength of arm'--do not wonder that i call it an assurance of all being 'well'! all is _best_, as you promise--dear, darling ba!--and i say, in my degree, with all the energy of my nature, _as you say_, promise as you promise--only meaning a worship of you that is solely fit for me, fit by position--are not you my 'mistress?' come, some good out of those old conventions, in which you lost faith after the bower's disappearance, (it was carried by the singing angels, like the house at loretto, to the siren's isle where we shall find it preserved in a beauty 'very rare and absolute')--is it not right you should be my lady, my queen? and you are, and ever must be, dear ba. because i am suffered to kiss the lips, shall i ever refuse to embrace the feet? and kiss lips, and embrace feet, love you _wholly_, my ba! may god bless you-- ever your own, r. it would be easy for mr. buckingham to find a merchant-ship bound for some mediterranean port, after a week or two in harbour, to another and perhaps a third--naples, palermo, syra, constantinople, and so on. the expense would be very trifling, but the want of comfort _enormous_ for an invalid--the one advantage is the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those rough new creatures. _i_ like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship, but another has other ways of viewing matters. no one article provided by the ship in the way of provisions can anybody touch. mr. b. must lay in his own stock, and the horrors of dirt and men's ministry are portentous, yet by a little arrangement beforehand much might be done. still, i only know my own powers of endurance, and counsel nobody to gain my experience. on the other hand, were all to do again, i had rather have seen venice _so_, with the five or six weeks' absolute rest of the mind's eyes, than any other imaginable way,--except balloon-travelling. do you think they meant landor's 'count julian'--the 'subject of his tragedy' sure enough,--and that _he_ was the friend of southey? so it struck me-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, march , .] ah well--we shall see. only remember that it is not my fault if i throw the double sixes, and if you, on [_some sun-shiny_ day, (a day too late to help yourself) stand face to face with a milkwhite unicorn.][ ] ah--do not be angry. it is ungrateful of me to write so--i put a line through it to prove i have a conscience after all. i know that you love me, and i know it so well that i was reproaching myself severely not long ago, for seeming to love your love more than you. let me tell you how i proved _that_, or seemed. for ever so long, you remember, i have been talking finely about giving you up for your good and so on. which was sincere as far as the words went--but oh, the hypocrisy of our souls!--of mine, for instance! 'i would give you up for your good'--_but_ when i pressed upon myself the question whether (if i had the power) i would consent to make you willing to be given up, by throwing away your love into the river, in a ring like charlemagne's, ... why i found directly that i would throw myself there sooner. i could not do it in fact--i shrank from the test. a very pitiful virtue of generosity, is your ba's! still, it is not possible, i think, that she should '_love your love more than you_.' there must be a mistake in the calculation somewhere--a figure dropt. it would be too bad for her! your account of your merchantmen, though with venice in the distance, will scarcely be attractive to a confirmed invalid, i fear--and yet the steamers will be found expensive beyond his means. the sugar-vessels, which i hear most about, give out an insufferable smell and steam--let us talk of it a little on thursday. on monday i forgot. for landor's 'julian,' oh no, i cannot fancy it to be probable that those parisians should know anything of landor, even by a mistake. do you not suppose that the play is founded (confounded) on shelley's poem, as the french use materials ... by distraction, into confusion? the 'urn by the adriatic' (which all the french know how to turn upside down) fixes the reference to shelley--does it not? not a word of the head--what does _that_ mean, i wonder. i have not been down-stairs to-day--the wind is too cold--but you have walked? ... there was no excuse for you. god bless you, ever dearest. it is my last word till thursday's first. a fine queen you have, by the way!--a queen log, whom you had better leave in the bushes! witness our hand.... ba--regina. [footnote : the words in brackets are struck out.] _r.b. to e.b.b._ [post-mark, march , .] indeed, dearest, you shall not have _last word_ as you think,--all the 'risk' shall not be mine, neither; how can i, in the event, throw ambs-ace (is not that the old word?) and not peril _your_ stakes too, when once we have common stock and are partners? when i see the unicorn and grieve proportionately, do you mean to say you are not going to grieve too, for my sake? and if so--why, _you_ clearly run exactly the same risk,--_must_,--unless you mean to rejoice in my sorrow! so your chance is my chance; my success your success, you say, and my failure, your failure, will you not say? you see, you see, ba, my own--own! what do you think frightened me in your letter for a second or two? you write 'let us talk on thursday ... monday i forgot'--which i read,--'no, not on thursday--i had forgotten! it is to be _monday_ when we meet next'!--whereat ... as a goose in death contracts his talons close, as hudibras sings--i clutched the letter convulsively--till relief came. so till to-morrow--my all-beloved! bless you. i am rather hazy in the head as archer gurney will find in due season--(he comes, i told you)--but all the morning i have been going for once and for ever through the 'tragedy,' and it is _done_--(done _for_). perhaps i may bring it to-morrow--if my sister can copy all; i cut out a huge kind of sermon from the middle and reserve it for a better time--still it is very long; so long! so, if i ask, may i have 'luria' back to morrow? so shall printing begin, and headache end--and 'no more for the present from your loving' r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ friday. [post-mark, march , .] i shall be late with my letter this morning because my sisters have been here talking, talking ... and i did not like to say exactly 'go away that i may write.' mr. kenyon shortened our time yesterday too by a whole half-hour or three quarters--the stars are against us. he is coming on sunday, however, he says, and if so, monday will be safe and clear--and not a word was said after you went, about you: he was in a good joyous humour, as you saw, and the letter he brought was, oh! so complimentary to me--i will tell you. the writer doesn't see anything 'in browning and turner,' she confesses--'_may_ perhaps with time and study,' but for the present sees nothing,--only has wide-open eyes of admiration for e.b.b. ... now isn't it satisfactory to _me_? do you understand the full satisfaction of just that sort of thing ... to be praised by somebody who sees nothing in shakespeare?--to be found on the level of somebody so flat? better the bad-word of the britannia, ten times over! and best, to take no thought of bad or good words! ... except such as i shall have to-night, perhaps! shall i? will you be pleased to understand in the meanwhile a little about the 'risks' i am supposed to run, and not hold to such a godlike simplicity ('gods and bulls,' dearest!) as you made show of yesterday? if we two went to the gaming-table, and you gave me a purse of gold to play with, should i have a right to talk proudly of 'my stakes?' and would any reasonable person say of both of us playing together as partners, that we ran 'equal risks'? i trow not--and so do _you_ ... when you have not predetermined to be stupid, and mix up the rouge and noir into 'one red' of glorious confusion. what had i to lose on the point of happiness when you knew me first?--and if now i lose (as i certainly may according to your calculation) the happiness you have given me, why still i am your debtor for _the gift_ ... now see! yet to bring you down into my ashes ... _that_ has been so intolerable a possibility to me from the first. well, perhaps i run _more_ risk than you, under that one aspect. certainly i never should forgive myself again if you were unhappy. 'what had _i_ to do,' i should think, 'with touching your life?' and if ever i am to think so, i would rather that i never had known you, seen your face, heard your voice--which is the uttermost sacrifice and abnegation. i could not say or sacrifice any more--not even for _you_! _you_, for _you_ ... is all i can! since you left me i have been making up my mind to your having the headache worse than ever, through the agreement with moxon. i do, do beseech you to spare yourself, and let 'luria' go as he is, and above all things not to care for my infinite foolishnesses as you see them in those notes. remember that if you are ill, it is not so easy to say, 'now i will be well again.' ever dearest, care for me in yourself--say how you are.... i am not unwell to-day, but feel flagged and weak rather with the cold ... and look at your flowers for courage and an assurance that the summer is within hearing. may god bless you ... blessing _us_, beloved! your own ba. mr. poe has sent me his poems and tales--so now i must write to thank him for his dedication. just now i have the book. as to mr. buckingham, he will go, constantinople and back, before we talk of him. _r.b. to e.b.b._ saturday morning. [post-mark, march , .] dearest,--it just strikes me that i _might_ by some chance be kept in town this morning--(having to go to milnes' breakfast there)--so as not to find the note i venture to expect, in time for an answer by our last post to-night. but i will try--this only is a precaution against the possibility. dear, dear ba! i cannot thank you, know not how to thank you for the notes! i adopt every one, of course, not as ba's notes but as miss barrett's, not as miss barrett's but as anybody's, everybody's--such incontestable improvements they suggest. when shall i tell you more ... on monday or tuesday? _that_ i _must_ know--because you appointed monday, 'if nothing happened--' and mr. k. happened--can you let me hear by our early post to-morrow--as on monday i am to be with moxon early, you know--and no letters arrive before - / or . i was not very well yesterday, but to-day am much better--and you,--i say how _i_ am precisely to have a double right to know _all_ about you, dearest, in this snow and cold! how do you bear it? and mr. k. spoke of '_that_ being your worst day.' oh, dear dearest ba, remember how i live in you--on the hopes, with the memory of you. bless you ever! r. _e.b.b. to r.b._ [post-mark, march , .] i do not understand how my letters limp so instead of flying as they ought with the feathers i give them, and how you did not receive last night, nor even early this morning, what left me at two o'clock yesterday. but i understand _now_ the not hearing from you--you were not well. not well, not well ... _that_ is always 'happening' at least. and mr. moxon, who is to have his first sheet, whether you are well or ill! it is wrong ... yes, very wrong--and if one point of wrongness is touched, we shall not easily get right again--as i think mournfully, feeling confident (call me cassandra, but i cannot jest about it) feeling certain that it will end (the means being so persisted in) by some serious illness--serious sorrow,--on yours and my part. as to monday, mr. kenyon said he would come again on sunday--in which case, monday will be clear. if he should not come on sunday, he will or may on monday,--yet--oh, in every case, perhaps you can come on monday--there will be no time to let you know of mr. kenyon--and _probably_ we shall be safe, and your being in town seems to fix the day. for myself i am well enough, and the wind has changed, which will make me better--this cold weather oppresses and weakens me, but it is close to april and can't last and won't last--it is warmer already. beware of the notes! they are not ba's--except for the insolence, nor ebb's--because of the carelessness. if i had known, moreover, that you were going to moxon's on monday, they should have gone to the fire rather than provoked you into superfluous work for the short interval. just so much are they despised of both ebb and ba. i am glad i did not hear from you yesterday because you were not well, and you _must never_ write when you are not well. but if you had been quite well, should i have heard?--_i doubt it_. you meant me to hear from you only once, from thursday to monday. is it not the truth now that you hate writing to me? the _athenæum_ takes up the 'tales from boccaccio' as if they were worth it, and imputes in an underground way the authorship to the members of the 'coterie' so called--do you observe _that_? there is an implication that persons named in the poem wrote the poem themselves. and upon _whom_ does the critic mean to fix the song of 'constancy' ... the song which is 'not to puzzle anybody' who knows the tunes of the song-writers! the perfection of commonplace it seems to me. it might have been written by the 'poet bunn.' don't you think so? while i write this you are in town, but you will not read it till sunday unless i am more fortunate than usual. on monday then! and no word before? no--i shall be sure not to hear to-night. now do try not to suffer through 'luria.' let mr. moxon wait a week rather. there is time enough. ever your ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ sunday. [post-mark, march , .] oh, my ba--how you shall hear of this to-morrow--that is all: _i_ hate writing? see when presently i _only_ write to you daily, hourly if you let me? just this _now_--i will be with you to-morrow in any case--i can go away _at once_, if need be, or stay--if you like you can stop me by sending a note for me _to moxon's before_ o'clock--if anything calls for such a measure. now briefly,--i am unwell and entirely irritated with this sad 'luria'--i thought it a failure at first, i find it infinitely worse than i thought--it is a pure exercise of _cleverness_, even where most successful; clever attempted reproduction of what was conceived by another faculty, and foolishly let pass away. if i go on, even hurry the more to get on, with the printing,--it is to throw out and away from me the irritating obstruction once and forever. i have corrected it, cut it down, and it may stand and pledge me to doing better hereafter. i say, too, in excuse to myself, _unlike_ the woman at her spinning-wheel, 'he thought of his _flax_ on the whole far more than of his singing'--more of his life's sustainment, of dear, dear ba he hates writing to, than of these wooden figures--no wonder all is as it is? here is a pure piece of the old chorley leaven for you, just as it reappears ever and anon and throws one back on the mistrust all but abandoned! chorley _knows_ i have not seen that powell for nearly fifteen months--that i never heard of the book till it reached me in a blank cover--that i never contributed a line or word to it directly or indirectly--and i should think he _also knows_ that all the sham learning, notes &c., all that saves the book from the deepest deep of contempt, was contributed by heraud (_a regular critic in the 'athenæum'_), who received his pay for the same: he knows i never spoke in my life to 'jones or stephens'--that there is no 'coterie' of which i can, by any extension of the word, form a part--that i am in this case at the mercy of a wretched creature who to get into my favour again (to speak the plain truth) put in the gross, disgusting flattery in the notes--yet chorley, knowing this, none so well, and what the writer's end is--(to have it supposed i, and the others named--talfourd, for instance--are his friends and helpers)--he condescends to _further_ it by such a notice, written with that observable and characteristic duplicity, that to poor gross stupid powell it shall look like an admiring 'oh, fie--_so_ clever but _so_ wicked'!--a kind of _d'orsay's_ praise--while to the rest of his readers, a few depreciatory epithets--slight sneers convey his real sentiments, he trusts! and this he does, just because powell buys an article of him once a quarter and would _expect_ notice. i think i hear chorley--'you know, i _cannot_ praise such a book--it _is_ too bad'--as if, as if--oh, it makes one sicker than having written 'luria,' there's one comfort! i shall call on chorley and ask for _his_ account of the matter. meantime nobody will read his foolish notice without believing as he and powell desire! bless you, my own ba--to-morrow makes amends to r.b. _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday. [post-mark, march , .] how ungrateful i was to your flowers yesterday, never looking at them nor praising them till they were put away, and yourself gone away--and _that_ was _your_ fault, be it remembered, because you began to tell me of the good news from moxon's, and, in the joy of it, i missed the flowers ... for the nonce, you know. afterward they had their due, and all the more that you were not there. my first business when you are out of the room and the house, and the street perhaps, is to arrange the flowers and to gather out of them all the thoughts you leave between the leaves and at the end of the stalks. and shall i tell you what happened, not yesterday, but the thursday before? no, it was the friday morning, when i found, or rather wilson found and held up from my chair, a bunch of dead blue violets. quite dead they seemed! you had dropped them and i had sate on them, and where we murdered them they had lain, poor things, all the night through. and wilson thought it the vainest of labours when she saw me set about reviving them, cutting the stalks afresh, and dipping them head and ears into water--but then she did not know how you, and i, and ours, live under a miraculous dispensation, and could only simply be astonished when they took to blowing again as if they never had wanted the dew of the garden, ... yes, and when at last they outlived all the prosperity of the contemporary white violets which flourished in water from the beginning, and were free from the disadvantage of having been sate upon. now you shall thank me for this letter, it is at once so amusing and instructive. after all, too, it teaches you what the great events of my life are, not that the resuscitation of your violets would not really be a great event to me, even if i led the life of a pirate, between fire and sea, otherwise. but take _you_ away ... out of my life!--and what remains? the only greenness i used to have (before you brought your flowers) was as the grass growing in deserted streets, ... which brings a proof, in every increase, of the extending desolation. dearest, i persist in thinking that you ought not to be too disdainful to explain your meaning in the pomegranates. surely you might say in a word or two that, your title having been doubted about (to your surprise, you _might_ say!), you refer the doubters to the jewish priest's robe, and the rabbinical gloss ... for i suppose it is a gloss on the robe ... do you not think so? consider that mr. kenyon and i may fairly represent the average intelligence of your readers,--and that _he_ was altogether in the clouds as to your meaning ... had not the most distant notion of it,--while i, taking hold of the priest's garment, missed the rabbins and the distinctive significance, as completely as he did. then for vasari, it is not the handbook of the whole world, however it may be mrs. jameson's. now why should you be too proud to teach such persons as only desire to be taught? i persist--i shall teaze you. this morning my brothers have been saying ... 'ah you had mr. browning with you yesterday, i see by the flowers,' ... just as if they said 'i see queen mab has been with you.' then stormie took the opportunity of swearing to me by all his gods that your name was mentioned lately in the house of commons--_is_ that true? or untrue? he forgot to tell me at the time, he says,--and you were named with others and in relation to copyright matters. _is_ it true? mr. hornblower gill is the author of a hymn to passion week, and wrote to me as the 'glorifier of pain!' to remind me that the best glory of a soul is shown in the joy of it, and that all chief poets except dante have seen, felt, and written it so. thus and therefore was matured his purpose of writing an 'ode to joy,' as i told you. the man seems to have very good thoughts, ... but he writes like a colder cowley still ... no impulse, no heat for fusing ... no inspiration, in fact. though i have scarcely done more than glance at his 'passion week,' and have little right to give an opinion. if you have killed luria as you helped to kill my violets, what shall i say, do you fancy? well--we shall see! do not kill yourself, beloved, in any case! the [greek: iostephanoi mousai] had better die themselves first! ah--what am i writing? what nonsense? i mean, in deep earnest, the deepest, that you should take care and exercise, and not be vexed for luria's sake--luria will have his triumph presently! may god bless you--prays your own ba. _r.b. to e.b.b._ tuesday afternoon. [post-mark, march , .] my own dearest, if you _do_--(for i confess to nothing of the kind), but if you _should_ detect an unwillingness to write at certain times, what would that prove,--i mean, what that one need shrink from avowing? if i never had you before me except when writing letters to you--then! why, we do not even _talk_ much now! witness mr. buckingham and his voyage that ought to have been discussed!--oh, how coldly i should write,--how the bleak-looking paper would seem unpropitious to carry my feeling--if all had to begin and try to find words _this_ way! now, this morning i have been out--to town and back--and for all the walking my head aches--and i have the conviction that presently when i resign myself to think of you wholly, with only the pretext,--the make-believe of occupation, in the shape of some book to turn over the leaves of,--i shall see you and soon be well; so soon! you must know, there is a chair (one of the kind called gond_ó_la-chairs by upholsterers--with an emphasized o)--which occupies the precise place, stands just in the same relation to this chair i sit on now, that yours stands in and occupies--to the left of the fire: and, how often, how _always_ i turn in the dusk and _see_ the dearest real ba with me. how entirely kind to take that trouble, give those sittings for me! do you think the kindness has missed its due effect? _no, no_, i am glad,--(_knowing what i_ now _know_,--what you meant _should be_, and did all in your power to prevent) that i have _not_ received the picture, if anything short of an adequate likeness. 'nil nisi--te!' but i have set my heart on _seeing_ it--will you remember next time, next saturday? i will leave off now. to-morrow, dearest, only dearest ba, i will write a longer letter--the clock stops it this afternoon--it is later than i thought, and our poor crazy post! this morning, hoping against hope, i ran to meet our postman coming meditatively up the lane--with _a_ letter, indeed!--but ba's will come to-night--and i will be happy, already _am_ happy, expecting it. bless you, my own love, ever your-- _e.b.b. to r.b._ tuesday evening. [post-mark, march , .] ah; if i '_do_' ... if i '_should_' ... if i _shall_ ... if i _will_ ... if i _must_ ... what can all the 'ifs' prove, but a most hypothetical state of the conscience? and in brief, i beg you to stand convinced of one thing, that whenever the 'certain time' comes for to 'hate writing to me' confessedly, 'avowedly,' (oh what words!) _i shall not like it at all_--not for all the explanations ... and the sights in gondola chairs, which the person seen is none the better for! the [greek: eidôlon] sits by the fire--the real ba is cold at heart through wanting her letter. and that's the doctrine to be preached now, ... is it? i 'shrink,' shrink from it. that's your word!--and mine! dearest, i began by half a jest and end by half-gravity, which is the fault of your doctrine and not of me i think. yet it is ungrateful to be grave, when practically you are good and just about the letters, and generous too sometimes, and i could not bear the idea of obliging you to write to me, even once ... when.... now do not fancy that i do not understand. i understand perfectly, on the contrary. only do _you_ try not to dislike writing when you write, or not to write when you dislike it ... _that_, i ask of you, dear dearest--and forgive me for all this over-writing and teazing and vexing which is foolish and womanish in the bad sense. it is a way of meeting, ... the meeting in letters, ... and next to receiving a letter from you, i like to write one to you ... and, so, revolt from thinking it lawful for you to dislike.... well! the goddess of dulness herself couldn't have written _this_ better, anyway, nor more characteristically. i will tell you how it is. you have spoilt me just as i have spoilt flush. flush looks at me sometimes with reproachful eyes 'a fendre le coeur,' because i refuse to give him my fur cuffs to tear to pieces. and as for myself, i confess to being more than half jealous of the [greek: eidôlon] in the gondola chair, who isn't the real ba after all, and yet is set up there to do away with the necessity 'at certain times' of writing to her. which is worse than flush. for flush, though he began by shivering with rage and barking and howling and gnashing his teeth at the brown dog in the glass, has learnt by experience what that image means, ... and now contemplates it, serene in natural philosophy. most excellent sense, all this is!--and dauntlessly 'delivered!' your head aches, dearest. mr. moxon will have done his worst, however, presently, and then you will be a little better i do hope and trust--and the proofs, in the meanwhile, will do somewhat less harm than the manuscript. you will take heart again about 'luria' ... which i agree with you, is more diffuse ... that is, less close, than any of your works, not diffuse in any bad sense, but round, copious, and another proof of that wonderful variety of faculty which is so striking in you, and which signalizes itself both in the thought and in the medium of the thought. you will appreciate 'luria' in time--or others will do it for you. it is a noble work under every aspect. dear 'luria'! do you remember how you told me of 'luria' last year, in one of your early letters? little i thought that ever, ever, i should feel so, while 'luria' went to be printed! a long trail of thoughts, like the rack in the sky, follows his going. can it be the same 'luria,' i think, that 'golden-hearted luria,' whom you talked of to me, when you complained of keeping 'wild company,' in the old dear letter? and i have learnt since, that '_golden-hearted_' is not a word for him only, or for him most. may god bless you, best and dearest! i am your own to live and to die-- ba. _say how you are._ i shall be down-stairs to-morrow if it keeps warm. miss thomson wants me to translate the hector and andromache scene from the 'iliad' for her book; and i am going to try it. end of the first volume _spottiswoode & co. printers, new-street square, london_ modern english writers. crown vo, / each. ready. matthew arnold . . . . . . . professor saintsbury. r.l. stevenson . . . . . . . l. cope cornford. john ruskin . . . . . . . . mrs meynell. alfred tennyson . . . . . . andrew lang. thomas henry huxley . . . . edward clodd. w.m. thackeray . . . . . . charles whibley. robert browning . . . . . . c.h. herford. in preparation george eliot . . . . . . . a.t. quiller-couch. j.a. froude . . . . . . . john oliver hobbes. william blackwood & sons, edinburgh and london. robert browning by c.h. herford professor of english literature in the university of manchester william blackwood and sons edinburgh and london mcmv to the rev. f.e. millson. dear old friend, a generation has passed since the day when, in your study at brackenbed grange, your reading of "ben ezra," the tones of which still vibrate in my memory, first introduced me to the poetry of robert browning. he was then just entering upon his wider fame. you had for years been one not merely of the few who recognised him, but of those, yet fewer, who proclaimed him. the standpoint of the following pages is not, i think, very remote from your own; conversations with you have, in any case, done something to define it. you see, then, that your share of responsibility for them is, on all counts, considerable, and you must not refuse to allow me to associate them with a name which the old rabbi's great heartening cry: "strive, and hold cheap the strain, learn, nor account the pang, dare, never grudge the throe," summons spontaneously to many other lips than mine. to some it is brought yet closer by his calm retrospect through sorrow. ei dê theion ho nous pros ton anthrôpon, kai ho kata touton bios theios pros ton anthrôpinon bion--arist., _eth. n_. x. . "nè creator nè creatura mai," cominciò ei, "figliuol, fu senza amore." --dante, _purg_. xvii. . preface. browning is confessedly a difficult poet, and his difficulty is by no means all of the kind which opposes unmistakable impediments to the reader's path. some of it is of the more insidious kind, which may co-exist with a delightful persuasion that the way is absolutely clear, and browning's "obscurity" an invention of the invertebrate. the problems presented by his writing are merely tough, and will always yield to intelligent and patient scrutiny. but the problems presented by his mind are elusive, and it would be hard to resist the cogency of his interpreters, if it were not for their number. the rapid succession of acute and notable studies of browning put forth during the last three or four years makes it even more apparent than it was before that the last word on browning has not yet been said, even in that very qualified sense in which the last word about any poet, or any poetry, can ever be said at all. the present volume, in any case, does not aspire to say it. but it is not perhaps necessary to apologise for adding, under these conditions, another to the list. from most of the recent studies i have learned something; but this book has its roots in a somewhat earlier time, and may perhaps be described as an attempt to work out, in the detail of browning's life and poetry, from a more definitely literary standpoint and without hegelian prepossessions, a view of his genius not unlike that set forth with so much eloquence and penetration, in his well-known volume, by professor henry jones. the narrative of browning's life, in the earlier chapters, makes no pretence to biographical completeness. an immense mass of detail and anecdote bearing upon him is now available and within easy reach. i have attempted to sift out from this picturesque loose drift the really salient and relevant material. much domestic incident, over which the brush would fain linger, will be missed; on the other hand, the great central epoch of browning's poetic life, from to , has been treated, deliberately, on what may appear an inordinately generous scale. some amount of overlapping and repetition, it may be added, in the analytical chapters the plan of the book rendered it impossible wholly to avoid. i am indebted to a friend, who wishes to be nameless, for reading the proofs, with results extremely beneficial to the book. university of manchester, _january _. contents. page preface vii part i. browning's life and work. chap. i. early life. _paracelsus_ ii. enlarging horizons. _sordello_ iii. maturing methods. dramas and dramatic lyrics introduction. i. dramas. from _strafford_ to _pippa passes_ ii. from the _blot in the 'scutcheon_ to _luria_ iii. the early dramatic lyrics and romances iv. wedded life in italy. _men and women_ i. january to september ii. society and friendships iii. politics iv. poems of nature v. poems of art vi. poems of religion vii. poems of love v. london. _dramatis personÆ_ vi. _the ring and the book_ vii. aftermath viii. the last decade part ii. browning's mind and art. ix. the poet i. divergent psychical tendencies of browning--"romantic" temperament, "realist" senses--blending of their _données_ in his imaginative activity--shifting complexion of "finite" and "infinite" ii. his "realism." plasticity, acuteness, and veracity of intellect and senses iii. but his realism qualified by energetic individual preference along certain well-defined lines iv. _joy in light and colour_ v. _joy in form_. love of abruptness, of intricacy; clefts and spikes vi. _joy in power_. violence in imagery and description; in sounds; in words. grotesqueness. intensity. catastrophic action. the pregnant moment vii. _joy in soul_. . limited in browning on the side of simple human nature; of the family; of the civic community; of myth and symbol viii. _joy in soul_. . supported by joy in light and colour; in form; in power. . extended to (a) sub-human nature, (b) the inanimate products of art; relation of browning's poetry to his interpretation of life x. the interpreter of life i. approximation of god, man, nature in the thought of the early nineteenth century; how far reflected in the thought of browning ii. antagonistic elements of browning's intellect; resulting fluctuations of his thought. two conceptions of reality. ambiguous treatment of "matter"; of time iii. conflicting tendencies in his conception of god iv. conflicting tendencies in his treatment of knowledge v. proximate solution of these antagonisms in the conception of love vi. final estimate of browning's relation to the progressive and conservative movements of his age index part i. browning's life and work browning. chapter i. early life. _paracelsus_. the boy sprang up ... and ran, stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. --_a death in the desert_. dass ich erkenne, was die welt im innersten zusammenhält. --_faust_. judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopædic knowledge, by the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, browning was one of the least insular of english poets. but he was also, of them all, one of the most obviously and unmistakably english. tennyson, the poetic mouthpiece of a rather specific and exclusive anglo-saxondom, belonged by his vergilian instincts of style to that main current of european poetry which finds response and recognition among cultivated persons of all nationalities; and he enjoyed a european distinction not attained by any other english poet since byron. browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant gallery of european creations, browning, who claimed italy as his "university," remains, as a poet, all but unknown even in italy, and all but non-existent for the rest of the civilised world beyond the channel. his cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the medium of a singularly individual intellect; and the detaching and isolating effect which pronounced individuality of thinking usually produces, even in a genial temperament, was heightened in his case by a robust indifference to conventions of all kinds, and not least to those which make genius easily intelligible to the plain man. what is known of browning's descent makes these contrasts in some degree intelligible. an old strain of wessex squires or yeomen, dimly discernible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, issued, about the middle of the eighteenth, in the first distinct personality among the poet's forebears, his grandfather, who also bore the name robert. he was a robust, hard-headed, energetic, pushing man of business and the world, who made his way from a clerkship to an important and responsible post in the bank of england, and settled accounts with religion and with literature in a right english way, by reading the bible and 'tom jones' through every year, and very little else. more problematical and elusive is the figure of his first wife, margaret tittle, with whom, to judge from the character of her eldest son, literary and artistic sensibility first mingled in the hard practical browning stock. in this second robert browning, indeed, the somewhat brutal and grasping egotism of the father gave place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine tenderness and charm. all his life long he was passionately devoted to literature, to art, to children. he collected rare books and prints with avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away. indifferent to money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. he had a neat touch in epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. but there was no lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. he had the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that called out its tenacity, not his own. while holding an appointment on his mother's west indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour. this shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly well-paid but unexciting service of the bank. in he married, and on may of the following year his eldest son, robert, was born. his wife was the daughter of a german shipowner, william wiedemann, who had settled and married at dundee. wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to her son. whether she also communicated from her scottish and german ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis absolutely in the air.[ ] what is clear is that she was herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the mother so often becomes genius in the son. "she was a divine woman," such was her son's brief sufficing tribute. physically he seems to have closely resembled her,[ ] and they were bound together by a peculiarly passionate love from first to last. [footnote : a similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of _holy-cross day_ and _rabbi ben ezra_ probably had jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence--not to browning but to the jewish race. as if to feel the spiritual genius of hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! it is significant that his demonstrable share of german blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary--and more especially to the "metaphysical"--products of the german mind.] [footnote : browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "why, has anybody to search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer from, when there sits your mother--whom you so absolutely resemble!" (_letters to e.b.b._, ii. .)] the home in camberwell into which the boy robert was born reflected the serene, harmonious, self-contented character of his parents. friends rarely disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the roar of london. books, business, and religion provided a framework of decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved with entire content. well-to-do camberwell perhaps contained few homes so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual life of the capital and the larger movements of the time. nothing in browning's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of citizenship and nationality which the imperial pageants and ceremonies of frankfurt so early kindled in the child goethe. but within the limits imposed by this quiet home young robert soon began to display a vigour and enterprise which tried all its resources. "he clamoured for occupation from the moment he could speak," and "something to do" meant above all some living thing to be caught for him to play with. the gift of an animal was found a valuable aid to negotiations with the young despot; when medicine was to be taken, he would name "a speckled frog" as the price of his compliance, and presently his mother would be seen hovering hither and thither among the strawberry-beds. a quaint menagerie was gradually assembled: owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes. boy-collectors are often cruel; but robert showed from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care for life: we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be nursed, of ladybirds picked up in the depths of winter and preserved with wondering delight at their survival. even in stories the death of animals moved him to bitter tears. he was equally quick at books, and soon outdistanced his companions at the elementary schools which he attended up to his fourteenth year. near at hand, too, was the dulwich gallery,--"a green half-hour's walk across the fields,"--a beloved haunt of his childhood, to which he never ceased to be grateful.[ ] but his father's overflowing library and portfolios played the chief part in his early development. he read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control. the letters of junius and of horace walpole were familiar to him "in boyhood," we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by mrs orr; as well as "all the works of voltaire." most to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy english and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century fantastic quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in the great master of the fantastic school, and of all who care for close-knit intellect in poetry, john donne. [footnote : _to e.b.b._, march , .] curiously enough, it was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear-cut form. "the first composition i ever was guilty of," he wrote to elizabeth barrett (aug. , ), "was something in imitation of ossian, whom i had not read, but conceived through two or three scraps in other books." and long afterwards ossian was "the first book i ever bought in my life" (ib.) these "imitations" were apparently in verse, and in rhyme; and browning's bent and faculty for both was very early pronounced. "i never can recollect not writing rhymes; ... but i knew they were nonsense even then." and a well-known anecdote of his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it. the crowding thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to prevent the abundant music that he "had in him" from "getting out." it is not surprising that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing and sweep of byron; nor that he should have caught also something of his "splendour of language," and even, a little later, a reflection, respectable and suburban enough, of his rebellious titanism. the less so, that in robert's eleventh or twelfth year byron, the head of the satanic school, had become the heroic champion of greek liberation, and was probably spoken of with honour in the home of the large-hearted banker who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of the unemancipated slave. in later years browning was accustomed to deliver himself of breezy sarcasms at the expense of the "flat-fish" who declaimed so eloquently about the "deep and dark blue ocean." but it is easy to see that this genial chaff covered a real admiration,--the tribute of one abounding nature to another, which even years and the philosophic mind did not seriously abate. "i always retained my first feeling for byron in many respects," he wrote in a significant letter to miss barrett in . " ... i would at any time have gone to finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, i am sure,--while heaven knows that i could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all wordsworth, coleridge, and southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[ ] it was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early byronic poems. he entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _incondita_, and his parents sought to publish them. no publisher could be found; but they won the attention of a notable critic, w.j. fox, who feared too much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his eye on him nevertheless. [footnote : _to e.b.b._, aug. , .] two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with far more intimate power. his casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "mr shelley's atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known to him even the name of the poet who had died in italy four years before. something of shelley's story seems to have been known to his parents. it gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious tolerance which prevailed in this evangelical home, that the parents should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical" poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend keats as well. he fell instantly under the spell of both. whatever he may have known before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic poetry here broke upon him for the first time. immature as he was, he already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most intimately akin to his own. byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative, self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of browning's poetry. in keats and in shelley he found poetic energies not less glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler filaments to the truth of things. beyond question this was the decisive literary experience of browning's early years. probably it had a chief part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with his father's willing consent, his definite choice. what we know of his inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy into the man is slight and baffling enough. the fiery spirit of poetry can rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the frame. minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he professed "atheism" and practised vegetarianism, betrayed at times the aggressive arrogance of an able youth, and gave his devoted and tender parents moments of very superfluous concern. for with all his immensely vivacious play of brain, there was something in his mental and moral nature from first to last stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that made him equally secure against expansion and collapse. the same simple tenacity of nature which kept his buoyantly adventurous intellect permanently within the tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in the region of practice and morality, within the bounds of a rather nice and fastidious decorum. malign influences effected no lodgment in a nature so fundamentally sound; they might cloud and trouble imagination for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, and as they were literary in origin, so they were mainly literary in expression. in the meantime he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment. we hear much of private tutors, of instruction in french, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the greek classes in university college. in all these matters he seems to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll. the athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs. of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile robert browning of twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment _pauline_. the quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest. he probably resented the frank expression of passion, nowhere else approached in his works. yet passion only agitates the surface of _pauline_. whether pauline herself stand for an actual woman--miss flower or another--or for the nascent spell of womanhood--she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem, a discouragingly minor part. no wonder she felt tempted to advise the burning of so unflattering a record. instead of the lyric language of love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul "before he can sing." and these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of genius. pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon species. he is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise. mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies. it is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. a pure dreamer would have "contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined himself king of infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of _pauline_ the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze of being. there had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them have almost the pellucid charm of homer,-- "never morn broke clear as those on the dim clustered isles in the blue sea, the deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves." but growing intellect demanded something more. shelley, the "sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; plato's more explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance. but disillusion broke in: "suddenly, without heart-wreck i awoke; i said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. he steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself in all that is most beautiful and intense in nature, so fulfilling, it might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all,"--yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here: "my soul saddens when it looks beyond: i cannot be immortal, taste all joy;" only the sickness of satiety. but when all joy was tasted, what then? if there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of god. such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in _pauline_. the material, vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere browning, and no mere disciple of shelley or another, who is palpably at work. the influence of shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when _pauline_ was written; browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different. rossetti, a few years later, took _pauline_ to be the work of an unconscious pre-raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error. in the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. his old mentor of the _incondita_ days, w.j. fox, in some sort a browningite before browning, reviewed _pauline_ in _the monthly repository_ (april ) with generous but discerning praise. this was the beginning of a warm friendship between the two, which ended only with fox's death. it was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the expanding genius of young browning than this robust and masculine critic and preacher. a few months later came an event of which we know very little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited horizons of camberwell. at the invitation of m. benckhausen, russian consul-general, browning accompanied him, in the winter of - , on a special mission to st petersburg. the journey left few apparent traces on his work. but he remembered the rush of the sledge through the forest when, half a century later, he told the thrilling tale of _iván ivánovitch_. and even the modest intimacy with affairs of state obtainable in the office of a consul-general seems to have led his thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career. one understands that to the future dissector of a hohenstiel-schwangau and a blougram the career might present attractions. it marks the seriousness of his ambition that he actually applied for a post in the persian embassy. this fancy of _ferishtah_, like a similar one of ten years later, was not gratified, but the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the diplomatist _in posse_ are pretty clearly legible in the subtle political webs which make up so much of the plots of _strafford, king victor_, and _sordello_. but much sharper rebuffs than this would have failed to disturb the immense buoyancy of browning's temperament. he was twenty-three, and in the first flush of conscious power. his exuberant animal spirits flowed out in whimsical talk; he wrote letters of the gayest undergraduate _insouciance_ to fox, and articles full of extravagant jesting for _the trifler_, an amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his little circle. he enjoyed life like a boy, and shared its diversions like a man about town. these superficial vivacities were the slighter play of a self-consciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily gathering power, richness, and assurance. his keen social instincts saved him from most of the infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to fox's journal during the following two years ( - ) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. joannes agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, god's breast; porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; the young man who in his pride of power sees in the failures and mistakes of other men examples providentially intended for his guidance,--it was such subjects as these that touched browning's fancy in those ardent and sanguine years. he probably entered with keener relish into these extravagances than his maturer wisdom approved. it is significant, at any rate, that when _agricola_ and _porphyria's lover_ were republished in _the bells and pomegranates_ of , a new title, _madhouse cells_, gave warning that their insanity was not to be attributed to the poet. the verses "still ailing wind," he qualified in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years later, for they are the young man's poem which james lee's wife reads "under the cliff," and subjects to her austere and disillusioned criticism. but they mark the drift of browning of the mid-'thirties, so far as they go, clearly enough. fortunately, however, we are not dependent upon these slight clues. for during the winter months of - he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of the young man's pride of power, a joannes agricola of equally superb confidence and far more magnificent ideals. in april browning was able to announce to his good friend fox the completion of _paracelsus_. he owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like that of the russian consul-general, marks the fascination exercised by young browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely different from his own. count amédée de ripert monclar was a french royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history. possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams of pauline's lover and those of the historic paracelsus; and he may well have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material would steady the young poet's hand. we could applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more confidence had not the count had an unlucky afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story of paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of pauline's lover, was entirely destitute of a pauline. there was no opening for love. but pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling french prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a noisome smoke, and browning threw himself with undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for knowledge and the arrogance of discovery. for it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms browning finally brought to bear upon paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile, was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man of original genius from the calumnies of ignorance and dulness. this view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take, paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder browning.[ ] it is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious commentator, that browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual pride, singled out paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of intellect. on the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the modern world. in the intellectual hunger of paracelsus, in that "insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his follower bitiskius (approvingly quoted by browning) ascribed to him, he saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic "restlessness." here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the universe; and browning, far from convicting him of intellectual futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less browning's than his own. [footnote : his library, as i am informed by prof. hall griffin, contained a copy of the works of paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son.] while he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius of paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured. he shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of folklore, however picturesque. the attendant spirit who enabled paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned sword, were for browning contemptible futilities. yet a different way of treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. goethe had not long before evolved his mephistopheles from the "attendant spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the paracelsus of protestantism, faust; tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the enchantment of the arthurian sword excalibur. browning's peremptory rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet. much of the finest poetry of _faust_, as, in a lower degree, of the _idylls_, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of popular imagination: for browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the magic of his touch. winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by. he did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own. festus, the honest, devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers paracelsus the criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated--at the bar of common-sense--by his great comrade's tragic end; michal, an exquisitely tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less distinguished; and the "italian poet" aprile, a creature of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of paracelsus's else unassailable conviction. aprile, who lives for love as paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with shelley, but he has unmistakable shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of shelley's work. had shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which paracelsus and aprile were dissevered halves: the greater part of his actual achievement belonged, browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his aprile. but shelley--the poet of _alastor_, the passionate "lover of love," was yet the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which paracelsus in his faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from him. sixteen years later, browning was to define in memorable words what he held to be the "noblest and predominating characteristic of shelley"--viz., "his simultaneous perception of power and love in the absolute and of beauty and good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom i have knowledge." this divining and glorifying power it is that browning ascribes to love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of paracelsus. this genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either. but all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great moments in paracelsus's career,--the scene in the quiet würzburg garden, where he conquers the doubts of festus and michal by the magnificent assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital cell at salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of the world. that paracelsian secret of the world was for browning doubtless the truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. paracelsus's reply to the anxious inquiry of festus whether he is sure of god's forgiveness: "i have lived! we have to live alone to well set forth god's praise"--might stand as a text before the works of browning. in all life he sees the promise and the potency of god,--in the teeming vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the rich conquests of his art, in his myth-woven nature. "god is glorified in man, and to man's glory vowed i soul and limb." the historic paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast conceptions of nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric discoveries. browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish specimens of the genus man whom he encountered in the detail of practice. it was the problem which browning himself was to face, and in his own view triumphantly to solve; and paracelsus, rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of browning's own criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the love which with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise "to trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, to know even hate is but a mask of love's, to see a good in evil and a hope in ill-success." paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. it is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,--a beauty like that of amiens or lincoln in gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate. chapter ii. enlarging horizons. _sordello_. zwei seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen; die eine hält in derber liebeslust sich an die welt mit klammernden organen; die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom dust zu den gefilden hoher ahnen. --_faust_. _paracelsus_, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. from a career in which the most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect. but it was equally obvious that the writer's talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original endowments required some other medium than drama for their full unfolding. the author of _paracelsus_ was primarily concerned with character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both points substantially with the author of _hamlet_. but while browning's energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it. the two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of _men and women_. in the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it. _paracelsus_ was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of sordello,--a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside. but the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that "ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[ ] [footnote : preface to the first edition of _strafford_ (subsequently omitted).] the open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in browning was plainly clamouring for more expression than he had yet found. an invitation from the first actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely, under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter of - the story of sordello remained untold, while its author plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic intrigues of _strafford_. the performance of the play on may , introduced further distractions. and _sordello_ had made little further progress, when, in the april of the following year, browning embarked on a sudden but memorable trip to the south of europe. it gave him his first glimpse of italy and of the mediterranean, and plenty of the rough homely intercourse with men which he loved. he travelled, in a fashion that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from london to the adriatic. the food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one advantage,--"the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those rough new creatures, _i_ like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship."[ ] grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[ ] two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of gibraltar and cape st vincent,--ghostly mementos of england,--not as arnold's weary titan, but as a herakles stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the mediterranean, when etna loomed against the flaming sky;[ ] and, between them, that glaring noontide on the african shore, when the "solitary passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good horse york in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave horses, _how they brought the good news_, in a blank leaf of bartoli's _simboli_. the voyage ended at trieste; and thence he passed to venice, brooded among her ruined palaces over sordello, and "english eyebright" and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward, through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my places and castles,"[ ] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of "delicious asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young imagination. [footnote : _r.b._ to _e.b.b._, i. .] [footnote : cf. the long letter to miss haworth, orr, _life_, p. .] [footnote : cf. _sordello_, bk. iii., end.] [footnote : ib., p. .] thus when, in , _sordello_ was at length complete, it bore the traces of many influences and many moods. it reflected the expanding ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. in the earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of _paracelsus_ is still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved _pauline_ is not entirely effaced. but in the later books we recognise without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of a supreme national conflict, has seen italy, and has, in the solitude and detachment from his _milieu_ which foreign travel brings, girded up his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic task. the tangled political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling allusiveness of the expert. the italian landscape is painted, not with richer imagination, for nothing in browning exceeds some passages of the earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of contour and expression. and he has taken the "sad disheveled form," humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. doubtless the result was not all gain. the intermittent composition and the shifting points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness of a brilliant and athletic intellect. the alleged "obscurity" of the poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not merely intricate, but blurred. but he had written nothing yet, and he was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of _sordello_ in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as he wrote of italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every footfall. moreover, he can now paint the clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force--a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in _paracelsus_. sordello himself stands out less clearly than paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating figure. he is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic background upon which he moves. of the story of paracelsus browning merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the greater part of the sordello story, as told confusedly and inconsistently by italian and provençal tradition. the whole later career of the mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, as the friend of raymond of toulouse and charles of anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,--is either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. to all appearance, the actual sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such "infinity" as he possessed. and if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like dante, the "apollo" of the italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was to be done." but the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a dante, might have deeply moulded the history of italy. his close relations with great guelph and ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained unused. yet dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the _purgatory_, had allowed him to illuminate the darkness of virgil, and to guide both the great poets towards the gate. the contrast offered an undeniable problem. but dante had himself hinted the solution by placing sordello among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn in the ante-purgatory. to a mind preoccupied, like browning's, with the failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. he imagined his sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis[ ] to make his spiritual quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition until he met the eye and lips of dante. it is difficult not to suspect the influence of another great poet. _sordello_ has no nearer parallel in literature than goethe's _tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism between the poet and the world, for which bordello's failure to "fit to the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. browning has nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _tasso_; but he has left on record his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _iphigenie_.[ ] [footnote : "ah but to find a certain mood enervate such a mind," &c. --_works_, i. .] [footnote : _to e.b.b._, july , . he is "vexed" at landor's disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval landor's earlier declaration that "nothing so hellenic had been written these two thousand years."] the elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely browning's own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind. like _faust_, like the poet in the _palace of art_, sordello bears the stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a solution of their differences. faust breaks away from the narrow pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass of his mind. tennyson's "glorious devil" (by a curious irony intended for no other than faust's creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he renounces his folly. _sordello_ cannot claim the mature and classical brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but it approaches _faust_ itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of the intellectual life. it is a young poet's attempt to cope with the problem of the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of art to life, and of life to art. neither goethe nor tennyson thought more loftily of the possibilities of poetic art. and neither insisted more peremptorily--or rather assumed more unquestioningly--that it only fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man. he is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying out the kingliest of mottoes--"ich dien." browning all his life had a hearty contempt for the foppery of "art for art," and he never conveyed it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of bordello's "opposite," the troubadour eglamor. "how he loved that art! the calling marking him a man apart from men--one not to care, take counsel for cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift without it." to eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in answer. such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating itself, like wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe," but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing current in the literary guild;-- "he, no genius rare, transfiguring in fire or wave or air at will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up in some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup, his topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few and their arrangement finds enough to do for his best art."[ ] [footnote : works, i. .] from these mysticisms and technicalities of troubadour and all other poetic guilds browning decisively detaches his poet. sordello is not a votary of poetry; he does not "cultivate the muse"; he does not even prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe. poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he recognises the "dream come true" of a soul which (like that of pauline's lover) "existence" thus "cannot satiate, cannot surprise." "laugh thou at envious fate," adorers cry to this inspired platonist, "who, from earth's simplest combination ... dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife with grandeurs, unaffronted to the last, equal to being all."[ ] [footnote : works, i. .] and, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. from the naïve self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls the sublime dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity, where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. but he cannot, like dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of intelligible speech. his uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate genius, a hamlet of poetry. in the second half of the poem the hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a hamlet of politics. he aspires to serve the people otherwise than by holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. though by birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial ghibellines, his natural affinity is clearly with the church, which in some sort stood for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force. we see him, now, a frail, inspired shelleyan[ ] democrat, pleading the guelph cause before the great ghibelline soldier salinguerra,--as he had once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished troubadour eglamor. salinguerra is the foil of the political, as eglamor of the literary, sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem focusses in those two scenes. he had enough of the lonely inspiration of genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity to cope with the astute man of the world. when salinguerra, naturally declining his naïve entreaty that he should put his ghibelline sword at the service of the guelph, offers sordello, on his part, the command of the imperial forces in italy if he will remain true to the ghibelline cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been before to the "infinite" sordello. after a long struggle, he renounces the offer, and--dies, exhausted with the strain of choice. [footnote : there are other shelleyan traits in _sordello_--e.g., the young witch image (as in _pauline_) at the opening of the second book.] what was browning's judgment upon sordello? does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose "failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would become the "perfect round"? assuredly not. that might indeed be his destiny, but browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least promising _milieu_,--a controlling and guiding passion of love. with compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, browning in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place. "ah, my sordello, i this once befriend and speak for you." it was true enough, in the past, that soul, as belonging to eternity, must needs prove incomplete for time. but is life to be therefore only a struggle to escape from the shackles of the body? is freedom only won by death? no, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry, though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions: "like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay, and that sky-space of water, ray for ray and star for star, one richness where they mixed," the soul seeing its way in time without being either dazzled by, or losing, its vision of eternity, having the saving clue of love. dante, for whom love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony with unexampled power; and the comparison, implicit in every page of _sordello_, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the last:-- "what he should have been, could be, and was not--the one step too mean for him to take--we suffer at this day because of: ecelin had pushed away its chance ere dante could arrive and take that step sordello spurned, for the world's sake. ... a sorry farce such life is, after all!" the publication of _sordello_ in closes the first phase of browning's literary career. by the great majority of those who had hailed the splendid promise of _paracelsus_, the author of _sordello_ was frankly given up. surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle with the difficult book. it was the day of the gentle literary public which had a few years before recoiled from _sartor resartus_, and which found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it. a later generation, leavened by carlyle, came near to regarding difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions which brought browning at length into vogue. chapter iii. maturing methods. dramas and dramatic lyrics. since chaucer was alive and hale, no man hath walk'd along our roads with step so active, so inquiring eye, or tongue so varied in discourse. --landor. the memorable moment when browning, standing on the ruined palace-step at venice, had taken humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his poetic life to which the later books of _sordello_ form a splendid prelude. for the browning of it was no longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its solution. "soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and transfigures to his eyes. it is as if a painter trained in the school of raphael or lionardo had discovered that he could use the minute and fearless brush of the flemings in the service of their ideals. he pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the clash and tangle of plot. in all these three ways the dramas and dramatic lyrics and romances, which were to be his poetic occupation during the forties, detach themselves sharply from _paracelsus_ and the early books of _sordello_. a poem like _the laboratory_ ( ), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of art to these. all that browning neglected or veiled in _paracelsus_ he here thrusts into stern relief. the passion and crime there faintly discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his absorbing theme. the curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop, taken for granted in _paracelsus_, are now painted with a realism reminiscent of romeo's apothecary and _the alchemist_. and the outward drama of intrigue, completely effaced in _paracelsus_ by the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the more sinister because it is not seen. these lyrics and romances are "dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as browning insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their self-revelation. a poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama proper his free, full, and natural expression. this was not altogether the case with browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. the drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. but it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of his. not only did action and outward event--the stuff of drama--interest browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and tinged with its feeling and its thought. half the value of a story for him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most easily and effectively through alien lips. for a like reason he loved to survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it imposed. both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. and browning's dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments tense with memory and hope. the insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. he sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive with moving shapes. to the stricken girl in _ye banks and braes_ memory is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; whereas the victim of _the confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic story. so in _the laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:-- "he is with her, and they know that i know where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow while they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear empty church, to pray god in, for them!--i am here." both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade. in this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the imaginary conversations of landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history. to landor, according to his wife's testimony, browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to landor he dedicated the last volume of the _bells and pomegranates_. landor, on his part, hailed in browning the "inquiring eye" and varied discourse of a second chaucer. it is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist browning's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past. browning cared less for the actual _personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naïve, anti-feudal temper. the french camp and the spanish cloister, _gismond_ and _my last duchess_ (originally called _france_ and _italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies. but in one point landor and browning stood at opposite poles. landor, far beyond any contemporary english example, had the classic sense and mastery of style; browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. the wave of realism which swept over english letters in the early 'forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. _pickwick_ in had established the immense vogue of dickens, the _heroes_ in had assured the imposing prestige of carlyle; and the example of both made for the freest and boldest use of language. across the channel the stupendous fabric of the _comédie humaine_ was approaching completion, and browning was one of balzac's keenest english readers. alone among the greater poets of the time browning was in genius and temperament a true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'forties, is the nearest counterpart and analogue of their prose. i. browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct application from macready. introduced in november by his "literary father" fox, browning immediately interested the actor. a reading of _paracelsus_ convinced him that browning could write, if not a good play, yet one with an effective tragic _rôle_ for himself. strained relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this service. browning, suddenly appealed to (in may ), promptly suggested _strafford_. he was full of the subject, having recently assisted his friend forster in compiling his life. the actor closed with the suggestion, and a year later (may , ) the play was performed at covent garden. the fine acting of macready, and of helen faucit, who was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. it went through five performances. browning's _strafford_, like his _paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to interpret a historic character; and historic experts like gardiner have, as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. the other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations the well-marked ply of his mind. the harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness. generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most readily invents. strafford's devotion to charles and pym's to his country were historical; but browning accentuates pym's heroism by making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of lucy carlisle. "give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to miss flower: the idea seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention of character. something of the visionary exaltation of the dying paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which strafford goes to meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot turn aside. all the characters have something of the "deep self-consciousness" of the author of _pauline_. not that they are, any of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided apprehension of life. they are either absolutely simple, like lady carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like strafford and charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex than they are. though played for only five nights, _strafford_ had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like messrs longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. it appeared in april, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted. the composition of _strafford_ had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. new projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. i am going "to begin ... thinking a tragedy," he wrote characteristically to miss haworth--"(an historical one, so i shall want heaps of criticisms on _strafford_), and i want to have _another_ tragedy in prospect; i write best so provided."[ ] [footnote : orr, _life_, p. .] the "historical tragedies" here foreshadowed, _king victor and king charles_ and _the return of the druses_, were eventually published as the second and fourth of the _bells and pomegranates_, in - . how little browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good. in _strafford_ as in _paracelsus_, and even in _sordello_, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. he seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--sardinia, juliers, lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. _king victor and king charles_ contains far less poetry than _paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe. there was material for genuine tragedy in the story. the old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,--this king victor has something in him of lear, something of the dying henry iv. but history provided more sober issues, and browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. charles is no regan, hardly even an albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which browning brings to bear upon him. reluctantly he orders victor's arrest, and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head. neither character is drawn with the power of strafford, but the play is largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or rigidity of age. this was a type of dramatic action which browning imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast between contending elements of his own nature. towards this type all his drama tended to gravitate. in _the return of the druses_ browning's native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only the general situation. his turn for curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on between frankish hospitallers, venetians, and druses of lebanon in a lonely island of the aegean where none of the three are at home. a political revolution--the revolt of the druses against their frankish lords--provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central interest is concentrated upon a "soul's tragedy," in which the conflict of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single man. djabal, the druse patriot brought up in brittany, analyses his own character with the merciless self-consciousness of browning himself: "i with my arab instinct--thwarted ever by my frank policy, and with in turn my frank brain thwarted by my arab heart-- while these remained in equipoise, i lived-- nothing; had either been predominant, as a frank schemer or an arab mystic i had been something." the conflict between policy and devotion is now transferred to the arena of a single breast, where its nature is somewhat too clearly understood and formulated. the "frank schemer" conceives the plan of turning the druse superstition to account by posing as an incarnation of their founder. but the "arab mystic" is too near sharing the belief to act his part with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted anael slays the prefect. the play is thenceforth occupied, ostensibly, with the efforts of the christian authorities to discover and punish the murderers. its real subject is the subtle changes wrought in djabal and anael by their gradual transition from the relation of prophet and devotee to that of lovers. her passion, even before he comes to share it, has begun to sap the security of his false pretensions: he longs, not at first to disavow them, but to make them true: he will be the prophetic helper of his people in very deed. to the outer world he maintains his claim with undiminished boldness and complete success; but the inner supports are gradually giving way, arab mystic and frank schemer lose their hold, and "a third and better nature rises up, my mere man's nature." anael, a simpler character than any previous woman of the plays, thus has a more significant function. lady carlisle fumbles blindly with the dramatic issues without essentially affecting them; polyxena furthers them with loyal counsel, but is not their main executant. anael, in her fervid devotion, not only precipitates the catastrophe, but emancipates her lover from the thraldom of his lower nature. in her browning for the first time in drama represented the purifying power of love. the transformations of soul by soul were already beginning to occupy browning's imagination. the poet of _cristina_ and _saul_ was already foreshadowed. but nothing as yet foreshadowed the kind of spiritual influence there portrayed--that which, instead of making its way through the impact of character upon character, passion upon passion, is communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. for one who believed as fixedly as browning in the power of these moments to change the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full of implicit drama. a chance inspiration led him to attempt to show how a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might become the involuntary _deus ex machina_ in the tangle of passion and plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its catastrophes. the result was a poem which elizabeth barrett "could find it in her heart to envy" its author, which browning himself (in ) liked better than anything else he had yet done.[ ] it has won a not less secure place in the affections of all who care for browning at all. it was while walking alone in a wood near dulwich, we are told by mrs orr, that "the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of asolo."[ ] the most important effect of this design was to call out browning's considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements of the human drama upon which pippa was to flash her transforming spell. his somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of balzac and dickens. and he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the great ottima and sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the magnificence in sin, of ottima herself. [footnote : _letters of r. and e.b.b._, i. .] [footnote : orr, _handbook_, p. .] _pippa passes_, the most romantic in conception of all browning's plays, thus first disclosed his genius for realism. _strafford_, _king victor_, _the druses_ are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy prose. it counted for something, too, that italy, and above all the little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal memory, not a vague region of fancy like his sardinia or lebanon. asolo, with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights" of may, and "glaring pomps" of june,--asolo, with its legend of "kate the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for browning's readers. pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought into touch, at so many points, with things that browning had seen. _pippa passes_ has, among browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar interest which belongs to the _tempest_ and to _faust_ among shakespeare's and goethe's. faery and devilry were not browning's affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, _pippa passes_ is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as browning imagined them, in all life. for browning, too, the world teemed with stephanos and trinculos, sebastians and antonios; it was, none the less, a magical isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of ariel as he passed. browning's ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new proportion. ii. browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the requirements and traditions of the stage. he might even appear to have renounced the stage altogether when in he arranged with moxon to publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. the first number of _bells and pomegranates_ contained the least theatrical of his dramas, _pippa passes_. "two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not reprinted), "i wrote a play, about which the chief matter i much care to recollect at present is that a pit-full of good-natured people applauded it. ever since i have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. what follows i mean for the first of a series of dramatical pieces, to come out at intervals; and i amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of pit-audience again." but browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. in the course of macready intervened with a request for another play from the author of _strafford_.[ ] thereupon browning produced with great rapidity _a blot in the 'scutcheon_. after prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room vicissitudes, it was performed on feb. , . macready, its first begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of helen faucit (mildred) and phelps (lord tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief success. [footnote : the date is fixed by browning's statement (orr, p. ).] the choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make terms with stage tradition. but the ordinary theatre-goer, who went expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself, as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. an english nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. but this seemingly commonplace _motif_ was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere--an atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper than sin. in a more sinister sense than _colombe's birthday_, this play might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:-- "ivy and violet, what do ye here with blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather hiding the arms of montecchi and vere?" the love of mildred and mertoun, which blots the tresham 'scutcheon, is in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal ambitions of colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. the conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them all is a nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and naïveté of mildred and mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether. more mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the situation as easily as an ordinary hamlet from his task of vengeance. but mertoun and mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. mertoun falters and stammers in his suit to tresham; mildred stands mute at her brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray. yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in mildred's chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of romance--the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the lover's serenade. and when the lover, who dared all risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, finally encounters tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a sword in his own defence. upon this union of boundless daring for one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted the 'scutcheon mertoun's fate hangs, and with his mildred's, and with hers tresham's. beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of mertoun and mildred, browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of gwendolen and austin. one has a glimpse here of his habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness on a low plane. it is gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of mertoun's love. "mark him, austin: that's true love! ours must begin again." in tresham browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of ancestral pride. he is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its honourable pride. when mertoun has received his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before him in mute intolerable reproach; and mildred has scarcely breathed her last in his arms when tresham succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for his hasty act. it is unlucky that this tragic climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious burlesque of his "ah,--i had forgotten: i am dying." in such things one feels browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial moments of action. although not brilliantly successful on the boards, _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the audience. for browning himself the most definite result was that macready passed out of his life--for twenty years they never met--and that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed. but his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by this time won; and _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ was followed by a drama which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of _pippa passes_ under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. the ostensible subject of _colombe's birthday_ is a political crisis on the familiar lines;--an imperilled throne in the centre of interest, a background of vague oppression and revolt. but as compared with _king victor_ or _the druses_ the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily overheard. the diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance, like the ladies' embassy in _love's labour's lost_; but neither is it allowed to become grave or menacing. berthold's arrival to present his claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of children at play. nevertheless, the victory of love over political interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of browning's plots. the alternative issues gain in seriousness and ideality as we proceed, and browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[ ] colombe herself is one of browning's most gracious and winning figures. she brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. her inborn truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet momentum, and gradually liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is cast. valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from gismond to caponsacchi. with great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward and spiritual "flight" of colombe. valence's "way of love" is to make her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in despair. she discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of power at the same time, and thus is brought, by valence's means, to a mood in which prince berthold's offer of his hand and crown together weighs formidably, for a moment, against valence's offer of his love alone, until she discovers that berthold is the very personation, in love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had escaped. then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource." [footnote : this fine speech of valence to the greater glory of his rival (act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. browning with good reason directed its omission unless "a very good valence" could be found.] berthold, like blougram, ogniben, and many another of browning's mundane personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. he comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity of valence. he means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process unaffectedly boring. without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently share his own. an adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open contempt. his ends are those of laertes or fortinbras, and he is quite capable of the methods of rosencrantz and guildenstern; but he regards ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of hamlet. by birth and principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of browning's men of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. he "watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and exposes them with ironical candour. few of browning's less right-minded persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:-- "all is for the best. too costly a flower were this, i see it now, to pluck and set upon my barren helm to wither,--any garish plume will do." _colombe's birthday_ was published in as no. of the _bells_, but had for the present no prospect of the stage. nine years later, however, the loyal phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at sadler's wells. the most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, browning wrote not long after finishing _colombe's birthday_.[ ] that play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _a soul's tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of chiappino. browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _wild duck_. chiappino is browning's werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the luigi of _pippa passes_. plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of , he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. his intercourse with elizabeth barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. "for _the soul's_ _tragedy_," he wrote (feb. )--"that will surprise you, i think. there is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word." this word his correspondent, needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more impressive than its successor _luria_. this was, however, no tribute to its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more openly ignored. the dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the great portrait studies of _men and women_; it might be called _ogniben_ with about as good right as they are called _lippo lippi_ or _blougram_; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. the chiappino of the second act is ogniben's chiappino, as gigadibs is blougram's gigadibs. his "tragedy" is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. all real stress of circumstance is excluded. both sides fight with blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those florentine risings which the brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of casa guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. the prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is genially bantered into submission. the "soul" of chiappino is, in fact, not the stuff of which tragedy is made. even in his instant acceptance of luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be. on the whole, browning's scorn must be considered to have injured his art. tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "tragedy" of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the springs from which his poetry drew its life. [footnote : browning's letter to elizabeth barrett, feb. , , which does not seem to have been adequately noticed. the piece is ignored by mrs orr. he speaks of suspending the publication of the "unlucky play" until a second edition of the _bells_--an "apparition" which moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it before _luria_: it will then be "in its place, for it was written two or three years ago." in other words, _the soul's tragedy_ was written in - , between _colombe's birthday_ and _luria_.] in the autumn of browning made a second tour to italy. it was chiefly memorable for his meeting, at leghorn, with edward john trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;--one who had not only himself "seen shelley plain," but has contributed more than any one else, save hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes of posterity. the journey quickened and enriched his italian memories; and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. among these was the drama of _luria_, ultimately published as the concluding number of the _bells_. in this remarkable drama browning turned once more to the type of historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in _strafford_. the fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for browning one of the most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama. he dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of charles's great minister; in _luria_, where he was working uncontrolled by historical authority, it is the fundamental theme. at the same time the effect is heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in _the return of the druses_. luria is a moor who has undertaken the service of florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. like othello,[ ] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and exacting state, with the supreme command of her military forces, a position in which the fervour of the oriental and the frank simplicity of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of italians and statesmen. "luria," wrote browning, while the whole scheme was "all in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks florence, and the old fortune follows, ... and i will soon loosen my braccio and puccio (a pale discontented man) and tiburzio (the pisan, good true fellow, this one), and domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and tuscan shrewd ways." florence, in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of iago to this second othello, but of an iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than shakespeare's. it was a source of weakness as well as of strength in browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. he has, in fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous florentine masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[ ] even the formidable antagonism of braccio, the florentine commissary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force. "brute force shall not rule florence." even so, it is only after conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow luria's trial to take its course. puccio, again, the former general of florence, superseded by luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the "pale discontented man" whom browning originally designed and whom such a situation was no doubt calculated to produce. instead of a cassius, enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, cæsar, we have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment. in keeping with such company is the noble pisan general, who vies with luria in generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the florentine attack. even domizia, the "panther" lady who comes to the camp burning for vengeance upon florence for the death of her kinsmen, and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges as his lover. but in domizia he confessedly failed. the correspondence with miss barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; "the panther would not be tamed." her hatred and her love alike merely beat the air. with all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage" has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and consuming fire. the more potent passion of luria and his lieutenant husain is more adequately rendered, though "the simple moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats in european subtlety. the east with its gift of "feeling" comes once more, as in the _druses_, into tragic contact with the north and its gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling east and not to thinking north that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast. luria has indeed, like djabal, assimilated just so much of european culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the lesser race "which when it apes the greater is forgone." but the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to florence. this is conceived with a refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there can be no question. mrs browning, whose eager interest accompanied this drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its "grandeur." the busy exuberance of browning's thinking was not favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but the fate of this son of the "lone and silent east," though utterly un-shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of shakespeare. [footnote : browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference to _luria_ while still unwritten: _letters of r.b. and e.b.b._, i. .] [footnote : "for me, the misfortune is, i sympathise just as much with these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer."--feb. , .] iii. "mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote browning in effect to miss barrett (feb. , ) of the "scenes and song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years before as the _dramatic lyrics_. yet it is just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and browning's genius, as we have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere escapes." with a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the student of browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. but they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast. he watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." the loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a dante, the tragic hatred of a timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination. the indignant invective against a political renegade, "just for a handful of silver he left us," in which browning spoke his own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside and let some accomplished devil, like the duke in _my last duchess_, some clerical libertine, like the bishop of st praxed's, some sneaking reptile, like the spanish friar, some tiger-hearted regan, like the lady of _the laboratory_, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of _the confessional_, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. there was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in _time's revenges_, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." he seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the nemesis inflicted upon "sibrandus schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of _instans tyrannus_. and he seized the element of sheer physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery cavalier tunes, the crash of gismond's "back--handed blow" upon gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the good news. of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first lyrics and romances. browning had had warm friendships with women, and was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in his dreams. his plans, as he told miss barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as you." that discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme of things. the love-poetry of the dramatic lyrics and romances is still somewhat tentative and insecure. the beautiful fantasia _in a gondola_ was directly inspired by a picture of his friend maclise. he paints the romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the "world of men." his attitude to women is touched with the virginal reserve of the young hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told in the lofty _prologue_ of artemis. he approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards. the lady of _the flower's name_ is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers among the dark leaves. the typical lover of these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most fugitive signs of love--a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name--not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure. _cristina_, _rudel_, and the _lost mistress_ stand in a line of development which culminates in _the last ride together_. cristina's lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought: "her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect, i shall pass my life's remainder." the _lost mistress_ is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow. not easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure. the really tragic love-story was, for browning, the story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out. "never fear, but there's provision of the devil's to quench knowledge lest on earth we walk in rapture," cristina's lover had bitterly reflected. courts, as the focuses of social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive of the lyrics and romances he appears as the champion of the love they menace. the hapless _last duchess_ suffers for the largess of her kindly smiles. the duchess of _the flight_ and the lady of _the glove_ successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in love's name. _the flight_ is a tale, as mrs browning said, "with a great heart in it." both the gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we overhear, and the old huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by browning. the genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the court which he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. even the hinted landscape-background serves as a mute chorus. in this "great wild country" of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the anomaly. similarly, in _the glove_, the lion, so magnificently sketched by browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no previous teller. the lion of schiller's ballad is already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room. browning's lion, still terrible and full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring vindication of its claims. * * * * * art was far from being as strange to the browning of - as love. but he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the art-world with which love has least to do. he studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter lutwyche showing "how he can hate"; the bishop of st praxed's piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which gandolph shall not choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _last duchess_ displaying his wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person. in a single poem only browning touches those problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'fifties; and the _pictor ignotus_ is as far behind the _andrea del_ _sarto_ and _fra lippo lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and plasticity. browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the anæmia of this anæmic soul. rarely again did he paint in such resolute uniformity of ashen grey. the "pictor" is the earliest, and the palest, of browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness which they call purity. the musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in browning's art than the painter. none of these lyrics foreshadows _abt vogler_ and _hugues of saxe-gotha_ as the _pictor_ foreshadows _lippi_ and _del sarto_. but if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. he sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the transforming magic of song. the thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_. these lyrics and romances of - are as full of tributes to the power of music as _l'allegro_ and _il penseroso_ themselves. orpheus, whose story milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on eurydice. more to his mind was the legend of that motley orpheus of the north, the hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears. the gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; theocrite's "little human praise" wins god's ear, and pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. a poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the biblical story of the cure of the stricken saul by the songs of the boy david. but a special influence drew browning to this subject,--the wonderful _song to david_ of christopher smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it chiefly to browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. smart's david is before all things the glowing singer of the joy of earth,--the glory of the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous praise of the lord. and it is this david of whom we have a presentiment in the no less glowing songs with which browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of saul. of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the present phase of browning's work. these were confessedly incomplete, but browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than miss barrett, who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work--now remember."[ ] and the "next parts" when they came, in _men and women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. the fragment falls, of course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour, but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which browning's busy intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. kenyon read it nightly, as he told mrs browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it to "homer's shield of achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." and certainly, if browning anywhere approaches that greek plasticity for which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet breathing scenes. then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the ecstatic vision of saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might yet be, that "boyhood of wonder and hope, present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope," all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his single head. it is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes across the spiritual darkness of saul, as the coming of hyperion scattered the shadows of saturnian night. [footnote : _e.b.b. to r.b._, dec. , .] chapter iv. wedded life in italy. _men and women_. this foot, once planted on the goal; this glory-garland round my soul. --_the last ride together_. warmer climes give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze of alpine highths thou playest with, borne on beyond sorrento and amalfi, where the siren waits thee, singing song for song. --landor. i. the _bells and pomegranates_ made no very great way with the public, which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. but both the title and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the most intimate personal relationship of his life. hardly one of the romances, as we saw, but had been read in ms. by elizabeth barrett, and pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. in the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as browning expected his readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"--her wit had divined a more felicitous application to browning's poetry-- "some 'pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." the two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[ ] and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was finally to draw them together. a few years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in france, and she laughingly accepted the omen. the omen was fulfilled; elizabeth browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, balaustion. [footnote : she had at once discerned the "new voice" in _paracelsus_, ; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in ) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's wonder" _(r.b. to e.b.b._, jan. , ).] but she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. her experience up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike his own. though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of english wood and meadow was for her chiefly, as to milton in his age, an enchanted memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened london chamber. "most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she said to horne, "have passed in my thoughts." both were eager students, and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being "learned poets"; but browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly, like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his knowledge of men; while miss barrett's greek and hebrew chiefly served to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods and titans, angels and seraphim. then, notwithstanding the _rôle_ of hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive vitality hardly inferior to browning's own; only that the energy which in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of collocation. both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts of a generation which repudiated the revolution and did its best to repudiate byron. but browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [ ] intense, and often fantastic and quaint. his imagination flamed forth like an intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and alert in man and nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange loveliness. it might have been averred of browning that he said everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[ ] there was something of Æschylus in her, as there was much of aristophanes in him; it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself upon the task of rendering the _prometheus bound_ in english; they met on common ground in the human and pathetic euripides. but her power was lyric, not dramatic. she sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was personating some imaginary mind. [footnote : the word her italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could not pronounce it. he said she was _testa lunga (letters of r. and e.b., i. )_.] [footnote : _letters, r. and e. b._, i. . cf. her admirable letter to ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "to say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (_letters of e. b. b._, ii., ).] early in january the two poets were brought by the genial kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in english literature, at once began. browning, as his way was in telling other men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his own. "i love your verses, my dear miss barrett, with all my heart," he assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. he feels them already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find fault,"--"nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew." it was "living," like his own; it was also direct, as his own was not. his frank _cameraderie_ was touched from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by no means prone. "you _do_, what i always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem likely now to do for the first time. you speak out, _you_,--i only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, _but i am going to try_." thus the first contact with the "lyric love" of after days set vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in browning's nature. his brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. the "first poem" of robert browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken from his "dancing ring of men and women,"--the dramatic lyrics and romances and one or two outstanding dramas,--he meant to write it. miss barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her correspondent. she revelled in the dramatic lyrics and romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like _sibrandus_ or _the spanish cloister_, which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly fragile woman is too rarely credited. _pippa passes_ she could find in her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other works--a preference in which he agreed. few more brilliant appreciations of english poetry are extant than some of those which sped during and from the invalid chamber in harley street to the "old room" looking out on the garden at new cross. but she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "i do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[ ] but she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. and it is clear that before the last plays, _luria_ and _a soul's tragedy_, were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. it was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually becoming adjusted, "_seeing all things, as it does, in you._" [footnote : _e.b.b to r.b._, th may . cf. _r.b._, th feb. .] she, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical penetration. the "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity applied to herself his unconscious phrase-- "cloth of frieze, be not too bold though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold," "that, beloved, was written for me!"[ ]--shows at the same time the keenest insight into the qualities of his work. she felt in him the masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. with the world of society and affairs she had other channels of communication. but no one of her other friends--not _orion_ horne, not even kenyon--bridged as browning did the gulf between the world of society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of poetry in which she lived. if she quickened the need for lyrical utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer contact with common things. if she had her part in _christmas-eve and easter-day_, he had his, no less, in _aurora leigh_. [footnote : _e.b.b. to r.b._, th jan. .] twenty-one months passed between browning's first letter and their marriage. the tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal "contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows of juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. all the winter and early spring her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet pressure of his will they never would have met. but with may came renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "he has a way of putting things which i have not, a way of putting aside,--so he came." a few weeks later he spoke. she at first absolutely refused to entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. but in the meantime the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but unsuppressed. once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. this man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. but when he disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return, that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable, and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words, she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she could still do something for the happiness of another. in another sense than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the portuguese," love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of death, and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, almost extinguished, desire to live. is it hyperbole, to be reminded of that other world-famous rescue from death which browning, twenty-five years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? browning did not need to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality of his herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like alcestis, from the grave. but the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems. browning, said kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was willing to become. love had flung upon his life, as upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "my whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[ ] "(with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." but his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short. elizabeth barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. the same deep sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of mr barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that september morning of , from an invalid's couch to be married. that "peculiarity," as she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have postponed. his refusal to allow her to seek health in italy in oct. had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in aug. drove her to the one alternative of going there as browning's wife. a week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, mrs browning left her home, with the faithful wilson and the indispensable flush, _en route_ for southampton. the following day they arrived in paris. [footnote : _r.b. to e.b.b._, sept. , .] ii. there followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, for they were never parted. that is the sufficient outward symbol of their all but flawless union. after a leisurely journey through france, and an experimental sojourn at the goal of mrs browning's two frustrated journeys, pisa, they settled towards the close of april in furnished apartments in florence, moving some four months later into the more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the palazzo (or "casa") guidi, just off the piazza pitti. their life--mirrored for us in mrs browning's vivid and delightful letters--was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. it is possible to describe everything that went on in the browning household in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted means. all that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career. their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues. mrs jameson laughed at their "miraculous prudence and economy"; and mrs browning herself laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,--his "horror of owing five shillings for five days"; browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil. they lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the italian and the english quarters of the florentine world. but arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as bohemia. "soundless and stirless hermits," mrs browning playfully called them; but in no house in florence did the news of political and literary europe find keener comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. two long absences, moreover ( - and - ), divided between london and paris, interrupted their italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "no place like paris for living in," browning declared after returning from its blaze to the quiet retreat of casa guidi. but both felt no less deeply the charm of their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[ ] nor did either, in spite of their delight in french poetry and their vivid interest in french politics, really enter the french world. they were received by george sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished elizabeth barrett in her invalid chamber years before; but though she "felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the "crowds of ill-bred men who adore her _à genoux bas_, betwixt a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva,"--they both felt that she did not care for them. dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction to hugo, browning carried about for years but had no chance of presenting; béranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence of an intermediator. balzac, to their grief, was just dead. a complete set of his works was one of their florentine ambitions. one memorable intimacy was formed, however, during the paris winter of - ; for it was now that he first met joseph milsand, his warm friend until milsand's death in , and probably, for the last twenty years at least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. their summer visits to london ( , , , ) brought them much more of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, discomfort, and fatigue. of himself, yet more than of the laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." the visitors who gathered about him in these london visits included friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master and mentor, fox, and kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, to dante rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple, and william allingham, whom rossetti introduced. among his own contemporaries they were especially intimate with tennyson,--the sterling and masculine "alfred" of carlyle, whom the world first learnt to know from his biography; and with carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his biographers mostly efface. [footnote : _letters of e.b.b._, ii. .] after their return from the second journey to the north their italian life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. the publication of _men and women_ ( ) and _aurora leigh_ ( ) drew new visitors to the salon in casa guidi, and after they repeatedly wintered in rome, mingling freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties of the carnival. to the end, however, their roman circle was more american than english. "is mr browning an american?" asked an english lady of the american ambassador. "is it possible that you ask me that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village in the united states so small that they could not tell you that robert browning is an englishman, and they wish he were an american." spiritualism, in the main an american institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other. one turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play--walter savage landor. here it was the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. of all these intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a glimpse. his actual dealings with men and women called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but--with one momentous exception--they did not touch his imagination. iii. almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the italian struggle for liberty. the brownings arrived in florence during the lull which preceded the great outbreak of . from the historic "windows of casa guidi" they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the tuscan revolution, the nine days' fight for milan, the heroic adventure of savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on the field of novara. ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of "a unanimity of despair" on the other, followed; and then the monotonous tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the emperor, "deep and cold," marched his armies over the alps for the deliverance of italy. of all this the brownings were deeply moved spectators. browning shared his wife's sympathy with the italians and her abhorrence of austria, and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. "'how long, o lord, how long!' robert kept saying." but he had not her passionate admiration for france, still less her faith in the president-emperor. his less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. his judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. he laughed at the boyish freaks of lander's magnificent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive louis napoleon the _coup d'état_, and when the liberation of lombardy was followed by the annexation of savoy and nice, the emperor's devoted defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his biting summary of the situation: "it was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity." a dozen years later louis napoleon's equivocal character and career were to be subjected by browning to a still more equivocal exposition. but this sordid trait brought him within a category of "soul" upon which browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. a poem upon napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of (cf. note, p. below), was abandoned. "blougram's" splendid and genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the meretricious figure of napoleon became a congenial problem only to that later browning of the 'sixties and 'seventies who was to explore the shady souls of a guido, a miranda, and a sludge. on the other hand, deeply as he felt the sorrows of italy, it was no part of his poetic mission to sing them. the voice of a great community wakened no lyric note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs. nationality was not an effectual motive with him. he felt as keenly as his wife, or as shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or sardonic jest in the _de gustibus_ or the _old pictures_--not in a _casa guidi windows_, or _songs before congress_, an _ode to naples_, or a _hellas_. an "ode" containing, by his own account, fierce things about england, he destroyed after villafranca. it is only in subtle and original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of italy's struggle for deliverance. the _patriot_ and _instans tyrannus_ both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. italy is mentioned in neither. both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in _the italian in england_ and the third scene of _pippa passes_. this "tyrant" has nothing to do with the austrian whom luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement. iv. the great political drama enacted in italy during the brownings' residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of browning's imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife. the spell of italian scenery was less easily evaded than the abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and colour. and the years of his italian sojourn certainly left palpable traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and rendering the whole relation between nature and man. they did not, indeed, make him in any sense a nature poet. in that very song of delight in "italy, my italy," which tells how the things he best loves in the world are "a castle precipice-encurled in a gash of the wind-grieved apennine," or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics asserting their place beside nature in the heart of italy's "old lover." and in the actual life of the brownings "nature" had to be content, as a rule, with the humbler share. their chosen abode was not a castle in the apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an apartment commanding the crowded streets of florence; and their principal absences from it were spent in rome, in london, or in the yet more congenial "blaze of paris." they delighted certainly to escape into the forest uplands. "robert and i go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights," she wrote from their high perch above lucca in ; but their adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the amphibian swimmer in _fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,-- "land the solid and safe to welcome again (confess!) when, high and dry, we chafe the body, and don the dress." the nature browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity, and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping" between the cypresses, is seen over fiesole or samminiato; the "alpine gorge" above lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the roman campagna has its tombs--"rome's ghost since her decease"; the etrurian hill--fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." he had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in landscape. but his rendering of landscape before the italian period was habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable _englishman in italy_, recalling wordsworth's indignant reproof of the great fellow-artist--scott--who "made an inventory of nature's charms." this hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the work of his italian period. but it tends to give way to a strangely subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the seeing soul. nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man. the author of _men and women_ is a greater poet of nature than the author of the _lyrics and romances_, because he is, also, a greater poet of "soul"; for his larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured nature for which, since wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression. browning's subtler feeling for nature sprang from his profounder insight into love. love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not wordsworth's, to the transfigured nature which wordsworth first disclosed. it is habitually lovers who have these visions,--all that was mystical in browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to his ideas of love. to the two in the campagna its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,--the joy of illimitable space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. to the lovers of the alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it were, the bar between man and nature: "the forests had done it; there they stood; we caught for a moment the powers at play: they had mingled us so, for once and good, their work was done, we might go or stay, they relapsed to their ancient mood." such "moments" were, in fact, for browning as well as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of nature towards human affairs. the powers did good, as they did evil, "at play"; intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like jaques plighting touchstone and audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. a certain eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in browning's highly individual feeling about nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. joy, when the brown old earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when he watches the "miracles wrought in play" in the teeming life of the campagna; fear, when, on a hot august midnight, earth tosses stormily on her couch. and all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in the great romantic legend of _childe roland_. what the _ancient mariner_ is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea, that _childe roland_ is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. the childe, like the mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the "starved ignoble" nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain--"mere ugly heights and heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the dark tower. but browning's horror-world differs from coleridge's in the pervading sense that the powers which control its issues are "at play." the catastrophe is not the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap. the hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the dark tower itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end-- "the hills, like giants at a hunting, lay chin upon hand, to see the game at bay." v. but the scenery of italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline and glowing colour, interested browning less than its painting, sculpture, and music. "nature i loved, and after nature, art," landor declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; browning would, in this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order. casa guidi windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the façade of the pitti--a fact of at least equal significance. from the days of his boyish pilgrimages to the dulwich gallery across the camberwell meadows, he had been an eager student and critic of painting; curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes and technicalities of the studio. he judged pictures with the eye of a skilful draughtsman; and two rapid journeys had given him some knowledge of the italian galleries. continuous residence among the chief glories of the brush and chisel did not merely multiply artistic incitement and appeal; it brought the whole world of art into more vital touch with his imaginative activity. it would be hard to say that there is any definite change in his view of art, but its problems grow more alluring to him, and its images more readily waylay and capture his passing thought. the artist as such becomes a more dominant figure in his hierarchy of spiritual workers; while browning himself betrays a new self-consciousness of his own function as an artist in verse; conceiving, for instance, his consummate address to his wife as an artist's way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could feel, that of finding unique expression for the unique love. "he who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, makes a strange art of an art familiar, fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets; he who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver, fitly serenade a slumbrous princess; he who writes may write for once, as i do." browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the prominence with him of the specifically artist's point of view. he cared for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of human life, hints of "the absolute truth of things" which the sensible world veils and the senses miss. but he cared for them also, and yet more, as expressions of the artist's own "love of loving, rage of knowing, seeing, feeling" that absolute truth. and he cared for them also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious. his own eye and ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and activities. during the last years in italy his passion for modelling even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully lamented that the "poor lost soul" produced only casts, which he broke on completion, and no more men and women. and his own taste in art drew him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was palpable,--whether it was a triumphant _tour de force_ like cellini's perseus, in the loggia--their daily banquet in the early days at florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the tuscan's early art," like those "pre-giotto pictures" which surrounded them in the salon of casa guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as mrs browning beautifully says,[ ] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her husband's. [footnote : _letters of e.b.b._, ii. .] almost all browning's finest poems of painting belong to these italian years, and were enshrined in _men and women._ they all illustrate more or less his characteristic preoccupation with the artist's point of view, and also, what is new, the point of view of particular and historical artists,--a guercino, an andrea del sarto, a giotto, a lippo lippi. even where he seems to write under the peculiar spell of his wife, as in the _guardian angel_, this trait asserts itself. they had spent three glowing august days of at fano, and thrice visited the painting by guercino there,--"to drink its beauty to our soul's content." mrs browning wrote of the "divine" picture. browning entered, with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own "angel" was with him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of "dear guercino's fame," because he "did not work thus earnestly at all times, and has endured some wrong." with all this, however, the _guardian angel_ is one of the few pieces left by browning which do not instantly discover themselves as his. his typical children are well-springs of spiritual influence, scattering the aerial dew of quickening song upon a withered world, or taking god's ear with their "little human praise." the spirituality of this child is of a different temper,--the submissive "lamblike" temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by thought. what is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the great monologue of _andrea del sarto_ an illuminating compassion. compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate. the situation appealed profoundly to browning, and andrea's monologue is one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. it is a study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with speech and their apathy with song. tennyson's lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. andrea's spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to crave. he is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy. reproach turns to grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:-- "and you smile indeed! this hour has been an hour! another smile? if you would sit thus by me every night i should work better, do you comprehend? i mean that i should earn more, give you more." the tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change still less. the "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul. suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in the fragrant darkness of an italian night. there is a scurry of feet along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of brother lippo lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers into the torchlight. _fra lippo lippi_ is not less true and vivacious than the _andrea_, if less striking as an example of browning's dramatic power. sarto is a great poetic creation; browning's own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. but this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, was a being to which browning's heart went out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. there is not much "soul" in lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies" men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature." he "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men instead of imposing one from without:-- "this world's no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink." "ay, but," objects the prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" and it is the prior and his system which for lippi stand in the place of andrea's soulless wife. lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its doom; and lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was most spiritual in himself. he was fortunate in the poet who has drawn his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style. these two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of browning. but we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind, as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of tuscany in the early 'fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous causerie called _old pictures in florence_. there is passion in its grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters, whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the invisible to come into play, and florence looked for her completion as giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire. if italy deepened browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in the kindred poetry of music. not that his italian life can have brought any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up within easy reach of london concerts and operas. but england was a land in which music was performed; italy was a land in which it was made. verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in florence the knowing spectator might see verdi himself, at its close, "look through all the roaring and the wreaths where sits rossini patient in his stall." italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas, could not find so full a response in browning's nature as italian painting. it had had its own gracious and tender youth; and palestrina, whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "saxe-gotha" and elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of florence. out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" michelangelo, but a race of accomplished _petits maîtres_, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. a goldsmith or a sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but browning, with the eternal april in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs. byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of venice; but the vivacious swing of _beppo_ was less to browning's mind than the "cold music" of baldassare galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of the feast:-- "what? those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, told them something? those suspensions, those solutions--'must we die?' those commiserating sevenths--"life might last! we can but try!" the musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more bitter echo:-- "dust and ashes, dead and done with, venice spent what venice earned: the soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned." and so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty _débris_ of the past, with no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a malory for the glories of old time or to villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo-- "'dust and ashes!' so you creak it, and i want the heart to scold. dear dead women, with such hair too--what's become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? i feel chilly and grown old." in the other music-poem of the italian time it is not difficult to detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and whimsical comparisons. once more browning seems preoccupied with that in music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and aimless vivacity. only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of the ballroom. yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless mirth, for ever revolving on itself:-- "est fuga, volvitur rota; on we drift: where looms the dim port?" the intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent strife of jangling tongues, "affirming, denying, holding, risposting, subjoining,"--the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light of nature and truth:-- "over our heads truth and nature-- still our life's zigzags and dodges, ins and outs, weaving a new legislature-- god's gold just shining its last where that lodges, palled beneath man's usurpature." but browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play, of these zigzags and dodges,--of zigzags and dodges of every kind,--not to feel the irony of the attack upon this "stringing of nature through cobwebs"; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's intricacy grows, "but where's music, the dickens?" we hear browning mocking the indignant inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. _master hugues_ could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of "god's gold" and the glimpses of the "earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception and instinctive delight in every filament of the web of human "legislature." this double aspect of browning's poetic nature is vividly reflected in the memorable essay on shelley which he wrote at paris in , as an introduction to a series of letters since shown to have been forged. the essay--unfortunately not included in his works--is a document of first-rate importance for the mind of browning in the midst of his greatest time; it is also by far the finest appreciation of shelley which had yet appeared. he saw in shelley one who, visionary and subjective as he was, had solved the problem which confronts every idealist who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality. to browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic grossness and strength. shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this task altogether,--building his dream-world of cloud and cavern loveliness remote from anything we know. it is browning, the most "actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the "practicality" of shelley,--insisted, as it is even now not superfluous to insist, on the fearless and direct energy with which he strove to root his intuitions in experience. "his noblest and predominating characteristic," he urges, to quote these significant words once more, "is his simultaneous perception of power and love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom i have knowledge; proving how, as he says-- "'the spirit of the worm beneath the sod in love and worship blends itself with god.'" browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of his own art. it lay in the peculiar "dramatic" quality of his mind to express himself freely only in situations not his own. hence, while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn with a curious externality and detachment. it is in his musicians, his painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of browning the poet really live. he is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians and rabbis, and of scores of callings which never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. in the _transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately illustrates. the reading public which entertained any opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for another boehme, "with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say." a few knew that they had to deal, not less, with a "stout mage like him of halberstadt," who "with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side." the portrait of the poet of valladolid, on the other hand (_how it strikes a contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. a grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("i never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. we see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. we see the alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who "stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ... if any beat a horse, you felt he saw, if any cursed a woman, he took note,"-- and all this, for browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself. browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of popular repute. later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _pacchiarotto_. the _popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the obstacles to his own. there is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,--the dying "grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition. "he said, 'what's time? leave now for dogs and apes! man has forever.'" this is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and absolutely individual form the central core of browning's passion and thought. even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of soul--"too full for sound and foam." it is, among songs over the dead, what _rabbi ben ezra_ and _prospice_ are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those. like ben ezra, the grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the trust:-- "he ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success found, or earth's failure: 'wilt thou trust death or not?' he answered, 'yes: hence with life's pale lure!'" to ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the foundations. he was made in the large mould of the gods,--born with "thy face and throat, lyric apollo,"--and the disease which crippled and silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he wreaked his mind. and now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe--of the sublime things of nature. "here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send! lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying." vi. _the grammarian's funeral_ achieves, in the terms and with the resources of browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of power and love in the abstract with beauty and good in the concrete, and finding a link between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of god. such a conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close relation in browning's view between poetry and religion, and in particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly. here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the christian idea. "the revelation of god in christ" was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the web of being blindly wove"--which shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." to that solution shelley seemed to browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. shelley had mistaken "churchdom" for christianity; but he was on the way, browning was convinced, to become a christian himself. "i shall say what i think,--had shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the christians." this emphatic declaration is of great importance for browning's intellectual history. he may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided shelley from the christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the christian thought of our time has in some important points "ranged itself with" shelley; so that the christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. but it is clear that for browning himself the essence of christianity lay at this time in something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought. it was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal interest which drew browning in these italian years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing "revelation of god in christ." it is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through browning's art, how that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of christ himself. but that was at no time browning's way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for. he would not trumpet forth truth in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. and nowhere is this method carried further than in the christian poems of the italian time. the supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but fra lippo lippi and master hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they expound; while the christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of men outside the christian world--an arab physician, a greek poet, a jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from christians yet farther from the centre than these, like blougram and the abbe deodaet. in method as in conception these pieces are among the most browningesque things that browning ever wrote. it is clear, however, that while his way of handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with them is new. the _karshish_, the _clean_, and the _blougram_ have no prototype or parallel among the poems of browning's previous periods. in the early dramatic lyrics and romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of pippa or of theocrite that "god's in his world"; and the irreligion is the humanist paganism of st praxed's, not so much hostile to christianity as unconscious of it. no single poem written before shows that acute interest in the problems of christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this and the following years. _saul_, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the david of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in , being the naïve, devout child, brother of pippa and of theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of christ was the splendid achievement of the later years.[ ] and to all this more acutely christian work the _christmas-eve and easter-day_ ( ) served as a significant prologue. [footnote : it is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from browning's correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first nine sections were published. the traditional legend of david would in any case suggest so much. that the intention was not then executed is just the significant fact.] there can be little doubt that the devout christian faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry. yet we may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent. she, as little as he, was a dogmatic christian; both refused to put on, in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[ ] "the truth, as god sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth.... i believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these different theologies,--and because the really divine draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with all sorts of worshippers, from the sistine chapel to mr fox's, those kneeling and those standing."[ ] yet she demurs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both these extremes. "the unitarians seem to me to throw over what is most beautiful in the christian doctrine; but the formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears excusable not to see." to which he replies (aug. ): "dearest, i know your very meaning, in what you said of religion, and responded to it with my whole soul--what you express now is for us both, ... those are my own feelings, my convictions beside--instinct confirmed by reason." [footnote : _e.b.b. to r.b._, th aug. .] [footnote : ib.] these words of browning's seem to furnish the clue to the relation between their minds in this matter. their intercourse disturbed no conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical. but her intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional consciousness, and in particular gave to that "revelation of god in christ" which they both regarded as what was "most beautiful in the christian doctrine," a more vital hold upon his intellectual and imaginative life. in this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid words to her (february )--"i mean to ... let my mind get used to its new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then let all i have done be the prelude and the real work begin"--were not unfulfilled. no deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the later, as a whole, from the earlier work: the "dramatic" method, which was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature, established itself more and more firmly in his practice. but the letters of - show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed, or succeeded only "once and for one only," in evading his dramatic bias, he certainly succeeded in making the dramatic form more eloquently expressive of his personal faith. this was peculiarly the case in the remarkable _christmas-eve and easter-day_ ( ), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious influences which it brought. the influence of the ardent singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the devout but undogmatic christian, which drew the problem of christianity nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. there is much throughout which suggests that browning was deliberately putting off the habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards untried sources and avenues of expression. he lays hold for the first time of the machinery of supernatural vision. nothing that he had yet done approached in boldness these christmas and easter apparitions of the lord of love. they break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid anomaly, upon his human and actual world. and the really notable thing is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even brutal fidelity as just here. he seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of theocrite's rome, in which the angels who come and go, and god who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the empyrean upon modern camberwell. the pages in which browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with balzac or zola. of course this is intensely characteristic of browning. the quickened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of expression,--sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,--as equally genuine utterances of spiritual fervour,-- "when frothy spume and frequent sputter prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest." these lines, and the great shelleyan declaration that "a loving worm within its clod were diviner than a loveless god," are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the _christmas-day_, in which they occur. we need not in any wise identify browning with the christmas-day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether browning's own. browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. he makes the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in browning himself there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because the earthen vessel was flawed. like _christmas-eve_, _easter-day_ is a dramatic study,--profound convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically defined than his own. the main speaker is plainly not identical with the narrator of _christmas-eve_, who is incidentally referred to as "our friend." their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their belief they differ widely. the speaker in _christmas-eve_ is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of _easter-day_ is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile content. the problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of divine love. but the easter-day vision conveys a sterner message than that of _christmas-eve_. love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. the christmas vision makes humanity seem more divine; the easter vision makes the divine seem less human. the hypersensitive moral nature of the easter-day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a last judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the northern lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. this difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. the rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained seriousness and lyric beauty. yet the easter-day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental issues. when the form of christian belief to be adopted has been settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable, will still remain restive. browning of all men felt impatient of every nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the living substance of character; and he makes his easter-day visionary confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in outward "evidence,"-- "'tis found, no doubt: as is your sort of mind, so is your sort of search: you'll find what you desire." still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who complacently assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of christianity to have been enacted "to give our joys a zest, and prove our sorrows for the best." upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious character falls the scorching splendour of the easter vision, with its ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by love, passing over into the uplifting counter--affirmation, indispensable to browning's optimism, that-- "all thou dost enumerate of power and beauty in the world the mightiness of love was curled inextricably round about." with all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in browning's work at all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. the strong personal conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance, checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a work of art. the speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations. the daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of dante, so keenly felt in the _sordello_ days, had been wrought to new potency by the magic of the life in dante's florence, and the subtler magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to that of dante for beatrice.[ ] the divine apparitions have the ironic hauteurs and sarcasms of beatrice in the _paradise_. yet the comparison brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of browning's presentment. in dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in place; but the christmas and easter visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern london, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain. [footnote : _one word more_.] browning probably felt this, for the _christmas-eve and easter-day_ stands in this respect alone in his work. but the idea of christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the _men and women_. it was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early italian years, completed the splendid torso of _saul_. david's vision of the christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the easter vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it. but while this vision abruptly bursts upon him, david's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its powers. david is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. the love for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of god; until the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the christ stands full before his eyes. all that is supernatural in the _saul_ is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of david's soul. the magic of the wonderful nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of angels and powers are unuttered and unseen. only less beautiful than browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. the lyric simplicity, the naïve intensity which bear a david, a pippa, a pompilia without effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight of a rabbi ben ezra. in this sense, the great song of david has a counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the arab physician karshish. he also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. but where david is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the semblance of resistance, karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. no touch of worldly motive belongs to either. the shepherd-boy is not more single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy. at every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,--"things of price"--"blue flowering borage, the aleppo sort," or "judaea's gum-tragacanth." but karshish has much of the temper of browning himself: these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. this man's flesh so admirably made by god is yet but the earthly prison for "that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." the case of lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put by. this abstracted docile man of perfect physical vigour, who heeds the approach of the roman avenger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the field,--compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he interprets him:-- "he holds on firmly to some thread of life-- ... which runs across some vast distracting orb of glory on either side that meagre thread, which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-- the spiritual life around the earthly life: the law of that is known to him as this, his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. so is the man perplext with impulses sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, proclaiming what is right and wrong across, and not along, this black thread through the blaze-- 'it should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'" lazarus stands where paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he "knows god's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the paracelsian endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day. to karshish, however, these very embarrassments--so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan--make it credible that lazarus is indeed no oriental sludge, but one who has verily seen god. but then came the terrible crux,--the pretension, intolerable to semitic monotheism, that god had been embodied in a man. the words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like ferishtah, he will not repeat them. yet he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems finally at an end--when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said--in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not incredible:-- "the very god! think, abib; dost thou think? so, the all-great were the all-loving too,-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying, 'o heart i made, a heart beats here!' face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!" that words like these, intensely johannine in conception, should seem to start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea of an approximation between god and that which he fashioned, is an extraordinary _tour de force_ of dramatic portraiture. among the minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which browning rarely resorts. the "awe" which invests lazarus is heightened by a mystic setting of landscape. the visionary scene of his first meeting with karshish, though altogether browningesque in detail, is wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:-- "i crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills like an old lion's cheek teeth. out there came a moon made like a face with certain spots multiform, manifold and menacing: then a wind rose behind me." a less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of _cleon_. the greek mind fascinated browning, though most of his renderings of it have the savour of a salt not gathered in attica, and his choice of types shows a strong personal bias. from the heroic and majestic elder art of greece he turns with pronounced preference to euripides the human and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile criticism, and his "warm tears." it is somewhat along these lines that he has conceived his greek poet of the days of karshish, confronted, like the arab doctor, with the "new thing." as karshish is at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive and worldly-wise of men. he looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy. but while karshish has the true scholar's dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. he gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,--his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys. the magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy. he is a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:-- "i know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!" with great ingenuity this greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un-greek as that of the incarnation is un-semitic. karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which fascinated while it awed; to cleon a future state in which joy and capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence:-- "zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, he must have done so, were it possible!" the little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant greek decadence, as does the closing picture in karshish the mystic dawn of the earth. here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky. in was in such grave _adagio_ notes as these that browning chose to set forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and humanity of heathendom. the after-fortunes of the christian legend, on the other hand, and the naïve ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to _scherzo_,--audacious and inimitable _scherzo_, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime. _holy-cross day_ and _the heretic's tragedy_ both culminate, like _karshish_ and _clean_, in a glimpse of christ. but here, instead of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. the jews, packed like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song of ben ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of christianity in the name of christ ever conceived:-- "we withstood christ then? be mindful how at least we withstand barabbas now! was our outrage sore? but the worst we spared, to have called these--christians, had we dared! let defiance of them pay mistrust of thee, and rome make amends for calvary!" and john of molay, as he burns in paris square, cries upon "the name he had cursed with all his life." the _tragedy_ stands alone in literature; browning has written nothing more original. its singularity springs mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. the "singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points in the exhibition,--noting that the fagots are piled to the right height and are of the right quality-- "good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ... larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:" and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking jests and gibes at the victim. but through this distorting medium we see the soul of john himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes and the saint we half descry with our own. of explicit pathos there is not a touch. yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:-- "ha, ha, john plucketh now at his rose to rid himself of a sorrow at heart! lo,--petal on petal, fierce rays unclose; anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart; and with blood for dew, the bosom boils; and a gust of sulphur is all its smell; and lo, he is horribly in the toils of a coal-black giant flower of hell! so, as john called now, through the fire amain, on the name, he had cursed with, all his life-- to the person, he bought and sold again-- for the face, with his daily buffets rife-- feature by feature it took its place: and his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, at the steady whole of the judge's face-- died. forth john's soul flared into the dark." none of these dramatic studies of christianity attracted so lively an interest as _bishop blougram's apology._ it was "actual" beyond anything he had yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an illustrious catholic prelate familiar in london society; it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly clever. even tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon _men and women_ at large. the figure of blougram, no less than his discourse, was virtually new in browning, and could have come from him at no earlier time. he is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom browning at all times drew with so keen a zest,--by ogniben, the bishop in _pippa passes_, the bishop of st praxed's. but mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the urgency of the christian problem which since _christmas-eve and easter-day_ had so largely and variously coloured browning's work. it occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,--it was far too deeply ingrained for that. but blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. like cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he repudiates. but there is much more in blougram than this. the imposing personality of wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. a great spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society, appealed powerfully to browning's congenital delight in all strong and vivid life. he was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his circumstances and shaped his life to his will. opposed to a man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough; and browning, far from taking his part and putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted, betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social service. it is plain that the actual blougram offered tempting points of contact with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through the lips of "rabbi ben ezra." even what was most problematic in him, his apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly holding his unbelief in check,-- "kept quiet like the snake 'neath michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." but browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and deliberate masquerade in blougram's defence. he made him "say right things and call them by wrong names." the intellectual athlete in him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in every equation he seemed to establish. he played, and made blougram play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery and that of hardly won control. the rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies less than half of _men and women_, and leaves the second half of the title unexplained. in that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes from every line of his italian work, the profound fulfilment of his spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent element. his imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and unqualified experience of love. his poetry focussed itself more persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the recognition. it would have been strange if the special form of love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained untouched by it. in fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for browning's poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it. vii. the love-poetry of the _men and women_ volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents. it was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of his poems issued in , to other rubrics, to the _dramatic lyrics_, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the _dramatic romances_. but of browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half were lovers or occupied with love. such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. the biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable months of - provoked no sonnets "_to_ the portuguese." his personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own. the white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue. no english poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. in his way of approaching love browning strangely blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions. the keen analytic accent of paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly note of shelley. "love is all" might have served as the text for the whole volume of browning's love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love. "love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in _men and women_; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, "the world triumphing over love." sometimes love's triumph is, for browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love. the triumph of browning's united lovers has often a superb elizabethan note of defiance. passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over nature. the gentle romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. they may meet and woo "among the ruins," as coleridge met and wooed his genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car. "oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! earth's returns for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! shut them in, with their triumphs and their glories and the rest! love is best." another lover, in _my star_, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just--a star. more finely touched than either of these is _by the fireside_. after _one word more_, to which it is obviously akin, it is browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. the outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. a landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save in _christabel_,-- "we two stood there with never a third, but each by each, as each knew well: the sights we saw and the sounds we heard, the lights and the shades made up a spell, till the trouble grew and stirred. * * * * * a moment after, and hands unseen were hanging the night around us fast; but we knew that a bar was broken between life and life: we were mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen. the forests had done it; there they stood; we caught for a moment the powers at play: they had mingled us so, for once and good, their work was done--we might go or stay, they relapsed to their ancient mood." _by the fireside_ is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever disguise the italian home-life of the poet and his wife. the famous description of "the perfect wife" as she sat "musing by firelight, that great brow and the spirit-small hand propping it, yonder, my heart knows how"-- remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form. yet neither here nor elsewhere did browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union. his intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate. the lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _in three days_. and from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:-- "oh moment, one and infinite! the water slips o'er stock and stone; the west is tender, hardly bright: how grey at once is the evening grown-- one star, its chrysolite! * * * * * oh, the little more, and how much it is! and the little less, and what worlds away! how a sound shall quicken content to bliss, or a breath suspend the blood's best play, and life be a proof of this!" but the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them. the "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. it provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics _love in a life_ and _life in a love_, variations on the same theme--vain pursuit of the averted face--the one a _largo_, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. the dreamier mood is elaborated in the _serenade at the villa_ and _one way of love_. a few superbly imaginative phrases bring the italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,-- "life was dead, and so was light." the serenader himself is no child of italy but a meditative teuton, who, hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give. the lover in _one way of love_ is something of a teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate. but there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure--admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea--and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:-- "she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing; suppose pauline had bade me sing!" or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, _the last ride together_ and _evelyn hope_. "how are we to take it?" asks mr fotheringham of the latter. "as the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" the question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression. this lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to romantic and to christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the christian faith in personal immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as romance demands. _the last ride together_ has attracted a different audience. its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds. this lover dreams of no future recovery of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of evelyn's lover, that "god creates the love to reward the love," is not his. his mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." but that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven. "what if heaven be that, fair and strong at life's best, with our eyes upturned whither life's flower is first discerned, we, fixed so, ever should so abide? what if we still ride on, we two with life for ever old yet new, changed not in kind but in degree, the instant made eternity,-- and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, for ever ride?" the "glory of failure" is with browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of romance. it is only the masculine lover whom browning allows thus to get the better of unreturned love. his women have no such _remedia amoris_; their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. it is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. this distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. an almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _a woman's last word, in a year_, and _any wife to any husband_: the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the "sentimental." there is a rarer, subtler pathos in _two in the campagna_. the outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. he feels the campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:-- "silence and passion, joy and peace, an everlasting wash of air-- ... such life here, through such length of hours, such miracles performed in play, such primal naked forms of flowers, such letting nature have her way while heaven looks from its towers;" and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also "be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. but the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that yearn." or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:-- "all is blue again after last night's rain, and the south dries the hawthorn spray. only, my love's away! i'd as lief that the blue were grey." the disasters of love rarely, with browning, stir us very deeply. his temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune--kinder to the man than to the poet--had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. it may even be questioned whether all browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of musset's _nuits_,--bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:-- "ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaître, c'était par une triste nuit. l'aile des vents battait à ma fenêtre; j'étais seul, courbé sur mon lit. j'y regardais une place chérie, tiède encor d'un baiser brûlant; et je songeais comme la femme oublie, et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, qui se déchirait lentement. je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, des cheveux, des débris d'amour. tout ce passé me criait à l'oreille ses éternels serments d'un jour. je contemplais ces réliques sacrées, qui me faisaient trembler la main: larmes du coeur par le coeur devorées, et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurées ne reconnaîtront plus demain!"[ ] [footnote : musset, _nuit de décembre_.] the same quest of the problematic which attracted browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"--embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. _a light woman, a pretty woman_, and _another way of love_ are refined studies in this world of half tones. but the most important and individual poem of this group is _the statue and the bust_, an excellent example of the union in browning of the romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates romance. the duke and the lady are simpler and slighter hamlets--hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. the poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme subtlety of browning's use of figure. he was at once too much and too little of a casuist,--too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,--to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit. lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive "dreams" of love. _women and roses_ has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. but there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream--the dream of an unloved woman. such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, browning painted in his poignant and original _in a balcony_. it is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. the three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in _colombe's birthday_. love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. there is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. for a brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. in its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic dream-politics of m. maeterlinck. but, those presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising clearness and persuasive reality that browning invariably communicates to his dreams. the three figures who in a few hours taste the height of ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic force and truth. for all three love is the absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may "resume life after death (it is no less than life, after such long unlovely labouring days) and liberate to beauty life's great need o' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work, suppress'd itself erewhile." in the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long foregone, as wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw everywhere the willing submission to duty. even "these statues round us stand abrupt, distinct, the strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed, the muse for ever wedded to her lyre, nymph to her fawn, and silence to her rose: see god's approval on his universe! let us do so--aspire to live as these in harmony with truth, ourselves being true!" but it is the two women who attract browning's most powerful handling. one of them, the queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. a "lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the indignant honesty of norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic gudrun or brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless girl he has chosen.[ ] between these powerful, rigid, and simple natures stands constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and palpitating ardour of a flame. she is concentrated romance. her love is an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,-- "complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs, long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look"; she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred openly happy friends." she loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for their own sake. but she is also romantically generous, and because she "owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own hopes of happiness. [footnote : an anecdote to which prof. dowden has lately called attention (_browning_, p. ) describes browning in his last years as demurring to the current interpretation of the _dénoûment_. some one had remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take norbert to his doom." "'now i don't quite think that,' answered browning, _as if he were following out the play as a spectator_. 'the queen has a large and passionate temperament.... she would have died by a knife in her heart. the guard would have come to carry away her dead body.'" the catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy. but we cannot believe that this was what browning originally meant to happen. that norbert and constance expect "doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in no doubt that they are right. they may, nevertheless, be wrong; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open of the doors? the queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to carry away her dead body"?] were it not for its unique position in browning's poetry, one might well be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which closes _men and women_--the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the nucleus, of the whole. but here, for "once, and only once, and for one only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome--overcome, however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway. all the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. the poet is a high priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is habitual and of routine,--even the habits of his genius and the routine of his art. unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, for once, not as lippo, roland, or andrea, but "in his true person." and he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the apprehension of the world,--the moon's other face with all its "silent silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "heaven's gift takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity of perfect love. the _one word more_ was written in september , shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon waned over the london roofs. less than six years later the "moon of poets" had passed for ever from his ken. chapter v. london. _dramatis personÆ._ ah, love! but a day and the world has changed! the sun's away, and the bird estranged. --_james lee's wife_. that one face, far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows. --_epilogue_. the catastrophe of june , , closed with appalling suddenness the fifteen years' married life of browning. "i shall grow still, i hope," he wrote to miss haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and remains." the words vividly express the valour in the midst of desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. the italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him; even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her had been laid had no power to detain him. but his departure was no mere flight from scenes intolerably dear. he had their child to educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but who was as little inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. after visiting his father in paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming letters[ ]--he settled in london, at first in lodgings, then at the house in warwick crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his home. something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of _fifine_. browning had been that "householder," had gone through the dragging days and nights,-- "all the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights, all the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then all the fancies,"-- perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting. certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath browning's genial sociality. the world from which his saint had been snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. when proposals were made in in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his bowels" by prying into his intimacies. to the last he dismissed similar proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious observance and fastidious good form. for the rest, london contained much that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility. florence and rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of shakespeare and milton, in which he presently began to move as an intimate. thackeray, ruskin, tennyson, carlyle, rossetti, leighton, woolner, prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals. and the flock of old friends who accepted browning began to be reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. tennyson was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of tennyson's popularity had certainly blocked many of the avenues of browning's fame, appealing as the laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which browning rudely traversed or ignored. on the tennysonian reader _pur sang_ browning's work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by frederick tennyson to his brother, of "chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with f. tennyson again, believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." this was the tone of the 'fifties, when tennyson's vogue was at its height. but with the 'sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond the trim pleasances of the early victorians to more daring romantic adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless grip of the beauty that lies in truth. the genius of the pre-raphaelites began to find response. and so did the yet richer and more composite genius of browning. moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred work. if _pippa passes_ counts for something in _aurora leigh, aurora leigh_ in its turn trained the future readers of _the ring and the book_. [footnote : his father beautifully said of mrs browning's portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.] the altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in , of browning's _dramatis personæ_ and mr swinburne's _atalanta in calydon_. both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities. "all my new cultivators are young men," browning wrote to miss blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, i observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they 'always meant to say,' and never did." the volume included practically all that browning had actually written since ,--less than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years. but during these later years in italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as _the ring and the book_. as a whole, the _dramatis personæ_ stands yet more clearly apart from _men and women_ than that does from all that had gone before. both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn. the sense of tragic loss broods over all its music. in lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. _rabbi ben ezra_ and _abt vogler, a death in the desert_, are as noble poetry as _andrea del sarto_ or _the grammarian's funeral_; but it is a poetry less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, _dis aliter visum_ and _youth and art_, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of _men and women_. the world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'sixties he turned upon life. the women are homely, even plain, like james lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and edith in _too late_, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _dis aliter visum_; and they have homely names, like "lee" or "lamb" or "brown," not gratuitously grotesque ones like blougram, blouphocks, or the outrageous "gigadibs." "sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not. the legend of the gold-haired maiden of pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard in galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of venice. if we may by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, burnt and bare" in themselves. and he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the french coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in italy. "this is a wild little place in brittany," he wrote to miss blagden in august ; "close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... if i could i would stay just as i am for many a day. i feel out of the very earth sometimes as i sit here at the window." the wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of james lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the isle with the primitive fancies of caliban; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of love which flows from the lips of the dying apostle. in the poetry of _men and women_ we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _dramatis personæ_, the processes of nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate. doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying john and of the third speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through moods not unlike those of james lee's wife, whose problem, like his own, was how to live when the answering love was gone. his "fire," like hers, was made "of shipwreck wood",[ ] and her words "at the window" can only be an echo of his-- "ah, love! but a day and the world has changed! the sun's away, and the bird estranged; the wind has dropped, and the sky's deranged: summer has stopped." [footnote : the second section of _james lee's wife, by the fireside_, cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed and significant, reference to the like-named poem in _men and women_, which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.] as her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to him. she walks "along the beach," or "on the cliff," or "among the rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!" he wrote to miss blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind. not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic fallacy." she is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[ ] if nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of god in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,--the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were. [footnote : cf. _supra_, p. .] _james lee's wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the _dramatis personæ_. the note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration. the _dramatic lyrics_ and _men and women_ are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the _lost mistress_, that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." and the lovers are spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. but these lovers of the 'sixties are of less ætherial temper; they are more obviously, familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and there is agony in the purifying fire. such are the wronged husband in _the worst of it_, and the finally frustrated lover in _too late_. in the group of "might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant and tragic but equally uncompensated. "you fool!" cries the homely little heroine of _dis aliter visum_ to the elderly scholar who ten years before had failed to propose to her,-- "you fool for all your lore!... the devil laughed at you in his sleeve! you knew not? that i well believe; or you had saved two souls;--nay, four." nor is there much of the glory of failure in kate brown's bitter smile, as she sums up the story of youth and art:-- "each life unfulfilled, you see; it hangs still, patchy and scrappy, we have not sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." it is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and absolute loss browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought of recovery after death. for himself death was now inseparably intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. not that he looked forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. _prospice_ would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. how near this thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of browning's imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be seen from the _eurydice to orpheus_ which he fitly placed immediately after these-- "but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! let them once more absorb me!" but in two well-known poems of the _dramatis personæ_ browning has splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion--note of _prospice_. _abt vogler_ and _rabbi ben ezra_ are among the surest strongholds of his popular fame. _rabbi ben ezra_ is a great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative splendour, indistinguishably blend. it is not for nothing that browning put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. ben ezra's thoughts are not all hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the fray. ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of the rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which the great potter moulded and modelled upon the wheel of time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of eastern fatalism mingling with the western gospel of individual energy. and all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means passivity. in _abt vogler_ the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured; only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy of artistic creation. browning has put into the mouth of his old catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. the abbé's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good." this was the work of music; and the poem is in truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions of music are explored and unfolded,--the mysterious avenues which it seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations of time and space themselves. all that is doctrinal and speculative in _abt vogler_ is rooted in musical experience,--the musical experience, no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. of the doctrine and speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. it has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. and neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet-- "i know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man that out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." _a death in the desert_, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these two. to attack strauss through the mouth of the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm to strauss, who had to be met on other ground and with other weapons,--the weapons of history and comparative religion--in which browning's skill was that only of a brilliant amateur. but the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this. what is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative fabric. love, browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal principle of his creed; god was vital to him only as a loving god, and christ only as the human embodiment and witness of god's love. the traditional story of christ was in this sense of profound significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the atonement, which, however closely bound up with the popular conception of god's love, had nothing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline the name of christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[ ] it was thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching christianity that he imagined this moving episode,--the dying apostle whose genius had made that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all but extinct,--"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still glowing with undiminished soul. the material fabric which enshrines this fine essence of the christian spirit is of the frailest; and the contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,--the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of rome. [footnote : other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.] the discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking, and contains some of browning's most memorable utterances about love, in particular the noble lines-- "for life with all it yields of joy and woe ... is just our chance of the prize of learning love, how love might be, hath been indeed, and is." nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out. man loved, and god would not be above man if he did not also love. the horrible spectre of a god who has power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of browning's thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exorcise it. and no wonder. for a loving god was the very keystone of browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure. it is no accident that the _death in the desert_ is followed immediately by a theological study in a very different key, _caliban upon setebos_. for in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" caliban--the "savage man"--appears "mooting the point 'what is god?'" and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. it was quite in browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes _pacchiarotto_, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of _christmas-eve_. browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of shakespeare's caliban.[ ] kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of stephano and trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of europe; a caustic symbol of democracy, as renan saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising culture. browning's caliban is far truer to shakespeare's conception; he is the caliban of shakespeare, not followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,--caliban of the days before the storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible to the wisdom of europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice. his wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. he anticipates the heady joy of stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own invention. and his religion too is his own,--no decoction from any of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the island. it is a mistake to call caliban's theology a study of primitive religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive tribe, and caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the individualist ways of browning's imagination. tradition and prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for caliban only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation of free thought:-- "his dam held that the quiet made all things which setebos vexed only: 'holds not so; who made them weak, made weakness he might vex." [footnote : it is characteristic that m. maeterlinck found no place for caliban in his striking fantasia on the _tempest, joyzelle_.] caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with browning's own. his god is that sheer power which browning from the first recognised; it is because setebos feels heat and cold, and is therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that caliban decides there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth." caliban is one of browning's most consummate realists; he has the remorselessly vivid perceptions of a lippo lippi and a sludge. browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line,--as the pie with the long tongue "that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize," or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called caliban (an admirable trait)-- "a bitter heart that bides its time and bites." and all this curious scrutiny is reflected in caliban's god. the sudden catastrophe at the close ("what, what? a curtain o'er the world at once!") is one of browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to provide its most vivid illustration. shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire together against its benignity and wisdom. the reader is apt to remember this conjunction when he passes from _caliban_ to _mr sludge._ stephano and trinculo, almost alone among shakespeare's rascals, are drawn without geniality, and sludge is the only one of browning's "casuists" whom he treats with open scorn. that some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. yet no one can mistake _sludge_ for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. the resentful husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession of browning's complex literary faculty, or baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and problematic modes of mind. his attitude towards spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions. himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no god. but even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain. it is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters. but sludge is clearly permitted, like blougram before and juan and hohenstiel-schwangau after him, to assume in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which had points of contact with browning's own. he has an eye for "spiritual facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset. but his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. his "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them "lazily alive, open-mouthed, ... letting all nature's loosely guarded motes settle and, slick, be swallowed." like caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees "the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself. but caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more estimable than sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy terms. caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to setebos's star--when setebos is looking; sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins. sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in common with that of the poet of ben ezra, and of the _epilogue_ which immediately follows.[ ] [footnote : the foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in florence in - , but after his settlement in london. the only ground for the current view is mrs browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that winter (_letters_, may , ). i am enabled, by the kindness of prof. hall griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from browning to buchanan in shows this "long poem" to have been one on napoleon iii. (cf. above, p. ). some of it probably appears in _hohenstiel schwangau_.] this _epilogue_ is one of the few utterances in which browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. that he should choose this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of god and man, to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. far more emphatically than in the analogous _christmas-eve_, browning resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic affirmations of the churches into symptoms of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine. the third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof god could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human hearts. the best comment upon his faith is the saying of meredith, "the fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[ ] only, for browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished face, which "far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows."[ ] [footnote : quoted _int. journ. of ethics_, april .] [footnote : the last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been so understood by some, particularly by mr j.m. robertson. but pantheism was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking converges, but which it never even proximately attains. god and the soul never mingle, however intimate their communion. cf. chap. x. below.] chapter vi. _the ring and the book_. tout passe.--l'art robuste seul a l'éternité. le buste survit à la cité. et la médaille austère que trouve un laboureur sous terre révèle un empereur. --gautier: _l'art_. after four years of silence, the _dramatis personæ_ was followed by _the ring and the book_. this monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. there is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood--the valiant stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. we are in italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of god, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,--a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl. with the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of art were yet more fascinating than its products, browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the _ring_. the chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. but it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. the story of pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy italian night of june , as he watched from the balcony of casa guidi. the patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the _donnée_ of that hour. but the conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike those of the primal vision. before the end of june in the following year mrs browning died, and browning presently left florence for ever. for the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as mrs orr says, browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. but within a few months, it is clear, the story of pompilia not merely recovered its hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the last and most brilliant gift. the poem which enshrined pompilia was thus instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet commemorative and memorial; and we understand how browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "lyric love," as it were the urania, or heavenly muse, of a modern epic. the definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the autumn of . in september he wrote to miss blagden from biarritz of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty well in my head--the roman murder-story, you know."[ ] after the completion of the _dramatis personæ_ in - , the "roman murder-story" became his central occupation. to it three quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. for the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in society, to "live and like earth's way." he talked openly among his literary friends of the poem and its progress, rumour and speculation busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and curious interest. at length, in november , the first instalment was published. it was received by the most authoritative part of the press with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely judicial _athenæum_ took the lead. confirmed sceptics or deriders, like edward fitzgerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. to critics trained in classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely disturbing; and most of fitzgerald's friends shared, according to him, the opinion of carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without _backbone_ or basis of common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man." tennyson, however, admitted (to fitzgerald) that he "found greatness" in it,[ ] and mr swinburne was in the forefront of the chorus of praise. the audience which now welcomed browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of mr swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later _idylls of the king_. readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to browning's italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality. [footnote : w.m. rossetti reports browning to have told him, in a call, march , , that he "began it in october . was staying at bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by roland, and there laid out the full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." the date is presumably an error of rossetti's for (_rossetti papers_, p. ). cf. letter of sept. , (orr, p. ).] [footnote : _more letters_ of e.f.g.] and undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for browning himself. he had inherited his father's taste for stories of mysterious crime.[ ] and to the detective's interest in probing a mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder browning, was added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible case for each party. the casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, and the devoted student of euripides,[ ] seized with delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." he avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay. every detail is examined from every point of view. little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. but then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at the outset, in the stage of "crude fact," merely a common and sordid tale like a hundred others, picked up "at random" from a rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing the infinite worth of "the insignificant." rather, he thought that on that broiling june day, a providential "hand" had "pushed" him to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a "prize." he saw in it from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth of a story which told "for once clean for the church and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[ ] the metal which went to the making of the _ring_, and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold. its disintegrated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman. above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of pompilia and caponsacchi. it was upon these two that browning's divining imagination fastened. their relation was the crucial point of the whole story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed "to abolish the death of things, deep calling unto deep." this process was itself, however, not sudden or simple. this first inspiration was superb, visionary, romantic,--in keeping with "the beauty and fearfulness of that june night" upon the terrace at florence, where it came to him. "all was sure, fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced, the victim stripped and prostrate: what of god? the cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash, quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew, as, in a glory of armour like saint george, out again sprang the young good beauteous priest bearing away the lady in his arms saved for a splendid minute and no more."[ ] [footnote : cf. ii. corkran, _celebrities and i_ (r. browning, senior), .] [footnote : it is perhaps not without significance that in the summer sojourn when _the ring and the book_ was planned, euripides was, apart from that, his absorbing companion. "i have got on," he writes to miss blagden, "by having a great read at euripides,--the one book i brought with me."] [footnote : _ring and the book_, i. .] [footnote : _ring and the book_, i. - .] such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled gold and agate of the _idylls of the king_. but browning's hero could be no sir galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more. the idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his chosen career. born to be a lover, in dante's great way, he had groped through life without the vision of beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps dante after beatrice's death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. the church encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, caponsacchi became. but the vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him. he walked in the garden of the hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.[ ] then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in the theatre, of "a lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad." [footnote : _caponsacchi_, f.] the gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of love. the young priest found himself haunting the solemn shades of the duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether marini were a better poet than dante after all. his patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in church all day long:-- "'are you turning molinist?' i answered quick: 'sir, what if i turned christian? it might be.'" the forged love-letters he instantly sees through. they are the scorpion--blotch feigned to issue miraculously from madonna's mouth. and then pompilia makes her appeal. "take me to rome!" the madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," and he at once receives and accepts "my own fact, my miracle self-authorised and self-explained," in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,--nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:-- "i paced the city: it was the first spring. by the invasion i lay passive to, in rushed new things, the old were rapt away; alike abolished--the imprisonment of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me down." the bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:-- "death meant, to spurn the ground. soar to the sky,--die well and you do that. the very immolation made the bliss; death was the heart of life, and all the harm my folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp: as if the intense centre of the flame should turn a heaven to that devoted fly which hitherto, sophist alike and sage, saint thomas with his sober grey goose-quill, and sinner plato by cephisian reed, would fain, pretending just the insect's good, whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again. into another state, under new rule i knew myself was passing swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthly garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so i lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and outthrob pain." but he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but only completed, the old ideal. the church had offered her priest no alternative between the world and the cloister,--self-indulgence and self-slaughter. for ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion altogether. she calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to her, the bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:-- "leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!" from the exalted pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death "are means to an end, that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form of worship is self-sacrifice." yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately determines his course. love is, for browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure than thought; caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve god:-- "duty to god is duty to her: i think god, who created her, will save her too some new way, by one miracle the more, without me." but when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty "like daring try be good and true myself, leaving the shows of things to the lord of show." with the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the final fact"-- "in contempt for all misapprehending ignorance of the human heart, much more the mind of christ,-- that i assuredly did bow, was blessed by the revelation of pompilia." thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. the militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts. and the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of pompilia. pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service. but while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance-- "promoted at one cry o' the trump of god to the new service, not to longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[ ] [footnote : _the pope_, .] and she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion "of my one friend, my only, all my own, who put his breast between the spears and me." pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "lyric love." remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished elizabeth browning. but browning's conception of his wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of pompilia. she, he declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life. pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naïve spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life." spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. he loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an aprile, a david, a pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song. pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. but she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. in lyrical wealth and swiftness browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of pippa; but how much he had grown in shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly achieved. her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. by simple force of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his last desperate cry-- "pompilia, will you let them murder me?" in contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part. the old pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed." "where are the christians in their panoply? the loins we girt about with truth, the breasts righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?... slunk into corners!" the aretine archbishop, who thrust the suppliant pompilia back upon the wolf, the convent of convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable abate and canon, guido's brothers,--it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old pope contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root. for here the theory of the church was hard to maintain. not only had the church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[ ] the blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light. was caponsacchi blind? "ay, as a man should be inside the sun, delirious with the plenitude of light."[ ] [footnote : _the pope_, f.] [footnote : _the pope_, .] it is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the _cenci_ had this other, less famous, "roman murder-case" fallen into his hands. the old godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. yet, though the shelleyan affinities of browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. the revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace. he parts company with rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to burke. as sources of moral and spiritual growth the state and the church do not count. training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. his idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism. he recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government. none of his unofficial heroes--paracelsus or sordello or rabbi ben ezra--has a deeper moral insight than the aged pope. but the pope's impressiveness for browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office. he faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his god-given judgment, and flags with years. his "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, pope though he be; and he naïvely submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. this summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. he vindicates caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique roman than of a christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human euripides; scorn for the founder of jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. the pope, like his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to "smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, ending, so far as man may, this offence." and with this solemn and final summing-up--this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing discords seem at length to be resolved--the poem, in most hands, would have closed. but browning was too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged pope to the condemned cell of guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" by "lucidity of soul." it ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just-- "pompilia, will you let them murder me?" it is easy--though hardly any longer quite safe--to cavil at the unique structure of _the ring and the book_. but this unique structure, which probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in the most exact and expressive way to browning's aims. the subject is not the story of pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all stories of spiritual naïvete such as hers, when projected upon the variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies. it is not her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. the issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified for the mind of man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity. browning even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. but for the poet who thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not the whole truth of the matter. here, as always, that immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. the execution vindicated the design. voluble, even "mercilessly voluble," the poet of _the ring and the book_ undoubtedly is. but it is the volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of browning's genius lurked so near--so vitally near--to the roots of the sublime. chapter vii. aftermath. which wins--earth's poet or the heavenly muse? --_aristophanes' apology_. the publication of _the ring and the book_ marks in several ways a turning-point in browning's career. conceived and planned before the tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems, pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his lyric love. but it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. with his usual extraordinary recuperative power, browning re-moulded the mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. he lived in the world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. the little knot of critics whose praise even of _men and women_ and _dramatis personæ_; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness, found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the story of pompilia. some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like edward fitzgerald, held their ground. and while the tone of even hostile criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects, seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of _pacchiarotto_. from to browning published nothing, and he appears also to have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating helen, the mother of lord dufferin (dated april , ), almost the only set of fourteen lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. but the decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his life. between and nine volumes in swift succession allured, provoked, or bewildered the reading world. everything was now planned on a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of _the ring and the book_ became normal. he gave free rein to his delight in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like _red-cotton night-cap country_ and _the inn album_; and the "special pleaders," hohenstiel and juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by sludge. a certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power. his poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the transmuting work of imagination has been already done. it is no accident that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of greek tragedy, so unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an effective source of poetry. the poems of this decade form thus an odd motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, aeschylus and euripides, the divine helper herakles and the glorious embodiment of the soul of athens, balaustion, emerging and re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of miranda or the elder man. no inept legend for the browning of this decade is the noble song of thamuris which his aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "earth's poet" and "the heavenly muse" are not allies, and they at times go different ways. _hervé riel_ (published march ) is less characteristic of browning in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was inspired. the french disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal ties with france, and was sharing with his dearest french friend, joseph milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a norman fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of sedan broke upon them. sympathy with the french sufferers induced browning to do violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to george smith for publication in _the cornhill_. most of its french readers doubtless heard of hervé riel, as well as of robert browning, for the first time. his english readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. but they recognised the poet of _the ring and the book_, hervé has no touch of browning's "philosophy." he is none the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of caponsacchi,--summoned in a supreme emergency for which the appointed authorities have proved unequal. a greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him. _balaustion's adventure_ was, as the charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of may-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which enshrines the story of herakles and alkestis, we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict; the agony of france may be partly divined in the agony of athens. thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble fragmentary "prologue" to a _hippolytus (artemis prologizes)_, a command of the majestic, reticent manner of greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more elizabethan than greek. the incongruity of greek dramatic methods with his own seems to have speedily checked his progress; but euripides, the author of the greek _hippolytus_, retained a peculiar fascination for him, and it was on another euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness of his powers, set his hand. the result certainly does not diminish our sense of the incongruity. keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos of euripides, he challenges comparison with euripides most successfully when he goes completely his own way. he was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. the "transcribed" greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of greek verse are wont to be, and when browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of description which balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between the passages of dialogue. such is the magnificent picture of the coming of herakles. in the original he merely enters as the chorus end their song, addressing them with the simple inquiry, "friends, is admetos haply within?" to which the chorus reply, like civil retainers, "yes, herakles, he is at home." browning, or his balaustion, cannot permit the mighty undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely fashion. a great interrupting voice rings suddenly through the dispirited maunderings of admetos' house-folk; and the hearty greeting, "my hosts here!" thrills them with the sense that something good and opportune is at hand:-- "sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt, along with the gay cheer of that great voice hope, joy, salvation: herakles was here! himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first to herald all that human and divine i' the weary, happy face of him,--half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more." the heroic helpfulness of herakles is no doubt the chief thing for browning in the story. the large gladness of spirit with which he confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. but it is clear that the euripidean story contained an element which browning could not assimilate--admetos' acceptance of alkestis' sacrifice. to the greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons who really incurred his reproof were admetos' parents, who in spite of their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in their son's favour. browning cannot away with an admetos who, from sheer reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by self-sacrificing love. admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves to be called away before his work for his people is done. alkestis seeks, with apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live and carry out the purposes of his soul,-- "nor let zeus lose the monarch meant in thee." but admetos will not allow this; for alkestis is as spirit to his flesh, and his life without her would be but a passive death. to which "pile of truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,--that this life-purpose of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. and in effect, her death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so that alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter hades rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by admetos' side. such the story became when the greek dread of death was replaced by browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by love. the pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no herakles was needed to pluck this alkestis from the death she sought, and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to lucianic burlesque. but, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight queen, whose eyes "lingered still straying among the flowers of sicily," absorbed in the far memory of the life that herakles asserted and enforced,--until, at alkestis' summons, she "broke through humanity into the orbed omniscience of a god." from his idealised admetos browning passed with hardly a pause to attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign. admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the french emperor, whose career had closed at sedan, was in some degree qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. browning had watched louis napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the _coup d'état_, and still more the annexation of savoy and nice after the war of . but he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at home. he was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife's _poems before congress_. the creator of _the italian in england_, of luigi, and bluphocks, could not but recognise the signal services of napoleon to the cause of italian freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which italy had been compelled to purchase it. "it was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it--which is a pity";[ ] it was on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of . he saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a _borné_ politician, a ruler of genuine liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of liberalism. the shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. how unlike the brilliant and precise realism of blougram, sixteen years before! the upcurling cloud-rings from hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. the assumptions we are invited to form give way one after another. leicester square proves the "residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. and there is a like fluctuation of mood. now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have been and was not. at the outset we see him complacently enough intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, "one who keeps the world safe." but he has ardent ideas and aspirations. the freedom of italy has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but deathless dream:-- "ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine for ever! crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, alive with tremors in the shaggy growth of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, imparting exultation to the hills." [footnote : _letters of e.b.b._, ii. .] but if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas. but hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual course. the finest part of this æthereal voyage is that in which his higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the "peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home. indignantly the author of _hervé riel_ asks why "the more than all magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when mother earth has no pride above her pride in that same "race all flame and air and aspiration to the boundless great, the incommensurably beautiful-- whose very falterings groundward come of flight urged by a pinion all too passionate for heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow." _the ring and the book_ had made browning famous. but fame was far from tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his own way with a more complete security and unconcern. _hohenstiel-schwangau_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little relished by the rest. and now that plea for a discredited politician was followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as mrs orr puts it, "a defence of inconstancy in marriage." the apologist for napoleon iii. came forward as the advocate of don juan. the prefixed bit of dialogue from molière's play explains the situation. juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "fie!" cries elvire, mockingly (in browning's happy paraphrase),-- "fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court to such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord attempts defence!" in this emergency, browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity of any juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither browning himself nor the great english poet who had identified his name with that of juan, and whom browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed. the poem inevitably challenged comparison with byron's masterpiece. in dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the english nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the _don juan_ of byron than _fifine at the fair_. it cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like mortimer, frankly identified browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[ ] for browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon blougram--"he said true things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. like goethe's faust, he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them. this is unquestionably a complete mistake; but browning, as usual, presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible. [footnote : mrs orr, _life_, p. . her own criticism is, however, curiously indecisive and embarrassed.] it was on the strand at pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy whom he calls fifine. arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. for browning now, as in the days of the _flight of the duchess_, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation. the elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more. the beautiful _prologue_--one of the most original lyrics in the language--strikes the keynote:-- "sometimes, when the weather is blue, and warm waves tempt to free oneself of tether, and try a life exempt from worldly noise and dust, in the sphere which overbrims with passion and thought,--why, just unable to fly, one swims.... emancipate through passion and thought,--with sea for sky, we substitute, in a fashion, for heaven--poetry." it is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem. but he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own. so his "apology for poetry" becomes an item in don juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance with light-o'-loves. fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white fingers pressing juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale constraint." between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all don juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence. elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of shakespeare's hero; fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough. the principal speaker himself is the most complex of browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture. this juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of love. it is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of browning's own. juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has. and browning's "emancipation" is not that of the purely romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment. the emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. this might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. but his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed "elvire" the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable fifines. the poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure" in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. a succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him. it is the water which supports the swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. ); the technical cluster of sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night" (c. ). the whole poem is haunted by the sense of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the apparent meaning of things. browning's world, else so massive and so indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant in which truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest itself through falsehood." juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. the "dream figures" of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of schumann's _carnival_, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet "tremblingly grew blank from bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank as soon, for liquid change through artery and vein o' the very marble wound its way." the august of found browning and his sister once more in france. this time, however, not at croisic but saint aubin--the primitive hamlet on the norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to joseph milsand. at a neighbouring village was another old friend, miss thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place. they walked along a narrow cliff-path: "the sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths.... we entered the brownings' house. the sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." a misunderstanding, now through the good offices of milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of browning and miss thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his "fair friend." the very title is jest--an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"british man with british maid"; the country of the "red-cotton night-cap" being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed "white-cotton night-cap country," from the white lawn head-dress of the norman women. nothing so typical and everyday could set browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be "wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous flat of insipidity." the story of miranda the paris jeweller and his mistress, clara de millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. time had not mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which browning found recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the french newspapers of that very august; the final judgment of the court at caen ("vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. the poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods. if any poem of browning's may be compared to versified special correspondence, it is this. he tells the story, in his own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which every pretence of poetry is usually remote. what was it in this rather sordid tale that arrested him? clearly the strangely mingled character of miranda. castile and paris contend in his blood; and his love adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic devotion. his sins are commonplace and prosaic enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself from the bonds of his own impurity. "the heart was wise according to its lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into coherent practice. a parallel piece of analysis presents clara as a finished artist in life--a meissonier of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring selection of means to ends. in other words, this not very attractive pair struck browning as another example of his familiar contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and those who aim higher and fail. yet it must be owned that these browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by browning's hand nor vitalised with his breath. neither clara nor miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his great creations; even clara's harangue to the cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. another symptom of decline in browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with an air of allegorical abstraction the "tower" and the "turf," and makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control. the summer retreat of was found once more on the familiar north coast of france,--this time at the quiet hamlet of mers, near treport. in this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his poems--_aristophanes' apology_ (published april ). it was not browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of balaustion, the brilliant girl devotee of euripides, had proved an admirable setting for his interpretations of greek drama; and the charm of that earlier "most delightful of may-month amusements" was perhaps not the less easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own. balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not only cite euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant. situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. the first adventure was almost greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is titanically browningesque, a riot of the least hellenic elements of browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the hellenic world. moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. the glory of euripides is still the ostensible theme; but aristophanes had so many points of contact with browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of browning's own, that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred. his aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of "life," a broad and generous realist, who like lippo lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[ ] aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[ ]--by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. the magnificent portrait of aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses-- "mind a-wantoning at ease of undisputed mastery over the body's brood"-- which was so congenial to the realist in browning; "the clear baldness--all his head one brow"--and the surging flame of red from cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam." [footnote : _arist. ap._, p. .] [footnote : ib., p. .] balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer "large-looming from his wave, * * * * * a sea-worn face, sad as mortality, divine with yearning after fellowship," while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." and when balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos, aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the divine poets by the noble song of thamyris. the "transcript from euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic framework. far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the _alkestis_, the reading of the _hercules furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of browning's _alkestis_. yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "large tears," as mrs orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her. the _inn album_ is, like _red-cotton night-cap country_, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere. once more, as in the _blot in the 'scutcheon_, and in _james lee's wife_, browning turned for his "incidents in the development of souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. but no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "james lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this club-and-country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. a thief, as schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but browning's elder man compromises even the professional perfidies of a don juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which don juan himself would have scouted. in _fifine_ the don juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose. but the decisive and commanding figure, for browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and nemesis, the elder lady. she is as unlike pompilia as he is unlike guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him. and if pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the elder lady may fairly remind us of that of marion erle in _aurora leigh_. but many complexities in the working out mark browning's design. the betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. the chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else. the _pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years. since _the ring and the book_ he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life. he himself, mingling freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest london society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him. yet barriers remained. poems like the _red-cotton night-cap country_, the _inn album_, and _fifine_ had alienated many whom _the ring and the book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the defence of some of browning's staunchest devotees. nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, robert browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight. the most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. but it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business. this is the main, at least the most dominant, note of _pacchiarotto_. it is like an aftermath of _aristophanes' apology_. but the english poet scarcely deigns to defend his art. no beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle and call out his chivalry. the mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _pacchiarotto_ is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a quixotic effort to "reform" his fellows. rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music. more seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _at the mermaid_, and _house_, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took europe by storm with the pageant of his broken heart. _house_ is for the most part rank prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort: "'_with this same key shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more! did shakespeare? if so, the less shakespeare he!" this "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. the poet seems haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. in _fears and scruples_ it symbolises the reticence of god. in _appearances_ the "poor room" in which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word was spoken" become half human in sympathy. a woman's "natural magic" makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song. the prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and lithe,--a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can pass. for here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in; there "i--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife at breast, and a life whence storm-notes start-- hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; account as wood, brick, stone, this ring of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!" these stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out among the strident notes of browning's anti-critical "apologetics." of all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in browning than love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. but as compared with the love-lays of the _dramatic lyrics_ or _men and women_ there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. a barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. the richest in this tender sunset beauty is the _st martin's summer_, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed. again and again browning here dwells upon the magic of love,--as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace and prose. the brief, exquisite snatches of song, _natural magic, magical nature_, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by one who remains master of his heart. _numpholeptos_ is the long-drawn enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell--a thing woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. in _bifurcation_ he puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in love's favour in _the statue and the bust_. _a forgiveness_ is a powerful reworking of the theme of _my last duchess_, with an added irony of situation: browning, who excels in the drama of silent figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband, still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last words throw off the mask:-- "hardly, i think! as little helped his brow the cloak then, father--as your grate helps now!" from these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. painting in these later days of browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of _holy-cross day_, while it wholly lacks the great lift of hebraic sublimity at the close. the _epilogue_ returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. they cannot have the strong and the sweet--body and bouquet--at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow. the argument was but another sally of the poet's good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his subtler mind. doubtless he, like ben jonson, inclined to see signs of the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." the falling-off of the present volume compared with _men and women_ or _dramatis personæ_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to bring them together. of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"--the fragrant reminiscences--which the poet affected to despise. the epilogue ends, incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the disordered stomach. the following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. for the translation of the _agamemnon_ ( ) was not in any sense a serious contribution to the english knowledge and love of greek drama. the balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the finer qualities of greek dramatic style. but browning seems to have gone to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the greek drama at its best owed to greek speech. and he has little difficulty in making the oracular brevity of aeschylus look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.[ ] the result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive to the student of browning's mind. nowhere else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets the heart and the conscience of nations. his acute individualism in effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of themistoclean athens by one of the brilliant irresponsible sophists of the next generation. [footnote : it is hard to explain how browning came also to choose his restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of Æschylus. it is more like fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.] the spring and summer of were not productive. the summer holiday was spent in a new haunt among the savoy alps, and browning missed the familiar stimulus of the sea-air. but the early autumn brought an event which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently, the most intimately personal poem of his later years. miss ann egerton-smith, his gifted and congenial companion at london concerts, and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer _villeggiatura_, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on sept. , as she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. it was not one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying all meaner allurements and distractions. elegy is often the outcome of such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of _la saisiaz_. yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall, save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which milton or shelley, arnold or tennyson, commemorated their dead friends. he himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. this poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one only." _la saisiaz_ recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats. the glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak--salève with its outlook over the snowy splendour of mont blanc--instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the grammarian; while the "cold music" of galuppi's toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics. something of both moods survives, but the dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rapturous confidence of the first. the poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate; he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while fancy and reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality; delivering at last, as the "sad summing up of all," a balanced and tentative affirmation. and he delivers the decision with an oppressive sense that it is but his own. he is "athanasius contra mundum"; and he dwells, with a "pallid smile" which athanasius did not inspire, upon the marvellous power of fame. nay, athanasius himself has his doubts. even his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of london's november he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of salève, and "saves up" the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less prosperous times. the _two poets of croisic_, published with _la saisiaz_, cannot be detached from it. the opening words take up the theme of "fame," there half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism of the worship of fame. the stories of rené gentilhomme and paul desfarges maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the stanza, and a browningesque version of the manner, of _beppo_. both stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught browning's eye. only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. yet these instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for browning; they touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself. if rené's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the "blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through whose service paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the broken string and won her singer his prize. browning's pedestrian verse passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the flickerings and bickerings, of fame, the eternal truth of love. but it is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the characteristic criterion, a happy life. but it is the happiness of rabbi ben ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil but by mastering it!-- "so, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: what then? since swiftness gives the charioteer the palm, his hope be in the vivid horse whose neck god clothed with thunder, not the steer sluggish and safe! yoke hatred, crime, remorse, despair: but ever mid the whirling fear let, through the tumult, break the poet's face radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!" chapter viii. the last decade. where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled. since the catastrophe of browning had not entered italy. in the autumn of he once more bent his steps thither. florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear. but in venice the charm of italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, dell' universo, on the grand canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial american friend, mrs arthur bronson. asolo, too, the town of pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" but the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his. the mood described ten years later in the prologue to _asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." the glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. but he built up no more great poems. he was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. the _dramatic idyls_ of and showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature. there was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. there is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. it is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme--the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids. not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field. italy, the main haunt of his song, yields--it can hardly be said to have inspired--one only of the _idyls_--_pietro of abano_. old memories of russia are furbished up in _iván ivánovitch_, odd gatherings from the byways of england and america in _ned bratts, halbert and hob, martin relph_; and he takes from virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. the mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _gerard de lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. in all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man. the noble "idyl" of _echetlos_ is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of herakles and alkestis. echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at marathon, "clearing greek earth of weed as he routed through the sabian and rooted up the mede," is one of the many figures which thrill us with browning's passion for greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often to communicate. but the great successes of the _dramatic idyls_ are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely human kind that browning had been used to tell. _pheidippides_ belongs to the heroic line of _how they brought the good news_ and _hervé riel_. the poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of browning's psychology converges, is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in _clive_ and _martin relph_. and in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade--the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. the two worlds--inner and outer--fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent illusions on the other. relph's horror of remorse--painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'get you behind the man i am now, you man that i used to be!'--is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of muleykeh equally illudes his arab comrades; the russian villagers, the pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the conclusion which for iván had been the merest matter of fact from the first. admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he sits cutting out a toy for his children:-- "they told him he was free as air to walk abroad; 'how otherwise?' asked he." with the "wild men" halbert and hob it is the spell of a sudden memory which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and the men they prove. browning in his earlier days had gloried in these moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion. "ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and sad:-- "ah me! so ignorant of man's whole, of bodily organs plain to see-- so sage and certain, frank and free, about what's under lock and key-- man's soul!" the volume called _jocoseria_ ( ) contains some fine things, and abounds with browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his genius. "wanting is--what?" is the significant theme of the opening lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising passion. compared with the _men and women_ or the _dramatis personæ_, the _jocoseria_ as a whole are indeed "framework which waits for a picture to frame, ... roses embowering with nought they embower." browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human nature in unadorned nakedness. _donald_ is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in sport; _solomon and balkis_ a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. lilith and eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as balkis and solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and adam urbanely replaces the mask. jochanan hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of ben ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. but twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. in the great poem of _ixion_, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. ixion is browning's prometheus. the song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god--man's creature and his ape--who may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that "from the tears and sweat and blood of his torment out of the wreck he rises past zeus to the potency o'er him, pallid birth of my pain--where light, where light is, aspiring, thither i rise, whilst thou--zeus take thy godship and sink." and in _never the time and the place_, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring. browning spent the summer months of at gressoney st jean, a lonely spot high up in the val d'aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "delightful gressoney!" he wrote, "who laughest, 'take what is, trust what may be!'" and a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. to browning's old age, as to goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of persia offered a peculiar attraction. in the _westöstlicher divan_, seventy years earlier, goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of eastern and western thought and poetry. browning, far less in actual touch with the oriental mind, turned to the east in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely european convictions--"persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader. the _fancies_ have the virtues of good fables,--pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"--such is the recurring burden of ferishtah's counsel. but such preaching on browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. against the vindictive god of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is god's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but when it is asked how a just god can single out sundry fellow-mortals "to undergo experience for our sake, just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them, in us might temper to the due degree joy's else-excessive largess,"-- instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of omnipotence. if the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the _fancies_, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. these exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of browning's faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it. they transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all browning's mysticism had its root. thus ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of "plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and sorrow, in the noble epilogue. as he listens to the call of love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. but a "chill wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by love itself:-- "what if all be error, if the halo irised round my head were--love, thine arms?" he disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind. a faith founded upon love had for browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by god. the _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_ ( ) is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than _ferishtah_. all the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air of colloquy. thrusting in between the lyrics of _ferishtah_ and _asolando_, these _parleyings_ recall those other "people of importance" whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of dante." neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with browning's choice. they do not illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history. the doings of these "people" had once been "important" to browning himself, and the old man's memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. the death of the dearest friend of his later life, j. milsand, in , probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. perhaps the _imaginary conversations_ of an older friend and master of browning's, one even more important in browning's day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. but these _parleyings_ are conversations only in name. they are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. all the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. we have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of avison "whilom of newcastle organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to pym the "man of men." or he calls up bernard mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend carlyle--"whose groan i hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock--melancholy." gerard de lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication. these visions of prometheus on the storm-swept crag, of artemis hunting in the dawn, show that browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent symbolic speech elicited from greek myth in the _hyperion_ or the _prometheus unbound_. but it was a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a _tour de force_. two years only now remained for browning, and it began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. his way of life underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. in october the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to italy, and the palazzo rezzonico on the grand canal, where "pen" and his young american wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, abode. to venice he turned his steps each autumn of these last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their feet. it was thus that, in the early autumn of , he came yet once again to asolo. his old friend and hostess, mrs arthur bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and asolo, seen from this "castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. it was here that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the last two years in london, others at asolo itself, which were finally published on the day of his death. the tower of queen cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. _asolando_--_facts and fancies_, both titles contain a hint of the ageing browning,--the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (_reverie; bad dreams_); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features. the opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:-- "and now a flower is just a flower: man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man-- simply themselves, uncinct by dower of dyes which, when life's day began, round each in glory ran." the famous epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but _a reverie_ shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by love. of outward evidence for that conviction browning saw less and less. but age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for browning, bound the love of god for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired. the old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,--love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age. yet _now_ and _summum bonum_, and _a pearl, a girl_, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory. what preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,--the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." but some of the greatest love-poetry of the world--from dante onwards--has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. for the rest, _asolando_ is a miscellany of old and new,--bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end. yet no such prescience appears to have been his. his buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own. he was full of schemes of work. at the end of october the idyllic days at asolo ended, and browning repaired for the last time to the palazzo rezzonico. a month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of december he peacefully died. on the last day of the year his body was laid to rest in "poets' corner." part ii. browning's mind and art chapter ix. the poet. then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss-- another boehme with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say,-- or some stout mage, like him of halberstadt, john, who made things boehme wrote thoughts about? he with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, * * * * * buries us with a glory, young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. --_transcendentalism_. i. "i have, you are to know," browning once wrote to miss haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ... that i every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "all poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of browning's poetic work. "finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. the province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in _pauline_, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like sordello, yet retain the law of his own being. "i pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in _two in the campagna_. browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. but while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." whereas browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. the ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for browning, the "finite" is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. a placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_ imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of plato's peras in relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague. ii. hence browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method. all the romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality. wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; keats and shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth. all three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred. they attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. on all these issues browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "barbarian," as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. his potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. it was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. his delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work. while browning thus, in nietzsche's phrase, said "yes" to many sides of existence which his romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. he gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. to the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by shelley and by keats, browning the platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "fairy-poetry," he agreed with elizabeth barrett in - , was "impossible in the days of steam." with a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as dante's or milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of space or time," or "to possess the sun and stars." no reader of _gerard de lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _paracelsus_ at the other, or _childe roland_ in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de force_; and browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "a poet never dreams," said his philosophical don juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects. in physical organisation browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. like his contemporary victor hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. if he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of french romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_. the isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. the reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. he is the poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. in the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of _prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish "the wings unfurled that sleep in the worm, they say." whatever affinities browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. he had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of peter bell himself. he lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. his senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. by a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. the implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. he makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. and he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. there is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[ ] but it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. when in their last winter at rome ( - ) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[ ] this was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock. [footnote : mrs orr, _life_, p. .] [footnote : mrs browning's _letters_, march .] iii. and yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for browning's art. if his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice. the acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. it is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. he gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. in each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. to trace these operations in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections. iv. . joy in light and colour. browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring. it is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. poets so great as keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." his colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the æthereal opal of shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and "verdurous glooms" of keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. he neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in nature, or the tender "silvery-grey" of andrea's placid perfection. he dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast. who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "bells" "of gold"? he loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of pippa, and steeping florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[ ]; he loves the blaze of the italian mid-day-- "great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps that triumph at the heels of june the god." even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[ ] he loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre south and the dusky east; poiphyria and lady carlisle, evelyn hope and the maid of pornic, share the gift with anael the druse, with sordello's palma, whose "tresses curled into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound about her like a glory! even the ground was bright as with spilt sunbeams;" and the girl in _love among the ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of venice. his love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light. verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." he sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." and, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms. when he paints a dark night, as in _pan and luna_, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. and even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all." [footnote : "i never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently published, to aubrey de vere, in (_a. de vere: a memoir_, by wilfrid ward).] [footnote : _two poets of croisic_.] but mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. he sees the "old june weather" blue above, and the "great opaque blue breadth of sea without a break" under the walls of the seaside palazzo in southern italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired david; and solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[ ] and the "gaze of apollo" through the gloom of verona woods;[ ] he sees the american pampas--"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse--"coal-black"--careering across it; and his swarthy ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[ ] if he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[ ] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[ ] he makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. and when, long after the tragic break-up of his italian home, he reverted in thought to miss blagden's florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,--"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[ ] [footnote : _popularity_.] [footnote : _sordello_.] [footnote : ibid.] [footnote : _englishman in italy_.] [footnote : _by the fireside_.] [footnote : mrs orr, _life_, p. .] browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above. it is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. but it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict. v. . joy in form. if the popular legend of browning ignores his passion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form. by general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to it. no doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. his ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in literature. if we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with even morbid excess. alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. in conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety. the forms of social convention browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. near akin in genius to the high priests of the romantic temple, browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the romantic bohemia. his "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." in his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form. an acute criticism of mrs browning's--in some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this admirably. _the athenæum_ had called him "misty." "misty," she retorts, "is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. you never are misty, not even in _sordello_--never vague. your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[ ] that is the overplus of form producing obscurity. but through immense tracts of browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. yet he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. his deep sharp lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite bias of eye and brain. sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part here also. as he loved the intense colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye. he caught at the edges of things--the white line of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." he once saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole."[ ] browning's joy in form was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity. his eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[ ] seizes the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the morning glories of florence;[ ] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[ ]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,"--the brilliant line of venice suspended "between blue and blue." "cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that i love heartily," he wrote to e.b.b.[ ] roses and moss strike most men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf needles." and who else would have thought of saying that "the fields look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[ ] in the _easter-day_ vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges. he loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old lion's cheek-teeth";[ ] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "turkish verse along a scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the familiar commonplace of browning's sculpturesque fancy. his metrical movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[ ] [footnote : _e.b. to r.b._, jan. , .] [footnote : _to e.b.b._, jan. , .] [footnote : _by the fireside_.] [footnote : _old pictures in florence_.] [footnote : _sordello_, i. .] [footnote : jan. , , apropos of a poem by horne. the "love" may refer to horne's description of these things, but it matters little for the present purpose.] [footnote : _home thoughts_.] [footnote : _karshish_, i. . cf. _englishman in italy_, i. .] [footnote : cf., _e.g._, his treatment of the six-line stanza.] nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. sordello's palace is "a maze of corridors,"--"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." he probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[ ] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[ ] or in its bud,[ ] the worm in its clod. when keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:-- "and still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep." browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." a cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to shelley's. in a cleft of the wind gashed apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[ ] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[ ] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[ ] and sibrandus schaffnaburgensis a watery inferno. a like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the image of the cup. but he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity. beside the calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all points a thoroughly browningesque tree. [footnote : _sordello_.] [footnote : this turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with donne; cf. _r.b. to e.b.b._, i. : "music should enwrap the thought, as donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."] [footnote : _porphyria_.] [footnote : _de gustibus_.] [footnote : _pan and luna_.] [footnote : e.g., _balaustion's adventure_; proem.] and so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of _spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ runs riot in browning's work. the rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of wave;"[ ] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge in and in as far as the point would go."[ ] the fleecy clouds embracing the flying form of luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its flesh."[ ] the fiery agony of john the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from his rose.[ ] lightning is a bright sword, plunged through the pine-tree roof. and mont blanc himself is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles,--"needles red and white and green, horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[ ] [footnote : _caliban on setebos_.] [footnote : _a lover's quarrel_.] [footnote : _pan and luna_.] [footnote : _the heretic's tragedy_.] [footnote : _la saisiaz_.] browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy. it was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. in this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed. abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from god; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the finite stopped_,--eternity at the end of time. but the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. browning's divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not "interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all its beauty and its power,[ ] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life. the doctrine of god's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with browning's generation. browning turned the doctrine into imaginative speech equalled in impressiveness by that of carlyle and by that of emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme good all the labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which carlyle impatiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which emerson's ideality ignored. [footnote : _easter-day_, xxx.] vi. . joy in power. browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon colour and form. in his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. his joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. in such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. we know that it was thus with browning. "from the first power was, i knew," he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[ ] it was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last. as wordsworth saw joy everywhere, and shelley love, so browning saw power. if he later "saw love as plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of love which caught his eye. his sense of power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form. but intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars. [footnote : _asolando: reverie._] no one can miss the element of savage energy in browning. his associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short work of cobwebs.[ ] the impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in english) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts. [footnote : mr e. gosse, in _dict. of n.b._] "who were the stragglers, what war did they wage; whose savage trample thus could pad the dank soil to a plash?" he asks in _childe roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the ways of browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme. hear again with what savage joy his moon "rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; shelley's moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its woof_. so the gentle wife of james lee sees in a vineyard "the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake." his "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce. and his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[ ] his mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and "wind-gashed." when they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and "entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[ ] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs. still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of hildebrand in _sordello_:-- "see him stand buttressed upon his mattock, hildebrand of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply as in a forge; ... teeth clenched, the neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, as if a cloud enveloped him while fought under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought at deadlock."[ ] [footnote : cf. _prometheus unbound_, passim.] [footnote : _saul_.] [footnote : _sordello_, i. .] when the hoary cripple in _childe roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is "pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." this idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in a dead man's hair or beard." similarly, browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: akiba,-- "the comb of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[ ] or hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[ ] [footnote : _joch. halk._] [footnote : _artemis prol._] this savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. by one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians _par excellence_, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, "like jove in a thatched house." music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which abt vogler reared his palace, the loom on which master hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue. but the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[ ] or the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[ ] or the hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his lightless loft. there was much in him of his own hamelin rats' alacrity of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and the rest. milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. browning would have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for other forms of robust malignity. [footnote : _christmas eve_, i. .] [footnote : _englishman in italy_, i. .] and with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words. he loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. both poets found their good among saxon monosyllables, but to tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to browning by gnarled and rugged force. dante, in a famous chapter of the _de vulgari eloquio_[ ] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and the "sleek." all four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of browning and tennyson; but it is safe to say that while tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of the "sleek," browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the "tousled."[ ] the utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his pippas and pompilias; but "all the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee," though genuine browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like "irks care the crop-full bird? frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" [footnote : _de vulg. eloq._, ii. .] [footnote : making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and "tousled" character of the english vocabulary as a whole, compared with italian.] browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. he probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[ ] but his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. it is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power. and he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone. he is, in fact, by far the greatest english master of grotesque. _childe roland_, where the natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in _paracelsus_, the "cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" god tastes a pleasure. shelley had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these one-eyed monsters;[ ] browning deliberately invokes it. but he can use grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. one source of the peculiar poignancy of the _heretic's tragedy_ is the eerie blend in it of mocking familiarity and horror. [footnote : h. corkran, _celebrities and i_.] [footnote : cf. locock, _examination of the shelley mss. in the bodleian_, p. . at the words "and monophalmic (_sic_) polyphemes who haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the stanza is left incomplete. mr forman explains the breaking-off in the same way.] yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that browning imagined power. he was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, as byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of nature oppressive with the burden of life straining to the birth. the stars in _saul_ "beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the hills"; upon the lovers of _in a balcony_ evening comes "intense with yon first trembling star." wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. the vast featureless campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[ ] "quietude--that's a universe in germ-- the dormant passion needing but a look to burst into immense life."[ ] [footnote : _two in the campagna._] [footnote : _asolando: inapprehensiveness_.] half the romantic spell of _childe roland_ lies in the wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe. the gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, until the decisive moment when roland's blast suddenly lets them loose. for the power that browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. the same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. his geology neglects the æons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the paracelsian god. he is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud "bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, some april morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom born in a night. the "metamorphoses of plants,"[ ] which fascinated goethe by their inner continuity, arrest browning by their outward abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so unlike it as the flower. the gradual coming on of spring among the mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of sound, and "fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet."[ ] [footnote : _metamorphose der pflanzen_.] [footnote : _saul_.] even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which day dies:-- "for note, when evening shuts, a certain moment cuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey." hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,--the worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[ ] the "transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull fuel of gums and straw. in such images we see how the simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming. for browning's trenchant imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed in like a flood. with all his connoisseur's delight in technique, language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their capacity to express. music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,[ ] and poetry "the sudden rose"[ ] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." that in such transmutations browning saw one of the most marvellous of human powers we may gather from the famous lines of _abt vogler_ already quoted:-- "and i know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, that out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." [footnote : _sordello_ (works, i. ).] [footnote : _fifine_, xlii.] [footnote : _transcendentalism_.] vii. . joy in soul. no saying of browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared "incidents in the development of souls"[ ] to be to him the supreme interest of poetry. the preceding sections of this chapter have sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital springs of browning's work. "little else" might be "worth study"; but a great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. on the other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of "every village." the quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty much what it was to peter bell. there was no doubt a strain of pantheistic thought in browning which logically involved a treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as wordsworth's own. but his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. his poetic throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible naddo upon his verses as based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[ ] the homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. in this point, human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a burns, a wordsworth, a millet, a barnes,--but even of the fastidious author of _the northern farmer_. once, in a moment of exaltation, at venice, browning had seen humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future mistress of his art. the programme thus laid down was not, like wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration. [footnote : preface to _sordello_, ed. .] [footnote : _sordello_, ii. .] and as browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. the bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme. the names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in blake and wordsworth and coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled. children--real children, naïve and inarticulate, like little fortù--rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like pippa, david, theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of home. in its child pathos _the pied piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but alone among his works. his choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached. pippa, david, pompilia, bordello, paracelsus, balaustion, mildred, caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate. mildred has no mother, and she falls; sordello moves like a shelleyan shadow about his father's house; balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of athens; paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of "the secret of the world," which is his alone; caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of pippa releases luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love. more considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the city or the state, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice. patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by browning. casa guidi windows betrayed too much. two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal. and browning puts the loftiest passion for athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest hebraism in the mouth of a jew of the dispersion. responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. in his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. the inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse. browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such. but, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,--the personified abstractions. whether in the base form branded by wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of keats's "autumn" and shelley's "west wind," this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by browning's hand. personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. it had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. the stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off. he climbs to no olympus or valhalla, he wanders through no empyrean. his rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. his artemis "prologizes" to, his herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of homer. shelley and keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the greek gods the elemental nature-worship from which they had started; apollo, hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising sun. browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of euripides or ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration. he can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of pan and luna, of arion and the dolphin,[ ] or of apollo and the fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; "maid-moon" luna is far more maid than moon. the spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of _the englishman in italy_. the spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a prometheus, but realised in a caponsacchi. [footnote : _fifine at the fair_, lxxviii.] viii. what, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points of special attraction for browning? to put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the complexion of its persons. the joy in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sudden disclosure and transformation,--all these characteristics have their analogies in browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul. just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,--pippa, pompilia, the david of the earlier _saul_. something of the strange charm of these naïvely beautiful beings springs from their isolation. that detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. they start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene. wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men. the little "h.c., six years old," is "a dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that "at the touch of wrong, without a strife, slips in a moment out of life." pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower. but loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged browning's imagination. his own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them. each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible to the foreigner. hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue. every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case. "where you speak straight out," browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "i break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[ ]; and each colour had its special truth and worth. his study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. his lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in _by the fireside_, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it. [footnote : _r.b. to e.b.b._, i. .] and within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "the care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in _sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of pompilia and pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his southern villa than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. the abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result. the bishop of st praxed's monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old gandulph. the larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a blougram, with his "chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." everywhere in browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. a moment of speech with shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of martin relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of clive; the whole complex story of pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in "some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[ ] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed. "it once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the lover's regret in browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is the keynote of his triumph. in the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve. "our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"-- "the honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist;" where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always allured and detained browning's imagination, though it was not always the source of its highest achievement. ivánovitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an elopement, the savagery of halbert and hob unnerved by an abrupt reminiscence,--it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who represent any class or kind at all. [footnote : _by the fireside_.] the exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of browning's imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of character. if the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible enterprise. it is hard to deny that even _the ring and the book_ itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork of angelo de hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. the poem is a great poetic mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to search and alcoves to importune,"-- "the day wears, and door succeeds door, we try the fresh fortune, range the wide house from the wing to the centre." for the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in _sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue. he approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core. not that browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "for blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." browning is less concerned to "save" the subjects of his so-called "special pleadings" than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as god made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. but the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as blougram's-- "just when we're safest comes a sunset touch." yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame. he imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. in later life he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion between man and truth. but instead of chilling his faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of _fifine_. "truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till "through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the soul of god.[ ] [footnote : _fifine at the fair_, cxxiv.] * * * * * and here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "from the first, power was, i knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its play. not that strong natures, as such, have much part in browning's poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to heart. if browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. bright spiritual beings like pippa shed their souls innocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of "x-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and worldliness. at all times in his life these accesses of spiritual power occupied his imagination. cristina's momentary glance and the lady of tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to completeness:-- "she has lost me, i have gained her, her soul's mine, and now grown perfect i shall pass my life's remainder." forty years later, browning told with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of ned bratts. karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of abib:-- "the very god! think, abib, dost thou think,-- so the all-great were the all-loving too"-- and the boy david his prophetic vision. a yet more splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened chamber crying that-- "spite of thick air and closed doors god told him it was june,--when harebells grow, and all that kings could ever give or take would not be precious as those blooms to me." but it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. a whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "browningesque" division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _old painters in florence_, and _the last ride together_, and _the lost mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the duke and lady of the _statue and the bust_, like andrea del sarto and the unknown painter. but his very preoccupation with art and with love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. no kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul. when he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us hugues and andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." suffering enters browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of _ye banks and braes_, or of "we twa hae paidl't in the burn frae morning sun till dine," belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like tennyson were far more sensitive than he. suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in _the confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in _any wife to any husband_, or _a woman's last word_; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _the worst of it_ or _james lee's wife_. and happiness, equally,--even the lover's happiness,--needed, to satisfy browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_by the fireside_)-- "oh, the little more, and how much it is! and the little less, and what worlds away! how a sound shall quicken content to bliss, or a breath suspend the blood's best play, and life be a proof of this!" further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself. the world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[ ] his imaginative selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in caliban's beasts:-- "yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds; a certain badger brown he hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight;" or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _the glove_ or the bright æthereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its "membraned wings so wonderful, so wide, so sun-suffused;"[ ] or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "i always love those wild creatures god sets up for themselves," he wrote to miss barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [ ] [footnote : _donald_.] [footnote : some of these examples are from mr brooke's excellent chapter on browning's treatment of nature.] [footnote : _to e.b.b._, th jan. .] finally, browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. to bear the mark of man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for browning's imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree. the "artificial products" of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. no poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for wordsworth. his habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops. most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion. but their "artificiality" was an added attraction. the wedge, for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his muscle. the cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing at the festal board. his delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. his mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist man. he turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. if he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible mace; the morning sun pours into pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl; and fifine's ear is "cut thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[ ] [footnote : _fifine at the fair_, ii. .] sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called "a rude armour ... hammered out, in time to be approved beyond the roman panoply melted to make it."[ ] [footnote : _sordello_, i. .] and thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _wahrheit_ and _dichtung_ of his greatest poem. between _dichtung_ and _wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. his imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic mind. on the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. but with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. the characteristic ways of browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. in the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides. chapter x. the interpreter of life. his voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion. --henry james. i. the trend of speculative thought in europe during the century which preceded the emergence of browning may be described as a progressive integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, thrust apart. nature was brought into nearer relation with man, and man with god, and god with nature and with man. in one aspect, not the least striking, it was a "return to nature"; economists from adam smith to malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from rousseau to wordsworth discovered in a life "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from hume to bentham, and from burke to coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the organism. in another aspect it was a return to god. if the scientific movement tended to subjugate man to a nature in which, as laplace said, there was no occasion for god, wordsworth saw both in nature and in man a spirit "deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of german philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of god. but, in yet another aspect, it was a return to man. if man was brought nearer to nature and to god, it was to a nature and to a god which had themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. he divined, with wordsworth, his own joy, with shelley his own love, in the breathing flower; he saw with hegel in the absolute spirit a power vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. and these interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, and emotional life. scott made the romantic past, byron and goethe, in their different ways, the hellenic past, a living element of the present; and fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of the german people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling him. in this complicated movement browning played a very notable and memorable part. but it was one of which the first generation of his readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and which his own language often disguises or conceals. of all the poets of the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working of god in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and destiny of man. half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness of god, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid the intricacies of the finite. on the side of nature his interest was less keen and his vision less subtle. his "visitations of the living god" came to him by other avenues than those opened by wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy passion," upon outward beauty. only limited classes of natural phenomena appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with foreboding and suspense. for continuities, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he lacked sense. we have seen how his eye fastened everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution. the abrupt demarcations which he everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a god-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome. ii. his metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. body and soul, nature and spirit, man and god, good and evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. that their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest. possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the "infinity" of god and the soul by banishing all the "finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. the infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[ ] "which ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. sorrow and evil were stains imposed by time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence. [footnote : _fifine at the fair._] but there were, as has been said, elements in browning's mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check. his most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. this "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. wordsworth had turned for "intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that "time was done, eternity begun." body and time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved into illusion. his actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust upon matter and distended in time, to the timeless infinitude it had forgone. it does not escape from time, but only passes on from the limited section of time known as life, into another section, without limit, known as eternity. and if it escapes from body, at least browning represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a garb of flesh. evelyn hope, when she wakens in another world, will find her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand." and just as matter and time invade browning's spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. two conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend in browning's mind. now it is a state of emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become "perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and "reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[ ] by which they have been won. but at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate state is reached. "progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. even in that more gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[ ] to his indomitable fighting instinct. [footnote : _saul_, xvii.] [footnote : _one word more_.] "soul resteth not, and mine must still advance," he had said in _pauline_, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. the "infinity" of the soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to approach, but not to reach. far from having to await a remote emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief quiet underfoot, like michael, "who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe." it was at this point that the athletic energy of browning's nature told most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. it did not affect its substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight to all its mundane and positive elements. it gave value to every challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of "good."[ ] above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and repose" to the vital "struggles in this." [footnote : _bishop blougram_.] browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of expression without material change of feature under the changing incidence of stress and glow. the ultimate gist of his teaching was presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express another, he had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of eternity they break. the white light was "blank" until shattered by refraction; and browning is less browning when he glories in its unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction alone "shows aright the secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[ ] [footnote : _deaf and dumb_.] we have now to watch browning's efforts to interpret this profound and intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his disposal.[ ] [footnote : on the matter of this section cf. mr a.c. pigou's acute and lucid discussions, _browning as a religious teacher_, ch. viii. and ix.] iii. beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for browning--namely, god. here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had given it. and here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in that wonderful browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. the whole of his theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the universe and the individuality of man. the mechanical creator of paley and the deists could never have satisfied him. from the first he "saw god everywhere." there was in him the stuff of which the "god-intoxicated" men are made, and he had moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible face of god-- "become my universe that feels and knows."[ ] [footnote : _epilogue_.] he clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the great poets of the previous generation,--wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused," shelley's "one spirit's plastic stress," and goethe's _erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of god at the loom of time. the dying vision of paracelsus is as sublime as these, and marks browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they embody. in all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, god was present, sharing their joy. but even here the psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in browning broke in vain. this god of manifold joys was sharply detached from his universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit. in every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers which even the infinite god could not pass, and no poet less needed the stern warning which he addressed to german speculation against the "gigantic stumble"[ ] of making them one. the mystic's dream of seeing all things in god, the hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual and indivisible self. in later life the sharp lines which he drew from the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which each man "cultivated his plot,"[ ] managing independently as he might the business of his soul. the divine love might wind inextricably about him,[ ] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding impress its rhythms upon his life,[ ] he retained his human identity inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[ ] his love might be a "spark from god's fire," but it was his own, to use as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[ ] [footnote : _christmas-eve._] [footnote : _ferishtah_.] [footnote : _easter-day_.] [footnote : _rabbi ben ezra_.] [footnote : _epilogue_.] [footnote : _christmas-eve_.] iv. in this sharp demarcation of man's being from god's, browning never faltered. on the contrary, the individualising animus which there found expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his view. in other words, the main current of browning's thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge. at the outset he stands on the high _à priori_ ground of plato. truth in its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. but the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[ ] the source of all error. the process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[ ] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. but browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the proteus was ever caught. things would be known to the soul as they were known to god only when it was emancipated by death. infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. for the speaker in _christmas-eve_ man's mind was the image of god's, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for francis furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance. thus for browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as god sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams. [footnote : _paracelsus_.] [footnote : _fifine_, cxxiv.] these conflicting views were rooted in different elements of browning's many-sided nature. his vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to which he stubbornly clung. when the optimism of the "head" was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the heart, came to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. on the other hand, a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider and wider scope. sheer joy in battle had no small share. the immortal and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they seem. to have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in god was to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as it is for man, like the risen lazarus-- "witless of the size, the sum, the value in proportion of all things, or whether it be little or be much." the mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. thus browning's passionate and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. the infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out god's law most implicitly when it ignored god's point of view. v. such a result could not be finally satisfying, and browning's thought fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. he did not himself use this phraseology about love; it is that of a school to which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. but it is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which takes place in love, as hegel found in the union of opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart of life. he did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude wreaking itself upon the finite." god himself would have been less divine, and so, as god, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love which "moves the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless god. we saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning to find god everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of the autonomy of man. god's love, poured through the world, inextricably blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which browning's mechanical metaphysics permitted. one comprehends, then, the profound significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by christian theology. in one supreme, crucial example the union of god with man in consummate love had actually, according to christian belief, taken place, and browning probably uttered his own faith when he made st john declare that "the acknowledgment of god in christ acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it."[ ] [footnote : _death in the desert_. these lines, however "dramatic," mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of browning's christian faith. the evidence of his writings altogether confirms mrs orr's express statement that christ was for him, from first to last, "a manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love; but not the redeemer of the orthodox creed.] for to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in god's nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as god's own by the least glimmer of love. whatever else is obscure or elusive in browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love. the lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward. "knowledge means ever renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach; but love is victory, the prize itself."[ ] [footnote : _pillar of sebzevir_.] this aspect of browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in browning's psychology. yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. in love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of nature. it started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion-- "love is incompatible with falsehood,--purifies, assimilates all other passions to itself."[ ] [footnote : _colombe's birthday_.] and the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[ ] love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. even in the contact with sin and sorrow browning saw simply the touch of earth from which love, like antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in turn and be beloved."[ ] [footnote : _fifine_.] [footnote : _the pope_.] but with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence love was for browning, also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of integration," as myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum of things," the element of permanence, of law. true, its harmony was of the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a pompilia, or an alcestis, from their legal doom. the true anarchist, as he sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in _bifurcation_, keeps lovers meant for each other apart. it is by love that the soul solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor sordello--of "fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of time and eternity at once;[ ] for love, belonging equally to both spheres, can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord: "like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay and that sky-space of water, ray for ray and star for star, one richness where they mixed, as this and that wing of an angel, fixed tumultuary splendours." [footnote : _sordello, sub fin_.] in a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on earth; and eternity itself could but continue what time had begun. death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for the essence of love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"-- "with life for ever old, yet new, changed not in kind but in degree, the instant made eternity,-- and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, for ever ride!" vi. no intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic "philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and articulate. browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas. but they were neither systematic deductions from a speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity and protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. in browning, if in any man, joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new earth and a new heaven." and if joy was the root of browning's intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which it moved, love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. in love, as browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found satisfaction. there he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from dishonour by its own soft snow." there he saw sudden incalculableness of power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating soul with soul,--"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole creation in the inextricable embrace of god. but if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal in love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his conception of it. the "love" which has so deep a significance for browning is a love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. his was one of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their principles and united their forces. psychologically, the one had its strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other in that which feels, and values emotions. sociologically, the one stood for individualism, the other for solidarity. in their ultimate presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. in their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard. in two of these four points of contrast, browning's temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the liberal side. individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class. progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. on the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of women's suffrage and home rule. in the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction. spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and god were the indissoluble realities. but his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms. and in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most brilliant champion in browning, and its most impressive statement in his doctrine of love. an utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed with a scorn as derisive as carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite of "that old stager the devil."[ ] yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. browning was paracelsus as well as aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "knowledge" and "love," love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new births. browning as the poet of love is thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line which handed on the torch of plato. the author of the _phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of love one of the avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed are. to dante the supreme realities were mirrored in the eyes of beatrice. for shelley love was interwoven through all the mazes of being; it was the source of the strength by which man masters his gods. to all these masters of idealism browning's vision of love owed something of its intensity and of its range. with the ethical love of jesus and st paul his affinities were more apparent, but less profound. for him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the root of all goodness. but it resembled more the joyous self-expansion of the greek than the humility and self-abnegation of christian love. not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of love; imbuing even god's love for the world with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace. aprile's infinite love for things impelled him to body them visibly forth. deeper in browning than his christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the poet's passion for being. [footnote : _red-cotton night-cap country_.] browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy, routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to god which is only the fullest realisation of humanity. index. note--the names of the persons are given in small capitals; titles of literary works in _italics_; other names in ordinary type; *black figures* indicate the more detailed references. only the more important of the incidental quotations are included. poems are referred to only under their authors' names. aeschylus, . allingham, w., . american fame of browning, . aristophanes, , f. arnold, m., . asolo, , , , . _athenæum, the_, , . balzac, , , , . barrett, elizabeth. see browning, e.b. bartoli, his _simboli_, . benckhausen, russian consul-general, . bÉranger, . blagden, isa. see browning, r., letters. bronson, mrs arthur, , . bronte, emily, her character "heathcliff," . browning, robert (grandfather), . browning, robert (father), , , , n., . browning, robert, cosmopolitan in sympathies, english by his art, , ; his birth, ; likeness to his mother, n.; character of his home, ; boyhood, , ; early sense of rhythm, ; reads shelley, keats, and byron, f.; journey to st petersburg, ; first voyage to italy, f.; second voyage to italy, ; correspondence with e.b. barrett, ; marriage, ; settlement in italy, ; friendships and society at florence, f.; italian politics, ; italian scenery, ; italian painting, f.; and music, f.; religion, f.; his interpretation of _in a balcony_, n.; death of mrs browning, ; return to london, ; society, ; summer sojourns in france, f., f.; in the alps, ; death of miss egerton-smith, ; italy once more, ; asolo and venice, f.; death, . works-- _abt vogler_, , * * f. _agamemnon_ (translation of), f. _andrea del sarto_, f., * * f. _another way of love_, . _any wife to any husband_, . _appearances_, . _aristophanes' apology_, * * f. _artemis prologizes_, , . _asolando_, , * * f. _at the mermaid_, . _bad dreams_, . _balaustion's adventure_, , * * f. _baldinucci_, . _bells and pomegranates_, , f., . _bifurcation_, . _bishop of st praxed's, the_, , , . _blot in the 'scutcheon, a_, * * f. _blougram's apology_, , , , , , * * f., f. _boy and the angel, the_, , . _by the fireside_, , * * f., . _caliban upon setebos_, * * f. _cavalier tunes_, . _childe roland_, * * f., f. _christmas-eve and easter day_, , * * f., . _cleon_, , * * f. _clive_, . _colombe's birthday_, , * * f. _confessional, the_, , . _cristina_, , * * f. _deaf and dumb_, . _death in the desert, a_, , * * f. _de gustibus_, , , . _dis aliter visum_, , . _dramas_, f. _dramatic idylls_, * * f. _dramatic lyrics_, f., * * f., . _dramatic romances_, , . _dramatis personæ_, * - *, . _echetlos_, . _englishman in italy, the_, . _epilogue to dramatis personæ_, , * * f., . _epistle of karshish, an_, , * * f. _eurydice to orpheus_, . _evelyn hope_, , . _fears and scruples_, . _ferishtah's fancies_, * * f. _fifine at the fair_, f., , * * f., , . _flight of the duchess, the_, * * f., . _flower's name, the_, . _forgiveness, a_, . _fra lippo lippi_, , * * f., . _francis furini_, . _gerard de lairesse_, . _gismond_, , , . _glove, the_, , * *. _grammarian's funeral, the_, * * f. _guardian angel, the_, . _halbert and hob_, * *. _helen's tower_, sonnet, . _heretic's tragedy, a_, * * f., . _hervé riel_, * * f., . _holy cross day_, n., * *. _home thoughts from abroad_ (quoted), . _home thoughts from the sea_, . _house_, . _how it strikes a contemporary_, f. _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, , , . _hugues of saxe gotha, master_, , * * f., . _in a balcony_, * * f. _in a gondola_, . _in a year_, . _incondita_, . _inn album, the_, , * * f. _instans tyrannus_, , . _in three days_, , . _italian in england, the_, . _iván ivánovitch_, , , * *. _ixion_, * * f. _james lee's wife_, f. _jochanan halkadosh_, . _jocoseria_, * * f. _johannes agricola_, f. _king victor and king charles_, , * *, . _laboratory, the_, , . _la saisiaz_, * * f. _last ride together, the_, , * * f., . _life in a love_, . _light woman, a_, . _lost leader, the_, . _lost mistress, the_, , . _love in a life_, . _luria_, , * * f. _madhouse cells_, . _martin relph_, f., . _men and women_, , , , , * - *, , . _muleykeh_, . _my last duchess_, , , . _my star_, . _natural magic_, . _ned bratts_, . _never the time and the place_, . _now_, . _numpholeptos_, . _old pictures in florence_, , f. _one way of love_, . _one word more_, f., * * f. _pacchiarotto_, , , , * * f. _pan and luna_, . _paracelsus_, f., , , , . _parleyings with certain people of importance_, f. _patriot, the_, . _pauline_, f. _pearl, a girl, a_, . _pheidippides_, . _pictor ignolus_, f. _pied piper, the_, f., . _pippa passes_, * * f., , , , , . _popularity_, . _porphyria's lover_, . _pretty woman, a_, . _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, , * * f. _prospice_, , . _rabbi ben ezra_, n., , * * f. _red-cotton night-cap country_, (miranda), , * * f. _return of the druses, the_, , * * f., . _reverie_, . _ring and the book, the_, f., * - *, f. _rudel_, . _saint martin's summer_, . _saul_, , * * f., , * * f. _serenade at the villa_, . _shelley, essay on_, , * * f., f. _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_, , . _sludge, mr, the medium_, , * * f. _solomon and balkis_, . _sordello_, , * * f., . _soul's tragedy, a_, f. _spanish cloister, the_, . _statue and the bust, the_, , . _strafford_, , , * * f. _summum bonum_, . _time's revenges_, . _toccata of galuppi's, a_, f., . _too late_, . _transcendentalism_, . _two in the campagna_, , , * *, . _two poets of croisic, the_, * * f. _woman's last word, a_, . _women and roses_, . _worst of it, the_, . _youth and art_, , . letters, to e.b.b., n., , , , n., , , , , , , - passim, , f., , f., ; to miss blagden, , , n., ; to miss flower, ; to miss haworth, n., , ; to ruskin, ; to aubrey de vere, n. browning, elizabeth barrett moulton-barrett (wife). first allusion to browning, ; reads _paracelsus_, n.; her character, early life, and poetry, f.; correspondence with browning, f.; marriage, ; settlement in italy, ; friendships, society at florence, f.; death, ; her relation to pompilia, . _aurora leigh_, , , , . _songs before congress_, . _sonnets from the portuguese_, . _casa guidi windows_, . letters to r.b., , , n., - _passim_, , . letter to ruskin, n. letters to others, , , , , . browning, sarah anna (mother), . burns, r., , . byron, lord, , , , , , . carlyle, thomas, , , , , , , , . _carnival_, schumann's, . casa guidi, f., . cellini, benvenuto, . chaucer, g., . coleridge, s. t., , f., . cornaro, catharine, , . _cornhill magazine, the_, . dante, f., , , , f, f., . dickens, charles, , . domett, alfred (referred to), . donne, john, , n. dulwich, , , . egerton-smith, ann, . emerson, r.w., . euripides, n., , . fano, the brownings at, . faucit, helen (lady martin), . fichte, j.e., f. fitzgerald, edward, , . florence, f. _passim._ flower, eliza, , . forster, john, . fox, w.j., , , , . germany. german strain in browning, n. giotto, , . goethe, j.w. von, , ; _faust_, , , , , ; _iphigenie_, n.; _metamorphose der pflanzen_, ; _tasso_, ; _westöstlicher divan_, . greek, early studies in, . gressoney, . haworth, euphrasia fanny, . horne, author of _orion_, . hugo, victor, , . ibsen, h., _the wild duck_, . jameson, anna, . jews. browning's attitude towards the jewish race, n. jonson, ben, , . _junius, letters of_, . keats, j., , , f., . kenyon, john, , , , , . landor, w.s., n., f., f., , . leighton, sir frederic, , . lucca, the brownings at, . maclise, . macready, f., . maeterlinck, m., , n. malory, . meredith, mr g., . metres, browning's, , , . michelangelo, . mill, john stuart, f. milsand, joseph, , , , . milton, j., , . _monthly repository_, . moxon, edward, publisher, n. musset, alfred de, f. napoleon iii., emperor, f., . ossian, . palestrina, . paris, f., , , . paul, saint, . phelps, actor, . pisa, . plato, , , . prinsep, v., . quarles, francis, . rezzonico palace, . ripert-monclar, comte amÉdÉe de, . rome, the brownings in, . rossetti, d.g., f., f., . rossetti, mr w.m., n. ruskin, john, n., , . sand, george, . schiller, f., , . scott, sir w., . shakespeare, w., , , ; _romeo and juliet_, ; _the tempest_, f., f.; _loves labour's lost_, ; _hamlet_, ; _julius cæsar_, ; _othello_, ; _as you like it_, . shelley, p.b., , , f., , , , f., , , , , , , , . smart, christopher, his _song to david_, . southey, r., . spiritualism, . swinburne, mr a.c., . tennyson, alfred lord, , , , f., , , , , f. tennyson, frederick, . thackeray, annie (mrs ritchie), . thackeray, w.m., . tittle, margaret, the poet's grandmother, . trelawney, e.j., . _trifler, the_, . venice, , . verdi, . villon, . virgil, dante's, . vocabulary, browning's, . voltaire, . walpole, horace, . wiedemann, william, the poet's maternal grandfather, . wiseman, cardinal, . woolner, . wordsworth, , , f., , , , , . york (a horse), . the end. printed by william blackwood and sons. periods of european literature. a complete and continuous history of the subject. edited by professor saintsbury. in crown vo vols., each s. net. i. the dark ages. by prof. w.p. ker. ii. the flourishing of romance and the rise of allegory. ( th and th centuries.) by george saintsbury, m.a., hon. ll.d. aberdeen, professor of rhetoric and english literature in edinburgh university. iii. the fourteenth century. by p.j. snell. iv. the transition period. by g. gregory smith. v. the earlier renaissance. by the editor. vi. the later renaissance. by david hannay. vii. the first half of the seventeenth century. by prof. h.j.c. grierson. viii. the augustan ages. by professor elton. ix. the mid-eighteenth century. by j.h. millar. x. the romantic revolt. by prof. c.e. vaughan. _[in preparation._ xi. the romantic triumph. by t.s. omond. xii. the later nineteenth century. by the editor. _[in preparation._ * * * * * philosophical classics for english readers. edited by professor knight, ll.d. price s. each. descartes. prof. mahaffy. butler. rev. w.l. collins. berkeley. prof. campbell fraser. fichte. prof. adamson. kant. prof. wallace. hamilton. prof. veitch. hegel. the master of balliol. leibniz. john theodore merz. vico. prof. flint. hobbes. prof. croom robertson. hume. prof. knight. spinoza. principal caird. bacon: part i. prof. nichol. bacon: part ii. prof. nichol. locke. prof. campbell fraser. foreign classics _for english readers._ edited by mrs oliphant. limp cloth, price s. each. dante. the editor. voltaire. general sir e.b. hamley, k.c.b. pascal. principal tulloch. petrarch. henry reeve, c.b. goethe. a. hayward, q.c. molière. the editor and f. tarver, m.a. montaigne. rev. w.l. collins. rabelais. sir walter besant. calderon. e.j. hasell. saint simon. c.w. collins. cervantes. the editor. corneille and racine. henry m. trollope. madame de sévigné. miss thackeray. la fontaine and other french fabulists. rev. w. lucas collins, m.a. schiller. james sime, m.a. tasso. e.j. hasell. rousseau. henry grey graham. alfred de mussel. c.f. oliphant. * * * * * ancient classics for english readers. edited by the rev. w. lucas collins, m.a. limp cloth, price s. each. homer: iliad. the editor. homer: odyssey. the editor. herodotus. g. c. swayne. cæsar. anthony trollope. virgil. the editor. horace. sir theodore martin. aeschylus. bishop coplestone. xenophon. sir alex. grant. cicero. the editor. sophocles. c.w. collins. pliny. rev. a. church and w.j. brodribb. euripides. w.b. donne. juvenal. e. walford. aristophanes. the editor. hesiod and theognis. j. davies. plautus and terence. the editor. tacitus. w.b. donne. lucian. the editor. plato. c.w. collins. greek anthology. lord neaves. livy. the editor. ovid. rev. a. church. catullus, tibullus, and propertius. j. davies. demosthenes. w.j. brodribb. aristotle. sir alex. grant. thucydides. the editor, lucretius. w.h. mallock. pindar. rev. f.d. morice. * * * * * william blackwood & sons, edinburgh and london [frontispiece: pippa] browning's heroines by ethel colburn mayne with frontispiece & decorations by maxwell armfield london chatto & windus preface when this book was projected, some one asked, "what is there to say about browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"--and the question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal ardour. soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "if there were nothing to say about browning's heroines beyond what he said himself, it would be a bad mark against him." for to _suggest_--to open magic casements--surely is the office of our artists in every sort: thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show the casement stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat desperately to open it. saying the things "about" is the other people's function. it is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is nothing. + + + + + browning, i think, is "coming back," as stars come back. there has been the period of obscuration. seventeen years ago, when the _yellow book_ and the _national observer_ were contending for _les jeunes_, browning was, in the more "precious" côterie, king of modern poets. i can remember the editor of that golden quarterly reading, declaiming, quoting, almost breathing, browning! it was from henry harland that this reader learnt to read _the ring and the book_: "leave out the lawyers and the tertium quid, and all after guido until the envoi." it was henry harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of: "and thinking too--oh, thinking, if you like, how utterly dissociated was i. . . ." --regardless of all aptitude in the allusion, making it simply because it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm" were always _his_ days of excitement. . . . a hundred browning verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in cromwell road. _misconceptions_ was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying branches: "this is a spray the bird clung to. . . ." you were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that first stanza--and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza was. nor shall i easily let slip the memory of _apparent failure_, thus recited. he would begin at the second verse, the "doric little morgue" verse. you were not to miss the great "phrase" in "the three men who did most abhor their lives in paris yesterday. . . ." --but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos in "so killed themselves." it was almost the show-example, he would tell you, of browning's chief defect--over-statement. "how did it happen, my poor boy? you wanted to be bonaparte, and have the tuileries for toy, and could not, so it broke your heart. . . ." how compassionately he would give that forth! "a screen of glass, you're thankful for"; "be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "poor men god made, and all for this!"--the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "h. h." by telling him he had a foreign accent. those were browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. two or three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a _standard_ reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. i preserve the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short stories of . browning and wagner were so obsolete! . . . how young that critic must have been--so young that he had never seen a star return. quite differently they come back--or is it quite the same? soon we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and--oh wonder!--is trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. the stars always do that, this watcher fancies, and certainly browning, like the jub-jub, was ages ahead of the fashion. his passport for to-day is dated up to the very hour--for though he could be so many other things besides, one of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that he could be so "ugly." _that_ would not have been reckoned among his glories in the yellow book-room; but the wheel shall come full circle--we shall be saying all this, one day, the other way round. for, as browning consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in _fifine_,[x: ] each age believes--and should believe--that to it alone the secret of true art has been whispered. ethel colburn mayne. footnotes: [x: ] i write far from my books, but the passage will be easily found or recalled. holland road, kensington, w. [illustration] contents part i girlhood page introductory i. the girl in "count gismond" ii. pippa passes i. dawn: pippa ii. morning: ottima iii. noon: phene iv. evening; night: the ending of the day iii. mildred tresham iv. balaustion v. pompilia part ii the great lady "my last duchess," and "the flight of the duchess" part iii the lover i. lovers meeting ii. trouble of love: the woman's i. the lady in "the glove" ii. dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours iii. the laboratory iv. in a year part iv the wife i. a woman's last word ii. james lee's wife i. she speaks at the window ii. by the fireside iii. in the doorway iv. along the beach v. on the cliff vi. reading a book, under the cliff vii. among the rocks viii. beside the drawing-board ix. on deck part v trouble of love: the man's i. the woman unwon ii. the woman won part i [illustration: girlhood] browning's heroines introductory browning's power of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other english poet. heine alone is his peer in this; but even heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. in older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for browning; and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. that is the just adjective. his girls are as brave as the young knights of other poets; and in this appreciation of a dauntless gesture in women we see one of the reasons why he may be called the first "feminist" poet since shakespeare. to me, indeed, even shakespeare's maidens have less of the peculiar iridescence of their state than browning's have, and i think this is because, already in the modern poet's day, girlhood was beginning to be seen as it had never been seen before--that is, as a "thing-by-itself." people had perceived--dimly enough, but with eyes which have since grown clearer-sighted--that there is a stage in woman's development which ought to be her very own to enjoy, as a man enjoys _his_ adolescence. this dawning sense is explicit in the earlier verses of one of browning's most original utterances, _evelyn hope_, which is the call of a man, many years older, to the mysterious soul of a dead young girl-- "sixteen years old when she died! perhaps she had hardly heard my name; it was not her time to love; beside, her life had many a hope and aim, duties enough and little cares, and now was quiet, now astir . . ." here recognition of the girl's individuality is complete. not a word in the stanza hints at evelyn's possible love for another man. "it was not her time"; there were quite different joys in life for her. . . . such a view is even still something of a novelty, and browning was the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. there had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ambiguous phrase-- "for each man kills the thing he loves." thus, even in shakespeare, the girl is not so much that transient, exquisite thing as she is the woman-in-love; thus, even for rosalind, there waits the emersonian _précis_-- "whither went the lovely hoyden? disappeared in blessèd wife; servant to a wooden cradle, living in a baby's life." i confess that this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and i do not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. the hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable--for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never be a girl again. in the same way, to me the earliest verses of _evelyn hope_ are the loveliest. as i read on, doubts and questions gather fast-- "but the time will come--at last it will, when, evelyn hope, what meant (i shall say) in the lower earth, in the years long still, that body and soul so pure and gay? why your hair was amber, i shall divine, and your mouth of your own geranium's red-- and what you would do with me, in fine, in the new life come in the old one's stead. i have lived (i shall say) so much since then, given up myself so many times, gained me the gains of various men, ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, either i missed, or itself missed me: and i want and find you, evelyn hope! what is the issue? let us see! i loved you, evelyn, all the while. my heart seemed full as it could hold? there was place and to spare for the frank young smile, and the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. so, hush--i will give you this leaf to keep: see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand! there, that is our secret: go to sleep! you will wake, and remember, and understand." * * * * * here the average man is revived, the man who can imagine no meaning for the loveliness of a girl's body and soul but that it shall "do something" with him. when they meet in the "new life come in the old one's stead," this is the question he looks forward to asking; and instinctively, i think, we ask ourselves a different one. _will_ evelyn, on waking, "remember and understand"? will she not have passed by very far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . true, he can to some extent realise that probability-- "delayed it may be for more lives yet, through worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn, much to forget, ere the time be come for taking you." but browning has used the wrong word here. she whom the "good stars that met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew," must, whether it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of herself from the _taking_ of any man. . . . this is a curious lapse in browning, to whom women are, in the highest sense of the word, individuals--not individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable thing. his heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion that chooses, not devotion that submits. a world of "gaiety and courage" lies between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of widened responsibility and heavier burdens for the devotee. if we compare a browning heroine with a byron one, we shall almost have traversed that new country, wherein the air grows ever more bracing as we travel onward. with shrinking and timidity the browning girl is unacquainted. as experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will not have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had entered her dream of life. she trusts-- "trust, that's purer than pearl"-- and how much purer than shrinking! free from the athletics and the slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the st. andrews girl, that admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. not for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place to play games in. like wordsworth's lucy-- "hers shall be the breathing balm, and hers the silence and the calm, of mute insensate things;" and from such "being" she draws joys more instant and more glancingly fair than lucy drew. among them is the joy of laughter. of all gifts that the fulness of time has brought to women, may we not reckon that almost the best? a woman laughs nowadays, where, before, as an ideal she smiled, or as a caricature giggled; and i think that the great symphony of sex has been deepened, heightened wellnigh beyond recognition, by that confident and delicate wood-note. * * * * * "all the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: all the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: in the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: breath and bloom, shade and shine--wonder, wealth, and--how far above them!-- truth, that's brighter than gem, trust, that's purer than pearl-- brightest truth, purest trust, in the universe, all were for me in the kiss of one girl." nothing there of "be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever"! do the fortunate girls of to-day get _summum bonum_ in their albums (if they have albums), as we of the past got kingsley's ineffable pat on the head? but since even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a later day must surely be in paradise. they keep, in the words of our poet, "much that we resigned"--much, too, that we prized. no girl, in our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and i hazard a guess that the fantasy persists. it is slower to be realised than even in our own dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's own judgment. man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of "superiority." he had placed himself badly on it, such as it was--the pose was ignoble, the balance insecure. one day, he will himself look back, rejoicing that he is down; and when--or if--he goes up again, it will be more worthily to stay, since other hands than his own will have built the pillar, and placed him thereupon. his chief hope of reinstatement lies in this one, certain fact: no girl will ever thrill to a lover who cannot answer for her to _a pearl, a girl_-- "a simple ring with a single stone, to the vulgar eye no stone of price: whisper the right word, that alone-- forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice, and lo! you are lord (says an eastern scroll) of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole, through the power in a pearl. a woman ('tis i this time that say) with little the world counts worthy praise, utter the true word--out and away escapes her soul: i am wrapt in blaze, creation's lord, of heaven and earth lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth-- through the love in a girl!" as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! but observe that he has to utter the _true_ word. + + + + + this brave and joyous note is the essential browning, and to me it supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the very early poem _pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. in _pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified. this might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most "original." browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition, for _pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "it exhibits," says mr. chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too the entirely un-characteristic mark of a browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. from the very first line this emotional flaccidity is evident-- "pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes and loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms drawing me to thee--these build up a screen to shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ." and again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind-- ". . . love looks through-- whispers--e'en at the last i have her still, with her delicious eyes as clear as heaven when rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . . how the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread as thinned by kisses! only in her lips it wells and pulses like a living thing, and her neck looks like marble misted o'er with love-breath--a pauline from heights above, stooping beneath me, looking up--one look as i might kill her and be loved the more. so love me--me, pauline, and nought but me, never leave loving! . . ." something is there to which not again, not once again, did browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. this is in french, and feigns to be written by pauline herself. she is there made to speak of "_mon pauvre ami_." let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover--"my poor dear friend"! we cannot of course be sure that browning, as a man, was versed in this scrap of feminine psychology; but we do gather with certainty from pauline's fabled comment that her view of the confession--for the poem is merely, as mr. chesterton says, "the typical confession of a boy"--was very much less lachrymose than that of _mon pauvre ami_. unconsciously, then, here--but in another poem soon to be discussed, not unconsciously--there sounds the humorous note in regard to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "the big child"--to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that aspect chiefly. pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this view; the girl in _youth and art_ is gayer and more ironic. here we have a woman, successful though (as i read the poem)[ : ] _not_ famous, recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived opposite one another--she as a young student of singing, he as a budding statuary-- "we studied hard in our styles, chipped each at a crust like hindoos, for air looked out on the tiles, for fun watched each other's windows. * * * * * and i--soon managed to find weak points in the flower-fence facing, was forced to put up a blind and be safe in my corset-lacing. * * * * * no harm! it was not my fault if you never turned your eyes' tail up as i shook upon e in alt, or ran the chromatic scale up. * * * * * why did you not pinch a flower in a pellet of clay and fling it? why did i not put a power of thanks in a look, or sing it?" * * * * * i confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what mr. chesterton calls it--"delightful." nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so far as "he" is concerned, i question), but they remained uninterested in one another--and why should they not? when at the end she cries-- "this could but have happened once, and we missed it, lost it for ever"-- one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this" was? "each life's unfulfilled, you see; it hangs still, patchy and scrappy; we have not sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired--been happy." away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the context it is to me wholly meaningless. the boy and girl had not fallen in love--there is no more to say; and i heartily wish that browning had not tried to say it. the whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. kate brown was evidently quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. i fear that this confession of my dislike for _youth and art_ is a betrayal of lacking humour; i can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _youth and art_ seems to my sense. . . . i rejoice that we need not reckon this kate among browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her rich old lord, and queen of _bals-parés_. thus we may console ourselves with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. we have only to imagine evelyn hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of kate brown's commonness. . . . let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we have yet considered. footnotes: [ : ] mr. chesterton and mrs. orr both speak of kate brown as having succeeded in her art. i cannot find any words in the poem which justify this view. she is "queen at _bals-parés_," and she has married "a rich old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful cantatrice. i the girl in "count gismond" it is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and the youngest is the heroine. the setting is french--a castle in aix-en-provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . . here is the story. once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses, and they lived in a splendid castle. the youngest had neither father nor mother, so she had come to dwell with her cousins, and they had all been quite happy together until one day in summer, when there was a great tourney and prize-giving to celebrate the birthday of the youngest princess. she was to award the crowns, and her cousins dressed her like a queen for the ceremony. she was very happy; she laughed and "sang her birthday-song quite through," while she looked at herself, garlanded with roses, in the glass before they all three went arm-in-arm down the castle stairs. the throne and canopy were ready; troops of merry friends had assembled. these kissed the cheek of the youngest princess, laughing and calling her queen, and then they helped her to stoop under the canopy, which was pierced by a long streak of golden sunshine. there, in the gleam and gloom, she took her seat on the throne. but for all her joy and pride, there came to her, as she sat there, a great ache of longing for her dead father and mother; and afterwards she remembered this, and thought that perhaps if her cousins had guessed that such sorrow was in her heart, even at her glad moment, they might not have allowed the thing to happen which did happen. all eyes were on her, except those of her cousins, which were lowered, when the moment came for her to stand up and present the victor's crown. shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked forth count gauthier-- ". . . and he thundered 'stay!' and all stayed. 'bring no crowns, i say!' 'bring torches! wind the penance-sheet about her! let her shun the chaste, or lay herself before their feet! shall she whose body i embraced a night long, queen it in the day? for honour's sake no crowns, i say!'" * * * * * some years afterwards she told the story of that birthday to a dear friend, and when she came to count gauthier's accusation, she had to stop speaking for an instant, because her voice was choked with tears. her friend asked her what she had answered, and she replied-- "i? what i answered? as i live i never fancied such a thing as answer possible to give;" --for just as the body is struck dumb, as it were, when some monstrous engine of torture is directed upon it, so was her soul for one moment. but only for one moment. for instantly another knight strode out--count gismond. she had never seen him face to face before, but now, so beholding him, she knew that she was saved. he walked up to gauthier and gave him the lie in his throat, then struck him on the mouth with the back of a hand, so that the blood flowed from it-- ". . . north, south, east, west, i looked. the lie was dead and damned, and truth stood up instead." recalling it now, with her friend adela, she mused a moment; then said how her gladdest memory of that hour was that never for an instant had she felt any doubt of the event. "god took that on him--i was bid watch gismond for my part: i did. did i not watch him while he let his armourer just brace his greaves, rivet his hauberk, on the fret the while! his foot . . . my memory leaves no least stamp out, nor how anon he pulled his ringing gauntlets on." before the trumpet's peal had died, the false knight lay, "prone as his lie," upon the ground; and gismond flew at him, and drove his sword into the breast-- "cleaving till out the truth he clove. which done, he dragged him to my feet and said 'here die, but end thy breath in full confession, lest thou fleet from my first, to god's second death! say, hast thou lied?' and, 'i have lied to god and her,' he said, and died." then gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend she could not repeat. she sank on his breast-- "over my head his arm he flung against the world . . ." --and then and there the two walked forth, amid the shouting multitude, never more to return. "and so they were married, and lived happy ever after." + + + + + gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless browning heroine we find the characteristic marks. on that birthday morning, almost her greatest joy was in the sense of her cousins' love-- "i thought they loved me, did me grace to please themselves; 'twas all their deed" --and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. both were beautiful-- ". . . each a queen by virtue of her brow and breast; not needing to be crowned, i mean, as i do. e'en when i was dressed, had either of them spoke, instead of glancing sideways with still head! but no: they let me laugh and sing my birthday-song quite through . . ." and so, all trust and gaiety, she had gone down arm-in-arm with them, and taken her state on the "foolish throne," while everybody applauded her. then had come the moment when gauthier stalked forth; and from the older mind, now pondering on that infamy, a flash of bitter scorn darts forth-- "count gauthier, when he chose his post, chose time and place and company to suit it . . ." for with sad experience--"knowledge of the world"--to aid her, she can see that the whole must have been pre-concerted-- "and doubtlessly ere he could draw all points to one, he must have schemed!" * * * * * her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day--that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing gauntlets"--reproduced as that must be for modern maids in some less heartening music! but, as the tale proceeds, we lose our sense of sisterhood; we realise that this girl belongs to a different age. when gauthier's breast is torn open, when he is dragged to her feet to die, she knows not any shrinking nor compassion--can apprehend each word in the dialogue between slayer and slain--can, over the bleeding body, receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man like a dog--and, gathered to gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside him. . . . all this we women of a later day have "resigned"--and i know not if that word be the right one or the wrong; so many lessons have we conned since gismond fought for a slandered maiden. we have learned that lies refute themselves, that "things come right in the end," that human life is sacred, that a woman's chastity may be sacred too, but is not her most inestimable possession--and, if it were, should be "able to take care of itself." further doctrines, though not yet fully accepted, are being passionately taught: such, for example, as that man--male man--is the least protective of animals. "over my head his arm he flung against the world . . ." i think we can see the princess, as she spoke those words, aglow and tremulous like the throbbing fingers in the northern skies. well, the "northern lights" recur, in our latitudes, at unexpected moments, at long intervals; but they do recur. one thing vexes, yet solaces, me in this tale of count gismond. the countess, telling adela the story, has reached the crucial moment of gauthier's insult when, choked by tears as we saw, she stops speaking. while still she struggles with her sob, she sees, at the gate, her husband with his two boys, and at once is able to go on. she finishes the tale, prays a perfunctory prayer for gauthier; then speaks of her sons, in both of whom, adoring wife that she is, she must declare a likeness to the father-- "our elder boy has got the clear great brow; tho' when his brother's black full eye shows scorn, it . . ." with that "it" she breaks off; for gismond has come up to talk with her and adela. the first words we hear her speak to that loved husband are--fibbing words! the broken line is finished thus-- ". . . gismond here? and have you brought my tercel back? i just was telling adela how many birds it struck since may." we, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this one--that we should not think it necessary to tell that fib. we should say nothing of what we had been "telling adela." and some of us, perhaps, would reject the false rhyme as well as the false words. ii "pippa passes" i. dawn: pippa the whole of pippa is emotion. she "passes" alone through the drama, except for one moment--only indirectly shown us--in which she speaks with some girls by the way. she does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite emotion uttering itself in song--quick lyrical outbursts from her joyous child's heart. the happiness-in-herself which this poor silk-winder possesses is something deeper than the gaiety of which i earlier spoke. gay she can be, and is, but the spell that all unwittingly she exercises, derives from the profounder depth of which the eastern poet thought when he said that "we ourselves are heaven and hell." . . . innocent but not ignorant, patient, yet capable of a hearty little grumble at her lot, pippa is "human to the red-ripe of the heart." she can threaten fictively her holiday, if it should ill-use her by bringing rain to spoil her enjoyment; but even this intimidation is of the very spirit of confiding love, for her threat is that if rain does fall, she will be sorrowful and depressed, instead of joyous and exhilarated, for the rest of the year during which she will be bound to her "wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil." such a possibility, thinks pippa's trustful heart, must surely be enough to cajole the weather into beauty and serenity. it is new year's day, and sole holiday in all the twelve-month for silk-winders in the mills of asolo. an oddly chosen time, one thinks--the short, cold festival! and it is notable that browning, though he acquiesces in the fictive date, yet conveys to us, so definitely that it must be with intention, the effect of summer weather. we find ourselves all through imagining mellow warmth and sunshine; nay, he puts into pippa's mouth, as she anticipates the treasured outing, this lovely and assuredly not janiverian forecast-- "thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. . . ." is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? for "blue" the hours of new year's day may be in italy, but as "_long_ blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. i maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really midsummer's day on which pippa passes from asolo through orcana and possagno, and back to asolo again. + + + + + we see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at asolo[ : ]--the lovely little town of northern italy which browning loved so well. in that chamber, made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed adjectives (note the position of "mean"), pippa prepares for her one external happiness in the year. "oh day, if i squander a wavelet of thee, a mite of my twelve hours' treasure, the least of thy gazes or glances, * * * * * one of thy choices or one of thy chances, * * * * * --my day, if i squander such labour or leisure, then shame fall on asolo, mischief on me!" i have omitted two lines from this eight-lined stanza, and omitted them because they illustrate all too forcibly browning's chief fault as a lyric--and, in this case, as a dramatic--poet. both of them are frankly parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that pippa did not think in parentheses. the agility and (it were to follow an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of browning's mind too often led him into like excesses: i deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples i shall not cite them. but their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical child. the stanza without them is the stanza as pippa felt it. . . . in the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her invocation to the holiday is out of character--impossible to regard its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an unlettered girl. but all carping is forgotten when we reach "thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"-- a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. there comes the darling menace to the holiday-- ". . . but thou must treat me not as prosperous ones are treated . . . for, day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest me, who am only pippa--old year's sorrow, cast off last night, will come again to-morrow: whereas, if thou prove gentle, i shall borrow sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow. all other men and women that this earth belongs to, who all days alike possess, make general plenty cure particular dearth,[ : ] get more joy one way, if another less: thou art my single day, god lends to leaven what were all earth else, with a feel of heaven-- sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!" having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of those "other men and women," and tells her day about them, like the child she is. they, she declares, are "asolo's four happiest ones." each is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she "passes" at morning, noon, evening, and night; but this she knows not at the time, nor ever knows. the first happy one is "that superb great haughty ottima," wife of the old magnate, luca, who owns the silk-mills. the new year's morning may be wet-- ". . . can rain disturb her sebald's homage? all the while thy rain beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane, he will but press the closer, breathe more warm against her cheek: how should she mind the storm?" here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown--that ottima's "happiness" is not in her husband. the second happy one is phene, the bride that very day of jules, the young french sculptor. they are to come home at noon, and though noon, like morning, should be wet-- ". . . what care bride and groom save for their dear selves? 'tis their marriage day; * * * * * hand clasping hand, within each breast would be sunbeams and pleasant weather, spite of thee." the third happy one--or happy ones, for these two pippa cannot separate--are luigi, the young aristocrat-patriot, and his mother. evening is their time, for it is in the dusk that they "commune inside our turret"-- "the lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth, she in her age, as luigi in his youth, for true content . . ." aye--though the evening should be obscured with mist, _they_ will not grieve-- ". . . the cheerful town, warm, close, and safe, the sooner that thou art morose receives them . . ." that is all the difference bad weather can make to such a pair. the fourth happy one is monsignor, "that holy and beloved priest," who is expected this night from rome, "to visit asolo, his brother's home, and say here masses proper to release a soul from pain--what storm dares hurt his peace? calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard." and now the great day knows all that the four happy ones possess, besides its own "blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--for not rain at morning can hurt ottima with her sebald, nor at noon the bridal pair, nor in the evening luigi and his mother, nor at night "that holy and beloved" bishop . . . "but pippa--just one such mischance would spoil her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's toil at wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil." + + + + + all at once she realises that in thus lingering over her toilet, she is letting some of her precious time slip by for naught, and betakes herself to washing her face and hands-- "aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught with a single splash from my ewer! you that would mock the best pursuer, was my basin over-deep? one splash of water ruins you asleep, and up, up, fleet your brilliant bits. * * * * * now grow together on the ceiling! that will task your wits." here we light on a trait in browning of which mr. chesterton most happily speaks--his use of "homely and practical images . . . allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace," in which he "is indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he "awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter." mr. chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism" in relation to browning's love-poetry, and _pippa passes_ is not a love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we use it to enhance a passage such as this. who has not caught the sunbeam asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere daily toilet--and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? for these are the things that all may have, as pippa had. the ambushing of that beam and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to ". . . grow together on the ceiling. that will task your wits!" --is one of the most enchanting moments in this lovely poem. the sunbeam settles by degrees (i wish that she had not been made to term it, with all too browningesque agility, "the radiant cripple"), and finally lights on her martagon lily, which is a lily with purple flowers. . . . here again, for a moment, she ceases to be the lyrical child, and turns into the browning (to cite mr. chesterton again) to whom nature really meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in _the englishman in italy_, or the stomach-cyst in _mr. sludge the medium_--"the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." to me, these lines on the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque--in that kind of ugliness which "was to browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"--but are monstrously (more than any other instance i can recall) unsuited to the mind from which they are supposed to come. "new-blown and ruddy as st. agnes' nipple, plump as the flesh-bunch on some turk-bird's poll!" one such example is enough. we have once more been deprived of pippa, and got nothing really worth the possession in exchange. but pippa is quickly retrieved, with her gleeful claim that _she_ is the queen of this glowing blossom, for is it not she who has guarded it from harm? so it may laugh through her window at the tantalised bee (are there travelling bees in italy on new-year's day? but this is midsummer day!), may tease him as much as it likes, but must ". . . in midst of thy glee, love thy queen, worship me!" there will be warrant for the worship-- ". . . for am i not, this day, whate'er i please? what shall i please to-day? * * * * * i may fancy all day--and it shall be so-- that i taste of the pleasures, am called by the names, of the happiest four in our asolo!" so, as she winds up her hair (we may fancy), pippa plays the not yet relinquished baby-game of let's-pretend; but is grown-up in this--that she begins and ends with love, which children give and take unconsciously. "some one shall love me, as the world calls love: i am no less than ottima, take warning! the gardens and the great stone house above, and other house for shrubs, all glass in front, are mine; where sebald steals, as he is wont, to court me, while old luca yet reposes . . ." but this earliest pretending breaks down quickly. what, after all, is the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? what would pippa gain, were she in truth great haughty ottima? she would but "give abundant cause for prate." ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that out, but pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich and proud can know, "how we talk in the little town below." so the first dream is over. "love, love, love--there's better love, i know!" --and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love of jules and phene-- "why should i not be the bride as soon as ottima?" moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl arrive--"if you call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse-- ". . . one flash of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses, blacker than all except the black eyelash; i wonder she contrives those lids no dresses, so strict was she the veil should cover close her pale pure cheeks--a bride to look at and scarce touch, scarce touch, remember, jules! for are not such used to be tended, flower-like, every feature, as if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature? * * * * * how will she ever grant her jules a bliss so startling as her real first infant kiss? oh, no--not envy, this!" for, recalling the virgin dimness of that apparition, the slender gamut of that exquisite reserve, the little work-girl has a moment's pang of pity for herself, who has to trip along the streets "all but naked to the knee." "whiteness in us were wonderful indeed," she cries, who is pure gold if not pure whiteness, and in an instant shows herself to be at any rate pure innocence. it could not be envy, she argues, which pierced her as she thought of that immaculate girlhood-- ". . . for if you gave me leave to take or to refuse, in earnest, do you think i'd choose that sort of new love to enslave me? mine should have lapped me round from the beginning; as little fear of losing it as winning: lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives, and only parents' love can last our lives." and she turns, thus rejecting the new love, to the "son and mother, gentle pair," who commune at evening in the turret: what prevents her being luigi? "let me be luigi! if i only knew what was my mother's face--my father, too!" for pippa has never seen either, knows not who either was, nor whence each came. and just because, thus ignorant, she cannot truly figure to herself such love, she now rejects in turn this third pretending-- "nay, if you come to that, best love of all is god's;" --and she will be monsignor! to-night he will bless the home of his dead brother, and god will bless in turn "that heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn with love for all men! i, to-night at least, would be that holy and beloved priest." now all the weighing of love with love is over; she has chosen, and already has the proof of having chosen rightly, already seems to share in god's love, for there comes back to memory an ancient new-year's hymn-- "all service ranks the same with god." no one can work on this earth except as god wills-- ". . . god's puppets, best and worst, are we; there is no last or first." and we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in greatness. . . . the revelation has come to her. not ottima nor phene, not luigi and his mother, not even the holy and beloved priest, ranks higher in god's eyes than she, the little work-girl-- "i will pass each, and see their happiness, and envy none--being just as great, no doubt, useful to men, and dear to god, as they!" * * * * * and so, laughing at herself once more because she cares "so mightily" for her one day, but still insistent that the sun shall shine, she sketches her outing-- "down the grass path grey with dew, under the pine-wood, blind with boughs, where the swallow never flew, nor yet cicala dared carouse, no, dared carouse--" but breaks off, breathless, in the singing for which through the whole region she is famed, leaves the "large mean airy chamber," enters the little street of asolo--and begins her day. ii. morning: ottima in the shrub-house on the hill-side are ottima, the wife of luca, and her german lover, sebald. he is wildly singing and drinking; to him it still seems night. but ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come. let him open the lattice and see! he goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" at last he succeeds in getting the window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she "shall find him something else to spoil." but this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement-- "kiss and be friends, my sebald! is't full morning? oh, don't speak, then!" --but sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him. with _his_ first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado--that sebald, in short, is close on a breakdown. he turns upon her with a gibe against her ever-shuttered windows. though it is she who now has ordered the unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were always blind till noon. the rest of the little world of asolo would be active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "and wisely," he adds bitterly-- "and wisely; you were plotting one thing there, nature, another outside. i looked up-- rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars, silent as death, blind in a flood of light; oh, i remember!--and the peasants laughed and said, 'the old man sleeps with the young wife.' this house was his, this chair, this window--his." the last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "this house _was_ his. . . ." but ottima, whether from scorn of sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. she gazes from the open lattice: "how clear the morning is--she can see st. mark's! padua, blue padua, is plain enough, but where lies vicenza? they shall find it, by following her finger that points at padua. . . ." sebald cannot emulate this detachment. morning seems to him "a night with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is altered with this dawn--the plant he bruised in getting through the lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his elbow's mark on the dusty sill. she flashes out one instant. "oh, shut the lattice, pray!" no: he will lean forth-- ". . . i cannot scent blood here, foul as the morn may be." but his mood shifts quickly as her own-- ". . . there, shut the world out! how do you feel now, ottima? there, curse the world and all outside!" and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal to let the truth stand forth between them-- ". . . let us throw off this mask: how do you bear yourself? let's out with all of it." but no. her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to "speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to be more than words." _his blood_, for instance-- ". . . let those two words mean 'his blood'; and nothing more. notice, i'll say them now: 'his blood.' . . ." she answers with phrases, the things that madden him--she speaks of "the deed," and at once he breaks out again. _the deed_, and _the event_, and _their passion's fruit_-- ". . . the devil take such cant! say, once and always, luca was a wittol, i am his cut-throat, you are . . ." with extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were, interrupts him, ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine. in doing this, she says something which sends a shiver down the reader's back-- ". . . here's wine! _i brought it when we left the house above, and glasses too--wine of both sorts . . ._" he takes no notice; he reiterates-- "but am i not his cut-throat? what are you?" still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience--the quality of her defect of callousness--ottima leaves this also without comment. she gazes now from the closed window, sees a capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers sebald the flask--the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine. melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, sebald refuses the red wine: "no, the white--the white!"--then drinks ironically to ottima's black eyes. he reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it. "do you remember last damned new year's day?" * * * * * the characters now are poised for us--in their national, as well as their individual, traits. ottima, an italian, has the racial matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; sebald, a german, the no less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. her attitude remains unchanged until the critical moment; his shifts and sways with every word and action. no sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that luca is not alive to fondle ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her sense)-- ". . . do you fondle me, then! who means to take your life?" --a new mood seizes on him. they have "one thing to guard against." they must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she needed proofs that he loves her-- ". . . yes, still love you, love you, in spite of luca and what's come to him." that would be a sure sign that luca's "white sneering old reproachful face" was ever in their thoughts. yes; they must even quarrel at times, as if they ". . . still could lose each other, were not tied by this . . ." but on her responding cry of "love!" he shudders back again: _is_ he so surely for ever hers? she, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early days of love-- ". . . that may morning we two stole under the green ascent of sycamores" --and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had ". . . come upon a thing like that, suddenly--" but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him-- "then, venus' body! had we come upon my husband luca gaddi's murdered corpse within there, at his couch-foot, covered close" --flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" she knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? for him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere. ". . . for me (she goes on), now he is dead, i hate him worse: i hate . . . dare you stay here? i would go back and hold his two dead hands, and say, 'i hate you worse, luca, than----'" and in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to sebald and takes _his_ hands, as if to feign that other taking. with the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, sebald flings her back-- ". . . take your hands off mine; 'tis the hot evening--off! oh, morning, is it?" --and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried-- "come in and help to carry"-- and with ghastly glee she adds-- ". . . we may sleep anywhere in the whole wide house to-night." * * * * * now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. she winds and unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? but he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts of yours," if this thing could be undone. it is not the mere killing--though he would "kill the world so luca lives again," even to fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _this_ is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"-- "one must be venturous and fortunate:-- what is one young for else?" and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . . why-- ". . . he gave me life, nothing less"-- and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all--what was there to wonder at? "he sat by us at table quietly: _why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_" in that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of sebald as at this hour he is. he turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which sebald yet has said, or is to say. she replies that she loves him better now than ever-- "and best (_look at me while i speak to you_) best for the crime." she is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off-- ". . . this naked crime of ours may not now be looked over: look it down." and were not the joys worth it, great as it is? would he give up the past? "give up that noon i owned my love for you?" --and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. the antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on--the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his--and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in july (and "the day of it too, sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent, till the storm came-- "swift ran the searching tempest overhead; and ever and anon some bright white shaft burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, as if god's messenger thro' the close wood screen plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke the thunder like a whole sea overhead . . ." --while she, in a frenzy of passion-- ". . . stretched myself upon you, hands to hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook all my locks loose, and covered you with them-- you, sebald, the same you!" but the flame of her is scorching the feeble lover; feebly he pleads, resists, begs pardon for the harsh words he has given her, yields, struggles . . . yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body and of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her-- "i kiss you now, dear ottima, now and now! this way? will you forgive me--be once more my great queen?" glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice about her brow-- "crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, magnificent in sin. say that!" so she bids him; so he crowns her-- "my great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, magnificent . . ." --but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of a girl singing. "the year's at the spring, and day's at the morn; morning's at seven; the hill-side's dew-pearled; the lark's on the wing; the snail's on the thorn: god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world!" (_pippa passes._) * * * * * like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth, unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy--no more. she is passing the great house of the first happy one, so soon rejected in her game of make-believe! if now she could know what part the dream-pippa might have taken on herself. . . . but she does not know, and, lingering for a moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom. the pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion by her song. it strikes on sebald with the force of a warning from above-- "god's in his heaven! do you hear that? who spoke? you, you spoke!"-- but she, contemptuously-- ". . . oh, that little ragged girl! she must have rested on the step: we give them but this one holiday the whole year round. did you ever see our silk-mills--their inside? _there are ten silk-mills now belong to you!_" enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be quiet--but pippa does not hear, and ottima then orders sebald to call, for _his_ voice will be sure to carry. no: her hour is past. he is ruled now by that voice from heaven. terribly he turns upon her-- "go, get your clothes on--dress those shoulders! . . . wipe off that paint! i hate you"-- and as she flashes back her "miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her-- "my god, and she is emptied of it now! outright now!--how miraculously gone all of the grace--had she not strange grace once? why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, no purpose holds the features up together, only the cloven brow and puckered chin stay in their places: and the very hair that seemed to have a sort of life in it, drops, a dead web!" poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer-- ". . . speak to me--not of me!" but he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect-- "that round great full-orbed face, where not an angle broke the delicious indolence--all broken!" once more that cry breaks from her-- "to me--not of me!" but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave-- ". . . a fawning, cringing lie, a lie that walks and eats and drinks!" --while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection-- ". . . my god! those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades-- i should have known there was no blood beneath!" for though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. he can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"--can be sure that _he_ knows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in-- "i hate, hate--curse you! god's in his heaven!" * * * * * now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[ : ] i am convinced that browning meant us to perceive from the first--that ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon him, wrests the dagger-- ". . . me! me! no, no, sebald, not yourself--kill me! mine is the whole crime. do but kill me--then yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak! i always meant to kill myself--wait, you! _lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me the more because you lean on me, my own heart's sebald!_ there, there, both deaths presently!" * * * * * here at last is the whole woman. "lean on my breast--not as a breast"; "mine is the whole crime"; "i always meant to kill myself--wait, you!" she will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too late for that, so "there, there, both deaths presently." . . . and now let us read again the lamentable dying words of sebald. it is even more than i have said: not only are we meant to understand that ottima's is the nobler spirit, but (i think) that not alone the passing of pippa with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's soul. always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour itself before him. "there, there, both deaths presently"--and in the dying, each is again revealed. he, all self-- "_my_ brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all _i_ feel" --and so on; while her sole utterance is-- "not me--to him, o god, be merciful!" pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but sebald as by direct intervention, ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. again, and yet again and again, we shall find in browning this passion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned to women. for him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave--not always, as in ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth-- "truth is the strong thing--let man's life be true!" ottima's and sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound her lover--_she_ can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. only pippa, passing, could in that hour save sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, ottima would, i believe, without pippa have saved herself. _direct intervention_: not every soul needs that. and--whether it be intentional or not, i feel unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it be unintentional--one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the four passings of pippa, a man's is the soul rescued. iii. noon: phene a group of art-students is assembled at orcana, opposite the house of jules, a young french sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his bride--that second happiest one, the pale and shrouded beauty whom pippa had seen alight at asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood. very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven, including schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and gottlieb, a new-comer to the group, who hears the reason for their excitement, and tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid the theorising of schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the fiendish malice of the painter, lutwyche, who has a grudge against jules, because jules (he has been told) had described him and his intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." very soon after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so lutwyche tells gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are awaiting--lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. but they must all keep well within call; everybody may be needed. at noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in."[ : ] the bride is--"how magnificently pale!" most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her pallor which has struck them, as it struck pippa on seeing her alight at asolo. she is a greek girl from malamocco,[ : ] fourteen years old at most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her name is phene, which, as lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "how magnificently pale"--and how jules gazes on her! to gottlieb that gaze of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "pity--pity!" he exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: schramm, ever ready with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all for schramm; while lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into decent men as they grow older. well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and loitered about the house as they arrived. + + + + + the girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her aspect-- "do not die, phene! i am yours now, you are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes, if you'll not die: so, never die!" he leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face slowly to him. he lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that her soul is drawing his to such communion that-- ". . . i could change into you, beloved! you by me, and i by you; this is your hand in mine, and side by side we sit: all's true. thank god!" but her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice-- "i have spoken: speak you!" --yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him onward in eager speech. "o my life to come"--the life with her . . . and yet, how shall he work! "will my mere fancies live near you, their truth-- the live truth, passing and re-passing me, sitting beside me?" still she is silent; he cries again "now speak!"--but in a new access of joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had contrived for her letters--in the fold of his psyche's robe, "next her skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first? "ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam into my world!" in his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand. she is not looking. . . . but there is nothing strange in that--all the rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things, and adoringly he watches her as-- ". . . again those eyes complete their melancholy survey, sweet and slow, of all my room holds; to return and rest on me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ." but pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven? yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits; so-- "what gaze you at? those? books i told you of; let your first word to me rejoice them too." eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first a tiny greek volume, and of course homer's should be the greek-- "first breathed me from the lips of my greek girl!" so out comes the odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for. that of the "almaign kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? she will recognise this of hippolyta-- "naked upon her bright numidian horse," for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. but no, it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake, for was it not done by her command? she had said he was to carve, against she came, this greek, "feasting in athens, as our fashion was," and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to express her thought. . . . but still no word from her--no least, least word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her-- "but you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!" --for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has found "the real flesh phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again-- "ah, you will die--i knew that you would die!"-- and after that, there falls a long silence. then she speaks. "now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her first bridal words. "now the end's coming: to be sure it must have ended some time!" --and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to him, the tale of lutwyche's revenge is told at last. we know it before phene speaks, for lutwyche, telling gottlieb, has told us; but jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance, filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as it were, in a trance. and this dream-like state causes her, now and then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those which had "cost such pains to learn . . ." this is the story she tries to tell. lutwyche had hated jules for long. there were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." greatly, and above all else, had jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "he could never," had said lutwyche to gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _he_ was not to wallow in the mire: _he_ would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with statuary." so lutwyche had resolved that precisely "on that matter" should his malice concentrate. he happened to hear of a young greek girl at malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest." she was said to be a daughter of the "hag natalia"--said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but natalia was, in plain words, a procuress. "we selected," said lutwyche, "this girl as the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at once. jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody who had seen his work at the academy and profoundly admired it: she would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "paolina, my little friend of the fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter--"the first moonbeam!"--for lutwyche; and she copied many more for him, the letters which psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the fold of her robe. in his very earliest answer, jules had proposed marriage to the unknown writer. . . . how they had laughed! but gottlieb, hearing, could not laugh. "i say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth." schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and then had pronounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world"; so, gottlieb silenced, lutwyche went on with the story. the letters had gone to jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three times a day; lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must be observed--in short, that jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united. but that, when accomplished, was not the whole of lutwyche's revenge, nor of his activity. to get the full savour of his malice, the victim must be undeceived in such a way that there could be no mistaking the hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy of verses which should reveal their author at the end. nor should these be given phene to hand jules, for so lutwyche would lose the delicious actual instant of the revelation. no; they should be taught her, line by line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the hag natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting stone-squarer." thus, listening beneath the window, lutwyche could enjoy each word, each moan, and when jules should burst out on them in a fury (but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter; and, next day, jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for rome and florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry." * * * * * that is the plan, but phene does not know it. all she knows is that natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the end. yet, despite this threat, when jules has fallen silent in his terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. she has forgotten half of it; she does not care now for natalia or any of them; above all, she wants to stay where jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it go on. "but can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even jules does not seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . so trust, we see, is born in her: if jules could do what she desires, phene knows he would. but since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the world." "oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has heard such words or seen such looks as his. but she has heard other words, seen other looks-- "the same smile girls like me are used to bear, but never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ." yet, watching those friends of jules who came with the lesson she was to learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him, they had used _that_ smile-- "but still natalia said they were your friends, and they assented though they smiled the more, and all came round me--that thin englishman with light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest; he held a paper" --and from that paper he read what phene had got by heart. but oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those eyes, as now jules lets her! ". . . i believe all sin, all memory of wrong done, suffering borne, would drop down, low and lower, to the earth whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay --never to overtake the rest of me, all that, unspotted, reaches up to you, drawn by those eyes!" but even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering--altered!" she knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are altering--altered--and what can she do? . . . with heartrending pathos, what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "i love you, love" . . . but what does love mean? she knows not, and her "music" is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change, but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the words--it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and _that_ she cannot find, not understanding. so in the desperate need to see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device-- ". . . or stay! i will repeat their speech, if that contents you. only change no more"-- and thus to him, but half aware as yet, sure only that she is not the dream-lady from afar, phene speaks the words that lutwyche wrote, and now waits outside to hear. "i am a painter who cannot paint; in my life, a devil rather than saint; in my brain, as poor a creature too; no end to all i cannot do! yet do one thing at least i can-- love a man or hate a man supremely: thus my lore began . . ." the timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as phene had learned them--and hard indeed they must have been to learn! for, as lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost-- "where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find--this!" and truly it is so "involved," that, in the lessons at natalia's, it had been thought well to tutor phene in the probable interruptions from her audience of one. there was an allusion to "the peerless bride with her black eyes," and _here_ jules was almost certain to break in, saying that assuredly the bride was phene herself, and so, could she not tell him what it all meant? "and i am to go on without a word." she goes on--on to the analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. if any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely, _how_ his hate can "grin through love's rose-braided mask," and _how_, hating another and having sought, long and painfully, to reach his victim's heart and pierce to the quick of it, he might chance to have succeeded in that aim-- "ask this, my jules, and be answered straight, by thy bride--how the painter lutwyche can hate!" * * * * * phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. he still is changed. he is not even thinking of her as she ceases. the name upon his lips is lutwyche, not her own. he mutters of "lutwyche" and "all of them," and "venice"; yes, them he will meet at venice, and it will be their turn. but with that word--"meet"--he remembers her; he speaks to her-- ". . . you i shall not meet: if i dreamed, saying this would wake me." now phene is again the silent one. we figure to ourselves the dark bent head, the eyes that dare no more look up, the dreadful acquiescence as he gives her money. so many others had done that; she had not thought _he_ would, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is his pleasure--why, she must take it, as she had taken that of the others. but he goes on. he speaks of selling all his casts and books and medals, that the produce may keep her "out of natalia's clutches"; and if he survives the meeting with the gang in venice, there is just one hope, for dimly she hears him say-- "we might meet somewhere, since the world is wide . . ." just that one vague, far hope, and for her _how_ wide the world is, how very hard to compass! but she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a girl's voice is heard, singing. "give her but a least excuse to love me! when--where-- how--can this arm establish her above me, if fortune fixed her as my lady there, there already, to eternally reprove me?" it is the song the peasants sing of "kate the queen"[ : ] and the page who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of doing good to"-- "'she never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed, 'need him to help her!' . . ." pippa, going back towards asolo, carols it out as she passes; and jules listens to the end. it was bitter for the page to know that his lady was above all need of him; yet men are wont to love so. but why should they always choose the page's part? _he_ had not, in his dreams of love. . . . and all at once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him. "here is a woman with utter need of me-- i find myself queen here, it seems! how strange!" he turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting her dismissal. her soul is on her silent lips-- "look at the woman here with the new soul . . . this new soul is mine!" and then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it-- "scatter all this, my phene--this mad dream! what's the whole world except our love, my own!" to-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin art, as well as life, afresh. . . . "some unsuspected isle in the far seas! * * * * * and you are ever by me while i gaze, --are in my arms as now--as now--as now! some unsuspected isle in the far seas! some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!" that is what lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge. in this passing of pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into one another, for phene is silence, as pippa is song. phene will speak more when jules and she are in their isle together--but never will she speak much: she _is_ silence. her need of him indeed was utter--she had no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very pygmalion and galatea. but jules' soul, no less, had needed pippa's song to waken to its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct intervention. not that phene, like ottima, could have saved herself; there _was_ no self to save--she had that awful, piercing selflessness of the used flesh and ignored soul. if pippa had not passed, if jules had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . i think that phene would have killed herself--like ottima, yet how unlike! for phene (but one step upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"--the others of the smile which girls like her are used to bear, "but never men, men cannot stoop so low." were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound, than in that line which browning sets in the mouth of silence? iv. evening; night: the ending of the day our interest now centres again upon pippa--partly because the evening and night episodes are little touched by other feminine influence, but also (and far more significantly) because the dramatic aspect of the work here loses nearly all of its peculiar beauty. the story, till now so slight yet so consummately sufficient, henceforth is involved with "plot"--that natural enemy of spontaneity and unity, and here most eminently successful in blighting both. indeed, the lovely simplicity of the earlier plan seems actually to aid the foe in the work of destruction, by cutting, as it were, the poem into two or even three divisions: first, the purely lyric portions--those at the beginning and the end--where pippa is alone in her room; second, the morning and noon episodes, where the dramas are absolutely unconnected with the passing girl; third, these evening and night scenes, where, on the contrary, all is forced into more or less direct relation with the little figure whose most exquisite magic has hitherto resided in the fusion of her complete personal loneliness with her potent influence upon the lives and characters of those who hear her sing. mr. chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross falsification of the whole beauty of _pippa passes_"--a glaring instance, as he says, of the definite literary blunders which browning could make. but though that searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, i think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. from the moment of the direct introduction of bluphocks[ : ] (whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the day is over, and pippa re-enters her "large, mean, airy chamber." + + + + + on her return to asolo from orcana, she passes the ruined turret wherein luigi and his mother--those third happiest ones whom in her thoughts she had not been able to separate--are wont to talk at evening. some of the austrian police are loitering near, and with them is an englishman, "lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned"--one bluphocks, who is on the watch in a double capacity. he is to point out luigi to the police, in whose pay he is, and to make acquaintance with pippa in return for money already given by a private employer--for bluphocks is the creature of anyone's purse. as pippa reaches the turret, a thought of days long, long before it fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells how-- "a king lived long ago, in the morning of the world when earth was nigher heaven than now;" and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the gods-- "that, having lived thus long, there seemed no need the king should ever die." her clear note penetrates to the spot where luigi and his mother are talking, as so often before. he is bound this night for vienna, there to kill the hated emperor of austria, who holds his italy in thrall; for luigi is a carbonarist, and has been chosen for this "lesser task" by his leaders. his mother is urging him not to go. first she had tried the direct appeal, but this had failed; then argument, but this failed too; and as she stood at end of her own resources, the one hope that remained was her son's delight in living--that sense of the beauty and glory of the world which was so strong in him that he felt "god must be glad one loves his world so much." this joy breaks out at each turn of the mother's discourse. while luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for april and june are coming! the mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. in june, not only summer's loveliness, but chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who gazes at the stars as he does--and how her blue eyes lift to them "as if life were one long and sweet surprise!" in june she comes--and with the reiteration, luigi falters, for he recollects that in this june they were to see together "the titian at treviso." . . . his mother has almost won, when a "low noise" outside, which luigi has first mistaken for the cuckoo, next for the renowned echo in the turret . . . that low noise is heard again--"the voice of pippa, singing." and, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of the world, luigi cries-- "no need that sort of king should ever die!" and she begins again-- "among the rocks his city was: before his palace, in the sun, he sat to see his people pass, and judge them every one" --and as she tells the manner of his judging, luigi again exclaims: "that king should still judge, sitting in the sun!" but the song goes on-- "his councillors, to left and right, looked anxious up--but no surprise disturbed the king's old smiling eyes, where the very blue had turned to white"; and those eyes kept their tranquillity even when, as legend tells, a python one day "scared the breathless city," but coming, "with forked tongue and eyes on flame," to where the king sat, and seeing the sweet venerable goodness of him, did not dare "approach that threshold in the sun, assault the old king smiling there . . . such grace had kings when the world begun!" "and such grace have they, now that the world ends!" cries luigi bitterly, for at vienna the python _is_ the king, and brave men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey." . . . he hesitates no more-- "'tis god's voice calls: how could i stay? farewell!" and rushes from the turret, resolute for vienna. by going he escapes the police, for it had been decided that if he stayed at asolo that night he should be arrested at once. he still may lose his life, for he will try to kill the emperor; but he will then have been true to his deepest convictions--and thus pippa's passing, pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself. + + + + + unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the duomo santa maria, where the fourth happiest one, the monsignor of her final choice, "that holy and beloved priest," is to stay to-night. and now, for the first time, we are to see her, though only for the barest instant, come into actual contact with some fellow-creatures. four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the santa maria. we hear them talk with one another before pippa reaches them: they are playing a "wishing game," originated by one who, watching the swallows fly towards venice, yearns for their wings. she is not long from the country; her dreams are still of new milk and apples, and ". . . the farm among the cherry-orchards, and how april snowed white blossom on her as she ran." so says one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come to the town to lead the life _she_ leads. she may be sure the old people have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have "twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage, made a dung-hill of her garden!" she acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall-- "they called it mine, i have forgotten why" --and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . as she murmurs thus to herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before, laughs now again: "would i be such a fool!"--and tells _her_ wish. the country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but zanze has a real desire, something worth talking about! it is that somebody she knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her the same treat he gave last week-- "feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers, lampreys and red breganze wine;" while she had stained her fingers red by "dipping them in the wine to write bad words with on the bright table: how he laughed!" and as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. the country girl recalls a superstition connected with these bright beetles--that if one was killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days. they said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she _is_ no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got--does cecco beat her still? but cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness, so long as she keeps her "curious hair"-- "i wish they'd find a way to dye our hair your colour . . . . . . the men say they are sick of black." a girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one that very likely "the men" are sick of _her_ hair, and does she pretend that _she_ has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims-- "why there! is not that pippa we are to talk to, under the window--quick-- . . ." the country girl thinks that if it were pippa, she would be singing, as they had been told. "oh, you sing first," retorts the other-- "then if she listens and comes close . . . i'll tell you, sing that song the young english noble made who took you for the purest of the pure, and meant to leave the world for you--what fun!" so, not the country girl, but she whose black hair discontents her, sings, and pippa "listens and comes close," for the song has words as sweet as any of her own . . . and the red-fingered one calls to her to come closer still, they won't eat her--why, she seems to be "the very person the great rich handsome englishman has fallen so violently in love with." she shall hear all about it; and on the steps of the church pippa is told by this creature, zanze, how a foreigner, "with blue eyes and thick rings of raw silk-coloured hair," had gone to the mills at asolo a month ago and fallen in love with pippa. pippa, however, will not keep him in love with her, unless she takes more care of her personal appearance--she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes "less like canoes" for her small feet; _then_ she may hope to feast upon lampreys and drink breganze, as zanze does. . . . and now pippa sings one of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the country girl. it begins-- "overhead the tree-tops meet, flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet; there was nought above me, and nought below my childhood had not learned to know" --a little story of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet life was cut short-- "suddenly god took me . . ." as pippa sang those words, she passed on. she had heard enough of the four girls' talk, even were they not now interrupted by a sudden clatter inside monsignor's house--a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of cries and the flinging down of a man, and then a noise as of dragging a bound prisoner out. . . . monsignor appeared for an instant at the window as she, coming from the duomo, passed his house. his aspect disappointed her-- "no mere mortal has a right to carry that exalted air; best people are not angels quite . . ." and with that one look at him, she passed on to asolo. + + + + + what was the noise that broke out as pippa finished her song? the loud call which came first was monsignor's, summoning his guards from an outer chamber to gag and bind his steward. this steward had been supping alone with the bishop, who had come not only (as pippa said in the morning, choosing him as the ideal person for her pretending) "to bless the home of his dead brother," but also to take possession of that brother's estate. . . . he knows the steward to be a rascal; but he himself, the "holy and beloved priest," is a good deal of a rascal too; he has connived at his brother's death, and had connived at his mode of life. now the steward is preparing to blackmail the bishop, as he had blackmailed the bishop's brother. both are aware that the dead man had a child; monsignor believes that this child was murdered by the steward at the instigation of a younger brother, who wished to succeed to the estates. he urges the man to confess; otherwise he shall be arrested by monsignor's people who are in the outer room. "did you throttle or stab my brother's infant--come now?"[ : ] but the steward has yet another card to play; moreover, so many enemies now surround him that his life is probably forfeited anyhow, so he will tell the truth. and the truth is that the child was not murdered by him or anyone else. the child--the girl--is close at hand; he sees her every day, he saw her this morning. now, shall he make away with her for monsignor? not "the stupid obvious sort of killing . . . of course there is to be no killing; but at rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and he can entice her thither, has begun operations already"--making use of a certain bluphocks, an englishman. monsignor will not _formally_ assent, of course . . . but will he give the steward time to cross the alps? the girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty singing felippa,[ : ] gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass off bluphocks as a somebody, and once pippa entangled--it will be best accomplished through her singing. . . . well, monsignor has listened; monsignor conceives--is it a bargain? it was precisely as the steward asked that question that pippa finished her song of a maiden's lesson and its ending, and monsignor leaped up and shouted to his guards. . . . the singing by which "little black-eyed pretty felippa" was to be entangled had rescued instead the soul of her fourth happiest one from this deep infamy. + + + + + the great day is over. pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. it had spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own sweetness. her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for pippa is very human--she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness, _she_ finds it; she can only think "how pert that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. yet, all the same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that "passed that jest upon her" of the englishman in love--no foreigner had come to the mills that she recollects. . . . and perhaps, after all, if luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not look any worse than zanze. but gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of envy and curiosity begin to clear off--she goes over the game of make-believe, how she was in turn each of the four . . . but no! the miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and new year's day is over, and ill or well, _she_ must be content. . . . even her lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has plucked for it--the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the hill. . . . alas! even the flower seems infected. she compares it, "this pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild growth, and once more zanze comes to mind--isn't she like the pampered blossom? and if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held in his bowers," which would he like best, the zanze or the pippa? . . . no: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening sleepy lilies will not do-- "oh what a drear dark close to my poor day! how could that red sun drop in that black cloud?" and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her: "day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. she is so alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with--this morning's, for instance, of being anyone she liked. she had played her game, had kept it up loyally with herself all day--what was the good? "now, one thing i should like to really know: how near i ever might approach all those i only fancied being, this long day: approach, i mean, so as to touch them, so as to . . . in some way . . . move them--if you please, do good or evil to them some slight way. for instance, if i wind silk to-morrow, my silk may bind and border ottima's cloak's hem . . ." sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. no nearer than that can she get--her silk might border ottima's cloak's hem. . . . but she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety, trust, and courage pippa must somehow swing--and how shall she achieve it? there floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the morning-- "all service ranks the same with god." but even this can help her only a little-- "true in some sense or other, i suppose . . ." she lies down; she can pray no more than that; the hymn no doubt is right, "some way or other," and with its message thus almost mocking in her ears, she falls asleep--the lonely little girl who has saved four souls to-day, and does not know, will never know; but will be again, to-morrow perhaps, when that sad talk on the church steps is faded from her memory, the gay, brave, trustful spirit who, by merely being that, had sung her four happiest ones up toward "god in his heaven." footnotes: [ : ] asolo, in the trevisan, is a very picturesque mediæval fortified town, the ancient acelum. it lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers brenta and piave, where treviso, vicenza, and padua may be clearly recognised. the alps encircle it, and in the distance rise the euganean hills. venice can be discerned on the extreme eastern horizon, which ends in the blue line of the adriatic. the village of asolo is surrounded by a wall with mediæval turrets.--berdoe, _browning cyclopædia_, p. . [ : ] another line that i should like to omit, for the following words, wholly in character, say all that the ugly ones have boomed at us so incredibly. but here the rhyme-scheme provides a sort of unpardonable excuse. [ : ] dr. berdoe and mrs. orr. [ : ] all the talk between the students is in prose. [ : ] the long shoaly island in the lagoon, immediately opposite venice. [ : ] this song refers to catherine of cornaro, the last queen of cyprus, who came to her castle at asolo when forced to resign her kingdom to the venetians in . "she lived for her people's welfare, and won their love by her goodness and grace." [ : ] "the name means _blue-fox_, and is a skit on the _edinburgh review_, which is bound in blue and fox" (dr. furnivall). [ : ] the dialogue between monsignor and the steward is in prose. [ : ] having made her monsignor's niece, observes mr. chesterton, "browning might just as well have made sebald her long-lost brother, and luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married." iii mildred tresham in "a blot in the 'scutcheon" i have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which i constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. the type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to morning skies. but when words are further called upon for its _expression_, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial trait in her--and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for innocence knows nothing of itself. so marked is this failure, to my sense, that i cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. i do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; i mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to his voice. for always (to my sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them, which only the french _mièvre_ can justly describe. he does not, in short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her--and, among those others, not himself. in browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. it may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, i say, but at the bottom of my heart i do not feel that that is the explanation. one with which i am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already quoted: "for each man kills the thing he loves"; and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises most shrewdly the thing he kills. as the cool practised libertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic creation of which i now speak. browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality--a type of which, as i have said, the poet is bound to attempt the portrayal. browning's instinctive questioning of the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament. + + + + + the character of mildred in _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ is a striking example of this. she is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent passion into complete surrender to her lover. he, after this surrender, seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both parents to the orphan girl. the brother consents, unknowing; but after his consent, learns from a servant that mildred has yielded herself to a man--he learns not _whom_. she, accused, makes no denial, gives no name, and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor, whom tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. tresham violently repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover, attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--mertoun (the lover) making no defence. tresham goes to mildred and tells her what he has done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the revelation of mertoun's identity, dies also. the defects in this story are so obvious that i need hardly point them out. most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling earl mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. he is all that in mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his reverence for this earl tresham. ". . . i was young, and your surpassing reputation kept me so far aloof . . ." thus he explains himself. he feared to ask for her hand, yet did not fear to seduce her! the thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "mediæval" is a strange adjective, used by mrs. orr to characterise a work of which the date is placed by browning himself in the eighteenth century. mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves unable to apprehend her at all. instinctively we assign to her at least five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. to me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. every student of browning knows of the enthusiasm which dickens expressed for this piece and this character: "browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. to say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . i know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book i have ever read, as mildred's recurrence to that 'i was so young--i had no mother.'" such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that dickens chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief: mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . the cry itself--i cannot be alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps error upon error. when i imagine an ardent girl in such a situation, almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more authentic than this. the first utterance, moreover, occurs before she knows that tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy, immediately after an interview with her lover. "i was so young, i loved him so, i had no mother, god forgot me, and i fell." _i fell_ . . . no woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is said by others of her. and _god forgot me_--is this the thought of one who "loves him so"? . . . the truth is that we have here the very commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it _is_ dramatic, not because it is true. we cannot suppose that browning meant earl mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. either she is capable of passion, or she is not. if she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her soul, but she will not, can not, say that "god forgot her": those words are alien to the passionate. if she is _not_, if mertoun is the mere seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. we know that he is like herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate, rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. these errors are the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet feel themselves unstained, and know that not god forgot them, but they this world in which we dwell. in her interview with tresham after the servant's revelation, i find the same untruth. he delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. her sole rejoinder--and here she does for one second attain to authenticity--is the question: "what is this for?" he, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the arraignment, he demands the lover's name. listen to her answer: ". . . thorold, do you devise fit expiation for my guilt, if fit there be! 'tis nought to say that i'll endure and bless you--that my spirit yearns to purge her stains off in the fierce renewing fire: but do not plunge me into other guilt! oh, guilt enough . . ." she of course refuses the name. he tells her to pronounce, then, her own punishment. again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement, well-nigh sickens the soul: "oh, thorold, you must never tempt me thus! to die here in this chamber, by that sword, would seem like punishment; so should i glide like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!" comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. this is the woman to whom, but a page or two back, young mertoun has sung the exquisite song, known to most readers of browning's lyrics: "there's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest, and her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest" . . . already in that hour with her, mertoun must have learnt that some of those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of mildred tresham. in that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." when mildred answers him with, "this will not be," we could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply brought with it. but "this will not be," because they do not "deserve the whole world's best of blisses." "sin has surprised us, so will punishment." and how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and courage browning can make mertoun speak! each word that _he_ says can be brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that _she_ says. . . . her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we do feel mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love" (is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "i'll not!" she cries-- ". . . 'i'll not affect a grace that's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'" "gone once, and gone for ever." true, when the grace _is_ gone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? there are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. to me, not the error which made her prey to penitence was mildred tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame. we take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[ : ] thorold, earl tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for browning's failure. what a girl he might have given us in mildred, had he listened only to himself! but, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth: "ah, thorold, we can but--remember you!" it was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the mildred that browning could have given us--the mildred of whom her brother is made to say: "you cannot know the good and tender heart, its girl's trust and its woman's constancy, how pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind, how grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free as light where friends are . . ." there she is, as browning might have shown her! "control's not for this lady," tresham adds--the sign-manual of a browning woman. as i have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the mildred tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "oh, thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "i think i might have urged some little point in my defence to thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries: ". . . i--forgive not, but bless you, thorold, from my soul of souls! there! do not think too much upon the past! the cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud while it stood up between my friend and you; you hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that so past retrieve? i have his heart, you know; i may dispose of it: i give it you! it loves you as mine loves!" true, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for thorold's deed--thorold who dies with these words on his lips: ". . . you hold our 'scutcheon up. austin, no blot on it! you see how blood must wash one blot away; the first blot came and the first blood came. to the vain world's eye all's gules again: no care to the vain world from whence the red was drawn!" and on austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers: "i said that: yet it did come. should it come, vengeance is god's, not man's. remember me!" _vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "god"? footnotes: [ : ] berdoe. _browning cyclopædia._ iv balaustion in "balaustion's adventure" and "aristophanes' apology" to me, balaustion is the queen of browning's women--nay, i am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. for in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "rosy balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the _apology_. in that piece, the bald bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the _adventure_, i shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her. he comes to her home in athens on the night when balaustion learns that her adored euripides is dead. she and her husband, euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "open, open, bacchos[ : ] bids!"--and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, aristophanes." balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her: "forward he stepped: i rose and fronted him"; and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of admiration: "'you, lady? what, the rhodian? form and face, victory's self upsoaring to receive the poet? right they named you . . . some rich name, vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched by the isle's unguent: some diminished end in _ion_' . . ." and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him: "'phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise, korakinidion, for the coal-black hair, nettarion, phabion, for the darlingness?'" but none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes: _balaustion_, wild-pomegranate-bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "thanks, rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as balaustion she shall live and die. "nettarion, phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes balaustion queen--the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": aristophanes guessed almost right! + + + + + how did she win the name of wild-pomegranate-flower? we learn it from herself in the _adventure_. let us hear: let us feign ourselves members of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming names: "petalé, phullis, charopé, chrusion"--to whom she cries in the delightful opening: "about that strangest, saddest, sweetest song i, when a girl, heard in kameiros once, and after, saved my life by? oh, so glad to tell you the adventure!" part of the adventure is historical. in the second stage of the peloponnesian war (that famous contention between the athenians and the inhabitants of peloponnesus which began on may , b.c. and lasted twenty-seven years), the athenian general, nikias, had suffered disaster at syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the sicilians. but the assurances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. he was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. when this bad news reached rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of athens, and resolved to side with sparta. balaustion[ : ] was there, and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those who loved me at kameiros"[ : ]: ". . . no! never throw athens off for sparta's sake-- never disloyal to the life and light of the whole world worth calling world at all! * * * * * to athens, all of us that have a soul, follow me!" and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at kaunos," and they turned "the glad prow westward, soon were out at sea, pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek, proud for our heart's true harbour." but they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove unawares into the harbour of that very syracuse where nikias and demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were slaves. the inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as the ship came into harbour, balaustion singing "that song of ours which saved at salamis." she had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell the sicilians that these were rhodians who had cast in their lot with the spartan league, for the captain of syracuse answered: "ay, but we heard all athens in one ode . . . you bring a boatful of athenians here"; and athenians they would not have at syracuse, "with memories of salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry. no prayers, no blandishments, availed the rhodians; they were just about to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a question, and ". . . 'wait!' cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure). 'that song was veritable aischulos, familiar to the mouth of man and boy, old glory: how about euripides? might you know any of his verses too?'" browning here makes use of the historical fact that euripides was reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-athenian greeks than by the athenians--for balaustion, "the rhodian," had been brought up in his worship, though she knew and loved the other great greek poets also; and already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in the quarries had found that those who could "teach euripides to syracuse" gained indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. thus, when the question sounded, "might you know any of his verses too?" the captain of the vessel cried: "out with our sacred anchor! here she stands, balaustion! strangers, greet the lyric girl! * * * * * why, fast as snow in thrace, the voyage through, has she been falling thick in flakes of him, * * * * * and so, although she has some other name, we only call her wild-pomegranate-flower, balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns * * * * * you shall find food, drink, odour all at once." he called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. but she could do better than that--she could recite a whole play: "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his, alkestis!" only that very year had it reached "our isle o' the rose"; she had seen it, at kameiros, played just as it was played at athens, and had learnt by heart "the perfect piece." now, quick and subtle for all her enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the sicilians how, besides "its beauty and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved deity: "herakles, whom you house i' the city here nobly, the temple wide greece talks about; i come a suppliant to your herakles! take me and put me on his temple-steps to tell you his achievement as i may." "then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in the _apology_: "then, because greeks are greeks, and hearts are hearts, and poetry is power--they all outbroke in a great joyous laughter with much love: 'thank herakles for the good holiday! make for the harbour! row, and let voice ring: _in we row bringing in euripides!_'" so did the rhodians land at syracuse. and the whole city, hearing the cry "in we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and balaustion, standing on the topmost step of the temple of herakles, told the play: "told it, and, two days more, repeated it, until they sent us on our way again with good words and great wishes." that was her adventure. three things happened in it "for herself": a rich syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on the tripod as thank-offering to herakles; a band of the captives--"whom their lords grew kinder to, because they called the poet countryman"--sent her a crown of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third thing . . . petalé, phullis, charopé, chrusion, hear of this also--of the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see athens"; and when they reached piræus, once again was found, as balaustion landed, beside her. february's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth; and when that moon rounds full: "we are to marry. o euripides!" * * * * * everyone who speaks of _balaustion's adventure_ will quote to you that ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped master. it is this passion for intellectual beauty which sets balaustion so apart, which makes her so complete and stimulating. she has a mind as well as a heart and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess--euthukles will have a wife indeed! every word she speaks is stamped with the browning marks of gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride, ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness, modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for balaustion is like many women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense of humour. it often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most attractive of deficiencies! certainly balaustion persuades us of its power; for in the _apology_, her refusal of the aristophanic comedy is firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. no man, thus poised, could have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her reality, but of her rightness. again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom in choosing woman for the bald bard's accuser; she is as potent in this part as in that of euripides' interpreter. but what a girl balaustion is, as well as what a woman! let us see her with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite revocation (in the _apology_) of the first adventure's telling: ". . . o that spring, that eve i told the earlier[ : ] to my friends! where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth i wonder, does the streamlet ripple still, outsmoothing galingale and watermint? * * * * * under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side, close to baccheion; till the cool increase, and other stars steal on the evening star, and so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!" then, in the _adventure_, comes the translation by browning of the _alkestis_ of euripides, which balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon the temple steps at syracuse. with this we have here no business, though so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived, that not a word of the play but might have been balaustion's own. this surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece, and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme greek dramatist and this girl are indivisible. what a woman was demanded for such a feat, and what a poet for both! may we not indeed say now that browning was our singer? whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted, us, and so persuaded men that women can be great? "its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes you thrill with love for herakles, never before so god-like, because always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. but read of him in the _alkestis_ of euripides, and you shall feel him indeed divine--"this grand benevolence." . . . we can hear the voice of balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds. + + + + + when she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden inspiration came to her: "i think i see how . . . you, i, or anyone might mould a new admetos, new alkestis"; and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes full tide across her soul: ". . . ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world! they give no gift that bounds itself and ends i' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds i' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes the man who only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give-- he also; share the poet's privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from the old. . . . so with me: for i have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst, satisfied heart and soul--yet more remains! could we too make a poem? try at least, inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!" and, trying thus, balaustion, feminist, portrays the perfect marriage. admetos, in balaustion's and browning's _alkestis_, will not let his wife be sacrificed for him: "never, by that true word apollon spoke! all the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!" and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of zeus in himself. "this purpose--that, throughout my earthly life, mine should be mingled and made up with thine-- and we two prove one force and play one part and do one thing. since death divides the pair, 'tis well that i depart and thou remain who wast to me as spirit is to flesh: let the flesh perish, be perceived no more, so thou, the spirit that informed the flesh, bend yet awhile, a very flame above the rift i drop into the darkness by-- and bid remember, flesh and spirit once worked in the world, one body, for man's sake. never be that abominable show of passive death without a quickening life-- admetos only, no alkestis now!" it is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in balaustion's and browning's _alkestis_. and the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint existence lies not in her, but in him: ". . . 'what! thou soundest in my soul to depths below the deepest, reachest good by evil, that makes evil good again, and so allottest to me that i live, and not die--letting die, not thee alone, but all true life that lived in both of us? look at me once ere thou decree the lot!' * * * * * therewith her whole soul entered into his, he looked the look back, and alkestis died." but when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "this is not to die," says the queen of hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of him she has left behind: "'two souls in one were formidable odds: admetos must not be himself and thou!' * * * * * and so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, the lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; and lo, alkestis was alive again." how do our little squabbles--the "sex-war"--look to us after this? + + + + + when next we meet with balaustion, in _aristophanes' apology_, she is married to her euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters--this time back to rhodes, from athens which has fallen. many things have happened in the meantime, and balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of athens, she may free herself from anguish. euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard euripides was dead: "one year ago, athenai still herself." together she and euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where aristophanes had that night won the prize which euripides had so seldom won. they had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!" balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in athens, but one work of aristophanes, the _lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent anger, recalls the experience. it had so appalled her, "that bestiality so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn himself as virtue laughingly reproving vice, and vice . . . euripides! such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death." yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her. "i thought, 'how thoroughly death alters things! where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'" euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. he had heard them cry: "honour him!" and "a statue in the theatre!" and "bring his body back,[ : ] bury him in piræus--thucydides shall make his epitaph!" but she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry. "our tribute should not be the same, my friend. statue? within our hearts he stood, he stands!" and, for his mere mortal body: "why, let it fade, mix with the elements there where it, falling, freed euripides!" _she_ knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom. this, by "singing, we two, its own song back again up to that face from which flowed beauty--face now abler to see triumph and take love than when it glorified athenai once." yes: they two would read together _herakles_, the play of which euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the adventure at syracuse. after that, on her first arrival in athens, she had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my lips"; she had told him "how alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age." all was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and aristophanes, fresh from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house, friendly to euripides." he knew, declared aristophanes, that the rhodian hated him most of mortals, but he would not blench. the others blenched--no word could they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . so he drove them out, and stood alone confronting "statuesque balaustion pedestalled on much disapprobation and mistake." he babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood. "true, lady, i am tolerably drunk"; for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet, reigned and increased "'till something happened' . . . here he strangely paused"; but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them there. . . . while aristophanes spoke, balaustion searched his face; and now (recalling, on the way to rhodes, that hour to euthukles), she likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea--such a change as they are in this very moment beholding. "just so, some overshadow, some new care stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face, and left there only such a dark surmise-- no wonder if the revel disappeared, so did his face shed silence every side! i recognised a new man fronting me." at once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "so you see myself? your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?" but neither should this disconcert him: "thank your eyes' searching; undisguised i stand: the merest female child may question me. spare not, speak bold, balaustion!" she, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had disbelieved most proved most true." drunk though he was, "there was a mind here, mind a-wantoning at ease of undisputed mastery over the body's brood, those appetites. oh, but he grasped them grandly!" it was no "ignoble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek, great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all the pillared head: "these made a glory, of such insolence-- i thought--such domineering deity . . . impudent and majestic . . ." instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it was to this that aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. and in the very spirit of her face she did speak: "bold speech be--welcome to this honoured hearth, good genius!" here sounds the essential note of generous natures. proved mistaken, their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory for the better thing. thus, as balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with every word. he is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even rhapsodise--she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the exultant cry: "o light, light, light, i hail light everywhere! no matter for the murk that was--perchance that will be--certes, never should have been such orb's associate!" mark that aristophanes has not yet _said_ anything to justify her change of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this recantation--for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth trusts him. now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes _aristophanes' apology_. it is (from him) the defence of comedy as he understands and practises it--broad and coarse when necessary; violent and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. euripides had been one of these, and balaustion now stands for him. . . . in the long run, it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such, involves a whole philosophy of life. we cannot follow it here; all we may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in it, the character of balaustion, and the growing charm which such revelation has for her opponent. at every turn of his argument, aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. he knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "you understand," he says again and again. at length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of sophocles with tidings of euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see "the rhodian rosy with euripides! . . . and here you stand with those warm golden eyes! maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn one's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . . anyhow, i have followed happily the impulse, pledged my genius with effect, since, come to see you, i am shown--myself!" she instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to euripides. but, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him the _herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped master. she warmly interrupts, reproving him. their house _is_ the shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him: "so you but suffer that i see the blaze and not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling, not the cold iron malice, the launched lie." if he does _this_, if he shows her "a mere man's hand ignobly clenched against yon supreme calmness," she will interpose: "such as you see me! silk breaks lightning's blow!" but aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. death is the great unfairness! once a man dead, the survivors croak, "respect him." and so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." that is why _he_, aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. those at whom aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised--and euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service. as he speaks thus, balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her tongue." she exclaims that the baseness of aristophanes' attack, of his "mud-volleying" at euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art, both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! and she declares that such shame cuts through all his glory. comedy is in the dust, laid low by him: "balaustion pities aristophanes!" now she has gone too far--she has spoken too boldly. "blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce: 'but this exceeds our license!'" --so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically to search out an excuse for her. he finds it soon. she and her husband are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred athenian needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for such ignorance. but strangers are privileged: aristophanes will condone. they want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the bottom of it all. their euripides had cried "death!"--deeming death the better life; he, aristophanes, cries "life!" if the euripideans condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses; they "think out thoroughly how youth should pass-- just as if youth stops passing, all the same!" * * * * * as he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees balaustion grow ever more indignant. but he conjures her to wait a moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end, declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is slight. in so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won. euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he, aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! if she will not acknowledge final defeat: "help him, balaustion! use the rosy strength!" --and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave attack." it is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . but she begins meekly enough. she is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent. but men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (she now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) what is it that he has done? he did not invent comedy! has he improved upon it? no, she declares. one of his aims is to discredit war. that was an aim of euripides also; and has aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious song to peace in the _cresphontes_? "come, for the heart within me dies away, so long dost thou delay!" she gives this forth, in the old "syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. again (she proceeds), euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has aristophanes discredited it? by the obscene allurements of the _lysistrata_! . . . thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. he has genius--she gladly grants it; but he has debased his genius. the mob indeed has awarded him the crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon? "tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st some rarer world than e'er ilissos washed!" but as to the immortality of either, who shall say? and is even _that_ the question? no: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white sail of good and beauty on its way? assuredly. . . . and so she cries at the last: "your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the poets are of all men most royal. she never would have dared approach this poet so: "but that the other king stands suddenly, in all the grand investiture of death, bowing your knee beside my lowly head --equals one moment! --now arise and go. both have done homage to euripides!" but he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an attack on himself. she must defend her poet more directly, or aristophanes will do no homage. at once she answers that she will, that she has the best, the only, defence at hand. she will read him the _herakles_, read it as, at syracuse, she spoke the _alkestis_. "accordingly i read the perfect piece." it ends with the lament of the chorus for the departure of herakles: "the greatest of all our friends of yore we have lost for evermore!" and when balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long silence, on this night of losing a friend. aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'our best friend'--who has been the best friend to athens, euripides or i?" and he answers that it is himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has charmed "the violet-crowned"; while euripides had challenged failure, and had failed. euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been like thamyris of thrace, who was blinded by the muses for daring to contend with them in song; _he_, aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no thamyris!" he seizes the psalterion--balaustion must let him use it for once--and sings the song, from sophocles, of thamyris marching to his doom. he gives some verses,[ : ] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ thamyris, but aristophanes. . . . they shall both be pleased with his next play; it shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends," and moreover, balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! thus he departs, in all friendliness: "farewell, brave couple! next year, welcome me!" it is "next year," and balaustion and euthukles are fleeing across the water to rhodes from athens. this year has seen the death of sophocles; and the greatest of all the aristophanic triumphs in the _frogs_. it was all _him_, balaustion says: "there blazed the glory, there shot black the shame" --it showed every facet of his genius, and in it bacchos himself was "duly dragged through the mire," and euripides, after all the promises, was more vilely treated than ever before. "so, aristophanes obtained the prize, and so athenai felt she had a friend far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year." but then, what happened? the great battle of Ægos potamos was fought and lost, and athens fell into the hands of the spartans. the conqueror's first words were, "down with the piræus! peace needs no bulwarks." at first the stupefied athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next decree came forth, "no more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started up a-stare, their hands refused their office. "three days they stood, stared--stonier than their walls." lysander, the spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a conference, issued decree. not the piræus only, but all athens should be destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at last should peace dwell there. * * * * * balaustion stands, recalling this to euthukles, who writes her words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third "supreme adventure" of her life. when that decree had sounded, and the spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away: "then did a man of phokis rise--o heart! . . . _who_ was the man of phokis rose and flung a flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance" --the "choric flower" of the _elektra_, full in the face of the foe? "you flung that choric flower, my euthukles!" --and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her girl-friends at the baccheion: "so, because greeks are greeks, and hearts are hearts, and poetry is power, and euthukles had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same-- sudden, the ice-thaw! the assembled foe, heaving and swaying with strange friendliness, cried 'reverence elektra!'--cried . . . 'let stand athenai'! . . ." --and athens was saved through euripides, "through euthukles, through--more than ever--me, balaustion, me, who, wild-pomegranate-flower, felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!" * * * * * but next day, sparta woke from the spell. harsh lysander decreed that though athens might be saved, the piræus should not. comedy should destroy the long walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance, should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the violet-crowned lay in the dust. "done that day!" mourns balaustion: "the very day euripides was born." but _they_ would not see the passing of athenai; they would go, fleeing the sights and sounds, "and press to other earth, new heaven, by sea that somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair" --and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner, whose ship she had saved in the first adventure! the ship was still weather-wise: it should "'convey balaustion back to rhodes, for sake of her and her euripides!' laughed he," --and they embarked. it should be rhodes indeed: to rhodes they now are sailing. euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by streams," "boiling and freezing, like the love and hate which helped or harmed him through his earthly course. they mix in arethusa by his grave." but, just as she had known, this revocation _has_ consoled her. now she will be able to forget. never again will her eyes behold athenai, nor in imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she and euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, athens: "that's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!" there is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate its heaven here on earth: "above all crowding, crystal silentness, above all noise, a silver solitude . . . hatred and cark and care, what place have they in yon blue liberality of heaven? how the sea helps! how rose-smit earth will rise breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be rhodes!" they are entering rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out the same: "all in one chorus--what the master-word they take up? hark! 'there are no gods, no gods! glory to god--who saves euripides!'" . . . there she is, wild-pomegranate-flower, balaustion--and triumphant woman. what other man has given us this?--and even browning only here. nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore. but balaustion triumphs, and we hail her--and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self. "this mortal shall put on individuality." of all men browning most wished women to do that. footnotes: [ : ] i follow browning's spellings throughout. [ : ] the character of balaustion is wholly imaginary. [ : ] a town of the island of rhodes. [ : ] in the _apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her interview with aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _herakles_ of euripides. [ : ] euripides died at the court of archelaus, king of macedonia. [ : ] browning never finished his translation of this splendid song. v pompilia in "the ring and the book" i said, in writing of balaustion: "nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore." i should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. true that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. that this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity i am not desirous to deny; but i do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and i deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? for women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this! thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "chivalry from women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry? not all in jest do i so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails me--and if me, then probably many another--when i find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." it is this which makes balaustion supreme for my delight. there is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the great fates, as one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . we turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives--money. and money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. a dowry, and a tiny one: _this_ created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _the ring and the book_. "another day that finds her living yet, little pompilia, with the patient brow and lamentable smile on those poor lips, and, under the white hospital-array, a flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise you'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again, alive i' the ruins. 'tis a miracle. it seems that when her husband struck her first, she prayed madonna just that she might live so long as to confess and be absolved; and whether it was that, all her sad life long never before successful in a prayer, this prayer rose with authority too dread-- or whether because earth was hell to her, by compensation when the blackness broke, she got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue, to show her for a moment such things were," --the prayer was granted her. so, musing on the murder of the countess franceschini by her husband; and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of rome express itself--"the other half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the crime: "half-rome." this other-half is wholly sympathetic to the seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at st. anna's. "why was she made to learn what guido franceschini's heart could hold?" demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims: "who did it shall account to christ-- having no pity on the harmless life and gentle face and girlish form he found, and thus flings back. go practise if you please with men and women. leave a child alone for christ's particular love's sake!" then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story of pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as browning, in the issue, makes us see and feel it too. in _the ring and the book_, browning tells us this story--this "pure crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine different persons, guido franceschini, the husband, speaking twice. stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither impression survives for a moment. each telling is at once the same and new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. we get, first of all, browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the appearance of that fact to: . half-rome, antagonistic to pompilia. . the other half, sympathetic to her. . "tertium quid," neutral. . count guido franceschini, at his trial. . giuseppe caponsacchi (the priest with whom pompilia fled), at the trial. . pompilia, on her death-bed. . count guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the defence. . the public prosecutor's speech. . the pope, considering his decision on guido's appeal to him after the trial. . guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers before execution. only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the survey is absorbing. not a point which can be urged on any side is omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as i have said, one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity of pompilia. "she is the heroine," says mr. arthur symons,[ : ] "as neither guido nor caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . with hardly [any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story with pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child." and so, here, have we not indeed the victim? but though i spoke of weariness, i must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of manhood. guido, like all evil things, is nothingness: he serves but to show forth what purity and love, in pompilia, could be; what bravery and love, in caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. this girl has not the browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others--this "lady young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the appointed man." the "pure crude fact," detailed by browning, was found in the authentic legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," on a stall in the piazza san lorenzo of florence. he bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem: "gold as it was, is, shall be evermore, prime nature with an added artistry." + + + + + pompilia, called comparini, was in reality "nobody's child." this, which at first sight may seem of minor importance to the issue, is actually at the heart of all; for, as i have said, it was the question of her dowry which set the entire drama in motion. the old comparini couple, childless, of mediocre class and fortunes, had through silly extravagance run into debt, and in were hard pressed by creditors. they could not draw on their capital, for it was tied up in favour of the legal heir, an unknown cousin. but if they had a child, that disability would be removed. violante comparini, seeing this, resolved upon a plan. she bought beforehand for a small sum the expected baby of a disreputable woman, giving herself out to her husband, pietro, and their friends as almost miraculously pregnant--for she was past fifty. in due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, pompilia. this girl was married at thirteen to count guido franceschini, an impoverished nobleman, fifty years old, of arezzo. he married her for her reported dowry, and she was sold to him for the sake of his rank. both parties to the bargain found themselves deceived (pompilia was, of course, a mere chattel in the business), for there was no dowry, and guido, though he _had_ the rank, had none of the appurtenances thereof which had dazzled the fancy of violante. pietro too was tricked, and the marriage carried through against his will. the old couple, reduced to destitution by extracted payment of a part of the dowry, were taken to the miserable franceschini castle at arezzo, and there lived wretchedly, in every sense, for a while; but soon fled back to rome, leaving the girl-wife behind to aggravated woes. about three years afterwards she also fled, intending to rejoin the comparini at rome. she was about to become a mother. the organiser and companion of her flight was a young priest, giuseppe caponsacchi, who was a canon at arezzo. guido followed them, caught them at castelnuovo, a village on the outskirts of rome, and caused both to be arrested. they were confined in the "new prisons" at rome, and tried for adultery. the result was a compromise--they were pronounced guilty, but a merely nominal punishment ("the jocular piece of punishment," as the young priest called it) was inflicted on each. pompilia was relegated for a time to a convent; caponsacchi was banished for three years to civita vecchia. as the time for pompilia's confinement drew near, she was permitted to go to her reputed parents' home, which was a villa just outside the walls of the city. a few months after her removal there, she became the mother of a son, whom the old people quickly removed to a place of concealment and safety. a fortnight later--on the second day of the new year--count guido, with four hired assassins, came to the villa, and all three occupants were killed: pietro and violante comparini, and pompilia his wife. for these murders, guido and his hirelings were hanged at rome on february , . but now we must return upon our steps, if we would know "the truth of this." when the old comparini reached rome, after their flight from arezzo, the pope had just proclaimed jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution for any sin was to be had for the asking--atonement, however, necessarily preceding. violante, remorseful for the sacrifice of their darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. she therefore confessed to pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for revenge on guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the other half-rome, may not have been) his only motive. "what? all that used to be, may be again? * * * * * what, the girl's dowry never was the girl's, and unpaid yet, is never now to pay? then the girl's self, my pale pompilia child that used to be my own with her great eyes-- will she come back, with nothing changed at all?" he repudiated pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims from her husband. taken into court, the case (also bound up in the square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left undecided. it was this which loosed all guido's fury on pompilia. he had already learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the disputed dowry.[ : ] there was only one way thus to rid himself, and that was to prove her guilty of adultery. he concentrated on it. first, his brother, the young canon girolamo, who lived at the castle, was incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. she fled to the archbishop of arezzo and implored his succour. he gave none. then she went to the governor: he also "pushed her back." she sought out a poor friar, and confessed her "despair in god"; he promised to write to her parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . guido's plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of persecution must be set up. she was hourly accused of "looking love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving up the game."[ : ] she abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window; she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same stone strength of white despair": "how does it differ in aught, save degree, from the terrible patience of god?" --and more and more he hated her. but at last, at the theatre one night, pompilia-- "brought there i knew not why, but now know well"[ : ] --saw, for the first time, giuseppe caponsacchi, "the young frank personable priest"[ : ]--and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt ". . . had there been a man like that, to lift me with his strength out of all strife into the calm! . . . suppose that man had been instead of this?" * * * * * caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual cupid" that browning calls him. his family, the oldest in arezzo and once the greatest, had wide interest in the church, and he had always known that he was to be a priest. but when the time came for "just a vow to read!" he stopped awestruck. could he keep such a promise? he knew himself too weak. but the bishop smiled. there were two ways of taking that vow, and a man like caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals," need not choose the harder one. "renounce the world? nay, keep and give it us!" he was good enough for _that_, thought caponsacchi, and in this spirit he took the vows. he did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at his post where beauty and fashion rule"--a fribble and a coxcomb, in short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . . after three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little canon conti, a kinsman of the franceschini. he was in the mood proper enough for the place, amused or no . . . "when i saw enter, stand, and seat herself a lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad" --and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the altar in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through matin-song." the burden was unpacked, and left-- "lofty and lone: and lo, when next i looked there was the rafael!" fat little conti noticed his rapt gaze, and exclaimed that he would make the lady respond to it. he tossed a paper of comfits into her lap; she turned, "looked our way, smiled the beautiful sad strange smile;" and thought the thought that we have learned--for instinctively and surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that man": ". . . silent, grave, solemn almost, he saw me, as i saw him." conti told caponsacchi who she was, and warned him to look away; but promised to take him to the castle if he could. at vespers, next day, caponsacchi heard from conti that the husband had seen that gaze. _he_ would not signify, but there was pompilia: "spare her, because he beats her as it is, she's breaking her heart quite fast enough." it was the turning-point in caponsacchi's life. he had no thought of pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse--he felt that he must leave arezzo. all that hitherto had charmed him there was done with--the social successes, the intrigue, song-making; and his patron was already displeased. these things were what he was there to do, and he was going to church instead! "are you turning molinist?" the patron asked. "i answered quick" (says caponsacchi in his narrative) "sir, what if i turned christian?" --and at once announced his resolve to go to rome as soon as lent was over. one evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life "had shaken under him"; and "thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like, how utterly dissociated was i a priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife of guido . . . . . . i had a whole store of strengths eating into my heart, which craved employ, and she, perhaps, need of a finger's help-- and yet there was no way in the wide world to stretch out mine." her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read, and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting. it was margherita, the "kind of maid" of count guido, and the letter purported to be from pompilia, offering her love. caponsacchi saw through the trick at once: the letter was written by guido. he answered it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it: ". . . what made you--may one ask?-- marry your hideous husband?" but henceforth such letters came thick and fast. caponsacchi was met in the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book, they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . at length there arrived a note in a different manner. this warned him _not_ to come, to avoid the window for his life. at once he answered that the street was free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that evening at the ave. his conviction was that he should find the husband there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. what it really was, he never guessed at all. meanwhile--turning now to pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. day after day, margherita had dinned the name of caponsacchi into the wife's ears. how he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed fidelity to the count who used _her_, margherita, as his pastime--ought she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? guido might kill him! here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it: "i know you cannot read--therefore, let me! '_my idol_'" . . . the letter was not from caponsacchi, and pompilia, divining this as surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . day after day such moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at end of her strength, she swooned away. as she was coming to again, margherita stooped and whispered _caponsacchi_. but still, though the sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him? "therefore while you profess to show him me, i ever see his own face. get you gone!" but the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half through april, pompilia learned what that something was. . . . going to bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been margherita's prattle. "easter was over; everyone was on the wing for rome--even caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." pompilia had heard it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day was done: "how good to sleep and so get nearer death!" but with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce her slumber? ". . . up i sprang alive, light in me, light without me, everywhere change!" the exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their "myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the lattice-panes, the birds-- "always with one voice--where are two such joys?-- the blessed building-sparrow! i stepped forth, stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky! my heart sang, 'i too am to go away, i too have something i must care about, carry away with me to rome, to rome! * * * * * not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[ : ] pope innocent xii--"the great good old pope," as browning calls him in the summary of book i--when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he calls "my rose, i gather for the breast of god." "oh child, that didst despise thy life so much when it seemed only thine to keep or lose, how the fine ear felt fall the first low word 'value life, and preserve life for my sake!' * * * * * thou, at first prompting of what i call god, and fools call nature, didst hear, comprehend, accept the obligation laid on thee, mother elect, to save the unborn child. . . . go past me, and get thy praise--and be not far to seek presently when i follow if i may!" "now" (says the sympathetic other half-rome), "begins the tenebrific passage of the tale." as we have seen, pompilia had tried all other means of escape, even before the great call came to her. her last appeal had been made to two of guido's kinsmen, on the wing for rome like everyone else--conti being one. both had refused, but conti had referred her to caponsacchi--not evilly like margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the other half-rome thus images the moment in which she resolved to appeal to him. "if then, all outlets thus secured save one, at last she took to the open, stood and stared with her wan face to see where god might wait-- and there found caponsacchi wait as well for the precious something at perdition's edge, he only was predestinate to save . . . * * * * * whatever way in this strange world it was, pompilia and caponsacchi met, in fine, she at her window, he i' the street beneath, and understood each other at first look." for suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of annunciation, she turned on margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "tell caponsacchi he may come!" "how plainly" (says pompilia)-- "how plainly i perceived hell flash and fade o' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy, then final reassurance i indeed was caught now, never to be free again!" but she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything. "after the ave maria, at first dark, i will be standing on the terrace, say!" she knew he would come, and prayed to god all day. at "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me." + + + + + he had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but, at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "our lady of all the sorrows." he knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she bent down--"and she did bend, while i stood still as stone, all eye, all ear." first she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that he loved her. she did not believe that he meant that as margherita meant it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had resolved to see him. her whole life was so strange that this but belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help her--he, and he alone! she told him her story. there was a reason now at last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take from caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with-- ". . . take me to rome! take me as you would take a dog, i think, masterless left for strangers to maltreat: take me home like that--leave me in the house where the father and mother are" . . . she tells his answer thus: "he replied-- the first word i heard ever from his lips, all himself in it--an eternity of speech, to match the immeasurable depth o' the soul that then broke silence--'i am yours.'" * * * * * but when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. first, the church seemed to rebuke--the church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! now she changed her tone, it appeared:-- "now, when i found out first that life and death are means to an end, that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form of worship is self-sacrifice." but that soon passed: the word was god's; this was the true self-sacrifice. . . . but might it not injure her--scandal would hiss about her name. would not god choose his own way to save her? and _he_ might pray. . . . two days passed thus. but he must go to counsel and to comfort her--was he not a priest? he went. she was there, leaning over the terrace; she reproached him: why did he delay the help his heart yearned to give? he answered with his fears for her, but she broke in, never doubting him though he should doubt himself: "'i know you: when is it that you will come?'" "to-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged--the place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the carriage, while he cried to the driver: ". . . 'by san spirito, to rome, as if the road burned underneath!'" when she was dying of guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how pompilia thought of that long flight: "i did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die: 'oh, to have caponsacchi for my guide!' ever the face upturned to mine, the hand holding my hand across the world . . ." and he, telling the judges of it at the murder-trial, cried that he never could lie quiet in his grave unless he "mirrored them plain the perfect soul pompilia." "you must know that a man gets drunk with truth stagnant inside him. oh, they've killed her, sirs! can i be calm?" but he must be calm: he must show them that soul. "the glory of life, the beauty of the world, the splendour of heaven . . . well, sirs, does no one move? do i speak ambiguously? the glory, i say, and the beauty, i say, and splendour, still say i" . . . --for thus he flings defiance at them. why do they not smile as they smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden smoke from hell"? "men, for the last time, what do you want with me?" for if they had but seen _then_ what guido franceschini was! if they would but have been serious! pompilia would not now be "gasping away the latest breath of all, this minute, while i talk--not while you laugh?" how can the end of this deed surprise them? pompilia and he had shown them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. he, the priest, had left her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she lies!" do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of christ when he tried to save her? his part is done--all that he had been able to do; he wants no more with earth, except to "show pompilia who was true"-- "the snow-white soul that angels fear to take untenderly . . . sirs, only seventeen!" then he begins his story of ". . . our flight from dusk to clear, through day and night and day again to night once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all." thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries: "you know this is not love, sirs--it is faith, the feeling that there's god." by morning they had passed perugia; assisi was opposite. he met her look for the first time since they had started. . . . at foligno he urged her to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's, "tired to death in the thicket, when she feels the probing spear o' the huntsman," she had cried, "on, on to rome, on, on"--and they went on. during the night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms; and caponsacchi prayed (thinking "why, in my life i never prayed before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . . when she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that rome was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. but she answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"-- "never to see a face nor hear a voice-- yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb; nor face, i see it in the dark" . . . --such tranquillity was such heaven to her! "this one heart" (she said on her death-bed): "this one heart gave me all the spring! i could believe himself by his strong will had woven around me what i thought the world we went along in . . . for, through the journey, was it natural such comfort should arise from first to last?" as she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all is caponsacchi: "him i now see make the shine everywhere." best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a little wayside inn. he tells of it thus. when the day was broad, he begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. he told the woman of the house that pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would she comfort her as women can? and then he left them together: "i spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro the garden; just to leave her free awhile . . . i might have sat beside her on the bench where the children were: i wish the thing had been, indeed: the event could not be worse, you know: one more half-hour of her saved! she's dead now, sirs!" as they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die now, he would account it to be in sin? the woman at the inn had told her about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . but soon, half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "gaetano." . . . afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son: "one who has only been made a saint--how long? twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps, to guard a namesake than those old saints grow, tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[ : ] for "little pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended parents: ". . . so many names for one poor child --francesca camilla vittoria angela pompilia comparini--laughable!"[ : ] . . . but now caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was castelnuovo, as good as rome: "say you are saved, sweet lady!" she awoke. the sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she cried out that she must not die: "'take me no farther, i should die: stay here! i have more life to save than mine!' she swooned. we seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?" he carried her, "against my heart, beneath my head bowed low, as we priests carry the paten," into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply. the host urged him to leave her in peace till morn. "oh, my foreboding! but i could not choose." all night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot, "filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment came, he must awaken her--he turned to go: ". . . and there faced me count guido." oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great good satisfying gripe," and abolished guido with his lie! . . . but while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife, "the minute, oh the misery, was gone;" --two police-officers stood beside, and guido was ordering them to take her. caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she was sleeping. he was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if the officer should detect "guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge between us and the mad dog howling there!" they all went up together. there she lay, "o' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self, wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun that filled the window with a light like blood." at guido's loud order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect, face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace and joy and light and life"--for he was standing against the window a-flame with morning. but in her terror, that seemed to her the flame from hell, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she chose hell rather than "embracing any more." caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble pouring in at the noise--he was caught--"they heaped themselves upon me." . . . then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then "came all the strength back in a sudden swell," --and she sprang at her husband, seized the sword that hung beside him, "drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy o' the blade. 'die,' cried she, 'devil, in god's name!' ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one . . . dead-white and disarmed she lay." she said, dying, that this, her first and last resistance, had been invincible, for she had struck at the lie in guido; and thus not "the vain sword nor weak speech" had saved her, but caponsacchi's truth:-- "you see, i will not have the service fail! i say the angel saved me: i am safe! . . . what o' the way to the end?--the end crowns all" --for even though she now was dying, there had been the time at the convent with the quiet nuns, and then the safety with her parents, and then: "my babe was given me! yes, he saved my babe: it would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing, through that arezzo noise and trouble . . . but the sweet peace cured all, and let me live and give my bird the life among the leaves god meant him! weeks and months of quietude, i could lie in such peace and learn so much, know life a little, i should leave so soon. therefore, because this man restored my soul all has been right . . . for as the weakness of my time drew nigh, nobody did me one disservice more, spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love i lay in the arms of, till my boy was born, born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss a whole long fortnight: in a life like mine a fortnight filled with bliss is long and much." for, thinking of her happy childhood before the marriage, already she has said that only that childhood, and the prayer that brought her caponsacchi, and the "great fortnight" remain as real: the four bad years between "vanish--one quarter of my life, you know." in that room in the inn they parted. they were borne off to separate cells of the same ignoble prison, and, separate, thence to rome. "pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me the last time in this life: not one sight more, never another sight to be! and yet i thought i had saved her . . . it seems i simply sent her to her death. you tell me she is dying now, or dead." but then it flashes to his mind that this may be a trick to make him confess--it would be worthy of them; and the great cry breaks forth: "no, sirs, i cannot have the lady dead! that erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, that voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) that vision in the blood-red daybreak--that leap to life of the pale electric sword angels go armed with--that was not the last o' the lady! come, i see through it, you find-- know the manoeuvre! . . . let me see for myself if it be so!" * * * * * but it is true. twenty-two dagger-thrusts-- "two days ago, when guido, with the right, hacked her to pieces" . . . oh, should they not have seen at first? that very flight proved the innocence of the pair who thus fled: these judges should have recognised the accepted man, the exceptional conduct that rightly claims to be judged by exceptional rules. . . . but it is all over. she is dying--dead perhaps. he has done with being judged--he is guiltless in thought, word, and deed; and she . . . ". . . for pompilia--be advised, build churches, go pray! you will find me there, i know, if you come--and you will come, i know. why, there's a judge weeping! did not i say you were good and true at bottom? you see the truth-- i am glad i helped you: she helped me just so." once more he flashes forth in her defence, in rage against guido--but the image of her, "so sweet and true and pure and beautiful," comes back to him: "sirs, i am quiet again. you see we are so very pitiable, she and i, who had conceivably been otherwise" --and at the thought of _how_ "otherwise," of what life with such a woman were for a free man, and of his life henceforth, a priest, "on earth, as good as out of it," with the memory of her, only the memory . . . for she is dying, dead perhaps . . . the whole man breaks down, and he goes from the place with one wild, anguished call to heaven: "oh, great, just, good god! miserable me!" i have chosen to reveal pompilia chiefly through caponsacchi's speech for two reasons. first, because there is nothing grander in our literature than that passionate and throbbing monologue; second, because to show this type of woman _through_ another speaker is the way in which browning always shows her best. as i said when writing of mildred tresham, directly such a woman speaks for herself, in browning's work, he forces the note, he takes from her (unconsciously) a part of the beauty which those other speakers have shown forth. so with pompilia, though not in the same degree as with mildred, for here the truth _is_ with us--pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the theatre. yet even here the same strange errors recur. she has words indeed that reach the inmost heart--poignant, overpowering in tenderness and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "not so!" of such is the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the marriage-state. this, wholly acceptable while left unexplained, loses its verisimilitude when comparisons are found in her mouth with which to delineate it; and the particular one chosen--of marriage as a coin, "a dirty piece would purchase me the praise of those i loved"--is actually inept, since the essence of her is that she does not know anything at all about the "coin," so certainly does not know that it is or may be "dirty." again, here is an ignorant child, whose deep insight has come to her through love alone. she feels, in the weakness of her nearing death, and the bliss of spiritual tranquillity, that all the past with guido is a terrific dream: "it is the good of dreams--so soon they go!" beautiful: but browning could not leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity. she must philosophise: "this is the note of evil: for good lasts" . . . pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says it in that image of the dream--but she would have left it alone, she would have made no maxim out of it. and the maxim, when it _is_ made, says no more than the image had said. once again: her plea for guido. that she should forgive him was essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. no reason can confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. to put in her mouth the plea that guido had been deceived in his hope of enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing "whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct, "so unaware, i only made things worse" . . . --this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which misled browning so frequently. there is no loveliness of pardon here; but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. the aim of guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all sense of good and evil. it is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no beauty of any kind. but browning could not "leave things alone"; he had to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own person. i shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. but i think the unmeasured praise of browning by some of his admirers has worked against, not for, him. it irritates to read of the "perfection" of this speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature. i turn now gladly to those beauties. chief is the pride and love of the new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her little son again since the "great fortnight." she thinks how well it was that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the villa: "he was too young to smile and save himself;" --for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that money's sake. . . . but she had not seen him again, and now will never see him. and when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what his mother was like, and people will say, "like girls of seventeen," and he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he looks at her. . . . that is not the way for a mother! "therefore i wish someone will please to say i looked already old, though i was young;" --and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." her name too is not a common one--that may help to keep apart "a little the thing i am from what girls are." but how hard for him to find out anything about her: "no father that he ever knew at all, nor never had--no, never had, i say!" --and a mother who only lived two weeks, and pietro and violante gone! only his saint to guard him--that was why she chose the new one; _he_ would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . after all, she hopes her boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. it is dwindling fast to that: "sheer dreaming and impossibility-- just in four days too! all the seventeen years, not once did a suspicion visit me how very different a lot is mine from any other woman's in the world. the reason must be, 'twas by step and step it got to grow so terrible and strange. these strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . . sat down where i sat, laid them where i lay, and i was found familiarised with fear." first there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by pietro and violante. then: "so with my husband--just such a surprise, such a mistake, in that relationship! everyone says that husbands love their wives, guard them and guide them, give them happiness; 'tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well-- you see how much of this comes true with me!" next, "there is the friend." . . . people will not ask her about him; they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "most surprise of all!" it is always that word: how he loves her, how she loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. it all seems unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend tisbe would pretend to be the figures on the tapestry:-- "you know the figures never were ourselves. . . . thus all my life." her life is like a "fairy thing that fades and fades." "--even to my babe! i thought when he was born, something began for me that would not end, nor change into a laugh at me, but stay for evermore, eternally, quite mine." and hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even _he_ "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." she fancies him grown big, "strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me, frowns with the others: 'poor imprudent child! why did you venture out of the safe street? why go so far from help to that lone house? why open at the whisper and the knock?'" * * * * * that new year's day, when she had been allowed to get up for the first time, and they had sat round the fire and talked of him, and what he should do when he was big-- "oh, what a happy, friendly eve was that!" and next day, old pietro had been packed off to church, because he was so happy and would talk so much, and violante thought he would tire her. and then he came back, and was telling them about the christmas altars at the churches--none was so fine as san giovanni-- ". . . when, at the door, a tap: we started up: you know the rest." pietro had done no harm; violante had erred in telling the lie about her birth--certainly that was wrong, but it was done with love in it, and even the giving her to guido had had love in it . . . and at any rate it is all over now, and pompilia has just been absolved, and thus there "seems not so much pain": "being right now, i am happy and colour things. yes, everybody that leaves life sees all softened and bettered; so with other sights: _to me at least was never evening yet_ _but seemed far beautifuller than its day_,[ : ] for past is past." then she falls to thinking of that real mother, who had sold her before she was born. violante had told her of it when she came back from the nuns, and was waiting for her boy to come. that mother died at her birth: "i shall believe she hoped in her poor heart that i at least might try be good and pure . . . and oh, my mother, it all came to this?" now she too is dying, and leaving her little one behind. but _she_ is leaving him "outright to god": "all human plans and projects come to nought: my life, and what i know of other lives prove that: no plan nor project! god shall care!" she will lay him with god. and her last breath, for gratitude, shall spend itself in showing, now that they will really listen and not say "he was your lover" . . . her last breath shall disperse the stain around the name of caponsacchi. ". . . there, strength comes already with the utterance!" * * * * * now she tells what we know; some of it we have learnt already from her lips. she goes back over the years in "that fell house of hate"; then, the seeing of him at the theatre, the persecution with the false letters, the annunciation-morning, the summons to him, the meeting, the escape: "no pause i' the leading and the light! * * * * * and this man, men call sinner? jesus christ!" but once more, mother-like, she reverts to her boy: ". . . we poor weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong! i was already using up my life-- this portion, now, should do him such a good, this other go to keep off such an ill. the great life: see, a breath, and it is gone!" still, all will be well: "let us leave god alone." and now she will "withdraw from earth and man to her own soul," will "compose herself for god" . . . but even as she speaks, the flood of gratitude to her one friend again sweeps back, and she exclaims, "well, and there is more! yes, my end of breath shall bear away my soul in being true![ : ] he is still here, not outside with the world, here, here, i have him in his rightful place! * * * * * i feel for what i verily find--again the face, again the eyes, again, through all, the heart and its immeasurable love of my one friend, my only, all my own, who put his breast between the spears and me. ever with caponsacchi! . . . o lover of my life, o soldier-saint, no work begun shall ever pause for death! love will be helpful to me more and more i' the coming course, the new path i must tread-- my weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that! * * * * * not one faint fleck of failure! why explain? what i see, oh, he sees, and how much more! * * * * * do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for god? say--i am all in flowers from head to foot! say--not one flower of all he said and did, but dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree whereof the blossoming perfumes the place at this supreme of moments!" she has recognised the truth. this _is_ love--but how different from the love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "he is your lover!" he is a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married if he could: "marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, * * * * * in heaven we have the real and true and sure." in heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never married, no, nor given in marriage: ". . . they are man and wife at once when the true time is . . . so, let him wait god's instant men call years; meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, do out the duty! through such souls alone god, stooping, shows sufficient of his light for us i' the dark to rise by. and i rise." * * * * * who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. pompilia is no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of god": "et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses, l'espace d'un matin." footnotes: [ : ] _introduction to the study of browning_, , p. . [ : ] abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_ which moved guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all. [ : ] guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope that his "impenitence" may defer his execution. [ : ] her dying speech. [ : ] browning's summary. book i. [ : ] mrs. orr, commenting on this passage, says: "the sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture; it was not suggested by the facts"--for mrs. orr, who had read the documents from which browning made the poem, says: "unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. . . . the real pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him." and, as she later adds, though for many readers this character is, in its haunting pathos, the most exquisite of browning's creations, "for others, it fails in impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them." but (she goes on) "it was only in an idealised pompilia that the material for poetical creation, in this 'murder story,' could have been found." these remarks will be seen partly to agree with some of my own. [ : ] her dying speech. [ : ] how wonderfully is the wistful nature of the girl summed up in these two lines! [ : ] caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will "burn his soul out in showing you the truth." part ii [illustration: the great lady] the great lady "my last duchess," and "the flight of the duchess" for a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of browning, the perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious than the miasma. his imagination needed not to free itself of all things adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for browning, even a "lady" could be a woman--and remain a woman, even though she be turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted from the realm of things that may be loved! of narrowness like this our poet was incapable. he could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. and especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material cares prevail not--where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers "not for bread alone." "was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red-- on her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, o'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his head?" he could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul existed. true, that in _a toccata of galuppi's_,[ : ] the soul _is_ questioned: "dust and ashes, dead and done with, venice spent what venice earned. the soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned." but this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but those of toil and privation. it is rather the sad vision of an entire social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. and despite the denial of soul in these venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! the sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly. "well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and afford --she, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword, while you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord." the music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions: "must we die?"-- "those commiserating sevenths--'life might last! we can but try!'" the question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! and then come the other questions: "hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to." "so an octave struck the answer. oh, they praised you, i dare say! 'brave galuppi, that was music! good alike at grave and gay! i can always leave off talking when i hear a master play.' then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one, some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun." . . . the "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that _he_, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these: ". . . you know physics, something of geology, mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; butterflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be! as for venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: what of soul was left, i wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" . . . yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. what, "creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since he is neither deaf nor blind: "but although i take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! . . . 'dust and ashes!' so you creak it, and i want the heart to scold. dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? i feel chilly and grown old." after all, the pageant of life has value! we need not _only_ the wise men. and even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to that music. "here's all the good it brings!" + + + + + none the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this pageant. itself has the seed of death within it. all that beauty, riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall kill some souls. . . . this too browning could perceive and show; and once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. there is something in true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible to say that, so often does he say it! in colombe, in the queen of _in a balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with constance, scarcely less noble, yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all, in the exquisite imagining of that "duchess," the girl-wife who twice is given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. he touched her first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically; then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely back to earth--in _my last duchess_ and _the flight of the duchess_ respectively. let us examine the two poems, and i think we shall agree, in reading the second, that browning, like caponsacchi, could not have the lady dead. first, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall," of a dead italian girl. "that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will 't please you sit and look at her? i said frà pandolf by design: for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus." the duke, a duke of ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name," is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy from a count whose daughter he designs to make his next duchess. he is a connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. thanks to that nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. but even now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed her--nor, if he did, could feel remorse. for it is not possible that _he_ could have been wrong. this duchess--it would have been idle to "make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other lesser being) without stooping--"and i choose never to stoop." her error had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which frà pandolf had so wonderfully caught. does the envoy suppose that it was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her cheek? it had _not_ been so. the mere painting-man, the mere frà pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist--may have said, for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the "faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of paint to reproduce. ". . . such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy." as the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the duke is forced to the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement: ". . . she had a heart--how shall i say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere." even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly conveyed: "sir, 'twas all one! my favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. . . ." + + + + + we, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to the duke, looking at the duchess. we can see the quivering, glad, tender creature as though we also were at gaze on frà pandolf's picture. . . . i call _this_ piece a wonder, now! scarce one of the monologues is so packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most "simple"--even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they are, as mr. arthur symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." two lives are summed up in fifty-six lines. first, the ghastly duke's; then, hers--but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one. . . . everything that came to her was transmuted into her own dearness--even his favour at her breast. we can figure to ourselves the giving of that "favour"--the high proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude: sir willoughby patterne by intelligent anticipation. but then, though the approving speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with his bough of cherries--and speech and blush were given again! absurder still, the spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule . . . "who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling?" even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's gift"--even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted" him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made excuse) . . . even so (this must be impressed upon the envoy), it would have meant some stooping, and the duke "chooses never to stoop." still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the next duchess! . . . more and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued upon that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is sounding in his ear-- ". . . oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene'er i passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? this grew; i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together." there falls a curious, throbbing silence. the envoy still sits gazing. there she stands, _looking as if she were alive_. . . . and almost he starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a meaning-- ". . . there she stands as if alive" --the picture is a wonder! still the visitor sits dumb. was it from human lips that those words had just now sounded: "_then all smiles stopped together_"? she stands there--smiling . . . but the duke grows weary of this pause before frà pandolf's piece. it is a wonder; but he has other wonders. moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily in silence, taken: the next duchess will be instructed beforehand in the proper way to "thank men." he intimates his will to move away: "will't please you rise? we'll meet the company below, then." the envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. somewhere, as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the count his master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . but in a hot resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such proximity. same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . . still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the due deference: ". . . nay, we'll go together down, sir," --and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by _him_) the envoy acquiesces. they begin to descend the staircase. but the visitor has no eyes for "wonders" now--he has seen the wonder, has heard the horror. . . . his host is all unwitting. strange, that the guest can pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. one of them, however, must be pointed out: ". . . notice neptune, though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which claus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me." . . . something else getting "stopped"! the envoy looks. + + + + + but lo, she is alive again! this time she is in distant northern lands, or _was_, for now (and, strangely, we thank heaven for it) we know not where she is. wherever it is, she is happy. she has been saved, as by flame; has been snatched from _her_ duke, and borne away to joy and love--by an old gipsy-woman! no lover came for her: it was love that came, and because she knew love at first sight and sound, she saved herself. the old huntsman of her husband's court tells the story to a traveller whom he calls his friend. "what a thing friendship is, world without end!" it happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the duke and the duchess all were young--if the duke was ever young! he had not been brought up at the northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had been summoned to the kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and died there, "at next year's end, in a velvet suit . . . petticoated like a herald, in a chamber next to an ante-room where he breathed the breath of page and groom, what he called stink, and they perfume." the "sick tall yellow duchess" soon took the boy to paris, where she belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of god knows who." so the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were railing and gibing. but in vain they railed and gibed until long years were past, "and back came our duke and his mother again." "and he came back the pertest little ape that ever affronted human shape; full of his travel, struck at himself. you'd say, he despised our bluff old ways? --not he!" --for in paris it happened that a cult of the middle ages was in vogue, and the duke had been told there that the rough north land was the one good thing left in these evil days: "so, all that the old dukes had been, without knowing it, this duke would fain know he was, without being it." it was a renaissance in full blast! all the "thoroughly worn-out" usages were revived: "the souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out." the "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its origins; and the duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs and length, all speed, no strength: "they should have set him on red berold, mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . . with the red eye slow consuming in fire, and the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!" thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. he preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty berold"; he drank "weak french wine for strong cotnar" . . . anything in the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations. "well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard: and out of a convent, at the word, came the lady in time of spring. --oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!" spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo: "and so we saw the lady arrive; my friend, i have seen a white crane bigger! she was the smallest lady alive, made in a piece of nature's madness, too small, almost, for the life and gladness that over-filled her." she rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle, where the duke awaited her. "up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead, straight at the castle, that's best indeed to look at from outside the walls" --and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and thralls," as of course they were styled. she gave our huntsman a look of gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked max, who rode on her other hand, the name of every bird that flew past: "was that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?" thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the italian duchess--but she _is_ the same!), the little lady rode forward: "when suddenly appeared the duke." she sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. but the duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." the sick tall yellow duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky sullied by a chill wind, "the lady's face stopped its play, as if her first hair had grown grey; for such things must begin some one day." but the brave spirit survived. in a day or two she was well again, as if she could not believe that god did not mean her to be content and glad in his sight. "so, smiling as at first went she." she was filled to the brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman--and this huntsman, who has _had_ a beloved wife, knows what he is saying. "she was active, stirring, all fire-- could not rest, could not tire-- to a stone she might have given life! . . . and here was plenty to be done, and she that could do it, great or small, she was to do nothing at all." for the castle was crammed with retainers, and the duke's plan permitted a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and out of it: "to sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen at the proper place, in the proper minute, and die away the life between." the little duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the italian girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. it was amusing enough (the old huntsman remembers)--but for the grief that followed after. for she did not submit easily. having broken the rules, she would find fault with them! she would advise and criticise, and "being a fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. but "the wise" only smiled. it was as if a little mechanical toy should be contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly _make_ it. thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic, for like the duke at ferrara, this duke (and his mother) did not choose to stoop. _he_ would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's claws." "so the little lady grew silent and thin, paling and ever paling." _then all smiles stopped together_ . . . and the duke, perceiving, said to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way to deal with it. like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a little more than he can stand--but, unlike the envoy, he can express himself. the old man soothes him down: "don't swear, friend!" and goes on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many a year, "and the duke's self . . . you shall hear." + + + + + "well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning, when the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning, a drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice," it chanced that the duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season (he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"), found that a hunting party was indicated: "always provided, old books showed the way of it!" poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to st. hubert, patron saint of hunters. the serfs and thralls were duly dressed up, "and oh, the duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!" but when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots" had subsided, the duke turned his attention to the duchess's part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly announced that he had discovered her function. an old book stated it: "when horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege, let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet, and with water to wash the hands of her liege in a clean ewer with a fair toweling, let her preside at the disemboweling." all was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed--and only then, on the day before the party, was the duke's pleasure signified to his lady. and the little duchess--paler and paler every day--said she would not go! her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their long lashes, as if too weary even for _him_ to light them; and she duly acknowledged his forethought for her, "but spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught, of the weight by day and the watch by night, and much wrong now that used to be right;" and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling." but everything was arranged! the duke was nettled. still she persisted: it was hardly the time . . . the huntsman knew what took place that day in the duchess's room, because jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside on the balcony, and since jacynth was like a june rose, why, the casement that jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep through also. well, the duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a smile that partook of the awful," turned the duchess over to his mother to learn her duty, and hear the truth. she learned it all, she heard it all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her whiskers," passed out, and the duke, who had waited to hear the lecture, passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like nero or saladin--at any rate, he showed a very stiff back. however, next day the company mustered. the weather was execrable--fog that you might cut with an axe; and the duke rode out "in a perfect sulkiness." but suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the courtyard arch, he saw a troop of gipsies on their march, coming with the annual gifts to the castle. for every year, in this north land, the gipsies come to give "presents" to the dukes--presents for which an equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming. and marvellous the "presents" are! these gipsies can do anything with the earth, the ore, the sand. snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can do with sand! "glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear, where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear, as if in pure water you dropped and let die a bruised black-blooded mulberry." and then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads distinct inside." these are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the castle from the valley. so they trooped this morning; and when they reached the fosse, all stopped but one: "the oldest gipsy then above ground." this witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew her well. every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit--yet here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no use now but to gather brine." she sidled up to the duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual acknowledgment. but the duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her; in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. at last she said in her "level whine," that as well as to bring the presents, she had come to pay her duty to "the new duchess, the youthful beauty." as she said that, an idea came to the duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face. supposing he set _this_ old woman to teach her, as the other had failed? what could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his fortunate duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone? he turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the gipsy's ear. the huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude of the "new duchess." and the gipsy listened submissively. her mouth tightened, her brow brightened--it was as if she were promising to give the lady a thorough frightening. the duke just showed her a purse--and then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower," that she might wile away an hour for her: "whose mind and body craved exertion, and yet shrank from all better diversion." and then the duke rode off. + + + + + now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." or rather, now begins what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. we can read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can simply accept and understand it--leaving the rest to the "browningites," of whom browning declared that _he_ was not. the huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him--a little distrustful of her since that interview with the duke--saw something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. she looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily, no stooping nor hobbling--above all, no cringing! she was wholly changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had extended to her very clothes. the shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed edged with gold coins. under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal queen. but most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." when first he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from their places--as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . he accepted all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and took the gipsy to jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door. "and jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one, for since last night, by the same token, not a single word had the lady spoken." the two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the weather." jacynth never could tell him afterwards _how_ she came to fall soundly asleep all of a sudden. but she did so fall asleep, and so remained the whole time through. he, on the balcony, was following the hunt across the open country--for in those days he had a falcon eye--when, all in a moment, his ear was arrested by "was it singing, or was it saying, or a strange musical instrument playing?" it came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain, and--first--saw jacynth "in a rosy sleep along the floor with her head against the door." and in the middle of the room, on the seat of state, "was a queen--the gipsy woman late!" she was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. that old woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining. she was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion--and the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's face. "for it was life her eyes were drinking . . . life's pure fire, received without shrinking, into the heart and breast whose heaving told you no single drop they were leaving." the life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose over each shoulder, "and the very tresses shared in the pleasure, moving to the mystic measure, bounding as the bosom bounded." he stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." but all at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion: "and i kept time to the wondrous chime, making out words and prose and rhyme, till it seemed that the music furled its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped from under the words it first had propped." he could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"--and the gipsy said: "and so at last we find my tribe, and so i set thee in the midst . . . i trace them the vein and the other vein that meet on thy brow and part again, making our rapid mystic mark; and i bid my people prove and probe each eye's profound and glorious globe till they detect the kindred spark in those depths so dear and dark . . . and on that round young cheek of thine i make them recognise the tinge . . . for so i prove thee, to one and all, fit, when my people ope their breast, to see the sign, and hear the call, and take the vow, and stand the test which adds one more child to the rest-- when the breast is bare and the arms are wide, and the world is left outside." there would be probation (said the gipsy), and many trials for the lady if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it: "so, trial after trial past, wilt thou fall at the very last breathless, half in trance with the thrill of the great deliverance, into our arms for evermore; and thou shalt know, those arms once curled about thee, what we knew before, _how love is the only good in the world_. henceforth be loved as heart can love, or brain devise, or hand approve! stand up, look below, it is our life at thy feet we throw to step with into light and joy; not a power of life but we employ to satisfy thy nature's want." the gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will do more than the world has done"--and the tribe will at least approach that end with this beloved woman. she says not _how_--whether by one man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by _her_ giving "her wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . . "i foresee and i could foretell thy future portion, sure and well; but those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, let them say what thou shalt do!" but whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with their blame, their praise: "our shame to feel, our pride to show, glad, angry--but indifferent, no!" and so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old age--will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul" . . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be like the ending of a dream, when "death, with the might of his sunbeam, touches the flesh, and the soul awakes." with that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. the music began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the ground, and hurried round to the portal. . . . in another minute he would have entered: "when the door opened, and more than mortal stood, with a face where to my mind centred all beauties i ever saw or shall see, the duchess: i stopped as if struck by palsy. she was so different, happy and beautiful, i felt at once that all was best" . . . and he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. but there was, in fact, no commanding. looking on the beauty that had invested her, "the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she wanted--like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild creature's bidding was. . . . he went before her to the stable; she followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last--sunk back into her former self, "like a blade sent home to its scabbard." he saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little duchess to the castle--the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile from her. and he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and knew that he would do anything in the world for her. but when he began to saddle his own nag ("of berold's begetting")--not meaning to be obtrusive--she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of the head. . . . well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the gipsy behind her--and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready whenever god should please that she needed him. . . . and she looked down "with a look, a look that placed a crown on me," and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! if it had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone home, kissed jacynth, and soberly drowned himself--but it was not a purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each other in a convent: "this, see, which at my breast i wear, ever did (rather to jacynth's grudgment) and ever shall, till the day of judgment. and then--and then--to cut short--this is idle, these are feelings it is not good to foster. i pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle, and the palfrey bounded--and so we lost her." + + + + + there is the story of the flight of the duchess; and it seems to me to need no "explanation" at all. the gipsy can be anyone or anything we like that _saves_ us; the duke and his mother anyone or anything that crushes love. "love is the only good in the world." and the love (though it _may_ be) _need_ not be the love of man for woman, and woman for man; but simply love. the quick warm impulse which made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home, and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the name of every bird--the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but love? the tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. and love was neither given nor accepted from her. worse, it was scorned; it was not "fitting." all she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing, nothing else-- "and die away the life between." and then came the time when, like pompilia, she had "something she must care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! not even when she pleaded the hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for the coming child. and then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . that night, even to jacynth, not a word could she utter. here was a world without love, a world that did not want her--and _she_ was here, and she must stay, until, until . . . which would the coming child be--herself again, or _him_ again? scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening. and then love walked in upon her. she was "of their tribe"--they wanted her; they wanted all she was. just what she was; she would not have to change; they wanted her. they liked her eyes, and the colour on her cheek--they liked _her_. her eyes might look at them, and "speak true," for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes. it is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! it is the self-realisation of a nature that can love. and this is but one way of telling the great tale. browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his ears of "following the queen of the gipsies, o!"--and to all of us, the gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for nourishment of heart and soul. but we need not follow only them to compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." we need but know, as the little duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. _she_ placed the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love. "and so at last we find my tribe, and so i set thee in the midst . . . henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . . it is our life at thy feet we throw to step with into light and joy." the duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. it needed courage--needed swift decision--needed even some small abandonment of "duty." but she saw what she must do, and did it. duty has two voices often; the duchess heard the true voice. if she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . and that she heard aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives not, we know from the old huntsman: "for the wound in the duke's pride rankled fiery; so they made no search and small inquiry"; and gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier. even the duchess could not make love valid there. reality was out of them. . . . true, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn adorer. he had stayed at the castle: "i must see this fellow his sad life through-- he is our duke, after all, and i, as he says, but a serf and thrall"; --but, as soon as the duke is dead, our friend intends to "go journeying" to the land of the gipsies, and there find his lady or hear the last news of her: "and when that's told me, what's remaining?" for jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer be cast before swine that can't value them. "_amen._" but at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's play," with her away! so her love did one thing even there--just as one likes to think that the unhappier duchess, the italian one, left precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke the bough of cherries for her in the orchard. and is it not good to think that almost immediately after _the flight of the duchess_ was published, browning was to meet the passionate-hearted woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the duchess's life-in-death! with this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill to read those lines of silenced prophecy: "i foresee and i could foretell thy future portion, sure and well: but those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, let them say what thou shalt do!" footnotes: [ : ] the "toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by a venetian composer, baldassare galuppi, who was born in , and died in . he lived and worked in london from to . "he abounded" (says vernon lee, in her _studies of the eighteenth century in italy_) "in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty." part iii [illustration: the lover] i lovers meeting browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. this faith is common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in any other, except perhaps george meredith. meredith too is without sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall i say? in his general outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic analogies with human experience. in browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanity _as_ humanity. it gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. man _was_, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from byron, almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as mr. arthur symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature." where browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook; and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental. in a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more inspiring. but for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker ways. after _pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up, "as i might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. for love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. it can indeed _do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too. nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. that other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted, but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. this is the true faith, the true freedom, for both. meredith has said the same, more axiomatically than browning ever said it: "he learnt how much we gain who make no claims" --but browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly proved it true. almost the historic happy marriage of the world! such was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. he understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!) conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. that is to say, he understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. the whole secret, for browning, lay in loving greatly. thus, for example, it is notable that, except _the laboratory_ and _fifine at the fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon jealousy. for him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in love for it. and even elvire's demurs (in _fifine_), even the departure from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of insight into juan's better self. he will never be all that he can be (she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be deep and true as well as brilliant. for browning, _how_ love comes is not important. it may be by the high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely answered, all is well. living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our dearest memory. "what is he buzzing in my ears? 'now that i come to die, do i view the world as a vale of tears?' ah, reverend sir, not i!" and why not? because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man "used to meet." what he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the "suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it were, with the bottles on the bedside table. "at a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, there watched for me, one june, a girl: i know, sir, it's improper, my poor mind's out of tune." nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the details. . . . she left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'ether,'" "and stole from stair to stair, and stood by the rose-wreathed gate. alas! we loved, sir--used to meet: how sad and mad and bad it was-- but then, how it was sweet!" they did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other "confession"--if he calls this one! it is the meaning of the man's life: that is all. in _confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. in _love among the ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. the lover, alone, is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before him. here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of "a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful prince once held his court. there had been a "domed and daring palace," a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve men might stand abreast. now all is pasture-land: "and such glory and perfection, see, of grass never was" --as here, "where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe long ago; lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame struck them tame; and that glory and that shame alike, the gold bought and sold." of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. it was part of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the chariot-races. . . . this is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows "that a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret whence the charioteers caught soul for the goal, when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb till i come." that king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its temples and colonnades, "all the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then all the men! when i do come, she will speak not, she will stand, either hand on my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace of my face, ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech each on each." a million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . . "oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! earth's returns for whole centuries of folly, noise and sin. shut them in with their triumphs and their glories and the rest! love is best!" but though love be best, it is not all. it is here to transfigure all; we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. for life calls us, even from our love. the day is long and we must work in it; but we can meet when the day is done. in the light of this low half-moon can put off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand at the other side of the bay: "then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; three fields to cross till a farm appears; a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch and blue spurt of a lighted match, and a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, than the two hearts beating each to each!" yes--we can meet at night. . . . but we must part at morning. "round the cape of a sudden came the sea, and the sun looked over the mountain's rim; and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me."[ : ] these are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so describe them; and indeed browning sings but seldom of wedded love. when he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. in nearly all his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love "in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains. "dear, had the world in its caprice deigned to proclaim 'i know you both, have recognised your plighted troth, am sponsor for you: live in peace!'-- how many precious months and years of youth had passed, that speed so fast, before we found it out at last, the world, and what it fears? how much of priceless life were spent with men that every virtue decks, and women models of their sex, society's true ornament-- ere we dared wander, nights like this, thro' wind and rain, and watch the seine, and feel the boulevard break again to warmth and light and bliss?" that old quarrel between the ideals of bohemia and of "respectability"! they could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "people would have talked." . . . well, people may talk now, but they _have_ gained something. they have gained freedom to live their lives as they choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that sways them. they have learnt how much that good word is worth! what is happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in the institute, which they are just passing? "guizot receives montalembert!" the two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. see the courtyard all alight for the reception! let them escape from it all, and leave respectability to its false standards. _they_ are not included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!" i accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for i think the lovers had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were pleased to think. the world still counted for them--as it counts for all who remember so vehemently to denounce it. moreover, married, they could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting it. no more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once it recognises the true contemner! to "feel the boulevard break again to warmth and light and bliss" --on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the real unfearing, become a craze! yes--we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. these lovers also had their falling-short--they could not _forget_ the world. hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. now we turn to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. there can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which browning has so marvellously uttered in _mesmerism_. here, in these breathless stanzas,[ : ] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. he brings his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey": "till i seemed to have and hold in the vacancy 'twixt the walls and me from the hair-plait's chestnut-gold to the foot in its muslin fold-- have and hold, then and there, her, from head to foot, breathing and mute, passive and yet aware, in the grasp of my steady stare-- hold and have, there and then, all her body and soul that completes my whole, all that women add to men, in the clutch of my steady ken"-- . . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to suffocate her if she cannot escape from it: "out of doors into the night! on to the maze of the wild wood-ways, not turning to left nor right from the pathway, blind with sight-- swifter and still more swift, as the crowding peace doth to joy increase in the wild blind eyes uplift thro' the darkness and the drift!" and he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes, comes . . . "'now--now'--the door is heard! hark, the stairs! and near-- nearer--and here-- 'now!' and at call the third she enters without a word!" * * * * * could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! would she not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as porphyria died? but in _porphyria's lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. this man, too, sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of passion's answering passion. "the rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake: i listened with heart fit to break. when glided in porphyria." . . . she glided in and did not speak. she looked round his cottage, then kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. when all the place was warm, she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose, "and, last, she sat down by my side and called me. when no voice replied, she put my arm about her waist, and made her smooth white shoulder bare, and all her yellow hair displaced, and, stooping, made my cheek lie there, and spread o'er all her yellow hair-- murmuring how she loved me--she too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, to set its struggling passion free from pride, and vainer ties dissever, and give herself to me for ever." but to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's, there had seized her "a sudden thought of one so pale for love of her, and all in vain: so, she was come through wind and rain." she found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and it had not been. but, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him and draws his head to her breast. "be sure i looked up at her eyes happy and proud; at last i knew porphyria worshipped me; surprise made my heart swell, and still it grew while i debated what to do. that moment she was mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good: i found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string i wound three times her little throat around, and strangled her." . . . but he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." he loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek beneath his burning kiss. now he propped her head--this time _his_ shoulder bore "the smiling rosy little head, so glad it has its utmost will, that all it scorned at once is fled, and i, its love, am gained instead! porphyria's love: she guessed not how her darling one wish would be heard. and thus we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirred, and yet god has not said a word!" * * * * * this poem was first published as the second of two headed "madhouse cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. but only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream, if porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? what truly happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real, whatever else is not . . . i ask, we all ask; but does it greatly matter? enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the madness. as porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was _herself_. when in all the rest of life would such another moment come? . . . how many lovers have mutually murmured that: "if we could die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . so this lover felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have been: "and thus we sit together now, and yet god has not said a word!" six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! with browning, the woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even _he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. from the nameless girl in _count gismond_ and from balaustion--these only--do we get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as i have just now shown. . . . always the tear assigned to woman! it may be "true"; i think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be, since all legend will thus have it. what then shall a woman say? that the time has come to alter this? that woman cries "for nothing," like the children? that she does not understand so well as man the ends of love? or that she understands them better? . . . perhaps all of these things; perhaps some others also. let us study now, at all events, the "tear"; let us see in what, as browning saw her, the trouble of love consists for woman. footnotes: [ : ] very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the minds of some. in berdoe's _browning cyclopædia_ the difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. he interprets the last line of _parting at morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! but it is the _man_ who speaks, not the woman. the confusion plainly arises from a misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him." berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! of course "him" refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . here is an instance of making obscurity where none really exists. [ : ] mr. symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break in sense or sound." ii trouble of love: the woman's i.--the lady in "the glove" writing of the unnamed heroine of _count gismond_, i said that she had one of the characteristic browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity of others. here, in _the glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the court. but now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of court-training: _dis_-trust. in this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . does this interpretation of the episode amaze? it is that which our poet gives of it. distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! all the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. like francis i, each had cried: ". . . 'twas mere vanity, not love, set that task to humanity!" but browning, who could detect the court-grown, found excuse for her in that lamentable gardening. the weed had been sown, as it was sown (so much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this alone, to be older. _she had been longer at court_; its lesson had penetrated her being. day after day she had watched, day after day had listened; then arrived de lorge with fervent words of love, and now she watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted, hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation, yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the lions! with the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst she had dreaded. + + + + + it was at the court of king francis i of france that it happened--the most brilliant court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of french knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. romance was in the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner, and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. round the king was gathered the _petite bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his powerful mistress, the duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the dauphin's neglected wife, the florentine catherine de médicis--foe of that wife's so silently detested rival, "madame dame diane de poitiers, grande sénéschale de normandie." the two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the duchesse d'Étampes had chosen clement marot, who could turn so gracefully the psalms of david into verse; la grande sénéschale, always supreme in taste, patronised pierre ronsard--and this was why pierre sometimes found that when he "talked fine to king francis," the king would yawn in his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement. that was what francis did one day after the peace of cambray had been signed by france and spain. he had grown weary of leisure: "here we've got peace, and aghast i'm caught thinking war the true pastime. is there a reason in metre? give us your speech, master peter!" peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words before the king whistled aloud: "let's go and look at our lions!" they went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset. foremost among them (relates ronsard in browning's poem) were de lorge and the lady he was "adoring." "oh, what a face! one by fits eyed her, and the horrible pitside" --for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions' dens were placed. the black arab keeper was told to stir up the great beast, bluebeard. a firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating hearts . . . "then earth in a sudden contortion gave out to our gaze her abortion. such a brute! . . . one's whole blood grew curdling and creepy to see the black mane, vast and heapy, the tail in the air stiff and straining, the wide eyes nor waxing nor waning." and the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered, and he was free again. "ay, that was the open sky o'erhead! and you saw by the flash on his forehead, by the hope in those eyes wide and steady, he was leagues in the desert already." the king laughed: "was there a man among them all who would brave bluebeard?" not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it were almost certain death: "once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!" but francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows) a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. it was the glove of de lorge's lady. they were sitting together, and he had been, as ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a balance." . . . he now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the barrier and walked straight up to the glove. the lion never moved; he was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . de lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more, as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. every eye was on them. the king cried out in applause that _he_ would have done the same: ". . . 'twas mere vanity, not love, set that task to humanity!" --and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned with loathing from de lorge's "queen dethroned." all but peter ronsard. _he_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her self-possession amid the court's mockery. "as if from no pleasing experiment she rose, yet of pain not much heedful, so long as the process was needful. * * * * * she went out 'mid hooting and laughter; clement marot stayed; i followed after." catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "i'm a poet," he added; "i must know human nature." "she told me, 'too long had i heard of the deed proved alone by the word: for my love--what de lorge would not dare! with my scorn--what de lorge could compare! and the endless descriptions of death he would brave when my lip formed a breath, i must reckon as braved'" . . . --and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was understood at the court of king francis. but to-day, looking at the lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to reward, no king or court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . and at this very court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped across, pretending that he must get it back? why should she not test de lorge here and now? for _now_ she was still free; now she could find out what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then discover that it did not mean anything at all! so--she had thrown the glove. "'the blow a glove gives is but weak: does the mark yet discolour my cheek? but when the heart suffers a blow, will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'" * * * * * de lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been capable of the public insult. the pain of _that_, had she loved him, must quite have broken her heart. and not only had he been capable of this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere vanity." love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . . ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would pass. he was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as that of the brilliant de lorge (thus ronsard ironically remarks); but there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been nemean." he would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it right that he should earn what he so ardently desired. "and when, shortly after, she carried her shame from the court, and they married, to that marriage some happiness, maugre the voice of the court, i dared augur." de lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and finally married a beauty who had been the king's mistress for a week. thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the king desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on that errand (looking daggers at her) but francis took occasion to tell the court the story of the other glove. and she would smile and say that he brought _hers_ with no murmur. + + + + + was the first lady right or wrong? she was right to hesitate in accepting de lorge's "devotion"--not because de lorge was worthless, but because she did not love him. the king spoke truly when he said that not love set that task to humanity. neither did mere vanity set it, as we now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could never have imposed. de lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. and not alone her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it. but, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that love could come to them through "wooing." nowadays, to be sure, so subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . but i think there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of king francis! we have only to read the discourses of marguerite de valois, sister of the king--we have only to consider the story of diane de poitiers, seventeen years older than her dauphin, to realise _that_ most fully. women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. it scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet i know not. again it is the meredithian axiom which arrests me: "he learnt how much we gain who make no claims." our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send them! and if so, a de lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, de lorge will have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the glove. "utter the true word--out and away escapes her soul." . . . gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul will give! and so the lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love set that task to humanity. even browning cannot win her our full pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear." ii.--dÎs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours "the gods saw it otherwise." thus we may translate the first clause of the title; the second, the reference to byron, i have never understood, and i think shall never understand. of all the accusations which stand against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is assuredly not one. such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of this poem played their parts most notably in byron's life--to their own disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the spirit of this french poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them in a paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still is free. reading the poem, indeed, with byron in mind, the fancy comes to me that if it had been by any other man but browning, it might almost be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the frenchman for having rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." for byron married her[ : ]--and in what did it result? . . . but that browning should in any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge byron as anything but the most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. thus, ever in perplexity, i must abjure the theory of byronic merit. there lurks in this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one of the great disastrous marriages of the world. + + + + + ten years before this meeting in paris, the two of the poem had known one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice had they "walked and talked" together. he was even then "bent, wigged, and lamed": "famous, however, for verse and worse, sure of the fortieth spare arm-chair" --that is, the next vacancy at the french academy, for so illustrious was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him. she who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the great, the good, and the beautiful. but to him her "culture" seemed pitifully amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull floats over the waters. nevertheless he had walked and talked with her "twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had chanced to meet. it was strange that more people had not discovered it, so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus the two were thrown together. one scorching noon they met; he invited her to a stroll on the cliff-road. she took his arm, and (looking back upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. for she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on him that day. "did you determine, as we stepped o'er the lone stone fence, 'let me get her for myself, and what's the earth with all its art, verse, music, worth-- compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'" for she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow. they would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old, famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her choice! . . . a perfect hour for both--while it lasted. but (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not last. the daily life would reclaim them; paris would follow, with full time for both to reason and reflect. . . . and thus (still interpreting to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_ not be fifty! young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does. for, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (she is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair, as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) he would not have said, like a boy, "love me or i die." but neither would he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young ardour and vitality to help his age. such was the demand which she (as, according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . and what would his own reflections have been? she is ready to use her disconcerting clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! for as they foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now can connect the action with its mental source. _his_ reflection, then, would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? for "two cheeks freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _him_, in exchange for a nosegay! "that ended me." . . . they duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched; they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such civilisation as there was: "and then, good-bye! ten years since then: ten years! we meet: you tell me, now, by a window-seat for that cliff-brow, on carpet-stripes for those sand-paths." ten years. he has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the opera; she has married lovelessly. they have met again, and, in sentimental mood, he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." and she has cried, in the words which open the poem: "stop, let me have the truth of that! is that all true?" --and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay. for ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood unchallenged. nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her, to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased, but they will talk of it in _her_ way. so she cuts him short, and draws this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . has she not matured? might it not have "done," after all? the nosegay was not so insipid! . . . but suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul, and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something greater in herself. "now i may speak: you fool, for all your lore! who made things plain in vain? what was the sea for? what, the grey sad church, that solitary day, crosses and graves and swallows' call? was there nought better than to enjoy? no feat which, done, would make time break, and let us pent-up creatures through into eternity, our due? no forcing earth teach heaven's employ? no grasping at love, gaining a share o' the sole spark from god's life at strife with death . . . ?" he calls his decision wisdom? it is one kind of wisdom only, and that the least--"worldly" wisdom. he was old, and she was raw and sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that. only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. have their souls evolved? and she cries that they have not: "the devil laughed at you in his sleeve!" of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two souls--nay, four. what of his stephanie, who danced vilely last night, they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her vogue has had its day"? . . . and what of the speaker herself? it takes but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot: "here comes my husband from his whist." what is "the truth of that"? again, i think, something of what i said in writing of _youth and art_: again not quite what browning seems to wish us to accept. love is the fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? does love weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the lady did? mrs. orr, devouter votary than i, explains that browning meant "that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul." did one wish merely to be humorous, one might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful marriage which has yet found expression! but merely to be humorous is not what i wish: we must consider this belief, which mrs. orr further declares to be the expression of browning's "poetic self." assuredly it is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul unstirred to deepest depth. we may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the view which seems to prevail in mrs. orr's interpretation of _dîs aliter visum_. mr. symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal mistake." . . . but was it really a mistake at all? i do not, in urging that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of berdoe, who argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than this one would have been"! the "match" standpoint is not here our standpoint. _that_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that these two people did not love. they were in the sentimental state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to act upon it. that he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. speaking elsewhere in this book of browning's theory of love, i said: "love can do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! ideals need not be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a worldling. witty as she has become, there still remain in her, i fear, some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . to sum up, for this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and browning is again not at his best when he makes the victim speak for herself. iii.--the laboratory now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is not, and will not be, a victim. at once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. into the soul of this woman in _the laboratory_, browning has penetrated till he seems to breathe with her breath. i question if there is another fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. it bears the great seal. not shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration. every word counts, almost every comma--for, like browning, we too seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited. + + + + + she is a court lady of the _ancien régime_, in the great brinvilliers poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. small, gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old wizard set about his work. she is due to dance at the king's, but there is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . now she must put on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. but she cannot be silent; even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she must pour forth the anguish of her soul. questions relieve her now and then: "which is the poison to poison her, prithee?" --but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out a cry: "he is with her, and they know that i know where they are, what they do . . ." --the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps through lovers in their bliss. they could not forget _me_, she thinks, as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . yet even in this hell, there is some solace. they must be remembering her, and ". . . they believe my tears flow while they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear empty church, to pray god in, for them!--i am here." yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. it is better to sit here and watch him than go dance at the king's; and she looks round in her restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_ way, to stanch the wound it makes! "that in the mortar--you call it a gum? ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! and yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?" but, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that hateful court where each knows of her misery. "to carry pure death in an earring, a casket, a signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!" she need but give a lozenge "at the king's," and pauline should die in half an hour; or light a pastille, and elise, "with her head and her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . but he is taking too long. "quick--is it finished? the colour's too grim! why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?" for if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . but one must be content: the old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to the vessel again, a new doubt assails her. "what a drop! she's not little, no minion like me-- that's why she ensnared him: this never will free the soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'no!' to that pulse's magnificent come-and-go. for only last night, as they whispered, i brought my own eyes to bear on her so, that i thought could i keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall, shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!" * * * * * but it is not painless in its working? she does not desire that: she wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to remain, "brand, burn up, bite into its grace[ : ]-- he is sure to remember her dying face!" is it done? then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not look morose about it: "it kills her, and this prevents seeing it close." she is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor: "_if it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_" there it lies--there. . . . "now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, you may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!" --and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what is that mark on her gorgeous gown? brush it off! brush off that dust! it might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the king's. . . . she is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of those torments. + + + + + she is gone, and she remains for ever. her age is past, but not the hearts that ached in it. we curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning? "if it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?" such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their utterance, and it is here. iv.--in a year nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the "dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _the laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder at her lover's mutability. "was it something said, something done, vexed him? was it touch of hand, turn of head? strange! that very way love begun: i as little understand love's decay."[ : ] here, again, is full authenticity. girl-like, she sits and broods upon it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. so greatly that still, still, she can dream: "would he loved me yet, on and on, while i found some way undreamed --paid my debt! gave more life and more, till, all gone, he should smile, 'she never seemed mine before.'" but this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over" too, though not yet ended. how will it end for her? "well, this cold clay clod was man's heart: crumble it, and what comes next? is it god ?" . . . the dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child! "'dying for my sake-- white and pink! can't we touch these bubbles then but they break?'" that is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done since the world began, and will do till it ends.[ : ] then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . again, the supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love, can never turn away from it. most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who loves truly? yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him? "i had wealth and ease, beauty, youth: since my lover gave me love, i gave these. that was all i meant --to be just, and the passion i had raised to content. since he chose to change gold for dust, if i gave him what he praised, was it strange?" and after all it was not enough! "justice" was not enough, the giving of herself was not enough. if she could try again, if she could find that "way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . . i should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted above: "_and the passion i had raised to content._" from browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl cries: "i, too, at love's brim touched the sweet: i would die if death bequeathed sweet to him." this is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." let us regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not express either the girl or her poet. the rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its going is so subtly indicated. "strange! that very way love begun: i _as little understand_ love's decay." we hear to-day of love that aims at reason. love forbid that i should say love knows not reason--but love and god forbid that it should _aim_ at reason! leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day. + + + + + this ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not die. she will live and she will grow. shall she then look back with scorn upon that earlier self? . . . we talk much now of "re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. but are there not re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation, like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? how many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that "ourself." hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_ self: we pass into a hades. "well, this cold clay clod was man's heart: crumble it, and what comes next? is it god?" or is it new heart, new self, new life? we come forth enfranchised from our hades. the evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little, it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . . surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more clearly to a transition-state? we _have been_ dead; but this "us" who comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled. only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of "dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream, and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for. footnotes: [ : ] the descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be applied to annabella milbanke. [ : ] note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the alliteration in this line. [ : ] mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. only after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of the rhyme." [ : ] and men also, i hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side. part iv [illustration: the wife] i a woman's last word they are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. she does not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. but does thinking signify? she loves--is not that enough? can she not have done with thinking, or at all events with talking about thinking? perhaps, with every striving, she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last word." . . . shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she contends no more? "what so wild as words are?" --and that _they_ should strive and argue! why, it is as when birds debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the hawk spies from a bough above. "see the creature stalking while we speak! hush and hide the talking, cheek on cheek!" for that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be "talking" as aught else! he shall have his own way--or no: that is a paltry yielding. there shall _be_ no way but his. "what so false as truth is, false to thee?" she abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to "know": "where the apple reddens never pry-- lest we lose our edens, eve and i. be a god and hold me with a charm! be a man and fold me with thine arm! teach me, only teach, love! as i ought i will speak thy speech, love, think thy thought-- meet, if thou require it, both demands, laying flesh and spirit in thy hands." * * * * * but even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice whispers in her soul that this is not the way. something is wrong. she hears, but cannot heed. it must be so, since he desires it--since he can desire it. since he _can_ . . . "that shall be to-morrow, not to-night: i must bury sorrow out of sight: --must a little weep, love, (foolish me!) and so fall asleep, love, loved by thee." he does not wish to know the real herself. then the real herself shall "sleep"; all shall be as before. + + + + + will this endure? all depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is. for is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? by her silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not otherwise. and so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? not the highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than for the woman. by implication, browning shows us that in _by the fireside_, one of his three great songs of wedded love: "oh, i must feel your brain prompt mine, your heart anticipate my heart, you must be just before, in fine, see and make me see, for your part, new depths of the divine!" once more we can trace there his development from _pauline_. she, looking up "as i might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as the wife in the _last word_ resolves to do. . . . as the poet grew, so grew the man in browning: we reach _by the fireside_ from these. for the woman in the _last word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband to the place where stands the man in _by the fireside_, when the "long dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which they found each other once for all. "my perfect wife, my leonor, oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, whom else could i dare look backward for, with whom beside should i dare pursue the path grey heads abhor? * * * * * my own, confirm me! if i tread this path back, is it not in pride to think how little i dreamed it led to an age so blest that, by its side, youth seems the waste instead?" and now read again: "meet, _if thou require it_, both demands, laying flesh and spirit in thy hands." a lower note there, is it not? and shall he so require, and she so yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_ say to one another: "come back with me to the first of all, let us lean and love it over again, let us now forget and now recall, break the rosary in a pearly rain, and gather what we let fall!" too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun so soon to know that edens shall be lost by thinking eves! but let me not enforce a moral. the mood is one that women know, and often wisely use. "talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is not the sum of individuality's expression. she can teach him--learning from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet, strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her sure indenture of freedom. "that shall be to-morrow, not to-night: i must bury sorrow out of sight." the "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his highest in the tyranny of to-night. then be sure that she, so loving and so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _this_ tear shall be dried. ii james lee's wife in this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's heart. james lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those "troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues. the man has failed her--as de lorge failed his lady, as the poet the "poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman of _the laboratory_ and the girl of _in a year_; she and her husband are at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _a woman's last word_. but even the complete surrender of individuality resolved upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever would have availed, the wife of james lee. all is over, and, as she gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free." we learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never speaks, and is but once present. all we actually see are the moods of nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. these nine revealings show us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail; the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from "old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use," since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the whole renunciation. echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere studied: the tear reigns supreme, the victim is _in excelsis_--for hardly did pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least could die, remembering caponsacchi. james lee's wife will live, remembering james lee. into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[ : ] we may read a symbolism. "this is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." and only indeed in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. _that_, as uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet still can claim that he "set down to her" "love that was life, life that was love, a tenure of breath at your lips' decree, a passion to stand as your thoughts approve, a rapture to fall where your foot might be." more--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of "mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." never has the mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us, with so much at once of pity and of irony. james lee's wife is a plain woman. "why, fade you might to a thing like me, and your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair, your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . . so she cries in the painful concluding poem. faded, coarse-haired, coarse-skinned . . . is all said? but he had married her. in what, do we find the word of that enigma? in the beauties of her heart and mind--the passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. these had done the first work; and alas! they have done the second also. the heart was passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! and of course we shall not dare deny james lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon: _she had no sense of humour!_ . . . if he was incomplete, so too was she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation, never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds. thus she sums him: "with much in you waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too." this man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out of ten, obtains her. "mrs. james lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. perhaps she _has_ none. perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _last word_--who was not of it! for here is the very heart of the problem: can or cannot character be altered? james lee's wife is of the morbid, the unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn the lore of self-suppression. not for them exactingness, caprice, the gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. the mrs. lees must curb them wholly. as the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all. let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad woman. i.--she speaks at the window he is coming back to their seaside home at sainte-marie, near pornic--the breton "wild little place" which browning knew and loved so well. "close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles. i feel out of the earth sometimes as i sit here at the window."[ : ] and at the window _she_ sits, watching for james lee's return. yesterday it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it always seems to come. "ah, love, but a day and the world has changed! the sun's away, and the bird estranged; the wind has dropped, and the sky's deranged: summer has stopped." we can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a faint annoyance? need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? it is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! such annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change. enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us think of something else. . . . but she goes on, and now we shall not\ doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says: "look in my eyes! wilt thou change too? should i fear surprise? shall i find aught new in the old and dear, in the good and true, with the changing year?" the questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or him? but in pity for herself, let her not ask them! we seem to see the man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind. "i never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . and then, doomed blunderer, she goes on: "thou art a man, but i am thy love. for the lake, its swan; for the dell, its dove; and for thee (oh, haste!) me, to bend above, me, to hold embraced." she does not _say_, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . and when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to ourselves the all it lacks. ii.--by the fireside summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. the blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits watching them. the wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck wood. . . . "oh, for the ills half-understood, the dim dead woe long ago befallen this bitter coast of france!" and then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea: "well, poor sailors took their chance; i take mine." out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate, "o' the warm safe house and happy freight --thee and me." the irony of it seizes her. those sailors need not curse them! ships safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "that is worse." and how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men on the sea! who lived here before this couple came? did another woman before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail" . . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open beneath? _this_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. and he? men too can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is given them. some sailors come safe home, and these would have been lighted by the ruddy casement. but she thinks only of the sailors drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house." that melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she broods. . . . iii.--in the doorway she stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn landscape.[ : ] it is a grey october day; the sea is in "stripes like a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the wind" in the distance. how ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on the wing. "hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!" as she gazes, her heart dies within her. their fig-tree has lost all the golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart "shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled." but courage, courage! winter comes to all--not to them alone. and have they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms, and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to yield? rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it seems an event), yet will again find food. but november--the chill month with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite departed. . . . no! this shall not be her mood. winter comes indeed to mere material nature; god means precisely that the spirit shall inherit his power to put life into the darkness and the cold. the spirit defies external change: "whom summer made friends of, let winter estrange!" and she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. they have the house, and the field . . . and love. iv.--along the beach rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. she walks alone on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea, for miles";[ : ] and broods once more. she figures him beside her; they are speaking frankly of her pain. she "will be quiet." . . . piteous phrase of all unquiet women! she will be quiet; she will "reason why he is wrong." well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! it is thus that in almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving woman. . . . she begins her "reasoning." "you wanted my love--is that much true? and so i did love, so i do: what has come of it all along? i took you--how could i otherwise? for a world to me, and more; for all, love greatens and glorifies till god's aglow, to the loving eyes, in what was mere earth before. yes, earth--yes, mere ignoble earth! now do i mis-state, mistake? do i wrong your weakness and call it worth? expect all harvest, dread no dearth, seal my sense up for your sake? oh, love, love, no, love! not so, indeed! you were just weak earth, i knew": --and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our study. well for her, i say again, that this is but a fancied talk! and since it is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. for she _has_ been wise in one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"--that memorable phrase, so browningesque! she has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. thus far, then, kind and wise in her great passion. . . . but she should _forget_ that she has seen through him--she should keep that vision in the background, not hold it ever in her sight. and now herself begins to see that this is where she has not been wise. she took him for hers, just as he was--and did not he, thus accepted, find her his? has she not watched all that was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the more to come? "well, and if none of these good things came, what did the failure prove? the man was my whole world, all the same." _that_ is the fault in her: "that i do love, watch too long, and wait too well, and weary and wear; and 'tis all an old story, and my despair fit subject for some new song." she has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the indulgence: this was the wrong way. the "bond" has been felt--and such "light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a bond. he has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life, and _that_ is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . so the songs have said and will say for all time--the new songs for the old despair. but though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to act upon it. always she will watch too long, and wait too well. hers is a nature as simple as it is intense. no sort of subterfuge is within her means--neither the gay deception nor the grave. what she knows that he resents, she still must do immutably--bound upon the wheel of her true self. for only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one. she turns back, she walks homeward along the beach--"on the edge of the low rocks by the sea, for miles." v.--on the cliff but still love is a power! love can move mountains, for is not love the same as faith? and not a mountain is here, but a mere man's heart--already "moved," for he _has_ loved her. it is summer again. she sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry grass--if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the summer sun." and there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and flat as an anvil's face. "no iron like that!" not a weed nor a shell: "death's altar by the lone shore." the drear analogies succeed one another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. the dead grass, the dead rock. . . . but now, what is this on the turf? a gay blue cricket! a cricket--only that? nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real fairy, with wings all right." and there too on the rock, like a drop of fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly. "no turf, no rock: in their ugly stead, see, wonderful blue and red!" shall there not then be other analogies? may not the minds of men, though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them, transfigured like them: "with such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs-- love settling unawares!" it was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. such miracles happen every day. vi.--reading a book, under the cliff these clever young men! she is reading a poem of the wind.[ : ] the singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its appeal. "'art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted, entrusting thus thy cause to me? forbear! no tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited with falsehood--love, at last aware of scorn--hopes, early blighted-- 'we have them; but i know not any tone so fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow; dost think men would go mad without a moan, if they knew any way to borrow a pathos like thine own?'" the splendid lines assail her.[ : ] in her anguish of response she turns from them at last--they are too much. this power of perception is almost a baseness! and bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_ of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him, and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. he is wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. he thus interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but the example for his use, the help to his path untried! such agonies as her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. how dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words, how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel: "oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest! himself the undefeated that shall be: failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test-- his triumph in eternity too plainly manifest!" of course he does not know! the wind means something else. and as the pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. how _could_ "the happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? only "the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the mind. this young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign country," at its height of gloom and gloss. at its height--next minute must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the earliest sign? that very wind beginning among the vines: "so low, so low, what shall it say but this? 'here is the change beginning, here the lines circumscribe beauty, set to bliss the limit time assigns.'" . . . change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says. "nothing can be as it has been before; better, so call it, only not the same. to draw one beauty into our hearts' core, and keep it changeless! such our claim; so answered: never more! simple? why, this is the old woe of the world; tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. rise with it then! rejoice that man is hurled from change to change unceasingly, his soul's wings never furled!" * * * * * her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant above her own suffering. flinging back his interpretation in his face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she rests in this. "the laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to still her pain? . . . not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a moment. stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries imperiously again. the laws of nature? "that's a new question; still replies the fact, nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so; we moan in acquiescence." only to acquiescence can we attain. "god knows: endure his act!" but the human loss, the human anguish. . . . formulas touch not these, nor does acquiescence mitigate. tell ourselves as wisely as we may that mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. we cannot fix the "one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as it were, on our souls. and then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but time washed over it ere death mercifully came. it was abolished even while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried it away on its moaning voice. change is the very essence of life; and life may be probation for a better life--who knows? but if she could have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband loved her. . . . vii.--among the rocks such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! and now that autumn is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. it is while we hope that summer still may stay that we are tortured. "oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, this autumn morning!" she will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch earth. that is best. ". . . how he sets his bones to bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet for the ripple to run over in its mirth; listening the while, where on the heap of stones the white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet." the geniality of earth! she will sink her troubled soul into the vast tranquillity. no science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old earth. but soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest. what does "this," then, show forth? her love in its tide can flow over the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "old earth smiles and knows": "if you loved only what were worth your love, love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: make the low nature better by your throes! give earth yourself, go up for gain above!" i confess that i cannot follow this analogy. the lesson may be clear--of that later; the analogy escapes me. who says that rocks are of lower nature than the sea which washes them? but if it does not mean this, what does it mean? mrs. orr interprets thus: "as earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." that seems to me to touch this instance not at all. it is the earth who has set "himself" (in the unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is getting, not giving. or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in the other. and watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. let that be true, i still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine. and the doctrine? grant that love is self-sacrifice (i had rather say that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also self-sufficiency? "make the low nature better by your throes." it is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? shall a man live, despised, in harmony with her who despises him? james lee's wife may call this love, but we absolve james lee, i think, if he does not! for human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it subsists. even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. our sympathy must leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely browning's aim? but possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle. viii.--beside the drawing-board she had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. a cast from leonardo da vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. she has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped ardour. "its beauty mounted into my brain," and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers: "with soul to help if the mere lips failed, i kissed all right where the drawing ailed, kissed fast the grace that somehow slips still from one's soulless finger-tips." this hand was that of a worshipped woman. her fancy sets the ring on it, by which one knows "that here at length a master found his match, a proud lone soul its mate." not even da vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty-- ". . . how free, how fine to fear almost!--of the limit-line." _he_, like her, had suffered some defeat. but think of the minutes in which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew, drew and learned and loved again!" such moments are not for such as she. she will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is not the same as da vinci's. "little girl with the poor coarse hand" . . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast. her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood." but was not that da vinci's business too? would he not, could she speak with him, proudly tell her so? "nothing but beauty in a hand." would the master have turned from this peasant one? no: she hears him condemn her, laugh her woes to scorn. "the fool forsooth is all forlorn because the beauty she thinks best lived long ago or was never born, because no beauty bears the test in this rough peasant hand!" it was not long before da vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness, but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use "of flesh and bone and nerve that make the poorest coarsest human hand an object worthy to be scanned a whole life long for their sole sake." just the hand--and all the body still to learn. is not this the lesson of life--this incompleteness? "now the parts and then the whole!" and here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she, with her stinted soul and stunted body! look again at the peasant hand. no beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread: "'what use survives the beauty?'" yes: da vinci would proclaim her fool. then _this_ shall be the new formula. she will be of use; will do the daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. she cannot keep her husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. she will be useful; she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her. "go, little girl with the poor coarse hand! i have my lesson, shall understand." this is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for survival. ix.--on deck and this has failed like the rest. she is on board the boat that carries her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. well, it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. gone--in every sense. "there is nothing to remember in me, nothing i ever said with a grace, nothing i did that you care to see, nothing i was that deserves a place in your mind, now i leave you, set you free." no "_petite fleur dans la pensée_"--none, none: she grants him all her dis-grace. but will he not grant her something too--now that she is gone? will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women have loved them so utterly? it _has_ been: she knows that, and the more certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle. his soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have loved her!), what might not have happened? she might have grown the same in his eyes as he is in hers! so strange it is to think of _that_. . . . she can think anything when such imagining is once possible to her. she can think of _him_ as the "harsh, ill-favoured one!" for what would it have mattered--her ugliness--if he had loved her? they would have been "like as pea and pea." ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream. imagine it. . . . if he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in hers! he, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as bright a brow. . . . "till you saw yourself, while you cried ''tis she!'" but it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for the joy would have killed her. or turn it again the converse way. supposing he could "fade to a thing like her," with the coarse hair and skin . . . "you might turn myself!--should i know or care when i should be dead of joy, james lee?" either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her "love that was life, life that was love"; and there is nothing at all to remember in her. as long as she lives his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. if she could fancy one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks again. . . . but the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and cliff and rocks. all the formulas have failed but this one. this one will not fail. he is set free. + + + + + she had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "one near one is too far." she saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have been wise enough to hide from him. but she could not. character is fate; and two characters are two fates. neither, with that other, could be different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was meant to be. footnotes: [ : ] the poems were first called _james lee_ only. [ : ] _life_, mrs. orr, p. . [ : ] "the little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . . such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_life_, p. . [ : ] _life_, p. . [ : ] these lines were published by browning, separately, in , when he was twenty-six. _james lee's wife_ was published in . [ : ] nettleship well says: "the difference between the first and second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was enough to make browning write in , he must have the plaint of a soul in . . . . and yet, something is lost." part v [illustration: the trouble of love] trouble of love: the man's i the woman unwon in the section entitled "lovers meeting" we saw the exultant mood of love in man, and i there pointed out how seldom even browning has assigned that mood to woman. but he does not show her as alone in suffering love's pain. the lyrics we are now to consider give us woman as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character through the utterances of men--and these are noble utterances, every one. mr. j. t. nettleship, in his _essays and thoughts_, well remarks that man's passion shows, in browning's work, "a greater width of view and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is imagined";[ : ] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover." i too have, by implication, found this fault with browning; but mr. nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." it will be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. that woman should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of things as they should be. man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite certainly _a person_--included in nature. that a devotee of browning should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his "teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence for man. but the curious fact which has struck both mr. nettleship and myself--that, in browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . can it be, then, that browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? or, more aptly for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? did he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of women? this, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet i think that affirmed it must be. it leaves him all nobility of mind and heart with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that of thaumaturgic power--it is but to say that he could not turn himself into a woman! + + + + + in what ways does browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for man? first, of course, as loved and unwon. but though this be the most obvious of the ways, not obvious is browning's treatment of it. to love "in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. no love is in vain. grief, anguish even, may attend it, but never can its issue be futility. nor is this merely the already familiar view that somehow, though rejected, love benignly works for the beloved. "that may be, that _is_" (he seems to say), "but it is not the truth which most inspires me." the glory of love for browning resides most radiantly in what it does for the lover's own soul. it is "god's secret": one who loves is initiate. "such am i: the secret's mine now! she has lost me, i have gained her; her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, i shall pass my life's remainder. life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended: and then, come next life quickly! this world's use will have been ended." that is the concluding stanza of _cristina_, which might be called the companion-piece to _porphyria's lover_; for in each the woman belongs to a social world remote from her adorer's; in each she has, nevertheless, perceived him and been drawn to him--but in _cristina_ is caught back into the vortex, while in _porphyria's lover_ the passion prevails, for the man, by killing her, has kept her folded in "god's secret" with himself. "she should never have looked at me if she meant i should not love her! there are plenty . . . men, you call such, i suppose . . . she may discover all her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found them: but i'm not so, and she knew it, when she fixed me, glancing round them." that is the lover's first impulsive cry on finding himself "thrown over." why did she not leave him alone? others tell him that that "fixing" of hers means nothing--that she is, simply, a coquette. but he "can't tell what her look said." certainly not any "vile cant" about giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the queen of women. not _that_, whatever else! and now, so sure of this that he grows sure of other things as well, he declares that it was a moment of true revelation for her also--she _did_ perceive in him the man she wanted. "oh, we're sunk enough here, god knows! but not quite so sunk that moments, sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing." that was what she had felt--the queen of women! a coquette, if they will, for others, but not for him; and, though cruel to him also in the event, not because she had not recognised him. she _had_ recognised him, and more--she had recognised the great truth, had deeply felt that the soul "stops here" for but one end, the true end, sole and single: "this love-way." if the soul miss that way, it goes wrong. there may be better ends, there may even be deeper blisses, but that is the essential--that is the significant thing in life. but they need not smile at his fatuity! he sees that she "knew," but he can see the issue also. "oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in derision, trampled out the light for ever. never fear but there's provision of the devil's to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture" . . . _that_ must be reckoned with; but all it does to those who "catch god's secret" is simply to make them prize their capture so much the more: "such am i: the secret's mine now! she has lost me, i have gained her;" --for though she has cast him off, he has grasped her soul, and will retain it. he has prevailed, and all the rest of his life shall prove him the victorious one--the one who has two souls to work with! he will prove all that such a pair can accomplish; and then death can come quickly: "this world's use will have been ended." she also knew this, but would not follow it to its issue. thus she lost him--but he gained her, and that shall do as well. + + + + + no loving "in vain" there! but this poem is the high-water mark of unsuccessful love exultant. browning was too true a humanist to keep us always on so shining a peak; he knew that there are lower levels, where the wounded wings must rest--that mood, for instance, of wistful looking-back to things undreamed-of and now gone, yet once experienced: "this is a spray the bird clung to, making it blossom with pleasure, ere the high tree-top she sprung to, fit for her nest and her treasure. oh, what a hope beyond measure was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to-- so to be singled out, built in, and sung to! this is a heart the queen leant on" . . . --and in a stanza far less lovely than that of the bird, he shows forth the analogy. the queen "went on"; but what a moment that heart had had! . . . gratitude, we see always, for the gift of love in the heart, for god's secret. the lover was left alone, but he had known the thrill. "better to have loved and lost"--nay, but "lost," for browning, is not in the scheme. she is there, in the world, whether his or another's. sometimes she has never been his at all, has never cared: "all june i bound the rose in sheaves. now, rose by rose, i strip the leaves and strew them where pauline may pass. she will not turn aside? alas! let them lie. suppose they die? the chance was, they might take her eye." and then, for many a month, he tried to learn the lute to please her. "to-day i venture all i know. she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing: suppose pauline had bade me sing!" thus we gradually see that all his life he has been learning to love her. now he has resolved to speak. . . . heaven or hell? "she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! lose who may--i still can say those who win heaven, blest are they!" here again is browning's typical lover. never does he whine, never resent: she was free to choose, and she has not chosen _him_. that is pain; but of the "humiliation" commonly assigned to unsuccessful love, he never dreams: where can be humiliation in having caught god's secret? . . . and even if she have half-inclined to him, but found that not all herself can give herself--more pain in that, a nearer approach to "failure," perhaps--even so, he understands. "i said--then dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all, my life seemed meant for, fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave--i claim only a memory of the same --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me." the girl hesitates. her proud dark eyes, half-pitiful, dwell on him for a moment--"with life or death in the balance," thinks he. ". . . right! the blood replenished me again; my last thought was at least not vain; i and my mistress, side by side shall be together, breathe and ride; so, one day more am i deified. _who knows but the world may end to-night?_"[ : ] now the moment comes in which he lifts her to the saddle. it is as if he had drawn down upon his breast the fairest, most celestial cloud in evening-skies . . . a cloud touched gloriously at once by setting sun and rising moon and evening-star. "down on you, near and yet more near, till flesh must fade for heaven was here-- thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear! thus lay she a moment on my breast." and then they begin to ride. his soul smooths itself out--there shall be no repining, no questioning: he will take the whole of his hour. "had i said that, had i done this, so might i gain, so might i miss. might she have loved me? just as well she might have hated, who can tell! * * * * * and here we are riding, she and i." _he_ is not the only man who has failed. all men strive--who succeeds? his enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe--everywhere the _done_ is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men dream beyond their powers: "i hoped she would love me; here we ride!" no one gains all. hand and brain are never equal; hearts, when they can greatly conceive, fail in the greatest courage; nothing we do is just what we dreamed it might be. we are hedged in everywhere by the fleshly screen. but _they_ two ride, and he sees her bosom lift and fall. . . . to the rest, then, their crowns! to the statesman, ten lines, perhaps, which contain the fruit of all his life; to a soldier, a flag stuck on a heap of bones--and as guerdon for each, a name scratched on the abbey stones. "my riding is better, by their leave!" even our artists! the poet says the thing, but we feel it. not one of us can express it like him; but has he _had_ it? when he dies, will he have been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have never turned a line? "sing, riding's a joy! for me, i ride." (note the fine irony here. the poet shall sing the joy of riding; this man _rides_.) the great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to art: "and that's your venus, whence we turn to yonder girl that fords the burn!" but the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not pity him. the musician fares even worse. after _his_ life's labours, they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention, but fashions change so quickly in music--he is out-of-date. he gave his youth? well-- "i gave my youth; but we ride, in fine." supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have for which to strive? we must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss to die for! if _he_ had this glory-garland round his soul, what other joy could he ever so dimly descry? "earth being so good, would heaven seem best? now, heaven and she are beyond this ride." * * * * * thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching pace. it shall be best as she decrees. she rejects him: he will not whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him--_she_ shall not be wrong! he has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of her--and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. that moment he has, whole and perfect: "who knows but the world may end to-night!" yes; they ride on--the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompass them; they are together. his soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great paradox--almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union, and so silent. . . . but is she _not_ there? and, being there, does she not now seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from her? she _is_ there-- "and yet--she has not spoke so long!" she is as silent as he. they might both be in a trance. he knows what his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? then what would it mean? . . . and the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. what if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she does love? can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with him, as he with her? can it mean that the instant is made eternity-- "and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, for ever ride?" * * * * * despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious love-song--surpassed, i think and many others think, by none in the world--i believe that the concluding stanza means just that. hope has rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in all, as she is in this? will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the pity--and the pride? . . . the wrong that has been done to browning by his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. always he must be, for them, the teacher. but he is the _poet_! he "sings, riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the "obvious human bliss." people seem to forget that it was browning who made that phrase[ : ]--which might almost be his protest against the transcendentalists. much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. mr. nettleship's gloss upon this stanza of _the last ride_ is a case in point. "[the lover] buoys himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." does this mean anything? and if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? i declare that it means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (i feel and know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced mood. and that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy. + + + + + in the strange _numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of browning's "message" for women. "the nympholepts of old," explains mr. augustine birrell in one of the volumes of _obiter dicta_, "were those unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent." the man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life."[ : ] she does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these impossible terms. herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet, beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. he goes forth in obedience; he comes back. ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. and she--forgives him, but not loves him. "what means the sad slow silver smile above my clay but pity, pardon?--at the best but acquiescence that i take my rest, contented to be clay?" she "smiles him slow forgiveness"--nothing more; he is dismissed, must travel forth again. _this_ time he may return, untinged by the ray which he is to traverse. she sends him, deliberately; he must break through the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her--but he is to come back unsmirched. so she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed. and patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone--until this day. this day his patience fails him, and he speaks. once more he had come back--once more been "pardoned." but the pity was so gentle--like a moon-beam. he had almost hoped the smile would pass the "pallid moonbeam limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." if she could pass that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay from gold's own self; "for gold means love." . . . but no; the "sad slow silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence in his lesserness for _him_. _she_ acquiesced not; she keeps her love for the "spirit-seven" before god's throne.[ : ] he then made one supreme appeal for "love, the love sole and whole without alloy." vainly! such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." her calm regard was unchanged--nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his kissing of her feet--he _did_ go forth again. this time he might return, immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . he knew he could not, but--he _might_! she promises that he can: should he not trust her? * * * * * and now, to-day, once more he is returned. still she stands, still she listens, still she smiles! but he protests at last: "surely i had your sanction when i faced, fared forth upon that untried yellow ray whence i retrack my steps?" the crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back deep-stained. how has the yellow used him? he has placed himself again for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of that prismatic glow." to this yellow he has subjected himself utterly: she _had_ ordained it! he was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." and here he is: "absurd and frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"--just as he had been with crimson, purple! she willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. he pleads once more her own permission--nay, command! and, as before, she shows "scarce recognition, no approval, some mistrust, more wonder at a man become monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well, through his adventure." but she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. and this was the one way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. well, it is as before: "i pass into your presence, i receive your smile of pity, pardon, and i leave." but no! this time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his penance. hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved, the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. he has tried the experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." this is his last word. ". . . no, i say: no fresh adventure! no more seeking love at end of toil, and finding, calm above my passion, the old statuesque regard, the sad petrific smile!" and he turns upon her with a violent invective. she is not so much hard and hateful as mistaken and obtuse. "you very woman with the pert pretence to match the male achievement!" _who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper"; when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that womanly falsehood fights with? oh woman's ears that will not hear the truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the very muck that made it! but he breaks off. "ah me!" he cries, "the true slave's querulous outbreak!" and forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. who knows but _this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys? + + + + + such a being as this, said browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal of love, accepted conventionally." _how_ impossible he has shown not only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. this is not woman's mission! and in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. if women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement," they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. there must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the marrings which have made it possible. but having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. he accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as i read this passage) to what is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. the insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. if man could but return, unstained! he must go forth, must explore the rays--of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . he cannot. experience is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"--the colours! the shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there, hearted." true, but this is not _experience_, and she shall not conceit herself into believing it to be. she shall not set up the "pert pretence to match the male achievement": she shall learn that men make women "easy victors," when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's sake. one or the other she must choose: knowledge and the right to judge, or ignorance and the duty to refrain from judgment. . . . and yet--he goes again; he obeys the silver smile! for the "crimson-quest may deepen to a sunrise"; he _may_ come back and find her waiting, "sunlight and salvation," because she understands at last; and both shall look for stains from those long shafts, and see none there. . . . maybe, maybe: he goes--will come again one day; and _that_ at last may prove itself the day when "men are pure, and women brave." + + + + + we pass from the unearthly atmosphere of _numpholeptos_--well-nigh the most abstract of all browning's poems--to the vivid, astonishing realism of _too late_. edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which has been made by the tidings. not till now had he fully realised his absorption in the thought of her: "the woman i loved so well, who married the other." he had been wont to "sit and look at his life." that life, until he met her, had rippled and run like a river. but he met her and loved her and lost her--and it was as if a great stone had been cast by a devil into his life's mid-current. the waves strove about it--the waves that had "come for their joy, and found this horrible stone full-tide." the stone thwarted god. but the lover has had two ways of thinking about it. though the waves, in all their strength and fullness, could not win past, a thread of water might escape and run through the "evening-country," safe, untormented, silent, until it reached the sea. this would be his tender, acquiescent brooding on all she is to him, and the hope that still they may be united at the last, though time shall then have stilled his passion. the second way was better! "or else i would think, 'perhaps some night when new things happen, a meteor-ball may slip through the sky in a line of light, and earth breathe hard, and landmarks fall, and my waves no longer champ nor chafe, since a stone will have rolled from its place: let be!'" for the husband might die, and he, still young and vigorous, might try again to win her. . . . that was how he had been wont to "sit and look at his life." "but, edith dead! no doubting more!" all the dreams are over; all the brooding days have been lived in vain. "but, dead! all's done with: wait who may, watch and wear and wonder who will. oh, my whole life that ends to-day! oh, my soul's sentence, sounding still, 'the woman is dead that was none of his; and the man that was none of hers may go!' there's only the past left: worry that!" . . . all that he was or could have been, she should have had for a word, a "want put into a look." she had not given that look; now she can never give it--and perhaps she _does_ want him. he feels that she does--a "pulse in his cheek that stabs and stops" assures him that she "needs help in her grave, and finds none near"--that from his heart, precisely _his_, she now at last wants warmth. and he can only send it--so! . . . his acquiescence then had been his error. "i ought to have done more: once my speech, and once your answer, and there, the end, and edith was henceforth out of reach! why, men do more to deserve a friend, be rid of a foe, get rich, grow wise, nor, folding their arms, stare fate in the face. why, better even have burst like a thief _and borne you away to a rock for us two, in a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief_" . . . well, _he_ had not done this. but-- "what did the other do? you be judge! look at us, edith! here are we both! give him his six whole years: i grudge none of the life with you, nay, loathe myself that i grudged his start in advance of me who could overtake and pass. but, as if he loved you! no, not he, nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . . --for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is and was alone in his worship. he knows even that such worship of her was among unaccountable things. that _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and held it forth to _her_, and said, "half a glance, and i drop the glass!" . . . for--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place this passionate love-song by itself in the world-- "handsome, were you? 'tis more than they held, more than they said; i was 'ware and watched: * * * * * the others? no head that was turned, no heart broken, my lady, assure yourself!" her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they were finding it! but whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth about her was simply that "on the whole, you were let alone, i think." and laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who acquiesced." he was a poet, was he not? "he rhymed you his rubbish nobody read, loved you and doved you--did not i laugh?" oh, what a prize! had she appreciated adequately her pink of poets? . . . but, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover: they had both been tried. "oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark, _tekel_, found wanting, set aside, scorned! see, i bleed these tears in the dark till comfort come, and the last be bled: he? he is tagging your epitaph." and now sounds that cry of the girl of _in a year_. "if it could only come over again!" she _must_ have loved him best. if there had been time. . . . she would have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart, to find that only verses could spurt from it. . . . "and late it was easy; late, you walked where a friend might meet you; edith's name arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked; if i heard good news, you heard the same; when i woke, i knew that your breath escaped; i could bide my time, keep alive, alert." now she is dead: "no doubting more." . . . but somehow he will get his good of it! he will keep alive--and long, she shall see; but not like the others; there shall be no turning aside, and he will begin at once as he means to end. those others may go on with the world--get gold, get women, betray their wives and their husbands and their friends. "there are two who decline, a woman and i, and enjoy our death in the darkness here."[ : ] and he recurs to her cherished, her dwelt-on, adored defects. only _he_ could have loved her so, in despite of them. the most complex mood of lovers, this! humility and pride are mingled; one knows not which is which--the pride of love, humility of self. only so could the loved one have declined to our level; only so could our love acquire value in those eyes--and yet "the others" did not love so, the defects _were_ valid: there should be some recognition: "_i_ loved, _quand même_!" why, it was almost the defects that brought the thrill: "i liked that way you had with your curls, wound to a ball in a net behind: your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl's, and your mouth--there was never, to my mind, such a funny mouth, for it would not shut; and the dented chin, too--what a chin! there were certain ways when you spoke, some words that you know you never could pronounce: you were thin, however; like a bird's your hand seemed--some would say, the pounce of a scaly-footed hawk--all but! the world was right when it called you thin. but i turn my back on the world: i take your hand, and kneel, and lay to my lips. bid me live, edith!" --and she shall be queen indeed, shall have high observance, courtship made perfect. he seems to see her stand there-- "warm too, and white too: would this wine had washed all over that body of yours, ere i drank it, and you down with it, thus!" . . . the wine of his life, that she would not take--but she shall take it now! he will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. edith needs help in her grave and finds none near--wants warmth from his heart? he sends it--so. + + + + + assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. she was the man's whole life, and she has died. then he dies too, that he may live. "there are two who decline, a woman and i, and enjoy our death in the darkness here." yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul endures." this is the last of my "women unwon." in none of all these poems does courage fail; love is ever god's secret. it comes and goes: the heart has had its moment. it does not come at all: the heart has known the loved one's loveliness. it has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with it. it has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart will pay it, if it can be paid. it has waked too late--it calls from the grave: the heart will follow it there. no love is in vain: "for god above creates the love to reward the love." footnotes: [ : ] he excepts, of course, all through this passage, _any wife to any husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme. [ : ] no line which browning has written is more characteristic than this--nor more famous. [ : ] in _by the fireside_. [ : ] arthur symons, _introduction to the study of browning_, p. . [ : ] browning himself, asked by dr. furnivall, on behalf of the browning society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "the 'seven spirits' are in the apocalypse, also in coleridge and byron, a common image." . . . "i certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." and he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _numpholeptos_ is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as i have once or twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity are best obtained by achievement. still more concisely: "innocence--sin--virtue"--in the hegelian chord of experience. [ : ] here is a clear echo of heine, in one of his most renowned lyrics:-- "the dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell, in crazy dances they're leaping: we two in the grave lie well, lie well, and i in thine arms am sleeping. the dead stand up, 'tis the judgment day, to heaven or hell they're hieing: we two care nothing, we two will stay together quietly lying." ii the woman won love is not static. we may not sit down and say, "it cannot be more than now; it will not be less. henceforth i take it for granted." though she be won, there still is more to do. i say "she" (and browning says it), because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has never been persuaded to hold it. possibly it is _because_ men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real herself. but, says browning, they must not grow weary in it. elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. for if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. we cannot come to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do. but is she in truth so elusive? are not women far simpler than they are accounted? "the first reader in another language," i have elsewhere said of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. let us see what browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity. "room after room, i hunt the house through we inhabit together. heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her-- next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her left in the curtain, the couch's perfume! as she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew; yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather." so elusive, says this man, is the real herself! but (i maintain) she does not know it. she goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind to its deepest implication. caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses, _for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows nothing. just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room! how should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? and when she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . . if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce it! for, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." yet she loves to hear her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there seem to be for him. "yet the day wears, and door succeeds door; i try the fresh fortune-- range the wide house from the wing to the centre. still the same chance! she goes out as i enter. spend my whole day in the quest, who cares? but 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore, such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!" listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." it is not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms: it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." what does _that_ house contain--where is _she_? he seems to hold her, yet she "goes out as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms! she listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a secret. for she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? perhaps she must always elude? she does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! and he quickly answers: "escape me? never-- beloved! while i am i, and you are you, so long as the world contains us both, me the loving and you the loth, while the one eludes, must the other pursue." but she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. she wants him to find her. and this, in its turn, scares _him_. "my life is a fault at last, i fear: it seems too much like a fate, indeed! though i do my best, i shall scarce succeed." it is the trouble of love. he may never reach her. . . . they look at one another, and he takes heart again. "but what if i fail of my purpose here? it is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and, baffled, get up and begin again-- so the chase takes up one's life, that's all." but she is now almost repelled. she is not this enigma: she _wants_ him to grasp her. well, then, she can help him, he says: "look but once from your farthest bound at me so deep in the dust and dark, no sooner the old hope goes to ground than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, i shape me-- ever removed!" is not this the meaning? the two poems seem to me supplementary of each other. first, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. she does not (as i have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover can divine her? the explanation given both by mrs. orr and berdoe of _love in a life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. is it not clear that no material house[ : ] is meant? they are both inhabiting the _body_; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain, the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. but through _her_ house he cannot range, as she through actualities. and though ever she eludes him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension; she does not desire to "escape" him. the old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the riddle ever trembling on her lips! but if she were understood, she might be taken for granted. . . . so the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept back: "while the one eludes must the other pursue." "the desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man." in those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at one another 'mid the perplexity. the man is eager, resolute, humorous; the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. the heart shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind her!" she feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the last resort, on _her_. but in _two in the campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. what he wants is more than this. he wants to pass the limits of personality, to forget the search in the oneness. there is more than "finding" to be done: finding is not the secret. he tries to tell her--and he cannot tell her, for he does not himself fully know. "i wonder do you feel to-day as i have felt since, hand in hand, we sat down on the grass, to stray in spirit better through the land, this morn of rome and may?" his thought escapes him ever. like a spider's silvery thread it mocks and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . no; it escapes, escapes. "help me to hold it! first it left the yellowing fennel. . . ." what does the fennel mean? something, but he cannot grasp it--and the thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five green beetles are groping--but not there either does it rest . . . it is all about him: entangling, eluding: "everywhere on the grassy slope, i traced it. hold it fast!" the grassy slope may be the secret! that infinity of passion and peace--the roman campagna: "the champaign with its endless fleece of feathery grasses everywhere! silence and passion, joy and peace, an everlasting wash of air-- rome's ghost since her decease." and think of all that that plain even now stands for: "such life here, through such lengths of hours, such miracles performed in play, such primal naked forms of flowers, such letting nature have her way while heaven looks from its towers!" they love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot _they_ "let nature have her way"? does she understand? "how say you? let us, o my dove, let us be unashamed of soul, as earth lies bare to heaven above! how is it under our control to love or not to love?" but always they stop short of one another. that is the dread mystery: "i would that you were all to me, you that are just so much, no more. nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free! where does the fault lie? what the core o' the wound, since wound must be?" he longs to yield his will, his whole being--to see with her eyes, set his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part his--_be_ her. . . . "no. i yearn upward, touch you close, then stand away. i kiss your cheek, catch your soul's warmth--i pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak-- then the good minute goes." goes--with such swiftness! already he is "far out of it." and shall this never be different? ". . . must i go still like the thistle-ball, no bar, onward, whenever light winds blow?" he must indeed, for already he is "off again": "just when i seemed about to learn!" even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. the thread is lost again: "the old trick! only i discern-- infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." _no_ contact is close enough. the passion is infinite, the hearts are finite. the deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the sentence. the good minute goes. it shall be theirs again--again they shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!" for it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. the campagna itself says that-- "rome's ghost since her decease." mutability, mutability! though the flowers are the primal, naked forms, they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old. _new as to-day is new: old as to-day is old_; and all the lovers have discerned, like him, "infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." for has she helped him to hold the thread? no; she too has been the sport of "the old trick." and even of that he cannot be wholly sure: "i _wonder_ do you feel to-day as i have felt . . . ?" + + + + + in the enchanting _lovers' quarrel_ we find a less metaphysical pair than those whom we have followed in their quest. this man has not taken her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of her own and his elusiveness. no; these two have just had, very humanly and gladly, the "time of their lives"! all through the winter they have frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly he has charmed her just as much. the same sort of fun appealed to them both at the same moment--games out of straws of their own devising; drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth: "free on each other's flaws, how we chattered like two church daws!" and then the _times_ would come in--and the emperor has married his mlle. de montijo! "there they sit ermine-stoled, and she powders her hair with gold." or a travel-book arrives from the library--and the two heads are close together over the pictures. "fancy the pampas' sheen! miles and miles of gold and green where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow, and to break now and then the screen-- black neck and eyeballs keen, up a wild horse leaps between!" . . . no picture in the book like that--what a genius he is! the book is pushed away; and there lies the table bare: "try, will our table turn? lay your hands there light, and yearn till the yearning slips thro' the finger-tips in a fire which a few discern, and a very few feel burn, and the rest, they may live and learn! then we would up and pace, for a change, about the place, each with arm o'er neck: 'tis our quarter-deck, we are seamen in woeful case. help in the ocean-space! or, if no help, we'll embrace." the next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing properly the parts: "see how she looks now, dressed in a sledging-cap and vest! 'tis a huge fur cloak-- like a reindeer's zoke falls the lappet along the breast: sleeves for her arms to rest, or to hang, as my love likes best." now it is _his_ turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the spanish ladies can"--but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork moustache, and she "turns into such a man!" . . . all this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth and put it to sleep. snow-time is love-time--for hearts can then show all: "how is earth to know neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?" * * * * * three months ago--and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! the march sun feels like may. he looks out upon it: "all is blue again after last night's rain, and the south dries the hawthorn-spray. only, my love's away! i'd as lief that the blue were grey." yes--she is gone; they have quarrelled. or rather, since it does not take two to do that wretched deed, _she_ has quarrelled. it was some little thing that he said--neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor taunt: "and the friends were friend and foe!" she went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago. one cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was _not_ so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless! this girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour--that much is clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. what _had_ he said? whatever it was, he "did not mean it." but that is frequently the sting of stings. spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice can--for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or the too-little. . . . well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly, she had gone, and still is gone--and he sits marvelling. three months! is she going to stay away for ever? is she going to cast him off for a word, a "bubble born of breath"? why, they had been _one_ person! "me, do you leave aghast with the memories we amassed?" just for "a moment's spite." . . . she ought to have understood. "love, if you knew the light that your soul casts in my sight, how i look to you for the pure and true, and the beauteous and the right--" but so had she looked to _him_, and he had shown her "a moment's spite." . . . yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this against the other memories. things like that are indeed for ever happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. the eye can be blurred by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear. but that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. it is different with love. "wrong in the one thing rare-- oh, it is hard to bear!" and especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." little brooks must be dancing down the dell, "each with a tale to tell, could my love but attend as well." but as she cannot, he will not. . . . only, things will get lovelier every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the spring, when the almond-blossom blows. "we shall have the word in a minor third there is none but the cuckoo knows: heaps of the guelder rose! i must bear with it, i suppose." for he would choose, if he could choose, that november should come back. then there would be nothing for her to love but love! in such a world as spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there, and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the heart cries: "why should i freeze? another heart, as chill as mine is now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one": "heart, shall we live or die? the rest . . . settle by-and-bye!" three months ago they were so happy! they lived blocked up with snow, the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get: "not to our ingle, though, where we loved each the other so!" if it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring, when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose which he will have to bear with . . . but, after all, it _is_ november for their hearts! hers is chill as his; she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. if it were winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him _as before_" (thus we perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her before with that word which was _not_ so many things!)--and what else is it but winter for their shivering hearts? so he begins to hope. in march, too, there are storms--here is one beginning now, at noon, which shows that it will last. . . . not yet, then, the too lovely spring! "it is twelve o'clock: i shall hear her knock in the worst of a storm's uproar: i shall pull her through the door, i shall have her for evermore!" . . . i think she came back. she would want to see how well he understood the spring--he who could make that picture of the pampas' sheen and the wild horse. why should spring's news unfold itself, and he not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere _times_ news? and it _is_ impossible to bear with the guelder-rose--the guelder-rose must be adored. they will adore it together; she will efface the score, and forgive him as before. what fun it will be, in the worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door! in _the lost mistress_ it is really finished: she has dismissed him. we are not told why. it cannot be because he has not loved her--he who so tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. he will not let her see how much he suffers--he still can say the "little things" she liked. "all's over, then: does truth sound bitter as one at first believes? hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter about your cottage eaves! and the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly, i noticed that, to-day; one day more breaks them open fully --you know the red turns grey." that is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it. "to-morrow we meet the same then, dearest? may i take your hand in mine? mere friends are we--well, friends the merest keep much that i resign." he is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. _he_ resigns. but the friends do not know what "he" knew. "for each glance of the eye so bright and black though i keep with heart's endeavour-- your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back, though it stay in my soul for ever--" . . . is this like a friend? but he accepts her bidding--very nearly. there are some things, perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not fear--he will try. "yet i will but say what mere friends say, or only a thought stronger; i will hold your hand but as long as all may, or so very little longer!" again we have the typical browning lover, who will not reproach nor scorn nor whine. but i think that this one had perhaps a little excess of whimsical humour. she would herself have needed a good deal of such humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "_does truth sound bitter, as one at first believes?_" somewhat puzzling to her, it may be, that very philosophical reflection! . . . this has been called a noble, tender, an heroic, song of loss. for me there lurks a smile in it. i do not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather i a little wonder how she could have sent him away. but is it certain that she will not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? he means to hold her hand a little longer than the others do! + + + + + _the worst of it_ is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has left him for a lover. he cares for nothing else in the world; his whole heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her. but there is no way, for him. and the "worst of it" is that all has happened _through_ him. she had given him herself, she had bound her soul by the "vows that damn"--and then had found that she must break them. and he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down! but _she_--the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! is there to be no heaven for her--no crown for that brow? shall other women be sainted, and not she, graced here beyond all saints? "hardly! that must be understood! the earth is your place of penance, then." but even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . if it had only been he that was false, not she! _he_ could have borne all easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little difference. and he is nothing, while she is all. too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against the woman. instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that which he makes--though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not catch. "and i to have tempted you"-- . . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise: "i to have tempted you! i, who tired your soul, no doubt, till it sank! unwise, i loved and was lowly, loved and aspired, loved, grieving or glad, till i made you mad, and you meant to have hated and despised-- whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!" this is the too-much of magnanimity. browning tends to exaggerate the beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in pompilia; and assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. tender, generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as some old writer called _anger_. all these wonderful and subtle reasons for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! the truth is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer--almost they might be called responsible for others' misdoings. we read the ringing stanzas of _the worst of it_, and feel that no one should be doomed to suffer such forgiveness. what chance had _her_ soul? at every turn it found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all eternity. "i knew you once; but in paradise, if we meet, i will pass nor turn my face." no: this with me is not a favourite poem. the wife, beautiful and passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. already that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the day of judgment. and he _is_ so crushingly right! he is not a prig, he is not a pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous--perfectly right. . . . and sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious brow,--sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue, we must be willing to be perfectly wrong. + + + + + but his suffering is genuine. she has twisted all his world out of shape. he believes no more in truth or beauty or life. "we take our own method, the devil and i, with pleasant and fair and wise and rare: and the best we wish to what lives, is--death." _she_ is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now she can begin again. but most likely she does not repent at all, he goes on to reflect--most likely she is glad she deceived him. she had endured too long:-- "[you] have done no evil and want no aid, will live the old life out and chance the new. and your sentence is written all the same, and i can do nothing--pray, perhaps: but somehow the word pursues its game-- if i pray, if i curse--for better or worse: and my faith is torn to a thousand scraps, and my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame. dear, i look from my hiding-place. are you still so fair? have you still the eyes? be happy! add but the other grace, be good! why want what the angels vaunt? i knew you once: but in paradise, if we meet, i will pass nor turn my face." i think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel, do we not? that _now_ she is having her first opportunity to be both happy and good--free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband. and so, by making a male utterance too "noble," browning has almost redressed the balance. the tear had been too frequently assigned to woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. we have seen that many of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of the woman won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in man. but not in _james lee's wife_ is the top-note of magnanimity more strained than in _the worst of it_. moral gymnastics should not be practised at the expense of others. no one knew that better than browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his warm, wise heart--too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and forgot the truth. "a man and woman _might_ feel so," he sometimes seems to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so felt." and thus, now and then, he gave both men and women--the worst of it. but oftener he gave them such a best of it that i hardly can imagine a reader of browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great epilogue:-- "greet the unseen with a cheer." footnotes: [ : ] compare this passage with one in a letter to e. b. b.: "in this house of life, where i go, you go--when i ascend, you run before--when i descend, it is after you." the end printed by ballantyne, hanson & co. at paul's work, edinburgh transcriber's notes: this text uses a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem. they are indicated here by five asterisks: * * * * * the number of periods in ellipses match the original. thought breaks in the text are indicated by the following: + + + + + the word manoeuvre used an ae ligature in the original. words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. the following words appear in the original with and without hyphens: commonplace/common-place disgrace/dis-grace moonbeam/moon-beam wellnigh/well-nigh browning's england a study of english influences in browning by helen archibald clarke author of "_browning's italy_" new york the baker & taylor company mcmviii _copyright, , by_ the baker & taylor company published, october, _the plimpton press norwood mass. u.s.a._ to my colleague in pleasant literary paths and many years friend charlotte porter contents chapter i page english poets, friends, and enthusiasms chapter ii shakespeare's portrait chapter iii a crucial period in english history chapter iv social aspects of english life chapter v religious thought in the nineteenth century chapter vi art criticism inspired by the english musician, avison illustrations browning at _frontispiece_ page percy bysshe shelley john keats william wordsworth rydal mount, the home of wordsworth an english lane first folio portrait of shakespeare charles i in scene of impeachment thomas wentworth, earl of strafford charles i whitehall westminster hall the tower, london the tower, traitors' gate an english manor house an english park john bunyan an english inn cardinal wiseman sacred heart the nativity the transfiguration handel avison's march browning's england chapter i english poets, friends and enthusiasms to any one casually trying to recall what england has given robert browning by way of direct poetical inspiration, it is more than likely that the little poem about shelley, "memorabilia" would at once occur: i "ah, did you once see shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to you and did you speak to him again? how strange it seems and new! ii "but you were living before that, and also you are living after; and the memory i started at-- my starting moves your laughter! iii "i crossed a moor, with a name of its own and a certain use in the world, no doubt, yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 'mid the blank miles round about: iv "for there i picked up on the heather and there i put inside my breast a moulted feather, an eagle-feather! well, i forget the rest." it puts into a mood and a symbol the almost worshipful admiration felt by browning for the poet in his youth, which he had, many years before this little lyric was written, recorded in a finely appreciative passage in "pauline." "sun-treader, life and light be thine forever! thou are gone from us; years go by and spring gladdens and the young earth is beautiful, yet thy songs come not, other bards arise, but none like thee: they stand, thy majesties, like mighty works which tell some spirit there hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn, till, its long task completed, it hath risen and left us, never to return, and all rush in to peer and praise when all in vain. the air seems bright with thy past presence yet, but thou art still for me as thou hast been when i have stood with thee as on a throne with all thy dim creations gathered round like mountains, and i felt of mould like them, and with them creatures of my own were mixed, like things, half-lived, catching and giving life. but thou art still for me who have adored tho' single, panting but to hear thy name which i believed a spell to me alone, scarce deeming thou wast as a star to men! as one should worship long a sacred spring scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross, and one small tree embowers droopingly-- joying to see some wandering insect won to live in its few rushes, or some locust to pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird stoop for its freshness from the trackless air: and then should find it but the fountain-head, long lost, of some great river washing towns and towers, and seeing old woods which will live but by its banks untrod of human foot, which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering in light as some thing lieth half of life before god's foot, waiting a wondrous change; then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay its course in vain, for it does ever spread like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on, being the pulse of some great country--so wast thou to me, and art thou to the world! and i, perchance, half feel a strange regret that i am not what i have been to thee: like a girl one has silently loved long in her first loneliness in some retreat, when, late emerged, all gaze and glow to view her fresh eyes and soft hair and lips which bloom like a mountain berry: doubtless it is sweet to see her thus adored, but there have been moments when all the world was in our praise, sweeter than any pride of after hours. yet, sun-treader, all hail! from my heart's heart i bid thee hail! e'en in my wildest dreams, i proudly feel i would have thrown to dust the wreaths of fame which seemed o'erhanging me, to see thee for a moment as thou art." browning was only fourteen when shelley first came into his literary life. the story has often been told of how the young robert, passing a bookstall one day spied in a box of second-hand volumes, a shabby little edition of shelley advertised "mr. shelley's atheistical poems: very scarce." it seems almost incredible to us now that the name was an absolutely new one to him, and that only by questioning the bookseller did he learn that shelley had written a number of volumes of poetry and that he was now dead. this accident was sufficient to inspire the incipient poet's curiosity, and he never rested until he was the owner of shelley's works. they were hard to get hold of in those early days but the persistent searching of his mother finally unearthed them at olliers' in vere street, london. she brought him also three volumes of keats, who became a treasure second only to shelley. [illustration: percy bysshe shelley "sun-treader, life and light be thine forever."] the question of shelley's influence on browning's art has been one often discussed. there are many traces of shelleyan music and idea in his early poems "pauline," "paracelsus," and "sordello," but no marked nor lasting impression was made upon browning's development as a poet by shelley. upon browning's personal development shelley exerted a short-lived though somewhat intense influence. we see the young enthusiast professing the atheism of his idol as the liberal views of shelley were then interpreted, and even becoming a vegetarian. as time went on the discipleship vanished, and in its place came the recognition on browning's part of a poetic spirit akin yet different from his own. the last trace of the disciple appears in "sordello" when the poet addresses shelley among the audience of dead great ones he has mustered to listen to the story of sordello: --"stay--thou, spirit, come not near now--not this time desert thy cloudy place to scare me, thus employed, with that pure face! i need not fear this audience, i make free with them, but then this is no place for thee! the thunder-phrase of the athenian, grown up out of memories of marathon, would echo like his own sword's grinding screech braying a persian shield,--the silver speech of sidney's self, the starry paladin, turn intense as a trumpet sounding in the knights to tilt,--wert thou to hear!" shelley appears in the work of browning once more in the prose essay on shelley which was written to a volume of spurious letters of that poet published in . in this is summed up in a masterful paragraph reflecting browning's unusual penetration into the secret paths of the poetic mind, the characteristics of a poet of shelley's order. the paragraph is as follows: "we turn with stronger needs to the genius of an opposite tendency--the subjective poet of modern classification. he, gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the one above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth,--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. not what man sees, but what god sees,--the _ideas_ of plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the divine hand,--it is toward these that he struggles. not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity, he has to do; and he digs where he stands,--preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak. such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibers naked to the chalk and stone. he does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes, to see those pictures on them. he is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. that effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality,--being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated. therefore, in our approach to the poetry, we necessarily approach the personality of the poet; in apprehending it, we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. both for love's and for understanding's sake we desire to know him, and, as readers of his poetry, must be readers of his biography too." finally, the little "memorabilia" lyric gives a mood of cherished memory of the sun-treader, who beaconed him upon the heights in his youth, and has now become a molted eagle-feather held close to his heart. keats' lesser but assured place in the poet's affections comes out in the pugnacious lyric, "popularity," one of the old-time bits of ammunition shot from the guns of those who found browning "obscure." the poem is an "apology" for any unappreciated poet with the true stuff in him, but the allusion to keats shows him to have been the fuse that fired this mild explosion against the dullards who pass by unknowing and uncaring of a genius, though he pluck with one hand thoughts from the stars, and with the other fight off want. popularity i stand still, true poet that you are! i know you; let me try and draw you. some night you'll fail us: when afar you rise, remember one man saw you, knew you, and named a star! ii my star, god's glow-worm! why extend that loving hand of his which leads you, yet locks you safe from end to end of this dark world, unless he needs you, just saves your light to spend? iii his clenched hand shall unclose at last, i know, and let out all the beauty: my poet holds the future fast, accepts the coming ages' duty, their present for this past. iv that day, the earth's feast-master's brow shall clear, to god the chalice raising; "others give best at first, but thou forever set'st our table praising, keep'st the good wine till now!" v meantime, i'll draw you as you stand, with few or none to watch and wonder: i'll say--a fisher, on the sand by tyre the old, with ocean-plunder, a netful, brought to land. vi who has not heard how tyrian shells enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes whereof one drop worked miracles, and colored like astarte's eyes raw silk the merchant sells? vii and each bystander of them all could criticise, and quote tradition how depths of blue sublimed some pall --to get which, pricked a king's ambition; worth sceptre, crown and ball. viii yet there's the dye, in that rough mesh, the sea has only just o'er-whispered! live whelks, each lip's beard dripping fresh as if they still the water's lisp heard thro' foam the rock-weeds thresh. ix enough to furnish solomon such hangings for his cedar-house, that, when gold-robed he took the throne in that abyss of blue, the spouse might swear his presence shone x most like the centre-spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb, what time, with ardors manifold, the bee goes singing to her groom, drunken and overbold. xi mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof! till cunning come to pound and squeeze and clarify,--refine to proof the liquor filtered by degrees, while the world stands aloof. xii and there's the extract, flasked and fine, and priced and salable at last! and hobbs, nobbs, stokes and nokes combine to paint the future from the past, put blue into their line. xiii hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats: nobbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup: nokes outdares stokes in azure feats,-- both gorge. who fished the murex up? what porridge had john keats? [illustration: john keats "who fished the murex up? what porridge had john keats?"] wordsworth, it appears, was, so to speak, the inverse inspiration of the stirring lines "the lost leader." browning's strong sympathies with the liberal cause are here portrayed with an ardor which is fairly intoxicating poetically, but one feels it is scarcely just to the mild-eyed, exemplary wordsworth, and perhaps exaggeratedly sure of shakespeare's attitude on this point. it is only fair to browning, to point out how he himself felt later that his artistic mood had here run away with him, whereupon he made amends honorable in a letter in reply to the question whether he had wordsworth in mind: "i can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that i undoubtedly had wordsworth in my mind--but simply as a model; you know an artist takes one or two striking traits in the features of his 'model,' and uses them to start his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman who happens to be sitting for nose and eye. i thought of the great poet's abandonment of liberalism at an unlucky juncture, and no repaying consequence that i could ever see. but, once call my fancy-portrait _wordsworth_--and how much more ought one to say!" the defection of wordsworth from liberal sympathies is one of the commonplaces of literary history. there was a time when he figured in his poetry as a patriotic leader of the people, when in clarion tones he exhorted his countrymen to "arm and combine in defense of their common birthright." but this was in the enthusiasm of his youth when he and southey and coleridge were metaphorically waving their red caps for the principles of the french revolution. the unbridled actions of the french revolutionists, quickly cooled off their ardor, and as taine cleverly puts it, "at the end of a few years, the three, brought back into the pale of state and church, were, coleridge, a pittite journalist, wordsworth, a distributor of stamps, and southey, poet-laureate; all converted zealots, decided anglicans, and intolerant conservatives." the "handful of silver" for which the patriot in the poem is supposed to have left the cause included besides the post of "distributor of stamps," given to him by lord lonsdale in , a pension of three hundred pounds a year in , and the poet-laureateship in . the first of these offices was received so long after the cooling of wordsworth's "revolution" ardors which the events of had brought about that it can scarcely be said to have influenced his change of mind. it was during wordsworth's residence in france, from november to december , that his enthusiasm for the french revolution reached white heat. how the change was wrought in his feelings is shown with much penetration and sympathy by edward dowden in his "french revolution and english literature." "when war between france and england was declared wordsworth's nature underwent the most violent strain it had ever experienced. he loved his native land yet he could wish for nothing but disaster to her arms. as the days passed he found it more and more difficult to sustain his faith in the revolution. first, he abandoned belief in the leaders but he still trusted to the people, then the people seemed to have grown insane with the intoxication of blood. he was driven back from his defense of the revolution, in its historical development, to a bare faith in the abstract idea. he clung to theories, the free and joyous movement of his sympathies ceased; opinions stifled the spontaneous life of the spirit, these opinions were tested and retested by the intellect, till, in the end, exhausted by inward debate, he yielded up moral questions in despair ... by process of the understanding alone wordsworth could attain no vital body of truth. rather he felt that things of far more worth than political opinions--natural instincts, sympathies, passions, intuitions--were being disintegrated or denaturalized. wordsworth began to suspect the analytic intellect as a source of moral wisdom. in place of humanitarian dreams came a deep interest in the joys and sorrows of individual men and women; through his interest in this he was led back to a study of the mind of man and those laws which connect the work of the creative imagination with the play of the passions. he had begun again to think nobly of the world and human life." he was, in fact, a more thorough democrat socially than any but burns of the band of poets mentioned in browning's gallant company, not even excepting browning himself. the lost leader i just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a riband to stick in his coat-- found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, lost all the others, she lets us devote; they, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, so much was theirs who so little allowed: how all our copper had gone for his service! rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud! we that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye, learned his great language, caught his clear accents, made him our pattern to live and to die! shakespeare was of us, milton was for us, burns, shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves! he alone breaks from the van and the freeman, --he alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! ii we shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre; deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence, still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, one task more declined, one more footpath untrod, one more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels, one wrong more to man, one more insult to god! life's night begins: let him never come back to us! there would be doubt, hesitation and pain, forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight, never glad confident morning again! best fight on well, for we taught him--strike gallantly, menace our hearts ere we master his own; then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! whether an artist is justified in taking the most doubtful feature of his model's physiognomy and building up from it a repellent portrait is question for debate, especially when he admits its incompleteness. but we may balance against this incompleteness, the fine fire of enthusiasm for the "cause" in the poem, and the fact that wordsworth has not been at all harmed by it. the worst that has happened is the raising in our minds of a question touching browning's good taste. just here it will be interesting to speak of a bit of purely personal expression on the subject of browning's known liberal standpoint, written by him in answer to the question propounded to a number of english men of letters and printed together with other replies in a volume edited by andrew reid in . "why i am a liberal." "'why?' because all i haply can and do, all that i am now, all i hope to be,-- whence comes it save from fortune setting free body and soul the purpose to pursue, god traced for both? if fetters, not a few, of prejudice, convention, fall from me, these shall i bid men--each in his degree also god-guided--bear, and gayly too? "but little do or can the best of us: that little is achieved thro' liberty. who then dares hold, emancipated thus, his fellow shall continue bound? not i, who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss a brother's right to freedom. that is 'why.'" [illustration: william wordsworth "how all our copper had gone for his service. rags--were they purple, his heart had been proved."] enthusiasm for liberal views comes out again and again in the poetry of browning. his fullest treatment of the cause of political liberty is in "strafford," to be considered in the third chapter, but many are the hints strewn about his verse that bring home with no uncertain touch the fact that browning lived man's "lover" and never man's "hater." take as an example "the englishman in italy," where the sarcastic turn he gives to the last stanza shows clearly where his sympathies lie: --"such trifles!" you say? fortù, in my england at home, men meet gravely to-day and debate, if abolishing corn-laws be righteous and wise! --if 't were proper, scirocco should vanish in black from the skies! more the ordinary note of patriotism is struck in "home-thoughts, from the sea," wherein the scenes of england's victories as they come before the poet arouse pride in her military achievements. home-thoughts, from the sea nobly, nobly cape saint vincent to the north-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into cadiz bay; bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face trafalgar lay; in the dimmest north-east distance dawned gibraltar grand and gray; "here and here did england help me: how can i help england?"--say, whoso turns as i, this evening, turn to god to praise and pray, while jove's planet rises yonder, silent over africa. in two instances browning celebrates english friends in his poetry. the poems are "waring" and "may and death." waring, who stands for alfred domett, is an interesting figure in colonial history as well as a minor light among poets. but it is highly probable that he would not have been put into verse by browning any more than many other of the poet's warm friends if it had not been for the incident described in the poem which actually took place, and made a strong enough impression to inspire a creative if not exactly an exalted mood on browning's part. the incident is recorded in thomas powell's "living authors of england," who writes of domett, "we have a vivid recollection of the last time we saw him. it was at an evening party a few days before he sailed from england; his intimate friend, mr. browning, was also present. it happened that the latter was introduced that evening for the first time to a young author who had just then appeared in the literary world [powell, himself]. this, consequently, prevented the two friends from conversation, and they parted from each other without the slightest idea on mr. browning's part that he was seeing his old friend domett for the last time. some days after when he found that domett had sailed, he expressed in strong terms to the writer of this sketch the self-reproach he felt at having preferred the conversation of a stranger to that of his old associate." this happened in , when with no good-bys, domett sailed for new zealand where he lived for thirty years, and held during that time many important official posts. upon his return to england, browning and he met again, and in his poem "ranolf and amohia," published the year after, he wrote the often quoted line so aptly appreciative of browning's genius,--"subtlest assertor of the soul in song." the poem belongs to the _vers de société_ order, albeit the lightness is of a somewhat ponderous variety. it, however, has much interest as a character sketch from the life, and is said by those who had the opportunity of knowing to be a capital portrait. waring i i what's become of waring since he gave us all the slip, chose land-travel or seafaring, boots and chest or staff and scrip, rather than pace up and down any longer london town? ii who'd have guessed it from his lip or his brow's accustomed bearing, on the night he thus took ship or started landward?--little caring for us, it seems, who supped together (friends of his too, i remember) and walked home thro' the merry weather, the snowiest in all december. i left his arm that night myself for what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet who wrote the book there, on the shelf-- how, forsooth, was i to know it if waring meant to glide away like a ghost at break of day? never looked he half so gay! iii he was prouder than the devil: how he must have cursed our revel! ay and many other meetings, indoor visits, outdoor greetings, as up and down he paced this london, with no work done, but great works undone, where scarce twenty knew his name. why not, then, have earlier spoken, written, bustled? who's to blame if your silence kept unbroken? "true, but there were sundry jottings, stray-leaves, fragments, blurs and blottings, certain first steps were achieved already which"--(is that your meaning?) "had well borne out whoe'er believed in more to come!" but who goes gleaning hedgeside chance-glades, while full-sheaved stand cornfields by him? pride, o'erweening pride alone, puts forth such claims o'er the day's distinguished names. iv meantime, how much i loved him, i find out now i've lost him. i who cared not if i moved him, who could so carelessly accost him, henceforth never shall get free of his ghostly company, his eyes that just a little wink as deep i go into the merit of this and that distinguished spirit-- his cheeks' raised color, soon to sink, as long i dwell on some stupendous and tremendous (heaven defend us!) monstr'-inform'-ingens-horrend-ous demoniaco-seraphic penman's latest piece of graphic. nay, my very wrist grows warm with his dragging weight of arm. e'en so, swimmingly appears, through one's after-supper musings, some lost lady of old years with her beauteous vain endeavor and goodness unrepaid as ever; the face, accustomed to refusings, we, puppies that we were.... oh never surely, nice of conscience, scrupled being aught like false, forsooth, to? telling aught but honest truth to? what a sin, had we centupled its possessor's grace and sweetness! no! she heard in its completeness truth, for truth's a weighty matter, and truth, at issue, we can't flatter! well, 'tis done with; she's exempt from damning us thro' such a sally; and so she glides, as down a valley, taking up with her contempt, past our reach; and in, the flowers shut her unregarded hours. [illustration: rydal mount, the home of wordsworth] v oh, could i have him back once more, this waring, but one half-day more! back, with the quiet face of yore, so hungry for acknowledgment like mine! i'd fool him to his bent. feed, should not he, to heart's content? i'd say, "to only have conceived, planned your great works, apart from progress, surpasses little works achieved!" i'd lie so, i should be believed. i'd make such havoc of the claims of the day's distinguished names to feast him with, as feasts an ogress her feverish sharp-toothed gold-crowned child! or as one feasts a creature rarely captured here, unreconciled to capture; and completely gives its pettish humors license, barely requiring that it lives. vi ichabod, ichabod, the glory is departed! travels waring east away? who, of knowledge, by hearsay, reports a man upstarted somewhere as a god, hordes grown european-hearted, millions of the wild made tame on a sudden at his fame? in vishnu-land what avatar? or who in moscow, toward the czar, with the demurest of footfalls over the kremlin's pavement bright with serpentine and syenite, steps, with five other generals that simultaneously take snuff, for each to have pretext enough and kerchiefwise unfold his sash which, softness' self, is yet the stuff to hold fast where a steel chain snaps, and leave the grand white neck no gash? waring in moscow, to those rough cold northern natures born perhaps, like the lambwhite maiden dear from the circle of mute kings unable to repress the tear, each as his sceptre down he flings, to dian's fane at taurica, where now a captive priestess, she alway mingles her tender grave hellenic speech with theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach as pours some pigeon, from the myrrhy lands rapt by the whirlblast to fierce scythian strands where breed the swallows, her melodious cry amid their barbarous twitter! in russia? never! spain were fitter! ay, most likely 'tis in spain that we and waring meet again now, while he turns down that cool narrow lane into the blackness, out of grave madrid all fire and shine, abrupt as when there's slid its stiff gold blazing pall from some black coffin-lid. or, best of all, i love to think the leaving us was just a feint; back here to london did he slink, and now works on without a wink of sleep, and we are on the brink of something great in fresco-paint: some garret's ceiling, walls and floor, up and down and o'er and o'er he splashes, as none splashed before since great caldara polidore. or music means this land of ours some favor yet, to pity won by purcell from his rosy bowers,-- "give me my so-long promised son, let waring end what i begun!" then down he creeps and out he steals only when the night conceals his face; in kent 'tis cherry-time, or hops are picking: or at prime of march he wanders as, too happy, years ago when he was young, some mild eve when woods grew sappy and the early moths had sprung to life from many a trembling sheath woven the warm boughs beneath; while small birds said to themselves what should soon be actual song, and young gnats, by tens and twelves, made as if they were the throng that crowd around and carry aloft the sound they have nursed, so sweet and pure, out of a myriad noises soft, into a tone that can endure amid the noise of a july noon when all god's creatures crave their boon, all at once and all in tune, and get it, happy as waring then, having first within his ken what a man might do with men: and far too glad, in the even-glow, to mix with the world he meant to take into his hand, he told you, so-- and out of it his world to make, to contract and to expand as he shut or oped his hand. oh waring, what's to really be? a clear stage and a crowd to see! some garrick, say, out shall not he the heart of hamlet's mystery pluck? or, where most unclean beasts are rife, some junius--am i right?--shall tuck his sleeve, and forth with flaying-knife! some chatterton shall have the luck of calling rowley into life! some one shall somehow run a muck with this old world for want of strife sound asleep. contrive, contrive to rouse us, waring! who's alive? our men scarce seem in earnest now. distinguished names!--but 'tis, somehow, as if they played at being names still more distinguished, like the games of children. turn our sport to earnest with a visage of the sternest! bring the real times back, confessed still better than our very best! ii i "when i last saw waring...." (how all turned to him who spoke! you saw waring? truth or joke? in land-travel or sea-faring?) ii "we were sailing by triest where a day or two we harbored: a sunset was in the west, when, looking over the vessel's side, one of our company espied a sudden speck to larboard. and as a sea-duck flies and swims at once, so came the light craft up, with its sole lateen sail that trims and turns (the water round its rims dancing, as round a sinking cup) and by us like a fish it curled, and drew itself up close beside, its great sail on the instant furled, and o'er its thwarts a shrill voice cried, (a neck as bronzed as a lascar's) 'buy wine of us, you english brig? or fruit, tobacco and cigars? a pilot for you to triest? without one, look you ne'er so big, they'll never let you up the bay! we natives should know best.' i turned, and 'just those fellows' way,' our captain said, 'the 'long-shore thieves are laughing at us in their sleeves.' iii "in truth, the boy leaned laughing back; and one, half-hidden by his side under the furled sail, soon i spied, with great grass hat and kerchief black, who looked up with his kingly throat, said somewhat, while the other shook his hair back from his eyes to look their longest at us; then the boat, i know not how, turned sharply round, laying her whole side on the sea as a leaping fish does; from the lee into the weather, cut somehow her sparkling path beneath our bow, and so went off, as with a bound, into the rosy and golden half o' the sky, to overtake the sun and reach the shore, like the sea-calf its singing cave; yet i caught one glance ere away the boat quite passed, and neither time nor toil could mar those features: so i saw the last of waring!"--you? oh, never star was lost here but it rose afar! look east, where whole new thousands are! in vishnu-land what avatar? "may and death" is perhaps more interesting for the glimpse it gives of browning's appreciation of english nature than for its expression of grief for the death of a friend. may and death i i wish that when you died last may, charles, there had died along with you three parts of spring's delightful things; ay, and, for me, the fourth part too. ii a foolish thought, and worse, perhaps! there must be many a pair of friends who, arm in arm, deserve the warm moon-births and the long evening-ends. iii so, for their sake, be may still may! let their new time, as mine of old, do all it did for me: i bid sweet sights and sounds throng manifold. iv only, one little sight, one plant, woods have in may, that starts up green save a sole streak which, so to speak, is spring's blood, spilt its leaves between,-- v that, they might spare; a certain wood might miss the plant; their loss were small: but i,--whene'er the leaf grows there, its drop comes from my heart, that's all. the poet's one truly enthusiastic outburst in connection with english nature he sings out in his longing for an english spring in the incomparable little lyric "home-thoughts, from abroad." home-thoughts, from abroad i oh, to be in england now that april's there, and whoever wakes in england sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough in england--now! ii and after april, when may follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge-- that's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture! and, though the fields look rough with hoary dew, all will be gay when noontide wakes anew the buttercups, the little children's dower --far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! after this it seems hardly possible that browning, himself speaks in "de gustibus," yet long and happy living away from england doubtless dimmed his sense of the beauty of english landscape. "de gustibus" was published ten years later than "home-thoughts from abroad," when italy and he had indeed become "lovers old." a deeper reason than mere delight in its scenery is also reflected in the poem; the sympathy shared with mrs. browning, for the cause of italian independence. "de gustibus----" i your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (if our loves remain) in an english lane, by a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. hark, those two in the hazel coppice-- a boy and a girl, if the good fates please, making love, say,-- the happier they! draw yourself up from the light of the moon, and let them pass, as they will too soon, with the bean-flower's boon, and the blackbird's tune, and may, and june! ii what i love best in all the world is a castle, precipice-encurled, in a gash of the wind-grieved apennine. or look for me, old fellow of mine, (if i get my head from out the mouth o' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands, and come again to the land of lands)-- in a sea-side house to the farther south, where the baked cicala dies of drouth, and one sharp tree--'tis a cypress--stands, by the many hundred years red-rusted, rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted, my sentinel to guard the sands to the water's edge. for, what expands before the house, but the great opaque blue breadth of sea without a break? while, in the house, for ever crumbles some fragment of the frescoed walls, from blisters where a scorpion sprawls. a girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles down on the pavement, green-flesh melons, and says there's news to-day--the king was shot at, touched in the liver-wing, goes with his bourbon arm in a sling: --she hopes they have not caught the felons. italy, my italy! queen mary's saying serves for me-- (when fortune's malice lost her--calais)-- open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, "italy." such lovers old are i and she: so it always was, so shall ever be! two or three english artists called forth appreciation in verse from browning. there is the exquisite bit called "deaf and dumb," after a group of statuary by woolner, of constance and arthur--the deaf and dumb children of sir thomas fairbairn. deaf and dumb a group by woolner. only the prism's obstruction shows aright the secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light into the jewelled bow from blankest white; so may a glory from defect arise: only by deafness may the vexed love wreak its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek, only by dumbness adequately speak as favored mouth could never, through the eyes. [illustration: an english lane] there is also the beautiful description in "balaustion's adventure" of the alkestis by sir frederick leighton. the flagrant anachronism of making a greek girl at the time of the fall of athens describe an english picture cannot but be forgiven, since the artistic effect gained is so fine. the poet quite convinces the reader that sir frederick leighton ought to have been a kaunian painter, if he was not, and that balaustion or no one was qualified to appreciate his picture at its full worth. "i know, too, a great kaunian painter, strong as herakles, though rosy with a robe of grace that softens down the sinewy strength: and he has made a picture of it all. there lies alkestis dead, beneath the sun, she longed to look her last upon, beside the sea, which somehow tempts the life in us to come trip over its white waste of waves, and try escape from earth, and fleet as free. behind the body, i suppose there bends old pheres in his hoary impotence; and women-wailers, in a corner crouch --four, beautiful as you four--yes, indeed!-- close, each to other, agonizing all, as fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy, to two contending opposite. there strains the might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match, --death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like the envenomed substance that exudes some dew whereby the merely honest flesh and blood will fester up and run to ruin straight, ere they can close with, clasp and overcome the poisonous impalpability that simulates a form beneath the flow of those grey garments; i pronounce that piece worthy to set up in our poikilé! "and all came,--glory of the golden verse, and passion of the picture, and that fine frank outgush of the human gratitude which saved our ship and me, in syracuse,-- ay, and the tear or two which slipt perhaps away from you, friends, while i told my tale, --it all came of this play that gained no prize! why crown whom zeus has crowned in soul before?" once before had sir frederick leighton inspired the poet in the exquisite lines on eurydice. eurydice to orpheus a picture by leighton but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! let them once more absorb me! one look now will lap me round for ever, not to pass out of its light, though darkness lie beyond: hold me but safe again within the bond of one immortal look! all woe that was, forgotten, and all terror that may be, defied,--no past is mine, no future: look at me! beautiful as these lines are, they do not impress me as fully interpreting leighton's picture. the expression of eurydice is rather one of unthinking confiding affection--as if she were really unconscious or ignorant of the danger; while that of orpheus is one of passionate agony as he tries to hold her off. though english art could not fascinate the poet as italian art did, for the fully sufficient reason that it does not stand for a great epoch of intellectual awakening, yet with what fair alchemy he has touched those few artists he has chosen to honor. notwithstanding his avowed devotion to italy, expressed in "de gustibus," one cannot help feeling that in the poems mentioned in this chapter, there is that ecstasy of sympathy which goes only to the most potent influences in the formation of character. something of what i mean is expressed in one of his latest poems, "development." in this we certainly get a real peep at young robert browning, led by his wise father into the delights of homer, by slow degrees, where all is truth at first, to end up with the devastating criticism of wolf. in spite of it all the dream stays and is the reality. nothing can obliterate the magic of a strong early enthusiasm, as "fact still held" "spite of new knowledge," in his "heart of hearts." development my father was a scholar and knew greek. when i was five years old, i asked him once "what do you read about?" "the siege of troy." "what is a siege and what is troy?" whereat he piled up chairs and tables for a town, set me a-top for priam, called our cat --helen, enticed away from home (he said) by wicked paris, who couched somewhere close under the footstool, being cowardly, but whom--since she was worth the pains, poor puss-- towzer and tray,--our dogs, the atreidai,--sought by taking troy to get possession of --always when great achilles ceased to sulk, (my pony in the stable)--forth would prance and put to flight hector--our page-boy's self. this taught me who was who and what was what: so far i rightly understood the case at five years old: a huge delight it proved and still proves--thanks to that instructor sage my father, who knew better than turn straight learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance, or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind, content with darkness and vacuity. it happened, two or three years afterward, that--i and playmates playing at troy's siege-- my father came upon our make-believe. "how would you like to read yourself the tale properly told, of which i gave you first merely such notion as a boy could bear? pope, now, would give you the precise account of what, some day, by dint of scholarship, you'll hear--who knows?--from homer's very mouth. learn greek by all means, read the 'blind old man, sweetest of singers'--_tuphlos_ which means 'blind,' _hedistos_ which means 'sweetest.' time enough! try, anyhow, to master him some day; until when, take what serves for substitute, read pope, by all means!" so i ran through pope, enjoyed the tale--what history so true? also attacked my primer, duly drudged, grew fitter thus for what was promised next-- the very thing itself, the actual words, when i could turn--say, buttmann to account. time passed, i ripened somewhat: one fine day, "quite ready for the iliad, nothing less? there's heine, where the big books block the shelf: don't skip a word, thumb well the lexicon!" i thumbed well and skipped nowise till i learned who was who, what was what, from homer's tongue, and there an end of learning. had you asked the all-accomplished scholar, twelve years old, "who was it wrote the iliad?"--what a laugh! "why, homer, all the world knows: of his life doubtless some facts exist: it's everywhere: we have not settled, though, his place of birth: he begged, for certain, and was blind beside: seven cites claimed him--scio, with best right, thinks byron. what he wrote? those hymns we have. then there's the 'battle of the frogs and mice,' that's all--unless they dig 'margites' up (i'd like that) nothing more remains to know." thus did youth spend a comfortable time; until--"what's this the germans say is fact that wolf found out first? it's unpleasant work their chop and change, unsettling one's belief: all the same, while we live, we learn, that's sure." so, i bent brow o'er _prolegomena_. and, after wolf, a dozen of his like proved there was never any troy at all, neither besiegers nor besieged,--nay, worse,-- no actual homer, no authentic text, no warrant for the fiction i, as fact, had treasured in my heart and soul so long-- ay, mark you! and as fact held still, still hold, spite of new knowledge, in my heart of hearts and soul of souls, fact's essence freed and fixed from accidental fancy's guardian sheath. assuredly thenceforward--thank my stars!-- however it got there, deprive who could-- wring from the shrine my precious tenantry, helen, ulysses, hector and his spouse, achilles and his friend?--though wolf--ah, wolf! why must he needs come doubting, spoil a dream? but then "no dream's worth waking"--browning says: and here's the reason why i tell thus much i, now mature man, you anticipate, may blame my father justifiably for letting me dream out my nonage thus, and only by such slow and sure degrees permitting me to sift the grain from chaff, get truth and falsehood known and named as such. why did he ever let me dream at all, not bid me taste the story in its strength? suppose my childhood was scarce qualified to rightly understand mythology, silence at least was in his power to keep: i might have--somehow--correspondingly-- well, who knows by what method, gained my gains, been taught, by forthrights not meanderings, my aim should be to loathe, like peleus's son, a lie as hell's gate, love my wedded wife, like hector, and so on with all the rest. could not i have excogitated this without believing such men really were? that is--he might have put into my hand the "ethics"? in translation, if you please, exact, no pretty lying that improves, to suit the modern taste: no more, no less-- the "ethics": 'tis a treatise i find hard to read aright now that my hair is grey, and i can manage the original. at five years old--how ill had fared its leaves! now, growing double o'er the stagirite, at least i soil no page with bread and milk, nor crumple, dogsear and deface--boys' way. this chapter would not be complete without browning's tribute to dog tray, whose traits may not be peculiar to english dogs but whose name is proverbially english. besides it touches a subject upon which the poet had strong feelings. vivisection he abhorred, and in the controversies which were tearing the scientific and philanthropic world asunder in the last years of his life, no one was a more determined opponent of vivisection than he. tray sing me a hero! quench my thirst of soul, ye bards! quoth bard the first: "sir olaf, the good knight, did don his helm and eke his habergeon...." sir olaf and his bard----! "that sin-scathed brow" (quoth bard the second), "that eye wide ope as though fate beckoned my hero to some steep, beneath which precipice smiled tempting death...." you too without your host have reckoned! "a beggar-child" (let's hear this third!) "sat on a quay's edge: like a bird sang to herself at careless play, 'and fell into the stream. dismay! help, you the standers-by!' none stirred. "bystanders reason, think of wives and children ere they risk their lives. over the balustrade has bounced a mere instinctive dog, and pounced plumb on the prize. 'how well he dives! "'up he comes with the child, see, tight in mouth, alive too, clutched from quite a depth of ten feet--twelve, i bet! good dog! what, off again? there's yet another child to save? all right! "'how strange we saw no other fall! it's instinct in the animal. good dog! but he's a long while under: if he got drowned i should not wonder-- strong current, that against the wall! "'here he comes, holds in mouth this time --what may the thing be? well, that's prime! now, did you ever? reason reigns in man alone, since all tray's pains have fished--the child's doll from the slime!' "and so, amid the laughter gay, trotted my hero off,--old tray,-- till somebody, prerogatived with reason, reasoned: 'why he dived, his brain would show us, i should say. "'john, go and catch--or, if needs be, purchase--that animal for me! by vivisection, at expense of half-an-hour and eighteenpence, how brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!'" chapter ii shakespeare's portrait once and once only did browning depart from his custom of choosing people of minor note to figure in his dramatic monologues. in "at the 'mermaid'" he ventures upon the consecrated ground of a heart-to-heart talk between shakespeare, ben jonson, and the wits who gathered at the classic "mermaid" tavern in cheapside, following this up with further glimpses into the inner recesses of shakespeare's mind in the monologues "house" and "shop." it is a particularly daring feat in the case of shakespeare, for as all the world knows any attempt at getting in touch with the real man, shakespeare, must, per force, be woven out of such "stuff as dreams are made on." in interpreting this portraiture of one great poet by another it will be of interest to glance at the actual facts as far as they are known in regard to the relations which existed between shakespeare and jonson. praise and blame both are recorded on jonson's part when writing of shakespeare, yet the praise shows such undisguised admiration that the blame sinks into insignificance. jonson's "learned socks" to which milton refers probably tripped the critic up occasionally by reason of their weight. there is a charming story told of the friendship between the two men recorded by sir nicholas l'estrange, within a very few years of shakespeare's death, who attributed it to dr. donne. the story goes that "shakespeare was godfather to one of ben jonson's children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, jonson came to cheer him up and asked him why he was so melancholy. 'no, faith, ben,' says he, 'not i, but i have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and i have resolved at last.' 'i prythee what?' says he. 'i'faith, ben, i'll e'en give him a dozen good lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them.'" if this must be taken with a grain of salt, there is another even more to the honor of shakespeare reported by rowe and considered credible by such shakespearian scholars as halliwell phillipps and sidney lee. "his acquaintance with ben jonson" writes rowe, "began with a remarkable piece of humanity and good nature; mr. jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown to the world, had offered one of his plays to the players in order to have it acted, and the persons into whose hands it was put, after having turned it carelessly and superciliously over, were just upon returning it to him with an ill-natured answer that it would be of no service to their company, when shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through, and afterwards to recommend mr. jonson and his writings to the public." the play in question was the famous comedy of "every man in his humour," which was brought out in september, , by the lord chamberlain's company, shakespeare himself being one of the leading actors upon the occasion. authentic history records a theater war in which jonson and shakespeare figured, on opposite sides, but if allusions in jonson's play the "poetaster" have been properly interpreted, their friendly relations were not deeply disturbed. the trouble began in the first place by the london of suddenly rushing into a fad for the company of boy players, recruited chiefly from the choristers of the chapel royal, and known as the "children of the chapel." they had been acting at the new theater in blackfriars since , and their vogue became so great as actually to threaten shakespeare's company and other companies of adult actors. just at this time ben jonson was having a personal quarrel with his fellow dramatists, marston and dekker, and as he received little sympathy from the actors, he took his revenge by joining his forces with those of the children of the chapel. they brought out for him in his satire of "cynthia's revels," in which he held up to ridicule marston, dekker and their friends the actors. marston and dekker, with the actors of shakespeare's company, prepared to retaliate, but jonson hearing of it forestalled them with his play the "poetaster" in which he spared neither dramatists nor actors. shakespeare's company continued the fray by bringing out at the globe theatre, in the following year, dekker and marston's "satiro-mastix, or the untrussing of the humorous poet," and as ward remarks, "the quarrel had now become too hot to last." the excitement, however, continued for sometime, theater-goers took sides and watched with interest "the actors and dramatists' boisterous war of personalities," to quote mr. lee, who goes on to point out that on may , , the privy council called the attention of the middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly leveled by the actors of the "curtain" at gentlemen "of good desert and quality," and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced. jonson, himself, finally made apologies in verses appended to printed copies of the "poetaster." "now for the players 'tis true i tax'd them and yet but some, and those so sparingly as all the rest might have sat still unquestioned, had they but had the wit or conscience to think well of themselves. but impotent they thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe; and much good do it them. what they have done against me i am not moved with, if it gave them meat or got them clothes, 'tis well: that was their end, only amongst them i was sorry for some better natures by the rest so drawn to run in that vile line." sidney lee cleverly deduces shakespeare's attitude in the quarrel in allusions to it in "hamlet," wherein he "protested against the abusive comments on the men-actors of 'the common' stages or public theaters which were put into the children's mouths. rosencrantz declared that the children 'so berattle [_i.e._ assail] the common stages--so they call them--that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither [_i.e._ to the public theaters].' hamlet in pursuit of the theme pointed out that the writers who encouraged the vogue of the 'child actors' did them a poor service, because when the boys should reach men's estate they would run the risk, if they continued on the stage, of the same insults and neglect which now threatened their seniors. "'_hamlet._ what are they children? who maintains 'em? how are they escorted [_i.e._ paid]? will they pursue the quality [_i.e._ the actor's profession] no longer than they can sing? will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players--as it is most like, if their means are no better--their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession? "'_rosencrantz._ faith, there has been much to do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [_i.e._ incite] them to controversy; there was for a while no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.'" this certainly does not reflect a very belligerent attitude since it merely puts in a word for the grown-up actors rather than casting any slurs upon the children. further indications of shakespeare's mildness in regard to the whole matter are given in the prologue to "troylus and cressida," where, as mr. lee says, he made specific reference to the strife between ben jonson and the players in the lines "and hither am i come a prologue arm'd, but not in confidence, of authors' pen, or actors' voyce." the most interesting bit of evidence to show that shakespeare and jonson remained friends, even in the heat of the conflict, may be gained from the "poetaster" itself if we admit that the virgil of the play, who is chosen peacemaker stands for shakespeare; and who so fit to be peacemaker as shakespeare for his amiable qualities seem to have impressed themselves upon all who knew him. following mr. lee's lead, "jonson figures personally in the 'poetaster' under the name of horace. episodically horace and his friends, tibullus and gallus, eulogize the work and genius of another character, virgil, in terms so closely resembling those which jonson is known to have applied to shakespeare that they may be regarded as intended to apply to him (act v, scene i). jonson points out that virgil, by his penetrating intuition, achieved the great effects which others laboriously sought to reach through rules of art. 'his learning labors not the school-like gloss that most consists of echoing words and terms ... nor any long or far-fetched circumstance-- wrapt in the curious generalities of arts-- but a direct and analytic sum of all the worth and first effects of art. and for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life that it shall gather strength of life with being, and live hereafter, more admired than now.' tibullus gives virgil equal credit for having in his writings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude of human existence: 'that which he hath writ is with such judgment labored and distilled through all the needful uses of our lives that, could a man remember but his lines, he should not touch at any serious point but he might breathe his spirit out of him.' "finally, virgil in the play is nominated by cæsar to act as judge between horace and his libellers, and he advises the administration of purging pills to the offenders." this neat little chain of evidence would have no weak link, if it were not for a passage in the play, "the return from parnassus," acted by the students in st. john's college the same year, . in this there is a dialogue between shakespeare's fellow-actors, burbage and kempe. speaking of the university dramatists, kempe says: "why here's our fellow shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and ben jonson, too. o! that ben jonson is a pestilent fellow. he brought up horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." burbage continues, "he is a shrewd fellow indeed." this has, of course, been taken to mean that shakespeare was actively against jonson in the dramatists' and actors' war. but as everything else points, as we have seen, to the contrary, one accepts gladly the loophole of escape offered by mr. lee. "the words quoted from 'the return from parnassus' hardly admit of a literal interpretation. probably the 'purge' that shakespeare was alleged by the author of 'the return from parnassus' to have given jonson meant no more than that shakespeare had signally outstripped jonson in popular esteem." that this was an actual fact is proved by the lines of leonard digges, an admiring contemporary of shakespeare's, printed in the edition of shakespeare's poems, comparing "julius cæsar" and jonson's play "cataline:" "so have i seen when cæsar would appear, and on the stage at half-sword parley were brutus and cassius--oh, how the audience were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence; when some new day they would not brook a line of tedious, though well-labored, cataline." this reminds one of the famous witticism attributed to eudymion porter that "shakespeare was sent from heaven and ben from college." if jonson's criticisms of shakespeare's work were sometime not wholly appreciative, the fact may be set down to the distinction between the two here so humorously indicated. "a winter's tale" and the "tempest" both called forth some sarcasms from jonson, the first for its error about the coast of bohemia which shakespeare borrowed from greene. jonson wrote in the induction to "bartholemew fair;" "if there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it he says? nor a nest of antics. he is loth to make nature afraid in his plays like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." the allusions here are very evidently to caliban and the satyrs who figure in the sheep-shearing feast in "a winter's tale." the worst blast of all, however, occurs in jonson's "timber," but the blows are evidently given with a loving hand. he writes "i remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honor to shakespeare that, in his writing, whatsoever he penn'd, hee never blotted out line. my answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand;--which they thought a malevolent speech. i had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justifie mine owne candor,--for i lov'd the man, and doe honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. hee was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie; brave notions and gentle expressions; wherein hee flow'd with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd;--_sufflaminandus erat_, as augustus said of haterius. his wit was in his owne power;--would the rule of it had beene so too! many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter; as when he said in the person of cæsar, one speaking to him,--cæsar thou dost me wrong; hee replyed,--cæsar did never wrong but with just cause; and such like; which were ridiculous. but hee redeemed his vices with his virtues. there was ever more in him to be praysed then to be pardoned." and even this criticism is altogether controverted by the wholly eulogistic lines jonson wrote for the first folio edition of shakespeare printed in , "to the memory of my beloved, the author mr. william shakespeare and what he hath left us."[ ] footnotes: [ ] see the tempest volume in first folio shakespeare. (crowell & co.) for the same edition he also wrote the following lines for the portrait reproduced in this volume, which it is safe to regard as the shakespeare ben jonson remembered: "to the reader this figure, that thou here seest put, it was for gentle shakespeare cut; wherein the graver had a strife with nature, to out-doo the life: o, could he but have drawne his wit as well in brasse, as he hath hit his face; the print would then surpasse all, that was ever writ in brasse. but, since he cannot, reader, looke not on his picture, but his booke. b. j." shakespeare's talk in "at the 'mermaid'" grows out of the supposition, not touched upon until the very last line that ben jonson had been calling him "next poet," a supposition quite justifiable in the light of ben's praises of him. the poem also reflects the love and admiration in which shakespeare the man was held by all who have left any record of their impressions of him. as for the portraiture of the poet's attitude of mind, it is deduced indirectly from his work. that he did not desire to become "next poet" may be argued from the fact that after his first outburst of poem and sonnet writing in the manner of the poets of the age, he gave up the career of gentleman-poet to devote himself wholly to the more independent if not so socially distinguished one of actor-playwright. "venus and adonis" and "lucrece" were the only poems of his published under his supervision and the only works with the dedication to a patron such as it was customary to write at that time. i have before me as i write the recent clarendon press fac-similes of "venus and adonis" and "lucrece," published respectively in and ,--beautiful little quartos with exquisitely artistic designs in the title-pages, headpieces and initials; altogether worthy of a poet who might have designs upon fame. the dedication to the first reads:-- "to the right honorable henry wriothesley, earle of southampton and baron of litchfield _right honourable, i know not how i shall offend in dedicating my unpolisht lines to your lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your honour seeme but pleased, i account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take advantage of all idle houres, till i have honoured you with some great labour. but if the first heire of my invention prove deformed, i shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father: and never after eare so barren a land, for feare it yield me still so bad a harvest, i leave it to your honourable survey, and your honor to your hearts content, which i wish may alwaies answere your owne wish, and the worlds hopeful expectation._ your honors in all dutie william shakespeare." the second reads:-- "to the right honorable, henry wriothesley, earle of southampton and baron of litchfield the love i dedicate to your lordship is without end: wherof this pamphlet without beginning is a superfluous moiety. the warrant i have of your honourable disposition, nor the worth of my untutored lines makes it assured of acceptance. what i have done is yours, what i have to doe is yours, being part in all i have, devoted yours. were my worth greater, my duety would shew greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your lordship; to whom i wish long life still lengthened with all happinesse. your lordships in all duety. william shakespeare." no more after this does shakespeare appear in the light of a poet with a patron. even the sonnets, some of which evidently celebrate southampton, were issued by a piratical publisher without shakespeare's consent, while his plays found their way into print at the hands of other pirates who cribbed them from stage copies. such hints as these have been worked up by browning into a consistent characterization of a man who regards himself as having foregone his chances of laureateship or "next poet" by devoting himself to a form of literary art which would not appeal to the powers that be as fitting him for any such position. such honors he claims do not go to the dramatic poet, who has never allowed the world to slip inside his breast, but has simply portrayed the joy and the sorrow of life as he saw it around him, and with an art which turns even sorrow into beauty.--"do i stoop? i pluck a posy, do i stand and stare? all's blue;"--but to the subjective, introspective poet, out of tune with himself and with the universe. the allusions shakespeare makes to the last "king" are not very definite, but, on the whole, they fit edmund spenser, whose poems from first to last are dedicated to people of distinction in court circles. his work, moreover, is full of wailing and woe in various keys, and also full of self-revelation. he allowed the world to slip inside his breast upon almost every occasion, and perhaps he may be said to have bought "his laurel," for it was no doubt extremely gratifying to queen elizabeth to see herself in the guise of the faerie queene, and even his dedication of the "faerie queene" to her, used as she was to flattery, must have been as music in her ears. "to the most high, mightie, and magnificent empresse, renouned for piety, vertue, and all gratious government, elizabeth, by the grace of god, queene of england, frahnce, and ireland and of virginia. defender of the faith, &c. her most humble servant edmund spenser doth in all humilitie, dedicate, present, and consecrate these his labours, to live with the eternity of her fame." the next year spenser received a pension from the crown of fifty pounds per annum. it is a careful touch on browning's part to use the phrase "next poet," for the "laureateship" at that time was not a recognized official position. the term, "laureate," seems to have been used to designate poets who had attained fame and royal favor, since nash speaks of spenser in his "supplication of piers pennilesse" the same year the "faerie queene" was published as next laureate. the first really officially appointed poet laureate was ben jonson, himself, who in either or received the post from james i., later ratified by charles i., who increased the annuity to one hundred pounds a year and a butt of wine from the king's cellars. probably the allusion "your pilgrim" in the twelfth stanza of "at the mermaid" is to "the return from parnassus" in which the pilgrims to parnassus who figure in an earlier play "the pilgrimage to parnassus" discover the world to be about as dismal a place as it is described in this stanza. at first sight it might seem that the position taken by shakespeare in the poem is almost too modest, yet upon second thoughts it will be remembered that though shakespeare had a tremendous following among the people, attested by the frequency with which his plays were acted; that though there are instances of his being highly appreciated by contemporaries of importance; that though his plays were given before the queen, he did not have the universal acceptance among learned and court circles which was accorded to spenser. it is quite fitting that the scene should be set in the "mermaid." no record exists to show that shakespeare was ever there, it is true, but the "mermaid" was a favorite haunt of ben jonson and his circle of wits, whose meetings there were immortalized by beaumont in his poetical letter to jonson:-- "what things have we seen done at the mermaid? heard words that have been so nimble and so full of subtle flame, as if that every one from whence they came had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, and had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life." add to this what fuller wrote in his "worthies," , "many were the wit-combats betwixt him and ben jonson, which two i behold like a spanish great galleon and an english man-of-war; master jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. shakespeare, with the english man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention," and there is sufficient poetic warrant for the "mermaid" setting. [illustration: first folio portrait of shakespeare "do i stoop? i pluck a posy. do i stand and stare? all's blue."] the final touch is given in the hint that all the time shakespeare is aware of his own greatness, perhaps to be recognized by a future age. let browning, himself, now show what he has done with the material. at the "mermaid" the figure that thou here seest.... tut! was it for gentle shakespeare put? b. jonson. (_adapted._) i i--"next poet?" no, my hearties, i nor am nor fain would be! choose your chiefs and pick your parties, not one soul revolt to me! i, forsooth, sow song-sedition? i, a schism in verse provoke? i, blown up by bard's ambition, burst--your bubble-king? you joke. ii come, be grave! the sherris mantling still about each mouth, mayhap, breeds you insight--just a scantling-- brings me truth out--just a scrap. look and tell me! written, spoken, here's my life-long work: and where --where's your warrant or my token i'm the dead king's son and heir? iii here's my work: does work discover-- what was rest from work--my life? did i live man's hater, lover? leave the world at peace, at strife? call earth ugliness or beauty? see things there in large or small? use to pay its lord my duty? use to own a lord at all? iv blank of such a record, truly here's the work i hand, this scroll, yours to take or leave; as duly, mine remains the unproffered soul. so much, no whit more, my debtors-- how should one like me lay claim to that largess elders, betters sell you cheap their souls for--fame? v which of you did i enable once to slip inside my breast, there to catalogue and label what i like least, what love best, hope and fear, believe and doubt of, seek and shun, respect--deride? who has right to make a rout of rarities he found inside? vi rarities or, as he'd rather, rubbish such as stocks his own: need and greed (o strange) the father fashioned not for him alone! whence--the comfort set a-strutting, whence--the outcry "haste, behold! bard's breast open wide, past shutting, shows what brass we took for gold!" vii friends, i doubt not he'd display you brass--myself call orichalc,-- furnish much amusement; pray you therefore, be content i balk him and you, and bar my portal! here's my work outside: opine what's inside me mean and mortal! take your pleasure, leave me mine! viii which is--not to buy your laurel as last king did, nothing loth. tale adorned and pointed moral gained him praise and pity both. out rushed sighs and groans by dozens, forth by scores oaths, curses flew: proving you were cater-cousins, kith and kindred, king and you! ix whereas do i ne'er so little (thanks to sherris) leave ajar bosom's gate--no jot nor tittle grow we nearer than we are. sinning, sorrowing, despairing, body-ruined, spirit-wrecked,-- should i give my woes an airing,-- where's one plague that claims respect? x have you found your life distasteful? my life did, and does, smack sweet. was your youth of pleasure wasteful? mine i saved and hold complete. do your joys with age diminish? when mine fail me, i'll complain. must in death your daylight finish? my sun sets to rise again. xi what, like you, he proved--your pilgrim-- this our world a wilderness, earth still grey and heaven still grim, not a hand there his might press, not a heart his own might throb to, men all rogues and women--say, dolls which boys' heads duck and bob to, grown folk drop or throw away? xii my experience being other, how should i contribute verse worthy of your king and brother? balaam-like i bless, not curse. i find earth not grey but rosy, heaven not grim but fair of hue. do i stoop? i pluck a posy. do i stand and stare? all's blue. xiii doubtless i am pushed and shoved by rogues and fools enough: the more good luck mine, i love, am loved by some few honest to the core. scan the near high, scout the far low! "but the low come close:" what then? simpletons? my match is marlowe; sciolists? my mate is ben. xiv womankind--"the cat-like nature, false and fickle, vain and weak"-- what of this sad nomenclature suits my tongue, if i must speak? does the sex invite, repulse so, tempt, betray, by fits and starts? so becalm but to convulse so, decking heads and breaking hearts? xv well may you blaspheme at fortune! i "threw venus" (ben, expound!) never did i need importune her, of all the olympian round. blessings on my benefactress! cursings suit--for aught i know-- those who twitched her by the back tress, tugged and thought to turn her--so! xvi therefore, since no leg to stand on thus i'm left with,--joy or grief be the issue,--i abandon hope or care you name me chief! chief and king and lord's anointed, i?--who never once have wished death before the day appointed: lived and liked, not poohed and pished! xvii "ah, but so i shall not enter, scroll in hand, the common heart-- stopped at surface: since at centre song should reach _welt-schmerz_, world-smart!" "enter in the heart?" its shelly cuirass guard mine, fore and aft! such song "enters in the belly and is cast out in the draught." xviii back then to our sherris-brewage! "kingship" quotha? i shall wait-- waive the present time: some new age ... but let fools anticipate! meanwhile greet me--"friend, good fellow, gentle will," my merry men! as for making envy yellow with "next poet"--(manners, ben!) the first stanza of "house"-- "shall i sonnet-sing you about myself? do i live in a house you would like to see? is it scant of gear, has it store of pelf? 'unlock my heart with a sonnet-key?'"-- brings one face to face with the interminable controversies upon the autobiographical significance of shakespeare's sonnets. as volumes upon the subject have been written, it is not possible even adequately to review the various theories here. the controversialists may be broadly divided into those who read complicated autobiographical details into the sonnets, those who scout the idea of their being autobiographical at all, and those who take a middle ground. of the first there are two factions: one of these believes that the opening sonnets were addressed to lord william herbert, earl of pembroke, and the other that they were addressed to shakespeare's patron, the earl of southampton. the first theory dates back as far as when it was started by james boaden, a journalist and the biographer of kemble and mrs. siddons. this theory has had many supporters and is associated to-day with the name of thomas tyler, who, in his edition of the sonnets published in , claimed to have identified the dark lady of the sonnets with a lady of the court, mary fitton and the mistress of the earl of pembroke. the theory, like most things of the sort, has its fascinations, and few people can read the sonnets without being more or less impressed by it. it is based, however, upon a supposition so unlikely that it may be said to be proved incorrect, namely, that the dedication of the sonnets to their "onlie begettor, mr. w. h." is intended for "mr. william herbert." there was a mr. william hall, later a master printer, and the friend of thomas thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets, who is much more likely to be the person meant. lord herbert was far too important a person to be addressed as mr. w. h. as mr. lee points out, when thorpe did dedicate books to herbert he was careful to give full prominence to the titles and distinction of his patron. the sonnets as we have already seen were not published with shakespeare's sanction. in those days the author had no protection, and if a manuscript fell into the hands of a printer he could print it if he felt so disposed. mr. william hall was in the habit of looking out for manuscripts and before he became a printer, in , had one published by southwell of which he himself wrote the dedication, to the "vertuous gentleman, mathew saunders, esquire w. h. wisheth, with long life, a prosperous achievement of his good desires." "there is little doubt," writes mr. lee, "that the w. h. of the southwell volume was mr. william hall, who, when he procured that manuscript for publication, was an humble auxiliary in the publishing army." to sum up in mr. lee's words his interesting and convincing chapter on "thomas thorpe and mr. 'w. h.'" "'mr. w. h.,' whom thorpe described as the 'only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,' was in all probability the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, who, figuratively speaking, brought the book into being either by first placing the manuscript in thorpe's hands or by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. to assign such significance to the word 'begetter' was entirely in thorpe's vein. thorpe described his rôle in the piratical enterprise of the 'sonnets' as that of 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' _i.e._, the hopeful speculator in the scheme. 'mr. w. h.' doubtless played the almost equally important part--one as well known then as now in commercial operations--of the 'vender' of the property to be exploited." the southampton theory is reared into a fine air-castle by gerald massey in his lengthy book on the sonnets--truly entertaining reading but too ingenious to be convincing. finally mr. lee in his book looks at the subject in an unbiased and perfectly sane way. he thinks the opening sonnets are to the earl of southampton, known to be shakespeare's patron, but he warns us that exaggerated devotion was the hall-mark of the sonnets of the age, and therefore what shakespeare says of his young patron in these sonnets need not be taken too literally as expressing the poet's sentiments, though he admits there may be a note of genuine feeling in them. also he thinks that some of the sonnets reflecting moods of melancholy or a sense of sin may reveal the writer's inner consciousness. possibly, too, the story of the "dark lady" may have some basis in fact, though he insists, "there is no clue to the lady's identity, and speculation on the topic is useless." furthermore, he thinks it doubtful whether all the words in these sonnets are to be taken with the seriousness implied, the affair probably belonging only to the annals of gallantry. it will be seen from the poem that browning took the uncompromisingly non-autobiographical view of the sonnets. in this stand present authoritative opinion would not justify him, but it speaks well for his insight and sympathy that he was not fascinated by the william herbert theory which, at the time he wrote the poem, was very much in the air. in "shop" is given, in a way, the obverse side of the idea. if it is proved that the dramatic poet does not allow himself to appear in his work, the step toward regarding him as having no individuality aside from his work is an easy one. the allusions in the poem to the mercenariness of the "shop-keeper" seem to hit at the criticisms of shakespeare's thrift, which enabled him to buy a home in his native place and retire there to live some years before the end of his life. in some quarters it has been customary to regard shakespeare as devoting himself to dramatic literature in order to make money, as if this were a terrible slur on his character. the superiority of such an independent spirit over that of those who constantly sought patrons was quite manifest to browning's mind or he would not have written this sarcastic bit of symbolism, between the lines of which can be read that browning was on shakespeare's side. house i shall i sonnet-sing you about myself? do i live in a house you would like to see? is it scant of gear, has it store of pelf? "unlock my heart with a sonnet key?" ii invite the world, as my betters have done? "take notice: this building remains on view, its suites of reception every one, its private apartment and bedroom too; iii "for a ticket, apply to the publisher." no: thanking the public, i must decline. a peep through my window, if folk prefer; but, please you, no foot over threshold of mine! iv i have mixed with a crowd and heard free talk in a foreign land where an earthquake chanced: and a house stood gaping, nought to balk man's eye wherever he gazed or glanced. v the whole of the frontage shaven sheer, the inside gaped: exposed to day, right and wrong and common and queer, bare, as the palm of your hand, it lay. vi the owner? oh, he had been crushed, no doubt! "odd tables and chairs for a man of wealth! what a parcel of musty old books about! he smoked,--no wonder he lost his health! vii "i doubt if he bathed before he dressed. a brasier?--the pagan, he burned perfumes! you see it is proved, what the neighbors guessed: his wife and himself had separate rooms." viii friends, the goodman of the house at least kept house to himself till an earthquake came: 'tis the fall of its frontage permits you feast on the inside arrangement you praise or blame. ix outside should suffice for evidence: and whoso desires to penetrate deeper, must dive by the spirit-sense-- no optics like yours, at any rate! x "hoity toity! a street to explore, your house the exception! '_with this same key shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more!" did shakespeare? if so, the less shakespeare he! shop i so, friend, your shop was all your house! its front, astonishing the street, invited view from man and mouse to what diversity of treat behind its glass--the single sheet! ii what gimcracks, genuine japanese: gape-jaw and goggle-eye, the frog; dragons, owls, monkeys, beetles, geese; some crush-nosed, human-hearted dog: queer names, too, such a catalogue! iii i thought "and he who owns the wealth which blocks the window's vastitude, --ah, could i peep at him by stealth behind his ware, pass shop, intrude on house itself, what scenes were viewed! iv "if wide and showy thus the shop, what must the habitation prove? the true house with no name a-top-- the mansion, distant one remove, once get him off his traffic-groove! v "pictures he likes, or books perhaps; and as for buying most and best, commend me to these city chaps! or else he's social, takes his rest on sundays, with a lord for guest. vi "some suburb-palace, parked about and gated grandly, built last year: the four-mile walk to keep off gout; or big seat sold by bankrupt peer: but then he takes the rail, that's clear. vii "or, stop! i wager, taste selects some out o' the way, some all-unknown retreat: the neighborhood suspects little that he who rambles lone makes rothschild tremble on his throne!" viii nowise! nor mayfair residence fit to receive and entertain,-- nor hampstead villa's kind defence from noise and crowd, from dust and drain,-- nor country-box was soul's domain! ix nowise! at back of all that spread of merchandize, woe's me, i find a hole i' the wall where, heels by head, the owner couched, his ware behind, --in cupboard suited to his mind. x for why? he saw no use of life but, while he drove a roaring trade, to chuckle "customers are rife!" to chafe "so much hard cash outlaid yet zero in my profits made! xi "this novelty costs pains, but--takes? cumbers my counter! stock no more! this article, no such great shakes, fizzes like wildfire? underscore the cheap thing--thousands to the fore!" xii 'twas lodging best to live most nigh (cramp, coffinlike as crib might be) receipt of custom; ear and eye wanted no outworld: "hear and see the bustle in the shop!" quoth he. xiii my fancy of a merchant-prince was different. through his wares we groped our darkling way to--not to mince the matter--no black den where moped the master if we interloped! xiv shop was shop only: household-stuff? what did he want with comforts there? "walls, ceiling, floor, stay blank and rough, so goods on sale show rich and rare! '_sell and scud home_' be shop's affair!" xv what might he deal in? gems, suppose! since somehow business must be done at cost of trouble,--see, he throws you choice of jewels, everyone, good, better, best, star, moon and sun! xvi which lies within your power of purse? this ruby that would tip aright solomon's sceptre? oh, your nurse wants simply coral, the delight of teething baby,--stuff to bite! xvii howe'er your choice fell, straight you took your purchase, prompt your money rang on counter,--scarce the man forsook his study of the "times," just swang till-ward his hand that stopped the clang,-- xviii then off made buyer with a prize, then seller to his "times" returned; and so did day wear, wear, till eyes brightened apace, for rest was earned: he locked door long ere candle burned. xix and whither went he? ask himself, not me! to change of scene, i think. once sold the ware and pursed the pelf, chaffer was scarce his meat and drink, nor all his music--money-chink. xx because a man has shop to mind in time and place, since flesh must live, needs spirit lack all life behind, all stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, all loves except what trade can give? xxi i want to know a butcher paints, a baker rhymes for his pursuit, candlestick-maker much acquaints his soul with song, or, haply mute, blows out his brains upon the flute! xxii but--shop each day and all day long! friend, your good angel slept, your star suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong! from where these sorts of treasures are, there should our hearts be--christ, how far! these poems are valuable not only for furnishing an interesting interpretation of shakespeare's character as a man and artist, but for the glimpses they give into browning's stand toward his own art. he wished to be regarded primarily as a dramatic artist, presenting and interpreting the souls of his characters, and he must have felt keenly the stupid attitude which insisted always in reading "browning's philosophy" into all his poems. the fact that his objective material was of the soul rather than of the external actions of life has no doubt lent force to the supposition that browning himself can be seen in everything he writes. it is true, nevertheless, that while much of his work is shakespearian in its dramatic intensity, he had too forceful a philosophy of life to keep it from sometimes coming to the front. besides he has written many things avowedly personal as this chapter amply illustrates. to what intensity of feeling browning could rise when contemplating the genius of shakespeare is revealed in his direct and outspoken tribute. here there breathes an almost reverential attitude toward the one supremely great man he has ventured to portray. the names shakespeare!--to such name's sounding, what succeeds fitly as silence? falter forth the spell,-- act follows word, the speaker knows full well; nor tampers with its magic more than needs. two names there are: that which the hebrew reads with his soul only: if from lips it fell, echo, back thundered by earth, heaven and hell, would own, "thou didst create us!" naught impedes we voice the other name, man's most of might, awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love mutely await their working, leave to sight all of the issue as--below--above-- shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, though dread--this finite from that infinite. chapter iii a crucial period in english history "whom the gods destroy they first make mad." of no one in english history is this truer than of king charles i. just at a time when the nation was feeling the strength of its wings both in church and state, when individuals were claiming the right to freedom of conscience in their form of worship and the people were growing more insistent for the recognition of their ancient rights and liberties, secured to them, in the first place, by the magna charta,--just at this time looms up the obstruction of a king so imbued with the defunct ideal of the divine right of kings that he is blind to the tendencies of the age. what wonder, then, if the swirling waters of discontent should rise higher and higher until he became engulfed in their fury. the history of the reign of charles i. is one full of involved details, yet the broader aspects of it, the great events which chiseled into shape the future of england stand out in bold relief in front of a background of interminable bickerings. there was constant quarreling between the factions within the english church, and between the protestants and the catholics, complicated by the discontent of the people and at times the nobles because of the autocratic, vacillating policy of the king. among these epoch-bringing events were the emergence of the puritans from the chaos of internecine church squabbles, the determined raising of the voice of the people in the long parliament, where king and people finally came to an open clash in the impeachment of the king's most devoted minister, wentworth, earl strafford, by pym, the great leader in the house of commons, ending in strafford's execution; the grand remonstrance, which sounded in no uncertain tones the tocsin of the coming revolution; and finally the king's impeachment of pym, hampden, holles, hazelrigg and strode, one of the many ill-advised moves of this monarch which at once precipitated the revolution. these cataclysms at home were further intensified by the scottish invasion and the irish rebellion. [illustration: charles i in scene of impeachment] it is not surprising that browning should have been attracted to this period of english history, when he contemplated the writing of a play on an english subject. his liberty-loving mind would naturally find congenial occupation in depicting this great english struggle for liberty. yet the hero of the play is not pym, the leader of the people, but strafford, the supporter of the king. the dramatic reasons are sufficient to account for this. strafford's career was picturesque and tragic and his personality so striking that more than one interpretation of his remarkable life is possible. the interpretation will differ according to whether one is partisan in hatred or admiration of his character and policy, or possesses the larger quality of sympathetic appreciation of the man and the problems with which he had to deal. any one coming to judge him in this latter spirit would undoubtedly perceive all the fine points in strafford's nature and would balance these against his theories of government to the better understanding of this extraordinary man. it is almost needless to say that browning's perception of strafford's character was penetrating and sympathetic. strafford's devotion to his king had in it not only the element of loyalty to the liege, but an element of personal love which would make an especial appeal to browning. he, in consequence, seizes upon this trait as the key-note of his portrayal of strafford. the play is, on the whole, accurate in its historical details, though the poet's imagination has added many a flying buttress to the structure. forster's lives of the english statesmen in lardner's cyclopædia furnished plenty of material, and he was besides familiar with some if not all of forster's materials for the lives. one of the interesting surprises in connection with browning's literary career was the fact divulged some years ago that he had actually helped forster in the preparation of the life of strafford. indeed it is thought that he wrote it almost entirely from the notes of forster. dr. furnivall first called attention to this, and later the life of strafford was reprinted as "robert browning's prose life of strafford."[ ] in his forewords to this volume, dr. furnivall, who, among many other claims to distinction, was the president of the "london browning society," writes, "three times during his life did browning speak to me about his prose 'life of strafford.' the first time he said only--in the course of chat--that very few people had any idea of how much he had helped john forster in it. the second time he told me at length that one day he went to see forster and found him very ill, and anxious about the 'life of strafford,' which he had promised to write at once, to complete a volume of 'lives of eminent british statesmen' for lardner's 'cabinet cyclopædia.' forster had finished the 'life of eliot'--the first in the volume--and had just begun that of strafford, for which he had made full collections and extracts; but illness had come on, he couldn't work, the book ought to be completed forthwith, as it was due in the serial issue of volumes; what _was_ he to do? 'oh,' said browning, 'don't trouble about it. i'll take your papers and do it for you.' forster thanked his young friend heartily, browning put the strafford papers under his arm, walked off, worked hard, finished the life, and it came out to time in , to forster's great relief, and passed under his name." professor gardiner, the historian, was of the opinion from internal evidence that the life was more browning's than forster's. he said to furnivall, "it is not a historian's conception of the character but a poet's. i am certain that it's not forster's. yes, it makes mistakes in facts and dates, but, it has got the man--in the main." in this opinion furnivall concurs. of the last paragraph in the history he exclaims, "i could swear it was browning's":--the paragraph in question sums up the character of strafford and is interesting in this connection, as giving hints, though not the complete picture of the strafford of the drama. footnotes: [ ] estes and lauriat, boston, mass. "a great lesson is written in the life of this truly extraordinary person. in the career of strafford is to be sought the justification of the world's 'appeal from tyranny to god.' in him despotism had at length obtained an instrument with mind to comprehend, and resolution to act upon, her principles in their length and breadth,--and enough of her purposes were effected by him, to enable mankind to 'see as from a tower the end of all.' i cannot discern one false step in strafford's public conduct, one glimpse of a recognition of an alien principle, one instance of a dereliction of the law of his being, which can come in to dispute the decisive result of the experiment, or explain away its failure. the least vivid fancy will have no difficulty in taking up the interrupted design, and by wholly enfeebling, or materially emboldening, the insignificant nature of charles; and by according some half-dozen years of immunity to the 'fretted tenement' of strafford's 'fiery soul',--contemplate then, for itself, the perfect realization of the scheme of 'making the prince the most absolute lord in christendom.' that done,--let it pursue the same course with respect to eliot's noble imaginings, or to young vane's dreamy aspirings, and apply in like manner a fit machinery to the working out the projects which made the dungeon of the one a holy place, and sustained the other in his self-imposed exile.--the result is great and decisive! it establishes, in renewed force, those principles of political conduct which have endured, and must continue to endure, 'like truth from age to age.'" the history, on the whole, lacks the grasp in the portrayal of wentworth to be found in the drama. c. h. firth, commenting upon this says truly, "one might almost say that in the first, strafford was represented as he appeared to his opponents, and in the second as he appeared to himself; or that, having painted strafford as he was, browning painted him again as he wished to be. in the biography strafford is exhibited as a man of rare gifts and noble qualities; yet in his political capacity, merely the conscious, the devoted tool of a tyrant. in the tragedy, on the other hand, strafford is the champion of the king's will against the people's, but yet looks forward to the ultimate reconciliation of charles and his subjects, and strives for it after his own fashion. he loves the master he serves, and dies for him, but when the end comes he can proudly answer his accusers, 'i have loved england too.'" the play opens at the important moment of wentworth's return to london from ireland, where for some time he had been governor. the occasion of his return, according to gardiner, was a personal quarrel with the chancellor loftus, of ireland. both men were allowed to come to england to plead their cause, which resulted in the victory of wentworth. in the play pym says, "ay, the court gives out his own concerns have brought him back: i know 'tis the king calls him." the authority for this remark is found in the forster-browning life. "in the danger threatened by the scots' covenant, wentworth was charles's only hope; the king sent for him, saying he desired his personal counsel and attendance. he wrote: 'the scots' covenant begins to spread too far, yet, for all this, i will not have you take notice that i have sent for you, but pretend some other occasion of business.'" certain it is that from this time wentworth became the most trusted counsellor of charles, that is, as far as charles was capable of trusting any one. the condition of affairs to which wentworth returned is brought out in the play in a thoroughly alive and human manner. we are introduced to the principal actors in the struggle for their rights and privileges against the government of charles meeting in a house near whitehall. among the "great-hearted" men are hampden, hollis, the younger vane, rudyard, fiennes--all leaders in the "faction,"--presbyterians, loudon and other members of the scots' commissioners. a bit of history has been drawn upon for this opening scene, for according to the forster-browning life, "there is no doubt that a close correspondence with the scotch commissioners, headed by lords loudon and dumferling, was entered into under the management of pym and hampden. whenever necessity obliged the meetings to be held in london, they took place at pym's house in gray's inn lane." in the talk between these men the political situation in england at the time from the point of view of the liberal party is brought vividly before the reader. there has been no parliament in england for ten years, hence the people have had no say in the direction of the government. the growing dissatisfaction of the people at being thus deprived of their rights focussed itself upon the question of "ship-money." the taxes levied by the king for the maintainance of a fleet were loudly objected to upon all sides. that a fleet was a necessary means of protection in those threatening times is not to be doubted, but the objections of the people were grounded upon the fact that the king levied these taxes upon his own authority. "ship-money, it was loudly declared," says gardiner, "was undeniably a tax, and the ancient customs of the realm, recently embodied in the petition of right, had announced with no doubtful voice that no tax could be levied without consent of parliament. even this objection was not the full measure of the evil. if charles could take this money without the consent of parliament, he need not, unless some unforeseen emergency arose, ever summon a parliament again. the true question at issue was whether parliament formed an integral part of the constitution or not." other taxes were objected to on the same grounds, and the more determined the king was not to summon a parliament, the greater became the political ferment. [illustration: thomas wentworth, earl of strafford] at the same time the religious ferment was centering itself upon hatred of laud, the archbishop of canterbury. his policy was to silence opposition to the methods of worship then followed by the church of england, by the terrors of the star chamber. the puritans were smarting under the sentence which had been passed upon the three pamphleteers, william prynne, henry burton, and john bastwick, who had expressed their opinions of the practises of the church with great outspokenness. prynne called upon pious king charles "to do justice on the whole episcopal order by which he had been robbed of the love of god and of his people, and which aimed at plucking the crown from his head, that they might set it on their own ambitious pates." burton hinted that "the sooner the office of the bishops was abolished the better it would be for the nation." bastwick, who had been brought up in the straitest principles of puritanism, had ended his pamphlet "_flagellum pontificis_," with this outburst, "take notice, so far am i from flying or fearing, as i resolve to make war against the beast, and every hint of antichrist, all the days of my life. if i die in that battle, so much the sooner i shall be sent in a chariot of triumph to heaven; and when i come there, i will, with those that are under the altar cry, 'how long, lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood upon them that dwell upon the earth?'" these men were called before the star chamber upon a charge of libel. the sentence was a foregone conclusion, and was so outrageous that its result could only be the strengthening of opposition. the "muckworm" cottington, as browning calls him, suggested the sentence which was carried out. the men were condemned to lose their ears, to pay a fine of £ each, and to be imprisoned for the remainder of their lives in the castles of carnarvon, launceston, and lancaster. finch, not satisfied with this, added the savage wish that prynne should be branded on the cheek with the letters s. l., to stand for "seditious libeller," and this was also done. the account of the execution of this sentence is almost too horrible to read. some one who recorded the scene wrote, "the humours of the people were various; some wept, some laughed, and some were very reserved." prynne, whose sufferings had been greatest for he had been burned as well as having his ears taken off, was yet able to indulge in a grim piece of humor touching the letters s. l. branded on his cheeks. he called them "stigmata laudis," the "scars of laud," on his way back to prison. popular demonstrations in favor of the prisoners were made all along the road when they were taken to their respective prisons, where they were allowed neither pen, ink nor books. fearful lest they might somehow still disseminate their heretical doctrines to the outer world, the council removed them to still more distant prisons, in the scilly isles, in guernsey and in jersey. retaliation against this treatment found open expression. "a copy of the star chamber decree was nailed to a board. its corners were cut off as the ears of laud's victims had been cut off at westminster. a broad ink mark was drawn round laud's name. an inscription declared that 'the man that puts the saints of god into a pillory of wood stands here in a pillory of ink!'" things were brought to a crisis in scotland also, through hatred of laud and the new prayer-book. the king, upon his visit to scotland, had been shocked at the slovenly appearance and the slovenly ritual of the scottish church, which reflected strongly survivals of the presbyterianism of an earlier time. the king wrote to the scottish bishops soon after his return to england: "we, tendering the good and peace of that church by having good and decent order and discipline observed therein, whereby religion and god's worship may increase, and considering that there is nothing more defective in that church than the want of a book of common prayer and uniform service to be kept in all the churches thereof, and the want of canons for the uniformity of the same, we are hereby pleased to authorise you as the representative body of that church, and do herewith will and require you to condescend upon a form of church service to be used therein, and to set down the canons for the uniformity of the discipline thereof." laud, who as archbishop of canterbury had no jurisdiction over scottish bishops, put his finger into the pie as secretary of the king. as gardiner says, "he conveyed instructions to the bishops, remonstrated with proceedings which shocked his sense of order, and held out prospects of advancement to the zealous. scotchmen naturally took offense. they did not trouble themselves to distinguish between the secretary and the archbishop. they simply said that the pope of canterbury was as bad as the pope of rome." the upshot of it all was that in may, , the "new prayer-book" was sent to scotland, and every minister was ordered to buy two copies on pain of outlawry. riots followed. it was finally decided that it must be settled once for all whether a king had any right to change the forms of worship without the sanction of a legislative assembly. then came the scottish covenant which declared the intention of the signers to uphold religious liberty. the account of the signing of this covenant is one of the most impressive episodes in all history. the covenant was carried on the th of february, , to the grey friars' church to which all the gentlemen present in edinburgh had been summoned. the scene has been most sympathetically described by gardiner. "at four o'clock in the grey winter evening, the noblemen, the earl of sutherland leading the way began to sign. then came the gentlemen, one after the other until nearly eight. the next day the ministers were called on to testify their approval, and nearly three hundred signatures were obtained before night. the commissioners of the boroughs signed at the same time. "on the third day the people of edinburgh were called on to attest their devotion to the cause which was represented by the covenant. tradition long loved to tell how the honored parchment, carried back to the grey friars, was laid out on a tombstone in the churchyard, whilst weeping multitudes pressed round in numbers too great to be contained in any building. there are moments when the stern scottish nature breaks out into an enthusiasm less passionate, but more enduring, than the frenzy of a southern race. as each man and woman stepped forward in turn, with the right hand raised to heaven before the pen was grasped, every one there present knew that there would be no flinching amongst that band of brothers till their religion was safe from intrusive violence. "modern narrators may well turn their attention to the picturesqueness of the scene, to the dark rocks of the castle crag over against the churchyard, and to the earnest faces around. the men of the seventeenth century had no thought to spare for the earth beneath or for the sky above. what they saw was their country's faith trodden under foot, what they felt was the joy of those who had been long led astray, and had now returned to the shepherd and bishop of their souls." such were the conditions that brought on the scotch war, neither charles nor wentworth being wise enough to make concessions to the covenanters. the grievances against the king's minister wentworth are in this opening scene shown as being aggravated by the fact that the men of the "faction" regard him as a deserter from their cause, pym, himself being one of the number who is loth to think wentworth stands for the king's policy. the historical ground for the assumption lies in the fact that wentworth was one of the leaders of the opposition in the parliament of . the reason for this was largely personal, because of buckingham's treatment of him. wentworth had refused to take part in the collection of the forced loan of , and was dismissed from his official posts in consequence. when he further refused to subscribe to that loan himself he was imprisoned in the marshalsea and at depford. regarding himself as personally attacked by buckingham, he joined the opposition. yet, as firth points out, "fiercely as he attacked the king's ministers, he was careful to exonerate the king." he concludes his list of grievances by saying, "this hath not been done by the king, but by projectors." again, "whether we shall look upon the king or his people, it did never more behove this great physician the parliament, to effect a true consent amongst the parties than now. both are injured, both to be cured. by one and the same thing hath the king and people been hurt. i speak truly both for the interest of the king and the people." his intention was to find some means of cooperation which would leave the people their liberty and yet give the crown its prerogative, "let us make what laws we can, there must--nay, there will be a trust left in the crown." it will be seen by any unbiased critic that wentworth was only half for the people even at this time. on the other hand, it is not astonishing that men, heart and soul for the people, should consider wentworth's subsequent complete devotion to the cause of the king sufficient to brand him as an apostate. the fact that he received so many official dignities from the king also leant color to the supposition that personal ambition was a leading motive with him. with true dramatic instinct browning has centered this feeling and made the most of it in the attitude of pym's party, while he offsets it later in the play by showing us the reality of the man strafford. there is no very authentic source for the idea also brought out in this first scene that strafford and pym had been warm personal friends. the story is told by dr. james welwood, one of the physicians of william iii., who, in the year , published a volume entitled "memoirs, of the most material transactions in england for the last hundred years preceding the revolution of ." without mentioning any source he tells the following story; "there had been a long and intimate friendship between mr. pym and him [wentworth], and they had gone hand in hand in everything in the house of commons. but when sir thomas wentworth was upon making his peace with the court, he sent to pym to meet him alone at greenwich; where he began in a set speech to sound mr. pym about the dangers they were like to run by the courses they were in; and what advantages they might have if they would but listen to some offers which would probably be made them from the court. pym understanding his speech stopped him short with this expression: 'you need not use all this art to tell me you have a mind to leave us; but remember what i tell you, you are going to be undone. but remember, that though you leave us now i will never leave you while your head is upon your shoulders.'" though only a tradition this was entirely too useful a suggestion not to be used. the intensity of the situation between the leaders on opposite sides is enhanced tenfold by bringing into the field a personal sentiment. the attitude of pym's followers is reflected again in their opinion of wentworth's irish rule. although wentworth's policy seemed to be successful in ireland, the very fact of its success would condemn it in the eyes of the popular party; besides later developments revealed its weaknesses. how it appeared to the eyes of a non-fanatical observer at this time may be gathered from the following letter of sir thomas roe to the queen of bohemia, written in . "the lord deputy of ireland doth great wonders, and governs like a king, and hath taught that kingdom to show us an example of envy, by having parliaments, and knowing wisely how to use them; for they have given the king six subsidies, which will arise to £ , , and they are like to have the liberty we contended for, and grace from his majesty worth their gift double; and which is worth much more, the honor of good intelligence and love between the king and people, which i would to god our great wits had had eyes to see. this is a great service, and to give your majesty a character of the man,--he is severe abroad and in business, and sweet in private conversation; retired in his friendships, but very firm; a terrible judge and a strong enemy; a servant violently zealous in his master's ends, and not negligent of his own; one that will have what he will, and though of great reason, he can make his will greater when it may serve him; affecting glory by a seeming contempt; one that cannot stay long in the middle region of fortune, being entreprenant; but will either be the greatest man in england, or much less than he is; lastly, one that may (and his nature lies fit for it, for he is ambitious to do what others will not), do your majesty very great service, if you can make him." in order to be in sympathy with the play throughout and especially with the first scene all this historical background must be kept in mind, for the talk gives no direct information, it merely in an absolutely dramatic fashion reveals the feelings and opinions of the men upon the situation, just as friends at a dinner party might discuss one of our own less strenuous political situations--all present being perfectly familiar with the issues at stake. strafford act i scene i.--_a house near whitehall._ _hampden, hollis, the +younger+ vane, rudyard, fiennes and many of the presbyterian party: loudon and other scots' commissioners._ _vane._ i say, if he be here-- _rudyard._ (and he is here!)-- _hollis._ for england's sake let every man be still nor speak of him, so much as say his name, till pym rejoin us! rudyard! henry vane! one rash conclusion may decide our course and with it england's fate--think--england's fate! hampden, for england's sake they should be still! _vane._ you say so, hollis? well, i must be still. it is indeed too bitter that one man, any one man's mere presence, should suspend england's combined endeavor: little need to name him! _rudyard._ for you are his brother, hollis! _hampden._ shame on you, rudyard! time to tell him that, when he forgets the mother of us all. _rudyard._ do i forget her? _hampden._ you talk idle hate against her foe: is that so strange a thing? is hating wentworth all the help she needs? _a puritan._ the philistine strode, cursing as he went: but david--five smooth pebbles from the brook within his scrip.... _rudyard._ be you as still as david! _fiennes._ here's rudyard not ashamed to wag a tongue stiff with ten years' disuse of parliaments; why, when the last sat, wentworth sat with us! _rudyard._ let's hope for news of them now he returns-- he that was safe in ireland, as we thought! --but i'll abide pym's coming. _vane._ now, by heaven, they may be cool who can, silent who will-- some have a gift that way! wentworth is here, here, and the king's safe closeted with him ere this. and when i think on all that's past since that man left us, how his single arm rolled the advancing good of england back and set the woeful past up in its place, exalting dagon where the ark should be,-- how that man has made firm the fickle king (hampden, i will speak out!)--in aught he feared to venture on before; taught tyranny her dismal trade, the use of all her tools, to ply the scourge yet screw the gag so close that strangled agony bleeds mute to death; how he turns ireland to a private stage for training infant villanies, new ways of wringing treasure out of tears and blood, unheard oppressions nourished in the dark to try how much man's nature can endure --if he dies under it, what harm? if not, why, one more trick is added to the rest worth a king's knowing, and what ireland bears england may learn to bear:--how all this while that man has set himself to one dear task, the bringing charles to relish more and more power, power without law, power and blood too --can i be still? _hampden._ for that you should be still. _vane._ oh hampden, then and now! the year he left us, the people in full parliament could wrest the bill of rights from the reluctant king; and now, he'll find in an obscure small room a stealthy gathering of great-hearted men that take up england's cause: england is here! _hampden._ and who despairs of england? _rudyard._ that do i, if wentworth comes to rule her. i am sick to think her wretched masters, hamilton, the muckworm cottington, the maniac laud, may yet be longed-for back again. i say, i do despair. _vane._ and, rudyard, i'll say this-- which all true men say after me, not loud but solemnly and as you'd say a prayer! this king, who treads our england underfoot, has just so much ... it may be fear or craft, as bids him pause at each fresh outrage; friends, he needs some sterner hand to grasp his own, some voice to ask, "why shrink? am i not by?" now, one whom england loved for serving her, found in his heart to say, "i know where best the iron heel shall bruise her, for she leans upon me when you trample." witness, you! so wentworth heartened charles, so england fell. but inasmuch as life is hard to take from england.... _many voices._ go on, vane! 'tis well said, vane! _vane._ --who has not so forgotten runnymead!-- _voices._ 'tis well and bravely spoken, vane! go on! _vane._ --there are some little signs of late she knows the ground no place for her. she glances round, wentworth has dropped the hand, is gone his way on other service: what if she arise? no! the king beckons, and beside him stands the same bad man once more, with the same smile and the same gesture. now shall england crouch, or catch at us and rise? _voices._ the renegade! haman! ahithophel! _hampden._ gentlemen of the north, it was not thus the night your claims were urged, and we pronounced the league and covenant, the cause of scotland, england's cause as well: vane there, sat motionless the whole night through. _vane._ hampden! _fiennes._ stay, vane! _loudon._ be just and patient, vane! _vane._ mind how you counsel patience, loudon! you have still a parliament, and this your league to back it; you are free in scotland still: while we are brothers, hope's for england yet. but know you wherefore wentworth comes? to quench this last of hopes? that he brings war with him? know you the man's self? what he dares? _loudon._ we know, all know--'tis nothing new. _vane._ and what's new, then, in calling for his life? why, pym himself-- you must have heard--ere wentworth dropped our cause he would see pym first; there were many more strong on the people's side and friends of his, eliot that's dead, rudyard and hampden here, but for these wentworth cared not; only, pym he would see--pym and he were sworn, 'tis said, to live and die together; so, they met at greenwich. wentworth, you are sure, was long, specious enough, the devil's argument lost nothing on his lips; he'd have pym own a patriot could not play a purer part than follow in his track; they two combined might put down england. well, pym heard him out; one glance--you know pym's eye--one word was all: "you leave us, wentworth! while your head is on, i'll not leave you." _hampden._ has he left wentworth, then? has england lost him? will you let him speak, or put your crude surmises in his mouth? away with this! will you have pym or vane? _voices._ wait pym's arrival! pym shall speak. _hampden._ meanwhile let loudon read the parliament's report from edinburgh: our last hope, as vane says, is in the stand it makes. loudon! _vane._ no, no! silent i can be: not indifferent! _hampden._ then each keep silence, praying god to spare his anger, cast not england quite away in this her visitation! _a puritan._ seven years long the midianite drove israel into dens and caves. till god sent forth a mighty man, _pym enters_ even gideon! _pym._ wentworth's come: nor sickness, care, the ravaged body nor the ruined soul, more than the winds and waves that beat his ship, could keep him from the king. he has not reached whitehall: they've hurried up a council there to lose no time and find him work enough. where's loudon? your scots' parliament.... _loudon._ holds firm: we were about to read reports. _pym._ the king has just dissolved your parliament. _loudon and other scots._ great god! an oath-breaker! stand by us, england, then! _pym._ the king's too sanguine; doubtless wentworth's here; but still some little form might be kept up. _hampden._ now speak, vane! rudyard, you had much to say! _hollis._ the rumor's false, then.... _pym._ ay, the court gives out his own concerns have brought him back: i know 'tis the king calls him. wentworth supersedes the tribe of cottingtons and hamiltons whose part is played; there's talk enough, by this,-- merciful talk, the king thinks: time is now to turn the record's last and bloody leaf which, chronicling a nation's great despair, tells they were long rebellious, and their lord indulgent, till, all kind expedients tried, he drew the sword on them and reigned in peace. laud's laying his religion on the scots was the last gentle entry: the new page shall run, the king thinks, "wentworth thrust it down at the sword's point." _a puritan._ i'll do your bidding, pym, england's and god's--one blow! _pym._ a goodly thing-- we all say, friends, it is a goodly thing to right that england. heaven grows dark above: let's snatch one moment ere the thunder fall, to say how well the english spirit comes out beneath it! all have done their best, indeed, from lion eliot, that grand englishman, to the least here: and who, the least one here, when she is saved (for her redemption dawns dimly, most dimly, but it dawns--it dawns) who'd give at any price his hope away of being named along with the great men? we would not--no, we would not give that up! _hampden._ and one name shall be dearer than all names. when children, yet unborn, are taught that name after their fathers',--taught what matchless man.... _pym._ ... saved england? what if wentworth's should be still that name? _rudyard and others._ we have just said it, pym! his death saves her! we said it--there's no way beside! i'll do god's bidding, pym! they struck down joab and purged the land. _vane._ no villanous striking-down! _rudyard._ no, a calm vengeance: let the whole land rise and shout for it. no feltons! _pym._ rudyard, no! england rejects all feltons; most of all since wentworth ... hampden, say the trust again of england in her servants--but i'll think you know me, all of you. then, i believe, spite of the past, wentworth rejoins you, friends! _vane and others._ wentworth? apostate! judas! double-dyed a traitor! is it pym, indeed.... _pym._ ... who says vane never knew that wentworth, loved that man, was used to stroll with him, arm locked in arm, along the streets to see the people pass, and read in every island-countenance fresh argument for god against the king,-- never sat down, say, in the very house where eliot's brow grew broad with noble thoughts, (you've joined us, hampden--hollis, you as well,) and then left talking over gracchus' death.... _vane._ to frame, we know it well, the choicest clause in the petition of right: he framed such clause one month before he took at the king's hand his northern presidency, which that bill denounced. _pym._ too true! never more, never more walked we together! most alone i went. i have had friends--all here are fast my friends-- but i shall never quite forget that friend. and yet it could not but be real in him! you, vane,--you, rudyard, have no right to trust to wentworth: but can no one hope with me? hampden, will wentworth dare shed english blood like water? _hampden._ ireland is aceldama. _pym._ will he turn scotland to a hunting-ground to please the king, now that he knows the king? the people or the king? and that king, charles! _hampden._ pym, all here know you: you'll not set your heart on any baseless dream. but say one deed of wentworth's since he left us.... [_shouting without._ _vane._ there! he comes, and they shout for him! wentworth's at whitehall, the king embracing him, now, as we speak, and he, to be his match in courtesies, taking the whole war's risk upon himself, now, while you tell us here how changed he is! hear you? _pym._ and yet if 'tis a dream, no more, that wentworth chose their side, and brought the king to love it as though laud had loved it first, and the queen after;--that he led their cause calm to success, and kept it spotless through, so that our very eyes could look upon the travail of our souls, and close content that violence, which something mars even right which sanctions it, had taken off no grace from its serene regard. only a dream! _hampden._ we meet here to accomplish certain good by obvious means, and keep tradition up of free assemblages, else obsolete, in this poor chamber: nor without effect has friend met friend to counsel and confirm, as, listening to the beats of england's heart, we spoke its wants to scotland's prompt reply by these her delegates. remains alone that word grow deed, as with god's help it shall-- but with the devil's hindrance, who doubts too? looked we or no that tyranny should turn her engines of oppression to their use? whereof, suppose the worst be wentworth here-- shall we break off the tactics which succeed in drawing out our formidablest foe, let bickering and disunion take their place? or count his presence as our conquest's proof, and keep the old arms at their steady play? proceed to england's work! fiennes, read the list! _fiennes._ ship-money is refused or fiercely paid in every county, save the northern parts where wentworth's influence.... [_shouting._ _vane._ i, in england's name, declare her work, this way, at end! till now, up to this moment, peaceful strife was best. we english had free leave to think; till now, we had a shadow of a parliament in scotland. but all's changed: they change the first, they try brute-force for law, they, first of all.... _voices._ good! talk enough! the old true hearts with vane! _vane._ till we crush wentworth for her, there's no act serves england! _voices._ vane for england! _pym._ pym should be something to england. i seek wentworth, friends. in the second scene of the first act, the man upon whom the popular party has been heaping opprobrium appears to speak for himself. again the historical background must be known in order that the whole drift of the scene may be understood. wentworth is talking with lady carlisle, a woman celebrated for her beauty and her wit, and fond of having friendships with great men. various opinions of this beautiful woman have been expressed by those who knew her. "her beauty," writes one, "brought her adorers of all ranks, courtiers, and poets, and statesmen; but she remained untouched by their worship." sir toby mathews who prefixed to a collection of letters published in "a character of the most excellent lady, lucy, countess of carlisle," writes that she will "freely discourse of love, and hear both the fancies and powers of it; but if you will needs bring it within knowledge, and boldly direct it to herself, she is likely to divert the discourse, or, at least, seem not to understand it. by which you may know her humour, and her justice; for since she cannot love in earnest she would have nothing from love." according to him she filled her mind "with gallant fancies, and high and elevated thoughts," and "her wit being most eminent among the rest of her great abilities," even the conversation of those most famed for it was affected. quite another view of her is given in a letter of voiture's written to mr. gordon on leaving england in . "in one human being you let me see more treasures than there are there [the tower], and even more lions and leopards. it will not be difficult for you to guess after this that i speak of the countess of carlisle. for there is nobody else of whom all this good and evil can be said. no matter how dangerous it is to let the memory dwell upon her, i have not, so far, been able to keep mine from it, and, quite honestly, i would not give the picture of her that lingers in my mind, for all the loveliest things i have seen in my life. i must confess that she is an enchanting personality, and there would not be a woman under heaven so worthy of affection, if she only knew what it was, and if she had as sensitive a nature as she has a reasonable mind. but with the temperament we know she possesses, there is nothing to be said except that she is the most lovable of all things not good, and the most delightful poison that nature ever concocted." browning himself says he first sketched her character from mathews, but finding that rather artificial, he used voiture and waller, who referred to her as the "bright carlisle of the court of heaven." it should be remembered that she had become a widow and was considerably older at the time of her friendship with wentworth than when voiture wrote of her, and was probably better balanced, and truly worthy of wentworth's own appreciation of her when he wrote, "a nobler nor a more intelligent friendship did i never meet with in my life." a passage in a letter to laud indicates that wentworth was well aware of the practical advantage in having such a friend as lady carlisle at court. "i judge her ladyship very considerable. she is often in place, and extremely well skilled how to speak with advantage and spirit for those friends she professeth unto, which will not be many. there is this further in her disposition, she will not seem to be the person she is not, an ingenuity i have always observed and honoured her for." it is something of a shock to learn that even before the wentworth episode was well over, she became a friend of his bitterest foe, pym. gardiner sums up her character in as fair a way as any one,--and not at all inconsistent with browning's portrayal of her. "lady carlisle had now been for many years a widow. she had long been the reigning beauty at court, and she loved to mingle political intrigue with social intercourse. for politics as a serious occupation she had no aptitude; but, in middle age, she felt a woman's pride in attaching to herself the strong heads by which the world was ruled, as she had attached to herself in youth, the witty courtier or the agile dancer. it was worth a statesman's while to cultivate her acquaintance. she could make him a power in society as well as in council, could worm out a secret which it behoved him to know, and could convey to others his suggestions with assured fidelity. the calumny which treated strafford, as it afterwards treated pym, as her accepted lover, may be safely disregarded. but there can be no doubt that purely personal motives attached her both to strafford and pym. for strafford's theory of monarchical government she cared as little as she cared for pym's theory of parliamentary government. it may be, too, that some mingled feeling may have arisen in strafford's breast. it was something to have an ally at court ready at all times to plead his cause with gay enthusiasm, to warn him of hidden dangers, and to offer him the thread of that labyrinth which, under the name of 'the queen's side,' was such a mystery to him. it was something, too, no doubt, that this advocate was not a grey haired statesman, but a woman, in spite of growing years, of winning grace and sparkling vivacity of eye and tongue." [illustration: charles i] strafford, himself, browning brings before us, ill, and worn out with responsibility as he was upon his return to england at this time. carlisle tactfully lets him know how he will have to face criticisms from other councillors about the king, and how even the confidence of the fickle king cannot be relied upon. in his conference with the king in this scene, strafford, at last, wins the confidence of the king as history relates. wentworth, horrified at the way in which a war with scotland has been precipitated, carries his point, that parliaments should be called in ireland and england. this will give time for preparation, and at the same time an opportunity of convincing the people that the war is justified by scotland's treason, so causing them willingly to grant subsidies for the expense of the war. to turn from the play to history, commissioners from the scottish parliament, the earls of loudon and dumferling had arrived in london to ask that the acts of the scottish parliament might receive confirmation from the king. this question was referred to a committee of eight privy councillors. propositions were made to put the scotch commissioners in prison; however, the king finally decided to dismiss them without treating with them. scottish indignation of course ran high at this proceeding, and here wentworth stepped in and won the king to his policy of ruling scotland directly from england. "he insisted," writes gardiner, "that a parliament, and a parliament alone, was the remedy fitted for the occasion. laud and hamilton gave him their support. he carried his point with the committee. what was of more importance he carried it with the king." and as one writer expressed it the lords were of the opinion that "his majesty should make trial of that once more, that so he might leave his people without excuse, and have where withal to justify himself to god and the world that in his own inclination he desired the old way; but that if his people should not cheerfully, according to their duties, meet him in that, especially in this exigent when his kingdom and person are in apparent danger, the world might see he is forced, contrary to his own inclination, to use extraordinary means rather than, by the peevishness of some few factious spirits, to suffer his state and government to be lost." in the play as in history, charles now confers upon wentworth an earldom. shortly after this the king "was prepared," says gardiner, "to confer upon his faithful minister that token of his confidence which he had twice refused before. on january , wentworth received the earldom of strafford, and a week later he exchanged the title of lord-deputy of ireland for the higher dignity of lord-lieutenant." in his conference with pym, strafford who, in talking to carlisle, had shown a slight wavering toward the popular party, because of finding himself so surrounded by difficulties, stands firm; this episode is a striking working up of the tradition of the friendship between these two men. the influence of the queen upon charles is the last strand in this tangled skein of human destiny brought out by browning in the scene. the parliament that wentworth wants she is afraid of lest it should ask for a renewal of the persecution of the catholics. the vacillating charles, in an instant, is ready to repudiate his interview with wentworth, and act only to please the queen. scene ii.--_whitehall._ _+lady+ carlisle and wentworth_ _wentworth._ and the king? _lady carlisle._ wentworth, lean on me! sit then! i'll tell you all; this horrible fatigue will kill you. _wentworth._ no;--or, lucy, just your arm; i'll not sit till i've cleared this up with him: after that, rest. the king? _lady carlisle._ confides in you. _wentworth._ why? or, why now?--they have kind throats, the knaves! shout for me--they! _lady carlisle._ you come so strangely soon: yet we took measures to keep off the crowd-- did they shout for you? _wentworth._ wherefore should they not? does the king take such measures for himself? besides, there's such a dearth of malcontents, you say! _lady carlisle._ i said but few dared carp at you. _wentworth._ at me? at us, i hope! the king and i! he's surely not disposed to let me bear the fame away from him of these late deeds in ireland? i am yet his instrument be it for well or ill? he trusts me too! _lady carlisle._ the king, dear wentworth, purposes, i said, to grant you, in the face of all the court.... _wentworth._ all the court! evermore the court about us! savile and holland, hamilton and vane about us,--then the king will grant me--what? that he for once put these aside and say-- "tell me your whole mind, wentworth!" _lady carlisle._ you professed you would be calm. _wentworth._ lucy, and i am calm! how else shall i do all i come to do, broken, as you may see, body and mind, how shall i serve the king? time wastes meanwhile, you have not told me half. his footstep! no. quick, then, before i meet him,--i am calm-- why does the king distrust me? _lady carlisle._ he does not distrust you. _wentworth._ lucy, you can help me; you have even seemed to care for me: one word! is it the queen? _lady carlisle._ no, not the queen: the party that poisons the queen's ear, savile and holland. _wentworth._ i know, i know: old vane, too, he's one too? go on--and he's made secretary. well? or leave them out and go straight to the charge-- the charge! _lady carlisle._ oh, there's no charge, no precise charge; only they sneer, make light of--one may say, nibble at what you do. _wentworth._ i know! but, lucy, i reckoned on you from the first!--go on! --was sure could i once see this gentle friend when i arrived, she'd throw an hour away to help her ... what am i? _lady carlisle._ you thought of me, dear wentworth? _wentworth._ but go on! the party here! _lady carlisle._ they do not think your irish government of that surpassing value.... _wentworth._ the one thing of value! the one service that the crown may count on! all that keeps these very vanes in power, to vex me--not that they do vex, only it might vex some to hear that service decried, the sole support that's left the king! _lady carlisle._ so the archbishop says. _wentworth._ ah? well, perhaps the only hand held up in my defence may be old laud's! these hollands then, these saviles nibble? they nibble?--that's the very word! _lady carlisle._ your profit in the customs, bristol says, exceeds the due proportion: while the tax.... _wentworth._ enough! 'tis too unworthy,--i am not so patient as i thought. what's pym about? _lady carlisle._ pym? _wentworth._ pym and the people. _lady carlisle._ o, the faction! extinct--of no account: there'll never be another parliament. _wentworth._ tell savile that! you may know--(ay, you do--the creatures here never forget!) that in my earliest life i was not ... much that i am now! the king may take my word on points concerning pym before lord savile's, lucy, or if not, i bid them ruin their wise selves, not me, these vanes and hollands! i'll not be their tool who might be pym's friend yet. but there's the king! where is he? _lady carlisle._ just apprised that you arrive. _wentworth._ and why not here to meet me? i was told he sent for me, nay, longed for me. _lady carlisle._ because,-- he is now ... i think a council's sitting now about this scots affair. _wentworth._ a council sits? they have not taken a decided course without me in the matter? _lady carlisle._ i should say.... _wentworth._ the war? they cannot have agreed to that? not the scots' war?--without consulting me-- me, that am here to show how rash it is, how easy to dispense with?--ah, you too against me! well,--the king may take his time. --forget it, lucy! cares make peevish: mine weigh me (but 'tis a secret) to my grave. _lady carlisle._ for life or death i am your own, dear friend! [_goes out._ _wentworth._ heartless! but all are heartless here. go now, forsake the people! i did not forsake the people: they shall know it, when the king will trust me!--who trusts all beside at once, while i have not spoke vane and savile fair, and am not trusted: have but saved the throne: have not picked up the queen's glove prettily, and am not trusted. but he'll see me now. weston is dead: the queen's half english now-- more english: one decisive word will brush these insects from ... the step i know so well! the king! but now, to tell him ... no--to ask what's in me he distrusts:--or, best begin by proving that this frightful scots affair is just what i foretold. so much to say, and the flesh fails, now, and the time is come, and one false step no way to be repaired. you were avenged, pym, could you look on me. _pym enters._ _wentworth._ i little thought of you just then. _pym._ no? i think always of you, wentworth. _wentworth._ the old voice! i wait the king, sir. _pym._ true--you look so pale! a council sits within; when that breaks up he'll see you. _wentworth._ sir, i thank you. _pym._ oh, thank laud! you know when laud once gets on church affairs the case is desperate: he'll not be long to-day: he only means to prove, to-day, we english all are mad to have a hand in butchering the scots for serving god after their fathers' fashion: only that! [illustration: whitehall] _wentworth._ sir, keep your jests for those who relish them! (does he enjoy their confidence?) 'tis kind to tell me what the council does. _pym._ you grudge that i should know it had resolved on war before you came? no need: you shall have all the credit, trust me! _wentworth._ have the council dared-- they have not dared ... that is--i know you not. farewell, sir: times are changed. _pym._ --since we two met at greenwich? yes: poor patriots though we be, you cut a figure, makes some slight return for your exploits in ireland! changed indeed, could our friend eliot look from out his grave! ah, wentworth, one thing for acquaintance' sake, just to decide a question; have you, now, felt your old self since you forsook us? _wentworth._ sir! _pym._ spare me the gesture! you misapprehend. think not i mean the advantage is with me. i was about to say that, for my part, i never quite held up my head since then-- was quite myself since then: for first, you see, i lost all credit after that event with those who recollect how sure i was wentworth would outdo eliot on our side. forgive me: savile, old vane, holland here, eschew plain-speaking: 'tis a trick i keep. _wentworth._ how, when, where, savile, vane, and holland speak, plainly or otherwise, would have my scorn, all of my scorn, sir.... _pym._ ... did not my poor thoughts claim somewhat? _wentworth._ keep your thoughts! believe the king mistrusts me for their prattle, all these vanes and saviles! make your mind up, o' god's love, that i am discontented with the king! _pym._ why, you may be: i should be, that i know, were i like you. _wentworth._ like me? _pym._ i care not much for titles: our friend eliot died no lord, hampden's no lord, and savile is a lord; but you care, since you sold your soul for one. i can't think, therefore, your soul's purchaser did well to laugh you to such utter scorn when you twice prayed so humbly for its price, the thirty silver pieces ... i should say, the earldom you expected, still expect, and may. your letters were the movingest! console yourself: i've borne him prayers just now from scotland not to be oppressed by laud, words moving in their way: he'll pay, be sure, as much attention as to those you sent. _wentworth._ false, sir! who showed them you? suppose it so, the king did very well ... nay, i was glad when it was shown me: i refused, the first! john pym, you were my friend--forbear me once! _pym._ oh, wentworth, ancient brother of my soul, that all should come to this! _wentworth._ leave me! _pym._ my friend, why should i leave you? _wentworth._ to tell rudyard this, and hampden this! _pym._ whose faces once were bright at my approach, now sad with doubt and fear, because i hope in you--yes, wentworth, you who never mean to ruin england--you who shake off, with god's help, an obscene dream in this ezekiel chamber, where it crept upon you first, and wake, yourself, your true and proper self, our leader, england's chief, and hampden's friend! this is the proudest day! come, wentworth! do not even see the king! the rough old room will seem itself again! we'll both go in together: you've not seen hampden so long: come: and there's fiennes: you'll have to know young vane. this is the proudest day! [_the king enters. wentworth lets fall pym's hand._ _charles._ arrived, my lord?--this gentleman, we know was your old friend. the scots shall be informed what we determine for their happiness. [_pym goes out._ you have made haste, my lord. _wentworth._ sir, i am come.... _charles._ to see an old familiar--nay, 'tis well; aid us with his experience: this scots' league and covenant spreads too far, and we have proofs that they intrigue with france: the faction too, whereof your friend there is the head and front, abets them,--as he boasted, very like. _wentworth._ sir, trust me! but for this once, trust me, sir! _charles._ what can you mean? _wentworth._ that you should trust me, sir! oh--not for my sake! but 'tis sad, so sad that for distrusting me, you suffer--you whom i would die to serve: sir, do you think that i would die to serve you? _charles._ but rise, wentworth! _wentworth._ what shall convince you? what does savile do to prove him.... ah, one can't tear out one's heart and show it, how sincere a thing it is! _charles._ have i not trusted you? _wentworth._ say aught but that! there is my comfort, mark you: all will be so different when you trust me--as you shall! it has not been your fault,--i was away, mistook, maligned, how was the king to know? i am here, now--he means to trust me, now-- all will go on so well! _charles._ be sure i do-- i've heard that i should trust you: as you came, your friend, the countess, told me.... _wentworth._ no,--hear nothing-- be told nothing about me!--you're not told your right-hand serves you, or your children love you! _charles._ you love me, wentworth: rise! _wentworth._ i can speak now. i have no right to hide the truth. 'tis i can save you: only i. sir, what must be? _charles._ since laud's assured (the minutes are within) --loath as i am to spill my subjects' blood.... _wentworth._ that is, he'll have a war: what's done is done! _charles._ they have intrigued with france; that's clear to laud. _wentworth._ has laud suggested any way to meet the war's expense? _charles._ he'd not decide so far until you joined us. _wentworth._ most considerate! he's certain they intrigue with france, these scots? the people would be with us. _charles._ pym should know. _wentworth._ the people for us--were the people for us! sir, a great thought comes to reward your trust: summon a parliament! in ireland first, then, here. _charles._ in truth? _wentworth._ that saves us! that puts off the war, gives time to right their grievances-- to talk with pym. i know the faction,--laud so styles it,--tutors scotland: all their plans suppose no parliament: in calling one you take them by surprise. produce the proofs of scotland's treason; then bid england help: even pym will not refuse. _charles._ you would begin with ireland? _wentworth._ take no care for that: that's sure to prosper. _charles._ you shall rule me. you were best return at once: but take this ere you go! now, do i trust you? you're an earl: my friend of friends: yes, while.... you hear me not! _wentworth._ say it all o'er again--but once again: the first was for the music: once again! _charles._ strafford, my friend, there may have been reports, vain rumors. henceforth touching strafford is to touch the apple of my sight: why gaze so earnestly? _wentworth._ i am grown young again, and foolish. what was it we spoke of? _charles._ ireland, the parliament,-- _wentworth._ i may go when i will? --now? _charles._ are you tired so soon of us? _wentworth._ my king! but you will not so utterly abhor a parliament? i'd serve you any way. _charles._ you said just now this was the only way. _wentworth._ sir, i will serve you. _charles._ strafford, spare yourself: you are so sick, they tell me. _wentworth._ 'tis my soul that's well and prospers now. this parliament-- we'll summon it, the english one--i'll care for everything. you shall not need them much. _charles._ if they prove restive.... _wentworth._ i shall be with you. _charles._ ere they assemble? _wentworth._ i will come, or else deposit this infirm humanity i' the dust. my whole heart stays with you, my king! [_as wentworth goes out, the queen enters._ _charles._ that man must love me. _queen._ is it over then? why, he looks yellower than ever! well, at least we shall not hear eternally of service--services: he's paid at least. _charles._ not done with: he engages to surpass all yet performed in ireland. _queen._ i had thought nothing beyond was ever to be done. the war, charles--will he raise supplies enough? _charles._ we've hit on an expedient; he ... that is, i have advised ... we have decided on the calling--in ireland--of a parliament. _queen._ o truly! you agree to that? is that the first fruit of his counsel? but i guessed as much. _charles._ this is too idle, henriette! i should know best. he will strain every nerve, and once a precedent established.... _queen._ notice how sure he is of a long term of favor! he'll see the next, and the next after that; no end to parliaments! _charles._ well, it is done. he talks it smoothly, doubtless. if, indeed, the commons here.... _queen._ here! you will summon them here? would i were in france again to see a king! _charles._ but, henriette.... _queen._ oh, the scots see clear! why should they bear your rule? _charles._ but listen, sweet! _queen._ let wentworth listen--you confide in him! _charles._ i do not, love,--i do not so confide! the parliament shall never trouble us ... nay, hear me! i have schemes, such schemes: we'll buy the leaders off: without that, wentworth's counsel had ne'er prevailed on me. perhaps i call it to have excuse for breaking it for ever, and whose will then the blame be? see you not? come, dearest!--look, the little fairy, now, that cannot reach my shoulder! dearest, come! in the second act, the historical episode, which pervades the act is the assembling and the dissolution of the short parliament. only the salient points of the political situation have been seized upon by browning. as in the first act, the popular party in private conclave is introduced. from the talk it is gathered that feeling runs high against strafford, by whose advice the parliament had been called, because of the exorbitant demands made upon it for money to support an army, this army to crush scotland whose cause was so nearly like its own. the popular party or the faction had supposed the parliament would be a means for the redressing of its long list of grievances which had been accumulating during the years since the last parliament had been held. instead of that the commons was deliberately informed by charles that there would be no discussions of its demands until it had granted the subsidies for which it had been asked. the play gives one a much more lively sense of the indignant feelings of the duped men than can possibly be gained by reading many more pages of history with its endless minor details. upon this gathering, pym suddenly enters again, and to the reproaches of him for his belief in strafford, makes the reply that the parliament has been dissolved, the king has cast strafford off forever, and henceforth strafford will be on their side,--a conclusion not warranted by history, and, of course, found out to be erroneous by pym and his followers in the next scene. again there is the dramatic need to emphasize the human side of life even in an essentially political play, by showing that pym's friendship and loyalty to wentworth were no uncertain elements in his character. the moment it could be proved beyond a doubt that wentworth was in the eyes of pym, england's enemy, that moment pym knew it would become his painful duty to crush wentworth utterly, therefore pym had for his own conscience' sake to make the uttermost trial of his faith. the second scene, as in the first act, brings out the other side. it is in the main true to history though much condensed. history relates that after the short parliament was dissolved, "voices were raised at whitehall in condemnation of strafford." his policy of raising subsidies from the parliament having failed, criticisms would, of course, be made upon his having pushed ahead a war without the proper means of sustaining it. charles himself was also frightened by the manifestations of popular discontent and failed to uphold wentworth in his policy. northumberland had been appointed commander-in-chief of the army, but besides having little heart for an enterprise so badly prepared for, he was ill in bed and could not take command of the army, so the king appointed strafford in his place. a hint of strafford as he appears in this scene may be taken from clarendon who writes "the earl of strafford was scarce recovered from a great sickness, yet was willing to undertake the charge out of pure indignation to see how few men were forward to serve the king with that vigor of mind they ought to do; but knowing well the malicious designs which were contrived against himself, he would rather serve as lieutenant-general under the earl of northumberland, than that he should resign his commission: and so, with and under that qualification, he made all possible haste towards the north before he had strength enough for the journey." browning makes the king tell strafford in this interview that he has dissolved the parliament. he represents strafford as horrified by the news and driven in this extremity to suggest the desperate measure of debasing the coinage as a means of obtaining funds. strafford actually counseled this, when all else failed, namely, the proposed loan from the city, and one from the spanish government, but, according to history, he himself voted for the dissolution of parliament, though the play is accurate in laying the necessity of the dissolution at the door of old vane. it was truly his ill-judged vehemence, for, not able to brook the arguments of the commons, "he rose," says gardiner, "to state that the king would accept nothing less than the twelve subsidies which he had demanded in his message. upon this the committee broke up without coming to a resolution, postponing further consideration of the matter to the following day." the next morning the king who had called his councillors together early "announced his intention of proceeding to a dissolution. strafford, who arrived late, begged that the question might first be seriously discussed, and that the opinions of the councillors, who were also members of the lower house, might first be heard. vane declared that there was no hope that the commons 'would give one penny.' on this the votes were taken. northumberland and holland were alone in wishing to avert a dissolution. supported by the rest of the council the king hurried to the house of lords and dissolved parliament." wholly imaginary is the episode in this scene where pym and his followers break in upon the interview of wentworth and the king. just at the climax of wentworth's sorrowful rage at the king's treatment of him, they come to claim wentworth for their side. that you would say i did advise the war; and if, through your own weakness, or what's worse, these scots, with god to help them, drive me back, you will not step between the raging people and me, to say.... i knew it! from the first i knew it! never was so cold a heart! remember that i said it--that i never believed you for a moment! --and, you loved me? you thought your perfidy profoundly hid because i could not share the whisperings with vane, with savile? what, the face was masked? i had the heart to see, sir! face of flesh, but heart of stone--of smooth cold frightful stone! ay, call them! shall i call for you? the scots goaded to madness? or the english--pym-- shall i call pym, your subject? oh, you think i'll leave them in the dark about it all? they shall not know you? hampden, pym shall not? _pym, hampden, vane, etc., enter._ [_dropping on his knee._] thus favored with your gracious countenance what shall a rebel league avail against your servant, utterly and ever yours? so, gentlemen, the king's not even left the privilege of bidding me farewell who haste to save the people--that you style your people--from the mercies of the scots and france their friend? [_to charles._] pym's grave grey eyes are fixed upon you, sir! your pleasure, gentlemen? _hampden._ the king dissolved us--'tis the king we seek and not lord strafford. _strafford._ --strafford, guilty too of counselling the measure. [_to charles._] (hush ... you know-- you have forgotten--sir, i counselled it) a heinous matter, truly! but the king will yet see cause to thank me for a course which now, perchance ... (sir, tell them so!)--he blames. well, choose some fitter time to make your charge: i shall be with the scots, you understand? then yelp at me! meanwhile, your majesty binds me, by this fresh token of your trust.... [_under the pretence of an earnest farewell, strafford conducts charles to the door, in such a manner as to hide his agitation from the rest: as the king disappears, they turn as by one impulse to pym, who has not changed his original posture of surprise._ _hampden._ leave we this arrogant strong wicked man! _vane and others._ hence, pym! come out of this unworthy place to our old room again! he's gone. [_strafford, just about to follow the king, looks back._ _pym._ not gone! [_to strafford._] keep tryst! the old appointment's made anew: forget not we shall meet again! _strafford._ so be it! and if an army follows me? _vane._ his friends will entertain your army! _pym._ i'll not say you have misreckoned, strafford: time shows. perish body and spirit! fool to feign a doubt, pretend the scrupulous and nice reserve of one whose prowess shall achieve the feat! what share have i in it? do i affect to see no dismal sign above your head when god suspends his ruinous thunder there? strafford is doomed. touch him no one of you! [_pym, hampden, etc., go out._ _strafford._ pym, we shall meet again! in the final talk of this scene with carlisle, the pathos of strafford's position is wonderfully brought out--the man who loves his king so overmuch that no perfidy on the king's part can make his resolution to serve him waver for an instant. _+lady+ carlisle enters._ you here, child? _lady carlisle._ hush-- i know it all: hush, strafford! _strafford._ ah? you know? well. i shall make a sorry soldier, lucy! all knights begin their enterprise, we read, under the best of auspices; 'tis morn, the lady girds his sword upon the youth (he's always very young)--the trumpets sound, cups pledge him, and, why, the king blesses him-- you need not turn a page of the romance to learn the dreadful giant's fate. indeed, we've the fair lady here; but she apart,-- a poor man, rarely having handled lance, and rather old, weary, and far from sure his squires are not the giant's friends. all's one: let us go forth! _lady carlisle._ go forth? _strafford._ what matters it? we shall die gloriously--as the book says. _lady carlisle._ to scotland? not to scotland? _strafford._ am i sick like your good brother, brave northumberland? beside, these walls seem falling on me. _lady carlisle._ strafford, the wind that saps these walls can undermine your camp in scotland, too. whence creeps the wind? have you no eyes except for pym? look here! a breed of silken creatures lurk and thrive in your contempt. you'll vanquish pym? old vane can vanquish you. and vane you think to fly? rush on the scots! do nobly! vane's slight sneer shall test success, adjust the praise, suggest the faint result: vane's sneer shall reach you there. --you do not listen! _strafford._ oh,--i give that up! there's fate in it: i give all here quite up. care not what old vane does or holland does against me! 'tis so idle to withstand! in no case tell me what they do! _lady carlisle._ but, strafford.... _strafford._ i want a little strife, beside; real strife; this petty palace-warfare does me harm: i shall feel better, fairly out of it. _lady carlisle._ why do you smile? _strafford._ i got to fear them, child! i could have torn his throat at first, old vane's, as he leered at me on his stealthy way to the queen's closet. lord, one loses heart! i often found it on my lips to say "do not traduce me to her!" _lady carlisle._ but the king.... _strafford._ the king stood there, 'tis not so long ago, --there; and the whisper, lucy, "be my friend of friends!"--my king! i would have.... _lady carlisle._ ... died for him? _strafford._ sworn him true, lucy: i can die for him. _lady carlisle._ but go not, strafford! but you must renounce this project on the scots! die, wherefore die? charles never loved you. _strafford._ and he never will. he's not of those who care the more for men that they're unfortunate. _lady carlisle._ then wherefore die for such a master? _strafford._ you that told me first how good he was--when i must leave true friends to find a truer friend!--that drew me here from ireland,--"i had but to show myself and charles would spurn vane, savile, and the rest"-- you, child, to ask me this? _lady carlisle._ (if he have set his heart abidingly on charles!) then, friend, i shall not see you any more. _strafford._ yes, lucy. there's one man here i have to meet. _lady carlisle._ (the king! what way to save him from the king? my soul-- that lent from its own store the charmed disguise which clothes the king--he shall behold my soul!) strafford,--i shall speak best if you'll not gaze upon me: i had never thought, indeed, to speak, but you would perish too, so sure! could you but know what 'tis to bear, my friend, one image stamped within you, turning blank the else imperial brilliance of your mind,-- a weakness, but most precious,--like a flaw i' the diamond, which should shape forth some sweet face yet to create, and meanwhile treasured there lest nature lose her gracious thought for ever! _strafford._ when could it be? no! yet ... was it the day we waited in the anteroom, till holland should leave the presence-chamber? _lady carlisle._ what? _strafford._ --that i described to you my love for charles? _lady carlisle._ (ah, no-- one must not lure him from a love like that! oh, let him love the king and die! 'tis past. i shall not serve him worse for that one brief and passionate hope, silent for ever now!) and you are really bound for scotland then? i wish you well: you must be very sure of the king's faith, for pym and all his crew will not be idle--setting vane aside! _strafford._ if pym is busy,--you may write of pym. _lady carlisle._ what need, since there's your king to take your part? he may endure vane's counsel; but for pym-- think you he'll suffer pym to.... _strafford._ child, your hair is glossier than the queen's! _lady carlisle._ is that to ask a curl of me? _strafford._ scotland----the weary way! _lady carlisle._ stay, let me fasten it. --a rival's, strafford? _strafford_ [_showing the george_]. he hung it there: twine yours around it, child! _lady carlisle._ no--no--another time--i trifle so! and there's a masque on foot. farewell. the court is dull; do something to enliven us in scotland: we expect it at your hands. _strafford._ i shall not fail in scotland. _lady carlisle._ prosper--if you'll think of me sometimes! _strafford._ how think of him and not of you? of you, the lingering streak (a golden one) in my good fortune's eve. _lady carlisle._ strafford.... well, when the eve has its last streak the night has its first star. [_she goes out._ _strafford._ that voice of hers-- you'd think she had a heart sometimes! his voice is soft too. only god can save him now. be thou about his bed, about his path! his path! where's england's path? diverging wide, and not to join again the track my foot must follow--whither? all that forlorn way among the tombs! far--far--till.... what, they do then join again, these paths? for, huge in the dusk, there's--pym to face! why then, i have a foe to close with, and a fight to fight at last worthy my soul! what, do they beard the king, and shall the king want strafford at his need? am i not here? not in the market-place, pressed on by the rough artisans, so proud to catch a glance from wentworth! they lie down hungry yet smile "why, it must end some day: is he not watching for our sake?" not there! but in whitehall, the whited sepulchre, the.... curse nothing to-night! only one name they'll curse in all those streets to-night. whose fault? did i make kings? set up, the first, a man to represent the multitude, receive all love in right of them--supplant them so, until you love the man and not the king---- the man with the mild voice and mournful eyes which send me forth. --to breast the bloody sea that sweeps before me: with one star for guide. night has its first, supreme, forsaken star. during the third act, the long parliament is in session, and pym is making his great speech impeaching wentworth. the conditions of affairs at the time of this parliament were well-nigh desperate for charles and wentworth. things had not gone well with the scottish war and wentworth was falling more and more into disfavor. england was now threatened with a scottish invasion. still, even with this danger to face it was impossible to raise money to support the army. the english had a suspicion that the scotch cause was their own. the universal demand for a parliament could no longer be ignored; the king, therefore, summoned it to meet on the third of november. as firth observes, "to strafford this meant ruin, but he hardly realized the greatness of the danger in which he stood. on october , the scotch commissioners in a public paper denounced him as an incendiary, and declared that they meant to insist on his punishment. "as soon as the parliament opened charles discovered that it was necessary for his service to have strafford again by his side, and summoned him to london. there is evidence that his friends urged him to pass over to ireland where the army rested at his devotion, or to transport himself to foreign kingdoms till fairer weather here should invite him home. the marquis of hamilton advised him to fly, but as hamilton told the king, the earl was too great-hearted to fear. though conscious of the peril of obedience, he set out to london to stand by his master." the enmity of the court party to strafford is touched upon in the first scene, and in the second, strafford's return, unsuspecting of the great blow that awaits him. he had indeed meditated a blow on his own part. according to firth, he felt that "one desperate resource remained. the intrigues of the parliamentary leaders with the scots had come to strafford's knowledge, and he had determined to impeach them of high treason. he could prove that pym and his friends had secretly communicated with the rebels, and invited them to bring a scottish army into england. strafford arrived in london on monday, november , , and spent tuesday in resting after his journey. on the morning of wednesday the th, he took his seat in the house of lords, but did not strike the blow." upon that day he was impeached of high treason by pym. gardiner's account here has much the same dramatic force as the play. "followed by a crowd of approving members, pym carried up the message. whilst the lords were still debating on this unusual request for imprisonment before the charge had been set forth, the news of the impeachment was carried to strafford. 'i will go,' he proudly said 'and look my accusers in the face.' with haughty mien and scowling brow he strode up the floor of the house to his place of honor. there were those amongst the peers who had no wish to allow him to speak, lest he should accuse them of complicity with the scots. the lords, as a body, felt even more personally aggrieved by his method of government than the commons. shouts of 'withdraw! withdraw!' rose from every side. as soon as he was gone an order was passed sequestering the lord-lieutenant from his place in the house and committing him to the custody of the gentleman usher. he was then called in and bidden to kneel whilst the order was read. he asked permission to speak, but his request was sternly refused. maxwell, the usher of the black rod, took from him his sword, and conducted him out of the house. the crowd outside gazed pitilessly on the fallen minister, 'no man capping to him, before whom that morning the greatest in england would have stood dis-covered.' 'what is the matter?' they asked. 'a small matter, i warrant you,' replied strafford with forced levity. 'yes, indeed,' answered a bystander, 'high treason is a small matter.'" this passage brings up the scene in a manner so similar to that of the play, it is safe to say that gardiner was here influenced by browning, the history having been written many years after the play. scene ii.--_whitehall._ _the queen and +lady+ carlisle._ _queen._ it cannot be. _lady carlisle._ it is so. _queen._ why, the house have hardly met. _lady carlisle._ they met for that. _queen._ no, no! meet to impeach lord strafford? 'tis a jest. _lady carlisle._ a bitter one. _queen._ consider! 'tis the house we summoned so reluctantly, which nothing but the disastrous issue of the war persuaded us to summon. they'll wreak all their spite on us, no doubt; but the old way is to begin by talk of grievances: they have their grievances to busy them. _lady carlisle._ pym has begun his speech. _queen._ where's vane?--that is, pym will impeach lord strafford if he leaves his presidency; he's at york, we know, since the scots beat him: why should he leave york? _lady carlisle._ because the king sent for him. _queen._ ah--but if the king did send for him, he let him know we had been forced to call a parliament-- a step which strafford, now i come to think, was vehement against. _lady carlisle._ the policy escaped him, of first striking parliaments to earth, then setting them upon their feet and giving them a sword: but this is idle. did the king send for strafford? he will come. _queen._ and what am i to do? _lady carlisle._ what do? fail, madam! be ruined for his sake! what matters how, so it but stand on record that you made an effort, only one? _queen._ the king away at theobald's! _lady carlisle._ send for him at once: he must dissolve the house. _queen._ wait till vane finds the truth of the report: then.... _lady carlisle._ --it will matter little what the king does. strafford that lends his arm and breaks his heart for you! _+sir+ h. vane enters._ _vane._ the commons, madam, are sitting with closed doors. a huge debate, no lack of noise; but nothing, i should guess, concerning strafford: pym has certainly not spoken yet. _queen_ [_to +lady+ carlisle_]. you hear? _lady carlisle._ i do not hear that the king's sent for! _vane._ savile will be able to tell you more. _holland enters._ _queen._ the last news, holland? _holland._ pym is raging like a fire. the whole house means to follow him together to whitehall and force the king to give up strafford. _queen._ strafford? _holland._ if they content themselves with strafford! laud is talked of, cottington and windebank too. pym has not left out one of them--i would you heard pym raging! _queen._ vane, go find the king! tell the king, vane, the people follow pym to brave us at whitehall! _savile enters._ _savile._ not to whitehall-- 'tis to the lords they go: they seek redress on strafford from his peers--the legal way, they call it. _queen._ (wait, vane!) _savile._ but the adage gives long life to threatened men. strafford can save himself so readily: at york, remember, in his own country: what has he to fear? the commons only mean to frighten him from leaving york. surely, he will not come. _queen._ lucy, he will not come! _lady carlisle._ once more, the king has sent for strafford. he will come. _vane._ oh doubtless! and bring destruction with him: that's his way. what but his coming spoilt all conway's plan? the king must take his counsel, choose his friends, be wholly ruled by him! what's the result? the north that was to rise, ireland to help,-- what came of it? in my poor mind, a fright is no prodigious punishment. _lady carlisle._ a fright? pym will fail worse than strafford if he thinks to frighten him. [_to the queen._] you will not save him then? _savile._ when something like a charge is made, the king will best know how to save him: and t'is clear, while strafford suffers nothing by the matter, the king may reap advantage: this in question, no dinning you with ship-money complaints! _queen_ [_to +lady+ carlisle_]. if we dissolve them, who will pay the army? protect us from the insolent scots? _lady carlisle._ in truth, i know not, madam. strafford's fate concerns me little: you desired to learn what course would save him: i obey you. _vane._ notice, too, there can't be fairer ground for taking full revenge--(strafford's revengeful)--than he'll have against his old friend pym. _queen._ why, he shall claim vengeance on pym! _vane._ and strafford, who is he to 'scape unscathed amid the accidents that harass all beside? i, for my part, should look for something of discomfiture had the king trusted me so thoroughly and been so paid for it. _holland._ he'll keep at york: all will blow over: he'll return no worse, humbled a little, thankful for a place under as good a man. oh, we'll dispense with seeing strafford for a month or two! _strafford enters._ _queen._ you here! _strafford._ the king sends for me, madam. _queen._ sir, the king.... _strafford._ an urgent matter that imports the king! [_to +lady+ carlisle._] why, lucy, what's in agitation now, that all this muttering and shrugging, see, begins at me? they do not speak! _lady carlisle._ 'tis welcome! for we are proud of you--happy and proud to have you with us, strafford! you were staunch at durham: you did well there! had you not been stayed, you might have ... we said, even now, our hope's in you! _vane_ [_to +lady+ carlisle_]. the queen would speak with you. _strafford._ will one of you, his servants here, vouchsafe to signify my presence to the king? _savile._ an urgent matter? _strafford._ none that touches you, lord savile! say, it were some treacherous sly pitiful intriguing with the scots-- you would go free, at least! (they half divine my purpose!) madam, shall i see the king? the service i would render, much concerns his welfare. _queen._ but his majesty, my lord, may not be here, may.... _strafford._ its importance, then, must plead excuse for this withdrawal, madam, and for the grief it gives lord savile here. _queen_ [_who has been conversing with vane and holland_]. the king will see you, sir! [_to +lady+ carlisle._] mark me: pym's worst is done by now: he has impeached the earl, or found the earl too strong for him, by now. let us not seem instructed! we should work no good to strafford, but deform ourselves with shame in the world's eye. [_to strafford._] his majesty has much to say with you. _strafford._ time fleeting, too! [_to +lady+ carlisle._] no means of getting them away? and she-- what does she whisper? does she know my purpose? what does she think of it? get them away! _queen_ [_to +lady+ carlisle_]. he comes to baffle pym--he thinks the danger far off: tell him no word of it! a time for help will come; we'll not be wanting then. keep him in play, lucy--you, self-possessed and calm! [_to strafford._] to spare your lordship some delay i will myself acquaint the king. [_to +lady+ carlisle._] beware! [_the queen, vane, holland, and savile go out._ _strafford._ she knows it? _lady carlisle._ tell me, strafford! _strafford._ afterward! this moment's the great moment of all time. she knows my purpose? _lady carlisle._ thoroughly: just now she bade me hide it from you. _strafford._ quick, dear child, the whole o' the scheme? _lady carlisle._ (ah, he would learn if they connive at pym's procedure! could they but have once apprised the king! but there's no time for falsehood, now.) strafford, the whole is known. _strafford._ known and approved? _lady carlisle._ hardly discountenanced. _strafford._ and the king--say, the king consents as well? _lady carlisle._ the king's not yet informed, but will not dare to interpose. _strafford._ what need to wait him, then? he'll sanction it! i stayed, child, tell him, long! it vexed me to the soul--this waiting here. you know him, there's no counting on the king. tell him i waited long! _lady carlisle._ (what can he mean? rejoice at the king's hollowness?) _strafford._ i knew they would be glad of it,--all over once, i knew they would be glad: but he'd contrive, the queen and he, to mar, by helping it, an angel's making. _lady carlisle._ (is he mad?) dear strafford, you were not wont to look so happy. _strafford._ sweet, i tried obedience thoroughly. i took the king's wild plan: of course, ere i could reach my army, conway ruined it. i drew the wrecks together, raised all heaven and earth, and would have fought the scots: the king at once made truce with them. then, lucy, then, dear child, god put it in my mind to love, serve, die for charles, but never to obey him more! while he endured their insolence at ripon i fell on them at durham. but you'll tell the king i waited? all the anteroom is filled with my adherents. _lady carlisle._ strafford--strafford, what daring act is this you hint? _strafford._ no, no! 'tis here, not daring if you knew? all here! [_drawing papers from his breast._ full proof, see, ample proof--does the queen know i have such damning proof? bedford and essex, brooke, warwick, savile (did you notice savile? the simper that i spoilt?), saye, mandeville-- sold to the scots, body and soul, by pym! _lady carlisle._ great heaven! _strafford._ from savile and his lords, to pym and his losels, crushed!--pym shall not ward the blow nor savile creep aside from it! the crew and the cabal--i crush them! _lady carlisle._ and you go-- strafford,--and now you go?-- _strafford._ --about no work in the background, i promise you! i go straight to the house of lords to claim these knaves. mainwaring! _lady carlisle._ stay--stay, strafford! _strafford._ she'll return, the queen--some little project of her own! no time to lose: the king takes fright perhaps. _lady carlisle._ pym's strong, remember! _strafford._ very strong, as fits the faction's head--with no offence to hampden, vane, rudyard and my loving hollis: one and all they lodge within the tower to-night in just equality. bryan! mainwaring! [_many of his +adherents+ enter._ the peers debate just now (a lucky chance) on the scots' war; my visit's opportune. when all is over, bryan, you proceed to ireland: these dispatches, mark me, bryan, are for the deputy, and these for ormond: we want the army here--my army, raised at such a cost, that should have done such good, and was inactive all the time! no matter, we'll find a use for it. willis ... or, no--you! you, friend, make haste to york: bear this, at once ... or,--better stay for form's sake, see yourself the news you carry. you remain with me to execute the parliament's command, mainwaring! help to seize these lesser knaves, take care there's no escaping at backdoors: i'll not have one escape, mind me--not one! i seem revengeful, lucy? did you know what these men dare! _lady carlisle._ it is so much they dare! _strafford._ i proved that long ago; my turn is now. keep sharp watch, goring, on the citizens! observe who harbors any of the brood that scramble off: be sure they smart for it! our coffers are but lean. and you, child, too, shall have your task; deliver this to laud. laud will not be the slowest in thy praise: "thorough" he'll cry!--foolish, to be so glad! this life is gay and glowing, after all: 'tis worth while, lucy, having foes like mine just for the bliss of crushing them. to-day is worth the living for. _lady carlisle._ that reddening brow! you seem.... _strafford._ well--do i not? i would be well-- i could not but be well on such a day! and, this day ended, 'tis of slight import how long the ravaged frame subjects the soul in strafford. _lady carlisle._ noble strafford! _strafford._ no farewell! i'll see you anon, to-morrow--the first thing. --if she should come to stay me! _lady carlisle._ go--'tis nothing-- only my heart that swells: it has been thus ere now: go, strafford! _strafford._ to-night, then, let it be. i must see him: you, the next after him. i'll tell how pym looked. follow me, friends! you, gentlemen, shall see a sight this hour to talk of all your lives. close after me! "my friend of friends!" [_strafford and the rest go out._ _lady carlisle._ the king--ever the king! no thought of one beside, whose little word unveils the king to him--one word from me, which yet i do not breathe! ah, have i spared strafford a pang, and shall i seek reward beyond that memory? surely too, some way he is the better for my love. no, no-- he would not look so joyous--i'll believe his very eye would never sparkle thus, had i not prayed for him this long, long while. scene iii.--_the antechamber of the house of lords._ _many of the presbyterian party. the +adherents+ of strafford, etc._ _a group of presbyterians._ -- . i tell you he struck maxwell: maxwell sought to stay the earl: he struck him and passed on. . fear as you may, keep a good countenance before these rufflers. . strafford here the first, with the great army at his back! . no doubt. i would pym had made haste: that's bryan, hush-- the gallant pointing. _strafford's followers._ -- . mark these worthies, now! . a goodly gathering! "where the carcass is there shall the eagles"--what's the rest? . for eagles say crows. _a presbyterian._ stand back, sirs! _one of strafford's followers._ are we in geneva? _a presbyterian._ no, nor in ireland; we have leave to breathe. _one of strafford's followers._ truly? behold how privileged we be that serve "king pym"! there's some-one at whitehall who skulks obscure; but pym struts.... _the presbyterian._ nearer. _a follower of strafford._ higher, we look to see him. [_to his +companions+._] i'm to have st. john in charge; was he among the knaves just now that followed pym within there? _another._ the gaunt man talking with rudyard. did the earl expect pym at his heels so fast? i like it not. _maxwell enters._ _another._ why, man, they rush into the net! here's maxwell-- ha, maxwell? how the brethren flock around the fellow! do you feel the earl's hand yet upon your shoulder, maxwell? _maxwell._ gentlemen, stand back! a great thing passes here. _a follower of strafford_ [_to another_]. the earl is at his work! [_to +m.+_] say, maxwell, what great thing! speak out! [_to a +presbyterian+._] friend, i've a kindness for you! friend, i've seen you with st. john: o stockishness! wear such a ruff, and never call to mind st. john's head in a charger? how, the plague, not laugh? _another._ say, maxwell, what great thing! _another._ nay, wait: the jest will be to wait. _first._ and who's to bear these demure hypocrites? you'd swear they came ... came ... just as we come! [_a +puritan+ enters hastily and without observing strafford's +followers+._ _the puritan._ how goes on the work? has pym.... _a follower of strafford._ the secret's out at last. aha, the carrion's scented! welcome, crow the first! gorge merrily, you with the blinking eye! "king pym has fallen!" _the puritan._ pym? _a strafford._ pym! _a presbyterian._ only pym? _many of strafford's followers._ no, brother, not pym only; vane as well, rudyard as well, hampden, st. john as well! _a presbyterian._ my mind misgives: can it be true? _another._ lost! lost! _a strafford._ say we true, maxwell? _the puritan._ pride before destruction, a haughty spirit goeth before a fall. _many of strafford's followers._ ah now! the very thing! a word in season! a golden apple in a silver picture, to greet pym as he passes! [_the doors at the back begin to open, noise and light issuing._ _maxwell._ stand back, all! _many of the presbyterians._ i hold with pym! and i! _strafford's followers._ now for the text! he comes! quick! _the puritan._ how hath the oppressor ceased! the lord hath broken the staff of the wicked! the sceptre of the rulers, he who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, that ruled the nations in his anger--he is persecuted and none hindreth! [_the doors open, and strafford issues in the greatest disorder, and amid cries from within of "+void the house+!"_ _strafford._ impeach me! pym! i never struck, i think, the felon on that calm insulting mouth when it proclaimed--pym's mouth proclaimed me ... god! was it a word, only a word that held the outrageous blood back on my heart--which beats! which beats! some one word--"traitor," did he say, bending that eye, brimful of bitter fire, upon me? _maxwell._ in the commons' name, their servant demands lord strafford's sword. _strafford._ what did you say? _maxwell._ the commons bid me ask your lordship's sword. _strafford._ let us go forth: follow me, gentlemen! draw your swords too: cut any down that bar us. on the king's service! maxwell, clear the way! [_the +presbyterians+ prepare to dispute his passage._ _strafford._ i stay: the king himself shall see me here. your tablets, fellow! [_to mainwaring._] give that to the king! yes, maxwell, for the next half-hour, let be! nay, you shall take my sword! [_maxwell advances to take it._ or, no--not that! their blood, perhaps, may wipe out all thus far, all up to that--not that! why, friend, you see when the king lays your head beneath my foot it will not pay for that. go, all of you! _maxwell._ i dare, my lord, to disobey: none stir! _strafford._ this gentle maxwell!--do not touch him, bryan! [_to the +presbyterians+._] whichever cur of you will carry this escapes his fellow's fate. none saves his life? none? [_cries from within of "strafford!"_ slingsby, i've loved you at least: make haste! stab me! i have not time to tell you why. you then, my bryan! mainwaring, you then! is it because i spoke so hastily at allerton? the king had vexed me. [_to the +presbyterians+._] you! --not even you? if i live over this, the king is sure to have your heads, you know! but what if i can't live this minute through? pym, who is there with his pursuing smile! [_louder cries of "strafford!"_ the king! i troubled him, stood in the way of his negotiations, was the one great obstacle to peace, the enemy of scotland: and he sent for me, from york, my safety guaranteed--having prepared a parliament--i see! and at whitehall the queen was whispering with vane--i see the trap! [_tearing off the george._ i tread a gewgaw underfoot, and cast a memory from me. one stroke, now! [_his own +adherents+ disarm him. renewed cries of "strafford!"_ england! i see thy arm in this and yield. pray you now--pym awaits me--pray you now! [_strafford reaches the doors: they open wide. hampden and a crowd discovered, and, at the bar, pym standing apart. as strafford kneels, the scene shuts._ [illustration: westminster hall] the history of the fourth act deals with further episodes of strafford's trial, especially with the change in the procedure from impeachment to a bill of attainder against strafford. the details of this great trial are complicated and cannot be followed in all their ramifications here. there was danger that the impeachment would not go through. strafford, himself, felt confident that in law his actions could not be found treasonable. after strafford's brilliant defense of himself, it was decided to bring in a bill of attainder. new evidence against strafford contained in some notes which the younger vane had found among his father's papers were used to strengthen the charge of treason. in these notes strafford had advised the king to act "loose and absolved from all rules of government," and had reminded him that there was an army in ireland, ready to reduce the kingdom. these notes were found by the merest accident. the younger vane who had just been knighted and was about to be married, borrowed his father's keys in order to look up some law papers. in his search he fell upon these notes taken at a committee that met immediately after the dissolution of the short parliament. he made a copy and carried it to pym who also made a copy. according to baillie, the "secret" of the change from the impeachment to the bill was "to prevent the hearing of the earl's lawyers, who give out that there is no law yet in force whereby he can be condemned to die for aught yet objected against him, and therefore their intent by this bill to supply the defect of the laws therein." to this may be added the opinion of a member of the commons. "if the house of commons proceeds to demand judgment of the lords, without doubt they will acquit him, there being no law extant whereby to condemn him of treason. wherefore the commons are determined to desert the lord's judicature, and to proceed against him by bill of attainder, whereby he shall be adjudged to death upon a treason now to be declared." one of the chief results in this change of procedure, emphasized by browning in an intense scene between pym and charles was that it altered entirely the king's attitude towards strafford's trial. as baillie expresses it, "had the commons gone on in the former way of pursuit, the king might have been a patient, and only beheld the striking off of strafford's head; but now they have put them on a bill which will force the king either to be our agent and formal voicer to his death, or else do the world knows not what." for the sake of a gain in dramatic power, browning has once more departed from history by making pym the moving power in the bill of attainder, and hampden in favor of it; while in reality they were opposed to the change in procedure, and believed that the impeachment could have been carried through. the relentless, scourging force of pym in the play, pursuing the arch-foe of england as he regarded wentworth to the death, once he is convinced that england's welfare demands it, would have been weakened had he been represented in favor of the policy which was abandoned, instead of with the policy that succeeded. but pym is made to intimate that he will abandon the bill unless the king gives his word that he will ratify it, and further, pym declares, should he not ratify the bill his next step will be against the king himself. _enter hampden and vane._ _vane._ o hampden, save the great misguided man! plead strafford's cause with pym! i have remarked he moved no muscle when we all declaimed against him: you had but to breathe--he turned those kind calm eyes upon you. [_enter pym, the +solicitor-general+ st. john, the +managers+ of the trial, fiennes, rudyard, etc._ _rudyard._ horrible! till now all hearts were with you: i withdraw for one. too horrible! but we mistake your purpose, pym: you cannot snatch away the last spar from the drowning man. _fiennes._ he talks with st. john of it--see, how quietly! [_to other +presbyterians+._] you'll join us? strafford may deserve the worst: but this new course is monstrous. vane, take heart! this bill of his attainder shall not have one true man's hand to it. _vane._ consider, pym! confront your bill, your own bill: what is it? you cannot catch the earl on any charge,-- no man will say the law has hold of him on any charge; and therefore you resolve to take the general sense on his desert, as though no law existed, and we met to found one. you refer to parliament to speak its thought upon the abortive mass of half-borne-out assertions, dubious hints hereafter to be cleared, distortions--ay, and wild inventions. every man is saved the task of fixing any single charge on strafford: he has but to see in him the enemy of england. _pym._ a right scruple! i have heard some called england's enemy with less consideration. _vane._ pity me! indeed you made me think i was your friend! i who have murdered strafford, how remove that memory from me? _pym._ i absolve you, vane. take you no care for aught that you have done! _vane._ john hampden, not this bill! reject this bill! he staggers through the ordeal: let him go, strew no fresh fire before him! plead for us! when strafford spoke, your eyes were thick with tears! _hampden._ england speaks louder: who are we, to play the generous pardoner at her expense, magnanimously waive advantages, and, if he conquer us, applaud his skill? _vane._ he was your friend. _pym._ i have heard that before. _fiennes._ and england trusts you. _hampden._ shame be his, who turns the opportunity of serving her she trusts him with, to his own mean account-- who would look nobly frank at her expense! _fiennes._ i never thought it could have come to this. _pym._ but i have made myself familiar, fiennes, with this one thought--have walked, and sat, and slept, this thought before me. i have done such things, being the chosen man that should destroy the traitor. you have taken up this thought to play with, for a gentle stimulant, to give a dignity to idler life by the dim prospect of emprise to come, but ever with the softening, sure belief, that all would end some strange way right at last. _fiennes._ had we made out some weightier charge! _pym._ you say that these are petty charges: can we come to the real charge at all? there he is safe in tyranny's stronghold. apostasy is not a crime, treachery not a crime: the cheek burns, the blood tingles, when you speak the words, but where's the power to take revenge upon them? we must make occasion serve,-- the oversight shall pay for the main sin that mocks us. _rudyard._ but his unexampled course, this bill! _pym._ by this, we roll the clouds away of precedent and custom, and at once bid the great beacon-light god sets in all, the conscience of each bosom, shine upon the guilt of strafford: each man lay his hand upon his breast, and judge! _vane._ i only see strafford, nor pass his corpse for all beyond! _rudyard and others._ forgive him! he would join us, now he finds what the king counts reward! the pardon, too, should be your own. yourself should bear to strafford the pardon of the commons. _pym._ meet him? strafford? have we to meet once more, then? be it so! and yet--the prophecy seemed half fulfilled when, at the trial, as he gazed, my youth, our friendship, divers thoughts came back at once and left me, for a time.... 'tis very sad! to-morrow we discuss the points of law with lane--to-morrow? _vane._ not before to-morrow-- so, time enough! i knew you would relent! _pym._ the next day, haselrig, you introduce the bill of his attainder. pray for me! scene iii.--_whitehall._ _the king._ _charles._ my loyal servant! to defend himself thus irresistibly,--withholding aught that seemed to implicate us! we have done less gallantly by strafford. well, the future must recompense the past. she tarries long. i understand you, strafford, now! the scheme-- carlisle's mad scheme--he'll sanction it, i fear, for love of me. 'twas too precipitate: before the army's fairly on its march, he'll be at large: no matter. well, carlisle? _enter pym._ _pym._ fear me not, sir:--my mission is to save, this time. _charles._ to break thus on me! unannounced! _pym._ it is of strafford i would speak. _charles._ no more of strafford! i have heard too much from you. _pym._ i spoke, sir, for the people; will you hear a word upon my own account? _charles._ of strafford? (so turns the tide already? have we tamed the insolent brawler?--strafford's eloquence is swift in its effect.) lord strafford, sir, has spoken for himself. _pym._ sufficiently. i would apprise you of the novel course the people take: the trial fails. _charles._ yes, yes: we are aware, sir: for your part in it means shall be found to thank you. _pym._ pray you, read this schedule! i would learn from your own mouth --(it is a matter much concerning me)-- whether, if two estates of us concede the death of strafford, on the grounds set forth within that parchment, you, sir, can resolve to grant your own consent to it. this bill is framed by me. if you determine, sir, that england's manifested will should guide your judgment, ere another week such will shall manifest itself. if not,--i cast aside the measure. _charles._ you can hinder, then, the introduction of this bill? _pym._ i can. _charles._ he is my friend, sir: i have wronged him: mark you, had i not wronged him, this might be. you think because you hate the earl ... (turn not away, we know you hate him)--no one else could love strafford: but he has saved me, some affirm. think of his pride! and do you know one strange, one frightful thing? we all have used the man as though a drudge of ours, with not a source of happy thoughts except in us; and yet strafford has wife and children, household cares, just as if we had never been. ah sir, you are moved, even you, a solitary man wed to your cause--to england if you will! _pym._ yes--think, my soul--to england! draw not back! _charles._ prevent that bill, sir! all your course seems fair till now. why, in the end, 'tis i should sign the warrant for his death! you have said much i ponder on; i never meant, indeed, strafford should serve me any more. i take the commons' counsel; but this bill is yours-- nor worthy of its leader: care not, sir, for that, however! i will quite forget you named it to me. you are satisfied? _pym._ listen to me, sir! eliot laid his hand, wasted and white, upon my forehead once; wentworth--he's gone now!--has talked on, whole nights, and i beside him; hampden loves me: sir, how can i breathe and not wish england well, and her king well? _charles._ i thank you, sir, who leave that king his servant. thanks, sir! _pym._ let me speak! --who may not speak again; whose spirit yearns for a cool night after this weary day: --who would not have my soul turn sicker yet in a new task, more fatal, more august, more full of england's utter weal or woe. i thought, sir, could i find myself with you, after this trial, alone, as man to man-- i might say something, warn you, pray you, save-- mark me, king charles, save----you! but god must do it. yet i warn you, sir-- (with strafford's faded eyes yet full on me) as you would have no deeper question moved --"how long the many must endure the one," assure me, sir, if england give assent to strafford's death, you will not interfere! or---- _charles._ god forsakes me. i am in a net and cannot move. let all be as you say! _enter +lady+ carlisle._ _lady carlisle._ he loves you--looking beautiful with joy because you sent me! he would spare you all the pain! he never dreamed you would forsake your servant in the evil day--nay, see your scheme returned! that generous heart of his! he needs it not--or, needing it, disdains a course that might endanger you--you, sir, whom strafford from his inmost soul.... [_seeing pym._] well met! no fear for strafford! all that's true and brave on your own side shall help us: we are now stronger than ever. ha--what, sir, is this? all is not well! what parchment have you there? _pym._ sir, much is saved us both. _lady carlisle._ this bill! your lip whitens--you could not read one line to me your voice would falter so! _pym._ no recreant yet! the great word went from england to my soul, and i arose. the end is very near. _lady carlisle._ i am to save him! all have shrunk beside; 'tis only i am left. heaven will make strong the hand now as the heart. then let both die! in the last act browning has drawn upon his imagination more than in any other part of the play. strafford in prison in the tower is the center around which all the other elements of the drama are made to revolve. a glimpse, the first, of the man in a purely human capacity is given in the second scene with strafford and his children. from all accounts little anne was a precocious child and browning has sketched her accordingly. the scene is like a gleam of sunshine in the gathering gloom. the genuine grief felt by the historical charles over the part he played in the ruin of strafford is brought out in an interview between strafford and charles, who is represented as coming disguised to the prison. strafford who has been hoping for pardon from the king learns from hollis, in the king's presence, that the king has signed his death warrant. he receives this shock with the remark which history attributes to him. "put not your trust in princes, neither in the sons of men, in whom is no salvation!" history tells us of two efforts to rescue strafford. one of these was an attempt to bribe balfour to allow him to escape from the tower. this hint the poet has worked up into the episode of charles, calling balfour and begging him to go at once to parliament, to say he will grant all demands, and that he chooses to pardon strafford. history, however, does not say that lady carlisle was implicated in any plan for the rescue of strafford, of which browning makes so much. according to gardiner, she was by this time bestowing her favors upon pym. devotion to the truth here on browning's part would have completely ruined the inner unity of the play. carlisle, the woman ready to devote herself to strafford's utmost need, while strafford is more or less indifferent to her is the artistic compliment of strafford the man devoted to the unresponsive king. the failure of the escape through pym's intervention is a final dramatic climax bringing face to face not so much the two individual men as the two principles of government for which england was warring, the monarchical and the parliamentary. to the last, strafford is loyal to the king and the kingly idea, while pym crushing his human feelings under foot, calmly contemplates the sacrifice not only of strafford, but even of the king, if england's need demand it. in this supreme moment of agony when strafford and pym meet face to face both men are made to realize an abiding love for each other beneath all their earthly differences. "a great poet of our own day," writes gardiner, "clothing the reconciling spirit of the nineteenth century in words which never could have been spoken in the seventeenth, has breathed a high wish. on his page an imaginary pym, recalling an imaginary friendship, looks forward hopefully to a reunion in a better and brighter world." scene ii.--_the tower._ _strafford sitting with his +children+. they sing._ _o bell 'andare per barca in mare, verso la sera di primavera!_ _william._ the boat's in the broad moonlight all this while-- _verso la sera di primavera!_ and the boat shoots from underneath the moon into the shadowy distance; only still you hear the dipping oar-- _verso la sera_, and faint, and fainter, and then all's quite gone, music and light and all, like a lost star. _anne._ but you should sleep, father; you were to sleep. _strafford._ i do sleep, anne; or if not--you must know there's such a thing as.... _william._ you're too tired to sleep? _strafford._ it will come by-and-by and all day long, in that old quiet house i told you of: we sleep safe there. _anne._ why not in ireland? _strafford._ no! too many dreams!--that song's for venice, william: you know how venice looks upon the map-- isles that the mainland hardly can let go? _william._ you've been to venice, father? _strafford._ i was young, then. _william._ a city with no king; that's why i like even a song that comes from venice. _strafford._ william! _william._ oh, i know why! anne, do you love the king? but i'll see venice for myself one day. _strafford._ see many lands, boy--england last of all,-- that way you'll love her best. [illustration: the tower, london] _william._ why do men say you sought to ruin her then? _strafford._ ah,--they say that. _william._ why? _strafford._ i suppose they must have words to say, as you to sing. _anne._ but they make songs beside: last night i heard one, in the street beneath, that called you.... oh, the names! _william._ don't mind her, father! they soon left off when i cried out to them. _strafford._ we shall so soon be out of it, my boy! 'tis not worth while: who heeds a foolish song? _william._ why, not the king. _strafford._ well: it has been the fate of better; and yet,--wherefore not feel sure that time, who in the twilight comes to mend all the fantastic day's caprice, consign to the low ground once more the ignoble term, and raise the genius on his orb again,-- that time will do me right? _anne._ (shall we sing, william? he does not look thus when we sing.) _strafford._ for ireland, something is done: too little, but enough to show what might have been. _william._ (i have no heart to sing now! anne, how very sad he looks! oh, i so hate the king for all he says!) _strafford._ forsook them! what, the common songs will run that i forsook the people? nothing more? ay, fame, the busy scribe, will pause, no doubt, turning a deaf ear to her thousand slaves noisy to be enrolled,--will register the curious glosses, subtle notices, ingenious clearings-up one fain would see beside that plain inscription of the name-- the patriot pym, or the apostate strafford! [_the +children+ resume their song timidly, but break off._ _enter hollis and an +attendant+._ _strafford._ no,--hollis? in good time!--who is he? _hollis._ one that must be present. _strafford._ ah--i understand. they will not let me see poor laud alone. how politic! they'd use me by degrees to solitude: and, just as you came in, i was solicitous what life to lead when strafford's "not so much as constable in the king's service." is there any means to keep oneself awake? what would you do after this bustle, hollis, in my place? _hollis._ strafford! _strafford._ observe, not but that pym and you will find me news enough--news i shall hear under a quince-tree by a fish-pond side at wentworth. garrard must be re-engaged my newsman. or, a better project now-- what if when all's consummated, and the saints reign, and the senate's work goes swimmingly,-- what if i venture up, some day, unseen, to saunter through the town, notice how pym, your tribune, likes whitehall, drop quietly into a tavern, hear a point discussed, as, whether strafford's name were john or james-- and be myself appealed to--i, who shall myself have near forgotten! _hollis._ i would speak.... _strafford._ then you shall speak,--not now. i want just now, to hear the sound of my own tongue. this place is full of ghosts. _hollis._ nay, you must hear me, strafford! _strafford._ oh, readily! only, one rare thing more,-- the minister! who will advise the king, turn his sejanus, richelieu and what not, and yet have health--children, for aught i know-- my patient pair of traitors! ah,--but, william-- does not his cheek grow thin? _william._ 'tis you look thin, father! _strafford._ a scamper o'er the breezy wolds sets all to-rights. _hollis._ you cannot sure forget a prison-roof is o'er you, strafford? _strafford._ no, why, no. i would not touch on that, the first. i left you that. well, hollis? say at once, the king can find no time to set me free! a mask at theobald's? _hollis._ hold: no such affair detains him. _strafford._ true: what needs so great a matter? the queen's lip may be sore. well: when he pleases,-- only, i want the air: it vexes flesh to be pent up so long. _hollis._ the king--i bear his message, strafford: pray you, let me speak! _strafford._ go, william! anne, try o'er your song again! [_the +children+ retire._ they shall be loyal, friend, at all events. i know your message: you have nothing new to tell me: from the first i guessed as much. i know, instead of coming here himself, leading me forth in public by the hand, the king prefers to leave the door ajar as though i were escaping--bids me trudge while the mob gapes upon some show prepared on the other side of the river! give at once his order of release! i've heard, as well of certain poor manoeuvres to avoid the granting pardon at his proper risk; first, he must prattle somewhat to the lords, must talk a trifle with the commons first, be grieved i should abuse his confidence, and far from blaming them, and.... where's the order? _hollis._ spare me! _strafford._ why, he'd not have me steal away? with an old doublet and a steeple hat like prynne's? be smuggled into france, perhaps? hollis, 'tis for my children! 'twas for them i first consented to stand day by day and give your puritans the best of words, be patient, speak when called upon, observe their rules, and not return them prompt their lie! what's in that boy of mine that he should prove son to a prison-breaker? i shall stay and he'll stay with me. charles should know as much, he too has children! [_turning to hollis's +companion+._] sir, you feel for me! no need to hide that face! though it have looked upon me from the judgment-seat ... i know strangely, that somewhere it has looked on me, ... your coming has my pardon, nay, my thanks: for there is one who comes not. _hollis._ whom forgive, as one to die! _strafford._ true, all die, and all need forgiveness: i forgive him from my soul. _hollis._ 'tis a world's wonder: strafford, you must die! _strafford._ sir, if your errand is to set me free this heartless jest mars much. ha! tears in truth? we'll end this! see this paper, warm--feel--warm with lying next my heart! whose hand is there? whose promise? read, and loud for god to hear! "strafford shall take no hurt"--read it, i say! "in person, honor, nor estate"-- _hollis._ the king.... _strafford._ i could unking him by a breath! you sit where loudon sat, who came to prophesy the certain end, and offer me pym's grace if i'd renounce the king: and i stood firm on the king's faith. the king who lives.... _hollis._ to sign the warrant for your death. _strafford._ "put not your trust in princes, neither in the sons of men, in whom is no salvation!" _hollis._ trust in god! the scaffold is prepared: they wait for you: he has consented. cast the earth behind! _charles._ you would not see me, strafford, at your foot! it was wrung from me! only, curse me not! _hollis_ [_to strafford_]. as you hope grace and pardon in your need, be merciful to this most wretched man. [_voices from within._ _verso la sera di primavera_ _strafford._ you'll be good to those children, sir? i know you'll not believe her, even should the queen think they take after one they rarely saw. i had intended that my son should live a stranger to these matters: but you are so utterly deprived of friends! he too must serve you--will you not be good to him? or, stay, sir, do not promise--do not swear! you, hollis--do the best you can for me! i've not a soul to trust to: wandesford's dead, and you've got radcliffe safe, laud's turn comes next: i've found small time of late for my affairs, but i trust any of you, pym himself-- no one could hurt them: there's an infant, too. these tedious cares! your majesty could spare them. nay--pardon me, my king! i had forgotten your education, trials, much temptation, some weakness: there escaped a peevish word-- 'tis gone: i bless you at the last. you know all's between you and me: what has the world to do with it? farewell! _charles_ [_at the door_]. balfour! balfour! _enter balfour._ the parliament!--go to them: i grant all demands. their sittings shall be permanent: tell them to keep their money if they will: i'll come to them for every coat i wear and every crust i eat: only i choose to pardon strafford. as the queen shall choose! --you never heard the people howl for blood, beside! _balfour._ your majesty may hear them now: the walls can hardly keep their murmurs out: please you retire! _charles._ take all the troops, balfour! _balfour._ there are some hundred thousand of the crowd. _charles._ come with me, strafford! you'll not fear, at least! _strafford._ balfour, say nothing to the world of this! i charge you, as a dying man, forget you gazed upon this agony of one ... of one ... or if ... why you may say, balfour, the king was sorry: 'tis no shame in him: yes, you may say he even wept, balfour, and that i walked the lighter to the block because of it. i shall walk lightly, sir! earth fades, heaven breaks on me: i shall stand next before god's throne: the moment's close at hand when man the first, last time, has leave to lay his whole heart bare before its maker, leave to clear up the long error of a life and choose one happiness for evermore. with all mortality about me, charles, the sudden wreck, the dregs of violent death-- what if, despite the opening angel-song, there penetrate one prayer for you? be saved through me! bear witness, no one could prevent my death! lead on! ere he awake--best, now! all must be ready: did you say, balfour, the crowd began to murmur? they'll be kept too late for sermon at st. antholin's! now! but tread softly--children are at play in the next room. precede! i follow-- _enter +lady+ carlisle with many +attendants+._ _lady carlisle._ me! follow me, strafford, and be saved! the king? [_to the king._] well--as you ordered, they are ranged without, the convoy.... [_seeing the king's state._] [_to strafford._] you know all, then! why i thought it looked best that the king should save you,--charles alone; 'tis a shame that you should owe me aught. or no, not shame! strafford, you'll not feel shame at being saved by me? _hollis._ all true! oh strafford, she saves you! all her deed! this lady's deed! and is the boat in readiness? you, friend, are billingsley, no doubt. speak to her, strafford! see how she trembles, waiting for your voice! the world's to learn its bravest story yet. _lady carlisle._ talk afterward! long nights in france enough, to sit beneath the vines and talk of home. _strafford._ you love me, child? ah, strafford can be loved as well as vane! i could escape, then? _lady carlisle._ haste! advance the torches, bryan! _strafford._ i will die. they call me proud: but england had no right, when she encountered me--her strength to mine-- to find the chosen foe a craven. girl, i fought her to the utterance, i fell, i am hers now, and i will die. beside, the lookers-on! eliot is all about this place, with his most uncomplaining brow. _lady carlisle._ strafford! _strafford._ i think if you could know how much i love you, you would be repaid, my friend! _lady carlisle._ then, for my sake! _strafford._ even for your sweet sake, i stay. _hollis._ for _their_ sake! _strafford._ to bequeath a stain? leave me! girl, humor me and let me die! _lady carlisle._ bid him escape--wake, king! bid him escape! _strafford._ true, i will go! die, and forsake the king? i'll not draw back from the last service. _lady carlisle._ strafford! _strafford._ and, after all, what is disgrace to me? let us come, child! that it should end this way! lead them! but i feel strangely: it was not to end this way. _lady carlisle._ lean--lean on me! _strafford._ my king! oh, had he trusted me--his friend of friends! _lady carlisle._ i can support him, hollis! _strafford._ not this way! this gate--i dreamed of it, this very gate. _lady carlisle._ it opens on the river: our good boat is moored below, our friends are there. _strafford._ the same: only with something ominous and dark, fatal, inevitable. _lady carlisle._ strafford! strafford! _strafford._ not by this gate! i feel what will be there! i dreamed of it, i tell you: touch it not! _lady carlisle._ to save the king,--strafford, to save the king! [_as strafford opens the door, pym is discovered with hampden, vane, etc. strafford falls back; pym follows slowly and confronts him._ _pym._ have i done well? speak, england! whose sole sake i still have labored for, with disregard to my own heart,--for whom my youth was made barren, my manhood waste, to offer up her sacrifice--this friend, this wentworth here-- who walked in youth with me, loved me, it may be, and whom, for his forsaking england's cause, i hunted by all means (trusting that she would sanctify all means) even to the block which waits for him. and saying this, i feel no bitterer pang than first i felt, the hour i swore that wentworth might leave us, but i would never leave him: i do leave him now. i render up my charge (be witness, god!) to england who imposed it. i have done her bidding--poorly, wrongly,--it may be, with ill effects--for i am weak, a man: still, i have done my best, my human best, not faltering for a moment. it is done. and this said, if i say ... yes, i will say i never loved but one man--david not more jonathan! even thus, i love him now: and look for my chief portion in that world where great hearts led astray are turned again, (soon it may be, and, certes, will be soon: my mission over, i shall not live long,)-- ay, here i know i talk--i dare and must, of england, and her great reward, as all i look for there; but in my inmost heart, believe, i think of stealing quite away to walk once more with wentworth--my youth's friend purged from all error, gloriously renewed, and eliot shall not blame us. then indeed.... this is no meeting, wentworth! tears increase too hot. a thin mist--is it blood?--enwraps the face i loved once. then, the meeting be! _strafford._ i have loved england too; we'll meet then, pym. as well die now! youth is the only time to think and to decide on a great course: manhood with action follows; but 'tis dreary, to have to alter our whole life in age-- the time past, the strength gone! as well die now. when we meet, pym, i'd be set right--not now! best die. then if there's any fault, fault too dies, smothered up. poor grey old little laud may dream his dream out, of a perfect church, in some blind corner. and there's no one left. i trust the king now wholly to you, pym! and yet, i know not: i shall not be there: friends fail--if he have any. and he's weak, and loves the queen, and.... oh, my fate is nothing-- nothing! but not that awful head--not that! _pym._ if england shall declare such will to me.... _strafford._ pym, you help england! i, that am to die, what i must see! 'tis here--all here! my god, let me but gasp out, in one word of fire, how thou wilt plague him, satiating hell! what? england that you help, become through you a green and putrefying charnel, left our children ... some of us have children, pym-- some who, without that, still must ever wear a darkened brow, an over-serious look, and never properly be young! no word? what if i curse you? send a strong curse forth clothed from my heart, lapped round with horror till she's fit with her white face to walk the world scaring kind natures from your cause and you-- then to sit down with you at the board-head, the gathering for prayer.... o speak, but speak! ... creep up, and quietly follow each one home, you, you, you, be a nestling care for each to sleep with,--hardly moaning in his dreams. she gnaws so quietly,--till, lo he starts, gets off with half a heart eaten away! oh, shall you 'scape with less if she's my child? you will not say a word--to me--to him? _pym._ if england shall declare such will to me.... _strafford._ no, not for england now, not for heaven now,-- see, pym, for my sake, mine who kneel to you! there, i will thank you for the death, my friend! this is the meeting: let me love you well! _pym._ england,--i am thine own! dost thou exact that service? i obey thee to the end. _strafford._ o god, i shall die first--i shall die first! * * * * * a lively picture of cavalier sentiment is given in the "cavalier tunes"--which ought to furnish conclusive proof that browning does not always put himself into his work. they may be compared with the words set to avison's march given in the last chapter which presents just as sympathetically "roundhead" sentiment. i. marching along i kentish sir byng stood for his king, bidding the crop-headed parliament swing: and, pressing a troop unable to stoop and see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, marched them along, fifty-score strong, great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. [illustration: the tower: traitors' gate] ii god for king charles! pym and such carles to the devil that prompts 'em their treasonous parles! cavaliers, up! lips from the cup, hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup till you're-- chorus.--_marching along, fifty-score strong, great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song._ iii hampden to hell, and his obsequies' knell serve hazelrig, fiennes, and young harry as well! england, good cheer! rupert is near! kentish and loyalists, keep we not here chorus.--_marching along, fifty-score strong, great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song?_ iv then, god for king charles! pym and his snarls to the devil that pricks on such pestilent carles! hold by the right, you double your might; so, onward to nottingham, fresh for the fight, chorus.--_march we along, fifty-score strong, great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song!_ ii. give a rouse i king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles! ii who gave me the goods that went since? who raised me the house that sank once? who helped me to gold i spent since? who found me in wine you drank once? chorus.--_king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles!_ iii to whom used my boy george quaff else, by the old fool's side that begot him? for whom did he cheer and laugh else, while noll's damned troopers shot him? chorus.--_king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles!_ iii. boot and saddle i boot, saddle, to horse, and away! rescue my castle before the hot day brightens to blue from its silvery grey, chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away!_" ii ride past the suburbs, asleep as you'd say; many's the friend there, will listen and pray "god's luck to gallants that strike up the lay--" chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away!_" iii forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay, flouts castle brancepeth the roundheads' array: who laughs, "good fellows ere this, by my fay," chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away!_" iv who? my wife gertrude; that, honest and gay, laughs when you talk of surrendering, "nay! i've better counsellors; what counsel they?" chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away!_" though not illustrative of the subject in hand, "martin relph" is included here on account of the glimpse it gives of an episode, interesting in english history, though devoid of serious consequences, since it marked the final abortive struggle of a dying cause. an imaginary incident of the rebellion in the time of george ii., forms the background of "martin relph," the point of the story being the life-long agony of reproach suffered by martin who let his envy and jealousy conquer him at a crucial moment. the history of the attempt of charles edward to get back the crown of england, supported by a few thousand highlanders, of his final defeat at the battle of culloden, and of the decay henceforth of jacobitism, needs no telling. the treatment of spies as herein shown is a common-place of war-times, but that a reprieve exonerating the accused should be prevented from reaching its destination in time through the jealousy of the only person who saw it coming gives the episode a tragic touch lifting it into an atmosphere of peculiar individual pathos. martin relph _my grandfather says he remembers he saw, when a youngster long ago, on a bright may day, a strange old man, with a beard as white as snow, stand on the hill outside our town like a monument of woe, and, striking his bare bald head the while, sob out the reason--so!_ if i last as long at methuselah i shall never forgive myself: but--god forgive me, that i pray, unhappy martin relph, as coward, coward i call him--him, yes, him! away from me! get you behind the man i am now, you man that i used to be! what can have sewed my mouth up, set me a-stare, all eyes, no tongue? people have urged "you visit a scare too hard on a lad so young! you were taken aback, poor boy," they urge, "no time to regain your wits: besides it had maybe cost you life." ay, there is the cap which fits! so, cap me, the coward,--thus! no fear! a cuff on the brow does good: the feel of it hinders a worm inside which bores at the brain for food. see now, there certainly seems excuse: for a moment, i trust, dear friends, the fault was but folly, no fault of mine, or if mine, i have made amends! for, every day that is first of may, on the hill-top, here stand i, martin relph, and i strike my brow, and publish the reason why, when there gathers a crowd to mock the fool. no fool, friends, since the bite of a worm inside is worse to bear: pray god i have balked him quite! i'll tell you. certainly much excuse! it came of the way they cooped us peasantry up in a ring just here, close huddling because tight-hooped by the red-coats round us villagers all: they meant we should see the sight and take the example,--see, not speak, for speech was the captain's right. "you clowns on the slope, beware!" cried he: "this woman about to die gives by her fate fair warning to such acquaintance as play the spy. henceforth who meddle with matters of state above them perhaps will learn that peasants should stick to their plough-tail, leave to the king the king's concern. "here's a quarrel that sets the land on fire, between king george and his foes: what call has a man of your kind--much less, a woman--to interpose? yet you needs must be meddling, folk like you, not foes--so much the worse! the many and loyal should keep themselves unmixed with the few perverse. "is the counsel hard to follow? i gave it you plainly a month ago, and where was the good? the rebels have learned just all that they need to know. not a month since in we quietly marched: a week, and they had the news, from a list complete of our rank and file to a note of our caps and shoes. "all about all we did and all we were doing and like to do! only, i catch a letter by luck, and capture who wrote it, too. some of you men look black enough, but the milk-white face demure betokens the finger foul with ink: 'tis a woman who writes, be sure! "is it 'dearie, how much i miss your mouth!'--good natural stuff, she pens? some sprinkle of that, for a blind, of course: with talk about cocks and hens, how 'robin has built on the apple-tree, and our creeper which came to grief through the frost, we feared, is twining afresh round casement in famous leaf.' "but all for a blind! she soon glides frank into 'horrid the place is grown with officers here and privates there, no nook we may call our own: and farmer giles has a tribe to house, and lodging will be to seek for the second company sure to come ('tis whispered) on monday week.' "and so to the end of the chapter! there! the murder you see, was out: easy to guess how the change of mind in the rebels was brought about! safe in the trap would they now lie snug, had treachery made no sign: but treachery meets a just reward, no matter if fools malign! "that traitors had played us false, was proved--sent news which fell so pat: and the murder was out--this letter of love, the sender of this sent that! 'tis an ugly job, though, all the same--a hateful, to have to deal with a case of the kind, when a woman's in fault: we soldiers need nerves of steel! "so, i gave her a chance, despatched post-haste a message to vincent parkes whom she wrote to; easy to find he was, since one of the king's own clerks, ay, kept by the king's own gold in the town close by where the rebels camp: a sort of a lawyer, just the man to betray our sort--the scamp! "'if her writing is simple and honest and only the lover-like stuff it looks, and if you yourself are a loyalist, nor down in the rebels' books, come quick,' said i, 'and in person prove you are each of you clear of crime, or martial law must take its course: this day next week's the time!' "next week is now: does he come? not he! clean gone, our clerk, in a trice! he has left his sweetheart here in the lurch: no need of a warning twice! his own neck free, but his partner's fast in the noose still, here she stands to pay for her fault. 'tis an ugly job: but soldiers obey commands. "and hearken wherefore i make a speech! should any acquaintance share the folly that led to the fault that is now to be punished, let fools beware! look black, if you please, but keep hands white: and, above all else, keep wives-- or sweethearts or what they may be--from ink! not a word now, on your lives!" black? but the pit's own pitch was white to the captain's face--the brute with the bloated cheeks and the bulgy nose and the bloodshot eyes to suit! he was muddled with wine, they say: more like, he was out of his wits with fear; he had but a handful of men, that's true,--a riot might cost him dear. and all that time stood rosamund page, with pinioned arms and face bandaged about, on the turf marked out for the party's firing-place. i hope she was wholly with god: i hope 'twas his angel stretched a hand to steady her so, like the shape of stone you see in our church-aisle stand. i hope there was no vain fancy pierced the bandage to vex her eyes, no face within which she missed without, no questions and no replies-- "why did you leave me to die?"--"because...." oh, fiends, too soon you grin at merely a moment of hell, like that--such heaven as hell ended in! let mine end too! he gave the word, up went the guns in a line. those heaped on the hill were blind as dumb,--for, of all eyes, only mine looked over the heads of the foremost rank. some fell on their knees in prayer, some sank to the earth, but all shut eyes, with a sole exception there. that was myself, who had stolen up last, had sidled behind the group: i am highest of all on the hill-top, there stand fixed while the others stoop! from head to foot in a serpent's twine am i tightened: _i_ touch ground? no more than a gibbet's rigid corpse which the fetters rust around! can i speak, can i breathe, can i burst--aught else but see, see, only see? and see i do--for there comes in sight--a man, it sure must be!-- who staggeringly, stumblingly rises, falls, rises, at random flings his weight on and on, anyhow onward--a man that's mad he arrives too late! else why does he wave a something white high-flourished above his head? why does not he call, cry,--curse the fool!--why throw up his arms instead? o take his fist in your own face, fool! why does not yourself shout "stay! here's a man comes rushing, might and main, with something he's mad to say?" and a minute, only a moment, to have hell-fire boil up in your brain, and ere you can judge things right, choose heaven,--time's over, repentance vain! they level: a volley, a smoke and the clearing of smoke: i see no more of the man smoke hid, nor his frantic arms, nor the something white he bore. but stretched on the field, some half-mile off, is an object. surely dumb, deaf, blind were we struck, that nobody heard, not one of us saw him come! has he fainted through fright? one may well believe! what is it he holds so fast? turn him over, examine the face! heyday! what, vincent parkes at last? dead! dead as she, by the self-same shot: one bullet has ended both, her in the body and him in the soul. they laugh at our plighted troth. "till death us do part?" till death us do join past parting--that sounds like betrothal indeed! o vincent parkes, what need has my fist to strike? i helped you: thus were you dead and wed: one bound, and your soul reached hers! there is clenched in your hand the thing, signed, sealed, the paper which plain avers she is innocent, innocent, plain as print, with the king's arms broad engraved: no one can hear, but if any one high on the hill can see, she's saved! and torn his garb and bloody his lips with heart-break--plain it grew how the week's delay had been brought about: each guess at the end proved true. it was hard to get at the folk in power: such waste of time! and then such pleading and praying, with, all the while, his lamb in the lion's den! and at length when he wrung their pardon out, no end to the stupid forms-- the license and leave: i make no doubt--what wonder if passion warms the pulse in a man if you play with his heart?--he was something hasty in speech; anyhow, none would quicken the work: he had to beseech, beseech! and the thing once signed, sealed, safe in his grasp,--what followed but fresh delays? for the floods were out, he was forced to take such a roundabout of ways! and 'twas "halt there!" at every turn of the road, since he had to cross the thick of the red-coats: what did they care for him and his "quick, for god's sake, quick!" horse? but he had one: had it how long? till the first knave smirked "you brag yourself a friend of the king's? then lend to a king's friend here your nag!" money to buy another? why, piece by piece they plundered him still, with their "wait you must;--no help: if aught can help you, a guinea will!" and a borough there was--i forget the name--whose mayor must have the bench of justices ranged to clear a doubt: for "vincent," thinks he, sounds french! it well may have driven him daft, god knows! all man can certainly know is--rushing and falling and rising, at last he arrived in a horror--so! when a word, cry, gasp, would have rescued both! ay bite me! the worm begins at his work once more. had cowardice proved--that only--my sin of sins! friends, look you here! suppose ... suppose.... but mad i am, needs must be! judas the damned would never have dared such a sin as i dream! for, see! suppose i had sneakingly loved her myself, my wretched self, and dreamed in the heart of me "she were better dead than happy and his!"--while gleamed a light from hell as i spied the pair in a perfectest embrace, he the savior and she the saved,--bliss born of the very murder-place! no! say i was scared, friends! call me fool and coward, but nothing worse! jeer at the fool and gibe at the coward! 'twas ever the coward's curse that fear breeds fancies in such: such take their shadow for substance still, --a fiend at their back. i liked poor parkes,--loved vincent, if you will! and her--why, i said "good morrow" to her, "good even," and nothing more: the neighborly way! she was just to me as fifty had been before. so, coward it is and coward shall be! there's a friend, now! thanks! a drink of water i wanted: and now i can walk, get home by myself, i think. this poem, on an incident in clive's life, is also included on account of its english historical setting. the remarkable career of robert clive cannot be gone into here. suffice it to refresh one's memory with a few principal events of his life. he was born in shopshire in . he entered the service of the east india company at eighteen and was sent to madras. here, on account of his falling into debt, and being in danger of losing his situation, he twice tried to shoot himself. the pistol failed to go off, however, and he became impressed with the idea that some great destiny was awaiting him. his feeling was fully realized as his subsequent career in india shows. at twenty-seven, when he returned to england he had made the english the first military power in india. on his return to india ( - ) he took a further step and secured for the english a political supremacy. finally, on his last visit, he crowned his earlier exploits by putting the english dominance on a sounder basis of integrity than it had before been. the incident related in the poem by the old man, browning heard from mrs. jameson, who had shortly before heard it from macaulay at lansdowne house. macaulay mentions it in his essay: "of his personal courage he had, while still a writer [clerk] given signal proof by a desperate duel with a military bully who was the terror of fort st. david." the old gentleman in the poem evidently mixed up his dates slightly, for he says this incident occurred when clive was twenty-one, and he represents him as committing suicide twenty-five years afterwards. clive was actually forty-nine when he took his own life. clive i and clive were friends--and why not? friends! i think you laugh, my lad. clive it was gave england india, while your father gives--egad, england nothing but the graceless boy who lures him on to speak-- "well, sir, you and clive were comrades--" with a tongue thrust in your cheek! very true: in my eyes, your eyes, all the world's eyes, clive was man, i was, am and ever shall be--mouse, nay, mouse of all its clan sorriest sample, if you take the kitchen's estimate for fame; while the man clive--he fought plassy, spoiled the clever foreign game, conquered and annexed and englished! never mind! as o'er my punch (you away) i sit of evenings,--silence, save for biscuit-crunch, black, unbroken,--thought grows busy, thrids each pathway of old years, notes this forthright, that meander, till the long-past life appears like an outspread map of country plodded through, each mile and rood, once, and well remembered still: i'm startled in my solitude ever and anon by--what's the sudden mocking light that breaks on me as i slap the table till no rummer-glass but shakes while i ask--aloud, i do believe, god help me!--"was it thus? can it be that so i faltered, stopped when just one step for us--" (us,--you were not born, i grant, but surely some day born would be) "--one bold step had gained a province" (figurative talk, you see) "got no end of wealth and honor,--yet i stood stock still no less?" --"for i was not clive," you comment: but it needs no clive to guess wealth were handy, honor ticklish, did no writing on the wall warn me "trespasser, 'ware man-traps!" him who braves that notice--call hero! none of such heroics suit myself who read plain words, doff my hat, and leap no barrier. scripture says the land's the lord's: louts them--what avail the thousand, noisy in a smock-frocked ring, all-agog to have me trespass, clear the fence, be clive their king? higher warrant must you show me ere i set one foot before t'other in that dark direction, though i stand for evermore poor as job and meek as moses. evermore? no! by-and-by job grows rich and moses valiant, clive turns out less wise than i. don't object "why call him friend, then?" power is power, my boy, and still marks a man,--god's gift magnific, exercised for good or ill. you've your boot now on my hearth-rug, tread what was a tiger's skin: rarely such a royal monster as i lodged the bullet in! true, he murdered half a village, so his own death came to pass; still, for size and beauty, cunning, courage--ah, the brute he was! why, that clive,--that youth, that greenhorn, that quill-driving clerk, in fine,-- he sustained a siege in arcot.... but the world knows! pass the wine. where did i break off at? how bring clive in? oh, you mentioned "fear"! just so: and, said i, that minds me of a story you shall hear. we were friends then, clive and i: so, when the clouds, about the orb late supreme, encroaching slowly, surely, threatened to absorb ray by ray its noontide brilliance,--friendship might, with steadier eye drawing near, bear what had burned else, now no blaze--all majesty. too much bee's-wing floats my figure? well, suppose a castle's new: none presume to climb its ramparts, none find foothold sure for shoe 'twixt those squares and squares of granite plating the impervious pile as his scale-mail's warty iron cuirasses a crocodile. reels that castle thunder-smitten, storm-dismantled? from without scrambling up by crack and crevice, every cockney prates about towers--the heap he kicks now! turrets--just the measure of his cane! will that do? observe moreover--(same similitude again)-- such a castle seldom crumbles by sheer stress of cannonade: 'tis when foes are foiled and fighting's finished that vile rains invade, grass o'ergrows, o'ergrows till night-birds congregating find no holes fit to build in like the topmost sockets made for banner-poles. so clive crumbled slow in london--crashed at last. a week before, dining with him,--after trying churchyard-chat of days of yore,-- both of us stopped, tired as tombstones, head-piece, foot-piece, when they lean each to other, drowsed in fog-smoke, o'er a coffined past between. as i saw his head sink heavy, guessed the soul's extinguishment by the glazing eyeball, noticed how the furtive fingers went where a drug-box skulked behind the honest liquor,--"one more throw try for clive!" thought i: "let's venture some good rattling question!" so-- "come, clive, tell us"--out i blurted--"what to tell in turn, years hence, when my boy--suppose i have one--asks me on what evidence i maintain my friend of plassy proved a warrior every whit worth your alexanders, cæsars, marlboroughs and--what said pitt?-- frederick the fierce himself! clive told me once"--i want to say-- "which feat out of all those famous doings bore the bell away --in his own calm estimation, mark you, not the mob's rough guess-- which stood foremost as evincing what clive called courageousness! come! what moment of the minute, what speck-center in the wide circle of the action saw your mortal fairly deified? (let alone that filthy sleep-stuff, swallow bold this wholesome port!) if a friend has leave to question,--when were you most brave, in short?" up he arched his brows o' the instant--formidably clive again. "when was i most brave? i'd answer, were the instance half as plain as another instance that's a brain-lodged crystal--curse it!--here freezing when my memory touches--ugh!--the time i felt most fear. ugh! i cannot say for certain if i showed fear--anyhow, fear i felt, and, very likely, shuddered, since i shiver now." "fear!" smiled i. "well, that's the rarer: that's a specimen to seek, ticket up in one's museum, _mind-freaks_, _lord clive's fear_, _unique_!" down his brows dropped. on the table painfully he pored as though tracing, in the stains and streaks there, thoughts encrusted long ago. when he spoke 'twas like a lawyer reading word by word some will, some blind jungle of a statement,--beating on and on until out there leaps fierce life to fight with. "this fell in my factor-days. desk-drudge, slaving at st. david's, one must game, or drink, or craze. i chose gaming: and,--because your high-flown gamesters hardly take umbrage at a factor's elbow if the factor pays his stake,-- i was winked at in a circle where the company was choice, captain this and major that, men high of color, loud of voice, yet indulgent, condescending to the modest juvenile who not merely risked but lost his hard-earned guineas with a smile. "down i sat to cards, one evening,--had for my antagonist somebody whose name's a secret--you'll know why--so, if you list, call him cock o' the walk, my scarlet son of mars from head to heel! play commenced: and, whether cocky fancied that a clerk must feel quite sufficient honor came of bending over one green baize, i the scribe with him the warrior,--guessed no penman dared to raise shadow of objection should the honor stay but playing end more or less abruptly,--whether disinclined he grew to spend practice strictly scientific on a booby born to stare at--not ask of--lace-and-ruffles if the hand they hide plays fair,-- anyhow, i marked a movement when he bade me 'cut!' "i rose. 'such the new manoeuvre, captain? i'm a novice: knowledge grows. what, you force a card, you cheat, sir?' "never did a thunder-clap cause emotion, startle thyrsis locked with chloe in his lap, as my word and gesture (down i flung my cards to join the pack) fired the man of arms, whose visage, simply red before, turned black. "when he found his voice, he stammered 'that expression once again!' "'well, you forced a card and cheated!' "'possibly a factor's brain, busied with his all-important balance of accounts, may deem weighing words superfluous trouble: _cheat_ to clerkly ears may seem just the joke for friends to venture: but we are not friends, you see! when a gentleman is joked with,--if he's good at repartee, he rejoins, as do i--sirrah, on your knees, withdraw in full! beg my pardon, or be sure a kindly bullet through your skull lets in light and teaches manners to what brain it finds! choose quick-- have your life snuffed out or, kneeling, pray me trim yon candle-wick!' "'well, you cheated!' "then outbroke a howl from all the friends around. to his feet sprang each in fury, fists were clenched and teeth were ground. 'end it! no time like the present! captain, yours were our disgrace! no delay, begin and finish! stand back, leave the pair a space! let civilians be instructed: henceforth simply ply the pen, fly the sword! this clerk's no swordsman? suit him with a pistol, then! even odds! a dozen paces 'twixt the most and least expert make a dwarf a giant's equal: nay, the dwarf, if he's alert, likelier hits the broader target!' "up we stood accordingly. as they handed me the weapon, such was my soul's thirst to try then and there conclusions with this bully, tread on and stamp out every spark of his existence, that,--crept close to, curled about by that toying tempting teasing fool-fore-finger's middle joint,-- don't you guess?--the trigger yielded. gone my chance! and at the point of such prime success moreover: scarce an inch above his head went my ball to hit the wainscot. he was living, i was dead. "up he marched in flaming triumph--'twas his right, mind!--up, within just an arm's length. 'now, my clerkling,' chuckled cocky with a grin as the levelled piece quite touched me, 'now, sir counting-house, repeat that expression which i told you proved bad manners! did i cheat?' "'cheat you did, you knew you cheated, and, this moment, know as well. as for me, my homely breeding bids you--fire and go to hell!' "twice the muzzle touched my forehead. heavy barrel, flurried wrist, either spoils a steady lifting. thrice: then, 'laugh at hell who list, i can't! god's no fable either. did this boy's eye wink once? no! there's no standing him and hell and god all three against me,--so, i did cheat!' "and down he threw the pistol, out rushed--by the door possibly, but, as for knowledge if by chimney, roof or floor, he effected disappearance--i'll engage no glance was sent that way by a single starer, such a blank astonishment swallowed up their senses: as for speaking--mute they stood as mice. "mute not long, though! such reaction, such a hubbub in a trice! 'rogue and rascal! who'd have thought it? what's to be expected next, when his majesty's commission serves a sharper as pretext for.... but where's the need of wasting time now? nought requires delay: punishment the service cries for: let disgrace be wiped away publicly, in good broad daylight! resignation? no, indeed drum and fife must play the rogue's march, rank and file be free to speed tardy marching on the rogue's part by appliance in the rear --kicks administered shall right this wronged civilian,--never fear, mister clive, for--though a clerk--you bore yourself--suppose we say-- just as would beseem a soldier!' "'gentlemen, attention--pray! first, one word!' "i passed each speaker severally in review. when i had precise their number, names and styles, and fully knew over whom my supervision thenceforth must extend,--why, then---- "'some five minutes since, my life lay--as you all saw, gentlemen-- at the mercy of your friend there. not a single voice was raised in arrest of judgment, not one tongue--before my powder blazed-- ventured "can it be the youngster blundered, really seemed to mark some irregular proceeding? we conjecture in the dark, guess at random,--still, for sake of fair play--what if for a freak, in a fit of absence,--such things have been!--if our friend proved weak --what's the phrase?--corrected fortune! look into the case, at least!" who dared interpose between the altar's victim and the priest? yet he spared me! you eleven! whosoever, all or each, to the disadvantage of the man who spared me, utters speech --to his face, behind his back,--that speaker has to do with me: me who promise, if positions change and mine the chance should be, not to imitate your friend and waive advantage!' "twenty-five years ago this matter happened: and 'tis certain," added clive, "never, to my knowledge, did sir cocky have a single breath breathed against him: lips were closed throughout his life, or since his death, for if he be dead or living i can tell no more than you. all i know is--cocky had one chance more; how he used it,--grew out of such unlucky habits, or relapsed, and back again brought the late-ejected devil with a score more in his train,-- that's for you to judge. reprieval i procured, at any rate. ugh--the memory of that minute's fear makes gooseflesh rise! why prate longer? you've my story, there's your instance: fear i did, you see!" "well"--i hardly kept from laughing--"if i see it, thanks must be wholly to your lordship's candor. not that--in a common case-- when a bully caught at cheating thrusts a pistol in one's face, i should underrate, believe me, such a trial to the nerve! 'tis no joke, at one-and-twenty, for a youth to stand nor swerve. fear i naturally look for--unless, of all men alive, i am forced to make exception when i come to robert clive. since at arcot, plassy, elsewhere, he and death--the whole world knows-- came to somewhat closer quarters." quarters? had we come to blows, clive and i, you had not wondered--up he sprang so, out he rapped such a round of oaths--no matter! i'll endeavor to adapt to our modern usage words he--well, 'twas friendly license--flung at me like so many fire-balls, fast as he could wag his tongue. "you--a soldier? you--at plassy? yours the faculty to nick instantaneously occasion when your foe, if lightning-quick, --at his mercy, at his malice,--has you, through some stupid inch undefended in your bulwark? thus laid open,--not to flinch --that needs courage, you'll concede me. then, look here! suppose the man, checking his advance, his weapon still extended, not a span distant from my temple,--curse him!--quietly had bade me 'there! keep your life, calumniator!--worthless life i freely spare: mine you freely would have taken--murdered me and my good fame both at once--and all the better! go, and thank your own bad aim which permits me to forgive you!' what if, with such words as these, he had cast away his weapon? how should i have borne me, please? nay, i'll spare you pains and tell you. this, and only this, remained-- pick his weapon up and use it on myself. i so had gained sleep the earlier, leaving england probably to pay on still rent and taxes for half india, tenant at the frenchman's will." "such the turn," said i, "the matter takes with you? then i abate --no, by not one jot nor tittle,--of your act my estimate. fear--i wish i could detect there: courage fronts me, plain enough-- call it desperation, madness--never mind! for here's in rough why, had mine been such a trial, fear had overcome disgrace. true, disgrace were hard to bear: but such a rush against god's face --none of that for me, lord plassy, since i go to church at times, say the creed my mother taught me! many years in foreign climes rub some marks away--not all, though! we poor sinners reach life's brink, overlook what rolls beneath it, recklessly enough, but think there's advantage in what's left us--ground to stand on, time to call 'lord, have mercy!' ere we topple over--do not leap, that's all!" oh, he made no answer,--re-absorbed into his cloud. i caught something like "yes--courage: only fools will call it fear." if aught comfort you, my great unhappy hero clive, in that i heard, next week, how your own hand dealt you doom, and uttered just the word "fearfully courageous!"--this, be sure, and nothing else i groaned. i'm no clive, nor parson either: clive's worst deed--we'll hope condoned. chapter iv social aspects of english life browning's poetry presents no such complete panorama of phases of social life in england as it does of those in italy, perhaps, because there is a poise and solidity about the english character which does not lend itself to so great a variety of mood as one may find in the peculiarly artistic temperament of the italians, especially those of the renaissance period. even such irregular proceedings as murders have their philosophical after-claps which show their usefulness in the divine scheme of things, while unfortunate love affairs work such beneficent results in character that they are shorn of much of their tragedy of sorrow. there is quite a group of love-lyrics with no definite setting that might be put down as english in temper. it does not require much imagination to think of the lover who sings so lofty a strain in "one way of love" as english:-- i all june i bound the rose in sheaves. now, rose by rose, i strip the leaves and strew them where pauline may pass. she will not turn aside? alas! let them lie. suppose they die? the chance was they might take her eye. ii how many a month i strove to suit these stubborn fingers to the lute! to-day i venture all i know. she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing: suppose pauline had bade me sing! iii my whole life long i learned to love. this hour my utmost art i prove and speak my passion--heaven or hell? she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! lose who may--i still can say, those who win heaven, blest are they! and is not this treatment of a "pretty woman" more english than not? a pretty woman i that fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers, and the blue eye dear and dewy, and that infantine fresh air of hers! ii to think men cannot take you, sweet, and enfold you, ay, and hold you, and so keep you what they make you, sweet! iii you like us for a glance, you know-- for a word's sake or a sword's sake, all's the same, whate'er the chance, you know. iv and in turn we make you ours, we say-- you and youth too, eyes and mouth too, all the face composed of flowers, we say. v all's our own, to make the most of, sweet-- sing and say for, watch and pray for, keep a secret or go boast of, sweet! vi but for loving, why, you would not, sweet, though we prayed you, paid you, brayed you in a mortar--for you could not, sweet! vii so, we leave the sweet face fondly there: be its beauty its sole duty! let all hope of grace beyond, lie there! viii and while the face lies quiet there, who shall wonder that i ponder a conclusion? i will try it there. ix as,--why must one, for the love foregone, scout mere liking? thunder-striking earth,--the heaven, we looked above for, gone! x why, with beauty, needs there money be, love with liking? crush the fly-king in his gauze, because no honey-bee? xi may not liking be so simple-sweet, if love grew there 'twould undo there all that breaks the cheek to dimples sweet? xii is the creature too imperfect, say? would you mend it and so end it? since not all addition perfects aye! xiii or is it of its kind, perhaps, just perfection-- whence, rejection of a grace not to its mind, perhaps? xiv shall we burn up, tread that face at once into tinder, and so hinder sparks from kindling all the place at once? xv or else kiss away one's soul on her? your love-fancies! --a sick man sees truer, when his hot eyes roll on her! xvi thus the craftsman thinks to grace the rose,-- plucks a mould-flower for his gold flower, uses fine things that efface the rose: xvii rosy rubies make its cup more rose, precious metals ape the petals,-- last, some old king locks it up, morose! xviii then how grace a rose? i know a way! leave it, rather. must you gather? smell, kiss, wear it--at last, throw away! "the last ride together" may be cited as another example of the philosophy which an englishman, or at any rate a browning, can evolve from a more or less painful episode. the last ride together i i said--then, dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all my life seemed meant for, fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave,--i claim only a memory of the same, --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me. ii my mistress bent that brow of hers; those deep dark eyes where pride demurs when pity would be softening through, fixed me a breathing-while or two with life or death in the balance: right! the blood replenished me again; my last thought was at least not vain: i and my mistress, side by side shall be together, breathe and ride, so, one day more am i deified. who knows but the world may end to-night? iii hush! if you saw some western cloud all billowy-bosomed, over-bowed by many benedictions--sun's-- and moon's and evening-star's at once-- and so, you, looking and loving best, conscious grew, your passion drew cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too, down on you, near and yet more near, till flesh must fade for heaven was here!-- thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear! thus lay she a moment on my breast. iv then we began to ride. my soul smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll freshening and fluttering in the wind. past hopes already lay behind. what need to strive with a life awry? had i said that, had i done this, so might i gain, so might i miss. might she have loved me? just as well she might have hated, who can tell! where had i been now if the worst befell? and here we are riding, she and i. v fail i alone, in words and deeds? why, all men strive and who succeeds? we rode; it seemed my spirit flew, saw other regions, cities new, as the world rushed by on either side. i thought,--all labor, yet no less bear up beneath their unsuccess. look at the end of work, contrast the petty done, the undone vast, this present of theirs with the hopeful past! i hoped she would love me; here we ride. vi what hand and brain went ever paired? what heart alike conceived and dared? what act proved all its thought had been? what will but felt the fleshly screen? we ride and i see her bosom heave. there's many a crown for who can reach. ten lines, a stateman's life in each! the flag stuck on a heap of bones, a soldier's doing! what atones? they scratch his name on the abbey-stones. my riding is better, by their leave. vii what does it all mean, poet? well, your brains beat into rhythm, you tell what we felt only; you expressed you hold things beautiful the best, and pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 'tis something, nay 'tis much: but then, have you yourself what's best for men? are you--poor, sick, old ere your time-- nearer one whit your own sublime than we who never have turned a rhyme? sing, riding's a joy! for me, i ride. viii and you, great sculptor--so, you gave a score of years to art, her slave, and that's your venus, whence we turn to yonder girl that fords the burn! you acquiesce, and shall i repine? what, man of music, you grown grey with notes and nothing else to say, is this your sole praise from a friend, "greatly his opera's strains intend, but in music we know how fashions end!" i gave my youth; but we ride, in fine. ix who knows what's fit for us? had fate proposed bliss here should sublimate my being--had i signed the bond-- still one must lead some life beyond, have a bliss to die with, dim-descried. this foot once planted on the goal, this glory-garland round my soul, could i descry such? try and test! i sink back shuddering from the quest. earth being so good, would heaven seem best? now, heaven and she are beyond this ride. x and yet--she has not spoke so long! what if heaven be that, fair and strong at life's best, with our eyes upturned whither life's flower is first discerned, we, fixed so, ever should so abide? what if we still ride on, we two with life for ever old yet new, changed not in kind but in degree, the instant made eternity,-- and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, for ever ride? "james lee's wife" is also english in temper as the english name indicates sufficiently, though the scene is laid out of england. this wife has her agony over the faithless husband, but she plans vengeance against neither him nor the other women who attract him. she realizes that his nature is not a deep and serious one like her own, and in her highest reach she sees that her own nature has been lifted up by means of her true and loyal feeling, that this gain to herself is her reward, or will be in some future state. the stanzas giving this thought are among the most beautiful in the poem. among the rocks i oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, this autumn morning! how he sets his bones to bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet for the ripple to run over in its mirth; listening the while, where on the heap of stones the white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. ii that is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true; such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows. if you loved only what were worth your love, love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: make the low nature better by your throes! give earth yourself, go up for gain above! two of the longer poems have distinctly english settings: "a blot in the scutcheon" and "the inn album;" while, of the shorter ones, "ned bratts" has an english theme, and "halbert and hob" though not founded upon an english story has been given an english _mis en scène_ by browning. in the "blot," we get a glimpse of eighteenth century aristocratic england. the estate over which lord tresham presided was one of those typical country kingdoms, which have for centuries been so conspicuous a feature of english life, and which through the assemblies of the great, often gathered within their walls, wielded potent influences upon political life. the play opens with the talk of a group of retainers, such as formed the household of these lordly establishments. it was not a rare thing for the servants of the great to be admitted into intimacy with the family, as was the case with gerard. they were often people of a superior grade, hardly to be classed with servants in the sense unfortunately given to that word to-day. besides the house and the park which figure in the play, such an estate had many acres of land devoted to agriculture--some of it, called the demesne, which was cultivated for the benefit of the owner, and some land held in villeinage which the unfree tenants, called villeins, were allowed to till for themselves. all this land might be in one large tract, or the demesne might be separate from the other. mertoun speaks of their demesnes touching each other. over the villeins presided the bailiff, who kept strict watch to see that they performed their work punctually. his duties were numerous, for he directed the ploughing, sowing and reaping, gave out the seed, watched the harvest, gathered and looked after the stock and horses. a church, a mill and an inn were often included in such an estate. [illustration: an english manor house] pride in their ancient lineage was, of course, common to noble families, though probably few of them could boast as tresham did that there was no blot in their escutcheon. some writers have even declared that most of the nobles are descended from tradesmen. according to one of these "the great bulk of our peerage is comparatively modern, so far as the titles go; but it is not the less noble that it has been recruited to so large an extent from the ranks of honorable industry. in olden times, the wealth and commerce of london, conducted as it was by energetic and enterprising men was a prolific source of peerages. thus, the earldom of cornwallis was founded by thomas cornwallis, the cheapside merchant; that of essex by william capel, the draper; and that of craven by william craven, the merchant tailor. the modern earl of warwick is not descended from 'the king-maker,' but from william greville, the woolstapler; whilst the modern dukes of northumberland find their head, not in the percies, but in hugh smithson, a respectable london apothecary. the founders of the families of dartmouth, radnor, ducie, and pomfret were respectively a skinner, a silk manufacturer, a merchant tailor, and a calais merchant; whilst the founders of the peerages of tankerville, dormer, and coventry were mercers. the ancestors of earl romney, and lord dudley and ward, were goldsmiths and jewelers; and lord dacres was a banker in the reign of charles i., as lord overstone is in that of queen victoria. edward osborne, the founder of the dukedom of leeds, was apprentice to william hewet, a rich cloth worker on london bridge, whose only daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by leaping into the thames after her, and eventually married. among other peerages founded by trade are those of fitzwilliam, leigh, petre, cowper, darnley, hill, and carrington." perhaps the imaginary house of tresham may be said to find its closest counterpart in the sidney family, for many generations owners of penshurst, and with a traditional character according to which the men were all brave and the women were all pure. sir philip sidney was himself the type of all the virtues of the family, while his father's care for his proper bringing up was not unlike tresham's for mildred. in the words of a recent writer: "the most famous scion of this kentish house was above all things, the moral and intellectual product of penshurst place. in the park may still be seen an avenue of trees, under which the father, in his afternoon walks with the boy, tested his recollection of the morning's lessons conned with the tutor. there, too, it was that he impressed on the lad those maxims for the conduct of life, afterwards emphasized in the correspondence still extant among the penshurst archives. "philip was to begin every day with lifting up his mind to the almighty in hearty prayer, as well as feelingly digesting all he prayed for. he was also, early or late, to be obedient to others, so that in due time others might obey him. the secret of all success lay in a moderate diet with rare use of wine. a gloomy brow was, however, to be avoided. rather should the youth give himself to be merry, so as not to degenerate from his father. above all things should he keep his wit from biting words, or indeed from too much talk of any kind. had not nature ramparted up the tongue with teeth and the lips with hair as reins and bridles against the tongue's loose use. heeding this, he must be sure to tell no untruth even in trifles; for that was a naughty custom, nor could there be a greater reproach to a gentleman than to be accounted a liar. _noblesse oblige_ formed the keynote of the oral and written precepts with which the future sir philip sidney was paternally supplied. by his mother, too, lady mary dudley, the boy must remember himself to be of noble blood. let him beware, therefore, through sloth and vice, of being accounted a blemish on his race." furthermore, the brotherly and sisterly relations of tresham and mildred are not unlike those of sir philip sidney and his sister mary. they studied and worked together in great sympathy, broken into only by the tragic fate of sir philip. although the education of women in those days was chiefly domestic, with a smattering of accomplishments, yet there were exceptional girls who aspired to learning and who became brilliant women. mildred under her brother's tutelage bid fare to be one of this sort. the ideals of the sidneys, it is true, were sixteenth-century ideals. eighteenth-century ideals were proverbially low. england, then, had not recovered from the frivolities inaugurated after the restoration. the slackness and unbelief among the clergy, and the looseness of morals in society were notorious, but this degeneration could not have been universal. there are always a few noahs and their families left to repeople the world with righteousness after a deluge of degeneracy, and browning is quite right in his portrayal of an eighteenth-century knight _sans peur et sans reproche_ who defends the honor of his house with his sword, because of his high moral ideals. besides, the methodist revival led by the wesleys gained constantly in power. it affected not only the people of the middle and lower classes, rescuing them from brutality of mind and manners, but it affected the established church for the better, and made its mark upon the upper classes. "religion, long despised and contemned by the titled and the great" writes withrow, "began to receive recognition and support by men high in the councils of the nation. many ladies of high rank became devout christians. a new element of restraint, compelling at least some outward respect for the decencies of life and observances of religion, was felt at court, where too long corruption and back-stair influence had sway." like all of his kind, no matter what the century, tresham is more than delighted at the thought of an alliance between his house and the noble house to which mertoun belonged. the youth of mildred was no obstacle, for marriages were frequently contracted in those days between young boys and girls. the writer's english grand-father and mother were married at the respective ages of sixteen and fifteen within the boundaries of the nineteenth century. the first two scenes of the play present episodes thoroughly illustrative of the life lived by the "quality." act i scene i.--_the interior of a lodge in lord tresham's park. many retainers crowded at the window, supposed to command a view of the entrance to his mansion._ _gerard, the warrener, his back to a table on which are flagons, etc._ _ st retainer._ ye, do! push, friends, and then you'll push down me! --what for? does any hear a runner's foot or a steed's trample or a coach-wheel's cry? is the earl come or his least poursuivant? but there's no breeding in a man of you save gerard yonder: here's a half-place yet, old gerard! _gerard._ save your courtesies, my friend. here is my place. _ nd retainer._ now, gerard, out with it! what makes you sullen, this of all the days i' the year? to-day that young rich bountiful handsome earl mertoun, whom alone they match with our lord tresham through the country side, is coming here in utmost bravery to ask our master's sister's hand? _gerard._ what then? _ nd retainer._ what then? why, you, she speaks to if she meets your worship, smiles on as you hold apart the boughs to let her through her forest walks you, always favorite for your no deserts you've heard, these three days, how earl mertoun sues to lay his heart and house and broad lands too at lady mildred's feet: and while we squeeze ourselves into a mousehole lest we miss one congee of the least page in his train, you sit o' one side--"there's the earl," say i-- "what then," say you! _ rd retainer._ i'll wager he has let both swans be tamed for lady mildred swim over the falls and gain the river! _gerard._ ralph! is not to-morrow my inspecting day for you and for your hawks? _ th retainer._ let gerard be! he's coarse-grained, like his carved black cross-bow stock. ha, look now, while we squabble with him, look! well done, now--is not this beginning, now, to purpose? _ st retainer._ our retainers look as fine-- that's comfort. lord, how richard holds himself with his white staff! will not a knave behind prick him upright? _ th retainer._ he's only bowing, fool! the earl's man bent us lower by this much. _ st retainer._ that's comfort. here's a very cavalcade! _ rd retainer._ i don't see wherefore richard, and his troop of silk and silver varlets there, should find their perfumed selves so indispensable on high days, holidays! would it so disgrace our family, if i, for instance, stood-- in my right hand a cast of swedish hawks, a leash of greyhounds in my left?-- _gerard._ --with hugh the logman for supporter, in his right the bill-hook, in his left the brushwood-shears! _ rd retainer._ out on you, crab! what next, what next? the earl! _ st retainer._ oh walter, groom, our horses, do they match the earl's? alas, that first pair of the six-- they paw the ground--ah walter! and that brute just on his haunches by the wheel! _ th retainer._ ay--ay! you, philip, are a special hand, i hear, at soups and sauces: what's a horse to you? d'ye mark that beast they've slid into the midst so cunningly?--then, philip, mark this further; no leg has he to stand on! _ st retainer._ no? that's comfort. _ nd retainer._ peace, cook! the earl descends. well, gerard, see the earl at least! come, there's a proper man, i hope! why, ralph, no falcon, pole or swede, has got a starrier eye. _ rd retainer._ his eyes are blue: but leave my hawks alone! _ th retainer._ so young, and yet so tall and shapely! _ th retainer._ here's lord tresham's self! there now--there's what a nobleman should be! he's older, graver, loftier, he's more like a house's head. _ nd retainer._ but you'd not have a boy --and what's the earl beside?--possess too soon that stateliness? _ st retainer._ our master takes his hand-- richard and his white staff are on the move-- back fall our people--(tsh!--there's timothy sure to get tangled in his ribbon-ties, and peter's cursed rosette's a-coming off!) --at last i see our lord's back and his friend's; and the whole beautiful bright company close round them--in they go! [_jumping down from the window-bench, and making for the table and its jugs._] good health, long life great joy to our lord tresham and his house! _ th retainer._ my father drove his father first to court, after his marriage-day--ay, did he! _ nd retainer._ god bless lord tresham, lady mildred, and the earl! here, gerard, reach your beaker! _gerard._ drink, my boys! don't mind me--all's not right about me--drink! _ nd retainer_ [_aside_]. he's vexed, now, that he let the show escape! [_to gerard._] remember that the earl returns this way. _gerard._ that way? _ nd retainer._ just so. _gerard._ then my way's here. [_goes._ _ nd retainer._ old gerard will die soon--mind, i said it! he was used to care about the pitifullest thing that touched the house's honor, not an eye but his could see wherein: and on a cause of scarce a quarter this importance, gerard fairly had fretted flesh and bone away in cares that this was right, nor that was wrong, such point decorous, and such square by rule-- he knew such niceties, no herald more: and now--you see his humor: die he will! _ nd retainer._ god help him! who's for the great servant's hall to hear what's going on inside? they'd follow lord tresham into the saloon. _ rd retainer._ i!-- _ th retainer._ i!-- leave frank alone for catching, at the door, some hint of how the parley goes inside! prosperity to the great house once more! here's the last drop! _ st retainer._ have at you! boys, hurrah! scene ii.--_a saloon in the mansion._ _enter lord thesham, lord mertoun, austin, and guendolen._ _tresham._ i welcome you, lord mertoun, yet once more, to this ancestral roof of mine. your name --noble among the noblest in itself, yet taking in your person, fame avers, new price and lustre,--(as that gem you wear, transmitted from a hundred knightly breasts, fresh chased and set and fixed by its last lord, seems to re-kindle at the core)--your name would win you welcome!-- _mertoun._ thanks! _tresham._ --but add to that, the worthiness and grace and dignity of your proposal for uniting both our houses even closer than respect unites them now--add these, and you must grant one favor more, nor that the least,--to think the welcome i should give;--'tis given! my lord, my only brother, austin: he's the king's. our cousin, lady guendolen--betrothed to austin: all are yours. _mertoun._ i thank you--less for the expressed commendings which your seal, and only that, authenticates--forbids my putting from me ... to my heart i take your praise ... but praise less claims my gratitude, than the indulgent insight it implies of what must needs be uppermost with one who comes, like me, with the bare leave to ask, in weighed and measured unimpassioned words, a gift, which, if as calmly 'tis denied, he must withdraw, content upon his cheek, despair within his soul. that i dare ask firmly, near boldly, near with confidence that gift, i have to thank you. yes, lord tresham, i love your sister--as you'd have one love that lady ... oh more, more i love her! wealth, rank, all the world thinks me, they're yours, you know, to hold or part with, at your choice--but grant my true self, me without a rood of land, a piece of gold, a name of yesterday, grant me that lady, and you ... death or life? _guendolen_ [_apart to austin_]. why, this is loving, austin! _austin._ he's so young! _guendolen._ young? old enough, i think, to half surmise he never had obtained an entrance here, were all this fear and trembling needed. _austin._ hush! he reddens. _guendolen._ mark him, austin; that's true love! ours must begin again. _tresham._ we'll sit, my lord. ever with best desert goes diffidence. i may speak plainly nor be misconceived. that i am wholly satisfied with you on this occasion, when a falcon's eye were dull compared with mine to search out faults, is somewhat. mildred's hand is hers to give or to refuse. _mertoun._ but you, you grant my suit? i have your word if hers? _tresham._ my best of words if hers encourage you. i trust it will. have you seen lady mildred, by the way? _mertoun._ i ... i ... our two demesnes, remember, touch; i have been used to wander carelessly after my stricken game: the heron roused deep in my woods, has trailed its broken wing thro' thicks and glades a mile in yours,--or else some eyass ill-reclaimed has taken flight and lured me after her from tree to tree, i marked not whither. i have come upon the lady's wondrous beauty unaware, and--and then ... i have seen her. _guendolen_ [_aside to austin_]. note that mode of faltering out that, when a lady passed, he, having eyes, did see her! you had said-- "on such a day i scanned her, head to foot; observed a red, where red should not have been, outside her elbow; but was pleased enough upon the whole." let such irreverent talk be lessoned for the future! _tresham._ what's to say may be said briefly. she has never known a mother's care; i stand for father too. her beauty is not strange to you, it seems-- you cannot know the good and tender heart, its girl's trust and its woman's constancy, how pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind, how grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free as light where friends are--how imbued with lore the world most prizes, yet the simplest, yet the ... one might know i talked of mildred--thus we brothers talk! _mertoun._ i thank you. _tresham._ in a word, control's not for this lady; but her wish to please me outstrips in its subtlety my power of being pleased: herself creates the want she means to satisfy. my heart prefers your suit to her as 'twere its own. can i say more? _mertoun._ no more--thanks, thanks--no more! _tresham._ this matter then discussed.... _mertoun._ --we'll waste no breath on aught less precious. i'm beneath the roof which holds her: while i thought of that, my speech to you would wander--as it must not do, since as you favor me i stand or fall. i pray you suffer that i take my leave! _tresham._ with less regret 't is suffered, that again we meet, i hope, so shortly. _mertoun._ we? again?-- ah yes, forgive me--when shall ... you will crown your goodness by forthwith apprising me when ... if ... the lady will appoint a day for me to wait on you--and her. _tresham._ so soon as i am made acquainted with her thoughts on your proposal--howsoe'er they lean-- a messenger shall bring you the result. _mertoun._ you cannot bind me more to you, my lord. farewell till we renew ... i trust, renew a converse ne'er to disunite again. _tresham._ so may it prove! _mertoun._ you, lady, you, sir, take my humble salutation! _guendolen and austin._ thanks! _tresham._ within there! [_+servants+ enter. tresham conducts mertoun to the door. meantime austin remarks_, here i have an advantage of the earl, confess now! i'd not think that all was safe because my lady's brother stood my friend! why, he makes sure of her--"do you say, yes"-- "she'll not say, no,"--what comes it to beside? i should have prayed the brother, "speak this speech, for heaven's sake urge this on her--put in this-- forget not, as you'd save me, t'other thing,-- then set down what she says, and how she looks, and if she smiles, and" (in an under breath) "only let her accept me, and do you and all the world refuse me, if you dare!" _guendolen._ that way you'd take, friend austin? what a shame i was your cousin, tamely from the first your bride, and all this fervor's run to waste! do you know you speak sensibly to-day? the earl's a fool. _austin._ here's thorold. tell him so! _tresham_ [_returning_]. now, voices, voices! 'st! the lady's first! how seems he?--seems he not ... come, faith give fraud the mercy-stroke whenever they engage! down with fraud, up with faith! how seems the earl? a name! a blazon! if you knew their worth, as you will never! come--the earl? _guendolen._ he's young. _tresham._ what's she? an infant save in heart and brain. young! mildred is fourteen, remark! and you ... austin, how old is she? _guendolen._ there's tact for you! i meant that being young was good excuse if one should tax him.... _tresham._ well? _guendolen._ --with lacking wit. _tresham._ he lacked wit? where might he lack wit, so please you? _guendolen._ in standing straighter than the steward's rod and making you the tiresomest harangue, instead of slipping over to my side and softly whispering in my ear, "sweet lady, your cousin there will do me detriment he little dreams of: he's absorbed, i see, in my old name and fame--be sure he'll leave my mildred, when his best account of me is ended, in full confidence i wear my grandsire's periwig down either cheek. i'm lost unless your gentleness vouchsafes".... _tresham._ ... "to give a best of best accounts, yourself, of me and my demerits." you are right! he should have said what now i say for him. yon golden creature, will you help us all? here's austin means to vouch for much, but you --you are ... what austin only knows! come up, all three of us: she's in the library no doubt, for the day's wearing fast. precede! _guendolen._ austin, how we must--! _tresham._ must what? must speak truth, malignant tongue! detect one fault in him! i challenge you! _guendolen._ witchcraft's a fault in him, for you're bewitched. _tresham._ what's urgent we obtain is, that she soon receive him--say, to-morrow-- next day at furthest. _guendolen._ ne'er instruct me! _tresham._ come! --he's out of your good graces, since forsooth, he stood not as he'd carry us by storm with his perfections! you're for the composed manly assured becoming confidence! --get her to say, "to-morrow," and i'll give you ... i'll give you black urganda, to be spoiled with petting and snail-paces. will you? come! the story of the love of mildred and mertoun is the universally human one, and belongs to no one country or no one period of civilization more than another, but the attitude of all the actors in the tragedy belongs distinctively to the phase of moral culture which we saw illustrated in the youth of sir philip sidney, and is characteristic of english ways of thinking whenever their moral force comes uppermost, as for example in the puritan thought of the cromwellian era. the play is in a sense a problem play, though to most modern readers the tragedy of its ending is all too horrible a consequence of the sin. dramatically and psychically, however, the tragedy is much more inevitable than that of romeo and juliet, whose love one naturally thinks of in the same connection. the catastrophe in the shakespeare play is almost mechanically pushed to its conclusion through mere external blundering, easily to have been prevented. juliet saw clearly where mildred does not, that loyalty to a deep and true love should triumph over all minor considerations, so that in her case the tragedy is, in no sense, due to her blindness of vision. in the "blot," lack of perception of the true values in life makes it impossible for mildred or tresham to act otherwise than they did. but having worked out their problem according to their lights, a new light of a more glorious day dawns upon them. the ideal by which tresham lives and moves and has his being is that of pride of birth, with honor and chastity as its watchwords. at the same time the idol of his life is his sister mildred, over whom he has watched with a father's and mother's care. when the blow to his ideal comes at the hands of this much cherished sister, it is not to be wondered at that his reason almost deserts him. the greatest agony possible to the human soul is to have its ideals, the very food which has been the sustenance of its being, utterly ruined. the ideal may be a wrong one, or an impartial one, and through the wrack and ruin may dawn larger vision, but, unless the nature be a marvelously developed one the storm that breaks when an ideal is shattered is overwhelming. it would be equally true of mildred that, nurtured as she had been and as young english girls usually are, in great purity, even ignorance of all things pertaining to life, the sense of her sin would be so overwhelming as to blind her to any possible means of expiation except the most extreme. and indeed may it not be said that only those who can see as mertoun and guendolen did that genuine and loyal love is no less love because, in a conventional sense, it has sinned,--only those would acknowledge, as tresham, indeed, does after he has murdered mertoun, how perfect the love of mildred and mertoun was. sin flourishes only when insincerity tricks itself out in the garb of love, and on the whole it is well that human beings should have an abiding sense of their own and others insincerity, and test themselves by their willingness to acknowledge their love before god and man. there are many mildreds but few mertouns. it is little wonder that dickens wrote with such enthusiasm of this play that he knew no love like that of mildred and mertoun, no passion like it. [illustration: an english park] one does not need to discuss whether murders were possible in english social life. they are possible in all life at all times as long as men and women allow their passions to overthrow their reason. the last act, however, illustrates the english poise already referred to; tresham regains his equilibrium with enlarged vision, his salvation is accomplished, his soul awakened. act iii scene i.--_the end of the yew-tree avenue under mildred's window. a light seen through a central red pane._ _enter tresham through the trees._ again here! but i cannot lose myself. the heath--the orchard--i have traversed glades and dells and bosky paths which used to lead into green wild-wood depths, bewildering my boy's adventurous step. and now they tend hither or soon or late; the blackest shade breaks up, the thronged trunks of the trees ope wide, and the dim turret i have fled from, fronts again my step: the very river put its arm about me and conducted me to this detested spot. why then, i'll shun their will no longer: do your will with me! oh, bitter! to have reared a towering scheme of happiness, and to behold it razed, were nothing: all men hope, and see their hopes frustrate, and grieve awhile, and hope anew. but i ... to hope that from a line like ours no horrid prodigy like this would spring, were just as though i hoped that from these old confederates against the sovereign day, children of older and yet older sires, whose living coral berries dropped, as now on me, on many a baron's surcoat once, on many a beauty's wimple--would proceed no poison-tree, to thrust, from hell its root, hither and thither its strange snaky arms. why came i here? what must i do? [_a bell strikes._] a bell? midnight! and 'tis at midnight.... ah, i catch --woods, river, plains, i catch your meaning now, and i obey you! hist! this tree will serve. [_he retires behind one of the trees. after a pause, enter mertoun cloaked as before._ _mertoun._ not time! beat out thy last voluptuous beat of hope and fear, my heart! i thought the clock i' the chapel struck as i was pushing through the ferns. and so i shall no more see rise my love-star! oh, no matter for the past! so much the more delicious task to watch mildred revive: to pluck out, thorn by thorn, all traces of the rough forbidden path my rash love lured her to! each day must see some fear of hers effaced, some hope renewed: then there will be surprises, unforeseen delights in store. i'll not regret the past. [_the light is placed above in the purple pane._ and see, my signal rises, mildred's star! i never saw it lovelier than now it rises for the last time. if it sets, 'tis that the re-assuring sun may dawn. [_as he prepares to ascend the last tree of the avenue, tresham arrests his arm._ unhand me--peasant, by your grasp! here's gold. 'twas a mad freak of mine. i said i'd pluck a branch from the white-blossomed shrub beneath the casement there. take this, and hold your peace. _tresham._ into the moonlight yonder, come with me! out of the shadow! _mertoun._ i am armed, fool! _tresham._ yes, or no? you'll come into the light, or no? my hand is on your throat--refuse!-- _mertoun._ that voice! where have i heard ... no--that was mild and slow. i'll come with you. [_they advance._ _tresham._ you're armed: that's well. declare your name: who are you? _mertoun._ (tresham!--she is lost!) _tresham._ oh, silent? do you know, you bear yourself exactly as, in curious dreams i've had how felons, this wild earth is full of, look when they're detected, still your kind has looked! the bravo holds an assured countenance, the thief is voluble and plausible, but silently the slave of lust has crouched when i have fancied it before a man. your name! _mertoun._ i do conjure lord tresham--ay, kissing his foot, if so i might prevail-- that he for his own sake forbear to ask my name! as heaven's above, his future weal or woe depends upon my silence! vain! i read your white inexorable face. know me, lord tresham! [_he throws off his disguises._ _tresham._ mertoun! [_after a pause._] draw now! _mertoun._ hear me but speak first! _tresham._ not one least word on your life! be sure that i will strangle in your throat the least word that informs me how you live and yet seem what you seem! no doubt 'twas you taught mildred still to keep that face and sin. we should join hands in frantic sympathy if you once taught me the unteachable, explained how you can live so, and so lie. with god's help i retain, despite my sense, the old belief--a life like yours is still impossible. now draw! _mertoun._ not for my sake, do i entreat a hearing--for your sake, and most, for her sake! _tresham._ ha ha, what should i know of your ways? a miscreant like yourself, how must one rouse his ire? a blow?--that's pride no doubt, to him! one spurns him, does one not? or sets the foot upon his mouth, or spits into his face! come! which, or all of these? _mertoun._ 'twixt him and me and mildred, heaven be judge! can i avoid this? have your will, my lord! [_he draws and, after a few passes, falls._ _tresham._ you are not hurt? _mertoun._ you'll hear me now! _tresham._ but rise! _mertoun._ ah, tresham, say i not "you'll hear me now!" and what procures a man the right to speak in his defense before his fellow man, but--i suppose--the thought that presently he may have leave to speak before his god his whole defense? _tresham._ not hurt? it cannot be! you made no effort to resist me. where did my sword reach you? why not have returned my thrusts? hurt where? _mertoun._ my lord-- _tresham._ how young he is! _mertoun._ lord tresham, i am very young, and yet i have entangled other lives with mine. do let me speak, and do believe my speech! that when i die before you presently,-- _tresham._ can you stay here till i return with help? _mertoun._ oh, stay by me! when i was less than boy i did you grievous wrong and knew it not-- upon my honor, knew it not! once known, i could not find what seemed a better way to right you than i took: my life--you feel how less than nothing were the giving you the life you've taken! but i thought my way the better--only for your sake and hers: and as you have decided otherwise, would i had an infinity of lives to offer you! now say--instruct me--think! can you, from the brief minutes i have left, eke out my reparation? oh think--think! for i must wring a partial--dare i say, forgiveness from you, ere i die? _tresham._ i do forgive you. _mertoun._ wait and ponder that great word! because, if you forgive me, i shall hope to speak to you of--mildred! _tresham._ mertoun, haste and anger have undone us. 'tis not you should tell me for a novelty you're young, thoughtless, unable to recall the past. be but your pardon ample as my own! _mertoun._ ah, tresham, that a sword-stroke and a drop of blood or two, should bring all this about! why, 'twas my very fear of you, my love of you--(what passion like a boy's for one like you?)--that ruined me! i dreamed of you-- you, all accomplished, courted everywhere, the scholar and the gentleman. i burned to knit myself to you: but i was young, and your surpassing reputation kept me so far aloof! oh, wherefore all that love? with less of love, my glorious yesterday of praise and gentlest words and kindest looks, had taken place perchance six months ago. even now, how happy we had been! and yet i know the thought of this escaped you, tresham! let me look up into your face; i feel 'tis changed above me: yet my eyes are glazed. where? where? [_as he endeavors to raise himself, his eye catches the lamp._ ah, mildred! what will mildred do? tresham, her life is bound up in the life that's bleeding fast away! i'll live--must live, there, if you'll only turn me i shall live and save her! tresham--oh, had you but heard! had you but heard! what right was yours to set the thoughtless foot upon her life and mine, and then say, as we perish, "had i thought, all had gone otherwise?" we've sinned and die: never you sin, lord tresham! for you'll die, and god will judge you. _tresham._ yes, be satisfied! that process is begun. _mertoun._ and she sits there waiting for me! now, say you this to her-- you, not another--say, i saw him die as he breathed this, "i love her"--you don't know what those three small words mean! say, loving her lowers me down the bloody slope to death with memories ... i speak to her, not you, who had no pity, will have no remorse, perchance intend her.... die along with me, dear mildred! 'tis so easy, and you'll 'scape so much unkindness! can i lie at rest, with rude speech spoken to you, ruder deeds done to you?--heartless men shall have my heart, and i tied down with grave-clothes and the worm, aware, perhaps, of every blow--oh god!-- upon those lips--yet of no power to tear the felon stripe by stripe! die, mildred! leave their honorable world to them! for god we're good enough, though the world casts us out. [_a whistle is heard._ _tresham._ ho, gerard! _enter gerard, austin and guendolen, with lights._ no one speak! you see what's done. i cannot bear another voice. _mertoun._ there's light-- light all about me, and i move to it. tresham, did i not tell you--did you not just promise to deliver words of mine to mildred? _tresham._ i will bear these words to her. _mertoun._ now? _tresham._ now. lift you the body, and leave me the head. [_as they half raise mertoun, he turns suddenly._ _mertoun._ i knew they turned me: turn me not from her! there! stay you! there! [_dies._ _guendolen_ [_after a pause_]. austin, remain you here with thorold until gerard comes with help: then lead him to his chamber. i must go to mildred. _tresham._ guendolen, i hear each word you utter. did you hear him bid me give his message? did you hear my promise? i, and only i, see mildred. _guendolen._ she will die. _tresham._ oh no, she will not die! i dare not hope she'll die. what ground have you to think she'll die? why, austin's with you! _austin._ had we but arrived before you fought! _tresham._ there was no fight at all. he let me slaughter him--the boy! i'll trust the body there to you and gerard--thus! now bear him on before me. _austin._ whither bear him? _tresham._ oh, to my chamber! when we meet there next, we shall be friends. [_they bear out the body of mertoun._ will she die, guendolen? _guendolen._ where are you taking me? _tresham._ he fell just here. now answer me. shall you in your whole life --you who have nought to do with mertoun's fate, now you have seen his breast upon the turf, shall you e'er walk this way if you can help? when you and austin wander arm-in-arm through our ancestral grounds, will not a shade be ever on the meadow and the waste-- another kind of shade than when the night shuts the woodside with all its whispers up? but will you ever so forget his breast as carelessly to cross this bloody turf under the black yew avenue? that's well! you turn your head: and i then?-- _guendolen._ what is done is done. my care is for the living. thorold, bear up against this burden: more remains to set the neck to! _tresham._ dear and ancient trees my fathers planted, and i loved so well! what have i done that, like some fabled crime of yore, lets loose a fury leading thus her miserable dance amidst you all? oh, never more for me shall winds intone with all your tops a vast antiphony, demanding and responding in god's praise! hers ye are now, not mine! farewell--farewell! scene ii.--_mildred's chamber._ _mildred alone._ he comes not! i have heard of those who seemed resourceless in prosperity,--you thought sorrow might slay them when she listed; yet did they so gather up their diffused strength at her first menace, that they bade her strike, and stood and laughed her subtlest skill to scorn. oh, 'tis not so with me! the first woe fell, and the rest fall upon it, not on me: else should i bear that henry comes not?--fails just this first night out of so many nights? loving is done with. were he sitting now, as so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love no more--contrive no thousand happy ways to hide love from the loveless, any more. i think i might have urged some little point in my defense, to thorold; he was breathless for the least hint of a defense: but no, the first shame over, all that would might fall. no henry! yet i merely sit and think the morn's deed o'er and o'er. i must have crept out of myself. a mildred that has lost her lover--oh, i dare not look upon such woe! i crouch away from it! 'tis she, mildred, will break her heart, not i! the world forsakes me: only henry's left me--left? when i have lost him, for he does not come, and i sit stupidly.... oh heaven, break up this worse than anguish, this mad apathy, by any means or any messenger! _tresham_ [_without_]. mildred! _mildred._ come in! heaven hears me! [_enter tresham._] you? alone? oh, no more cursing! _tresham._ mildred, i must sit. there--you sit! _mildred._ say it, thorold--do not look the curse! deliver all you come to say! what must become of me? oh, speak that thought which makes your brow and cheeks so pale! _tresham._ my thought? _mildred._ all of it! _tresham._ how we waded--years ago-- after those water-lilies, till the plash, i know not how, surprised us; and you dared neither advance nor turn back: so, we stood laughing and crying until gerard came-- once safe upon the turf, the loudest too, for once more reaching the relinquished prize! how idle thoughts are, some men's, dying men's! mildred,-- _mildred._ you call me kindlier by my name than even yesterday: what is in that? _tresham._ it weighs so much upon my mind that i this morning took an office not my own! i might ... of course, i must be glad or grieved, content or not, at every little thing that touches you. i may with a wrung heart even reprove you, mildred; i did more: will you forgive me? _mildred._ thorold? do you mock? or no ... and yet you bid me ... say that word! _tresham._ forgive me, mildred!--are you silent, sweet? _mildred_ [_starting up_]. why does not henry mertoun come to-night? are you, too, silent? [_dashing his mantle aside, and pointing to his scabbard, which is empty._ ah, this speaks for you! you've murdered henry mertoun! now proceed! what is it i must pardon? this and all? well, i do pardon you--i think i do. thorold, how very wretched you must be! _tresham._ he bade me tell you.... _mildred._ what i do forbid your utterance of! so much that you may tell and will not--how you murdered him ... but, no! you'll tell me that he loved me, never more than bleeding out his life there: must i say "indeed," to that? enough! i pardon you. _tresham._ you cannot, mildred! for the harsh words, yes: of this last deed another's judge: whose doom i wait in doubt, despondency and fear. _mildred._ oh, true! there's nought for me to pardon! true! you loose my soul of all its cares at once. death makes me sure of him for ever! you tell me his last words? he shall tell me them, and take my answer--not in words, but reading himself the heart i had to read him late, which death.... _tresham._ death? you are dying too? well said of guendolen! i dared not hope you'd die: but she was sure of it. _mildred._ tell guendolen i loved her, and tell austin.... _tresham._ him you loved: and me? _mildred._ ah, thorold! was't not rashly done to quench that blood, on fire with youth and hope and love of me--whom you loved too, and yet suffered to sit here waiting his approach while you were slaying him? oh, doubtlessly you let him speak his poor boy's speech --do his poor utmost to disarm your wrath and respite me!--you let him try to give the story of our love and ignorance, and the brief madness and the long despair-- you let him plead all this, because your code of honor bids you hear before you strike: but at the end, as he looked up for life into your eyes--you struck him down! _tresham._ no! no! had i but heard him--had i let him speak half the truth--less--had i looked long on him i had desisted! why, as he lay there, the moon on his flushed cheek, i gathered all the story ere he told it: i saw through the troubled surface of his crime and yours a depth of purity immovable, had i but glanced, where all seemed turbidest had gleamed some inlet to the calm beneath; i would not glance: my punishment's at hand. there, mildred, is the truth! and you--say on-- you curse me? _mildred._ as i dare approach that heaven which has not bade a living thing despair, which needs no code to keep its grace from stain, but bids the vilest worm that turns on it desist and be forgiven,--i--forgive not, but bless you, thorold, from my soul of souls! [_falls on his neck._ there! do not think too much upon the past! the cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud while it stood up between my friend and you; you hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that so past retrieve? i have his heart, you know; i may dispose of it: i give it you! it loves you as mine loves! confirm me, henry! [_dies._ _tresham._ i wish thee joy, beloved! i am glad in thy full gladness! _guendolen_ [_without_]. mildred! tresham! [_entering with austin._] thorold, i could desist no longer. ah, she swoons! that's well. _tresham._ oh, better far than that! _guendolen._ she's dead! let me unlock her arms! _tresham._ she threw them thus about my neck, and blessed me, and then died: you'll let them stay now, guendolen! _austin._ leave her and look to him! what ails you, thorold? _guendolen._ white as she, and whiter! austin! quick--this side! _austin._ a froth is oozing through his clenched teeth; both lips, where they're not bitten through, are black: speak, dearest thorold! _tresham._ something does weigh down my neck beside her weight: thanks: i should fall but for you, austin, i believe!--there, there, 'twill pass away soon!--ah,--i had forgotten: i am dying. _guendolen._ thorold--thorold--why was this? _tresham._ i said, just as i drank the poison off, the earth would be no longer earth to me, the life out of all life was gone from me. there are blind ways provided, the foredone heart-weary player in this pageant-world drops out by, letting the main masque defile by the conspicuous portal: i am through-- just through! _guendolen._ don't leave him, austin! death is close. _tresham._ already mildred's face is peacefuller. i see you, austin--feel you: here's my hand, put yours in it--you, guendolen, yours too! you're lord and lady now--you're treshams; name and fame are yours: you hold our 'scutcheon up. austin, no blot on it! you see how blood must wash one blot away: the first blot came and the first blood came. to the vain world's eye all's gules again: no care to the vain world, from whence the red was drawn! _austin._ no blot shall come! _tresham._ i said that: yet it did come. should it come, vengeance is god's, not man's. remember me! [_dies._ _guendolen_ [_letting fall the pulseless arm_]. ah, thorold, we can but--remember you! in "ned bratts," browning has given a striking picture of the influence exerted by bunyan upon some of his wicked contemporaries. the poet took his hints for the story from bunyan himself, who tells it as follows in the "life and death of mr. badman." "at a summer assizes holden at hertford, while the judge was sitting upon the bench, comes this old tod into the court, clothed in a green suit, with his leathern girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his life; and being come in, he spake aloud, as follows: 'my lord,' said he, 'here is the veriest rogue that breathes upon the face of the earth. i have been a thief from a child: when i was but a little one, i gave myself to rob orchards and to do other such like wicked things, and i have continued a thief ever since. my lord, there has not been a robbery committed these many years, within so many miles of this place, but i have either been at it, or privy to it.' the judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the justices, they agreed to indict him; and so they did of several felonious actions; to all of which he heartily confessed guilty, and so was hanged, with his wife at the same time." browning had the happy thought of placing this episode in bedford amid the scenes of bunyan's labors and imprisonment. bunyan, himself, was tried at the bedford assizes upon the charge of preaching things he should not, or according to some accounts for preaching without having been ordained, and was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment in the bedford jail. at one time it was thought that he wrote "pilgrim's progress" during this imprisonment, but dr. brown, in his biography of bunyan conjectured that this book was not begun until a later and shorter imprisonment of - , in the town prison and toll-house on bedford bridge. dr. brown supposes that the portion of the book written in prison closes where christian and hopeful part from the shepherds on the delectable mountains. "at that point a break in the narrative is indicated--'so i awoke from my dream;' it is resumed with the words--'and i slept and dreamed again, and saw the same two pilgrims going down the mountains along the highway towards the city.' already from the top of an high hill called 'clear,' the celestial city was in view; dangers there were still to be encountered; but to have reached that high hill and to have seen something like a gate, and some of the glory of the place, was an attainment and an incentive." there bunyan could pause. several years later the pilgrimage of christiana was written. browning, however, adopts the tradition that the book was written during the twelve years' imprisonment, and makes use of the story of bunyan's having supported himself during this time by making tagged shoe-laces. he brings in, also, the little blind daughter to whom bunyan was said to be devoted. the poet was evidently under the impression also that the assizes were held in a courthouse, but there is good authority for thinking that at that time they were held in the chapel of herne. nothing remains of this building now, but it was situated at the southwest corner of the churchyard of st. paul, and was spoken of sometimes as the school-house chapel. ned bratts and his wife did not know, of course, that they actually lived in the land of the "pilgrim's progress." this has been pointed out only recently in a fascinating little book by a. j. foster of wootton vicarage, bedfordshire. he has been a pilgrim from elstow, the village where bunyan was born near bedford, through all the surrounding country, and has fixed upon many spots beautiful and otherwise which he believes were transmuted in bunyan's imagination into the house beautiful, the delectable mountains, vanity fair and so on through nearly all the scenes of christian's journey. the house beautiful he identifies with houghton house in the manor of dame ellen's bury. this is one of the most interesting of the country houses of england, because of its connection with sir philip sidney's sister, mary sidney. after the death of her husband, lord pembroke, james i. presented her with the royal manor of dame ellen's bury, and under the guidance of inigo jones, it is generally supposed, houghton house was built. it is in ruins now and covered with ivy. trees have grown within the ruins themselves. still it is one of the most beautiful spots in bedfordshire. "in bunyan's time," mr. foster writes, "we may suppose the northern slope of houghton park was a series of terraces rising one above another, and laid out in the stiff garden fashion of the time. a flight of steps, or maybe a steep path, would lead from one terrace to the next, and gradually the view over the plain of bedford would reveal itself to the traveler as he mounted higher and higher." from houghton house there is a view of the chiltern hills. mr. foster is of the opinion that bunyan had this view in mind when he described christian as looking from the roof of the house beautiful southwards towards the delectable mountains. he writes, "one of the main roads to london from bedford, and the one, moreover, which passes through elstow, crosses the hills only a little more than a mile east of houghton house, and bunyan, in his frequent journeys to london, no doubt often passed along this road. all in this direction was, therefore, to him familiar ground. many a pleasant walk or ride came back to him through memory, as he took pen in hand to describe hill difficulty with its steep path and its arbor, and the house beautiful with its guest-chamber, its large upper room looking eastward, its study and its armory. "many a time did bunyan, as he journeyed, look southwards to the blue chilterns, and when the time came he placed together all that he had seen, as the frame in which he should set his way-faring pilgrim." pleasant as it would be to follow with mr. foster his journey through the real scenes of the "pilgrim's progress," our main interest at present is to observe how browning's facile imagination has presented the conversion, through the impression made upon them by bunyan's book, of ned and his wife. ned bratts 't was bedford special assize, one daft midsummer's day: a broiling blasting june,--was never its like, men say. corn stood sheaf-ripe already, and trees looked yellow as that; ponds drained dust-dry, the cattle lay foaming around each flat. inside town, dogs went mad, and folk kept bibbing beer while the parsons prayed for rain. 't was horrible, yes--but queer: queer--for the sun laughed gay, yet nobody moved a hand to work one stroke at his trade: as given to understand that all was come to a stop, work and such worldly ways, and the world's old self about to end in a merry blaze. midsummer's day moreover was the first of bedford fair, with bedford town's tag-rag and bobtail a-bowsing there. but the court house, quality crammed: through doors ope, windows wide, high on the bench you saw sit lordships side by side. there frowned chief justice jukes, fumed learned brother small, and fretted their fellow judge: like threshers, one and all, of a reek with laying down the law in a furnace. why? because their lungs breathed flame--the regular crowd forbye-- from gentry pouring in--quite a nosegay, to be sure! how else could they pass the time, six mortal hours endure till night should extinguish day, when matters might haply mend? meanwhile no bad resource was--watching begin and end some trial for life and death, in a brisk five minutes' space, and betting which knave would 'scape, which hang, from his sort of face. so, their lordships toiled and moiled, and a deal of work was done (i warrant) to justify the mirth of the crazy sun as this and t'other lout, struck dumb at the sudden show of red robes and white wigs, boggled nor answered "boh!" when asked why he, tom styles, should not--because jack nokes had stolen the horse--be hanged: for judges must have their jokes, and louts must make allowance--let's say, for some blue fly which punctured a dewy scalp where the frizzles stuck awry-- else tom had fleered scot-free, so nearly over and done was the main of the job. full-measure, the gentles enjoyed their fun, as a twenty-five were tried, rank puritans caught at prayer in a cow-house and laid by the heels,--have at 'em, devil may care!-- and ten were prescribed the whip, and ten a brand on the cheek, and five a slit of the nose--just leaving enough to tweak. well, things at jolly high-tide, amusement steeped in fire, while noon smote fierce the roof's red tiles to heart's desire, the court a-simmer with smoke, one ferment of oozy flesh, one spirituous humming musk mount-mounting until its mesh entoiled all heads in a fluster, and serjeant postlethwayte --dashing the wig oblique as he mopped his oily pate-- cried "silence, or i grow grease! no loophole lets in air? jurymen,--guilty, death! gainsay me if you dare!" --things at this pitch, i say,--what hubbub without the doors? what laughs, shrieks, hoots and yells, what rudest of uproars? bounce through the barrier throng a bulk comes rolling vast! thumps, kicks,--no manner of use!--spite of them rolls at last into the midst a ball which, bursting, brings to view publican black ned bratts and tabby his big wife too: both in a muck-sweat, both ... were never such eyes uplift at the sight of yawning hell, such nostrils--snouts that sniffed sulphur, such mouths a-gape ready to swallow flame! horrified, hideous, frank fiend-faces! yet, all the same, mixed with a certain ... eh? how shall i dare style--mirth the desperate grin of the guest that, could they break from earth, heaven was above, and hell might rage in impotence below the saved, the saved! "confound you! (no offence!) out of our way,--push, wife! yonder their worships be!" ned bratts has reached the bar, and "hey, my lords," roars he, "a jury of life and death, judges the prime of the land, constables, javelineers,--all met, if i understand, to decide so knotty a point as whether 't was jack or joan robbed the henroost, pinched the pig, hit the king's arms with a stone, dropped the baby down the well, left the tithesman in the lurch, or, three whole sundays running, not once attended church! what a pother--do these deserve the parish-stocks or whip, more or less brow to brand, much or little nose to snip,-- when, in our public, plain stand we--that's we stand here, i and my tab, brass-bold, brick-built of beef and beer, --do not we, slut? step forth and show your beauty, jade! wife of my bosom--that's the word now! what a trade we drove! none said us nay: nobody loved his life so little as wag a tongue against us,--did they, wife? yet they knew us all the while, in their hearts, for what we are --worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged--search near and far! eh, tab? the pedler, now--o'er his noggin--who warned a mate to cut and run, nor risk his pack where its loss of weight was the least to dread,--aha, how we two laughed a-good as, stealing round the midden, he came on where i stood with billet poised and raised,--you, ready with the rope,-- ah, but that's past, that's sin repented of, we hope! men knew us for that same, yet safe and sound stood we! the lily-livered knaves knew too (i've balked a d----) our keeping the 'pied bull' was just a mere pretence: too slow the pounds make food, drink, lodging, from out the pence! there's not a stoppage to travel has chanced, this ten long year, no break into hall or grange, no lifting of nag or steer, not a single roguery, from the clipping of a purse to the cutting of a throat, but paid us toll. od's curse! when gipsy smouch made bold to cheat us of our due, --eh, tab? the squire's strong-box we helped the rascal to-- i think he pulled a face, next sessions' swinging-time! he danced the jig that needs no floor,--and, here's the prime, 't was scroggs that houghed the mare! ay, those were busy days! "well, there we flourished brave, like scripture-trees called bays, faring high, drinking hard, in money up to head --not to say, boots and shoes, when ... zounds, i nearly said-- lord, to unlearn one's language! how shall we labor, wife? have you, fast hold, the book? grasp, grip it, for your life! see, sirs, here's life, salvation! here's--hold but out my breath-- when did i speak so long without once swearing? 'sdeath, no, nor unhelped by ale since man and boy! and yet all yesterday i had to keep my whistle wet while reading tab this book: book? don't say 'book'--they're plays, songs, ballads and the like: here's no such strawy blaze, but sky wide ope, sun, moon, and seven stars out full-flare! tab, help and tell! i'm hoarse. a mug! or--no, a prayer! dip for one out of the book! who wrote it in the jail --he plied his pen unhelped by beer, sirs, i'll be bail! "i've got my second wind. in trundles she--that's tab. 'why, gammer, what's come now, that--bobbing like a crab on yule-tide bowl--your head's a-work and both your eyes break loose? afeard, you fool? as if the dead can rise! say--bagman dick was found last may with fuddling-cap stuffed in his mouth: to choke's a natural mishap!' 'gaffer, be--blessed,' cries she, 'and bagman dick as well! i, you, and he are damned: this public is our hell: we live in fire: live coals don't feel!--once quenched, they learn-- cinders do, to what dust they moulder while they burn!' "'if you don't speak straight out,' says i--belike i swore-- 'a knobstick, well you know the taste of, shall, once more, teach you to talk, my maid!' she ups with such a face, heart sunk inside me. 'well, pad on, my prate-apace!' "'i've been about those laces we need for ... never mind! if henceforth they tie hands, 't is mine they'll have to bind. you know who makes them best--the tinker in our cage, pulled-up for gospelling, twelve years ago: no age to try another trade,--yet, so he scorned to take money he did not earn, he taught himself the make of laces, tagged and tough--dick bagman found them so! good customers were we! well, last week, you must know his girl,--the blind young chit, who hawks about his wares,-- she takes it in her head to come no more--such airs these hussies have! yet, since we need a stoutish lace,-- "i'll to the jail-bird father, abuse her to his face!" so, first i filled a jug to give me heart, and then, primed to the proper pitch, i posted to their den-- _patmore_--they style their prison! i tip the turnkey, catch my heart up, fix my face, and fearless lift the latch-- both arms a-kimbo, in bounce with a good round oath ready for rapping out: no "lawks" nor "by my troth!" "'there sat my man, the father. he looked up: what one feels when heart that leapt to mouth drops down again to heels! he raised his hand.... hast seen, when drinking out the night, and in the day, earth grow another something quite under the sun's first stare? i stood a very stone. "'"woman!" (a fiery tear he put in every tone), "how should my child frequent your house where lust is sport, violence--trade? too true! i trust no vague report. her angel's hand, which stops the sight of sin, leaves clear the other gate of sense, lets outrage through the ear. what has she heard!--which, heard shall never be again. better lack food than feast, a dives in the--wain or reign or train--of charles!" (his language was not ours: 't is my belief, god spoke: no tinker has such powers.) "bread, only bread they bring--my laces: if we broke your lump of leavened sin, the loaf's first crumb would choke!" "'down on my marrow-bones! then all at once rose he: his brown hair burst a-spread, his eyes were suns to see: up went his hands: "through flesh, i reach, i read thy soul! so may some stricken tree look blasted, bough and bole, champed by the fire-tooth, charred without, and yet, thrice-bound with dreriment about, within may life be found, a prisoned power to branch and blossom as before, could but the gardener cleave the cloister, reach the core, loosen the vital sap: yet where shall help be found? who says 'how save it?'--nor 'why cumbers it the ground?' woman, that tree art thou! all sloughed about with scurf, thy stag-horns fright the sky, thy snake-roots sting the turf! drunkenness, wantonness, theft, murder gnash and gnarl thine outward, case thy soul with coating like the marle satan stamps flat upon each head beneath his hoof! and how deliver such? the strong men keep aloof, lover and friend stand far, the mocking ones pass by, tophet gapes wide for prey: lost soul, despair and die! what then? 'look unto me and be ye saved!' saith god: 'i strike the rock, outstreats the life-stream at my rod! be your sins scarlet, wool shall they seem like,--although as crimson red, yet turn white as the driven snow!'" "'there, there, there! all i seem to somehow understand is--that, if i reached home, 't was through the guiding hand of his blind girl which led and led me through the streets and out of town and up to door again. what greets first thing my eye, as limbs recover from their swoon? a book--this book she gave at parting. "father's boon-- the book he wrote: it reads as if he spoke himself: he cannot preach in bonds, so,--take it down from shelf when you want counsel,--think you hear his very voice!" "'wicked dear husband, first despair and then rejoice! dear wicked husband, waste no tick of moment more, be saved like me, bald trunk! there's greenness yet at core, sap under slough! read, read!' "let me take breath, my lords! i'd like to know, are these--hers, mine, or bunyan's words? i'm 'wildered--scarce with drink,--nowise with drink alone! you'll say, with heat: but heat's no stuff to split a stone like this black boulder--this flint heart of mine: the book-- that dealt the crashing blow! sirs, here's the fist that shook his beard till wrestler jem howled like a just-lugged bear! you had brained me with a feather: at once i grew aware christmas was meant for me. a burden at your back, good master christmas? nay,--yours was that joseph's sack, --or whose it was,--which held the cup,--compared with mine! robbery loads my loins, perjury cracks my chine, adultery ... nay, tab, you pitched me as i flung! one word, i'll up with fist.... no, sweet spouse, hold your tongue! "i'm hasting to the end. the book, sirs--take and read! you have my history in a nutshell,--ay, indeed! it must off, my burden! see,--slack straps and into pit, roll, reach, the bottom, rest, rot there--a plague on it! for a mountain's sure to fall and bury bedford town, 'destruction'--that's the name, and fire shall burn it down! o 'scape the wrath in time! time's now, if not too late. how can i pilgrimage up to the wicket-gate? next comes despond the slough: not that i fear to pull through mud, and dry my clothes at brave house beautiful-- but it's late in the day, i reckon: had i left years ago town, wife, and children dear.... well, christmas did, you know!-- soon i had met in the valley and tried my cudgel's strength on the enemy horned and winged, a-straddle across its length! have at his horns, thwick--thwack: they snap, see! hoof and hoof-- bang, break the fetlock-bones! for love's sake, keep aloof angels! i'm man and match,--this cudgel for my flail,-- to thresh him, hoofs and horns, bat's wing and serpent's tail! a chance gone by! but then, what else does hopeful ding into the deafest ear except--hope, hope's the thing? too late i' the day for me to thrid the windings: but there's still a way to win the race by death's short cut! did master faithful need climb the delightful mounts? no, straight to vanity fair,--a fair, by all accounts, such as is held outside,--lords, ladies, grand and gay,-- says he in the face of them, just what you hear me say. and the judges brought him in guilty, and brought him out to die in the market-place--st. peter's green's about the same thing: there they flogged, flayed, buffeted, lanced with knives, pricked him with swords,--i'll swear, he'd full a cat's nine lives,-- so to his end at last came faithful,--ha, ha, he! who holds the highest card? for there stands hid, you see, behind the rabble-rout, a chariot, pair and all: he's in, he's off, he's up, through clouds, at trumpet-call, carried the nearest way to heaven-gate! odds my life-- has nobody a sword to spare? not even a knife? then hang me, draw and quarter! tab--do the same by her! o master worldly-wiseman ... that's master interpreter, take the will, not the deed! our gibbet's handy close: forestall last judgment-day! be kindly, not morose! there wants no earthly judge-and-jurying: here we stand-- sentence our guilty selves: so, hang us out of hand! make haste for pity's sake! a single moment's loss means--satan's lord once more: his whisper shoots across all singing in my heart, all praying in my brain, 'it comes of heat and beer!'--hark how he guffaws plain! 'to-morrow you'll wake bright, and, in a safe skin, hug your sound selves, tab and you, over a foaming jug! you've had such qualms before, time out of mind!' he's right! did not we kick and cuff and curse away, that night, when home we blindly reeled, and left poor humpback joe i' the lurch to pay for what ... somebody did, you know! both of us maundered then 'lame humpback,--never more will he come limping, drain his tankard at our door! he'll swing, while--somebody....' says tab, 'no, for i'll peach!' 'i'm for you, tab,' cries i, 'there's rope enough for each!' so blubbered we, and bussed, and went to bed upon the grace of tab's good thought: by morning, all was gone! we laughed--'what's life to him, a cripple of no account?' oh, waves increase around--i feel them mount and mount! hang us! to-morrow brings tom bearward with his bears: one new black-muzzled brute beats sackerson, he swears: (sackerson, for my money!) and, baiting o'er, the brawl they lead on turner's patch,--lads, lasses, up tails all,-- i'm i' the thick o' the throng! that means the iron cage, --means the lost man inside! where's hope for such as wage war against light? light's left, light's here, i hold light still, so does tab--make but haste to hang us both! you will?" i promise, when he stopped you might have heard a mouse squeak, such a death-like hush sealed up the old mote house. but when the mass of man sank meek upon his knees, while tab, alongside, wheezed a hoarse "do hang us, please!" why, then the waters rose, no eye but ran with tears, hearts heaved, heads thumped, until, paying all past arrears of pity and sorrow, at last a regular scream outbroke of triumph, joy and praise. my lord chief justice spoke, first mopping brow and cheek, where still, for one that budged, another bead broke fresh: "what judge, that ever judged since first the world began, judged such a case as this? why, master bratts, long since, folk smelt you out, i wis! i had my doubts, i' faith, each time you played the fox convicting geese of crime in yonder witness-box-- yea, much did i misdoubt, the thief that stole her eggs was hardly goosey's self at reynard's game, i' feggs! yet thus much was to praise--you spoke to point, direct-- swore you heard, saw the theft: no jury could suspect-- dared to suspect,--i'll say,--a spot in white so clear: goosey was throttled, true: but thereof godly fear came of example set, much as our laws intend; and, though a fox confessed, you proved the judge's friend. what if i had my doubts? suppose i gave them breath, brought you to bar: what work to do, ere 'guilty, death,'-- had paid our pains! what heaps of witnesses to drag from holes and corners, paid from out the county's bag! trial three dog-days long! _amicus curiæ_--that's your title, no dispute--truth-telling master bratts! thank you, too, mistress tab! why doubt one word you say? hanging you both deserve, hanged both shall be this day! the tinker needs must be a proper man. i've heard he lies in jail long since: if quality's good word warrants me letting loose,--some householder, i mean-- freeholder, better still,--i don't say but--between now and next sessions.... well! consider of his case, i promise to, at least: we owe him so much grace. not that--no, god forbid!--i lean to think, as you, the grace that such repent is any jail-bird's due: i rather see the fruit of twelve years' pious reign-- astræa redux, charles restored his rights again! --of which, another time! i somehow feel a peace stealing across the world. may deeds like this increase! so, master sheriff, stay that sentence i pronounced on those two dozen odd: deserving to be trounced soundly, and yet ... well, well, at all events despatch this pair of--shall i say, sinner-saints?--ere we catch their jail-distemper too. stop tears, or i'll indite all weeping bedfordshire for turning bunyanite!" so, forms were galloped through. if justice, on the spur, proved somewhat expeditious, would quality demur? and happily hanged were they,--why lengthen out my tale?-- where bunyan's statue stands facing where stood his jail. the effect which "pilgrim's progress" had on these two miserable beings, may be taken as typical of the enormous influence wielded by bunyan in his own time. the most innocent among us had overwhelming qualms in regard to our sins, as children when we listened to our mothers read the book. i remember having confessed some childish peccadillo that was weighing on my small mind as the first result of my thoroughly aroused sense of guilt. in these early years of the twentieth century, such a feeling seems almost as far removed as the days of bunyan. a sense of guilt is not a distinguishing characteristic of the child of the present day, and it may also be doubted whether such reprobates as ned and his wife would to-day be affected much if at all by the "pilgrim's progress." there was probably great personal magnetism in bunyan himself. we are told that after his discharge from prison, his popularity as a preacher widened rapidly. such vast crowds of people flocked to hear him that his place of worship had to be enlarged. he went frequently to london on week days to deliver addresses in the large chapel in southwark which was invariably thronged with eager worshipers. browning's picture of bunyan shows the instant effect of his personality upon tab. "there sat the man, the father. he looked up: what one feels when heart that leapt to mouth drops down again to heels! he raised his hand.... hast seen, when drinking out the night, and in the day, earth grow another something quite under the sun's first stare? i stood a very stone." and again "then all at once rose he: his brown hair burst a-spread, his eyes were suns to see: up went his hands." it is like a clever bit of stage business to make ned and tab use the shoe laces to tie up the hands of their victims, and to bring on by this means the meeting between tab and bunyan. of course, the blind daughter's part is imaginary, but yet it seems to bring very vividly before us this well loved child. another touch, quite in keeping with the time, is the decision of the judge that the remarkable change of heart in ned and tab was due to the piety of king charles. like every one else, however, he was impressed by what he heard of the tinker, and inclined to see what he could do to give him his freedom. it seems that bunyan's life in jail was a good deal lightened by the favor he always inspired. the story goes that from the first he was in favor with the jailor, who nearly lost his place for permitting him on one occasion to go as far as london. after this he was more strictly confined, but at last he was often allowed to visit his family, and remain with them all night. one night, however, when he was allowed this liberty bunyan felt resistlessly impressed with the propriety of returning to the prison. he arrived after the keeper had shut up for the night, much to the official's surprise. but his impatience at being untimely disturbed was changed to thankfulness, when a little after a messenger came from a neighboring clerical magistrate to see that the prisoner was safe. "you may go now when you will" said the jailer; "for you know better than i can tell you when to come in again." [illustration: john bunyan statue by j. e. boehm] though bunyan is not primarily the subject of this poem, it is an appreciative tribute to his genius and to his force of character, only to be paralleled by dowden's sympathetic critique in his "puritan and anglican studies." what browning makes ned and tab see through suddenly aroused feeling--namely that it is no book but "plays, songs, ballads and the like: here's no such strawy blaze, but sky wide ope, sun, moon, and seven stars out full-flare," dowden puts in the colder language of criticism. "the 'pilgrim's progress' is a gallery of portraits, admirably discriminated, and as convincing in their self-verification as those of holbein. his personages live for us as few figures outside the drama of shakespeare live.... all his powers cooperated harmoniously in creating this book--his religious ardor, his human tenderness, his sense of beauty, nourished by the scriptures, his strong common sense, even his gift of humor. through his deep seriousness play the lighter faculties. the whole man presses into this small volume." "halbert and hob" belongs here merely for its wild north of england setting. we may imagine, if we choose, that this wild father and son dwelt in the beautiful country of northumberland, in the north of england, but descriptions of the scenery could add nothing to the atmosphere of the poem, for northumberland is surpassingly lovely. doubtless, human beings of this type have existed in all parts of the globe. at any rate, these particular human beings were transported by browning from aristotle's "ethics" to the north of england. the incident is told by aristotle in illustration of the contention that anger and asperity are more natural than excessive and unnecessary desires. "thus one who was accused of striking his father said, as an apology for it, that his own father, and even his grandfather, had struck his; 'and he also (pointing to his child) will strike me, when he becomes a man; for it runs in our family.' a certain person, also, being dragged by his son, bid him stop at the door, for he himself had dragged his father as far as that." the dryness of "aristotle's cheeks" is as usual so enlivened by browning that the fate of halbert and hob grows pathetic and comes close to our sympathies. halbert and hob here is a thing that happened. like wild beasts whelped, for den, in a wild part of north england, there lived once two wild men inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut, time out of mind their birthright: father and son, these--but-- such a son, such a father! most wildness by degrees softens away: yet, last of their line, the wildest and worst were these. criminals, then? why, no: they did not murder and rob; but, give them a word, they returned a blow--old halbert as young hob: harsh and fierce of word, rough and savage of deed, hated or feared the more--who knows?--the genuine wild-beast breed. thus were they found by the few sparse folk of the countryside; but how fared each with other? e'en beasts couch, hide by hide, in a growling, grudged agreement: so, father and son aye curled the closelier up in their den because the last of their kind in the world. still, beast irks beast on occasion. one christmas night of snow, came father and son to words--such words! more cruel because the blow to crown each word was wanting, while taunt matched gibe, and curse completed with oath in wager, like pastime in hell,--nay, worse: for pastime turned to earnest, as up there sprang at last the son at the throat of the father, seized him and held him fast. "out of this house you go!"--(there followed a hideous oath)-- "this oven where now we bake, too hot to hold us both! if there's snow outside, there's coolness: out with you, bide a spell in the drift and save the sexton the charge of a parish shell!" now, the old trunk was tough, was solid as stump of oak untouched at the core by a thousand years: much less had its seventy broke one whipcord nerve in the muscly mass from neck to shoulder-blade of the mountainous man, whereon his child's rash hand like a feather weighed. nevertheless at once did the mammoth shut his eyes, drop chin to breast, drop hands to sides, stand stiffened--arms and thighs all of a piece--struck mute, much as a sentry stands, patient to take the enemy's fire: his captain so commands. whereat the son's wrath flew to fury at such sheer scorn of his puny strength by the giant eld thus acting the babe new-born: and "neither will this turn serve!" yelled he. "out with you! trundle, log! if you cannot tramp and trudge like a man, try all-fours like a dog!" still the old man stood mute. so, logwise,--down to floor pulled from his fireside place, dragged on from hearth to door,-- was he pushed, a very log, staircase along, until a certain turn in the steps was reached, a yard from the house-door-sill. then the father opened eyes--each spark of their rage extinct,-- temples, late black, dead-blanched,--right-hand with left-hand linked,-- he faced his son submissive; when slow the accents came, they were strangely mild though his son's rash hand on his neck lay all the same. "hob, on just such a night of a christmas long ago, for such a cause, with such a gesture, did i drag--so-- my father down thus far: but, softening here, i heard a voice in my heart, and stopped: you wait for an outer word. "for your own sake, not mine, soften you too! untrod leave this last step we reach, nor brave the finger of god! i dared not pass its lifting: i did well. i nor blame nor praise you. i stopped here: and, hob, do you the same!" straightway the son relaxed his hold of the father's throat. they mounted, side by side, to the room again: no note took either of each, no sign made each to either: last as first, in absolute silence, their christmas-night they passed. at dawn, the father sate on, dead, in the self-same place, with an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting-face: but the son crouched all a-tremble like any lamb new-yeaned. when he went to the burial, someone's staff he borrowed--tottered and leaned. but his lips were loose, not locked,--kept muttering, mumbling. "there! at his cursing and swearing!" the youngsters cried: but the elders thought "in prayer." a boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his vest. so tottered, muttered, mumbled he, till he died, perhaps found rest. "is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" o lear, that a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear! in the "inn album," a degenerate type of nineteenth-century englishman is dissected with the keen knife of a surgeon, which browning knows so well how to wield. the villain of this poem was a real personage, a lord de ros, a friend of the duke of wellington. the story belongs to the annals of crime and is necessarily unpleasant, but in order to see how browning has worked up the episode it is interesting to know the bare facts as furnivall gives them in "notes and queries" march , . he says "that the gambling lord showed the portrait of the lady he had seduced and abandoned and offered his dupe an introduction to her, as a bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; that the young gambler eagerly accepted the offer; and that the lady committed suicide on hearing of the bargain between them." dr. furnivall heard the story from some one who well remembered the sensation it had made in london years ago. in his management of the story, browning has intensified the villainy of the lord at the same time that he has shown a possible streak of goodness in him. the young man, on the other hand, he has made to be of very good stuff, indeed, notwithstanding his year of tutelage from the older man. he makes one radical change in the story as well as several minor ones. in the poem the younger man had been in love with the girl whom the older man had dishonorably treated, and had never ceased to love her. of course, the two men do not know this. by the advice of the elder man, the younger one has decided to settle down and marry his cousin, a charming young girl, who is also brought upon the scene. the other girl is represented as having married an old country parson, who sought a wife simply as a helpmeet in his work. by thus complicating the situations, room has been given for subtle psychic development. the action is all concentrated into one morning in the parlor of the old inn, reminding one much of the method of ibsen in his plays of grouping his action about a final catastrophe. at the inn one is introduced first to the two gamblers in talk, the young man having won his ten thousand pounds from the older man, who had intended to fleece him. the inn album plays an important part in the action, innocent as its first appearance upon the scene seems to be. the description of this and the inn parlor opens the poem. the inn album i "that oblong book's the album; hand it here! exactly! page on page of gratitude for breakfast, dinner, supper, and the view! i praise these poets: they leave margin-space; each stanza seems to gather skirts around, and primly, trimly, keep the foot's confine, modest and maidlike; lubber prose o'er-sprawls and straddling stops the path from left to right. since i want space to do my cipher-work, which poem spares a corner? what comes first? '_hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!_' (open the window, we burn daylight, boy!) or see--succincter beauty, brief and bold-- '_if a fellow can dine on rumpsteaks and port wine, he needs not despair of dining well here_--' '_here!_' i myself could find a better rhyme! that bard's a browning; he neglects the form: but ah, the sense, ye gods, the weighty sense! still, i prefer this classic. ay, throw wide! i'll quench the bits of candle yet unburnt. a minute's fresh air, then to cipher-work! three little columns hold the whole account: _ecarté_, after which blind hookey, then cutting-the-pack, five hundred pounds the cut. 'tis easy reckoning: i have lost, i think." two personages occupy this room shabby-genteel, that's parlor to the inn perched on a view-commanding eminence; --inn which may be a veritable house where somebody once lived and pleased good taste till tourists found his coign of vantage out, and fingered blunt the individual mark and vulgarized things comfortably smooth. on a sprig-pattern-papered wall there brays complaint to sky sir edwin's dripping stag; his couchant coast-guard creature corresponds; they face the huguenot and light o' the world. grim o'er the mirror on the mantlepiece, varnished and coffined, _salmo ferox_ glares --possibly at the list of wines which, framed and glazed, hangs somewhat prominent on peg. so much describes the stuffy little room-- vulgar flat smooth respectability: not so the burst of landscape surging in, sunrise and all, as he who of the pair is, plain enough, the younger personage draws sharp the shrieking curtain, sends aloft the sash, spreads wide and fastens back to wall shutter and shutter, shows you england's best. he leans into a living glory-bath of air and light where seems to float and move the wooded watered country, hill and dale and steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, a-sparkle with may morning, diamond drift o' the sun-touched dew. except the red-roofed patch of half a dozen dwellings that, crept close for hill-side shelter, make the village-clump this inn is perched above to dominate-- except such sign of human neighborhood, (and this surmised rather than sensible) there's nothing to disturb absolute peace, the reign of english nature--which mean art and civilized existence. wildness' self is just the cultured triumph. presently deep solitude, be sure, reveals a place that knows the right way to defend itself: silence hems round a burning spot of life. now, where a place burns, must a village brood, and where a village broods, an inn should boast-- close and convenient: here you have them both. this inn, the something-arms--the family's-- (don't trouble guillim; heralds leave our half!) is dear to lovers of the picturesque, and epics have been planned here; but who plan take holy orders and find work to do. painters are more productive, stop a week, declare the prospect quite a corot,--ay, for tender sentiment,--themselves incline rather to handsweep large and liberal; then go, but not without success achieved --haply some pencil-drawing, oak or beech, ferns at the base and ivies up the bole, on this a slug, on that a butterfly. nay, he who hooked the _salmo_ pendent here, also exhibited, this same may-month, '_foxgloves: a study_'--so inspires the scene, the air, which now the younger personage inflates him with till lungs o'erfraught are fain sigh forth a satisfaction might bestir even those tufts of tree-tops to the south i' the distance where the green dies off to grey, which, easy of conjecture, front the place; he eyes them, elbows wide, each hand to cheek. his fellow, the much older--either say a youngish-old man or man oldish-young-- sits at the table: wicks are noisome-deep in wax, to detriment of plated ware; above--piled, strewn--is store of playing-cards, counters and all that's proper for a game. circumstantial as the description of this parlor and the situation of the inn is, it is impossible to say which out of the many english inns browning had in mind. inns date back to the days of the romans, who had ale-houses along the roads, the most interesting feature of which was the ivy garland or wreath of vine-leaves in honor of bacchus, wreathed around a hoop at the end of a long pole to point out the way where good drink could be had. a curious survival of this in early english times was the "ale-stake," a tavern so called because it had a long pole projecting from the house front wreathed like the old roman poles with furze, a garland of flowers or an ivy wreath. this decoration was called the "bush," and in time the london taverners so vied with each other in their attempt to attract attention by very long poles and very prominent bushes that in a law was passed according to which all taverners in the city of london owning ale-stakes projecting or extending over the king's highway more than seven feet in length, at the utmost, should be fined forty pence, and compelled to remove the sign. here is the origin, too, of the proverb, "good wine needs no bush." in the later development of the inn the signs lost their bacchic character and became most elaborate, often being painted by artists. the poet says this inn was the "something-arms," and had perhaps once been a house. many inns were the "something (?) arms" and certainly many inns had been houses. one such is the pounds bridge inn on a secluded road between speldhurst and penshurst in kent. it was built by the rector of penshurst, william darkenoll, who lived in it only three years, when it became an inn. the inn of the poem might have been a combination in browning's memory of this and the "white horse" at woolstone, which is described as a queerly pretty little inn with a front distantly resembling a chippendale bureau-bookcase. "it is tucked away under the mighty sides of white horse hill, berkshire, and additionally overhung with trees and encircled with shrubberies and under-woods, and is finally situated on a narrow road that presently leads, as it would seem, to the end of the known world." so writes the enthusiastic lover of inns, charles harper. or, perhaps, since there is a river to be seen from the inn of the poem the "swan" at sandleford water, where a foot bridge and a water splash on the river enborne mark the boundaries of hampshire and berkshire. here "you have the place wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the birds of the overarching trees." the illustration given of the black bear inn, tewksbury, is a quite typical example of inn architecture, and may have helped the picture in browning's mind, though its situation is not so rural as that described in the poem. inns have, from time immemorial, been the scenes of romances and tragedies and crimes. there have been inns like the "castle" where the "quality" loved to congregate. the "inn album" of this establishment had inscribed in it almost every eighteenth-century name of any distinction. there have been inns which were noted as the resort of the wits of the day. ben jonson loved to take "mine ease in mine inn," and dr. johnson declared that a seat in a tavern chair was the height of human felicity. "he was thinking," as it has been pertinently put, "not only of a comfortable sanded parlor, a roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and good company, but also of the circle of humbly appreciative auditors who gathered round an accepted wit, hung upon his words, offered themselves as butts for his ironic or satiric humor, and--stood treat." or there was the inn of sinister aspect where highwaymen might congregate, or inns with hosts who let their guests down through trap-doors in the middle of the night to rob and murder them--or is this only a vague remembrance of a fanciful inn of dickens? then there was the pilgrim's inn in the days when chaucerian folks loved to go on pilgrimages, and in the last century the cyclists inn, and to-day the inn of the automobilist. the particular inn in the poem belongs to the class, rural inn, and in spite of its pictures by noted masters was "stuffy" as to the atmosphere. [illustration: an english inn] the "inn album" or visitors' book is a feature of inns. in this country we simply sign our names in the visitors' book, but the "album" feature of the visitors' book of an english inn is its glory and too often its shame, for as mr. harper says, "bathos, ineptitude, and lines that refuse to scan are the stigmata of visitors' book verse. there is no worse poetry on earth than that which lurks between those covers, or in the pages of young ladies' albums." he declares that "the interesting pages of visitors' books are generally those that are not there, as an irishman might say; for the world is populated very densely with those appreciative people who, whether from a love of literature, or with an instinct for collecting autographs that may have a realizable value, remove the signatures of distinguished men, and with them anything original they may have written." browning pokes fun at the poetry of his inn album, but at the same time uses it as an important part of the machinery in the action. his english "iago" writes in it the final damnation of his own character--the threat by means of which he hopes to ruin his victims, but which, instead, causes the lady to take poison and the young man to murder "iago." the presence of the two men at this particular inn is explained in the following bit of conversation between them. "you wrong your poor disciple. oh, no airs! because you happen to be twice my age and twenty times my master, must perforce no blink of daylight struggle through the web there's no unwinding? you entoil my legs, and welcome, for i like it: blind me,--no! a very pretty piece of shuttle-work was that--your mere chance question at the club-- '_do you go anywhere this whitsuntide? i'm off for paris, there's the opera--there's the salon, there's a china-sale,--beside chantilly; and, for good companionship, there's such-and-such and so-and-so. suppose we start together?_' '_no such holiday!_' i told you: '_paris and the rest be hanged! why plague me who am pledged to home-delights? i'm the engaged now; through whose fault but yours? on duty. as you well know. don't i drowse the week away down with the aunt and niece? no help: it's leisure, loneliness and love. wish i could take you; but fame travels fast,-- a man of much newspaper-paragraph, you scare domestic circles; and beside would not you like your lot, that second taste of nature and approval of the grounds! you might walk early or lie late, so shirk week-day devotions: but stay sunday o'er, and morning church is obligatory: no mundane garb permissible, or dread the butler's privileged monition! no! pack off to paris, nor wipe tear away!_' whereon how artlessly the happy flash followed, by inspiration! '_tell you what-- let's turn their flank, try things on t'other side! inns for my money! liberty's the life! we'll lie in hiding: there's the crow-nest nook, the tourist's joy, the inn they rave about, inn that's out--out of sight and out of mind and out of mischief to all four of us-- aunt and niece, you and me. at night arrive; at morn, find time for just a pisgah-view of my friend's land of promise; then depart. and while i'm whizzing onward by first train, bound for our own place (since my brother sulks and says i shun him like the plague) yourself-- why, you have stepped thence, start from platform, gay despite the sleepless journey,--love lends wings,-- hug aunt and niece who, none the wiser, wait the faithful advent! eh?_' '_with all my heart_,' said i to you; said i to mine own self: '_does he believe i fail to comprehend he wants just one more final friendly snack at friend's exchequer ere friend runs to earth, marries, renounces yielding friends such sport?_' and did i spoil sport, pull face grim,--nay, grave? your pupil does you better credit! no! i parleyed with my pass-book,--rubbed my pair at the big balance in my banker's hands,-- folded a cheque cigar-case-shape,--just wants filling and signing,--and took train, resolved to execute myself with decency and let you win--if not ten thousand quite, something by way of wind-up-farewell burst of firework-nosegay! where's your fortune fled? or is not fortune constant after all? you lose ten thousand pounds: had i lost half or half that, i should bite my lips, i think. you man of marble! strut and stretch my best on tiptoe, i shall never reach your height. how does the loss feel! just one lesson more!" the more refined man smiles a frown away. on the way to the station where the older man is to take the train they have another talk, in which each tells the other of his experience, but they do not find out yet that they have both loved the same woman. "stop, my boy! don't think i'm stingy of experience! life --it's like this wood we leave. should you and i go wandering about there, though the gaps we went in and came out by were opposed as the two poles, still, somehow, all the same, by nightfall we should probably have chanced on much the same main points of interest-- both of us measured girth of mossy trunk, stript ivy from its strangled prey, clapped hands at squirrel, sent a fir-cone after crow, and so forth,--never mind what time betwixt. so in our lives; allow i entered mine another way than you: 't is possible i ended just by knocking head against that plaguy low-hung branch yourself began by getting bump from; as at last you too may stumble o'er that stump which first of all bade me walk circumspectly. head and feet are vulnerable both, and i, foot-sure, forgot that ducking down saves brow from bruise. i, early old, played young man four years since and failed confoundedly: so, hate alike failure and who caused failure,--curse her cant!" "oh, i see! you, though somewhat past the prime, were taken with a rosebud beauty! ah-- but how should chits distinguish? she admired your marvel of a mind, i'll undertake! but as to body ... nay, i mean ... that is, when years have told on face and figure...." "thanks, mister _sufficiently-instructed_! such no doubt was bound to be the consequence to suit your self-complacency: she liked my head enough, but loved some heart beneath some head with plenty of brown hair a-top after my young friend's fashion! what becomes of that fine speech you made a minute since about the man of middle age you found a formidable peer at twenty-one? so much for your mock-modesty! and yet i back your first against this second sprout of observation, insight, what you please. my middle age, sir, had too much success! it's odd: my case occurred four years ago-- i finished just while you commenced that turn i' the wood of life that takes us to the wealth of honeysuckle, heaped for who can reach. now, i don't boast: it's bad style, and beside, the feat proves easier than it looks: i plucked full many a flower unnamed in that bouquet (mostly of peonies and poppies, though!) good nature sticks into my button-hole. therefore it was with nose in want of snuff rather than ess or psidium, that i chanced on what--so far from '_rosebud beauty_'.... well-- she's dead: at least you never heard her name; she was no courtly creature, had nor birth nor breeding--mere fine-lady-breeding; but oh, such a wonder of a woman! grand as a greek statue! stick fine clothes on that, style that a duchess or a queen,--you know, artists would make an outcry: all the more, that she had just a statue's sleepy grace which broods o'er its own beauty. nay, her fault (don't laugh!) was just perfection: for suppose only the little flaw, and i had peeped inside it, learned what soul inside was like. at rome some tourist raised the grit beneath a venus' forehead with his whittling-knife-- i wish,--now,--i had played that brute, brought blood to surface from the depths i fancied chalk! as it was, her mere face surprised so much that i stopped short there, struck on heap, as stares the cockney stranger at a certain bust with drooped eyes,--she's the thing i have in mind,-- down at my brother's. all sufficient prize-- such outside! now,--confound me for a prig!-- who cares? i'll make a clean breast once for all! beside, you've heard the gossip. my life long i've been a woman-liker,--liking means loving and so on. there's a lengthy list by this time i shall have to answer for-- so say the good folk: and they don't guess half-- for the worst is, let once collecting-itch possess you, and, with perspicacity, keeps growing such a greediness that theft follows at no long distance,--there's the fact! i knew that on my leporello-list might figure this, that, and the other name of feminine desirability, but if i happened to desire inscribe, along with these, the only beautiful-- here was the unique specimen to snatch or now or never. 'beautiful' i said-- 'beautiful' say in cold blood,--boiling then to tune of '_haste, secure whate'er the cost this rarity, die in the act, be damned, so you complete collection, crown your list!_' it seemed as though the whole world, once aroused by the first notice of such wonder's birth, would break bounds to contest my prize with me the first discoverer, should she but emerge from that safe den of darkness where she dozed till i stole in, that country-parsonage where, country-parson's daughter, motherless, brotherless, sisterless, for eighteen years she had been vegetating lily-like. her father was my brother's tutor, got the living that way: him i chanced to see-- her i saw--her the world would grow one eye to see, i felt no sort of doubt at all! '_secure her!_' cried the devil: '_afterward arrange for the disposal of the prize!_' the devil's doing! yet i seem to think-- now, when all's done,--think with '_a head reposed_' in french phrase--hope i think i meant to do all requisite for such a rarity when i should be at leisure, have due time to learn requirement. but in evil day-- bless me, at week's end, long as any year, the father must begin '_young somebody, much recommended--for i break a rule-- comes here to read, next long vacation_.' '_young!_' that did it. had the epithet been '_rich_,' '_noble_,' '_a genius_,' even '_handsome_,'--but --'_young!_'" "i say--just a word! i want to know-- you are not married?" "i?" "nor ever were?" "never! why?" "oh, then--never mind! go on! i had a reason for the question." "come,-- you could not be the young man?" "no, indeed! certainly--if you never married her!" "that i did not: and there's the curse, you'll see! nay, all of it's one curse, my life's mistake which, nourished with manure that's warranted to make the plant bear wisdom, blew out full in folly beyond field-flower-foolishness! the lies i used to tell my womankind, knowing they disbelieved me all the time though they required my lies, their decent due, this woman--not so much believed, i'll say, as just anticipated from my mouth: since being true, devoted, constant--she found constancy, devotion, truth, the plain and easy commonplace of character. no mock-heroics but seemed natural to her who underneath the face, i knew was fairness' self, possessed a heart, i judged must correspond in folly just as far beyond the common,--and a mind to match,-- not made to puzzle conjurers like me who, therein, proved the fool who fronts you, sir, and begs leave to cut short the ugly rest! '_trust me!_' i said: she trusted. '_marry me!_' or rather, '_we are married: when, the rite?_' that brought on the collector's next-day qualm at counting acquisition's cost. there lay my marvel, there my purse more light by much because of its late lie-expenditure: ill-judged such moment to make fresh demand-- to cage as well as catch my rarity! so, i began explaining. at first word outbroke the horror. '_then, my truths were lies!_' i tell you, such an outbreak, such new strange all-unsuspected revelation--soul as supernaturally grand as face was fair beyond example--that at once either i lost--or, if it please you, found my senses,--stammered somehow--'_jest! and now, earnest! forget all else but--heart has loved, does love, shall love you ever! take the hand!_' not she! no marriage for superb disdain, contempt incarnate!" "yes, it's different,-- it's only like in being four years since. i see now!" "well, what did disdain do next, think you?" "that's past me: did not marry you!-- that's the main thing i care for, i suppose. turned nun, or what?" "why, married in a month some parson, some smug crop-haired smooth-chinned sort of curate-creature, i suspect,--dived down, down, deeper still, and came up somewhere else-- i don't know where--i've not tried much to know,-- in short, she's happy: what the clodpoles call 'countrified' with a vengeance! leads the life respectable and all that drives you mad: still--where, i don't know, and that's best for both." "well, that she did not like you, i conceive. but why should you hate her, i want to know?" "my good young friend,--because or her or else malicious providence i have to hate. for, what i tell you proved the turning-point of my whole life and fortune toward success or failure. if i drown, i lay the fault much on myself who caught at reed not rope, but more on reed which, with a packthread's pith, had buoyed me till the minute's cramp could thaw and i strike out afresh and so be saved. it's easy saying--i had sunk before, disqualified myself by idle days and busy nights, long since, from holding hard on cable, even, had fate cast me such! you boys don't know how many times men fail perforce o' the little to succeed i' the large, husband their strength, let slip the petty prey, collect the whole power for the final pounce. my fault was the mistaking man's main prize for intermediate boy's diversion; clap of boyish hands here frightened game away which, once gone, goes forever. oh, at first i took the anger easily, nor much minded the anguish--having learned that storms subside, and teapot-tempests are akin. time would arrange things, mend whate'er might be somewhat amiss; precipitation, eh? reason and rhyme prompt--reparation! tiffs end properly in marriage and a dance! i said 'we'll marry, make the past a blank'-- and never was such damnable mistake! that interview, that laying bare my soul, as it was first, so was it last chance--one and only. did i write? back letter came unopened as it went. inexorable she fled, i don't know where, consoled herself with the smug curate-creature: chop and change! sure am i, when she told her shaveling all his magdalen's adventure, tears were shed, forgiveness evangelically shown, 'loose hair and lifted eye,'--as some one says. and now, he's worshipped for his pains, the sneak!" "well, but your turning-point of life,--what's here to hinder you contesting finsbury with orton, next election? i don't see...." "not you! but _i_ see. slowly, surely, creeps day by day o'er me the conviction--here was life's prize grasped at, gained, and then let go! --that with her--may be, for her--i had felt ice in me melt, grow steam, drive to effect any or all the fancies sluggish here i' the head that needs the hand she would not take and i shall never lift now. lo, your wood-- its turnings which i likened life to! well,-- there she stands, ending every avenue, her visionary presence on each goal i might have gained had we kept side by side! still string nerve and strike foot? her frown forbids: the steam congeals once more: i'm old again! therefore i hate myself--but how much worse do not i hate who would not understand, let me repair things--no, but sent a-slide my folly falteringly, stumblingly down, down and deeper down until i drop upon--the need of your ten thousand pounds and consequently loss of mine! i lose character, cash, nay, common-sense itself recounting such a lengthy cock-and-bull adventure--lose my temper in the act...." "and lose beside,--if i may supplement the list of losses,--train and ten-o'clock! hark, pant and puff, there travels the swart sign! so much the better! you're my captive now! i'm glad you trust a fellow: friends grow thick this way--that's twice said; we were thickish, though, even last night, and, ere night comes again, i prophesy good luck to both of us! for see now!--back to '_balmy eminence_' or '_calm acclivity_,' or what's the word! bestow you there an hour, concoct at ease a sonnet for the album, while i put bold face on, best foot forward, make for house, march in to aunt and niece, and tell the truth-- (even white-lying goes against my taste after your little story). oh, the niece is rationality itself! the aunt-- if she's amenable to reason too-- why, you stooped short to pay her due respect, and let the duke wait (i'll work well the duke). if she grows gracious, i return for you; if thunder's in the air, why--bear your doom, dine on rump-steaks and port, and shake the dust of aunty from your shoes as off you go by evening-train, nor give the thing a thought how you shall pay me--that's as sure as fate, old fellow! off with you, face left about! yonder's the path i have to pad. you see, i'm in good spirits, god knows why! perhaps because the woman did not marry you --who look so hard at me,--and have the right, one must be fair and own." the two stand still under an oak. "look here!" resumes the youth. "i never quite knew how i came to like you--so much--whom i ought not court at all; nor how you had a leaning just to me who am assuredly not worth your pains. for there must needs be plenty such as you somewhere about,--although i can't say where,-- able and willing to teach all you know; while--how can you have missed a score like me with money and no wit, precisely each a pupil for your purpose, were it--ease fool's poke of tutor's _honorarium_-fee? and yet, howe'er it came about, i felt at once my master: you as prompt descried your man, i warrant, so was bargain struck. now, these same lines of liking, loving, run sometimes so close together they converge-- life's great adventures--you know what i mean-- in people. do you know, as you advanced, it got to be uncommonly like fact we two had fallen in with--liked and loved just the same woman in our different ways? i began life--poor groundling as i prove-- winged and ambitious to fly high: why not? there's something in 'don quixote' to the point, my shrewd old father used to quote and praise-- '_am i born man?_' asks sancho: '_being man, by possibility i may be pope!_' so, pope i meant to make myself, by step and step, whereof the first should be to find a perfect woman; and i tell you this-- if what i fixed on, in the order due of undertakings, as next step, had first of all disposed itself to suit my tread, and i had been, the day i came of age, returned at head of poll for westminster --nay, and moreover summoned by the queen at week's end, when my maiden-speech bore fruit, to form and head a tory ministry-- it would not have seemed stranger, no, nor been more strange to me, as now i estimate, than what did happen--sober truth, no dream. i saw my wonder of a woman,--laugh, i'm past that!--in commemoration-week. a plenty have i seen since, fair and foul,-- with eyes, too, helped by your sagacious wink; but one to match that marvel--no least trace, least touch of kinship and community! the end was--i did somehow state the fact, did, with no matter what imperfect words, one way or other give to understand that woman, soul and body were her slave would she but take, but try them--any test of will, and some poor test of power beside: so did the strings within my brain grow tense and capable of ... hang similitudes! she answered kindly but beyond appeal. '_no sort of hope for me, who came too late. she was another's. love went--mine to her, hers just as loyally to some one else._' of course! i might expect it! nature's law-- given the peerless woman, certainly somewhere shall be the peerless man to match! i acquiesced at once, submitted me in something of a stupor, went my way. i fancy there had been some talk before of somebody--her father or the like-- to coach me in the holidays,--that's how i came to get the sight and speech of her,-- but i had sense enough to break off sharp, save both of us the pain." "quite right there!" "eh? quite wrong, it happens! now comes worst of all! yes, i did sulk aloof and let alone the lovers--_i_ disturb the angel-mates?" "seraph paired off with cherub!" "thank you! while i never plucked up courage to inquire who he was, even,--certain-sure of this, that nobody i knew of had blue wings and wore a star-crown as he needs must do,-- some little lady,--plainish, pock-marked girl,-- finds out my secret in my woful face, comes up to me at the apollo ball, and pityingly pours her wine and oil this way into the wound: '_dear f-f-friend, why waste affection thus on--must i say, a somewhat worthless object? who's her choice-- irrevocable as deliberate-- out of the wide world? i shall name no names-- but there's a person in society, who, blessed with rank and talent, has grown gray in idleness and sin of every sort except hypocrisy: he's thrice her age, a by-word for "successes with the sex" as the french say--and, as we ought to say, consummately a liar and a rogue, since--show me where's the woman won without the help of this one lie which she believes-- that--never mind how things have come to pass, and let who loves have loved a thousand times-- all the same he now loves her only, loves her ever! if by "won" you just mean "sold," that's quite another compact. well, this scamp, continuing descent from bad to worse, must leave his fine and fashionable prey (who--fathered, brothered, husbanded,--are hedged about with thorny danger) and apply his arts to this poor country ignorance who sees forthwith in the first rag of man her model hero! why continue waste on such a woman treasures of a heart would yet find solace,--yes, my f-f-friend-- in some congenial_--fiddle-diddle-dee?'" "pray, is the pleasant gentleman described exact the portrait which my '_f-f-friends_' recognize as so like? 't is evident you half surmised the sweet original could be no other than myself, just now! your stop and start were flattering!" "of course caricature's allowed for in a sketch! the longish nose becomes a foot in length, the swarthy cheek gets copper-colored,--still, prominent beak and dark-hued skin are facts: and '_parson's daughter_'--'_young man coachable_'-- '_elderly party_'--'_four years since_'--were facts to fasten on, a moment! marriage, though-- that made the difference, i hope." "all right! i never married; wish i had--and then unwish it: people kill their wives, sometimes! i hate my mistress, but i'm murder-free. in your case, where's the grievance? you came last, the earlier bird picked up the worm. suppose you, in the glory of your twenty-one, had happened to precede myself! 't is odds but this gigantic juvenility, this offering of a big arm's bony hand-- i'd rather shake than feel shake me, i know-- had moved _my_ dainty mistress to admire an altogether new ideal--deem idolatry less due to life's decline productive of experience, powers mature by dint of usage, the made man--no boy that's all to make! i was the earlier bird-- and what i found, i let fall: what you missed who is the fool that blames you for?" they become so deeply interested in this talk that the train is missed, and, in the meantime, the lady who now lives in the neighborhood as the wife of the hard-working country parson meets the young girl at the inn. they are great friends and have come there, at the girl's invitation, to talk over her prospective husband. she desires her friend to come to her home and meet her fiancé, but the lady, who is in constant fear of meeting "iago," never goes anywhere, and proposes a meeting with him at the inn. while she waits, "iago" comes in upon her. there is a terrible scene of recrimination between these two, the man again daring to prefer his love. the lady scorns him. horror is added to horror when the young man appears at the door, and recognizes the woman he really loves. his faith in her and his love are shaken for a moment, but return immediately and he stands her true friend and lover. the complete despicableness of "iago's" nature finally reveals itself in the lines he writes in the album and gives to the lady to read. the poem is too long to quote in full. the closing scene, however, will give the reader a good idea of the poet's handling of this nineteenth-century tragedy. the true nobility of soul of the younger man links him with mertoun among browning's heroes and represents the englishman or the man of any country for that matter at his highest. whether redemption for the older man would have been possible had the lady believed him in the inn parlor is doubtful. such natures are like ibsen's "peer gynt." they need to be put into a button mould and moulded over again. "here's the lady back! so, madam, you have conned the album-page and come to thank its last contributor? how kind and condescending! i retire a moment, lest i spoil the interview, and mar my own endeavor to make friends-- you with him, him with you, and both with me! if i succeed--permit me to inquire five minutes hence! friends bid good-by, you know." and out he goes. vii she, face, form, bearing, one superb composure-- "he has told you all? yes, he has told you all, your silence says-- what gives him, as he thinks the mastery over my body and my soul!--has told that instance, even, of their servitude he now exacts of me? a silent blush! that's well, though better would white ignorance beseem your brow, undesecrate before-- ay, when i left you! i too learn at last --hideously learned as i seemed so late-- what sin may swell to. yes,--i needed learn that, when my prophet's rod became the snake i fled from, it would, one day, swallow up --incorporate whatever serpentine falsehood and treason and unmanliness beslime earth's pavement: such the power of hell, and so beginning, ends no otherwise the adversary! i was ignorant, blameworthy--if you will; but blame i take nowise upon me as i ask myself --_you_--how can you, whose soul i seemed to read the limpid eyes through, have declined so deep even with him for consort? i revolve much memory, pry into the looks and words of that day's walk beneath the college wall, and nowhere can distinguish, in what gleams only pure marble through my dusky past, a dubious cranny where such poison-seed might harbor, nourish what should yield to-day this dread ingredient for the cup i drink. do not i recognize and honor truth in seeming?--take your truth and for return, give you my truth, a no less precious gift? you loved me: i believed you. i replied --how could i other? '_i was not my own_,' --no longer had the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the mind to judge, since heart and soul now were another's. my own right in me, for well or ill, consigned away--my face fronted the honest path, deflection whence had shamed me in the furtive backward look at the late bargain--fit such chapman's phrase!-- as though--less hasty and more provident-- waiting had brought advantage. not for me the chapman's chance! yet while thus much was true, i spared you--as i knew you then--one more concluding word which, truth no less, seemed best buried away forever. take it now its power to pain is past! four years--that day-- those lines that make the college avenue! i would that--friend and foe--by miracle, i had, that moment, seen into the heart of either, as i now am taught to see! i do believe i should have straight assumed my proper function, and sustained a soul, nor aimed at being just sustained myself by some man's soul--the weaker woman's-want! so had i missed the momentary thrill of finding me in presence of a god, but gained the god's own feeling when he gives such thrill to what turns life from death before. '_gods many and lords many_,' says the book: you would have yielded up your soul to me --not to the false god who has burned its clay in his own image. i had shed my love like spring dew on the clod all flowery thence, not sent up a wild vapor to the sun that drinks and then disperses. both of us blameworthy,--i first meet my punishment-- and not so hard to bear. i breathe again! forth from those arms' enwinding leprosy at last i struggle--uncontaminate: why must i leave _you_ pressing to the breast that's all one plague-spot? did you love me once? then take love's last and best return! i think, womanliness means only motherhood; all love begins and ends there,--roams enough, but, having run the circle, rests at home. why is your expiation yet to make? pull shame with your own hands from your own head now,--never wait the slow envelopment submitted to by unelastic age! one fierce throe frees the sapling: flake on flake lull till they leave the oak snow-stupefied. your heart retains its vital warmth--or why that blushing reassurance? blush, young blood! break from beneath this icy premature captivity of wickedness--i warn back, in god's name! no fresh encroachment here! this may breaks all to bud--no winter now! friend, we are both forgiven! sin no more! i am past sin now, so shall you become! meanwhile i testify that, lying once, my foe lied ever, most lied last of all. he, waking, whispered to your sense asleep the wicked counsel,--and assent might seem; but, roused, your healthy indignation breaks the idle dream-pact. you would die--not dare confirm your dream-resolve,--nay, find the word that fits the deed to bear the light of day! say i have justly judged you! then farewell to blushing--nay, it ends in smiles, not tears! why tears now? i have justly judged, thank god!" he does blush boy-like, but the man speaks out, --makes the due effort to surmount himself. "i don't know what he wrote--how should i? nor how he could read my purpose which, it seems, he chose to somehow write--mistakenly or else for mischief's sake. i scarce believe my purpose put before you fair and plain would need annoy so much; but there's my luck-- from first to last i blunder. still, one more turn at the target, try to speak my thought! since he could guess my purpose, won't you read right what he set down wrong? he said--let's think! ay, so!--he did begin by telling heaps of tales about you. now, you see--suppose any one told me--my own mother died before i knew her--told me--to his cost!-- such tales about my own dead mother: why, you would not wonder surely if i knew, by nothing but my own heart's help, he lied, would you? no reason's wanted in the case. so with you! in they burnt on me, his tales, much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, make captive any visitor and scream all sorts of stories of their keeper--he's both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; sane people soon see through the gibberish! i just made out, you somehow lived somewhere a life of shame--i can't distinguish more-- married or single--how, don't matter much: shame which himself had caused--that point was clear, that fact confessed--that thing to hold and keep. oh, and he added some absurdity --that you were here to make me--ha, ha, ha!-- still love you, still of mind to die for you, ha, ha--as if that needed mighty pains! now, foolish as ... but never mind myself --what i am, what i am not, in the eye of the world, is what i never cared for much. fool then or no fool, not one single word in the whole string of lies did i believe, but this--this only--if i choke, who cares?-- i believe somehow in your purity perfect as ever! else what use is god? he is god, and work miracles he can! then, what shall i do? quite as clear, my course! they've got a thing they call their labyrinth i' the garden yonder: and my cousin played a pretty trick once, led and lost me deep inside the briery maze of hedge round hedge; and there might i be staying now, stock-still, but that i laughing bade eyes follow nose and so straight pushed my path through let and stop and soon was out in the open, face all scratched, but well behind my back the prison-bars in sorry plight enough, i promise you! so here: i won my way to truth through lies-- said, as i saw light,--if her shame be shame i'll rescue and redeem her,--shame's no shame? then, i'll avenge, protect--redeem myself the stupidest of sinners! here i stand! dear,--let me once dare call you so,--you said thus ought you to have done, four years ago, such things and such! ay, dear, and what ought i? you were revealed to me: where's gratitude, where's memory even, where the gain of you discernible in my low after-life of fancied consolation? why, no horse once fed on corn, will, missing corn, go munch mere thistles like a donkey! i missed you, and in your place found--him, made him my love, ay, did i,--by this token, that he taught so much beast-nature that i meant ... god knows whether i bow me to the dust enough!... to marry--yes, my cousin here! i hope that was a master-stroke! take heart of hers, and give her hand of mine with no more heart than now you see upon this brow i strike! what atom of a heart do i retain not all yours? dear, you know it! easily may she accord me pardon when i place my brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign, since uttermost indignity is spared-- mere marriage and no love! and all this time not one word to the purpose! are you free? only wait! only let me serve--deserve where you appoint and how you see the good! i have the will--perhaps the power--at least means that have power against the world. for time-- take my whole life for your experiment! if you are bound--in marriage, say--why, still, still, sure, there's something for a friend to do, outside? a mere well-wisher, understand! i'll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know, swing it wide open to let you and him pass freely,--and you need not look, much less fling me a '_thank you--are you there, old friend_?' don't say that even: i should drop like shot! so i feel now at least: some day, who knows? after no end of weeks and months and years you might smile '_i believe you did your best_!' and that shall make my heart leap--leap such leap as lands the feet in heaven to wait you there! ah, there's just one thing more! how pale you look! why? are you angry? if there's, after all, worst come to worst--if still there somehow be the shame--i said was no shame,--none! i swear!-- in that case, if my hand and what it holds,-- my name,--might be your safeguard now--at once-- why, here's the hand--you have the heart! of course-- no cheat, no binding you, because i'm bound, to let me off probation by one day, week, month, year, lifetime! prove as you propose! here's the hand with the name to take or leave! that's all--and no great piece of news, i hope!" "give me the hand, then!" she cries hastily. "quick, now! i hear his footstep!" hand in hand the couple face him as he enters, stops short, stands surprised a moment, laughs away surprise, resumes the much-experienced man. "so, you accept him?" "till us death do part!" "no longer? come, that's right and rational! i fancied there was power in common sense, but did not know it worked thus promptly. well-- at last each understands the other, then? each drops disguise, then? so, at supper-time these masquerading people doff their gear, grand turk his pompous turban, quakeress her stiff-starched bib and tucker,--make-believe that only bothers when, ball-business done, nature demands champagne and _mayonnaise_. just so has each of us sage three abjured his and her moral pet particular pretension to superiority, and, cheek by jowl, we henceforth munch and joke! go, happy pair, paternally dismissed to live and die together--for a month, discretion can award no more! depart from whatsoe'er the calm sweet solitude selected--paris not improbably-- at month's end, when the honeycomb's left wax, --you, daughter, with a pocketful of gold enough to find your village boys and girls in duffel cloaks and hobnailed shoes from may to--what's the phrase?--christmas-come-never-mas! you, son and heir of mine, shall re-appear ere spring-time, that's the ring-time, lose one leaf, and--not without regretful smack of lip the while you wipe it free of honey-smear-- marry the cousin, play the magistrate, stand for the country, prove perfection's pink-- master of hounds, gay-coated dine--nor die sooner than needs of gout, obesity, and sons at christ church! as for me,--ah me, i abdicate--retire on my success, four years well occupied in teaching youth --my son and daughter the exemplary! time for me to retire now, having placed proud on their pedestal the pair: in turn, let them do homage to their master! you,-- well, your flushed cheek and flashing eye proclaim sufficiently your gratitude: you paid the _honorarium_, the ten thousand pounds to purpose, did you not? i told you so! and you, but, bless me, why so pale--so faint at influx of good fortune? certainly, no matter how or why or whose the fault, i save your life--save it, nor less nor more! you blindly were resolved to welcome death in that black boor-and-bumpkin-haunted hole of his, the prig with all the preachments! _you_ installed as nurse and matron to the crones and wenches, while there lay a world outside like paris (which again i recommend) in company and guidance of--first, this, then--all in good time--some new friend as fit-- what if i were to say, some fresh myself, as i once figured? each dog has his day, and mine's at sunset: what should old dog do but eye young litters' frisky puppyhood? oh i shall watch this beauty and this youth frisk it in brilliance! but don't fear! discreet, i shall pretend to no more recognize my quondam pupils than the doctor nods when certain old acquaintances may cross his path in park, or sit down prim beside his plate at dinner-table: tip nor wink scares patients he has put, for reason good, under restriction,--maybe, talked sometimes of douche or horsewhip to,--for why? because the gentleman would crazily declare his best friend was--iago! ay, and worse-- the lady, all at once grown lunatic, in suicidal monomania vowed, to save her soul, she needs must starve herself! they're cured now, both, and i tell nobody. why don't you speak? nay, speechless, each of you can spare,--without unclasping plighted troth,-- at least one hand to shake! left-hands will do-- yours first, my daughter! ah, it guards--it gripes the precious album fast--and prudently! as well obliterate the record there on page the last: allow me tear the leaf! pray, now! and afterward, to make amends, what if all three of us contribute each a line to that prelusive fragment,--help the embarrassed bard who broke out to break down dumbfoundered at such unforeseen success? '_hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot_' you begin--_place aux dames_! i'll prompt you then! '_here do i take the good the gods allot!_' next you, sir! what, still sulky? sing, o muse! '_here does my lord in full discharge his shot!_' now for the crowning flourish! mine shall be...." "nothing to match your first effusion, mar what was, is, shall remain your masterpiece! authorship has the alteration-itch! no, i protest against erasure. read, my friend!" (she gasps out). "read and quickly read '_before us death do part_,' what made you mine and made me yours--the marriage-license here! decide if he is like to mend the same!" and so the lady, white to ghastliness, manages somehow to display the page with left-hand only, while the right retains the other hand, the young man's,--dreaming-drunk he, with this drench of stupefying stuff, eyes wide, mouth open,--half the idiot's stare and half the prophet's insight,--holding tight, all the same, by his one fact in the world-- the lady's right-hand: he but seems to read-- does not, for certain; yet, how understand unless he reads? so, understand he does, for certain. slowly, word by word, _she_ reads aloud that license--or that warrant, say. "'_one against two--and two that urge their odds to uttermost--i needs must try resource! madam, i laid me prostrate, bade you spurn body and soul: you spurned and safely spurned so you had spared me the superfluous taunt "prostration means no power to stand erect, stand, trampling on who trampled--prostrate now!" so, with my other fool-foe: i was fain let the boy touch me with the buttoned foil, and him the infection gains, he too must needs catch up the butcher's cleaver. be it so! since play turns earnest, here's my serious fence. he loves you; he demands your love: both know what love means in my language. love him then! pursuant to a pact, love pays my debt: therefore, deliver me from him, thereby likewise delivering from me yourself! for, hesitate--much more, refuse consent-- i tell the whole truth to your husband. flat cards lie on table, in our gamester-phrase! consent--you stop my mouth, the only way._' "i did well, trusting instinct: knew your hand had never joined with his in fellowship over this pact of infamy. you known-- as he was known through every nerve of me. therefore i '_stopped his mouth the only way_' but _my_ way! none was left for you, my friend-- the loyal--near, the loved one! no--no--no! threaten? chastise? the coward would but quail. conquer who can, the cunning of the snake! stamp out his slimy strength from tail to head, and still you leave vibration of the tongue. his malice had redoubled--not on me who, myself, choose my own refining fire-- but on poor unsuspicious innocence; and,--victim,--to turn executioner also--that feat effected, forky tongue had done indeed its office! one snake's 'mouth' thus '_open_'--how could mortal '_stop it_'? "so!" a tiger-flash--yell, spring, and scream: halloo! death's out and on him, has and holds him--ugh! but _ne trucidet coram populo juvenis senem_! right the horatian rule! there, see how soon a quiet comes to pass! the youth is somehow by the lady's side. his right-hand grasps her right-hand once again. both gaze on the dead body. hers the word. "and that was good but useless. had i lived the danger was to dread: but, dying now-- himself would hardly become talkative, since talk no more means torture. fools--what fools these wicked men are! had i borne four years, four years of weeks and months and days and nights, inured me to the consciousness of life coiled round by his life, with the tongue to ply,-- but that i bore about me, for prompt use at urgent need, the thing that '_stops the mouth_' and stays the venom? since such need was now or never,--how should use not follow need? bear witness for me, i withdraw from life by virtue of the license--warrant, say, that blackens yet this album--white again, thanks still to my one friend who tears the page! now, let me write the line of supplement, as counselled by my foe there: '_each a line_!'" and she does falteringly write to end. "_i die now through the villain who lies dead, righteously slain. he would have outraged me, so, my defender slew him. god protect the right! where wrong lay, i bear witness now. let man believe me, whose last breath is spent in blessing my defender from my soul!_" and so ends the inn album. as she dies, begins outside a voice that sounds like song, and is indeed half song though meant for speech muttered in time to motion--stir of heart that unsubduably must bubble forth to match the fawn-step as it mounts the stair. "all's ended and all's over! verdict found '_not guilty_'--prisoner forthwith set free, mid cheers the court pretends to disregard! now portia, now for daniel, late severe, at last appeased, benignant! '_this young man-- hem--has the young man's foibles but no fault. he's virgin soil--a friend must cultivate. i think no plant called "love" grows wild--a friend may introduce, and name the bloom, the fruit!_' here somebody dares wave a handkerchief-- she'll want to hide her face with presently! good-by then! '_cigno fedel, cigno fedel, addio!_' now, was ever such mistake-- ever such foolish ugly omen? pshaw! wagner, beside! '_amo te solo, te solo amai!_' that's worth fifty such! but, mum, the grave face at the opened door!" and so the good gay girl, with eyes and cheeks diamond and damask,--cheeks so white erewhile because of a vague fancy, idle fear chased on reflection!--pausing, taps discreet; and then, to give herself a countenance, before she comes upon the pair inside, loud--the oft-quoted, long-laughed-over line-- "'_hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!_' open the door!" no: let the curtain fall! chapter v religious thought in the nineteenth century in "bishop blougram's apology" and "christmas-eve and easter day," browning has covered the main tendencies in religious thought of the nineteenth century in england; and possibly "caliban" might be included as representative of calvinistic survivals of the century. the two most strongly marked of these tendencies have been shown in the tractarian movement which took anglican in the direction of high churchism and catholicism, and in the scientific movement which led in the direction of agnosticism. the battle between the church of rome and the church of england was waged the latter part of the first half of the century, and the greater battle between science and religion came on in its full strength the middle of the century when the influence of spencer, darwin, tyndall, huxley and other men of science began to make itself felt, as well as that of such critics of historical christianity as strauss in germany and renan in france. the influence of the dissenting bodies,--the presbyterians and the methodists--also became a power during the century. broadly speaking, it may be said that the development has been in the direction of the utmost freedom of conscience in the matter of religion, though the struggles of humanity to arrive there even during this century are distressing to look back upon; and occasionally one is held up even in america to-day by the ghost of religious persecution. it is an open secret that in bishop blougram, browning meant to portray cardinal wiseman, whose connection with the tractarian movement is of great interest in the history of this movement. browning enjoyed hugely the joke that cardinal wiseman himself reviewed the poem. the cardinal praised it as a poem, though he did not consider the attitude of a priest of rome to be properly interpreted. a comparison of the poem with opinions expressed by the cardinal as well as a glimpse into his activities will show how far browning has done him justice. it is well to remember at the outset that the poet's own view is neither that of blougram nor of the literary man gigadibs, with whom blougram talks over his wine. gigadibs is an agnostic and cannot understand how a man of blougram's fine intellectual and artistic perceptions is able so implicitly to believe in catholic doctrine. blougram's apology for himself amounts to this,--that he does not believe with absolute certainty any more than does gigadibs; but, on the other hand, gigadibs does not disbelieve with absolute certainty, so blougram's state is one of belief shaken occasionally by doubt, while gigadibs is one of unbelief shaken by fits of belief. bishop blougram's apology . . . . . . . now come, let's backward to the starting place. see my way: we're two college friends, suppose. prepare together for our voyage, then; each note and check the other in his work,-- there's mine, a bishop's outfit; criticize! what's wrong? why won't you be a bishop too? what first, you don't believe, you don't, and can't, (not statedly, that is, and fixedly and absolutely and exclusively) in any revelation called divine. no dogmas nail your faith; and what remains but say so, like the honest man you are? first, therefore, overhaul theology! nay, i too, not a fool, you please to think, must find believing every whit as hard: and if i do not frankly say as much, the ugly consequence is clear enough. now wait, my friend: well, i do not believe-- if you'll accept no faith that is not fixed, absolute and exclusive, as you say. you're wrong--i mean to prove it in due time. meanwhile, i know where difficulties lie i could not, cannot solve, nor ever shall, so give up hope accordingly to solve-- (to you, and over the wine). our dogmas then with both of us, though in unlike degree, missing full credence--overboard with them! i mean to meet you on your own premise: good, there go mine in company with yours! and now what are we? unbelievers both, calm and complete, determinately fixed to-day, to-morrow and forever, pray? you'll guarantee me that? not so, i think! in no wise! all we've gained is, that belief. as unbelief before, shakes us by fits, confounds us like its predecessor. where's the gain? how can we guard our unbelief, make it bear fruit to us?--the problem here. just when we are safest, there's a sunset touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, a chorus-ending from euripides,-- and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears as old and new at once as nature's self, to rap and knock and enter in our soul, take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- the grand perhaps! we look on helplessly. there the old misgivings, crooked questions are-- this good god,--what he could do, if he would, would, if he could--then must have done long since: if so, when, where and how? some way must be,-- once feel about, and soon or late you hit some sense, in which it might be, after all. why not, "the way, the truth, the life?" the advantage of making belief instead of unbelief the starting point is, blougram contends, that he lives by what he finds the most to his taste; giving him as it does, power, distinction and beauty in life as well as hope in the life to come. well, now, there's one great form of christian faith i happened to be born in--which to teach was given me as i grew up, on all hands, as best and readiest means of living by; the same on examination being proved the most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise and absolute form of faith in the whole world-- accordingly, most potent of all forms for working on the world. observe, my friend! such as you know me, i am free to say, in these hard latter days which hamper one, myself--by no immoderate exercise of intellect and learning, but the tact to let external forces work for me, --bid the street's stones be bread and they are bread; bid peter's creed, or rather, hildebrand's, exalt me o'er my fellows in the world and make my life an ease and joy and pride; it does so,--which for me's a great point gained, who have a soul and body that exact a comfortable care in many ways. there's power in me and will to dominate which i must exercise, they hurt me else: in many ways i need mankind's respect, obedience, and the love that's born of fear: while at the same time, there's a taste i have, a toy of soul, a titillating thing, refuses to digest these dainties crude. the naked life is gross till clothed upon: i must take what men offer, with a grace as though i would not, could i help it, take! an uniform i wear though over-rich-- something imposed on me, no choice of mine; no fancy-dress worn for pure fancy's sake and despicable therefore! now folk kneel and kiss my hand--of course the church's hand. thus i am made, thus life is best for me, and thus that it should be i have procured; and thus it could not be another way, i venture to imagine. you'll reply, so far my choice, no doubt, is a success; but were i made of better elements, with nobler instincts, purer tastes, like you, i hardly would account the thing success though it did all for me i say. but, friend, we speak of what is; not of what might be, and how 'twere better if 'twere otherwise. i am the man you see here plain enough: grant i'm a beast, why, beasts must lead beasts' lives! suppose i own at once to tail and claws; the tailless man exceeds me: but being tailed i'll lash out lion fashion, and leave apes to dock their stump and dress their haunches up. my business is not to remake myself, but make the absolute best of what god made. but, friend, i don't acknowledge quite so fast i fail of all your manhood's lofty tastes enumerated so complacently, on the mere ground that you forsooth can find in this particular life i choose to lead no fit provision for them. can you not? say you, my fault is i address myself to grosser estimators than should judge? and that's no way of holding up the soul, which, nobler, needs men's praise perhaps, yet knows one wise man's verdict outweighs all the fools'-- would like the two, but, forced to choose, takes that. i pine among my million imbeciles (you think) aware some dozen men of sense eye me and know me, whether i believe in the last winking virgin, as i vow, and am a fool, or disbelieve in her and am a knave,--approve in neither case, withhold their voices though i look their way: like verdi when, at his worst opera's end (the thing they gave at florence,--what's its name?) while the mad houseful's plaudits near outbang his orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones, he looks through all the roaring and the wreaths where sits rossini patient in his stall. nay, friend, i meet you with an answer here-- that even your prime men who appraise their kind are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel, see more in a truth than the truth's simple self, confuse themselves. you see lads walk the street sixty the minute; what's to note in that? you see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; him you must watch--he's sure to fall, yet stands! our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. the honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist, demirep that loves and saves her soul in new french books-- we watch while these in equilibrium keep the giddy line midway: one step aside, they're classed and done with. i, then, keep the line before your sages,--just the men to shrink from the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad you offer their refinement. fool or knave? why needs a bishop be a fool or knave when there's a thousand diamond weights between? so, i enlist them. your picked twelve, you'll find, profess themselves indignant, scandalized at thus being held unable to explain how a superior man who disbelieves may not believe as well: that's schelling's way! it's through my coming in the tail of time, nicking the minute with a happy tact. had i been born three hundred years ago they'd say, "what's strange? blougram of course believes;" and, seventy years since, "disbelieves of course." but now, "he may believe; and yet, and yet how can he?" all eyes turn with interest. whereas, step off the line on either side-- you, for example, clever to a fault, the rough and ready man who write apace, read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less-- you disbelieve! who wonders and who cares? lord so-and-so--his coat bedropped with wax, all peter's chains about his waist, his back brave with the needlework of noodledom-- believes! again, who wonders and who cares? but i, the man of sense and learning too, the able to think yet act, the this, the that, i, to believe at this late time of day! enough; you see, i need not fear contempt. . . . . . . . "ay, but since really you lack faith," you cry, "you run the same risk really on all sides, in cool indifference as bold unbelief. as well be strauss as swing 'twixt paul and him. it's not worth having, such imperfect faith, no more available to do faith's work than unbelief like mine. whole faith, or none!" softly, my friend! i must dispute that point. once own the use of faith, i'll find you faith. we're back on christian ground. you call for faith: i show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. the more of doubt, the stronger faith, i say, if faith o'ercomes doubt. how i know it does? by life and man's free will, god gave for that! to mould life as we choose it, shows our choice: that's our one act, the previous work's his own. you criticize the soul? it reared this tree-- this broad life and whatever fruit it bears! what matter though i doubt at every pore, head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my finger's ends, doubts in the trivial work of every day, doubts at the very bases of my soul in the grand moments when she probes herself-- if finally i have a life to show, the thing i did, brought out in evidence against the thing done to me underground by hell and all its brood, for aught i know? i say, whence sprang this? shows it faith or doubt? all's doubt in me; where's break of faith in this? it is the idea, the feeling and the love, god means mankind should strive for and show forth whatever be the process to that end,-- and not historic knowledge, logic sound, and metaphysical acumen, sure! "what think ye of christ," friend? when all's done and said, like you this christianity or not? it may be false, but will you wish it true? has it your vote to be so if it can? trust you an instinct silenced long ago that will break silence and enjoin you love what mortified philosophy is hoarse, and all in vain, with bidding you despise? if you desire faith--then you've faith enough: what else seeks god--nay, what else seek ourselves? you form a notion of me, we'll suppose, on hearsay; it's a favourable one: "but still" (you add), "there was no such good man, because of contradiction in the facts. one proves, for instance, he was born in rome, this blougram; yet throughout the tales of him i see he figures as an englishman." well, the two things are reconcilable. but would i rather you discovered that, subjoining--"still, what matter though they be? blougram concerns me nought, born here or there." pure faith indeed--you know not what you ask! naked belief in god the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures to be borne. it were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare. some think, creation's meant to show him forth: i say it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed evil's for. its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disemprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once than mind, confronted with the truth of him. but time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most; the child feels god a moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. with me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath michael's foot who stands calm just because he feels it writhe. . . . . . . . the sum of all is--yes, my doubt is great, my faith's still greater, then my faith's enough. i have read much, thought much, experienced much, yet would die rather than avow my fear the naples' liquefaction may be false, when set to happen by the palace-clock according to the clouds or dinner-time. i hear you recommend, i might at least eliminate, decrassify my faith since i adopt it; keeping what i must and leaving what i can--such points as this. i won't--that is, i can't throw one away. supposing there's no truth in what i hold about the need of trial to man's faith, still, when you bid me purify the same, to such a process i discern no end. clearing off one excrescence to see two, there's ever a next in size, now grown as big, that meets the knife: i cut and cut again! first cut the liquefaction, what comes last but fichte's clever cut at god himself? experimentalize on sacred things! i trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain to stop betimes: they all get drunk alike. the first step, i am master not to take. you'd find the cutting-process to your taste as much as leaving growths of lies unpruned, nor see more danger in it,--you retort. your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise when we consider that the steadfast hold on the extreme end of the chain of faith gives all the advantage, makes the difference with the rough purblind mass we seek to rule: we are their lords, or they are free of us, just as we tighten or relax our hold. so, other matters equal, we'll revert to the first problem--which, if solved my way and thrown into the balance, turns the scale-- how we may lead a comfortable life, how suit our luggage to the cabin's size. of course you are remarking all this time how narrowly and grossly i view life, respect the creature-comforts, care to rule the masses, and regard complacently "the cabin," in our old phrase. well, i do. i act for, talk for, live for this world now, as this world prizes action, life and talk: no prejudice to what next world may prove, whose new laws and requirements, my best pledge to observe then, is that i observe these now, shall do hereafter what i do meanwhile. let us concede (gratuitously though) next life relieves the soul of body, yields pure spiritual enjoyment: well, my friend, why lose this life i' the meantime, since its use may be to make the next life more intense? do you know, i have often had a dream (work it up in your next month's article) of man's poor spirit in its progress, still losing true life for ever and a day through ever trying to be and ever being-- in the evolution of successive spheres-- _before_ its actual sphere and place of life, halfway into the next, which having reached, it shoots with corresponding foolery halfway into the next still, on and off! as when a traveller, bound from north to south, scouts fur in russia: what's its use in france? in france spurns flannel: where's its need in spain? in spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for algiers! linen goes next, and last the skin itself, a superfluity at timbuctoo. when, through his journey, was the fool at ease? i'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world, i take and like its way of life; i think my brothers, who administer the means, live better for my comfort--that's good too; and god, if he pronounce upon such life, approves my service, which is better still. if he keep silence,--why, for you or me or that brute beast pulled-up in to-day's "times," what odds is't, save to ourselves, what life we lead? turning to the life of cardinal wiseman, it is of especial interest in connection with browning's portrayal of him to observe his earlier years. he was born in spain, having a spanish father of english descent and an english mother, all catholics, as blougram says, "there's one great form of christian faith i happened to be born in." his mother took him as an infant, and laid him upon the altar of the cathedral of seville, and consecrated him to the service of the church. [illustration: cardinal wiseman] his father having died when he was a tiny boy, his mother took him and his brother to england where he was trained at the catholic college of ushaw. from there he went to rome to study at the english catholic college there. later he became rector of this college. the sketch of wiseman at this period given by his biographer, wilfred ward, is most attractive. "scattered through his 'recollections' are interesting impressions left by his student life. while mastering the regular course of scholastic philosophy and theology sufficiently to take his degree with credit, his tastes were not primarily in this direction. the study of roman antiquities, christian and pagan, was congenial to him, as was also the study of italian art--in which he ultimately became proficient--and of music: and he early devoted himself to the syriac and arabic languages. in all these pursuits the enthusiasm and eminence of men living in rome itself at this era of renaissance was a potent stimulus to work. the hours he set aside for reading were many more than the rule demanded. but the daily walk and the occasional expedition to places of historic interest outside of rome helped also to store his mind and to fire his imagination." wiseman writes, himself, of this period, "the life of the student in rome should be one of unblended enjoyment. his very relaxations become at once subsidiary to his work and yet most delightfully recreative. his daily walks may be through the field of art ... his wanderings along the stream of time ... a thousand memories, a thousand associations accompany him." from this letter and from accounts of him he would seem to have been possessed of a highly imaginative temperament, possibly more artistic than religious. scholars, linguists, or historians, artists or antiquarians interested him far more than thinkers or theologians. in noting the effects on wiseman's character of the thoughts and sights of rome, "it must be observed," writes ward, "that even the action of directly religious influences brought out his excessive impressionableness. his own inner life was as vivid a pageant to him as the history of the church. he was liable at this time to the periods of spiritual exaltation--matched, as we shall see later on, by fits of intense despondency--which marked him through life." this remarkable intellectual activity brought with it doubts of religious truth. "the imaginative delight in rome as a living witness to the faith entirely left him, and at the same time he was attacked by mental disturbances and doubts of the truth of christianity. there are contemporary indications, and still plainer accounts in the letters of his later life, of acute suffering from these trials. the study of biblical criticism, even in the early stages it had then reached, seems immediately to have occasioned them; and the suffering they caused him was aggravated into intense and almost alarming depression by the feebleness of his bodily health." he says, speaking of this phase in his life, "many and many an hour have i passed, alone, in bitter tears, on the _loggia_ of the english college, when every one was reposing in the afternoon, and i was fighting with subtle thoughts and venomous suggestions of a fiendlike infidelity which i durst not confide to any one, for there was no one that could have sympathized with me. this lasted for years; but it made me study and think, to conquer the plague--for i can hardly call it danger--both for myself and for others. but during the actual struggle the simple submission of faith is the only remedy. thoughts against faith must be treated at the time like temptations against any other virtue--put away; though in cooler moments they may be safely analyzed and unraveled." again he wrote of these years as, "years of solitude, of desolation, years of shattered nerves, dread often of instant insanity, consumptive weakness, of sleepless nights and weary days, and hours of tears which no one witnessed." "of the effect of these years of desolation on his character he speaks as being simply invaluable. it completed what ushaw had begun, the training in patience, self-reliance, and concentration in spite of mental depression. it was amid these trials, he adds, 'that i wrote my "horæ syriacæ" and collected my notes for the lectures on the "connection between science and revealed religion" and the "eucharist." without this training i should not have thrown myself into the puseyite controversy at a later period.' any usefulness which discovered itself in later years he considers the 'result of self-discipline' during his inner conflict. the struggle so absorbed his energies that his early life was passed almost wholly free from the special trials to which that period is liable. he speaks of his youth as in that respect 'almost temptationless.'" this state of mind seemed to last about five years and then he writes in a letter: "i have felt myself for some months gradually passing into a new state of mind and heart which i can hardly describe, but which i trust is the last stage of mental progress, in which i hope i may much improve, but out of which i trust i may never pass. i could hardly express the calm mild frame of mind in which i have lived; company and society i have almost entirely shunned, or have moved through it as a stranger; hardly a disturbing thought, hardly a grating sensation has crossed my being, of which a great feeling of love seems to have been the principle. whither, i am inclined to ask myself, does all this tend? whence does it proceed? i think i could make an interesting history of my mind's religious progress, if i may use a word shockingly perverted by modern fanatics, from the hard dry struggles i used to have when first i commenced to study on my own account, to the settling down into a state of stern conviction, and so after some years to the nobler and more soothing evidences furnished by the grand harmonies and beautiful features of religion, whether considered in contact with lower objects or viewed in her own crystal mirror. i find it curious, too, and interesting to trace the workings of those varied feelings upon my relations to the outward world. i remember how for years i lost all relish for the glorious ceremonies of the church. i heeded not its venerable monuments and sacred records scattered over the city; or i studied them all with the dry eye of an antiquarian, looking in them for proofs, not for sensations, being ever actively alive to the collection of evidences and demonstrations of religious truth. but now that the time of my probation as i hope it was, is past, i feel as though the freshness of childhood's thoughts had once more returned to me, my heart expands with renewed delight and delicious feelings every time i see the holy objects and practices around me, and i might almost say that i am leading a life of spiritual epicureanism, opening all my senses to a rich draught of religious sensations." from these glimpses it would appear that wiseman was a much more sincere man in his religious feeling than he is given credit for by browning. his belief is with him not a matter of cold, hard calculation as to the attitude which will be, so to speak, the most politic from both a worldly and a spiritual point of view. the beautiful passage beginning "just when we are safest, there's a sunset touch" etc., comes nearer to the genuine enthusiasm of a wiseman than any other in the poem. there is an essential difference between the minds of the poet and the man he portrays, which perhaps made it impossible for browning fully to interpret wiseman's attitude. both have religious fervor, but browning's is born of a consciousness of god revealed directly to himself, while wiseman's consciousness of god comes to him primarily through the authority of the church, that is through generations of authoritative believers the first of whom experienced the actuality of revelation. hundreds and thousands of people have minds of this caliber. they cannot see a truth direct for themselves, they must be told by some person clothed in authority that this or that is true or false. to wiseman the beauty of his own form of religion with its special dogmas made so strong an appeal, that, since he could only believe through authority, under any circumstances, it was natural to him to adopt the particular form that gave him the most satisfaction. proofs detrimental to belief do not worry long with doubts such a mind, because the authority they depend on is not the authority of knowledge, but the authority of belief. this comes out clearly enough in one of wiseman's letters in which after enumerating a number of proofs brought forward by various scholars tending to cast discredit on the dogmas of the church, he triumphantly exclaims, "and yet, who that has an understanding to judge, is driven for a moment from the holdings of faith by such comparisons as these!" [illustration: sacred heart _f. utenbach_] upon looking through his writings there will always be found in his expression of belief, i think, that ring of true sincerity as well as what i should call an intense artistic delight in the essential beauty of his religion. as to blougram's argument that he believed in living in the world while he was in it, wiseman's life was certainly not that of a worldling alone, though he is described by one person as being "a genuine priest, very good looking and able bodied, and with much apparent practice in the world." he was far too much of a student and worker to be altogether so worldly-minded as browning represents him. his chief interest for englishmen is his connection with the tractarian movement. the wish of his soul was to aid the catholic revival in england, and with that end in view he visited england in . two years before, the movement at oxford, known as the tractarian movement had begun. the opinions of the men in this movement were, as every one knows, printed in a series of ninety tracts of which newman wrote twenty-four. it was an outgrowth of the conditions of the time. to sum up in the words of withrow,[ ] "the church of england had distinctly lost ground as a directing and controlling force in the nation. the most thoughtful and earnest minds in the church felt the need of a great religious awakening and an aggressive movement to regain its lost influence." as dean church describes them, the two characteristic forms of christianity in the church of england were the high church, and the evangelicals, or low church." of the former he says: "its better members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth on occasion into fervid devotion. its worse members were jobbers and hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed families out of the church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things." footnotes: [ ] religious progress of the century. but at oxford was a group of men of intense moral earnestness including newman, pusey, keble, arnold, maurice, kingsley, and others, who began an active propaganda of the new or revised doctrines of the oxford movement. "the success of the tracts," says molesworth, "was much greater, and the outcry against them far louder and fiercer, than their authors had expected. the tracts were at first small and simple, but became large and learned theological treatises. changes, too, came over the views of some of the writers. doctrines which probably would have shocked them at first were put forward with a recklessness which success had increased. alarm was excited, remonstrances stronger and stronger were addressed to them. they were attacked as romanizing in their tendency." "the effect of such writing was two-fold[ ]--the public were dismayed and certain members of the tractarian party avowed their intention of becoming romanists. so decided was the setting of the tide towards rome that newman made a vigorous effort to turn it by his famous tract no. . in this he endeavored to show that it was possible to interpret the thirty-nine articles in the interest of roman catholicism. this tract aroused a storm of indignation. the violent controversy which it occasioned led to the discontinuance of the series." footnotes: [ ] see withrow. such in little was this remarkable movement. when tract no. appeared wiseman had been in england for some time, and had been a strong influence in taking many thinking men in the direction of rome. his lectures and discourses upon his first visit to england had attracted remarkable attention. the account runs by one who attended his lectures to catholics and protestants: "society in this country was impressed, and listened almost against its will, and listened not displeased. here was a young roman priest, fresh from the center of catholicism, who showed himself master, not only of the intricacies of polemical discussion but of the amenities of civilized life. the spacious church of moorfields was thronged on every evening of dr. wiseman's appearance. many persons of position and education were converted, and all departed with abated prejudice, and with very different notions about catholicism from those with which they had been prepossessed by their education." wiseman, himself, wrote, "i had the consolation of witnessing the patient and edifying attention of a crowded audience, many of whom stood for two hours without any symptom of impatience." the great triumph for wiseman, however, was when, shortly after tract , newman, "a man," described "in many ways, the most remarkable that england has seen during the century, perhaps the most remarkable whom the english church has produced in any century," went over to the church of rome and was confirmed by wiseman. others followed his example and by as many as four hundred clergymen and laity had become roman catholics. the controversies and discussions of that time, it must be remembered, were more upon the dogmas of the church than upon what we should call to-day the essential truths of religion. yet, to a certain order of mind dogmas seem important truths. there are those whose religious attitude cannot be preserved without belief in dogmas, and the advantage of the catholic church is that it holds firmly to its dogmas, come what may. it was expected, however, that this romeward movement would arouse intense antipathy. "the arguments by which it was justified were considered, in many cases, disingenuous, if not jesuitical." in opposition of this sort we come nearer to browning's attitude of mind. because such arguments as wiseman and the tractarians used could not convince him, he takes the ordinary ground of the opposition, that in using such arguments they must be insincere, and they must be perfectly conscious of their insincerity. still, in spite of the fact that browning's mind could not get inside of blougram's, he shows that he has some sympathy for the bishop in the close of the poem where he says, "he said true things but called them by wrong names." raise blougram's philosophy to the plane of the mysticism of a browning, and the arguments for belief would be much the same but the _counters_ in the arguments would become symbols instead of dogmas. in "christmas-eve and easter day," browning becomes the true critic of the nineteenth-century religious movements. he passes in review in a series of dramatic pictures the three most diverse modes of religious thought of the century. the dissenter's view is symbolized by a scene in a very humble chapel in england, the catholic view by a vision of high mass at st. peter's and the agnostic view by a vision of a lecture by a learned german professor,--while the view of the modern mystic who remains religious in the face of all destructive criticism is shown in the speaker of the poem. the intuitional, aspiring side of his nature is symbolized by the vision of christ that appears to him, while the intensity of its power fluctuates as he either holds fast or lets go the garment of christ. opposed to his intuitional side is his reasoning side. possibly the picture of the dissenting chapel is exaggeratedly humble, though if we suppose it to be a methodist chapel, it may be true to life, as methodism was the form of religion which made its appeal to the lowest classes. indeed, at the time of its first successes, it was the saving grace of england. "but for the moral antiseptic," writes withrow, "furnished by methodism, and the revival of religion in all the churches which it produced, the history of england would have been far other than it was. it would probably have been swept into the maelstrom of revolution and shared the political and religious convulsions of the neighboring nation," that is the french revolution. "but methodism had greatly changed the condition of the people. it had rescued vast multitudes from ignorance and barbarism, and raised them from almost the degradation of beasts to the condition of men and the fellowship of saints. the habits of thrift and industry which it fostered led to the accumulation, if not of wealth, at least to that of a substantial competence; and built up that safeguard of the commonwealth, a great, intelligent, industrious, religious middle-class in the community." after the death of wesley came various divisions in the methodist church; it has so flexible a system that it may be adapted to very varied needs of humanity, and in that has consisted its great power. the mission of the church was originally to the poor and lowly, but "it has won for itself in spite of scorn and persecution," says dr. schöll, "a place of power in the state and church of great britain." [illustration: the nativity _fra lippo lippi_] a scornful attitude is vividly brought before us in the opening of this poem, to be succeeded later by a more charitable point of view. christmas-eve i out of the little chapel i burst into the fresh night-air again. five minutes full, i waited first in the doorway, to escape the rain that drove in gusts down the common's centre at the edge of which the chapel stands, before i plucked up heart to enter. heaven knows how many sorts of hands reached past me, groping for the latch of the inner door that hung on catch more obstinate the more they fumbled, till, giving way at last with a scold of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled one sheep more to the rest in fold, and left me irresolute, standing sentry in the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry, six feet long by three feet wide, partitioned off from the vast inside-- i blocked up half of it at least. no remedy; the rain kept driving. they eyed me much as some wild beast, that congregation, still arriving, some of them by the main road, white a long way past me into the night, skirting the common, then diverging; not a few suddenly emerging from the common's self thro' the paling-gaps, --they house in the gravel-pits perhaps, where the road stops short with its safeguard border of lamps, as tired of such disorder;-- but the most turned in yet more abruptly from a certain squalid knot of alleys, where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly, which now the little chapel rallies and leads into day again,--its priestliness lending itself to hide their beastliness so cleverly (thanks in part to the mason), and putting so cheery a whitewashed face on those neophytes too much in lack of it, that, where you cross the common as i did, and meet the party thus presided, "mount zion" with love-lane at the back of it, they front you as little disconcerted as, bound for the hills, her fate averted, and her wicked people made to mind him, lot might have marched with gomorrah behind him. ii well, from the road, the lanes or the common in came the flock: the fat weary woman, panting and bewildered, down-clapping her umbrella with a mighty report, grounded it by me, wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort, like a startled horse, at the interloper (who humbly knew himself improper, but could not shrink up small enough) --round to the door, and in,--the gruff hinge's invariable scold making my very blood run cold. prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered on broken clogs, the many-tattered little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother of the sickly babe she tried to smother somehow up, with its spotted face, from the cold, on her breast, the one warm place; she too must stop, wring the poor ends dry of a draggled shawl, and add thereby her tribute to the door-mat, sopping already from my own clothes' dropping, which yet she seemed to grudge i should stand on: then, stooping down to take off her pattens, she bore them defiantly, in each hand one, planted together before her breast and its babe, as good as a lance in rest. close on her heels, the dingy satins of a female something, past me flitted, with lips as much too white, as a streak lay far too red on each hollow cheek; and it seemed the very door-hinge pitied all that was left of a woman once, holding at least its tongue for the nonce. then a tall yellow man, like the _penitent thief_, with his jaw bound up in a handkerchief, and eyelids screwed together tight, led himself in by some inner light. and, except from him, from each that entered, i got the same interrogation-- "what, you the alien, you have ventured to take with us, the elect, your station? a carer for none of it, a _gallio_!"-- thus, plain as print, i read the glance at a common prey, in each countenance as of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho. and, when the door's cry drowned their wonder, the draught, it always sent in shutting, made the flame of the single tallow candle in the cracked square lantern i stood under, shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting as it were, the luckless cause of scandal: i verily fancied the zealous light (in the chapel's secret, too!) for spite would shudder itself clean off the wick, with the airs of a saint john's candlestick. there was no standing it much longer. "good folks," thought i, as resolve grew stronger, "this way you perform the grand-inquisitor when the weather sends you a chance visitor? you are the men, and wisdom shall die with you, and none of the old seven churches vie with you! but still, despite the pretty perfection to which you carry your trick of exclusiveness, and, taking god's word under wise protection, correct its tendency to diffusiveness, and bid one reach it over hot plough-shares,-- still, as i say, though you've found salvation, if should choose to cry, as now, 'shares!'-- see if the best of you bars me my ration! i prefer, if you please, for my expounder of the laws of the feast, the feast's own founder; mine's the same right with your poorest and sickliest supposing i don the marriage vestiment: so, shut your mouth and open your testament, and carve me my portion at your quickliest!" accordingly, as a shoemaker's lad with wizened face in want of soap, and wet apron wound round his waist like a rope, (after stopping outside, for his cough was bad, to get the fit over, poor gentle creature, and so avoid disturbing the preacher) --passed in, i sent my elbow spikewise at the shutting door, and entered likewise, received the hinge's accustomed greeting, and crossed the threshold's magic pentacle, and found myself in full conventicle, --to wit, in zion chapel meeting, on the christmas-eve of 'forty-nine, which, calling its flock to their special clover, found all assembled and one sheep over, whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine. iii i very soon had enough of it. the hot smell and the human noises, and my neighbor's coat, the greasy cuff of it, were a pebble-stone that a child's hand poises, compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure of the preaching man's immense stupidity, as he poured his doctrine forth, full measure, to meet his audience's avidity. you needed not the wit of the sibyl to guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling: no sooner our friend had got an inkling of treasure hid in the holy bible, (whene'er 'twas the thought first struck him, how death, at unawares, might duck him deeper than the grave, and quench the gin-shop's light in hell's grim drench) than he handled it so, in fine irreverence, as to hug the book of books to pieces: and, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance, not improved by the private dog's-ears and creases, having clothed his own soul with, he'd fain see equipt yours,-- so tossed you again your holy scriptures. and you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt: nay, had but a single face of my neighbors appeared to suspect that the preacher's labors were help which the world could be saved without, 'tis odds but i might have borne in quiet a qualm or two at my spiritual diet, or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon: but the flock sat on, divinely flustered, sniffing, methought, its dew of hermon with such content in every snuffle, as the devil inside us loves to ruffle. my old fat woman purred with pleasure, and thumb round thumb went twirling faster, while she, to his periods keeping measure, maternally devoured the pastor. the man with the handkerchief untied it, showed us a horrible wen inside it, gave his eyelids yet another screwing, and rocked himself as the woman was doing. the shoemaker's lad, discreetly choking, kept down his cough. 'twas too provoking! my gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it; so, saying like eve when she plucked the apple, "i wanted a taste, and now there's enough of it," i flung out of the little chapel. iv there was a lull in the rain, a lull in the wind too; the moon was risen, and would have shone out pure and full, but for the ramparted cloud-prison, block on block built up in the west, for what purpose the wind knows best, who changes his mind continually. and the empty other half of the sky seemed in its silence as if it knew what, any moment, might look through a chance gap in that fortress massy:-- through its fissures you got hints of the flying moon, by the shifting tints, now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy burning to yellow, and whitest yellow, like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow, all a-simmer with intense strain to let her through,--then blank again, at the hope of her appearance failing. just by the chapel, a break in the railing shows a narrow path directly across; 'tis ever dry walking there, on the moss-- besides, you go gently all the way uphill. i stooped under and soon felt better; my head grew lighter, my limbs more supple, as i walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter. my mind was full of the scene i had left, that placid flock, that pastor vociferant, --how this outside was pure and different! the sermon, now--what a mingled weft of good and ill! were either less, its fellow had colored the whole distinctly; but alas for the excellent earnestness, and the truths, quite true if stated succinctly, but as surely false, in their quaint presentment, however to pastor and flock's contentment! say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes, with his provings and parallels twisted and twined, till how could you know them, grown double their size in the natural fog of the good man's mind, like yonder spots of our roadside lamps, haloed about with the common's damps? truth remains true, the fault's in the prover; the zeal was good, and the aspiration; and yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over, pharaoh received no demonstration, by his baker's dream of baskets three, of the doctrine of the trinity,-- although, as our preacher thus embellished it, apparently his hearers relished it with so unfeigned a gust--who knows if they did not prefer our friend to joseph? but so it is everywhere, one way with all of them! these people have really felt, no doubt, a something, the motion they style the _call_ of them; and this is their method of bringing about, by a mechanism of words and tones, (so many texts in so many groans) a sort of reviving and reproducing, more or less perfectly, (who can tell?) the mood itself, which strengthens by using; and how that happens, i understand well. a tune was born in my head last week, out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek of the train, as i came by it, up from manchester; and when, next week, i take it back again. my head will sing to the engine's clack again, while it only makes my neighbor's haunches stir, --finding no dormant musical sprout in him, as in me, to be jolted out. 'tis the taught already that profits by teaching; he gets no more from the railway's preaching than, from this preacher who does the rail's office, i: whom therefore the flock cast a jealous eye on. still, why paint over their door "mount zion," to which all flesh shall come, saith the prophecy? the reasoning which follows upon this is characteristic of browning. perceiving everywhere in the world transcendent power, and knowing love in little, from that transcendent love may be deduced. his reasoning finally brings him to a state of vision. his subjective intuitions become palpable objective symbols, a not infrequent occurrence in highly wrought and sensitive minds. v but wherefore be harsh on a single case? after how many modes, this christmas-eve, does the self-same weary thing take place? the same endeavor to make you believe, and with much the same effect, no more: each method abundantly convincing, as i say, to those convinced before, but scarce to be swallowed without wincing by the not-as-yet-convinced. for me, i have my own church equally: and in this church my faith sprang first! (i said, as i reached the rising ground, and the wind began again, with a burst of rain in my face, and a glad rebound from the heart beneath, as if, god speeding me, i entered his church-door, nature leading me) --in youth i looked to these very skies, and probing their immensities, i found god there, his visible power; yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense of the power, an equal evidence that his love, there too, was the nobler dower. for the loving worm within its clod, were diviner than a loveless god amid his worlds, i will dare to say. you know what i mean: god's all, man's nought: but also, god, whose pleasure brought man into being, stands away as it were a handbreadth off, to give room for the newly-made to live, and look at him from a place apart, and use his gifts of brain and heart, given, indeed, but to keep for ever. who speaks of man, then, must not sever man's very elements from man, saying, "but all is god's"--whose plan was to create man and then leave him able, his own word saith, to grieve him, but able to glorify him too, as a mere machine could never do, that prayed or praised, all unaware of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer, made perfect as a thing of course. man, therefore, stands on his own stock of love and power as a pin-point rock: and, looking to god who ordained divorce of the rock from his boundless continent, sees, in his power made evident, only excess by a million-fold o'er the power god gave man in the mould. for, note: man's hand, first formed to carry a few pounds' weight, when taught to marry its strength with an engine's, lifts a mountain, --advancing in power by one degree; and why count steps through eternity? but love is the ever-springing fountain: man may enlarge or narrow his bed for the water's play, but the water-head-- how can he multiply or reduce it? as easy create it, as cause it to cease; he may profit by it, or abuse it, but 'tis not a thing to bear increase as power does: be love less or more in the heart of man, he keeps it shut or opes it wide, as he pleases, but love's sum remains what it was before. so, gazing up, in my youth, at love as seen through power, ever above all modes which make it manifest, my soul brought all to a single test-- that he, the eternal first and last, who, in his power, had so surpassed all man conceives of what is might,-- whose wisdom, too, showed infinite, --would prove as infinitely good; would never, (my soul understood,) with power to work all love desires, bestow e'en less than man requires; that he who endlessly was teaching, above my spirit's utmost reaching, what love can do in the leaf or stone, (so that to master this alone, this done in the stone or leaf for me, i must go on learning endlessly) would never need that i, in turn, should point him out defect unheeded, and show that god had yet to learn what the meanest human creature needed, --not life, to wit, for a few short years, tracking his way through doubts and fears, while the stupid earth on which i stay suffers no change, but passive adds its myriad years to myriads, though i, he gave it to, decay, seeing death come and choose about me, and my dearest ones depart without me. no: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it, has ever been seen the sole good of life in it, the love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it, shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it. and i shall behold thee, face to face, o god, and in thy light retrace how in all i loved here, still wast thou! whom pressing to, then, as i fain would now, i shall find as able to satiate the love, thy gift, as my spirit's wonder thou art able to quicken and sublimate, with this sky of thine, that i now walk under, and glory in thee for, as i gaze thus, thus! oh, let men keep their ways of seeking thee in a narrow shrine-- be this my way! and this is mine! vi for lo, what think you? suddenly the rain and the wind ceased, and the sky received at once the full fruition of the moon's consummate apparition. the black cloud-barricade was riven, ruined beneath her feet, and driven deep in the west; while, bare and breathless, north and south and east lay ready for a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, sprang across them and stood steady. 'twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, from heaven to heaven extending, perfect as the mother-moon's self, full in face. it rose, distinctly at the base with its seven proper colors chorded, which still, in the rising, were compressed, until at last they coalesced, and supreme the spectral creature lorded in a triumph of whitest white,-- above which intervened the night. but above night too, like only the next, the second of a wondrous sequence, reaching in rare and rarer frequence, till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, another rainbow rose, a mightier, fainter, flushier and flightier,-- rapture dying along its verge. oh, whose foot shall i see emerge, whose, from the straining topmost dark, on to the keystone of that arc? vii this sight was shown me, there and then,-- me, one out of a world of men, singled forth, as the chance might hap to another if, in a thunderclap where i heard noise and you saw flame, some one man knew god called his name. for me, i think i said, "appear! good were it to be ever here. if thou wilt, let me build to thee service-tabernacles three, where, forever in thy presence, in ecstatic acquiescence, far alike from thriftless learning and ignorance's undiscerning, i may worship and remain!" thus at the show above me, gazing with upturned eyes, i felt my brain glutted with the glory, blazing throughout its whole mass, over and under until at length it burst asunder and out of it bodily there streamed, the too-much glory, as it seemed, passing from out me to the ground, then palely serpentining round into the dark with mazy error. viii all at once i looked up with terror. he was there. he himself with his human air. on the narrow pathway, just before. i saw the back of him, no more-- he had left the chapel, then, as i. i forgot all about the sky. no face: only the sight of a sweepy garment, vast and white, with a hem that i could recognize. i felt terror, no surprise; my mind filled with the cataract, at one bound of the mighty fact. "i remember, he did say doubtless that, to this world's end, where two or three should meet and pray, he would be in the midst, their friend; certainly he was there with them!" and my pulses leaped for joy of the golden thought without alloy, that i saw his very vesture's hem. then rushed the blood back, cold and clear, with a fresh enhancing shiver of fear; and i hastened, cried out while i pressed to the salvation of the vest, "but not so, lord! it cannot be that thou, indeed, art leaving me-- me, that have despised thy friends! did my heart make no amends? thou art the love _of god_--above his power, didst hear me place his love, and that was leaving the world for thee. therefore thou must not turn from me as i had chosen the other part! folly and pride o'ercame my heart. our best is bad, nor bears thy test; still, it should be our very best. i thought it best that thou, the spirit, be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and in beauty, as even we require it-- not in the forms burlesque, uncouth, i left but now, as scarcely fitted for thee: i knew not what i pitied. but, all i felt there, right or wrong, what is it to thee, who curest sinning? am i not weak as thou art strong? i have looked to thee from the beginning, straight up to thee through all the world which, like an idle scroll, lay furled to nothingness on either side: and since the time thou wast descried, spite of the weak heart, so have i lived ever, and so fain would die, living and dying, thee before! but if thou leavest me----" ix less or more, i suppose that i spoke thus. when,--have mercy, lord, on us! the whole face turned upon me full. and i spread myself beneath it, as when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it in the cleansing sun, his wool,-- steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness some defiled, discolored web-- so lay i, saturate with brightness. and when the flood appeared to ebb, lo, i was walking, light and swift, with my senses settling fast and steadying, but my body caught up in the whirl and drift of the vesture's amplitude, still eddying on, just before me, still to be followed, as it carried me after with its motion: what shall i say?--as a path were hollowed and a man went weltering through the ocean, sucked along in the flying wake of the luminous water-snake. darkness and cold were cloven, as through i passed, upborne yet walking too. and i turned to myself at intervals,-- "so he said, so it befalls. god who registers the cup of mere cold water, for his sake to a disciple rendered up, disdains not his own thirst to slake at the poorest love was ever offered: and because my heart i proffered, with true love trembling at the brim, he suffers me to follow him for ever, my own way,--dispensed from seeking to be influenced by all the less immediate ways that earth, in worships manifold, adopts to reach, by prayer and praise, the garment's hem, which, lo, i hold!" the vision of high mass at st. peters in rome is the antipode of the little methodist chapel. the catholic church is the church of all others which has gathered about itself the marvels of art in sculpture, painting and music. as the chapel depressed with its ugliness, the great cathedral entrances with its beauty. [illustration: the transfiguration _fra angelico_] x and so we crossed the world and stopped. for where am i, in city or plain, since i am 'ware of the world again? and what is this that rises propped with pillars of prodigious girth? is it really on the earth, this miraculous dome of god? has the angel's measuring-rod which numbered cubits, gem from gem, 'twixt the gates of the new jerusalem, meted it out,--and what he meted, have the sons of men completed? --binding, ever as he bade, columns in the colonnade with arms wide open to embrace the entry of the human race to the breast of ... what is it, yon building, ablaze in front, all paint and gilding, with marble for brick, and stones of price for garniture of the edifice? now i see; it is no dream; it stands there and it does not seem; for ever, in pictures, thus it looks, and thus i have read of it in books often in england, leagues away, and wondered how these fountains play, growing up eternally each to a musical water-tree, whose blossoms drop, a glittering boon, before my eyes, in the light of the moon, to the granite lavers underneath. liar and dreamer in your teeth! i, the sinner that speak to you, was in rome this night, and stood, and knew both this and more. for see, for see, the dark is rent, mine eye is free to pierce the crust of the outer wall, and i view inside, and all there, all, as the swarming hollow of a hive, the whole basilica alive! men in the chancel, body and nave, men on the pillars' architrave, men on the statues, men on the tombs with popes and kings in their porphyry wombs, all famishing in expectation of the main-altar's consummation. for see, for see, the rapturous moment approaches, and earth's best endowment blends with heaven's; the taper-fires pant up, the winding brazen spires heave loftier yet the baldachin; the incense-gaspings, long kept in, suspire in clouds; the organ blatant holds his breath and grovels latent, as if god's hushing finger grazed him, (like behemoth when he praised him) at the silver bell's shrill tinkling, quick cold drops of terror sprinkling on the sudden pavement strewed with faces of the multitude. earth breaks up, time drops away, in flows heaven, with its new day of endless life, when he who trod, very man and very god, this earth in weakness, shame and pain, dying the death whose signs remain up yonder on the accursed tree,-- shall come again, no more to be of captivity the thrall, but the one god, all in all, king of kings, lord of lords, as his servant john received the words, "i died, and live for evermore!" xi yet i was left outside the door. "why sit i here on the threshold-stone left till he return, alone save for the garment's extreme fold abandoned still to bless my hold?" my reason, to my doubt, replied, as if a book were opened wide, and at a certain page i traced every record undefaced, added by successive years,-- the harvestings of truth's stray ears singly gleaned, and in one sheaf bound together for belief. yes, i said--that he will go and sit with these in turn, i know. their faith's heart beats, though her head swims too giddily to guide her limbs, disabled by their palsy-stroke from propping mine. though rome's gross yoke drops off, no more to be endured, her teaching is not so obscured by errors and perversities, that no truth shines athwart the lies: and he, whose eye detects a spark even where, to man's the whole seems dark, may well see flame where each beholder acknowledges the embers smoulder. but i, a mere man, fear to quit the clue god gave me as most fit to guide my footsteps through life's maze, because himself discerns all ways open to reach him: i, a man able to mark where faith began to swerve aside, till from its summit judgment drops her damning plummet, pronouncing such a fatal space departed from the founder's base: he will not bid me enter too, but rather sit, as now i do, awaiting his return outside. --'twas thus my reason straight replied and joyously i turned, and pressed the garment's skirt upon my breast, until, afresh its light suffusing me, my heart cried--what has been abusing me that i should wait here lonely and coldly, instead of rising, entering boldly, baring truth's face, and letting drift her veils of lies as they choose to shift? do these men praise him? i will raise my voice up to their point of praise! i see the error; but above the scope of error, see the love.-- oh, love of those first christian days! --fanned so soon into a blaze, from the spark preserved by the trampled sect, that the antique sovereign intellect which then sat ruling in the world, like a change in dreams, was hurled from the throne he reigned upon: you looked up and he was gone. gone, his glory of the pen! --love, with greece and rome in ken, bade her scribes abhor the trick of poetry and rhetoric, and exult with hearts set free, in blessed imbecility scrawled, perchance, on some torn sheet leaving sallust incomplete. gone, his pride of sculptor, painter! --love, while able to acquaint her while the thousand statues yet fresh from chisel, pictures wet from brush, she saw on every side, chose rather with an infant's pride to frame those portents which impart such unction to true christian art. gone, music too! the air was stirred by happy wings: terpander's bird (that, when the cold came, fled away) would tarry not the wintry day,-- as more-enduring sculpture must, till filthy saints rebuked the gust with which they chanced to get a sight of some dear naked aphrodite they glanced a thought above the toes of, by breaking zealously her nose off. love, surely, from that music's lingering, might have filched her organ-fingering, nor chosen rather to set prayings to hog-grunts, praises to horse-neighings. love was the startling thing, the new: love was the all-sufficient too; and seeing that, you see the rest: as a babe can find its mother's breast as well in darkness as in light, love shut our eyes, and all seemed right. true, the world's eyes are open now: --less need for me to disallow some few that keep love's zone unbuckled, peevish as ever to be suckled, lulled by the same old baby-prattle with intermixture of the rattle, when she would have them creep, stand steady upon their feet, or walk already, not to speak of trying to climb. i will be wise another time, and not desire a wall between us, when next i see a church-roof cover so many species of one genus, all with foreheads bearing _lover_ written above the earnest eyes of them; all with breasts that beat for beauty, whether sublimed, to the surprise of them, in noble daring, steadfast duty, the heroic in passion, or in action,-- or, lowered for sense's satisfaction, to the mere outside of human creatures, mere perfect form and faultless features. what? with all rome here, whence to levy such contributions to their appetite, with women and men in a gorgeous bevy, they take, as it were, a padlock, clap it tight on their southern eyes, restrained from feeding on the glories of their ancient reading, on the beauties of their modern singing, on the wonders of the builder's bringing, on the majesties of art around them,-- and, all these loves, late struggling incessant, when faith has at last united and bound them, they offer up to god for a present? why, i will, on the whole, be rather proud of it,-- and, only taking the act in reference to the other recipients who might have allowed it, i will rejoice that god had the preference. xii so i summed up my new resolves: too much love there can never be. and where the intellect devolves its function on love exclusively, i, a man who possesses both, will accept the provision, nothing loth, --will feast my love, then depart elsewhere, that my intellect may find its share. in his next experience the speaker learns what the effect of scientific criticism has been upon historical christianity. the warfare between science and religion forms one of the most fascinating and terrible chapters in the annals of the development of the human mind. about the middle of the nineteenth century the war became general. it was no longer a question of a skirmish over this or that particular discovery in science which would cause some long-cherished dogma to totter; it was a full battle all along the line, and now that the smoke has cleared away, it is safe to say that science sees, on the one hand, it cannot conquer religion, and religion sees, on the other, it cannot conquer science. what each has done is to strip the other of its untruths, leaving its truths to grow by the light each holds up for the other. together they advance toward the knowledge of the most high. xiii no sooner said than out in the night! my heart beat lighter and more light: and still, as before, i was walking swift, with my senses settling fast and steadying, but my body caught up in the whirl and drift of the vesture's amplitude, still eddying on just before me, still to be followed, as it carried me after with its motion, --what shall i say?--as a path were hollowed, and a man went weltering through the ocean, sucked along in the flying wake of the luminous water-snake. xiv alone! i am left alone once more-- (save for the garment's extreme fold abandoned still to bless my hold) alone, beside the entrance-door of a sort of temple,--perhaps a college, --like nothing i ever saw before at home in england, to my knowledge. the tall old quaint irregular town! it may be ... though which, i can't affirm ... any of the famous middle-age towns of germany; and this flight of stairs where i sit down, is it halle, weimar, cassel, frankfort or göttingen, i have to thank for 't? it may be göttingen,--most likely. through the open door i catch obliquely glimpses of a lecture-hall; and not a bad assembly neither, ranged decent and symmetrical on benches, waiting what's to see there; which, holding still by the vesture's hem, i also resolve to see with them, cautious this time how i suffer to slip the chance of joining in fellowship with any that call themselves his friends; as these folk do, i have a notion. but hist--a buzzing and emotion! all settle themselves, the while ascends by the creaking rail to the lecture-desk, step by step, deliberate because of his cranium's over-freight, three parts sublime to one grotesque, if i have proved an accurate guesser, the hawk-nosed high-cheek-boned professor. i felt at once as if there ran a shoot of love from my heart to the man-- that sallow virgin-minded studious martyr to mild enthusiasm, as he uttered a kind of cough-preludious that woke my sympathetic spasm, (beside some spitting that made me sorry) and stood, surveying his auditory with a wan pure look, well nigh celestial,-- those blue eyes had survived so much! while, under the foot they could not smutch, lay all the fleshly and the bestial. over he bowed, and arranged his notes, till the auditory's clearing of throats was done with, died into a silence; and, when each glance was upward sent, each bearded mouth composed intent, and a pin might be heard drop half a mile hence,-- he pushed back higher his spectacles, let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells, and giving his head of hair--a hake of undressed tow, for color and quantity-- one rapid and impatient shake, (as our own young england adjusts a jaunty tie when about to impart, on mature digestion, some thrilling view of the surplice-question) --the professor's grave voice, sweet though hoarse, broke into his christmas-eve discourse. xv and he began it by observing how reason dictated that men should rectify the natural swerving, by a reversion, now and then, to the well-heads of knowledge, few and far away, whence rolling grew the life-stream wide whereat we drink, commingled, as we needs must think, with waters alien to the source; to do which, aimed this eve's discourse; since, where could be a fitter time for tracing backward to its prime this christianity, this lake, this reservoir, whereat we slake, from one or other bank, our thirst? so, he proposed inquiring first into the various sources whence this myth of christ is derivable; demanding from the evidence, (since plainly no such life was liveable) how these phenomena should class? whether 'twere best opine christ was, or never was at all, or whether he was and was not, both together-- it matters little for the name, so the idea be left the same. only, for practical purpose's sake, 'twas obviously as well to take the popular story,--understanding how the ineptitude of the time, and the penman's prejudice, expanding fact into fable fit for the clime, had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it into this myth, this individuum,-- which, when reason had strained and abated it of foreign matter, left, for residuum, a man!--a right true man, however, whose work was worthy a man's endeavor: work, that gave warrant almost sufficient to his disciples, for rather believing he was just omnipotent and omniscient, as it gives to us, for as frankly receiving his word, their tradition,--which, though it meant something entirely different from all that those who only heard it, in their simplicity thought and averred it, had yet a meaning quite as respectable: for, among other doctrines delectable, was he not surely the first to insist on the natural sovereignty of our race?-- here the lecturer came to a pausing-place. and while his cough, like a drouthy piston, tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him, i seized the occasion of bidding adieu to him, the vesture still within my hand. xvi i could interpret its command. this time he would not bid me enter the exhausted air-bell of the critic. truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic when papist struggles with dissenter, impregnating its pristine clarity, --one, by his daily fare's vulgarity, its gust of broken meat and garlic; --one, by his soul's too-much presuming to turn the frankincense's fuming and vapors of the candle starlike into the cloud her wings she buoys on. each, that thus sets the pure air seething, may poison it for healthy breathing-- but the critic leaves no air to poison; pumps out with ruthless ingenuity atom by atom, and leaves you--vacuity. thus much of christ does he reject? and what retain? his intellect? what is it i must reverence duly? poor intellect for worship, truly, which tells me simply what was told (if mere morality, bereft of the god in christ, be all that's left) elsewhere by voices manifold; with this advantage, that the stater made nowise the important stumble of adding, he, the sage and humble, was also one with the creator. you urge christ's followers' simplicity: but how does shifting blame, evade it? have wisdom's words no more felicity? the stumbling-block, his speech--who laid it? how comes it that for one found able to sift the truth of it from fable, millions believe it to the letter? christ's goodness, then--does that fare better? strange goodness, which upon the score of being goodness, the mere due of man to fellow-man, much more to god,--should take another view of its possessor's privilege, and bid him rule his race! you pledge your fealty to such rule? what, all-- from heavenly john and attic paul, and that brave weather-battered peter, whose stout faith only stood completer for buffets, sinning to be pardoned, as, more his hands hauled nets, they hardened,-- all, down to you, the man of men, professing here at göttingen, compose christ's flock! they, you and i, are sheep of a good man! and why? the goodness,--how did he acquire it? was it self-gained, did god inspire it? choose which; then tell me, on what ground should its possessor dare propound his claim to rise o'er us an inch? were goodness all some man's invention, who arbitrarily made mention what we should follow, and whence flinch,-- what qualities might take the style of right and wrong,--and had such guessing met with as general acquiescing as graced the alphabet erewhile, when a got leave an ox to be, no camel (quoth the jews) like g, for thus inventing thing and title worship were that man's fit requital. but if the common conscience must be ultimately judge, adjust its apt name to each quality already known,--i would decree worship for such mere demonstration and simple work of nomenclature, only the day i praised, not nature, but harvey, for the circulation. i would praise such a christ, with pride and joy, that he, as none beside, had taught us how to keep the mind god gave him, as god gave his kind, freer than they from fleshly taint: i would call such a christ our saint, as i declare our poet, him whose insight makes all others dim: a thousand poets pried at life, and only one amid the strife rose to be shakespeare: each shall take his crown, i'd say, for the world's sake-- though some objected--"had we seen the heart and head of each, what screen was broken there to give them light, while in ourselves it shuts the sight, we should no more admire, perchance, that these found truth out at a glance, than marvel how the bat discerns some pitch-dark cavern's fifty turns, led by a finer tact, a gift he boasts, which other birds must shift without, and grope as best they can." no, freely i would praise the man,-- nor one whit more, if he contended that gift of his, from god descended. ah friend, what gift of man's does not? no nearer something, by a jot, rise an infinity of nothings than one: take euclid for your teacher: distinguish kinds: do crownings, clothings, make that creator which was creature? multiply gifts upon man's head, and what, when all's done, shall be said but--the more gifted he, i ween! that one's made christ, this other, pilate, and this might be all that has been,-- so what is there to frown or smile at? what is left for us, save, in growth of soul, to rise up, far past both, from the gift looking to the giver, and from the cistern to the river, and from the finite to infinity, and from man's dust to god's divinity? xvii take all in a word: the truth in god's breast lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: though he is so bright and we so dim, we are made in his image to witness him: and were no eye in us to tell, instructed by no inner sense, the light of heaven from the dark of hell, that light would want its evidence,-- though justice, good and truth were still divine, if, by some demon's will, hatred and wrong had been proclaimed law through the worlds, and right misnamed. no mere exposition of morality made or in part or in totality, should win you to give it worship, therefore: and, if no better proof you will care for, --whom do you count the worst man upon earth? be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more of what right is, than arrives at birth in the best man's acts that we bow before: this last knows better--true, but my fact is, 'tis one thing to know, and another to practise. and thence conclude that the real god-function is to furnish a motive and injunction for practising what we know already. and such an injunction and such a motive as the god in christ, do you waive, and "heady, high-minded," hang your tablet-votive outside the fane on a finger-post? morality to the uttermost, supreme in christ as we all confess, why need we prove would avail no jot to make him god, if god he were not? what is the point where himself lays stress? does the precept run "believe in good, in justice, truth, now understand for the first time?"--or, "believe in me, who lived and died, yet essentially am lord of life?" whoever can take the same to his heart and for mere love's sake conceive of the love,--that man obtains a new truth; no conviction gains of an old one only, made intense by a fresh appeal to his faded sense. xviii can it be that he stays inside? is the vesture left me to commune with? could my soul find aught to sing in tune with even at this lecture, if she tried? oh, let me at lowest sympathize with the lurking drop of blood that lies in the desiccated brain's white roots without throb for christ's attributes, as the lecturer makes his special boast! if love's dead there, it has left a ghost. admire we, how from heart to brain (though to say so strike the doctors dumb) one instinct rises and falls again, restoring the equilibrium. and how when the critic had done his best, and the pearl of price, at reason's test, lay dust and ashes levigable on the professor's lecture-table,-- when we looked for the inference and monition that our faith, reduced to such condition, be swept forthwith to its natural dust-hole,-- he bids us, when we least expect it, take back our faith,--if it be not just whole, yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it, which fact pays damage done rewardingly, so, prize we our dust and ashes accordingly! "go home and venerate the myth i thus have experimented with-- this man, continue to adore him rather than all who went before him, and all who ever followed after!"-- surely for this i may praise you, my brother! will you take the praise in tears or laughter? that's one point gained: can i compass another? unlearned love was safe from spurning-- can't we respect your loveless learning? let us at least give learning honor! what laurels had we showered upon her, girding her loins up to perturb our theory of the middle verb; or turk-like brandishing a scimitar o'er anapæsts in comic-trimeter; or curing the halt and maimed 'iketides,' while we lounged on at our indebted ease: instead of which, a tricksy demon sets her at titus or philemon! when ignorance wags his ears of leather and hates god's word, 'tis altogether; nor leaves he his congenial thistles to go and browse on paul's epistles. --and you, the audience, who might ravage the world wide, enviably savage, nor heed the cry of the retriever, more than herr heine (before his fever),-- i do not tell a lie so arrant as say my passion's wings are furled up, and, without plainest heavenly warrant, i were ready and glad to give the world up-- but still, when you rub brow meticulous, and ponder the profit of turning holy if not for god's, for your own sake solely, --god forbid i should find you ridiculous! deduce from this lecture all that eases you, nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you, "christians,"--abhor the deist's pravity,-- go on, you shall no more move my gravity than, when i see boys ride a-cockhorse, i find it in my heart to embarrass them by hinting that their stick's a mock horse, and they really carry what they say carries them. xix so sat i talking with my mind. i did not long to leave the door and find a new church, as before, but rather was quiet and inclined to prolong and enjoy the gentle resting from further tracking and trying and testing. "this tolerance is a genial mood!" (said i, and a little pause ensued). "one trims the bark 'twixt shoal and shelf, and sees, each side, the good effects of it, a value for religion's self, a carelessness about the sects of it. let me enjoy my own conviction, not watch my neighbor's faith with fretfulness, still spying there some dereliction of truth, perversity, forgetfulness! better a mild indifferentism, teaching that both our faiths (though duller his shine through a dull spirit's prism) originally had one color! better pursue a pilgrimage through ancient and through modern times to many peoples, various climes, where i may see saint, savage, sage fuse their respective creeds in one before the general father's throne!" xx --'twas the horrible storm began afresh! the black night caught me in his mesh, whirled me up, and flung me prone. i was left on the college-step alone. i looked, and far there, ever fleeting far, far away, the receding gesture, and looming of the lessening vesture!-- swept forward from my stupid hand, while i watched my foolish heart expand in the lazy glow of benevolence, o'er the various modes of man's belief. i sprang up with fear's vehemence. needs must there be one way, our chief best way of worship: let me strive to find it, and when found, contrive my fellows also take their share! this constitutes my earthly care: god's is above it and distinct. for i, a man, with men am linked and not a brute with brutes; no gain that i experience, must remain unshared: but should my best endeavor to share it, fail--subsisteth ever god's care above, and i exult that god, by god's own ways occult, may--doth, i will believe--bring back all wanderers to a single track. meantime, i can but testify god's care for me--no more, can i-- it is but for myself i know; the world rolls witnessing around me only to leave me as it found me; men cry there, but my ear is slow: their races flourish or decay --what boots it, while yon lucid way loaded with stars divides the vault? but soon my soul repairs its fault when, sharpening sense's hebetude, she turns on my own life! so viewed, no mere mote's-breadth but teems immense with witnessings of providence: and woe to me if when i look upon that record, the sole book unsealed to me, i take no heed of any warning that i read! have i been sure, this christmas-eve, god's own hand did the rainbow weave, whereby the truth from heaven slid into my soul? i cannot bid the world admit he stooped to heal my soul, as if in a thunder-peal where one heard noise, and one saw flame, i only knew he named my name: but what is the world to me, for sorrow or joy in its censure, when to-morrow it drops the remark, with just-turned head then, on again, "that man is dead"? yes, but for me--my name called,--drawn as a conscript's lot from the lap's black yawn, he has dipt into on a battle-dawn: bid out of life by a nod, a glance,-- stumbling, mute-mazed, at nature's chance,-- with a rapid finger circled round, fixed to the first poor inch of ground to fight from, where his foot was found; whose ear but a minute since lay free to the wide camp's buzz and gossipry-- summoned, a solitary man to end his life where his life began, from the safe glad rear, to the dreadful van! soul of mine, hadst thou caught and held by the hem of the vesture!-- xxi and i caught at the flying robe, and unrepelled was lapped again in its folds full-fraught with warmth and wonder and delight, god's mercy being infinite. for scarce had the words escaped my tongue, when, at a passionate bound, i sprung, out of the wandering world of rain, into the little chapel again. he finds himself back in the chapel, all that has occurred having been a vision. his conclusions have that broadness of view which belongs only to those most advanced in thought. he has learned that not only must there be the essential truth behind every sincere effort to reach it, but that even his own vision of the truth is not necessarily the final way of truth but is merely the way which is true for him. the jump from the attitude of mind that persecutes those who do not believe according to one established rule to such absolute toleration of all forms because of their symbolizing an eternal truth gives the measure of growth in religious thought from the days of wesley to browning. the wesleys and their fellow-helpers were stoned and mobbed, and some died of their wounds in the latter part of the eighteenth century, while in , when "christmas-eve" was written, an englishman could express a height of toleration and sympathy for religions not his own, as well as taking a religious stand for himself so exalted that it is difficult to imagine a further step in these directions. perhaps we are suffering to-day from over-toleration, that is, we tolerate not only those whose aspiration takes a different form, but those whose ideals lead to degeneracy. it seems as though all virtues must finally develop their shadows. what, however, is a shadow but the darkness occasioned by the approach of some greater light. xxii how else was i found there, bolt upright on my bench, as if i had never left it? --never flung out on the common at night, nor met the storm and wedge-like cleft it, seen the raree-show of peter's successor, or the laboratory of the professor! for the vision, that was true, i wist, true as that heaven and earth exist. there sat my friend, the yellow and tall, with his neck and its wen in the selfsame place; yet my nearest neighbor's cheek showed gall. she had slid away a contemptuous space: and the old fat woman, late so placable, eyed me with symptoms, hardly mistakable, of her milk of kindness turning rancid. in short, a spectator might have fancied that i had nodded, betrayed by slumber, yet kept my seat, a warning ghastly, through the heads of the sermon, nine in number, and woke up now at the tenth and lastly. but again, could such disgrace have happened? each friend at my elbow had surely nudged it; and, as for the sermon, where did my nap end? unless i heard it, could i have judged it? could i report as i do at the close, first, the preacher speaks through his nose: second, his gesture is too emphatic: thirdly, to waive what's pedagogic, the subject-matter itself lacks logic: fourthly, the english is ungrammatic. great news! the preacher is found no pascal, whom, if i pleased, i might to the task call of making square to a finite eye the circle of infinity, and find so all-but-just-succeeding! great news! the sermon proves no reading where bee-like in the flowers i bury me, like taylor's the immortal jeremy! and now that i know the very worst of him, what was it i thought to obtain at first of him? ha! is god mocked, as he asks? shall i take on me to change his tasks, and dare, despatched to a river-head for a simple draught of the element, neglect the thing for which he sent, and return with another thing instead?-- saying, "because the water found welling up from underground, is mingled with the taints of earth, while thou, i know, dost laugh at dearth, and couldst, at wink or word, convulse the world with the leap of a river-pulse,-- therefore i turned from the oozings muddy, and bring thee a chalice i found, instead: see the brave veins in the breccia ruddy! one would suppose that the marble bled. what matters the water? a hope i have nursed: the waterless cup will quench my thirst." --better have knelt at the poorest stream that trickles in pain from the straitest rift! for the less or the more is all god's gift, who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam. and here, is there water or not, to drink? i then, in ignorance and weakness, taking god's help, have attained to think my heart does best to receive in meekness that mode of worship, as most to his mind, where earthly aids being cast behind, his all in all appears serene with the thinnest human veil between, letting the mystic lamps, the seven, the many motions of his spirit, pass, as they list, to earth from heaven. for the preacher's merit or demerit, it were to be wished the flaws were fewer in the earthen vessel, holding treasure which lies as safe in a golden ewer; but the main thing is, does it hold good measure? heaven soon sets right all other matters!-- ask, else, these ruins of humanity, this flesh worn out to rags and tatters, this soul at struggle with insanity, who thence take comfort--can i doubt?-- which an empire gained, were a loss without. may it be mine! and let us hope that no worse blessing befall the pope, turned sick at last of to-day's buffoonery, of posturings and petticoatings, beside his bourbon bully's gloatings in the bloody orgies of drunk poltroonery! nor may the professor forego its peace at göttingen presently, when, in the dusk of his life, if his cough, as i fear, should increase, prophesied of by that horrible husk-- when thicker and thicker the darkness fills the world through his misty spectacles, and he gropes for something more substantial than a fable, myth or personification,-- may christ do for him what no mere man shall, and stand confessed as the god of salvation! meantime, in the still recurring fear lest myself, at unawares, be found, while attacking the choice of my neighbors round, with none of my own made--i choose here! the giving out of the hymn reclaims me; i have done: and if any blames me, thinking that merely to touch in brevity the topics i dwell on, were unlawful,-- or worse, that i trench, with undue levity, on the bounds of the holy and the awful,-- i praise the heart, and pity the head of him, and refer myself to thee, instead of him, who head and heart alike discernest, looking below light speech we utter, when frothy spume and frequent sputter prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest! may truth shine out, stand ever before us! i put up pencil and join chorus to hepzibah tune, without further apology, the last five verses of the third section of the seventeenth hymn of whitfield's collection, to conclude with the doxology. in "easter-day" the interest is purely personal. it is a long and somewhat intricate discussion between two friends upon the basis of belief and gives no glimpses of the historical progress of belief. in brief, the poem discusses the relation of the finite life to the infinite life. the first speaker is not satisfied with the different points of view suggested by the second speaker. first, that one would be willing to suffer martyrdom in this life if only one could truly believe it would bring eternal joy. or perhaps doubt is god's way of telling who are his friends, who are his foes. or perhaps god is revealed in the law of the universe, or in the shows of nature, or in the emotions of the human heart. the first speaker takes the ground that the only possibility satisfying modern demands is an assurance that this world's gain is in its imperfectness surety for true gain in another world. an imaginatively pictured experience of his own soul is next presented, wherein he represents himself at the judgment day as choosing the finite life instead of the infinite life. as a result, he learns there is nothing in finite life except as related to infinite life. the way opened out toward the infinite through love is that which gives the light of life to all the good things of earth which he desired--all beauties, that of nature and art, and the joy of intellectual activity. easter-day . . . . . . . xv and as i said this nonsense, throwing back my head with light complacent laugh, i found suddenly all the midnight round one fire. the dome of heaven had stood as made up of a multitude of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack of ripples infinite and black, from sky to sky. sudden there went, like horror and astonishment, a fierce vindictive scribble of red quick flame across, as if one said (the angry scribe of judgment) "there-- burn it!" and straight i was aware that the whole ribwork round, minute cloud touching cloud beyond compute, was tinted, each with its own spot of burning at the core, till clot jammed against clot, and spilt its fire over all heaven, which 'gan suspire as fanned to measure equable,-- just so great conflagrations kill night overhead, and rise and sink, reflected. now the fire would shrink and wither off the blasted face of heaven, and i distinct might trace the sharp black ridgy outlines left unburned like network--then, each cleft the fire had been sucked back into, regorged, and out it surging flew furiously, and night writhed inflamed, till, tolerating to be tamed no longer, certain rays world-wide shot downwardly. on every side caught past escape, the earth was lit; as if a dragon's nostril split and all his famished ire o'erflowed; then, as he winced at his lord's goad, back he inhaled: whereat i found the clouds into vast pillars bound, based on the corners of the earth, propping the skies at top: a dearth of fire i' the violet intervals, leaving exposed the utmost walls of time, about to tumble in and end the world. xvi i felt begin the judgment-day: to retrocede was too late now. "in very deed," (i uttered to myself) "that day!" the intuition burned away all darkness from my spirit too: there, stood i, found and fixed, i knew, choosing the world. the choice was made; and naked and disguiseless stayed, and unevadable, the fact. my brain held all the same compact its senses, nor my heart declined its office; rather, both combined to help me in this juncture. i lost not a second,--agony gave boldness: since my life had end and my choice with it--best defend, applaud both! i resolved to say, "so was i framed by thee, such way i put to use thy senses here! it was so beautiful, so near, thy world,--what could i then but choose my part there? nor did i refuse to look above the transient boon of time; but it was hard so soon as in a short life, to give up such beauty: i could put the cup undrained of half its fulness, by; but, to renounce it utterly, --that was too hard! nor did the cry which bade renounce it, touch my brain authentically deep and plain enough to make my lips let go. but thou, who knowest all, dost know whether i was not, life's brief while, endeavoring to reconcile those lips (too tardily, alas!) to letting the dear remnant pass, one day,--some drops of earthly good untasted! is it for this mood, that thou, whose earth delights so well, hast made its complement a hell?" xvii a final belch of fire like blood, overbroke all heaven in one flood of doom. then fire was sky, and sky fire, and both, one brief ecstasy, then ashes. but i heard no noise (whatever was) because a voice beside me spoke thus, "life is done, time ends, eternity's begun, and thou art judged for evermore." xviii i looked up; all seemed as before; of that cloud-tophet overhead no trace was left: i saw instead the common round me, and the sky above, stretched drear and emptily of life. 'twas the last watch of night, except what brings the morning quite; when the armed angel, conscience-clear, his task nigh done, leans o'er his spear and gazes on the earth he guards, safe one night more through all its wards, till god relieve him at his post. "a dream--a waking dream at most!" (i spoke out quick, that i might shake the horrid nightmare off, and wake.) "the world gone, yet the world is here? are not all things as they appear? is judgment past for me alone? --and where had place the great white throne? the rising of the quick and dead? where stood they, small and great? who read the sentence from the opened book?" so, by degrees, the blood forsook my heart, and let it beat afresh; i knew i should break through the mesh of horror, and breathe presently: when, lo, again, the voice by me! xix i saw.... oh brother, 'mid far sands the palm-tree-cinctured city stands, bright-white beneath, as heaven, bright-blue, leans o'er it, while the years pursue their course, unable to abate its paradisal laugh at fate! one morn,--the arab staggers blind o'er a new tract of death, calcined to ashes, silence, nothingness,-- and strives, with dizzy wits, to guess whence fell the blow. what if, 'twixt skies and prostrate earth, he should surprise the imaged vapor, head to foot, surveying, motionless and mute, its work, ere, in a whirlwind rapt it vanished up again?--so hapt my chance. he stood there. like the smoke pillared o'er sodom, when day broke,-- i saw him. one magnific pall mantled in massive fold and fall his head, and coiled in snaky swathes about his feet: night's black, that bathes all else, broke, grizzled with despair, against the soul of blackness there. a gesture told the mood within-- that wrapped right hand which based the chin, that intense meditation fixed on his procedure,--pity mixed with the fulfilment of decree. motionless, thus, he spoke to me, who fell before his feet, a mass, no man now. xx "all is come to pass. such shows are over for each soul they had respect to. in the roll of judgment which convinced mankind of sin, stood many, bold and blind, terror must burn the truth into: their fate for them!--thou hadst to do with absolute omnipotence, able its judgments to dispense to the whole race, as every one were its sole object. judgment done, god is, thou art,--the rest is hurled to nothingness for thee. this world, this finite life, thou hast preferred, in disbelief of god's plain word, to heaven and to infinity. here the probation was for thee, to show thy soul the earthly mixed with heavenly, it must choose betwixt. the earthly joys lay palpable,-- a taint, in each, distinct as well; the heavenly flitted, faint and rare, above them, but as truly were taintless, so, in their nature, best. thy choice was earth: thou didst attest 'twas fitter spirit should subserve the flesh, than flesh refine to nerve beneath the spirit's play. advance no claim to their inheritance who chose the spirit's fugitive brief gleams, and yearned, 'this were to live indeed, if rays, completely pure from flesh that dulls them, could endure,-- not shoot in meteor-light athwart our earth, to show how cold and swart it lies beneath their fire, but stand as stars do, destined to expand, prove veritable worlds, our home!' thou saidst,--'let spirit star the dome of sky, that flesh may miss no peak, no nook of earth,--i shall not seek its service further!' thou art shut out of the heaven of spirit; glut thy sense upon the world: 'tis thine for ever--take it!" xxi "how? is mine, the world?" (i cried, while my soul broke out in a transport.) "hast thou spoke plainly in that? earth's exquisite treasures of wonder and delight, for me?" xxii the austere voice returned,-- "so soon made happy? hadst thou learned what god accounteth happiness, thou wouldst not find it hard to guess what hell may be his punishment for those who doubt if god invent better than they. let such men rest content with what they judged the best. let the unjust usurp at will: the filthy shall be filthy still: miser, there waits the gold for thee! hater, indulge thine enmity! and thou, whose heaven self-ordained was, to enjoy earth unrestrained, do it! take all the ancient show! the woods shall wave, the rivers flow, and men apparently pursue their works, as they were wont to do, while living in probation yet. i promise not thou shalt forget the past, now gone to its account; but leave thee with the old amount of faculties, nor less nor more, unvisited, as heretofore, by god's free spirit, that makes an end. so, once more, take thy world! expend eternity upon its shows, flung thee as freely as one rose out of a summer's opulence, over the eden-barrier whence thou art excluded. knock in vain!" xxiii i sat up. all was still again. i breathed free: to my heart, back fled the warmth. "but, all the world!"--i said. i stooped and picked a leaf of fern, and recollected i might learn from books, how many myriad sorts of fern exist, to trust reports, each as distinct and beautiful as this, the very first i cull. think, from the first leaf to the last! conceive, then, earth's resources! vast exhaustless beauty, endless change of wonder! and this foot shall range alps, andes,--and this eye devour the bee-bird and the aloe-flower? xxiv then the voice, "welcome so to rate the arras-folds that variegate the earth, god's antechamber, well! the wise, who waited there, could tell by these, what royalties in store lay one step past the entrance-door. for whom, was reckoned, not so much, this life's munificence? for such as thou,--a race, whereof scarce one was able, in a million, to feel that any marvel lay in objects round his feet all day; scarce one, in many millions more, willing, if able, to explore the secreter, minuter charm! --brave souls, a fern-leaf could disarm of power to cope with god's intent,-- or scared if the south firmament with north-fire did its wings refledge! all partial beauty was a pledge of beauty in its plenitude: but since the pledge sufficed thy mood, retain it! plenitude be theirs who looked above!" xxv though sharp despairs shot through me, i held up, bore on. "what matter though my trust were gone from natural things? henceforth my part be less with nature than with art! for art supplants, gives mainly worth to nature; 'tis man stamps the earth-- and i will seek his impress, seek the statuary of the greek, italy's painting--there my choice shall fix!" xxvi "obtain it!" said the voice, "--the one form with its single act, which sculptors labored to abstract, the one face, painters tried to draw, with its one look, from throngs they saw. and that perfection in their soul, these only hinted at? the whole, they were but parts of? what each laid his claim to glory on?--afraid his fellow-men should give him rank by mere tentatives which he shrank smitten at heart from, all the more, that gazers pressed in to adore! 'shall i be judged by only these?' if such his soul's capacities, even while he trod the earth,--think, now, what pomp in buonarroti's brow, with its new palace-brain where dwells superb the soul, unvexed by cells that crumbled with the transient clay! what visions will his right hand's sway still turn to forms, as still they burst upon him? how will he quench thirst, titanically infantine, laid at the breast of the divine? does it confound thee,--this first page emblazoning man's heritage?-- can this alone absorb thy sight, as pages were not infinite,-- like the omnipotence which tasks itself to furnish all that asks the soul it means to satiate? what was the world, the starry state of the broad skies,--what, all displays of power and beauty intermixed, which now thy soul is chained betwixt,-- what else than needful furniture for life's first stage? god's work, be sure, no more spreads wasted, than falls scant! he filled, did not exceed, man's want of beauty in this life. but through life pierce,--and what has earth to do, its utmost beauty's appanage, with the requirement of next stage? did god pronounce earth 'very good'? needs must it be, while understood for man's preparatory state; nought here to heighten nor abate; transfer the same completeness here, to serve a new state's use,--and drear deficiency gapes every side! the good, tried once, were bad, retried. see the enwrapping rocky niche, sufficient for the sleep in which the lizard breathes for ages safe: split the mould--and as light would chafe the creature's new world-widened sense, dazzled to death at evidence of all the sounds and sights that broke innumerous at the chisel's stroke,-- so, in god's eye, the earth's first stuff was, neither more nor less, enough to house man's soul, man's need fulfil. man reckoned it immeasurable? so thinks the lizard of his vault! could god be taken in default, short of contrivances, by you,-- or reached, ere ready to pursue his progress through eternity? that chambered rock, the lizard's world, your easy mallet's blow has hurled to nothingness for ever; so, has god abolished at a blow this world, wherein his saints were pent,-- who, though found grateful and content, with the provision there, as thou, yet knew he would not disallow their spirit's hunger, felt as well,-- unsated,--not unsatable, as paradise gives proof. deride their choice now, thou who sit'st outside!" xxvii i cried in anguish, "mind, the mind, so miserably cast behind, to gain what had been wisely lost! oh, let me strive to make the most of the poor stinted soul, i nipped of budding wings, else now equipped for voyage from summer isle to isle! and though she needs must reconcile ambition to the life on ground, still, i can profit by late found but precious knowledge. mind is best-- i will seize mind, forego the rest, and try how far my tethered strength may crawl in this poor breadth and length. let me, since i can fly no more, at least spin dervish-like about (till giddy rapture almost doubt i fly) through circling sciences, philosophies and histories should the whirl slacken there, then verse, fining to music, shall asperse fresh and fresh fire-dew, till i strain intoxicate, half-break my chain! not joyless, though more favored feet stand calm, where i want wings to beat the floor. at least earth's bond is broke!" xxviii then, (sickening even while i spoke) "let me alone! no answer, pray, to this! i know what thou wilt say! all still is earth's,--to know, as much as feel its truths, which if we touch with sense, or apprehend in soul, what matter? i have reached the goal-- 'whereto does knowledge serve!' will burn my eyes, too sure, at every turn! i cannot look back now, nor stake bliss on the race, for running's sake. the goal's a ruin like the rest!-- and so much worse thy latter quest," (added the voice) "that even on earth-- whenever, in man's soul, had birth those intuitions, grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less, making the finite comprehend infinity,--the bard would spend such praise alone, upon his craft, as, when wind-lyres obey the waft, goes to the craftsman who arranged the seven strings, changed them and rechanged-- knowing it was the south that harped. he felt his song, in singing, warped; distinguished his and god's part: whence a world of spirit as of sense was plain to him, yet not too plain, which he could traverse, not remain a guest in:--else were permanent heaven on the earth its gleams were meant to sting with hunger for full light,-- made visible in verse, despite the veiling weakness,--truth by means of fable, showing while it screens,-- since highest truth, man e'er supplied, was ever fable on outside. such gleams made bright the earth an age; now the whole sun's his heritage! take up thy world, it is allowed, thou who hast entered in the cloud!" xxix then i--"behold, my spirit bleeds, catches no more at broken reeds,-- but lilies flower those reeds above: i let the world go, and take love! love survives in me, albeit those i love be henceforth masks and shows, not living men and women: still i mind how love repaired all ill, cured wrong, soothed grief, made earth amends with parents, brothers, children, friends! some semblance of a woman yet with eyes to help me to forget, shall look on me; and i will match departed love with love, attach old memories to new dreams, nor scorn the poorest of the grains of corn i save from shipwreck on this isle, trusting its barrenness may smile with happy foodful green one day, more precious for the pains. i pray,-- leave to love, only!" xxx at the word, the form, i looked to have been stirred with pity and approval, rose o'er me, as when the headsman throws axe over shoulder to make end-- i fell prone, letting him expend his wrath, while thus the inflicting voice smote me. "is this thy final choice? love is the best? 'tis somewhat late! and all thou dost enumerate of power and beauty in the world, the mightiness of love was curled inextricably round about. love lay within it and without, to clasp thee,--but in vain! thy soul still shrunk from him who made the whole, still set deliberate aside his love!--now take love! well betide thy tardy conscience! haste to take the show of love for the name's sake, remembering every moment who, beside creating thee unto these ends, and these for thee, was said to undergo death in thy stead in flesh like thine: so ran the tale. what doubt in thee could countervail belief in it? upon the ground 'that in the story had been found too much love! how could god love so?' he who in all his works below adapted to the needs of man, made love the basis of the plan,-- did love, as was demonstrated: while man, who was so fit instead to hate, as every day gave proof,-- man thought man, for his kind's behoof, both could and did invent that scheme of perfect love: 'twould well beseem cain's nature thou wast wont to praise, not tally with god's usual ways!" xxxi and i cowered deprecatingly-- "thou love of god! or let me die, or grant what shall seem heaven almost! let me not know that all is lost, though lost it be--leave me not tied to this despair, this corpse-like bride! let that old life seem mine--no more-- with limitation as before, with darkness, hunger, toil, distress: be all the earth a wilderness! only let me go on, go on, still hoping ever and anon to reach one eve the better land!" xxxii then did the form expand, expand-- i knew him through the dread disguise as the whole god within his eyes embraced me. xxxiii when i lived again, the day was breaking,--the grey plain i rose from, silvered thick with dew. was this a vision? false or true? since then, three varied years are spent, and commonly my mind is bent to think it was a dream--be sure a mere dream and distemperature-- the last day's watching: then the night,-- the shock of that strange northern light set my head swimming, bred in me a dream. and so i live, you see, go through the world, try, prove, reject, prefer, still struggling to effect my warfare; happy that i can be crossed and thwarted as a man, not left in god's contempt apart, with ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, tame in earth's paddock as her prize. thank god, she still each method tries to catch me, who may yet escape, she knows,--the fiend in angel's shape! thank god, no paradise stands barred to entry, and i find it hard to be a christian, as i said! still every now and then my head raised glad, sinks mournful--all grows drear spite of the sunshine, while i fear and think, "how dreadful to be grudged no ease henceforth, as one that's judged. condemned to earth for ever, shut from heaven!" but easter-day breaks! but christ rises! mercy every way is infinite,--and who can say? this poem has often been cited as a proof of browning's own belief in historical christianity. it can hardly be said to be more than a doubtful proof, for it depends upon a subjective vision of which the speaker, himself, doubts the truth. the speaker in this poem belongs in the same category with bishop blougram. a belief in infinite love can come to him only through the dogma of the incarnation, he therefore holds to that, no matter how tossed about by doubts. the failure of all human effort to attain the absolute and, as a consequence, the belief in an absolute beyond this life is a dominant note in browning's own philosophy. the nature of that absolute he further evolves from the intellectual observation of power that transcends human comprehension, and the even more deep-rooted sense of love in the human heart. much of his thought resembles that of the english scientist, herbert spencer. the relativity of knowledge and the relativity of good and evil are cardinal doctrines with both of them. herbert spencer's mystery behind all phenomena and browning's failure of human knowledge are identical--the negative proof of the absolute,--but where spencer contents himself with the statement that though we cannot know the absolute, yet it must transcend all that the human mind has conceived of perfection, browning, as we have already seen, declares that we _can_ know something of the nature of that absolute through the love which we know in the human heart as well as the power we see displayed in nature. in connection with this subject, which for lack of space can merely be touched on in the present volume, it will be instructive to round out browning's presentations of his own contributions to nineteenth-century thought with two quotations, one from "the parleyings:" "with bernard de mandeville," and one from a poem in his last volume "reverie." in the first, human love is symbolized as the image made by a lens of the sun, which latter symbolizes divine love. bernard de mandeville . . . . . . . ix boundingly up through night's wall dense and dark, embattled crags and clouds, outbroke the sun above the conscious earth, and one by one her heights and depths absorbed to the last spark his fluid glory, from the far fine ridge of mountain-granite which, transformed to gold, laughed first the thanks back, to the vale's dusk fold on fold of vapor-swathing, like a bridge shattered beneath some giant's stamp. night wist her work done and betook herself in mist to marsh and hollow there to bide her time blindly in acquiescence. everywhere did earth acknowledge sun's embrace sublime thrilling her to the heart of things: since there no ore ran liquid, no spar branched anew, no arrowy crystal gleamed, but straightway grew glad through the inrush--glad nor more nor less than, 'neath his gaze, forest and wilderness, hill, dale, land, sea, the whole vast stretch and spread, the universal world of creatures bred by sun's munificence, alike gave praise-- all creatures but one only: gaze for gaze, joyless and thankless, who--all scowling can-- protests against the innumerous praises? man, sullen and silent. stand thou forth then, state thy wrong, thou sole aggrieved--disconsolate-- while every beast, bird, reptile, insect, gay and glad acknowledges the bounteous day! x man speaks now:--"what avails sun's earth-felt thrill to me? sun penetrates the ore, the plant-- they feel and grow: perchance with subtler skill he interfuses fly, worm, brute, until each favored object pays life's ministrant by pressing, in obedience to his will, up to completion of the task prescribed, so stands and stays a type. myself imbibed such influence also, stood and stand complete-- the perfect man,--head, body, hands and feet, true to the pattern: but does that suffice? how of my superadded mind which needs --not to be, simply, but to do, and pleads for--more than knowledge that by some device sun quickens matter: mind is nobly fain to realize the marvel, make--for sense as mind--the unseen visible, condense --myself--sun's all-pervading influence so as to serve the needs of mind, explain what now perplexes. let the oak increase his corrugated strength on strength, the palm lift joint by joint her fan-fruit, ball and balm,-- let the coiled serpent bask in bloated peace,-- the eagle, like some skyey derelict, drift in the blue, suspended glorying,-- the lion lord it by the desert-spring,-- what know or care they of the power which pricked nothingness to perfection? i, instead, when all-developed still am found a thing all-incomplete: for what though flesh had force transcending theirs--hands able to unring the tightened snake's coil, eyes that could outcourse the eagle's soaring, voice whereat the king of carnage couched discrowned? mind seeks to see, touch, understand, by mind inside of me, the outside mind--whose quickening i attain to recognize--i only. all in vain would mind address itself to render plain the nature of the essence. drag what lurks behind the operation--that which works latently everywhere by outward proof-- drag that mind forth to face mine? no! aloof i solely crave that one of all the beams which do sun's work in darkness, at my will should operate--myself for once have skill to realize the energy which streams flooding the universe. above, around, beneath--why mocks that mind my own thus found simply of service, when the world grows dark, to half-surmise--were sun's use understood, i might demonstrate him supplying food, warmth, life, no less the while? to grant one spark myself may deal with--make it thaw my blood and prompt my steps, were truer to the mark of mind's requirement than a half-surmise that somehow secretly is operant a power all matter feels, mind only tries to comprehend! once more--no idle vaunt 'man comprehends the sun's self!' mysteries at source why probe into? enough: display, make demonstrable, how, by night as day, earth's centre and sky's outspan, all's informed equally by sun's efflux!--source from whence if just one spark i drew, full evidence were mine of fire ineffably enthroned-- sun's self made palpable to man!" xi thus moaned man till prometheus helped him,--as we learn,-- offered an artifice whereby he drew sun's rays into a focus,--plain and true, the very sun in little: made fire burn and henceforth do man service--glass-conglobed though to a pin-point circle--all the same comprising the sun's self, but sun disrobed of that else-unconceived essential flame borne by no naked sight. shall mind's eye strive achingly to companion as it may the supersubtle effluence, and contrive to follow beam and beam upon their way hand-breadth by hand-breadth, till sense faint--confessed frustrate, eluded by unknown unguessed infinitude of action? idle quest! rather ask aid from optics. sense, descry the spectrum--mind, infer immensity! little? in little, light, warmth, life are blessed-- which, in the large, who sees to bless? not i more than yourself: so, good my friend, keep still trustful with--me? with thee, sage mandeville! the second "reverie" has the effect of a triumphant swan song, especially the closing stanzas, the poem having been written very near the end of the poet's life. "in a beginning god made heaven and earth." forth flashed knowledge: from star to clod man knew things: doubt abashed closed its long period. knowledge obtained power praise. had good been manifest, broke out in cloudless blaze, unchequered as unrepressed, in all things good at best-- then praise--all praise, no blame-- had hailed the perfection. no! as power's display, the same be good's--praise forth shall flow unisonous in acclaim! even as the world its life, so have i lived my own-- power seen with love at strife, that sure, this dimly shown, --good rare and evil rife. whereof the effect be--faith that, some far day, were found ripeness in things now rathe, wrong righted, each chain unbound, renewal born out of scathe. why faith--but to lift the load, to leaven the lump, where lies mind prostrate through knowledge owed to the loveless power it tries to withstand, how vain! in flowed ever resistless fact: no more than the passive clay disputes the potter's act, could the whelmed mind disobey knowledge the cataract. but, perfect in every part, has the potter's moulded shape, leap of man's quickened heart, throe of his thought's escape, stings of his soul which dart through the barrier of flesh, till keen she climbs from the calm and clear, through turbidity all between, from the known to the unknown here, heaven's "shall be," from earth's "has been"? then life is--to wake not sleep, rise and not rest, but press from earth's level where blindly creep things perfected, more or less, to the heaven's height, far and steep, where, amid what strifes and storms may wait the adventurous quest, power is love--transports, transforms who aspired from worst to best, sought the soul's world, spurned the worms'. i have faith such end shall be: from the first, power was--i knew. life has made clear to me that, strive but for closer view, love were as plain to see. when see? when there dawns a day, if not on the homely earth, then yonder, worlds away, where the strange and new have birth, and power comes full in play. chapter vi art criticism inspired by the english musician, avison in the "parleying" "with charles avison," browning plunges into a discussion of the problem of the ephemeralness of musical expression. he hits upon avison to have his colloquy with because a march by this musician came into his head, and the march came into his head for no better reason than that it was the month of march. some interest would attach to avison if it were only for the reason that he was organist of the church of st. nicholas in newcastle-upon-tyne. in the earliest accounts st. nicholas was styled simply, "the church of newcastle-upon-tyne," but in it became a cathedral. this was after avison's death in . all we know about the organ upon which avison performed is found in a curious old history of newcastle by brand. "i have found," he writes, "no account of any organ in this church during the times of popery though it is very probable there has been one. about the year , the corporation of newcastle contributed £ towards the erection of the present organ. they added a trumpet stop to it june d, ." the year that avison was born, , it is recorded further that "the back front of this organ was finished which cost the said corporation £ together with the expense of cleaning and repairing the whole instrument." june , , the common council of newcastle ordered a sweet stop to be added to the organ. this was after avison became organist, his appointment to that post having been in . so we know that he at least had a "trumpet stop" and a "sweet stop," with which to embellish his organ playing. the church is especially distinguished for the number and beauty of its chantries, and any who have a taste for examining armorial bearings will find two good-sized volumes devoted to a description of those in this church, by richardson. equal distinction attaches to the church owing to the beauty of its steeple, which has been called the pride and glory of the northern hemisphere. according to the enthusiastic richardson it is justly esteemed on account of its peculiar excellency of design and delicacy of execution one of the finest specimens of architectural beauty in europe. this steeple is as conspicuous a feature of newcastle as the state house dome is of boston, situated, as it is, almost in the center of the town. richardson gives the following minute description of this marvel. "it consists of a square tower forty feet in width, having great and small turrets with pinnacles at the angles and center of each front tower. from the four turrets at the angles spring two arches, which meet in an intersecting direction, and bear on their center an efficient perforated lanthorne, surmounted by a tall and beautiful spire: the angles of the lanthorne have pinnacles similar to those on the turrets, and the whole of the pinnacles, being twelve in number, and the spire, are ornamented with crockets and vanes." there is a stirring tradition in regard to this structure related by bourne to the effect that in the time of the civil wars, when the scots had besieged the town for several weeks, and were still as far as at first from taking it, the general sent a messenger to the mayor of the town, and demanded the keys, and the delivering up of the town, or he would immediately demolish the steeple of st. nicholas. the mayor and aldermen upon hearing this, immediately ordered a certain number of the chiefest of the scottish prisoners to be carried up to the top of the tower, the place below the lanthorne and there confined. after this, they returned the general an answer to this purpose,--that they would upon no terms deliver up the town, but would to the last moment defend it: that the steeple of st. nicholas was indeed a beautiful and magnificent piece of architecture, and one of the great ornaments of the town; but yet should be blown into atoms before ransomed at such a rate: that, however, if it was to fall, it should not fall alone, that the same moment he destroyed the beautiful structure he should bathe his hands in the blood of his countrymen who were placed there on purpose either to preserve it from ruin or to die along with it. this message had the desired effect. the men were there kept prisoners during the whole time of the siege and not so much as one gun fired against it. avison, however, had other claims to distinction, besides being organist of this ancient church. he was a composer, and was remembered by one of his airs, at least, into the nineteenth century, namely "sound the loud timbrel." he appears not to be remembered, however, by his concertos, of which he published no less than five sets for a full band of stringed instruments, nor by his quartets and trios, and two sets of sonatas for the harpsichord and two violins. all we have to depend on now as to the quality of his music are the strictures of a certain dr. hayes, an oxford professor, who points out many errors against the rules of composition in the works of avison, whence he infers that his skill in music is not very profound, and the somewhat more appreciative remarks of hawkins who says "the music of avison is light and elegant, but it wants originality, a necessary consequence of his too close attachment to the style of geminiani which in a few particulars only he was able to imitate." geminiani was a celebrated violin player and composer of the day, who had come to england from italy. he is said to have held his pupil, avison, in high esteem and to have paid him a visit at newcastle in . avison's early education was gained in italy; and in addition to his musical attainments he was a scholar and a man of some literary acquirements. it is not surprising, considering all these educational advantages that he really made something of a stir upon the publication of his "small book," as browning calls it, with, we may add, its "large title." an essay on musical expression by charles avison _organist_ in newcastle with alterations and large additions to which is added, a letter to the author concerning the music of the ancients and some passages in classic writers relating to the subject. likewise mr. avison's reply to the author of _remarks on the essay on musical expression_ in a letter from mr. _avison_ to his friend in _london_ the third edition london printed for lockyer davis, in _holborn_. printer to the royal society. mdcclxxv. the author of the "remarks on the essay on musical expression" was the aforementioned dr. w. hayes, and although the learned doctor's pamphlet seems to have died a natural death, some idea of its strictures may be gained from avison's reply. the criticisms are rather too technical to be of interest to the general reader, but one is given here to show how gentlemanly a temper mr. avison possessed when he was under fire. his reply runs "his first critique, and, i think, his masterpiece, contains many circumstantial, but false and virulent remarks on the first allegro of these concertos, to which he supposes i would give the name of _fugue_. be it just what he pleases to call it i shall not defend what the public is already in possession of, the public being the most proper judge. i shall only here observe, that our critic has wilfully, or ignorantly, confounded the terms _fugue_ and _imitation_, which latter is by no means subject to the same laws with the former. [illustration: handel] "had i observed the method of answering the _accidental subjects_ in this _allegro_, as laid down by our critic in his remarks, they must have produced most shocking effects; which, though this mechanic in music, would, perhaps, have approved, yet better judges might, in reality, have imagined i had known no other art than that of the spruzzarino." there is a nice independence about this that would indicate mr. avison to be at least an aspirant in the right direction in musical composition. his criticism of handel, too, at a time when the world was divided between enthusiasm for handel and enthusiasm for buononcini, shows a remarkably just and penetrating estimate of this great genius. "mr. handel is, in music, what his own dryden was in poetry; nervous, exalted, and harmonious; but voluminous, and, consequently, not always correct. their abilities equal to every thing; their execution frequently inferior. born with genius capable of _soaring the boldest flights_; they have sometimes, to suit the vitiated taste of the age they lived in, _descended to the lowest_. yet, as both their excellencies are infinitely more numerous than their deficiencies, so both their characters will devolve to latest posterity, not as models of perfection, yet glorious examples of those amazing powers that actuate the human soul." on the whole, mr. avison's "little book" on musical expression is eminently sensible as to the matter and very agreeable in style. he hits off well, for example, the difference between "musical expression" and imitation. "as dissonances and shocking sounds cannot be called musical expression, so neither do i think, can mere imitation of several other things be entitled to this name, which, however, among the generality of mankind hath often obtained it. thus, the gradual rising or falling of the notes in a long succession is often used to denote ascent or descent; broken intervals, to denote an interrupted motion; a number of quick divisions, to describe swiftness or flying; sounds resembling laughter, to describe laughter; with a number of other contrivances of a parallel kind, which it is needless here to mention. now all these i should chuse to style imitation, rather than expression; because it seems to me, that their tendency is rather to fix the hearer's attention on the similitude between the sounds and the things which they describe, and thereby to excite a reflex act of the understanding, than to affect the heart and raise the passions of the soul. "this distinction seems more worthy our notice at present, because some very eminent composers have attached themselves chiefly to the method here mentioned; and seem to think they have exhausted all the depths of expression, by a dextrous imitation of the meaning of a few particular words, that occur in the hymns or songs which they set to music. thus, were one of these gentlemen to express the following words of _milton_, --their songs divide the night, and lift our thoughts to heav'n: it is highly probable, that upon the word _divide_, he would run a _division_ of half a dozen bars; and on the subsequent part of the sentence, he would not think he had done the poet justice, or _risen_ to that _height_ of sublimity which he ought to express, till he had climbed up to the very top of his instrument, or at least as far as the human voice could follow him. and this would pass with a great part of mankind for musical expression; instead of that noble mixture of solemn airs and various harmony, which indeed elevates our thoughts, and gives that exquisite pleasure, which none but true lovers of harmony can feel." what avison calls "musical expression," we call to-day "content." and thus avison "tenders evidence that music in his day as much absorbed heart and soul then as wagner's music now." it is not unlikely that this very passage may have started browning off on his argumentative way concerning the question: how lasting and how fundamental are the powers of musical expression. the poet's memory goes back a hundred years only to reach "the bands-man avison whose little book and large tune had led him the long way from to-day." charles avison . . . . . . . and to-day's music-manufacture,--brahms, wagner, dvorak, liszt,--to where--trumpets, shawms, show yourselves joyful!--handel reigns--supreme? by no means! buononcini's work is theme for fit laudation of the impartial few: (we stand in england, mind you!) fashion too favors geminiani--of those choice concertos: nor there wants a certain voice raised in thy favor likewise, famed pepusch dear to our great-grandfathers! in a bush of doctor's wig, they prized thee timing beats while greenway trilled "alexis." such were feats of music in thy day--dispute who list-- avison, of newcastle organist! v and here's your music all alive once more-- as once it was alive, at least: just so the figured worthies of a waxwork-show attest--such people, years and years ago, looked thus when outside death had life below, --could say "we are now," not "we were of yore," --"feel how our pulses leap!" and not "explore-- explain why quietude has settled o'er surface once all-awork!" ay, such a "suite" roused heart to rapture, such a "fugue" would catch soul heavenwards up, when time was: why attach blame to exhausted faultlessness, no match for fresh achievement? feat once--ever feat! how can completion grow still more complete? hear avison! he tenders evidence that music in his day as much absorbed heart and soul then as wagner's music now. perfect from center to circumference-- orbed to the full can be but fully orbed: and yet--and yet--whence comes it that "o thou"-- sighed by the soul at eve to hesperus-- will not again take wing and fly away (since fatal wagner fixed it fast for us) in some unmodulated minor? nay, even by handel's help! having stated the problem that confronts him, namely, the change of fashion in music, the poet boldly goes on to declare that there is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music, because it does give direct expression to the moods of the soul, yet there is a hitch that balks her of full triumph, namely the musical form in which these moods are expressed does not stay fixed. this statement is enriched by a digression upon the meaning of the soul. vi i state it thus: there is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music. "soul"--(accept a word which vaguely names what no adept in word-use fits and fixes so that still thing shall not slip word's fetter and remain innominate as first, yet, free again, is no less recognized the absolute fact underlying that same other fact concerning which no cavil can dispute our nomenclature when we call it "mind"-- something not matter)--"soul," who seeks shall find distinct beneath that something. you exact an illustrative image? this may suit. vii we see a work: the worker works behind, invisible himself. suppose his act be to o'erarch a gulf: he digs, transports, shapes and, through enginery--all sizes, sorts, lays stone by stone until a floor compact proves our bridged causeway. so works mind--by stress of faculty, with loose facts, more or less, builds up our solid knowledge: all the same, underneath rolls what mind may hide not tame, an element which works beyond our guess, soul, the unsounded sea--whose lift of surge, spite of all superstructure, lets emerge, in flower and foam, feeling from out the deeps mind arrogates no mastery upon-- distinct indisputably. has there gone to dig up, drag forth, render smooth from rough mind's flooring,--operosity enough? still the successive labor of each inch, who lists may learn: from the last turn of winch that let the polished slab-stone find its place, to the first prod of pick-axe at the base of the unquarried mountain,--what was all mind's varied process except natural, nay, easy, even, to descry, describe, after our fashion? "so worked mind: its tribe of senses ministrant above, below, far, near, or now or haply long ago brought to pass knowledge." but soul's sea,--drawn whence, fed how, forced whither,--by what evidence of ebb and flow, that's felt beneath the tread, soul has its course 'neath mind's work over-head,-- who tells of, tracks to source the founts of soul? yet wherefore heaving sway and restless roll this side and that, except to emulate stability above? to match and mate feeling with knowledge,--make as manifest soul's work as mind's work, turbulence as rest, hates, loves, joys, woes, hopes, fears, that rise and sink ceaselessly, passion's transient flit and wink, a ripple's tinting or a spume-sheet's spread whitening the wave,--to strike all this life dead, run mercury into a mould like lead, and henceforth have the plain result to show-- how we feel, hard and fast as what we know-- this were the prize and is the puzzle!--which music essays to solve: and here's the hitch that balks her of full triumph else to boast. then follows his explanation of the "hitch," which necessitates a comparison with the other arts. his contention is that art adds nothing to the _knowledge_ of the mind. it simply moulds into a fixed form elements already known which before lay loose and dissociated, it therefore does not really create. but there is one realm, that of feeling, to which the arts never succeed in giving permanent form though all try to do it. what is it they succeed in getting? the poet does not make the point very clear, but he seems to be groping after the idea that the arts present only the _phenomena_ of feeling or the image of feeling instead of the _reality_. like all people who are appreciative of music, he realizes that music comes nearer to expressing the spiritual reality of feeling than the other arts, and yet music of all the arts is the least permanent in its appeal. viii all arts endeavor this, and she the most attains thereto, yet fails of touching: why? does mind get knowledge from art's ministry? what's known once is known ever: arts arrange, dissociate, re-distribute, interchange part with part, lengthen, broaden, high or deep construct their bravest,--still such pains produce change, not creation: simply what lay loose at first lies firmly after, what design was faintly traced in hesitating line once on a time, grows firmly resolute henceforth and evermore. now, could we shoot liquidity into a mould,--some way arrest soul's evanescent moods, and keep unalterably still the forms that leap to life for once by help of art!--which yearns to save its capture: poetry discerns, painting is 'ware of passion's rise and fall, bursting, subsidence, intermixture--all a-seethe within the gulf. each art a-strain would stay the apparition,--nor in vain: the poet's word-mesh, painter's sure and swift color-and-line-throw--proud the prize they lift! thus felt man and thus looked man,--passions caught i' the midway swim of sea,--not much, if aught, of nether-brooding loves, hates, hopes and fears, enwombed past art's disclosure. fleet the years, and still the poet's page holds helena at gaze from topmost troy--"but where are they, my brothers, in the armament i name hero by hero? can it be that shame for their lost sister holds them from the war?" --knowing not they already slept afar each of them in his own dear native land. still on the painter's fresco, from the hand of god takes eve the life-spark whereunto she trembles up from nothingness. outdo both of them, music! dredging deeper yet, drag into day,--by sound, thy master-net,-- the abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing unbroken of a branch, palpitating with limbs' play and life's semblance! there it lies, marvel and mystery, of mysteries and marvels, most to love and laud thee for! save it from chance and change we most abhor! give momentary feeling permanence, so that thy capture hold, a century hence, truth's very heart of truth as, safe to-day, the painter's eve, the poet's helena, still rapturously bend, afar still throw the wistful gaze! thanks, homer, angelo! could music rescue thus from soul's profound, give feeling immortality by sound, then were she queenliest of arts! alas-- as well expect the rainbow not to pass! "praise 'radaminta'--love attains therein to perfect utterance! pity--what shall win thy secret like 'rinaldo'?"--so men said: once all was perfume--now, the flower is dead-- they spied tints, sparks have left the spar! love, hate, joy, fear, survive,--alike importunate as ever to go walk the world again, nor ghost-like pant for outlet all in vain till music loose them, fit each filmily with form enough to know and name it by for any recognizer sure of ken and sharp of ear, no grosser denizen of earth than needs be. nor to such appeal is music long obdurate: off they steal-- how gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they full-blooded with new crimson of broad day-- passion made palpable once more. ye look your last on handel? gaze your first on gluck! why wistful search, o waning ones, the chart of stars for you while haydn, while mozart occupies heaven? these also, fanned to fire, flamboyant wholly,--so perfections tire,-- whiten to wanness, till ... let others note the ever-new invasion! the poet makes no attempt to give any reason why music should be so ephemeral in its appeal. he merely refers to the development of harmony and modulation, nor does it seem to enter his head that there can be any question about the appeal being ephemeral. he imagines the possibility of resuscitating dead and gone music with modern harmonies and novel modulations, but gives that up as an irreverent innovation. his next mood is a historical one; dead and gone music may have something for us in a historical sense, that is, if we bring our life to kindle theirs, we may sympathetically enter into the life of the time. ix i devote rather my modicum of parts to use what power may yet avail to re-infuse (in fancy, please you!) sleep that looks like death with momentary liveliness, lend breath to make the torpor half inhale. o relfe, an all-unworthy pupil, from the shelf of thy laboratory, dares unstop bottle, ope box, extract thence pinch and drop of dusts and dews a many thou didst shrine each in its right receptacle, assign to each its proper office, letter large label and label, then with solemn charge, reviewing learnedly the list complete of chemical reactives, from thy feet push down the same to me, attent below, power in abundance: armed wherewith i go to play the enlivener. bring good antique stuff! was it alight once? still lives spark enough for breath to quicken, run the smouldering ash red right-through. what, "stone-dead" were fools so rash as style my avison, because he lacked modern appliance, spread out phrase unracked by modulations fit to make each hair stiffen upon his wig? see there--and there! i sprinkle my reactives, pitch broadcast discords and resolutions, turn aghast melody's easy-going, jostle law with license, modulate (no bach in awe), change enharmonically (hudl to thank), and lo, up-start the flamelets,--what was blank turns scarlet, purple, crimson! straightway scanned by eyes that like new lustre--love once more yearns through the largo, hatred as before rages in the rubato: e'en thy march, my avison, which, sooth to say--(ne'er arch eyebrows in anger!)--timed, in georgian years the step precise of british grenadiers to such a nicety,--if score i crowd, if rhythm i break, if beats i vary,--tap at bar's off-starting turns true thunder-clap, ever the pace augmented till--what's here? titanic striding toward olympus! x fear no such irreverent innovation! still glide on, go rolling, water-like, at will-- nay, were thy melody in monotone, the due three-parts dispensed with! xi this alone comes of my tiresome talking: music's throne seats somebody whom somebody unseats, and whom in turn--by who knows what new feats of strength,--shall somebody as sure push down, consign him dispossessed of sceptre, crown, and orb imperial--whereto?--never dream that what once lived shall ever die! they seem dead--do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? bring our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king starts, you shall see, stands up, from head to foot no inch that is not purcell! wherefore? (suit measure to subject, first--no marching on yet in thy bold c major, avison, as suited step a minute since: no: wait-- into the minor key first modulate-- gently with a, now--in the lesser third!) the really serious conclusion of the poem amounts to a doctrine of relativity in art and not only in art but in ethics and religion. it is a statement in poetry of the prevalent thought of the nineteenth century, of which the most widely known exponent was herbert spencer. the form in which every truth manifests itself is partial and therefore will pass, but the underlying truth, the absolute which unfolds itself in form after form is eternal. every manifestation in form, according to browning, however, has also its infinite value in relation to the truth which is preserved through it. xii of all the lamentable debts incurred by man through buying knowledge, this were worst: that he should find his last gain prove his first was futile--merely nescience absolute, not knowledge in the bud which holds a fruit haply undreamed of in the soul's spring-tide, pursed in the petals summer opens wide, and autumn, withering, rounds to perfect ripe,-- not this,--but ignorance, a blur to wipe from human records, late it graced so much. "truth--this attainment? ah, but such and such beliefs of yore seemed inexpugnable. "when we attained them! e'en as they, so will this their successor have the due morn, noon, evening and night--just as an old-world tune wears out and drops away, until who hears smilingly questions--'this it was brought tears once to all eyes,--this roused heart's rapture once?' so will it be with truth that, for the nonce, styles itself truth perennial: 'ware its wile! knowledge turns nescience,--foremost on the file, simply proves first of our delusions." xiii now-- blare it forth, bold c major! lift thy brow, man, the immortal, that wast never fooled with gifts no gifts at all, nor ridiculed-- man knowing--he who nothing knew! as hope, fear, joy, and grief,--though ampler stretch and scope they seek and find in novel rhythm, fresh phrase,-- were equally existent in far days of music's dim beginning--even so, truth was at full within thee long ago, alive as now it takes what latest shape may startle thee by strangeness. truths escape time's insufficient garniture; they fade, they fall--those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine and free through march frost: may dews crystalline nourish truth merely,--does june boast the fruit as--not new vesture merely but, to boot, novel creation? soon shall fade and fall myth after myth--the husk-like lies i call new truth's corolla-safeguard: autumn comes, so much the better! as to the questions why music does not give feeling immortality through sound, and why it should be so ephemeral in its appeal, there are various things to be said. it is just possible that it may soon come to be recognized that the psychic growth of humanity is more perfectly reflected in music than any where else. ephemeralness may be predicated of culture-music more certainly than of folk-music, why? because culture-music often has occupied itself more with the technique than with the content, while folk-music, being the spontaneous expression of feeling must have content. folk-music, it is true, is simple, but if it be genuine in its feeling i doubt whether it ever loses its power to move. therefore, in folk-music is possibly made permanent simple states of feeling. now in culture-music, the development has constantly been in the direction of the expression of the ultimate spiritual reality of emotions. music is now actually trying to accomplish what browning demands of it: "dredging deeper yet, drag into day,--by sound, thy master-net,-- the abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing unbroken of a branch, palpitating with limbs' play and life's semblance! there it lies, marvel and mystery, of mysteries and marvels, most to love and laud thee for! save it from chance and change we most abhor." this is true no matter what the emotion may be. hate may have its "eidolon" as well as love. above all arts, music has the power of raising evil into a region of the artistically beautiful. doubt, despair, passion, become blossoms plucked by the hand of god when transmuted in the alembic of the brain of genius--which is not saying that he need experience any of these passions himself. in fact, it is his power of perceiving the eidolon of beauty in modes of passion or emotion not his own that makes him the great genius. it is doubtless true that whenever in culture-music there has really been content aroused by feeling, no matter what the stage of technique reached, _that_ music retains its power to move. it is also highly probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. the audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as avison called them. it is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, harmony, modulation, etc., to be symbolized by a series of concrete materials like clay bricks, silver bricks, gold bricks, diamond bricks; a beautiful thought might take as exquisite a form in bricks of clay as it would in diamond bricks, or diamond bricks might be flung together without any informing thought so that they would attract only the thoughtless by their glitter. but it also follows that, with the increase in the kinds of bricks, there is an increase in the possibilities for subtleties in psychic expression, therefore music to-day is coming nearer and nearer to the spiritual reality of feeling. it requires the awakened soul that maeterlinck talks about, that is, the soul alive to the spiritual essences of things to recognize this new realm which composers are bringing to us in music. there are always, at least three kinds of appreciators of music, those who can see beauty only in the masters of the past, those who can see beauty only in the last new composer, and those who ecstatically welcome beauty past, present and to come. these last are not only psychically developed themselves, but they are able to retain delight in simpler modes of feeling. they may be raised to a seventh heaven of delight by a bach fugue played on a clavichord by mr. dolmetsch, feeling as if angels were ministering unto them, or to a still higher heaven of delight by a tschaikowsky symphony or a string quartet of grieg, feeling that here the seraphim continually do cry, or they may enter into the very presence of the most high through some subtly exquisite and psychic song of an american composer, for some of the younger american composers are indeed approaching "truth's very heart of truth," in their music. on the whole, one gets rather the impression that the poet has here tackled a problem upon which he did not have great insight. he passes from one mood to another, none of which seem especially satisfactory to himself, and concludes with one of the half-truths of nineteenth-century thought. it is true as far as it goes that forms evolve, and it is a good truth to oppose to the martinets of settled standards in poetry, music and painting; it is also true that the form is a partial expression of a whole truth, but there is the further truth that, let a work of art be really a work of genius, and the form as well as the content touches the infinite; that is, we have as browning says in a poem already quoted, "bernard de mandeville," the very sun in little, or as he makes abt vogler say of his music, the broken arc which goes to the formation of the perfect round, or to quote still another poem of browning's, "cleon," the perfect rhomb or trapezoid that has its own place in a mosaic pavement. [illustration: avison's march] the poem closes in a rolicking frame of mind, which is not remarkably consistent with the preceding thought, except that the poet seems determined to get all he can out of the music of the past by enlivening it with his own jolly mood. to this end he sets a patriotic poem to the tune of avison's march, in honor of our old friend, pym. it is a clever _tour de force_ for the words are made to match exactly in rhythm and quantity the notes of the march. truth to say, the essential goodness of the tune comes out by means of these enlivening words. xiv therefore--bang the drums, blow the trumpets, avison! march-motive? that's truth which endures resetting. sharps and flats, lavish at need, shall dance athwart thy score when ophicleide and bombardon's uproar mate the approaching trample, even now big in the distance--or my ears deceive-- of federated england, fitly weave march-music for the future! xv or suppose back, and not forward, transformation goes? once more some sable-stoled procession--say, from little-ease to tyburn--wends its way, out of the dungeon to the gallows-tree where heading, hacking, hanging is to be of half-a-dozen recusants--this day three hundred years ago! how duly drones elizabethan plain-song--dim antique grown clarion-clear the while i humbly wreak a classic vengeance on thy march! it moans-- larges and longs and breves displacing quite crotchet-and-quaver pertness--brushing bars aside and filling vacant sky with stars hidden till now that day returns to night. xvi nor night nor day: one purpose move us both, be thy mood mine! as thou wast minded, man's the cause our music champions: i were loth to think we cheered our troop to preston pans ignobly: back to times of england's best! parliament stands for privilege--life and limb guards hollis, haselrig, strode, hampden, pym, the famous five. there's rumor of arrest. bring up the train bands, southwark! they protest: shall we not all join chorus? hark the hymn, --rough, rude, robustious--homely heart a-throb, harsh voises a-hallo, as beseems the mob! how good is noise! what's silence but despair of making sound match gladness never there? give me some great glad "subject," glorious bach, where cannon-roar not organ-peal we lack! join in, give voice robustious rude and rough,-- avison helps--so heart lend noise enough! fife, trump, drum, sound! and singers then, marching, say "pym, the man of men!" up, head's, your proudest--out, throats, your loudest-- "somerset's pym!" strafford from the block, eliot from the den, foes, friends, shout "pym, our citizen!" wail, the foes he quelled,--hail, the friends he held, "tavistock's pym!" hearts prompt heads, hands that ply the pen teach babes unborn the where and when --tyrants, he braved them,-- patriots, he saved them-- "westminster's pym." another english musician, arthur chappell, was the inspiration of a graceful little sonnet written by the poet in an album which was presented to mr. chappell in recognition of his popular concerts in london. browning was a constant attendant at these. it gives a true glimpse of the poet in a highly appreciative mood: the founder of the feast "enter my palace," if a prince should say-- "feast with the painters! see, in bounteous row, they range from titian up to angelo!" could we be silent at the rich survey? a host so kindly, in as great a way invites to banquet, substitutes for show sound that's diviner still, and bids us know bach like beethoven; are we thankless, pray? thanks, then, to arthur chappell,--thanks to him whose every guest henceforth not idly vaunts "sense has received the utmost nature grants, my cup was filled with rapture to the brim, when, night by night,--ah, memory, how it haunts!-- music was poured by perfect ministrants, by halle, schumann, piatti, joachim." * * * * * transcriber notes typographical inconsistencies have been changed and are listed below. archaic and variable spelling and hyphenation are preserved. author's punctuation style is preserved, except where noted. some illustrations moved to one page later. passages in italics indicated by _underscores_. passages in bold indicated by =equal signs=. emphasized words within italics indicated by plus +emphasis+. transcriber changes the following changes were made to the original text: page : removed extra quote after keats (what porridge had john =keats?=) page : was 'blurrs' (stray-leaves, fragments, =blurs= and blottings) page : paragraph continued, no quote needed (=tibullus= gives virgil equal credit for having in his writings touched with telling truth) page : was 'shakesspeare' (jonson wrote for the first folio edition of =shakespeare= printed in ) page : was 'b. i.' (=b. j.=) page : added single quotes (shakespeare's talk in "at the ='mermaid'=" grows out of the supposition) page : was 'shakepeare's' (he thinks the opening sonnets are to the earl of southampton, known to be =shakespeare's= patron) page : added comma after strafford (not pym, the leader of the people, but =strafford,= the supporter of the king.) page : added end quote (some half-dozen years of immunity to the 'fretted tenement' of strafford's 'fiery =soul'=) page : capitalized king (the =king=, upon his visit to scotland, had been shocked) page : was 'finnees' (hampden, hollis, the younger vane, rudyard, =fiennes= and many of the presbyterian party) page : removed extra start quote ("be my friend =of= friends!"--my king! i would have....) page : was 'brillance' (the else imperial =brilliance= of your mind) page : was 'you way' (if pym is busy,--=you may= write of pym.) page : capitalized king (the =king=, therefore, summoned it to meet on the third of november.) page : matching the original: leaving it hyphenated (the greatest in england would have stood =dis-covered=.') page : was 'partiot' (the =patriot= pym, or the apostate strafford!) page : was 'perfers' (the king =prefers= to leave the door ajar) page : was 'her's' (i am =hers= now, and i will die.) page : was 'bethrothal' (till death us do join past parting--that sounds like =betrothal= indeed!) page : was 'canonade' (such a castle seldom crumbles by sheer stress of =cannonade=: 'tis when foes are foiled and fighting's finished that vile rains invade) page : inserted stanza (=down= i sat to cards, one evening) page : added starting quote (="when= he found his voice, he stammered 'that expression once again!') page : added starting quote (='end= it! no time like the present!) page : changed comma to period (the morning's lessons conned with the =tutor.= there, too, it was that he impressed on the lad those maxims) page : added end quote (why, he makes sure of her--"do you say, =yes"=-- "she'll not say, no,"--what comes it to beside?) page : added stanza ("'=i've= been about those laces we need for ... never mind!) page : keeping original spelling (with =dreriment= about, within may life be found) page : added stanza ("'=wicked= dear husband, first despair and then rejoice!) page : was 'checks' (the dryness of "aristotle's =cheeks=" is as usual so enlivened by browning that the fate of halbert and hob grows) page : added starting quote (="you= wrong your poor disciple.) page : removed end quote (wish i could take you; but fame travels =fast=) page : was 'aud' (aunt =and= niece, you and me.) page : was 'oustide' (such =outside=! now,--confound me for a prig!) page : changed singe quote to double (="not= you! but i see.) page : was 'descretion' (to live and die together--for a month, =discretion= can award no more!) page : removed starting quote ("he may believe; and yet, and yet =how= can he?" all eyes turn with interest.) page : left in ending quote with unknown start (high church, and the evangelicals, or low =church."=) page : changed period to comma (judgment drops her damning =plummet,= pronouncing such a fatal space) page : removed starting quote (=about= the year , the corporation of newcastle contributed) page : added period (whose little book and large tune had led him the long way from =to-day.=") page : was 'irreverant' (gives that up as an =irreverent= innovation.) page : added beginning quote (="when= we attained them!) page : added comma (we have as browning says in a poem already =quoted,= "bernard de mandeville,") http://www.archive.org/details/browningstheirli whituoft the brownings their life and art [illustration: robert browning _from a drawing made by field talfourd, in rome, _] the brownings their life and art by lilian whiting author of "the world beautiful," "italy the magic land," "the spiritual significance," etc. illustrated boston little, brown, and company copyright, , by little, brown, and company. all rights reserved published, october, printers s. j. parkhill & co., boston, u.s.a. inscribed to robert barrett browning (cavaliere della corona d'italia) painter, sculptor, connoisseur in art with enchanting remembrances of hours in "la torre all' antella" and the faithful regards of lilian whiting florence, italy, june, foreword the present volume was initiated in florence, and, from its first inception, invested with the cordial assent and the sympathetic encouragement of robert barrett browning. one never-to-be-forgotten day, all ethereal light and loveliness, has left its picture in memory, when, in company with mr. browning and his life-long friend, the marchesa peruzzi di' medici (_náta_ story), the writer of this biography strolled with them under the host's orange trees and among the riotous roses of his florentine villa, "la torre all' antella," listening to their sparkling conversation, replete with fascinating reminiscences. to mr. browning the tribute of thanks, whose full scope is known to the recording angel alone, is here offered; and there is the blending of both privilege and duty in grateful acknowledgements to messrs. smith, elder, & company for their courtesy in permitting the somewhat liberal drawing on their published letters of both the brownings, on which reliance had to be based in any effort to "call up the buried past again," and construct the story, from season to season, so far as might be, of that wonderful interlude of the wedded life of the poets. yet any formality of thanks to this house is almost lost sight of in the rush of memories of that long and mutually-trusting friendship between the late george murray smith, the former head of this firm, and robert browning, a friendship which was one of the choicest treasures in both their lives. to the macmillan company, the publishers for both the first and the present lord tennyson; to houghton mifflin company; to messrs. dodd, mead, & company; to the cornhill magazine (to which the writer is indebted for some data regarding browning and professor masson); to each and all, acknowledgments are offered for their courtesy which has invested with added charm a work than which none was ever more completely a labor of love. to edith, contessa rucellai (_náta_ bronson), whose characteristically lovely kindness placed at the disposal of this volume a number of letters written by robert browning to her mother, mrs. arthur bronson, special gratitude is offered. "poetry," said mrs. browning, "is its own exceeding great reward." any effort, however remote its results from the ideal that haunted the writer, to interpret the lives of such transcendent genius and nobleness as those of robert and elizabeth barrett browning, must also be its own exceeding reward in leading to a passion of pursuit of all that is highest and holiest in the life that now is, and in that which is to come. lilian whiting the brunswick, boston midsummer days, contents page chapter i - the most exquisite romance of modern life--ancestry and youth of robert browning--love of music--formative influences--the fascination of byron--a home "crammed with books"--the spell of shelley--"incondita"--poetic vocation definitely chosen--"pauline" chapter ii - childhood and early youth of elizabeth barrett--hope end--"summer snow of apple-blossoms"--her bower of white roses--"living with visions"--the malvern hills--hugh stuart boyd--love of learning--"juvenilia"--impassioned devotion to poetry chapter iii - browning visits russia--"paracelsus"--recognition of wordsworth and landor--"strafford"--first visit to italy--mrs. carlyle's baffled reading of "sordello"--lofty motif of the poem--the universal problem of life--enthusiasm for italy--the sibylline leaves yet to unfold chapter iv - elizabeth barrett's love for the greek poets--lyrical work-- serious entrance on professional literature--noble ideal of poetry--london life--kenyon--first knowledge of robert browning chapter v - "bells and pomegranates"--arnould and domett--"a blot in the 'scutcheon"--macready--second visit to italy--miss barrett's poetic work--"colombe's birthday"--"lady geraldine's courtship"--"romances and lyrics"--browning's first letter to miss barrett--the poets meet--letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett--"loves of the poets"--vita nuova chapter vi - marriage and italy--"in that new world"--the haunts of petrarca--the magic land--in pisa--vallombrosa--"un bel giro"--guercino's angel--casa guidi--birth of robert barrett browning--bagni di lucca--"sonnets from the portuguese"--the enchantment of italy chapter vii - "casa guidi windows"--society in florence--marchesa d'ossoli-- browning's poetic creed--villeggiatura in siena--venice-- brilliant life in london--paris and milsand--browning on shelley--in florence--idyllic days in bagni di lucca--mrs. browning's spiritual outlook--delightful winter in rome--a poetic pilgrimage--harriet hosmer--characteristics of mrs. browning chapter viii - london life--an interlude in paris--"aurora leigh"--florentine days--"men and women"--the hawthornes--"the old yellow book"--a summer in normandy--the eternal city--the storys and other friends--lilies of florence--"it is beautiful!" chapter ix - the completed cycle--letters to friends--browning's devotion to his son--warwick crescent--"dramatis personæ"--london life-- death of the poet's father--sarianna browning--oxford honors the poet--death of arabel barrett--audierne--"the ring and the book" chapter x - in scotland with the storys--browning's conversation--an amusing incident--with milsand at st. aubin's--"the red cotton night-cap country"--robert barrett browning's gift for art-- alfred domett ("waring")--"balaustion's adventure"--browning and tennyson--"pacchiarotto"--visits jowett at oxford-- declines lord rectorship of st. andrews--"la saisiaz"--italy revisited--the dream of asolo--"ivanovitch"--pride in his son's success--"dramatic idylls" chapter xi - "les charmettes"--venetian days--dr. hiram corson--the browning society--oxford honors browning--katherine dekay bronson-- honors from edinburgh--visit to professor masson--italian recognition--nancioni--the goldoni sonnet--at st. moritz-- in palazzo giustiniani--"ferishtah's fancies"--companionship with his son--death of milsand--letters to mrs. bronson-- devere gardens--palazzo rezzonico--sunsets from the lido-- robert barrett browning's gift in portraiture chapter xii - "asolando"--last days in devere gardens--letters of browning and tennyson--venetian lingerings and friends--mrs. bronson's choice circle--browning's letters to mrs. bronson--asolo-- "in ruby, emerald, chrysopras"--last meeting of browning and story--in palazzo rezzonico--last meeting with dr. corson-- honored by westminster abbey--a cross of violets--choral music to mrs. browning's poem, "the sleep"--"and with god be the rest!" index illustrations _in photogravure_ page robert browning _frontispiece_ from a drawing by field talfourd, rome, elizabeth barrett browning from a drawing by field talfourd, rome, _engravings_ busts of robert and elizabeth barrett browning monument to michael angelo, by vasari church of santa croce, florence old monastery at vallombrosa the guardian angel, guercino church of san agostino, fano monument to dante, by stefano ricci piazza di santa croce, florence palazzo vecchio, florence statue of savonarola, by e. pazzi sala dei cinquecento, palazzo vecchio, florence fresco of dante, by giotto the bargello, florence cathedral of santa maria del fiore, florence (known as the duomo) the ponte vecchio and the arno, florence casa guidi the clasped hands of the brownings cast in bronze from the model taken by harriet hosmer in rome, the campagna and ruins of the claudian aqueducts, rome the coronation of the virgin, by filippo lippi accademia di belle arti, florence andrea del sarto. portrait of the artist and his wife pitti gallery, florence equestrian statue of ferdinando de' medici, by giovanni da bologna piazza dell' annunziata, florence villa petraja, near florence church of san miniato, near florence the palazzo barberini, via quattro fontane, rome the english cemetery, florence tomb of elizabeth barrett browning kate field from the portrait by elihu vedder, florence, the pallazzo riccardi, florence bust of robert browning, by his son portrait of robert browning in , by his son church of san lorenzo, florence portrait of robert barrett browning, as a child, portrait of robert browning, by george frederick watts, r.a. mrs. arthur bronson, by ellen montalba, in asolo miss edith bronson, (comtessa rucellai) portrait of professor hiram corson, by j. colin forbes, r.a. palazzo rezzonico, venice engraved facsimile of a letter from robert browning to professor hiram corson the brownings their life and art chapter i - "allons! after the great companions! and to belong to them!" "to know the universe itself as a road--as many roads--as roads for travelling souls." the most exquisite romance of modern life--ancestry and youth of robert browning--love of music--formative influences--the fascination of byron--a home "crammed with books"--the spell of shelley-- "incondita"--poetic vocation definitely chosen--"pauline." such a very page _de contes_ is the life of the wedded poets, robert and elizabeth barrett browning, that it is difficult to realize that this immortal idyl of poetry, genius, and love was less than fifteen years in duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. it is a story that has touched the entire world "... with mystic gleams, like fragments of forgotten dreams," this story of beautiful associations and friendships, of artistic creation, and of the entrance on a wonderful realm of inspiration and loveliness. at the time of their marriage he was in his thirty-fifth, and she in her forty-first year, although she is described as looking so youthful that she was like a girl, in her slender, flower-like grace; and he lived on for twenty-eight years after "clouds and darkness fell upon camelot," with the death of his "lyric love." the story of the most beautiful romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive periods,--that of the separate life of each up to the time of their marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment of italy; and his life after her withdrawal from earthly scenes. the story is also of duplex texture; for the outer life, rich in associations, travel, impressions, is but the visible side of the life of great creative art. a delightful journey is made, but its record is not limited to the enjoyment of friends and place; a poem is written whose charm and power persist through all the years. [illustration: busts of robert and elizabeth barrett browning made in by william wetmore story] no adequate word could be written of the brownings that did not take account of this twofold life of the poets. it is almost unprecedented that the power and resplendence and beauty of the life of art should find, in the temporal environment, so eminent a correspondence of beauty as it did with robert and elizabeth browning. not that they were in any wise exempt from sorrow and pain; the poet, least of all, would choose to be translated, even if he might, to some enchanted region remote from all the mingled experiences of humanity; it is the common lot of destiny, with its prismatic blending of failure and success, of purpose and achievement, of hope and defeat, of love and sorrow, out of which the poet draws his song. he would not choose "that jar of violet wine set in the air, that palest rose sweet in the night of life," to the exclusion of the common experiences of the day. "who never ate his bread in sorrow, who never spent the darksome hours weeping, and watching for the morrow, he knows you not, ye unseen powers." but to those who, poets or otherwise, see life somewhat in the true proportion of its lasting relations, events are largely transmuted into experiences, and are realized in their extended relations. the destiny of the brownings led them into constantly picturesque surroundings; and the force and manliness of his nature, the tender sweetness and playful loveliness of hers, combined with their vast intellectual range, their mutual genius for friendships, their devotion to each other and to their son, their reverence for their art, and their lofty and noble spirituality of nature,--all united to produce this exquisite and unrivaled romance of life,-- "a beauty passing the earth's store." the rapture of the poet's dream pervaded every experience. "o life, o poetry, which means life in life." the transmutation of each into the other, both life and poetry, as revealed in their lives, is something as exceptional as it is beautiful in the world's history. it is only to those who live for something higher than merely personal ends, that the highest happiness can come; and the aim of these wedded poets may well be read in the lines from "aurora leigh": "... beloved, let us love so well, our work shall still be better for our love, and still our love be sweeter for our work, and both commended, for the sake of each, by all true workers and true lovers born." in the ancestry of robert browning there was nothing especially distinctive, although it is representative of the best order of people; of eminently reputable life, of moderate means, of culture, and of assured intelligence. it is to the brownings of dorsetshire, who were large manor-owners in the time of henry vii, that the poet's family is traced. robert browning, the grandfather of the poet, was a clerk in the bank of england, a position he obtained through the influence of the earl of shaftesbury. entering on this work at the age of twenty, he served honorably for fifty years, and was promoted to the position of the bank stock office, a highly responsible place, that brought him in constant contact with the leading financiers of the day. born in , he had married, in , margaret tittle, the inheritor of some property in the west indies, where she was born of english parentage. the second robert, the father of the poet, was the son of this union. in his early youth he was sent out to take charge of his mother's property, and his grandson, robert barrett browning, relates with pardonable pride how he resigned the post, which was a lucrative one, because he could not tolerate the system of slave labor prevailing there. by this act he forfeited all the estate designed for him, and returned to england to face privation and to make his own way. he, too, became a clerk in the bank of england, and in , at the age of thirty, married sarah anna wiedemann, the daughter of a ship-owner in dundee. mr. wiedemann was a german of hamburg, who had married a scotch lady; and thus, on his maternal side, the poet had mingled scotch and german ancestry. the new household established itself in southampton street, camberwell, and there were born their two children, robert, on may , , and on january , , sarah anna, who came to be known as sarianna through all her later life. the poet's father was not only an efficient financier, but he was also a man of scholarly culture and literary tastes. he was a lover of the classics, and was said to have known by heart the first book of the iliad, and the odes of horace. there is a legend that he often soothed his little son to sleep by humming to him an ode of anacreon. he wrote verse, he was a very clever draughtsman, and he was a collector of rare books and prints. mr. w. j. stillman, in his "autobiography of a journalist," refers to the elder browning, whom he knew in his later years, as "a serene, untroubled soul,... as gentle as a gentle woman, a man to whom, it seemed to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank acceptance of life as he found it come to him.... his unworldliness had not a flaw." in browning's poem entitled "development" (in "asolando") he gives this picture of his father and of his own childhood: "my father was a scholar and knew greek. when i was five years old, i asked him once 'what do you read about?' 'the siege of troy.' 'what is a siege, and what is troy?' whereat he piled up chairs and tables for a town, set me a-top for priam, called our cat --helen, enticed away from home (he said) by wicked paris, who couched somewhere close under the footstool.... * * * * * this taught me who was who and what was what; so far i rightly understood the case at five years old; a huge delight it proved and still proves--thanks to that instructor sage my father...." the poet's mother was a true gentlewoman, characterized by fervent religious feeling, delicacy of perception, and a great love for music. she was reared in the scottish kirk, and her husband in the church of england, but they both connected themselves after their marriage with an "independent" body that held their meetings in york street, where the robert browning hall now stands. they were, however, greatly attached to the rev. henry melvill (later canon at st. paul's), whose evening service they habitually attended. while the poet's mother had little training in music, she was a natural musician, and was blessed with that keen, tremulous susceptibility to musical influence that was so marked a trait in her son. william sharp pictures a late afternoon, when, playing softly to herself in the twilight, she was startled to hear a sound in the room. "glancing around, she beheld a little white figure distinctly outlined against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. the next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over,'play! play!'" the elder browning was an impassioned lover of medieval legend and story. he was deeply familiar with paracelsus, with faust, and with many of the talmudic tales. his library was large and richly stored,--the house, indeed, "crammed with books," in which the boy browsed about at his own will. it was the best of all possible educations, this atmosphere of books. and the wealth of old engravings and prints fascinated the child. he would sit among these before a glowing fire, while from the adjoining room floated strains "of a wild gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences." it is recorded as his mother's chief happiness,--"her hour of darkness and solitude and music." of such fabric are poetic impressions woven. the atmosphere was what emerson called the "immortal ichor." the boy was companioned by the "liberating gods." something mystic and beautiful beckoned to him, and incantations, unheard by the outer sense, thronged about him, pervading the air. the lad began to recast in english verse the odes of horace. from his school, on holiday afternoons, he sought a lonely spot, elm-shaded, where he could dimly discern london in the distance, with the gleam of sunshine on the golden cross of st. paul's,--lying for hours on the grass whence, perchance, he "saw distant gates of eden gleam and did not dream it was a dream." meantime the boy read junius, voltaire, walpole's letters, the "emblems" of quarles (a book that remained as a haunting influence all his life), and mandeville's "fable of the bees." the first book of his own purchase was a copy of ossian's poems, and his initial effort in literary creation was in likeness of the picturesque imaginations that appealed with peculiar fascination to his mind. "the world of books is still the world," wrote mrs. browning in "aurora leigh," and this was the world of robert browning's early life. the genesis of many of his greatest poems can be traced directly to this atmosphere of books, and their constant use and reference in his childhood. literature and life, are, indeed, so absolutely interpenetrated and so interdependent that they can almost invariably be contemplated as cause and effect, each reacting upon the other in determining sequences. by the magic of some spiritual alchemy, reading is transmuted into the qualities that build up character, and these qualities, in turn, determine the continued choice of books, so that selection and result perpetuate themselves, forming an unceasing contribution to the nature of life. if with these qualities is united the kindling imagination, the gift that makes its possessor the creative artist, the environment of books and perpetual reference to them act as a torch that ignites the divine fire. browning's early stimulus owes much, not only to the book-loving father, but to his father's brother, his uncle reuben browning, who was a classical scholar and who took great interest in the boy. preserved to the end of the poet's life was a copy of the odes of horace, in translation, given to him as a lad of twelve, with his uncle's autograph inscription on the fly-leaf. this was the translation made by christopher smart, whose "song of david" soon became one of the boy's favorites, and it is curious to trace how, more than sixty years later, browning embodied smart in his "parleyings with certain people of importance in their day," as one with whom "... truth found vent in words for once with you...." browning, with the poet's instant insight, read the essential story of his boyhood into the lines: "... dreaming, blindfold led by visionary hand, did soul's advance precede my body's, gain inheritance of fact by fancy...?" no transcription of the poet's childhood could even suggest the fortunate influences surrounding him that did not emphasize the rare culture and original power of his father. the elder browning was familiar with old french and with both spanish and italian literature. "his wonderful store of information might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine," said one who knew him well. it is easy to see how out of such an atmosphere the future poet drew unconsciously the power to weave his "magic web" of such poems as the "parleyings," "abt vogler," "ferishtah's fancies," and was lured on into that realm of marvelous creation out of which sprang his transcendent masterpiece, "the ring and the book." the elder browning's impassioned love of books was instanced by the curious fact that he could go in the dark to his library, and out of many hundreds of volumes select some particular one to which conversational reference had incidentally been made regarding some point which he wished to verify. he haunted all the old book-stalls in london, and knew their contents better than did their owners. books are so intimately associated with the very springs of both character and achievement that no adequate idea of the formative influences of the life and poetry of robert browning could be gained without familiarity with this most determining and conspicuous influence of his boyhood. the book with which a man has lived becomes an essential factor in his growth. "none of us yet know," said ruskin, "for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought, proof against all adversity, bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts,... houses built without hands for our souls to live in." these houses for the soul, built in thought, will be transposed into outer form and semblance. there is a nebulous but none the less pernicious tradition that great literature is formidable, and presents itself as a task rather than as a privilege to the reader. devotion to the best books has been regarded as something of a test of mental endurance, for which the recompense, if not the antidote, must be sought in periods of indulgence in the frivolous and the sensational. never was there a more fatal misconception. it is the inconsequential, the crude, the obtuse, that are dull in literature, as in life; and stupidity in various languages might well be entitled to rank among the seven deadly sins of dante. even in the greatest literature there is much that the child may easily learn to appreciate and to love. "great the master and sweet the magic" that opens the golden door of literary stimulus. books are to the mind as is food to the body. emerson declares that the poet is the only teller of news, and mrs. browning pronounced poets as "the only truth-tellers now left to god." familiarity with noble thought and beautiful expression influences the subconscious nature to an incalculable degree, and leads "the spirit finely touched" on "to all fine issues." browning lived in this stimulating atmosphere. he warmed his hands at the divine fire; and the fact that all this richness of resource stimulated rather than stifled him is greatly to the credit of his real power. favorable surroundings and circumstances did not serve him as a cushion on which to go to sleep, but rather as the pedestal on which he might climb to loftier altitudes. it was no lotus-eating experience into which the lad was lulled, but the vital activity of the life of creative thought. the heavenly powers are not invariably, even if frequently, sought in sorrow only, and in the mournful midnight hours. there are natures that grow by affluence as well as by privation, and that develop their best powers in sunshine. "even in a palace life can be well lived," said marcus aurelius. the spirit formed to dwell in the starry spaces is not allured to the mere enjoyment of the senses, even when material comfort and intellectual luxuries may abound. not that the modest abundance of the elder browning's books and pictures could take rank as intellectual luxury. it was stimulus, not satiety, that these suggested. pictures and painters had their part, too, in the unconscious culture that surrounded the future poet. london in that day afforded little of what would be called art; the national gallery was not opened until browning was in his young manhood; the tate and other modern galleries were then undreamed of. but, to the appropriating temperament, one picture may do more than a city full of galleries might for another, and to the small collection of some three or four hundred paintings in the dulwich gallery, browning was indebted for great enjoyment, and for the art that fostered his sympathetic appreciation. in after years he referred to his gratitude for being allowed its privileges when under the age (fourteen) at which these were supposed to be granted. small as was the collection, it was representative of the italian and spanish, the french and the dutch schools, as well as of the english, and the boy would fix on some one picture and sit before it for an hour, lost in its suggestion. it was the more imaginative art that enchained him. in later years, speaking of these experiences in a letter to miss barrett, he wrote of his ecstatic contemplation of "those two guidos, the wonderful rembrandt's 'jacob's vision,' such a watteau...." an old engraving from correggio, in his father's home, was one of the sources of inspiration of browning's boyhood. the story fascinated him; he never tired of asking his father to repeat it, and something of its truth so penetrated into his consciousness that in later years he had the old print hung in his room that it might be before him as he wrote. it became to him, perhaps, one of "the unshaped images that lie within my mind's cave." the profound significance of the picture evidently haunted him, as is made evident by a passage in "pauline" that opens: "but i must never grieve whom wing can waft far from such thoughts--as now. andromeda! and she is with me; years roll, i shall change, but change can touch her not--so beautiful with her fixed eyes...." is there gained another glimpse of browning's boyhood in those lines in "pauline"?: "i am made up of an intensest life, of a most clear idea of consciousness of self, distinct from all its qualities, from all affections, passions, feelings, powers." the various and complex impressions, influences, and shaping factors of destiny that any biographer discerns in the formative years of his subject are as indecipherable as a palimpsest, and as little to be classified as the contents of pandora's box; nor is it on record that the man himself can look into his own history and rightly appraise the relative values of these. nothing, certainly, could be more remote from the truth than the reading of autobiographic significance into any stray line a poet may write; for imagination is frequently more real than reality. yet many of the creations of after life may trace their germination to some incident or impression. william sharp offers a beautiful and interesting instance of one of these when he ascribes the entrancing fantasy of "the flight of the duchess" to a suggestion made on the poet's mind as a child on a guy fawkes day, when he followed across the fields a woman singing a strange song, whose refrain was: "following the queen of the gypsies, o!" the haunting line took root in his memory and found its inflorescence in that memorable poem. it was not conducive to poetic fancy when the lad was placed in the school of a mr. ready, at peckham, where he solaced himself for the rules and regulations which he abhorred by writing little plays, and persuading his school-fellows to act in them with him. browning's first excursion into shelley's poems, brought home to him one night as a gift from his mother, was in one of the enchanting evenings of may; where, at the open window by which he sat, there floated in the melody of two nightingales, one in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of gold," and the other in a copper-beech, at the opposite side of the garden. such an hour mirrors itself unconsciously in a poet's memory, and affords, in future years, "such stuff as dreams are made of." byron, who, as mazzini says, "led the genius of britain on a pilgrimage throughout all europe," stamped an impress upon the youthful browning that may be traced throughout his entire life. there was something in the genius of byron that acted as an enormous force on the nature in response to it, that transformed nebulous and floating ideals and imaginings into hope and resolution, that burned away barriers and revealed truth. by its very nature influence is determined as much by the receiver as by the inspirer, and if a light is applied to a torch, the torch, too, must be prepared to ignite, or there will be no blaze. "a deft musician does the breeze become whenever an Æolian harp it finds; hornpipe and hurdygurdy both are dumb unto the most musicianly of winds." the fire of byron, the spirituality of shelley, illuminated that world of drift and dream in which robert browning dwelt; and while shelley, with his finer spirit, his glorious, impassioned imagination, "a creature of impetuous breath," incited poetic ardors and unmeasured rapture of vision, byron penetrated his soul with a certain effective energy that awakened in him creative power. the spell of shelley's poetry acted upon browning as a vision revealed of beauty and radiance. for shelley himself, who, as tennyson said, "did yet give the world another heart and new pulses," browning's feeling was even more intense. in the analysis of shelley's poetic nature browning offers the critical reader a key to his own. he asserts that it is the presence of the highest faculty, even though less developed, that gives rank to nature, rather than a lower faculty more developed. although it was in later years that the impression shelley made upon his boyhood found adequate expression in his noted essay, the spell reflected itself in "pauline," and is to be distinctly traced in many of his poems throughout his entire life. he was aware from the first of that peculiarly kindling quality in shelley, the flash of life in his work: "he spurreth men, he quickeneth to splendid strife." under the title of "incondita" was collected a group of the juvenile verses of robert browning, whose special claim to interest is in the revelation of the impress made upon the youth by byron and shelley. among the early friends of the youthful poet were alfred domett (the "waring" of his future poem), and joseph arnould, who became a celebrated judge in india. with browning there was never any question about his definite vocation as a poet. "pauline" was published in , before he had reached his twenty-first birthday. rejected by publishers, it was brought out at the expense of his aunt, mrs. silverthorne; and his father paid for the publication of "paracelsus," "sordello," and for the first eight parts of "bells and pomegranates." on the appearance of "pauline," it was reviewed by rev. william johnson fox, as the "work of a poet and a genius." allan cunningham and other reviewers gave encouraging expressions. the design of "pauline" is that spiritual drama to which browning was always temperamentally drawn. it is supposed to be the confessions and reminiscences of a dying man, and while it is easy to discern its crudeness and inconsistencies, there are in it, too, many detached passages of absolute and permanent value. as this: "sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever! thou art gone from us; years go by and spring gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful, yet thy songs come not...." mr. browning certainly gave hostages to poetic art when he produced "pauline," in which may be traced the same conceptions of life as those more fully and clearly presented in "paracelsus" and "sordello." it embodies the conviction which is the very essence and vital center of all browning's work--that ultimate success is attained through partial failures. from first to last browning regards life as an adventure of the soul, which sinks, falls, rises, recovers itself, relapses into faithlessness to its higher powers, yet sees the wrong and aims to retrieve it; gropes through darkness to light; and though "tried, troubled, tempted," never yields to alien forces and ignominious failure. the soul, being divine, must achieve divinity at last. that is the crystallization of the message of browning. the poem "pauline," lightly as mr. browning himself seemed in after life to regard it, becomes of tremendous importance in the right approach to the comprehension of his future work. it reveals to us in what manner the youthful poet discerned "the gleam." like tennyson, he felt "the magic of merlin,"--of that spirit of the poetic ideal that bade him follow. "the master whisper'd 'follow the gleam.'" and what unguessed sweetness and beauty of life and love awaited the poet in the unfolding years! chapter ii - "here's the garden she walked across. * * * * * roses ranged in a valiant row, i will never think she passed you by!" childhood and early youth of elizabeth barrett--hope end--"summer snow of apple-blossoms"--her bower of white roses--"living with visions"--the malvern hills--hugh stuart boyd--love of learning--"juvenilia"-- impassioned devotion to poetry. the literature of childhood presents nothing more beautiful than the records of the early years of elizabeth barrett. fragmentary though they be, yet, gathered here and there, they fall into a certain consecutive unity, from which one may construct a mosaic-like picture of the daily life of the little girl who was born on march , , in coxhoe hall, durham, whence the family soon removed to hope end, a home of stately beauty and modest luxury. there were brothers to the number of eight; and two sisters, henrietta and arabel, all younger than herself. edward, the eldest son, especially cared for elizabeth, holding her in tender and almost reverential love, and divining, almost from his infancy, her exquisite gifts. apparently, the eldest sister was also greatly beloved by the whole troop of the younger brothers,--charles, samuel, george, henry, alfred, and the two younger, who were named septimus and octavius. with three daughters and eight sons, the household did not lack in merriment and overflowing life; and while the little elizabeth was born to love books and dreams, and assimilated learning as naturally as she played with her dolls, she was no prodigy, set apart because of fantastic qualities, but an eager, earnest little maid, who, although she read homer at eight years of age, yet read him with her doll clasped closely in one hand, and who wrote her childish rhymes as unconsciously as a bird sings. it is a curious coincidence that this love of the greeks, as to history, literature, and mythology, characterized the earliest childhood of both robert browning and elizabeth barrett. pope's homer was the childish favorite of each. "the greeks were my demigods," she herself said, in later life, of her early years, "and haunted me out of pope's homer, until i dreamt more of agamemnon than of moses the black pony." the house at hope end has been described by lady carmichael as "a luxurious home standing in a lovely park, among trees and sloping hills," and the earliest account that has been preserved of the little girl reveals her sitting on a hassock, propped against the wall, in a lofty room called "elizabeth's chamber," with a stained glass oriel window through which golden gleams of light fell, lingering on the long curls that drooped over her face as she sat absorbed in a book. she was also an eager worker in her garden, the children all being given a plot to cultivate for themselves, and elizabeth won special fame for her bower of white roses. there are few data about the parents of elizabeth barrett, and the legal name, moulton-barrett, by which she signed her marriage register and by which her father is commonly known, has been a source of some confused statements. her father, edward barrett moulton, came into an inheritance of property by which he was required to add the name of barrett again, hyphenating it, and was thus known as edward barrett moulton-barrett. he married mary graham clarke, a native of newcastle-on-the-tyne, a woman of gentle loveliness, who died on october , . mr. moulton-barrett lived until , his death occurring only a year before that of his famous daughter, who was christened elizabeth barrett moulton, and who thus became, after her father's added name, elizabeth barrett moulton-barrett, although, except when a legal signature was necessary, she signed her name as elizabeth barrett. the family are still known by the hyphenated name; and mrs. browning's namesake niece, a very scholarly and charming young woman, now living in rome, is known as elizabeth moulton-barrett. she is the daughter of mrs. browning's youngest brother, alfred, and her mother, who is still living, is the original of mrs. browning's poem, "a portrait." while miss moulton-barrett never saw her aunt (having been born after her death), she is said to resemble mrs. browning both in temperament and character. by a curious coincidence the barrett family, like the brownings, had been for generations the owners of estates in the west indies, and it is said that elizabeth barrett was the first child of their family to be born in england for more than a hundred years. her father, though born in jamaica, was brought to england as a young child, and he was the ward of chief baron lord abinger. he was sent to harrow, and afterwards to cambridge, but he did not wait to finish his university course, and married when young. one of his sisters was painted by sir thomas lawrence, and this portrait is now in the possession of octavius moulton-barrett, esq., of the isle of wight. elizabeth's brother edward was but two years her junior. it was he who was drowned at torquay, almost before her eyes, and who is commemorated in her "de profundis." of the other brothers only three lived to manhood. when elizabeth was three years of age, the family removed to hope end in herefordshire, a spacious and stately house with domes and minarets embowered in a grove of ancient oaks. it was a place calculated to appeal to the imagination of a child, and in later years she wrote of it: "green the land is where my daily steps in jocund childhood played, dimpled close with hill and valley, dappled very close with shade,-- summer-snow of apple-blossoms, running up from glade to glade." here all her girlhood was passed, and it was in the garden of hope end that she stood, holding up an apron filled with flowers, when that lovely picture was painted representing her as a little girl of nine or ten years of age. much of rather apochryphal myth and error has grown up about mrs. browning's early life. however gifted, she was in no wise abnormal, and she galloped on moses, her black pony, through the herefordshire lanes, and offered pagan sacrifices to some imaginary athene, "with a bundle of sticks from the kitchen fire and a match begged from an indulgent housemaid." in a letter to richard hengist home, under date of october , , in reply to a request of his for data for a biographical sketch of her for "the new spirit of the age," she wrote: "... and then as to stories, mine amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. a bird in a cage would have as good a story. most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts. i wrote verses--as i dare say many have done who never wrote any poems--very early, at eight years of age, and earlier. but, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me,--an object to read, think, and live for." when she was eleven or twelve, she amused herself by writing a great epic in four books, called "the battle of marathon," which possessed her fancy. her father took great pride in this, and, "bent upon spoiling me," she laughingly said in later years, had fifty copies of this childish achievement printed, and there is one in the british museum library to-day. no creator of prose romance could invent more curious coincidences than those of the similar trend of fancy that is seen between the childhood of robert browning and elizabeth barrett. her "battle of marathon" revealed how the greek stories enchanted her fancy, and how sensitive was her ear in the imitation of the rhythm caught from pope. this led her to the delighted study of greek, that she might read its records at first hand; and greek drew her into latin, and from this atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her interest in thought and dream. the idyllic solitude in which she lived fostered all these mental excursions. "i had my fits of pope and byron and coleridge," she has related, "and read greek as hard under the trees as some of your oxonians in the bodleian; gathered visions from plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank greek.... do you know the malvern hills? the hills of piers plowman's visions? they seem to me my native hills. beautiful, beautiful they were, and i lived among them till i had passed twenty by several years." mr. moulton-barrett was one of the earliest of social reformers. so much has been said, and, alas! with too much justice, it must be conceded, of his eccentric tyranny, his monomania,--for it amounted to that, in relation to the marriage of any of his children regarding which his refusal was insanely irrational,--that it is pleasant to study him for a moment in his more normal life. in ledbury, the nearest village, he would hold meetings for the untaught people, read and pray with them, and this at a period when for a man of wealth to concern himself in social betterment was almost unknown. he was truly "the friend of the unfriended poor," and by his side, with wondering, upturned, childish eyes, was the little elizabeth, an ardent and sympathetic companion. until quite recently there were still living those who remembered mr. barrett as this intelligent and active helper; and in the parish church is a monument to him, by the side of a gloriously decorated tomb of the fourteenth century, with an inscription to his memory that vividly recalls the work of one who strove to revive the simple faith in god that has always, in all nations and in all centuries, met every real need of life. mrs. barrett, a sweet and gentle woman, without special force of character, died when elizabeth was but twenty years of age; and it was some five years before her mother's death that elizabeth met with the accident, from the fall from her saddle when trying to mount her pony, that caused her life-long delicacy of health. her natural buoyancy of spirits, however, never failed, and she was endowed with a certain resistless energy which is quite at variance with the legendary traditions that she was a nervous invalid. hardly less than browning in his earliest youth, was elizabeth barrett "full of an intensest life." her italian master one day told her that there was an unpronounceable english word that expressed her exactly, but which, as he could not give in english, he would express in his own tongue,--_testa lunga_. relating this to mr. browning in one of her letters, she says: "of course the signor meant headlong!--and now i have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. but you see i do not. headlong i was at first, and headlong i continue,--precipitately rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briers instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary,--tearing open letters, and never untying a string,--and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning." impetuous, vivacious, with an inimitable sense of humor, full of impassioned vitality,--this was the real elizabeth barrett, whose characteristics were in no wise changed during her entire life. always was she "a creature of impetuous breath," full of vivacious surprises, and witty repartee. hope end was in the near vicinity of eastnor castle, a country seat of the somersets; it is to-day one of the present homes of lady henry somerset, and there are family records of long, sunny days that the young girl-poet passed at the castle, walking on the terraces that lead down to the still water, or lying idly in the boat as the ripples of the little lake lapped against the reeds and rushes that grew on the banks. in the castle library is preserved to-day an autograph copy of the first volume of elizabeth barrett's poems, published when she was twenty, and containing that didactic "essay on mind" written when she was but seventeen, and of which she afterward said that it had "a pertness and a pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author," and which she regretted, she went on to say, "even more than the literary defectiveness." this volume was presented by her to a member of the somerset family whose name is inscribed over that of her own signature. during these years hugh stuart boyd, the blind scholar, was living in great malvern, and one of miss barrett's greatest pleasures was to visit and read greek with him. he was never her "tutor," in the literal sense, as has so widely been asserted, for her study of greek was made with her brother edward, under his tutor, a mr. macsweeney; but she read and talked of greek literature (especially of the christian poets) with him, and she loved to record her indebtedness to him "for many happy hours." she wrote of him as one "enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings." the memory of her discussions with him is embalmed in her poem, "wine of cyprus," which was addressed to him: "and i think of those long mornings which my thought goes far to seek, when, betwixt the folio's turnings, solemn flowed the rhythmic greek." elizabeth barrett was more than a student, however scholarly, of greek. she had a temperamental affinity for the greek poets, and such translations as hers of "prometheus bound" and bion's "lament for adonis," identify her with the very life itself of Æschylus and bion. in her essay on "the greek christian poets" we find her saying: "we want the touch of christ's hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things ... something of a yearning after this may be seen among the greek christian poets,... religious poets of whom the universal church and the world's literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either." all her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic handwriting of her later life. she laughingly professed a theory that "an immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense, sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons." she instanced that of landor, "who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted his i's in proportion." poetry as a serious art was the most earnest object in the life of elizabeth barrett. to her poetry meant "life in life." "art's a service,--mark." the poetic vocation could hardly be said to be so much a conscious and definite choice with her as a predetermined destiny, and still it was both. the possibility of not being a poet could never have occurred to her. there could have been as little question of beethoven's being other than a musician or of raphael as being other than a painter. in poetry elizabeth barrett recognized the most potent form of service; and she held that poetic art existed for the sake of human co-operation with the divine purposes. the opening chapters of her life in the lovely seclusion of hope end closed in with the removal of the family to sidmouth in devonshire. here they were bestowed in a house which had been occupied by the grand duchess helena. it commanded a splendid sea view, on which four drawing-room windows looked out, and there were green hills and trees behind. they met a few friends,--sir john kean, the herrings,--and the town abounded in green lanes, "some of them quite black with foliage, where it is twilight in the middle of the day, and others letting in beautiful glimpses of the hills and the sunny sea." henrietta barrett took long walks, elizabeth accompanying her sister, mounted on her donkey. the brothers and sisters were all fond of boating and passed much time on the water. they would row as far as dawlish, ten miles distant, and back; and after the five o'clock dinner there were not infrequently moonlight excursions on the sea. during these first months at sidmouth miss barrett read bulwer's novels, which she asserts "quite delighted" her; as she found in them "all the dramatic talent which scott has, and all the passion which he has not." bulwer seemed to her, also, "a far more profound discriminator of character" than scott. she read mrs. trollope, "that maker of books," whose work she characterized as not novels but "libels." she found in mrs. trollope "neither the delicacy nor the candor which constitute true nobility of mind," and thought that her talent formed but "a scanty veil to shadow her other defects." miss barrett grew to love sidmouth, with its walks on the seashore; and letters, reading, poetic production, and family interests filled the time. here, too, she found time to enter on a task dear to her, the translation of the "prometheus bound" of Æschylus. some years later, however, she entirely revised this early translation, of which she wrote to hugh stuart boyd that it was "as cold as caucasus, and flat as the neighboring plain," and that "a palinodia, a recantation," was necessary to her. in her preface to the later translation she begged that her reader would forgive her english for not being greek, and herself for not being Æschylus. chapter iii - "... i press god's lamp close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late, will pierce the gloom; i shall emerge one day." browning visits russia--"paracelsus"--recognition of wordsworth and landor--"strafford"--first visit to italy--mrs. carlyle's baffled reading of "sordello"--lofty motif of the poem--the universal problem of life--enthusiasm for italy--the sibylline leaves yet to unfold. from camberwell to st. petersburg was somewhat of a transition. this was mr. browning's initial excursion into a wider world of realities, as distinguished from that mirage which rises in the world of dreams and mental nebulæ. "to know the universe itself as a road,--as many roads," is the way in which the beckoning future prefigures itself to the artist temperament. "all around him patmos lies who hath spirit-gifted eyes." the eyes thus touched with the chrism of poetic art see the invisible which is peopled with forms unseen to others, and which offers a panorama of living drama. it is the poet who overhears the "talk of the gods," and when he shall report "some random word they say," he becomes "... the fated man of men whom the ages must obey." this was the undreamed destiny hovering over the young poet, luring him on like a guiding cloud which became a pillar of fire by night. among his london friends was the chevalier george de benkhausen, the russian consul-general, who, being suddenly summoned to russia on some secret mission of state, invited browning to accompany him. browning went "nominally in the character of secretary," mrs. orr says, and they fared forth on march , by steamer to rotterdam, and then journeyed more than fifteen hundred miles by diligence, drawn by relays of galloping horses. the expedition was to browning a rich mine of poetic material. the experience sank into the subconsciousness as seed to await fruition. in his "ivan ivanovitch," where is seen "this highway broad and straight e'en from the neva's mouth to moscow's gates of gold," and in which the unending pine forests rising from the snow-covered ground are so vividly pictured; and in "colombe's birthday," where is seen the region of the heroine,-- "castle ravestein-- that sleeps out trustfully its extreme age on the meuse' quiet bank, where she lived queen over the water-buds,..." and the place "... when he hid his child among the river-flowers at ravestein," it can be seen how all this country impressed his imagination. professor hall griffin finds in the fifth book of "sordello" an unmistakable description of the most famous and oldest portrait of charlemagne, which hangs in the council hall of the rath-haus, in aix, which mr. browning saw on this trip. during these three months he saw something of russian society, and on the breaking up of the ice in the neva in spring, witnessed the annual ceremony of the czar's drinking the first glass of water from it. much of the gorgeous, barbaric splendor of russian fairs and booths, "with droshkies and fish-pies" on the one hand, and stately palaces on the other, haunted him, and reflected themselves in several of his poems. especially did the russian music and strains of folk-song linger in his memory for all the after years. on his return from russia browning had some fancy for entering on a diplomatic career, and was momentarily disappointed at not receiving an appointment to persia, which he had in mind; fortunately for him and for the world he was held to the orbit of his poetic gift. diplomacy has an abundance of recruits without devastating poetic genius to furnish them. the winter of found him deeply absorbed in "paracelsus." this poem is dedicated to the marquis amédée de ripert-monclar, who was a great friend of browning at this time. the marquis was four years his senior; he was in england as a private agent for the duchesse de berri and the royalist party in france to the english government. the subject of the poem is said to have been suggested by the marquis, although the fact that all this medieval lore had been familiar to browning from his earliest childhood must be accounted the pre-determining factor in its creation. william sharp quotes browning as having once said of his father: "the old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. he was completely versed in medieval legend, and seemed to have known paracelsus, faustus, and even talmudic personages, personally," and his son assimilated unconsciously this entire atmosphere. both "paracelsus" and "sordello" seem to spring, as by natural poetic evolution, from "pauline"; all three of these poems are, in varying degree, a drama of the soul's progress. they all suggest, and "paracelsus," especially, in a great degree embodies, the hegelian philosophy; yet mr. barrett browning expresses his rather positive conviction that his father never read hegel at any period of his life. dr. corson regarded these early poems of browning as of peculiar value in showing his attitude toward things. "we see in what direction the poet has set his face," said dr. corson, "what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple." dr. corson further illuminated this attitude of the poet by pointing out that he emphasized the approach to perfection as something that cannot be brought out through what is born and resides in the brain; but it must be by "the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the god-man, christ. the human soul is regarded in browning's poetry," continued dr. corson, "as a complexly organized, individualized, divine force, destined to gravitate toward the infinite. how is this force with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? how much earthly ballast must it carry to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness?" incredibly enough, in the revelations of the retrospective view, "paracelsus" made little impression on the literary critics of the day; the _athenæum_ devoting to it less space even than to "the anonymous pauline," while the "philip van artevelde" of henry taylor (now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that production. neither _blackwood's_, the _quarterly_, nor the _edinburgh_ even mentioned "paracelsus"; the _athenæum_ admitted that it had talent, but admonished the poet that "writers would do well to remember that though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of shelley, we love him--not because of these characteristics, but in spite of them." the one gleam of consolation to the young poet in all this general neglect or unfavorable comment was that of a three-column article from the pen of john forster in the _examiner_, then conducted by leigh hunt, and on whose staff were sergeant talfourd and proctor (barry cornwall) beside forster, who was then a rising young journalist of twenty-three, only one month the senior of browning. but forster spoke with no uncertain note; rather, with authority, and in this critique he said: "since the publication of 'philip van artevelde' we have met with no such evidences of poetical genius ... and we may safely predict for its author a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius." the immediate effect of the publication of "paracelsus" was of a social rather than of a literary character, for something in it seemed magnetic to the life of the day, and the young poet found himself welcomed by a brilliant literary circle. he met wordsworth and walter savage landor, dickens, monckton milnes (later lord houghton), proctor (barry cornwall), horne, sergeant talfourd, leigh hunt, and others. hunt was then domiciled in cheyne row, in close proximity to the carlyles, with whom browning had already formed a friendship. rev. william johnson fox, one of browning's earliest friends, was at this time living at craven hill, bayswater, and on an evening when macready had dined with him, browning came in. this evening (november , ) is noted in macready's diary, and after speaking of mr. fox as an "original and profound thinker," he adds: "mr. robert browning, the author of 'paracelsus,' came in after dinner; i was very much pleased to meet him. his face is full of intelligence.... i took mr. browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. he expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal, wished to send me his book. we exchanged cards, and parted." later (under date of december ), mr. macready records: "read 'paracelsus,' a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, diction, but occasionally obscure. the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of the time." on new year's eve mr. macready invited a little house party, among whom were forster and browning. "mr. browning was very popular with the whole party," writes mr. macready in his journal; "his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won golden opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man i ever saw." browning's personal appearance, "slim, and dark, and very handsome," as mary cowden clarke said, is pictured by many of his friends of that time. "as a young man," writes william sharp, "he seems to have had a certain ivory delicacy of coloring ... and he appeared taller than he really was, partly because of his rare grace of movement, and partly from a characteristic high poise of the head when listening intently to music or conversation.... his hair was so beautiful in its heavy sculpturesque waves as to attract frequent notice. another, and more subtle personal charm, was his voice, then with a rare, flute-like tone, clear, sweet, and resonant." macready was not only a notable figure on the stage at this period, but he was also (what every great actor must be) a man of thought, intense sensibility, and wide culture. soon after macready had appeared in talfourd's "ion" (the _première_ being on the playwright's birthday), talfourd gave a supper at his house, at which browning for the first time met wordsworth and landor. macready himself sat between these two illustrious poets, with browning opposite to him. the guests included ellen tree, miss mitford, and forster. macready, recording this night in his diary, writes of "wordsworth who pinned me." landor, it seems, talked of constructing drama, and said he "had not the faculty," that he "could only set persons to talking; all the rest was chance." but an ever remembered moment came for the young poet when the host proposed a toast to the author of "paracelsus," and wordsworth, rising, said: "i am proud to drink to your health, mr. browning," and landor bowed with his inimitable, courteous grace, raising his glass to his lips. for some years, whenever wordsworth visited london, forster invited browning to meet him. the younger poet was never an enthusiast in his mild friendship for the elder, although in after years ( ) he replied to a question by rev. a. b. grosart, the editor of wordsworth's works, that while in hasty youth he did "presume to use the great and venerated personality of wordsworth as a sort of painter's model," he intended in "the lost leader" no portrait of the entire man. while wordsworth's political attitude did not please the young disciple of shelley, for landor he conceived the most profound admiration and sympathetic affection. it was a striking sequel to this youthful attraction that in landor's desolate old age it should be browning who tenderly cared for him, and surrounded his last days with unfailing comfort and solicitude. at this memorable supper, just as browning was about to take his leave, macready laid his hand on the young man's shoulder, saying earnestly: "write a play for me, and keep me from going to america." the thought appealed to the poet, who replied: "shall it be historical and english? what do you say to 'strafford' for a subject?" forster was then bringing out his biography of strafford, on which browning had assisted, so that the theme had already engaged his imagination. a few days after the supper macready records in his diary receiving a note from browning and adds: "what can i say upon it? it was a tribute which remunerated me for the annoyances and cares of years; it was one of the very highest, may i not say the highest, honor i have through life received." a certain temperamental sympathy between the two men is evident, though macready sounded no such fathomless depths as lay, however unsuspected, in browning; but macready gives many indications of poetic sympathies, as, for instance, when he records in his diary how he had been looking through coleridge's translation of wallenstein, "abounding with noble passages and beautiful scenes," to see if it would lend itself to stage representation. on november of this autumn macready notes in his journal that browning came that night to bring his tragedy of "strafford," of which the fourth act was incomplete. "i requested him to write in the plot of what was deficient," says macready, and drove to the garrick club while browning wrote out this story. later, there was a morning call from browning, who gave him an interesting old print of richard, from some tapestry, and they talked of "la vallière." all the time we get glimpses of an interesting circle: bulwer and forster call, and they discuss cromwell; bulwer's play of "virginius" is in rehearsal; macready acts cardinal wolsey; there is a dinner at lady blessington's, where are met lord canterbury, count d'orsay, bulwer, trelawney, and proctor; there is a call on miss martineau, and meetings with thackeray and dickens; kenyon appears in the intersecting circles; marston (the father of the blind poet) writes his play, "the patrician's daughter"; mr. longfellow, "a professor at one of the u. s. universities," appears on the scene, and there is a dinner at which "mr. and mrs. n. p. willis sat next to longfellow." on a night when browning came with some alterations for "strafford," a stranger called, "saying he was a greek, a great lover of the drama; i introduced browning to him as a great tragic poet," records macready, "and the youth wrote down his name, telling us he was setting off for athens directly." the rehearsals of "strafford" came on, but macready seems already to have had misgivings. "in shakespeare," he writes, "the great poet has only introduced such events as act on the individuals concerned; but in browning's play we have a long scene of passion--upon what? a plan destroyed, a parliament dissolved...." it is easy to see how browningesque this was; for to the poet no events of the objective life were so real and significant as those of the purely mental drama of thought, feeling, and purpose. the rehearsals were, however, gratifying to the author, it seems, for macready records in his diary (that recurs like the chorus in a greek tragedy) that he was happy "with the extreme delight browning testified at the rehearsal of my part, which he said to him was a full recompense for having written the play, as he had seen his utmost hopes of character perfectly embodied." the play was performed at the covent garden theater on the night of may , . both edmund gosse and william sharp deny that browning's plays failed on the stage; at all events, with each attempt there were untoward circumstances which alone would have contributed to or even doomed a play to a short tenure. in "strafford" was produced in london under the auspices of the browning society, and the real power of the play surprised as well as deeply impressed the audiences who saw it. but "pauline," "paracelsus," and "strafford" all have a peculiar element of reminiscent importance, if it may be so termed, in that they were the forerunners, the indications of the great work to come. there is no dramatic poem of browning's that has not passages of superb acting effects, as well as psychological fascinations for the thinker; and the future years were to touch him with new power to produce work whose dramatic power lives in imperishable significance. "strafford" had a run of only five nights at this first time of its production; macready received and accepted an offer to go to america, and other things happened. browning became absorbed in his "sordello," and suddenly, on good friday of , he sailed for venice, "intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes," he wrote to john robertson, who had been introduced to browning by miss martineau. on a sailing ship, bound for trieste, the poet found himself the only passenger. it was on this voyage, while between gibraltar and naples, that he wrote "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix." it was written on deck, penciled on the fly-leaf of bartoli's _de' simboli trasportati al morale_. when dr. corson first visited browning in , in his london home in warwick crescent, browning showed his guest this identical copy of the book, with the penciled poem on the fly-leaves, of which dr. corson said, in a private letter to a friend: "one book in the library i was particularly interested in,--bartoli's _simboli_, or, rather, in what the poet had written in pencil on its fly-leaves, front and back, namely, 'how they brought the good news from ghent to aix.'" dr. corson added that he had been so often asked as to what this "good news" was, that he put the question to mr. browning, who replied: "'i don't remember whether i had in my mind any in particular, when i wrote the poem'; and then, after a pause," continued dr. corson, "he said, with a dash of expression characteristic of him, 'of course, very important news were carried between those two cities during that period.'" in mrs. orr's biography of browning she quotes a long letter written by him to miss haworth, in the late summer of , after his return from this italian trip, in which he says: "you will see 'sordello' in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. i did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed through the straits of gibraltar), but i did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you,... i saw the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world.... i went to trieste, then to venice, then through treviso, and bassano to the mountains, delicious asolo, all my places and castles you will see. then to vicenza, padua, and venice again. then to verona, trent, innspruck (the tyrol), munich, salzburg, frankfort and mayence; down the rhine to cologne, then to aix-le-chapelle, liège, and antwerp; then home.... i saw very few italians, 'to know,' that is. those i did see i liked...." it is related that the captain of the ship became so much attached to browning that he offered him a free passage to constantinople; and that his friendly attraction to his youthful passenger was such that on returning to england he brought to the poet's sister a gift of six bottles of attar of roses. the poems of "pippa passes" and "in a gondola" may be directly traced to this visit, and browning seemed so invigorated by it that his imagination was aflame with a multitude of ideas at once. meanwhile "paracelsus" was winning increasing appreciation. the poet did not escape the usual sweeping conclusion generally put forth regarding any unusual work, that the author has made extensive studies for it,--as if ideas and imagination drew their inspiration from the outer world, and were solely to be appraised, as to their results, by the capacity for cramming. so much cramming, so much genius! he who thus mistakes inspiration for industry certainly proves how very remote is his mind from the former. with this marvelous work by a young man of twenty-three the usual literary legends were set afloat, like thistledown in the air, which seem to have floated and alighted everywhere, and which now, more than seventy-five years later, are apparently still floating and alighting on the pens of various writers, to the effect that "paracelsus" is the result of "vast research among contemporary records," till the poem added another to the seven labors of hercules. as a matter of fact, and as has already been noted, browning had merely browsed about his father's library. dr. berdoe points out that the real "paracelsus" cannot be understood without considerable excursions into the occult sciences, and he is quite right as to the illumination these provide, in proportionate degree as they are acquired by the reader; as a matter of course they enlarge his horizon, and offer him clues to unsuspected labyrinths; and so fine and complete is dr. berdoe's own commentary on "paracelsus" that it might not unduly be held as supplementary to the reader's entire enjoyment of the poem. dr. berdoe notes that the bishop of spanheim, who was the instructor of paracelsus, defined "divine magic," as another name for alchemy, "and lays down the great doctrine of all medieval occultism, as of all modern theosophy,--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man." the sympathetic reader of browning's "paracelsus" will realize, however, that the drama he presents is spiritual, rather than occult. it is not the search for the possible mysteries, or achievements of the crucible. it is the adventure of the soul, not the penetration into the secrets of unknown elementals. in the autumn of the browning family removed from camberwell to hatcham. they bestowed themselves in a spacious, delightful old house, with "long, low rooms," wherein the household gods, inclusive of the six thousand books of the elder browning's treasured library, found abundant accommodation; and the outlook on the surrey hills gratified them all. during these years we catch a few glimpses of the poet's only sister, sarianna, who was two years younger than her brother, and quite as fond of listening to the conversation of an uncle, william shergold browning, who had removed to paris. here he was connected with the rothschild banking house, and had achieved some distinction as the author of a "history of the huguenots." he also wrote two historical novels, entitled "hoel mar en morven" and "provost of paris," and compiled one of those harmless volumes entitled "leisure hours." it was this uncle who had brought about the introduction of his nephew and marquis amédée de ripert-monclar, whose uncle, the marquis de fortia, a member of the institut, was a special friend of william shergold browning. in later years a grandson of the paris browning, after graduating at lincoln college, became crown prosecutor in new south wales. he is known as robert jardine browning, and he was on terms of intimacy with his cousins, robert and sarianna, whom he often visited. [illustration: elizabeth barrett browning _from a drawing made by field talfourd, in rome, _] the family friendship with carlyle was a source of great pleasure to mrs. browning, the poet's mother, and there is on record a night when carlyle and his brother dined with the brownings at hatcham. another family friend and habitué was the rev. archer gurney, who at a later time became chaplain to the british embassy in paris. mr. gurney was a writer of poems and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work entitled "fra cipollo and other poems" was published, from which browning drew his motto for "colombe's birthday." mr. gurney was deeply interested in young browning's poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having something to do with the publication of "bells and pomegranates." another friend of the poet was christopher dowson, who married the sister of alfred domett; at their homes, albion terrace, and their summer cottage in epping forest, browning was a frequent visitor. dowson died early; but field talfourd (a brother of the author of "ion" and the artist who made those crayon portraits of browning and his wife, in the winter of , in rome), joseph arnould, and alfred domett, with one or two other young men, comprised the poet's more intimate circle at this time. arnould and domett were both studying for the bar; arnould had gained the newdigate in , and had won great applause by his recital (in the sheldonian theater) of his "hospice of st. bernard." later he was offered the editorship of the _daily news_, founded by forster and dickens, but he kept true to his legal studies and in time became the judge of the high court at bombay, and was knighted by the crown. there was a dinner given by macready at which browning, carlyle, and miss martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the carlyles' where browning met a son of burns "who sang some of his father's songs." to a friend browning wrote: "i dined with dear carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people 'dear' in a hurry) yesterday. i don't know any people like them." browning passed a day with miss martineau at ascot, and again visited her in elstree, where she was staying with the macreadys. she greatly admired "paracelsus," and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a "wonderful event." he dined with her at her home in westminster, and there met john robertson, the assistant editor of the _westminster review_, to which miss martineau was a valued contributor. henry chorley, a musical critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after browning dined with him "in his bachellor abode," the other guests being arnould, domett, and bryan proctor; later, at a musicale given by chorley, browning met charlotte cushman and adelaide kemble. chorley drew around him the best musicians of the time: mendelssohn, moscheles, liszt, david, and other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. proctor was then living in harley street, and his house was a center for the literary folk of the day. george eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, "while destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our _dramatis personæ_ folded in her hands." it was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by sergeant talfourd, at his home (no. ) in russell square, browning first met john kenyon. our great events mostly come to us like gods in disguise, and this evening was no exception. unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time. browning's life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with the muses. the one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, miss fanny haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature itself. she was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her young friend in two sonnets. this friendship was one of literary attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to poetry rather than demanded it in life. but now, golden doors were to open. at this dinner at mr. talfourd's, john kenyon came over to the poet, after they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his old school-fellow, robert browning. finding this surmise to be true, he became greatly attached to him. mr. kenyon had lost his wife some time previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure in london society. southey said of kenyon that he was "one of the best and pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known," and kenyon, declaring that browning "deserved to be a poet, being one in heart and life," offered to him his "best and most precious gift,"--that of an introduction to his second cousin, elizabeth barrett. this was the first intimation of destiny, but the meeting was still to remain in the future. "sordello" was published in ,--"a colossal derelict on the ocean of poetry," as william sharp terms it. the impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of many anecdotes. tennyson declared that there were only two lines in it--the opening and the closing ones--which he understood, and "they are both lies," he feelingly added. douglas jerrold tackled it when he was just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. he watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, "i don't know what this means; it is gibberish," jerrold exclaimed, "thank god, i am not an idiot." still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand "sordello" is given by a french critic, odysse barot, who quotes a passage where the poet says, "god gave man two faculties," and adds, "i wish while he was about it (_pendant qu'il était en train_) god had supplied another--namely, the power of understanding mr. browning." mrs. carlyle declared that she read "sordello" attentively twice, but was unable to discover whether the title referred to "a man, a city, or a tree"; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in mantua, after which "immersion in worldliness" he again seeks seclusion, and partially recovers himself. the _motif_ of the poem recalls the truth expressed in the lines: "who loves the music of the spheres and lives on earth, must close his ears to many voices that he hears." suddenly a dazzling political career opens before sordello; he is discovered to be--not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great ghibelline chief, salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and cometh not with observation. it is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to robert browning. notwithstanding the traditional "obscurity" of "sordello," it offers to the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion. to alfred domett, under date of may , , browning writes:[ ] "... i cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. i have a notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone--to heaven, or timbuctoo! i give way to this fancy, for it lets me write what, i dare say, i have written niggardly enough, of my real love for you, better love than i had supposed i was fit for.... i have read your poems; you can do anything, and i should think would do much. i will if i live. at present, if i stand on head or heels i don't know; what men require i know as little; and of what they are in possession i know not.... with this i send you your 'sordello.' i suppose, i am sure, indeed, that the translation from dante, on the fly-leaf, is your own...." in another letter to alfred domett, browning thus refers to tennyson: "... but how good when good he is! that noble 'locksley hall!'" browning had already become enamored of italy; and mrs. bridell-fox, writing to william sharp, speaks of meeting the poet after his return, and thus describes the impression he made upon her:[ ] "i remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to venice. i cannot tell the date for certain. he was full of enthusiasm for that queen of cities. he used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilizing the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola, on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. my own passionate longing to see venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood." this visit of the young poet to italy forged the link of that golden chain which was to unite all his future with that land of art and song which held for him such wonderful sibylline leaves of the yet undreamed-of chapters of his life. chapter iv - "o life, o beyond, _art_ thou fair, _art_ thou sweet?" "how the world is made for each of us! how all we perceive and know in it tends to some moment's product thus, when a soul declares itself--to wit, by its fruit, the thing it does!" elizabeth barrett's love for the greek poets--lyrical work--serious entrance on professional literature--noble ideal of poetry--london life--kenyon--first knowledge of robert browning. elizabeth barrett was but twelve days in translating the "prometheus bound" of Æschylus, and of the result of this swift achievement she herself declared, when laughingly discussing this work with home in later years, that it ought to have been "thrown in the fire immediately afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth." combined with a few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in , and received from the _athenæum_ the edifying verdict that "those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any one rather than Æschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before us." the quiet life at sidmouth goes on,--goes on, in fact, for three years,--and the life is not an unmixed joy to miss barrett. "i like the greenness and the tranquillity and the sea," she writes to a friend. "sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in the country. the grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning to have anything to do with the earth...." in the summer of the barretts left sidmouth for london, locating at first in gloucester place (no. ) where they remained for three years. hugh stuart boyd had, in the meantime, removed to st. john's wood; mr. kenyon and miss mitford became frequent visitors. miss barrett's literary activity was stimulated by london life, and she began contributing to a number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more voluminous. to mr. boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in london: "as george is going to do what i am afraid i shall not be able to do to-day,--to visit you,--he must take with him a few lines from me, to say how glad i am to feel myself again only at a short distance from you; and gladder i shall be when the same room holds both of us. but i cannot open the window and fly.... how much you will have to say to me about the greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the romans. if you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my being turned out of your doors. such is my prophecy. "papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on mrs. hemans's death. i had a presentiment that you would...." if the classic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted mr. boyd to feel the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find some compensation for not being great classicists. it is in this poem that the lines occur,-- "nor mourn, o living one, because her part in life was mourning: would she have lost the poet's fire, for anguish of the burning? * * * * * albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing, the foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing." miss barrett's fugitive poems of this time tell much of the story of her days. she sees haydon's portrait of wordsworth, and it suggests the sonnet beginning: "wordsworth upon helvellyn!..." the poems written previously to "a drama of exile" do not at all indicate the power and beauty and the depth of significance for which all her subsequent work is so remarkable. "the seraphim," "isobel's child," "the virgin mary to the child jesus," however much they may contain occasional glimpses of poetic fire, would never have established her rank. yet "the sleep" belongs to this period, and that poem of exquisite pathos, "cowper's grave." anticipating a little, there came that poem which awakened england and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the suffering of children in factory life, "the cry of the children," which appeared almost simultaneously with lord shaftesbury's great speech in parliament on child labor. the poem and the statesman and philanthropist together aroused england. a poem called "confessions" is full of a mysterious power that haunts the reader in a series of pictures: "face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, i saw her: god and she and i only, there i sate down to draw her soul through the clefts of confession--'speak, i am holding thee fast, as the angel of resurrection shall do at the last.'" and what touching significance is in these lines: "the least touch of their hands in the morning, i keep it by day and by night; their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light." there were the "crowned and wedded" that celebrated the marriage of england's beloved queen; "bertha in the lane," which has been one of the most universal favorites of any of her lyrics; still later, "the dead pan," which essentially embodies her highest convictions regarding the poetic art: that poetry must be real, and, above all, true. "o brave poets, keep back nothing, nor mix falsehood with the whole! * * * * hold, in high poetic duty, truest truth the fairest beauty!" in such lines as these she expressed her deepest feeling. then appeared "comfort," "futurity," and "an apprehension"; the dainty little picture of her childish days in "hector in the garden"; the sonnets to george sand, on which the french biographer[ ] of mrs. browning, in recent years, has commented, translating the first line,-- "_vrai genie, mais vraie femme!_" and adding that these words, addressed to george sand, are illustrated by her own life. the sonnet "insufficiency," of this period, closes with the lines, "and what we best conceive we fail to speak. wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall, and then resume thy broken strains, and seek fit peroration without let or thrall." in all this work that deep religious note, that exaltation of spirituality which so completely characterized elizabeth barrett browning, is felt by the reader. religion was always to her a life, not a litany. the divine love was as the breath of life to her, wherein she lived and moved, and on which she relied for her very being. the poem called "a rhapsody of life's progress," though not often noted by the critical writers on mrs. browning, is one full of impressive lines, with that haunting refrain of every stanza,-- "o life, o beyond, thou art strange, thou art sweet!" albeit, a candid view must also recognize that this poem reveals those early faults, the redundancy, the almost recklessness of color and rhythm, that are much less frequently encountered in the poems of mrs. browning than they were in those of miss barrett. for poetic work is an art as well as a gift, and while "poets are born, not made," yet, being born, the poet must proceed also to make himself. in this "rhapsody" occur the lines that are said to have thrown cultured bostonians into a bewilderment exceptional; a baffled and despairing state not to be duplicated in all history, unless by that of the greeks before the eleusinian mysteries; the lines running,-- "let us sit on the thrones in a purple sublimity, and grind down men's bones to a pale unanimity." polite circles in boston pondered unavailingly upon this medley, and were apparently reduced to the same mental condition as was mrs. carlyle when she read "sordello." unfortunately for jane carlyle there were in her day no browning societies, with their all-embracing knowledge, to which browning himself conveniently referred all persons who questioned him as to the meaning of certain passages. one boston woman, not unknown to fame, recalls even now that she walked the common, revolving these cryptic lines in her mind, and meeting dr. holmes, asked if he understood them, to which the autocrat replied, "god forbid!" this very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery, was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power of miss barrett later on. from her earliest childhood she had the scholar's instinct and love of learning; she read fluently french, german, and italian; she was well grounded in latin, and for the greek she had that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation rather than an acquirement. its rich intellectual treasure entered into her inmost life. she also read hebrew, and all her life kept with her a little hebrew bible, as well as a greek testament, the margins of both of which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic handwriting. miss barrett's earliest work, published anonymously, at her father's expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality, whatever its promise; but once in london, something in the very atmosphere seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. poetry had always been to her "its own exceeding great reward," but she was now conscious of a desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of its fascination. to elizabeth barrett, secure in her father's home, there was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the norse heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered. "here a star, and there a star, some lose their way,-- here a mist, and there a mist, afterwards ... day!" miss barrett finds london "wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist," but she tries to like it, and "looks forward to seeing those here whom we might see nowhere else." her brother george, who had recently graduated from the university of glasgow, was now a barrister student at the inner temple. henrietta and arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight in the new surroundings. retrospectively viewed, mrs. browning's life falls easily into three periods, which seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a realization. she was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family came up to london, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams and visions for her company. these years were but the prelude, the preparatory period. she then entered on the experimental phase, the testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and later fulfillment. in her forty-first year came her marriage to robert browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous achievement, during which the incomparable "sonnets from the portuguese" and "aurora leigh" were written,--the period of realization. before the beginning of the london period miss barrett's literary work had been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or less crude experimenter. for poetry to elizabeth barrett was a divine commission no less than an inborn gift. under any circumstances, she would have poured her life "with passion into music," and with the utmost sincerity could she have said, with george eliot's "armgart," "i am not glad with that mean vanity which knows no good beyond its appetite full feasting upon praise! i am only glad, being praised for what i know is worth the praise; glad of the proof that i myself have part in what i worship!" as is revealed and attested in many expressions of her maturer years, poetry was to her the most serious, as well as the most enthralling, of pursuits, while she was also a very accomplished scholar. a special gift, and a facility for the acquirement of scholarly knowledge in the academic sense, do not invariably go together; often is the young artist so bewitched with his gift, so entranced with the glory and the splendor of a dream, that the text-book, by contrast, is a dull page, to which he cannot persuade himself to turn. to him the air is peopled with visions and voices that fascinate his attention. in the college days of james russell lowell is seen an illustration of this truth, the young student being temporarily suspended, and sent--not to coventry, but to concord. perhaps the banishment of a harvard student for the high crime and misdemeanor of being addicted to rhyme rather than mathematics, and his penalty in the form of exile to concord, the haunt of emerson and the muses, may have made pan laugh. but, at all events, miss barrett was as naturally a scholar, in the fullest significance of the term, as she was a poet. this splendid equipment was a tremendous factor in that splendor of achievement, and in that universally recognized success, that has made the name of elizabeth barrett browning immortal in all ages, as the greatest woman poet the world has ever known. the professional literary life is a drama in itself,--comedy, or tragedy, as may be, and usually a mixture of both. it ranges over wide areas of experience, from that of the author of "richard feverel," who is said to have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of the luxurious author whose _séances_ with the muses are decorously conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who now and then condescends to "dictate" a "best seller," is apt to be surprised by a local photographer. but as a noted educator defined a university as "a log,--with mark hopkins sitting on the other end," so the "real thing" in a literary career may not inaptly be typified by louisa alcott sitting on the back stairs, writing on an old atlas; and it was into actualities somewhat like these that elizabeth barrett desired to plunge. the question that she voiced in later years, in "aurora leigh,"-- "my own best poets, am i one with you, that thus i love you,--or but one through love? does all this smell of thyme about my feet conclude my visit to your holy hill in personal presence, or but testify the rustling of your vesture through my dreams with influent odours?"-- this question, in substance, stirred now in her life, and insisted upon reply. she must, like all real poets, proceed to "hang her verses in the wind," and watch if perchance there are "... the five which five hundred will survive." elizabeth barrett was of a simplicity that had no affinities with the _poseur_ in any respect, and she had an inimitable sense of humor that pervaded all her days. wit and pathos are, indeed, so closely allied that it would be hardly possible that the author of the "de profundis," a poem that sounds the profoundest depths of the human soul, should not have the corresponding quality of the swiftest perception of the humorous. it was somewhere about this time that poe sent to her a volume of his poems with an inscription on the fly-leaf that declared her to be "the noblest of her sex." "and what could i say in reply," she laughingly remarked, "but 'sir, you are the most discerning of yours!'" the first poem of hers that was offered in a purely professional way was "the romaunt of margret." it appeared in the _new monthly magazine_, then edited by bulwer, who was afterward known as the first lord lytton. at this time richard hengist horne was basking in the fame of his "orion," and to him miss barrett applied, through a mutual friend, as to whether her enclosed poem had any title to that name, or whether it was mere verse. "as there could be no doubt in the mind of the recipient on that point," said mr. horne, "the poem was forwarded to bulwer, and duly appeared. the next one sent," continues mr. horne, "started the poetess at once on her bright and noble career." this "next one" appears to have been "the poet's vow," and a confirmation of this supposition is seen in a letter of hers at this date to mr. boyd, in which she explains her not having at hand a copy of the _athenæum_ that he had wished to see, and adds: "i can give you, from memory, the _athenæum's_ review in that number. the critic says 'it is rich in poetry ... including a fine, although too dreamy, ballad, the poet's vow. we are almost tempted to pause and criticise the work of an artist of so much inspiration and promise as the author of this poem, and to exhort him to a greater clearness of expression, and less quaintness in the choice of his phraseology, but this is not the time or place for digression.' "you see my critic has condemned me with a very gracious countenance. do put on yours." again, under date of october, , she writes to mr. boyd: "... but what will you say to me when i confess that in the face of all your kind encouragement, my drama of the angels (the seraphim) has not been touched until the last three days? it was not out of pure idleness on my part, nor of disregard to your admonition; but when my thoughts were distracted with other things, books just began enclosing me all around, a whole load of books upon my conscience, and i could not possibly rise to the gate of heaven and write about my angels. you know one can't sometimes sit down to the sublunary occupation of even reading greek, unless one feels free to it. and writing poetry requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of itself.... "... i have had another note from the editor--very flattering, and praying for farther supplies. the 'angels' were not ready, and i was obliged to send something else." a discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in wimpole street, and elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house, "whose walls look so much like newgate's turned inside out." she continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. with a strong will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction, and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious insistence upon the matters of external life. she had her preferences; but she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the hour, and there was an end of it. she had that rare power of instantaneous mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a burden to every one concerned by endless discussion. london itself did not captivate her fancy. "did dr. johnson in his paradise in fleet street love the pavements and the walls?" she questioned. "i doubt that," she added; "the place, the privileges, don't mix in one's love as is done by the hills and the seaside." the privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. one of these was when she met wordsworth, whom she describes as being "very kind," and that he "let her hear his conversation." this conversation she did not find "prominent," for she saw at the same time landor, "the brilliant landor," she notes, and felt the difference "between great genius and eminent talent." but there was a day on which she went to chiswick with wordsworth and miss mitford, and all the way she thought she must be dreaming. it was landor, though, who captivated her fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. landor, "in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again," she writes, gave her two greek epigrams he had recently written. all this time she is reading everything,--sheridan knowles's play of "the wreckers," which forrest had rejected, "rather for its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit," she concludes; and "ion," which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. reading combe's "phrenology," she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. if this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, "for my pulse is in a continual flutter," she notes; and she explains to mr. boyd that the line "one making one in strong compass" in "the poet's vow," which he found incomprehensible, really means that "the oneness of god, 'in whom are all things,' produces a oneness, or sympathy, with all things. the unity of god preserves a unity in man." all in all, miss barrett is coming to enjoy her london life. there was the royal academy, "and real live poets, with their heads full of the trees and birds, and sunshine of paradise"; and she has "stood face to face with wordsworth and landor"; miss mitford has become a dear friend, but she visits london only at intervals, as she lives--shades of benighted days!--thirty miles from london. a twentieth century residence across the continent could hardly seem more remote. the removal to wimpole street was decided upon, and to that house (no. ), gloomy or the reverse, the barretts migrated. miss barrett's new book, under the title of "the seraphim and other poems," was published, marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own name. "i feel very nervous about it," she said; "far more than i did when my 'prometheus' crept out of the greek." mr. kenyon was about to go to rydal mount on a visit to wordsworth, and miss barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of myrtle or geranium, and send to her--two, that she may be sure of saving one. autographs had value in those days, and in a note to mr. bray miss barrett alludes to one of shakespeare's that had been sold for a hundred pounds and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own shakespearean autograph. a new poetic era had dawned about the time that "the seraphim" appeared. tennyson had written "audley court," and was beginning to be known in america, owing this first introduction to emerson, who visited landor in florence and made some sojourn afterward in england. the boston publishing house of c. c. little and company (now little, brown, and company) had written to tennyson (under date of april , ) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. browning had published only "pauline," "paracelsus," and "strafford." shelley and keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful english cemetery in rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, by the colossal pyramid of caius cestus. byron and scott and coleridge had also died. there were landor and southey, rogers and campbell; but with miss barrett there came upon the scene a new minstrelsy that compelled its own recognition. some of her shorter poems had caught the popular ear; notably, her "cowper's grave," which remains, to-day, one of her most appealing and exquisite lyrics. "it is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying; it is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying." the touching pathos of the line, "o christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!" moves every reader. and what music and touching appeal in the succeeding stanza: "and now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story, how discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory, and how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed, he wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted." in seeing, "on cowper's grave,... his rapture in a vision," miss barrett pictured his strength-- "... to sanctify the poet's high vocation." her reverence for poetic art finds expression in almost every poem that she has written. among other shorter poems included with "the seraphim" were "the poet's vow," "isobel's child," and others, including, also, "the romaunt of margret." _the athenæum_ pronounced the collection an "extraordinary volume,--especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment,--but hardly less disappointing than extraordinary. miss barrett's genius is of a high order," the critic conceded; but he found her language "wanting in simplicity." one reviewer castigated her for presuming to take such a theme as "the seraphim" "from which milton would have shrank!" all the critics agree in giving her credit for genius of no ordinary quality; but the general consensus of opinion was that this genius manifested itself unevenly, that she was sometimes led into errors of taste. that she was ever intentionally obscure, she denied. "unfortunately obscure" she admitted that she might be, but "willingly so,--never." of the personal friends of elizabeth barrett one of the nearest was mary russell mitford, who was nineteen years her senior. miss mitford describes her at the time of their meeting as having "such a look of youthfulness that she had some difficulty in persuading a friend that miss barrett was old enough to be introduced into society." miss mitford added that she was "certainly one of the most interesting persons" she had ever seen; "of a slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam." mr. kenyon brought andrew crosse, a noted electrician of the day, to see miss barrett; and in some reminiscences[ ] written by mrs. andrew crosse there is a chapter on "john kenyon and his friends" that offers the best comprehension, perhaps, of this man who was so charming and beloved a figure in london society,--a universal favorite. born in in jamaica, the son of a wealthy land-owner, he was sent to england as a lad, educated there, and in he set out for a tour of the continent. in , in paris, he met and became intimate with professor george ticknor of harvard university, the spanish historian; and through this friendship mr. kenyon came to know many of the distinguished americans of the day, including emerson, longfellow, and willis. coleridge, southey, wordsworth, and landor were among kenyon's most intimate circle; and there is a record of one of his dinners at which the guests were daniel webster, professor and mrs. ticknor, dickens, montalembert, and lady mary shepherd. in kenyon married miss curteis, and they lived for some years in devonshire place, with frequent interludes of travel on the continent. mrs. kenyon died in , but when the barretts came up to london kenyon had resumed his delightful hospitalities, of which he made fairly a fine art. professor ticknor has left an allusion to another dinner at kenyon's where he met miss barrett. in the autumn of miss barrett, accompanied by her brother edward, went to torquay, for the warmer climate, and mr. kenyon also had gone there for the winter. around him were gathered a group of notable friends, with whom miss barrett, his cousin (with one remove), was constantly associated,--landor, andrew crosse, theodosia garrow (afterwards the wife of thomas adolphus trollope), and bezzi, an accomplished italian, who was afterward associated with seymour kirkup in discovering dante's portrait concealed under the whitewash applied to the walls of the bargello in florence. miss barrett was at this time entering into that notable correspondence with richard hengist horne, many of these letters containing passages of interest. for instance, of poetry we find her saying: "if poetry under any form be exhaustible, nature is; and if nature is, we are near a blasphemy, and i, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul. '_si l'âme est immortelle,_ _l'amour ne l'est-il-pas?_' extending _l'amour_ into all love of the ideal, and attendant power of idealizing.... i don't believe in mute, inglorious miltons, and far less in mute, inglorious shakespeares." referring to some correspondence with miss martineau, miss barrett characterizes her as "the noblest female intelligence between the seas," and of tennyson, in relation to some mention of him, she wrote that "if anything were to happen to tennyson, the whole world should go into mourning." a project (said to have originated with wordsworth) was launched to "modernize" chaucer, in which miss barrett, leigh hunt, monckton milnes, mr. horne, and one or two others enthusiastically united, the only dissenter being landor, who characteristically observed that any one who was fit to read chaucer at all could read him in the original. later on the co-operation of browning, tennyson, talfourd, bulwer, mary howitt, and the cowden clarkes was solicited and in part obtained. but landor held firm, and of his beloved chaucer he said: "i will have no hand in breaking his dun, but rich-painted glass, to put in thinner (if clearer) panes." a great deal of correspondence ensued in connection with this herculean labor, most of which is of less interest to the general reader than it might well be to the literary antiquarian. the next special literary enthusiasm of mr. horne and miss barrett was the projection of a work of criticism, to be issued anonymously, and entitled "the new spirit of the age." they collaborated on the critique on wordsworth and leigh hunt, and for the one on landor miss barrett was mainly responsible, in which she says he "writes poetry for poets, and criticism for critics;... and as if poetry were not, in english, a sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing poetry in latin." she speaks of his "pericles and aspasia" and his "pentameron" as "books for the world and for all time, complete in beauty of sentiment and subtlety of criticism." two of landor's works, very little known, the "poems from the arabic and persian" and "a satire upon satirists," are here noted. "it will be delightful to me to praise tennyson,--although, by saint eloy, i never imitated him," she writes to mr. horne; "and i take that oath because the _quarterly_ was sure that if it had not been for him i should have hung a lady's hair 'blackly' instead of 'very blackly.'" miss mitford was somewhat concerned with this hazardous venture, but she had no desire to discuss dickens, as she "could not admire his love of low life!" miss barrett's appreciation of tennyson is much on record. she finds him "a divine poet." monckton milnes, whose first work she liked extremely, seemed to her in his later poems as wanting in fire and imagination, and as being too didactic. barry cornwall's lyrics impressed her "like embodied music." mr. horne finally wrote the critique on dickens, and of it miss barrett said: "i think the only omission of importance in your admirable essay is the omission of the influence of the french school of imaginative literature upon the mind of dickens, which is manifest and undeniable.... did you ever read the powerful _trois jours d'un condamné_, and will you confront that with the tragic saliences of 'oliver twist'?... we have no such romance writer as victor hugo ... george sand is the greatest female genius of the world, at least since sappho." (at this time george eliot had not appeared.) miss barrett appreciatively alludes to sir henry taylor (the author of "philip van artevelde") as "an infidel in poetry," and to the author of "festus" as "a man of great thoughts." she finds part of the poem "weak," but, "when all is said," she continues, "what poet-stuff remains! what power! what fire of imagination, worth the stealing of prometheus!" in relation to some strictures on carlyle, miss barrett vivaciously replies that his object is to discover the sun, not to specify the landscape, and that it would be a strange reproach to bring against the morning star that it does not shine in the evening. the idea of a lyrical drama, "psyche apocalypte," was entertained by mr. horne and miss barrett, but, fortunately, no fragment of it was materialized into public light. there was a voluminous correspondence between them concerning this possible venture. meanwhile miss barrett's poems won success past her "expectation or hope. _blackwood's_ high help was much," she writes, "and i continue to have the kindest letters from unknown readers.... the american publisher has printed fifteen hundred copies. if i am a means of ultimate loss to him, i shall sit in sackcloth." in another of her letters to mr. horne we read that wordsworth is in a fever because of a projected railroad through the lake country, and that carlyle calls harriet martineau "quite mad," because of her belief in mesmerism. "for my own part," adds miss barrett, "i am not afraid to say that i almost believe in mesmerism, and quite believe in harriet martineau." she is delighted that horne's "orion" is to be published in new york. "i love the americans," she asserts, "a noble and cordial people." miss barrett remained for three years in torquay, the climate being regarded as better for her health. but the tragedy of her life took place there in the drowning of her brother edward, who went out one day with two friends in a boat and never returned. three days later the boat was found floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were recovered. this sad event occurred in the august of , and it was more than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her correspondence. in the september of she returned to london, and in a letter to mr. boyd soon after she replied to his references to gregory as a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand _de virginitate_, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in prose. miss barrett's delicacy of health through all these years has been so universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated) that it needs no more than passing allusion here. so far as possible she herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with, yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a far greater degree than has usually been realized. "my time goes to the best music when i read or write," she says, "and whatever money i can spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books." elizabeth barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends, and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal life. her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. she was glad to return from torquay to her family again. "papa's domestic comfort is broken up by the separation," she said, "and the associations of torquay lie upon me, struggle against them as i may, like a nightmare.... part of me is worn out; but the poetical part--that is, the love of poetry--is growing in me as freshly every day. did anybody ever love poetry and stop in the middle? i wonder if any one ever could?... besides, i am becoming better. dear mr. boyd," she entreats, "do not write another word about my illness either to me or to others. i am sure you would not willingly disturb me. i can't let ... prescribe anything for me except her own affection." these words illustrate the spirit in which miss barrett referred to her own health. no one could be more remote from a morbid invalidism too often associated with her. one of her first efforts after her return from torquay was to send to the _athenæum_ some greek translations, which, to her surprise, were accepted, and she writes to mr. boyd that she would enclose to him the editor's letter "if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading from the pyramids." it must have been due to a suggestion from the editor of the _athenæum_ at this time that she wrote her noble and affluent essay on "the greek christian poets," which is perhaps her finest work in prose. something in the courteous editorial note suggested this to her, and she discusses the idea with mr. boyd. mr. dilke was then the editor of the _athenæum_. he quite entered into the idea of this essay, only begging miss barrett to keep away from theology. mr. dilke also suggests that she write a review of english poetical literature, from chaucer to contemporary times, and this initiated her essay called "the book of the poets." for her greek review she desired a copy of the _poetæ christiani_, but found the price (fourteen guineas) ruinous. but whether she had all the needful data or not, the first paper was a signal success, and she fancied that some _bona avis_, as good as a nightingale, had shaken its wings over her. of the three greek tragedians, Æschylus, euripides, and sophocles, elizabeth barrett had read every line. plato she loved and read exhaustively; of aristotle at this time she had read his ethics, poetics, and his work on rhetoric, and of aristophanes a few, only, of his plays. but miss barrett was also a great novel-reader, keeping her "pillows stuffed with novels," as she playfully declared. her room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of the scholar. upon a bracket the bust of homer looked down; her bookcase showed one entire shelf occupied by the greek poets; another relegated wholly to the english poets; and philosophy, ethics, science, and criticism were liberally represented. a bust of chaucer companioned that of homer. by her sofa nestled flush, her dog, miss mitford's gift. it was in this year of that there penetrated into her atmosphere and consciousness the first intimation of robert browning. "pippa passes" had just been published, and john kenyon, ever alert to bring any happiness into the lives of his friends (kenyon, "the joy-giver," as he was well termed), suggested introducing the young poet to her, but on the plea of her ill-health she declined. a little later, in a letter to mr. boyd, she mentions one or two comments made on her essay, "the greek christian poets,"--that mr. horne, and also "mr. browning, the poet," had both, as she was told, expressed approval. "mr. browning is said to be learned in greek," she adds, "especially the dramatists." so already the air begins to stir and tremble with the coming of him of whom in later days she wrote: "i yield the grave for thy sake, and resign my near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee." the entrancing thrill of that wonderful wagner music that ushers in the first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of "lohengrin" is typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of elizabeth barrett. a new element with its transfiguring power awaited her, and some undefined prescience of that "... most gracious singer of high poems" whose music was to fall at her door "... in folds of golden fulness" haunted her like "an odor from dreamland sent." she pondered on "... how theocritus had sung of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years," but she dared not dream that the "mystic shape" that drew her backward, and whose voice spoke "in mastery," had come to lead her,--not to death, but love. chapter v - "... if a man could feel, not one day in the artist's ecstasy, but every day,--feast, fast, or working-day, the spiritual significance burn through the hieroglyphic of material shows, henceforward he would paint the globe with wings." "bells and pomegranates"--arnould and domett--"a blot in the 'scutcheon"-- macready--second visit to italy--miss barrett's poetic work-- "colombe's birthday"--"lady geraldine's courtship"--"romances and lyrics"--browning's first letter to miss barrett--the poets meet-- letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett--"loves of the poets"--vita nuova. the appearance of "bells and pomegranates" made a deep impression on elizabeth barrett, as the numbers, opening with "pippa passes," successively appeared between and . of "pippa" she said she could find it in her heart to covet the authorship, and she felt all the combinations of effect to be particularly "striking and noble." in a paper that miss barrett wrote in these days for the _athenæum_, critically surveying the poetic outlook of the time, she referred to browning and tennyson as "among those high and gifted spirits who would still work and wait." when this london journal reviewed (not too favorably) browning's "romances and lyrics," miss barrett took greatly to heart the injustice that she felt was done him, and reverted to it in a number of personal letters, expressing her conviction that "it would be easier to find a more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius." an edition of tennyson, in two volumes, came out, including the "ulysses," "morte d'arthur," "locksley hall," and "oenone," of which she says no one quite appeals to her as does "oenone," and she expresses her belief that philosophic thinking, like music, is always involved in high ideality of any kind. wordsworth she insisted upon estimating from his best, not from his poorest work, and his "ode" was to her so grand as to atone for a multitude of poetic sins. "i confess," she wrote to boyd, "that he is not unfrequently heavy and dull, and that coleridge has an intenser genius." to her cousin, kenyon, miss barrett sent the manuscript of her poem, "the dead pan," which he showed to browning, who wrote of it to kenyon with ardent admiration. this note was sent to miss barrett, who displayed it to horne that he might see the opinion of the poet whom they both admired. still later, horne published in his "new spirit of the age" sketches of several writers with their portraits; and those of carlyle, miss martineau, wordsworth, tennyson, and browning, miss barrett had framed for her own room. she asked kenyon if that of browning were a good one. "rather like," he replied. so here and there the fates were invisibly at work, forging the subtle threads that were drawing the poets unconsciously nearer. it was the suggestion of browning's publisher, moxon, that "bells and pomegranates" might be issued in pamphlet form, appearing at intervals, as this plastic method would be comparatively inexpensive, and would also permit the series to be stopped at any time if its success was not of a degree to warrant continuance. the poet found his title, as he afterward explained in a letter to miss barrett, in exodus, "... upon the hem of the robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue and of purple, and of scarlet, and bells of gold between them round about." after "pippa passes" there followed "king victor and king charles," a number of lyrics, "the return of the druses," "a blot in the 'scutcheon," "luria," and "a soul's tragedy." on each of the title-pages the author was named as the writer of "paracelsus," "sordello" being ignored. among the dedications of these several numbers those so honored included john kenyon, proctor, and talfourd. browning offered "a blot in the 'scutcheon" to macready (whose stage fortunes at this period were not brilliant), with the remark that "the luck of the third venture is proverbial." the actor consulted forster, who passed the play on to dickens, to whom it deeply appealed. under date of november , , dickens wrote of it to forster in the most enthusiastic words, saying the reading of it had thrown him "into a perfect passion of sorrow," and that it was "full of genius, natural, and great thoughts,... and i swear it is a tragedy that must be played, and played by macready," continued the novelist. "and tell browning that i believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work." forster did not, however, administer this consolation to the young author, who was only to learn of dickens's admiration thirty years later, when forster's biography of him appeared. the story of the production of the play is told in a letter from joseph arnould to alfred domett (then in new zealand), written under date of may, , dated from arnould's home in victoria square, pimlico: "as one must begin somewhere, suppose we take browning.... in february his play, 'a blot in the 'scutcheon,' was announced as forthcoming at drury lane.... meantime, judicious friends had a habit of asking when the play was coming out...."[ ] a long chapter of vexations is humorously described by domett, who concludes his letter with this tribute to the play. "... with some of the finest situations and grandest passages you can conceive, it does undoubtedly want a sustained interest to the end of the third act; in fact the whole of that act on the stage is a falling off from the second, which i need not tell you is, for purposes of performance, the most unpardonable fault. still, it will no doubt--nay, it must--have done this, viz., produced a higher opinion than ever of browning's genius and the great things he is yet to do, in the minds not only of a clique, but of the general world of readers. this man will go far yet...." while this vexation cancelled the friendly relations that had existed between browning and macready, it fostered the friendship between the poet and helen faucit (later lady martin), who remembered browning's attitude "as full of generous sympathy" for the actors of the cast; while he recalled miss faucit's "perfect behavior as a woman, and her admirable playing, as the one gratifying factor" in the affair. but browning was too noble by nature for any lasting resentment, and meeting macready soon after the death of both his own wife, in italy, and of mrs. macready, he could only grasp his old friend's hand and exclaim with emotion, "oh, macready!" in the autumn of browning set forth for italy on his second visit. two years before his friend domett had left england for new zealand, commemorated by the poet in the lines,-- "how, forsooth, was i to know it if waring meant to glide away like a ghost at break of day." browning landed at naples, and there, according to mrs. orr, he became acquainted with a young neapolitan, signor scotti, who took the bargaining of their tour upon himself, after they had agreed to travel together, "and now as i write," said mr. browning in a letter from his naples hotel to his sister sarianna, "i hear him disputing our bill. he does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two." the pair wandered over the enchanting shores of all the naples region, lingered in sorrento, drove over the picturesque road to amalfi, and listened to the song of the sirens along the shore. their arrival in rome was browning's first sight of the eternal city. here mr. browning found an old friend, the contessa carducci, with whom the two passed most of their evenings. he made his poetic pilgrimage to the graves of shelley and keats, as do all later pilgrims, and he visited the grotto of egeria in memory of byron. he loitered in the old _chiesa_ near santa maria maggiore, where the sixteenth century bishop "ordered his tomb," and he visited trelawney in leghorn. there exists little record of this trip save in the poem "the englishman in italy," and his return to england through germany is alike unrecorded. six years had passed since the publication of "the seraphim and other poems," and on mr. browning's arrival at home again, he found two new volumes of miss barrett's, entitled simply "poems," in which were "a drama of exile," "bertha in the lane," "catarina to camoens," "a vision of poets," nearly all of the sonnets that she ever wrote save that immortal sequence, "sonnets from the portuguese," and "lady geraldine's courtship." these volumes absolutely established her poetic rank with that of tennyson and browning. she "heard the nations praising her far off." while she had many expressions of grateful gladness for all this chorus of praise with hardly a dissenting voice, the verdict did not affect her own high standards. "i have written these poems as well as i could," she says, "and i hope to write others better. i have not reached my own ideal ... but i love poetry more than i love my own successes in it." her love of absolute truth, and the absence of any petty self-love in her character, stand out in any study of her life. "why, if you had told me that my books were without any value in your eyes, do you imagine that i should not have valued you, reverenced you ever after for your truth, so sacred a thing in friendship?" she writes to a friend. the reviews are eminently appreciative and satisfying. _blackwood's_ gave a long critique in a special article, frankly pointing out faults, but asserting that her merits far outweighed her defects, and that her genius "was profound, unsullied, and without a flaw." the long poem, "a drama of exile" was pronounced the least successful of all, and the prime favorite was "lady geraldine's courtship." of this poem of ninety-two stanzas, with eleven more in its "conclusion," thirty-five of the stanzas, or one hundred and forty-four lines, were written in one day. though lack of health largely restricted miss barrett to her room, her sympathies and interests were world-wide. she read the reviews of the biography of dr. arnold, a work she desired to read, entire, and records that "dr. arnold must have been a man in the largest and noblest sense." she rejoices in the refutation of puseyism that is offered in the _edinburgh review_; she reads "an admirable paper by macaulay" in the same number; she comments on the news that newman has united himself with the catholic church; and in one letter she writes that mr. horne has not returned to england and adds: "mr. browning is not in england, either, so that whatever you send for him must await his return from the east, or west, or south, wherever he is; dickens is in italy; even miss mitford talks of going to france, and the 'new spirit of the age' is a wandering spirit." in her "lady geraldine's courtship" had occurred the lines: "or from browning some 'pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." a certain consciousness of each other already stirred in the air for browning and miss barrett, and still closer were the fates drawing the subtle threads of destiny. it was in this november that mrs. jameson first came into miss barrett's life, coming to the door with a note, and "overcoming by kindness was let in." this initiated a friendship that was destined in the near future to play its salient part in the life of elizabeth barrett. in what orderly sequence the links of life appear, viewed retrospectively! she "gently wrangles" with mr. boyd for addressing her as "miss barrett," deprecating such cold formality, and offering him his choice of her little pet name "ba" or of elizabeth. she reads hans christian andersen's "improvisatore," and in reply to some expressed wonder at her reading so many novels she avows herself "the most complete and unscrupulous romance reader" possible; and adds that her love of fiction began with her breath, and will end with it; "and it goes on increasing. on my tombstone may be written," she continued, "'_ci gît_ the greatest novel reader in the world,' and nobody will forbid the inscription." and so the prelude of her life draws to a close, and the future is to be no more the mere living "with visions for her company," for now, in this january of , she has a letter from browning, and she writes: "i had a letter from browning, the poet, last night, which threw me into ecstasies,--browning, the author of 'paracelsus,' and king of the mystics." not long after she writes that she is getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with robert browning, and that they are growing to be the truest of friends. lowell writes to miss barrett regarding her poems, though the letter does not seem to be anywhere on record, and she writes to mr. westwood that in her view mr. browning's power is of a very high order, and that he must read "paracelsus." in its author she finds one who "speaks true oracles." she finds "colombe's birthday" exquisite, and "pippa passes" she "kneels to, with deepest reverence." the first letter of browning to miss barrett was written on january of this year ( ), and he began with the words: "i love your verses with all my heart, dear miss barrett." he enters into the "fresh strange music, the exquisite pathos, and true, brave thought" of her work; and reminds her that kenyon once asked him if he would like to see miss barrett, but that she did not feel able, and he felt as if close to some world's wonder, but the half-opened door shut. her reply, which is dated the next day, thanks him for his sympathy and offers him her gratitude, "agreeing that of all the commerce from tyre to carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing." and she craves a lasting obligation in that he shall suggest her master-faults in poetry. she does not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism, and possibly might not be at all obedient to it, but she has such high respect for his power in art, and his experience as an artist. she refers to mr. kenyon as her friend and helper, and her books' friend and helper, "critic and sympathizer, true friend at all hours!" and she adds that "while i live to follow this divine art of poetry ... i must be a devout student and admirer of your works." browning is made very happy by her words, and he feels that his poor praise "was nearly as felicitously brought out as a certain tribute to tasso, which amused me in rome some weeks ago," he says. "in a neat penciling on the wall by his tomb at sant' onofrio--'_alla cara memoria--di--torquato tasso--il dottore bernardini--offriva--il sequente carme--tu_'--and no more; the good man, it would seem, breaking down with the over-load of love here! but my '_o tu_' was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after." and then he must repeat (to himself) that her poetry must be infinitely more to him than his could be to her, "for you do what i have only hoped to do." and he hopes she will nevermore talk of "the honor" of his acquaintance, but he will joyfully wait for the delight of her friendship. and to his fear that she may hate letter-writing she replies suggesting that nobody likes writing to everybody, but it would be strange and contradictory if she were not always delighted to hear from and to write to him; and she can read any manuscript except the writing on the pyramids, and if he will only treat her _en bon camarade_ "without reference to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen'"; taking no thought for his sentences (or hers), "nor for your badd speling nor for mine," she is ready to sign and seal the contract of correspondence. and while she throws off the ceremony, she holds faster to the kindness. she is overjoyed with this cordial sympathy. "is it true," she asks, "that i know so little of you? and is it true that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature? it is not true to my mind,--and therefore it is not true that i know little of you, except in so far as it is true that your greatest works are to come.... i think--if i may dare name myself with you in the poetic relation--that we both have high views of the art we follow and steadfast purpose in the pursuit of it.... and that neither of us would be likely to be thrown from the course by the casting of any atalanta ball of speedy popularity. "and after all that has been said and mused upon the anxiety experienced by the true artist,--is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil? for my part i sometimes wonder how, without such an object and purpose of life, people contrive to live at all." and her idea of happiness "lies deep in poetry and its associations." and he replies that what he has printed "gives no knowledge of me," and that he has never begun what he hopes he was born to begin and end--"r. b. a poem." "do you know tennyson?" she asks, "that is, with a face to face knowledge? i have great admiration for him," she continues. "in execution he is exquisite,--and in music a most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine airs." and she asks if he knows what it is to covet his neighbor's poetry,--not his fame, but his poetry. it delights her to hear of his garden full of roses and his soul full of comforts. she finds the conception of his pippa "most exquisite, and altogether original." in one of miss barrett's letters a few weeks later there seems discernible a forecast of "aurora leigh," when she writes that her chief intention is the writing "of a sort of novel-poem," and one "as completely modern as 'geraldine's courtship,' running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like 'where angels fear to tread'; and so meeting face to face and without mask the humanity of the age, and speaking the truth, as i conceive of it, out plainly." she is waiting for a story; she will not take one, because she likes to make her own. here is without doubt the first conception of "aurora leigh." touching on life in another letter, she records her feeling that "the brightest place in the house is the leaning out of the window." browning replies: "and pray you not to lean out of the window when my own foot is only on the stair."... "but i did not mean to strike a tragic chord," she replies; "indeed i did not. as to 'escaping with my life,' it was just a phrase ... for the rest i am essentially better ... and feel as if it were intended for me to live and not to die." and referring to a passage relating to prometheus she asks: "and tell me, if Æschylus is not the divinest of all the divine greek souls?" she continues: "but to go back to the view of life with the blind hopes; you are not to think--whatever i may have written or implied--that i lean either to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through darkness instead of light ... and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion i come out with two lessons learned--the wisdom of cheerfulness and the duty of social intercourse. anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in society.... what we call life is a condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault.... and i do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness, and i feel it to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one.... remember, that as you owe your unscathed joy to god, you should pay it back to his world. i thank you for some of it already." and she feels how kind he is,--how gently and kindly he speaks to her. in his next letter he alludes with much feeling to her idea of the poem-novel: "the poem you propose to make; the fresh, fearless, living work you describe, is the only poem to be undertaken now by you or any one who is a poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered god or man; it is what i have been all my life intending to do, and now shall be much nearer doing since you will be along with me. and you can do it, i know and am sure,--so sure that i could find it in my heart to be jealous of your stopping on the way even to translate the prometheus...." the lovers, for such they already are, however unconsciously to both, fall into a long discussion of prometheus, and the greek drama in general, and in another letter, with allusion to his begging her to take her own good time in writing, she half playfully proffers that it is her own bad time to which she must submit. "this implacable weather!" she writes; "this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!... there will be a may and june if we live to see such things," and then she speaks of seeing him besides, and while she recognizes it is morbid to shrink and grow pale in the spirit, yet not all her fine philosophy about social duties quite carries her through. but "if he thinks she shall not like to see him, he is wrong, for all his learning." what pathos of revelation of this brave, celestial spirit, tenanting the most fragile of bodies, is read in the ensuing passage: "what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. you seem to have drunken of the cup of life full with the sun shining on it. i have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow for a strong emotion. before this seclusion of my illness i was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, known more, of society, than i, who am hardly to be called young now. i grew up in the country, had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries.... books and dreams were what i lived in--and domestic life seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass.... why, if i live on and escape this seclusion, do you not perceive that i labor under signal disadvantages, that i am, in a manner, a blind poet?... i have had much of the inner life ... but how willingly would i exchange some of this ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life.... but grumbling is a vile thing, and we should all thank god for our measures of life, and think them enough.... like to write? of course, of course i do. i seem to live while i write--it is life for me. why, what is it to live? not to eat and drink and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the fibers of being, passionately and joyfully.... "ah, you tempt me with a grand vision of prometheus!... i am inclined to think that we want new forms.... the old gods are dethroned. why should we go back to the antique moulds? if it is a necessity of art to do this, then those critics are right who hold that art is exhausted.... i do not believe this; and i believe the so-called necessity of art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. let us all aspire rather to life.... for there is poetry everywhere...." miss barrett writes to him, continuing the discussion of poetry as an art, that she does not want "material as material, but that every life requires a full experience," and she has a profound conviction that a poet is at a lamentable disadvantage if he has been shut from most of the outer aspects of life. and he, replying, deprecates a little the outward life for a poet, with amusing references to a novel of d'israeli's, where, "lo, dinner is done, and vivian grey is here, and violet fane there, and a detachment of the party is drafted off to catch butterflies." but still he partly agrees, and feels that her danish novel ("the improvisatore") must be full of truth and beauty, and "that a dane should write so, confirms me in a belief that italy is stuff for the use of the north and no more--pure poetry there is none, as near as possible none, in dante, even;... and alfieri,... with a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as colorless as salad grown under a garden glass...." but she--if she asks questions about novels it is because she wants to see him by the refracted lights, as well as by the direct ones; and dante's poetry--"only material for northern rhymers?" she must think of that before she agrees with him. as for browning, he bids her remember that he writes letters to no one but her; but there is never enough of telling her.... and she, noting his sitting up in the morning till six, and sleeping only till nine, wants to know "how 'lurias' can be made out of such ungodly imprudences? and what is the reasonableness of it," she questions, "when we all know that thinking, dreaming, creative people, like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others"; and he is anticipating the day when he shall see her with his own eyes, and now a day is named on which he will call, and he begs her not to mind his coming in the least, for if she does not feel able to see him he will come again, and again, as his time is of no importance. it was on the afternoon of may ( ) that robert browning and elizabeth barrett first met, and of them it could almost have been said, in words ascribed to michael angelo for vittoria colonna,-- "we are the only two, that, face to face, do know each other, as god doth know us both." it is said that the first letter of browning's to her after this meeting is the only one destroyed of all this wonderful correspondence; and this was such a letter as could only be interpreted into a desire for marriage, which she, all tender thoughtfulness always for others, characteristically felt would be fatal to his happiness because of her invalid state. he begged her to return the letter, and he then destroyed it; and again pleaded that their friendship and intellectual comradeship should continue. "your friendship and sympathy will be dear and precious to me all my life, if you indeed leave them with me so long, or so little," she writes; and she utterly forbids any further expression or she must do this "to be in my own eyes and before god a little more worthy, or a little less unworthy, of a generosity...." and he discreetly veils his ardors for the time, and the wonderful letters run on. [illustration: monument to michael angelo, by vasari church of santa croce. "_they are safe in heaven...._ _the michaels and rafaels...._" old pictures in florence.] he is writing "the flight of the duchess," and sending it to her by installments; she finds it "past speaking of," and she also refers to "exquisite pages" of landor's in the "pentameron." and poems which he has left with her,--she must have her own gladness from them in her own way. and did he go to chelsea, and hear the divine philosophy? apparently he did, for he writes: "yes, i went to chelsea and found dear carlyle alone--his wife is in the country where he will join her as soon as the book's last proof sheets are corrected.... he was all kindness, and talked like his own self while he made me tea--and would walk as far as vauxhall bridge with me on my way home." she writes: "i had a letter yesterday from charles hemans, the son of felicia, ... who says his mother's memory is surrounded to him 'with almost a divine lustre,'... and is not that better than your tradition about shelley's son? and is it not pleasant to know that the noble, pure-hearted woman, the vittoria colonna of our country, should be so loved and comprehended by one, at least, of her own house?" under date of august , miss barrett has been moved to write out the pathetic story of her brother edward's death. he had accompanied her to torquay,--he, "the kindest, the noblest, the dearest, and when the time came for him to return i, weakened by illness, could not master my spirits or drive back my tears," and he then decided not to leave her. "and ten days from that day," she continued, "the boat left the shore which never returned--and he had left me! for three days we waited,--oh, that awful agony of three days!... do not notice what i have written to you, my dearest friend. i have never said so much to a living being--i never could speak or write of it...." but he writes her that "better than being happy in her happiness, is it to participate in her sorrow." and the very last day of that august he writes that he has had such power over himself as to keep silent ... but "let me say now--this only once,--that i loved you from my soul, and gave you my life, as much of it as you would take, and all that ... is independent of any return on your part." she assures him that he has followed the most generous of impulses toward her, "yet i cannot help adding that, of us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part." she confesses how deeply she is affected by his words, "but what could i speak," she questions, "that would not be unjust to you?... your life! if you gave it to me and i put my whole heart into it, what should i put in but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to? what could i give you which it would not be ungenerous to give?" there was a partial plan that miss barrett should pass that next winter in pisa, but owing to the strange and incalculable disposition of her father, who, while he loved her, was singularly autocratic in his treatment, the plan was abandoned. all this sorrow may have contributed to her confession to browning that no man had ever been to her feelings what he was; and that if she were different in some respects she would accept the great trust of his happiness.... "but we may be friends always," she continues, "and cannot be so separated that the knowledge of your happiness will not increase mine.... worldly thoughts these are not at all, there need be no soiling of the heart with any such;... you cannot despise the gold and gauds of the world more than i do,... and even if i wished to be very poor, in the world's sense of poverty, i could not, with three or four hundred a year, of which no living will can dispossess me. and is not the chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it?" but he, perfect in his beautiful trust and tenderness, was "joyfully confident" that the way would open, and he thanks god that, to the utmost of his power, he has not been unworthy of having been introduced to her. he is "no longer in the first freshness of his life" and had for years felt it impossible that he should ever love any woman. but he will wait. that she "cannot dance like cerito" does not materially disarrange his plan! and by the last of those september days she confesses that she is his "for everything but to do him harm," he has touched her so profoundly, and now "none, except god and your own will, shall interpose between you and me." and he answered her in such words as these: "when i come back from seeing you and think over it all, there is never a least word of yours i could not occupy myself with...." in a subsequent letter elizabeth barrett questions: "could it be that heart and life were devastated to make room for you? if so it was well done." and she sends thanks to browning's sister, sarianna, for a copy of landor's verses. and with all these gracious and tenderly exquisite personal matters, the letters are yet brilliant in literary allusion and criticism. during these three years from to were written the greater number of miss barrett's finest lyrics. those two remarkable poems, "a rhapsody of life's progress" and "confessions"; "loved once"; "the sleep" (the poem which was read at her burial in the lovely, cypress-crowned cemetery in florence, and whose stanzas, set to music, were chanted by the choir in westminster abbey when the body of her husband was laid in the "poets' corner"), "the dead pan," and that most exquisite lyric of all, "catarina to camoens," were all written during this period. the title of the latter was but a transparent veil for her own feelings toward robert browning, and had she died in his absence, as catarina did in that of camoens, the words would have expressed her own feeling. what profound pathos is in the line, "death is near me,--and not _you_," and how her own infinite sweetness of spirit is mirrored in the stanza, "i will look out to his future; i will bless it till it shine, should he ever be a suitor unto sweeter eyes than mine." and read her own self-revelation again in "a denial," "we have met late--it is too late to meet, o friend, not more than friend!" but the denial breaks down, and the last lines tell the story: "here's no more courage in my soul to say 'look in my face and see.'" and in that last line of "insufficiency," "i love thee so, dear, that i only can leave thee." in "question and answer," in "proof and disproof," "a valediction," "loved once," and "inclusions," he who reads between the lines and has the magic of divination may read the story of her inner life. in the poem "confessions" is touched a note of mystical, spiritual romance, spiritual tragedy, wholly of the inner life, that entirely differentiates from any other poetic expression of mrs. browning. in one stanza occur these lines: "the least touch of their hands in the morning, i keep it by day and by night; their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light." even with all allowance for the imagination of the poet, these lines reveal such feeling, such tremulous susceptibility, that with less intellectual balance than was hers, combined with such lack of physical vigor, would almost inevitably have resulted in failure of poise. the current of spiritual energy was so strong with elizabeth barrett as to largely take the place of greater physical strength. that she never relapsed into the conditions of morbid invalidism is a marvel, and it is also an impressive testimony to the power of spiritual energy to control and determine physical conditions. all through that summer the letters run on, daily, semi-daily. of his work browning writes that he shall be "prouder to begin one day,--may it be soon!--with your hand in mine from the beginning." miss barrett, referring to the earl of compton, who is reported from rome as having achieved some prominence as a painter, proceeds to say: "people in general would rather be marquises than roman artists, consulting their own wishes and inclination. i, for my part, ever since i could speak my mind and knew it, always openly and inwardly preferred the glory of those who live by their heads, to the opposite glory of those who carry other people's arms. so much for glory. happiness goes the same way to my fancy. there is something fascinating to me in that bohemian way of living.... all the conventions of society cut so close and thin, that the soul can see through.... beyond, above. it is real life as you say ... whether at rome or elsewhere. i am very glad that you like simplicity in habits of life--it has both reasonableness and sanctity.... i am glad that you--who have had temptation enough, more than enough, i am sure, in every form--have lived in the midst of this london of ours, close to the great social vortex, yet have kept so safe, and free, and calm, and pure from the besetting sins of our society." browning, in one letter, alluding to the prevailing stupidity of the idea that genius and domestic happiness are incompatible, says: "we will live the real answer, will we not?... a man of genius mistreats his wife; well, take away the genius,--does he so instantly improve?" of the attitude of his family toward their marriage he writes: "my family all love you, dearest,--you cannot conceive my father's and mother's childlike faith in goodness--and my sister is very high-spirited, and quick of apprehension--so as to seize the true point of the case at once.... last night i asked my father, who was absorbed over some old book, if he should not be glad to see his new daughter?--to which he, starting, replied, 'indeed i shall'; with such a fervor as to make my mother laugh,--not abated by his adding: 'and how i should be glad of her seeing sarianna!'" and she writes: "shall we go to greece, then, robert? let us, if you like it. when we have used a little the charm of your italy,... i should like to see athens with my living eyes.... athens was in all the dreams i dreamed, before i knew you. why should we not see athens, and egypt, too, and float down the mystical nile, and stand in the shadow of the pyramids? all of it is more possible now, than walking up the street seemed to me last year." and he writes that he always felt her "wine of cyprus" poem to fill his heart "with unutterable desires." to book-lovers the question as to how many books may be taken on a journey, or what volumes, indeed, may be left behind, is a vital one. the reader will smile sympathetically at miss barrett's consultation with browning as to whether, if they do "achieve the peculiar madness of going to italy," they could take any books? and whether it would be well to so arrange that they should not take duplicates? he advises the narrowest compass for luggage. "we can return for what we want, or procure it abroad," he says, made wise by his two italian journeys; and he adds: "i think the fewer books we take the better; they take up room,--and the wise way always seemed to me to read at home, and open one's eyes and see abroad. a critic somewhere mentioned that as my characteristic--there were two other poets he named placed in novel circumstances ... in a great wood, for instance, mr. trench would begin opening books to see how woods were treated ... the other man would set to writing poetry forthwith,--and r. b. would sit still and learn how to write after! a pretty compliment, i thought that. but, seriously, there must be a great library at pisa (with that university) and abroad they are delighted to facilitate such matters.... i have read in a chamber of the doges' palace at venice painted all over by tintoretto, walls and ceiling, and at rome there is a library with a learned priest always kept ready 'to solve any doubts that may arise.'" robert browning and elizabeth barrett were married on september , , in the church of st. pancras, marylebone, the only witnesses being his cousin, james silverthorne, and her maid, wilson. to have taken her sisters into her confidence would have been to expose them to the fairly insane wrath of her father. "i hate and loathe everything which is clandestine--we both do, robert and i," said mrs. browning later; but this was the only possible way. had mr. browning spoken to her father in the usual manner, "he would have been forbidden the house without a moment's scruple," she explained to a friend; "and i should have been incapacitated from any after exertion by the horrible scenes to which, as a thing of course, i should have been exposed.... i cannot bear some words. in my actual state of physical weakness, it would have been the sacrifice of my whole life--of my convictions, of my affections, and, above all, of what the person dearest to me persisted in calling his life, and the good of it--if i had observed that 'form.' therefore i determined not to observe it, and i consider that in not doing so, i sinned against no duty. that i was _constrained_ to act clandestinely, and did not _choose_ to do so, god is my witness. also, up to the very last, we stood in the light of day for the whole world, if it please, to judge us. i never saw him out of the wimpole street house. he came twice a week to see me, openly in the sight of all." in no act of her life did mrs. browning more impressively reveal her good sense than in this of her marriage. "i had long believed such an act," she said, "the most strictly personal of one's life,--to be within the rights of every person of mature age, man or woman, and i had resolved to exercise that right in my own case by a resolution which had slowly ripened. all the other doors of life were shut to me, and shut me as in a prison, and only before this door stood one whom i loved best and who loved me best, and who invited me out through it for the good's sake he thought i could do him."... to a friend she explained her long refusal to consent to the marriage, fearing that her delicate health would make it "ungenerous" in her to yield to his entreaty; but he replied that "he would not tease me, he would wait twenty years if i pleased, and then, if life lasted so long for both of us, then, when it was ending, perhaps, i might understand him and feel that i might have trusted him.... he preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfillment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world." she continues: "i tell you so much that you may see the manner of man i had to do with, and the sort of attachment which for nearly two years has been drawing and winning me. i know better than any in the world, indeed, what mr. kenyon once unconsciously said before me, that 'robert browning is great in every thing.'... now may i not tell you that his genius, and all but miraculous attainments, are the least things in him, the moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew him admit." after the marriage ceremony mrs. browning drove with her maid to the home of mr. boyd, resting there, as if making a morning call on a familiar friend, until joined by her sisters, who took her for a little drive on hampstead heath. for five days she remained in her father's house, and during this time browning could not bring himself to call and ask for his wife as "miss barrett," so they arranged all the details of their journey by letter. on september they left for paris, and the last one of these immortal letters, written the evening before their departure, from mrs. browning to her husband, contains these words: "by to-morrow at this time i shall have you, only, to love me, my beloved! you, only! as if one said, god, only! and we shall have him beside, i pray of him!" with her maid, mrs. browning walked out of her father's house the next day, meeting her husband at a bookseller's around the corner of the street, and they drove to the station, leaving for southampton to catch the night boat to havre. never could the world have understood the ineffable love and beauty and nobleness of the characters of both robert and elizabeth barrett browning, had these letters been withheld from the public. quite aside from the deeper interest of their personal revelation,--the revelation of such nobleness and such perfect mutual comprehension and tenderness of sympathy as are here revealed,--the pages are full of interesting literary allusion and comment, of wit, repartee, and of charm that defies analysis. it was a wise and generous gift when the son of the poets, robert barrett browning, gave these wonderful letters to the reading public. the supreme test of literature is that which contributes to the spiritual wealth of the world. measured by this standard, these are of the highest literary order. no one can fail to realize how all that is noblest in manhood, all that is holiest in womanhood, is revealed in this correspondence. edmund clarence stedman, after reading these letters, said: "it would have been almost a crime to have permitted this wonderful, exceptional interchange of soul and mind, between these two strong, 'excepted' beings, to leave no trace forever." robert barrett browning, in referring to his publication of this correspondence in a conversation with the writer of this volume, remarked that he really had no choice in the matter, as the apochryphal legends and myths and improvisations that had even then begun to weave themselves about the remarkable and unusual story of the acquaintance, courtship, and marriage of his parents, could only be dissipated by the simple truth, as revealed in their own letters. their love took its place in the spiritual order; it was a bond that made itself the mystic force in their mutual development and achievement; and of which the woman, whose reverence for the divine life was the strongest element in her nature, could yet say,-- "and i, who looked for only god, found thee!" life, as well as literature, would have been the poorer had not mr. barrett browning so wisely and generously enriched both by the publication of this correspondence. not the least among the beautiful expressions that have been made by those spirits so touched to fine issues as to enter into the spiritual loveliness of these letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett, is a sonnet by a new england poet, rev. william brunton,--a poet who "died too soon," but whose love for the poetry of the brownings was as ardent as it was finely appreciative: "oh! dear departed saints of highest song, behind the screen of time your love lay hid, its fair unfoldment was in life forbid-- as doing such divine affection wrong, but now we read with interest deep and strong, and lift from off the magic jar the lid, and lo! your spirit stands the clouds amid and speaks to us in some superior tongue! "devotion such as yours is heavenly-wise, and yet the possible of earth ye show; ye dwellers in the blue of summer skies, through you a finer love of love we know; it is as if the angels moved with men, and key of paradise were found again!" chapter vi - "and on her lover's arm she leant and round her waist she felt it fold, and far across the hills they went to that new world which is the old. across the hills, and far away, beyond their utmost purple rim, beyond the night, beyond the day, through all the world she followed him." marriage and italy--"in that new world"--the haunts of petrarca--the magic land--in pisa--vallombrosa--"un bel giro"--guercino's angel--casa guidi--birth of robert barrett browning--bagni di lucca--"sonnets from the portuguese"--the enchantment of italy. paris, "and such a strange week it was," wrote mrs. browning to miss mitford; "whether in the body, or out of the body, i can scarcely tell. our balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my even thinking of him at all." the journey from london to paris was not then quite the swift and easy affair it now is, the railroad between paris and havre not being then completed beyond rouen; still, such an elixir of life is happiness that mrs. browning arrived in the french capital feeling much better than when she left london. mrs. jameson had only recently taken leave of miss barrett on her sofa, and sympathetically offered to take her to italy herself for the winter with her niece; miss barrett had replied: "not only am i grateful to you, but happy to be grateful to you," but she had given no hint of the impending marriage. mrs. jameson's surprise, on receiving a note from mrs. browning, saying she was in paris, was so great that her niece, geraldine bate (afterward mrs. macpherson of rome), asserted that her aunt's amazement was "almost comical." mrs. jameson lost no time in persuading the brownings to join her and her niece at their quiet pension in the rue ville l'eveque, where they remained for a week,--this "strange week" to mrs. browning. in paris they visited the galleries of the louvre, but did little sight-seeing beyond, "being satisfied with the idea of paris," she said. to a friend mrs. jameson wrote: "i have also here a poet and a poetess--two celebrities who have run away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. both excellent; but god help them! for i know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world." as for ways and means, however, the brownings were sufficiently provided. he had a modest independence, and she also had in her own right a little fortune of some forty thousand pounds, yielding three or four hundred pounds a year; but in the july preceding their marriage browning, with his sensitive honor, insisted upon her making a will bequeathing this capital to her own family. in a letter to him dated july of that summer the story of his insistence on this is revealed in her own words: "i will write the paper as you bid me.... you are noble in all things ... but i will not discuss it so as to tease you.... i send you the paper therefore, to that end, and only to that end...." the "document," by browning's insistence, gave her property to her two sisters, in equal division, or, in case of their death, to the surviving brothers. nothing less than this would satisfy robert browning. meantime, there was the natural london comment. wordsworth observed: "so robert browning and elizabeth barrett have gone off together! it is to be hoped they can understand each other, for no one else can." mr. kenyon wrote "the kindest letter" to them both, and pronounced them "justified to the uttermost," and to mrs. browning he said: "i considered that you had imperiled your life upon this undertaking and i still thought you had done wisely!" but by that magic alchemy of love and happiness mrs. browning only gained constantly in strength, and mrs. jameson pronounced them "wise people, whether wild poets or not." among the interesting comments on the marriage was joseph arnould's letter to alfred domett, under date of november of that year. he wrote: "... i think the last piece of news i told you of was browning's marriage to miss barrett. she is, you know, our present greatest living english poetess: ... she has been in the most absolute and enforced seclusion from society; cultivating her mind to a wonderful amount of accomplishment, instructing herself in all languages, reading chrysostom in the original greek, and publishing the best metrical translation that has yet appeared of the 'prometheus bound'--having also found time to write three volumes of poetry, the last of which raised her name to a place second only to that of browning and tennyson, amongst all those who are not repelled by eccentricities of external form from penetrating into the soul and quintessential spirit of poetry that quickens the mould into which the poet has cast it. well, this lady, so gifted, so secluded, so tyrannized over, fell in love with browning in the spirit before ever she saw him in the flesh--in plain english, loved the writer, before she knew the man. imagine, you who know him, the effect which his graceful bearing, high demeanor, and noble speech must have had on such a mind when first she saw the man of her visions in the twilight of her darkened room. she was at once in love as a poet-soul only can be; and browning, as by contagion or electricity, was no less from the first interview wholly in love with her.... he is a glorious fellow! oh, i forgot to say that the _soi-disante_ invalid, once emancipated from the paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival, or rather, a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats, and drinks like a young and healthy woman,--in fact, is a healthy woman of, i believe, some five and thirty. but one word covers all; they are in love, who lends his own youth to everything." the journey from paris to italy, if less comfortable and expeditious than now, was certainly more romantic, and the brownings, in company with mrs. jameson and her niece, fared forth to orleans, and thence to avignon, where they rested for two days, making a poetic pilgrimage to vaucluse, where petrarca had sought solitude. "there at the very source of the '_chiare, fresche e dolci acque_,'" records mrs. macpherson in her biography of mrs. jameson, "mr. browning took his wife up in his arms, and carrying her across through the shallow, curling waters, seated her on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. thus love and poetry took a new possession of the spot immortalized by petrarca's fancy." from marseilles they sailed to livorno (leghorn), the port only a few miles from pisa. the voyage was a delight to mrs. browning. she was enchanted with the beautiful panorama of the riviera as they sailed down the coast, where the terraces of mountains rise, with old castles and ruins often crowning their summits, and the white gleam of the hill-towns against a background of blue sky. all the spezzia region was haunted by memories of shelley; lerici, where last he had lived, was plainly in view, and they gazed sadly at viareggio, encircled by pine woods and mountains, where the body of the poet had been found. in pisa they took rooms in the collegio fernandino, in the piazza del duomo, in that corner of pisa wherein are grouped the cathedral, the baptistery, the leaning tower, and the campo santo, all in this consummate beauty of silence and seclusion,--a splendor of abandoned glory. all the stir of life (if, indeed, one may dream of life in pisa) is far away on the other side of the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the tower. a statue of cosimo di medici was near; the lanfranchi palace, where byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the arno. they quite preferred the duomo and the campo santo to social festivities, and professor ferrucci offered them all the hospitalities of the university library. they had an apartment of four rooms, "matted and carpeted," coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner at the trattoria, "thrushes and chianti with a marvelous cheapness, no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet elijah, or the lilies of the field, took as little thought for their dining," writes mrs. browning, "and it exactly suits us. at nine we have our supper of roast chestnuts and grapes.... my head goes round sometimes. i was never happy before in my life.... and when i am so good as to let myself be carried up-stairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my duty is considered done to a perfection worthy all adoration.... mrs. jameson and geraldine are staying in the hotel, and we manage to see them every day; so good and true and affectionate she is, and so much we shall miss her when she goes.... our present residence we have taken for six months, but we have dreams, and we discuss them like soothsayers over the evening grapes and chestnuts." that in london mrs. jameson, on her first call on miss barrett, should have so winningly insisted on being admitted to her room as to be successful, almost to miss barrett's own surprise, seems, when seen in connection with the way in which fate was to throw them together afterward, in italy, to have been one of those "foreordained" happenings of life. they heard a musical mass for the dead in the campo santo; they walked under orange trees with golden fruit hanging above their heads; they took drives to the foot of the mountains, and watched the reflections in the little lake of ascuno. mrs. browning, from her windows, could see the cathedral summit glitter whitely, between the blue sky and its own yellow marble walls. beautiful and tender letters came to them both from mr. kenyon, and they heard that carlyle had said that he hoped more from robert browning, for the people of england, than from any other living english writer. all of these things entered into the very fiber of their pisan days. pisa seemed to her a beautiful town,--it could not be less, she felt, with arno and its palaces, and it was to her full of repose, but not desolate. meantime, mr. browning was preparing for a new edition of his collected poems. curiously, all the biographers of robert browning have recorded that it was during this sojourn in pisa that the "sonnets from the portuguese" were first made known to him. dr. dowden quotes the story as given by mr. edmund gosse, and mr. gosse cites browning himself as his authority. yet there was some mistake, as the sonnets were not seen by mr. browning till some time later. robert barrett browning, in florence, in the spring of , in reply to a question asked by the writer of this book in regard to the accuracy of this impression, replied that both mr. gosse and dr. dowden were mistaken; as his mother did not show these "sonnets" to his father until the summer of , when they were at bagni di lucca. mr. gosse must in some way have mistaken mr. browning's words, and the error has perpetuated itself through every successive biography of the poet. the first home of the brownings in florence was in an apartment near santa maria novella, where the italian sunshine burned fiercely, and where mrs. browning exclaimed that she began to comprehend the possibility of st. lawrence's ecstasies on the gridiron. "yet there have been cool intermissions," she wrote, "and as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as we can step out of the window on a balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon watermelons, and iced water, and figs, and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with angelic patience." there was a five days' interlude at vallombrosa, which the poets vainly entreated the monks to prolong to two months, but the brethren would have none of the presence of two women,--mrs. browning and her maid, wilson. so they perforce left these fascinating hills, "a sea of hills looking alive among the clouds." still further up above the monastery was the old hermitage now transformed into a hotel. it was here that migliorotti passed many years, asserting that he could only think of it as paradise, and thus it came to be known as paradisino, the name it still bears. far below in a dim distance lies florence, with her domes and towers on which the sunshine glitters, or the white moonlight of the val d'arno shines; and on every hand are the deep valleys and crevasses, the val di sieve, the val di casentino, and the height of san miniato in alpe. castles and convents, or their ruins, abound; and here dante passed, and there st. benedict, and again is the path still holy with the footsteps of st. francis. the murmuring springs that feed the arno are heard in the hills; and the vast solitudes of the wood, with their ruined chapels and shrines, made this sojourn to the brownings something to be treasured in memory forever. they even wandered to that beautiful old fifteenth-century church, santa maria delle grazie vallombrosella, "a daughter of the monastery of vallombrosa," where were works of robbia, and saw the blue hills rise out of the green forests in their infinite expanse. [illustration: old monastery at vallombrosa "_and vallombrosa we two went to see_ _last june beloved companion..._" casa guidi windows.] when they fared forth for vallombrosa, it was at four o'clock in the morning, mrs. browning being all eagerness and enthusiasm for this matutinal pilgrimage. reaching pelago, their route wound for five miles along a "_via non rotabile_," through the most enchanting scenery, to pontassieve. "oh! such mountains," wrote mrs. browning of this never-to-be-forgotten journey, "as if the whole world were alive with mountains--such ravines--black in spite of flashing waters in them--such woods and rocks--traveled in basket sledges drawn by four white oxen--wilson and i and the luggage--and robert riding step by step. we were four hours doing the five miles, so you may fancy what rough work it was. whether i was most tired or charmed was a _tug_ between body and soul. "the worst was that," she continued, "there being a new abbot at the monastery--an austere man, jealous of his sanctity and the approach of women--our letter, and robert's eloquence to boot, did nothing for us, and we were ingloriously and ignominiously expelled at the end of five days." while the brownings were in vallombrosa arnould wrote to alfred domett: "browning is spending a luxurious year in italy--is, at this present writing, with his poetess bride dwelling in some hermit hut in vallombrosa, where the etruscan shades high overarched embower. he never fails to ask pressingly about you, and i give him all your messages. i would to god he would purge his style of obscurities,--that the wide world would, and the gay world and even the less illuminated part of the thinking world, know his greatness even as we do. i find myself reading 'paracelsus' and the 'dramatic lyrics' more often than anything else in verse." they descended, perforce, into florence again, burning sunshine and all, the abbot of the monastery having someway confounded their pleadings with the temptation of st. anthony, as something to be as heroically resisted. they set up their household gods in the shades of the via delle belle donne, near the duomo, where dinners, "unordered," mrs. browning said, "come through the streets, and spread themselves on our table, as hot as if we had smelt cutlets hours before." she found florence "unspeakably beautiful," both by grace of nature and of art, but they planned to go to rome in the early autumn, taking an apartment "over the tarpeian rock." later this plan was relinquished, and with an apartment on their hands for six months they yet abandoned it, for want of sunshine, and removed to casa guidi. "think what we have done," wrote mrs. browning to miss mitford; "taken two houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, pre-signing the contract. you will set it down to excellent poet's work in the way of domestic economy, but the fault was altogether mine, for my husband, to please me, took rooms with which i was not pleased for three days, through the absence of sunshine. the consequence was that we had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go, ourselves, but you can scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in italy. so away we came into the blaze of him into the piazza pitti; precisely opposite the grand duke's palace; i with my remorse, and poor robert without a single reproach. any other man, a little lower than the angels, would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing,--but as for his being angry with me for any cause except not eating enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way first." mrs. browning's dog, flush, was a member of the household not to be ignored, and her one source of consolation, in being turned away from the vallombrosa summer, lay in the fact that "flush hated it," and was frightened by the vast and somber pine forests. "flush likes civilized life," said mrs. browning laughingly, "and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as abound in florence." so now they bestowed themselves in "rooms yellow with sunshine from morning till night," in casa guidi, where, "for good omen," they looked down on the old gray church of san felice. there was a large, square anteroom, where the piano was placed, with one large picture, picked up in an obscure street in florence; and a little dining-room, whose walls were covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of tennyson, carlyle, and of robert browning; a long, narrow room, wraith-like with plaster casts and busts, was mr. browning's study, while she had her place in the large drawing-room, looking out upon the ancient church. its old pictures of saints, gazing sadly from their sepulchral frames of black wood, with here and there a tapestry, and with the lofty, massive bookcases of florentine carving, all gave the room a medieval look. almost could one fancy that it enthroned the "fairy lady of shalott," who might weave "... from day to day, a magic web of colors gay." dante's grave profile, a cast of the face of keats taken after death, and a few portraits of friends, added their interest to the atmosphere of a salon that seemed made for poets' uses. there were vast expanses of mirrors in the old carved florentine frames, a colossal green velvet sofa, suggesting a catafalque, and a supernaturally deep easy-chair, in the same green velvet, which was mrs. browning's favorite seat when she donned her singing robes. near this low arm-chair was always her little table, strewn with writing materials, books, and newspapers. other tables in the _salotto_ bore gayly bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. on the floor of a bedroom were the arms (in scabola), of the last count who had lived in this apartment, and there was a picturesque oil-jar, to hold rain-water, which mrs. browning declared would just hold the captain of the forty thieves. all in all, the poets vowed they would not change homes with the grand duke himself, who was their neighbor in the palazzo pitti at the distance of a stone's throw. in the late afternoons they would wander out to the loggia dei lanzi, where mrs. browning greatly admired cellini's perseus with the head of medusa, and they watched "the divine sunsets on the arno, turning it to pure gold under the bridges." sometimes they were joined by hiram powers, who was one of their earliest friends in florence, "our chief friend and favorite," mrs. browning said of him, and she found him a "simple, straightforward, genial american, as simple as the man of genius he has proved himself need be." another friend of these early days was miss boyle, a niece of the earl of cork, somewhat a poet, withal, who, with her mother, was domiciled in the villa careggi, in which lorenzo il magnifico died, and which was loaned to the boyles by lord holland. miss boyle frequently dropped in on them in the evening, "to catch us at hot chestnuts and mulled wine," said mrs. browning, "and a good deal of laughing she and robert make between them." on the terrace of casa guidi orange trees and camellias bloomed, and the salons with their "rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, and satin from cardinals' beds," were a picturesque haunt. the ideal and poetic life of mrs. browning, so far from isolating her from the ordinary day and daylight duties, invested these, instead, with glow and charm and playful repartee; and, indeed, her never-failing sense of humor transformed any inconvenience or inadvertence into amusement. she, who is conceded to have written the finest sonnets since shakespeare, could also mend a coat for her husband with a smile and a greek epigram. [illustration: the guardian angel. guercino. church of san agostino, fano, italy "_guercino drew this angel i saw teach_ (_alfred, dear friend!_) _that little child to pray._" the guardian angel; a picture at fano.] joseph arnould again wrote to their mutual friend, domett: "browning and his wife are still in florence; both ravished with italy and italian life; so much so, that i think for some years they will make it the paradise of their poetical exile. i hold fast to my faith in 'paracelsus.' browning and carlyle are my two crowning men amongst the highest english minds of the day. third comes alfred tennyson.... by-the-bye, did you ever happen upon browning's 'pauline'? a strange, wild (in parts singularly magnificent) poet-biography; his own early life as it presented itself to his own soul viewed poetically; in fact, psychologically speaking, his 'sartor resartus'; it was written and published three years before 'paracelsus,' when shelley was his god." a little later arnould wrote again: "browning and his wife are still in florence, and stay there till the summer; he is bringing out another edition of his poems (except 'sordello'), chapman and hall being his publishers, moxon having declined. he writes always most affectionately, and never forgets kind inquiries about and kind messages to you." allured by resplendent tales of fano, the brownings made a trip to that seaside hamlet, but found it uninhabitable in the late summer heat. a statue in the piazza commemorated the ancient _fanum fortunæ_ of tradition, and in the cathedral of san fortunato were frescoes by domenichino, and in the _chiesa_ of sant' agostino was the celebrated painting of sant' angelo custode, by guercino, which suggested to browning his poem "the guardian angel." the tender constancy of browning's friendship for alfred domett is in evidence in this poem, and the beauty of his reference to his wife,-- "my angel with me, too,..." lingers with the reader. in no poem of his entire work has browning given so complete a revelation of his own inner life as in this memorable lyric. the picture, dim as is the light in which it is seen, is one of the most impressive of all guercino's works. in the little church of san paterniano is a "marriage of the virgin," by guercino, and in the palazzo del municipio of fano is guercino's "betrothal of the virgin," and the "david" of domenichino. the brownings while in fano made the excursion to the summit of monte giove, an hour's drive from the piazza, where was the old monastery and a wonderful view of the adriatic, and of the panorama of the apennines. "we fled from fano after three days," wrote mrs. browning, "and finding ourselves cheated out of our dream of summer coolness, we resolved on substituting for it what the italians call '_un bel giro_.' so we went to ancona ... where we stayed a week, living on fish and cold water." they found ancona "a straggling sea city, holding up against the brown rocks, and elbowing out the purple tides," and mrs. browning felt an inclination to visit it again when they might find a little air and shadow. they went on to loreto, and then to ravenna, where in the early dawn of a summer morning they stood by the tomb of dante, deeply touched by the inscription. all through this journey they had "wonderful visions of beauty and glory." returning to florence, to their terraces, orange trees, and divine sunsets, one of their earliest visitors in casa guidi was father prout, who had chanced to be standing on the dock at livorno when they first landed in italy, from the journey from france, and who now appeared in florence on his way to rome. mr. browning had fallen ill after their trip to fano, and father prout prescribed for him "port wine and eggs," which _régime_, combined with the racy conversation of the genial priest, seemed efficacious. in the meantime mrs. browning stood with her husband by the tomb of michael angelo in santa croce; she saw the venus, the "divine raphaels." the peruzzi chapel had then recently been restored--some exquisite frescoes by giotto being among the successful restorations. the "mountainous marble masses" of the duomo, "tessellated marbles climbing into the sky, self-crowned with that prodigy of marble domes," struck mrs. browning as the wonder of all architecture. the political conditions of italy began to enlist her interest. in june of pio nono had ascended the papal throne, preceded by a reputation for a liberal policy, and it was even hoped that he would not oppose the formation of a united italy. the papal and the temporal government was still one, but pius ix was a statesman as well as a churchman. england had especially commissioned lord minto to advocate reform, and the enthusiasts for italian liberty received him with acclaim. the disasters of were still in the unrevealed future, and a new spirit was stirring all over the italian kingdom. piedmont was looked to with hope; and the grand duke of tuscany had instituted a national guard, as the first step toward popular government. the great topic of the day was the new hope of italy. in florence the streets and piazzas were vocal with praises of the grand duke. on one night that browning went to the opera the tumult grew intense, and the duke was escorted back to palazzo pitti with thousands of wax torchlights and a blaze of glory and cries of "eviva! eviva!" browning, however, distrusted pio nono, thinking him weak, and events proved that his opinion was justified. the winter of - was passed by the brownings in casa guidi. "i wish you could see what rooms we have," wrote mrs. browning to her husband's sister, sarianna: "what ceilings, what height and breadth, what a double terrace for orange trees; how cool, how likely to be warm, how perfect every way!" the poets were constantly engaged in their work. mrs. browning began her long poem, "casa guidi windows," and many of browning's lyrics that appeared in the collection called "men and women" were written at this period. they passed much time in the galleries and churches. they drove in the beautiful environs of florence. the pictures, history, and legends entered into their lives to serve in later days as poetic material. in the brief twilight of winter days they often strolled into the old gray church of san felice, on which their windows looked out, where browning would gratify his passion for music by evolving from the throbbing keys of the organ some faint toccata of galuppi's, while his wife smiled and listened, and the tide of florentine life flowed by in the streets outside. casa guidi is almost opposite the palazzo pitti, so that mrs. browning had easy access to her beloved madonnas in the pitti gallery, which to her husband, also, was so unfailing a resource. one of mrs. browning's american admirers, and one of the reviewers of her poems, george stillman hillard, visited florence that winter, and passed more than one evening in casa guidi with the brownings. of mrs. browning he wrote: "mrs. browning is in many respects the correlative of her husband.... i have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. she is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl.... nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit.... a union so complete as theirs--in which the mind has nothing to crave, nor the heart to sigh for--is cordial to behold and cheering to remember." of all italy mr. hillard perhaps best loved florence, finding there an indescribable charm, "a blending of present beauty and traditional interest; but then florence is alive," he added, "and not enslaved." it was probably hillard who suggested to william wetmore story that he should meet browning. at all events this meeting took place, initiating the friendship that endured "forty years, without a break," and that was one of the choicest social companionships. the spring of brought new joy to casa guidi, for on march was born their son, who was christened robert wiedemann barrett, the middle name (which in his manhood he dropped) being the maiden name of the poet's mother. the passion of both husband and wife for poetry was now quite equaled by that for parental duties, which they "caught up," said mrs. browning, "with a kind of rapture." mr. browning would walk the terraces where orange trees and oleanders blossomed, with the infant in his arms, and in the summer, when they visited spezzia, and the haunt of shelley at lurici, they wandered five miles into the mountains, the baby with them, on horseback and donkey-back. the child grew rounder and rosier; and mrs. browning was able to climb hills and help her husband to lose himself in the forests. the death of browning's mother immediately after the birth of his son was a great sadness to the poet, and one fully shared by his wife, who wrote to miss browning: "i grieve with you, as well as for you; for though i never saw her face, i loved that pure and tender spirit.... robert and i dwell on the hope that you and your father will come to us at once.... if florence is too far off, is there any other place where we could meet and arrange for the future?" the brownings went for the summer to bagni di lucca, after the little _détour_ on the mediterranean coast, where they lingered in the white marble mountains of carrara. in lucca they passed long summer hours in the beautiful duomo, which had been consecrated by pope alexander ii in the eleventh century. the beauty and the solitude charmed the poets; the little penini was the "most popular of babies," and when wilson carried the child out in the sunshine the italians would crowd around him and exclaim, "_che bel bambino!_" they had given him the pet italian name "penini," which always persisted. the austrians had then taken possession of florence, and leopoldo, "l'intrepido," as the italians asserted, remained quietly in the palazzo pitti. browning, writing to mrs. jameson, says there is little for his wife to tell, "for she is not likely to encroach upon my story which i could tell of her entirely angel nature, as divine a heart as god ever made." the poet with his wife and wilson and the baby made almost daily excursions into the forests and mountains, up precipitous fays and over headlong ravines; dining "with the goats," while the baby "lay on a shawl, rolling and laughing." the contrast of this mountain-climbing mrs. browning, with her husband and child, and the miss barrett of three or four years before, lying on a sofa in a darkened room, is rather impressive. the picture of one day is suggested by mrs. browning's description in a letter to miss mitford, where she writes: "... i have performed a great exploit, ridden on a donkey five miles deep into the mountains, to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. robert on horseback, wilson and the nurse with baby, on other donkeys; guides, of course. we set off at eight in the morning and returned at six p. m., after dining on the mountain pinnacle.... the scenery, sublime and wonderful,... innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a human habitation." [illustration: monument to dante, in the piazza di santa croce. stefano ricci. "_....the architect and hewer_ _did pile the empty marbles as thy tomb._" casa guidi windows.] it was during this _villeggiatura_ that mrs. browning, one morning after their breakfast, with shy sweetness, tucked the pages of the "sonnets" into her husband's pocket and swiftly vanished. robert barrett browning, who, as already noted, gave the history of this poetic interlude _viva voce_, has also recorded it in writing, as follows: what earthly vocabulary can offer fit words in which to speak of celestial beauty? how these exquisite "sonnets" tell the story of that romance of genius and love,--from the woman's first thrill of interest in the poetry of an unknown poet, to the hour when he, "the princely giver," brought to her "the gold and purple" of his heart "for such as i to take or leave withal," and she questions "can it be right to give what i can give?" with the fear that her delicacy of health should make such gifts "be counted with the ungenerous." but she thinks of how he "was in the world a year ago," and thus she drinks "of life's great cup of wonder! wonderful, never to feel thee thrill the day or night with personal act or speech,-- * * * * * ... atheists are as dull, who cannot guess god's presence out of sight." and the questioning,-- "how do i love thee? let me count the ways. i love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,... ... i love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if god choose, i shall but love thee better after death." returning to florence in october, browning soon began the preparation for his poem, "christmas eve and easter day," and mrs. browning arranged for a new one-volume edition of her poems, to include "the seraphim," and the poems that had appeared in the same volume, and also the poems appearing in , many of them revised. marchesa d'ossoli, whom the brownings had heretofore known as margaret fuller, surprised them by appearing in florence with her husband and child, the private marriage having taken place some two years before. the greenoughs, the storys, and mr. and mrs. christopher pearse cranch were all in florence, and were all habitués of casa guidi. mr. cranch, poet, painter, and musician, was the kindly friend of longfellow and of lowell in their cambridge homes, and the greenoughs and storys were also of the cambridge circle. to friends at home the marchesa wrote of going to the opera with the greenoughs, and that she saw the brownings often, "and i love and admire them more and more," she continued. "mr. browning enriches every hour passed with him, and he is a most true, cordial, and noble man." the florentine days have left their picturings: mr. story opens a studio, and while he is modeling, mrs. story reads to him from monckton milnes's life of keats, which mr. browning loaned them. mrs. story drives to casa guidi to carry mrs. browning her copy of "jane eyre," and mrs. greenough takes both mrs. story and mrs. browning to drive in the cascine. two american painters, frank boott and frank heath, are in florence, and are more or less caught up in the casa guidi life; and the coterie all go to mrs. trollope's to see fancy costumes arranged for a ball to be given at sir george hamilton's. in one of the three villas on bellosguardo miss isa blagden was now domiciled. for more than a quarter of a century miss blagden was a central figure in english society in florence. she became mrs. browning's nearest and most intimate friend, and she was the ardently prized friend of the trollopes also, and of miss frances power cobbe, who shared her villa during one spring when florence was in her most radiant beauty. "isa was a very bright, warm-hearted, clever little woman," said thomas adolphus trollope of her; "who knew everybody, and was, i think, more universally beloved among us than any other individual." miss blagden had written one or two novels, of little claim, however, and after her death a small volume of her poems was published, but all these had no more than the mere _succès d'estime_, as apparently the pen was with her, as with margaret fuller, a non-conductor; but as a choice spirit, of the most beautiful and engaging qualities of companionship, "isa," as she was always caressingly called, is still held in memory. madame pasquale villari, the wife of the great historian and the biographer of machiavelli and of savonarola, well remembers miss blagden, who died, indeed, in her arms in the summer of . the intimate friendship between mrs. browning and miss blagden was initiated in the early months of the residence of the brownings in florence; but it was in this winter of - that they began to see each other so constantly. the poems of matthew arnold were published that winter, among which mrs. browning especially liked "the deserted merman" and "the sick king of bokkara," and about this time the authorship of "jane eyre" was revealed, and charlotte brontë discovered under the _nom-de-plume_ of currer bell. during the time that mrs. browning had passed at torquay, before her marriage, she had met theodosia garrow, whose family were on intimate terms with mr. kenyon. miss barrett and miss garrow became friends, and when they met again it was in florence, miss garrow having become the wife of thomas adolphus trollope. hiram powers in these days was domiciled in the via dei serragli, in close proximity to casa guidi, and he frequently dropped in to have his morning coffee with the brownings. [illustration: the palazzo vecchio, florence.] landor had been for some years in his villa on the fiesolean slope, not far from maiano, where leigh hunt had wandered, dreaming of boccaccio. two scenes of the "decameron" were laid in this region, and the deep ravine at the foot of one of the neighboring hills was the original of the "valley of the ladies." not far away had been the house of machiavelli; and nestling among the blue hills was the little white village of settignano, where michael angelo was born. leigh hunt had been on terms of the most cordial intimacy with landor, whom he described as "living among his paintings and hospitalities"; and landor had also been visited by emerson, and by lord and lady blessington, by nathaniel parker willis (introduced by lady blessington), by greenough, francis and julius hare, and by that universal friend of every one, mr. kenyon, all before the arrival of the brownings in florence. landor had, however, been again in england for several years, where browning and miss barrett had both met and admired him, as has been recorded. the florence on which the brownings had entered differed little from the florence of to-day. the palazzo pitti, within a stone's throw of casa guidi, stood in the same cyclopean massiveness as now; the piazza and church of san miniato, cypress-shaded, rose from the sweep of the hills, and the miraculous crucifix of san giovanni gualberto was then, as now, an object of pilgrimage. the wonder of the italian sunsets, that "perished silently of their own glory," burned away over the far hills, and the strange, lofty tower of the palazzo vecchio caught the lingering rays. beyond the porta romana, not far from casa guidi, was the road to the val d'emo, where the certosa crowns an eminence. the stroll along the arno at sunset was a favorite one with the poets, and in late afternoons they often climbed the slope to the boboli gardens for the view over florence and the val d'arno. nor did they ever tire of lingering in the piazza della signoria, before the marvelous palace with its medieval tower, and standing before the colossal fountain of neptune, just behind the spot that is commemorated by a tablet in the pavement marking the martyrdom of savonarola. the great equestrian statue of cosimo i always engaged their attention in this historic piazza, which for four centuries had been the center of the political life of the florentines. all these places, the churches, monuments, palaces, and the art of florence, were fairly mirrored in the minds of the wedded poets, impressing their imagination with the fidelity of an image falling on a sensitized plate. to them, as to all who love and enter into the ineffable beauty of the city of lilies, it was an atmosphere of enchantment. chapter vii - "i heard last night a little child go singing 'neath casa guidi windows, by the church, _o bella libertà, o bella!..._" "but easter-day breaks! but christ rises! mercy every way is infinite,--and who can say?" "casa guidi windows"--society in florence--marchesa d'ossoli--browning's poetic creed--villeggiatura in siena--venice--brilliant life in london--paris and milsand--browning on shelley--in florence--idyllic days in bagni di lucca--mrs. browning's spiritual outlook--delightful winter in rome--a poetic pilgrimage--harriet hosmer--characteristics of mrs. browning. the brownings were never for a moment caught up in the wave of popular enthusiasm for pio nono that swept over italy. yet mrs. browning confessed herself as having been fairly "taken in" by the grand duke of tuscany. had _blackwood's magazine_ published part i of her "casa guidi windows" at the time that she sent it to this periodical, the poem would have been its own proof of her distrust of the pope, but it would also have offered the same proof of her ill-founded trust in the grand duke; so that, on the whole, she was well content to fail in having achieved the distinction of a prophet regarding pio nono, as no cassandra can afford to be convicted of delusion in some portion of the details of her prophecy. to achieve lasting reputation as a soothsayer, the prophecy must be accurate throughout. the fact that there was an interval of three years between the first and the second parts of this poem accounts for the discrepancy between them. in her own words she confessed: "i wrote a meditation and a dream, hearing a little child sing in the street: i leant upon his music as a theme, till it gave way beneath my heart's full beat which tried at an exultant prophecy, but dropped before the measure was complete-- alas for songs and hearts! o tuscany, o dante's florence, is the type too plain?" the flashing lightnings of a betrayed people gleam like an unsheathed sword in another canto beginning: "from casa guidi windows i looked forth, and saw ten thousand eyes of florentines flash back the triumph of the lombard north." these ardent lines explain how she had been misled, for who could dream at the time that leopoldo ("_l'intrepido_," as a poet of viareggio called him in a truly italian fervor of enthusiasm) could have proved himself a traitor to these trusting people,--these tender-hearted, gentle, courteous, refined italians? all these attributes pre-eminently characterize the people; but also mrs. browning's insight that "the patriots are not instructed, and the instructed are not patriots," was too true. the adherents of the papal power were strong and influential, and the personal character, whatever might be said of his political principles,--the personal character of pio nono was singularly winning, and this was by no means a negligible factor in the great problem then before italy. [illustration: statue of savonarola, by e. pazzi, in the sala dei cinquecento, palazzo vecchio.] mrs. browning very wisely decided to let "casa guidi windows" stand as written, with all the inconsistency between its first and second parts, as each reflected what she believed true at the time of writing; and it thus presents a most interesting and suggestive commentary on italian politics between and . its discrepancies are such "as we are called upon to accept at every hour by the conditions of our nature," she herself said of it, "implying the interval between aspiration and performance, between faith and disillusion, between hope and fact." this discrepancy was more painful to her than it can be even to the most critical reader; but the very nature of the poem, its very fidelity to the conditions and impressions of the moment, give it great value, though these impressions were to be modified or canceled by those of a later time; it should stand as it is, if given to the world at all. and the courage to avow one's self mistaken is not the least of the forms that moral courage may assume. regarding pio nono, mrs. browning is justified by history, notwithstanding the many amiable and beautiful qualities of the pontiff which forever assure him a place in affection, if not in political confidence. even his most disastrous errors were the errors of judgment rather than those of conscious intention. pio nono had the defects of his qualities, but loving and reverent pilgrimages are constantly made to that little chapel behind the iron railing in the old church of san lorenzo _fuori le mura_ in rome (occupying the site of the church founded by constantine), where his body is entombed in a marble sarcophagus of the plainest design according to his own instructions; but the interior of the vestibule is richly decorated with mosaic paintings, the tribute of those who loved him. leopoldo was so kindly a man, so sincere in his work for the liberty of the press and for other important reforms, that it is no marvel that mrs. browning invested him with resplendence of gifts he did not actually possess, but which it was only logical to feel that such a man must have. sometimes a too complete reliance on the _ex pede herculem_ method of judgment is misleading. while the cause of italian liberty had the entire sympathy of robert browning, he was yet little moved to use it as a poetic motive. professor hall griffin suggests that it is possible that browning deliberately chose not to enter a field which his wife so particularly made her own; but that is the less tenable as they never discussed their poetic work with each other, and as a rule rarely showed to each other a single poem until it was completed. the foreign society in florence at this time included some delightful american sojourners, for, beside the storys and hiram powers (an especial friend of the brownings), there were george s. hillard, george william curtis, and the marchesa d'ossoli with her husband,--all of whom were welcomed at casa guidi. the english society then in florence was, as mrs. browning wrote to miss mitford, "kept up much after the old english models, with a proper disdain for continental simplicities of expense; and neither my health nor our pecuniary circumstances," she says, "would admit of our entering it. the fact is, we are not like our child, who kisses everybody who smiles on him! you can scarcely imagine to yourself how we have retreated from the kind advances of the english here, and struggled with hands and feet to keep out of this gay society." but it is alluring to imagine the charm of their chosen circle, the storys always first and nearest, and these other gifted and interesting friends. mr. story is so universally thought of as a sculptor that it is not always realized how eminent he was in the world of letters as well. two volumes of his poems contain many of value, and a few, as the "cleopatra," "an estrangement," and the immortal "io victis," that the world would not willingly let die; his "roba di roma" is one of those absolutely indispensable works regarding the eternal city; and several other books of his, in sketch and criticism, enrich literature. a man of the most courtly and distinguished manner, of flawless courtesy, an artist of affluent expressions, it is not difficult to realize how congenial and delightful was his companionship, as well as that of his accomplished wife, to the brownings. indeed, no biographical record could be made of either household, with any completeness, that did not largely include the other. in all the lovely chronicles of literature and life there is no more beautiful instance of an almost lifelong friendship than that between robert browning and william wetmore story. in this spring of browning was at work on his "christmas eve and easter day," and casa guidi preserved a liberal margin of quiet and seclusion. "you can scarcely imagine," wrote mrs. browning, "the retired life we live.... we drive day by day through the lovely cascine, only sweeping through the city. just such a window where bianca capello looked out to see the duke go by,--and just such a door where tasso stood, and where dante drew his chair out to sit." when curtis visited florence he wrote to browning begging to be permitted to call, and he was one of the welcomed visitors in casa guidi. browning took him on many of those romantic excursions with which the environs of florence abound,--to settignano, where michael angelo was born; to the old roman amphitheater in fiesole; to that somber, haunted summit of san miniato, and to vallombrosa, where he played to curtis some of the old gregorian chants on an organ in the monastery. afterward, in a conversation with longfellow, mr. curtis recalled a hymn by pergolese that browning had played for him. tennyson's poem, "the princess," went into the third edition that winter, and mrs. browning observed that she knew of no poet, having claim _solely_ through poetry, who had attained so certain a success with so little delay. hearing that tennyson had remarked that the public "hated poetry," mrs. browning commented that, "divine poet as he was, and no laurel being too leafy for him," he must yet be unreasonable if he were not gratified with "so immediate and so conspicuous a success." browning's "imprisoned splendor" found expression that winter in several lyrics, which were included in the new (two volume) edition of his poems. among these were the "meeting at night," "parting at morning," "a woman's last word," and "evelyn hope." "love among the ruins," "old pictures in florence," "saul," and his "a toccata of galuppi's," all belong to this group. in that ardent love poem, "a woman's last word," occur the lines: "teach me, only teach, love! as i ought i will speak thy speech, love, think thy thought-- "meet, if thou require it, both demands, laying flesh and spirit in thy hands." no lyric that robert browning ever wrote is more haunting in its power and sweetness, or more rich in significance, than "evelyn hope," with "that piece of geranium flower" in the glass beside her beginning to die. the whole scene is suggested by this one detail, and in characterization of the young girl are these inimitable lines,-- "the good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire, and dew-- * * * * * yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, either i missed or itself missed me; * * * * * so, hush,--i will give you this leaf to keep; see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand! there, that is our secret: go to sleep! you will wake, and remember, and understand." [illustration: fresco of dante, by giotto, in the bargello, florence. "_.... with a softer brow_ _than giotto drew upon the wall._" casa guidi windows.] mrs. browning's touching lyric, "a child's grave at florence," was published in the _athenæum_ that winter; and in this occur the simple but appealing stanzas,-- "oh, my own baby on my knees, my leaping, dimpled treasure, * * * * * but god gives patience, love learns strength, and faith remembers promise; * * * * * still mine! maternal rights serene not given to another! the crystal bars shine faint between the souls of child and mother." to this day, that little grave in the english cemetery in florence, with its "a. a. e. c." is sought out by the visitor. to mrs. browning the love for her own child taught her the love of all mothers. in "only a curl" are the lines: "o children! i never lost one,-- but my arm's round my own little son, and love knows the secret of grief." florence "bristled with cannon" that winter, but nothing decisive occurred. the faith of the italian people in pio nono, however, grew less. mr. kirkup, the antiquarian, still carried on his controversy with bezzi as to which of them were the more entitled to the glory of discovering the dante portrait, and in the spring there occurred the long-deferred marriage of mrs. browning's sister henrietta to captain surtees cook, the attitude of mr. barrett being precisely the same as on the marriage of his daughter elizabeth to robert browning. the death of wordsworth was another of the events of this spring, leaving vacant the laureateship. the _athenæum_ at once advocated the appointment of mrs. browning, as one "eminently suitable under a female sovereign." other literary authorities coincided with this view, it seeming a sort of poetic justice that a woman poet should be laureate to a queen. the _athenæum_ asserted that "there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than elizabeth barrett browning," but the honor was finally conferred upon tennyson, with the ardent approbation of the brownings, who felt that his claim was rightly paramount. in the early summer the marchese and marchesa d'ossoli, with their child, sailed on that ill-starred voyage whose tragic ending startled the literary world of that day. their last evening in florence was passed with the brownings. the marchesa expressed a fear of the voyage that, after its fatal termination, was recalled by her friends as being almost prophetic. curiously she gave a little bible to the infant son of the poets as a presentation from her own little child; and robert barrett browning still treasures, as a strange relic, the book on whose fly-leaf is written "in memory of angelino d'ossoli." mrs. browning had a true regard for the marchesa, of whom she spoke as "a very interesting person, thoughtful, spiritual, in her habitual mode of mind." in his poetic creed, browning deprecated nothing more entirely (to use a mild term where a stronger would not be inappropriate) than that the poet should reveal his personal feeling in his poem; and to the dramatic character of his own work he held tenaciously. he rebuked the idea that shakespeare "unlocked his heart" to his readers, and he warns them off from the use of any fancied latch-key to his own inner citadel. "which of you did i enable once to slip inside my breast, there to catalogue and label what i like least, what love best?" and in another poem the reader will recall how fervently he thanks god that "even the meanest of his creatures" "boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her!" it was the knowledge of this intense and pervading conviction of her husband's that kept mrs. browning so long from showing to him her exquisitely tender and sacred self-revelation in the "sonnets from the portuguese." yet it was in that very "one word more" where browning thanks god for the "two soul-sides," that he most simply reveals himself, and also in "prospice" and in this "christmas eve and easter day." this poem, with its splendor of vision, was published in , with an immediate sale of two hundred copies, after which for the time the demand ceased. william sharp well designates it as a "remarkable apologia for christianity," for it can be almost thought of in connection with newman's "apologia pro vita sua," and as not remote from the train of speculative thought which matthew arnold wrought into his "literature and dogma." it is very impressive to see how the very content of hegelian dialectic is the key-note of browning's art. "the concrete and material content of a life of perfected knowledge and volition means one thing, only, love," teaches hegelian philosophy. this, too, is the entire message of browning's poetry. man must love god in the imperfect manifestation which is all he can offer of god. he must relate the imperfect expression to the perfect aspiration. "all i aspired to be and was not--comforts me." in the unfaltering search for the divine ideal is the true reward. "one great aim, like a guiding star, above-- which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height that takes the prize." browning conceived and presented the organic idea and ideal of life, in its fullness, its intensity, as perhaps few poets have ever done. he would almost place a positive sin above a negative virtue. to live intensely, even if it be sinfully, was to browning's vision to be on the upward way, rather than to be in a state of negative good. the spirit of man is its own witness of the presence of god. life cannot be truly lived in any fantastic isolation. "just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, a chorus ending from euripides." with browning, as with spinoza, there is an impatience, too, with the perpetual references to death, and they both constantly turn to the everlasting truth of life. "it is this harping on death that i despise so much," exclaimed browning, in the later years of his life, in a conversation with a friend. "in fiction, in poetry, in art, in literature this shadow of death, call it what you will,--despair, negation, indifference,--is upon us. but what fools who talk thus!... why, death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. without death, which is our word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life." after the completion of "christmas eve and easter day," mrs. browning questioned her husband about the apparent asceticism of the second part of the poem, and he replied that he meant it to show only one side of the matter. "don't think," she wrote to a friend, "that robert has taken to the cilix,--indeed he has not, but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them." browning teaches in this poem that faith is an adventure of the spirit, the aspiration felt, even if unnamed. but as to renunciation,-- "'renounce the world!'--ah, were it done by merely cutting one by one your limbs off, with your wise head last, how easy were it!" the renunciation that the poet sees is not so simple. it is not to put aside all the allurements of life, but to use them nobly; to persist in the life of the spirit, to offer love for hatred, truth for falsehood, generous self-sacrifice rather than to grasp advantages,--to live, not to forsake the common daily lot. it is, indeed, the philosophy amplified that is found in the words of jesus, "i pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." the brownings remained till late in the summer in their casa guidi home, detained at first by the illness of mrs. browning, after which they decided to postpone going to england until another year. in the late summer they went for a few weeks to siena, where, two miles outside the walls, they found a seven-roomed villa with a garden and vineyard and olive orchard, and "a magnificent view of a noble sweep of country, undulating hills and verdure, and on one side the great maremma extending to the foot of the roman mountains." they were located on a little hill called poggia dei venti, with all the winds of the heavens, indeed, blowing about them, and with overflowing quantities of milk and bread and wine, and a loggia at the top of the villa. mrs. browning found herself rapidly recovering strength, and their comfort was further extended by finding a library in siena, where, for three francs a month, they had access to the limited store of books which seem so luxurious in italy. the boy browning was delighted with his new surroundings, his sole infelicity being his inability to reach the grapes clustering over the trellises; he missed the austrian band that made music (or noise) for his delectation in florence, although to compensate for this privation he himself sang louder than ever. in after years mr. browning laughingly related this anecdote of his son's childhood: "i was one day playing a delicate piece of chopin's on the piano, and hearing a loud noise outside, hastily stopped playing when my little boy ran in, and my wife exclaimed: 'how could you leave off playing when penini brought three drums to accompany you?'" for all this bloom and beauty in siena they paid a little less than fifteen francs a week. soon after their arrival they learned of the shipwreck in which the marchese and marchesa d'ossoli and the little angelino all perished, and the tragedy deeply impressed mrs. browning. "the work that the marchesa was preparing upon italy would have been more equal to her faculties than anything she has ever produced," said mrs. browning, "her other writings being curiously inferior to the impression made by her conversation." before returning to florence the brownings passed a week in the town of siena to visit the pictures and churches, but they found it pathetic to leave the villa, and especially harrowing to their sensibilities to part with the pig. there is consolation, however, for most mortal sorrows, and the brownings found it in their intense interest in sienese art. the wonderful pulpit of the duomo, the work of niccola pisano; the font of san giovanni; the sodomas, and the libreria (the work of pius iii, which he built when he was cardinal, and in which, at the end of the aisle, is a picture of his own elevation to the papal throne, painted after his death) fascinated their attention. the brownings found it dazzling to enter this interior, all gold and color, with the most resplendent decorative effects. they followed in the footsteps of saint catherine, as do all pilgrims to siena, and climbed the hill to the oratorio di santa caterina in fontebranda, and read that inscription: "here she stood and touched that precious vessel and gift of god, blessed catherine, who in her life did so many miracles." they lingered, too, in the cappella santa caterina in san domenico, where catherine habitually prayed, where she beheld visions and received her mystic revelations. they loitered in the piazza, watching the stars hang over that aerial tower, "il mangia," and drove to san gimignano, with its picturesque medieval atmosphere. [illustration: cathedral of santa maria del fiore, florence, known as the duomo. "_the most to praise and the best to see_ _was the startling bell-tower giotto raised._" old pictures in florence.] it was in the autumn of that tennyson's "in memoriam," first privately and then anonymously printed, was acknowledged by the poet. the brownings read extracts from it in the _examiner_, and they were deeply moved by it. "oh, there's a poet!" wrote mrs. browning. at last, "by a sort of miracle," they obtained a copy, and mrs. browning was carried away with its exquisite touch, its truth and earnestness. "the book has gone to my heart and soul," she says, "i think it full of deep pathos and beauty." an interesting visitor dropped in at casa guidi in the person of a grandson of goethe; and his mission to florence, to meet the author of "paracelsus" and discuss with him the character of the poem, was a tribute to its power. mrs. browning, whose poetic ideals were so high, writing to a friend of their guest, rambled on into some allusions to poetic art, and expressed her opinion that all poets should take care to teach the world that poetry is a divine thing. "rather perish every verse i ever wrote, for one," she said, "than help to drag down an inch that standard of poetry which, for the sake of humanity as well as literature, should be kept high." in "aurora leigh" she expresses the same sentiment in the lines: "i, who love my art, would never wish it lower to suit my stature." full of affection and interest are mrs. browning's letters to her husband's sister, sarianna, who, with her father, is now living in hatcham, near london. in the spring of , after passing the winter in florence, the brownings set out for england; the plan at first being to go south to naples, pause at rome, and then go northward; but this was finally abandoned, and they proceeded directly to venice, where mrs. browning was enchanted with life set in a scenic loveliness of "music and stars." "i have been between heaven and earth since our arrival in venice," she writes. "the heaven of it is ineffable. never have i touched the skirts of so celestial a place. the beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water between all that gorgeous color and carving, the enchanting silence, the moonlight, the music, the gondolas,--i mix it all up together...." in the divine beauty of venetian evenings they sat in the white moonlight in the piazza of san marco, taking their coffee and the french papers together. or they would go to the opera, where for a ridiculously small sum they had an entire box to themselves. but while mrs. browning longed "to live and die in venice, and never go away," the climate did not agree with mr. browning, and they journeyed on toward paris, stopping one night at padua and driving out to arqua for petrarca's sake. in milan mrs. browning climbed the three hundred and fifty steps, to the topmost pinnacle of the glorious cathedral. at como they abandoned the diligence for the boat, sailing through that lovely chain of lakes to flüelen, and thence to lucerne, the scenery everywhere impressing mrs. browning as being so sublime that she "felt as if standing in the presence of god." from lucerne they made a _détour_ through germany, pausing at strasburg, and arriving in paris in july. this journey initiated an absence of almost a year and a half from italy. they had let their apartment, so they were quite free to wander, and they were even considering the possibility of remaining permanently in paris, whose brilliant intellectual life appealed to them both. after a brief sojourn in the french capital, they went on to england, and they had rather an embarrassment of riches in the number of houses proffered them, for tennyson begged them to accept the loan of his house and servants at twickenham, and joseph arnould was equally urgent that they should occupy his town house. but they took lodgings, instead, locating in devonshire street, and london life proceeds to swallow them up after its own absorbing fashion. they breakfast with rogers, and pass an evening with the carlyles; forster gives a "magnificent dinner" for them; mrs. fanny kemble calls, and sends them tickets for her reading of "hamlet"; and the proctors, mrs. jameson, and other friends abound. they go to new cross, hatcham, to visit mr. browning's father and sister, where the little penini "is taken into adoration" by his grandfather. mrs. browning's sisters show her every affection, and her brothers come; but her father, in reply to her own and her husband's letter, simply sends back to her, with their seals unbroken, all the letters she had written to him from italy. "so there's the end," she says; "i cannot, of course, write again. god takes it all into his own hands, and i wait." the warm affection of her sisters cheered her, mrs. surtees cook (henrietta barrett) coming up from somersetshire for a week's visit, and her sister arabel being invited with her. it was during this sojourn in london that bayard taylor, poet and critic, and afterward american minister plenipotentiary to germany, called upon the brownings, bringing a letter of introduction from hillard. the poet's wife impressed taylor as almost a spirit figure, with her pallor and slender grace, and the little penini, "a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, babbling his little sentences in italian," strayed in like a sunbeam. while taylor was with them, mr. kenyon called, and after his departure browning remarked to his guest: "there goes one of the most splendid men living,--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as kenyon the magnificent." the poets were overwhelmed with london hospitalities, and as mrs. browning gave her maid, wilson, leave of absence to visit her own family, the care of little pen fell upon her. he was in a state of "deplorable grief" for his nurse, "and after all," laughed mrs. browning, "the place of nursery maid is more suitable to me than that of poetess (or even poet's wife) in this obstreperous london." in the late september the brownings crossed to paris, carlyle being their traveling companion, and after an effort to secure an apartment near the madeleine, they finally established themselves in the avenue des champs Élysées (no. ), where they had pretty, sunny rooms, tastefully furnished, with the usual french lavishness in mirrors and clocks,--all for two hundred francs a month, which was hardly more than they had paid for the dreary grosvenor street lodgings in london. mrs. browning was very responsive to that indefinable exhilaration of atmosphere that pervades the french capital, and the little penini was charmed with the gayety and brightness. mrs. browning enjoyed the restaurant dining, _à la carte_, "and mixing up one's dinner with heaps of newspapers, and the 'solution' by Émile de girardin," who suggested, it seems, "that the next president of france should be a tailor." meantime she writes to a friend that "the 'elf' is flourishing in all good fairyhood, with a scarlet rose leaf on each cheek." they found themselves near neighbors of béranger, and frequently saw him promenading the avenue in a white hat, and they learned that he lived very quietly and "kept out of scrapes, poetical and political." mrs. browning notes that they would like to know béranger, were the stars propitious, and that no accredited letter of introduction to him would have been refused, but that they could not make up their minds to go to his door and introduce themselves as vagrant minstrels. to george sand they brought a letter from mazzini, and although they heard she "had taken vows against seeing strangers," mrs. browning declared she would not die, if she could help it, without meeting the novelist who had so captivated her. mazzini's letter, with one from themselves, was sent to george sand through mutual friends, and the following reply came: madame, j'aurai l'honneur de vous recevoir dimanche prochain, rue racine, . c'est le seul jour que je puisse passer chez moi; et encore je n'en suis pas absolument certaine--mais je ferai tellement mon possible, que ma bonne étoile m'y aidera peut-être un peu. agréez mille remerciments de coeur ainsi que monsieur browning, que j'espère voir avec vous, pour la sympathie que vous m'accordez. george sand. paris, _fevrier_, . the visit must have been mutually satisfactory, for it was repeated two or three times, and they found her simple, "without a shade of affectation or consciousness." another pleasure they had was in meeting lamartine, who took the initiative in asking to be allowed to call on them. after their arrival in paris carlyle passed several evenings with them, and mrs. browning felt, with her husband, that he was one of the most interesting of men, "highly picturesque" in conversation. her sympathetic insight gave her always the key and the clue to character, and perhaps no one ever read carlyle more truly than she, when she interpreted his bitterness only as melancholy, and his scorn as sensibility. the brownings had not been long in paris before they were invited to a reception at lady elgin's, where they met madame mohl, who at once cordially urged their coming to her "evenings," to meet her french celebrities. lady elgin was domiciled in the old faubourg saint germain, and received every monday evening from eight to twelve, _sans façon_, people being in morning dress, and being served with simple refreshment of tea and cakes. lady elgin expressed the hope that the brownings would come to her on every one of these evenings, mrs. browning said that she had expected "to see balzac's duchesses and _hommes de lettres_ on all sides," but she found it less notable, though very agreeable. the elder browning and his daughter pay a visit to them, greatly to mrs. browning's enjoyment. at this time they half contemplated living permanently in paris, if it seemed that mrs. browning could endure the climate, and she records, during the visit of her husband's father and sister, that if they do remain in paris they hope to induce these beloved members of the family to also establish themselves there. as it turned out, the brownings passed only this one winter in the french capital, but the next spring mr. browning (_père_) and his daughter sarianna took up their residence in paris, where they remained during the remainder of his life. mrs. browning was always deeply attached to her husband's sister. "sarianna is full of accomplishment and admirable sense," she wrote of her, and the visit of both gave her great pleasure. the _coup d'état_ took place early in december, but they felt no alarm. mrs. browning expressed her great faith in the french people, and declared the talk about "military despotism" to be all nonsense. the defect she saw in m. thiers was "a lack of breadth of view, which helped to bring the situation to a dead lock, on which the french had no choice than to sweep the board clean and begin again." it was during this early winter, with french politics and french society and occasional spectacles and processions extending from the carrousel to the arc de l'Étoile, that browning wrote that essay on shelley, which his publisher of that time, mr. moxon, had requested to accompany a series of shelley letters which had been discovered, but which were afterward found to be fraudulent. the edition was at once suppressed; but a few copies had already gone out, and, as professor dowden says, "the essay is interesting as browning's only considerable piece of prose;... for him the poet of 'prometheus unbound' was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of matthew arnold's fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. a great moral purpose looked forth from shelley's work, as it does from all lofty works of art." it was "the dream of boyhood," browning tells us, to render justice to shelley; and he availed himself of this opportunity with alluring eagerness. his interpretation of shelley is singularly noble and in accord with all the great spiritual teachings of his own poetic work. browning's plea that there is no basis for any adequate estimate of shelley, who "died before his youth was ended," cannot but commend its justice; and he urges that in any measurement of shelley as a man he must be contemplated "at his ultimate spiritual stature" and not judged by the mistakes of ten years before when in his entire immaturity of character. how all that infinite greatness of spirit and almost divine breadth of comprehension that characterize robert browning reveal themselves in this estimate of shelley. it is seeing human errors and mistakes as god sees them,--the temporary faults, defects, imperfections of the soul on its onward way to perfection. this was the attitude of browning's profoundest convictions regarding human life. "eternal process moving on; from state to state the spirit walks." this achievement of the divine ideal for man is not within the possibilities of the brief sojourn on earth, but what does the transition called death do for man but to "interpose at the difficult moment, snatch saul, the mistake, saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,--and bid him awake from the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set clear and safe in new light and new life,--a new harmony yet to be run, and continued, and ended--who knows?--or endure! the man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure." browning's message in its completeness was invariably that which is imaged, too, in these lines from mrs. browning's "aurora leigh": "and take for a worthier stage the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights." for it is only in this drama of the infinite life that the spiritual man can be tested. it was from the standpoint of an actor on this celestial stage that browning considered shelley. in the entire range of browning's art the spiritual man is imaged as a complex and individualized spark of the divine force. he is seen for a flitting moment on his way toward a divine destiny. professor hall griffin states as his belief that browning's paper was to some degree inspired by that of joseph milsand on himself, which appeared in august, , in the _revue des deux mondes_ in which milsand commended browning's work "as pervaded by an intense belief in the importance of the individual soul." to browning this winter was enchanted by the initiation of his friendship with milsand, the distinguished french scholar and critic, who had already made a name as a philosophic thinker and had published a book on ruskin (_l'esthétique anglaise_), and who was a discerner of spirits in poetic art as well. about the time that "paracelsus" appeared, milsand had seen an extract from the poem that captivated him, and he at once sent for the volume. he had also read, with the deepest interest, browning's "christmas eve and easter day." he was contributing to the _revue des deux mondes_ two papers on _la poésie anglaise depuis byron_, the first of which, on tennyson, had appeared the previous august. milsand was about completing the second paper of this series (on browning), and it happened just at this time that miss mitford's "recollections of a literary life" was published, in which, writing of the brownings, she had told the story of that tragic death of mrs. browning's brother edward, who had been drowned at torquay. in these days, when, as emerson rhymes the fact, "every thought is public, every nook is wide, the gossips spread each whisper and the gods from side to side," it is a little difficult to quite comprehend, even in comprehending mrs. browning's intense sensitiveness and the infinite sacredness of this grief, why she should have been so grieved at miss mitford's tender allusion to an accident that was, by its very nature, public, and which must have been reported in the newspapers of the day. mrs. browning was always singularly free from any morbid states, from any tendency to the _idée fixe_, to which a semi-invalid condition is peculiarly and pardonably liable; but she said, in an affectionate letter to miss mitford: "i have lived heart to heart (for instance) with my husband these five years: i have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips." it is said there are no secrets in heaven, and in that respect, at least, the twentieth century is not unlike the celestial state; and it is almost as hard a task for the imagination to comprehend the reserve in all personal matters that characterized the mid-nineteenth century as it would be to enter into absolute comprehension of the medieval mind; but mrs. browning's own pathetic deprecation of her feelings regarding this is its own passport to the sympathy of the reader. to miss mitford's reply, full of sympathetic comprehension and regret, mrs. browning replied that she understood, "and i thank you," she added, "and love you, which is better. now, let us talk of reasonable things." for mrs. browning had that rare gift and grace of instantly closing the chapter, and turning the page, and ceasing from all allusion to any subject of regret, after the inevitable reference of the moment had been made. she had the mental energy and the moral buoyancy to drop the matter, and this characteristic reveals how normal she was, and how far from any morbidness. milsand, with a delicacy that robert browning never forgot, came to him to ask his counsel regarding the inclusion of this tragic accident that had left such traces on his wife's genius and character (traces that are revealed in immortal expression in her poem, "de profundis," written some years later), and browning was profoundly touched by his consideration. grasping both milsand's hands, he exclaimed, "only a frenchman could have done this!" a friendship initiated under circumstances so unusual, and with such reverent intuition of mrs. browning's feelings, could not but hold its place apart to them both. the brownings found paris almost as ineffable in beauty in the early spring as was their florence. "it's rather dangerous to let the charm of paris work," laughed mrs. browning; "the honey will be clogging our feet soon, and we shall find it difficult to go away." they had a delightful winter socially, as well; they went to ary scheffer's and heard madame viardot, then in the height of her artistic fame; george sand sent them tickets for the _première_ of "les vacances de pandolphe"; they went to the vaudeville to see the "dame aux camellias," of which mrs. browning said that she did not agree with the common cry about its immorality. to her it was both moral and human, "but i never will go to see it again," she says, "for it almost broke my heart. the exquisite acting, the too literal truth to nature...." they met paul de musset, but missed his brother alfred that winter, whose poems they both cared for. the elder browning retained through his life that singular talent for caricature drawing that had amused and fascinated his son in the poet's childhood; and during his visit to the brownings in paris he had produced many of these drawings which became the delight of his grandson as well. the paris streets furnished him with some inimitable suggestions, and robert barrett browning, to this day, preserves many of these keen and humorous and extremely clever drawings of his grandfather. thierry, the historian, who was suffering from blindness, sent to the brownings a request that they would call on him, with which they immediately complied, and they were much interested in his views on france. the one disappointment of that season was in not meeting victor hugo, whose fiery hostility to the new _régime_ caused it to be more expedient for him to reside quite beyond possible sight of the gilded dome of the invalides. in june the brownings returned to london, where they domiciled themselves in welbeck street (no. ), mrs. browning's sisters both being near, mrs. surtees cook having established herself only twenty doors away, and miss arabel barrett being in close proximity in wimpole street. they were invited to kenyon's house at wimbledon, where landor was a guest, whom mrs. browning found "looking as young as ever, and full of passionate energy," and who talked with characteristic exaggeration of louis napoleon and of the president of the french nation. landor "detested" the one and "loathed" the other; and as he did not accept talleyrand's ideal of the use of language, he by no means concealed these sentiments. mazzini immediately sought the brownings, his "pale, spiritual face" shining, and his "intense eyes full of melancholy illusions." he brought mrs. carlyle with him, mrs. browning finding her "full of thought, and feeling, and character." miss mulock, who had then written "the ogilvies," and had also read her title clear to some poetic recognition, was in evidence that season, as were mr. and mrs. monckton milnes, and fanny kemble was also a brilliant figure in the social life. nor was the london of that day apparently without a taste for the sorceress and the soothsayer, for no less a personage than lord stanhope was, it seems, showing to the elect the "spirits of the sun" in a crystal ball, which lady blessington had bought from an egyptian magician and had sold again. lady blessington declared she had no understanding of the use of it, but it was on record that the initiated could therein behold oremus, spirit of the sun. both the crystal ball and the seers were immensely sought, notwithstanding the indignation expressed by mr. chorley, who regarded the combination of social festivities and crystal gazing as eminently scandalous. which element he considered the more dangerous is not on the palimpsest that records the story of these days. lord stanhope invited the brownings to these occult occasions of intermingled attractions, and mrs. browning writes: "for my part, i endured both luncheon and spiritual phenomena with great equanimity." an optician of london took advantage of the popular demand and offered a fine assortment of crystal ball spheres, at prices which quite restricted their sale to the possessors of comfortable rent-rolls, and lord stanhope asserted that a great number of persons resorted to these balls to divine the future, without the courage to confess it. one wonders as to whom "the american corinna, in yellow silk," in london, that season, could have been? the brownings were invited to a country house in farnham, to meet charles kingsley, who impressed them with his genial and tender kindness, and while they thought some of his social views wild and theoretical, they loved his earnestness and originality, and believed he could not be "otherwise than good and noble." it was during this summer (according to william michael rossetti) that browning and dante gabriel rossetti first met, rossetti coming to call on them in company with william allingham. on august , from chapel house, twickenham, tennyson wrote to mrs. browning of the birth of his son, hallam, to which she replied: "thank you and congratulate you from my heart. may god bless you all three.... will you say to dear mrs. tennyson how deeply i sympathize in her happiness...." to this letter browning added a postscript saying: "how happy i am in your happiness, and in the assurance that it is greater than even you can quite know yet. god bless, dear tennyson, you and all yours." tennyson wrote again to mrs. browning, saying, "... how very grateful your little note and browning's epilogue made me." and he signs himself "ever yours and your husband's." there was a brilliant christening luncheon at the home of monckton milnes, "and his baby," notes mrs. browning, "was made to sweep, in india muslin and brussels lace, among a very large circle of admiring guests." the brownings were especially invited to bring their little penini with them, "and he behaved like an angel, everybody said," continued his mother, "and looked very pretty, i said myself; only he disgraced us all at last by refusing to kiss the baby on the ground of its being '_troppo grande_.'" to mrs. tennyson's note of invitation to the brownings to attend the christening of their child, mrs. browning replied that they had planned to leave england before that date; "but you offer us an irresistible motive for staying, in spite of fogs and cold," she continued, "and we would not miss the christening for the world." at the last, however, mrs. browning was unable to go, so that the poet went alone. after the little ceremony browning took the boy in his arms and tossed him, while tennyson, looking on, exclaimed: "ah, that is as good as a glass of champagne for him." florence nightingale was a not infrequent visitor of the brownings that summer, and she always followed her calls by a gift of masses of flowers. while "morte d'arthur" had been written more than ten years previously, tennyson was now evolving the entire plan of the "idylls of the king." coventry patmore, who brought the manuscript copy of his own poems, published later, for mr. browning to read, mentioned to the poets that tennyson was writing a collection of poems on arthur, which were to be united by their subject, after the manner of "in memoriam," which project interested mrs. browning greatly. "the work will be full of beauty, i don't doubt," she said. ruskin invited the brownings to denmark hill to see his turners, and they found the pictures "divine." they liked ruskin very much, finding him "gentle, yet earnest." during this london sojourn mr. browning's old friend, william johnson fox, who had first encouraged the young poet by praising "not a little, which praise comforted me not a little," the verses of his "incondita"; who had written a favorable review of "pauline"; who had found a publisher for "paracelsus," and had introduced the poet to macready, again appears, and writes to his daughter that he has had "a charming hour" with the brownings, and that he is more fascinated than ever with mrs. browning. "she talked lots of george sand, and so beautifully, and she silver-electroplated louis napoleon!" mr. fox adds:[ ] "they came in to their lodgings late at night, and r. b. says that in the morning twilight he saw three pictures on the bedroom wall, and speculated as to whom they might be. light gradually showed the first to be beatrice cenci. 'good,' said he; 'in a poetic region.' more light; the second, lord byron! who can the third be? and what think you it was? your (fox's) sketch (engraved chalk portrait) of me?' he made quite a poem and picture of the affair. she seems much better; and the young florentine was gracious." in november the brownings again left london for florence, pausing a week in paris on the way, where they witnessed the picturesque pomp of the reception of louis napoleon, the day being brilliant with sunshine, and the hero of the hour producing an impression by riding entirely alone, with at least ten paces between himself and the nearest of his escort, till even charlotte cushman, sitting at the side of mrs. browning, watching the spectacle, declared this to be "fine." the "young florentine" was in a state of ecstasy, which he expressed in mingled french and italian. they journeyed to florence by the mont cenis, stopping a week in genoa, where mrs. browning lay ill on her sofa; but the warmth of the italian sunshine soon restored her, and for two days before they left, she was able to walk all about the beautiful old city. they visited together the andrea doria palace, and enjoyed sauntering in a sunshine that was like that of june days dropped into the heart of november. they were delighted to hear the sound of their "dear italian" again, and proceeded by diligence to florence, where they took possession of their casa guidi home, which looked, wrote mrs. browning to her sister-in-law, as if they had only left it yesterday. the little penini was "in a state of complete agitation" on entering florence, through having heard so much talk of it, and expressed his emotion by repeated caresses and embraces. mrs. browning shared the same amazement at the contrast of climate between turin and genoa that twentieth-century travelers experience; turin having been so cold that they were even obliged to have a fire all night, while at genoa they were "gasping for breath, with all the windows and doors open, blue skies burning overhead, and no air stirring." but this very heat was life-giving to mrs. browning as they lingered on the terraces, gazing on the beautiful bay encircled by its sweep of old marble palaces. she even climbed half-way up the lighthouse for the view, resting there while browning climbed to the top, for that incomparable outlook which every visitor endeavors to enjoy. in florence there were the "divine sunsets" over the arno, and penini's italian nurse rushing in to greet the child, exclaiming, "_dio mio, come e bellino!_" they "caught up their ancient traditions" just where they left them, mrs. browning observes, though mr. browning, "demoralized by the boulevards," missed the stir and intensity of parisian life. they found powers, the sculptor, changing his location, and mr. lytton (the future earl), who was an attaché at the english embassy, became a frequent and a welcome visitor. in a letter to mr. kenyon mrs. browning mentions that mr. lytton is interested in manifestations of spiritualism, and had informed her that, to his father's great satisfaction (his father being sir e. bulwer lytton), these manifestations had occurred at knebworth, the lytton home in england. tennyson's brother, who had married an italian lady, was in florence, and the american minister, mr. marsh. with young lytton at this time, poetry was an article of faith, and nothing would have seemed to him more improbable, even had any of his clairvoyants foretold it, than his future splendid career as viceroy of india. [illustration: the ponte vecchio and the arno, florence.] mrs. browning was reading prudhon that winter, and also swedenborg, lamartine, and other of the french writers. browning was writing from time to time many of the lyrics that appear in the collection entitled "men and women," while on mrs. browning had already dawned the plan of "aurora leigh." they read the novel of dumas, _diane de lys_, browning's verdict on it being that it was clever, but outrageous as to the morals; and mrs. browning rejoiced greatly in mrs. harriet beecher stowe's "uncle tom's cabin," saying of mrs. stowe, "no woman ever had such a success, such a fame." all in all, this winter of - was a very happy one to the poets, what with their work, their friends, playing with the little wiedemann (penini), the names seeming interchangeably used, and their reading, which included everything from poetry and romance to german mysticism, social economics, and french criticism. mrs. browning found one of the best apologies for louis napoleon in lamartine's work on the revolution of ' ; and she read, with equal interest, that of louis blanc on the same period. in april "colombe's birthday" was produced at the haymarket theater in london, the role of the heroine being taken by miss helen faucit, afterward lady martin. the author had no financial interest in this production, which ran for two weeks, and was spoken of by london critics as holding the house in fascinated attention, with other appreciative phrases. mrs. browning watches the drama of italian politics, and while she regarded mazzini as noble, she also felt him to be unwise, a verdict that time has since justified. "we see a great deal of frederick tennyson," she writes; "robert is very fond of him, and so am i. he too writes poems, and prints them, though not for the public." their mutual love of music was a strong bond between browning and mr. tennyson, who had a villa on the fiesolean slope, with a large hall in which he was reported to "sit in the midst of his forty fiddlers." for the coming summer they had planned a retreat into giotto's country, the casentino, but they finally decided on bagni di lucca again, where they remained from july till october, mr. browning writing "in a balcony" during this _villeggiatura_. before leaving florence they enjoyed an idyllic day at pratolina with mrs. kinney, the wife of the american minister to the court of turin, and the mother of edmund clarence stedman. the royal residences of the old dukes of tuscany were numerous, but among them all, that at pratolina, so associated with francesco primo and bianca capella, is perhaps the most interesting, and here mrs. kinney drove her guests, where they picnicked on a hillside which their hostess called the mount of vision because mrs. browning stood on it; mr. browning spoke of the genius of his wife, "losing himself in her glory," said mrs. kinney afterward, while mrs. browning lay on the grass and slept. the american minister and mrs. kinney were favorite guests in casa guidi, where they passed with the brownings the last evening before the poets set out for their summer retreat. mrs. browning delighted in mr. kinney's views of italy, and his belief in its progress and its comprehension of liberty. the youthful florentine, penini, was delighted at the thought of the change, and his devotion to his mother was instanced one night when browning playfully refused to give his wife a letter, and pen, taking the byplay seriously, fairly smothered her in his clinging embrace, exclaiming, "never mind, mine darling ba!" he had caught up his mother's pet name, "ba," and often used it. it was this name to which she refers in the poem beginning, "i have a name, a little name, uncadenced for the ear." beside the pratolina excursion, mr. lytton gave a little reception for them before the florentine circle dissolved for the summer, asking a few friends to meet the brownings at his villa on bellosguardo, where they all sat out on the terrace, and mrs. browning made the tea, and they feasted on nectar and ambrosia in the guise of cream and strawberries. "such a view!" said mrs. browning of that evening. "florence dissolving in the purple of the hills, and the stars looking on." mrs. browning's love for florence grew stronger with every year. that it was her son's native city was to her a deeply significant fact, for playfully as they called him the "young florentine," there was behind the light jest a profound recognition of the child's claim to his native country. still, with all this response to the enchantment of florence, they were planning to live in paris, after another winter (which they wished to pass in rome), as the elder browning and his daughter sarianna were now to live in the french capital, and robert browning was enamored of the brilliant, abounding life, and the art, and splendor of privilege, and opportunity in paris. "i think it too probable that i may not be able to bear two successive winters in the north," said mrs. browning, "but in that case it will be easy to take a flight for a few winter months into italy, and we shall regard paris, where robert's father and sister are waiting for us, as our fixed place of residence." this plan, however, was never carried out, as italy came to lay over them a still deeper spell, which it was impossible to break. mr. lytton, with whom mrs. browning talked of all these plans and dreams that evening on his terrace, had just privately printed his drama, "clytemnestra," which mrs. browning found "full of promise," although "too ambitious" because after Æschylus. but this young poet, afterward to be so widely known in the realm of poetry as "owen meredith," and as lord lytton in the realm of diplomacy and statesmanship, impressed her at the time as possessing an incontestable "faculty" in poetry, that made her expect a great deal from him in the future. she invited him to visit them in their sylvan retreat that summer at bagni di lucca, an invitation that he joyously accepted. some great _savant_, who was "strong in veritable chinese," found his way to casa guidi, as most of the wandering minstrels of the time did, and "nearly assassinated" the mistress of the _ménage_ with an interminable analysis of a japanese novel. mr. lytton, who was present, declared she grew paler and paler every moment, which she afterward asserted was not because of sympathy with the heroine of this complex tale! but this formidable scholar had a passport to mrs. browning's consideration by bringing her a little black profile of her beloved isa, which gave "the air of her head," and then, said mrs. browning, laughingly, "how could i complain of a man who rather flattered me than otherwise, and compared me to isaiah?" but at last, after the middle of july, what with poets, and sunsets from terraces, and savants, and stars, they really left their florence "dissolving in her purple hills" behind them, and bestowed themselves in casa tolomei, at the baths, where a row of plane trees stood before the door, in which the cicale sang all day, and solemn, mysterious mountains kept watch all day and night. there was a garden, lighted by the fireflies at night, and penini mistook the place for eden. his happiness overflowed in his prayers, and he thriftily united the petition that god would "mate him dood" with the supplication that god would also "tate him on a dontey," thus uniting all possible spiritual and temporal aspirations. the little fellow was wild with happiness in this enchanted glade, where the poets were "safe among mountains, shut in with a row of seven plane-trees joined at top." mr. browning was still working on his lyrics, of which his wife had seen very few. "we neither of us show our work to the other till it is finished," she said. she recognized that an artist must work in solitude until the actual result is achieved. [illustration: casa guidi "_i heard last night a little child go singing_ _'neath casa guidi windows, by the church._" casa guidi windows.] it seems that mr. chorley in london had fallen into depressed spirits that summer, indulging in the melancholy meditations that none of his friends loved him, beyond seeing in him a "creature to be eaten," and that, having furnished them with a banquet, their attentions to him were over (a most regrettable state of mind, one may observe, _en passant_, and one of those spiritual pitfalls which not only mr. chorley in particular, but all of us in general would do particularly well to avoid). the letter that mrs. browning wrote to him wonderfully reveals her all-comprehending sympathy and her spiritual buoyancy and intellectual poise. "you are very wrong," she says to him, "and i am very right to upbraid you. i take the pen from robert--he would take it if i did not. we scramble a little for the pen which is to tell you this, and be dull in the reiteration, rather than not to instruct you properly.... i quite understand how a whole life may seem rumpled and creased--torn for the moment; only you will live it smooth again, dear mr. chorley, take courage. you have time and strength and good aims; and human beings have been happy with much less.... i think we belied ourselves to you in england. if you knew how, at that time, robert was vexed and worn! why, he was not the same, even to me!... but then and now believe that he loved and loves you. set him down as a friend, as somebody to rest on, after all; and don't fancy that because we are away here in the wilderness (which blossoms as the rose, to one of us, at least) we may not be full of affectionate thoughts and feelings toward you in your different sort of life in london." the lovely spirit goes on to remind mr. chorley that they have a spare bedroom "which opens of itself at the thought of you," and that if he can trust himself so far from home, she begs him to try it for their sakes. "come and look in our faces, and learn us more by heart, and see whether we are not two friends?" surely, that life was rich, whatever else it might be denied, that had elizabeth browning for a friend. her genius for friendship was not less marvelous, nor less to be considered, than her genius as a poet. indeed, truly speaking, the one, in its ideal fullness and completeness, comprehends the other. the summer days among the beautiful hills, and by the green, rushing river, were made aboundingly happy to the brownings by the presence of their friends, the storys, who shared these vast solitudes. the storys had a villa perched on the top of the hill, just above the brownings', the terrace shaded with vines, and the great mountains towering all around them, while a swift mountain brook swept by under an arched bridge, its force turning picturesque mills far down the valley. under the shadow of the chestnut trees fringing its banks, shelley had once pushed his boat. "of society," wrote story to lowell, "there is none we care to meet but the brownings, and with them we have constant and delightful intercourse, interchanging long evenings, two or three times a week, and driving and walking whenever we meet. they are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic. both are busily engaged in writing, he on a volume of lyrics, and she on a tale or novel in verse." this "tale" must have been "aurora leigh." the wives of the poet and the sculptor held hilarious intercourse while going back and forth between each other's houses on donkey-back, with an enjoyment hardly eclipsed by that of penini himself, whose prayer that god would let him ride on "dontey-back" was so aboundingly granted that the child might well believe in the lavishness of divine mercies. browning and story walked beside and obediently held the reins of their wives' steeds, that no mishap might occur. how the picture of these arcadian days, in those vast leafy solitudes, peopled only by gods and muses, the attendant "elementals" of these choice spirits, flashes out through more than the half century that has passed since those days of their joyous intercourse. there was a night when story went alone to take tea with the brownings, staying till nearly midnight, and browning accompanied him home in the mystic moonlight. mrs. browning, who apparently shared her little son's predilections for the donkey as a means of transportation, would go for a morning ride, browning walking beside her as slowly as possible, to keep pace with the donkey's degree of speed. into this arcady came, by some untraced dispensation of the gods, a french master of recitations, who had taught rachel, and had otherwise allied himself with the great. m. alexandre brought his welcome with him, in his delightful recitations from the poets. mr. lytton, having accepted mrs. browning's invitation given to him on his bellosguardo terrace, now appeared; and the storys and the brownings organized a _festa_, in true italian spirit, in an excursion they should all make to prato fiortito. prato fiortito is six miles from bagni di lucca, perpendicularly up and down, "but such a vision of divine scenery," said mrs. browning. high among the mountains, bagni di lucca is yet surrounded by higher peaks of the apennines. the journey to prato fiortito is like going up and down a wall, the only path for the donkeys being in the beds of the torrents that cut their way down in the spring. here, after "glorious climbing," in which mrs. browning distinguished herself no less than the others, they arrived at the little old church, set amid majestic limestone mountains and embowered in purple shade. here they feasted, penini overcome with delight, and on shawls spread under the great chestnut trees mrs. browning and mrs. story were made luxuriously comfortable, while they all talked and read, m. alexandre reciting from the french dramatists, and lytton reading from his "clytemnestra." the luncheon was adorned by a mass of wild strawberries, picked on the spot, by browning, story, lytton, and alexandre, while the ladies co-operated in the industry at this honestly earned feast by assisting to hull the berries. the bottle of cream and package of sugar tucked away in the picnic basket added all that heart could desire to this ambrosial luncheon. mrs. story, whom mrs. browning described as "a sympathetic, graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought," was a most agreeable companion; and she and mrs. browning frequently exchanged feminine gossip over basins of strawberries and milk in each other's houses, for strawberries abounded in these hills. "if a tree is felled in the forests," said mrs. browning, "strawberries spring up just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing." one night when the brownings were having tea with the storys, the talk turned on hawthorne. story, of course, knew the great romancer, whom the brownings had not then met and about whom they were curious. "hawthorne is a man who talks with a pen," said story; "he does not open socially to his intimate friends any more than he does to strangers. it isn't his way to converse." mrs. browning had then just been reading the "blithedale romance," in which she had sought unavailingly, it seems, for some more personal clue to the inner life of its author. on a brilliant august day the brownings and the storys fared forth on a grand excursion on donkey-back, to benabbia, a hilltown, perched on one of the peaks. above it on the rocks is a colossal cross, traced by some thunder-bolt of the gods, cut in the solid stone. from this excursion they all returned after dark, in terror of their lives lest the donkeys slip down the sheer precipices; but the scenery was "exquisite, past all beauty." mrs. browning was spell-bound with its marvelous sublimity, as they looked around "on the world of innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a human habitation." mrs. browning was then reading the poems of coventry patmore, just published, of which browning had read the manuscript in london in the previous year. the poems of alexander smith had also appeared at this time, and in him mrs. browning found "an opulence of imagery," but a defect as to the intellectual part of poetry. with her characteristic tolerance, she instanced his youth in plea of this defect, and said that his images were "flowers thrown to him by the gods, gods beautiful and fragrant, but having no root either in etna or olympus." enamored, as ever, of novels, she was also reading "vilette," which she thought a strong story, though lacking charm, and mrs. gaskell's "ruth," which pleased her greatly. with no dread of death, mrs. browning had a horror of the "rust of age," the touch of age "which is the thickening of the mortal mask between souls. why talk of age," she would say, "when we are all young in soul and heart?... be sure that it's highly moral to be young as long as possible. women who dress 'suitably to their years' (that is, as hideously as possible) are a disgrace to their sex, aren't they now?" she would laughingly declare. this summer in the apennines at bagni di lucca had been a fruitful one to browning in his poetic work. it became one of constant development, and, as edmund gosse points out, "of clarification and increasing selection." he had already written many of his finest lyrics, "any wife to any husband," "the guardian angel," and "saul"; and in these and succeeding months he produced that miracle of beauty, the poem called "the flight of the duchess"; and "a grammarian's funeral," "the statue and the bust," "childe roland to the dark tower came," "fra lippo lippi," and "andrea del sarto." to milsand, browning wrote that he was at work on lyrics "with more music and painting than before." the idyllic summer among the grand chestnut trees came to an end, as summers always do, and october found the brownings again in casa guidi, though preparing to pass the winter in rome. verdi had just completed his opera of "trovatore," which was performed at the pergola in florence, and the poets found it "very passionate and dramatic." in november they fared forth for rome, "an exquisite journey of eight days," chronicled mrs. browning, "seeing the great monastery and triple church of assisi, and that wonderful passion of waters at terni." it was the picturesque rome of the popes that still remained in that winter, and the eternal city was aglow with splendid festivals and processions and with artistic interest. the brownings caught something of its spirit, even as they came within view of the colossal dome of st. peter's, and they entered the city in the highest spirits, "robert and penini singing," related mrs. browning, "actually, for the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and scene." the storys had engaged an apartment for them, and they found "lighted fires and lamps," and all comfort. [illustration: the clasped hands of robert and elizabeth barrett browning cast in bronze from the model taken by harriet hosmer in rome, . the original is in the possession of the author.] that winter of - still stands out in the roman panorama as one of exceptional brilliancy. there was a galaxy of artists,--story, who had already won fame on two continents; william page, who believed he had discovered the secret of titian's coloring; crawford, and "young leighton," as mrs. browning called the future president of the royal academy; gibson, and his brilliant pupil, harriet hosmer; fisher, who painted a portrait of browning, and also of penini, for his own use to exhibit in london. it was during this winter that miss hosmer took the cast of the "clasped hands" of the brownings, which was put into bronze, and which must always remain a work of the most tender interest. mrs. browning was very fond of "hatty," as she called her, and in a letter to her isa she described a pretty scene when lady marian alford, the daughter of the duke of northampton, knelt before the girl sculptor and placed on her finger a ring of diamonds surrounding a ruby. browning's early friend, m. de ripert-monclar, to whom he had dedicated his "paracelsus," and lockhart, were also in rome; and leighton was completing his great canvas of cimabue's madonna carried in procession through the streets of florence. the brownings were domiciled in the bocca di leone, while the storys were in the piazza di spagna; thackeray and his two daughters were close at hand, in and out at the brownings', with his "talk of glittering dust swept out of salons." there were hans christian andersen, and fanny kemble, with her sister, mrs. sartoris, and lady oswald, a sister of lord elgin. thackeray's daughter, miss anne thackeray (now lady ritchie), still finds vivid her girlish memory of mrs. browning,--"a slight figure in a thin black gown and the unpretentious implements of her magic," by her sofa, on a little table. lady ritchie turns back to her diary of that winter to find in it another of her early impressions of mrs. browning, "in soft, falling flounces of black silk, with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin gold chain around her neck." this chain held a tiny locket of crystal set in coils of gold, which she had worn from childhood, not at all as an ornament, but as a little souvenir. on her death mr. browning put into it some of her hair, and gave the treasured relic to kate field, from whom it came later into the possession of the writer of this book. lady ritchie recalls one memorable evening that season in the salon of mrs. sartoris, when the guests assembled in the lofty roman drawing-room, full of "flowers and light, of comfort and color." she recalls how the swinging lamps were lighted, shedding a soft glow; how the grand piano stood open, and there was music, and "tables piled with books," and flowers everywhere. the hostess was in a pearl satin gown with flowing train, and sat by a round table reading aloud from poems of mr. browning, when the poet himself was announced, "and as she read, in her wonderful muse-like way, he walked in." all the lively company were half laughing and half protesting, and mrs. kemble, with her regal air, called him to her side, to submit to him some disputed point, which he evaded. mrs. sartoris had a story, with which she amused her guests, of a luncheon with the brownings, somewhere in italy, where, when she rose to go, and remarked how delightful it had been, and the other guests joined in their expressions of enjoyment, mr. browning impulsively exclaimed: "come back and sup with us, do!" and mrs. browning, with the dismay of the housewife, cried: "oh, robert, there is no supper, nothing but the remains of the pie." to which the poet rejoined: "then come back and finish the pie." mrs. browning was deeply attached to fanny kemble. she describes her, at this time, as "looking magnificent, with her black hair and radiant smile. a very noble creature, indeed," added mrs. browning; "somewhat unelastic, attached to the old modes of thought and convention, but noble in qualities and defects.... mrs. sartoris is genial and generous ... and her house has the best society in rome, and exquisite music, of course." mrs. browning often joined her husband in excursions to galleries, villas, and ruins; and when in the sistine chapel, on a memorable festival, they heard "the wrong miserere," she yet found it "very fine, right or wrong, and overcoming in its pathos." m. goltz, the austrian minister, was an acquaintance whom the brownings found "witty and agreeable," and mrs. browning called the city "a palimpsest rome," with its records written all over the antique. the sorrow of the storys over the death of a little son shadowed mrs. browning, and she feared for her own penini, but as the winter went on she joyfully wrote of him that he "had not dropped a single rose-leaf from his cheeks," and with her sweet tenderness of motherly love she adds that he is "a poetical child, really, and in the best sense. he is full of sweetness and vivacity together, of imagination and grace," and she pictures his "blue, far-reaching eyes, and the innocent face framed in golden ringlets." mrs. kemble came to them two or three times a week, and they had long talks, "we three together," records mrs. browning. mr. page occupied the apartment just over that of the brownings, and they saw much of him. "his portrait of miss cushman is a miracle," exclaimed mrs. browning. page begged to paint a portrait of the poet, of which mrs. browning said that he "painted a picture of robert like an italian, and then presented it to me like a prince." the coloring was venetian, and the picture was at first considered remarkable, but its color has entirely vanished now, so that it seems its painter was not successful in surprising the secret of titian. in the spring of mr. barrett browning showed this picture to some friends in his villa near florence, and its thick, opaque surface hardly retained even a suggestion of color. not the least of mrs. browning's enjoyment of that winter was the pleasure that rome gave to her little son. "penini is overwhelmed with attentions and gifts of all kinds," she wrote, and she described a children's party given for him by mrs. page, who decorated the table with a huge cake, bearing "penini" in sugar letters, where he sat at the head and did the honors. browning all this time was writing, although the social allurements made sad havoc on his time. they wandered under the great ilex trees of the pincio, and gazed at the monte mario pine. then, as now, every one drove in that circular route on the pincian hill, where carriages meet each other in passing every five minutes. with the storys and other friends they often went for long drives and frequent picnics on the wonderful campagna, that vast green sea that surrounds rome, the campagna mystica. on one day mr. browning met "hatty" hosmer on the spanish steps, and said to her: "next saturday ba and i are going to albano on a picnic till monday, and you and leighton are to go with us." "why this extravagance?" laughingly questioned miss hosmer. "on account of a cheque, a _buona grazia_, that ticknor and fields of boston have sent--one they were not in the least obliged to send," replied the poet. in those days there was no international copyright, but mr. browning's boston publishers needed no legal constraint to act with ideal honor. so on the appointed morning, a _partie carré_ of artists--two poets, one sculptor, one painter--drove gayly through the porta san giovanni, on that road to albano, with its wonderful views of the claudian aqueducts in the distance, through whose arches the blue sky is bluer, and beyond which are the violet-hued alban hills. then, as now, the road led by the casa dei spirite, with its haunting associations, and its strange mural decorations of specters and wraiths. past that overhanging cliff, with its tragic legend, they drove, encountering the long procession of wine carts, with their tinkling bells, and the dogs guarding the sleeping padrones. passing the night in albano, the next day they mounted donkeys for their excursion into the alban hills, past lonely monasteries, up the heights of rocca di papa, where the traveler comes on the ancient camping-ground of hannibal, and where they see the padres and acolytes sunning themselves on the slopes of monte cavo; on again, to the rocky terraces from which one looks down on alba longa and the depths of lago di nemi, beneath whose waters is still supposed to be the barque of caligula, and across the expanse of the green campagna to where Æneas landed. [illustration: the campagna and ruins of the claudian aqueducts, rome. "_there, branching from the brickwork's cleft,_ _some old tomb's ruin...._" two in the campagna. ] miss hosmer is the authority on this poetic pilgrimage, and she related that they all talked of art, of the difficulties of art,--those encountered by the poet, the sculptor, and the painter,--each regarding his own medium of expression as the most difficult. mrs. browning's "hatty" had bestowed in her bag a volume of mr. browning's, and on the homeward journey from albano to rome he read aloud to them his "saul." at the half-way house on the campagna, the torre di mezza, they paused, to gaze at the "weird watcher of the roman campagna," the monument to apuleia, whose ruins are said to have assumed her features. nothing in all the classic atmosphere of rome, filled with the most impressive associations of its mighty past, appealed more strongly to the brownings than the glorious campagna, with its apparently infinite open space, brilliant with myriads of flowers, and the vast billowing slopes that break like green waves against the purple hills, in their changeful panorama of clouds and mists and snow-crowned heights dazzling under a glowing sun. fascinating as this winter in rome had been to them, rich in friendships and in art, the brownings were yet glad to return to their florence with the may days, to give diligence and devotion to their poetic work, which nowhere proceeded so felicitously as in casa guidi. browning was now definitely engaged on the poems that were to make up the "men and women." mrs. browning was equally absorbed in "aurora leigh." each morning after their arcadian repast of coffee and fruit, he went to his study, and she to the _salotto_, whose windows opened on the terrace looking out on old gray san felice where she always wrote, to devote themselves to serious work. "aurora leigh" proceeded rapidly some mornings, and again its progress would remind her of the web of penelope. during this summer browning completed "in a balcony," and wrote the "holy cross day," the "epistle of karnish," and "ben karshook's wisdom." like his wife, browning held poetry to be above all other earthly interests; he was a poet by nature and by grace, and his vast range of scholarship, his "british-museum-library memory," and his artistic feeling and taste, all conserved to this one end. but poetry to him was not outside, but inclusive of the very fullest human life. mrs. browning's lines, "... no perfect artist is developed here from any imperfect woman,..." embodied his convictions as well, for man and woman alike. he had that royal gift of life in its fullness, an almost boundless capacity of enjoyment, and to him life meant the completest development and exercise of all its powers. the brownings found their florentine circle all in evidence. mr. lytton, a favorite and familiar visitor at casa guidi; frederick tennyson (and perhaps his "forty fiddlers" as well), and the trollopes, isa blagden, and various wandering minstrels. they passed evenings with mr. lytton in his villa, and would walk home "to the song of nightingales by starlight and firefly light." to mrs. browning florence looked more beautiful than ever after rome. "i love the very stones of it," she said. limitations of finance kept them in florence all that summer. "a ship was to have brought us in something, and brought us in nothing," she explained to a friend in england, "and the nothing had a discount, beside." but she took comfort in the fact that penini was quite as well and almost as rosy as ever, despite the intense heat; and the starlight and the song of the nightingales were not without consolation. a letter from milsand ("one of the noblest and most intellectual men," says mrs. browning of him) came, and they were interested in his arraignment of the paralysis of imagination in literature. in september she hears from miss mitford of her failing health, and tenderly writes: "may the divine love in the face of our lord jesus christ shine upon you day and night, with his ineffable tenderness." mrs. browning's religious feeling was always of that perfect reliance on the divine love that is the practical support of life. "for my own part," she continues, "i have been long convinced that what we call death is a mere incident in life.... i believe that the body of flesh is a mere husk that drops off at death, while the spiritual body emerges in glorious resurrection at once. swedenborg says some people do not immediately realize that they have passed death, which seems to me highly probable. it is curious that frederick denison maurice takes this precise view of the resurrection, with apparent unconsciousness of what swedenborg has stated, and that i, too, long before i had ever read swedenborg, or had even heard the name of maurice, came to the same conclusion.... i believe in an active, human life, beyond death, as before it, an uninterrupted life." mrs. browning would have found herself in harmony with that spiritual genius, dr. william james, who said: "and if our needs outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that the invisible universe is there? often our faith in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true." faith is the divine vision, and no one ever more absolutely realized this truth than elizabeth browning. "ah, blessed vision! blood of god! my spirit beats her mortal bars, as down dark tides the glory slides, and star-like mingles with the stars." at another time mrs. browning remarked that she should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion, according to the needs of man; while dr. james has said, "believe what is in the line of your needs." many similarities of expression reveal to how wonderful a degree mrs. browning had intuitively grasped phases of truth that became the recognized philosophy of a succeeding generation, and which were stamped by the brilliant and profound genius of william james, the greatest psychologist of the nineteenth century. "what comes from god has life in it," said mrs. browning, "and certainly from the growth of all living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted." the summer passed "among our own nightingales and fireflies," playfully said mrs. browning, and in the autumn mrs. sartoris stopped to see them, on her way to rome, "singing passionately and talking eloquently." notwithstanding some illness, mrs. browning completed four thousand lines of "aurora leigh" before the new year of , in which were expressed all her largest philosophic thought, and her deepest insight into the problems of life. fogazzaro, whose recent death has deprived italy of her greatest literary inspirer since carducci, said of "aurora leigh" that he wished the youth of italy might study this great poem,--"those who desire poetic fame that they might gain a high conception of poetry; the weak, in that they might find stimulus for strength; the sad and discouraged, in that they might find comfort and encouragement." it was this eminent italian novelist and senator (the king of italy naming a man as senator, not in the least because of any political reasons, but to confer on him the honor of recognition of his genius in literature, science, or art, and a very inconvenient, however highly prized, honor he often finds it),--senator antonio fogazzaro, who contributed, to an italian biography[ ] of the brownings by fanny zampini, contessa salazar, an "introduction" which is a notable piece of critical appreciation of the wedded poets from the italian standpoint. the senator records himself as believing that few poets can be read "with so much intellectual pleasure and spiritual good; for if the works of robert and elizabeth browning surprise us by the vigorous originality of their thought," he continues, "they also show us a rare and salutary spectacle,--two souls as great in their moral character as in their poetic imagination. 'aurora leigh' i esteem mrs. browning's masterpiece.... the ideal poet is a prophet, inspired by god to proclaim eternal truth...." the student of italian literature will find a number of critical appreciations of the brownings, written within the past forty or fifty years, some of which offer no little interest. "every man has two countries, his own and italy," and the land they had made their own in love and devotion returned this devotion in measure overflowing. robert and elizabeth browning would have been great,--even immortally great, as man and woman, if they had not been great poets. they both lived, in a simple, natural way, the essential life of the spirit, the life of scholarship and noble culture, of the profound significance of thought, of creative energy, of wide interest in all the important movements of the day, and of beautiful and sincere friendships. "o life, o poetry, which means life in life," wrote mrs. browning. the character of mrs. browning has been so often portrayed as that of some abnormal being, half-nervous invalid, half-angel, as if she were a special creation of nature with no particular relation to the great active world of men and women, that it is quite time to do away with the category of nonsense and literary hallucination. one does not become less than woman by being more. mrs. browning fulfilled every sweetest relation in life as daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother; and her life was not the less normal in that it was one of exceptional power and exaltation. she saw in art the most potent factor for high service, and she held that it existed for love's sake, for the sake of human co-operation with the purposes of god. chapter viii - "inward evermore to outward,--so in life, and so in art which still is life." "... i love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if god choose, i shall but love thee better after death." london life--an interlude in paris--"aurora leigh"--florentine days--"men and women"--the hawthornes--"the old yellow book"--a summer in normandy--the eternal city--the storys and other friends--lilies of florence--"it is beautiful!" the florentine winter is by no means an uninterrupted dream of sunshine and roses; the tramontana sweeps down from the encircling apennines, with its peculiarly piercing cold that penetrates the entire system with the unerring precision of the röentgen ray; torrents of icy rains fall; and the purple hills, on whose crest st. domenico met st. benedict, are shrouded in clouds and mist. all the loveliness of florence seems to be utterly effaced, till one questions if it existed except as a mirage; but when the storm ceases, and the sun shines again, there is an instantaneous transformation. in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the spell of enchantment resumes its sway over the flower town, and all is forgiven and forgotten. the winter of was bitterly cold, and by january the brownings fairly barricaded themselves in two rooms which could best be heated, and in these fires were kept up by day as well as night. in april, however, the divine days came again, and the green hillslope from the palazzo pitti to the boboli gardens was gay with flowers. mr. browning gave four hours every day to dictating his poems to a friend who was transcribing them for him. mrs. browning had completed some seven thousand lines of "aurora leigh," but not one of these had yet been copied for publication. various hindrances beset them, but finally in june they left for england, their most important impedimenta being sixteen thousand lines of poetry, almost equally divided between them, comprising his manuscript for "men and women," and hers for "aurora leigh," complete, save for the last three books. the change was by no means unalloyed joy. to give up, even temporarily, their "dream-life of florence," leaving the old tapestries and pre-giotto pictures, for london lodgings, was not exhilarating; but after a week in paris they found themselves in an apartment in no. dorset street, manchester square, where they remained until october, every hour filled with engagements or work. proof-sheets were coming in at all hours; likewise friends, with the usual contingent of the "devastators of a day," and all that fatigue and interruption and turmoil that lies in wait for the pilgrim returning to his former home, beset and entangled them. mrs. browning's youngest brother, alfred barrett, was married that summer to his cousin lizzie, the "pretty cousin" to whom allusion has already been made as the original of mrs. browning's poem, "a portrait." they were married in paris at the english embassy, and passed the summer on the continent. mrs. browning's sister henrietta (mrs. surtees cook) was unable to come up to london, so that the hoped-for pleasure of seeing this brother and sister was denied her; but miss arabel barrett was close at hand in the wimpole street home, and the sisters were much together. mr. barrett had never changed his mental attitude regarding the marriage of his daughter elizabeth, nor that of any of his children, and while this was a constant and never-forgotten grief with mrs. browning, there seems no necessity for prolonged allusion to it. the matter can only be relegated to the realms of non-comprehension as the idiosyncrasy of an otherwise good man, of intelligence and much nobility of nature. the brownings were invited to knebworth, to visit lord lytton, but they were unable to avail themselves of the pleasure because of proof-sheets and contingent demands which only writers with books in press can understand. proof-sheets are unquestionably endowed with some super-human power of volition, and invariably arrive at the psychological moment when, if their author were being married or buried, the ceremony would have to be postponed until they were corrected. but the poets were not without pleasant interludes, either; as when tennyson came from the isle of wight to london for three or four days, two of which he passed with the brownings. he "dined, smoked, and opened his heart" to them; and concluded this memorable visit at the witching hour of half-past two in the morning, after reading "maud" aloud the evening before from the proof-sheets. the date of this event is established by an inscription affixed to the back of a pen-and-ink sketch of tennyson, made on that night by dante gabriel rossetti, and which is now in the possession of robert barrett browning. this inscription, written by robert browning, reads: "tennyson read his poem 'maud' to e. b. b., r. b., arabel, and rossetti, on the evening of sept. th, , at , dorset street. rossetti made this sketch of tennyson, as he sat, reading, on one end of the sofa, e. b. b. being on the other end." and this is signed, "r. b. march th, ... , warwick crescent." as the date is mrs. browning's birthday, it is easy to realize how, in that march of , he was recalling tender and beloved memories. on the drawing itself mrs. browning had, at the time of the reading, copied the first two lines of "maud." tennyson replied to a question from william sharp, who in wrote to the laureate to ask about this night, that he had "not the slightest recollection" of rossetti's presence; but the inscription on the picture establishes the fact. william michael rossetti was also one of the group, and a record that he made quite supports the fact of tennyson's unconsciousness of his brother's presence, for he says: "so far as i remember the poet-laureate neither saw what my brother was doing nor knew of it afterward." and as if every one of this gifted group present that night left on record some impression, dante gabriel rossetti has noted that, after tennyson's reading, browning read his "fra lippo lippi," and "with as much sprightly variation as there was in tennyson of sustained continuity." in a letter to allingham, rossetti also alluded to this night, and infused a mild reproach to mrs. browning in that her attention was diverted by "two not very exciting ladies"; and in a letter to mrs. tennyson, mrs. browning speaks of being "interrupted by some women friends whom i loved, but yet could not help wishing a little further just then, that i might sit in the smoke, and listen to the talk," after the reading. so, from putting together, mosaic fashion, all the allusions made by the cloud of witnesses, the reader constructs a rather accurate picture of that night of the gods. mrs. browning, who "was born to poet-uses," like the suitor of her own "lady geraldine," was in a rapture of pleasure that evening, and of "maud" she wrote: "the close is magnificent, full of power, and there are beautiful, thrilling lines all through. if i had a heart to spare, the laureate would have won mine." tennyson's voice she found "like an organ, music rather than speech," and she was "captivated" by his _naïveté_, as he stopped every now and then to say, "there's a wonderful touch!" mrs. browning writes to mrs. tennyson of "the deep pleasure we had in mr. tennyson's visit to us." she adds: "he didn't come back, as he said he would, to teach me the 'brook' (which i persist, nevertheless, in fancying i understand a little), but he did so much and left such a voice (both him 'and a voice!') crying out 'maud' to us, and helping the effect of the poem by the personality, that it's an increase of joy and life to us ever." [illustration: the coronation of the virgin, filippo lippi. in the accademia di belle arti, florence. "_ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,_ _lilies and vestments and white faces...._" fra lippo lippi] deciding to pass the ensuing winter in paris, the brownings found themselves anxious to make the change, that they might feel settled for the time, as she needed entire freedom from demands that she might proceed with her "aurora leigh." he had conceived the idea of revising and recasting "sordello." they passed an evening with ruskin, however, and presented "young leighton" to him. they met carlyle at forster's, finding him "in great force"--of denunciations. they met kinglake, and were at the proctors, and of the young poet, anne adelaide proctor, mrs. browning says, "how i like adelaide's face!" mrs. sartoris and mrs. kemble were briefly in london, and kenyon, the beloved friend, vanished to the isle of wight. to penini's great delight, wilson, the maid, married a florentine, one ferdinando romagnoli, who captivated the boy by his talk of florence, and penini caught up his pretty italian enthusiasms, and discoursed of florentine skies, and the glories of the cascine, to any one whom he could waylay. in paris they first established themselves in the rue de grenelle, in the old faubourg san germain, a location they soon exchanged for a more comfortable apartment in the rue de colisée, just off the champs Élysées. here they renewed their intercourse with lady elgin (now an invalid) and with her daughter, lady augusta bruce, madame mohl, and with other friends. mrs. browning was absorbed in her great poem, which she was able to complete, however, only after their return to london the next june, and never did an important literary work proceed with less visible craft. she lay on her sofa, half supported by cushions, writing with pencil on little scraps of paper, which she would slip under the pillows if any chance visitor came in. "elizabeth is lying on the sofa, writing like a spirit," browning wrote to harriet hosmer. to mrs. browning ruskin wrote, praising her husband's poems, which gratified her deeply, and she replied, in part, that when he wrote to praise her poems, of course she had to bear it. "i couldn't turn around and say, 'well, and why don't you praise him, who is worth twenty of me?' one's forced," she continued, "to be rather decent and modest for one's husband as well as for one's self, even if it's harder. i couldn't pull at your coat to read 'pippa passes,' for instance.... but you have put him on your shelf, so we have both taken courage to send you his new volumes, 'men and women,'... that you may accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both of us." mrs. browning considered these poems beyond any of his previous work, save "paracelsus," but there is no visible record left of what she must have felt regarding that tender and exquisite dedication to her, that "one word more ... to e. b. b.," which must have been to her "the heart's sweet scripture to be read at night." these lines are, indeed, a fitting companion-piece to her "sonnets from the portuguese." for all these poems, his "fifty men and women," were for her,--his "moon of poets." "there they are, my fifty men and women naming me the fifty poems finished! take them, love, the book and me together; where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. * * * * * i shall never, in the years remaining, paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, make you music that should all-express me; * * * * * verse and nothing else have i to give you. other heights in other lives, god willing; all the gifts from all the heights, your own, love!" so he wrote to his "one angel,--borne, see, on my bosom!" for her alone were the "silent, silver lights and darks undreamed of," and while there was one side to face the world with, he thanked god that there was another,-- "one to show a woman when he loves her!" it was rossetti, however, who was the true interpreter of browning to ruskin,--for if it requires a god to recognize a god, so likewise in poetic recognitions. to rossetti the poems comprised in "men and women" were the "elixir of life." the moving drama of browning's poetry fascinated him. some years before he had chanced upon "pauline" in the british museum, and being unable to procure the book, had copied every line of it. the "high seriousness" which aristotle claims to be one of the high virtues of poetry, impressed rossetti in browning. what a drama of the soul universal was revealed in that "fifty men and women"! what art, what music, coming down the ages, from italy, from germany, and what pictures from dim frescoes, and long-forgotten paintings hid in niche and cloister, were interpreted in these poems! how one follows "poor brother lippo" in his escapade: "... i could not paint all night-- ouf! i leaned out of window for fresh air. there came a hurry of feet and little feet, a sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song,-- _flower o' the broom,_ _take away love, and our earth is a tomb!_ _flower o' the quince,_ _i let lisa go, and what good in life since?_" and in "andrea del sarto" what passionate pathos of an ideal missed! "but all the play, the insight and the stretch-- out of me, out of me! and wherefore out? had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, we might have risen to rafael, i and you! * * * * * had you ... but brought a mind! some women do so. had the mouth there urged 'god and the glory! never care for gain. the present by the future, what is that? live for fame, side by side with agnolo! rafael is waiting; up to god, all three!' i might have done it for you...." and that exquisite idyl of "the love of wedded souls" in "by the fire-side." it requires no diviner to discover from whose image he drew the line, "my perfect wife, my leonor." how browning's art fused poetic truth and poetic beauty in all these poems, vital with keen and shrewd observation, deep with significance, and pervaded by the perpetual recognition of a higher range of achievements than are realized on earth. "a man's grasp should exceed his reach, or what's a heaven for?" in all these poems can be traced the magic of italy and happiness. (are the two more than half synonymous?) the perfect sympathy, the delicate divination and intuitive comprehension with which browning was surrounded by his wife, were the supreme source of the stimulus and development of his powers as a poet. [illustration: andrea del sarto. portrait of the artist and his wife. in the pitti gallery, florence. "_you turn your face, but does it bring your heart?_" andrea del sarto.] the parisian winter was full of movement and interest. no twentieth-century prophet had then arisen to instruct the populace how to live on twenty-four hours a day, but the brownings captured what time they could rescue from the devouring elements, rose early, breakfasted at nine, and gave the next hour and a half to penini's lessons,--"the darling, idle, distracted child," who was "blossoming like a rose" all this time; who "learned everything by magnetism," and, however "idle," was still able in seven weeks to read french "quite surprisingly." mrs. browning had already finished and transcribed some six thousand lines (making five books) of "aurora leigh "; but she planned at least two more books to complete the poem, which must needs be ready by june; and when, by the author's calendar, it is february, by some necromancy june is apt to come in the next morning. the brownings made it an invariable rule to receive no visitors till after four, but the days had still a trick of vanishing like the fleet angel who departs before he leaves his blessing. at all events, the last days of may came before "aurora leigh" was completed, and its author half despairingly realized that two weeks more were needed for the transcription of her little slips to the pages ready for the press. meantime browning had occupied himself for a time in an attempt to revise "sordello," an effort soon abandoned, as he saw that, for good or ill, the work must stand as first written. madame mohl's "evenings" continued to attract browning, where he met a most congenial and brilliant circle, and while his wife was unable to accompany him to these mild festivities, she insisted that he should avail himself of these opportunities for intercourse with french society. with lady monson he went to see ristori in "medea," finding her great, but not, in his impression, surpassing rachel. monckton milnes comes over to paris, and a frenchman of letters gives a dinner for him, at which browning meets george sand and cavour. the success of "men and women" was by this time assured. browning stood in the full light of recognition on both sides the ocean. for america--or rather, perhaps, one should say, boston, for american recognition focused in boston (which was then, at all events, incontestably the center of all "sweetness and light")--discerned the greatness of robert browning as swiftly as any transatlantic dwellers on the watch-tower. rossetti, who from the days that he copied "pauline" in the british museum library, not knowing the author, was an ardent admirer of browning, found himself in paris, and he and browning passed long mornings in the louvre. the painter declared that browning's knowledge of early italian art was beyond that of any one whom he had met, ruskin not excepted. ruskin was a standard of artistic measurement in those days to a degree hardly conceivable now; not that much of his judgment does not stand the test of time, but that authoritative criticism has so many embodiments. mrs. browning, to whom ruskin was one of the nearest of her circle, considered him a critic who was half a poet as well, and her clear insight discerned what is now universally recognized, that he was "encumbered by a burning imagination." she told him that he was apt to light up any object he looked upon, "just as we, when we carried torches into the vatican, were not clear as to how much we brought to that wonderful demosthenes, folding the marble round him in its thousand folds," and questioned as to where was the dividing line between the sculptor and the torch-bearer. this fairly clairvoyant insight of mrs. browning into character, the ability to discern defects as well as virtues where she loved, and to love where she discerned defects, is still further illustrated by a letter of hers to ruskin on the death of miss mitford. "but no, her 'judgment' was not 'unerring,'" wrote mrs. browning. "she was too intensely sympathetic not to err often ... if she loved a person it was enough.... and yet ... her judgment could be fine and discriminating, especially upon subjects connected with life and society and manners." again, to a friend who had met a great bereavement she also wrote in these paris days: "we get knowledge in losing what we hoped for, and liberty by losing what we love. this world is a fragment, or, rather, a segment, and it will be rounded presently. not to doubt that is the greatest blessing it gives now. the common impression of death is as false as it is absurd. a mere change of circumstances,--what more? and how near these spirits are, how conscious of us, how full of active energy, of tender reminiscence and interest in us? who shall dare to doubt? for myself, i do not doubt at all." in that latest collection of browning's poems, no one excited more discussion at the time than "the statue and the bust." there being then no browning societies to authoritatively decide the poet's real meaning on any disputed point, the controversy assumed formidable proportions. did browning mean this poem to be an _apologia_ for illegal love? was asked with bated breath. the statue of fernandino di medici, in the piazza dell' annunziata, in florence,--that magnificent equestrian group by giovanni da bologna,--is one of the first monuments that the visitor who has a fancy for tracing out poetic legends fares forth to see. as an example of plastic art, alone, it is well worth a pilgrimage; but as touched by the magic of the poet's art, it is magnetic with life. dating back to , it was left for robert browning to invest it with immortality. "there's a palace in florence, the world knows well and a statue watches it from the square." in the poem mr. browning alludes to the cornice, "where now is the empty shrine"; but his son believes that there never was any bust in this niche, the bust being simply the poet's creation. the statue of the grand duke is remarkable enough to inspire any story; and the florentine noble may well take pride in the manner that "john of douay" has presented him, if he still "contrives" to see it, and still "laughs in his tomb" at the perpetual pilgrimage that is made to the scene of the legend, as well as to the royal villa petraja, also immortalized in browning's poem. june came, the closing books of "aurora leigh" had been written, and under the roof of her dear friend and cousin, kenyon, who had begged the brownings to accept the loan of his house in devonshire place, the last pages were transcribed, and the dedication made to the generous friend who was the appointed good angel of their lives. they were saddened by kenyon's illness, which imprisoned him for that summer on the isle of wight, and after seeing "aurora leigh" through the press, they passed a little time with him at cowes, and also visited mrs. browning's sister henrietta (mrs. surtees cook), before setting out for italy. no one in london missed them more than dante gabriel rossetti. "with them has gone one of my delights," he said; "an evening resort where i never felt unhappy." [illustration: equestrian statue of ferdinando de' medici, by giovanni da bologna. in the piazza dell' annunziata, florence. "_there's a palace in florence the world knows well,_ _and a statue watches it from the square._" the ring and the book.] the success of "aurora leigh" was immediate, a second edition being called for within a fortnight, and edition after edition followed. this work, of which, twelve years before, she had a dim foreshadowing, as of a novel in verse, has the twofold interest of a great dramatic poem and of a philosophic commentary on art and life. to estimate it only as a social treatise is to recognize but one element in its kaleidoscopic interest. yet the narrative, it must be confessed, is fantastic and unreal. when the conception of the work first dawned upon her, she said she preferred making her story to choosing that of any legend, for the theme; but the plot is its one defect, and is only saved from being a serious defect by the richness and splendor of thought with which it is invested. the poem is to some degree a spiritual autobiography; its narrative part having no foundation in reality, but on this foundation she has recorded her highest convictions on the philosophy of life. love, art, ethics, the christianity of christ,--all are here, in this almost inexhaustible mine of intellectual and spiritual wealth. it is a poem peculiarly calculated to kindle and inspire. what a passage is this: "... i can live at least my soul's life, without alms from men, and if it be in heaven instead of earth, let heaven look to it,--i am not afraid." a profound occult truth is embodied in the following: "whate'er our state we must have made it first; and though the thing displease us,--aye, perhaps, displease us warrantably, never doubt that other states, though possible once, and then rejected by the instinct of our lives, if then adopted had displeased us more. * * * * * what we choose may not be good; but that we choose it, proves it good for us." no oriental savant could more forcibly present his doctrine of karma than has mrs. browning in these lines. her recognition of the power of poetry is here expressed: "and plant a poet's word even deep enough in any man's breast, looking presently for offshoots, you have done more for the man than if you dressed him in a broadcloth coat, and warmed his sunday pottage at your fire." poetry was to her as serious a thing as life itself. "there has been no playing at skittles for me in either poetry, or life," she said; "i never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet." in the success of "aurora leigh" she was herself surprised. private letters from strangers filled with the warmest, even if sometimes indiscriminate, praises, rained down upon her, and she found the press "astonishing in its good will." that her "golden-hearted robert" was "in ecstasies about it, far more than as if it had been a book of his own," was apparently her most precious reward. milsand, who she had fancied would hardly like this poem, wrote a critique of it for the _revue_ which touched her with its "extraordinary kindness." he asked and obtained permission to translate it into french, and in a letter to miss sarianna browning she speaks of her happiness that he should thus distinguish the poem. soon after their arrival in florence came the saddest of news, that of the death of john kenyon, their beloved friend, whose last thoughtful kindness was to endow them with a legacy insuring to them that freedom from material care which is so indispensable to the best achievements in art. during his life he had given to them one hundred pounds a year, and in his will he left them ten thousand guineas,--the largest of the many legacies that his generous will contained. the carnival, always gay in florence, was exceedingly so that year, and penini, whose ardor for a blue domino was gratified, and who thought of nothing else for the time being, seemed to communicate his raptures, so that browning proposed taking a box at the opera ball, and entertaining some invited friends with gallantina and champagne. suddenly the air grew very mild, and he decided that his wife might and must go; she sent out hastily to buy a mask and domino (he had already a beautiful black silk one, which she later transmuted into a black silk gown for herself), and while her endurance and amusement kept her till two o'clock in the morning, the poet and his friends remained till after four. the italian carnival, however wild and free it may be (and is), yet never degenerates into rudeness. the inborn delicacy and gentle refinement of the people render this impossible. yet for the time being there is perfect social equality, and at this ball the grand duke and wilson's husband, ferdinando, were on terms of fellowship. in the early april of that spring the summer suddenly dawned upon lovely florence like a transformation scene on a stage. the trees in the cascine were all a "green mist." everywhere was that ethereal enchantment of the flower city, with her gleaming towers and domes, her encircling purple hills and picturesque streets. and how, indeed, could any one who has watched the loveliness of a florentine springtime ever escape its haunting spell? the dweller in italy may see a thousand things to desire,--better public privileges, more facilities for comfort, but the day comes when, if he has learned to love the italian atmosphere so intensely that all the glories of earth could not begin to compensate for it, he would give every conceivable achievement of modern art and progress for one hour among those purple hills, for one hour with the sunset splendors over the towers, and the olive-crowned heights of fiesole and bellosguardo; or to hear again the impassioned strains of street singers ring out in pathetic intensity in the bewildering moonlight. _la bella firenze_, lying dream-enchanted among her amethyst hills, would draw her lover from the wilds of siberia, for even one of those etherial evenings, when the stars blaze in a splendor over san miniato, or one rose-crowned morning, when the golden sunshine gilds the tower of the old cathedral on fiesole. in that spring mrs. stowe visited florence, and the brownings liked her and rejoiced that she had moved the world for good. to mrs. jameson mrs. browning wrote that "uncle tom's cabin" was a "sign of the times." she read victor hugo's "contemplations," finding some of the personal poems "overcoming in their pathos"; they went to tea on the terrace at bellosguardo, in april evenings, gazing over florence veiled in transparent blue haze in the valley below. in this april mrs. browning's father died; she had never ceased to hope for reconciliation, and her sorrow was great, but, as usual, she was gently serene, "not despondingly calm," she said. mrs. jameson again came to florence, and there were more teas on overhanging terraces, and enjoyments of the divine sunsets. in august they went with miss blagden, mr. lytton, and one or two others to again make _villeggiatura_ at bagni di lucca, where mrs. browning rose every morning at six to bathe in the rapid little mountain stream,--finding herself strengthened by this heroic practice,--and penini flourished "like a rose possessed by a fairy." the succeeding winter was passed in florence, mrs. browning instructing her little son in german, and herself reveled in french and german romances. her rest was always gained in lying on the sofa and reading novels; browning, who cared little for fiction, found his relaxation in drawing. he taught penini on the piano, and the boy read french, german, and italian every day, and played in the open air under the very shadow of the palazzo pitti. [illustration: villa petraja, near florence. "_... try if petraja, cool and green._ _cure last night's fault with this morning's flowers._" the statue and the bust.] the hawthornes, who had met the brownings in london at a breakfast given by lord houghton, came up from rome, and mrs. hawthorne declared that the grasp of browning's hand "gives a new value to life." they passed an evening at casa guidi, and mrs. hawthorne recorded that in the corridor, as they entered, was a little boy who answered in the affirmative as to whether he were "penini," and who "looked like a waif of poetry, lovelier still in the bright light of the drawing-room." mr. browning instantly appeared with his cordial welcome, leading them into the salon that looked out on the terrace, filled with growing plants. from san felice there came the chanting of music, and the flowers, the melody, the stars hanging low in the sky, all ablaze over san miniato, with the poet and his child, all conspired to entrance the sensitive and poetic mrs. hawthorne. then mrs. browning came in, "delicate, like a spirit, the ethereal poet-wife, with a cloud of curls half concealing her face, and with the fairy fingers that gave a warm, human pressure,--a very embodiment of heart and intellect." mrs. hawthorne had brought her a branch of pink roses, which mrs. browning pinned on her black velvet gown. they were taken into the drawing-room, a lofty, spacious apartment where gobelin tapestries, richly carved furniture, pictures, and _vertu_ all enchanted mrs. hawthorne, and they talked "on no very noteworthy topics," hawthorne afterward recorded, though he added that he wondered that the conversation of browning should be so clear and so much to the purpose, considering that in his poetry one ran "into the high grass of obscure allusion." the poet bryant and his daughter were present that evening, a little to the regret of mrs. hawthorne, and there were tea and strawberries, mrs. browning presiding at the tray, and penini, "graceful as ganymede," passing the cake. the brownings left florence soon after this evening. the summer of was passed in normandy, in company with mr. browning's father and his sister sarianna, all of them occupying together a house on the shore of the channel, near havre. they confessed themselves in a heavenly state of mind, equally appreciative of the french people,--manners, cooking, cutlets, and costumes, all regarded with perpetual admiration. penini, too, was by no means behind in his pretty, childish enthusiasms. he was now nine years of age, reading easily french and german, as well as the two languages, english and italian--each of which was as much his native tongue as the other--and with much proficiency at the piano. browning already played duets with his little son, while the happy mother looked smilingly on. mrs. browning was one who lived daily her real life. for there is much truth in the oriental truism that our real life is that which we do _not_ live,--in our present environment, at least. she always gave of her best because she herself dwelt in the perpetual atmosphere of high thought. full of glancing humor and playfulness of expression, never scorning homely conditions, she yet lived constantly in the realm of nobleness. "poets become such by scorning nothing," she has said. the following winter found them again in rome, where mrs. browning was much occupied with italian politics. her two deepest convictions were faith in the honest purposes of louis napoleon, and her enthusiasm for italian liberty and unity. in her poem, "a tale of villafranca," she expressed her convictions and feelings. one of their nearer friends in rome was massimo d'azeglio, the prime minister of piedmont from to , one of the purest of italian patriots, who was full of hope for italy. the english minister plenipotentiary to rome at that time was lord odo russell, and when the prince of wales (later king edward vii) arrived in rome, the minister (later lord ampthill) invited (through colonel bruce) several gentlemen to meet him, colonel bruce said to browning that he knew it "would gratify the queen that the prince should make the acquaintance of mr. browning." mrs. browning spoke of "the little prince" in one of her letters to isa blagden as "a gentle, refined boy," and she notes how massimo d'azeglio came to see them, and talked nobly, and confesses herself more proud of his visit "than of another personal distinction, though i don't pretend to have been insensible to that," she adds, evidently referring to the meeting with the young prince. mrs. browning's love for novels seemed to have been inherited by her son, for this winter he was reading an italian translation of "monte cristo" with such enthusiasm as to resolve to devote his life to fiction. "dear mama," he gravely remarked, "for the future i mean to read novels. i shall read all dumas's to begin." on their return to florence in the spring, mrs. browning gives william page a letter of introduction to ruskin, commending mr. page "as a man earnest, simple and noble, who "has not been successful in life, and when i say life i include art, which is life to him. you will recognize in this name _page_," she continues, "the painter of robert's portrait which you praised for its venetian color, and criticised in other respects," she concluded. and she desires ruskin to know the "wonder and light and color and space and air" that page had put into his "venus rising from the sea," which the paris salon of that summer had refused on the ground of its nudity,--a scruple that certainly widely differentiates the salon of from that of . salvini, even then already recognized as a great artist, was playing in a theater in florence that spring, and the brownings saw with great enjoyment and admiration his impersonations of hamlet and othello. on a glowing june morning browning was crossing the piazza san lorenzo, when the market-folk had all their curious wares of odds and ends spread about on tables. at one of these he chanced on "the square old yellow book" which held the story of the franceschini tragedy, which the poet's art transmuted into his greatest poem, "the ring and the book." no other single work of browning's can rival this in scope and power. it would seem as if he had, at the moment, almost a prescience of the incalculable value of this crumpled and dilapidated volume; as if he intuitively recognized what he afterward referred to as "the predestination." on his way homeward he opened the book; "... through street and street, at the strozzi, at the pillar, at the bridge; till, by the time i stood at home again in casa guidi by felice church, * * * * * i had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth." in this brief time he had comprehended the entire story of the trial and execution of count guido franceschino, nobleman of arezzo, for the murder of his wife, pompilia, and apparently much of the conception of his great work of future years, "the ring and the book," took possession of him at once. but it was like the seed that must germinate and grow. little indeed did he dream that in this chance purchase he had been led to the material for the supreme achievement of his art. one evening before leaving florence for siena, where the brownings had taken the villa alberti for the summer, they had walter savage landor to tea, and also miss blagden and kate field, then a young girl, studying music in florence, who was under miss blagden's charge. just as the tea was placed on the table, browning turned to his honored guest, and thanked him for his defense of old songs; and opening landor's latest book, "last fruit," he read in a clear, vibrant voice from the "idylls of theocritus." the chivalrous deference touched the aged poet. "ah, you are kind," said he; "you always find out the best bits in my books." [illustration: church of san miniato, near florence. "_came she, our new crescent of a hair's breadth._ _full she flared it, lamping samminiato._" one word more.] the loyal homage rendered by the younger poet, in all the glow of his power, to the "old master," was lovely to see. as will be recalled, landor had been one of the first to recognize the genius of browning when his youthful poem, "paracelsus," appeared. landor had then written to southey: "god grant that robert browning live to be much greater, high as he now stands among most of the living." it was one noon soon after this evening that landor came to casa guidi, desolate and distraught, declaring he had left his villa on the fiesolean slope never to return, because of his domestic difficulties. the brownings were about leaving for siena and mr. browning decided to engage an apartment for the venerable poet, when the storys, who were making _villeggiatura_ in the strange old medieval city, invited landor to be their guest. the villa where the storys were domiciled was near the brownings, and landor was much in both households. "he made us a long visit," wrote mrs. story, "and was our honored and cherished guest. his courtesy and high breeding never failed him." landor would often be seen astir in the early dawn, sitting under the olive trees in the garden, writing latin verses. to kate field, who had become a great favorite with the brownings, mr. browning wrote with some bit of verse of landor's: siena, villa alberti, july . dear miss field:--i have only a minute to say that mr. landor wrote these really pretty lines in your honor the other day,--you remember on what circumstances they turn. i know somebody who is ready to versify to double the extent at the same cost to you, and do his best, too, and you also know. yours affectionately ever, r. b. the servant waits for this and stops the expansion of soul! p. s. ... what do you mean by pretending that we are not the obliged, the grateful people? your stay had made us so happy, come and make us happy again, says (or would say were she not asleep) my wife, and yours also,-- r. b. of landor, while they were in siena, mrs. browning wrote to a friend that robert always said he owed more to him than any other contemporary, and that landor's genius insured him the gratitude of all artists. in these idyllic days mr. story's young daughter, edith, (now the marchesa peruzzi di medici, of florence,) had a birthday, which the poetic group all united to celebrate. in honor of the occasion landor not only wrote a latin poem for the charming girl, but he appeared in a wonderful flowered waistcoat, one that dated back to the days of lady blessington, to the amusement of all the group. from isa blagden, who remained in her villa on bellosguardo, came almost daily letters to mrs. browning, who constantly gained strength in the life-giving air of siena, where they looked afar over a panorama of purple hills, with scarlet sunsets flaming in the west, the wind blowing nearly every day, as now. the cave of the winds, as celebrated by virgil, might well have been located in siena. mrs. browning and mrs. story would go back and forth to visit each other, mounted on donkeys, their husbands walking beside, as they had done in the arcadian days at bagni di lucca. odo russell passed two days with the brownings on his way from rome to london, to their great enjoyment. landor's health and peace of mind became so far restored that he was able to "write awful latin alcaics." penini, happy in his great friends, the story children, julian, waldo, and edith, and hardly less so with the _contadini_, whom he helped to herd the sheep and drive in the grape-carts, galloped through lanes on his own pony, insisted on reading to his _contadini_ from the poems of dall' ongaro, and grew apace in happiness and stature. for two hours every day his father taught him music, and the lad already played beethoven sonatas, and music of difficult execution from german composers. the brownings and the storys passed many evenings together, "sitting on the lawn under the ilexes and the cypresses, with tea and talk, until the moon had made the circuit of the quarter of the sky." mrs. browning's health grew better, and story writes to charles eliot norton that "browning is in good spirits about her, and pen is well, and as i write," he continues, "i hear him laughing and playing with my boys and edith on the terrace below." it was late in october before they returned to florence, and then only for a sojourn of six weeks before going to rome for the winter. the siena summer had been a period of unalloyed delight to mrs. browning, whose health was much improved, and not the least of the happiness of both had been due to the congenial companionship of the storys, and to their delicate courtesies, which mrs. browning wrote to mrs. jameson that she could never forget. browning wrote to mrs. story saying to her that she surely did not need to be told how entirely they owed "the delightful summer" to her own and mr. story's kindness. "ba is hardly so well," he adds, "as when she was let thrive in that dear old villa and the pleasant country it hardly shut out." mrs. browning's small book, the "poems before congress," only eight in all, was published in this early spring of , and met with no cheering reception. she felt this keenly, but said, "if i were ambitious of any thing it would be to be wronged where, for instance, cavour is wronged." with mrs. browning a political question was equally a moral question. her devotion to italy, and faith in the regeneration of the country, were vital matters to her. she was deeply touched by the american attitude toward her poem, "a curse for a nation," for the americans, she noted, rendered thanks to the reprover of ill deeds, "understanding the pure love of the motive." these very "poems before congress" brought to her praises, and the offer of high prices as well, and of this nation she said it was generous. a letter from robert browning written to kate field, who was then in florence with miss blagden, and which has never before been published, is as follows: rome, via del tritone, , march th, . dear miss field,--do you really care to have the little photograph? here it is with all my heart. i wonder i dare be so frank this morning, however, for a note just rec'd from isa mentions an instance of your acuteness, that strikes me with a certain awe. "kate," she says, "persists that the 'curse for a nation' is for america, and not england." you persist, do you? no doubt against the combined intelligence of our friends who show such hunger and thirst for a new poem of ba's--and, when they get it, digest the same as you see. "write a nation's curse for me," quoth the antislavery society five years ago, "and send it over the western sea." "not so," replied poor little ba, "for my heart is sore for my own lands' sins, which are thus and thus,--what curse assign to another land when heavy for the sins of mine?" "write it for that very reason," rejoined ba's cheerer, "because thou hast strength to see and hate a foul thing done within thy gate," and so, after a little more dallying, she wrote and sent over the western seas what all may read, but it appears only kate field, out of all florence, can understand. it seems incredible. how did you find out, beside, the meaning of all these puzzling passages which i quote in the exact words of the poem? in short, you are not only the delightful kate field which i always knew you to be, but the sole understander of ba in all florence. i can't get over it.... browning, the husband, means to try increasingly and somewhat intelligibly to explain to all his intimates at florence, with the sole exception of kate field; to whose comprehension he will rather endeavor to rise, than to stoop, henceforth. and so, with true love from ba to kate field, and our united explanation to all other friends, that the subject matter of the present letter is by no means the annexation of savoy and nice, she will believe me, hers very faithfully robert browning. to kate field mrs. browning wrote, the letter undated, but evidently about this time, apparently in reply to some request of miss field's to be permitted to write about them for publication: my dear kate,--i can't put a seal on your lips when i know them to be so brave and true. take out your license, then, to name me as you please, only remembering, dear, that even kind words are not always best spoken. here is the permission, then, to say nothing about your friends except that they are your friends, which they will always be glad to have said and believed. i had a letter from america to-day, from somebody who, hearing i was in ill health, desired to inform me that he wouldn't weep for me, were it not for robert browning and penini! no, don't repeat that. it was kindly meant, and you are better, my dear kate, and happier, and we are all thanking god for italy. love us here a little, and believe that we all love and think of you. yours ever affectionately, e. b. b. the american appreciation of mrs. browning constantly increased, and editors offered her an hundred dollars each for any poem, long or short, that might pass through their publications on its way to final destiny. theodore parker had passed that winter in rome, and mrs. browning felt that he was "high and noble." early in may he left for florence, where his death occurred before the return of the brownings. the education of penini during these months was conducted by an old abbé, who was also the instructor of mr. story's only daughter, edith, and the two often shared their lessons, the lad going to palazzo barberini to join miss edith in this pursuit of knowledge. certain traditions of the venerable abbé have drifted down the years, indicating that his breviary and meditations on ecclesiastical problems did not exclusively occupy his mind, for the present marchesa peruzzi has more than one laughing reminiscence of this saintly father, who at one time challenged his pupil to hop around the large table on one foot. the hilarity of the festivity was not lessened when the reverendo himself joined in the frolic, his robes flapping around him, as they all contributed to the merriment. the marchesa has many a dainty note written to her by penini's mother. once it is as pen's amanuensis that she serves, praying the loan of a "'family robinson,' by mayne reid," to solace the boy in some indisposition. "i doubt the connection between mayne reid and robinson," says mrs. browning, "but speak as i am bidden." and another note was to tell "dearest edith" that pen's papa wanted him for his music, and that there were lessons, beside; and "thank dear edith for her goodness," and "another day, with less obstacles." the intercourse between the brownings and the storys was always so full of mutual comprehension and perfect sympathy and delicate, lovely recognition on both sides, that no life of either the sculptor or the wedded poets could be presented that did not include these constant amenities of familiar, affectionate intercourse. many english friends of the brownings came and went that winter, and among others was lady annabella nöel, a granddaughter of lord byron, and a great admirer of mr. browning. a new acquaintance of the brownings was lady marion alford, a daughter of the earl of northampton, "very eager about literature, and art, and robert," laughed mrs. browning, and lady marion and "hatty" (miss hosmer) were, it seems, mutually captivated. [illustration: the palazzo barberini, via quattro fontane, rome. the home of william wetmore story and his family for nearly forty years.] some of the english artists came to rome, burne-jones and val prinsep among them, and they with browning wandered about the classic byways of the city and drove to see the coliseum by moonlight. in june the brownings left rome, by way of orvieto and chiusi. they crossed that dead, mystic campagna that flows, like a sea, all around rome--a sea of silence and mystery; with its splendid ruins of the old aqueducts and tombs, its vast stretches of space that were all aglow, in those june days, with scarlet poppies. they stopped one night at viterbo, the little city made famous since those days by richard bagot's tragic novel, "temptation," and where the convent is interesting from its associations with vittoria colonna, who in made here a retreat for meditation and prayer. in orvieto they rested for a day and night, and mrs. browning was able to go with her husband into the marvelous cathedral, with its "jeweled and golden façade" and its aerial gothic construction. mr. browning, with his little son, drove over to the wild, curious town of bagnorgio, which, though near orvieto, is very little known. but this was the birthplace of giovanni da fidenza, the "seraphic doctor," who was canonized as st. buonaventura, from the exclamation of san francesco, who, on awakening from a dream communion with giovanni da fidenza, exclaimed, "_o buona ventura!_" dante introduces this saint into the _divina commedia_, as chanting the praises of san domenico in paradise: "_io san vita di bonaventura_ _du bagnorgio, che ne grandi uffici,_ _sempre posposi la sinistra cura._" bagnorgio is, indeed, the heart of poetic legend and sacred story, but it is so inaccessible, perched on its high hill, with deep chasms, evidently the work of earthquakes, separating it from the route of travel, that from a distance it seems impossible that any conveyance save an airship could ever reach the town. by either route, through the umbrian region, by way of assisi and perugia, or by way of orvieto and siena, the journey between rome and florence is as beautiful as a dream. the brownings paused for one night's rest at lake thrasymene, the scenes of the battlefield of hannibal and flaminius, with the town on a height overlooking the lake. "beautiful scenery, interesting pictures and tombs," said mrs. browning of this journey, "but a fatiguing experience." she confessed to not feeling as strong as she had the previous summer, but still they were planning their _villeggiatura_ in siena, taking the same villa they had occupied the previous season, where penini should keep tryst with the old abbé, who was to come with the storys and with his latin. they found landor well and fairly amenable to the new conditions of his life. domiciled with isa blagden was miss frances power cobbe, who was drawn to florence that spring largely to meet theodore parker, with whom she had long corresponded. mr. and mrs. lewes (george eliot) were in florence that spring of , the great novelist making her studies for "romola." they were the guests of the thomas adolphus trollopes. landor, too, came frequently to take tea with miss blagden and miss cobbe on their terrace, and discuss art with browning. dall' ongaro and thomas adolphus trollope were frequently among the little coterie. his visits to casa guidi and his talks with mrs. browning were among the most treasured experiences of mr. trollope. "i was conscious, even then," he afterward wrote in his reminiscences of this lovely florentine life, "of coming away from casa guidi a better man, with higher views and aims. the effect was not produced by any talk of the nature of preaching, but simply by the perception and appreciation of what elizabeth browning was: of the purity of the spiritual atmosphere in which she habitually dwelt." miss hosmer came, too, that spring, as the guest of miss blagden, and she often walked down the hill to breakfast with her friends in casa guidi. browning, who was fond of an early walk, sometimes went out to meet her, and on one occasion they had an escapade which "hatty" related afterward with great glee. it was on one of these morning encounters that miss hosmer confessed to the poet that the one longing of her soul was to ride behind caretta, the donkey, and browning replied that nothing could be easier, as girolamo, caretta's owner, was the purveyor of vegetables to casa guidi, and that they would appropriate his cart for a turn up poggia imperiale. "_di gustibus non_," began browning. "better let go latin and hold on to the cart," sagely advised the young sculptor. in the midst of their disasters from the surprising actions of caretta, they met her owner. "_dio mio_" exclaimed girolamo, "it is signor browning. san antonio!" girolamo launched forth into an enumeration of all the diabolical powers possessed by caretta, and called on all the saints to witness that she was a disgrace to nature. meantime the poet, the sculptor, the vegetables, and the donkey were largely combined into one hopeless mass, and browning's narration and re-enactment of the tragedy, after they reached casa guidi, threw mrs. browning into peals of laughter. again the brownings sought their favorite siena, where miss blagden joined them, finding a rude stone villino, of two or three rooms only, the home of some _contadini_, within fifteen minutes' walk of mrs. browning, and taking it to be near her friend. but for the serious illness of mrs. browning's sister henrietta (mrs. surtees cook) the summer would have been all balm and sunshine. the storys were very near, and mr. landor had been comfortably housed not far from his friends, who gave the aged scholar the companionship he best loved. browning took long rides on horseback, exploring all the romantic regions around siena, such rides that he might almost have exclaimed with his own hero, the grand duke ferdinand,-- "for i ride--what should i do but ride?" penini, too, galloped through the lanes on his pony, his curls flying in the wind, and read latin with the old abbé. the lessons under this genial tutor were again shared with miss edith story, one of whose earliest childish recollections is of sitting on a low hassock, leaning against mrs. browning, while penini sat on the other side, and his mother talked with both the children. mr. story's two sons, the future painter and sculptor respectively, were less interested at this time in canvas and clay than they were in their pranks and sports. the storys and brownings, miss blagden and landor, all loaned each other their books and newspapers, and discussed the news and literature of the day. the poet was much occupied in modeling, and passed long mornings in mr. story's improvised studio, where he copied two busts, the "young augustus" and the "psyche," with notable success. in the october of that year both the brownings and the storys returned to rome, the poets finding a new apartment in the via felice. mrs. browning's sister henrietta died that autumn, and in her grief she said that one of the first things that did her good was a letter from mrs. stowe. she notes her feeling that "how mere a line it is to overstep between the living and the dead." her spiritual insight never failed her, and of herself she said: "i wish to live just so long, and no longer, than to grow in the spirit." in the days of inevitable sadness after her sister's death, whatever the consolations and reassurances of faith and philosophy, mrs. browning wrote to a friend of the tender way in which her husband shielded her, and "for the rest," she said, "i ought to have comfort, for i believe that love, in its most human relations, is an eternal thing." she added: "one must live; and the only way is to look away from one's self into the larger and higher circle of life in which the merely personal grief or joy forgets itself." penini and his friend, miss edith, continued their studies under the old abbé; his mother heard him read a little german daily, and his father "sees to his music, and the getting up of arithmetic," noted mrs. browning. the lad rode on his pony over monte pincio, and occasionally cantered out on the campagna with his father. but mrs. browning had come to know that her stay on earth was to be very brief, and to her dear isa she wrote that for the first time she had pain in looking into her little son's face--"which you will understand," she adds, but to her husband she did not speak of this premonition. she urged him to go out into the great world, for rome was socially resplendent that winter. among other notable festivities there was a great ball given by mrs. hooker, where princes and cardinals were present, and where the old roman custom of attending the princes of the church up and down the grand staircase with flaming torches was observed. the beautiful princess rospoli was a guest that night, appearing in the tri-color. commenting on the civil war that was threatening america, mrs. browning said she "believed the unity of the country should be asserted with a strong hand." val prinsep, in rome that winter, was impressed by mr. browning into the long walks in which they both delighted, and they traversed rome on both sides the tiber. the poet was not writing regularly in those days, though his wife "gently wrangled" with him to give more attention to his art, and held before him the alluring example of the laureate who shut himself up daily for prescribed work. browning had "an enormous superfluity of vital energy," which he had to work off in long walks, in modeling, and in conversations. "i wanted his poems done this winter very much," said mrs. browning; "and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to use.... there has been little poetry done since last winter." but in later years browning became one of the most regular of workers, and considered that day lost on which he had not written at least some lines of poetry. at this time the poet was fascinated by his modeling. "nothing but clay does he care for, poor, lost soul," laughed mrs. browning. her "hatty" ran in one day with a sketch of a charming design for a fountain for lady marion alford. "the imagination is unfolding its wings in hatty," said mrs. browning. in days when mrs. browning felt able to receive visitors, there were many to avail themselves of the privilege. on one day came lady juliana knox, bringing miss sewell (amy herbert); and m. carl grun, a friend of the poet, dall' ongaro, came with a letter from the latter, who wished to translate into italian some of the poems of mrs. browning. lady juliana had that day been presented to the holy father, and she related to mrs. browning how deeply touched she had been by his adding to the benediction he gave her, "_priez pour le pape._" penini had a choice diversion in that the duchesse de grammont, of the french embassy, gave a "_matinée d'enfants_," to which he received a card, and went, resplendent in a crimson velvet blouse, and was presented to small italian princes of the colonna, the doria, piombiono, and others, and played leap-frog with his titled companions. mrs. browning reads with eager interest a long speech of their dear friend, milsand, which filled seventeen columns of the _moniteur_, a copy of which his french friend sent to browning. the brownings had planned to join the poet's father and sister in paris that summer, but a severe attack of illness in which for a few days her life was despaired of made mrs. browning fear that she would be unable to take the journey. characteristically, her only thought was for the others, never for herself, and she writes to miss browning how sad she is in the thought of her husband's not seeing his father, and "if it were possible for robert to go with pen," she continues, "he should, but he wouldn't go without me." when she had sufficiently recovered to start for florence, they set out on june , resting each night on the way, and reaching siena four days later, where they lingered. from there mr. browning wrote to the storys that they had traveled through exquisite scenery, and that ba had borne the journey fairly well. but on arriving in florence and opening their apartment again in casa guidi, it was apparent that the poet had decided rightly that there was to be no attempt made to visit paris. during these closing days of mrs. browning's stay on earth, her constant aim was "to keep quiet, and try not to give cause for trouble on my account, to be patient and live on god's daily bread from day to day." "_o beauty of holiness,_ _of self-forgetfulness, of lowliness!_" it is difficult to read unmoved her last words written to miss sarianna browning. "don't fancy, dear," she said, "that this is the fault of my will," and she adds: "robert always a little exaggerates the difficulties of traveling, and there's no denying that i have less strength than is usual to me.... what does vex me is that the dearest nonno should not see his peni this year, and that you, dear, should be disappointed, _on my account again_. that's hard on us all. we came home into a cloud here. i can scarcely command voice or hand to name _cavour_. that great soul, which meditated and made italy, has gone to the diviner country. if tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. i feel yet as if i could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy." for a week previous to her transition to that diviner world in which she always dwelt, even on earth, she was unable to leave her couch; but she smilingly assured them each day that she was better, and in the last afternoon she received a visit from her beloved isa, to whom she spoke with somewhat of her old fire of generous enthusiasm of the new premier, who was devoted to the ideals of cavour, and in whose influence she saw renewed hope for italy. the storys were then at leghorn, having left rome soon after the departure of the brownings, and they were hesitating between switzerland for the summer, or going again to siena, where they and the brownings might be together. the poet had been intending to meet the storys at leghorn that night, but he felt that he could not leave his wife, though with no prescience of the impending change. she was weak, but they talked over their summer plans, decided they would soon go to siena, and agreed that they would give up casa guidi that year, and take a villa in florence, instead. they were endeavoring to secure an apartment in palazzo barberini for the winter, the storys being most anxious that they should be thus near together, and mrs. browning discussed with him the furnishing of the rooms in case they decided upon the palazzo. only that morning mr. lytton had called, and while mrs. browning did not see him, her husband talked with him nearly all the morning. late in the evening she seemed a little wandering, but soon she slept, waking again about four, when they talked together, and she seemed to almost pass into a state of ecstasy, expressing to him in the most ardent and tender words her love and her happiness. the glow of the luminous florentine dawn brightened in the room, and with the words "it is beautiful!" she passed into that realm of life and light and loveliness in which she had always seemed to dwell. "and half we deemed she needed not the changing of her sphere, to give to heaven a shining one, who walked an angel here." [illustration: the english cemetery, florence, in which mrs. browning is buried.] curiously, miss blagden had not slept at all that night. after her return from her visit to mrs. browning the previous afternoon, "every trace of fatigue vanished," she wrote to a friend, "and all my faculties seemed singularly alert. i was unable to sleep, and sat writing letters till dawn, when a cabman came to tell me '_la signora della casa guidi e morte!_'" the storys came immediately from leghorn, and miss blagden took edith story and penini to her villa. it was touching to see his little friend's endeavor to comfort the motherless boy. mr. and mrs. story stayed with browning in the rooms where everything spoke of her presence: the table, strewn with her letters and books; her little chair, a deep armchair of dark green velvet, which her son now holds sacred among his treasures, was drawn by the table just as she had left it, and in her portfolio was a half-finished letter to madame mario, speaking of cavour, and her noble aspirations for italy. in the late afternoon of july , , a group of english and american, with many italian friends gathered about the little casket in the lovely cypress-shaded english cemetery of florence, and as the sun was sinking below the purple hills it was tenderly laid away, while the amethyst mountains hid their faces in a misty veil. "what would we give to our beloved? the hero's heart to be unmoved, the poet's star-tuned harp to sweep. * * * * * god strikes a silence through you all, and giveth his beloved, sleep." almost could the friends gathered there hear her poet-voice saying: "and friends, dear friends, when it shall be that this low breath is gone from me, and round my bier ye come to weep, let one, most loving of you all, say 'not a tear must o'er her fall! he giveth his beloved, sleep.'" chapter ix - "think, when our one soul understands the great word which makes all things new, when earth breaks up and heaven expands, how will the change strike me and you in the house not made with hands? "oh, i must feel your brain prompt mine, your heart anticipate my heart, you must be just before, in fine, see and make me see, for your part, new depths of the divine!" the completed cycle--letters to friends--browning's devotion to his son-- warwick crescent--"dramatis personÆ"--london life--death of the poet's father--sarianna browning--oxford honors the poet--death of arabel barrett--audierne--"the ring and the book." "the cycle is complete," said browning to the storys, as they all stood in those desolate rooms and gazed about. the salon was just as she had left it; the table covered with books and magazines, her little chair drawn up to it, the long windows open to the terrace, and the faint chant of nuns, "made for midsummer nights," in san felice, on the air. "here we came fifteen years ago," continued mr. browning; "here ba wrote her poems for italy; here pen was born; here we used to walk up and down this terrace on summer evenings." the poet lingered over many tender reminiscences, and after the storys had taken leave, he and his son yielded to the entreaties of isa blagden to stay with her in her villa on bellosguardo during the time that he was preparing to leave florence, which he never looked upon again. when all matters of detail were concluded, miss blagden, "perfect in all kindness," accompanied them to paris, continuing her own journey to england, while browning with his son, his father, and sister, proceeded to st. enogat, near st. malo, on the normandy coast. before mrs. browning's illness there had been a plan that all the brownings and mr. and mrs. w. j. stillman should pass the summer together at fontainebleau. there was something about st. enogat singularly restful to browning, the sea, the solitude, the "unspoiled, fresh, and picturesque place," as he described it in a letter to madame du quaire. the mystic enchantment of it wrought its spell, and penini had his pony and was well and cheerful, and browning realized too well that the change called death is but the passing through "the gates of new life," to be despairing in his sorrow. the spirit of one "... who never turned his back, but marched breast forward," breathes through all the letters that he wrote at this time to friends. "don't fancy i am prostrated," he wrote to leighton; "i have enough to do for myself and the boy, in carrying out her wishes." somewhat later he expressed his wish that mr. (later sir frederick) leighton should design the memorial tomb, in that little florence cemetery, for his wife; and the marble with only "e. b. b." inscribed on it, visited constantly by all travelers in florence and rarely found without flowers, is the one sir frederick designed. [illustration: tomb of elizabeth barrett browning in the english cemetery, florence designed by sir frederick leighton, r.a.] in a letter to his boyhood's friend, miss haworth, browning alluded to the future, when penini would so need the help of "the wisdom, the genius, the piety" of his mother; and the poet adds: "i have had everything, and shall not forget." in reply to a letter of sympathy from kate field, he wrote: "dear friend,--god bless you for all your kindness which i shall never forget. i cannot write now except to say this, and beside, that i have had great comfort from the beginning." in the early autumn browning took his son to london. the parting of the ways had come, and already he dimly perceived that the future would not copy fair the past. there are "reincarnations," in all practical effect, that are realized in this life as well as, speculatively, hereafter; and his days of italian terraces and oleander blooms, of enchanting hours on bellosguardo, and lingerings in old palaces and galleries, and saunterings down narrow streets crowded with _contadini_,--these days were as entirely past as if he had been transported to another planet. "not death; we do not call it so, yet scarcely more with dying breath do we forego; we pass an unseen line, and lo! another zone." the sea and the sands and the sky prefigured themselves in those days to browning as all indistinguishably blended in an unreal world, from which the past had receded and on which the future had not yet dawned. "gray rocks and grayer sea, and surf along the shore; and in my heart a name my lips shall speak no more." to story he wrote with assurances of affection, but saying, "i can't speak about anything. i could, perhaps, if we were together, but to write freezes me." miss blagden, in london, had taken rooms in upper westbourne terrace, and when in the late autumn browning and his son went on to england, he took an apartment in chichester road, almost opposite the house where miss blagden was staying. but she had lived too long in enchanted florence to be content elsewhere, and she soon returned to her villa on the heights of bellosguardo, from which the view is one of the most beautiful in all europe. browning soon took the house, no. warwick crescent, which for nearly all the rest of his life continued to be his home. here he was near mrs. browning's sister, arabel barrett, of whom he was very fond, and whose love for her sister's little son was most grateful to them both. mr. browning had his old tapestries, pictures, and furniture of old florentine carving, some of it black with age, sent on from casa guidi, and he proceeded to transform a prim london house into an interior of singular charm. he lined the staircase with italian pictures; books overflowed in all the rooms, and the glimpse of water in the canal near reflected the green trees of the crescent, giving the place a hint of sylvan arcadias. there was the grand piano on which penini practiced, and a tutor was engaged to prepare the lad for the university. the poet felt that this was the critical time to give his son "the english stamp," in "whatever it is good for," he added. but as a matter of fact the young florentine had little affinity with english ways. he was the child of poets; a linguist from his infancy, an omnivorous reader, and with marked talent for art, distinguishing himself later in both painting and sculpture, but he had little inclination for the exact sciences. in his london home browning was soon again launched on a tide of work,--the dearest of which was in preparing the "last poems" of his wife for publication. he gave it a dedication to "grateful florence, and tommaseo, her spokesman." he was also preparing a new edition of his own works to be issued in three volumes. the tutor he had secured for his son was considered skillful in "grammatical niceties," which, he said, "was much more to my mind than to pen's." but he, as well as the boy, was homesick for italy, and he wrote to story that his particular reward would be "just to go back to italy, to rome"; and he adds: "why should i not trust to you what i know you will keep to yourselves, but which will certainly amuse you as nothing else i could write is like to do? what good in our loving each other unless i do such a thing? so, o story, o emelyn, (dare i say, for the solemnity's sake?) and o edie, the editorship has, under the circumstances, been offered to me: me! i really take it as a compliment because i am, by your indulgence, a bit of a poet, if you like, but a man of the world and able editor hardly!"[ ] the editorship in question was that of _cornhill_, left vacant by the death of thackeray. browning was too great of spirit to sink into the recluse, and first beguiled into rossetti's studio, he soon met millais, and by degrees he responded again to friends and friendships, and life called to him with many voices. in the late summer of the poet and his son were at "green, pleasant little cambo," and then at biarritz. he was absorbed in euripides; and the supreme work of his life, "the ring and the book," the roman murder story, as he then called it, was constantly in his thought and beginning to take shape. the sudden and intense impression that the franceschini tragedy had made on him, on first reading it, rushed back and held him as under a spell. but the "dramatis personæ" and "in a balcony" were to be completed before the inauguration of this great work. for more than four years the thrilling tragedy had lain in his mind, impressing that subconscious realm of mental action where all great work in art acquires its creative vitality. it is said that episodes of crime had a great fascination for browning, _père_, who would write out long imaginary conversations regarding the facts, representing various persons in discussion, the individual views of each being brought out. the analogy of this to the treatment of the franceschini tragedy in his son's great poem is rather interesting to contemplate. with the poet it was less dramatic interest in the crime, _per se_, than it was that the complexities of crime afforded the basis from which to work out his central and controlling purpose, his abiding and profound conviction that life here is simply the experimental and preparatory stage for the life to come; that all its events, even its lapses from the right, its fall into terrible evil, are-- "machinery just meant to give thy soul its bent," a part of the mechanism to "try the soul's stuff on"; that man lives in an environment of spiritual influences which act upon him in just that degree to which he can recognize and respond to them; and that he must sometimes learn the ineffable blessedness of the right through tragic experiences of the wrong. in the very realities of man's imperfection browning sees his possibilities of "progress, man's distinctive work alone." when browning asks: "and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fullness of the days?..." he condenses in these lines his philosophy of life. many of the poems appearing in the "dramatis personæ" had already been written: "gold hair" and "james lee's wife" at pornic, and others at green cambo. in the splendor and power of "abt vogler," "rabbi ben ezra," and "a death in the desert," the poet expressed a philosophy that again suggests his intuitive agreement with the hegelian. "rabbi ben ezra" holds in absolute solution the vedanta philosophy. to the question as to what all this enigma of life means, the poet answers: "thence shall i pass, approved a man, for aye removed from the developed brute; a god though in the germ. * * * * * he fixed thee 'mid this dance of plastic circumstance, this present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest." how keen the sense of humor and of the sharp contrasts of life in "fra lippo lippi," and what power of character analysis. the intellectual vigor and the keen insight into the play of mental action in "bishop blougram's apology"--a poem that occasioned great discussion on its appearance (from a real or fancied resemblance of the "bishop" to cardinal wiseman)--are almost unsurpassed in poetic literature. many of the poems in the "dramatis personæ" are aglow with the romance of life, as in the "eurydice to orpheus," and "a face," which refers to emily patmore. there are studio traces as well in these, and in the "deaf and dumb," suggested by a group of woolner. the crowning power of all is revealed in the noble faith and the exquisite tenderness of "prospice," especially in those closing lines when all of fear and pain and darkness and cold,-- "shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest!" the references to his wife in this poem, in the enthralling "one word more," and in the dedication to "the ring and the book," as well as those to be divined in his character drawing of "pompilia," are incomparable in their impressiveness and beauty, and must live so long as poetry is enshrined in life. the vital drama, the splendor of movement, the color, the impassioned exaltation of feeling, the pictorial vividness that are in these poems grouped under "dramatic romances" and "dramatis personæ," give them claim to the first rank in the poet's creations. curiously, during this period, the change in browning's habits of work, which his wife used to urge upon him, seemed to gradually take possession of him, so that he came to count that day lost in which he had not written some lines of poetry. did he, perchance in dreams, catch something of "the rustling of her vesture" that influenced his mind to the change? to elizabeth browning poetry was not only a serious calling, but its "own exceeding great reward," always. another change came to browning, which redeemed him from the growing tendency to become a recluse, and made him a familiar figure in the great world. he seemed to become aware that there was something morbid and unworthy in the avoidance of the world of men and women. browning's divinely commissioned work had to do with life, in its most absolute actualities as well as its great spiritual realities, because the life eternal in its nature was the theme on which he played his poetic variations, and no revelation of human nature came amiss to him. he had already supervised the publication of mrs. browning's essay on "the greek christian poets" and "the book of the poets," and "nothing," he said, "that ought to be published, shall be kept back." he had also lent story considerable assistance in arranging with blackwood for the serial publication of "roba di roma." for two or three summers browning with his father, his sister, and his son, passed the summers at st. marie, near pornic, from where in the august of he wrote to leighton that he was living on fruit and milk, and that each day he completed some work, read a little with pen, and somewhat more by himself. st. marie was a "wild little place" in brittany, on the very edge of the sea, a hamlet of hardly more than a dozen houses, of which the brownings had the privilege of occupying that of the mayor, whose chief attraction, apparently, was that, though bare, it was clean. the poet liked it all, and it was there that he wrote "in the doorway" in "james lee's wife," with the sea, the field, and the fig-tree visible from his window. in the late summer the brownings are all again at st. marie in brittany, and the poet writes to isa blagden that he supposes what she "calls fame within these four years" has come somewhat from his going about and showing himself alive, "but," he adds, "i was in london from the time that i published 'paracelsus' till i ended the writing of plays with 'luria,'--and i used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics, etc., than i do now,--but what came of it?" if in the lines following there is a hint of sadness, who can blame him? during this summer he revised "sordello" for re-publication, not, however, as he had once contemplated, making in it any significant changes. in the dedication to his friend milsand, he incorporated so clear an exposition of his idea in the poem that this dedication will always be read with special interest. in london again the next winter, browning wrote to isa blagden that he "felt comfort in doing the best he could with the object of his life,--poetry. i hope to do much more yet," he continued; "and that the flower of it will be put into _her_ hand somehow." the london spring found the poet much engaged, taking his son to studios, and to the royal academy, to concerts, and for long walks, and in a letter to kate field not heretofore published is indicated something of the general trend of the days: london, , warwick crescent, upper westbourne terrace, may th, . dear kate field, (so let me call you, please, in regard to old times when i might have done it, and did not,) i know well enough that there is great stupidity in this way of mine, this putting off a thing because i hope to compass some other thing, as here, for had you not asked for some photographs which i supposed i could soon find time and inclination to get, i should have thanked you at once; as i do now, indeed, and with all my heart, but the review article is wavering and indistinct in my mind now, and though it is inside a drawer of this table where i write, i cannot bring myself to look at it again,--not from a motive which is disparaging to you, as i am sure you understand; the general impression is enough for me, also, if you care in the least how i feel toward you. the boy has certainly the likeness to which you refer, and an absolute sameness, almost, in feature as well as in look, with certain old portraits of hers,--here, older and younger; there is not a trace of me in him, thank god! i know that dear, teasing isa, and how she won't answer your questions, but sometimes, for compensation, she tells you what you never asked for, and though i always, or very often, ask about you, yet i think it may have been in reply to curiosity about the price of italian stock, that she lately described to me a photograph of you, yourself, and how you were: what? even that's over. and moreover, how you were your old self with additions, which, to be sure, i don't require. give my true regard to your mother, and thank her for her goodness in understanding me. but i write only to have a pleasant chat with you, in a balcony, looking for fire-flies in the garden, wider between us than the slanting pitti façade, now that it's warm and maylike in florence. always yours, robert browning. [illustration: kate field from a portrait painted by elihu vedder, florence, .] mr. browning had now begun to think of placing his son, who had passed his sixteenth birthday, in oxford. in quest of this desire the poet sought the acquaintance of dr. jowett, afterward master of balliol college. this initiated a friendship between browning and jowett that lasted all the poet's life, and that has insured to balliol many priceless treasures of association with both robert and elizabeth browning. up to that time jowett had not been an admirer of browning's poetry. but his keen interest in the theme then engaging browning was aroused, and he wrote to a friend: "i thought i was getting too old to make new friends, but i believe that i have made one,--mr. browning, the poet, who has been staying with me during the past few days. it is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of his open, generous nature, and his great ability and knowledge. i had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man. his great energy is very remarkable, as is his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. of personal objects he seems to have none, except the education of his son, in which i hope in some degree to help him."[ ] after returning to london, browning writes to tennyson, in thanks for a book received from the laureate:[ ] , warwick crescent, w., oct. , . my dear tennyson,--when i came back last year from my holiday i found a gift from you, a book; this time i find only the blue and gold thing which, such as it is, i send you, you are to take from me. i could not even put in what i pleased but i have said all about it in the word or two of preface, as also that i beg leave to stick the bunch in your buttonhole. may i beg that mrs. tennyson will kindly remember me? ever affectionately yours, robert browning. tennyson wrote in reply that the nosegay was very welcome. "i stick it in my buttonhole ... and feel ----'s cork heels added to my boots," he added. volumes of selections from the poems of both browning and his wife were now being demanded for the "golden treasury"; and to miss blagden browning says further that he will certainly do the utmost to make the most of himself before he dies, "for one reason that i may help pen the better." browning complies with his publisher's request to prepare a new selection of his wife's poems. "how i have done it, i can hardly say," he noted, "but it is one dear delight that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever--her books are more and more read,"--and a new edition of her "aurora leigh" was exhausted within a few months. the winter was a very full and engaging one. on one evening he dined at the deanery of st. paul's, sir john lubbock and tennyson being also guests, but the stanleys, who were invited, were not present. at another dinner the poets met, tennyson recording: "mr. browning gave me an affectionate greeting after all these years," and browning writing to a friend: "... i have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with tennyson, who with his wife and one son is staying in town for a few weeks, and she is just what she was and always will be, very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. i met him at a large party ... also at carlyle's...." in may of browning's father was in poor health, and on june he died, at his home in paris, his son having arrived three days before. although nearly eighty-five years of age, the elder browning had retained all his clearness of mind, and only just before he passed away he had responded to some question of his son regarding a disputed point in medieval history with "a regular book-full of notes and extracts." his son speaks of the aged man's "strange sweetness of soul," apparently a transmitted trait, for the poet shared it, and has left it in liberal heritage to his son, robert barrett browning, the "pen" of all these pages. of his father the poet said: "he was worthy of being ba's father,--out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. she loved him, and he said very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints." miss browning came henceforth to live with her brother, and for the remainder of his life she was his constant companion. she was a woman of delightful qualities,--of poise, cheerfulness, of great intelligence and of liberal culture. she was a very discriminating reader, and was peculiarly gifted with that sympathetic comprehension that makes an ideal companionship. her presence now transformed the london house into a home. the next summer they passed at le croisic, where browning wrote "hervé riel," in "the most delicious and peculiar old house," and he and his sister, both very fond of the open air, walked once to guerande, the old capital of bretagne, some nine miles from their house. browning had received his first academic honors that summer, oxford having conferred on him her degree of m.a. the next october browning was made honorary fellow of balliol college, a distinction that he greatly prized. during this summer rev. dr. phillips brooks (later bishop of massachusetts) was in london, and visited browning once or twice. to a boston friend who asked for his impressions of the great poet, dr. brooks wrote:[ ] "... i can't say anything now except that he is one of the nicest people to pass an evening with in london. he is a clear-headed and particularly clear-eyed man of the world, devoted to society, one of the greatest diners-out in london, cordial and hearty, shakes your hand as if he were really glad to see you.... as to his talk it wasn't 'sordello,' and it wasn't as fine as 'paracelsus,' but nobody ever talked more nobly, truly, and cheerily than he. i went home and slept after hearing him as one does after a fresh starlight walk with a good cool breeze on his face." in , on july , a little more than two years after the death of mrs. browning, arabel barrett had a dream, in which she was speaking with her sister elizabeth, and asked, "when shall i be with you?" "dearest, in five years," was the reply. she told this dream to mr. browning, who recorded it at the time. in june of miss barrett died, the time lacking one month only of being the five years. "only a coincidence, but noticeable," mr. browning wrote to isa blagden. but in the larger knowledge that we now have of the nature of life and the phenomena of sleep, that the ethereal body is temporarily released from the physical (sleep being the same as death, save that in the latter the magnetic cord is severed, and the separation is final)--in the light of this larger knowledge it is easy to realize that the two sisters actually met in the ethereal realm, and that the question was asked and answered according to miss barrett's impression. the event was sudden, its immediate cause being rheumatic affection of the heart, and she died in browning's arms, as did his wife. her companionship had been a great comfort to him, and mr. gosse notes that for many years after her death he could not bear to pass delamere terrace. the late summer of that year was devoted to traveling from cannes about the coast, and they finally decided on audierne for a sojourn. "sarianna and i have just returned from a four hours' walk," he writes to a friend from this place; but here, as everywhere, he was haunted by florentine memories, and by intense longings for his vanished paradise. to isa blagden he wrote: "i feel as if i should immensely like to glide along for a summer day through the streets and between the old stone walls, unseen come and unheard go,--perhaps by some miracle i shall do so ... oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny afternoon with my face turned toward florence...." while at audierne, browning put the final touches to the new six-volume edition of his works that was about to appear from the house of smith, elder, and company, on the title-page of which he signs himself as m.a., honorary fellow of balliol college. mr. nettleship's volume of essays on browning's poems was published that season, indicating a strong interest in the poet; and another very gratifying experience to him was the interest in his work manifested by the undergraduates of both oxford and cambridge. undoubtedly the pleasant glow of this appreciation stimulated his energy in the great poem on which he was now definitely at work, "the ring and the book." publishers were making him offers for its publication, "the r. b. who for six months once did not sell a single copy of his poems," he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, to whom he announced that he should "ask two hundred pounds for the sheets to america, and get it!" with an evident conviction that this was a high price for his work. the increasing recognition of the poet was further indicated by a request from tauchnitz for the volumes of selections which browning dedicated to the laureate in these graceful words: "to alfred tennyson. in poetry--illustrious and consummate; in friendship--noble and sincere." the publication of "the ring and the book" was the great literary event of . two numbers had appeared in the previous autumn, but when offered in its completeness the poem was found to embody the most remarkable interpretation of transfigured human life to be found in all the literature of poetry. the fame of the poet rose to splendor. this work was the inauguration of an epoch, of a period from which his work was to be read, studied, discussed, to a degree that would have been incredible to him, had any cassandra of previous years lifted the veil of the future. the great reviews united in a very choral pean of praise; the _fortnightly_, the _quarterly_, the _edinburgh review_, the _revue des deux mondes_, and others were practically unanimous in their recognition of a work which was at once felt to be the very epitome of the art and life of robert browning. the poem is, indeed, a vast treasure into which the poet poured all his searching, relentless analysis of character, and grasp of motive; all his compassion, his sensitive susceptibility to human emotion; all his gift of brilliant movement; all his heroic enthusiasms, and his power of luminous perception. but all this wealth of feeling and thought had been passed through the crucible of his critical creation; it had been fused and recast by the alchemy of genius. he transmuted fact into truth. "do you see this ring? 't is rome-work made to match (by castellani's imitative craft) etrurian circlets.... * * * * * i fused my live soul and that inert stuff, before attempting smithcraft...." the "square old yellow book" which browning had chanced upon in the market-place of san lorenzo, in that june of , was not a volume, but a "lawyer's file of documents and pamphlets." in relating how he found the book browning says, in the poem: "... i found this book, gave a _lira_ for it, eightpence english just, (mark the predestination!) when a hand, always above my shoulder, pushed me once, * * * * * across a square in florence, crammed with booths." he stepped out on the narrow terrace, built "over the street and opposite the church, * * * * * whence came the clear voice of the cloistered ones chanting a chant made for midsummer nights--" and making his own the story. [illustration: the palazzo riccardi, florence. erected by michelozzo about . "_....riccardi where they lived_ _his race........_" the ring and the book.] in dr. charles w. hodell was enabled by the courtesy of balliol college, to whom browning left the "old yellow book," to make a photographic reproduction of the original documents, to which dr. hodell added a complete and masterly translation, and a noble essay entitled "on the making of a great poem," the most marvelous analysis and commentary on "the ring and the book" that has ever been produced. the photographed pages of the original documents, the translation, and this essay were published by the carnegie institution, in a large volume entitled "the old yellow book." in his preface professor hodell records that he was drawn to the special study of this poem by professor hiram corson, litt.d., ll.d., to whom he reverently refers as "my master." of "the ring and the book" dr. hodell says: "in the wide range of the work of robert browning no single poem can rival 'the ring and the book,' in scope and manifold power. the subject had fallen to his hands at the very fulness of his maturity, by 'predestination,' as it seemed to him. in the poem, as he planned his treatment, there was opportunity for every phase of his peculiar genius.... so that the completed masterpiece becomes the macrocosm of his work.... without doubt it may be held to be the greatest poetic work, in a long poem, of the nineteenth century. it is a drama of profound spiritual realities. 'so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye, and save the soul beside.' browning was the only important poet of the victorian age who did not draw upon the morte d'arthur legends; and the rich mythology of the greeks tempted him as little. the motive that always appealed to him most was that of the activity of the human spirit, its power to dominate all material barriers to transcend every temporary limit, by the very power of its own energy." in his historic researches professor hodell found reason to believe that the pope, in "the ring and the book," was stephen vi, and not vii; and writing to robert barrett browning to inquire regarding this point, he received from the poet's son the following interesting letter, which, by dr. hodell's generous courtesy, is permitted to appear in this book. la torre all' antella, florence, jan. , . my dear sir,--i wish i were able to give you the information you ask me for, but my father's books are in venice, and i have not any here touching on the matter to refer to. if pope stephen was, as you say, the sixth and not the seventh, of course the mistake is obvious and perhaps attributable to an unconscious slip of the memory, which with my father was not at its best in dates and figures. it is not likely that such an error should have appeared in any old work, such as he would have consulted; and certainly it was not caused by carelessness, for he was painstaking to a degree, and had a proper horror of blundering, which is the word he would have used. i can only account for such a mistake as this--which he would have been the first to pronounce unpardonable--by his absent-mindedness, his attention being at the moment absorbed by something else. absent-mindedness was one of his characteristics, over instances of which he used to laugh most heartily. my father's intention, i know, was to be scrupulously accurate about the facts in this poem. i may tell you as an instance that, wishing to be sure that there was moonlight on a particular night, he got a distinguished mathematician to make the necessary calculation. the description of the finding of the book is without doubt true in every detail. indeed, to this day the market at san lorenzo is very much what it was then and as i can remember it. not long ago, i myself bought an old volume there off a barrow. the "yellow book" was probably picked up in june of before going to rome for the winter--the last my father passed in italy. as it had always been understood that the book should be presented to balliol, i went soon after my father's death to stay a few days with jowett, and gave it to him. in the portrait that hangs in balliol hall i painted my father as he sat to me with the book in his hands. nothing would have gratified him more than what you tell me about the interest with which his works are studied in america, and i need not say how much pleasure this gives me. believe me with many thanks for your kind letter, yours very sincerely, r. barrett browning. a very curious discovery was made in rome, in the winter of , by signer giorgi, the librarian of the royal casanatense library, in an ancient manuscript account of curious legal trials, among which were those of beatrice cenci, of miguel de molinos (in ), and of the trial and sentence of guido franceschini. the fact that taxes credulity in regard to this manuscript, of whose existence, even, no one in modern times had ever dreamed, is that the three points of view, as presented by browning in the "half rome," "the other half rome," and "tertium quid," are in accord with those given in this strange document, which for more than a century had lain undisturbed in the archives. in a little explanation regarding the significance of the closing lines of "the ring and the book," also kindly given by robert barrett browning, it seems that his mother habitually wore a ring of etruscan gold, wrought by castellani, with the letters "a. e. i." on it; and that after her death the poet always wore it on his watch-chain, as does now his son. in the tablet placed on casa guidi to the memory of mrs. browning (the inscription of which was written by the italian poet, tommaseo) the source of the other allusion, of the linking italy and england, is found. as the reader will recall, the lines run: "and save the soul! if this intent save mine,-- if the rough ore be rounded to a ring, render all duty which good ring should do, and, failing grace, succeed in guardianship,-- might mine but lie outside thine, lyric love, thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) linking our england to his italy!" dr. corson especially notes browning's opening invocation to his wife, praying her aid and benediction in the work he has undertaken. "this passage," says dr. corson, "has a remarkable movement, the unobtrusive but distinctly felt alliteration contributing to the effect." "o lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,-- boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue." that browning could never have created the character of pompilia, save for that all-enfolding influence of the character of his wife, all the greater critics of "the ring and the book" agree. to dr. corson, browning said of her: "i am not sorry, now, to have lived so long after she went away, but i confess to you that all my types of women were beautiful and blessed by my perfect knowledge of one woman's pure soul. had i never known elizabeth, i never could have written 'the ring and the book.'" of pompilia dr. hodell also says: "... but there is another influence in the creation of this ideal character beside that of the madonna, it was the madonna of his home, the mother of his own child, whose spiritual nature was as noteworthy as her intellect. and before this spiritual nature the poet bowed in humble reverence." mrs. orr, too, has written: "mrs. browning's spiritual presence was more than a presiding memory in the heart. i am convinced that it entered largely into the conception of pompilia. "it takes, however, both the throbbing humanity of balaustion and the saintly glory of pompilia to express fully the nature of elizabeth barrett browning as she appeared to her husband." dr. dowden, brooke, corson, herford, hodell, chesterton, and other authoritative critics allude to their recognition of mrs. browning in the character of pompilia; and no reader of this immortal masterpiece of poetic art can ever fail to find his pulses thrilling with those incomparable lines, spoken in her last hour on earth by pompilia: "o lover of my life, o soldier-saint, no work begun shall ever pause for death! love will be helpful to me more and more i' the coming course, the new path i must tread-- * * * * * tell him that if i seem without him now, that's the world's insight! oh, he understands! * * * * * so let him wait god's instant men call years; meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, do out the duty!..." in the entire range of browning's heroines pompilia is the most exalted and beautiful character. chapter x - "i am strong in the spirit, deep-thoughted, clear-eyed; i could walk, step for step, with an angel beside, on the heaven-heights of truth. oh, the soul keeps its youth * * * * * "'twixt the heavens and the earth _can_ a poet despond? o life, o beyond, thou art strange, thou art sweet!" in scotland with the storys--browning's conversation--an amusing incident--with milsand at st. aubin's--"red cotton night-cap country"--robert barrett browning's gift for art--alfred domett ("waring")--"balaustion's adventure"--browning and tennyson-- "pacchiarotto"--visits jowett at oxford--declines lord rectorship of st. andrews--"la saisiaz"--italy revisited--the dream of asolo-- "ivanovitch"--pride in his son's success--"dramatic idylls." in the summer of the storys, with their daughter, came from rome and joined browning with his sister and his son, for a holiday in scotland. they passed some time at a little inn on loch achnault, where lady marian alford also came, and there are still vivid reminiscences of picnic lunches on the heather, and of readings by the poet from "the ring and the book." chapters from "rob roy" also contributed to the enjoyment of evenings when the three ladies of the party--mrs. story, lady marian, and the lovely young girl, miss edith story--were glad to draw a little nearer to the blazing fire which, even in august, is not infrequently to be desired in scotland. lord dufferin was also a friend of those days, and for the tower he had built at clandeboye in the memory of his mother, helen, countess of gifford, browning wrote, soon after, his poem entitled "helen's tower." mrs. orr speaks of this poem as little known, and not included in his published works; but it is now to be found in all the complete editions of browning. after this arcadian sojourn browning and his son, with miss browning, were the guests of lady ashburton at loch luichart lodge. for two or three years after the publication of "the ring and the book," browning wrote little. the demands of friends and of an always enormous correspondence occupied much time; his son was growing into young manhood, and already manifesting his intense love of art, and his gifts as both painter and sculptor. browning's conversation was always fascinating. it was full of glancing allusion, wit, sparkle, and with that constant undertone of significance that may be serious or gay, but which always lingers with a certain impressiveness to haunt the mind of the listener. dr. hiram corson, who may perhaps be regarded as browning's greatest interpreter, speaks of one of his visits to the poet, in london, where the conversation turned from shelley to shakespeare. "he spoke with regret of the strangely limited reading of the plays, even by those who believe themselves habitual and devoted readers," says dr. corson. "at luncheon," continues dr. corson, "his talk was, as usual with him, rapid and off-hand. he gave but a _coup d'oeil_ to every subject that came up. in all subsequent talks with him, i never got the slightest impression from him of pride of intellect, though his was certainly one of the subtlest and most comprehensive intellects of his time. he was absolutely free from it; was saved from it by his spiritual vitality. his intellectual and his spiritual nature jointly operated. nor did he ever show to me any pride of authorship; never made any independent allusion to his poetry. one might have supposed that his poetry, great and extensive as it was, was a parergon, a by-work, with him. "i have no recollection of any saying of his, such as might be recorded for its wisdom or profundity. never a brilliant thought crystallized in a single sentence. his talk was especially characterized by its cordiality and rapid flow. the 'member of society' and the poet seemed to be quite distinct. "one day when mrs. corson and i were lunching with him in warwick crescent," said dr. corson, "he told us a most amusing incident. on that morning browning was particularly 'an embodied joy.' he told several good stories, one of which showed that the enigmatical character attributed to his poetry by some of his critics was to him a good joke. i have no doubt he must have enjoyed the douglas jerrold story, that jerrold, in endeavoring to read 'sordello,' thought he had lost his mind. "but to browning's story. he said, 'i was visited by the chinese minister and his attachés, without having been previously informed of their coming. before they entered, i had noticed from my window a crowd in the street, which had been attracted by the celestials in their national rigs, who were just then getting out of their carriages, i not knowing then what manner of visitors i was to have. soon the interpreter announced at the drawing-room door, "his excellency, the chinese minister and his attachés." as they entered, the interpreter presented them, individually, first, of course, his excellency, the minister, and then the rest in order of rank. it was quite an impressive occasion. recovering myself, i said to the interpreter: "to what am i indebted for this great honor?" he replied: "you are a distinguished poet in your country, and so is his excellency in his." we did obeisance to each other. i then asked the character of his excellency's poetry. the interpreter replied, "chiefly poetical enigmas." grasping his excellency's hand, i said, "i salute you as a brother."' "browning told this story while walking up and down the room. when he said, 'i salute you as a brother,' he made the motion of a most hearty hand-shake." mrs. arthur bronson, than whom mr. browning never had a more sympathetic and all-comprehending friend, said that if she tried to recall robert browning's words it was as though she had talked to a being apart from other men. "my feeling may seem exaggerated," she smiled, "but it was only natural, when considering my vivid sense of his moral and intellectual greatness. his talk was not abstruse and intricate, like some of his writings. far from it. as a rule he seemed rather to avoid deep and serious subjects. there was no loss, for everything he chose to say was well said. a familiar story, grave or gay, when clothed with his words, and accentuated by his expressive gestures and the mobility of his countenance, had all the charm of novelty; while a comic anecdote from his lips sparkled with wit, born of his own keen sense of humor. i found in him that most rare combination of a powerful personality united to a nature tenderly sympathetic." another who knew him well perpetrated the _mot_ that "tennyson hides behind his laurels, and browning behind the man of the world." henry james, whose gift of subtle analysis was never more felicitously revealed than in his expressions about browning, declared that the poet had two personalities: one, the man of the world, who walked abroad, talked, did his duty; the other, the poet,--"an inscrutable personage,--who sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of that sphere to look for suitable company. the poet and the man of the world were disassociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been." for three or four summers after this sojourn in scotland the brownings were at st. aubin, in brittany, where they had a cottage "not two steps away" from that of his friend milsand. in the early mornings browning would be seen pacing the sands, reading from his little greek copy of homer; and in the late afternoons the two friends would stroll on the normandy beach with their arms around each other's shoulders. they are described as very different in appearance,--browning vigorous and buoyant, milsand nervous, thin, reserved,--but akin in a certain delicate sensitiveness, a swift susceptibility to impressions. of browning milsand said that what he really valued most was his kindness, his simple, open, radiant goodness. "all the chords of sympathy vibrated in his strong voice," added milsand. the french critic was very fond of the poet's son, and in reference to him he once said: "the father has reason to be happy that in walking before he has opened a path for his son, instead of making him stumble." as has been seen, in mrs. browning's letters, she always shared her husband's enthusiasm for milsand, and the latter had said that he felt in her "that shining superiority always concealing itself under her unconscious goodness and lovely simplicity." on sundays at st. aubin's, browning frequently accompanied milsand to the little chapel of château-blagny, for protestant worshipers. from his cottage browning could gaze across the bay to the lighthouse at havre, and he "saw with a thrill" the spot where he once passed a summer with his wife. italian recollections sometimes rose before his inner vision. to isa blagden, who had gone to siena, he wrote that he could "see the fig-tree under which ba sat, reading and writing, poor old landor's oak opposite." of milsand he wrote to a friend: "i never knew or shall know his like among men," and to milsand, who had assisted him in some proof-reading, he wrote acknowledging his "invaluable assistance," and said: "the fact is, in the case of a writer with my peculiarities and habits, somebody quite ignorant of what i may have meant to write, and only occupied with what is really written, ought to supervise the thing produced. i won't attempt to thank you, dearest friend.... the poem will reach you in about a fortnight. i look forward with all confidence and such delight to finding us all together again in the autumn. all love to your wife and daughter. r. b." milsand, writing of browning in the _revue_, revealed his high appreciation of the poet when he said: "browning suggests a power even greater than his achievement. he speaks like a spirit who is able to do that which to past centuries has been almost impossible." it was st. aubin that furnished browning with material for his poem, "red cotton night-cap country," the title of which was suggested by miss thackeray (now lady ritchie) who had a cottage there one summer, near those of browning and milsand. browning and his sister occupied one of the most primitive of cottages, but the location was beautiful, perched on the cliff of st. aubin, and commanded a changeful panorama of sea and sky. "the sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table,--the only book he had with him. the bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but there was a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practice in the early morning. mr. browning declared they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[ ] as all browning readers will remember, "red cotton night-cap country" is dedicated to miss thackeray. in the succeeding autumn browning passed some weeks at fontainebleau, where he was absorbed in reading Æschylus, and in making an especial study of the great dramatist. it was perhaps at this time that he conceived the idea of translating the agamemnon, which, he says in his preface, "was commanded of me by my venerated friend thomas carlyle, and rewarded it will be if i am permitted to dignify it by the prefatory insertion of his dear and noble name." [illustration: bust of robert browning, by his son, robert barrett browning. in the possession of the sculptor at his villa near florence.] before the close of this year browning had also complied with a request from tauchnitz to prepare for publication a selection from the poems of mrs. browning. this tauchnitz edition of mrs. browning will always retain its interest as representing her husband's favorites among her poems. "the rhyme of the duchess may," with its artistic symmetry and exquisite execution, was of course included. this poem may be said to exhibit all mrs. browning's poetic characteristics. encouraged by millais, robert barrett browning had seriously entered on the study of painting, his first master being m. heyermans in antwerp. in frederick lehmann had expressed high appreciation of a work of the young artist, the study of a monk absorbed in reading a book,--a picture that he liked so well as subsequently to purchase it. another picture by barrett browning was entitled "the armorer," and found a place in the royal academy of that year, and was purchased by a member of parliament who was also something of a connoisseur in art. in this season was inaugurated the annual "private view" of the paintings of the poet's son, which were exhibited in a house in queen's gate gardens and attracted much attention. in his son's success browning took great pride and pleasure. on the sale of the picture to the m. p., browning wrote to millais: , warwick crescent, may , . my beloved millais,--you will be gladdened in the kind heart of you to learn that pen's picture has been bought by mr. fielder, a perfect stranger to both of us. you know what your share has been in his success, and it cannot but do a world of good to a young fellow whose fault was never that of being insensible to an obligation. ever affectionately yours, robert browning.[ ] in browning had been appointed life governor of the university of london, an honor that he particularly appreciated as indicating the interest of students in his poetry. in the late winter of , after an absence of thirty years, alfred domett again appeared. he had vanished "like a ghost at break of day," and like a ghost he returned, calling at once on his friend in warwick crescent. a letter from miss browning to domett explains itself: , warwick crescent, upper westbourne terrace, feb. . my dear mr. domett,--my brother was so sorry to miss you yesterday; he is a man of many engagements, and unfortunately is engaged every evening next week, or i would ask you to join our family dinner as soon as possible--but meanwhile, as he is impatient to see you, will you be very kind and come to lunch with us on monday at one o'clock? we shall be delighted to meet you. if you cannot come on monday, name some other morning. always yours truly, sarianna browning. the old friendship between browning and domett was renewed with constant intercourse and interchange of delightful letters. milsand was in the habit of passing a part of every spring with browning in his home in warwick crescent, and with the arrival of domett a warm and sincere friendship united all three. once, in scotland, as the guest of ernest benzon, when browning missed part of a visit from milsand, the poet said: "no words can express the love i have for milsand, increasingly precious as he is." the benzons were at that time in the hills above loch tummel, where jowett was staying, swinburne also with the master of balliol. had there been a phonograph to register the conversation of such a trio as jowett, browning, and swinburne, its records would be eagerly sought. a fragmentary record, indeed, remains in a note made by edwin harrison, who was with jowett at this time. in his diary mr. harrison recorded: "r. b. was in the neighborhood, staying at little milton, above loch tummel, where he was perpetrating 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau' at the rate of so many lines a day, neither more nor less. he walked over to see jowett one afternoon, very keen about a fanciful rendering he had imagined for lines in the alcestis. a few evenings later we met him and his son at dinner at altaine house, by the foot of the loch. you may be sure that where jowett and browning were, the conversation was animated and interesting." in "balaustion's adventure" the poet seemed to take captive the popular appreciation of the day, for more than three thousand copies had been sold within the first six months, and his sister told domett that she regarded it as the most swiftly appreciated poem of all her brother's works. certainly it is one of the most alluring of browning's works,--this delightful treatment of the interwoven life of mortals and of the immortal gods. the june of brought to browning the sad news of the death of his wife's dearest friend, isa blagden. "a little volume of isabella blagden's poems was published after her death," writes thomas adolphus trollope. "they are not such as would take the world by storm, but it is impossible to read them without perceiving how choice a spirit their author must have been, and understanding how she was especially honored with the friendship of mrs. browning."[ ] on the publication of "red cotton night-cap country," browning sent a first copy to tennyson, and the laureate's son says of it: "among the lines which my father liked were 'palatial, gloomy chambers for parade, and passage lengths of lost significance'; and he praised the simile about the man with his dead comrade in the lighthouse. he wrote to mr. browning: 'my wife has just cut the leaves. i have yet again to thank you, and feel rather ashamed that i have nothing of my own to send you back.'" an entry in tennyson's diary in the following december notes: "mr. browning dined with us. he was very affectionate and delightful. it was a great pleasure to hear his words,--that he had not had so happy a time for a long while as since we have been in town." tennyson's "queen mary" was published in , and on receiving a copy from the author browning wrote expressing thanks for the gift, and even more for "queen mary the poem." he found it "astonishingly fine"; and he adds: "what a joy that such a poem should be, and be yours." the relations between the two great poets of the victorian age were always ideally beautiful, in their cordial friendship and their warm mutual appreciation. in a note dated in the christmas days of browning writes: my dear tennyson,--true thanks again, this time for the best of christmas presents, another great work, wise, good, and beautiful. the scene where harold is overborne to take the oath is perfect, for one instance. what a fine new ray of light you are entwining with your many-colored wreath!... all happiness befall you and yours this good season and ever.[ ] the present lord tennyson, in his biography of his father, makes many interesting allusions to the friendship and the pleasant intercourse between the poets. "browning frequently dined with us," he says, "and the _tête-à-tête_ conversations between him and my father on every imaginable topic were the best talk i have ever heard, so full of repartee, epigram, anecdote, depth, and wisdom, too brilliant to be possible to reproduce. these brother poets were two of the most widely read men of their time, absolutely without a touch of jealousy, and reveling, as it were, in each other's power.... browning had a faculty for absurd and abstruse rhymes, and i recall a dinner where jebb, miss thackeray, and browning were all present, and browning said he could make a rhyme for every word in the language. we proposed rhinoceros, and without pause he said, 'o, if you should see a rhinoceros and a tree be in sight, climb quick, for his might is a match for the gods,--he can toss eros.'" a london friend relates that on one occasion browning chanced upon a literal translation some one had made from the norwegian: "the soul where love abideth not resembles a house by night, without a fire or torch," and remarked how easy it would be to put this into rhyme; and immediately transmuted it into the couplet, "what seems the soul when love's outside the porch? a house by night, without a fire or torch." when browning's "inn album" appeared, and he sent a copy to tennyson, the laureate responded: "my dear browning,--you are the most brotherly of poets, and your brother in the muses thanks you with the affection of a brother. she would thank you too, if she could put hand to pen." tennyson once remarked to his son, hallam, that he wished he had written browning's lines: "the little more, and how much it is, the little less, and what worlds away." there was an interval of twelve years between the appearance of the "dramatis personæ" (in ) and the publication of "pacchiarotto." in this collection browning's amusing play of rhyme is much in evidence. among mr. browning's most enjoyable experiences were his frequent visits to oxford and cambridge, in both of which he was an honored guest. in the spring of he had an especially delightful stay at oxford, the pleasure even beginning on the train, "full of men, all my friends," he wrote of it; and continued: "i was welcomed on arrival by a fellow who installed me in my rooms--then came the pleasant meeting with jowett, who at once took me to tea with his other guests, the archbishop of canterbury, the bishop of london, the dean of westminster, lord airlie, and others." there was a banquet and much postprandial eloquence that night, and browning mentions among the speakers lord coleridge, professor smith, mr. green (on science and literature with a most complimentary appreciation of browning), and "a more rightly-directed one," says the poet, "on arnold, swinburne, and the old pride of balliol, clough, which was cleverly and almost touchingly answered by dear matthew arnold." the dean of westminster responded to the toast of "the fellows and the scholars," and the entire affair lasted over six hours. "but the whole thing," said browning, "was brilliant, genial, and there was a warmth, earnestness, and refinement about it which i never experienced in any previous public dinner." the profound impression that browning made both by his personality and his poetic work is further attested by his being again chosen lord rector of the university of glasgow. dr. william knight, the professor of moral philosophy at st. andrews, urges browning's acceptance of this office, and begs the poet to realize "how the thoughtful youth of scotland" estimate his work. professor knight closes by saying that his own obligations to browning, "and to the author of 'aurora leigh' are such that of them silence is golden." while mr. browning was deeply touched by this testimonial of esteem, he still, for the second time, declined the honor. many readers and lovers of robert browning's poem "la saisiaz" little dream of the singular story connected with it. "la saisiaz" is a chalet above geneva, high up in the savoyard mountains, looking down on geneva and lake leman. it is a tall, white house, with a red roof that attracted the lovers of beauty, solitude, and seclusion. among the few habitués for many years were robert browning and his sister, sarianna, and their friend, miss egerton-smith. it was the bond of music that especially united browning and this lady, and in london they were apt to frequent concerts together. "la saisiaz" is surrounded by tall poplar trees, but the balcony from a third-floor window, which was browning's room, looked through a space in the trees out on the blue lake, and on this balcony he would draw out his chair and writing desk. back of the chalet a steep path ran up the mountains, where the three friends often climbed, to enjoy a gorgeous and unrivaled sunset spectacle. in they were all there as usual in august, and one evening had planned that the next day they would start early in the morning and pass the day on the mountain, going by carriage, a servant accompanying them carrying the basket of luncheon. in the early evening browning and miss egerton-smith were out, pacing up and down the "grass-grown path," and talking of the infinite life which includes death and that which is beyond death. the next morning she did not appear, and browning and his sister waited for her. they sat out on the terrace after having morning coffee, expecting to see the "tall white figure," and finally miss browning went to her room to ask if she were ill, and she lay dead on the floor. miss egerton-smith was buried in the neighboring cemetery of collonge, where her grave, over which a wonderful willow tree bends, is still seen--a place of frequent pilgrimage to visitors in this region. five days after her death browning made the excursion up the mountain alone, "but a bitter touched its sweetness, for the thought stung 'even so both of us had loved and wondered just the same, five days ago!'" la salève, the mountain overlooking the arve and the rhone valley, is one of the most wildly picturesque points in all the alpine region. the chalet of "la saisiaz" was perched on this mountain spur, about half-way up the mountain, on a shelving terrace, with vast and threatening rocks rising behind. the poem called "la saisiaz" is one of browning's greatest. it is full of mystical questioning and of his positive and radiant assertions of faith; it abounds in vivid and exquisite scenic effects, and it has the personal touches of tenderness. the morning after her death is thus pictured: "no, the terrace showed no figure, tall, white, leaning through the wreaths, tangle-twine of leaf and bloom that intercept the air one breathes." browning and miss egerton-smith had first met in florence. she was an english lady of means (being part proprietor of the _liverpool mercury_) and of a reserve of temperament which kept her aloof from people in general. with the poet and his sister she was seen in all that cordial sweetness of her nature which her sensitive reserve veiled from strangers. italy again! a sapphire sky bending over hills and peaks and terraces swimming in violet shadows; villas, and sudden views, and arching _pianterreni_, and winding roads between low stone walls hidden in their riotous overgrowth of roses! and the soft air, the tall black cypresses against the sky, the sunsets and the stars, and golden lights, and dear italian phrases! the trailing ivy vines all in a tangle; the wayside shrine, the vast white monastery perched on an isolated mountain top; the flaming scarlet of the poppies in the grass, the castles and battlements dimly caught on the far horizon,--the poetry, the loveliness, the ineffable beauty of italy! seventeen years had passed since that midsummer day when the dear form of his "lyric love" had been laid under the florentine lilies, when browning, in the spring of , returned to his italy. what dreams and associations thronged upon him! "places are too much, or else too little for immortal man,-- * * * * * ... thinking how two hands before had held up what is left to only one." seventeen years had passed, but venice, the ethereal city, the mystic dream of sea and sky, was unchanged, and, however unconsciously, the poet was now to initiate another era, another new "state" in his life. he never again went farther south than venice; he could never see florence or rome again, where _she_ had lived beside him; but the dream city now became for him a second and dearer home. with his sister sarianna, he broke the journey by lingering in a hotel on the summit of the splügen, where he indulged himself in those long walks which he loved, miss browning often accompanying him down the via cala mala, or to the summit where they could look down into lombardy. browning was at work on his "dramatic idyls," and not only "ivan ivanovitch," but several others were written on the splügen. pausing at lago di como, and a day in verona, they made their way to asolo, "my very own of all italian cities," the poet would say of it. asolo, which from its rocky hilltop, has an outlook over all veneto,--over all italy, it would almost seem, for the towers and domes of venice are visible on a clear day,--gave its full measure of joy to browning, and when they descended into venice they were domiciled in the palazzo brandolin-rota, on the grand canal, near the accademia. in venice he met a russian lady whom he consulted about some of the names he was giving to the characters in his "ivan ivanovitch." the success of his son in the paris salon and other exhibitions was a continual happiness to mr. browning. both in paris and in london the pictures of barrett browning were accorded an honorable place "on the line"; he received a medal from the salon, and there was not wanting, either, that commercial side of success that sustains its theory. the young artist had now seriously entered on sculpture, under rodin, with much prestige and promise. the first series of "dramatic idyls" was published in the autumn of , closely following "la saisiaz" and the "two poets of croisic." the devoted student of browning could hardly fail to be impressed by one feature of his poetry which, though a prominent one, has received little attention from the critics. this feature is his doctrine of the sub-self, as the source of man's highest spiritual knowledge. he has given his fullest expression of this belief in his "paracelsus," and it appears in "sordello" (especially in the fifth book), in "a death in the desert," in "fifine," and in "christopher smart," and is largely developed in "the ring and the book." again, in "beatrice signorini," contained in "asolando," published only on the day of his death, this theory is again apparent, and these instances are only partial out of the many in which the doctrine is touched or elaborated, showing how vital it was with him from the earliest to the latest period of his work. another striking quality in browning is that of the homogeneous spirit of his entire poetic expression. it is the great unity in an equally great variety. it is always clear as to the direction in which browning is moving, and as to the supreme message of his philosophy of life. chapter xi - "moreover something is or seems, that touches me with mystic gleams, like shadows of forgotten dreams." "alas! our memories may retrace each circumstance of time and place, season and change come back again, and outward things unchanged remain; the rest we cannot re-instate; ourselves we cannot re-create; nor set our souls to the same key of the remembered harmony!" "les charmettes"--venetian days--dr. hiram corson--the browning society-- oxford honors browning--katherine dekay bronson--honors from edinburgh--visit to professor masson--italian recognition--nancioni-- the goldoni sonnet--at st. moritz--in palazzo giustiniani-- "ferishtah's fancies"--companionship with his son--death of milsand-- letters to mrs. bronson--devere gardens--palazzo rezzonico--sunsets from the lido--robert barrett browning's gift in portraiture. twenty-five years after robert browning had visited the famous haunts of rousseau with his wife, he again made a little sojourn with his sister in lovely chambéry, making various excursions in all the picturesque region about, and again visiting "les charmettes," which miss browning had not before seen; as before, browning sat down to the old harpsichord, attempting to play "rousseau's dream," but only two notes of the antique instrument responded to his touch. through all the wonderful scenery of the mont cenis pass they proceeded to turin and thence to venice, where they arrived in the midst of the festivities of the congress carnival in september of . the storys, whom browning had anticipated meeting in venice, had gone to vallombrosa, where their daughter (the marchesa peruzzi di' medici) had a villa, to which the family retired in summer from their stately old palace in florence. mr. story's two sons, the painter and the sculptor, both had studios in venice at this time, and mr. browning often strolled into these. among other friends browning and his sister visited the countess mocenigo, who was ensconced in the same palace that byron had occupied. she showed her guests through all the rooms with their classic associations, and browning sat down to the desk at which byron had written the last canto of "childe harold." to the satisfaction of the brownings, venice soon regained her usual quiet,--that wonderful silence broken only by the plash of water against marble steps, and the cries of the gondoliers,--and he resumed his long walks, often accompanied by miss browning, exploring every curious haunt and lingering in shops and squares. the poet familiarized himself with the enchanting dream city, as no tours in gondolas alone could ever do. to him venice came to be dear beyond words, and soon after he made all arrangements to purchase the palazzo manzoni, an ancient venetian palace of the fifteenth century, whose façade was a faint glow of color from its medallions of colored marbles, and whose balconies and arched windows seemed especially designed for a poet's habitation. but the ancient structure was found to be in a too perilous condition, and browning, with never-failing regret, resigned the prospect; nor was he ever consoled, it is said, until, some years later, his son became the owner of the noble palazzo rezzonico. every day the poet saw venice transformed into new splendor. "to see these divine sunsets is the joy of life," he would say, as a city, flushed with rose, reflected itself in pale green waters, and the golden sunset filled with liquid light every narrow street and passage, contrasting sharply with the dense black shadows. browning had a love of the sky that made its glorious panorama one of the delights of his life. one of the crowning honors of the poet's life invested these days for him with renewed vitality of interest,--that of the formation of the browning society in london for the study and promulgation of his poetic work. this was, indeed, a contrast to the public attitude of thirty years before. once, in a letter to mrs. millais (dated january , ) he had described himself to her as "the most unpopular poet that ever was." the browning society was due, in its first inception, to dr. furnivall and to miss emily hickey, and its founding was entirely without browning's knowledge. although the poet avowed himself as "quite other than a browningite," he could not fail to be touched and gratified by such a mark of interest and appreciation. dr. hiram corson, professor of literature at cornell university, had, however, formed a browning club, composed of professors and their wives and many eminent scholars, some four or five years before the formation of the browning society in london, and the notable browning readings which professor corson had given continually in many of the large cities and before universities, had been of incalculable aid in making robert browning's poetry known and understood in the united states. as an interpreter of browning, dr. corson stood unrivaled. his aim was to give to his audience the spiritual meaning of the poem read. his rich voice had the choral intonation without which no poem can be vocally interpreted. his reading gave not only the articulated thought, but the spiritual message of the poet. it is hardly too much to say that no one has ever fully realized the dramatic power of browning who has not listened to the interpretation of dr. corson. of his own part in the creation of the browning society in london, dr. corson kindly contributed this record: "i was stopping with my wife at the inns of court hotel, on high holborn. a day or two before receiving mr. browning's invitation, dr. frederick james furnivall dined with us, and after dinner we went over to the inns of court gardens, just back of the hotel. there we walked about during the long evening twilight, and talked over the founding of a society which dr. furnivall and miss emily henriette hickey, the poetess, had been contemplating, for the study of browning's poetry. i told him of what i had done at cornell university, the previous four or five years, in a browning club composed of professors and their wives, and in my university classes. it was decided that the london browning society should be organized in october; and i engaged to go over to england the following june, and read a paper before the society; which i did at its eighth meeting, on the d of june, the subject of the paper being 'the idea of personality as embodied in robert browning's poetry, and of art as an intermediate agency of personality.'" another source of joy to browning, and one that far exceeded that of any recognition of himself, was the increasing recognition of his son's achievements in art. barrett browning was at this time a pupil of rodin in paris, devoting himself to sculpture with the same ardor that he gave to his painting. as to which expression in art was the more his métier, _chi lo sa_? the young man was the child of the muses, and all forms of art were to him a temperamental inheritance. oxford again honored browning, this time in the june of , with the degree of d.c.l. "i never saw my father happier than on this occasion," mr. barrett browning said to the writer of this volume when questioned regarding it; and another observer who was present speaks of browning's distinction in his red oxford gown, his shoulders thrown back, and his swift, light step. one of the humors of the occasion was the dangling of a red cotton night-cap over his head by one of the undergraduates, who was in danger of a not ill-merited rebuke, but browning interceded with the vice-chancellor not to be too hard "on the harmless drolleries of the young man." it was in this oxford gown, holding in his hand "the square old yellow book," that robert barrett browning painted the portrait of his father, which he presented to oxford, and which now hangs, a treasured possession, in balliol hall, to which portrait some allusion has already been made. [illustration: portrait of robert browning, by his son. painted in , and presented to oxford university by the artist.] one of the most beautiful of the friendships of the last decade of the poet's life was that with mrs. arthur bronson, a very cultivated and charming american woman who for more than twenty years made her home in venice. casa alvisi, on the grand canal, opposite santa maria della salute, came to be such a delightful center of social life for the choice circle that mrs. bronson gathered around her, that its records fairly enter into the modern history of venice. adjoining casa alvisi was the old giustiniani palace, in which mrs. bronson had taken a suite of rooms that she might use them in dispensing her hospitalities. no one who has been the privileged guest of mrs. bronson can ever lose the grateful appreciation of her genius as a hostess. her lovely hospitality was dispensed with the quality that entitled it to be considered as absolutely a special gift of the gods, and when she invited browning and his sister to occupy these rooms in the palazzo giustiniani recanti, it was with a grace that forestalled any refusal. at first miss browning did a little housekeeping on their own account, except that they dined and passed the evening with mrs. bronson; later on, for several seasons, they were her house-guests in casa alvisi,--that unique and dream-enchanted interior crowded with lovely venetian things, and bibelots and bric-à-brac picked up the world over. but the brother and sister always occupied the rooms in the palace. it was after the first one of this series of annual visits that browning wrote to mrs. bronson the following letter after his return to london: , warwick crescent, w. nov. , ' . i would not write at first arriving, dear friend, because i fancied that i might say too much all at once, and afterward be afraid of beginning again till some interval; this fortnight since i saw you, however, must pass for a very long interval indeed, i will try to tell you as quietly as possible that i never shall feel your kindness,--such kindness!--one whit less than i do now; perhaps i feel it "now" even more deeply than i could, at all events, realize that i was feeling. you have given venice an appreciation that will live in my mind with every delight of that dearest place in the world. but all the same you remain for me a dearest of friends, whether i see you framed by your venice, or brightening up our bleak london, should you come there. in venice, however, should i live and you be there next autumn, it will go hard with me if i do not meet you again. what a book of memories, and instigations to get still more memories, does your most beautiful and precious book prove to me! i never supposed that photographers would have the good sense to use their art on so many out-of-the-way scenes and sights, just those i love most.... you--you have lost lowell, and field, and the rest of the good fellowship, but you will be sure of a succession of the sort. on the poet's seventieth birthday he received, from the browning societies of oxford, cambridge, cornell university, and others, a gift of a complete set of his own works, bound in olive green morocco, in a beautifully carved oak case, with this inscription: "to robert browning on his seventieth birthday, may th, , from some members of the browning societies. these members having ascertained that the works of a great modern poet are never in robert browning's house, beg him to accept a set of these works which they assure him will be found worthy of his most serious attention." dr. corson has related that when he visited the poet at one time browning showed him this case, placed against the wall of the drawing-room, with an almost boyish delight. in august of , on their leisurely way to venice, browning and his sister lingered at saint-pierre la chartreuse and at gressoney saint-jean, where his enchanting outlook upon monte rosa was a continual joy, mr. browning spent one night in the monastery of the grand chartreuse, in order to hear the midnight mass; while miss browning, denied hospitality in the monastery, received that of the convent near at hand, where she was cordially entertained by the mother superior. the prologue of "ferishtah's fancies," published the next year, is dated from gressoney, val d'aosta, and the lines, "a fancy-freak by contrast born of thee, delightful gressoney!" will recall themselves to the memory. miss browning was an ideal companion in these mountain wanderings. she was equal to endless walks, and she had the accomplishment of being able to ride a mule or a donkey as one to the manor born. from gressoney they looked up to the glaciers of monte rosa, almost overhanging, and from saint-pierre browning wrote to a friend that they were in the roughest and most primitive inn, "but my sister bears it bravely." italian recognition of browning was stimulated and extended, if not primarily inspired, by il signor dottore nancioni, who had the chair of literature in the university of florence, and whom the brownings had first met in the old siena days. as milsand first made browning known in france, through his critical papers in the _revue_, so nancioni published, in the _nuova antologia_, and in the _fanfulla della domenica_ of rome, several papers devoted to serious and critical study and interpretation of browning's work; and he made the journey from rome to venice to meet the poet again. the recital of poetry was by no means ended in italy in the days of the _improvvisatori_, and professor nanciani frequently gave readings from browning before cultivated italian audiences. when venice honored goldoni with a statue, browning was invited to contribute to that wonderful "album" of letters, with which italy characteristically commemorates all scholarly events, with contributions from literary men. the sonnet so pleased the venetians that they gave it the place of honor in the album. the london seasons during all these years were of unrivaled brilliancy. browning was seen in all the great houses, and often for two weeks he would dine out every consecutive night. dr. corson, whose first visit to browning was made in the early eighties, gave to a friend in a personal letter this little transcription of his first meeting with the poet, with whom he had long been in correspondence: "he received me in the drawing-room, on the second floor. after a few minutes' conversation, he showed me various interesting things, in the drawing-room, busts and portraits and mementoes of mrs. browning, keeping up a rapid and meandering current of talk. something was said, i forget what, which caused me to allude to 'the book,' the 'square old yellow book,' with 'crumpled vellum covers,' which he picked out of the market-day trumpery in the piazza san lorenzo, in florence, and which led to the composition of his masterpiece, 'the ring and the book,' 'i'll take you down in a few minutes,' he said, 'to the library, and show it to you.' when we left the drawing-room and were at the top of the stairway, he, with an apparent unconsciousness, and as if i were a younger brother, put his arm over my off shoulder, and so descended with me, talking all the while at his usual rapid rate. i tell this little incident, as i observed later, on several occasions, such an expression of unconscious cordiality and good fellowship was a characteristic of him. "beside his chair, at the writing table, stood mrs. browning's low-seated, high and straight-backed, black haircloth covered chair, on which were piled books almost to the top of the back, which most effectually excluded any one from the honor of sitting in it. "when showing me 'the book,' he called my attention to passages in the latin portion of it--the arguments of the two lawyers, bottinius and hyacinthus de archangelis, and i was struck with the way in which he translated them, the rapid and close recasting of the thought in english, a rare gift even with the best latin scholars. i had occasions to discover, in subsequent visits, that he read the greek in a genial way and with less grammatical consciousness than do many greek professors. his scholarship was extensive and, i would add, _vital_, it not having been imposed upon him at a public school and a university, and he having had what must have been shakespeare's power of acquiring and absorbing knowledge of all kinds. on some subsequent visit, i don't remember what we had been talking about that led to the remark, he said to me, in his rapid mode of speech, 'i never could have done much at a public school,' meaning, of course, an endowed foundation school, such as eton and others, in which there is a special preparation for the universities. after a pause, he added, 'no, nor at a university either. italy was _my_ university.' in his 'de gustibus----' he says: 'open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, italy.' "while he was showing me 'the book,' i asked him about a passage in 'the ring and the book.' he replied, 'i don't remember the passage. it has been some time since i read the poem, and i haven't a copy of it in my house!' "he showed me many of mrs. browning's books--nearly all of them mo editions--said she couldn't hold big books--english, french, italian, latin, and greek books; a hebrew bible which had belonged to a distinguished english bishop, whose name i've forgotten. 'did mrs. browning read hebrew?' i asked. 'oh, yes,' he replied, and added with a sigh, 'she was a wonderful woman.'" [illustration: church of san lorenzo, florence "_june was the month, lorenzo named the square._" the ring and the book.] the succeeding summer found the corsons again in london, and the following invitation from browning particularly pleased them in its assurance that "nobody else" would be present. dear professor corson,--could mrs. corson and yourself do my sister and me the great pleasure of taking luncheon with us--and nobody else--next tuesday ( th) at one o'clock? believe me, dear professor corson, yours truly ever,-- robert browning. on browning's return to england in , after his wife's death, he had entered into a most brilliant and congenial social life. thackeray died soon after his return; but there were carlyle, ruskin, jowett, millais, rossetti, proctor, matthew arnold, woolner, leighton, tennyson (whose companionship, as we have seen, was one of his keenest enjoyments), and his publisher, george murray smith, of the head of the house of smith, elder, and company, who was one of his chosen friends. carlyle died in , but many of this group well outlived browning. on new year's day of miss browning wrote to mrs. bronson: the very first word i write this year is to you, dearest friend, wishing you every good gift the earth below, and heaven above, can offer. if robert does not write his own share in these kind feelings, it is only because we have mutually agreed that we shall come more constantly before you if we keep our letters apart. ... you cannot think how incessantly we dwell on the memories of the pleasant past. we are in casa alvisi in spirit daily, and i picture to myself all that is going on in the well-loved rooms. i hope edith works at her guitar. she will find that it will repay the trouble. give our kindest love to her, and take yourself our loving hearts. god bless you this year. ever yours affectionately, sarianna browning. in a letter to mrs. bronson browning alludes to the purchase of the new house in devere gardens: "... i am really in treaty--not too deeply _in_ it for extrication at need--with the land-owner who proposes to build me the house i want,--freehold, if you please! so that it can be pen's after me; my notion is to contract just what sarianna and i require now, leaving it in the said pen's power to add and alter according to future advisability." portions of other letters from browning to mrs. bronson are as follows. the first refers to the little daughter of princess mélanie metternich. "first and worst of all, dear friend, how truly grieved i am to hear of the sad end of the poor little girl i remember so well. do you remember how she, with her sister, walked before us on our way homeward from the piazza on nearly our last evening? and how prettily she asked me at her own house to write in her birthday book! all this sudden extinction of light in the gay ca' bembo, where i saw the silks bespread before your knowledge and my ignorance! "it is needless to say how much i pity the princess, and her kindly husband, too, and i am sorry, very sorry, for you also, dear friend of mine, well knowing how you must have suffered in degree." mrs. bronson had a talent for the writing of drawing-room comedies, and to one of these the poet alludes: "dear friend,--i kept your comedietta by me a whole week that i might taste of it again and again; how clever it is, who can know better than i, who furnished the bare framework which your virginia creeper has over-flourished so charmingly? it is all capitally done; quite as much elaborated as the little conception was worth; but its great value to me is the proof it really gives what really good work you might do on a larger scale.... "... i dined last evening at john murray's, in the room where used to meet byron, scott, moore, all those famous men of old, whose portraits still adorn the walls. murray told me he well remembered byron and his ways; could still in fancy see him and scott, and also hear them, as they stamped heavily (lame as both were) down the somewhat narrow stairs. sociability may well come to the relief of people who cannot amuse themselves at home, for the weather, mild, and too mild, is gray, sunless and spiritless, altogether. to-day it rains, a rare occurrence...." one of the very pleasant interludes in mr. browning's life came about this time in the receipt of a letter from professor masson of the university of edinburgh, inviting the poet to be his guest the week of the coming tercentenary celebration of the university. it had been decided to confer on mr. browning an honorary degree, but by some misadventure the official letter announcing this had not reached him, and in reply to professor masson he wrote that he had not received "the invitation to edinburgh which occasions this particularly kind one," which he thankfully acknowledged, "but i should find it difficult if not impossible to leave london in april," he continues, "as my son will then be with me; but had i seen my way in so doing it would delight me, indeed, could i spend the days in question with you and mrs. masson." he added that if ever he was privileged "to see the as famous as beautiful city again," he should call on the massons the first thing of all, and he desired thanks to mrs. masson "for associating her goodness with yours." apparently another letter appears from professor masson, but still browning does not receive the official invitation of the university. "should it follow," he writes, "i will acknowledge the distinction as gratefully as i have done already when it was conferred by oxford and cambridge." the massons also invited mr. browning to bring his son with him, and he responded: "... so, my dear professor masson, i provisionally accept your hospitality with thankfulness, and that of mrs. masson. for my son, who is away, i can only say that he shall be informed of your goodness, and i fully believe will be delighted to avail himself of it.... as to the 'vagueness or intelligibility' of your note, i can assure you that one thing was intelligible enough,--that you wished to help me most kindly and pleasantly to witness an extremely interesting ceremony, and i have written to my son and his answer you shall hear as soon as possible.... by the way, ought i to attend in the oxford d.c.l. gown,--at any preliminary entertainment, for instance." the next letter tells its own story. , warwick crescent, w. march th, . my dear professor masson,--nothing can be kinder than all your proposed arrangements. my son arrived two days ago, and, unfortunately, is obliged to return to paris next week in order to finish work begun there--and he will be detained too long to allow of the visit which he would otherwise delight in paying you and for the invitation to which he desires me to offer you and mrs. masson his grateful acknowledgments, being well aware of what a privilege he is forced to deprive himself.... i shall bring the oxford d.c.l. gown and provide myself with a hood in edinburgh. so, with repeated thanks for all your goodness, and looking forward with much pleasure to the approaching festivities, and even more in the opportunity to converse, believe me, my dear professor masson, yours very sincerely, robert browning. miss rosaline masson, the professor's daughter, has described how browning sat before the fire the evening of his arrival, in an armchair, his hands resting on it, while he spoke with sympathetic pride of his son's work, and told how the son, who had studied so much abroad, had once announced to millais his intention of going to egypt to paint, and that millais had replied that he would not give up his months in the highlands of scotland for any years in egypt. the massons had as their guests for this great commemoration the count and countess aurelio saffi, the count bringing with him his gorgeous bologna gown, in which he had the resplendence of a figure in a stained glass window. the week was a most enjoyable one to mr. browning. receptions and dinners made up a round of festivity, and when he was asked by his hostess if he objected to all the adulation he received, he replied: "object to it? no; i have waited forty years for it and now--i like it." after his return to london he sent to mrs. masson two manuscripts of mrs. browning's, her translations of "psyche and pan" and of "psyche propitiating ceres," and to professor masson a letter from leigh hunt to himself, which the professor had wished to copy,--the original which he sent being written on sheets of different colors held together with colored embroidery. browning wrote to his host that he had read with delight his two lectures on carlyle, and that "the goodness of that memorable week" was never long out of his mind. the letters written to mrs. bronson offer almost a panoramic picture of his life over all these closing years. alluding to a studio that he had taken for the temporary accommodation of his son's pictures and busts, mr. browning resumes: ... pen's statues and busts are in bronze now, and his large "idyl," three landscapes, and whatsoever else, to arrive soon. were you only here to see! well, you can bear with the talking about them you shall undergo, for we two understand each other, don't we? i know i am ever yours and your own edith's affectionately, robert browning. in the late summer browning and his sister were the guests of mrs. bloomfield moore, in her villa at st. moritz, from which mr. browning thus writes to mrs. bronson: villa berry, st. moritz, ober engadine. sept. , ' . yes, dearest friend, your pretty wreath came this morning, and opposite this table shall it hang till i leave the house, be it withered or no, and at present it is fresh. now, thank you for what? for everything, your love, and thoughts, and regrets, too. do not we, too, regret that italy is closed to us; but the comfort out of the vexation is that you will, will you not, cross to london from paris, and so we shall see you for all the multiplied hindrances. now how do you suppose it is faring with us? we are alone. our hostess was summoned to america last week, to her extreme regret, and after a hot business of telegraphing and being telegraphed to, left last wednesday. she had taken this comfortable villa till the middle of december, and would not hear of our quitting it, and, all things considered, we had little inclination to do so, for you were from home, and what would be the good of lingering out this month elsewhere, the air and influences happening to suit us extremely. so our plan is to stay out sept. here, and be content with at most two months' absence, instead of the four we utterly enjoyed last year. mrs. moore was altogether as kind and considerate as possible, and has made every possible provision for our comfort after her departure. we are quite alone. friends are in the place, but we only get glimpses of them. the place is emptying fast, the pensions shut up, the walks on the mountain-side are wholly our own. two days ago the snow fell thickly, and what a sight were the mountains next morning in a glowing sun! these changes i expect will diversify the whole month, and inside this warm, pleasant room sarianna and i read, and don't require "the devil to find some missing ill for idle hands to do." you have much more to enjoy with all that good music thrown in, and i am glad for you. we get books and papers enough, and i am correcting proofs of the poem i was too negligent about in london. many distractions stood in the way of that. after all, we have attained the main object of our journey, the complete re-establishment of sarianna's health, who walks twice a day, just as of old. i am cheered, too, by letters from robert, the last of which comes just now. he was anxious that his statue of "dryope" should be seen at the brussels exhibition, a triennial one, and important from the concurrence of the best foreign artists; but the "grosvenor," where it was shown, did not close till the first week in august, while the brussels gallery was closed to (entrance of) works on the th of july. robert sent his photographs with a petition for a "delai," only exceptionally granted; the committee conceded it unanimously, and have given it a place where it stands by itself, and is capitally seen. he went to see it, and so did the king and queen, to whom he would have been presented, had he not been in morning dress. (the father of robert to the mother of edith.) you know very well how interested and delighted i shall be to read your german translations if you send them; do! again, from this invigorating mountain village browning writes to his venetian friend and hostess in casa alvisi: villa berry, st. moritz, engadine, s. sept. , ' . for first thing, dearest friend, i am glad to know that my letter with the poems reached you before your departure. i had some fear that you might miss it. it is like your goodness to care so much about what amounts to so little. i did what i could to be of use by amending; i could have done more to the purpose if the poems were original; but i know your translations were faithful, as they should be. when you write out of your own dear head let me see, and try hard to improve it, never so little. i well remember the whole book of verses you let me read at venice; i could not well have helped you there. and now for a sorrow after the gladness; we do not pass through paris this time, but take the direct and more convenient route by amiens and calais. last year we wanted, or needed, to see pen, who was at his paris studio; but now he is still in dinard. i do not know when he means to leave; if he finds you at paris it will be a delight for him to see you.... well, yes, the king's behavior has been admirable; what a chance the poor pope has thrown away in not preceding him! if the "prisoner of the vatican" had quietly walked out of his confinement, with a cross before him, and an attendant on each side, and passed on to naples and the hospitals "braving all danger in imitation of his master," i verily believe there might have happened a revolution. such events from much less causes being frequent enough. where is the "wisdom of the serpent"? dearest friend, my sister writes, all love to edith, all love to you, from your ever affectionate robert browning. on their return to london the letters to mrs. bronson again resume the story of this interesting life: "... i have got rid of my last proof-sheets, and all of a sudden it occurs to me to ask--now that alteration is impossible, i suppose--whether i have offended in just dating the last poem from the place where i wrote it--the giustiniani? the first poem was dated at the inn, and the last seemed to belong to the beloved place where it was penned, as i wanted to remember, or be remembered, rather. have i done wrong? (i hear at this moment my sister actually singing in the next room,--so completely is she re-established in health.) by letters we find that the admirable weather at st. moritz was continued up to the end of the last week; here the weather is fine, and finer than usual, but the sparkle is off the wine, the wonderful freshness of st. moritz does not incline one to dance rather than walk. "i am in absolute peace and quietude, and so thoroughly prepared to enjoy your coming,--if that may be...." the next letter speaks of american friends: , warwick crescent, w. oct. , ' . dearest friend,--i waited a little before replying to your letter, wanting to be sure when i could say that pen would be in paris; he proposed to go there yesterday, and you will certainly have a visit from him as soon as he can manage to do what i know he desires very much. here are your verses which i try to be as severe about as possible, with no success, at all, worth speaking of! you will take my corrections (infinitesimal, this time) for what they are worth, and continue to send me what you write, will you not? i was surprised two days ago by a note from mr. lowell, inviting me and my sister to meet the storys at dinner to-morrow, they being his guests during a short stay in london; and yesterday afternoon they called on my sister, both the storys and mr. lowell; the former are flourishing, and go in a few days to rome. where they have passed the summer, we were not told. last evening at a dinner given by sidney colvin, i met mr. james, who showed great interest in hearing how you were, and how much nearer you were likely to be. on the other hand, there will be a sad visitor to venice presently, professor huxley, in a deplorable state of health, from over-work. i hate to speak of what is only too present with me,--your own health,--i trust you have got rid of that cough, (all dreadful things go with a cough in my memory.)... ... my book, which you kindly inquire about, is out of my hands and in print, but the publishing, the when and how, concerns the publisher. i do not expect to see the completed thing for another month. yes, i felt so lovingly to the giustinian-reconnati that i could not bear cutting the link allowed by the place and date that were appended to the ms., and you permit, so all is well, if you remember me as ever affectionately yours, robert browning. under date of october , , browning says in one letter: "i saw huxley's brother-in-law, sir robert collier, last evening, at dr. granville's, and inquired about the stay in venice. it will be a very short one as he has to return almost immediately for the marriage of his daughter rachel; i can hardly think he will re-return, the ceremony at an end, yet he may; and in that case he shall be informed of your goodness to himward, in apostolically appropriate language. he is a thoroughly admirable person in all but his inconsiderateness in this waste of a precious life. i duly told the storys how much you wanted to see them, and they probably have seen you by this time. mrs. story meant to rest at paris, and forego the amiens route. she has been unwell, but i thought her appearance very satisfactory. i dined with them last week at mr. lowell's, and called there on sunday. i met henry james the other day, and surprised as well as inspirited him by the news that you were so near, and, as i believed, so soon to be nearer. now write to me, tell me all you are about to do; how is dear edith?... o, no, pen is none of mine to outward view, but wholly his mother's--in some respects, at least. at the same age there was small difference between pen's face and that of the brother she lost,--to judge by a drawing i possess...." to the marchesa peruzzi di' medici who sent to him a translation she had made of the "ricordo autobiografici" of giovanni duprè, browning thus writes:[ ] "it is not so very 'little' an affair, and in the fear that when my sister has finished it, i may have to begin my own reading, and end it so late as to lead you to suppose that either book or letter has gone wrong, on this account i write at once to thank you most heartily. my sister says the autobiography is fascinating; i can well believe it, for i never knew such a work to be without interest, and this of duprè must abound in precisely the matters that interest me most.... when i have thoroughly gone through the book i will write you again, if you permit me, as i know your old memories will be indulgent in the case. we may be in italy this autumn, and if you are within reach you will be certain to see the old friend who always rejoices when he hears of your well-being, and trusts it may continue.... pen is very well; at dinard just now, painting landscape in the open air. i have told him already of the book which he will take delight in reading. i am occupied this very day in sending his statue of 'dryope' to brussels, where the exhibition will give it a chance of being judged by better knowledge than is found here." the following letter indicates, in browning's own charming way, the warm attachment that both he and his sister had for mrs. bronson: , warwick crescent, w. feb. , ' . dearest mrs. bronson,--this dull morning grew to near blackness itself, when, at breakfast, my sister said once again, "no news of her from venice,"--and i once again calculated and found by this time it was a month and a full half since we heard from you. why should this be? if i had simply and rationally written a line, instead of thinking a thought, i should have known, as your dear goodness will let me know, as soon as you receive this, how you are, how edith is, now that the winter is over and gone with the incentives to that cough which was still vexatious when we had your last letter. do not let us mind high-days and holidays: be sure of this, that every day will be truly festal that brings us a word from you, for other clouds than the material ones make us melancholy just now; and how this turbid element about us contrasts with the golden hours near the beloved friends,--perhaps more vivid,--certainly more realized as valuable, than ever! i do not mean to write much because what i want to impress on your generosity is that just a half sheet, with mere intelligence about you, will be a true comfort and sustainment to me and to my sister,--the barest account of yourself, and what we appreciate with you; and, for our part, you shall hear, at least, that we are well, or ailing, stationary, or about to move. in the early spring browning again writes to mrs. bronson: , warwick crescent, w. april , ' . dearest friend,--this is not a letter, for i have this minute returned from a funeral, in pitiful weather, and am unable either in body or soul to write one, much as i hope to do, with something of my warm self in it. but i find burne jones's pretty and touching letter, and want this leaf to serve as an envelope to what may please you, who deserve so thoroughly that it should. i will write in a day or two. i heard from pen this morning, who is at dinard, being too ill to remain in paris, but finds himself already better. he told me and re-told me how good you had been to him. how i trust all is going well with you,--certainly you need no assurance of,--enough that i love you with all my heart. bless you and your edith. it is an edith,--proctor's (barry cornwall's) daughter, whom i have been following to her grave. some fifty years ago her father said to me while caressing her, "ah, browning, this is the poetry." "i know it." "no, you know nothing about it." well, if i was ignorant then, i am instructed now. so, dear two poems, long may i have you to read and to enjoy! yours affectionately ever, robert browning. in the following autumn mr. barrett browning, who had not seen venice since his infancy, joined his father, and was "simply infatuated" with the dream city. it was for his sake that browning had wished to purchase the manzoni palace, "to secure for him a perfect domicile, every facility for his painting and sculpture." the autumn of brought to browning a great sadness in the death of milsand, and miss browning being out of health, and unequal to a continental journey, they both passed a part of the autumn at llangollen, where sir theodore and lady martin (helen faucit) were their near neighbors, with whom they had tea every sunday, and renewed one of the most delightful friendships. on the publication of dr. corson's "introduction to the poetry of browning," he sent a copy to the poet who thus replied: . warwick crescent. w. dec. . ' . my dear dr corson, i waited some days after the arrival of your book and letter thinking i might be able to say more of my sense of your goodness: but i can do no more now than a week ago. you "hope i shall not find too much to disapprove of": what i ought to protest against, is "a load to sink a navy--too much honor": how can i put aside your generosity, as if cold justice--however befitting myself,--would be in better agreement with your nature? let it remain as an assurance to younger poets that, after fifty years' work unattended by any conspicuous recognition, an over-payment may be made, if there be such another munificent appreciator as i have been privileged to find--in which case let them, even if more deserving, be equally grateful. i have not observed anything in need of correction in the notes. the "little tablet" was a famous "last supper," mentioned by varwn, (page. ) and gone astray long ago from the church of s. spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while i was in florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger. i saw it,--genuine or no, a work of great beauty. (page .) a "canon," in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated--in various keys--and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the "canon"--the imperative _law_--to what follows. fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal: to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician. and now,--here is christmas: all my best wishes go to you and mrs. corson--those of my sister also. she was indeed suffering from grave indisposition in the summer, but is happily recovered. i could not venture, under the circumstances, to expose her convalescence to the accidents of foreign travel--hence our contenting ourselves with wales rather than italy. shall you be again induced to visit us? present or absent, you will remember me always, i trust, as yours most affectionately robert browning. the year of was an eventful one in that the "parleyings" were published in the early spring; that browning removed from warwick crescent to devere gardens; and that the marriage of his son to miss coddington of new york was celebrated on october of that year, an event that gave the poet added happiness. to a stranger who had asked permission to call upon him browning wrote about this time: "... my son returns the day after to-morrow with his wife, from their honeymoon at venice, to stay with me till to-morrow week only, when they leave for liverpool and america--there to pass the winter. during their short stay, i am bound to consult their convenience, and they will be engaged in visiting, or being visited by friends, so as to preclude me from any chance of an hour at my own disposal. if you please--or, rather, if circumstances permit you to give me the pleasure of seeing you at twelve on saturday morning, the first day when i shall be at liberty, i shall be happy to receive you." [illustrations: manuscript letter] the stranger did so arrange that his visit should extend itself over the magic date of "november th," and on that day he stood at the portal to devere gardens house. "i was taken up to the poet's study," he writes. "there had been that day a memorial meeting for matthew arnold, to which browning had been, and he spoke with reminiscent sadness of arnold's life. "'i have been thinking all the way home of his hardships,' said mr. browning. 'he once told me, when i asked why he had not recently written any poetry, that he could not afford to, but that when he had saved enough, he intended to give up all other work, and devote himself to poetry. i wonder if he has turned to it now?' browning added musingly." one interesting incident related by this caller is that, having just been reading and being greatly impressed by mr. nettleship's analysis and interpretation of "childe roland," he asked the author if he accepted it. "oh, no," replied mr. browning; "not at all. understand, i don't repudiate it, either; i only mean that i was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing it. 'twas like this; one year in florence i had been rather lazy; i resolved that i would write something every day. well, the first day i wrote about some roses, suggested by a magnificent basket that some one had sent my wife. the next day 'childe roland' came upon me as a kind of dream. i had to write it, then and there, and i finished it the same day, i believe. but it was simply that i had to do it. i did not know then what i meant beyond that, and i'm sure i don't know now. but i am very fond of it." this interesting confession emboldened the visitor to ask if the poet considered 'james lee's wife' quite guiltless in her husband's estrangement. "well, i'm not sure," replied mr. browning; "i was always very fond of her, but i fancy she had not much tact, and did not quite know how to treat her husband. i think she worried him a little. but if you want to know any more," he continued, with a twinkle in his eye, "you had better ask the browning society,--you have heard of it, perhaps?" when robert barrett browning purchased the palazzo rezzonico, the acquirement was a delight to his father, not unmixed with a trace of consternation, for it is one of the grandest and most imposing palaces in italy. up to it was occupied by cardinal rezzonico himself, when, at that date, he became pope under the title of clement xiii. this palace, built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, commands an unparalleled situation on the grand canal, and the majestic structure of white marble, with its rich carvings, the baroque ornaments of its key-stones, its classic cornices and tripartite loggias, its columns and grand architectural lines, is remarked, even in venice, the city of palaces, for its sumptuous magnificence. as mr. browning had before remarked to mrs. bronson, "pen" was infatuated with venice. it is equally true that much of the infatuation of the ethereal city for subsequent visitors was due in no small measure to the beautiful and reverent manner in which robert barrett browning made this palace a very valhalla of the wedded poets, robert and elizabeth barrett browning. here the son gathered every exquisite treasure associated with his mother, and when, three years later, his father breathed his last within this noble palace, the younger browning added to the associations of his mother those, also, of his father's books, art, and intimate possessions. with his characteristic courtesy and generous consideration mr. barrett browning permitted visitors, for many years, through his entire ownership of the palace, to visit and enjoy the significant collections, treasures which his taste and his love had there gathered. [illustration: portrait of robert barrett browning ("penini"), as a child. painted at siena, by hamilton wild, .] on the façade of the palace two stately entrances open upon the broad flight of marble steps that lead down to the water, and on the architraves are carved river-gods. in the spacious court was placed his own statue of "dryope." ascending one marble flight of the grand escalier, one entered a lofty apartment whose noble proportions and richness of effect were most impressive. the floor, of red marble, in its rich, byzantine hue, harmonized with a richly painted ceiling, which was one celebrated in venetian art. from this vast salon opened, through richly carved doors, a series of rooms, each made vital with the portraits, sketches, busts, and other memorials of the poets. there were story's busts of browning and of his wife; there was robert barrett browning's bust of his father,--one of the most remarkable among portrait busts in contemporary art; the portraits of robert and elizabeth browning painted by gordigiani of rome, about ; a lovely pastel of mrs. browning when she was a child, representing her as standing in a garden, holding up her apron filled with flowers; there was her little writing-desk, and other intimate personal mementoes about. the immense array of presentation copies from other authors to the poets made an interesting library of themselves, as did the various translations of their own poems into many languages. there was a portrait of browning painted when a young man, with a troubadour cloak falling over his shoulders; and a most interesting portrait of milsand, painted by barrett browning, as a gift to his father. there was also a picture of himself as a lad, the "penini" of siena days, mounted on his pony, and painted by hamilton wild (a boston artist), in that most picturesque of hill-towns, during one of those summers that the brownings and the storys had passed in the haunts of santa caterina. by mrs. browning's little writing tablet was placed the last manuscript she had ever written; and on a table lay a german translation of "aurora leigh," with an inscription of presentation to browning. from one of these salons, looking out on the grand canal, is an alcove, formerly used as the private chapel of the rezzonico. it was all white and gold, with a venetian window draped in the palest green plush, while on either side were placed tall vases encrusted with green. in this alcove mr. barrett browning had caused to be inscribed, in golden letters, surrounded with traceries and arabesques in gold, a copy of the inscription that was composed by the poet, tommaseo, and placed by the city of florence on the wall of casa guidi, near the grand portal: qui scrisse e mori elisabetta barrett browning che in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta e fece del suo verso aureo anello fra italia e inghilterra pone questo memoria firenze grata . on the first floor was the room in which the poet wrote when the guest of his son in the palace; a _sala_ empaneled with the most exquisite decorated alabaster, panels of which also formed the doors, and opening from this was his sleeping-room, also beautifully decorated. in one splendid _sala_, with rich mural decorations, and floor of black italian marble, were many choice works of art, rare souvenirs, pictures of special claim to interest, wonderful tapestries, and almost, indeed, an _embarras de richesse_ of beauty. in robert barrett browning sold the rezzonico; and now, beside his _casa_ and studios in asolo, he has one of the old medici villas, near florence,--"la torre all' antella," with a lofty tower, from which the view is one of the most commanding and fascinating in all tuscany. the panorama includes all florence, with her domes and campanile and towers; and the fiesolean hills, with the old town picturesquely revealed among the trees and against the background of sky, and with numerous other villages and hamlets, and a mountain panorama of changing color always before the eye. mr. browning is one of the choicest of spirits, with all that culture and beauty of spiritual life that characterized his parents. he is a great linguist, and is one of the most interesting of men. no one knew his father, in that wonderful inner way, as did his son. he was twelve years old at the time of his mother's death, and from that period he was the almost constant companion of his father, until browning's death, twenty-eight years later. robert barrett browning has also purchased the massive casa guidi, thus fitly becoming the owner of the palace in which he was born, and that is forever enshrined in literary history and poetic romance. it is, also, one of those poetic sequences of life, that casa guidi and palazzo peruzzi, near each other, in the via maggiore in florence, are respectively owned by mr. browning and the marchesa peruzzi di' medici, under which stately title mr. story's daughter edith, the childhood friend and companion of "penini," is now known. after the return to london of browning and his sister sarianna, from st. moritz, his constant letters to mrs. bronson again take up the story of a poet's days. in the early winter he thus writes to his cherished friend--the date being december , : "now let us shut the gondola glasses (i forget the technical word) and talk, dear friend! here are your dear labors of love,--the letters and enclosures, and here is my first day of leisure this long fortnight, for, would you believe it? i have been silly enough to sit every morning for three hours to one painter, who took an additional two hours yesterday, in order to get done; before which exercise of patience i had to sit to another gentleman, who will summon me again in due time,--all this since my return from venice and the _youthful five_! however, when, two days ago, there was yet another application to sit, the bear within the 'lion' came out, and i declined, as little gruffly as i was able. and so the end is i can talk and enjoy myself--even at a distance--with a friend as suddenly dear as all hands from the clouds must needs be. i will not try and thank you for what you know i so gratefully have accepted,--and shall keep forever, i trust. "well, here is the duke's letter; he is a man of few words, and less protestation; but feels, as he should, your kindness, and will gladly acknowledge it, should you come to england, and it seems that you may. but what will venice be without you next year, if we return there as we hope to do? "... mrs. bloomfield moore passed through london some three weeks ago, and at once wrote to me about what pictures of robert's might be visible? she at once bought the huge 'delivery to the secular arm,' for the philadelphia academy of fine arts, and the 'dinard market woman' for herself, and this so spontaneously, and i did hear in a day or two that she was convinced i had not asked half enough for the pictures! she had inquired at the gallery where the larger one was exhibited, and they estimated its value at so much. i told her their estimate was not mine, and that robert was thoroughly remunerated--to say nothing of what he would think of all this graciousness; and since her departure i have had an extremely gratifying letter full of satisfaction at her purchases,..." on the death of lord houghton, mr. browning had been prevailed upon to accept the office of foreign correspondent to the royal academy; he was much beloved by the academicians, many of whom were among his familiar friends, and that his son was an artist endeared to him all art. to mrs. bronson browning once remarked: "do you know, dear friend, if the thing were possible, i would renounce all personal ambition and would destroy every line i ever wrote, if by so doing i could see fame and honors heaped on my robert's head." mrs. bronson's comment on this was that in his son he saw the image of his wife, whom he adored,--"literally adored," she added. at the academy banquets browning was always an honored guest, and his nomination by the president to the post of foreign correspondent was promptly ratified by the council. on the removal to devere gardens, mr. browning took great pleasure in the arrangement of his home. his father's library of six thousand books was now unpacked, and, for the first time, he had space for them; many of the beautiful old carvings, chests, cabinets, bookcases, that he had brought from florence, could in the new home be placed to advantage. the visitor, to-day, to mr. barrett browning's florentine villa will see many of these rich and elaborate furnishings, and the younger browning will point out an immense sofa (that resembles a catafalque), with amused recollection of having once seen his father and ruskin sitting side by side on it, "their feet dangling." from venice the poet had brought home, first and last, many curious and beautiful things,--a silver lamp, old sconces from churches, and many things of which he speaks in his letters to mrs. bronson. the initial poem in "asolando," entitled "rosny," was written at the opening of the year , and it was soon followed by "beatrice signorini" and "flute-music." in february he writes to george murray smith, his publisher, of his impulse to revise "pauline," which had lain untouched for fifty years,--an impulse to "correct the most obvious faults ... letting the thoughts, such as they are, remain exactly as at first." it seems that the portrait, too, that is to accompany the volume does not quite please him, and he suggests slight changes. "were pen here," he says, "he could manage it all in a moment." this confidence was not undeserved. richly gifted in many directions, a true child of the gods, robert barrett browning has an almost marvelous gift in portraiture. he seems to be the diviner, the seer, as well as the artist, when transferring to canvas a face that interests him. the portrait of milsand, to which allusion has before been made, and that of his father, painted in his oxford robes, with "the old yellow book in his hand," which is in balliol, are signal illustrations of his power in portraying almost the very mental processes of thought and feeling and kindling imagination,--all that goes to make up the creative life of art. he is fairly a connoisseur in literature, as well as in his own specialties of painting and sculpture; and the poetry of the elder browning has no more critically appreciative reader than his son. some volume of his father's is always at hand in his traveling; and he, like all browning-lovers, can never open any volume of robert browning's without finding revealed to him new vistas of thought, renewed aspiration and resolve for all noble living, and infinite suggestiveness of spiritual achievement. chapter xii - "on the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round." "o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest!" "asolando"--last days in devere gardens--letters of browning and tennyson--venetian lingerings and friends--mrs. bronson's choice circle--browning's letters to mrs. bronson--asolo--"in ruby, emerald, chrysopras"--last meeting of browning and story--in palazzo rezzonico--last meeting with dr. corson--honored by westminster abbey--a cross of violets--choral music to mrs. browning's poem, "the sleep"--"and with god be the rest." in the winter of - mr. browning wrote "rosny," which follows the "prologue" in "asolando," and soon after the "beatrice signorini" and "flute music." he also completely revised his poems for the new edition which his publishers were issuing in monthly volumes, the works completed in july. "parleyings," which had appeared in , had, gloriously or perilously as may be, apparently taken all the provinces of learning, if not all the kingdoms of earth, for its own; for its themes ranged over philosophy, politics, love, and art, as well as alchemy, and one knows not what; but its power and vigor reveal that there had been no fading of the divine fire. the poet made a few minor changes in "the inn album," but with that exception he agreed with his friend and publisher, that no further alterations of any importance were required. mr. browning's relations with his publishers were always harmonious and mutually gratifying. such a relation is, to any author, certainly not the least among the factors of his happiness or of his power of work, and to browning, george murray smith was his highly prized friend and counselor, as well as publisher, whose generous courtesies and admirable judgment had more than once even served him in ways quite outside those of literature. in the late summer of browning and his sister fared forth for primiero, to join the barrett brownings, with whom the poet concurred in regarding this little hill-town as one of the most beautiful of places, his favorite asolo always excepted. "primiero is far more beautiful than gressoney, far more than saint-pierre de chartreuse," he wrote to a friend: "with the magnificence of the mountains that, morning and evening, are literally transmuted to gold." in letters or conversation, as well as in his verse, browning's love of color was always in evidence. "he dazzles us with scarlet, and crimson, and rubies, and the poppy's 'red effrontery,'" said an english critic; "with topaz, amethyst, and the glory of gold, and makes the sonnet ache with the luster of blue." when, in the haunting imagery of memory pictures, after leaving florence, he reverted to the gardens of isa blagden, on bellosguardo, the vision before him was of "the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the wall under the olive trees." for browning was the poet of every thrill and intensity of life--the poet and prophet of the dawn, not of the dark; the herald who announced the force of the positive truth and ultimate greatness; never the interpreter of the mere negations of life. the splendor of color particularly appealed to him, thrilling every nerve; and when driving with mrs. bronson in asolo he would beg that the coachman would hasten, if there were fear of missing the sunset pageant from the loggia of "la mura." in "pippa passes," how he painted the splendor of sunrise pouring into her chamber, and in numberless other of his poems is this fascination of color for him revealed. [illustration: portrait of robert browning in . painted by george frederick watts, r.a. in the possession of the national portrait gallery, london.] under the date of august, , the poet writes to mrs. bronson: dearest,--we have at last, only yesterday, fully determined on joining the couple at primiero, and, when the heats abate, going on to venice for a short stay. may the stay be with you as heretofore? i don't feel as if i could go elsewhere, or do otherwise, although in case of any arrangements having been made that stand in the way, there is the obvious hôtel suisse. i suppose at need there could be found a messenger to poor guiseppina, whose misfortunes i commiserate. you know exactly how much and how little we want. but if i am to get any good out of my visit i must lead the quietest of lives.... we propose setting out next monday, the th,--basle, milan, padua, treviso, primiero, by the week's end. i have been nearly eleven weeks in town, with an exceptional four days' visit to oxford; and hard social work all the time, indeed, up to the latest, when, three weeks ago, i found it impossible to keep going. don't think that the kindness which sometimes oppresses me while in town, forgets me afterward; i have pouring invitations to the most attractive places in england, ireland, scotland,--but "c'est admirable, mais ce n'est pas la paix." may i count on the "paix" where i so much enjoyed it? i hear with delight that edith will be with you again,--that completes the otherwise incompleteness. yes, the rezzonico is what you americans call a "big thing."... but the interest i take in its acquisition is different altogether from what accompanied the earlier attempt. at most, i look on approvingly, as by all accounts i am warranted in doing, but there an end.... ... so, dearest friend, "a rivederci!" give my love to edith and tell her i hope in her keeping her kindness for me, spite of the claims on it of all the others. and my sister, not one word of her? somehow you must know her more thoroughly than poor, battered me, tugged at and torn to pieces, metaphorically, by so many sympathizers, real or pretended. she wants change, probably more than i do. and, but for her, i believe i should continue here, with the gardens for my place of healing. how she will enjoy the sight of you, if it may be! tell me what is to be hoped, or feared, or despaired of, at pen's address, whatever it may be. and remember me as ever most affectionately yours, robert browning. the succeeding letter, written from albergo gille, primiero, tells the story of a rather trying journey, what with the heat and his indisposition, but on finding himself bestowed at primiero he is "absolutely well again," and anticipating his venice: "what a venice it would be," he says, "if i went elsewhere than to the beloved friend who calls me so kindly!" and he adds: "my stay will be short, but sweet in every sense of the word if i find her in good health, and in all other respects just as i left her; 'no change' meaning what it does to me who remember her goodness so well. it will be delightful to meet edith again, if only it may be that she arrives while we are yet with you, even before, perhaps. "can i tell you anything about my journey except that it was so agreeable an one? on the first evening as i stepped outside our carriage for a moment, i caught sight of a well-known face. 'dr. butler, surely.' you have heard of his marriage the other day to a learnedest of young ladies, who beat all the men last year at greek. he insisted on introducing me to her; i had seen her once before without undergoing that formality and willingly i shook hands with a sprightly young person ... pretty, and grand-daughterly, she is, however, only twenty-six years his junior. then, this happened; the little train from montebelluna to feltre was crowded--we could find no room except in a smoking carriage--wherein i observed a good-natured, elderly gentleman, an italian, i took for granted. presently he said, 'can i offer you an english paper?' 'what, are you english?' 'oh, yes, and i know you,--who are going to see your son at primiero.' 'why, who can you be?' 'one who has seen you often.' 'not surely, mr. malcolm?' 'well, nobody else.' so ensued an affectionate greeting, he having been the guardian angel of pen in all his chafferings about the purchase of the palazzo. he gave me abundance of information, and satisfied me on many points. i had been anxious to write and thank him as he deserved, but this provided an earlier and more graceful way, for a beginning at least. "pen is at work on a pretty picture, a peasant girl whom he picked up in the neighborhood, and his literal treatment stands him in good stead; he is reproducing her cleverly, at any rate, he takes pains enough." towards the end of september they joined in venice the "beloved friend," whose genius for friendship only made each sojourn with her more beautiful than the preceding, if that which was perfect could receive an added degree. "it was curious to see," wrote mrs. bronson, "how on each of his arrivals in venice he took up his life precisely as he had left it." browning and his sister frequently went on sundays to the waldensian chapel, where in this autumn there was a preacher of great eloquence. every morning, after their early coffee, the poet was off for a brisk walk, and after returning he busied himself with his letters and newspapers, his mail always containing more or less letters from strangers and admirers, some of whom solicited autographs, which, so far as possible, he always granted. mrs. bronson has somewhere noted that when asked, _viva voce_, for an autograph, he would look puzzled, and say "i don't like to always write the same verse, but i can only remember one," and he would then proceed to copy "all that i know of a certain star," which, however it "dartles red and blue," he knew nothing of save that it had "opened its soul" to him. arthur rogers, delivering the bohlen lectures for , compared browning with isaiah, in his lecture on "poetry and prophecy," and he instanced this "star" which "opened its soul" to the poet, as attesting that browning, like isaiah, could do no more than search depths of life. the palazzo giustiniani-recanti was a fitting haunt for a poet. casa alvisi, adjoining, in which mrs. bronson lived, looked out, as has been noted, on santa maria della salute, which was on the opposite side of the grand canal; but the giustiniani palace, dating to the fifteenth century, had its outlook through gothic windows to the south, on a court and garden of romantic loveliness. the perfect tact of their hostess left the poet and his sister entirely free to come and go as they pleased, and at midday they took their déjeuner together, ordering by preference italian dishes, as rissotto, macaroni, and fruits, especially figs and grapes. they enjoyed these _tête-à-tête_ repasts, talking and laughing all the while, and then, about three every afternoon they joined mrs. bronson and her daughter for the gondola trip. the hostess records that the poet's invariable response to the question as to where they should go would be: "anywhere, all is beautiful, only let it be toward the lido." while both the poet and his sister were scrupulously prompt in returning all calls of ceremony, they were glad to evade formal visits so far as possible; and the absolute freedom with which their hostess surrounded them was grateful beyond words. "the thought deeply impressed me," said mrs. bronson, "that one who had lifted so many souls above the mere necessity for living in a troublesome world deserved from those permitted to approach him their best efforts to brighten his personal life.... the little studies for his comfort, the small cares entailed upon me during the too brief days and weeks when his precious life was partly entrusted to my care, might seem to count for little in an existence far removed from that of an ordinary man; yet, as a fact, he was glad and grateful for the smallest attention. he was appreciative of all things. he never regarded gratitude as a burden, as less generous minds are apt to do," continued mrs. bronson. [illustration: mrs. arthur bronson from a painting by ellen montalba, in asolo in the possession of edittá, contessa rucellai (_née_ bronson), palazzo rucellai, florence.] one of his greatest enjoyments in venice was to wander with edith bronson through the venetian _calli_. "edith is the best cicerone in the world," he would remark; "she knows everything and teaches me all she knows. there never was such a guide." the young girl indeed knew her venice as a devotee knows his illuminated missal, and her lovely vivacity and sweetness must have invested her presence with the same charm that is felt to-day in the contessa rucellai, in her florentine palace, for miss bronson, it may be said _en passant_, became the wife of one of the most eminent italian nobles, the rucellai holding peculiar claim to distinction even among the princely houses of florence. from these gondola excursions they always returned about five, and sometimes the poet would join the group around mrs. bronson's tea-table, conversing with equal facility in french, german, or italian, and to their delight would say, "edith, dear, you may give me a cup of tea." but as a rule he considered this beverage as too unhygienic at that hour, and whenever with an "excuse me, please," he sought his own apartments, he was never questioned for his reasons. "it was enough that he wished it," said his hostess. he and miss browning always appeared promptly for dinner, which was at half-past seven in casa alvisi. the poet was scrupulous about his evening dress; and miss browning, mrs. bronson relates, was habitually clad "in rich gowns of a somber tint, with quaint, antique jewels, and each day with a different french cap of daintiest make." the evenings seem to have been idyllic. browning would often read aloud, and he loved to improvise on an old spinnet standing in a dim recess in one of the salons. the great venetian families were usually in _villeggiatura_ at the time when browning was in venice, so that he met comparatively few of them; it was this freedom from social obligations that contributed so much to the restful character of his sojourns, and enabled him to give himself up to that ineffable enchantment of venice. he made a few friends, however, among mrs. bronson's brilliant circle, and one of the notable figures among these was the old russian noble and diplomat, prince gagarin, who, born in rome, had been educated in his own country, and had represented russia at the courts of athens, constantinople, and turin. mrs. bronson has told the story of one evening when the poet and the old diplomat indulged in a mutual tournament of music; "first one would sing, and then the other," browning recalling folk-songs of russia which he had caught up in his visit to that country fifty years before. another of mrs. bronson's inner circle, which included the principessa montenegro, the mother of queen elena, and other notable figures, was the contessa marcello, whom both the poet and his sister greatly liked; and one radiant day they all accepted an invitation to visit the contessa at her villa at mogliano, a short railway trip from venice. the poet seemed to much enjoy the brief journey, and at the station was the contessa with her landau, in which mrs. bronson, the poet, and his sister were seated, while miss bronson rode one of the ponies on which some of the young people had come down to greet the guests. after luncheon the contessa, with her young daughter, the contessina, led their guests out in the grounds to a pergola where coffee was served, and which commanded a vista of a magnificent avenue of copper beeches, whose great branches met and interlaced overhead. the contessa was the favorite lady of honor at the court of queen margherita, and she interested mr. browning very much by speaking of her beloved royal mistress, and showing him some of the handwriting of the queen, which he thought characteristically graceful and forcible. the contessina and miss bronson, with others of the younger people, seated themselves in rustic chairs to listen to every word from the poet; and a venetian sculptor, who was there, concealed himself in the shrubbery and made a sketch of browning. the contessina, who, like all the young italian girls of high breeding and culture, kept an album of foreign poetry, brought hers, and pleadingly asked mr. browning if he would write in it for her. as usual, for the reasons already given, he (perforce) wrote "my star," and when the girl looked at it she exclaimed that it was one of her old favorites, and showed him where she had already copied it into the book. at the station, when they drove down again to take the returning train, one of the young _literati_ of italy was there, and the contessa introduced him to browning, saying that the young man had already achieved distinction in letters. mr. browning talked with him most cordially, and after they were on their way he said that the young writer "seemed to be a youth of promise, and that he hoped he should meet him again." but when they did hear of him again it was as the lecturer of a series of talks on zola, "which, as may be supposed," notes mrs. bronson, "the poet expressed no desire to attend." the marvelous days of that unearthly loveliness of venice in the early autumn flew by, and mrs. bronson's guest returned to devere gardens. to his hostess the poet wrote, under date of devere gardens, december , : dearest friend,--i may just say that and no more; for what can i say? i shall never have your kindness out of my thoughts,--and you never will forget me, i know. we shall please you by telling you our journey was quite prosperous, and wonderfully fine weather, till it ended in grim london, and its fog and cold. (at basle there was cold, but the sun made up for everything.) we altered our plans so far as to sleep and to stay through a long day at basle, visiting the museum, cathedral, etc., and went on by night train in a sleeping-car, of which we were the sole occupants, to calais, directly. at dover the officials were prepared for us, would not look at the luggage, and were very helpful as well as courteous; and at london orders had been given to treat us with all possible good nature. they wouldn't let us open any box but that where the lamp was packed; offered to take our word for its weight, and finally asked me, "since there were the three portions, would i accept the weight of the little vessel at bottom as that of the other two?" "rather," as pen says, so they declined to weigh the whole lamp, charging less than a quarter of what it does weigh, and even then requiring assurance that i was "quite satisfied." we were to be looked after first of all the passengers, and so got away early enough to find things at home in excellent order.... i send a hasty line to try to express the impossible,--how much i love you, and how deeply i feel all your great kindness. every hour of the day i miss you, and wish i were with you and dear edith again, in beloved casa alvisi. these letters to mrs. bronson reveal browning the man as do no other records in literature. the consciousness of being perfectly understood, and the realization of the delicacy and beauty of the character of mrs. bronson made this choice companionship one of the greatest joys in browning's life. it may, perhaps, as well be interpolated here that a large package of the fascinating letters from robert browning to mrs. bronson, from which these extracts are made, were placed at the disposal of the writer of this volume by the generous kindness of mrs. bronson's daughter, the contessa rucellai, and with the slight exception of a few paragraphs used by mrs. bronson herself (in two charming papers that she wrote on browning), they have never before been drawn upon for publication. under the date of january , , the poet writes to mrs. bronson: no, dearest friend, i can well believe you think of me sometimes, even oft-times, for in what place, or hour, or hour of the day, can you fail to be reminded of some piece of kindness done by you and received by me during those memorable three months when you cared for me and my sister constantly, and were so successful in your endeavor to make us perfectly happy. depend on it, neither i nor she move about this house (which has got to be less familiar to us through our intimate acquaintance with yours),--neither of us forget you for a moment, nor are we without your name on our lips much longer, when we sit quietly down at home of an evening, and talk over the pleasantest of pleasant days.... the sole invitation i can but accept this morning is to the farewell dinner about to be given by the lord mayor to mr. phelps; that i am bound to attend. i have not seen him or mrs. phelps yet; but they receive this afternoon, and if i am able i shall go. you will wish to know that all our articles have arrived safely, and more expeditiously than we had expected. the tables, lanterns, etc., are very decidedly approved of, and fit into the proper corners very comfortably; so that everywhere will be an object reminding us, however unnecessarily, of venice. your ink-stand brightens the table by my hand; the lamp will probably stand beside it; while tassini tempts me to dip into him every time i pass the book-case. i may never see the loved city again, but where in the house will not some little incident of the then unparalleled months, wake up memories of the gondola, and the stopping, here and there, and the fun at morchio's; the festive return home, behind broad-backed luigi; then the tea, and the dinner, and gargarin's crusty old port flavor, and the dyers, and ralph curtis, and o, the delightful times! of edith i say nothing because she has herself, the darling! written to me, the surprise and joy of that! and i mean to have a talk with her on paper, alas! my very self, and induce her not to let me have the last word. oh, my two beloveds i must see venice again; it would be heart-breaking to believe otherwise. of course i entered into all your doings, the pretty things you got, and prettier, i am sure, you gave. and i was sorry, so sorry, to hear that naughty edith, no darling, for half a second, now i think of it,--did not figure in the tableaux. i hope and believe, however, she did dance in the new year. bid her avoid this cold-catching and consequent headache. do write, dearest friend, keep me _au courant_ of everything. no minutest of your doings but is full of interest to me and sarianna. but i am at the paper's extreme edge. were it elephant folio (is there such a size?) it would not hold all i have in my heart, and head, too, of love for you and "our edie;" so, simply, god bless you, my beloveds! robert browning. princess montenegro sent me by way of a new year's card,--what do you think? a pretty photograph of the rezzonico. the young lady was equally mindful of sarianna. r. b. to miss edith bronson the poet wrote, as follows: dearest edie,--i did not reply to your letter at once for this reason; an immediate answer might seem to imply i expected such a delightful surprise every day, or week, or even month; and it was wise economy to let you know that i can go on without a second piece of kindness till you again have such a good impulse and yield to it--by no means binding yourself to give me regularly such a pleasure. you shall owe me nothing, but be as generous as is consistent with justice to other people.... i did not go out except to the complimentary farewell dinner our lord mayor gave to mr. phelps which nobody could be excused from attending. we all grieved at the loss, especially of mrs. phelps, who endeared herself to everybody. both of them were sorry to go from us.... the next letter reveals anew browning's always thoughtful courtesy in bespeaking kindness for mutual friends, as he writes: "there is arranged to be a sort of expedition [to venice] of young toynbee hall men, headed by alberto ball, the son of our common friend, for the purpose of studying, not merely amusing, themselves with,--the beloved city. well as the balls are entitled to say that they know you, still, the young and clever ball chooses to wish me to beg your kind notice; and i suppose that his companions are to be noticed also,--of what really appears to be a praiseworthy effort after self-instruction. will you smile on him when he calls on you? for his father's sake, who is anxious about the scheme's success? i have bespoken pen's assistance, and he will do the honors of the rezzonico with alacrity, i have no doubt." [illustration: miss edith bronson, (now contessa rucellai) from a water-color by passini, venice, .] in almost every life that is strongly individualized those who look back after it has passed from visible sight cannot but recognize how rhythmic are the sequences that have characterized its last months on earth. if the person in question had actually known the day on which he should be called away, he would hardly have done other than he did. it is as if the spirit had some prescience, not realized by the ordinary consciousness, but still controlling its conduct of the last time allotted here. with this last year of robert browning's life, this unseen leading is especially obvious. in the spring he had revised his poetic work; he had passed commemoration week at oxford, as he loved to do; he had passed much of the time with his friend, the master of balliol, and among his last expressions on leaving oxford was "jowett knows how i love him." he was also in cambridge, and edmund gosse has charmingly recalled the way in which he dwelt, retrospectively, on his old italian days. in june, also, he paid his usual visit to lord albemarle (the last survivor of those who fought at waterloo), and in that month he wrote to professor knight, who was about to exchange the chair of philosophy at the university of glasgow for that of literature at st. andrews, saying: "it is the right order; philosophy first, and poetry, which is its highest outcome, afterward, and much harm has been done by reversing the usual process." the letters to mrs. bronson tell much of the story of these days. in one, dated june , , he gives this reminiscence of asolo: dearest friend,--it was indeed a joy to get your letter. i know that a change of place would be desirable for you, darling edie told me so, but i fancied you would not leave venice so soon.... ... one thing is certain, that if i do go to venice, and abide at the rezzonico, every day during the visit i shall pass over to the beloved alvisi and entirely beloved friends there, who are to me in venice what san marco is to the piazza. enough of this now, and something about asolo. when i first found out asolo, i lodged at the main hotel in the square,--an old, large inn of the most primitive kind. the ceiling of my bed-room was traversed by a huge crack, or rather cleft, caused by the earthquake last year; the sky was as blue as blue could be, and we were all praying in the fields, expecting the town to tumble in. on the morning after my arrival, i walked up to the rocca; and on returning to breakfast i mentioned it to the land-lady, wherein a respectable middle-aged man, sitting by, said: "you have done what i, born here, never thought of doing." i took long walks every day, and carried away a lively recollection of the general beauty, but i did not write a word of 'pippa passes'--that idea struck me when walking in an english wood, and i made use of italian memories. i used to dream of seeing asolo in the distance and making vain attempts to reach it--repeatedly dreamed this for many a year. and when i found myself once more in italy, with sarianna, i went there straight from venice. we found the old inn lying in ruins, a new one (being) built, to take its place,--i suppose that which you see now. we went to a much inferior albergo, the best then existing, and were roughly, but pleasantly, entertained for a week, as i say. people told me the number of inhabitants had greatly increased, and things seemed generally more ordinary and life-like. i am happy that you like it so much. when i got my impression, italy was new to me.... ... i shall go to oxford for commemoration, and stay a week for another affair,--a "gaudy" dinner given to the magnates of eton. to the forthcoming collection, entitled "asolando," the group of poems dedicated to mrs. bronson, the poet alludes as follows: ... by the way the new little book of poems that was to associate your name with mine, remains unprinted. for why? the publishers think its announcement might panic-strike the purchasers of the new edition, who have nearly enough of me for some time to come! never mind. we shall have our innings. bless you ever and your edith; keep me in mind as your very own always affectionate r. b. the poet's love for asolo is revealed in the following letter to mrs. bronson: , devere gardens, w. july ,' . dearest friend,--i shall delight in fancying your life at asolo, my very own of all italian towns; your house built into the wall, and the neighboring castle ruins, and the wonderful outlook; on a clear day you can see much further than venice. i mentioned some of the dear spots pointed out to my faith as ruins, while what wants no faith at all,--the green hills surrounding you, posagno close by,--how you will enjoy it! and do go there and get all the good out of the beautiful place i used to dream about so often in old days, till at last i saw it again, and the dreams stopped,--to begin, again, i trust, with a figure there never associated with asolo before. shall i ever see you there in no dream? i cannot say; i feel inclined to leave england this next autumn that is so soon to overtake us.... pen stays a few days longer in paris to complete his picture. he had declined to compete at the exposition, but has been awarded a medal ( rd), which, however, enables him to dispense with the permission of the salon that his works shall be received. julian story gets also a medal of the same class. pen reports stupendously of the paris show.... ... well, you know we have been entertaining and entertained by the shah. i met him at lord roseberry's, and before dinner was presented to him, when he asked me in french: _"Êtes-vous poëte?" "on s'est permis de le dire quelquefois." "et vous avez fait des livres?" "plusieurs livres?" "trop de livres." "voulez-vous m'en faire le cadeau d'un de vos livres afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de vous?" "avec plaisir."_ accordingly i went next day to a shop where they keep them ready bound, and chose a brightly covered "selection."... all the outing i have accomplished was a week at oxford, which was a quiet one,--jowett's health, i fear, not allowing the usual invitation of guests to balliol. i had all the more of him, to my great satisfaction. sarianna is quite in her ordinary health, but tired as we cannot but be. she is away from the house, but i know how much she would have me put in of love in what i would say for her.... did you get a little book by michael field? "long ago," a number of poems written to _innestare_ what fragmentary lines and words we have left of sappho's poetry. i want to know particularly how they strike you. to tennyson for his eightieth birthday mr. browning writes: to-morrow is your birthday, indeed a memorable one. let me say i associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us; secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after; and for my own part let me further say, i have loved you dearly. may god bless you and yours! i have had disastrous experience.... admiringly and affectionately yours, robert browning.[ ] to this letter lord tennyson replied: aldworth, august, . my dear browning,--i thank you with my whole heart and being for your noble and affectionate letter, and with my whole heart and being i return your friendship. to be loved and appreciated by so great and powerful a nature as yours will be a solace to me, and lighten my dark hours during the short time of life that is left to us. ever yours, a. tennyson. the poet found himself again longing for his italy. to mrs. bronson, under date of august , he wrote, referring to a letter of hers received two days before, crowned with "the magical stamp of asolo": "... so a fancy springs up which shall have utterance as just a fancy. the time has come for determining on some change of place, if change is ever to be, and, i repeat, just a fancy, if i were inclined to join you at asolo, say a fortnight hence, could good rooms be procurable for sarianna and myself? now as you value--i won't say my love, but my respect and esteem--understand me literally, and give me only the precise information i want--not one half-syllable about accommodation in your house! "i ask because when i and sarianna went there years ago, the old locanda on the square lay in ruins, and we put up at a rougher inn in the town's self. i dare say the principal hotel is rebuilt by this time, or rather has grown somewhat old. probably you are there indeed. just tell us exactly. pen is trying his best to entice us his way, which means to primiero and venice; but the laziness of age is subduing me, and how i shrink from the 'middle passage,'--all that day and night whirling from london to basle, with the eleven or twelve hours to milan. milan opens on paradise, but the getting to milan! perhaps i shall turn northward and go to scotland after all. still, dear and good one, tell me what i ask. after the requisite information you will please tell me accurately how you are, how that wicked gad-a-bout, edith, is, and where; and what else you can generously afford of news,--news venetian, i mean...." later the poet writes: "... i trust that as few clouds as may be may trouble the blue of our month at asolo; i shall bring your book full of verses for a final overhauling on the spot where, when i first saw it, inspiration seemed to steam up from the very ground. "and so edith is (i conjecture, i hope, rightly) to be with you; won't i show her the little ridge in the ruin where one talks to the echo to greatest advantage." from milan browning wrote to mrs. bronson: dearest friend,--it is indeed a delight to expect a meeting so soon. be good and mindful of how simple our tastes and wants are, and how they have been far more than satisfied by the half of what you provided to content them. i shall have nothing to do but to enjoy your company, not even the little business of improving my health since that seems perfect. i hear you do not walk as in the old days. i count upon setting that right again. o venezia, benedetta! it was with greater enjoyment, apparently, than ever before even, that mr. browning turned to the asolo of his "pippa passes" and "sordello." mrs. bronson, in her brilliant and sympathetic picturing of the poet, speaks of his project "to raise a tower like pippa's near a certain property in asolo, where he and miss browning might pass at least a part of every year." the "certain property," to which mrs. bronson so modestly alludes, was her own place, "la mura." the tower has since been erected by the poet's son, and the dream is thus fulfilled, though the elder browning did not live to see it. mrs. bronson describes his enjoyment of nature in this lovely little hill-town,--"the ever-changing cloud shadows on the plain, the ranges of many-tinted mountains in the distance, and the fairy-like outline of the blue euganean hills, which form in part the southern boundary of the vast campagna." browning would speak of the associations which these hills bear with the names of shelley and byron. across the deep ravine from la mura a ruined tower was all that remained of the villa of queen catarina cornaro, who, when she lost cyprus, retired to asolo; and in browning's dedication to mrs. bronson of his "asolando," he ascribes the title to cardinal bembo, the secretary of queen catarina. mr. browning loved to recall the traditions of that poetic little court, which for two decades was held within those walls, whose decay was fairly hidden by the wealth of flowers that embowered them. of his own project he would talk, declaring that he would call it "pippa's tower," and that it should be so built that from it he could see venice every day. he playfully described the flag-signals that should aid communication between "pippa's tower" and casa alvisi. "a telephone is too modern," he said; and explained that when he asked his friend to dine the flag should be blue,--her favorite color; and if her answer was yes, her flag should be the same color; or if no, her flag should be red. this last visit of the poet to his city of dream and vision seemed to mrs. bronson one of unalloyed pleasure. "to think that i should be here again!" he more than once exclaimed, as if with an unconscious recognition that these weeks were to complete the cycle of his life on earth. asolo is thirty-four miles from venice, and it is within easy driving distance of possagno, the native place of canova, in whose memory the town has a museum filled with his works and casts. "pen must see this," remarked mr. browning, as he lingered over the statues and groups and tombs. mrs. bronson records that one day on returning from a drive to bassano the poet was strangely silent, and no one spoke; finally he announced that he had written a poem since they left bassano. in response to an exclamation of surprise he said: "oh, it's all in my head, but i shall write it out presently." his hostess asked if he would not even say what inspired it, to which he returned: "well, the birds twittering in the trees suggested it. you know i don't like women to wear those things in their bonnets." the poem in question proved to be "the lady and the painter." mr. browning took the greatest enjoyment in the view from mrs. bronson's loggia. "here," he would say, "we can enjoy beauty without fatigue, and be protected from sun, wind, and rain." his hostess has related that its charm made him often break his abstemious habit of refusing the usual five o'clock refreshment, and that he "loved to hear the hissing urn," and when occasionally accepting a cup of tea and a biscuit would say, "i think i am the better for this delicious tea, after all." every afternoon at three they all went to drive, exploring the region in all directions. the driving in asolo seemed to charm him as did the gondola excursions in venice. "he observed everything," said mrs. bronson, "hedges, trees, the fascination of the little river musone, the great _carri_ piled high with white and purple grapes. he removed his hat in returning the salutation of a priest, and touched his hat in returning the salutation of the poorest peasant, who, after the manner of the country, lifted his own to greet the passing stranger. 'i always salute the church,' mr. browning would say; 'i respect it.'" all his life browning was an early riser. in asolo, as elsewhere, he began his day with a cold bath at seven, and at eight he and his sister sat down to their simple breakfast, their hostess keeping no such heroic hours. mrs. bronson had adopted the foreign fashion of having her light breakfast served in her room, and her mornings were given to her wide correspondence and her own reading and study. she was a most accomplished and scholarly woman, whose goodness of heart and charm of manner were paralleled by her range of intellectual interests and her grasp of affairs. after breakfasting browning and his sister, inseparable companions always, would start off on their wanderings over the hills. the poet was keenly interested in searching out the points of interest of his early years in asolo; the "echo," the remembered views, the vista whose fascination still remained for him. from the ruined _rocca_ that crowned the hill, the view comprised all the violet-hued plain, stretching away to padua, vicenzo, bassano; the entire atmosphere filled with historic and poetic associations. how the poet mirrored the panorama in his stanzas: "how many a year, my asolo, since--one step just from sea to land-- i found you, loved yet feared you so-- for natural objects seemed to stand palpably fire-clothed! no--" the "lambent flame," and "italia's rare, o'er-running beauty," enchanted his vision. returning from their saunterings, the brother and sister took up their morning reading of english and french newspapers, italian books, with the poet's interludes always of his beloved greek dramatists. in these october days the storys arrived to visit mrs. bronson in her picturesque abode. an ancient wall, mostly in ruins, with eighteen towers, still surrounds asolo, and partly in one of these towers, and partly in the arch of the old portal, "la mura" was half discovered and half constructed. its loggia had one wall composed entirely of sliding glass, which could be a shelter from the storm with no obstruction of the view, or be thrown open to all the bloom and beauty of the radiant summer. just across the street was the apartment in which mrs. bronson bestowed her guests. that browning and story should thus be brought together again for their last meeting on earth, however undreamed of to them, prefigures itself now as another of those mosaic-like events that combined in beauty and loveliness to make all his last months on earth a poetic sequence. the storys afterward spoke of mr. browning as being "well, and in such force, brilliant, and delightful as ever"; and the last words that passed between the poet and the sculptor were these of browning's: "we have been friends for forty years, forty years without a break!" on the first day of november this perfect and final visit to asolo ended, and yielding to the entreaties of his son, browning and his sister bade farewell to mrs. bronson and her daughter, who were soon to follow them to venice, where the poet and miss browning were to be the guests of the barrett brownings in palazzo rezzonico. the events of all these weeks seem divinely appointed to complete with stately symmetry this noble life. as one of them he found in venice his old friend, and (as has before been said) the greatest interpreter of his poetry, dr. hiram corson. the cornell professor was taking his university sabbatical year, and with mrs. corson had arrived in venice just before the poet came down from asolo. "i called on him the next day," dr. corson said of this meeting. "he seemed in his usual vigor, and expressed great pleasure in the restorations his son was making in the palace. 'it's a grand edifice,' he said, 'but too vast.'" dr. corson continued: "he was then engaged in reading the proofs of his 'asolando.' he usually walked two hours every day; went frequently in his gondola with his sister to his beloved lido, and one day when i walked with him 'where st. mark's is, where the doges used to wed the sea with rings,' i had to quicken my steps to keep pace with him. he called my attention to an interesting feature of this world-renowned place, and told me much of their strange history. he knew the city literally _par coeur_." [illustration: professor hiram corson from a painting by j. colin forbes, r.a., in the possession of eugene rollin corson.] mr. browning passed with dr. and mrs. corson the last morning they were in venice. of the parting dr. corson has since written in a personal letter to a friend: "he told us much about himself; about asolo, which he had first visited more than fifty years before, during his visit to italy in , when, as he says in the prologue to 'asolando,' alluding to 'the burning bush,' 'natural objects seemed to stand palpably fire-clothed.' "a servant announcing that the gondola had come to take us to the railway station, he rose from his chair, and said, 'now be sure to visit me next may, in london. you'll remember where my little house is in de vere gardens'; and bidding us a cordial good-bye, with a 'god bless you both,' he hastened away. we little thought, full of life as he then was, that we should see him no more in this world." to a letter from miss browning to their hostess, browning added: dearest mrs. bronson,--i am away from you in one sense, never to be away from the thought of you, and your inexpressible kindness. i trust you will see your way to returning soon. venice is not herself without you, in my eyes--i dare say this is a customary phrase, but you well know what reason i have to use it, with a freshness as if it were inspired for the first time. come, bringing news of edith, and the doings in the house, and above all of your own health and spirits and so rejoice ever your affectionate robert browning. with another letter of his sister's to their beloved friend and hostess, mr. browning sent the following note,--perhaps the last lines that he ever wrote to mrs. bronson, as she returned almost immediately to casa alvisi, and the daily personal intercourse renewed itself to be broken only by his illness and death. the poet wrote: palazzo rezzonico, nov. th, . dearest friend,--a word to slip into the letter of sarianna, which i cannot see go without a scrap of mine. (come and see pen and you will easily concert things with him.) i have all confidence in his knowledge and power. i delight in hearing how comfortably all is proceeding with you at la mura. i want to say that having finished the first two volumes of gozzi, i brought the third with me to finish at my leisure and return to you; and particularly i may mention that the edition is very rare and valuable. it appears that symmonds has just thought it worth while to translate the work, and he was six months finding a copy to translate from! ... i have got--since three or four days--the whole of my new volume in type, and expect to send it back, corrected, by to-morrow at latest. but i must continue at my work lest interruptions occur, so, bless you and good-bye in the truest sense, dear one! ever your affectionately robert browning. the "new volume in type" to which he referred was his collection entitled "asolando," all of which, with the exception of one poem, had been written within the last two years of his life. mr. barrett browning relates that while his father was reading aloud these last proofs to himself and his wife, the poet paused over the "epilogue," at the stanza-- "one who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." and remarked: "it almost seems like praising myself to say this, and yet it is true, the simple truth, and so i shall not cancel it." november, often lovely in venice, was singularly summer-like that year. on one day mr. browning found the heat on the lido "scarcely endurable," indeed, but "snow-tipped alps" revealed themselves in the distance, offering a strange contrast to the brilliant sunshine and the soft blue skies. still november is not june, after all, however perfect the imitation of some of its days. one day there was a heavy fog on his favorite lido, and the poet, who refused to be deprived of his walk, became thoroughly chilled and illness followed. the following note from mr. barrett browning to mrs. bronson indicates the anxiety that prevailed in palazzo rezzonico, where the tenderest care of his son and daughter-in-law ministered to the poet. the note is undated, save by the day of the week. palazzo rezzonico, o'clock, monday evening. dearest mrs. bronson,--the improvement of last night is scarcely maintained this morning,--the action of the heart being weaker at moments. he is quite clear-headed, and is never tired of saving he feels better, "immensely better,--i don't suppose i could get up and walk about, in fact i know i could not, but i have no aches or pains,--quite comfortable, could not be more so,"--this is what he said a moment ago. i will let you know if there is any change as the day goes on. my love to you. yours, pen. the delightful relations that had always prevailed between the poet and his publishers were touchingly completed when, just before he breathed his last, came a telegram from george murray smith with its tidings of the interest with which "asolando" was being received in england. and then this little note written on that memorable date of december , , from barrett browning to mrs. bronson, tells the story of the poet's entrance on the new life. palazzo rezzonico, . p.m. dearest friend,--our beloved breathed his last as san marco's clock struck ten,--without pain--unconsciously. i was able to make him happy a little before he became unconscious by a telegram from smith saying, "reviews in all this day's papers most favorable, edition nearly exhausted." he just murmured, "how gratifying." those were his last intelligible words. yours, pen. in that hour how could the son and the daughter who so loved him remember aught save the exquisite lines with which the poet had anticipated the reunion with his "lyric love": "then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest!" in the grand _sala_ with its floor of black italian marble and its lofty ceiling with exquisite fresco decoration, the simple and impressive service was held in palazzo rezzonico, and a fleet of gondolas, filled with friends and accompanied by the entire venetian syndic, bore the casket to its temporary resting-place in the chapel of san michele, in the campo santo. the gondola that carried the casket had an angel, carved in wood, at the prow, and a lion at the stern. dean bradley, on behalf of westminster abbey, had telegraphed to robert barrett browning, asking that the body of the poet might be laid within those honored walls; and as the cemetery in florence wherein is mrs. browning's tomb had long been closed, this honor from england was accepted. the same honor of a final resting-place in westminster abbey was also extended for the removal of the body of mrs. browning, but their son rightly felt that he must yield to the wishes of florence that her tomb be undisturbed, and it is fitting that it should remain in the italy she so loved. [illustration: palazzo rezzonico, venice owned by robert browning from to . in the upper room, at the left-hand corner, the poet died.] so associated with her brother's life was miss sarianna browning that the story would be incomplete not to add that she survived him many years,--a gracious and beloved presence. in the january following the poet's death, she said in a letter to mrs. bronson: "i have already let a day pass without thanking you for the most beautiful locket, which i love even more for your sake than his. i shall always think of you, so good, so near, and so dearly loved by him. all your watchfulness over our smallest comfort,--how he felt it!... bless you forever for all the joy you gave him at asolo,--how happy he was! and how you were entwined in all our plans for the happy future we were to enjoy there! think of him when you go back, as loving the whole place, and yourself, the embodiment of its sweetness." miss browning died in her nephew's home, la torre all' antella, near florence, in the spring of , in her ninetieth year. on the façade of the palazzo rezzonico the city of venice placed this inscription to the memory of the poet: a roberto browning morto in questo palazzo il dicembre, venezia pose "open my heart and you will see graved inside of it,--'italy'" it was on the last day of that the impressive rites were held in westminster abbey for robert browning. the archbishop of canterbury, the dean of windsor, an aid-de-camp representing queen victoria, dean bradley, the sub-dean, and many eminent canons, and sir frederick bridge, of the abbey choir, all were present among the officiating clergy. the casket under its purple pall, with a massive cross of violets, and wreaths of lilies-of-the valley, and white roses (mrs. browning's favorite flower), was followed by the honorary pall-bearers including hallam tennyson, representing the poet laureate (whose health did not permit him to be present), archdeacon farrar, the master of balliol (representing oxford), the master of trinity (representing cambridge), professor masson (representing the university of edinburgh), and george murray smith. the committal service was entirely choral, and mrs. browning's poem with its touching refrain, "he giveth his beloved sleep!" was chanted by the full vested choir of the abbey, to music composed for the occasion by sir frederick bridge. preceding the benediction, the entire vast concourse of people united in singing the hymn, "o god, our help in ages past!" as that great assemblage turned away from the last rites in commemoration of the poet who produced the largest body of poetry, and the most valuable as a spiritual message, of any english poet, was there not wafted in the air the choral strains from some unseen angelic choir, that thrilled the venerable abbey with celestial triumph: "'glory to god--to god!' he saith: knowledge by suffering entereth, and life is perfected by death." index abinger, lord, "abt vogler," "andrea del sarto," , "any wife to any husband," "apprehension, an," arnold, matthew, arnould, joseph, friendship for browning, , , , ; letters to domett, , , , ashburton, lady louisa, "asolando," , , "aurora leigh," , , , , , , , , , , , , - , "balaustion's adventure," barrett, alfred, , ----, arabel, , , , , , , ----, edward (brother), , , ; death of, , , ----, edward (father) legal name, ; marriage, ; character, , , , ; death, ----, elizabeth. _see_ moulton-barrett, elizabeth ----, george, , ----, henrietta (mrs. surtees cook), , ; marriage, ; affection for sister, ; , , ----, mrs. (mother), , "battle of marathon," "beatrice signorini," , "bells and pomegranates," , , , "ben karshook's wisdom," berdoe, dr., commentary on "paracelsus," "bertha in the lane," , "bishop blougram's apology," blagden, isabella, friendship with brownings, , , , , , , , , , , , ; death, blessington, lady, , , "blot in the 'scutcheon, a," "book of the poets, the," , boyd, hugh stuart, tutor, ; letters from elizabeth barrett, , , , , , , , , bronson, mrs. arthur (katherine dekay), friendship with browning, , ; letters from browning, , , , - , , , , - , , ; hospitality, , - ; entertains browning in asolo, , , ; letters from robert barrett browning, - ; letter from sarianna browning, bronson, edith (contessa rucellai), , brooks, rev. dr. phillips, , browning, mrs. (mother), - , ----, elizabeth barrett, birth, ; childhood, , ; ancestry, , ; first literary work, ; accident to, ; studies, ; tastes, , ; removal to sidmouth, ; translation of "prometheus bound," ; removal to london, ; fugitive poems, - , ; hebrew bible, ; definite periods in her life, ; change of residence, , ; notable friends, , ; publication of "the seraphim," ; literary criticisms, , , , ; goes to torquay, ; personal appearance, ; death of brother, ; returns to england, ; translations from greek, ; description of her room, ; refusal to meet browning, ; publication of two volumes of poems, ; literary reputation established, , ; first letter from browning, , ; correspondence of poets, - ; meets browning, ; lyrics, , ; marriage, , ; will, ; lyrics, , ; mentioned for laureateship, , ; books read by, ; genius for friendship, ; comment on dress, ; description of, , ; souvenir locket, ; views on life, ; appreciation of tennyson, ; success of "aurora leigh," - ; american appreciation, ; ill health, , ; closing days, ; last words, ; burial, ; tomb, ; tablet on casa guidi to her memory, , ; tauchnitz edition of poems, browning, reuben (uncle), ----, robert (father), character and qualities, - ; removal to paris, ; talent for caricature, ; death, ----, robert (grandfather), ----, robert, ancestry of, - ; birth, ; childhood and early tastes, - ; first literary work, ; home atmosphere, , ; school, ; influenced by byron and shelley, , ; juvenile verses, ; publication of "pauline," ; visit to russia, , ; meets wordsworth, landor, dickens, and leigh hunt, , ; personal appearance, ; writes play for macready, ; visit to venice, , ; removal to hatcham, ; english friends and social life, - ; hears of elizabeth barrett, ; visit to italy, , ; return to england, ; correspondence of the poets, - ; first meeting with miss barrett, ; marriage, , ; sees "sonnets from the portuguese," ; lyrics, , , ; keynote of his art, - ; interpretation of shelley, , ; fisher's portrait of, ; page's portrait of, ; literary standing, ; finds "old yellow book," ; homage to landor, ; leaves florence forever, ; returns to london, ; takes london house, ; literary work, - ; extension of social activities, , ; friendship with jowett, ; meeting with tennyson, ; death of father, ; oxford conferred degree of m.a., ; made honorary fellow of balliol college, ; new six-volume edition of poems, ; dedication to tennyson, ; success of "the ring and the book," - ; comparison of character of pompilia to that of his wife, ; visits scotland with the storys, - ; conversation and personal charm, - ; with milsand in "red cotton night-cap country," - ; prepares tauchnitz edition of mrs. browning's poems, ; friendship with domett, ; relations with tennyson, - ; facility for rhyming, ; visit to oxford and cambridge, ; sojourn at "la saisiaz," - ; revisits italy, , - ; doctrine of life, ; oxford conferred degree of d.c.l., ; son's portrait of, ; friendship with mrs. bronson, ; gift from browning societies, ; letters to mrs. bronson, , , , - , , , , - , ; italian recognition, ; honored at edinburgh, ; letters to professor masson, , ; removal to devere gardens, ; foreign correspondent to royal academy, ; poet of intensity, ; last year in london, ; return to asolo, - ; last meeting with the storys and dr. corson, - ; death, ; memorial inscription, ; burial, browning, robert barrett ("penini"), birth, ; anecdotes of, , , , , , ; studies of, , , , , , , ; love of novels, ; enjoyment of siena, ; children's party at french embassy, ; preparation for university, ; characteristics, , ; explanation of "the ring and the book," ; begins study of painting, ; picture in royal academy, ; success in art, , ; marriage to miss coddington, ; purchase of palazzo rezzonico, ; portrait of father, , ; portrait of milsand, ; purchase of casa guidi, ; florentine villa, - , ----, robert jardine, ----, sarianna, , ; letter from browning, ; letters from mrs. browning, ; goes to live with brother, ; letter to domett, ; travels with brother, ; letters to mrs. bronson, , ; death, brownings, the, life in paris, , ; finances, ; journey to italy, ; winter in pisa, , ; home in florence, ; visit to vallombrosa, , ; apartments in casa guidi, , ; trip to fano, , ; literary work, ; meet story, ; summer at bagni di lucca, ; florentine friends and life, - , , ; visit to siena, ; return to england, ; life and friends in paris, - ; return to england, ; social life in london, - ; return to casa guidi, ; summer at bagni di lucca, - ; winter in rome, - ; "clasped hands," ; pilgrimage to albano, ; return to florence, ; poetic work, ; italian appreciation, ; return to london, ; tennyson reads "maud" to them, ; winter and social life in paris, - ; return to florence, ; florentine gayety, , ; summer in normandy, ; another winter in rome, ; return to florence, ; summer in siena, - ; in florence again, ; roman winter, , - ; journey to florence, - ; last summer in siena, - ; last winter in rome, - ; return to casa guidi, ; memorials in palazzo rezzonico, "browning society, the," browning, william shergold, brunton, rev. wm., poem, "by the fire-side," carducci, contessa, carlyle, thomas and jane, , , , , , , , , , casa alvisi, , , "casa guidi windows," , , "catarina to camoens," , chaucer, project to modernize, "childe roland to the dark tower came," , "child's grave at florence, a," chorley, henry, , , "christmas eve and easter day," , , , , "christopher smart," clarke, mary graham. _see_ barrett, mrs. "clasped hands, the," coddington, fanny, "colombe's birthday," , , "comfort," "conclusion," "confessions," , , cook, mrs. surtees. _see_ barrett, henrietta corson, dr. hiram, criticism of browning's poetry, , ; visit to browning, , , , - , - ; founder of browning society, - ; letters from browning, , ; cosimo i, statue of, "cowper's grave," , coxhoe hall, cranch, christopher pearse, crosse, andrew, , "crowned and wedded," "cry of the children, the," "curse for a nation, a," curtis, george william, , cushman, charlotte, , "dead pan, the," , , "deaf and dumb," "death in the desert, a," , "denial, a," "de profundis," , , "development," dickens, charles, , , , , dilke, mr., domett, alfred, friendship for browning, , , ; browning's letters to, , ; arnould's letters to, , , , dowden, dr. edward, , dowson, christopher, "drama of exile, a," , - "dramatic idyls," "dramatis personæ," - "dryope," statue of, dulwich gallery, eastnor castle, egerton-smith, miss, - elgin, lady, , , eliot, george, "englishman in italy, the," "epistle of karnish," "essay on mind," "eurydice to orpheus," "evelyn hope," "face, a," faucit, helen (lady martin), , "ferishtah's fancies," field, kate, browning gives locket, ; visit to the brownings, ; browning's letters to, , , ; mrs. browning's letter to, "fifine," "flight of the duchess, the," , "flute-music," forster, john, criticism of "paracelsus," ; friendship for browning, , , ; , , fox, rev. william johnson, , , "fra lippo lippi," , - franceschini, tragedy of, fuller, margaret. _see_ d'ossoli, marchesa furnivall, dr., "futurity," garrow, theodosia. _see_ trollope giorgi, signor, "gold hair," gosse, edmund, , "grammarian's burial, a," "greek christian poets, the," , , griffin, professor hall, , , "guardian angel, the," , gurney, rev. archer, "half rome," haworth, fanny, letter from browning, ; hawthorne, nathaniel, , - "hector in the garden," "helen's tower," "hervé riel," hillard, george stillman, , hodell, dr. charles w., - holmes, dr. oliver wendell, "holy cross day," hope end, , , , horne, richard hengist, letter from elizabeth barrett, , ; friendship with miss barrett, , , , , , , hosmer, harriet, takes cast of "clasped hands," ; excursion with brownings, , ; letter from browning, ; visits poets, , "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," "in a balcony," , , "in a gondola," "inclusions," "incondita," , "inn album," , "insufficiency," , "in the doorway," "isabel's child," , italy, political conditions of, , , , , , , "ivan ivanovitch," , james, henry, characterization of browning, "james lee's wife," , jameson, mrs., friendship with miss barrett, , , , , , , ; letter from browning, jerrold, douglas, jowett, dr., , , kemble, mrs. fanny, , , , , kenyon, john, ; meets browning, ; offers an introduction to miss barrett, ; ; visit to rydal mount, ; account of, , ; termed the "joy-giver," ; shows manuscript of "dead pan" to browning, ; dedication of "paracelsus" to, ; appreciation of, ; letters to the brownings, , ; friendship, , , , ; dedication of "aurora leigh" to, ; death and legacy to brownings, kingsley, charles, king victor and king charles, kinney, mrs., , "lady and the painter, the," "lady geraldine's courtship," , , "lament for adonis," landor, walter savage, chirography of, ; meets browning, ; courtesy of, ; meets miss barrett, , , ; quoted, ; intimacy with leigh hunt, , ; opinions, ; guest of brownings, ; homage from browning, ; guest of storys, , , , "la saisiaz," - "last poems," "la torre all' antella," , "la vallière," leighton, sir frederic, "les charmettes," "lost leader, the," "loved once," , lowell, james russell, , "luria," lytton, bulwer, , , ----, lord (owen meredith), ; entertains mrs. browning, - ; visits the brownings, , , macready, william, meeting with browning, , ; suggests playwriting to browning, ; sees "strafford," ; produces "strafford," ; dinner to browning, ; produces "a blot in the 'scutcheon," , marcello, contessa, martineau, harriet, friendship with brownings, , , , , , masson, professor, browning entertained by, - mazzini, , medici, marchesa peruzzi di, birthday fête, ; reminiscences of, , ; visit to scotland, ; villa of, ; translation of duprè's autobiography, ; browning's letter to, ; florentine palace of, medici, statue of fernandino di, "meeting at night," "men and women," , , , , millais, lady, ----, sir john everett, browning's letter to, - ; milnes, monckton (lord houghton), , , , ; christening party, milsand, joseph, meeting with browning, ; paper on browning, ; letter from browning, , ; friendship with brownings, , , , ; criticism of "aurora leigh," ; death, ; portrait, mitford, mary russell, ; association with the brownings, , , , , , , , ; letter from mrs. browning, , , , , ; death, mohl, mme., , , moore, mrs. bloomfield, moulton-barrett, elizabeth (niece), ----. _see_ barrett, explanation of name, nancioni, il signor dottore, nettleship, mr., essays on browning, "new spirit of the age, the," , nightingale, florence, "old yellow book, the," "one word more," , - , ongaro, dall', "only a cure," ossoli, marchesa d' (margaret fuller), , ; visits the brownings, ; death, , "other half rome, the," "pacchiarotto," page, william, , , palazzo giustiniani, ---- peruzzi, ---- pitti, , , ---- rezzonico, - , , , "paracelsus," , , , , , , , , , , , , , "parleyings," "parting at morning," patmore, coventry, "pauline," , , , , , , , , "penini." _see_ browning, robert barrett "pippa passes," , , , , , - pius ix (pio nono), , , , , poe, edgar allan, "poems before congress," "poet's vow, the," , , "pompilia," , , "portrait, a," , powers, hiram, , , , prince of wales (edward vii), - proctor ("barry cornwall"), , , , , , "prometheus bound," , , "proof and disproof," "prospice," , "question and answer," "rabbi ben ezra," "recollections of a literary life," "red cotton night-cap country," , "return of the druses, the," "rhapsody of life's progress, a," , , "rhyme of the duchess may, the," "ring and the book, the," , , , - ripert-monclar, marquis amédée de, , , ritchie, lady, , , robertson, john, , rogers, arthur, "romances and lyrics," "romaunt of margret, the," , "rosny," rossetti, dante gabriel, , , , , sand, george, , "saul," , scotti, signor, "seraphim, the," , , , sharp, william, quoted, ; suggested origin of "flight of the duchess," ; quoted, ; description of browning, ; shelley, percy bysshe, , , silverthorne, mrs., "sleep, the," , smith, alexander, smith, george murray, , , "sonnets from the portuguese," , , , , , , , "sordello," , , , , - , , , , "soul's tragedy, a," "statue and the bust, the," , stedman, edmund clarence, story, edith. _see_ medici, marchessa peruzzi di ----, william wetmore and emeline, browning's first meeting, , ; characteristics, , ; associations with the brownings, - , , , , , , , , , ; entertain landor, ; characterization of hawthorne, ; last meeting with browning, - "strafford," , , , talfourd, field, talfourd, sergeant, , , , , taylor, bayard, tennyson, alfred, ; comment on "sordello," ; ; works, , ; miss barrett's comments on, , , ; becomes laureate, ; letter to mrs. browning, , ; reads "maud" to the poets, ; letters from browning, , , ; friendship with browning, ; dedication, ; regarding browning's lines, ----, frederick, , ----, hallam, "tertium quid," thackeray, anne. _see_ ritchie, lady ticknor and fields, tittle, margaret, "toccata of galuppi's, a," trollope, thomas adolphus and theodosia, , , , , "two poets of croisic," "valediction, a," vallombrosa, , villari, mme. pasquale, "virgin mary to the child jesus, the," "vision of poets, a," wiedemann, sarah anna, - "wine of cyprus," , "woman's last word, a," wordsworth, william, , , , , , , zampini, fanny (contessa salazar), footnotes: [ ] letters of robert browning and alfred domett. new york: dodd, mead and co. [ ] life of robert browning. london: walter scott, limited. [ ] la vie et l'oeuvre de elizabeth browning, par germaine-marie merlette; licencie des lettres; docteur de l'université de paris. [ ] red letter days of my life. london: richard bentley and son. [ ] "letters of robert browning and alfred domett." new york: dodd, mead, and company. [ ] robert browning: life and letters. boston: houghton, mifflin, and company. [ ] "la vita e le opere di roberto et elisabetta barrett browning. rome: societa typografico-editrice nazionale." [ ] william wetmore story and his friends. boston: the houghton-mifflin co. [ ] life and letters of benjamin jowett. london: john murray. [ ] alfred lord tennyson. london and new york: the macmillan co. [ ] life of phillips brooks. new york: e. p. dutton and co. [ ] records of tennyson, ruskin, and browning. london: the macmillan company. [ ] life and letters of sir john millais. london: methuen and co. [ ] what i remember. new york: harper and brothers. [ ] alfred lord tennyson. london and new york: the macmillan company. [ ] william wetmore story. boston: the houghton-mifflin company. [ ] alfred lord tennyson. london and new york: the macmillan co. * * * * * transcriber's note: text in italics is enclosed between underscores (_italics_). additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. the original text includes greek characters. for this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. the following misprints have been corrected: "bythe" to "by the" (page ) "twentienth" to "twentieth" (page ) "personae" corrected to "personæ" (page ) "to to" corrected to "to" (page ) "personae" corrected to "personæ" (page ) "writen" corrected to "written" (page ) "edinburg" corrected to "edinburgh" (index) "fireside" corrected to "fire-side" (index) some quotes are opened with marks but are not closed. obvious errors have been silently closed, while those requiring interpretation have been left open. other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained. an introduction to the study of browning by arthur symons new edition revised and enlarged first edition, . reprinted, london, paris and toronto j. m. dent & sons ltd. - bedford street, w.c. _" ... browning, a great poet, a very great poet indeed, as the world will have to agree with us in thinking."_--landor. to george meredith novelist and poet this little book on an illustrious contemporary is with deep respect and admiration inscribed. preface this _introduction to the study of browning_, which is now reprinted in a new form, revised throughout, and with everything relating to facts carefully brought up to date, has been for many years out of print. i wrote it as an act of homage to the poet whom i had worshipped from my boyhood; i meant it to be, in almost his own words, used of shelley, some approach to "the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to render to his fame and memory." it was sufficiently rewarded by three things: first, by the generous praise of walter pater, in the _guardian_, which led to the beginning of my friendship with him; then, by a single sentence from george meredith, "you have done knightly service to a brave leader"; lastly, by a letter from browning himself, in which he said: "how can i manage even to thank--much more praise--what, in its generosity of appreciation, makes the poorest recognition 'come too near the praising of myself'?" i repeat these things now, because they seem to justify me in dragging back into sight a book written when i was very young, and, as i am only too conscious, lacking in many of the qualities which i have since acquired or developed. but, on going over it, i have found, for the most part, what seems to me a sound foundation, though little enough may be built on that foundation. i have revised many sentences, and a few opinions; but, while conscious that i should approach the whole subject now in a different way, i have found surprisingly few occasions for any fundamental or serious change of view. i am conscious how much i owed, at that time, to the most helpful and judicious friend whom i could possibly have had at my elbow, dykes campbell. there are few pages of my manuscript which he did not read and criticise, and not a page of my proofs which he did not labour over as if it had been his own. he forced me to learn accuracy, he cut out my worst extravagances, he kept me sternly to my task. it was in writing this book under his encouragement and correction that i began to learn the first elements of literary criticism. this new edition, then, of my book is new and yet the same. i have altered everything that seemed to require altering, and i have made the style a little more equable; but i have not, i hope, broken anywhere into a new key, or added any sort of decoration not in keeping with the original plainness of the stuff. when pater said: "his book is, according to his intention, before all things a useful one," he expressed my wish in the matter; and also when he said: "his aim is to point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the dubious portions of his author's work." in the letter from which i have quoted, browning said: "it does indeed strike me as wonderful that you should have given such patient attention to all those poems, and (if i dare say further) so thoroughly entered into--at any rate--the spirit in which they were written and the purpose they hoped to serve." if browning really thought that, my purpose, certainly, had been accomplished. _april _. preface to the first edition i have ever held that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. it has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to the best, not to forage for the worst--the small faults which acquire prominence only by isolation--of the poet with whose writings i am concerned. i wish also to give information, more or less detailed, about each of mr. browning's works; information sufficient to the purpose i have in view, which is to induce those who have hitherto deprived themselves of a stimulating pleasure to deprive themselves of it no longer. further, my aim is in no sense controversial. in a book whose sole purpose is to serve as an introduction to the study of a single one of our contemporary poets, i have consciously and carefully refrained from instituting comparisons--which i deprecate as, to say the least, unnecessary--between the poet in question and any of the other eminent poets in whose time we have the honour of living. i have to thank mr. browning for permission to reprint the interesting and now almost inaccessible prefaces to some of his earlier works, which will be found in appendix ii. i have also to thank dr. furnivall for permission to make use of his _browning bibliography_, and for other kind help. i wish to acknowledge my obligation to mrs. orr's _handbook to robert browning's works_, and to some of the browning society's papers, for helpful information and welcome light. finally, i would tender my especial and grateful thanks to mr. j. dykes campbell, who has given me much kindly assistance. _sept. , _. contents page general characteristics characteristics of the poems appendix: i. a bibliography of robert browning ii. reprint of discarded prefaces to the first editions of some of browning's works index to poems robert browning born may , . died december , . general characteristics an introduction to the study of browning the first and perhaps the final impression we receive from the work of robert browning is that of a great nature, an immense personality. the poet in him is made up of many men. he is dramatist, humorist, lyrist, painter, musician, philosopher and scholar, each in full measure, and he includes and dominates them all. in richness of nature, in scope and penetration of mind and vision, in energy of passion and emotion, he is probably second among english poets to shakespeare alone. in art, in the power or the patience of working his native ore, he is surpassed by many; but few have ever held so rich a mine in fee. so large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments, that we cannot feel as if the whole vast extent of his work has come near to exhausting them. as it is, he has written more than any other english poet with the exception of shakespeare, and he comes very near the gigantic total of shakespeare. mass of work is of course in itself worth nothing without due quality; but there is no surer test nor any more fortunate concomitant of greatness than the union of the two. the highest genius is splendidly spendthrift; it is only the second order that needs to be niggardly. browning's works are not a mere collection of poems, they are a literature. and his literature is the richest of modern times. if "the best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life," his place is among the great poets of the world. in the vast extent of his work he has dealt with or touched on nearly every phase and feature of humanity, and his scope is bounded only by the soul's limits and the last reaches of life. but of all "poetical works," small or great, his is the most consistent in its unity. the manner has varied not a little, the comparative worth of individual poems is widely different, but from the first word to the last the attitude is the same, the outlook on life the same, the conception of god and man, of the world and nature, always the same. this unity, though it may be deduced from, or at least accommodated to, a system of philosophical thought, is much more the outcome of a natural and inevitable bent. no great poet ever constructed his poems upon a theory, but a theory may often be very legitimately discovered in them. browning, in his essay on shelley, divides all poets into two classes, subjective and objective, the seer and the maker. his own genius includes a large measure of them both; for it is equally strong on the dramatic and the metaphysical side. there are for him but two realities; and but two subjects, life and thought. on these are expended all his imagination and all his intellect, more consistently and in a higher degree than can be said of any english poet since the age of elizabeth. life and thought, the dramatic and the metaphysical, are not considered apart, but woven into one seamless tissue; and in regard to both he has one point of view and one manner of treatment. it is this that causes the unity which subsists throughout his work; and it is this, too, which distinguishes him among poets, and makes that originality by virtue of which he has been described as the most striking figure in our poetic literature. most poets endeavour to sink the individual in the universal; it is browning's special distinction that when he is most universal he is most individual. as a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate, but as a collection of units. most thinkers write and speak of man; browning of men. with man as a species, with man as a society, he does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. every man is for him an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation. life exists for each as completely and separately as if he were the only inhabitant of our planet. in the religious sense this is the familiar christian view; but browning, while accepting, does not confine himself to, the religious sense. he conceives of each man as placed on the earth with a purpose of probation. life is given him as a test of his quality; he is exposed to the chances and changes of existence, to the opposition and entanglement of circumstances, to evil, to doubt, to the influence of his fellow-men, and to the conflicting powers of his own soul; and he succeeds or fails, toward god, or as regards his real end and aim, according as he is true or false to his better nature, his conception of right. he is not to be judged by the vulgar standards of worldly success or unsuccess; not even by his actions, good or bad as they may seem to us, for action can never fully translate the thought or motive which lay at its root; success or unsuccess, the prime and final fact in life, lies between his soul and god. the poet, in browning's view of him, is god's witness, and must see and speak for god. he must therefore conceive of each individual separately and distinctively, and he must see how each soul conceives of itself. it is here that browning parts company most decisively with all other poets who concern themselves exclusively with life, dramatic poets, as we call them; so that it seems almost necessary to invent some new term to define precisely his special attitude. and hence it is that in his drama thought plays comparatively so large, and action comparatively so small, a part; hence, that action is valued only in so far as it reveals thought or motive, not for its own sake, as the crown and flower of these. "to the motive, the endeavour, the heart's self his quick sense looks: he crowns and calls aright the soul o' the purpose, ere 'tis shaped as act, takes flesh i' the world, and clothes itself a king."[ ] for his endeavour is not to set men in action for the pleasure of seeing them move; but to see and show, in their action and inaction alike, the real impulses of their being: to see how each soul conceives of itself. this individuality of presentment is carried out equally in the domain of life and of thought; as each man lives, so he thinks and perceives, so he apprehends god and truth, for himself only. it is evident that this special standpoint will give not only a unity but an originality to the work of which it may be called the root; equally evident that it will demand a special method and a special instrument. the dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense in which we apply it to shakespeare and the elizabethans, aims at showing, by means of action, the development of character as it manifests itself to the world in deeds. his study is character, but it is character in action, considered only in connection with a particular grouping of events, and only so far as it produces or operates upon these. the processes are concealed from us, we see the result. in the very highest realisations of this dramatic power, and always in intention, we are presented with a perfect picture, in which every actor lives, and every word is audible; perfect, complete in itself, without explanation, without comment; a dogma incarnate, which we must accept as it is given us, and explain and illustrate for ourselves. if we wish to know what this character or that thought or felt in his very soul, we may perhaps have data from which to construct a more or less probable hypothesis; but that is all. we are told nothing, we care to know nothing of what is going on in the thought; of the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which will perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation in action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. this is not the intention: it is a spectacle of life we are beholding; and life is action. but is there no other sense in which a poet may be dramatic, besides this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, which "peradventure may outgrow, the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, and take for a nobler stage the soul itself, in shifting fancies and celestial lights, with all its grand orchestral silences, to keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds."[ ] this new form of drama is the drama as we see it in browning, a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul. instead of a grouping of characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result in action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they influence the character or the mind. this is very clearly explained in the original advertisement to _paracelsus_, where browning tells us that his poem is an attempt "to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis i desire to produce, i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded." in this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled (thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its characteristics, to reveal its very nature. suppose him to be attracted by some particular soul or by some particular act. the problem occupies him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is; he winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks to pieces the machinery. presently he begins to reconstruct, before our eyes, the whole series of events, the whole substance of the soul, but, so to speak, turned inside out. we watch the workings of the mental machinery as it is slowly disclosed before us; we note the specialties of construction, its individual character, the interaction of parts, every secret of it. we thus come to see that, considered from the proper point of view, everything is clear, regular and explicable in however entangled an action, however obscure a soul; we see that what is external is perfectly natural when we can view its evolution from what is internal. it must not be supposed that browning explains this to us in the manner of an anatomical lecturer; he makes every character explain itself by its own speech, and very often by speech that is or seems false and sophistical, so only that it is personal and individual, and explains, perhaps by exposing, its speaker. this, then, is browning's consistent mental attitude, and his special method. but he has also a special instrument, the monologue. the drama of action demands a concurrence of several distinct personalities, influencing one another rapidly by word or deed, so as to bring about the catastrophe; hence the propriety of the dialogue. but the introspective drama, in which the design is to represent and reveal the individual, requires a concentration of interest, a focussing of light on one point, to the exclusion or subordination of surroundings; hence the propriety of the monologue, in which a single speaker or thinker can consciously or unconsciously exhibit his own soul. this form of monologue, learnt perhaps from landor, who used it with little psychological intention, appears in almost the earliest of browning's poems, and he has developed it more skilfully and employed it more consistently than any other writer. even in works like _sordello_ and _red cotton night-cap country_, which are thrown into the narrative form, many of the finest and most characteristic parts are in monologue; and _the inn album_ is a series of slightly-linked dialogues which are only monologues in disguise. nearly all the lyrics, romances, idyls, nearly all the miscellaneous poems, long and short, are monologues. and even in the dramas, as will be seen later, there is visible a growing tendency toward the monologue with its mental and individual, in place of the dialogue with its active and outer interest. browning's aim, then, being to see how each soul conceives of itself, and to exhibit its essential qualities, yet without complication of incident, it is his frequent practice to reveal the soul to itself by the application of a sudden test, which shall condense the long trial of years into a single moment, and so "flash the truth out by one blow." to this practice we owe his most vivid and notable work. "the poetry of robert browning," says pater, "is pre-eminently the poetry of situations." he selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in itself, and places it in some situation where its vital essence may become apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity. the choice of good or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate will be decided. when a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a second in which to win or lose; but the second may be worth an eternity. these moments of intense significance, these tremendous spiritual crises, are struck out in browning's poetry with a clearness and sharpness of outline that no other poet has achieved. "to realise such a situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand fold.... yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act."[ ] it is as a result of this purpose, in consonance with this practice, that we get in browning's works so large a number of distinct human types, and so great a variety of surroundings in which they are placed. only in shakespeare can we find anything like the same variety of distinct human characters, vital creations endowed with thoughtful life; and not even, perhaps, in shakespeare, such novelty and variety of _milieu_. there is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. passing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of east and west, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the athens of socrates and euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between paganism and christianity, and recorded the last utterance of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has distilled the very essence of the middle ages and the renaissance, the very essence of the modern world. the men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and popes, jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of brutus, joyous girls and malevolent greybeards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them. he has found and studied humanity, not only in english towns and villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the roman campagna, in venetian gondolas, in florentine streets, on the boulevards of paris and in the prado of madrid, in the snow-bound forests of russia, beneath the palms of persia and upon egyptian sands, on the coasts of normandy and the salt plains of brittany, among druses and arabs and syrians, in brand-new boston and amidst the ruins of thebes. but this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or social curiosity. i do not think browning has ever set himself the task of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done it. the instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or background. the statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal. the characteristic of which i have been speaking (the persistent care for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it. the popularity of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it, poetry like tennyson's, for instance, is largely due to the very quality which browning's finest characteristic excludes from his. compare, altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of tennyson's with one of browning's best lyrics. the perfection of the former consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all. the perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of a single moment of passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single personality, and to that personality only at a single moment. to appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. and the difficulty is increased when we remember another of browning's characteristics, closely allied to this, and, indeed, resulting from it: his preference for the unusual and complex rather than the simple and ordinary. people prefer to read about characters which they can understand at first sight, with which they can easily sympathise. a dramatist, who insists on presenting them with complex and exceptional characters, studies of the good in evil and the evil in good, representations of states of mind which are not habitual to them, or which they find it difficult to realise in certain lights, can never obtain so quick or so hearty a recognition as one who deals with great actions, large and clear characters, familiar motives. when the head has to be exercised before the heart, there is chilling of sympathy. allied to browning's originality in temper, topic, treatment and form, is his originality in style; an originality which is again due, in large measure, to the same prevailing cause. his style is vital, his verse moves to the throbbing of an inner organism, not to the pulsations of a machine. he prefers, as indeed all true poets do, but more exclusively than any other poet, sense to sound, thought to expression. in his desire of condensation he employs as few words as are consistent with the right expression of his thought; he rejects superfluous adjectives, and all stop-gap words. he refuses to use words for words' sake: he declines to interrupt conversation with a display of fireworks: and as a result it will be found that his finest effects of versification correspond with his highest achievements in imagination and passion. as a dramatic poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, sometimes almost to vulgarise, his style and diction for the proper expression of some particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of phrase and delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. he will not _let himself go_ in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes are more "ideal." and where many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. it follows that browning's verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other poets. where it seems to him necessary to sacrifice one of the two, sense or sound, he has never hesitated which to sacrifice. but while he has certainly failed in some of his works, or in some passages of them, to preserve the due balance, while he has at times undoubtedly sacrificed sound too liberally to the claims of sense, the extent of this sacrifice is very much less than is generally supposed. the notion, only too general, expressed by such a phrase as "his habitual rudeness of versification" (used by no unfavourable _edinburgh_ reviewer in ) is one of the most singularly erroneous perversions of popular prejudice that have ever called for correction at the hands of serious criticism. browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification. except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention. in one very important matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious. his lyrical poems contain more structural varieties of form than those of any preceding english poet, not excepting shelley. his blank verse at its best is more vital in quality than that of any modern poet. and both in rhymed and in blank verse he has written passages which for almost every technical quality are hardly to be surpassed in the language. that browning's style should have changed in the course of years is only natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in the best) direction. "the later manner of a painter or poet," says f.w.h. myers in his essay on virgil, "generally differs from his earlier manner in much the same way. we observe in him a certain impatience of the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." these tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in browning, as they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we may observe in the somewhat parallel case of carlyle. we find as a consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work, while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered him liable become more and more frequent and prominent. but, good or bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with aurora leigh, "so life, in deepening with me, deepened all the course i took, the work i did. indeed the academic law convinced of sin; the critics cried out on the falling off, regretting the first manner. but i felt my heart's life throbbing in my verse to show it lived, it also--certes incomplete, disordered with all adam in the blood, but even its very tumours, warts and wens, still organised by and implying life."[ ] it has been, as a rule, strangely overlooked, though it is a matter of the first moment, that browning's poems are in the most precise sense _works of art_, and this in a very high degree, positive and relative, if we understand by a "work of art" a poem which attains its end and fulfils its purpose completely, and which has a worthy end and plain purpose to attain. surely this is of far more vital importance than the mere melodiousness of single lines, or a metre of unvarying sweetness bearing gently along in its placid course (as a stream the leaf or twig fallen into it from above) some tiny thought or finikin fragment of emotion. matthew arnold, who was both poet and critic, has told us with emphasis of "the necessity of accurate construction, and the subordinate character of expression."[ ] his next words, though bearing a slightly different signification, may very legitimately be applied to browning. arnold tells us "how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image." for "a great action," read "an adequate subject," and the words define and defend browning's principle and practice exactly. there is no characteristic of his work more evident, none more admirable or more rare, than the unity, the compactness and completeness, the skill and care in construction and definiteness in impression, of each poem. i do not know any contemporary of whom this may more truly be said. the assertion will be startling, no doubt, to those who are accustomed to think of browning (as people once thought of shakespeare) as a poet of great gifts but little skill; as a giant, but a clumsy giant; as what the french call a _nature_, an almost unconscious force, expending itself at random, without rule or measure. but take, for example, the series of _men and women_, as originally published, read poem after poem (there are fifty to choose from) and scrutinise each separately; see what was the writer's intention, and observe how far he has fulfilled it, how far he has succeeded in conveying to your mind a distinct and sharply-cut impression. you will find that whatever be the subject, whatever the style, whether in your eyes the former be mistaken, the latter perverse, the poem itself, within its recognised limits, is designed, constructed and finished with the finest skill of the draughtsman or the architect. you will find that the impression you have received from the whole is single and vivid, and, while you may not perceive it, it will generally be the case that certain details at which your fastidiousness cries out, certain uncouthnesses, as you fancy, are perfectly appropriate and in their place, and have contributed to the perfection of the _ensemble_. a word may here be said in reference to the charge of "obscurity," which, from the time when browning's earliest poem was disposed of by a complacent critic in the single phrase, "a piece of pure bewilderment," has been hurled at each succeeding poem with re-iterate vigour of virulence. the charge of "pure bewilderment" is about as reasonable as the charge of "habitual rudeness of versification." it is a fashion. people abuse their "browning" as they abuse their "bradshaw," though all that is wanting, in either case, is a little patience and a little common sense. browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, "i never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet;" as indeed he has himself said, to much the same effect, in a letter printed many years ago: "i never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man." but he has not made anything like such a demand on the reader's faculties as people, _not_ readers, seem to suppose. _sordello_ is difficult, _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ is difficult, so, perhaps, in parts, is _fifine at the fair_; so, too, on account of its unfamiliar allusions, is _aristophanes' apology_; and a few smaller poems, here and there, remotely argumentative or specially complex in psychology, are difficult. but really these are about all to which such a term as "unintelligible," so freely and recklessly flung about, could with the faintest show of reason be applied by any reasonable being. in the , lines which form browning's longest work and masterpiece, the "psychological epic" of _the ring and the book_, i am inclined to think it possible that a careful scrutiny might reveal which an ordinary reader would require to read twice. anything more clear than the work as a whole it would be difficult to find. it is much easier to follow than _paradise lost_; the _agamemnon_ is rather less easy to follow than _a blot in the 'scutcheon_. that there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could deny. but it is only the excuse of a misconception. browning is a thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift as it is subtle. to a dull reader there is little difference between cloudy and fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the other is too dense. of all thinkers in poetry, browning is the most swift and fiery. "if there is any great quality," says mr. swinburne, in those noble pages in which he has so generously and triumphantly vindicated his brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity-- "if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in mr. browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. to charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. he is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour, springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. he never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway."[ ] moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with bishop butler, in answer to a similar complaint: "it must be acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or, if you please, obscure; but i must take leave to add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been put in a plainer manner."[ ] there is another popular misconception to which also a word in passing may as well be devoted. this is the idea that browning's personality is apt to get confused with his characters', that his men and women are not separate creations, projected from his brain into an independent existence, but mere masks or puppets through whose mouths he speaks. this fallacy arises from the fact that not a few of his imaginary persons express themselves in a somewhat similar fashion; or, as people too rashly say, "talk like browning." the explanation of this apparent paradox, so far as it exists, is not far to seek. all art is a compromise, and all dramatic speech is in fact impossible. no persons in real life would talk as shakespeare or any other great dramatist makes them talk. nor do the characters of shakespeare talk like those of any other great dramatist, except in so far as later playwrights have consciously imitated shakespeare. every dramatic writer has his own style, and in this style, subject to modification, all his characters speak. just as a soul, born out of eternity into time, takes on itself the impress of earth and the manners of human life, so a dramatic creation, pure essence in the shaping imagination of the poet, takes on itself, in its passage into life, something of the impress of its abode. "the poet, in short, endows his creations with his own attributes; he enables them to utter their feelings as if they themselves were poets, thus giving a true voice even to that intensity of passion which in real life often hinders expression."[ ] if this fact is recognised (that dramatic speech is not real speech, but poetical speech, and poetical speech infused with the individual style of each individual dramatist, modulated, indeed, but true to one keynote) then it must be granted that browning has as much right to his own style as other dramatists have to theirs, and as little right as they to be accused on that account of putting his personality into his work. but as browning's style is very pronounced and original, it is more easily recognisable than that of most dramatists (so far, no doubt, a defect[ ]) and for this reason it has come to seem relatively more prominent than it really is. this consideration, and not any confusion of identity, is the cause of whatever similarity of speech exists between browning and his characters, or between individual characters. the similarity is only skin-deep. take a convenient instance, _the ring and the book_. i have often seen it stated that the nine tellings of the story are all told in the same style, that all the speakers, guido and pompilia, the pope and tertium quid alike, speak like browning. i cannot see it. on the contrary, i have been astonished, in reading and re-reading the poem, at the variety, the difference, the wonderful individuality in each speaker's way of telling the same story; at the profound art with which the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language, no less than the broad distinctions of character and the subtle indications of bias, are adapted and converted into harmony. a certain general style, a certain general manner of expression, are common to all, as is also the case in, let us say, _the tempest_. but what distinction, what variation of tone, what delicacy and expressiveness of modulation! as a simple matter of fact, few writers have ever had a greater flexibility of style than browning. i am doubtful whether full justice has been done to one section of browning's dramatic work, his portraits of women. the presence of woman is not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as it is in the work of some other poets; woman is to him neither an exclusive preoccupation, nor a continual unrest; but as faithful and vital representations, i do not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite on a level with his portraits of men, and far beyond those of any other english poet of the last three centuries. in some of them, notably in pompilia, there is a something which always seems to me almost incredible in a man: an instinct that one would have thought only a woman could have for women. and his women, good or bad, are always real women, and they are represented without bias. browning is one of the very few men (mr. meredith, whose women are, perhaps, the consummate flower of his work, is his only other english contemporary) who can paint women without idealisation or degradation, not from the man's side, but from their own; as living equals, not as goddesses or as toys. his women live, act, and suffer, even think; not assertively, mannishly (for the loveliest of them have a very delicate charm of girlishness) but with natural volition, on equal rights with men. any one who has thought at all on the matter will acknowledge that this is the highest praise that could be given to a poet, and the rarest. browning's women are not perhaps as various as his men; but from ottima to pompilia (from the "great white queen, magnificent in sin," to the "lily of a maiden, white with intact leaf") what a range and gradation of character! these are the two extremes; between them, as earth lies between heaven and hell, are stationed all the others, from the faint and delicate dawn in pauline, michal and palma, through pippa and mildred and colombe and constance and the queen, to balaustion and elvire, fifine and clara and the heroine of the _inn album_, and the lurid close in cristina. i have named only a few, and how many there are to name! someone has written a book on _shakespeare's women_: whoever writes a book on _browning's women_ will have a task only less delightful, a subject only less rich, than that. when browning was a boy, it is recorded that he debated within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as well as a poet. finally, though not, i believe, for a good many years, he decided in the negative. but the latent qualities of painter and musician have developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken. no english poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. _abt vogler_ is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. it is not the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks. _master hugues of saxe-gotha_ is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation; _a toccata of galuppi's_ is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but _abt vogler_ is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born. in his poems on the arts of painting and sculpture (not in themselves more perfect in sympathy, though larger in number, than those on music) he is simply the first to write of these arts as an artist might, if an artist could express his soul in words or rhythm. it has always been a fashion among poets to write about music, though scarcely anyone but shakespeare and milton has done so to much purpose; it is now, owing to the influence of rossetti (whose magic, however, was all his own, and whose mantle went down into the grave with him) a fashion to write about pictures. but indiscriminate sonneteering about pictures is one thing: browning's attitude and insight into the plastic arts quite another. poems like _andrea del sarto_, _fra lippo lippi_, _pictor ignotus_, have a revealing quality which is unique; tragedies or comedies of art, in a more personal and dramatic way than the musical poems, they are like these in touching the springs of art itself. they may be compared with _abt vogler_. poems of the order of _the guardian angel_ are more comparable with _a toccata of galuppi's_, the rendering of the impressions and sensations caused by a particular picture. _old pictures in florence_ is not unsimilar to _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, critical, technical, lovingly learned, sympathetically quizzical. but browning's artistic instinct and knowledge are manifested not only in special poems of this sort, but everywhere throughout his works. he writes of painters because he has a kinship with them. "their pictures are windows through which he sees into their souls." it is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a painter should be capable of superb landscape-painting in verse; and we find in browning this power. it is further evident that such a poet, a man who has chosen poetry instead of painting, must consider the latter art subordinate to the former, and it is only natural that we should find browning subordinating the pictorial to the poetic capacity, and this more carefully than most other poets. his best landscapes are as brief as they are brilliant. they are like sabre-strokes, swift, sudden, flashing the light from their sweep, and striking straight to the heart. and they are never pushed into prominence for an effect of idle beauty, nor strewn about in the way of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like roses in a runner's path. they are subordinated always to the human interest; blended, fused with it, so that a landscape in a poem of browning's is literally a part of the emotion. all poetry which describes in detail, however magnificent, palls on us when persisted in. "the art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description. that is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or a phrase paint lasting pictures. the shakespearian, the dantesque, are in a line, two at most."[ ] it is to this, the finest essence of landscape-painting, that most of browning's landscapes belong. yet he can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit. look at the poem of _the englishman in italy_. the whole piece is one long description, minute, careful and elaborated. perhaps it is worth observing that the description is addressed to a child. in the exercise of his power of placing a character or incident in a sympathetic setting, browning shows himself, as i have pointed out, singularly skilful. he never avails himself of the dramatic poet's licence of vagueness as to surroundings: he sees them himself with instant and intense clearness, and stamps them as clearly on our brain. the picture calls up the mood. here is the opening of one of his very earliest poems, _porphyria's lover_:-- "the rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake, i listened with heart fit to break. when glided in porphyria." there, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line porphyria may enter. take a middle-period poem, _a serenade at the villa_, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the same fiery art:-- "that was i, you heard last night when there rose no moon at all, nor, to pierce the strained and tight tent of heaven, a planet small: life was dead and so was light. not a twinkle from the fly, not a glimmer from the worm. when the crickets stopped their cry, when the owls forebore a term, you heard music; that was i. earth turned in her sleep with pain, sultrily suspired for proof: _in at heaven and out again, lightning!--where it broke the roof, bloodlike, some few drops of rain_. what they could my words expressed, o my love, my all, my one! singing helped the verses best, and when singing's best was done, to my lute i left the rest. so wore night; the east was gray, white the broad-faced hemlock flowers; there would be another day; ere its first of heavy hours found me, i had passed away." this tells enough to be an entire poem. it is not a description of the night and the lover: we are made to see them. the lines i have italicised are of the school of dante or of rembrandt. their vividness overwhelms. in the latest poems, as in _ivân ivânovitch_ or _ned bratts_, we find the same swift sureness of touch. it is only natural that most of browning's finest landscapes are italian.[ ] as a humorist in poetry, browning takes rank with our greatest. his humour, like most of his qualities, is peculiar to himself, though no doubt carlyle had something of it. it is of wide capacity, and ranges from the effervescence of pure fun and freak to that salt and briny laughter whose taste is bitterer than tears. its full extent will be seen by comparing _the pied piper of hamelin_ with _confessions_, or in the contrast of the two parts of _holy-cross day_. we find the simplest form of humour, the jolly laughter of an unaffected nature, the effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as _up at a villa--down in the city_, or _pacchiarotto_, or _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_. _fra lippo lippi_ leans to this category, though it is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature, the born bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle of the monk. he is browning's finest figure of comedy. _ned bratts_ is another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with the grotesque. in _a lovers' quarrel_ and _dîs aliter visum_, humour refines into passion. in _bishop blougram_ it condenses into wit. the poem has a well-bred irony; in _a soul's tragedy_ irony smiles and stings; in _mr. sludge, the medium_, it stabs with a thirsty point. in _caliban upon setebos_ we have the pure grotesque, an essentially noble variety of art, admitting of the utmost refinement of workmanship. the _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_ attains a new effect of grotesque: it is the comic tragedy of vituperative malevolence. _holy-cross day_ heightens the grotesque with pity, indignation and solemnity: _the heretic's tragedy_ raises it to sublimity. browning's satire is equally keen and kindly. it never condescends to raise laughter at infirmity, or at mere absurdities of manners; it respects human nature, but it convicts falsity by the revealing intensity of its illumination. of cynicism, of the wit that preys upon carrion, there is less than nothing. of all poets browning is the healthiest and manliest; he is one of the "substantial men" of whom landor speaks. his genius is robust with vigorous blood, and his tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health. the most subtle of minds, his is the least sickly. the wind that blows in his pages is no hot and languorous breeze, laden with scents and sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea. his poetry is a tonic; it braces and invigorates. "_il fait vivre ses phrases_:" his verse lives and throbs with life. he is incomparably plentiful of vital heat; "so thoroughly and delightfully alive." this is an effect of art, and a moral impression. it brings us into his own presence, and stirs us with an answering warmth of life in the breathing pages. the keynote of his philosophy is:-- "god's in his heaven, all's right with the world!" he has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from no _man_, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with stumblings and fallings. i am a man, he might say with the noblest utterance of antiquity, and i deem nothing alien that is human. his investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable optimism. any one can say "all's right with the world," when he looks at the smiling face of things, at comfortable prosperity and a decent morality. but the test of optimism is its sight of evil. browning has fathomed it, and he can still hope, for he sees the reflection of the sun in the depths of every foul puddle. this vivid hope and trust in man is bound up with a strong and strenuous faith in god. browning's christianity is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally christian in that it never sinks into pietism. he is never didactic, but his faith is the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it. yet as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all creeds with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible to prove him (as shakespeare has been proved) a believer in every thing and a disbeliever in anything. such, so far as i can realise my conception of him, is robert browning; and such the tenour of his work as a whole. it is time to pass from general considerations to particular ones; from characteristics of the writer to characteristics of the poems. in the pages to follow i shall endeavour to present a critical chronicle of browning's works; not neglecting to give due information about each, but not confining myself to the mere giving of information. it is hoped that the quotations for which i may find room will practically illustrate and convincingly corroborate what i have to say about the poetry from which they are taken. footnotes: [footnote : _luria_, act iii.] [footnote : _aurora leigh_, book fifth.] [footnote : walter pater, _the renaissance_, p, .] [footnote : _aurora leigh_, book third.] [footnote : preface to _poems_, .] [footnote : _george chapman: a critical essay_, .] [footnote : _works_, , preface to sermons, pp. viii.-ix., where will also be found some exceedingly sensible remarks, which i commend to those whom it concerns, on persons "who take it for granted that they are acquainted with everything; and that no subject, if treated in the manner it should be, can be treated in any manner but what is familiar and easy to them."] [footnote : "realism in dramatic art," _new quarterly magazine_, oct., .] [footnote : allowing at its highest valuation all that need be allowed on this score, we find only that mr. browning has the defects of his qualities; and from these who is exempted? by virtue of this style of his he has succeeded in rendering into words the inmost thoughts and finest shades of feeling of the "men and women fashioned by his fancy," and in such a task we can pardon even a fault, for such a result we can overlook even a blemish; as lessing, in _laokoon_, remarking on an error in raphael's drapery, finely says, "who will not rather praise him for having had the wisdom and the courage to commit a slight fault, for the sake of greater fulness of expression?"] [footnote : george meredith, _diana of the crossways_.] [footnote : italians, it is pleasant to remember, have warmly welcomed the poet who has known and loved italy best. "her town and country, her churches and her ruins, her sorrows and her hopes," said prof. nencioni, as long ago as , "are constantly sung by him. how he loves the land that inspires him he has shown by his long residence among us, and by the thrilling, almost lover-like tone with which he speaks of our dear country. 'open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it italy,' as he exclaims in _de gustibus_."] characteristics of the poems ( - ) characteristics of the poems ( - .) * * * * * . pauline: a fragment of a confession. [published anonymously in ; first reprinted (the text unaltered) in _poetical works_, vols., smith, elder and co., (vol. i., pp. - ); revised text, _poetical works_, , vol. i., pp. - .] _pauline_ was written at the age of twenty. its prefatory motto from cornelius agrippa (dated "_london, january, _. _v.a.xx._") serves to convey a hint that the "confession" is dramatic, and at the same time lays claim to the indulgence due to the author's youth. these two points are stated plainly in the "exculpatory word" prefixed to the reprint in . after mentioning the circumstances under which the revival of the poem was forced on him, browning says: "the thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which i have since written according to a scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time." in a note to the collected edition of , browning adds: "twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems more than sufficient; my faults remain duly recorded against me, and i claim permission to somewhat diminish these, so far as style is concerned, in the present and final edition." a revised text follows, in which, while many "faults" are indeed "diminished," it is difficult not to feel at times as if the foot-notes had got into the text. _pauline_ is the confession of an unnamed poet to the woman whom he loves, and whose name is given in the title. it is a sort of spiritual autobiography; a record of sensations and ideas, rather than of deeds. "the scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another." there is a vagueness of outline about the speaker which is due partly, no doubt, to the immaturity of the writer, partly also to the too exclusive portraiture of inactive mood. the difficulty is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in french, and signed "pauline," in which browning offered a sort of explanatory criticism of his own work. so far as we can grasp his personality, the speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after god and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated circle of his own selfhood. led by some better impulse, he now turns to pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of as "sun-treader," finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude and a redemption. the poet of the poem is an imaginary character, but it is possible to trace in this character some real traits of its creator. the passage beginning "i am made up of an intensest life" is certainly a piece of admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal significance. in this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the qualities (humour excepted) which mark browning's mature work. intensity of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the greek classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight into the human soul, these are already manifest. no characteristic is more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the familiarity with greek literature, shown not merely by the references to plato and to agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the poem, the one ending:-- "yet i say, never morn broke clear as those on the dim clustered isles in the blue sea, the deep groves and white temples and wet caves: and nothing ever will surprise me now-- who stood beside the naked swift-footed, who bound my forehead with proserpine's hair." the enthusiasm which breathes through whole pages of address to the "sun-treader" gives no exaggerated picture of browning's love and reverence for shelley, whose _alastor_ might perhaps in some respects be compared with _pauline_. the rhythm of browning's poem has a certain echo in it of shelley's earlier blank verse; and the lyrically emotional descriptions and the vivid and touching metaphors derived from nature frequently remind us of shelley, and sometimes of keats. on every page we meet with magical touches like this:-- "thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath blew soft from the moist hills; the black-thorn boughs, so dark in the bare wood, when glistening in the sunshine were white with coming buds, like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks had violets opening from sleep like eyes;" with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland tarn:-- "the trees bend o'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;" and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in browning's work. it seems like wronging the poem to speak of its _promise_: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. it is lacking, certainly, as browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them but its vigorous freshness. . paracelsus. [published in ; first acknowledged work (_poetical works_, , vol. ii., pp. - .) the original ms. is in the forster library at south kensington.] the poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life of paracelsus. it is in the form of dialogue between paracelsus and others: festus and his wife michal in the first scene, aprile, an italian poet, in the second, and festus only in the remainder. the poem is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography of paracelsus, translated from the _biographie universelle_. _paracelsus_ might be praised, and has justly been praised, for its serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people, that "matter is the visible body of the invisible god," and who had been the luther of medicine. but the historical element is less important than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely poetical. the leading motive is not unlike that of _pauline_ and of _sordello_: it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former, and much more clearly than in the latter. paracelsus is a portrait of the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible. his career is traced from its noble outset at würzburg to its miserable close in the hospital at salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest and deterioration. his last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man. the character and mental vicissitudes of paracelsus are brought out, as has been stated, in dialogue with others. the three minor characters, though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have a distinct individuality of their own. michal is browning's first sketch of a woman. she is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. there is something already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of pompilia." festus, michal's husband, the friend and adviser of paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. he, like michal, has no influence on the external action of the poem. aprile, the italian poet whom paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the development of the seeker after knowledge. unlike festus and michal, he is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the artist pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as paracelsus with the desire to know. he flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of the stronger spirit, one luminous moment and no more. _paracelsus_, though written in dialogue, is not intended to be a drama. this was clearly stated in the preface to the first edition, an important document, never afterwards reprinted. "instead of having recourse," wrote browning, "to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis i desire to produce, i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."[ ] the proportions of the work are epical rather than dramatic; but indeed it is difficult to class, so exuberant is the vitality which fills and overflows all limits. what is not a drama, though in dialogue, nor yet an epic, except in length, can scarcely be considered, any more than its successors, and perhaps imitators, _festus_, _balder_, or _a life drama_, properly artistic in form. but it is distinguished from this prolific progeny not only by a finer and firmer imagination, a truer poetic richness, but by a moderation, a concreteness, a grip, which are certainly all its own. in few of browning's poems are there so many individual lines and single passages which we are so apt to pause on, to read again and again, for the mere enjoyment of their splendid sound and colour. and this for a reason. the large and lofty character of paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. we meet on almost every page with lines like these:-- "ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once into the vast and unexplored abyss, what full-grown power informs her from the first, why she not marvels, strenuously beating the silent boundless regions of the sky." or again, lines like these, which have become the watch-word of a gordon:-- "i go to prove my soul! i see my way as birds their trackless way. i shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, i ask not: but unless god send his hail or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, in some time, his good time, i shall arrive: he guides me and the bird. in his good time!" at times the brooding splendour bursts forth in a kind of vast ecstasy, and we have such magnificence as this:-- "the centre fire heaves underneath the earth, and the earth changes like a human face; the molten ore bursts up among the rocks, winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright in hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask-- god joys therein. the wroth sea's waves are edged with foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, when, in the solitary waste, strange groups of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like, staring together with their eyes on flame-- god tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: but spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes over its breast to waken it, rare verdure buds tenderly upon rough banks, between the withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; the grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms like chrysalids impatient for the air, the shining dorrs are busy, beetles run along the furrows, ants make their ado; above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark soars up and up, shivering for very joy; afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls flit where the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets; savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain--and god renews his ancient rapture." the blank verse of _paracelsus_ is varied by four lyrics, themselves various in style, and full of rare music: the spirit song of the unfaithful poets-- "the sad rhyme of the men who sadly clung to their first fault, and withered in their pride," the gentle song of the mayne river, and that strange song of old spices which haunts the brain like a perfume:-- "heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes of labdanum, and aloe-balls, smeared with dull nard an indian wipes from out her hair: such balsam falls down sea-side mountain pedestals, from tree-tops where tired winds are fain, spent with the vast and howling main, to treasure half their island gain. and strew faint sweetness from some old egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud which breaks to dust when once unrolled; or shredded perfume, like a cloud from closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung, mouldering her lute and books among, as when a queen, long dead was young." footnotes: [footnote : see the whole preface, appendix ii.] . strafford: an historical tragedy. [written toward the close of ; acted at the theatre royal, covent garden (_strafford_, mr. macready; _countess of carlisle_, miss helen faucit), may , ; by the browning society at the strand theatre, dec. , , and at oxford by the o.u.d.s. in ; published in (_poetical works_, , vol. ii., pp. - ).] _strafford_ was written, at macready's earnest request, in an interval of the composition of _sordello_. like all browning's plays which were acted, it owed its partial failure to causes quite apart from its own merits or defects as a play.[ ] browning may not have had the making of a good playwright; but at least no one ever gave him the chance of showing whether he was or not. the play is not without incident, especially in the third act. but its chief merit lies in the language and style of the dialogue. there is no aim at historical dignity or poetical elaboration; the aim is nature, quick with personal passion. every word throbs with emotion; through these exclamatory, yet how delicate and subtle lines, we seem actually to see and hear the speakers, and with surprising vividness. the words supply their own accents, looks and gestures. in his preface to the first edition (reprinted in appendix ii.) browning states that he believes the historical portraits to be faithful. this is to a considerable extent confirmed by professor gardiner, who has given a careful consideration of the play in its historical aspects, in his introduction to miss hickey's annotated edition (g. bell & sons, ). as a representation of history, he tells us, it is inaccurate; "the very roots of the situation are untrue to fact." but (as he allows) this departure from fact, in the conduct of the action, is intentional, and, of course, allowable: browning was writing a drama, not a history. of the portraits, the really vital part of the play as an interpretation of history, he writes:-- "for myself, i can only say that, every time i read the play, i feel more convinced that mr. browning has seized the real strafford, the man of critical brain, of rapid decision, and tender heart, who strove for the good of his nation, without sympathy for the generation in which he lived. charles, too, with his faults perhaps exaggerated, is, nevertheless, a real charles.... there is a wonderful parallelism between the lady carlisle of the play and the less noble lady carlisle which history conjectures rather than describes.... on the other hand, pym is the most unsatisfactory, from an historical point of view, of the leading personages." yet, if it is interesting, it is by no means of primary importance to know the historical basis and probable accuracy of browning's play. the whole interest is centred in the character of strafford; it is a personal interest, and attaches itself to the personal character or the hero. the leading motive is strafford's devotion to his king, and the note of tragic discord arises from the ingratitude and faithlessness of charles set over against the blind fidelity of his minister. the antagonism of law and despotism, of pym and strafford, is, perhaps, less clearly and forcibly brought out: though essential to the plot, it wears to our sight a somewhat secondary aspect. strafford himself appears not so much a superb and unbending figure, a political power, as a man whose service of charles is due wholly to an intense personal affection, and not at all to his national sympathies, which seem, indeed, rather on the opposite side. he loves the man, not the king, and his love is a freak of the affections. that it is against his better reason he recognises, but the recognition fails to influence his heart or his conduct. this is finely expressed in the following lines, spoken by lady carlisle:-- "could you but know what 'tis to bear, my friend, one image stamped within you, turning blank the else imperial brilliance of your mind,-- a weakness, but most precious,--like a flaw i' the diamond, which should shape forth some sweet face yet to create, and meanwhile treasured there lest nature lose her gracious thought for ever'" browning has rarely drawn a more pathetic figure. every circumstance that could contribute to this effect is skilfully seized and emphasised: charles's incredibly selfish weakness, the implacable sternness of pym, the _triste_ prattle of strafford's children and their interrupted joyous song in the final scene, all serve to heighten our feeling of affectionate pity and regret. the imaginary former friendship between pym and strafford adds still more to the pathos of the delineation, and gives rise to some of the finest speeches, notably the last great colloquy between these two, which so effectively rounds and ends the play. the fatal figure of pym is impressive and admirable throughout, and the portrait of the countess of carlisle, browning's second portrait of a woman, is a noble and singularly original one. her unrecognised and undeterred devotion to strafford is finely and tenderly pathetic; it has the sorrowful dignity of faithful service, rewarded only in serving. footnotes: [footnote : see _robert browning: personalia_, by edmund gosse (houghton, mifflin & co., ).] . sordello. [published in (_poetical works_, , vol. i., pp. - ).] _sordello_ is generally spoken of as being the most obscure and the least attractive of browning's poems; it has even been called "the most illegible production of any time or country." hard, very hard, it undoubtedly is; but undoubtedly it is far from unattractive to the serious student of poetry, who will find in it something of the fascination of an alpine peak: not to be gained without an effort, treacherous and slippery, painfully dazzling to weak eyes, but for all that irresistibly fascinating. _sordello_ contains enough poetic material for a dozen considerable poems; indeed, its very fault lies in its plethora of ideas, the breathless crowd of hurrying thoughts and fancies, which fill and overflow it. that this is not properly to be called "obscurity" has been triumphantly shown by mr. swinburne in his essay on george chapman. some of his admirable statements i have already quoted, but we may bear to be told twice that browning is too much the reverse of obscure, that he is only too brilliant and subtle, that he never thinks but at full speed. but besides this characteristic, which is common to all his work, there are one or two special reasons which have made this particular poem more difficult than others. the condensation of style which had marked browning's previous work, and which has marked his later, was here (in consequence of an unfortunate and most unnecessary dread of verbosity, induced by a rash and foolish criticism) accentuated not infrequently into dislocation. the very unfamiliar historical events of the story[ ] are introduced, too, in a parenthetic and allusive way, not a little embarrassing to the reader. but it is also evident that the difficulties of a gigantic conception were not completely conquered by the writer's genius, not then fully matured; that lack of entire mastery over the material has frequently caused the two interests of the poem, the psychological and the historical, to clash; the background to intrude on and confuse the middle distance, if not even the foreground itself. every one of these faults is the outcome of a merit: altogether they betray a growing nature of extraordinary power, largeness and richness, not as yet to be bound or contained within any limits or in any bonds. _sordello_ is a psychological epic. but to call it this only would be to do it somewhat less than justice. there is in the poem a union of breathless eagerness with brooding suspense, which has an almost unaccountable fascination for those who once come under its charm, and nowhere in browning's work are there so many pictures, so vivid in aspect, so sharp in outline, so rich in colour. at their best they are sudden, a flash of revelation, as in this autumnal goito:-- "'twas the marsh gone of a sudden. mincio, in its place, laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face, and, where the mists broke up immense and white i' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light, out of the crashing of a myriad stars." verona, by torchfire, seen from a window, is shown with the same quick flare out of darkness:-- "then arose the two and leaned into verona's air, dead-still. a balcony lay black beneath until out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, grey-haired men came on it and harangued the people: then sea-like that people surging to and fro shouted." only carlyle, in the most vivid moments of his _french revolution_, has struck such flashes out of darkness. and there are other splendours and rarities, not only in the evocation of actual scenes and things, but in mere similes, like this, in which the quality of imagination is of a curiously subtle and unusual kind:-- "as, shall i say, some ethiop, past pursuit of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black enormous watercourse which guides him back to his own tribe again, where he is king: and laughs because he guesses, numbering the yellower poison-wattles on the pouch of the first lizard wrested from its couch under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips to cure his nostril with, and festered lips, and eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast) that he has reached its boundary, at last may breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the south sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth, eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried in fancy, puts them soberly aside for truth, projects a cool return with friends, the likelihood of winning mere amends ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently, then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he, hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon off-striding for the mountains of the moon." and, while much of the finest poetry is contained in picturesque passages such as these, we find verse of another order, thrilling as the trumpet's "golden cry," in the passionate invocation of dante, enshrining the magnificently dantesque characterization of the three divisions of the _divina commedia_. "for he--for he, gate-vein of this hearts' blood of lombardy, (if i should falter now)--for he is thine! sordello, thy forerunner, florentine! a herald-star i know thou didst absorb relentless into the consummate orb that scared it from its right to roll along a sempiternal path with dance and song fulfilling its allotted period, serenest of the progeny of god-- who yet resigns it not! his darling stoops with no quenched lights, desponds with no blank troops of disenfranchised brilliances, for, blent utterly with thee, its shy element like thine upburneth prosperous and clear. still, what if i approach the august sphere named now with only one name, disentwine that under-current soft and argentine from its fierce mate in the majestic mass leavened as the sea whose fire was mixt with glass in john's transcendent vision,--launch once more that lustre? dante, pacer of the shore where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume-- or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope into a darkness quieted by hope; plucker of amaranths grown beneath god's eye in gracious twilights where his chosen lie, i would do this! if i should falter now!" browning has himself told us that his stress lay on the "incidents in the development of a soul." the portrait of sordello is one of the most elaborate and complete which he has given us. it is painted with more accessory detail and on a larger canvas than any other single figure. like _pauline_ and _paracelsus_, with which it has points of affinity, the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul "whose ambition," as it has been rightly said, "is in extravagant disproportion to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than in willing and doing itself." sordello's youth is fed upon fancy: he imagines himself apollo, this or that hero of the time; in dreams he is and does to the height of his aspirations. but from any actual doing he shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act. we might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from action and from sympathy. he looks on men as foils to himself, or as a background on which to shine. but the root of his failure is this, and it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism: he longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions. his mind perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns the mere accidents. but earth being earth, and life growth, and accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the top of the ladder. finding that he cannot do everything, sordello sees no alternative but to do nothing. consequently his state comes to be a virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. poet and man of action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break down one another. he meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it, but dies of the effort. for the world his life has been a failure, for himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was permitted to see the truth and to recognise it. but in all his aims, in all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from them or from him but the warning of his example. this sordello of browning seems to have little identity with the brief and splendid sordello of dante, the figure that fronts us in the superb sixth canto of the _purgatoria_, "a guisa di leon quando si posa." the records of the real sordello are scant, fragmentary and contradictory. no coherent outline of his personality remains, so that the character which browning has made for him is a creation as absolute as if it had been wholly invented. the name indeed of sordello, embalmed in dante's verse, is still fresh to our ears after the "ravage of six long sad hundred years," and it is dante, too, who in his _de vulgari eloquentia_, has further signalised him by honourable record. sordello, he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in the dialects of cremona, brescia and verona, cities near mantua, helped to form the tuscan tongue. but besides the brief record of dante, there are certain accounts of sordello's life, very confused and conflicting, in the early italian chronicles and the provençal lives of the troubadours. tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of them. according to him, sordello was a mantuan of noble family, born at goito at the close of the twelfth century. he was a poet and warrior, though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of mantua. he eloped with cunizza, the wife of count richard of st. boniface; at some period of his life he went into provence; and he died a violent death, about the middle of the thirteenth century. the works attributed to him are poems in tuscan and provençal, a didactic poem in latin named _thesaurus thesaurorum_ (now in the ambrosiana in milan), an essay in provençal on "the progress and power of the kings of aragon in the comté of provence," a treatise on "the defence of walled towns," and some historial translations from latin into the vulgar tongue. of all these works only the _thesaurus_ and some thirty-four poems in provençal, _sirventes_ and _tensens_, survive: some of the finest of them are satires.[ ] the statement that sordello was specially famed for his philosophical verses, though not confirmed by what remains of his poetry, is interesting and significant in connection with browning's conception of his character. there is little however in the scanty tales we have of the historic sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. the fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the grasp, and browning has rather given the name of sordello to an imagined type of the poetic character than constructed a type of character to fit the name. still less are the dubious attributes with which the bare facts of history or legend invest cunizza (whom, none the less, dante spoke with in heaven) recognisable in the exquisite and all-golden loveliness of palma. footnotes: [footnote : "mr. browning prepared himself for writing _sordello_," says mrs. orr, "by studying all the chronicles of that period of italian history which the british museum contained; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. he also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are laid."--_handbook_, p. .] [footnote : of all these matters, and of all else that is known of sordello, a good and sympathetic account will be found in mr. eugene benson's little book on _sordello and cunizza_ (dent, ).] . pippa passes. [published in as no. i of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , vol. iii., pp. - ).] _pippa passes_ is browning's most perfect work, and here, more perhaps than in anything he ever wrote, he wrote to please himself. as a whole, he has never written anything to equal it in artistic symmetry; while a single scene, that between ottima and sebald, reaches the highest level of tragic utterance which he has ever attained. the plan of the work, in which there are elements of the play and elements of the masque, is a wholly original one: a series of scenes, connected only by the passing through them of a single person, who is outside their action, and whose influence on that action is unconscious. "mr browning," says mrs. sutherland orr in the _handbook_, "was walking alone in a wood near dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of asolo, felippa or pippa."[ ] it is this motive that makes unity in variety, linking together a sequence of otherwise independent scenes. the poem is the story of pippa's new year's day holiday, her one holiday in the year. she resolves to fancy herself to be in turn the four happiest people in asolo, and, to realise her fancy as much as she can, she spends her day in wandering about the town, passing, in the morning, the shrub-house up the hillside, where ottima and her lover sebald have met; at noon, the house of jules, over orcana; in the evening, the turret on the hill above asolo, where are luigi and his mother; and at night, the palace by the duomo, now tenanted by monsignor the bishop. these, whom she imagines to be the happiest people in the town, have all, in reality, arrived at crises of tremendous and tragic importance to themselves, and, in one instance, to her. each stands at the turning-point of a life: ottima and sebald, unrepentant, with a crime behind them; jules and phene, two souls brought strangely face to face by a fate which may prove their salvation or their perdition; luigi, irresolute, with a purpose to be performed; monsignor, undecided, before a great temptation. pippa passes, singing, at the moment when these souls' tragedies seem tending to a fatal end, at the moment when the baser nature seems about to triumph over the better. something in the song, "like any flash that cures the blind," strikes them with a sudden light; each decides, suddenly; each, according to the terms of his own nature, is saved. and pippa passes, unconscious of the influence she has exerted, as they are but half-aware of the agency of what they take as an immediate word from god. each of these four scenes is in dialogue, the first three in blank verse, the last in prose. between each is an interlude, in prose or verse, representing the "talk by the way," of art-students, austrian police, and poor girls, all bearing on some part of the action. pippa's prologue and epilogue, like her songs, are in varied lyric verse. the blank verse throughout is the most vivid and dignified, the most coloured and yet restrained, that browning ever wrote; and he never wrote anything better for singing than some of pippa's songs. of the four principal scenes, by far the greatest is the first, that between ottima and her paramour, the german sebald, on the morning after the murder of old luca gaddi, the woman's husband. it is difficult to convey in words any notion of its supreme excellence of tragic truth: to match it we must revert to almost the very finest elizabethan work. the representation of ottima and sebald, the italian and the german, is a singularly acute study of the italian and german races. sebald, in a sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him after the deed. but ottima is steadfast in evil, with the italian conscienceless resoluteness. she can no more feel either fear or remorse than clytæmnestra. the scene between jules, the french sculptor, and his bride phene, and that between luigi, the light-headed italian patriot, and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style. both are full of colour and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and passages, such as this, which is spoken by luigi:-- "god must be glad one loves his world so much. i can give news of earth to all the dead who ask me:--last year's sunsets, and great stars that had a right to come first and see ebb the crimson wave that drifts the sun away-- those crescent moons with notched and burning rims that strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood, impatient of the azure--and that day in march, a double rainbow stopped the storm-- may's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights-- gone are they, but i have them in my soul!" but in neither is there any single passage of such incomparable quality as the thunderstorm in the first scene, a storm not to be matched in english poetry:-- "buried in woods we lay, you recollect; swift ran the searching tempest overhead; and ever and anon some bright white shaft burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, as if god's messenger through the close wood screen plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke the thunder like a whole sea overhead." the vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which browning had shown the first glimpse in _sordello_. besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor girls" on the duomo steps, which seems to me one of the most pathetic things ever written by the most pathetic of contemporary poets. it is this scene that contains the exquisite song, "you'll love me yet." "you'll love me yet!--and i can tarry your love's protracted growing: june reared that bunch of flowers you carry, from seeds of april's sowing. i plant a heartful now: some seed at least is sure to strike, and yield--what you'll not pluck indeed, not love, but, may be, like. you'll look at least on love's remains, a grave's one violet: your look?--that pays a thousand pains. what's death? you'll love me yet!" footnotes: [footnote : _handbook_, p. .] . king victor and king charles: a tragedy. [published in as no. ii. of _bells and pomegranates_, although written some years earlier (_poetical works_, , vol. iii., pp. - ).] _king victor and king charles_ is an historical tragedy, dealing with the last episode in the career of victor ii., first king of sardinia. browning says in his preface: "so far as i know, this tragedy is the first artistic consequence of what voltaire termed 'a terrible event without consequences;' and although it professes to be historical, i have taken more pains to arrive at the history than most readers would thank me for particularising: since acquainted, as i will hope them to be, with the chief circumstances of victor's remarkable european career--nor quite ignorant of the sad and surprising facts i am about to reproduce (a tolerable account of which is to be found, for instance, in abbé roman's _récit_, or even the fifth of lord orrery's _letters from italy_)--i cannot expect them to be versed, nor desirous of becoming so, in all the details of the memoirs, correspondence, and relations of the time.... when i say, therefore, that i cannot but believe my statement (combining as it does what appears correct in voltaire and plausible in condorcet) more true to person and thing than any it has hitherto been my fortune to meet with, no doubt my word will be taken, and my evidence spared as readily." the episode recorded in the play is the abdication of victor in favour of his son charles, and his subsequent attempt to return to the throne. the only point in which browning has departed from history is that the very effective death on the stage replaces the old king's real death in captivity a year later. as a piece of literature, this is the least interesting and valuable of browning's plays, the thinnest in structure, the dryest in substance. the interest of the play is, even more than that of _strafford_, political. the intrigue turns on questions of government, complicated with questions of relationship and duty. the conflict is one between ruler and ruler, who are also father and son; and the true tragedy of the situation seems to be this: shall charles obey the instincts of a son, and cede to his father's wish to resume the government he has abdicated, or is there a higher duty which he is bound to follow, the duty of a king to his people? the motive is a fine one, but it is scarcely handled with browning's accustomed skill and subtlety. king victor, of whose "fiery and audacious temper, unscrupulous selfishness, profound dissimulation, and singular fertility in resources," browning speaks in his preface, is an impressive study of "the old age of crafty men," the futile wiliness of decrepit and persevering craft, though we are scarcely made to feel the once potent personality of the man, or to understand the influence which his mere word or presence still has upon his son. d'ormea, who checkmates all the schemes of his old master, is a curious and subtle study of one who "serves god at the devil's bidding," as he himself confesses in the cynical frankness of his continual ironical self-criticism. after twenty years of unsuccessful intrigue, he has learnt by experience that honesty is the best policy. but at every step his evil reputation clogs and impedes his honest action, and the very men whom he is now most sincere in helping are the most mistrustful of his sincerity. charles, whose good intentions and vacillating will are the precise opposites of his father's strong will and selfish purposes, is really the central figure of the play. he is one of those men whom we at once despise and respect. gifted with many good qualities, he seems to lack the one thing needful to bind them together. polyxena, his wife, possesses just that resolution in which he is wanting. she is a fine, firm, clear character, herself admirable, and admirably drawn. her "noble and right woman's manliness" (to use browning's phrase) is prompt to sweep away the cobwebs that entangle her husband's path or obscure his vision of things. from first to last she sees through charles, victor and d'ormea, who neither understand one another nor perhaps themselves; from first to last she is the same clear-headed, decisive, consistent woman, loyal always to love, but always yet more loyal toward truth. . dramatic lyrics.[ ] [published in as no. iii. of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , dispersedly in vols. iv., v., and vi.).] _dramatic lyrics_, browning's first volume of short poems, contains some of his finest, and many of his most popular pieces. the little volume, it was only sixteen pages in length, has, however, an importance even beyond its actual worth; for we can trace in it the germ at least of most of browning's subsequent work. we see in these poems for the first time that extraordinary mastery of rhyme which butler himself has not excelled; that predilection for the grotesque which is shared by no other english poet; and, not indeed for the first time, but for the first time with any special prominence, the strong and thoughtful humour, running up and down the whole compass of its gamut, gay and hearty, satirical and incisive, in turn. we see also the first formal beginning of the dramatic monologue, which, hinted at in _pauline_, disguised in _paracelsus_, and developed, still disguised, in _sordello_, became, from the period of the _dramatic lyrics_ onward, the staple form and special instrument of the poet, an instrument finely touched, at times, by other performers, but of which he is the only liszt. the literal beginning of the monologue must be found in two lyrical poems, here included, _johannes agricola_ and _porphyria's lover_ (originally named _madhouse cells_), which were published in a magazine as early as , or about the time of the publication of _paracelsus_. these extraordinary little poems reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost finished art: a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect lyric language. each poem renders a single mood, and renders it completely. but it is still only a mood: _my last duchess_ is a life. this poem (it was at first one of two companion pieces called _italy and france_) is the first direct progenitor of _andrea del sarto_ and the other great blank verse monologues; in it we see the form, save for the scarcely appreciable presence of rhyme, already developed. the poem is a subtle study in the jealousy of egoism, not a study so much as a creation; and it places before us, as if bitten in by the etcher's acid, a typical autocrat of the renaissance, with his serene self-composure of selfishness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devotion to art. the scene and the actors in this little italian drama stand out before us with the most natural clearness; there is some telling touch in every line, an infinitude of cunningly careless details, instinct with suggestion, and an appearance through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the very finest art can give. but let the poem speak for itself. "my last duchess. "ferrara. "that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will 't please you sit and look at her? i said 'frà pandolf' by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus. sir, 'twas not her husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek: perhaps frà pandolf chanced to say 'her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much,' or 'paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat:' such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. she had a heart--how shall i say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. sir, 'twas all one! my favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. she thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--i know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling? even had you skill in speech--(which i have not)--to make your will quite clear to such an one, and say, 'just this or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, or there exceed the mark,'--and if she let herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, --e'en then would be some stooping; and i choose never to stoop. oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene'er i passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? this grew; i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. there she stands as if alive. will 't please you rise? we'll meet the company below, then. i repeat the count your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretence of mine for dowry will be disallowed; though his fair daughter's self, as i avowed at starting, is my object. nay, we'll go together down, sir. notice neptune, though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which claus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" a poem of quite another order of art, a life-like sketch rather than a creation, is found in _waring_. the original of waring was one of browning's friends, alfred domett, the author of _ranolf and amohia_, then or afterwards prime minister in new zealand.[ ] the poem is written in a free and familiar style, which rises from time to time into a kind of precipitate brilliance; it is more personal in detail than browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and friendly. in another poem, now known as _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of hate. the snarling monk of the spanish cloister pours out on poor, innocent, unsuspecting "brother lawrence" a wealth of really choice and masterly vituperation, not to be matched out of shakespeare. the poem is a clever study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt toward some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look or action jars on the nerves. it flashes, too, a brilliant comic light on the natural tendencies of asceticism. side by side with this poem, under the general name of _camp and cloister_, was published the vigorous and touching little ballad now known as _incident of the french camp_, a stirring lyric of war, such as browning has always been able, rarely as he has cared, to write. the ringing _cavalier tunes_ (so graphically set to music by sir c. villiers stanford) strike the same note; so, too, does the wonderfully clever little riding poem, _through the metidja to abd-el-kadr_, a _tour de force_ strung together on a single rhyme: "as i ride, as i ride." _count gismond_, the companion of _my last duchess_, is a vivid little tale, told with genuine sympathy with the mediæval spirit. it is almost like an anticipation of some of the remarkable studies of the middle ages contained in morris's first and best book of poems, _the defence of guenevere_, published sixteen years later. the mediæval temper of entire confidence in the ordeal by duel has never been better rendered than in these two stanzas, the very kernel of the poem, spoken by the falsely-accused girl:-- " ... till out strode gismond; then i knew that i was saved. i never met his face before, but, at first view, i felt quite sure that god had set himself to satan; who would spend a minute's mistrust on the end? he strode to gauthier, in his throat gave him the lie, then struck his mouth with one back-handed blow that wrote in blood men's verdict there. north, south, east, west, i looked. the lie was dead, and damned, and truth stood up instead."[ ] of the two aspects of _queen worship_, one, _rudel to the lady of tripoli_, has a mournfully sweet pathos in its lingering lines, and _cristina_, not without a touch of vivid passion, contains that personal conviction afterwards enshrined in the lovelier casket of _evelyn hope_. _artemis prologuizes_ is browning's only experiment in the classic style. the fragment was meant to form part of a longer work, which was to take up the legend of hippolytus at the point where euripides dropped it. the project was no doubt abandoned for the same wise reasons which led keats to leave unfinished a lovelier experiment in _hyperion_. it was in this poem that browning first adopted the greek spelling of proper names, a practice which he has since carried out, with greater consistency, in his transcripts from Ã�schylus and euripides. perhaps the finest of the _dramatic lyrics_ is the little lyric tragedy, _in a gondola_, a poem which could hardly be surpassed in its perfect union or fusion of dramatic intensity with charm and variety of music. it was suggested by a picture of maclise, and tells of two venetian lovers, watched by a certain jealous "three"; of their brief hour of happiness, and of the sudden vengeance of the three. there is a brooding sense of peril over all the blithe and flitting fancies said or sung to one another by the lovers in their gondola; a sense, however, of future rather than of present peril, something of a zest and a piquant pleasure to them. the sudden tragic ending, anticipated yet unexpected, rounds the whole with a dramatic touch of infallible instinct. i know nothing with which the poem may be compared: its method and its magic are alike its own. we might hear it or fancy it perhaps in one of the ballades of chopin, with its entrancing harmonies, its varied and delicate ornamentation, its under-tone of passion and sadness, its storms and gusts of wind-like lashing notes, and the piercing shiver that thrills through its suave sunshine. it is hardly needful, i hope, to say anything in praise of the last of the _dramatic lyrics_, the incomparable child's story of _the pied piper of hamelin_,[ ] "a thing of joy for ever," as it has been well said, "to all with the child's heart, young and old." this poem, probably the most popular of browning's poems, was written for william macready, the son of the actor, and was thrown into the volume at the last moment, for the purpose of filling up the sheet. footnotes: [footnote : it should be stated here that the three collections of miscellaneous poems published in , and , and named respectively _dramatic lyrics_, _dramatic romances and lyrics_, and _men and women_, were in broken up and the poems re-distributed. i shall take the volumes as they originally appeared; a reference to the list of contents of the edition of , given in the bibliography at the end of this book, will enable the reader to find any poem in its present locality.] [footnote : see _robert browning and alfred domett_. edited by f.g. kenyon. (smith, elder & co., ).] [footnote : it is worth noticing, as a curious point in browning's technique, that in the stanza (_ababcc_) in which this and some of his other poems are written, he almost always omits the pause customary at the end of the fourth line, running it into the fifth, and thus producing a novel metrical effect, such as we find used with success in more than one poem of carew.] [footnote : browning's authority for the story, which is told in many quarters, was north wanley's _wonders of the little world_, , and the books there cited.] . the return of the druses: a tragedy in five acts. [published in as no. iv. of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , vol. iii., pp. - ). written in (in five days), and named in ms. _mansoor the hierophant_. the action takes place during one day.] the story of _the return of the druses_ is purely imaginary as to facts, but it is founded on the druse belief in divine incarnations, a belief inculcated by the founder of their religion, hakeem biamr allah, the sixth fatemite caliph of egypt, whose pretension to be an incarnation of the divinity was stamped in the popular mind by his mysterious disappearance, and the expectation of his glorious return. browning here gives the rein to his fervid and passionate imagination; in event, in character, in expression, the play is romantic, lyrical and oriental. the first line-- "the moon is carried off in purple fire,--" sounds the note of the new music; and to the last line the emotion is sustained at the same height. passionate, rapid, vivid, intense and picturesque, no stronger contrast could be imagined than that which exists between this drama and _king victor and king charles_. the cause of the difference must be sought in the different nature of the two subjects, for one of browning's most eminent qualities is his care in harmonising treatment with subject. _king victor and king charles_ is a modern play, dealing with human nature under all the restrictions of a pervading conventionality and an oppressive statecraft. it deals, moreover, with complex and weakened emotions, with the petty and prosaic details of a secondary western government. _the return of the druses_, on the other hand, treats of human nature in its most romantic conditions, of the mystic east, of great and immediate issues, of the most inspiring of crises, a revolt for liberty, and a revolt under the leadership of a "messiah," about whom hangs a mystery, and a reputation of more than mortal power. the characters, like the language, are all somewhat idealised. djabal, the protagonist, is the first instance of a character specially fascinating to browning as an artistic subject: the deceiver of others or of himself who is only partially insincere, and not altogether ill-intentioned. djabal is an impostor almost wholly for the sake of others. he is a patriotic druse, the son of the last emir, supposed to have perished in the massacre of the sheikhs, but preserved when a child and educated in europe. his sole aim is to free his nation from its bondage, and lead it back to lebanon. but in order to strengthen the people's trust in him, and to lead them back in greater glory, he pretends that he is "hakeem," their divine, predestined deliverer. the delusion grows upon himself; he succeeds triumphantly, but in the very moment of triumph he loses faith in himself, the imposture is all but discovered, and he dies, a victim of what was wrong in him, while the salt of his noble and successful purpose keeps alive his memory among his people. in striking contrast with djabal stands loys, the frank, bright, young breton knight, with his quick, generous heart, his chivalrous straightforwardness of thought and action, his earnest pity for the oppressed druses, and his passionate love for the druse maiden anael. anael herself is one of the most "actual yet uncommon" of the poet's women. she is a true daughter of the east, to the finest fibre of her being. her tender and fiery soul burns upward through error and crime with a leaping, quenchless flame. she loves djabal, believing him to be "hakeem" and divine, with a love which seems to her too human, too much the love evoked by a mere man's nature. her attempt at adoration only makes him feel more keenly the fact of his imposture. misunderstanding his agitation and the broken words he lets drop, she fancies he despises her, and feels impelled to do some great deed, and so exalt herself to be worthy of him. fired with enthusiasm, she anticipates his crowning act, the act of liberation, and herself slays the tyrannical prefect. the magnificent scene in which this occurs is the finest in the play, and there is a singularly impressive touch of poetry and stagecraft in a certain line of it, where djabal and anael meet, at the moment when she has done the deed which he is waiting to do. unconscious of what she has done, he tells her to go:-- "i slay him here, and here you ruin all. why speak you not? anael, the prefect comes!" [anael _screams_.] there is drama in this stage direction. with this involuntary scream (and the shudder and start aside one imagines, to see if the dead man really is coming) a great actress might thrill an audience. djabal, horror-stricken at what she has done, confesses to her that he is no hakeem, but a mere man. after the first revulsion of feeling, her love, hitherto questioned and hampered by her would-be adoration, burst forth with a fuller flood. but she expects him to confess to the tribe. djabal refuses: he will carry through his scheme to the end. in the first flush of her indignation at his unworthiness, she denounces him. in the final scene occurs another wonderful touch of nature, a touch which reminds one of desdemona's "nobody: i myself," in its divine and adorable self-sacrifice of truth. learning what anael has done, djabal is about to confess his imposture to the people, who are still under his fascination, when anael, all her old love (not her old belief) returning upon her, cries with her last breath, "hakeem!" and dies upon the word. the druses grovel before him; as he still hesitates, the trumpet of his venetian allies sounds. turning to khalil, anael's brother, he bids him take his place and lead the people home, accompanied and guarded by loys. "we follow!" cry the druses, "now exalt thyself!" "_dja._ [_bends over_ anael.] and last to thee! ah, did i dream i was to have, this day, exalted thee? a vain dream--has thou not won greater exaltation? what remains but press to thee, exalt myself to thee? thus i exalt myself, set free my soul! [_he stabs himself; as he falls, supported by_ khalil _and_ loys, _the venetians enter: the_ admiral _advances_. _admiral_. god and st. mark for venice! plant the lion! [_at the clash of the planted standard, the druses shout and move tumultuously forward_, loys, _drawing his sword_. _dja._ [_leading them a few steps between_ khalil _and_ loys.] on to the mountain! at the mountain, druses! [_dies_.]" this superb last scene shows how well browning is able, when he likes, to render the tumultuous action of a clashing crowd of persons and interests. the whole fourth and fifth acts are specially fine; every word comes from the heart, every line is pregnant with emotion. . a blot in the 'scutcheon: a tragedy in three acts. [published in as no. v. of _bells and pomegranates_, written in five days (_poetical works_, , vol. iv., pp. - ). played originally at the theatre royal, drury lane, february , (_mildred_, miss helen faucit; _lord tresham_, mr. phelps). revived by mr. phelps at sadler's wells, november , ; played at boston, u.s., march , , under the management of mr. lawrence barrett, who took the part of _lord tresham_; at st. george's hall, london, may , , and at the olympic theatre, march , , by the browning society; and by the independent theatre at the opera comique, june , . the action takes place during two days.] _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ is the simplest, and perhaps the deepest and finest of browning's plays. the browning society's performances, and mr. barrett's in america, have proved its acting capacities, its power to hold and thrill an audience.[ ] the language has a rich simplicity of the highest dramatic value, quick with passion, pregnant with thought and masterly in imagination; the plot and characters are perhaps more interesting and affecting than in any other of the plays; while the effect of the whole is impressive from its unity. the scene is english; the time, somewhere in the eighteenth century; the motive, family honour and dishonour. the story appeals to ready popular emotions, emotions which, though lying nearest the surface, are also the most deeply-rooted. the whole action is passionately pathetic, and it is infused with a twofold tragedy, the tragedy of the sin, and that of the misunderstanding, the last and final tragedy, which hangs on a word, spoken only when too late to save three lives. this irony of circumstance, while it is the source of what is saddest in human discords, is also the motive of what has come to be the only satisfying harmony in dramatic art. it takes the place, in our modern world, of the necessity of the greeks; and is not less impressive because it arises from the impulse and unreasoning wilfulness of man rather than from the implacable insistency of god. it is with perfect justice, both moral and artistic, that the fatal crisis, though mediately the result of accident, of error, is shown to be the consequence and the punishment of wrong. a tragedy resulting from the mistakes of the wholly innocent would jar on our sense of right, and could never produce a legitimate work of art. even oedipus suffers, not merely because he is under the curse of a higher power, but because he is wilful, and rushes upon his own fate. timon suffers, not because he was generous and good, but from the defects of his qualities. so, in this play, each of the characters calls down upon his own head the suffering which at first seems to be a mere caprice and confusion of chance. mildred tresham and henry mertoun, both very young, ignorant and unguarded, have loved. they attempt a late reparation, apparently with success, but the hasty suspicion of lord tresham, mildred's brother, diverted indeed into a wrong channel, brings down on both a terrible retribution. tresham, who shares the ruin he causes, feels, too, that his punishment is his due. he has acted without pausing to consider, and he is called on to pay the penalty of "evil wrought by want of thought." the character of mildred, a woman "more sinned against than sinning," is exquisitely and tenderly drawn. we see her, and we see and feel "the good and tender heart, its girl's trust and its woman's constancy, how pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind, how grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free as light where friends are"-- as her brother, in a memorable passage, describes her. she is so thrillingly alive, so beautiful and individual, so pathetic and pitiful in her desolation. every word she speaks comes straight from her heart to ours. "i know nothing that is so affecting," wrote dickens in a letter to forster, "nothing in any book i have ever read, as mildred's recurrence to that 'i was so young--had no mother.' i know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it."[ ] not till pompilia do we find so pathetic a portrait of a woman. in thorold, earl tresham, we have an admirable picture of the head of a great house, proud above all things of the honour of the family and its yet stainless 'scutcheon, and proud, with a deep brotherly tenderness of his sister mildred: a strong and fine nature, one whom men instinctively cite as "the perfect spirit of honour." mertoun, the apparent hero of the play, is a much less prominent and masterly figure than tresham, not so much from any lack of skill in his delineation, as from the essential ineffectualness of his nature. guendolen tresham, the beatrice of the play (her lover austin is certainly no benedick) is one of the most pleasantly humorous characters in browning. her gay, light-hearted talk brightens the sombre action like a gleam of sunlight. and like her prototype, she is a true woman. as beatrice stands by the calumniated hero, so guendolen stands by mildred, and by her quick woman's heart and wit, her instinct of things, sees and seizes the missing clue, though too late, as it proves, to avert the impending disaster. the play contains one of browning's most delicate and musical lyrics, the serenade beginning, "there's a woman like a dew-drop." this is the first of the love-songs in long lines which browning wrote so often at the end of his life, and so seldom earlier. footnotes: [footnote : a contemporary account, written by joseph arnould to alfred domett, says: "the first night was magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. the gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of _browning_) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes.... altogether the first night was a triumph."--_robert browning and alfred domett_, , p. .] [footnote : forster's _life of dickens_, vol. ii., p. .] . colombe's birthday: a play in five acts. [published in as no. vi. of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , vol. iv., pp. - ). played at the haymarket theatre, april , , miss helen faucit taking the part of _colombe_; also, with miss alma murray as _colombe_, at st. george's hall, november , , under the direction of the browning society. the action takes place from morning to night of one day]. _colombe's birthday_, a drama founded on an imaginary episode in the history of a german duchy of the seventeenth century, is the first play which is mainly concerned with inward rather than outward action; in which the characters themselves, what they are in their own souls, what they think of themselves, and what others think of them, constitute the chief interest, the interest of the characters as they influence one another or external events being secondary. colombe of ravestein, duchess of juliers and cleves, is surprised, on the first anniversary of her accession (the day being also her birthday), by a rival claimant to the duchy, prince berthold, who proves to be in fact the true heir. berthold, instead of pressing his claim, offers to marry her. but he conceives the honour and the favour to be sufficient, and makes no pretence at offering love as well. on the other hand, valence, a poor advocate of cleves, who has stood by colombe when all her other friends failed, offers her his love, a love to which she can only respond by "giving up the world"; in other words, by relinquishing her duchy, and the alliance with a prince who is on the way to be emperor. we have nothing to do with the question of who has the right and who has the might: that matter is settled, and the succession agreed on, almost from the beginning. nor are we made to feel that any disgrace or reputation of weakness will rest on colombe if she gives up her duchy; not even that the pang at doing so will be over-acute or entirely unrelieved. all the interest centres in the purely personal and psychological bearings of the act. it is perhaps a consequence of this that the style is somewhat different from that of any previous play. any one who notices the stage directions will see that the persons of the drama frequently speak "after a pause." the language which they use is, naturally enough, more deliberate and reflective, the lines are slower and more weighty, than would be appropriate amid the breathless action of _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ or _the return of the druses_. a certain fiery quality, a thrilling, heart-stirred and heart-stirring tone, which we find in these is wanting; but the calm sweep of the action is carried onward by a verse whose large harmonies almost recall _paracelsus_. colombe, the true heroine of the play named after her is, if not "the completest full-length portrait of a woman that browning has drawn," certainly one of the sweetest and most stable. her character develops during the course of the play; as she herself says, "this is indeed my birthday--soul and body, its hours have done on me the work of years--" and it leaves her a nobler and stronger, yet not less charming woman than it found her. hitherto she has been a mere "play-queen," shut in from action, shut in from facts and the world, and caring only to be gay and amused. but now, at the first and yet final trial, she is proved and found to be of noble metal. the gay girlishness of the young duchess, her joyous and generous light heart; her womanliness, her earnestness, her clear, deep, noble nature, attract us from her first words, and leave us, after the hour we have spent in her presence, with a memory like that of some woman whom we have met, for an hour or a moment, in the world or in books. berthold, the weary and unsatisfied conqueror, is a singularly unconventional figure. he is a man of action, with some of the sympathies of the scholar and the lover; resolute in the attainment of ends which he sees to be, in themselves, vulgar; his ambition rather an instinct than something to be pursued for itself, and his soul too keenly aware of the joys and interests he foregoes, to be quite satisfied or content with his lot and conduct. the grave courtesy of his speech to colombe, his somewhat condescending but not unfriendly tone with valence, his rough home-truths with the parasitical courtiers, and his frank confidence with melchior, are admirably discriminated. melchior himself, little as he speaks, is a fine sketch of the contemplative, bookish man who finds no more congenial companion and study than a successful man of action. his attitude of detachment, a mere spectator in the background, is well in keeping with the calm and thoughtful character of the play. valence, the true hero of the piece, the "pale fiery man" who can speak with so moving an eloquence, whether he is pleading the wrongs of his townsmen or of colombe, the rights of berthold or of himself, is no less masterly a portrait than the prince, though perhaps less wholly unconventional a character. his grave earnestness, his honour as a man and passion as a lover, move our instinctive sympathy, and he never forfeits it. were it for nothing else, he would deserve remembrance from the fact that he is one of the speakers in that most delightful of love-duets, the incomparable scene at the close of the fourth act. "i remember well to have seen," wrote moncure d. conway in , "a vast miscellaneous crowd in an american theatre hanging with breathless attention upon every word of this interview, down to the splendid climax when, in obedience to the duchess's direction to valence how he should reveal his love to the lady she so little suspects herself to be herself, he kneels--every heart evidently feeling each word as an electric touch, and all giving vent at last to their emotion in round after round of hearty applause." all the minor characters are good and life-like, particularly guibert, the shrewd, hesitating, talkative, cynical, really good-hearted old courtier, whom not even a court had deprived of a heart, though the dangerous influence of the conscienceless gaucelme, his fellow, has in its time played sad pranks with it. he is one of the best of browning's minor characters. the performance, in , of _colombe's birthday_, under the direction of the browning society, has brought to light unsuspected acting qualities in what is certainly not the most "dramatic" of browning's plays. "_colombe's birthday_," it was said on the occasion, "is charming on the boards, clearer, more direct in action, more full of delicate surprises than one imagines it in print. with a very little cutting it could be made an excellent acting play."[ ] footnotes: [footnote : a. mary f. robinson, in _boston literary world_, december , .] . dramatic romances and lyrics. [published in as no. vii. of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , dispersedly, in vols. iv., v., and vi.).] _dramatic romances_, browning's second volume of miscellaneous poems, is not markedly different in style or substance from the _lyrics_ published three years earlier. it is somewhat more mature, no doubt, as a whole, somewhat richer and fuller, somewhat wider in reach and firmer in grasp; but in tone and treatment it harmonises considerably more with its predecessor than with its successor, after so long an interval, _men and women_. the book opens with the ballad, _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, the most popular piece, except perhaps the _pied piper_, that browning has written. few boys, i suppose, have not read with breathless emotion this most stirring of ballads: few men can read it without a thrill. the "good news" is intended for that of the pacification of ghent, but the incident itself is not historical. the poem was written at sea, off the african coast. another poem of somewhat similar kind, appealing more directly than usual to the simpler feelings, is _the lost leader_. it was written in reference to wordsworth's abandonment of the liberal cause, with perhaps a thought of southey, but it is applicable to any popular apostasy. this is one of those songs that do the work of swords. it shows how easily browning, had he so chosen, could have stirred the national feeling with his songs. the _home-thoughts from abroad_ belongs, in its simple directness, its personal and forthright fervour of song, to this section of the volume. with the two pieces now known as _home-thoughts from abroad_ and _home-thoughts from the sea_, a third, very inferior, piece was originally published. it is now more appropriately included with _claret_ and _tokay_ (two capital little snatches) under the head of _nationality in drinks_. the two "home-thoughts," from sea and from land, are equally remarkable for their poetry and for their patriotism. i hope there is no need to commend to all englishmen so passionate and heartfelt a record of love for england. it is in _home-thoughts from abroad_, that we find the well-known and magical lines on the thrush:-- "that's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!" the whole poem is beautiful, but _home-thoughts from the sea_ is of that order of song that moves the heart "more than with a trumpet." "nobly, nobly, cape saint vincent to the north-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into cadiz bay; bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face trafalgar lay; in the dimmest north-east distance dawned gibraltar grand and gray; 'here and here did england help me: how can i help england?'--say, whoso turns as i, this evening, turn to god to praise and pray, while jove's planet rises yonder, silent over africa." next to _the lost leader_ comes, in the original edition, a sort of companion poem, in "the lost mistress. i. all's over, then: does truth sound bitter as one at first believes? hark! 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter about your cottage eaves! ii. and the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly, i noticed that, to-day; one day more bursts them open fully --you know the red turns gray. iii. to-morrow we meet the same, then, dearest? may i take your hand in mine? mere friends are we,--well, friends the merest keep much that i resign: iv. for each glance of the eye so bright and black though i keep with heart's endeavour,-- your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back, though it stay in my heart for ever!-- v. yet i will but say what mere friends say, or only a thought stronger; i will hold your hand but as long as all may. or so very little longer!" this is one of those love-songs which we cannot but consider among the noblest of such songs in all love's language. the subject of "unrequited love" has probably produced more effusions of sickly sentiment than any other single subject. but browning, who has employed the motive so often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in _the last ride together_) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental. there is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of despair. in the first of the _garden fancies_ (_the flower's name_) a delicate little love-story of a happier kind is hinted at. the second _garden fancy_ (_sibrandus schafnaburgensis_) is of very different tone. it is a whimsical tale of a no less whimsical revenge taken upon a piece of pedantic lumber, the name of which is given in the title. the varying ring and swing communicated to the dactyls of these two pieces by the jolly humour of the one and the refined sentiment of the other, is a point worth noticing. the easy flow, the careless charm of their versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a careless reader. nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise perfectly the loose lilt of such verses as these:-- "what a name! was it love or praise? speech half-asleep or song half-awake? i must learn spanish, one of these days, only for that slow sweet name's sake." the two perfect little pieces on "fame" and "love," _earth's immortalities_, are remarkable, even in browning's work, for their concentrated felicity, and, the second especially, for swift suggestiveness of haunting music. not less exquisite in its fresh melody and subtle simplicity is the following _song_:-- i. "nay but you, who do not love her, is she not pure gold, my mistress? holds earth aught--speak truth--above her? aught like this tress, see, and this tress, and this last fairest tress of all, so fair, see, ere i let it fall? ii. because, you spend your lives in praising; to praise, you search the wide world over: then why not witness, calmly gazing, if earth holds aught--speak truth--above her? above this tress, and this, i touch but cannot praise, i love so much!" in two tiny pictures, _night and morning_, one of four lines, the other of twelve, we have, besides the picture, two moments which sum up a lifetime, and "on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion is balanced!" i. "meeting at night. . the gray sea and the long black land; and the yellow half-moon large and low; and the startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep, as i gain the cove with pushing prow, and quench its speed i' the slushy sand. . then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; three fields to cross till a farm appears; a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch and blue spurt of a lighted match, and a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, than the two hearts beating each to each! ii. parting at morning. round the cape of a sudden came the sea, and the sun looked over the mountain's rim: and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me." but the largest, if not the greatest work in the volume must be sought for, not in the romances, properly speaking, nor in the lyrics, but in the dramatic monologues. _pictor ignotus_ (florence, --) is the first of those poems about painting, into which browning has put so much of his finest art. it is a sort of first faint hint or foreshadowing of _andrea del sarto_, perfectly individual and distinct though it is. _pictor ignotus_ expresses the subdued sadness of a too timid or too sensitive nature, an "unknown painter" who has dreamed of painting great pictures and winning great fame, but who shrinks equally from the attempt and the reward: an attempt which he is too self-distrustful to make, a reward which he is too painfully discriminating to enjoy. "so, die my pictures! surely, gently die! o youth, men praise so,--holds their praise its worth? blown harshly, keeps the trump its golden cry? tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?" the monotonous "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the verses, the admirably arranged pause, recurrence and relapse of the lines, render the sense and substance of the subject with singular appropriateness. _the tomb at st. praxed's_ (now known as _the bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_), has been finally praised by ruskin, and the whole passage may be here quoted:-- "robert browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the middle ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, with which we have been specially concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his. "'as here i lie in this state-chamber, dying by degrees, hours and long hours in the dead night, i ask "do i live, am i dead?" peace, peace seems all. saint praxed's ever was the church for peace; and so, about this tomb of mine. i fought with tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: --old gandolf cozened me, despite my care; shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south he graced his carrion with, god curse the same! yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence one sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, and somewhat of the choir, those silent seats. and up into the aery dome where live the angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: and i shall fill my slab of basalt there, and 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, with those nine columns round me, two and two, the odd one at my feet where anselm stands: peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe as fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. --old gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, put me where i may look at him! true peach, rosy and flawless: how i earned the prize! draw close: that conflagration of my church --what then? so much was saved if aught were missed! my sons, ye would not be my death? go dig the white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, drop water gently till the surface sink, and if ye find ... ah god, i know not, i!... bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, and corded up in a tight olive-frail, some lump, ah god, of _lapis lazuli_, big as a jew's head cut off at the nape, blue as a vein o'er the madonna's breast.... sons, all have i bequeathed you, villas, all, that brave frascati-villa with its bath, so, let the blue lump poise between my knees, like god the father's globe on both his hands ye worship in the jesu church so gay, for gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: man goeth to the grave, and where is he? did i say basalt for my slab, sons? black-- 'twas ever antique-black i meant! how else shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? the bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, those pans and nymphs ye wot of, and perchance some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, the saviour at his sermon on the mount, saint praxed in a glory, and one pan ready to twitch the nymph's last garment off, and moses with the tables ... but i know ye mark me not! what do they whisper thee, child of my bowels, anselm? ah, ye hope to revel down my villas while i gasp bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine, which gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then! 'tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest i grieve my bath must needs be left behind, alas! one block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, there's plenty jasper somewhere in the world-- and have i not saint praxed's ear to pray horses for ye, and brown greek manuscripts, and mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? --that's if ye carve my epitaph aright, choice latin, picked phrase, tully's every word, no gaudy ware like gandolf's second line-- tully, my masters? ulpian serves his need.' "i know no other piece of modern english prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good latin. it is nearly all that i have said of the central renaissance in thirty pages of the _stones of venice_, put into as many lines, browning's also being the antecedent work."[ ] this poem is the third of the iambic monologues, and, but for _artemis prologizes_, the first in blank verse. i am not aware if it was written much later than _pictor ignotus_, but it belongs to a later manner. scarcely at his very best, scarcely in the very greatest monologues of the central series of _men and women_, or in these only, has browning written a finer or a more characteristic poem. as a study in human nature it has all the concentrated truth, all the biting and imaginative realism, of a scene from balzac's _comédie humaine_: it is as much a fact and a creation. it is, moreover, as ruskin has told us, typical not only of a single individual but of a whole epoch; while, as a piece of metrical writing, it has all the originality of an innovation. if browning can scarcely be said to have created this species of blank verse, half familiar, vivid with natural life, full of vigour and beauty, rising and falling, with the unerring motion of the sea, he has certainly adapted, perfected, and made it a new thing in his hands. akin to _the tomb at st. praxed's_ on its dramatic, though dissimilar on its lyric, side, is the picturesque and terrible little poem of _the laboratory_[ ] in which a brinvilliers of the _ancien régime_ is represented buying poison for her rival; one of the very finest examples of browning's unique power of compressing and concentrating intense emotion into a few pregnant words, each of which has its own visible gesture and audible intonation. it is in such poems that browning is at his best, nor is he perhaps anywhere so inimitable. the second poem under the general heading of "france and spain," _the confessional_, in which a girl, half-maddened by remorse and impotent rage, tells how a false priest induced her to betray the political secrets of her lover, is, though vivid and effective, not nearly so powerful and penetrating as its companion piece. _time's revenges_ may perhaps be classified with these utterances of individual passion, though in form it is more closely connected with the poems i shall touch on next. it is a bitter and affecting little poem, not unlike some of the poems written many years afterwards by a remarkable and unfortunate poet,[ ] who knew, in his own experience, something of what browning happily rendered by the instinct of the dramatist only. it is a powerful and literal rendering of a certain sordid and tragic aspect of life, and is infused with that peculiar grim humour, the laugh that chokes in a sob, which comes to men when mere lamentation is a thing foregone. the octosyllabic couplets of _time's revenges_, as well as its similarly realistic treatment and striking simplicity of verse and phrase, connect it with the admirable little poem now know as _the italian in england_.[ ] this is a tale of an italian patriot, who, after an unsuccessful rising, has taken refuge in england. it tells of his escape and of how he was saved from the austrian pursuers by the tact and fidelity of a young peasant woman. its chief charm lies in the simplicity and sincere directness of its telling. _the englishman in italy_, a poem of very different class, written in brisk and vigorous anapæsts, is a vivid and humorous picture of italian country life. it is delightfully gay and charming and picturesque, and is the most entirely descriptive poem ever written by browning. in _the glove_ we have a new version, from an original and characteristic standpoint, of the familiar old story known to all in its metrical version by leigh hunt, and more curtly rhymed (without any very great impressiveness) by schiller. browning has shown elsewhere that he can tell a simple anecdote simply, but he has here seized upon the tale of the glove, not for the purpose of telling over again what leigh hunt had so charmingly and sufficiently told, but in order to present the old story in a new light, to show how the lady might have been right and the knight wrong, in spite of king francis's verdict and the look of things. the tale, which is very wittily told, and contains some fine serious lines on the lion, is supposed to be related by peter ronsard, in the position of on-looker and moraliser; and the character of the narrator, after the poet's manner, is brought out by many cunning little touches. the poem is written almost throughout in double rhymes, in the metre and much in the manner of the _pacchiarotto_ of thirty years later. it is worth noticing that in the lines spoken by the lady to ronsard, and in these alone, the double rhymes are replaced by single ones, thus making a distinct severance between the earnestness of this one passage and the cynical wit of the rest. the easy mastery of difficult rhyming which we notice in this piece is still more marked in the strange and beautiful romance named _the flight of the duchess_.[ ] not even in _pacchiarotto_ has browning so revelled in the most outlandish and seemingly incredible combinations of sound, double and treble rhymes of equal audacity and success. there is much dramatic appropriateness in the unconventional diction, the story being put into the mouth of a rough old huntsman. the device of linking fantasy with familiarity is very curious, and the effect is original in the extreme. the poem is a fusion of many elements, and has all the varying colour of a romantic comedy. contrast the intensely picturesque opening landscape, the cleverly minute description of the gipsies and their trades, the humorous naturalness of the duke's mediæval masquerading as related by his unsympathising forester, and, in a higher key the beautiful figure of the young duchess, and the serene, mystical splendour of the old gipsy's chant. two poems yet remain to be named, and two of the most perfect in the book. the little parable poem of _the boy and the angel_ is one of the most simply beautiful, yet deeply earnest, of browning's lyrical poems. it is a parable in which "the allegorical intent seems to be shed by the story, like a natural perfume from a flower;" and it preaches a sermon on contentment and the doing of god's will such as no theologian could better. _saul_ (which i shall mention here, though only the first part, sections one to nine, appeared in _dramatic romances_, sections ten to nineteen being first published in _men and women_) has been by some considered almost or quite browning's finest poem. and indeed it seems to unite almost the whole of his qualities as a poet in perfect fusion. music, song, the beauty of nature, the joy of life, the glory and greatness of man, the might of love, human and divine: all these are set to an orchestral accompaniment of continuous harmony, now hushed as the wind among the woods at evening, now strong and sonorous as the storm-wind battling with the mountain-pine. _saul_ is a vision of life, of time and of eternity, told in song as sublime as the vision is steadfast. the choral symphony of earth and all her voices with which the poem concludes is at once the easiest passage to separate from its context, and (if we may dare, in such a matter, to choose) one, at least, of the very greatest of all. "i know not too well how i found my way home in the night. there were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: i repressed, i got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, as a runner beset by the populace famished for news-- life or death. the whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews; and the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but i fainted not, for the hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed all the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth-- not so much, but i saw it die out in the day's tender birth; in the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills; in the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills; in the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill that rose heavily, as i approached them, made stupid with awe: e'en the serpent that slid away silent,--he felt the new law. the same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers; the same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine bowers: and the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, with their obstinate, all but hushed voices--' e'en so, it is so!'" footnotes: [footnote : _modern painters_, vol. iv., pp. - .] [footnote : it is interesting to remember that rossetti's first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line, "which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"] [footnote : james thomson, the writer of _the city of dreadful night_.] [footnote : "mr browning is proud to remember," we are told by mrs orr, "that mazzini informed him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow exiles in england to show how an englishman could sympathise with them."--_handbook_ nd ed., p. .] [footnote : some curious particulars are recorded in reference to the composition of this poem. "_the flight of the duchess_ took its rise from a line--'following the queen of the gipsies, o!' the burden of a song which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a guy fawkes' day. the poem was written in two parts, of which the first was published in _hood's magazine_, april, , and contained only nine sections. as mr browning was writing it, he was interrupted by the arrival of a friend on some important business, which drove all thoughts of the duchess and the scheme of her story out of the poet's head. but some months after the publication of the first part, when he was staying at bettisfield park, in shropshire, a guest, speaking of early winter, said, 'the deer had already to break the ice in the pond.' on this a fancy struck the poet, and, on returning home, he worked it up into the conclusion of _the flight of the duchess_ as it now stands."--_academy_, may , .] . a soul's tragedy. [published in (with _luria_) as no. viii. of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , vol. iv., pp. - ). acted by the stage society at the court theatre, march , .] the development of browning's genius, as shown in his plays, has been touched on in dealing with _colombe's birthday_. that play, as i intimated, shows the first token of transition from the comparatively conventional dramatic style of the early plays to the completely unconventional style of the later ones, which in turn lead almost imperceptibly to the final pausing-place of the monologue. from _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ to _colombe's birthday_ is a step; from _colombe's birthday_ to _a soul's tragedy_ and _luria_ another step; and in these last we are not more than another step from _men and women_ and its successors. in _a soul's tragedy_ the action is all internalized. outward action there is, and of a sufficiently picturesque nature; but here, considerably more than even in _colombe's birthday_, the interest is withdrawn from the action, as action, and concentrated on a single character, whose "soul's tragedy," not his mere worldly fortunes, strange and significant as these are, we are called on to contemplate. chiappino fills and possesses the scene. the other characters are carefully subordinated, and the impression we receive is not unlike that received from one of browning's most vivid and complete monologues, with its carefully placed apparatus of sidelights. the character of chiappino is that of a djabal degenerated; he is the second of browning's delineations of the half-deceived and half-deceiving nature, the moral hybrid. chiappino comes before us as a much-professing yet apparently little-performing person, moody and complaining, envious of his friend luitolfo's better fortune, a soured man and a discontented patriot. but he is quite sure of his own complete probity. he declaims bitterly against his fellow-townsmen, his friend, and the woman whom he loves; all of whom, he asseverates, treat him unjustly, and as he never could, by any possibility, treat them. while he is thus protesting to eulalia, his friend's betrothed, to whom for the first time he avows his own love, a trial is at hand, and nearer than he or we expect. luitolfo rushes in. he has gone to the provost's palace to intercede on behalf of his banished friend, and in a moment of wrath has struck and, as he thinks, killed the provost: the guards are after him, and he is lost. is this the moment of test? apparently; and apparently chiappino proves his nobility. for, with truly heroic unselfishness, he exchanges dress with his friend, induces him, in a sort of stupefaction of terror, to escape, and remains in his place, "to die for him." but the harder test has yet to come. instead of the provost's guards, it is the enthusiastic populace that bursts in upon him, hailing him as saviour and liberator. the people have risen in revolt, the guards have fled, and the people call on the striker of the blow to be their leader. chiappino says nothing. "chiappino?" says eulalia, questioning him with her eyes. "yes, i understand," he rejoins, "you think i should have promptlier disowned this deed with its strange unforeseen success, in favour of luitolfo. but the peril, so far from ended, hardly seems begun. to-morrow, rather, when a calm succeeds, we easily shall make him full amends: and meantime--if we save them as they pray, and justify the deed by its effects? _eu._ you would, for worlds, you had denied at once. _ch._ i know my own intention, be assured! all's well. precede us, fellow-citizens!" thus ends act first, "being what was called the poetry of chiappino's life;" and act second, "its prose," opens after a supposed interval of a month. the second act exhibits, in very humorous prose, the gradual and inevitable deterioration which the silence and the deception have brought about. drawn on and on, upon his own lines of thought and conduct, by ogniben, the pope's legate, who has come to put down the revolt by diplomatic measures, chiappino denies his political principles, finding a democratic rule not at all so necessary when the provostship may perhaps fall to himself; denies his love, for his views of love are, he finds, widened; and finally, denies his friend, to the extent of arguing that the very blow which, as struck by luitolfo, has been the factor of his fortune, was practically, because logically, his own. ogniben now agrees to invest him with the provost's office, making at the same time the stipulation that the actual assailant of the provost shall suffer the proper penalty. hereupon luitolfo comes forward and avows the deed. ogniben orders him to his house; chiappino "goes aside for a time;" "and now," concludes the legate, addressing the people, "give thanks to god, the keys of the provost's palace to me, and yourselves to profitable meditation at home." besides chiappino, there are three other characters, who serve to set off the main figure. eulalia is an observer, luitolfo a foil, ogniben a touchstone. eulalia and luitolfo, though sufficiently worked out for their several purposes, are only sketches, the latter perhaps more distinctly outlined than the former, and serving admirably as a contrast to chiappino. but ogniben, who does so much of the talking in the second act, is a really memorable figure. his portrait is painted with more prominent effect, for his part in the play is to draw chiappino out, and to confound him with his own weapons: "i help men," as he says, "to carry out their own principles; if they please to say two and two make five, i assent, so they will but go on and say, four and four make ten." his shrewd socratic prose is delightfully wise and witty. this prose, the only dramatic prose written by browning, with the exception of that in _pippa passes_, is, in its way, almost as good as the poetry: keen, vivacious, full-thoughted, picturesque, and singularly original. for instance, chiappino is expressing his longing for a woman who could understand, as he says, the whole of him, to whom he could reveal alike his strength and weakness. "ah, my friend," rejoins ogniben, "wish for nothing so foolish! worship your love, give her the best of you to see; be to her like the western lands (they bring us such strange news of) to the spanish court; send her only your lumps of gold, fans of feathers, your spirit-like birds, and fruits and gems. so shall you, what is unseen of you, be supposed altogether a paradise by her,--as these western lands by spain: though i warrant there is filth, red baboons, ugly reptiles and squalor enough, which they bring spain as few samples of as possible." there is in all this prose, lengthy as it is, the true dramatic note, a recognisable tone of talk. but _a soul's tragedy_ is for the study, not the stage. . luria: a tragedy in five acts. [published in (with _a soul's tragedy_) as no. viii of _bells and pomegranates_ (_poetical works_, , vol. vi. pp. - ). the action takes place from morning to night of one day]. the action and interest in _luria_ are somewhat less internalised than in _a soul's tragedy_, but the drama is in form a still nearer approach to monologue. many of the speeches are so long as to be almost monologues in themselves; and the whole play is manifestly written (unlike the other plays, except its immediate predecessor, or rather its contemporary) with no thought of the stage. the poet is retreating farther and farther from the glare of the footlights; he is writing after his own fancy, and not as his audience or his manager would wish him to write. none of browning's plays is so full of large heroic speech, of deep philosophy, of choice illustration; seldom has he written nobler poetry. there is not the intense and throbbing humanity of _a blot in the 'scutcheon_; the characters are not so simply and so surely living men and women; but in the grave and lofty speech and idealised characters of _luria_ we have something new, and something great as well. the central figure is luria himself; but the other characters are not so carefully and completely subordinated to him as are those in _a soul's tragedy_ to chiappino. luria is one of the noblest and most heroic figures in browning's works. a moor, with the instincts of the east and the culture of the west, he presents a racial problem which is very subtly handled; while his natural nobility and confidence are no less subtly set off against the italian craft of his surroundings. the spectacle he presents is impressive and pathetic. an alien, with no bond to florence save that of his inalienable love, he has led her forces against the pisans, and saved her. looking for no reward but the grateful love of the people he has saved, he meets instead with the basest ingratitude. while he is fighting and conquering for her, florence, at home, is trying him for his life on a charge of treachery: a charge which has no foundation but in the base natures of his accusers, who know that he might, and therefore suspect that he will, turn to evil purpose his military successes and the power which they have gained him over the army. generals of their own blood have betrayed them: how much more will this barbarian? luria learns of the treachery of his allies in time to take revenge, he is urged to take revenge, and the means are placed in his hands, but his nobler nature conquers, and the punishment he deals on florence is the punishment of his own voluntary death. the strength of love which restrains him from punishing the ungrateful city forbids him to live when his only love has proved false, his only link to life has gone. but before he dies he has the satisfaction of seeing the late repentance and regret of every enemy, whether secret schemer or open foe. "luria goes not poorly forth. if we could wait! the only fault's with time; all men become good creatures: but so slow!" in the pathos of his life and death luria may remind us of another unrequited lover, strafford, whose devotion to his king gains the same reward as luria's devotion to his adopted country. in luria's faithful friend and comrade husain we have a contrasted picture of the moor untouched by alien culture. the instincts of the one are dulled or disturbed by his western wisdom and experience; husain still keeps the old instincts and the unmixed nature, and still speaks the fervid and highly-coloured eastern speech. but while husain is to some extent a contrast with luria, luria and husain together form an infinitely stronger contrast with the group of italians. braccio, the florentine commissary, is an admirable study of italian subtlety and craft. only a writer with browning's special knowledge and sympathies could have conceived and executed so acute and true a picture of the italian temper of the time, a temper manifested with singular appropriateness by the city of machiavelli. braccio is the chief schemer against luria, and he schemes, not from any real ill-will, but from the diplomatic distrust of a too cautious and too suspicious patriot. domizia, the vengeful florentine lady, plotting against florence with the tireless patience of an unforgetting wrong, is also a representative sketch, though not so clearly and firmly outlined as a character. puccio, luria's chief officer, once his commander, the simple fighting soldier, discontented but honest, unswervingly loyal to florence, but little by little aware of and aggrieved at the wrong done to luria, is a really touching conception. tiburzio, the pisan leader, is yet finer in his perfect chivalry of service to his foe. nothing could be more nobly planned than the first meeting, and indeed the whole relations, of these magnanimous and worthy opponents, luria and tiburzio. there is a certain intellectual fascination for browning in the analysis of mean natures and dubious motives, but of no contemporary can it be more justly said that he rises always and easily to the height and at the touch of an heroic action or of a noble nature. . christmas-eve and easter-day: a poem. [published in (_poetical works_, , vol. v., pp. - ). written in florence.] _christmas-eve and easter-day_ is the chief work in which browning deals directly and primarily with the subject of christianity and the religious beliefs of the age. both the poems which appear under this title are studies of religious life and thought, the first more in the narrative and critical way, the second rather in relation to individual experience. browning's position towards christianity is perhaps unique. he has been described as "the latest extant defender of the faith," but the manner of his belief and the modes of his defence are as little conventional as any other of his qualities. beyond all question the most deeply religious poet of our day, perhaps the greatest religious poet we have ever had, browning has never written anything in the ordinary style of religious verse, the style of herbert, of keble, of the hymn-writers. the spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form. _christmas-eve and easter-day_, _la saisiaz_ and _ferishtah's fancies_ are the only prominent exceptions to this rule. _christmas-eve_ is a study or vision of the religious life of the time. it professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through on a christmas-eve ("whether in the body i cannot tell, or whether out of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a country town, in st. peter's at rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in göttingen. the vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock is like a bit of dickens at his best. equally good, in another kind, is the picture of the professor and his audience at göttingen, with its searching and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith of the honest thinker. different again in style, and higher still in poetry, is the glowing description of the basilica and its sensuous fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision: a piece of imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though equalled, if not exceeded, by the more terrible vision of judgment which will be cited later from _easter-day_. "for lo, what think you? suddenly the rain and the wind ceased, and the sky received at once the full fruition of the moon's consummate apparition. the black cloud-barricade was riven, ruined beneath her feet, and driven deep in the west; while, bare and breathless, north and south and east lay ready for a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, sprang across them and stood steady. 'twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, from heaven to heaven extending, perfect as the mother-moon's self, full in face. it rose, distinctly at the base with its seven proper colours chorded, which still, in the rising, were compressed, until at last they coalesced, and supreme the spectral creature lorded in a triumph of purest white,-- above which intervened the night. but above night too, like only the next, the second of a wondrous sequence, reaching in rare and rarer frequence, till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, another rainbow rose, a mightier, fainter, flushier, and flightier,-- rapture dying along its verge. oh, whose foot shall i see emerge, whose, from the straining topmost dark, on to the keystone of that arc?" at moments of such energy and ecstasy as this, all that there is in the poet of mere worldly wisdom and intellectual ingenuity drops off, or rather is consumed to a white glow in the intense flame of triumphant and over-mastering inspiration. the piercing light cast in the poem on the representative creeds of the age is well worthy of serious consideration, from an ethical as well as from a poetical point of view. no nobler lesson of religious tolerance, united with religious earnestness, has been preached in our day. nothing could be more novel and audacious than the union here attempted and achieved of colloquial realism and grotesque humour with imaginative vision and solemn earnestness. the style and metre vary with the mood. where the narrative is serious the lines are regular and careful, they shrink to their smallest structural limit, and the rhymes are chiefly single and simple. where it becomes humorous, the rhythm lengthens out its elastic syllables to the full extent, and swings and sways, jolts and rushes; the rhymes fall double and triple and break out into audible laughter. _easter-day_, like its predecessor, is written in lines of four beats each, but the general effect is totally dissimilar. here the verse is reduced to its barest constituents; every line is, syllabically as well as accentually, of equal length; and the lines run in pairs, without one double rhyme throughout. the tone and contents of the two poems (though also, in a sense, derived from the same elements) are in singular contrast. _easter-day_, despite a momentary touch or glimmer, here and there, of grave humour, is thoroughly serious in manner and continuously solemn in subject. the burden of the poem is stated in its first two lines:-- "how very hard it is to be a christian!" up to the thirteenth section it is an argument between the speaker, who is possessed of much faith but has a distinct tendency to pessimism, and another, who has a sceptical but also a hopeful turn of mind, respecting christianity, its credibility, and how its doctrines fit human nature and affect the conduct of life. after keen discussion the argument returns to the lament, common to both disputants: how very hard it is to be, practically, a christian. the speaker then relates, on account of its bearing on the discussion, an experience (or vision, as he leaves us free to imagine) which once came to him. three years before, on an easter-eve, he was crossing the common where stood the chapel referred to by their friend (the poem thus, and thus only, links on to _christmas-eve_.) as he walked along, musingly, he asked himself what the faith really was to him; what would be his fate, for instance, if he fell dead that moment? and he said to himself, jestingly enough, why should not the judgment-day dawn now, on easter-morn? "and as i said this nonsense, throwing back my head with light complacent laugh, i found suddenly all the midnight round one fire. the dome of heaven had stood as made up of a multitude of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack of ripples infinite and black, from sky to sky. sudden there went, like horror and astonishment, a fierce vindictive scribble of red quick flame across, as if one said (the angry scribe of judgment) 'there-- burn it!' and straight i was aware that the whole ribwork round, minute cloud touching cloud beyond compute, was tinted, each with its own spot of burning at the core, till clot jammed against clot, and spilt its fire over all heaven, which 'gan suspire as fanned to measure equable,-- just so great conflagrations kill night overhead, and rise and sink, reflected. now the fire would shrink and wither off the blasted face of heaven, and i distinct might trace the sharp black ridgy outlines left unburned like network--then, each cleft the fire had been sucked back into, regorged, and out its surging flew furiously, and night writhed inflamed, till, tolerating to be tamed no longer, certain rays world-wide shot downwardly. on every side, caught past escape, the earth was lit; as if a dragon's nostril split and all his famished ire o'erflowed; then as he winced at his lord's goad, back he inhaled: whereat i found the clouds into vast pillars bound, based on the corners of the earth propping the skies at top: a dearth of fire i' the violet intervals, leaving exposed the utmost walls of time, about to tumble in and end the world." judgment, according to the vision, is now over. he who has chosen earth rather than heaven, is allowed his choice: earth is his for ever. how the walls of the world shrink and narrow, how the glow fades off from the beauty of nature, of art, of science; how the judged soul prays for only a chance of love, only a hope of ultimate heaven; how the ban is taken off him, and he wakes from the vision on the grey plain as easter-morn is breaking: this, with its profound and convincing moral lessons, is told, without a didactic note, in poetry of sustained splendour. in sheer height of imagination _easter-day_ could scarcely exceed the greatest parts of _christmas-eve_, but it preserves a level of more equable splendour, it is a work of art of more chastened workmanship. in its ethical aspect it is also of special importance, for, while the poet does not necessarily identify himself in all respects with the seer of the vision, the poem enshrines some of browning's deepest convictions on life and religion. . men and women. [published in , in vols.; now dispersed in vols. iv., v. and vi. of _poetical works_, .] the series of _men and women_, fifty-one poems in number, represents browning's genius at its ripe maturity, its highest uniform level. in this central work of his career, every element of his genius is equally developed, and the whole brought into a perfection of harmony never before or since attained. there is no lack, there is no excess. i do not say that the poet has not touched higher heights since, or perhaps before; but that he has never since nor before maintained himself so long on so high a height, never exhibited the rounded perfection, the imagination, thought, passion, melody, variety, all fused in one, never produced a single work or group at once so great and so various, admits, i think, of little doubt. here are fifty poems, every one of which, in its way, is a masterpiece; and the range is such as no other english poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems. in _men and women_ browning's special instrument, the monologue, is brought to perfection. such monologues as _andrea del sarto_ or the _epistle of karshish_ never have been, and probably never will be surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order. to conceive a drama, to present every side and phase and feature of it from one point of view, to condense all its potentialities of action, all its significance and import, into some few hundred lines, this has been done by but one poet, and nowhere with such absolute perfection as here. even when dealing with a single emotion, browning usually crystallizes it into a choice situation; and almost every poem in the series, down to the smallest lyric, is essentially a dramatic monologue. but perhaps the most striking instances of the form and method, and, with the little drama of _in a balcony_, the principal poems in the collection, are the five blank verse pieces, _andrea del sarto_, _fra lippo lippi_, _cleon_, _karshish_, and _bishop blougram_. each is a masterpiece of poetry. each is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse, conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence. each, besides being the presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own, philosophical, ethical, or artistic. _andrea del sarto_ and _fra lippo lippi_ deal with art. _cleon_ and _karshish_, in a sense companion poems, are concerned, each secondarily, with the arts and physical sciences, primarily with the attitude of the western and eastern worlds when confronted with the problem of the gospel of christ. _bishop blougram_ is modern, ecclesiastical and argumentative. but however different in form and spirit, however diverse in _milieu_, each is alike the record of a typical soul at a typical moment. _andrea del sarto_ is a "translation into song" of the picture known as "andrea del sarto and his wife," in the pitti palace at florence. the story of andrea del sarto is told by vasari, in one of the best known of his _lives_: how the painter, who at one time seemed as if he might have competed with raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his beautiful, soulless wife, the fatal lucrezia del fede; and how, led and lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal, and, losing all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, the unerring fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition of a single type, his wife's, which distinguish his later works. browning has taken his facts from vasari, and he has taken them quite literally. but what a change, what a transformation and transfiguration! instead of a piece of prose biography and criticism, we have (in mr. swinburne's appropriate words) "the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh." no more absolutely creative work has been done in our days; few more beautiful and pathetic poems written. the mood of sad, wistful, hopeless mournfulness of resignation which the poem expresses, is a somewhat rare one with browning's vivid and vivacious genius. it is an autumn twilight piece. "a common greyness silvers everything,-- all in a twilight, you and i alike --you, at the point of your first pride in me (that's gone, you know),--but i, at every point; my youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down to yonder sober pleasant fiesole. there's the bell clinking from the chapel top; that length of convent-wall across the way holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; the last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, and autumn grows, autumn in everything. eh, the whole seems to fall into a shape as if i saw alike my work and self and all that i was born to be and do, a twilight-piece." the very movement of the lines, their tone and touch, contribute to the effect. a single clear impression is made to result from an infinity of minute, scarcely appreciable touches: how fine these touches are, how clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realised only by a loving and scrupulous study. whether the picture which suggested the poem is an authentic work of andrea, or whether, as experts have now agreed, it is a work by an unknown artist representing an imaginary man and woman is, of course, of no possible consequence in connection with the poem. nor is it of any more importance that the andrea of vasari is in all probability not the real andrea. historic fact has nothing to do with poetry: it is mere material, the quarry of ideas; and the real truth of browning's portrait of andrea would no more be impugned by the establishment of vasari's inaccuracy, than the real truth of shakespeare's portrait of macbeth by the proof of the untrustworthiness of holinshed. a greater contrast, in every respect, than that between _andrea del sarto_ and _fra lippo lippi_ can scarcely be conceived. the story of filippo lippi[ ] is taken, like that of andrea, from vasari's _lives_: it is taken as literally, it is made as authentically living, and, in its own more difficult way, it is no less genuine a poem. the jolly, jovial tone of the poem, its hearty humour and high spirits, and the breathless rush and hurry of the verse, render the scapegrace painter to the life. not less in keeping is the situation in which the unsaintly friar is introduced: caught by the civic guard, past midnight, in an equivocal neighbourhood, quite able and ready, however, to fraternise with his captors, and pour forth, rough and ready, his ideas and adventures. a passage from the poem placed side by side with an extract from vasari will show how faithfully the record of fra lippo's life is followed, and it will also show, in some small measure, the essential newness, the vividness and revelation of the poet's version. "by the death of his father," writes vasari,[ ] "he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother also having died shortly after his birth. the child was for some time under the care of a certain mona lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with great difficulty until he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the above-named convent of the carmelites." here is browning's version:-- "i was a baby when my mother died and father died and left me in the street. i starved there, god knows how, a year or two on fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks, refuse and rubbish. one fine frosty day, my stomach being empty as your hat, the wind doubled me up and down i went. old aunt lapaccia trussed me with one hand, (its fellow was a stinger as i knew) and so along the wall, over the bridge, by the straight cut to the convent. six words there, while i stood munching my first bread that month: 'so, boy, you're minded,' quoth the good fat father, wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,-- 'to quit this very miserable world?'" but not only has browning given a wonderfully realistic portrait of the man; a man to whom life in its fulness was the only joy, a true type of the renaissance spirit, metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false asceticism of so-called "religious" art, in the characteristic comments and confessions of an innovator in the traditions of religious painting. _cleon_ is prefaced by the text "as certain also of your own poets have said" (_acts_, xvii. ), and is supposed to be a letter from one of the poets to whom st. paul refers, addressed to protus, an imaginary "tyrant," whose wondering admiration of cleon's many-sided culture has drawn him to one who is at once poet, painter, sculptor, musician and philosopher. compared with such poems as _andrea del sarto_, there is little realisable detail in the course of the calm argument or statement, but i scarcely see how the temper of the time, among its choicest spirits (the time of classic decadence, of barren culture, of fruitless philosophy) could well have been more finely shadowed forth. the quality of the versification, unique here as in every one of the five great poems, is perfectly adapted to the subject. the slow sweep of the verse, its stately melody, its large, clear, classic harmony, enable us to receive the right impression as admirably as the other qualities, already pointed out, enable us to feel the resigned sadness of andrea and the jovial gusto of lippo. in _cleon_ we have a historical picture, imaginary indeed, but typical. it reveals or records the religious feeling of the pagan world at the time of the coming of christ; its sadness, dissatisfaction and expectancy, and the failure of its wisdom to fathom the truths of the new gospel. in _an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician_, we have perhaps a yet more subtle delineation of a character similar by contrast. cleon is a type of the western and sceptical, karshish of the eastern and believing, attitude of mind; the one repellent, the other absorbent, of new things offered for belief. karshish, "the picker up of learning's crumbs," writes from syria to his master at home, "abib, all sagacious in our art," concerning a man whose singular case has fascinated him, one lazarus of bethany. there are few more lifelike and subtly natural narratives in browning's poetry; few more absolutely interpenetrated by the finest imaginative sympathy. the scientific caution and technicality of the arab physician, his careful attempt at a statement of the case from a purely medical point of view, his self-reproachful uneasiness at the strange interest which the man's story has caused in him, the strange credulity which he cannot keep from encroaching on his mind: all this is rendered with a matchless delicacy and accuracy of touch and interpretation. nor can anything be finer than the representation of lazarus after his resurrection, a representation which has significance beyond its literal sense, and points a moral often enforced by the poet: that doubt and mystery, in life and in religion alike, are necessary, and indeed alone make either life or religion possible. the special point in the tale of lazarus which has impressed karshish with so intense an interest is that "this man so cured regards the curer, then, as--god forgive me! who but god himself, creator and sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile! --'sayeth that such an one was born and lived, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died, with lazarus by, for aught i know, and yet was ... what i said nor choose repeat, and must have so avouched himself, in fact, in hearing of this very lazarus who saith--but why all this of what he saith? why write of trivial matters, things of price calling at every moment for remark? i noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage, the aleppo sort, aboundeth, very nitrous. it is strange!" how perfectly the attitude of the arab sage is here given, drawn, against himself, to a conviction which he feels ashamed to entertain. as in _cleon_ the very pith of the letter is contained in the postscript, so, after the apologies and farewell greetings of karshish, the thought which all the time has been burning within him bursts into flame. "the very god! think, abib; dost thou think? so, the all-great were the all-loving too-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying, 'o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee!' the madman saith he said so: it is strange." so far, the monologues are single-minded, and represent the sincere and frank expression of the thoughts and opinions of their speakers. _bishop blougram's apology_ introduces a new element, the casuistical. the bishop's apology is, literally, an _apologia_, a speech in defence of himself, in which the aim is to confound an adversary, not to state the truth. this form, intellectual rather than emotional, argumentative more than dramatic, has had, from this time forward, a considerable attraction for browning, and it is responsible for some of his hardest work, such as _fifine at the fair_ and _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_. _bishop blougram's apology_ represents the after-dinner talk of a great roman catholic dignitary. it is addressed to mr. gigadibs, a young and shallow literary man, who poses as free-thinker and as critic of the bishop's position. mr. gigadibs' implied opinion is, that a man of blougram's intellect and broad views cannot, with honesty, hold and teach roman catholic dogma; that his position is anomalous and unideal. blougram retorts with his voluminous and astonishingly clever "apology." in this apology we trace three distinct elements. first, there is a substratum of truth, truth, that is, in the abstract; then there is an application of these true principles to his own case and conduct, an application which is thoroughly unjustifiable-- "he said true things, but called them by wrong names--" but which serves for an ingenious, and apparently, as regards gigadibs, a triumphant, defence; finally, there is the real personal element, the man as he is. we are quite at liberty to suppose, even if we were not bound to suppose, that after all blougram's defence is merely or partly ironical, and that he is not the contemptible creature he would be if we took him quite seriously. it is no secret that blougram himself is, in the main, modelled after and meant for cardinal wiseman, who, it is said, was the writer of a good-humoured review of the poem in the catholic journal, _the rambler_ (january, ). the supple, nervous strength and swiftness of the blank verse is, in its way, as fine as the qualities we have observed in the other monologues: there is a splendid "go" in it, a vast capacity for business; the verse is literally alive with meaning, packed with thought, instinct with wit and irony; and not this only, but starred with passages of exquisite charm, such as that on "how some actor played death on the stage," or that more famous one:-- "just when we're safest, there's a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, a chorus-ending from euripides,-- and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears as old and new at once as nature's self, to rap and knock and enter in our soul, take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- the grand perhaps!" at least six of the poems contained in _men and women_ deal with painting and music. but while four of these seem to fall into one group, the remaining two, _andrea del sarto_ and _fra lippo lippi_, properly belong, though themselves the greatest of the art-poems as art-poems, to the group of monodramas already noticed. but _old pictures in florence_, _the guardian angel_, _master hugues of saxe-gotha_ and _a toccata of galuppi's_, are chiefly and distinctively notable in their relation to art, or to some special picture or piece of music. _the guardian angel_ is a "translation into song" of guercino's picture of that name (_l'angelo custode_). it is addressed to "waring," and was written by browning at ancona, after visiting with mrs. browning the church of san agostino at fano, which contains the picture. this touching and sympathetic little poem is browning's only detailed description of a picture; but it is of more interest as an expression of personal feeling. something in its sentiment has made it one of the most popular of his poems. _old pictures in florence_ is a humorous and earnest moralising on the meaning and mission of art and the rights and wrongs of artists, suggested by some of the old pictures in florence. it contains perhaps the most complete and particular statement of browning's artistic principles that we have anywhere in his work, as well as a very noble and energetic outburst of indignant enthusiasm on behalf of the "early masters," the lesser older men whom the world slurs over or forgets. the principles which browning imputes to the early painters may be applied to poetry as well as to art. very characteristic and significant is the insistence on the deeper value of life, of soul, than of mere expression or technique, or even of mere unbreathing beauty. _master hugues of saxe-gotha_ is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in f minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. it is a mingling of music and moralising. the famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious _tour de force_; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the _dramatis persona_. in complete contrast to _master hugues_ is _a toccata of galuppi's_,[ ] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting of browning's poems, certainly one of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. it is a vision of venice evoked from the shadowy toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant, evanescent, worldly life, when "balls and masks began at midnight, burning ever to midday," and the lover and his lady would break off their talk to listen while galuppi "sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord." but "the eternal note of sadness" soon creeps in. "yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: 'dust and ashes, dead and done with, venice spent what venice earned. * * * * * dust and ashes!' so you creak it, and i want the heart to scold. dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? i feel chilly and grown old." in this poem browning has called up before us the whole aspect of venetian life in the eighteenth century. in three other poems, among the most remarkable that he has ever written, _a grammarian's funeral_, _the heretic's tragedy_ and _holy-cross day_, he has realised and represented the life and temper of the middle ages and the renaissance. _a grammarian's funeral_, "shortly after the revival of learning in europe," gives the nobler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the renaissance, men like cyriac of ancona and filelfo, devoted pedants who broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation and learning of ancient greece and rome. it gives this, the nobler and earlier spirit, as finely as _the tomb at st. praxed's_ gives the later and grosser. in browning's hands the figure of the old grammarian becomes heroic. "he settled _hoti's_ business," true; but he did something more than that. it is the spirit in which the work is done, rather than the special work itself, here only relatively important, which is glorified. is it too much to say that this is the noblest of all requiems ever chanted over the grave of the scholar? "here's the top peak; the multitude below live, for they can, there: this man decided not to live but know-- bury this man there. here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send! lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, living or dying." the union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the stately, is one that only browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. as the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing rhythm of their feet. _the heretic's tragedy: a middle-age interlude_, is described by the author as "a glimpse from the burning of jacques du bourg-molay [last grand-master of the templars], a.d. , as distorted by the refraction from flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries." of all browning's mediæval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, the most astonishing. its special "note" is indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. if i say that it is perhaps the finest example in english poetry of the pure grotesque, i shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. if i call it fantastic, i shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a seriousness which touches on sublimity. browning's power of sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of legend, like this of _the heretic's tragedy_, or that in _holy-cross day_, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form. _holy-cross day_ expresses the feelings of the jews, who were forced on this day (the th september) to attend an annual christian sermon in rome. a deliciously naïve extract from an imaginary _diary by the bishop's secretary_, , first sets forth the orthodox view of the case; then the poem tells us "what the jews really said." nothing more audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the first part of this poem, with its "fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! blessedest thursday's the fat of the week;" while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast song of death of rabbi ben ezra is an effect worthy of heine: more than worthy. heine would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end. with the three great mediæval poems should be named the slighter sketch of _protus_. the first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts, are a fine instance of browning's power of translating sense into sound. compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines-- "among these latter busts we count by scores half-emperors and quarter-emperors, * * * * * one loves a baby-face, with violets there-- violets instead of laurels in the hair,-- as they were all the little locks could bear"-- with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast of the conclusion:-- "here's john the smith's rough-hammered head. great eye, gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can to give you the crown-grasper. what a man!" one poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "_childe roland to the dark tower came_." if it were not for certain lines, certain metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should find in this poem an exception to the rule of browning's work so singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. but in passages of _pauline_, of _paracelsus_, of the lyric written in , and incorporated, more than twenty years later, with _james lee's wife_, we have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful. in _childe roland_ all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression. the poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the "dark tower" has been defined as love, life, death and truth. but, as a matter of fact, browning, in writing it, had no allegorical intention whatever. it was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. it was suggested by the line from shakespeare which heads it, and was "built up," in mrs. orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ... including a tower which mr. browning once saw in the carrara mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[ ] the poem depicts the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "dark tower." the description of his journey across a strange and dreadful country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:-- "a sudden little river crossed my path as unexpected as a serpent comes. no sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; this, as it frothed by, might have been a bath for the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. so petty yet so spiteful! all along, low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit of mute despair, a suicidal throng: the river which had done them all the wrong, whate'er that was rolled by, deterred no whit. which while i forded,--good saints, how i feared to set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, each step, or feel the spear i thrust to seek for hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! --it may have been a water-rat i speared but, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek." the manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic realism. the weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful record of distorted impressions. the poet's imagination is like a flash of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful distinctness, the horrors of the landscape. a large and important group of _men and women_ consists of love-poems, or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. _love among the ruins_, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings. the lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before their meeting, when the lover gazes around him, struck into sudden meditation by the vision of the mighty city fallen and of the living might of love. "and i know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve smiles to leave to their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece in such peace, and the slopes and rills and undistinguished grey melt away-- that a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret whence the charioteers caught soul for the goal, when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb till i come. for he looked upon the city, every side, far and wide, all the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' colonnades, all the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then, all the men! when i do come, she will speak not, she will stand, either hand on my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace of my face, ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech each on each. in one year they sent a million fighters forth south and north, and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force-- gold, of course. oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! earth's returns for whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! shut them in, with their triumphs and their glories and the rest! love is best." the quaint chime or tinkle of a metre made out of the cadence of sheep-bells renders with curious felicity the quietness and fervent meditation of the subject. _a lovers' quarrel_ is in every respect a contrast. it is a whimsical and delicious lyric, with a flowing and leaping melody, a light and piquant music deepened into pathos by a mournful undertone of retrospect and regret, not without a hope for the future. all browning is seen in this pathetic gaiety, this eagerness and unrest and passionate make-believe of a lover's mood. _evelyn hope_ strikes a tenderer note; it is one of browning's sweetest, simplest and most pathetic pieces, and embodies, in a concrete form, one of his deepest convictions. it is the lament of a man, no longer young, by the death-bed of a young girl whom he has loved, unknown to her. she has died scarcely knowing him, not even suspecting his love. but what matter? god creates love to reward love, and there is another life to come. "so hush,--i will give you this leaf to keep see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand! there, that is our secret: go to sleep! you will wake, and remember, and understand." _a woman's last word_ is an exquisite little lyric which sings itself to its own music of delicate gravity and gentle pathos; but it too holds, in its few small lines, a complete situation, that most pathetic one in which a woman resolves to merge her individuality in the wish and will of her husband, to bind, for his sake, her intellect in the chains of her heart. "a woman's last word. i. let's contend no more, love, strive nor weep: all be as before, love, --only sleep! ii. what so wild as words are? i and thou in debate, as birds are, hawk on bough! iii. see the creature stalking while we speak! hush and hide the talking, cheek on cheek! iv. what so false as truth is, false to thee? where the serpent's tooth is, shun the tree-- v. where the apple reddens never pry-- lest we lose our edens, eve and i. vi. be a god and hold me with a charm! be a man and fold me with thine arm! vii. teach me, only teach, love! as i ought i will speak thy speech, love, think thy thought-- viii. meet, if thou require it, both demands, laying flesh and spirit in thy hands. ix. that shall be to-morrow not to-night: i must bury sorrow out of sight: x. --must a little weep, love, (foolish me!) and so fall asleep, love, loved by thee." _any wife to any husband_ is the grave and mournful lament of a dying woman, addressed to the husband whose love has never wavered throughout her life, but whose faithlessness to her memory she foresees. the situation is novel in poetry, and it is realised with an intense sympathy and depth of feeling. the tone of dignified sadness in the woman's words, never passionate or pleading, only confirmed and hopeless, is admirably rendered in the slow and solemn metre, whose firm smoothness and regularity translate into sound the sentiment of the speech. _a serenade at the villa_, which expresses a hopeless love from the man's side, has a special picturesqueness, and something more than picturesqueness: nature and life are seen in throbbing sympathy. the little touches of description give one the very sense of the hot thundrous summer night as it "sultrily suspires" in sympathy with the disconsolate lover at his fruitless serenading. i can scarcely doubt that this poem (some of which has been quoted on p. above), was suggested by one of the songs in sidney's _astrophel and stella_, a poem on the same subject in the same rare metre:-- "who is it that this dark night underneath my window plaineth? it is one who from thy sight being, ah! exiled, disdaineth every other vulgar light." if browning's love-poems have any model or anticipation in english poetry, it is certainly in the love-songs of sidney, in what browning himself has called, "the silver speech, of sidney's self, the starry paladin." no lover in english poetry has been so much a man as sidney and browning. _two in the campagna_ presents a more intricate situation than most of the love-poems. it is the lament of a man, addressed to the woman at his side, whom he loves and by whom he is loved, over the imperfection and innocent inconstancy of his love. the two can never quite grow to one, and he, oppressed by the terrible burden of imperfect sympathies, is for ever seeking, realising, losing, then again seeking the spiritual union still for ever denied. the vague sense of the roman campagna is distilled into exquisite words, and through all there sounds the sad and weary undertone of baffled endeavour:-- "infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." _the last ride together_ is one of those love-poems which i have spoken of as specially noble and unique, and it is, i think, the noblest and most truly unique of them all. thought, emotion and melody are mingled in perfect measure: it has the lyrical "cry," and the objectiveness of the drama. the situation, sufficiently indicated in the title, is selected with a choice and happy instinct: the very motion of riding is given in the rhythm. every line throbs with passion, or with a fervid meditation which is almost passion, and in the last verse, and, still more, in the single line-- "who knows but the world may end to-night?" the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock. _by the fireside_ though in all its circumstances purely dramatic and imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and we can hardly be wrong in classing it, in soul though not in circumstance, with _one word more_ and the other sacred poems which enshrine the memory of elizabeth barrett browning. but, apart from this suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and picturesqueness. nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background: they are fused with the emotion which they both help to form and assist in revealing. _one word more_ (_to e. b. b._) is one of those sacred poems in which, once and again, a great poet has embalmed in immortal words the holiest and deepest emotion of his existence. here, and here only in the songs consecrated by the husband to the wife, the living love that too soon became a memory is still "a hope, to sing by gladly." _one word more_ is browning's answer to the _sonnets from the portuguese_. and, just as mrs. browning never wrote anything more perfect than the _sonnets_, so browning has never written anything more perfect than the answering lyric. yet another section of this most richly varied volume consists of poems, narrative and lyrical, dealing in a brief and pregnant way with some special episode or emotion: love, in some instances, but in a less exclusive way than in the love-poems proper. _the statue and the bust_ (one of browning's best narratives) is a romantic and mainly true tale, written in _terza rima_, but in short lines. the story on which it is founded is a florentine tradition. "in the piazza of the ss. annunziata at florence is an equestrian statue of the grand duke ferdinand the first, representing him as riding away from the church, with his head turned in the direction of the riccardi [now antinori] palace, which occupies one corner of the square. tradition asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner there; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her."[ ] in the poem the lovers agree to fly together, but the flight, postponed for ever, never comes to pass. browning characteristically blames them for their sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," for their vacillating purpose, their failure in attaining "their life's set end," whatever that end might be. despite the difficulty of the metre, the verse is singularly fresh and musical. in this poem, the first in which browning has used the _terza rima_, he observes, with only occasional licence, the proper pause at the end of each stanza of three lines. this law, though rarely neglected by dante, has seldom been observed by the few english poets who have attempted the measure. neither byron in the _prophecy of dante_, nor shelley in _the triumph of life_, nor mrs. browning in _casa guidi windows_, has done so. in browning's later poems in this metre, the pause, as if of set purpose, is wholly disregarded. _how it strikes a contemporary_ is at once a dramatic monologue and a piece of poetic criticism. under the spanish dress, and beneath the humorous treatment, it is easy to see a very distinct, suggestive and individual theory of poetry, and in the poet who "took such cognizance of men and things, ... "of all thought, said and acted, then went home and wrote it fully to our lord the king--" we have, making full allowance for the imaginary dramatic circumstances, a very good likeness of a poet of browning's order. another poem, "_transcendentalism_," is a slighter piece of humorous criticism, possibly self-criticism, addressed to one who "speaks" his thoughts instead of "singing" them. both have a penetrating quality of beauty in familiarity. _before_ and _after_, which mean before and after the duel, realise between them a single and striking situation. _before_ is spoken by a friend of the wronged man; _after_ by the wronged man himself. the latter is not excelled by any poem of browning's in its terrible conciseness, the intensity of its utterance of stifled passion. "after. "take the cloak from his face, and at first let the corpse do its worst! "how he lies in his rights of a man! death has done all death can. and, absorbed in the new life he leads, he recks not, he heeds nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike on his senses alike, and are lost in the solemn and strange surprise of the change. ha, what avails death to erase his offence, my disgrace? i would we were boys as of old in the field, by the fold: his outrage, god's patience, man's scorn, were so easily borne! i stand here now, he lies in his place: cover the face!" i know of no piece of verse in the language which has more of the quality and hush of awe in it than this little fragment of eighteen lines. _instans tyrannus_[ ] (the threatening tyrant) recalls by its motive, however unlike it may be as a poem, the _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_. the situations are widely different, but the root of each is identical. in both is developed the mood of passive or active hate, arising from mere instinctive dislike. but while in the earlier poem the theme is treated with boisterous sardonic humour, it is here embodied in the grave figure of a stern, single-minded, relentless hater, a tyrant in both senses of the term. another poem, representing an act of will, though here it is love, not hate, that impels, is _mesmerism_. the intense absorption, the breathless eagerness of the mesmerist, are rendered in a really marvellous way by the breathless and yet measured race of the verses: fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full-stop, or a real pause in sense or sound. the beautiful and significant little poem called _the patriot: an old story_, is a narrative and parable at once, and only too credible and convincing as each. _respectability_ holds in its three stanzas all that is vital and enviable in the real "bohemia," and is the first of several poems of escape, which culminate in _fifine at the fair_. both here and in another short suggestive poem, _a light woman_ (which might be called the fourth act of a tragedy), the situation is outlined like a silhouette. equally graphic, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is the picturesque and whimsical view of town and country life taken by a frivolous italian person of quality in the poem named _up at a villa--down in the city_, "a masterpiece of irony and of description," as an italian critic has defined it. of the wealth of lyrics and short poems no adequate count can here be made. yet, i cannot pass without a word, if only in a word may i indicate, the admirable craftsmanship and playful dexterity of the lines on _a pretty woman_; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel music of _love in a life and life in a love_; the tense emotion, the suppressed and hopeful passion, of _in three days_, and the sad and haunting song of _in a year_, with its winding and liquid melody, its mournful and wondering lament over love forgotten; the rich and marvellously modulated music, the glowing colour, the vivid and passionate fancy, of _women and roses_; the fresh felicity of "_de gustibus_," with its enthusiasm for italy scarcely less fervid than the english enthusiasm of the _home-thoughts_; the quaint humour and pregnant simplicity of the admirable little parable of _the twins_; the sympathetic charm and light touch of _misconceptions_, and the pretty figurative fancy of _my star_; the strong, sad, suggestive little poem named _one way of love_, with its delicately-wrought companion _another way of love_, the former a love-lyric to be classed with _the lost mistress_ and _the last ride together_; and, finally, the epilogue to the first volume and a late poem in the second: _memorabilia_, a tribute to shelley, full of grateful remembrance and admiring love, significant among the few personal utterances of the poet, and the not less lovely poem and only less fervent tribute to keats, the sumptuous, gorgeous, and sardonic lines on _popularity_. a careful study or even, one would think, a careless perusal, of but a few of the poems named above, should be enough to show, once and for all, the infinite richness and variety of browning's melody, and his complete mastery over the most simple and the most intricate lyric measures. as an example of the finest artistic simplicity, rich with restrained pathos and quiet with keen tension of feeling, we may choose the following. "one way of love i. all june i bound the rose in sheaves. now, rose by rose, i strip the leaves and strew them where pauline may pass. she will not turn aside? alas! let them lie. suppose they die? the chance was they might take her eye. ii. how many a month i strove to suit these stubborn fingers to the lute! to-day i venture all i know. she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing: suppose pauline had bade me sing? iii. my whole life long i learned to love. this hour my utmost art i prove and speak my passion--heaven or hell? she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! love who may--i still can say, those who win heaven, blest are they!" in a balcony.[ ] [written at bagni di lucca, ; published in _men and women_, above; reprinted in _poetical works_, , under a separate heading; _id_., (vol. vii. pp. - ). performed at the browning society's third annual entertainment, prince's hall, piccadilly, nov. , , and by the english drama society at the victoria hall, june , .] the dramatic scene of _in a balcony_ is the last of the works written in dialogue. we have seen, in tracing the course of the plays from _strafford_ to _a soul's tragedy_, how the playwright gave place to the poet; how the stage construction, the brisk and interchanged dialogue of the earlier dramas, gradually and inevitably developed into the more subtle, the more lengthy dialogue, which itself approached more and more nearly to monologue, of the later ones. _in a balcony_, written eight years later than _a soul's tragedy_, has more affinity with it, in form at least, than with any other of the plays. but while the situation there was purely intellectual and moral, it is here passionate and highly-wrought, to a degree never before reached, except in the crowning scene of _pippa passes_. we must go to the greatest among the elizabethans to exceed that; we must turn to _le roi s'amuse_ to equal this. the situation is, in one sense, extremely subtle; in another, remarkably simple. the action takes place within a few hours, on a balcony at night. norbert and constance are two lovers. norbert is in the service of a certain queen, to whom he has, by his diplomatic skill and labour, rendered great services. his aim, all the while, though unknown, as he thinks, to her, has been the hope of winning constance, the queen's cousin and dependant. he is now about to claim her as his recompense; but constance, fearing for the result, persuades him, reluctant though he is, to ask in a roundabout way, so as to flatter or touch the queen. he over-acts his part. the queen, a heart-starved and now ageing woman, believes that he loves her, and responds to him with the passion of a long-thwarted nature. she announces the wonderful news, with more than the ecstasy of a girl, to constance. constance resolves to resign her lover, for his good and the queen's, and, when he appears, she endeavours to make him understand and enter into her plot. but he cannot and will not see it. in the presence of the queen he declares his love for constance, and for her alone. the queen goes out, in white silence. the lovers embrace in new knowledge and fervour of love. measured steps are heard within, and we know that the guard is approaching. each of the three characters is admirably delineated. norbert is a fine, strong, solid, noble character, without subtlety or mixture of motives. he loves constance: he knows that his love is returned: he is resolved to win her hand. from first to last he is himself, honest, straightforward, single-minded, passionate; presenting the strongest contrast to constance's feminine over-subtlety. constance is more, very much more, of a problem: "a character," as mr. wedmore has admirably said, "peculiarly wily for goodness, curiously rich in resource for unalloyed and inexperienced virtue." does her proposal to relinquish norbert in favour of the queen show her to have been lacking in love for him? it has been said, on the one hand, that her act was "noble and magnanimous," on the other hand, that the act proved her nature to be "radically insincere and inconstant." probably the truth lies between these two extremes. her love, we cannot doubt, was true and intense up to the measure of her capacity; but her nature was, instinctively, less outspoken and truthful than norbert's, more subtle, more reasoning. at the critical moment she is seized by a whirl of emotions, and, with very feminine but singularly unloverlike instinct, she resolves, as she would phrase it, to sacrifice _herself_, not seeing that she is insulting her lover by the very notion of his accepting such a sacrifice. her character has not the pure and steadfast nobility of norbert's, but it has the capacity of devotion, and it is genuinely human. the queen, unlike constance, but like norbert, is simple and single in nature. she is a tragic and intense figure, at once pathetic and terrible. i am not aware that the peculiarly pregnant motive: the hidden longing for love in a starved and stunted nature, clogged with restrictions of state and ceremony, harassed and hampered by circumstances and by the weight of advancing years; the passionate longing suddenly met, as it seems, with reward, and breaking out into a great flame of love and ardour, only to be rudely and finally quenched: i am not aware that this motive has ever elsewhere been worked out in dramatic poetry. as here developed, it is among the great situations in literature. the verse in which this little tragedy is written has, perhaps, more flexibility than that of any of the formal dramas. it has a strong and fine harmony, a weight and measure, and above all that pungent naturalness which belongs to the period of _andrea del sarto_ and the other great monologues. footnotes: [footnote : the picture which lippo promises to paint (ll. - ) is an exact description of his _coronation of the virgin_, in the accademia delle belle arti at florence.] [footnote : mrs foster's translation (bohn).] [footnote : baldassarre galuppi, surnamed buranello ( - ), was a venetian composer of some distinction. "he was an immensely prolific composer," says vernon lee, "and abounded in melody, tender, pathetic, brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."--_studies of the eighteenth century in italy_, p. .] [footnote : _handbook_, p. . the poem was written at paris, january , .] [footnote : mrs orr, _handbook_, p. .] [footnote : the poem was suggested by the opening of the third ode of the third book of horace: "justum et tenacem propositi virum."] [footnote : it will be more convenient to treat _in a balcony_ in a separate section than under the general heading of _men and women_, for it is, to all intents and purposes, an independent work of another order.] . dramatis personÃ�. [published in (_poetical works_, , vol. vii., pp. - ).] _dramatis personæ_, like _men and women_ (which it followed after an interval of nine years) is a collection of dramatic monologues, in each of which it is attempted to delineate a single character or a single mood by setting the "imaginary person" in some revealing situation. of the two possible methods, speech and soliloquy, browning for the most part prefers the former. in _dramatis personæ_, however, he recurs, rather more frequently than usual, to the latter; and the situations imaged are usually suggestive rather than explicit, more incomplete and indirect than those in the _men and women_. as an ingenious critic said, shortly after the volume was published, "mr browning lets us overhear a part of the drama, generally a soliloquy, and we must infer the rest. had he to give the story of _hamlet_, he would probably embody it in three stanzas, the first beginning, 'o that this too too solid flesh would melt!' the second 'to be or not to be, that is the question;' and the third, 'look here upon this picture, and on that!' from these disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story." here our critic's clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but there is some truth in his definition or description of the special manner which characterises such poems as _too late_, or _the worst of it_. but not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the style and versification, have undergone a change during the long-silent years which lie between _men and women_ and _dramatis personæ_. the first note of change, of the change which makes us speak of earlier and later work, is here sounded. from up to forms a single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent. _dramatis personæ_ stands on the border line between this period and another, the "later period," which more decisively begins with _the ring and the book_. still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded here. i might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality for scenes and situations of english and modern rather than of mediæval and foreign life. the larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues. three only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures. the first of these, and the longest, _james lee_, as it was first called, _james lee's wife_[ ] as it is now more appropriately named, is a _lieder kreis_, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in "tragic hints," not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an unhappy marriage. there is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering; it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial in record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. the development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final resolved parting. this poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which browning has employed the sequence form; almost the only instance, indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a poem. _james lee's wife_ is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection. in two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, _the worst of it_ and _too late_, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental appeal to some one loved and lost. in _james lee's wife_ a woman was the speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. _the worst of it_ and _too late_ are both spoken by men. the former is the utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man whose loved one is dead. but in each case the situation is further complicated. the woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the worst of it," the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined herself. the poem is one of the most passionate and direct of browning's dramatic lyrics: it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness. similar in cadence, though different in arrangement, is the measure of _too late_, with its singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by two couplets, which together made another quatrain. it is worth noticing how admirably and uniformly browning contrives to connect, in sound, the two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. the poem is spoken by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: like the lover of evelyn hope, he never told his love. his edith married another, a heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival regards him), and now she is dead. his vague but vivid hopes of some future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all poured out with pathetic naturalness. these three poems are soliloquies; _dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours_, a poem closely akin in sentiment and style, recurs to the more frequent and perhaps preferable manner of speech to an imagined listener. it is written in that favourite stanza of five lines, on which browning has played so many variations: here, perhaps, in the internal rhyme so oddly placed, the newest and most ingenious of all. the sentiment and situation are the exact complement or contrast of those expressed in _by the fireside_. there, fate and nature have brought to a crisis the latent love of two persons: the opportunity is seized, and the crown of life obtained. here, in circumstances singularly similar, the vital moment is let slip, the tide is _not_ taken at the turn. and ten years afterwards, when the famous poet and the girl whom he all but let himself love, meet in a paris drawing-room, and one of them tells the old tale over for the instruction of both, she can point out, with bitter earnestness and irony (and a perfect little touch of feminine nature) his fatal mistake. _youth and art_ is a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat similar moral. it has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and ballad-like simplicity. still more perfect a poem, still more subtle, still more heinesque, if it were not better than heine, is the little piece called _confessions_. the pathetic, humorous, rambling snatch of final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful irony, to the attendant clergyman, has a sort of grim ecstasy, and the end is one of the most triumphant things in this kind of poetry. "confessions. i. what is he buzzing in my ears? 'now that i come to die. do i view the world as a vale of tears?' ah, reverend sir, not i! ii. what i viewed there once, what i view again where the physic bottles stand on the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, with a wall to my bedside hand. iii. that lane sloped, much as the bottles do, from a house you could descry o'er the garden wall; is the curtain blue or green to a healthy eye? iv. to mine, it serves for the old june weather blue above lane and wall; and that farthest bottle labelled 'ether' is the house o'er-topping all. v. at a terrace, somewhat near the stopper, there watched for me, one june, a girl: i know, sir, it's improper, my poor mind's out of tune. vi. only, there was a way ... you crept close by the side, to dodge eyes in the house, two eyes except: they styled their house 'the lodge.' vii. what right had a lounger up their lane? but, by creeping very close, with the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain and stretch themselves to oes, viii. yet never catch her and me together, as she left the attic, there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'ether,' and stole from stair to stair, ix. and stood by the rose-wreathed gate. alas, we loved, sir,--used to meet: how sad and bad and mad it was-- but then, how it was sweet!" _a likeness_ forms a third, and a good third, to these two fine and subtle studies of modern english life. it is one of those poems which, because they seem simple and superficial, and can be galloped off the tongue in a racing jingle, we are apt to underrate or overlook. yet it would be difficult to find a more vivid bit of _genre_ painting than the three-panelled picture in this single frame. the three blank verse poems which complete the series of purely dramatic pieces, _a death in the desert, caliban upon setebos_ and _mr. sludge, "the medium"_ are more elaborate than any yet named. they follow, to a considerable extent, the form of the blank verse monologues which are the glory of _men and women_. alike in their qualities and defects they represent a further step in development. the next step will lead to the elaborate and extended monologues which comprise the greater part of browning's later works. a _death in the desert_ is an argument in a dramatic frame-work. the situation imaged is that of the mysterious death of st. john in extreme old age. the background to the last utterance of the apostle is painted with marvellous brilliance and tenderness: every circumstance is conceived and represented in that pictorial style, in which a word is equal to a touch of the brush of a great painter. but, delicately as the circumstances and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that the poem is mainly left to exist. the bearing of this argument on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. to make the dying john refute strauss or renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. but i can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of christian truth against a foreseen scepticism. in style, the poem a little recalls _cleon_; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and certainly appropriate to the utterance of the "beloved disciple." _caliban upon setebos_; or, _natural theology in the island_,[ ] is more of a creation, and a much greater poem, than _a death in the desert_. it is sometimes forgotten that the grotesque has its own region in art. the region of the grotesque has been well defined, in connection with this poem, in a paper read by mr. cotter morison before the browning society. "its proper province," he writes, "would seem to be the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[ ] with the exception of _the heretic's tragedy_, _caliban upon setebos_ is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. browning's caliban, unlike shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen stephano and trinculo, he has forgotten it. he simply sprawls on the ground "now that the heat of day is best," and expounds for himself, for his own edification, his system of natural theology. i think huxley has said that the poem is a truly scientific representation of the development of religious ideas in primitive man. it needed the subtlest of poets to apprehend and interpret the undeveloped ideas and sensations of a rudimentary and transitionally human creature like caliban, to turn his dumb stirrings of quaint fancies into words, and to do all this without a discord. the finest poetical effect is in the close: it is indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, _surprises_, in literature. caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his god; believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his mind on religious questions. he chuckles to himself in safe self-complacency. all at once-- "what, what? a curtain o'er the world at once! crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes, there scuds his raven that hath told him all! it was fool's play, this prattling! ha! the wind shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, and fast invading fires begin! white blaze-- a tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, his thunder follows! fool to jibe at him! lo! 'lieth flat and loveth setebos! 'maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, will let those quails fly, will not eat this month one little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" _mr. sludge, "the medium"_ is equally remote from both the other poems in blank verse. it is a humorous and realistic tale of modern spiritualism, suggested, it is said, by the life and adventures of the american medium, home. like _bishop blougram_, it is at once an exposure and an apologia. as a piece of analytic portraiture it would be difficult to surpass; and it is certainly a fault on the right side if the poet has endowed his precious blackguard with a dialectical head hardly to be expected on such shoulders; if, in short, he has made him nearly as clever as himself. when the critics complain that the characters of a novelist are too witty, the characters of a poet too profound, one cannot but feel thankful that it is once in a while possible for such strictures to be made. the style of _mr. sludge_ is the very acme of colloquialism. it is not "what is commonly understood by poetry," certainly: but is it not poetry, all the same? if such a character as sludge should be introduced into poetry at all, it is certain that no more characteristic expression could have been found for him. but should he be dealt with? we limit our poetry nowadays, to the length of our own tether; if we are unable to bring beauty out of every living thing, merely because it is alive, and because nature is beautiful in every movement, is it our own fault or nature's? shakespeare and his age trusted nature, and were justified; in our own age only browning has wholly trusted nature. scarcely second in importance to the dramatic group, comes the group of lyrical poems, some of which are indeed, formally dramatic, that is, the "utterance of so many imaginary persons," but still in general tone and effect lyrical and even personal. _abt vogler_ for instance, and _rabbi ben ezra_, might no doubt be considered instances of "vicarious thinking" on behalf of the modern german composer and the mediæval jewish philosopher. but in neither case is there any distinct dramatic intention. the one is a deep personal utterance on music, the other a philosophy of life. but before i touch on these, which, with _prospice_, are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, i should name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little elegy of love and mourning, _may and death; a face_, with its perfect clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the vignettes of palma in _sordello_, or as a real picture of the "tuscan's early art"; the two octaves (not in the first edition) on woolner's group of constance and arthur (_deaf and dumb_) and sir frederick leighton's picture of _eurydice and orpheus_; and the two semi-narrative poems, _gold hair: a story of pornic_, and _apparent failure_, the former a vivid rendering of the strange story told in brittany of a beautiful girl-miser, the latter a record and its stinging and consoling moral ("poor men, god made, and all for that!") of a visit that browning paid in to the morgue. _abt vogler_[ ] ("after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention") is an utterance on music which perhaps goes further than any attempt which has ever been made in verse to set forth the secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts. only the wonderful lines in the _merchant of venice_ come anywhere near it. the wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and beauty of a sky, of a sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first, become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing. life, religion and music, the _ganzen, guten, schönen_ of existence, are combined in threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential spirit. "therefore to whom turn i but to thee, the ineffable name? builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! what, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same! doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? there shall never be one lost good! what was, shall live as before; the evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; what was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; on the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity affirms the conception of an hour. the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by. and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonized? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized? sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know." in _rabbi ben ezra_ browning has crystallized his religious philosophy into a shape of abiding beauty. it has been called, not rashly, the noblest of modern religious poems. alike in substance and in form it belongs to the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has, in browning's work, an almost unique quality of grave beauty, of severe restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm. what the _psalm of life_ is to the people who do not think, _rabbi ben ezra_ might and should be to those who do: a light through the darkness, a lantern of guidance and a beacon of hope, to the wanderers lost and weary in the _selva selvaggia_. it is one of those poems that mould character. i can give only one or two of its most characteristic verses. "not on the vulgar mass called 'work' must sentence pass, things done, that took the eye and had the price; o'er which, from level stand, the low world laid its hand, found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: but all, the world's coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb, so passed in making up the main account; all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act, fancies that broke through language and escaped; all i could never be, all, men ignored in me. this, i was worth to god, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. * * * * * so, take and use thy work: amend what flaws may lurk, what strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! my times be in thy hand! perfect the cup as planned! let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!" the emotion and the measure of _rabbi ben ezra_ have the chastened, sweet gravity of wise old age. _prospice_ has all the impetuous blood and fierce lyric fire of militant manhood. it is a cry of passionate exultation and exaltation in the very face of death: a war-cry of triumph over the last of foes. i would like to connect it with the quotation from dante which browning, in a published letter, tells us that he wrote in his wife's testament after her death: "thus i believe, thus i affirm, thus i am certain it is, that from this life i shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured." if _rabbi ben ezra_ has been excelled as a song of life, then _prospice_ may have been excelled as a hymn of death. "prospice. fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face, when the snows begin, and the blasts denote i am nearing the place, the power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe; where he stands, the arch fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go; for the journey is done and the summit attained, and the barriers fall, though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, the reward of it all. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. no! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers the heroes of old, bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness and cold. for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minute's at end, and the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest!" last of all comes the final word, the summary or conclusion of the whole matter, in the threefold speech of the _epilogue_, a comprehensive and suggestive vision of the religious life of humanity. footnotes: [footnote : the first six stanzas of the sixth section of this poem, the splendid song of the wind, were published in a magazine, as _lines_, in . parts ii. & iii., of section viii. (except the last two lines) were added to the poem in .] [footnote : the poem was originally preceded by the text, "thou thoughtest that i was altogether such an one as thyself" (_ps._ . ).] [footnote : _browning society's papers_, part v., p. .] [footnote : the abt or abbé george joseph vogler (born at würzburg, bavaria, in , died at darmstadt, ) was a composer, professor, kapelmeister and writer on music. among his pupils were weber and meyerbeer. the "musical instrument of his invention" was called an orchestrion. "it was," says sir g. grove, "a very compact organ, in which four keyboards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet."--(see miss marx's "account of abbé vogler," in the _browning society's papers_, part iii., p. ).] . the ring and the book. [published, in vols., in - : vol. i., november, ; vol. ii., december, ; vol. iii., january, ; vol. iv., february, . in books: ., the ring and the book; ii., half-rome; iii., the other half-rome; iv., tertium quid; v., count guido franceschini; vi., giuseppe caponsacchi; vii., pompilia; viii., dominus hyacinthus de archangelis, pauperum procurator; ix., juris doctor johannes-baptista bottinius, fisci et rev. cam. apostol. advocatus; x., the pope; xi., guido; xii., the book and the ring. (_poetical works_, ; vols. viii.-x.)] _the ring and the book_ is at once the largest and the greatest of browning's works, the culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point, more decisively than _dramatis personæ_, of his style. it consists of twelve books, the first and last being of the nature of preface and appendix. it embodies a single story, told ten times, each time from an individual standpoint, by nine different persons (one of them speaking twice), besides a summary of the story by the poet in the first book, and some additional particulars in the last. the method thus adopted is at once absolutely original and supremely difficult. to tell the same story, without mere repetition, no less than ten times over, to make each telling at once the same and new, a record of the same facts but of independent impressions, to convey by means of each monologue a sense of the speaker not less vivid and life-like than by the ordinary dramatic method, with a yet more profound measure of analytic and psychological truth, and finally to group all these figures with unerring effect of prominence and subordination, to fuse and mould all these parts into one living whole is, as a _tour de force_, unique, and it is not only a _tour de force_. _the ring and the book_, besides being the longest poetical work of the century, must be ranked among the greatest poems in our literature: it has a spiritual insight, human science, dramatic and intellectual and moral force, a strength and grip, a subtlety, a range and variety of genius and of knowledge, hardly to be paralleled outside shakespeare. it has sometimes been said that the style of browning is essentially undramatic, that pompilia, guido, and the lawyers all talk in the same way, that is, like browning. as a matter of fact nothing is more remarkable than the variety of style, the cunning adjustment of language and of rhythm to the requirements of every speaker. from the general construction of the rhythm to the mere similies and figures of speech employed in passing, each monologue is absolutely individual, and, though each monologue contains a highly finished portrait of the character whose name it bears, these portraits, so far from being disconnected or independent, are linked together in as close an interdependence as the personages of a regularly constructed drama. the effect of the reiterated story, told in some new fashion by each new teller of it, has been compared with that of a great fugue, blending, with the threads of its crossing and recrossing voices, a single web of harmony. the "theme" is pompilia; around her the whole action circles. as, in _pippa passes_, the mere passing of an innocent child, her unconscious influence on those on whom her song breaks in at a moment of crisis, draws together the threads of many stories, so pompilia, with hardly more consciousness of herself, makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her. the same sweet rectitude and purity of nature serve to call out the latent malignity of guido and the slumbering chivalry of caponsacchi. without her, the one might have remained a "_petit mâitre_ priestling;" the other merely a soured, cross-grained, impecunious country squire: rome would have had no tragedy to talk about, nor we this book to read. it is in pompilia that all the threads of action meet: she is the heroine, as neither guido nor caponsacchi can be called the hero. the story of _the ring and the book_, like those of so many of the greatest works of shakespeare and his contemporaries, comes to us from italy. unlike shakespeare's, however, but like one at least of webster's two masterpieces, it is no legend, but the true story of a roman murder-case, found (in all its main facts and outlines) in a square old yellow book, small-quarto size, part print, part manuscript, which browning picked up for eightpence on a second-hand stall in the piazza san lorenzo at florence, one day in june, . the book was entitled (in latin which browning thus translates):-- "a roman murder-case: position of the entire criminal cause of guido franceschini, nobleman, with certain four the cut-throats in his pay, tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death by heading or hanging as befitted ranks, at rome on february twenty two, since our salvation sixteen ninety eight: wherein it is disputed if, and when, husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape the customary forfeit." the book proved to be one of those contemporary records of famous trials which were not uncommon in italy, and which are said to be still preserved in many italian libraries. it contained the printed pleadings for and against the accused, the judicial sentence, and certain manuscript letters describing the efforts made on guido's behalf and his final execution. this book (with a contemporary pamphlet which browning afterwards met with in london) supplied the outlines of the poem to which it helped to give a name. the story itself is a tragic one, rich in material for artistic handling, though not for the handling of every artist. but its importance is relatively inconsiderable. "i fused my live soul and that inert stuff," says the poet, and "thence bit by bit i dug the ingot truth, that memorable day, assayed and knew my piecemeal gain was gold,-- yes; but from something else surpassing that, something of mine which, mixed up with the mass, makes it bear hammer and be firm to file. fancy with fact is just one fact the more; to-wit, that fancy has informed, transpierced, thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break." the story, in brief, is this. pompilia, the supposed daughter of pietro and violante comparini, an aged burgher couple of rome, has been married, at the age of thirteen, to count guido franceschini, an impoverished middle-aged nobleman of arezzo. the arrangement, in which pompilia is, of course, quite passive, has been made with the expectation, on the part of guido, of a large dowry; on the part of the comparini of an aristocratic alliance, and a princely board at guido's palace. no sooner has the marriage taken place than both parties find that they have been tricked. guido, disappointed of his money, and unable to reach the pair who have deceived him, vents his spite on the innocent victim, pompilia. at length pompilia, knowing that she is about to become a mother, escapes from her husband, aided by a good young priest, giuseppe caponsacchi, a canon of arezzo; and a few months afterwards, at the house of her supposed parents, she gives birth to a son. a fortnight after the birth of his heir, guido, who has been waiting till his hold on the dowry is thus secured, takes with him four cut-throats, steals by night to rome, and kills his wife and the aged comparini, leaving the child alive. he is captured the same night, and brought to judgment at rome. when the poem opens, the case is being tried before the civil courts. no attempt is made to dispute the fact of guido's actual committal of the deed; he has been caught red-handed, and pompilia, preserved almost by miracle, has survived her wounds long enough to tell the whole story. the sole question is, whether the act had any justification; it being pretended by guido that his wife had been guilty of adultery with the priest caponsacchi, and that his deed was a simple act of justice. he was found guilty by the legal tribunal, and condemned to death; pompilia's innocence being confirmed beyond a doubt. guido then appealed to the pope, who confirmed the judicial sentence. the whole of the poem takes place between the arrest and trial of guido, and the final sentence of the pope; at the time, that is, when the hopes and fears of the actors, and the curiosity of the spectators, would be at their highest pitch. the first book, entitled _the ring and the book_, gives the facts of the story, some hint of the author's interpretation of them, and the outlines of his plan. we are not permitted any of the interest of suspense. browning shows us clearly from the first the whole bearing and consequence of events, as well as the right and wrong of them. he has written few finer passages than the swift and fiery narrative of the story, lived through in vision on the night of his purchase of the original documents. but complete and elaborate as this is, it is merely introductory, a prologue before the curtain rises on the drama. first we have three representative specimens of public opinion: _half-rome_, _the other half-rome_, and _tertium quid_; each speaker presenting the complete case from his own point of view. "half-rome" takes the side of guido. we are allowed to see that the speaker is a jealous husband, and that his judgment is biased by an instinctive sympathy with the presumably jealous husband, guido. "the other half-rome" takes the side of the wife, "little pompilia with the patient eyes," now lying in the hospital, mortally wounded, and waiting for death. this speaker is a bachelor, probably a young man, and his judgment is swayed by the beauty and the piteousness of the dying girl. the speech of "half-rome," being as it is an attempt to make light of the murder, and the utterance of a somewhat ridiculous personage, is exceedingly humorous and colloquial; that of the "other half-rome" is serious, earnest, sometimes eloquent. no contrast could be more complete than that presented by these two "sample-speeches." the objects remain the same, but we see them through different ends of the telescope. either account taken by itself is so plausible as to seem almost morally conclusive. but in both instances we have down-right apology and condemnation, partiality bred of prejudice. _tertium quid_ presents us with a reasoned and judicial judgment, impartiality bred of contempt or indifference; this being-- "what the superior social section thinks, in person of some man of quality who,--breathing musk from lace-work and brocade, his solitaire amid the flow of frill, powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back, and cane dependent from the ruffled wrist-- harangues in silvery and selectest phrase, 'neath waxlight in a glorified saloon where mirrors multiply the girandole: courting the approbation of no mob, but eminence this and all-illustrious that, who take snuff softly, range in well-bred ring, card-table-quitters for observance' sake, around the argument, the rational word ... how quality dissertated on the case." "tertium quid" deals with the case very gently, mindful of his audience, to whom, at each point of the argument calling for judgment, he politely refers the matter, and passes on. he speaks in a tone of light and well-bred irony, with the aristocratic contempt for the _plebs_, the burgesses, society's assumption of exclusive information. he gives the general view of things, clearly, neutrally, with no vulgar emphasis of black and white. "i simply take the facts, ask what they mean." so far we have had rumour alone, the opinions of outsiders; next come the three great monologues in which the persons of the drama, count guido, caponsacchi, and pompilia, bear witness of themselves. "the imaginary occasion," says mrs. orr, "is that of count guido's trial, and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. the author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. the motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker, are thus in some degree fictitious; but they are always founded upon fact, and the literal fact of a vast number of details is self-evident."[ ] these three monologues (with the second of guido) are by far the most important in the book. first comes _count guido franceschini_. the two monologues spoken by him are, for sheer depth of human science, the most marvellous of all: "every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every vein and joint of the subtle and intricate spirit divided and laid bare."[ ] under torture, he has confessed to the murder of his wife. he is now permitted to defend himself before the judges. "soft-cushioned sits he; yet shifts seat, shirks touch, as, with a twitchy brow and wincing lip, and cheek that changes to all kinds of white, he proffers his defence, in tones subdued near to mock-mildness now, so mournful seems the obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy; now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured, to passion.... also his tongue at times is hard to curb; incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase. * * * * * and never once does he detach his eye from those ranged there to slay him or to save, but does his best man's-service for himself." his speech is a tissue of falsehoods and prevarications: if he uses a fact, it is only to twist it into a form of self-justification. he knows it is useless to deny the murder; his aim, then, is to explain and excuse it. every device attainable by the instinct and the brain of hunted humanity he finds and uses. now he slurs rapidly over an inconvenient fact; now, with the frank audacity of innocence, proclaims and blazons it abroad; now he is rhetorically eloquent, now ironically pathetic; always contriving to shift the blame upon others, and to make his own course appear the only one plausible or possible, the only one possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the church. every shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of churchmen, and the gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived. no keener and subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and possibly in lawyers' prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of dramatic art. covering a narrower range, but still more significant within its own limits, the speech of _giuseppe caponsacchi_, the priest who assisted pompilia in her flight to rome (given now in her defence before the judges who have heard the defence of guido) is perhaps the most passionate and thrilling piece of blank verse ever written by browning. indeed, i doubt if it be an exaggeration to say that such fire, such pathos, such splendour of human speech, has never been heard or seen in english verse since webster. in tone and colour the monologue is quite new, exquisitely modulated to a surprising music. the lighter passages are brilliant: the eloquent passages full of a fine austerity; but it is in those passages directly relating to pompilia that the chief greatness of the work lies. there is in these appeals a quivering, thrilling, searching quality of fervid pathetic directness: i can give no notion of it in words; but here are a few lines, torn roughly out of their context, which may serve in some degree to illustrate my meaning:-- "pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me the last time in this life: not one sight since, never another sight to be! and yet i thought i had saved her. i appealed to rome: it seems i simply sent her to her death. you tell me she is dying now, or dead; i cannot bring myself to quite believe this is a place you torture people in: what if this your intelligence were just a subtlety, an honest wile to work on a man at unawares? 'twere worthy you. no, sirs, i cannot have the lady dead! that erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, that voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) that vision of the pale electric sword angels go armed with,--that was not the last o' the lady! come, i see through it, you find-- know the manoeuvre! also herself said i had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false? let me see for myself if it be so! though she were dying a priest might be of use, the more when he's a friend too,--she called me far beyond 'friend.'" severed from its connection, much of the charm of the passage vanishes away: always the test of the finest dramatic work; but enough remains to give some faint shadow of the real beauty of the work. observe how the rhythm trembles in accord with the emotion of the speaker: now slow, solemn, sad, with something of the quiet of despair; now strenuously self-deluding and feverishly eager: "let me see for myself if it be so!" a line which has all the flush and gasp in it of broken sudden utterance. and the monologue ends in a kind of desperate resignation:-- "sirs, i am quiet again. you see, we are so very pitiable, she and i, who had conceivably been otherwise. forget distemperature and idle heat; apart from truth's sake, what's to move so much? pompilia will be presently with god; i am, on earth, as good as out of it, a relegated priest; when exile ends, i mean to do my duty and live long. she and i are mere strangers now: but priests should study passion; how else cure mankind, who come for help in passionate extremes? i do but play with an imagined life. * * * * * mere delectation, fit for a minute's dream!-- just as a drudging student trims his lamp, opens his plutarch, puts him in the place of roman, grecian; draws the patched gown close, dreams, 'thus should i fight, save or rule the world!'-- then smilingly, contentedly, awakes to the old solitary nothingness. so i, from such communion, pass content ... o great, just, good god! miserable me!" from the passionate defence of caponsacchi, we pass to the death-bed of _pompilia_. like shakespeare, browning makes all his heroines young; and this child of seventeen, who has so much of the wisdom of youth, tells on her death-bed, to the kind people about her, the story of her life, in a simple, child-like, dreamy, wondering way, which can be compared, so far as i know, with nothing else ever written. "then a soul sighs its lowest and its last after the loud ones;" and we have here the whole heart of a woman, the whole heart and the very speech and accent of the most womanly of women. no woman has ever written anything so close to the nature of women, and i do not know what other man has come near to this strange and profoundly manly intuition, this "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies," as mr. swinburne has said, "the poet of pompilia." all _the ring and the book_ is a leading up to this monologue, and a commentary round it. it is a song of serene and quiet beauty, beautiful as evening-twilight. to analyse it is to analyse a rose's perfume: to quote from it is to tear off the petal of a rose. here, however, for their mere colour and scent, are a few lines. pompilia is speaking of the birth of her child. "a whole long fortnight: in a life like mine a fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. all women are not mothers of a boy, though they live twice the length of my whole life, and, as they fancy, happily all the same. there i lay, then, all my great fortnight long, as if it would continue, broaden out happily more and more, and lead to heaven: christmas before me,--was not that a chance? i never realized god's birth before-- how he grew likest god in being born. this time i felt like mary, had my babe lying a little on my breast like hers." with a beautiful and holy confidence she now "lays away her babe with god," secure for him in the future. she forgives the husband who has slain her: "i could not love him, but his mother did." and with her last breath she blesses the friend who has saved her:-- "o lover of my life, o soldier-saint, no work begun shall ever pause for death. * * * * * so, let him wait god's instant men call years; meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, do out the duty! through such souls alone god stooping shows sufficient of his light for us i' the dark to rise by. and i rise." after _pompilia_, we have the pleadings and counterpleadings of the lawyers on either side: _dominus hyacinthus de archangelis, pauperum procurator_ (the counsel for the defendant), and _juris doctor johannes-baptista bottinius_, _fisci et rev. cam. apostol. advocatus_ (public prosecutor). arcangeli,-- "the jolly learned man of middle age, cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law, mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use, despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh, constant to the devotion of the hearth, still captive in those dear domestic ties!"-- is represented, with fine grotesque humour, in the very act of making his speech, pre-occupied, all the while he "wheezes out law and whiffles latin forth," with a birthday-feast in preparation for his eight-year-old son, little giacinto, the pride of his heart. the effect is very comic, though the alternation or intermixture of lawyer's-latin and domestic arrangements produces something which is certainly, and perhaps happily, without parallel in poetry. his defence is, and is intended to be, mere quibbling. _causâ honoris_ is the whole pith and point of his plea: pompilia's guilt he simply takes for granted. bottini, the exact opposite in every way of his adversary,-- "a man of ready smile and facile tear, improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck, and language--ah, the gift of eloquence! language that goes as easy as a glove o'er good and evil, smoothens both to one"-- bottini presents us with a full-blown speech, intended to prove pompilia's innocence, though really in every word a confession of her utter depravity. his sole purpose is to show off his cleverness, and he brings forward objections on purpose to prove how well he can turn them off; assumes guilt for the purpose of arguing it into comparative innocence. "yet for the sacredness of argument, ... anything, anything to let the wheels of argument run glibly to their goal!" he pretends to "paint a saint," whom he can still speak of, in tones of earnest admiration, as "wily as an eel." his implied concessions and merely parenthetic denials, his abominable insinuations and suggestions, come, evidently enough, from the instincts of a grovelling mind, literally incapable of appreciating goodness, as well as from professional irritation at one who will "leave a lawyer nothing to excuse, reason away and show his skill about." the whole speech is a capital bit of satire and irony; it is comically clever and delightfully exasperating. after the lawyers have spoken, we have the final judgment, the summing-up and laying bare of the whole matter, fact and motive, in the soliloquy of _the pope_. guido has been tried and found guilty, but, on appeal, the case had been referred to the pope, innocent xii. his decision is made; he has been studying the case from early morning, and now, at the "dim droop of a sombre february day, in the plain closet where he does such work, with, from all peter's treasury, one stool, one table and one lathen crucifix," he passes the actors of the tragedy in one last review, nerving himself to pronounce the condemnation which he feels, as judge, to be due, but which he shrinks from with the natural shrinking of an aged man about to send a strong man to death before him. pompilia he pronounces faultless and more,-- "my rose, i gather for the breast of god;" caponsacchi, not all without fault, yet a true soldier of god, prompt, for all his former seeming frivolousness, to spring forward and redress the wrong, victorious, too, over temptation:-- "was the trial sore? temptation sharp? thank god a second time! why comes temptation but for man to meet and master and make crouch beneath his foot, and so be pedestalled in triumph? pray 'lead us into no such temptation, lord!' yea, but, o thou, whose servants are the bold, lead such temptations by the head and hair, reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, that so he may do battle and have praise!" for guido he can see no excuse, can find no loophole for mercy, and but little hope of penitence or salvation, and he signs the death-warrant. "for the main criminal i have no hope except in such a suddenness of fate. i stood at naples once, a night so dark, i could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. so may the truth be flashed out by one blow, and guido see; one instant, and be saved." the whole monologue is of different order from all the others. every one but this expresses a more or less partial and fragmentary view. _tertium quid_ alone makes any pretence at impartiality, and his is the result of indifference, not of justice. the pope's speech is long, slow, discoursive, full of aged wisdom, dignity and nobility. the latter part of it, containing some of browning's most characteristic philosophy, is by no means out of place, but perfectly coherent and appropriate to the character of the speaker. last of all comes the second and final speech of _guido_, "the same man, another voice," as he "speaks and despairs, the last night of his life," before the cardinal acciaiuoli and abate panciatichi, two old friends, who have come to obtain his confession, absolve him, and accompany him to the scaffold:-- "the tiger-cat screams now, that whined before, that pried and tried and trod so gingerly, till in its silkiness the trap-teeth join; then you know how the bristling fury foams. they listen, this wrapped in his folds of red, while his feet fumble for the filth below; the other, as beseems a stouter heart, working his best with beads and cross to ban the enemy that come in like a flood spite of the standard set up, verily and in no trope at all, against him there: for at the prison-gate, just a few steps outside, already, in the doubtful dawn, thither, from this side and from that, slow sweep and settle down in silence solidly, crow-wise, the frightful brotherhood of death." we have here the completed portrait of guido, a portrait perhaps unsurpassed as a whole by any of browning's studies in the complexities of character. in his first speech he fought warily, and with delicate skill of fence, for life. here, says mr. swinburne, "a close and dumb soul compelled into speech by mere struggle and stress of things, labours in literal translation and accurate agony at the lips of guido." hopeless, but impelled by the biting frenzy of despair, he pours out on his awe-stricken listeners a wild flood of entreaty, defiance, ghastly and anguished humour, flattery, satire, raving blasphemy and foaming impenitence. his desperate venom and blasphemous raillery is part despair, part calculated horror. in his last revolt against death and all his foes, he snatches at any weapon, even truth, that may serve his purpose and gain a reprieve:-- "i thought you would not slay impenitence, but teazed, from men you slew, contrition first,-- i thought you had a conscience ... would you send a soul straight to perdition, dying frank an atheist?" how much of truth there is in it all we need not attempt to decide. it is not likely that guido could pretend to be much worse than he really was, though he unquestionably heightens the key of his crime, working up to a pitch of splendid ferocity almost sublime, from a malevolence rather mean than manly. at the last, struck suddenly, as he sees death upon him, from his pretence of defiant courage, he hurls down at a blow the whole structure of lies, and lays bare at once his own malignant cowardice and the innocence of his murdered wife:--is it with a touch of remorse, of saving penitence? "nor is it in me to unhate my hates,-- i use up my last strength to strike once more old pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face, to trample underfoot the whine and wile of beast violante,--and i grow one gorge to loathingly reject pompilia's pale poison my hasty hunger took for food. a strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk, no cloying cups, no sickly sweet of scent, but sustenance at root, a bucketful. how else lived that athenian who died so, drinking hot bull's blood, fit for men like me? i lived and died a man, and take man's chance, honest and bold: right will be done to such. who are these you have let descend my stair? ha, their accursed psalm! lights at the sill! is it 'open' they dare bid you? treachery! sirs, have i spoken one word all this while out of the world of words i had to say? not one word! all was folly--i laughed and mocked! sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie, is--save me notwithstanding! life is all! i was just stark mad,--let the madman live pressed by as many chains as you please pile! don't open! hold me from them! i am yours, i am the granduke's,--no, i am the pope's! abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god, ... pompilia, will you let them murder me?" the coward's agony of the fear of death has never been rendered in words so truthful or so terrible. last of all comes the epilogue, entitled _the book and the ring_, giving an account of count guido's execution, in the form of contemporary letters, real and imaginary; with an extract from the augustinian's sermon on pompilia, and other documents needed to wind off the threads of the story. _the ring and the book_ was the first important work which browning wrote after the death of his wife, and her memory holds in it a double shrine: at the opening an invocation, at the close a dedication. i quote the invocation: the words are sacred, and nothing remains to be said of them except that they are worthy of the dead and of the living. "o lyric love, half-angel and half-bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,-- boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue, and sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- when the first summons from the darkling earth reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, and bared them of the glory--to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- this is the same voice: can thy soul know change? hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! never may i commence my song, my due to god who best taught song by gift of thee, except with bent head and beseeching hand-- that still, despite the distance and the dark, what was, again may be; some interchange of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, some benediction anciently thy smile: --never conclude, but raising hand and head thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn for all hope, all sustainment, all reward, their utmost up and on,--so blessing back in those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, some whiteness which, i judge, thy face makes proud, some wanness where, i think, thy foot may fall!" footnotes: [footnote : _handbook_, p. .] [footnote : swinburne, _essays and studies_, p. .] . balaustion's adventure: including a transcript from euripides. [published in august, . dedication: "to the countess cowper.--if i mention the simple truth: that this poem absolutely owes its existence to you,--who not only suggested, but imposed on me as a task, what has proved the most delightful of may-month amusements--i shall seem honest, indeed, but hardly prudent; for, how good and beautiful ought such a poem to be!--euripides might fear little; but i, also, have an interest in the performance: and what wonder if i beg you to suffer that it make, in another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at your feet?--r. b., london, july , ." (_poetical works_, , vol. xi. pp. - ).] the episode which supplies the title of _balaustion's adventure_ was suggested by the familiar story told by plutarch in his life of nicias: that after the ruin of the sicilian expedition, those of the athenian captives who could repeat any poetry of euripides were set at liberty, or treated with consideration, by the syracusans. in browning's poem, balaustion tells her four girl-friends the story of her "adventure" at syracuse, where, shortly before, she had saved her own life and the lives of a ship's-company of her friends by reciting the play of _alkestis_ to the euripides-loving townsfolk. after a brief reminiscence of the adventure, which has gained her (besides life, and much fame, and the regard of euripides) a lover whom she is shortly to marry, she repeats, for her friends, the whole play, adding, as she speaks the words of euripides, such other words of her own as may serve to explain or help to realise the conception of the poet. in other words, we have a transcript or re-telling in monologue of the whole play, interspersed with illustrative comments; and after this is completed balaustion again takes up the tale, presents us with a new version of the story of alkestis, refers by anticipation to a poem of mrs. browning and a picture of sir frederick leighton, and ends exultantly:-- "and all came--glory of the golden verse, and passion of the picture, and that fine frank outgush of the human gratitude which saved our ship and me, in syracuse,-- ay, and the tear or two which slipt perhaps away from you, friends, while i told my tale, --it all came of the play which gained no prize! why crown whom zeus has crowned in soul before?" it will thus be seen that the "transcript from euripides" is the real occasion of the poem, balaustion's adventure, though graphically described, and even balaustion herself, though beautifully and vividly brought before us, being of secondary importance. the "adventure," as it has been said, is the amber in which browning has embalmed the _alkestis_. the play itself is rendered in what is rather an interpretation than a translation; an interpretation conceived in the spirit of the motto taken from mrs. browning's _wine of cyprus_:-- "our euripides, the human, with his droppings of warm tears, and his touches of things common till they rose to touch the spheres." browning has no sympathy with those who impute to euripides a sophistic rather than a pathetic intention; and it is conceivable that the "task" which lady cowper imposed upon him was to show, by some such method of translation and interpretation, the warm humanity, deep pathos, right construction and genuine truth to nature of the drama. with this end in view, browning has woven the thread of the play into a sort of connected narrative, translating, with almost uniform literalness of language, the whole of the play as it was written by euripides, but connecting it by comments, explanations, hints and suggestions; analyzing whatever may seem not easily to be apprehended, or not unlikely to be misapprehended; bringing out by a touch or a word some delicate shade of meaning, some subtle fineness of idea or intention.[ ] a more creative piece of criticism can hardly be found, not merely in poetry, but even in prose. perhaps it shares in some degree the splendid fault of creative criticism by occasionally lending, not finding, the noble qualities which we are certainly made to see in the work itself. the translation, though not literal in form, is literal in substance, and it is rendered into careful and expressive blank verse. owing to the scheme on which it is constructed, the choruses could not be rendered into lyrical verse; while, for the same reason, a few passages here and there are omitted, or only indicated by a word or so in passing. the omitted passages are very few in number; but it is not always easy to see why they should have been omitted.[ ] browning's canon of translation is "to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language," and here, certainly, he has observed his rule. notwithstanding the greater difficulty of the metrical form, and the far greater temptation to "brighten up" a version by the use of paraphrastic but sonorous effects, it is improbable that any prose translation could be more faithful. and not merely is browning literal in the sense of following the original word for word, he gives the exact root-meaning of words which a literal translator would consider himself justified in taking in their general sense. occasionally a literality of this sort is less easily intelligible to the general reader than the more obvious word would have been; but, except in a very few instances, the whole translation is not less clear and forcible than it is exact. whether or not the _alkestis_ of browning is quite the _alkestis_ of euripides, there is no doubt that this literal, yet glorified and vivified translation of a greek play has added a new poem to english literature. the blank verse of _balaustion's adventure_ is somewhat different from that of its predecessor, _the ring and the book_: to my own ear, at least, it is by no means so original or so fine. it is indeed more restrained, but browning seems to be himself working under a sort of restraint, or perhaps upon a theory of the sort of versification appropriate to classical themes. something of frank vigour, something of flexibility and natural expressiveness, is lost, but, on the other hand, there is often a rich colour in the verse, a lingering perfume and sweetness in the melody, which has a new and delicate charm of its own. footnotes: [footnote : note, for instance, the admirable exposition and defence of the famous and ill-famed altercation between pheres and admetos: one of the keenest bits of explanatory analysis in mr. browning's works. or observe how beautifully human the dying alkestis becomes as he interprets for her, and how splendid a humanity the jovial herakles puts on.] [footnote : the two speeches of eumelos, not without a note of pathos, are scarcely represented by-- "the children's tears ran fast bidding their father note the eye-lids' stare, hands'-droop, each dreadful circumstance of death."] . prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society. [published in december, . (_poetical works_, vol. xi. pp. - ).] _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_[ ] is a blank verse monologue, supposed to be spoken, in a musing day-dream, by louis napoleon, while emperor of the french, and calling himself, to the delight of ironical echoes, the "saviour of society." the work is equally distant in spirit from the branding satire and righteous wrath of victor hugo's _châtiments_ and _napoléon le petit_, and from lord beaconsfield's _couleur de rose_ portrait, in _endymion_, of the nominally pseudonymous prince florestan. it is neither a denunciation nor a eulogy, nor yet altogether an impartial delineation. it is an "apology," with much the same object as those of bishop blougram or mr. sludge, the medium: "by no means to prove black white or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less of self-illusion reconcile itself to itself."[ ] the poem is very hard reading, perhaps as a whole the hardest intellectual exercise in browning's work, but this arises not so much from the obscurity of its ideas and phrases as from the peculiar complexity of its structure. to apprehend it we must put ourselves at a certain standpoint, which is not easy to reach. the monologue as a whole represents, as we only learn at the end, not a direct speech to a real person in england, but a mere musing over a cigar in the palace in france. it is divided into two distinct sections, which need to be kept clearly apart in the mind. the first section, up to the line, more than half-way through, "something like this the unwritten chapter reads," is a direct self-apology. prince hohenstiel-schwangau puts forward what he represents as his theory of practice. it is founded on the principle of _laisser-faire_, and resolves itself into conformity: concurrence with things as they are, with society as it is. he finds existing institutions, not indeed perfect, but sufficiently good for practical purposes; and he conceives his mission to be that of a builder on existing foundations, that of a social conservator, not of a social reformer: "to do the best with the least change possible." on his own showing, he has had this single aim in view from first to last, and on this ground, that of expediency, he explains and defends every act of his tortuous and vacillating policy. he has had his ambitions and ideals of giving freedom to italy, for example, but he has set them aside in the interests of his own people and for what he holds to be their more immediate needs. so far the direct apology. he next proceeds to show what he might have done, but did not, the ideal course as it is held; commenting the while, as "sagacity," upon the imaginary new version of his career. his comments represent his real conduct, and they are such as he assumes would naturally be made on the "ideal" course by the very critics who have censured his actual temporising policy. the final pages contain an involuntary confession that, even in his own eyes, prince hohenstiel is not quite satisfied with either his conduct or his defence of it. to separate the truth from the falsehood in this dramatic monologue has not been browning's intention, and it need not be ours. it may be repeated that browning is no apologist for louis napoleon: he simply calls him to the front, and, standing aside, allows him to speak for himself.[ ] in his speech under these circumstances we find just as much truth entangled with just as much sophistry as we might reasonably expect. here, we get what seems the genuine truth; there, in what appears to the speaker a satisfactory defence, we see that he is simply exposing his own moral defect; again, like bishop blougram, he "says true things, but calls them by wrong names." passages of the last kind are very frequent; are, indeed, to be found everywhere throughout the poem; and it is in these that browning unites most cleverly the vicarious thinking due to his dramatic subject, and the good honest thought which we never fail to find dominant in his most exceptional work. the prince gives utterance to a great deal of very true and very admirable good sense; we are at liberty to think him insincere in his application of it, but an axiom remains true, even if it be wrongly applied. the versification of the poem is everywhere vigorous, and often fine; perhaps the finest passage it contains is that referring to louis napoleon's abortive dreams on behalf of italy. "ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine for ever! crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, alive with tremors in the shaggy growth of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there imparting exultation to the hills! sweep of the swathe when only the winds walk and waft my words above the grassy sea under the blinding blue that basks o'er rome-- hear ye not still--'be italy again?' and ye, what strikes the panic to your heart? decrepit council-chambers,--where some lamp drives the unbroken black three paces off from where the greybeards huddle in debate, dim cowls and capes, and midmost glimmers one like tarnished gold, and what they say is doubt, and what they think is fear, and what suspends the breath in them is not the plaster-patch time disengages from the painted wall where rafael moulderingly bids adieu, nor tick of the insect turning tapestry to dust, which a queen's finger traced of old; but some word, resonant, redoubtable, of who once felt upon his head a hand whereof the head now apprehends his foot." footnotes: [footnote : the name _hohenstiel-schwangau_ is formed from hohen schwangau, one of the castles of the late king of bavaria.] [footnote : james thomson on _the ring and the book_.] [footnote : i find in a letter of browning, which mrs orr has printed in her _life and letters of browning_ ( ), a reference to "what the editor of the _edinburgh_ calls my eulogium on the second empire--which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be--'a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of england'--it is just what i imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself."] . fifine at the fair. [published in (_poetical works_, vol. xi. pp. - ).] _fifine at the fair_ is a monologue at once dramatic and philosophical. its arguments, like those of _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, are part truth, part sophistry. the poem is prefaced by a motto from molière's _don juan_, in which donna elvira suggests to her husband, with a bitter irony, the defence he ought to make for himself. don juan did not take the hint. browning has done so. the genesis of the poem and the special form it has assumed are further explained by the following passage from mrs. orr:-- "mr. browning was, with his family, at pornic, many years ago, and there saw the gypsy who is the original of fifine. his fancy was evidently set roaming by her audacity, her strength--the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. as he laid down the theory, mr. browning would be speaking in his own person. but he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified don juan would grow up under his pen."[ ] this modified don juan is the spokesman of the poem: not the "splendid devil" of tirso de molina, but a modern gentleman, living at pornic, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophical person, "of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will." strolling through the fair with his wife, he expatiates on the charm of a bohemian existence, and, more particularly, on the charms of one fifine, a rope-dancer, whose performance he has witnessed. urged by the troubled look of his wife, he launches forth into an elaborate defence of inconstancy in love, and consequently of the character of his admiration for fifine. he starts by arguing:-- "that bodies show me minds, that, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures, and sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,-- all by demonstrating the value of fifine!" he then applies his method to the whole of earthly life, finally resolving it into the principle:-- "all's change, but permanence as well. * * * * * truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. the individual soul works through the shows of sense, (which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) up to an outer soul as individual too; and, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, and reach at length 'god, man, or both together mixed.'" last of all, just as his speculations have come to an end in an earnest profession of entire love to his wife, and they pause for a moment on the threshold of the villa, he receives a note from fifine. "oh, threaten no farewell! five minutes shall suffice to clear the matter up. i go, and in a trice return; five minutes past, expect me! if in vain-- why, slip from flesh and blood, and play the ghost again!" he exceeds the allotted five minutes. elvire takes him at his word; and, as we seem to be told in the epilogue, husband and wife are reconciled only in death. such is the barest outline of the structure and purport of the poem. but no outline can convey much notion of the wide range, profound significance and infinite ingenuity of the arguments; of the splendour and vigour of the poetry; or of the subtle consistency and exquisite truth of the character-painting. small in amount as is this last in proportion to the philosophy, it is of very notable kind and quality. not only the speaker, but fifine, and still more elvire, are quickened into life by graphic and delicate touches. if we except lucrezia in _andrea del sarto_, in no other monologue is the presence and personality of the silent or seldom-speaking listener so vividly felt. we see the wronged wife elvire, we know her, and we trace the very progress of her moods, the very changes in her face, as she listens to the fluent talk of her husband. don juan (if we may so call him) is a distinct addition to browning's portrait-gallery. let no one suppose him to be a mere mouthpiece for dialectical disquisitions. he is this certainly, but his utterances are tinged with individual colour. this fact which, from the artistic point of view, is an inestimable advantage, is apt to prove, as in the case of prince hohenstiel, somewhat of a practical difficulty. "the clearest way of showing where he uses ( ) truth, ( ) sophism, ( ) a mixture of both--is to say that wherever he speaks of fifine (whether as type or not) in relation to himself and his own desire for truth, or right living with his wife, he is sophistical: wherever he speaks directly of his wife's value to him he speaks truth with an alloy of sophism; and wherever he speaks impersonally he speaks the truth.[ ]" keeping this in mind, we can easily separate the grain from the chaff; and the grain is emphatically worth storing. perhaps no poem of browning's contains so much deep and acute comment on life and conduct: few, such superabounding wealth of thought and imagery. browning is famed for his elaborate and original similes; but i doubt if he has conceived any with more originality, or worked them out with richer elaboration, than those of the swimmer, of the carnival, of the druid monument, of fifine herself. nor has he often written more original poetry than some of the more passionate or imaginative passages of the poem. the following lines, describing an imaginary face representing horror, have all the vivid sharpness of an actual vision or revelation:-- "observe how brow recedes, head shudders back on spine, as if one haled the hair, would have the full-face front what pin-point eye's sharp stare announces; mouth agape to drink the flowing fate, while chin protrudes to meet the burst o' the wave; elate almost, spurred on to brave necessity, expend all life left, in one flash, as fire does at its end." just as good in a different style, is this quaint and quiet landscape:-- "for, arm in arm, we two have reached, nay, passed, you see, the village-precinct; sun sets mild on saint-marie-- we only catch the spire, and yet i seem to know what's hid i' the turn o' the hill: how all the graves must glow soberly, as each warms its little iron cross, flourished about with gold, and graced (if private loss be fresh) with stiff rope-wreath of yellow, crisp bead-blooms which tempt down birds to pay their supper, mid the tombs, with prattle good as song, amuse the dead awhile, if couched they hear beneath the matted camomile." the poem is written in alexandrine couplets, and is, i believe, the only english poem of any length written in this metre since drayton's _polyolbion_. browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best french verse, but he allows himself occasionally two licenses not used in french since the time of marot: ( ) the addition of an unaccented syllable at the end of the first half of the verse, as:-- "'twas not for every gawain to gaze upon the grail!"-- ( ) the addition of two syllables, making seven instead of six beats. "what good were else i' the drum and fife? o pleasant land of france!" footnotes: [footnote : _handbook_, p. .] [footnote : j.t. nettleship on "fifine at the fair" (_browning society's papers_, part ii. p. ). mr. nettleship's elaborate analysis of the poem is a most helpful and admirable piece of work.] . red cotton night-cap country; or, turf and towers. [published in (_poetical works_, , vol xii. pp. - ).] _red cotton night-cap country_ is a story of real life, true in all its facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years before: st. aubin, in normandy (the st. rambert of the poem). it is the story of the life of antoine mellerio, the paris jeweller, whose tragic death occurred at st. aubin on the th april . a suit concerning his will, decided only in the summer of , supplied browning with the materials of his tragedy. in the first proof of the poem the real names of persons and places were given; but they were changed before publication, and are now in every case fictitious. the second edition of mrs. orr's _handbook_ contains a list of the real names, which i subjoin.[ ] the book is dedicated to miss thackeray (mrs. richmond ritchie), and the whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism. told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the _dramatis persona_ is robert browning. it is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony. its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of carlyle. in such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all the impressiveness of contrast. the story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy: like several of browning's later books, it is a study in evil. the two characters who fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too, are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." the character of miranda, the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special subtlety; analysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the experienced operator. miranda is swayed through life by two opposing tendencies, for he is of mixed castilian and french blood. he is mastered at once by two passions, earthly and religious, illicit love and catholic devotion: he cannot let go the one and he will not let go the other; he would enjoy himself on the "turf" without abandoning the shelter of the "towers." his life is spent in trying to effect a compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down his house of life. clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination. "'but--loved him?' friend, i do not praise her love! true love works never for the loved one so, nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away, love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself. 'worship not me, but god!' the angels urge!" this man and woman are analysed with exquisite skill; but they are not in the strict sense inventions, creations: we understand rather than see them. only towards the end, where the facts leave freer play for the poetic impulse, do they rise into sharp vividness of dramatic life and speech. nothing in the poem equals in intensity the great soliloquy of miranda before his strange and suicidal leap, and the speech of clara to the "cousinry." here we pass at a bound from chronicling to creation. as a narrative, _red cotton night-cap country_ has all the interest of a novel, with the concentration and higher pitch of poetry. less ingenious and philosophical than _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ and _fifine at the fair_, it is far more intimately human, more closely concerned with "man's thoughts and loves and hates," with the manifestations of his eager and uneasy spirit, in strange shapes, on miry roads, in dubious twilights. of all browning's works it is perhaps the easiest to read; no tale could be more straightforward, no language more lucid, no verse more free from harshness or irregularity, the versification, indeed, is exceptionally smooth and measured, seldom rising into strong passion, but never running into volubility. here and there are short passages, which i can scarcely detach for quotation, with a singular charm of vague remote music. the final summary of clara and miranda, excellent and convenient alike, may be severed without much damage from the context. "clara, i hold the happier specimen,-- it may be, through that artist-preference for work complete, inferiorly proposed, to incompletion, though it aim aright. morally, no! aspire, break bounds! i say, endeavour to be good, and better still, and best! success is nought, endeavour's all. but intellect adjusts the means to ends, tries the low thing, and leaves it done, at least; no prejudice to high thing, intellect would do and will do, only give the means. miranda, in my picture-gallery, presents a blake; be clara--meissonnier! merely considered so, by artist, mind! for, break through art and rise to poetry, bring art to tremble nearer, touch enough the verge of vastness to inform our soul what orb makes transit through the dark above, and there's the triumph!--there the incomplete, more than completion, matches the immense,-- then, michelagnolo against the world!" footnotes: [footnote : page . _the firm miranda_--mellerio brothers. page . _st. rambert_--st aubin; _joyeux, joyous gard_--lion, lionesse. page . _vire_--caen. page . _st. rambertese_--st. aubinese. page . _londres_--douvres; _london_--dover; _la roche_--courcelle; _monlieu_--bernières; _villeneuve_--langrune; _pons_--luc; _la ravissante_--la délivrande. page . _raimbaux_--bayeux. page . _morillon_--hugonin; _mirecourt_--bonnechose; _miranda_--mellerio. page . _new york_--madrid. page . _clairvaux_--tailleville. page . _madrilene_--turinese. page . _gonthier_--bény; _rousseau_--voltaire; _léonce_--antoine. page . _of "firm miranda, london and new york"_--"mellerio brothers"--meller, people say. page . _rare vissante_--del yvrande; _aldabert_--regnobert. page . _eldobert_--ragnebert; _mailleville_--beaudoin. page . _chaumont_--quelen; _vertgalant_--talleyrand. page . _ravissantish_--délivrandish. page . _clara de millefleurs_--anna de beaupré; _coliseum street_--miromesnil street. page . _steiner_--mayer; _commercy_--larocy; _sierck_--metz. page . _muhlhausen_--debacker. page , _carlino centofanti_--miranda di mongino. page . _portugal_--italy. page . "_gustave_"--"alfred." page . _vaillant_--mériel. page . _thirty-three_--twenty-five. . _beaumont_--pasquier. page . _sceaux_--garges. page . _luc de la maison rouge_--jean de la becquetière; _claise_--vire; _maude_--anne. page . _dionysius_--eliezer; _scolastica_--elizabeth. page . _twentieth_--thirteenth. page . _fricquot_--"picot."--mrs. orr's _handbook_, second edition, pp. - .] . aristophanes' apology: including a transcript from euripides; being the last adventure of balaustion. [published in april, . (_poetical works_, , vol. xiii. pp. - ).] _aristophanes' apology_, as its sub-title indicates, is a kind of sequel to _balaustion's adventure_. it is the record, in balaustion's words, of an adventure which happened to her after her marriage with euthukles. on the day when the news of euripides' death reached athens, as balaustion and her husband were sitting at home, toward nightfall, aristophanes, coming home with his revellers from the banquet which followed his triumph in the play of _thesmophoriazousai_, burst in upon them. "there stood in person aristophanes. and no ignoble presence! on the bulge of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,-- true, the veins swelled, blue net-work, and there surged a red from cheek to temple, then retired as if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,-- was never nursed by temperance or health. but huge the eyeballs rolled black native fire, imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout aggressive, while the beak supreme above, while the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, beard whitening under like a vinous foam, these made a glory, of such insolence-- i thought,--such domineering deity hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine for his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path which, purpling, recognized the conqueror. impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, but that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: still, sensuality was grown a rite." he, too, has just heard of euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to euripides." the revellers retire abashed before balaustion; he alone remains. from the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. when his "apology" is ended, balaustion replies, censuring him pretty severely, making adroit use of the licence of a "stranger" and a woman, and defending euripides against him. for a further (and the best) defence, she reads the whole of the _herakles_, which browning here translates. aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur: he flings them a snatch of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the _frogs_, and is gone. and now, a year after, as the couple return to rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled athens, balaustion dictates to euthukles her recollection of the "adventure," for the double purpose of putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the present sorrow. it will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts. there is, first, the apology of aristophanes, second, the translation of the play of euripides. _herakles_, or, as it is more generally known, _hercules furens_, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank verse and varied choric measures. it is not, as was the case with _alkestis_ worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted. we have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play. these are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare beauty (as in the famous "ode bewailing age," and that other on the labours of herakles). precisely the same characteristics that we have found in the translation of the _alkestis_ are here again to be found, and all that i said on the former, considered apart from its setting, may be applied to the latter. we have the same literalness (again with a few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general clearness and charm. the original part of the book is of far closer texture and more remarkable order than "the amber which embalms _alkestis_" the first adventure of balaustion; but it has less human emotion, less general appeal. it is nothing less than a resuscitation of the old controversy between aristophanes and euripides; a resuscitation, not only of the controversy, but of the combatants. "local colour" is laid on with an unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really greek. there is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: athenian customs, greek names, the plays of euripides, above all, the plays of aristophanes. "every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows mr. browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was bunyan in his bible." the result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life of the jungle. browning's attitude towards the controversy, the side he takes as champion of euripides, is distinctly shown, not merely in balaustion's statement and defence, but in the whole conduct of the piece. aristophanes, though on his own defence, is set in a decidedly unfavourable light; and no one, judging from browning's work, can doubt as to his opinion of the relative qualities of the two great poets. it is possible even to say there is a partiality in the presentment. but it must be remembered on the other hand that browning is not concerned simply with the question of art, but with the whole bearings, artistic and ethical, of the contest; and it must be remembered that the aim of comedy is intrinsically lower and more limited than that of tragedy, that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller issues and more temporary questions; and that euripides may reasonably be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of the riddle of life, than his mighty assailant. this is how aristophanes has been described, by one who should know:-- "he is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness. we may build up a conception of his powers if we mount rabelais upon hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of shelley, give him a vein of heinrich heine, and cover him with the mantle of the anti-jacobin, adding (that there may be some irish in him) a dash of grattan, before he is in motion."[ ] now the "titanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in browning's most vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some strange fashion, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and idealised the otherwise congruous figure. not that this is overlooked or forgotten: it is brought out admirably in several places, notably in the fine song put into the mouth of aristophanes at the close; but it is scarcely so prominent as lovers of him could desire. it is possible, too, that browning somewhat over-accentuates his earnestness; not his fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and exhibited it. "my soul bade fight": yes, but "laugh," too, and laugh for laughter's as well as fight for principle's sake. this, again, is merely a matter of detail, of shading. there can be little doubt that the whole general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living and breathing outline. his apology is presented in browning's familiar manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry. as a piece of dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies; and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital knowledge of the attic drama and the work and personality of aristophanes and euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama as a criticism of life. footnotes: [footnote : george meredith, _on the idea of comedy_.] . the inn album. [published in november, . (_poetical works_, , vol xii. pp. - .) translated into german in : "_das fremdenbuch_ von robert browning. aus dem englischen von e. leo. hamburg: w. mauke söhne."] the story of _the inn album_ is founded on fact, though it is not, like _red cotton night-cap country_, an almost literal transcript from life. the characters of the poem are four, all unnamed: a young "polished snob," an impoverished middle-aged nobleman, a woman, whom he had seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men. of these characters, the only one whom browning has invented is the girl, through whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about. but he has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts. the career of the elder man, which came to an end in , did not by any means terminate with the events recorded in the poem. _the inn album_ is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that darkness visible. it is profoundly sad; yet "these things are life: and life, they say, is worthy of the muse." it would also be profoundly depressing but for the art which has wrung a grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to the height of tragedy. out of materials that might be melodramatic, browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is single, intense and overpowering. notwithstanding the clash of physical catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it browning has achieved that highest of achievements: the right, vivid and convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its extremes of possible action and emotion. it is not perfect: the colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though not in the great scenes, to the confines of a bastard realism. but in the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life. the four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure drama than any other of browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form) are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the characters in _red cotton night-cap country_, or than the character in _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_. the "good gay girl," serving her unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. the elder man is one of browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst characters even he has ever investigated. he is at once bad, clever and cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless. he prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. but now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. the cause of it he traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal splendour of soul he saw only when too late. it is significant of him that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as a mistake on his part; and his attitude is not that of remorse, but of one who has missed a chance. when, after four years, he meets unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. in the fact that this passionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation. the character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and convincing. like the man, her development has been arrested and distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. her love was single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it into hate. yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her former self. the subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now while making equally plain what she was in the past. she is a figure not so much pathetic as terrible. pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his mephistopheles, but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. his last speech, with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic things i know. such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a triumph of browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the hardest of all dramatic assumptions. . pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper: with other poems. [published in july, (_poetical works_, , vol. xiv. pp. - ).] _pacchiarotto and other poems_ is the first collection of miscellaneous pieces since the _dramatis personæ_ of . it is somewhat of an exception to the general rule of browning's work. a large proportion of it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it would be at once more correct and concise to call it "robert browning's apology." _pacchiarotto_, _at the "mermaid"_, _house_, _shop_ and _epilogue_, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. the most important part of the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of the fleet, _hervé riel_. the first and longest poem, _of pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_, divides itself into two parts, the first being the humorous rendering of a true anecdote told in vasari, of giacomo pacchiarotto, a sienese painter of the sixteenth century; and the second, a still more mirthful onslaught of the poet upon his critics. the story-- "begun with a chuckle, and throughout timed by raps of the knuckle,"-- is funny enough in itself, and it points an excellent moral; but it is chiefly interesting as a whimsical freak of verse, an extravaganza in staccato. the rhyming is of its kind almost incomparable as a sustained effort in double and triple grotesque rhymes. not even in _hudibras_, not even in _don juan_, is there anything like them. i think all other experiments of the kind, however successful as a whole, let you see now and then that the author has had a hard piece of work to keep up his appearance of ease. in _pacchiarotto_ there is no evidence of the strain. the masque of critics, under the cunning disguise of may-day chimney-sweepers:-- "'we critics as sweeps out your chimbly! much soot to remove from your flue, sir! who spares coal in kitchen an't you, sir! and neighbours complain it's no joke, sir! you ought to consume your own smoke, sir!'"-- this after-part, overflowing with jolly humour and comic scorn, a besom wielded by a laughing giant, is calculated to put the victims in better humour with their executioner than with themselves. browning has had to endure more than most men at the hands of the critics, and he takes in this volume, not in this poem only, a full and a characteristically good-humoured revenge. the _epilogue_ follows up the pendant to _pacchiarotto_. there is the same jolly humour, the same combative self-assertiveness, the same retort _tu quoque_, with a yet more earnest and pungent enforcement. "wine, pulse in might from me! it may never emerge in must from vat, never fill cask nor furnish can, never end sweet, which strong began-- god's gift to gladden the heart of man; but spirit's at proof, i promise that! no sparing of juice spoils what should be fit brewage--wine for me. man's thoughts and loves and hates! earth is my vineyard, these grow there: from grape of the ground, i made or marred my vintage; easy the task or hard, who set it--his praise be my reward! earth's yield! who yearn for the dark blue sea's let them 'lay, pray, bray'[ ]--the addle-pates! mine be man's thoughts, loves, hates!" despite its humorous expression, the view of poetic art contained in these verses is both serious and significant. it is a frank (if defiant) confession of faith. _at the "mermaid"_, a poem of characteristic energy and directness, is a protest against the supposition or assumption that the personality and personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his dramatic work. it protests, at the same time, against the sham melancholy and pseudo-despair which byron made fashionable in poetry:-- "have you found your life distasteful? my life did and does smack sweet. was your youth of pleasure wasteful? mine i saved and hold complete. do your joys with age diminish? when mine fail me, i'll complain. must in death your daylight finish? my sun sets to rise again. * * * * * i find earth not gray but rosy, heaven not grim but fair of hue. do i stoop? i pluck a posy. do i stand and stare? all's blue." _house_ confirms or continues the primary contention in _at the "mermaid"_: this time by the image of a house of life, which some poets may choose to set on view: "for a ticket apply to the publisher." browning not merely denounces but denies the so-called self-revelations of poets. he answers wordsworth's "with this same key shakespeare unlocked his heart," by the characteristic retort:-- "did shakespeare? if so, the less shakespeare he!" in _shop_ we have another keen piece of criticism: a protest against poets who make their shop their home, and their song mere ware for sale. after the personal and critical section we pass to half-a-dozen lyrics: _fears and scruples_, a covert and startling poem, a doctrine embodied in a character; then two beautiful little _pisgah-sights_, a dainty experiment in metre, and in substance the expression of browning's favourite lesson, the worth of earth and the need of the mystery of life; _appearances_, a couple of stanzas whose telling simplicity recalls the lovely earlier lilt, _misconceptions; natural magic_ and _magical nature_, two magical snatches, as perfect as the "first fine careless rapture" of the earlier lyrics. i quote the latter:-- "magical nature. . flower--i never fancied, jewel--i profess you! bright i see and soft i feel the outside of a flower. save but glow inside and--jewel, i should guess you, dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower. . you, forsooth, a flower? nay, my love, a jewel-- jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime! time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel, jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!" but the finest lyric in the volume is _st. martin's summer_, a poem fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as the ghostly visitants at late love's pleasure-bower of whom it sings. i do not think browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant and original quality. _bifurcation_, as its name denotes, is a study of divided paths in life, the paths of love and duty chosen severally by two lovers whose epitaphs browning gives. the moral problem, which is sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open. the poem is an etching, sharp, concise and suggestive. _numpholeptos_ (nymph-entranced) has all the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of burne jones. its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with _st. martin's summer_, but are unlike anything else in browning. it is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life. "still you stand, still you listen, still you smile! still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile, softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft increase so round this heart of mine, that oft i could believe your moonbeam smile has past the pallid limit and, transformed at last, lies, sunlight and salvation--warms the soul it sweetens, softens! * * * * * what means the sad slow silver smile above my clay but pity, pardon?--at the best, but acquiescence that i take my rest, contented to be clay, while in your heaven the sun reserves love for the spirit-seven companioning god's throne they lamp before, --leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o'er by that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon which smiles me slow forgiveness! such the boon i beg? nay, dear ... love, the love whole and sole without alloy!" the action of this soul's tragedy takes place under "the light that never was on sea or land": it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a disembodied soul. _a forgiveness_ is a drama of this world. it is the legitimate successor of the monologues of _men and women_; it may, indeed, be most precisely compared with an earlier monologue, _my last duchess_; and it is, like these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy. like all the best of browning's poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and developed from this central point. it is the story of a love merged in contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged. the personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in browning: a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate. he tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner, with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of a merciless intellect; leading gradually up to a crisis only to be matched by the very finest crises in browning:-- "immersed in thought so deeply, father? sad, perhaps? for whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps --still plain i seem to see!--about his head the idle cloak,--about his heart (instead of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude my vengeance in the cloister's solitude? hardly, i think! as little helped his brow the cloak then, father--as your grate helps now!" the poem is by far the greatest thing in the volume; it is, indeed, one of the very finest examples of browning's psychological subtlety and concentrated dramatic power.[ ] the ballad of _hervé riel_ which has no rival but tennyson's _revenge_ among modern sea-ballads, was written at croisic, th september , and was published in the _cornhill magazine_ for march, in, order that the £ which had been offered for it might be sent to the paris relief fund. it may be named, with the "ride from ghent to aix," as a proof of how simply and graphically browning can write if he likes; how promptly he can stir the blood and thrill the heart. the facts of the story, telling how, after the battle of the hogue, a simple croisic sailor saved all that was left of the french fleet by guiding the vessels into the harbour, are given in the croisic guide-books; and browning has followed them in everything but the very effective end:-- "'since 'tis ask and have, i may-- since the others go ashore-- come! a good whole holiday! leave to go and see my wife, whom i call the belle aurore!' that he asked and that he got,--nothing more." "ce brave homme," says the account, "ne demanda pour récompense d'un service aussi signalé, qu'un _conge absolu_ pour rejoindre sa femme, qu'il nomma la belle aurore." _cenciaja_, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature of a note or appendix to shelley's "superb achievement" _the cenci_. it serves to explain the allusion to the case of paolo santa croce (_cenci_, act v. sc. iv.). browning obtained the facts from a ms. volume of memorials of italian crime, in the possession of sir john simeon, who published it in the series of the philobiblon society.[ ] _filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial_, a grotesque and humorously-told "reminiscence of a.d. ," is, up to stanza , the versification of an anecdote recorded by baldinucci, the artist and art critic ( - ), in his history of painters. the incident with which it concludes is imaginary. footnotes: [footnote : the jocose vindictiveness with which browning returns again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. the above is only one out of four or five instances.] [footnote : it is worth comparing _a forgiveness_ with a poem of very similar motive by leconte de lisle: _le jugement de komor_ (_poèmes barbares_). each is a fine example of its author, in just those qualities for which both poets are eminent: originality and subtlety of subject, pregnant picturesqueness of phrase and situation, and grimly tragic power. the contrast no less than the likeness which exists between them will be evident on a comparison of the two poems.] [footnote : in reference to the title _cenciaja_, and the italian proverb which follows it, _ogni cencio vuol entrare in bucato_, browning stated, in a letter to mr. h.b. forman (printed in his _shelley_, , ii. ), that "'aia' is generally an accumulative yet depreciative termination: 'cenciaja'--a bundle of rags--a trifle. the proverb means, 'every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,' and i used it to deprecate the notion that i intended anything of the kind."] . the agamemnon of Ã�schylus. [published in october, (_poetical works_, , vol. xiii. pp. - ).] browning prefaces his transcript of the _agamemnon_ with a brief introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:-- "if, because of the immense fame of the following tragedy, i wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, i should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. the use of certain allowable constructions which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship, is no violence: but i would be tolerant for once,--in the case of so immensely famous an original,--of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as greek a fashion as english will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for Ã�schylus and get theognis.' i should especially decline,--what may appear to brighten up a passage,--the employment of a new word for some old one--[greek: phonos], or [greek: megas], or [greek: telos], with its congeners, recurring four times in three lines.... further,--if i obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, i should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. and lastly, when presented with these ideas i should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble Ã�schylus." every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage. browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful. throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of Ã�schylus. an incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. but for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the greek in order to fully understand the english. browning has anticipated, but not altogether answered, this objection. for, besides those passages which in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not merely "in as greek a fashion as english will bear," but beyond it: phrases which are native to greek, foreign to english. the choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as english can come to greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at "the ideas of the poet." it is a titan's version of an olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the similitude of greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[ ] footnotes: [footnote : j.a. symonds, _academy_, nov. , .] . la saisiaz: the two poets of croisic. [published in may, . _la saisiaz_ (written november, ), pp. - ; _the two poets of croisic_, pp. - . (_poetical works_, , vol. xiv. pp. - , - ).] in _la saisiaz_ browning reasons of god and the soul, of life here and of life to come. the poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with browning and his sister, in the summer of , at a villa called la saisiaz (the sun) in the mountains near geneva. the first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth. "was ending ending once and always, when you died?" browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning. he assumes two postulates, and two only, that god exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's existence continues. "without the want, life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant, makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away, all we have to do is surely not endure another day. this life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy: life done-- out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none. 'but the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute; both together make the music: either marred and all is mute." this hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. but, to his own mind at least, he finds that "sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate. by necessity ordained thus? i shall bear as best i can; by a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? no, as i am man!" yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. having arrived at this point, browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between "fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and "reason." he here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty. if it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage. again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time? he ends, therefore, with a "hope--no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope," which amounts practically to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line-- "he at least believed in soul, was very sure of god!" _the two poets of croisic_ is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of paul desforges-maillard, whose story furnished piron with the matter of his _métromanie_. the first of the "two poets" is one rené gentilhomme, born , once page to the prince of condé, afterwards court-poet to louis xiii. his story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of desforges, which browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case. paul-briand maillard, self-surnamed desforges, was born at croisic, april , : he died at the age of seventy-three. his memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the paris of his day, including no less a person than voltaire. the first part of the story is told pretty literally in browning's pages:--how desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, assumed the title of a woman, and as mlle. malcrais de la vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, mme. mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation. the sequel is somewhat altered. voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion. desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first representation of piron's _métromanie_, in which voltaire's humiliation and the croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered. in his graphic and condensed version of the tale, browning has used a poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative. the poem is written in _ottava rima_, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. it is difficult to see why browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes. the lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line. the result of the innovation is far from successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness. of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:-- "who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope, means recognizing fear; the keener sense of all comprised within our actual scope recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense. who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope henceforward among groundlings? that's offence just as indubitably: stars abound o'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground! so, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: what then? since swiftness gives the charioteer the palm, his hope be in the vivid horse whose neck god clothed with thunder, not the steer sluggish and safe! yoke hatred, crime, remorse, despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, let, through the tumult, break the poet's face radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!" the poem is followed by an exquisite epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of browning's lyrics. the briefer prologue is not less beautiful:-- "such a starved bank of moss till, that may-morn, blue ran the flash across: violets were born! sky--what a scowl of cloud till, near and far, ray on ray split the shroud: splendid, a star! world--how it walled about life with disgrace till god's own smile came out: that was thy face!" . dramatic idyls. [published in may (_poetical works_, , vol. xv. pp. - ).] in the _dramatic idyls_ browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. his idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. that he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, i suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what léon cladel has called _tragiques histoires plébéiennes_. but the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "publican black ned bratts and tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of his majesty napoleon iii., or of even the two poets of croisic. all the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. the motto of the book might be:-- "there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of his life is bound in shallows and in miseries." this idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of browning's poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here. in _martin relph_ (which "embodies," says mrs. orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by mr. browning when he was himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows. martin relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves. the chance is but of an instant's duration. he hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. in that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony. in _ivàn ivànovitch_ (founded on a popular russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold illustration of the theme. the testing-moment comes to the mother, loùscha, and again to ivàn ivànovitch. while the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for god." _halbert and hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the nicomachean ethics of aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form. the crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit. in _ned bratts_ (suggested by the story of "old tod," in bunyan's _life and death of mr. badman_[ ]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _pheidippides_ (the legend of the runner who brought the news of marathon to athens, and died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way. perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to _halbert and hob_. there is hardly in browning a more elemental touch than that of: "a boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his breast." _martin relph_, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _ivàn ivànovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling browning has perhaps never excelled it. nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the effective change from iambs to anapæsts gives their very motion. "was that--wind? anyhow, droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs, snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight! still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate there's no mistaking more! shall i lean out--look--learn the truth whatever it be? pad, pad! at last, i turn-- 'tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in the sledge! an army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge: they increase as they hunt: for i see, through the pine-trunks ranged each side, slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide the four-footed steady advance. the foremost--none may pass: they are elders and lead the line, eye and eye--green-glowing brass! but a long way distant still. droug, save us! he does his best: yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,--one reaches.... how utter the rest?" the setting of the story, the vast motionless russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. there are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "_how otherwise_? asked he." _ned bratts_ takes almost the same position among browning's humorous poems that _ivàn ivànovitch_ does among his narratives. it is a whole comedy in itself. surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. what opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of ned bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? it serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by bunyan and his book. in the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, _pheidippides_, with its clear greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. the measure is of browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem. "so, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute is still 'rejoice!'--his word which brought rejoicing indeed. so is pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a god loved so well he saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began, so to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute: 'athens is saved!' pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed." footnotes: [footnote : at a summer assizes holden at _hartfort_, while the judge was sitting upon the bench, comes this old _tod_ into the court, cloathed in a green suit with his leathern girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his life; and, being come in, he spake aloud as follows: _my lord_, said he, _here is the veryest rogue that breaths upon the face of the earth, ... my lord, there has not been a robbery committed this many years, within so many miles of this place but i have either been at it or privy to it._ "the judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the justices, they agreed to indict him; and so they did, of several felonious actions; to all of which he heartily confessed guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time.... "as for the truth of this story, the relator told me that he was at the same time himself in the court, and stood within less than two yards of old _tod_, when he heard him aloud to utter the words."--bunyan's _life and death of mr. badman_, .] . dramatic idyls. second series. [published in july, . _poetical works_, , vol. xv. pp. - .] the second series of _dramatic idyls_ is bound together, like the first, though somewhat less closely, by a leading idea, which, whether consciously or not, is hinted at in a pointed little prologue: the idea of the paradox of human action, and the apparent antagonism between motive and result. the volume differs considerably from its precursor, and it contains nothing quite equal to the best of the earlier poems. there is more variety, perhaps, but the human interest is less intense, the stories less moving and absorbing. with less humour, there is a much more pronounced element of the grotesque. and most prominent of all is that characteristic of browning which a great critic has called agility of intellect. the first poem, _echetlos_, is full of heroical ardour and firm, manly vigour of movement. like _pheidippides_, it is a legend of marathon. it sings of the mysterious helper who appeared to the greeks, in rustic garb and armed with a plough. "but one man kept no rank and his sole arm plied no spear, as a flashing came and went, and a form i' the van, the rear, brightened the battle up, for he blazed now there, now here. * * * * * did the steady phalanx falter? to the rescue, at the need, the clown was ploughing persia, clearing greek earth of weed, as he routed through the sakian and rooted up the mede." after the battle, the man was nowhere to be seen, and inquiry was made of the oracle. "how spake the oracle? 'care for no name at all! say but just this: we praise one helpful whom we call the holder of the ploughshare. the great deed ne'er grows small.'" with _echetlos_ may be mentioned the virgilian legend of _pan and luna_, a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that "verse of five words, each a boon: arcadia, night, a cloud, pan, and the moon." _clive_, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject, treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series. the story deals with an episode in the life of clive, when, as a young man, he first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught cheating at cards. the poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a subtle analysis and presentation of the character of clive. its structure is quite in browning's best manner: a central situation, illumined by "what double and treble reflection and refraction!" like balzac (whose _honorine_, for instance, is constructed on precisely similar lines) browning often increases the effect of his picture by setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one, related to it in some subtle way. the story of _clive_ obtains emphasis, and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in figure of the old veteran who tells the tale. scarcely anything in the poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old man, sitting, like colonel newcome, solitary in his house among his memories, with his boy away: "i and clive were friends." the arabian tale of _muléykeh_ is the most perfect and pathetic piece in the volume. it is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably clear, simple, yet elevated style. the end is among the great heroic things in poetry. hóseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare, muléykeh the pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped. duhl, the son of sheybán, who envies hóseyn and has endeavoured by every means, but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal her. he enters hóseyn's tent noiselessly by night, saddles muléykeh, and gallops away. in an instant hóseyn is on the back of buhéyseh, the pearl's sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit. "and hóseyn--his blood turns flame, he has learned long since to ride, and buhéyseh does her part,--they gain--they are gaining fast on the fugitive pair, and duhl has ed-dárraj to cross and quit, and to reach the ridge el-sabán,--no safety till that be spied! and buhéyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last, for the pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit. she shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange and queer: buhéyseh is mad with hope--beat sister she shall and must, though duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank. she is near now, nose by tail--they are neck by croup--joy! fear! what folly makes hóseyn shout 'dog duhl, damned son of the dust, touch the right ear and press with your foot my pearl's left flank!' and duhl was wise at the word, and muléykeh as prompt perceived who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey, and a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore. and hóseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved, looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may: then he turned buhéyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore. and, lo, in the sunrise, still sat hóseyn upon the ground weeping: and neighbours came, the tribesmen of bénu-asád in the vale of green er-rass, and they questioned him of his grief; and he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, duhl had wound his way to the nest, and how duhl rode like an ape, so bad! and how buhéyseh did wonders, yet pearl remained with the thief. and they jeered him, one and all: 'poor hóseyn is crazed past hope! how else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite! to have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl, and here were muléykeh again, the eyed like an antelope, the child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!' 'and the beaten in speed!' wept hóseyn: 'you never have loved my pearl!'" there remain _pietro of abano_[ ] and _doctor_ ----. the latter, a talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of browning's poems: it is rather farce than humour. the former is a fine piece of genuine grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and clever phrasing and rhyming. it is written in an elaborate comic metre of browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music. the poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "teutonic grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which browning is as great a master in poetry as carlyle in prose. the volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation. "thus i wrote in london, musing on my betters," browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of dante should be foisted upon himself. indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable. "'touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke vitalising virtue: song would song succeed sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!' indeed? rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage." footnotes: [footnote : pietro of abano was an italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at abano, near padua, in , died about . he had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the inquisition. he was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the inquisition burnt his portrait. his reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. the book referred to in it is his principal work, _conciliator differentiarum quæ inter philosophos et medicos versantur_. mantua, .] . jocoseria. [published in march, (_poetical works_, , pp. - ).] the name _jocoseria_ (mentioned by browning in its original connection, melander's "jocoseria," in the notes to _paracelsus_) expresses very cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and fusion of grave and gay. the book is not, as a whole, so intense or so brilliant as the first and second series of _dramatic idyls_, but one or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by anything in either volume. the longest poem, though by no means the best is the imaginary rabbinical legend of _jochanan hakkadosh_ (john the saint), which browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[ ] "to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing dispersedly, in fragments of rabbinical writing, [the name, 'collection of many lies,' follows in hebrew,] from which i might have helped myself more liberally." it is written in _terza rima_, like _doctor_ ---- in the second series of _dramatic idyls_, and is supposed to be told by "the jew aforesaid" in order to "make amends and justify our mishna." that it may to some extent do, but it seems to me that its effectiveness as an example of the serio-grotesque style would have been heightened by some metre less sober and placid than the _terza rima_; by rhythm and rhyme as audacious and characteristic as the rhythm and the rhymes of _pietro of abano_, for instance. _ixion_, a far finer poem than _jochanan hakkadosh_, is, no doubt, an equally sincere utterance of personal belief. the poem is a monologue, in unrhymed hexameters and pentameters. it presents the old myth in a new light. ixion is represented as the prometheus of man's righteous revolt against the tyranny of an unjust god. the poem is conceived in a spirit of intense earnestness, and worked out with great vigour and splendour of diction. for passion and eloquence nothing in it surpasses the finely culminating last lines, of which i can but tear a few, only too barbarously, from their context:-- "what is the influence, high o'er hell, that turns to a rapture pain--and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope? what is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle? back must i fall, confess 'ever the weakness i fled'? no, for beyond, far, far is a purity all-unobstructed! zeus was zeus--not man: wrecked by his weakness i whirl. out of the wreck i rise--past zeus to the potency o'er him! i--to have hailed him my friend! i--to have clasped her--my love! pallid birth of my pain,--where light, where light is, aspiring thither i rise, whilst thou--zeus, keep the godship and sink!" while _ixion_ is the noblest and most heroically passionate of these poems, _adam, lilith, and eve_, is the most pregnant and suggestive. browning has rarely excelled it in certain qualities, hardly found in any other poet, of pungency, novelty, and penetrating bitter-sweetness. "adam, lilith, and eve. one day it thundered and lightened. two women, fairly frightened, sank to their knees, transformed, transfixed, at the feet of the man who sat betwixt; and 'mercy!' cried each, 'if i tell the truth of a passage in my youth!' said this: 'do you mind the morning i met your love with scorning? as the worst of the venom left my lips, i thought, "if, despite this lie, he strips the mask from my soul with a kiss--i crawl, his slave,--soul, body and all!"' said that: 'we stood to be married; the priest, or someone, tarried; "if paradise-door prove locked?" smiled you. i thought, as i nodded, smiling too, "did one, that's away, arrive--nor late nor soon should unlock hell's gate!"' it ceased to lighten and thunder. up started both in wonder, looked round, and saw that the sky was clear, then laughed, 'confess you believed us, dear!' 'i saw through the joke!' the man replied they seated themselves beside." much of the same power is shown in _cristina and monaldeschi_,[ ] a dramatic monologue with all the old vigour of browning's early work of that kind; not only keen and subtle, but charged with a sharp electrical quality, which from time to time darts out with a sudden and unexpected shock. the style and tone are infused with a peculiar fierce irony. the metre is rapid and stinging, like the words of the vindictive queen as she hurries her treacherous victim into the hands of the assassins. there is dramatic invention in the very cadence: "ah, but how each loved each, marquis! here's the gallery they trod both together, he her god, she his idol,--lend your rod, chamberlain!--ay, there they are--'_quis separabit_?'--plain those two touching words come into view, apposite for me and you!" _mary wollstonecraft and fuseli_, a dramatic lyric of three verses, the pathetic utterance of an unloved loving woman's heart, is not dissimilar in style to _cristina and monaldeschi_. it would be unjust to fuseli to name him bottom, but only fair to mary wollstonecraft to call her titania. of the remaining poems, _donald_ ("a true story, repeated to mr. browning by one who had heard it from its hero, the so-called donald, himself,"[ ]) is a ballad, not at all in browning's best style, but certainly vigorous and striking, directed against the brutalising influences of sport, as _tray_ was directed against the infinitely worse brutalities of ignorant and indiscriminate vivisection. its noble human sympathies and popular style appeal to a ready audience. _solomon and balkis_, though by no means among the best of browning's comic poems, is a witty enough little tale from that inexhaustible repository, the talmud. it is a dialogue between solomon and the queen of sheba, not "solely" nor at all "of things sublime." _pambo_ is a bit of pointed fun, a mock-modest apology to critics. finally, besides a musical little love-song named _wanting is--what?_ we have in _never the time and the place_ one of the great love-songs, not easily to be excelled, even in the work of browning, for strength of spiritual passion and intensity of exultant and certain hope. "never the time and the place. never the time and the place and the loved one all together! this path--how soft to pace! this may--what magic weather! where is the loved one's face? in a dream that loved one's face meets mine, but the house is narrow, the place is bleak where, outside, rain and wind combine with a furtive ear, if i strive to speak, with a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, with a malice that marks each word, each sign! o enemy sly and serpentine, uncoil thee from the waking man! do i hold the past thus firm and fast yet doubt if the future hold i can? this path so soft to pace shall lead thro' the magic of may to herself indeed! or narrow if needs the house must be, outside are the storms and strangers: we-- oh, close, safe, warm, sleep i and she, --i and she!" footnotes: [footnote : this note contains three burlesque sonnets whose chief interest is, that they are, with the exception of the unclaimed sonnet printed in the _monthly repository_ in , the first sonnets ever published by browning.] [footnote : one can scarcely read this poem without recalling the superb and not unsimilar episode in prose of another "great dramatic poet," landor's imaginary conversation between the empress catherine and princess dashkof.] [footnote : mrs. orr, _handbook_, p. .] . ferishtah's fancies. [published in november, (_poetical works_, , vol. xvi. pp. - ).] _ferishtah's fancies_ consists of twelve sections, each an argument in an allegory, persian by presentment, modern or universal in intention.[ ] lightly laid in between the sections, like flowers between the leaves, are twelve lyrics, mostly love songs addressed to a beloved memory, each lyric having a close affinity with the preceding "fancy." a humorous lyrical prologue, and a passionate lyrical epilogue, complete the work. we learn from mrs. orr, that "the idea of _ferishtah's fancies_ grew out of a fable by pilpay, which mr. browning read when a boy. he ... put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the dervish who is first introduced as a learner should reappear in the character of a teacher. ferishtah's 'fancies' are the familiar illustrations by which his teachings are enforced."[ ] the book is browning's _west-eastern divan_, and it is written at nearly the same age as goethe's. but, though there is a good deal of local colour in the setting, no attempt, as the motto warns us, is made to reproduce eastern thought. the "persian garments" are used for a disguise, not as a habit; perhaps for the very reason that the thoughts they drape are of such intense personal sincerity. the drapery, however, is perfectly transparent, and one may read "robert browning" for "dervish ferishtah" _passim_. the first two fancies (_the eagle_ and _the melon-seller_) give the lessons which ferishtah learnt, and which determined him to become a dervish: all the rest are his own lessons to others. these deal severally with faith (_shah abbas_), prayer (_the family_), the incarnation (_the sun_), the meaning of evil and of pain (_mihrab shah_), punishment present and future (_a camel-driver_), asceticism (_two camels_), gratefulness to god for small benefits (_cherries_), the direct personal relation existing between man and god (_plot-culture_), the uncertain value of knowledge contrasted with the sure gain of love (_a pillar at sebzevah_), and, finally, in _a bean-stripe: also apple eating_, the problem of life: is it more good than evil, or more evil than good? the work is a serious attempt to grapple with these great questions, and is as important on its ethical as on its artistic side. each argument is conveyed by means of a parable, often brilliant, often quaint, always striking and serviceable, and always expressed in scrupulously clear and simple language. the teaching, put more plainly and definitely, perhaps, with less intellectual disguise than usual, is the old unconquered optimism which, in browning, is so unmistakably a matter of temperament. the most purely delightful poetry in the volume will be found in the delicate and musical love-songs which brighten its pages. they are snatches of spontaneous and exquisite song, bird-notes seldom heard except from the lips of youth. perhaps the most perfect is the first. "round us the wild creatures, overhead the trees, underfoot the moss-tracks,--life and love with these! i to wear a fawn-skin, thou to dress in flowers: all the long lone summer-day, that greenwood life of ours! rich-pavilioned, rather,--still the world without,-- inside--gold-roofed silk-walled silence round about! queen it thou in purple,--i, at watch and ward couched beneath the columns, gaze, thy slave, love's guard! so, for us no world? let throngs press thee to me! up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! god is soul, souls i and thou: with souls should souls have place." "with souls should souls have place," is, with browning, the condensed expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. like the lovers of his lyric, he has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has gone up and down among men, listening to that human music, and observing that human or divine comedy. he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen. if it should be asked whether such work will live, there can be only one answer, and he has already given it: "it lives, if precious be the soul of man to man." footnotes: [footnote : this is emphasized by the ingenious motto from _king lear_: "you, sir, i entertain you for one of my hundred; only, i do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are persian; but let them be changed."] [footnote : _handbook_, p. .] . parleyings with certain people of importance in their day. [published in january . _poetical works_, , vol. xvi., pp. - .] the method of the _parleying_ is something of a new departure, and at the same time something of a reversion. it is a reversion towards the dramatic form of the monologue; but it is a new departure owing to the precise form assumed, that of a "parleying" or colloquy of the author with his characters. the persons with whom browning parleys are representative men selected from the england, holland, and italy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. the parleying with _bernard de mandeville_ (born at dort, in holland, ; died in london, ; author of _the fable of the bees, or private vices, public benefits_) takes up the optimistic arguments already developed in _ferishtah's fancies_ and elsewhere, and preaches, through the dubious medium of the enigmatic fabulist, trust in the ordering of the world, confidence in discerning a "soul of goodness in things evil." _daniel bartoli_ ("a learned and ingenius writer," born at florence, ; died at rome, ; the historian of the order of jesuits) serves to point a moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of a true tale recounted by browning, the graphic and brilliant story of the duke and the druggist's daughter. the parleying with _christopher smart_ (the author of the _song to david_, born at shipborne, in kent, ; died in the king's bench, ) is a penetrating and characteristic study in one of the great poetic problems of the eighteenth century, the problem of a "void and null" verse-writer who, at one moment only of his life, sang, as browning reminds him, "a song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang, and stations you for once on either hand with milton and with keats." _george bubb dodington_ (lord melcombe, born ; died ) stands as type of the dishonest politician, and in the course of a colloquy, which is really a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out, a mock serious essay in the way of a superior rogues' guide or instructions for knaves, receives at once castigation and instruction. the parleying with _francis furini_ (born at florence, ; died ) deals with its hero as a man, as artist and as priest; it contains some of browning's noblest writing on art; and it touches on current and, indeed, continual controversies in its splendidly vigorous onslaught on the decriers of that supreme art which aims at painting men and women as god made them. _gerard de lairesse_ (born at liége, in flanders, ; died at amsterdam ; famed not only for his pictures, but for his _treatise on the art of painting_, composed after he had become blind) gives his name to a discussion on the artistic interpretation of nature, its change and advancement, and the deeper and truer vision which has displaced the mythological fancies of earlier painters and poets. the parleying with _charles avison_ (born at newcastle, ; died there, ), the more than half forgotten organist-composer, embodies an inquiry, critical or speculative, into the position and function of music. all these poems are written in decasyllabic rhymed verse, with varied arrangement of the rhymes. they are introduced by a dialogue between apollo and the fates, and concluded by another between john fust and his friends, both written in lyrical measures, both uniting deep seriousness of intention with capricious humour of form; the one wild and stormy as the great "dance of furies" in gluck's _orfeo_; the other quaint and grimly and sublimely grotesque as an old german print. _gerard de lairesse_ contains a charming little "spring song" of three stanzas; and _charles avison_ a sounding train-bands' chorus, written to the air of one of avison's marches. the volume as a whole is full of weight, brilliance, and energy; and it is not less notable for its fineness of versification, its splendour of sound and colour, than for its depth and acuteness of thought and keen grasp of intricate argument. indeed, the quality which more than any other distinguishes it from browning's later work is the careful writing of the verse, and the elaborate beauty of certain passages. much of browning's later work would be ill represented by a selection of the "purple patches." his strength has always lain, but of late has lain much more exclusively, in the _ensemble_. here, however, there is not merely one passage of more than a hundred and fifty lines, the like of which (i do not say in every sense the equal, but certainly the like of which) we must go back to _sordello_ or to _paracelsus_ to find; but, again and again, wherever we turn, we meet with more than usually fine and impressive passages, single lines of more than usually exquisite quality. the glory of the whole collection is certainly the "walk," or description, in rivalry with gerard de lairesse, of a whole day's changes, from sunrise to sunset. to equal it in its own way, we must look a long way back in our browning, and nowhere out of browning. where all is good, any preference must seem partial; but perhaps nothing in it is finer than this picture of morning. "but morning's laugh sets all the crags alight above the baffled tempest: tree and tree stir themselves from the stupor of the night and every strangled branch resumes its right to breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free in dripping glory. prone the runnels plunge, while earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, each grass-blade's glory-glitter. had i known the torrent now turned river?--masterful making its rush o'er tumbled ravage--stone and stub which barred the froths and foams: no bull ever broke bounds in formidable sport more overwhelmingly, till lo, the spasm sets him to dare that last mad leap: report who may--his fortunes in the deathly chasm that swallows him in silence! rather turn whither, upon the upland, pedestalled into the broad day-splendour, whom discern these eyes but thee, supreme one, rightly called moon-maid in heaven above and, here below, earth's huntress-queen? i note the garb succinct saving from smirch that purity of snow from breast to knee--snow's self with just the tint of the apple-blossom's heart-blush. ah, the bow slack-strung her fingers grasp, where, ivory-linked horn curving blends with horn, a moonlike pair which mimic the brow's crescent sparkling so-- as if a star's live restless fragment winked proud yet repugnant, captive in such hair! what hope along the hillside, what far bliss lets the crisp hair-plaits fall so low they kiss those lucid shoulders? must a morn so blithe needs have its sorrow when the twang and hiss tell that from out thy sheaf one shaft makes writhe its victim, thou unerring artemis? why did the chamois stand so fair a mark, arrested by the novel shape he dreamed was bred of liquid marble in the dark depths of the mountain's womb which ever teemed with novel births of wonder? not one spark of pity in that steel-grey glance which gleamed at the poor hoof's protesting as it stamped idly the granite? let me glide unseen from thy proud presence: well may'st thou be queen of all those strange and sudden deaths which damped so oft love's torch and hymen's taper lit for happy marriage till the maidens paled and perished on the temple-step, assailed by--what except to envy must man's wit impute that sure implacable release of life from warmth and joy? but death means peace." . asolando: fancies and facts. [dated , but published december , . _poetical works_, , vol. xvii., pp. iv., .] _asolando_ (a name taken from the invented verb _asolare_, "to disport in the open air") was published on the day of browning's death. he died in venice, and his body was brought to england, and buried in westminster abbey on the last day of the year. the abbey was invisible in the fog, and, inside, dim yellow fog filled all the roof, above the gas and the candles. the coffin, carried high, came into the church to the sound of processional music, and as one waited near the grave one saw the coffin and the wreaths on it, over the heads of the people, and heard, in dr. bridge's setting, the words: "he giveth his beloved sleep." reading _asolando_ once more, and remembering that coffin one had looked down upon in the abbey, only then quite feeling that all was indeed over, it is perhaps natural that the book should come to seem almost consciously testamentary, as if certain things in it had been really meant for a final leave-taking. the epilogue is a clear, brave looking-forward to death, as to an event now close at hand, and imagined as actually accomplished. it breaks through for once, as if at last the occasion demanded it, a reticence never thus broken through before, claiming, with a supreme self-confidence, calmly, as an acknowledged right, the "well done" of the faithful servant at the end of the long day's labour. in _reverie_, in _rephan_, and in other poems, the teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is the same joyous readiness to "aspire yet never attain;" the same delight in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the "wild joy of living," in woman, in art, in scholarship; and in _rosny_ we have the vision of a hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, "that is best." to those who value browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. something like metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank verse of _development_, the lyrical verse of the _prologue_, and the third of the _bad dreams_, with their subtle comments and surmises on the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. but it is life itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in the youngest of browning's books. the book will be not less welcome to those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in short pieces, and that even _the ring and the book_ would scarcely be an equivalent for the fifty _men and women_ of those two incomparable volumes of . nor is _asolando_ without a further attractiveness to those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace. "car nous voulons la nuance encor, pas la couleur, rien que la nuance," as paul verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession of faith. it is, indeed, _la nuance_, the last fine shade, that browning has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, _summum bonum_, _poetics_, _a pearl, a girl_, and the others, so young-hearted, so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of _flute music, with an accompaniment_. simple and eager in _dubiety_, daintily, prettily pathetic in _humility_, more intense in _speculative_, in the fourteen lines called _now_, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal." "now. out of your whole life give but a moment: all of your life that has gone before, all to come after it,--so you ignore, so you make perfect the present,--condense, in a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment, thought and feeling and soul and sense-- merged in a moment which gives me at last you around me for once, you beneath me, above me-- me--sure that despite of time future, time past,-- this tick of our life-time's one moment you love me! how long such suspension may linger? ah, sweet-- the moment eternal--just that and no more-- when ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core, while cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!" here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy, "unbodied" and "embodied," of any, of every lover; in several of the poems a more developed story is told or indicated. one of the finest pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called _inapprehensiveness_, which condenses a whole tragedy into its thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as _my last duchess_. only heine, browning, and george meredith in _modern love_, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing, in a tone of what i may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of matter so difficult to handle. the poem is a mere incident, such as happens every day: we are permitted to overhear a scrap of trivial conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the "babbling runnel" of light talk. a study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the _bad dreams_: how fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man's remorse for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes love and repentance alike too late! with these may be named that other electric little poem, _which?_ a study in love's casuistries, reminding one slightly of the finest of all browning's studies in that kind, _adam, lilith, and eve_. it is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found. such a poem as _imperante augusto natus est_ (strong, impressive, effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is incomparable, the dramatic monologues of _men and women_, and in particular with the _epistle of karshish_. in _beatrice signorini_ we have one of the old studies in lovers' casuistries; and it is told with gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it: "the pretty incident i put in rhyme." in the _ponte dell' angela, venice_, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely "hitched into rhyme" (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which it most resembles. but there is something not precisely similar to anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank, beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as _summum bonum_, in which exquisite expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection. in most of browning's love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more or less exceptional. it is to this that they owe their singular, penetrating quality of charm. but there is a charm of another kind, and a more generally appreciated one, "that commonplace perfection of honest grace," which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own. in the lyrics to which i am referring, browning has spoken straight out, in just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. here is a poem called _speculative_: "others may need new life in heaven-- man, nature, art--made new, assume! man with new mind old sense to leaven, nature--new light to clear old gloom, art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room. i shall pray: 'fugitive as precious-- minutes which passed--return, remain! let earth's old life once more enmesh us, you with old pleasure, me--old pain, so we but meet nor part again.'" how hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal feeling! the lover's intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for herself, the "little human woman full of sin," for herself, unchanged, unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven. to the lover in _summum bonum_ all the delight of life has been granted; it lies in "the kiss of one girl," and that has been his. in the delicious little poem called _humility_, the lover is content in being "proudly less," a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love's feast, laid for another. in _white witchcraft_ love has outlived injury; in the first of the _bad dreams_ it has survived even heart-break. "last night i saw you in my sleep: and how your charm of face was changed! i asked 'some love, some faith you keep?' you answered, 'faith gone, love estranged.' whereat i woke--a twofold bliss: waking was one, but next there came this other: 'though i felt, for this, my heart break, i loved on the same.'" not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only browning could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this last volume of a poet preeminently subtle. this characteristic of simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire, in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of _the pope and the net_, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it. there are other light ballads, as different in merit as _muckle-mouth meg_ on the one hand and _the cardinal and the dog_ and _the bean-feast_ on the other, with snatches of moralising story, as cutting as _arcades ambo_, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging as _the lady and the painter_, which is a last word written for love of birds and of the beauty of nakedness. one among these poems, _the cardinal and the dog_, indistinguishable in style from the others, was written fifty years earlier. it is as if the poet, taking leave of that "british public" which had "loved him not," and to whose caprices he had never condescended, was, after all, anxious to "part friends." the result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained. so far i wrote in , when browning was only just dead, and i went on, in words which i keep for their significance to-day, because time has already brought in its revenges, and browning has conquered. that browning, i said then, could ever become a popular poet, in the sense in which tennyson is popular, must be seen by everyone to be an impossibility. his poetry is obviously written for his own pleasure, without reference to the tastes of the bulk of readers. the very titles of his poems, the barest outline of their prevailing subjects, can but terrify or bewilder an easy-going public, which prefers to take its verse somnolently, at the season of the day when the newspaper is too substantial, too exciting. to appreciate browning you must read with your eyes wide open. his poetry is rarely obscure, but it is often hard. it deals by preference with hard matter, with "men and the ideas of men," with life and thought. other poets before him have written with equally independent aims; but had milton, had wordsworth, a larger and more admiring audience in his own day? if the audience of milton and of wordsworth has widened, it would be the merest paradox to speak of either milton or wordsworth as a popular poet. by this time, every one at least knows them by name, though it would be a little unkind to consider too curiously how large a proportion of the people who know them by name have read many consecutive lines of _paradise lost_ or _the excursion_. but to be so generally known by name is something, and it has not yet fallen to the lot of browning. "browning is dead," said a friend of mine, a hunting man, to another hunting man, a friend of his. "dear me, is he?" said the other doubtfully; "did he 'come out' your way?" by the time browning has been dead as long as wordsworth, i do not think anyone will be found to make these remarks. death, not only from the christian standpoint, is the necessary pathway to immortality. as it is, browning's fame has been steadily increasing, at first slowly enough, latterly with even a certain rapidity. from the first he has had the exceptional admiration of those whose admiration is alone really significant, whose applause can alone be really grateful to a self-respecting writer. no poet of our day, no poet, perhaps, of any day, has been more secure in the admiring fellowship of his comrades in letters. and of all the poets of our day, it is he whose influence seems to be most vital at the moment, most pregnant for the future. for the time, he has also an actual sort of church of his own. the churches pass, with the passing away of the worshippers; but the spirit remains, and must remain if it has once been so vivid to men, if it has once been a refuge, a promise of strength, a gift of consolation. and there has been all this, over and above its supreme poetic quality, in the vast and various work, shakesperean in breadth, shakesperean in penetration, of the poet whose last words, the appropriate epilogue of a lifetime, were these: "at the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time, when you set your fancies free, will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, --pity me? oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! what had i on earth to do with the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did i drivel --being--who? one who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. no, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time greet the unseen with a cheer! bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'strive and thrive!' cry 'speed,--fight on, fare ever there as here!'" appendix i a bibliography of robert browning the following list of the published writings of robert browning, in the order of their publication, has been compiled mainly from dr. furnivall's very complete and serviceable browning bibliography, contained in the first part of the browning society's papers (pp. - ). volumes of "selections" are not noticed in this list: there have been many in england, some in germany, and in the tauchnitz collection, and a large number in america, where an edition of the complete works was first published, in seven volumes, by messrs. houghton, mifflin & co., boston. . pauline: a fragment of a confession. london: saunders and otley, conduit street. , pp. . . paracelsus. by robert browning. london. published by effingham wilson, royal exchange. mdcccxxxv., pp. xi., . . five poems contributed to _the monthly repository_ (edited by w.j. fox), - ; all signed "z."--i. sonnet ("eyes, calm beside thee, lady, couldst thou know!"), vol. viii., new series, , p. . not reprinted. ii. the king--(vol. ix., new series, pp. - ). reprinted, with six fresh lines, and revised throughout, in _pippa passes_ ( ), where it is pippa's song in part iii.-iii., iv. porphyria and johannes agricola. (vol. x., pp. - .) reprinted in _dramatic lyrics_ ( ) under the title of _madhouse cells_.--v. lines. (vol. x., pp. - .) reprinted, revised, in _dramatis personæ_ ( ) as the first six stanzas of § vi. of _james lee_. . strafford: an historical tragedy. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: printed for longman, rees, orme, brown, green, and longman, paternoster row. , pp. vi., . . sordello. by robert browning. london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxl., pp. iv., . . bells and pomegranates: no. i.--pippa passes. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxli., pp. . (price _d_., sewed.) . bells and pomegranates: no. ii.--king victor and king charles. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxlii., pp. . (price _s_., sewed). . bells and pomegranates: no. iii.--dramatic lyrics. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxlii., pp. , (price _s_., sewed.) contents:-- . cavalier tunes: i. marching along; ii. give a rouse; iii. my wife gertrude [boot and saddle, ]. . italy and france: i. italy [my last duchess.--ferrara, ]; ii. france [count gismond.--aix in provence, ]. . camp and cloister: i. camp (french) [incident of the french camp, ]; ii. cloister (spanish) [soliloquy of the spanish cloister, ]. . in a gondola. . artemis prologuizes. . waring. . queen worship: i. rudel to the lady of tripoli; ii. cristina. . madhouse cells: i. [johannes agricola, ]; ii. [porphyria's lover, ]. . through the metidja to abd-el-kadr. . the pied piper of hamelin. . bells and pomegranates: no. iv--the return of the druses. a tragedy in five acts. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxliii., pp. . (price _s_., sewed.) . bells and pomegranates: no. v.--a blot in the 'scutcheon. a tragedy in three acts. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxliii., pp. . (price _s_., sewed.) . bells and pomegranates: no. vi.--colombe's birthday. a play in five acts. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxliv., pp. . (price _s_., sewed.) . eight poems contributed to _hood's magazine_, june to april :--i. the laboratory (ancien régime). (june , vol. i., no. vi., pp. - ). reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ), as the first of two poems called "france and spain."--ii., iii. claret and tokay (_id._ p. ). reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ).--iv., v. garden fancies: . the flower's name; . sibrandus schafnaburgensis. (july , vol. ii., no. vii., pp. - .) reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ).--vi. the boy and the angel. (august , vol. ii., no. viii., pp. - .) reprinted, revised, and with five fresh couplets, in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ).--vii. the tomb at st. praxed's (rome, --) (march , vol. iii., no. iii., pp. - ). reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( )--viii. the flight of the duchess. (april , vol. iii., no. iv., pp. - .) part first only, § - ; reprinted, with the remainder added, in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). . bells and pomegranates: no. vii.--dramatic romances and lyrics. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxlv., pp. . (price _s_., sewed.) contents:-- . how they brought the good news from ghent to aix. . pictor ignotus [florence, --]. . italy in england [the italian in england, ]. . england in italy, _piano di sorrento_ [the englishman in italy, ]. . the lost leader. . the lost mistress. . home thoughts from abroad. . the tomb at st. praxed's [the bishop orders his tomb in st. praxed's church, ]. . garden fancies: i. the flower's name; ii sibrandus schafnaburgensis. . france and spain: i. the laboratory (_ancien régime_); ii. the confessional, . the flight of the duchess. . earth's immortalities. . song. . the boy and the angel. . night and morning: i. night [meeting at night, ], ii. morning [parting at morning, ], . claret and tokay [nationality in drinks, ]. . saul. . time's revenges. . the glove (peter ronsard _loquitur_). . bells and pomegranates: no. viii. and last.--luria; and a soul's tragedy. by robert browning, author of "paracelsus." london: edward moxon, dover street. mdcccxlvi., pp. . (price _s_. _d_., sewed.) . poems. by robert browning. in two volumes. a new edition. london: chapman and hall, strand. , pp. vii., ; viii., . these two volumes contain _paracelsus_ and _bells and pomegranates_. . christmas-eve and easter-day. a poem. by robert browning. london: chapman and hall, strand. , pp. iv., . . letters of percy bysshe shelley. with an introductory essay, by robert browning. london: edward moxon, dover street, , pp. vi., . (introductory essay, pp., - .) these so-called letters of shelley proved to be forgeries, and the volume was suppressed. browning's essay has been reprinted by the browning society, and, later, by the shelley society. see no. below. its value to students of shelley is in no way impaired by its chance connection with the forged letters, to which it barely alludes. . two poems. by elizabeth barrett and robert browning. london: chapman and hall. , pp. . this pamphlet contains "a plea for the ragged schools of london," by e. b. b., and "the twins," by r. b. the two poems were printed by miss arabella barrett, mrs. browning's sister, for a bazaar in aid of a "refuge for young destitute girls," one of the earliest of its kind, founded by her in . . cleon. by robert browning. london: edward moxon, dover street. , pp. . . the statue and the bust. by robert browning. london: edward moxon, dover street. , pp. . . men and women. by robert browning. in two volumes. london: chapman and hall, piccadilly. . vol. i., pp. iv., ; vol. ii., pp. iv., . vol. i. contents:-- . love among the ruins. . a lovers' quarrel. . evelyn hope. . up at a villa--down in the city (as distinguished by an italian person of quality). . a woman's last word. . fra lippo lippi. . a toccata of galuppi's. . by the fire-side. . any wife to any husband. . an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician. . mesmerism. . a serenade at the villa. . my star. . instans tyrannus. . a pretty woman. . "childe roland to the dark tower came." . respectability. . a light woman. . the statue and the bust. . love in a life. . life in a love. . how it strikes a contemporary. . the last ride together. . the patriot--_an old story_. . master hugues of saxe-gotha. . bishop blougram's apology. . memorabilia. vol. ii. contents:-- . andrea del sarto (called the faultless painter). . before. . after. . in three days. . in a year. . old pictures in florence. . in a balcony. . saul. . "de gustibus." . women and roses. . protus. . holy-cross day. . the guardian angel: a picture at fano. . cleon. . the twins. . popularity. . the heretic's tragedy: a middle age interlude. . two in the campagna. . a grammarian's funeral. . one way of love. . another way of love. . "transcendentalism": a poem in twelve books. . misconceptions. . one word more: to e. b. b. . ben karshook's wisdom. (five stanzas of four lines each, signed "robert browning," and dated "rome, april , ")--_the keepsake_. . (edited by miss power, and published by david bogue, london.) p. . this poem has never been reprinted by the author in any of his collected volumes, but is to be found in furnivall's _browning bibliography_. . may and death.--_the keepsake_, , p. . reprinted, with some new readings, in _dramatis personæ_ ( ). . the poetical works of robert browning. third edition. vol. i., pp. x., . lyrics, romances, men and women. vol. ii., pp. . tragedies and other plays. vol. iii., pp. . paracelsus, christmas eve and easter day, sordello. london: chapman and hall, piccadilly. . there are no new poems in this edition, but the pieces originally published under the titles of _dramatic lyrics, dramatic lyrics and romances_, and _men and women_, are redistributed. this arrangement has been preserved in all subsequent editions. the table of contents below will thus show the present position of the poems. vol. i, contents--lyrics:-- . cavalier tunes. . the lost leader. . "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix." . through the metidja to abd-el-kadr. . nationality in drinks. . garden fancies.[ ] . the laboratory. . the confessional. . cristina. . the lost mistress. . earth's immortalities. . meeting at night. . parting at morning. . song. . a woman's last word. . evelyn hope. , love among the ruins. . a lovers' quarrel. . up at a villa--down in the city. . a toccata of galuppi's. . old pictures in florence, . "de gustibus ----." . home-thoughts from abroad. . home-thoughts from the sea. . saul. . my star. . by the fire-side. . any wife to any husband. . two in the campagna. . misconceptions. . a serenade at the villa. . one way of love. . another way of love. . a pretty woman. . respectability. . love in a life. . life in a love. . in three days. . in a year. . women and roses. . before. . after. . the guardian angel. . memorabilia. . popularity. . master hugues of saxe-gotha. romances:-- . incident of the french camp. . the patriot. . my last duchess. . count gismond. . the boy and the angel. . instans tyrannus. . mesmerism. . the glove. . time's revenges. . the italian in england. . the englishman in italy. . in a gondola. . waring. . the twins. . a light woman. . the last ride together. . the pied piper of hamelin. . the flight of the duchess. . a grammarian's funeral. . johannes agricola in meditation. . the heretic's tragedy. . holy-cross day. . protus. . the statue and the bust. . porphyria's lover. . "childe roland to the dark tower came." men and women:-- . "transcendentalism." . how it strikes a contemporary. . artemis prologuizes. . an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician. . pictor ignotus. . fra lippo lippi. . andrea del sarto. . the bishop orders his tomb in st. praxed's church. . bishop blougram's apology. . cleon. . rudel to the lady of tripoli. . one word more. vol. ii. contents--tragedies and other plays:-- . pippa passes. . king victor and king charles. . the return of the druses. . a blot in the 'scutcheon. . colombe's birthday. . luria. . a soul's tragedy. . in a balcony. . strafford. vol. iii. contents:-- . paracelsus, . christmas eve and easter day. . sordello. footnotes: [footnote : the _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_ is here included as no. iii. in the edition of it follows under a separate heading. this is the only point of difference between the two editions.] . gold hair: a legend of pornic. by robert browning. (with imprint--london: printed by w. clowes and sons, stamford street and charing cross) , pp. . . prospice.--_atlantic monthly_, vol. xiii., june , p. . . dramatis personÃ�. by robert browning. london: chapman and hall, piccadilly. , pp. vi., . contents:-- . james lee [james lee's wife, ]. . gold hair: a legend of pornic. . the worst of it. . dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours. . too late. . abt vogler. . rabbi ben ezra. . a death in the desert. . caliban upon setebos; or, natural theology in the island. . confessions. . may and death. . prospice. . youth and art. . a face. . a likeness. . mr sludge "the medium." . apparent failure. . epilogue. . orpheus and eurydice.--_catalogue of the royal academy_, , p. . no. . a picture by f. leighton. printed as prose. it is reprinted in _poetical works_, , where it is included in _dramatis personæ_. the same volume contains a new stanza of eight lines, entitled "deaf and dumb: a group by woolner." this was written in for woolner's partly-draped group of constance and arthur, the deaf and dumb children of sir thomas fairbairn, which was exhibited in the international exhibition of . . the poetical works of robert browning, m.a., honorary fellow of balliol college, oxford. london: smith, elder and co., waterloo place. . vol. i., pp. viii., . pauline--paracelsus--strafford. vol. ii., pp. iv., . sordello--pippa passes. vol. iii., pp. iv., . king victor and king charles--dramatic lyrics--the return of the druses. vol. iv., pp. iv., . a blot in the 'scutcheon--colombe's birthday--dramatic romances. vol. v., pp. iv., . a soul's tragedy--luria--christmas eve and easter day--men and women. vol. vi., pp. iv., . in a balcony--dramatis personæ. this edition retains the redistribution of the minor poems in the edition of , already mentioned. . the ring and the book. by robert browning, m.a., honorary fellow of balliol college, oxford. in four volumes. london: smith, elder and co. - . vol. i., pp. iv., ; vol. ii., pp. iv., ; vol. iii., pp. iv., ; vol. iv., pp. iv., . . hervé riel--_cornhill magazine_, march , pp. - . reprinted in _pacchiarotto, and other poems_ ( ). . balaustion's adventure: including a transcript from euripides. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. iv., . . prince hohenstiel-schwangau: saviour of society. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. iv., . . fifine at the fair. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. xii., . . red cotton night-cap country: or, turf and towers. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. iv., . . aristophanes' apology: including a transcript from euripides: being the last adventure of balaustion. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . . the inn album. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. iv., . . pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper: with other poems. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . contents:-- . prologue. . of pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper. . at the "mermaid." . house. . shop. . pisgah-sights ( , ). . fears and scruples. . natural magic. . magical nature. . bifurcation. . numpholeptos. . appearances. . st. martin's summer. . hervé riel. . a forgiveness. . cenciaja. . filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial (a reminiscence of a.d. ). . epilogue. . the agamemnon of Ã�schylus. transcribed by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. xi. (preface, v.-xi.), . . la saisiaz: the two poets of croisic. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . contents:-- . prologue, . la saisiaz (pp. - ). the two poets of croisic (pp. - ). epilogue. . song. ("the blind man to the maiden said")--_the hour will come_. by wilhelmine von hillern. translated from the german by clara bell. london, , vol. ii., p. . not reprinted. . "oh, love, love": translation from the _hippolytus_ of euripides. (eighteen lines, dated "dec. , "). contributed to prof. j.p. mahaffy's _euripides_ ("classical writers." macmillan, ). p. . . dramatic idyls. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. vi., . contents:-- . martin relph. . pheidippides. . halbert and hob. . ivàn ivànovitch. . tray. . ned bratts. . dramatic idyls. second series. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . contents:--prologue. . echetlos. . clive. . muléykeh. . pietro of abano. . doctor ----. . pan and luna. epilogue. . ten new lines to "epilogue."--_scribner's century magazine_, november , pp. - . lines written in an autograph album, october , . printed in the _century_ without browning's consent. reprinted in the first issue of the browning society's papers, part iii., p. , but withdrawn from the second issue. . jocoseria. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . contents:-- . wanting is--what? . donald. . solomon and balkis. . cristina and monaldeschi. . mary wollstonecraft and fuseli. . adam, lilith, and eve. . ixion. . jochanan hakkadosh. . never the time and the place. . pambo. . sonnet on goldoni (dated "venice, nov. , ").--_pall mall gazette_, december , , p. . written for the album of the committee of the goldoni monument at venice, and inserted on the first page. reprinted in the browning society's papers, part v. p. .* . paraphrase from horace.--_pall mall gazette_, december , , p. . four lines, written impromptu for mr. felix moscheles. reprinted in the browning society's papers, part v., p. .* . helen's tower: sonnet (dated "april , ").--_pall mall gazette_, december , , p. . reprinted in browning society's papers, part v., p. .* written for the earl of dufferin, who built a tower in memory of his mother, helen, countess of gifford, on a rock on his estate, at clandeboye, ireland, and originally printed in the later copies of a privately printed pamphlet called _helen's tower_. lord tennyson's lines, written on the same occasion, appeared a little previously in _the leisure hour_. . the divine order, and other sermons and addresses. by the late thomas jones. edited by brynmor jones, ll.b. with introduction by robert browning. london: w. isbister. . the introduction is on pp. xi.-xiii. . sonnet on rawdon brown. (dated "november , ").--_century magazine_, "bric-à-brac" column, february . reprinted in the browning society's papers, part v., p. .* written at venice, on an apocryphal story relating to the late mr rawdon brown, who "went to venice for a short visit, with a definite object in view, and ended by staying forty years." . the founder of the feast: sonnet. (dated "april , ").--_the world_, april , . inscribed by browning in the album presented to mr arthur chappell, director of the st. james's hall saturday and monday popular concerts. reprinted in the browning society's papers, part vii., p. .* . the names: sonnet on shakespeare. (dated "march , ").--_shakespere show book_, may , , p. . reprinted in the browning society's papers, part v., p. .* . ferishtah's fancies. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co. , pp. viii., . each blank verse "fancy" is followed by a short lyric. contents:--prologue. ferishtah's fancies: . the eagle. . the melon-seller. . shah abbas. . the family. . the sun. . mihrab shah. . a camel-driver. . two camels . cherries. . plot-culture, . a pillar at sebzevah. . a bean stripe: also apple-eating. epilogue. . why i am a liberal: sonnet.--_why i am a liberal_, edited by andrew reid. london: cassell and co. . reprinted in the browning society's papers, part vii., p. .* . spring song.--_the new amphion_; being the book of the edinburgh university union fancy fair. edinburgh: t. and a. constable, university press. . the poem is on p. . reprinted in _parleyings_, p. . . prefatory note to _poems_ by elizabeth barrett browning. london: smith, elder and co. . three pages, unnumbered. . memorial lines, for memorial of the queen's jubilee, in st. margaret's church, westminster. . reprinted in the browning society's papers, part x., p. .* . parleyings with certain people of importance in their day: to wit, bernard de mandeville, daniel bartoli, christopher smart, george bubb dodington, francis furini, gerard de lairesse, and charles avison. introduced by a dialogue between apollo and the fates, concluded by another between john fust and his friends. by robert browning. london: smith, elder and co., waterloo place. , pp. viii., . (_poetical works_, , vol. xvi., pp. - .) contents:--apollo and the fates--a prologue. parleyings: . with bernard de mandeville. . with daniel bartoli. . with christopher avison. . with george bubb dodington. . with francis furini. . with gerard de lairesse. . with charles avison. fust and his friends--an epilogue. . an essay on percy bysshe shelley. by robert browning. being a reprint of the introductory essay prefixed to the volume of [ spurious] letters of shelley, published by edward moxon in . edited by w. tyas harden. london: published for the shelley society by reeves and turner, strand, , pp. . see no. above. . to edward fitzgerald. (dated july , ).--_the athenæum_, no. , , july , , p. . reprinted in the browning society's papers, part xi., p. .* . lines addressed to levi lincoln thaxter. (written in ).--_poet lore_, vol. i., august , p. . . the poetical works of robert browning. london: smith, elder & co., waterloo place. volumes. vol. i.-xvi., ; vol. xvii., . vol. i. pp. viii., . pauline--sordello. vol. ii., pp. vi., . paracelsus--strafford. vol. iii., pp. vi., . pippa passes, king victor and king charles, the return of the druses, a soul's tragedy. vol. iv., pp. vi., . a blot in the 'scutcheon, colombe's birthday, men and women. vol. v., pp. vi., . dramatic romances, christmas-eve and easter-day. vol. vi., pp. vii., . dramatic lyrics, luria. vol. vii., pp. vi., . in a balcony, dramatis personæ. vol. viii., pp. . the ring and the book, vol. i. vol. ix., pp. . the ring and the book, vol. ii. vol. x., pp. . the ring and the book, vol. iii. vol. xi., pp. . balaustion's adventure, prince hohenstiel-schwangau, fifine at the fair. vol. xii., pp. . red cotton night-cap country, the inn album, vol. xiii., pp. . aristophanes' apology, the agamemnon of Ã�schylus. vol. xiv., pp. vi., . pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper, with other poems. [la saisiaz, the two poets of croisic.] vol. xv., pp. vi., . dramatic idyls, jocoseria. vol. xvi., pp. vi., . ferishtah's fancies. parleyings with certain people. general index, pp. - ; index to first lines of shorter poems, pp. - . vol. xvii., pp. viii., . asolando, biographical and historical notes to the poems. general index, pp. - ; index to first lines of shorter poems, pp. - . this edition contains browning's final text of his poems. . asolando: fancies and facts. by robert browning. london: smith, elder & co., waterloo place. , pp. viii., . (_poetical works_, , vol. xvii., pp. - .) contents:--prologue. . rosny. . dubiety. . now. . humility. . poetics. . summum bonum. . a pearl, a girl. . speculative. . white witchcraft. . bad dreams (i.-iv.). . inapprehensiveness. . which? . the cardinal and the dog. . the pope and the net. . the bean-feast. . muckle-mouth meg. . arcades ambo. . the lady and the painter. . ponte dell' angelo, venice. . beatrice signorini. . flute-music, with an accompaniment. . "imperante augusto natus est--." . development. . rephan. . reverie. prologue. . the poetical works of robert browning. with portraits. in two volumes. london: smith, elder & co., waterloo place, . vol. i., pp. viii., ; vol. ii., pp. vii., . the editor's note, after p. viii., signed "augustine birrell," says: "all that has been done is to prefix (within square brackets) to some of the plays and poems a few lines explanatory of the characters and events depicted and described, and to explain in the margin of the volumes the meaning of such words as might, if left unexplained, momentarily arrest the understanding of the reader ... mr. f.g. kenyon has been kind enough to make the notes for 'the ring and the book,' but for the rest the editor alone is responsible." the text is that of the edition of , , but the arrangement is more strictly chronological. the notes are throughout unnecessary and to be regretted. ii. reprint of discarded prefaces to the first editions of some of browning's works . preface to _paracelsus_ ( ). "i am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset,--mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common,--judge it by principles on which it has never been moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. i therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers, whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons or events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis i desire to produce, i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded; and this for a reason. i have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and i cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such, only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. i do not very well understand what is called a dramatic poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves,--and all new facilities placed at an author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. it is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success;--indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation--a lyre or a crown. i trust for his indulgence towards a poem which had not been imagined six months ago, and that even should he think slightingly of the present (an experiment i am in no case likely to repeat) he will not be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular, and perhaps less difficult form. th march ." . preface to _strafford_ ( ). "i had for some time been engaged in a poem of a very different nature [_sordello_] when induced to make the present attempt; and am not without apprehension that my eagerness to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch, may have operated unfavourably on the represented play, which is one of action in character, rather than character in action. to remedy this, in some degree, considerable curtailment will be necessary, and, in a few instances, the supplying details not required, i suppose, by the mere reader. while a trifling success would much gratify, failure will not wholly discourage me from another effort: experience is to come, and earnest endeavour may yet remove many disadvantages. the portraits are, i think, faithful; and i am exceedingly fortunate in being able, in proof of this, to refer to the subtle and eloquent exposition of the characters of eliot and strafford, in the lives of eminent british statesmen now in the course of publication in lardner's cyclopædia, by a writer [john forster] whom i am proud to call my friend; and whose biographies of hampden, pym, and vane, will, i am sure, fitly illustrate the present year--the second centenary of the trial concerning ship-money. my carlisle, however, is purely imaginary: i at first sketched her singular likeness roughly in, as suggested by matthew and the memoir-writers--but it was too artificial, and the substituted outline is exclusively from voiture and waller. the italian boat-song in the last scene is from redi's _bacco_, long since naturalised in the joyous and delicate version of leigh hunt." . preface to _sordello_ (not in first edition, but added in ). i reprint it, though still retained by the author, on account of its great importance as a piece of self-criticism or self-interpretation. "to j. milsand, of dijon. dear friend,--let the next poem be introduced by your name, and so repay all trouble it ever cost me. i wrote it twenty-five years ago for only a few, counting even in these on somewhat more care about its subject than they really had. my own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book, such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? i blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since; for i lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might,--instead of what the few must,--like: but after all, i imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as i find it. the historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. i, at least, always thought so--you, with many known and unknown to me, think so--others may one day think so: and whether my attempt remain for them or not, i trust, though away and past it, to continue ever yours, r. b. london, june , ." . preface to _bells and pomegranates_.--i. _pippa passes_ ( ). "advertisement. two or three years ago i wrote a play, about which the chief matter i much care to recollect at present is, that a pit-full of good-natured people applauded it: ever since, i have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. what follows, i mean for the first of a series of dramatical pieces, to come out at intervals; and i amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear, will for once help me to a sort of pit-audience again. of course such a work must go on no longer than it is liked; and to provide against a certain and but too possible contingency, let me hasten to say now--what, if i were sure of success, i would try to say circumstantially enough at the close--that i dedicate my best intentions most admiringly to the author of 'ion'--most affectionately to serjeant talfourd. robert browning." . preface to _bells and pomegranates_.--viii. _luria_ and _a soul's tragedy_. "here ends my first series of 'bells and pomegranates:' and i take the opportunity of explaining, in reply to inquiries, that i only meant by that title to indicate an endeavour towards something like an alteration, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred. it is little to the purpose, that such is actually one of the most familiar of the many rabbinical (and patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because i confess that, letting authority alone, i supposed the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired meaning. 'faith and good works' is another fancy, for instance, and perhaps no easier to arrive at: yet giotto placed a pomegranate-fruit in the hand of dante, and raffaelle crowned his theology (in the _camera della segnatura_) with blossoms of the same; as if the bellari and vasari would be sure to come after, and explain that it was merely '_simbolo delle buone opere--il qual pomogranato fu però usato nelle vesti del pontefice appresso gli ebrei_.' r. b." it may be worth while to append the interesting concluding paragraph of the preface to the first series of _selections_, issued by messrs. smith, elder and co. in : "a few years ago, had such an opportunity presented itself, i might have been tempted to say a word in reply to the objections my poetry was used to encounter. time has kindly co-operated with my disinclination to write the poetry and the criticism besides. the readers i am at last privileged to expect, meet me fully half-way; and if, from their fitting standpoint, they must still 'censure me in their wisdom,' they have previously 'awakened their senses that they may the better judge.' nor do i apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh. having hitherto done my utmost in the art to which my life is a devotion, i cannot engage to increase the effort; but i conceive that there may be helpful light, as well as reassuring warmth, in the attention and sympathy i gratefully acknowledge r. b. london, may , ." index to poems abt vogler, , , , adam, lilith, and eve, , after, , "agamemnon (the), of Ã�schylus," , , andrea del sarto, , , , , , , , , another way of love, any wife to any husband, apparent failure, appearances, arcades ambo, "aristophanes' apology," , , artemis prologuizes, , , "asolando: fancies and facts," - at the mermaid, , , bad dreams, , , "balaustion's adventure," , , bean-feast, the, bean-stripe (a): also apple-eating, beatrice signorini, before, bifurcation, bishop blougram's apology, , , - , bishop (the) orders his tomb at st. praxed's church, - , "blot in the 'scutcheon, a," , - , , , boy and the angel, the, by the fireside, , caliban upon setebos, , - camel-driver, a, cardinal and the dog, the, , cavalier tunes, cenciaja, cherries, 'childe roland to the dark tower, came,' - "christmas-eve and easter-day," - cleon, , , , clive, , "colombe's birthday," - , confessional, the, confessions, , - count gismond, - cristina, cristina and monaldeschi, - deaf and dumb, death in the desert, a, , 'de gustibus,' , development, dîs aliter visum, , doctor ----, , donald, "dramatic idyls," - "dramatic idyls" (second series), - "dramatic lyrics," - "dramatic romances and lyrics," , - "dramatis personæ," - , dubiety, eagle, the, earth's immortalities, echetlos, , englishman in italy, the, , epilogue to "dramatic idyls" (second series), epilogue to "dramatis personæ," epilogue to pacchiarotto, , - epilogue to the two poets of croisic, epistle of karshish, , , - , eurydice and orpheus, evelyn hope, , face, a, family, the, fears and scruples, "ferishtah's fancies," , , "fifine at the fair," , , , - , filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial, flight of the duchess, the, flower's name, the, flute music, with an accompaniment, forgiveness, a, fra lippo lippi, , , , , garden fancies, girl, a, glove, the, gold hair: a story of pornic, grammarian's funeral, a, guardian angel, the, , halbert and hob, heretic's tragedy, the, , , - , hervé riel, , holy-cross day, , , home-thoughts from abroad, , home-thoughts from the sea, house, , how it strikes a contemporary, how they brought the good news from ghent to aix, humility, , "in a balcony," , , in a gondola, inapprehensiveness, in a year, incident of the french camp, "inn album, the," , , , instans tyrannus, in three days, italian in england, the, ivàn ivànovitch, , , - ixion, - james lee's wife, , , jochanan hakkadosh, "jocoseria," , johannes agricola, "king victor and king charles," - , laboratory, the, "la saisiaz," , , last ride together, the, , , life in a love, light woman, a, likeness, a, lost leader, the, , lost mistress, the, , love among the ruins, , love in a life, lovers' quarrel, a, , , "luria," , , - , , magical nature, , - martin relph, , , mary wollstonecraft and fuseli, master hugues of saxe-gotha, , , , may and death, meeting at night, , melon-seller, the, memorabilia, "men and women," , , , , , , , , , , , mesmerism, mihrab shah, misconceptions, , mr sludge, "the medium," , , muckle-mouth meg, muléykeh, , , my last duchess, , , , , my star, nationality in drinks, natural magic, ned bratts, , , , never the time and the place , now, numpholeptos, , old pictures in florence, , , one way of love, , , one word more, pacchiarotto, , , , "pacchiarotto and other poems," , pambo, pan and luna, "paracelsus," , , , , , , , , "parleyings with certain people," - parting at morning, patriot, the: an old story, "pauline," - , , , , pearl, a, pheidippides, , pictor ignotus, , , , pied piper of hamelin, the, , , pietro of abano, pillar at sebzevah, a, "pippa passes," - , , , pisgah-sights, plot-culture, poetics, pope and the net, the, popularity, porphyria's lover, , pretty woman, a, "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," , , , , , prospice, , - protus, rabbi ben ezra, , , "red-cotton night-cap country," , , , , rephan, respectability, "return of the druses, the," , , reverie, "ring and the book, the," , , , , , , rosny, rudel to the lady of tripoli, st. martin's summer, saul, , serenade at the villa, a, , , shah abbas, shop, , sibrandus schafnaburgensis, , solomon and balkis, soliloquy of the spanish cloister, , , "sordello," , , , , , , , , , "soul's tragedy, a," , , , speculative, , statue and the bust, the, "strafford," , , , summum bonum, , , sun, the, through the metidja to abd-el-kadr, time's revenges, toccata of galuppi's, a, , , too late, , , 'transcendentalism,' tray, twins, the, two camels, two in the campagna, "two poets of croisic, the," - up at a villa--down in the city, , wanting is--what? waring, , which, white witchcraft, woman's last word, a, , women and roses, worst of it, the, , youth and art, by the same writer poems (collected edition in two volumes) . aubrey beardsley, . the symbolist movement in literature, . plays, acting and music, . cities, . studies in prose and verse, . a book of twenty songs, . spiritual adventures, . studies in seven arts, . the fool of the world, and other poems, . the temple press letchworth england proofreading team a handbook to the works of robert browning by mrs. sutherland orr "no pause i' the leading and the light!" _the ring and the book_, vol. ix. p. . london g. bell and sons, ltd. _first published may ._ _second edition, ._ _third edition, ._ _fourth edition, ._ _fifth edition, ._ _sixth edition, ._ _reprinted , , , , , , , ._ printed in great britain by purnell and sons paulton, somerset, england preface to the first edition. this book was written at the request of some of the members of the browning society, and was originally intended to be a primer. it bears the marks of this intention in its general scheme, and in the almost abrupt brevity which the desired limits of space seemed to impose on its earlier part. but i felt from the first that the spirit of mr. browning's work could neither be compressed within the limits, nor adapted to the uses, of a primer, as generally understood; and the book has naturally shaped itself into a kind of descriptive index, based partly on the historical order and partly or the natural classification of the various poems. no other plan suggested itself, at the time, for bringing the whole series of these poems at once under the reader's eye: since a description which throughout followed the historical order would have involved both lengthiness and repetition; while, as i have tried to show, there exists no scheme of natural classification into which the whole series could have been forced. i realize, only now that it is too late, that the arrangement is clumsy and confusing: or at least has become so by the manner in which i have carried it out; and that even if it justify itself to the mind of my readers, it can never be helpful or attractive to their eye, which had the first right to be considered. that i should have failed in a first attempt, however earnest, to meet the difficulties of such a task, is so natural as to be almost beyond regret, where my credit only is concerned; but i shall be very sorry if this result of my inexperience detracts from any usefulness which the handbook might otherwise possess as a guide to mr. browning's works. i note also, and with real vexation, some blunders of a more mechanical kind, which i might have been expected to avoid. i have been indebted for valuable advice to mr. furnivall; and for fruitful suggestion to mr. nettleship, whose proposed scheme of classification i have in some degree followed. a. orr. _march nd, ._ preface to the second edition. in preparing the handbook for its second edition, my first endeavour has been to correct, as far as possible, the faults which i acknowledged in my preface to the first. but even before the time for doing so had arrived, i had convinced myself that where construction or arrangement was concerned, these faults could not be corrected: that i, at least, could discover no more artistic method of compressing into a small space, and to any practical purpose, an even relatively just view of mr. browning's work. the altered page-headings will, where they occur, soften away the harshness of the classification, while they remove a distinct anomaly: the discussion of such a poem as "pauline" under its own title, such a one as "aristophanes' apology," under that of a group; but even this slight improvement rather detracts from than increases what little symmetry my scheme possessed. the other changes which, on my own account, i have been able to make, include the re-writing of some passages in which the needful condensation had unnecessarily mutilated the author's sense; the completing of quotation references which through an unforeseen accident had been printed off in an unfinished state; and the addition of a few bibliographical facts. by mr. browning's desire, i have corrected two mistakes: the misreading, on my part, of an historical allusion in "the statue and the bust," and of a poetical sentiment expressed in "pictor ignotus"--and, by the insertion of a word or sentence in the notice of each, expanded or emphasized the meaning of several of the minor poems. i should have stated in my first preface, had not the fact appeared to me self-evident, that i owe to mr. browning's kindness all the additional matter which my own reading could not supply: such as the index to the greek names in "aristophanes' apology," and the persian in "ferishtah's fancies;" the notes to "transcendentalism," and "pietro of abano;" and that he has allowed me to study in the original documents the story of "the ring and the book." the two signed notes by which he has enriched the present edition have grown out of recent circumstances. a. orr. _january th, ._ preface to the third edition. the present edition of the handbook includes a summary of mr. browning's "parleyings," which from the contents of this volume, as well as from its recent appearance, finds its natural place in a supplement. i have added an index to the six volumes of the "works," which has been desired for greater facility of reference. various corrections and improvements of the nature indicated in the preface to my second edition have been also made in the book. a. orr. _june th, ._ preface to the fifth edition. the deeply painful circumstances in which the handbook re-appears have compelled me to defer the fulfilment of mr. browning's wish, that its quotation references should be adapted to the use of readers of his new edition. they also leave it the poorer by some interesting notes which he more than once promised me for my next reprint; i had never the heart to say to him: "is it not safer to give them now?" the correction, p. , of the note referring to p. of "aristophanes' apology," was lately made by mr. browning in the handbook, pending the time when he could repeat it in his own work. the cancelled footnote on my rd page means that he did remove the contradiction of which i spoke. an open discussion on "numpholeptos," which took place some months ago, made me aware that my little abstract was less helpful even than its brevity allowed, because i had emphasized the imagery of the poem where it most obscured--or least distinctly illustrated--its idea; and i re-wrote a few sentences which i now offer in their amended form. a phrase or two in "one word more" has been altered for the sake of more literal accuracy. no other correction worth specifying has been made in the book. a. orr. _january th, ._ preface to the sixth edition. the changes made in the present edition have been almost entirely bibliographical. their chief object was that indicated in an earlier preface, of bringing the handbook into correspondence with the latest issue of mr. browning's works. i felt reluctant when making them, to entirely sacrifice the convenience of those students of browning who from necessity, or, as in my own case, from affection, still cling to the earlier editions; and would gladly have retained the old references while inserting the new. all however that seemed practical in this direction was to combine the index of with that of in so far as they run parallel with each other. a long felt want has been supplied by the addition to the handbook of a bibliography of mr. browning's works, based on that of dr. furnivall, and thoroughly revised by mr. dykes campbell. the bibliographical details scattered throughout the work have also been made more complete. the time and trouble required for the altered quotation references have been reduced to a minimum by the thoughtful kindness of my friend miss fanny carey of trent leigh, nottingham; who voluntarily, many months ago, prepared for me a list of the new page numbers, leaving them only to be transcribed when the time came. i have also to thank mr. g. m. smith for a copy of his general index to the works. a. orr. _dec. st, ._ table of contents. page preface to the first edition v preface to second edition vi preface to third edition vii preface to fifth edition viii preface to sixth edition ix general characteristics. the nature of mr. browning's genius. his choice and treatment of subject. versification. continuous character of his work. introductory group. "pauline." "paracelsus." "sordello" non-classified poems. dramas. "strafford." "pippa passes." "king victor and king charles." "the return of the druses." "a blot in the 'scutcheon." "colombe's birthday." "a soul's tragedy." "luria." "in a balcony" (a fragment) "the ring and the book" transcripts from the greek, with "artemis prologizes" classified groups. argumentative poems. special pleadings. "aristophanes' apology," with "balaustion's adventure." "fifine at the fair." "prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society." "bishop blougram's apology." "mr. sludge, 'the medium'" argumentative poems continued. reflections. "christmas-eve and easter-day." "la saiziaz." "cleon." "an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician." "caliban upon setebos; or, natural theology in the island" didactic poems. "a death in the desert." "rabbi ben ezra." "deaf and dumb: a group by woolner." "the statue and the bust" critical poems. "old pictures in florence." "respectability." "popularity." "master hugues of saxe-gotha." "a light woman." "transcendentalism." "how it strikes a contemporary." "dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours." "at the 'mermaid.'" "house." "shop." "pisgah-sights" i. "pisgah-sights," ii. "bifurcation." "epilogue" "pacchiarotto and other poems" emotional poems. love. lyrical love poems. "one word more. to e. b. b." "prospice." "numpholeptos." "prologue" (to "pacchiarotto and other poems."). "natural magic." "magical nature." introductory poem to "the two poets of croisic." concluding poem to "the two poets of croisic" (a tale). dramatic love poems. "cristina." "evelyn hope." "love among the ruins." "a lovers' quarrel." "by the fireside." "any wife to any husband." "two in the campagna." "love in a life." "life in a love." "the lost mistress." "a woman's last word." "a serenade at the villa." "one way of love." "rudel to the lady of tripoli." "in three days." "in a gondola." "porphyria's lover." "james lee's wife." "the worst of it." "too late." emotional poems continued. religious, artistic, and expressive of the fiercer emotions. "saul." "epilogue to dramatis personæ." "fears and scruples." "fra lippo lippi." "abt vogler." "pictor ignotus." "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church." "a toccata of galuppi's." "the guardian-angel: a picture at fano." "eurydice to orpheus: a picture by leighton." "a face." "andrea del sarto." "the laboratory." "my last duchess." "soliloquy of the spanish cloister." "the confessional." "a forgiveness." historical poems, or poems founded on fact. "red cotton night-cap country; or, turf and towers." "cenciaja." "the two poets of croisic." "the inn album." "the heretic's tragedy: a middle-age interlude" romantic poems. "childe roland to the dark tower came." "the flight of the duchess" humorous or satirical poems. "holy-cross day." "pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper." "filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial." "up at a villa--down in the city." "another way of love." "garden fancies--ii. sibrandus schafnaburgensis" descriptive poems. "de gustibus--." "home-thoughts, from abroad." "the englishman in italy" non-classified poems continued. miscellaneous poems--including songs, legends, dramatic poems, and episodes. "the lost leader." "nationality in drinks." "garden fancies--i. the flower's name." "earth's immortalities." "home-thoughts, from the sea." "my star." "misconceptions." "a pretty woman." "women and roses." "before." "after." "memorabilia." "the last ride together." "a grammarian's funeral." "johannes agricola in meditation." "confessions." "may and death." "youth and art." "a likeness." "appearances." "st. martin's summer." prologue to "la saisiaz." "cavalier tunes." "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix." "song." "incident of the french camp." "count gismond." "the boy and the angel." "the glove." "the twins." "the pied piper of hamelin; a child's story." "gold hair: a story of pornic." "hervé riel." "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr." "meeting at night." "parting at morning." "the patriot: an old story." "instans tyrannus." "mesmerism." "time's revenges." "the italian in england." "protus." "apparent failure." "waring" concluding group. dramatic idyls. jocoseria. dramatic idyls, i. series: "martin relph." "pheidippides." "halbert and hob." "ivàn ivànovitch." "tray." "ned bratts." dramatic idyls, ii. series. "prologue." "echetlos." "clive." "mulèykeh." "pietro of abano." "doctor ----." "pan and luna." "epilogue." "jocoseria." "wanting is--what?" "donald." "solomon and balkis." "cristina and monaldeschi." "mary wollstonecraft and fuseli." "adam, lilith, and eve." "ixion." "jochanan hakkadosh." "never the time and the place." "pambo" supplement. ferishtah's fancies parleyings with certain people of importance in their day: to wit: bernard de mandeville, daniel bartoli, christopher smart, george bubb dodington, francis furini, gerard de lairesse, and charles avison. introduced by a dialogue between apollo and the fates: concluded by another between john fust and his friends. note bibliography alphabetical list of browning's works index to first lines of poems index handbook to browning's works general characteristics. the nature of mr. browning's genius. if we were called upon to describe mr. browning's poetic genius in one phrase, we should say it consisted of an almost unlimited power of imagination exerted upon real things; but we should have to explain that with mr. browning the real includes everything which a human being can think or feel, and that he is realistic only in the sense of being never visionary; he never deals with those vague and incoherent fancies, so attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from the poet's brain. he imagines vividly because he observes keenly and also feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal sympathy with the real and the ideal--with the seen and the unseen. the one is as living to him as the other. his treatment of visible and of invisible realities constitutes him respectively a dramatic and a metaphysical poet; but, as the two kinds of reality are inseparable in human life, so are the corresponding qualities inseparable in mr. browning's work. the dramatic activity of his genius always includes the metaphysical. his genius always shows itself as dramatic and metaphysical at the same time. mr. browning's genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women. these men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. but their thinking tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our sense of their reality by clothing itself always in the most practical and picturesque language which thought can assume. it has been urged that he does not sink himself in his characters as a completely dramatic writer should; and this argument must stand for what it is worth. his personality may in some degree be constructed from his works: it is, i think, generally admitted, that that of shakespeare cannot; and in so far as this is the test of a complete dramatist, mr. browning fails of being one. he does not sink himself in his men and women, for his sympathy with them is too active to admit of it. he not only describes their different modes of being, but defends them from their own point of view; and it is natural that he should often select for this treatment characters with which he is already disposed to sympathize. but his women are no less living and no less distinctive than his men; and he sinks his individuality at all times enough to interest us in the characters which are not akin to his own as much as in those which are. even if it were otherwise, if his men and women were all variations of himself, as imagined under differences of sex, of age, of training, or of condition, he would still be dramatic in this essential quality, the only one which bears on our contention: that everything which, as a poet, he thinks or feels, comes from him in a dramatic, that is to say, a completely living form. it is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the metaphysical. the abstract, no less than the practical questions which shape themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and words, in the character and conduct of his men and women. this does not mean that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can be made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it: for in that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not metaphysical; it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot be given in a picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it. he accepts this residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called divine thought. thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of existence; the one thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which we can never get behind. his gospel would begin, "in the beginning was the thought;" and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his "alpha and omega" is a divine intelligence from which all the ideas of the human intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true. these religious conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the metaphysical activity of his poetic genius. the two are blended in the vision of a supreme being not to be invested with human emotions, but only to be reached through them. to show that mr. browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is not a metaphysical _thinker_, though he is a thinker whose thought is metaphysical so far as principle goes. a metaphysical thinker is always in some way or other thinking about _thought_; and this is precisely what mr. browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its assumptions upon trust. he is a constant analyst of secondary motives and judgments. no modern freethinker could make a larger allowance for what is incidental, personal, and even material in them: we shall see that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact. but he has never questioned the origin of our primary or innate ideas, for he has, as i have said, never questioned their truth. it is essential to bear in mind that mr. browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some point to which other minds have _reasoned_ their way. the coincidence occurs most often with german lines of thought, and it has therefore been concluded that he has studied the works in which they are laid down, or has otherwise moved in the same track; the fact being that he has no bond of union with german philosophers, but the natural tendencies of his own mind. it may be easily ascertained that he did not read their language until late in life; and if what i have said of his mental habits is true, it is equally certain that their methods have been more foreign to him still. he resembles hegel, fichte, or schelling, as the case may be, by the purely creative impulse which has met their thought, and which, if he had lived earlier, might have forestalled it. mr. browning's position is that of a fixed centre of thought and feeling. fifty years ago he was in advance of his age. he stood firm and has allowed the current to overtake him, or even leave him behind. if i may be allowed a comparison: other mental existences suggest the idea of a river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and in a widening bed, to lose itself in the sea. mr. browning's genius appears the sea itself, with its immensity and its limits, its restlessness and its repose, the constant self-balancing of its ebb and flow. as both dramatic and metaphysical poet, mr. browning is inspired by one central doctrine: that while thought is absolute in itself, it is relative or personal to the mind which thinks it; so that no one man can attain the whole truth of any abstract subject, and no other can convict him of having failed to do so. and he also believes that since intellectual truth is so largely for each of us a matter of personal impression, no language is special enough to convey it. the arguments which he carries on through the mouths of his men and women often represent even moral truth as something too subtle, too complex, and too changing, to be definitely expressed; and if we did not see that he reverences what is good as much as he excuses what is bad, we might imagine that even on this ground he considered no fixed knowledge to be attainable. these opinions are, however, closely bound up with his religious beliefs, and in great measure explained by them. he is convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation clearly marked out before us. on the other hand, he believes that the circumstances of life are as much adapted to the guidance of each separate soul as if each were the single object of creative care; and that therefore while the individual knows nothing of the divine scheme, he _is_ everything in it. this faith in personality is naturally abstruse on the metaphysical side, but it is always picturesque on the dramatic; for it issues in that love of the unusual which is so striking to every reader of mr. browning's works; and we might characterize these in a few words, by saying that they reflect at once the extent of his general sympathies, and his antagonism to everything which is general. but the "unusual" which attracts him is not the morbid or the monstrous, for these mean defective life. it is every healthy escape from the conventional and the commonplace, which are also defective life; and this is why we find in his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded motives and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but continuous electric shock. and since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and self-sacrifice. it may, indeed, be said that while mr. browning's judgments are leavened by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by the other; this again being so evident to his serious renders that i need only indicate it here. but the love of love does more than colour his views of life; it is an essential element in his theology; and it converts what would otherwise be a pure theism into a mystical christianity which again is limited by his rejection of all dogmatic religious truth. i have already alluded to his belief that, though the deity is not to be invested with human emotions, he can only be reached through them. love, according to him, is the necessary channel; since a colourless omnipotence is outside the conception as outside the sympathies of man. christ is a message of divine love, indispensable and therefore true; but he is, as such, a spiritual mystery far more than a definable or dogmatic fact. a definite revelation uttered for all men and for all time is denied by the first principles of mr. browning's religious belief. what christianity means for him, and what it does not, we shall also see in his works. it is almost superfluous to add that mr. browning's dramatic sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. he believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its way. we also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good in a _conscious_ creative power which is outside both, and which deals directly with each separate human soul. but neither must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the contemplation of evil or by any means always seek to extenuate it. he thinks of it philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an excess or a distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the natural sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer for its own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, and may defend accordingly. he would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do so. evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and invested with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach himself so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and its attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. even where suffering is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his individual point of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as distinct from the personal compensations which it so often brings into play. he cannot think of it in the mass; and here again his theism asserts itself, though in a less obvious manner. so much of mr. browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful religious spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to understand how elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is competent to unite. the testimony of one poem might otherwise be set against that of another with confusing results. mr. browning's paternal grandfather was an englishman of a west country stock;[ ] his paternal grandmother a creole. the maternal grandfather was a german from hamburg named wiedemann, an accomplished draughtsman and musician.[ ] the maternal grandmother was completely scotch. this pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of mr. browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are, in great measure, accounted for. it contains almost the only facts of a biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work. his choice and treatment of subject. versification. mr. browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only true material of dramatic art. he rejects no incident which admits of development on the side of feeling and motive. he accepts none which cannot be so developed. his range of subject covers, therefore, a great deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from nothing which he portrays. his treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always picturesque. it raises a distinct image of the person or action he intends to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated with thought: and i shall later have occasion to notice the false impression of mr. browning's genius which this circumstance creates. details, which with realists of a narrower kind would give only a physical impression of the scene described, serve in his case to build up its mental impression. they create a mental or emotional atmosphere which makes us vaguely feel the intention of the story as we travel through it, and flashes it upon us as we look back. in "red cotton night-cap country" (as we shall presently see) he dwells so significantly on the peacefulness of the neighbourhood in which the tragedy has occurred, that we feel in it the quiet which precedes the storm, and which in some measure invites it. in one of the idyls, "ivàn ivànovitch," he begins by describing the axe which will strike off the woman's head, and raising a vague idea of its fitness for any possible use. in another of them, "martin relph," the same process is carried on in an opposite manner. we see a mental agony before we know its substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "ned bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a tremendously hot day in which nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes a matter of course. it would be easy to multiply examples. mr. browning's verse is also subordinate to this intellectual theory of poetic art. it is uniformly inspired by the principle that sense should not be sacrificed to sound: and this principle constitutes his chief ground of divergence from other poets. it is a case of divergence--nothing more: since he is too deeply a musician to be indifferent to sound in verse, and since no other poet deserving the name would willingly sacrifice sense to it. but while all agree in admitting that sense and sound in poetry are the natural complement of each other, each will be practically more susceptible to one than to the other, and will unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. with all his love for music, mr. browning is more susceptible to sense than to sound. he values though more than expression; matter, more than form; and, judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his balance in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one. he has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for significance. he has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so, in the exercise of strength. he has never intended to be obscure, but he has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of significance and of strength. habit grows on us by degrees till its slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and mr. browning has illustrated this natural law. the self-enslavement was the more inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a solitary one. his genius[ ] removed him from the first from that sphere of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was self-increasing. it is thus that mr. browning explains the eccentricities of his style; and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not defend them. he has never blamed his public for accusing him of obscurity or ugliness he has only thought those wrong who taxed him with being wilfully ugly or obscure. he began early to defy public opinion because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true principles of his art. but his first and greatest failure from a popular point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment, however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief. "paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared "unintelligible;" and mr. browning was pondering this fact and concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too concise, when an extract from a letter of miss caroline fox was forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. the writer stated that john sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he know that wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for his sonnet_?" mr. browning was not personally acquainted with either john sterling or caroline fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. still, he gave the joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it deserved in the case of miss fox, whom he imagined, from her self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the period immediately following, he contented himself with two words where he would rather have used ten. the harsh and involved passages in "sordello," which add so much to the remoteness of its thought, were the first consequence of this lesson. "pauline" and "paracelsus" had been deeply musical, and the music came back to their author's verse with the dramas, lyrics, and romances by which "sordello" was followed. but the dread of being diffuse had doubly rooted itself in his mind, and was to bear fruit again as soon as the more historical or argumentative mood should prevail. the determination never to sacrifice sense to sound is the secret of whatever repels us in mr. browning's verse, and also of whatever attracts. wherever in it sense keeps company with sound, we have a music far deeper than can arise from mere sound, or even from a flow of real lyric emotion, which has its only counterpart _in_ sound. it is in the idea, and of it. it is the brain picture beating itself into words. the technical rules by which mr. browning works, carry out his principle to the fullest extent. i. he uses the smallest number of words which his meaning allows; is particularly sparing in adjectives. ii. he uses the largest _relative_ number of saxon (therefore picturesque) words.[ ] iii. he uses monosyllabic words wherever this is possible. iv. he farther condenses his style by abbreviations and omissions, of which some are discarded, but all warranted by authority: "in," "on," and "of," for instance, become "i'," "o'," and "o'." pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are, on the same principle, occasionally left out. v. he treats consonants as the backbone of the language, and hence, as the essential feature in a rhyme; and never allows the repetition of a consonant in a rhyme to be modified by a change in the preceding vowel, or by the recurrence of the rhyming syllable in a different word--or the repetition of a consonant in blank verse to create a half-consonance resembling a rhyme: though other poets do not shrink from doing so.[ ] vi. he seldom dilutes his emphasis by double rhymes, reserving these--especially when made up of combined words, and producing a grotesque effect--for those cases in which the meaning is given with a modifying colour: a satirical, or self-satirical, intention on the writer's part. strong instances of this occur in "the flight of the duchess," "christmas eve," and "pacchiarotto." vii. he always uses the measure most appropriate to his subject, whether it be the ten-syllabled blank verse which makes up "the ring and the book," the separate dramatic monologues, and nearly all the dramas, or the heroic rhymed verse which occurs in "sordello" and "fifine at the fair;" or one of the lyrical measures, of which his slighter poems contain almost, if not quite, every known form.[ ] viii. he takes no liberties with unusual measures; though he takes any admissible liberty with the usual measures, which will interrupt their monotony, and strengthen their effect. ix. he eschews many vulgarisms or inaccuracies which custom has sanctioned, both in prose and verse, such as, "thou _wert_;" "better than _them_ all;" "he _need_ not;" "he _dare_ not." the universal "i _had_ better;" "i _had_ rather," is abhorrent to him.[ ] x. no prosaic turns or tricks of language are ever associated in his verse with a poetic mood. the continuous character of his work. the writer of a handbook to mr. browning's poetry must contend with exceptional difficulties, growing out of what i have tried to describe as the unity in variety of mr. browning's poetic life. this unity of course impresses itself on his works; and in order to give a systematic survey of them, we must treat as a collection of separate facts what is really a living whole; and seek to give the impression of that whole by a process of classification which cuts it up alive. mr. browning's work is, to all intents and purposes, one group; and though we may divide and subdivide it for purposes of illustration, the division will be always more or less artificial, and, unless explained away, more or less misleading. we cannot even divide it into periods, for if the first three poems represent the author's intellectual youth, the remainder are one long maturity; while even in these the poetic faculty shows itself full-grown. we cannot trace in it the evidence of successive manners like those of raphael, or successive moods like those of shakespeare; or, if we do, this is neutralized by the simple fact that mr. browning's productive career has been infinitely longer than was raphael's, and considerably so than shakespeare's; and that changes which meant the development of a genius in their case, mean the course of a life in his. and this is the central fact of the case. mr. browning's work is himself. his poetic genius was in advance of his general growth, but it has been subject to no other law. "the ring and the book" was written at what may be considered the turning-point of a human life. it was in some degree a turning-point in the author's artistic career: for most of his emotional poems were published before, and most of the argumentative after it; and in this sense his work may be said to divide itself into two. but the division is useless for our purpose. the browning of the second period is the browning of the first, only in a more crystallized form. no true boundary line can be drawn even here. my endeavour will, therefore, be to bring the sense of this real continuity into the divisions which i must impose on mr. browning's work; and thus also to infuse something of his life into the meagre statement of contents to which i am forced to reduce it. the few words of explanation by which i preface each group may assist this end. at the same time i shall resist all temptation to "bring out" what i have indicated as mr. browning's leading ideas by headings, capitals, italics, or any other artificial device whatever; as in so doing i should destroy his emphasis and hinder the right reading, besides effacing the usually dramatic character, of the individual poems. the impressions i have received from the collective work will, i trust, be confirmed by it. footnotes: [footnote : i stated in my first edition that mr. browning was descended from the "captain micaiah browning" who raised the siege of derry in by springing the boom across lough foyle, and perished in the act (the incident being related in macaulay's "history of england," vol. iv., pp. and of the edition of ). i am now told that there is no evidence of this lineal descent, though there are circumstances which point to some kind of relationship. another probable ancestor is captain ---- browning, who commanded the ship "holy ghost," which conveyed henry v. to france before he fought the battle of agincourt; and in return for whose services two waves, said to represent waves of the sea, were added to his coat of arms. the same arms were worn by captain micaiah browning, and are so by the present family.] [footnote : wiedemann is the second baptismal name of mr. browning's son; and, in his infantine mouth, it became (we do not exactly guess how), the "penini," shortened into "pen," which some ingenious interpreters have derived from the word "apennine."] [footnote : and--we are bound to admit--the singular literary obtuseness of the england of fifty years ago.] [footnote : a distinguished american philologist, the late george p. marsh, has declared that he exceeds all other modern english writers in his employment of them.] [footnote : in "in memoriam" we have such rhymes as:-- {now {curse {mourn {good {light {report {low {horse {turn {blood {delight {port in the blank verse of "the princess," and of "enoch arden" such assonances as:-- {sun {lost {whom {wand {noon {burst {seem {hand. {known {clipt {word {down {kept {wood, etc. i take these instances from the works of so acknowledged a master of verse as mr. tennyson, rather than from those of a smaller poet who would be no authority on the subject, because they thus serve to show that the poetic ear may have different kinds as well as degrees of sensibility, and must, in every case, be accepted as, to some extent, a law to itself.] [footnote : "la saisiaz," for instance, is written in the same measure as "locksley hall," fifteen syllables, divided by a pause, into groups of four trochees, and of three and a half--the last syllable forming the rhyme. it is admirably suited to the sustained and incisive manner in which the argument is carried on. "ixion" in "jocoseria," is in alternate hexameter and pentameter, which the author also employs here for the only time; it imitates the turning of the wheel on which ixion is bound. "pheidippides" is in a measure of mr. browning's own, composed of dactyls and spondees, each line ending with a half foot or pause. it gives the impression of firm, continuous, and rhythmic motion, and is generally fitted to convey the exalted sentiment and heroic character of the poem. in his translation of the "agamemnon," mr. browning has used the double ending continuously, so as to reproduce the extended measure of the greek iambic trimeter.] [footnote : as objection has been taken to the opinions conveyed in this paragraph, and mr. browning's authority has been even, in a manner, invoked against them, i subjoin by his desire the accompanying note. the question of what is, or is not, a vicious locution is not essential to the purposes of the book; but it is essential that i should not be supposed to have misstated mr. browning's views on any point on which i could so easily ascertain them. "i make use of 'wast' for the second person of the perfect-indicative, and 'wert' for the present-potential, simply to be understood; as i should hardly be if i substituted the latter for the former, and therewith ended my phrase. 'where wert thou, brother, those three days, had he not raised thee?' means one thing, and 'where wast thou when he did so?' means another. that there is precedent in plenty for this and many similar locutions ambiguous, or archaic, or vicious, i am well aware, and that, on their authority, i _be_ wrong, the illustrious poet _be_ right, and you, our critic, _was_ and shall continue to be my instructor as to 'every thing that pretty _bin_.' as regards my objection to the slovenly 'i had' for 'i'd,' instead of the proper 'i would,' i shall not venture to supplement what landor has magisterially spoken on the subject. an adverb adds to, and does not, by its omission, alter into nonsense the verb it qualifies. 'i would rather speak than be silent, better criticize than learn' are forms structurally regular: what meaning is in 'i had speak, had criticize'? then, i am blamed for preferring the indicative to what i suppose may be the potential mood in the case of 'need' and 'dare'--just that unlucky couple: by all means go on and say 'he need help, he dare me to fight,' and so pair off with 'he need not beg, he dare not reply,' forms which may be expected to pullulate in this morning's newspaper. "venice, oct. , ." "r. b." ] i. introductory group. "pauline," "paracelsus," "sordello." these three poems are mr. browning's first, and they are also, as i have said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them from the remainder of it. each is in its different way the study of a human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence, and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. this ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with mr. browning's mind--young and untutored by experience as it then was, full of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been--that it is difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life. but if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much more in fancy than in fact. his sympathy with the ambition of paracelsus and sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are only justified in asserting what is beyond dispute: that these poems represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which begins and ends in them. the mind of his men and women will be exercised on many things, but never again so much upon itself. the vivid sense of their personality will be less in their minds than in his own. "pauline." ( .) this poem is, as its title declares, a fragment of a confession. the speaker is a man, probably still young; and pauline, the name of the lady who receives the confession, and is supposed to edit it. it is not, however, "fragmentary" in the sense of revealing only a small part of the speaker's life, or of only recording isolated acts, from which the life may be built up. its fragmentary character lies in this: that, while very explicit as a record of feeling and motive, it is entirely vague in respect to acts. it is an elaborate retrospect of successive mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to pauline, the man's constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now magnifies and distorts them. an ultra-consciousness of self is in fact the key-note of the whole mental situation. pauline's lover has been a prey to the spiritual ambition so distinctly illustrated in these three first poems; and, unlike paracelsus and sordello, he has given it no outlet in unselfish aims. his life has not been wholly misspent; he is a poet and a student; he has had dreams of human good; he has reverenced great men: and never quite lost the faith in god, and the sense of nearness to him; and he alleges some of these facts in deprecation of his too harsh verdict upon himself. but his ultimate object has been always the gratification of self--the ministering to its pleasures and to its powers; and this egotism has become narrower and more consuming, till the thirst for even momentary enjoyment has banished the very belief in higher things. the belief returns, and we leave him at the close of his confession exhausted by the mental fever, but released from it--new-born to a better life; though how and why this has happened is again part of the mystery of the case. "pauline" is _the_ one of mr. browning's longer poems of which no intelligible abstract is possible: a circumstance the more striking that it is perfectly transparent, as well as truly poetical, so far as its language is concerned. the defects and difficulties of "pauline" are plainly admitted in an editor's note, written in french, and signed by this name; and which, proceeding as it does from the author himself, supplies a valuable comment on the work. "i much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. i do not know moreover whether in striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend: that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (_genre_) which it can merely indicate. this unpretending opening, this stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations almost impossible. the reasons which he elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent have secured my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise i should have advised him to throw into the fire. i believe none the less in the great principle of all composition--in that principle of shakespeare, of raphael, and of beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than to their execution; i have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and i much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. it would be best to burn this; but what can i do?" * * * * * we might infer from this, as from his subsequent introduction, that mr. browning disclaimed all that is extravagant in the poem, and laid it simply to the charge of the imaginary person it is intended to depict: but that he has also prefaced it with a curious latin quotation which identifies that person with himself.[ ] "pauline" did not take its place among the author's collected works till , when the uniform edition of them appeared; and he then introduced it by a preface (to which i have just alluded) in which he declared his unwillingness to publish such a boyish production, and gave the reasons which induced him to do so. the poem is boyish, or at all events youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic beauties in its author's mind. it contains however one piece of mental portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for mr. browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it. it begins thus (vol. i. page ): "i am made up of an intensest life," the tribute at page [ ] to the saving power of imagination is also characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous manner. it is interesting to know that in the line (page ), "the king treading the purple calmly to his death," he was thinking of agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of classic literature began. the allusion to plato, at pages , , and , largely confirms this impression. the feeling for music asserts itself also at page , though in a less spiritual form than it assumes in his later works. but the most striking piece of true biography which "pauline" contains, is its evidence of the young writer's affectionate reverence for shelley, whom he idealizes under the name of sun-treader. an invocation to his memory occupies three pages, beginning with the ninth; it is renewed at the end of the poem, and there can be no doubt that the pathetic language in which it is couched came straight from the young poet's own heart. we even fancy that shelley's influence is visible in the poem itself, which contains a profusion of natural imagery, and some touches of naturalistic emotion, not at all in keeping with mr. browning's picturesque, but habitually human genius. the influence, if it existed, passed away with his earliest youth; not so the admiration and sympathy which it implied; and this, considering the wide difference which separated the two minds, is an interesting fact.[ ] "paracelsus." ( .) "paracelsus" is a summary of the life, as mr. browning conceives it, of this well-known physicist of the sixteenth century; and is divided into five scenes, or groups of scenes, each representing a critical moment in his experience, and reviewing in his own words the circumstances by which it has been prepared. the personages whom it includes are, besides the principal one, festus and michal, early friends of paracelsus, and now man and wife; and the italian poet aprile. michal appears only in the first scene; aprile in the second or third; but festus accompanies paracelsus throughout the drama, in the constant character of judicious, if not profound, adviser, and of tender friend. his personality is sufficiently marked to claim the importance of a type; and as such he stands forth, as contrasted with both paracelsus and aprile, and yet a bond of union between them. it is more probable however that he was created for the mere dramatic purpose of giving shape to the confession of paracelsus, and preserving it from monotony. the story is principally told in a dialogue between them. the first scene is entitled "paracelsus aspires;" and takes place at würzburg between himself, festus, and michal, on the eve of his departure from their common home. both friends begin by opposing his aspirations, and thus lead him to expound and defend them. the aim and spirit of these is the distinguishing feature of the poem. paracelsus aspires to knowledge: such knowledge as will benefit his fellow-men. he will seek it in the properties of nature, and, as history tells us, he will succeed. but his _aspirations_ pass over these isolated discoveries, which he has no idea of connecting into scientific truths: and tend ever towards some final revelation of the secret of life, to flash forth from his own brain when the flesh shall have been subdued, and the imprisoned light of intellect set free. and here mr. browning's metaphysical fancy is somewhat at issue with his facts. paracelsus employed nature in the quest of the supernatural or magical; this is shown by the poem, though in it he begins by repudiating, with all other external aids, the help of the black art. he therefore relied on other kinds of knowledge than that which springs direct from the human mind. the inconsistency however disappears in mr. browning's conception of the case, and the metaphysical language which he imputes to paracelsus in the earlier stages of his career, is not felt to be untrue. paracelsus not only aspires to know: he believes it his mission to acquire knowledge; and he believes also that it is only to be acquired through untried methods, through untaught men: most of all through solitary communion with nature, and at the sacrifice of all human joys. festus regards this as a delusion, and combats it, in this first scene, with the arguments of common sense; overshooting the mark just enough to leave his friend the victory. paracelsus has declared that he appreciates all he is renouncing, but that he has no choice. he knows that the way on which he is about to enter is "trackless;" but so is the bird's: god will guide him as he guides the bird. and festus replies that the road to knowledge is _not_ trackless. "mighty marchers" have left their footprints upon it. nature has not written her secrets in desert places, but in the souls of great men: the "stagirite,"[ ] and the sages who form a glory round him. he urges paracelsus to learn what they can teach, and then take the torch of wisdom from the exhausted runner's hand, and let his fresh strength continue the race. he warns him against the personal ambition which alloys his unselfish thirst for knowledge; against the presumption which impels him to serve god (and man). "... apart from such appointed channel as he wills shall gather imperfect tributes, for that sole obedience valued perchance...." (vol. ii. p. .) against the dangers of a course which cuts him adrift from human love. but paracelsus has his answer ready. "the wisdom of the past has done nothing for mankind. men have laboured and grown famous: and the evils of life are unabated: the earth still groans in the blind and endless struggle with them. truth comes from within the human intellect. to know is to have opened a way for its escape--not a way for its admission. it has often refused itself to a life of study. it has been born of loitering idleness. the force which inspires him proves his mission to be authentic. his own will could not create such promptings. he dares not set them aside." the depth of his conviction carries the day, and the scene ends with these expressive words:-- "_par._ ... are there not, festus, are there not, dear michal. two points in the adventure of the diver, one--when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, one--when, a prince, he rises with his pearl? festus, i plunge! _fest._ we wait you when you rise!" (vol. ii. p. .) the next two, or indeed three scenes are united under the title "paracelsus attains;" but the attainment is not at first visible. we find him at constantinople, in the house of the greek conjuror, nine years after his departure from home. he has not discovered the magical secret which he came to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position, is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure. his desultory course has borne scanty and confused results. his powers have been at once overstrained and frittered away. he is beset by the dread of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral shipwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear. his thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love and joy. at this juncture the poet aprile appears, and unconsciously reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess. he has sought knowledge at the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is suffering for it. knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of life. aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused to _know_. he has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has overtaken him also: for he is dying. if the one existence has lacked sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. aprile's "love" is not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything which belongs to the life of art. he represents the æsthetic or emotional in life, as paracelsus represents the intellectual. we see this in the sorrowful confession of paracelsus:-- "i cannot feed on beauty for the sake of beauty only, nor can drink in balm from lovely objects for their loveliness;" (vol. ii. p. .) and, in the words already addressed to aprile (page ):-- "are we not halves of one dissevered world," aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes the moral of the story, and begins thus (page ):-- "knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great, our time so brief,...." paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the truth; and the message sinks into his soul. in what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and paracelsus is at bâle, again opening his heart to his old friend. he is professor at the university. his fame extends far beyond it. outwardly he has "attained." but the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, because it is more hopeless. he has failed in his highest aims--and failed doubly: because he has learned to content himself with low ones. he believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his shoulders and be considered great. but the crowning truth is as far from him as ever; and the mass of those who crowd his lecture-room do not even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed. he is humiliated at having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge; still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact; and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as they can give will repay him. his contempt for himself and them is making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his disgrace. in spite however of his failure paracelsus has done so much, that festus is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out. their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abasement as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. he grieves over what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he will not regard as due to any deeper cause. but paracelsus will take no comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words--in part the echo of festus' own:-- "... no, no: love, hope, fear, faith--these make humanity; these are its sign and note and character. and these i have lost!..." (vol. ii. p. .) festus has no answer to give. he parts from paracelsus perplexed and saddened rather than convinced, but with a dawning consciousness of depths in life, to which his strong but simple soul has no key. in the fourth scene these depths are more fully and more perplexingly revealed. two years more have elapsed. paracelsus has escaped from bâle, and is at colmar, once more confessing himself to festus, and once more said to "aspire." but his aspirations are less easy to understand than formerly, because their aim is less single. the sense of wasted life, aprile's warnings, some natural rebound against the continued intellectual strain have determined him to strive for a fuller existence, and neglect no opportunity of usefulness or enjoyment. a serious and commendable change would seem to be denoted by the words, "i have tried each way singly: now for both!" (page ); and again at page , where a new-born softness asserts itself. his language has, however, a vein of bitterness, sometimes even of cynicism, which belies the idea of any sustained impulse to good. he is worn in body, weary in mind, fitful and wayward in mood, and just in the condition in which men half impose on others, and half on themselves. he alludes to the habit of drinking as one which he has now contracted; and he is clearly entering on the period of his greatest excesses, perhaps also of his most strenuous exertions in the cause of knowledge. but his energy is reckless and irregular, and the spirit of the gambler rather than that of the student is in it. he works all night to forget himself by day, gathering up his diminished strength for, a lavish expenditure; and a new misgiving as to the wisdom of his "aspirations" pierces through the assertion that even sickness may lend an aid; since "... mind is nothing but disease, and natural health is ignorance." (vol. ii. p. .) we feel that henceforward his path will be all downhill. in the fifth and closing scene, thirteen years later, paracelsus "attains" again, and for the last time. he is dying. festus watches by him in his hospital cell with a very touching tenderness; and as paracelsus awakes from a period of lethargy to a delirious remembrance of his past life, he soothes and guides him to an inspired calm in which its true meaning is revealed to him. the half prophetic death-bed vision includes everything which experience had taught him; and a great deal which we cannot help thinking only a more modern experience could have taught. it disclaims all striving after absolute knowledge, and asserts the value of limitation in every energy of life. the passage in which he describes the faculties of man, and which begins "power--neither put forth blindly, nor controlled calmly by perfect knowledge;" (vol. ii. p. .) contains the natural lesson of the speaker's career, supposing him in a condition to receive it. but it also reflects mr. browning's constant ideal of a fruitful and progressive existence; and the very beautiful monologue of which it forms part is, so far as it goes, his actual confession of faith. the scientific idea of evolution is here distinctly foreshadowed: though it begins and ends, in mr. browning's mind, in the large theism which was and is the basis of his religious belief. the poem is followed by an historical appendix, which enables the reader to verify its facts, and judge mr. browning's interpretation of them. "sordello." ( .) "sordello" is, like "paracelsus," the imaginary reconstruction of a real life, in connection with contemporary facts; but its six "books" present a much more complicated structure. the historical part of "paracelsus" is all contained in the one life. in "sordello" it forms a large and moving background, which often disputes our attention with the central figure, and sometimes even absorbs it: projecting itself as it were in an artistic middle distance, in which fact and fancy are blended; while the mental world through which the hero moves, is in its way, as restless and as crowded as the material. it may save time and trouble to readers of the poem to know something of its historical foundation and poetic motive, before making any great effort to disentangle its various threads; but it will always be best to read it once without this key: since the story, involved as it is, has a sustained dramatic interest which is destroyed by anticipating its course. the historical personages who take part in it directly and indirectly, are ghibellines. guelphs. eccelino da romano ii., azzo, lord of este surnamed the monk: (father and son). married, first to agnes este; secondly to adelaide, richard, count of san a tuscan. bonifacio (father and son). taurello salinguerra, a soldier, married, first to retrude, of the family of the german emperor frederick the second; and secondly, in advanced life, to sofia, fifth daughter of eccelino the monk. adelaide, second wife of eccelino da romano. palma (properly cunizza), eccelino's daughter by agnes este. the poet sordello. _historical basis of the story._ a mantuan poet of the name of sordello is mentioned by dante in the "purgatorio," where he is supposed to be recognized as a fellow-townsman by virgil. "surse ver lui del luogo ove pria stava, dicendo, o mantovan, io son sordello della tua terra: e l' un l' altro abbracciava."[ ] and also in his treatise "de vulgare eloquentiâ," where he speaks of him as having created the italian language. these facts are related by sismondi in his "italian republics," vol. ii., page ; and the writer refers us for more particulars to his work on the "literature of southern europe." he seems, however, to exhaust the subject when he tells us that the nobility of sordello's birth, and his intrigue or marriage with cunizza are attested by contemporaries; that a "mysterious obscurity" shrouds his life; and that his violent death is obscurely indicated by dante, whose mention of him is now his only title to immortality. according to one tradition he was the son of an archer named elcorte. another seems to point to him when it imputes a son to salinguerra as the only offspring of his first marriage, and having died before himself. mr. browning accepts the latter hypothesis, whilst he employs both. the birth of his sordello, as probably of the real one, coincides with the close of the twelfth century; and with an active condition of the family feuds which were just merging in the conflict of guelphs and ghibellines. the "biographie universelle" says: "the first encounter between the two parties took place at vicenza towards . eccelino the second, who allied himself with the republics of verona and padua, was exiled from vicenza himself his whole family and his faction, by a podesta, his enemy. before submitting to this sentence, he undertook to defend himself by setting fire to the neighbouring houses; a great part of the town was burned during the conflict, in which eccelino was beaten. these were the first scenes of confusion and massacre, which met the eyes of the son of the lord of romano, the ferocious eccelino the third, born th of april, ." in mr. browning's version, adelaide, wife of eccelino ii., is saved with her infant son--this eccelino the third--by the devotion of an archer, elcorte, who perishes in the act. retrude, wife of salinguerra, and also present on this occasion, only lives to be conveyed to adelaide's castle at goito; but her new-born child survives; and adelaide, dreading his future rivalry with her own, allows his father to think him dead, and brings him up, under the name of sordello, as her page, declaring him to be elcorte's son adopted out of gratitude. the "intrigue" between him and palma (cunizza) appears in due time as a poetical affinity, strongest on her side, and which determines her to see him restored to his rightful place. palma's subsequent marriage with richard, count of san bonifacio, serves to justify the idea of an engagement to him, ratified by her father before his retirement from the world, and which she and salinguerra conspire to break, the one from love of sordello, the other in the interests of her house. eccelino's real assumption of the monastic habit after adelaide's death is represented as in part caused by remorse--for salinguerra is his old and faithful ally, and he has connived at the wrong done to him in the concealment of his son; and his return to the guelph connexion from which his daughter has sprung, as a general disclaimer of his second wife's views. the lombard league also figures in the story, as the consequence of salinguerra's and palma's conspiracy against san bonifacio; though it also appears as brought about by the historic course of events. salinguerra, under cover of military reprisals, has entrapped the count into ferrara, and detained him there, at the moment when he was expected to meet his lady-love in his own city of verona. verona prepares to resent this outrage on its prince, and with it, the other states which represent the guelph cause; and when palma--seizing her opportunity--summons sordello thither in his character of her minstrel, and reveals to him her projects for him and for herself, their interview is woven into the historical picture of a great mediæval city suddenly called to arms. what sordello sees when he goes with palma to ferrara, belongs to the history of all mediæval warfare; and his sudden and premature death revives the historical tradition though in a new form. the intermediate details of his minstrel's career are of course imaginary; but his struggle to increase the expressiveness of his mother tongue again records a fact. i have mentioned such accessible authorities as sismondi and the "biographie universelle," because they _are_ accessible: not from any idea that they give the measure of mr. browning's knowledge of his subject. he prepared himself for writing "sordello" by studying all the chronicles of that period of italian history which the british museum supplied; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. he also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are laid. _its dramatic idea._ the dramatic idea of "sordello" is that of an imaginative nature, nourished by its own creations, and also consumed by them; and breaking down in consequence under the first strain of real conflict and passion. the mysterious italian poet,--scarcely known but as a voice, a mere phantom among living men--was well fitted to illustrate such an idea; he might also perhaps have suggested it. but we know that it was already growing in mr. browning's mind; for sordello had been foreshadowed in aprile, though the two are as different as their common poetic quality allows. aprile is consumed by a creative passion, which is always akin to love; sordello by an imaginative fever which has no love in it; and in this respect he presents a stronger contrast to aprile than paracelsus himself. as a poet he may be said to contain both the artist and the thinker, and therefore to transcend both; and his craving is for neither love nor knowledge, as the foregoing poem represents them, but for that magnitude of poetic existence, which means all love and all knowledge, as all beauty and all power in itself. but he makes the same mistake as aprile, or at least as paracelsus, and makes it in a greater degree; for he rejects all the human conditions of the poetic life: and strives to live it, not in experience or in sympathy, but by a pure act of imagination, or as he calls it, of _will_; and he wears himself out body and soul by a mental strain which proves as barren as it is continuous. the true joy of living comes home to him at last, and with it the first challenge to self-sacrifice. duty prevails; but he dies in the conflict, or rather of it. the intended lesson of the story is distinctly enforced in its last scene, but is patent almost from the first--that the mind must not disclaim the body, nor imagination divorce itself from reality: that the spiritual is bound up with the material in our earthly life. all mr. browning's practical philosophy is summed up in this truth, and much of his religion; for it points to the necessity of a human manifestation of the divine being; and though sordello's story contains no explicit reference to christian doctrine, an unmistakeable christian sentiment pervades its close. that restless and ambitious spirit had missed its only possible anchorage: the ideal of an intellectual existence at once guided and set free by love. mr. browning has indeed prefaced the poem by saying that in writing it he has laid his chief stress _on the incidents in the development of a soul_. it must be read with reference to this idea; and i should be bound to give precedence to it over the poetic inspiration of the story if mr. browning had practically done so. this is not, however, the case. sordello's poetic individuality overshadows the moral, and for a time conceals it altogether. the close of his story is distinctly the emerging of a soul from the mists of poetic egotism by which it has been obscured; and mr. browning has meant us from the first to see it struggling through them. but in so doing he has judged sordello's poetic life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the negation of it. the idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in him the making of the largest man. his sordello is imperial among men for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and mr. browning would have made it more consistently so, had he worked out his idea at a later time. but the poem was written at a period in which his artistic judgment was yet inferior to his poetic powers, and the need of ordering his vast material from the reader's, as well as the writer's, point of view--though he states it by implication at the end of the third book--had not thoroughly penetrated his mind. i venture on this criticism, though it is no part of my task to criticize, because "sordello" is the one of mr. browning's works which still remains to be read; and even a mistaken criticism may sometimes afford a clue. "sordello" is not only harder to read than "paracelsus," but harder than any other of mr. browning's works; its complications of structure being interwoven with difficulties of a deeper kind which again react upon them. enough has been said to show that the conception of the character is very abstruse on the intellectual and poetic side; that it presents us with states of thought and feeling, remote from common experience, and which no language could make entirely clear; and unfortunately the style is sometimes in itself so obscure that we cannot judge whether it is the expression or the idea which we fail to grasp. the poem was written under the dread of diffuseness which had just then taken possession of mr. browning's mind, and we have sometimes to struggle through a group of sentences out of which he has so laboured to squeeze every unnecessary word, that their grammatical connection is broken up, and they present a compact mass of meaning which without previous knowledge it is almost impossible to construe. we are also puzzled by an abridged, interjectional, way of carrying on the historical part of the narrative; by the author's habit of alluding to imaginary or typical personages in the same tone as to real ones; and by misprints, including errors in punctuation, which will be easily corrected in a later edition, but which mar the present one. it is only fair to add that he would deprecate the idea of any excessive labour as bestowed on this, to his mind, immature performance. it is for us, not for him, to do justice to it. with all its faults and obscurities, "sordello" is a great work; full moreover of pregnant and beautiful passages which are not affected by them. when mr. browning re-edited "sordello" in , he considered the possibility of re-writing it in a more transparent manner; but he concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarizing the contents of each "book" in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story. it will be useful to read this carefully. book the first. the story opens at verona, at the moment of the formation of the lombard league--a well-known union of guelph cities against the ghibellines in northern italy. mr. browning, addressing himself to an imaginary audience composed of living and dead, describes the city as it hastens to arms, and the chain of circumstances through which she has been called upon to do so; and draws a curious picture of two political ideals which he considers respectively those of ghibelline and guelph: the one symbolized by isolated heights, the other by a continuous level growth; those again suggesting the violent disruptions which create imperial power; these the peaceful organic processes of democratic life. the poet shelley is desired to withdraw his "pure face" from among the spectators of this chequered scene; and dante is invoked in the name of him whose fame preceded his, and has been absorbed by it. a secret chamber in count richard's palace shows palma and sordello in earnest conference with each other. then the curtain falls; and we are carried back thirty years, and to goito castle. sordello is there: a refined and beautiful boy; framed for all spiritual delights. as his life is described, it has neither duties nor occupations; no concern with the outer world; no contact even with that of adelaide, his supposed protectress. he is dreaming away his childhood in the silent gloom of the castle, or the sunny outdoor life of the hills and woods. he lives in imagination, blends the idea of his own being with everything he sees; and for years is happy in the bare fact of existence. but the germ of a fatal spiritual ambition is lurking within him; and as he grows into a youth, he hankers after something which he calls sympathy, but which is really applause. he therefore makes a human crowd for himself out of carved and tapestried figures, and the few names which penetrate into his solitude, and fancies himself always the greatest personage amongst them. he simulates all manner of heroic performances and of luxurious rest. he is eccelino, the emperor's vicar; he is the emperor himself. he becomes more than this; for his fancy has soared upwards to the power which includes all empire in one--the spiritual power of song. apollo is its representative. sordello is he. he has had one glimpse of palma; she becomes his daphne; the dream life is at its height. and now sordello is a man. he begins to sicken for reality. vanity and ambition are ripe in him. his egotisms are innocent, but they are absorbing. the soul is as yet dormant.[ ] book the second. the dream-life becomes a partial reality. sordello's wanderings carry him one day to the walls of mantua, outside which palma is holding a "court of love." eglamor sings. his song is incomplete. sordello feels what is wanting; catches up the thread of the story; and sings it to its proper close.[ ] his triumph is absolute. he is installed as palma's minstrel in eglamor's place. eglamor accepts his defeat with touching gentleness, and lies down to die. this poet is meant to embody the limited art, which is an end in itself, and one with the artist's life. sordello, on the other hand, represents the boundless aspirations which art may subserve, but which must always leave it behind. the parallel will be stated more distinctly later on. sordello's first wish is fulfilled. he has found a career which will reconcile his splendid dreams with his real obscurity, and set him, by right of imagination--the true apolloship--apart from other men. but his true difficulties have yet to begin. it is not enough that he feels himself a transcendent personage. he must make others believe that he is so. every act of imagination is with him an act of existence, or as mr. browning calls it of will; but this self-asserting was much easier with the imaginary crowd than it can be with the real one. sordello is soon at cross-purposes with his hearers: for when he sings of human passion, or human prowess, they never dream of identifying him with it; and when he sings of mere abstract modes of being, they do not understand. the love of abstract conception is indeed the rock on which he splits. the feelings which are real to us are unreal to him, because they are accidental. what is real to him is the underlying consciousness which according to his view is permanent: the "intensest" self described in "pauline"--the mind which is spoken of in the fifth "book" of "sordello" (vol. i. page ) as nearest to god when emptied of even thought; and his aim is to put forth all the _qualities_ which this absolute existence can assume, and yet be reflected in other men's minds as independent of them. this lands him in struggles not only with his hearers but with himself--for he is unused to expressing what he feels; and with a language which at best could convey "whole perceptions" like his, in a very meagre form, or a fragmentary one. he still retains the love of real life and adventure which inspired his boyish dreams. there is nothing, as i have said, that he does not wish to _be_; and now, amidst commonplace human beings, his human desires often take a more simple and natural form. but the poet in him pushes the man aside, and bids him, at all events, wait. he does not know that he is failing through the hopeless disunion of the two. he silences his better humanity, and retains the worst; for he is more and more determined to succeed at whatever cost. yet failure meets him on every side. he is too large for his public, but he is also too small for it. every question raised even in talk carries him into the infinite. every man of his audience has a practical answer ready before he has. naddo plies him with common sense. "he is to speak to the human heart--he is not to be so philosophical--he is not to seem so clever." shallow judges pull him to pieces. shallow rivals strive to sing him down.[ ] he loses his grasp of the ideal. he cannot clutch the real. his imagination dries up. meanwhile adelaide has died. salinguerra, who had joined the emperor at naples, is brought back in hot haste by the news that eccelino has retired to a monastery, has disclaimed the policy of his house; and is sealing his peace with the guelph princes by the promised marriage of his sons eccelino and alberic with the sisters of este; and of his daughter palma with count richard of san bonifacio himself. he is coming to mantua. sordello must greet him with his best art. but sordello shrinks from the trial, and escapes back to goito, whence palma has just departed. what his mantuan life has taught him is thus expressed (vol. i. page ):-- "the body, the machine for acting will, had been at the commencement proved unfit; that for demonstrating, reflecting it, mankind--no fitter: was the will itself in fault?" he is wiser than he was, but his objects remain the same. the sympathies--the moral sense--the soul--are still asleep. book the third. sordello buries himself once more in the contemplation of nature; but finds in it only a short-lived peace. the marshy country about mantua is suddenly converted into water; and with the shock of this catastrophe comes also the feeling: nature can do and undo; her opportunities are endless. with man "...youth once gone is gone: deeds let escape are never to be done." (vol. i. p. .) he has dreamed of love, of revel, and of adventure; but he has let pass the time when such dreams could be realized; and worst of all, the sacrifice has been useless. he has sacrificed the man in him to the poet; and his poetic existence has been impoverished by the act. he has rejected experience that he might _be_ his fullest self before living it; and only _living_, in other words, experience, could have made that self complete. his later years have been paving the way for this discovery; it bursts on him all at once. he has been under a long strain. the reaction at length has come. he yearns helplessly for the "blisses strong and soft" which he has known he was passing by, but of which the full meaning never reached him until now. he must live yet. the question is, "in what way." and this is unexpectedly answered. palma sends for him to verona: tells him of her step-mother's death--of strange secrets revealed to herself--of the secret influence sordello has exercised over her life--of a great future awaiting his own, and connecting it with the emperor's cause. she summons him to accompany her to ferrara, and hear from salinguerra's lips what that future is to be. sordello has entered on a new phase of existence. he feels that henceforward he is not to _act men_, but to _make them act_; this is how his being is to be fulfilled. it is a first step in the direction of unselfishness, but not yet into it. the soul is not yet awake. at this point of his narrative mr. browning makes a halt, and carries us off to venice, where he muses on the various questions involved in sordello's story. the very act of digression leads back to the comparison between eglamor and sordello: between the artist who is one with his work, and him who is outside and beyond it--between the completeness of execution which comes of a limited ideal, and the true greatness of those performances which "can never be more than dreamed." and the case of the true poet is farther illustrated by that of the weather-bound sailor, who seems to have settled down for life with the fruits of his adventures, but waits only the faintest sign of a favourable wind to cut his moorings and be off. then comes a vision of humanity, also in harmony with the purpose of the poem. it takes the form of some frail and suffering woman, and is addressed by the author with a tenderness in which we recognize one of his constant ideals of love: the impulse not to worship or to enjoy, but to comfort and to protect. he next considers the problem of human sorrow and sin, and deprecates the absolute condemnation of the sinner, in language which anticipates that of "fifine at the fair." "every life has its own law. the 'losel,' the moral outcast, keeps his own conceit of truth though through a maze of lies. good labours to exist through evil, by means of the very ignorance which sets each man to tackle it for himself, believing that he alone can."[ ] mr. browning rejects at least the _show_ of knowledge which gives you a name for what you die of; and that deepening of ignorance which comes of the perpetual insisting that fountains of knowledge spring everywhere for those who choose to dispense it. "what science teaches is made useless by the shortness of human existence; it absorbs all our energy in building up a machine which we shall have no time to work. all direct truth comes to us from the poet: whether he be of the smaller kind who only see, or the greater, who can tell what they have seen, or the greatest who can make others see it." corresponding instances follow.[ ] mr. browning is aware that one is a poet at his own risk; and that the poetic chaplet may also prove a sacrificial one. he will still wear it, however, because in his case it means the suffrage of a "patron friend"[ ] "whose great verse blares unintermittent on like your own trumpeter at marathon,--" (vol. i. p. .) he recalls his readers to the "business" of the poem: "the fate of such as find our common nature--overmuch despised because restricted and unfit to bear the burthen they impose on it-- cling when they would discard it; craving strength to leap from the allotted world, at length they do leap,--flounder on without a term, each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ in unexpanded infancy, unless...." (pp. , .) admits that the story sounds dull; but suggests the possibility of its containing an agreeable surprise. an amusing anecdote to this effect concludes the chapter.[ ] book the fourth. we are now introduced to taurello salinguerra: a fine soldier-like figure; the type of elastic strength in both body and mind. we are told that he possesses the courage of the fighter, the astuteness of the politician, the knowledge and graces of the man of leisure. he has shown himself capable of controlling an emperor, and of giving precedence to a woman. he is young at sixty, while the son who is half his age, is "lean, outworn and really old." and the crowning difference between him and sordello is this: that while sordello only draws out other men as a means of displaying himself, he only displays himself sufficiently to draw out other men. "his choicest instruments" have "surmised him shallow." he is in his palace at ferrara, musing over the past--that past which held the turning-point of his career; which began the feud between himself and the now guelph princes, and which naturally merged him in the ghibelline cause. he remembers how the fathers of the present este and san bonifacio combined to cheat him out of the modenese heiress who was to be his bride--how he retired to sicily, to return with a wife of the emperor's own house--how his enemies surprised him at vicenza. he sees his old comrade eccelino, so passive now, so brave and vigorous then. he sees the town as they fire it together: the rush for the gates: the slashing, the hewing, the blood hissing and frying on the iron gloves. his spirit leaps in the returning frenzy of that struggle and flight. it sinks again as he thinks of elcorte--adelaide's escape--her rescued child; his own doom in the wife and child who were not rescued. "and now! he has effaced himself in the interests of the romano house. its life has grafted itself on his own; and to what end? the emperor is coming. his badge and seal, already in salinguerra's hands, bestow the title of imperial prefect on whosoever assumes the headship of the ghibellines in the north of italy; and eccelino, its proper chief, recoils; withdraws even his name from the cause. who shall wear the badge? none so fitly as himself, who holds san bonifacio captive--who has dislocated if not yet broken the guelph right arm. yet, is it worth his while? shall he fret his remaining years? shall he rob his old comrade's son?" he laughs the idea to scorn.... sordello has come with palma to ferrara. he came to find the men who were to be the body to his spirit, the instrument to his will. but he came, expecting that these would be great. and now he discovers that very few are great; while behind and beneath, and among them, extends something which has never yet entered his field of thought: the mass of mankind. the more he looks the more it grows upon him: this people with the "... mouths and eyes, petty enjoyments and huge miseries,--" (vol. i. p. .) and the more he feels that the few are great because the many are in them--because they are types and representatives of these. hitherto he has striven to impose himself on mankind. he now awakes to the joy and duty of serving it. it is the magnified body which his spirit needs. and in the new-found knowledge, the new-found sympathy, his soul springs full-grown into life. but another check is in store for him. he has taken for granted that the cause in which he is to be enlisted is the people's cause. the new soul in him can conceive nothing less. a first interview with salinguerra dispels this dream, and dispels it in such a manner that he leaves the presence of his unknown father years older and wearier than when he entered it. he wanders through the city, mangled by civil war. the effects of ghibelline vengeance meet him on every side. is the guelph more humane? he discusses the case with palma. they weigh deeds with deeds. "guelph and ghibelline are alike unjust and cruel, alike inveterate enemies of their fellow-men." who then represents the people's cause? a sudden answer comes. a bystander recognizing his minstrel's attire begs sordello to sing, and suggests the roman tribune crescentius as his theme. rome rises before his mind--the mother of cities--the great constructive power which weaves the past into the future; which represents the continuity of human life. _the reintegration of rome must typify the triumph of mankind._ but rome is now the church; she is one with the guelph cause. the guelph cause is therefore in some sense the true one. sordello's new-found spiritual and his worldly interests thus range themselves on opposite sides. book the fifth. the day draws to its close. sordello has seen more of the suffering human beings whom he wishes to serve, and the ideal rome has collapsed in his imagination like a mocking dream. nothing can be effected at once. no deed can bridge over the lapse of time which divides the first stage of a great social structure from its completion. each life may give its touch; it can give no more; through the endless generations. the vision of a regenerate humanity, "his last and loveliest," must depart like the rest. then suddenly a voice, "... sordello, wake! god has conceded two sights to a man-- one, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, the other, of the minute's work, man's first step to the plan's completeness: what's dispersed save hope of that supreme step which, descried earliest, was meant still to remain untried only to give you heart to take your own step, and there stay--leaving the rest alone?" (vol. i. p. .) the facts restate themselves, but from an opposite point of view. no man can give more than his single touch. the whole could not dispense with one of them. the work is infinite, but it is continuous. the later poet weaves into his own song the echoes of the first. "the last of each series of workmen sums up in himself all predecessors," whether he be the type of strength like charlemagne, or of knowledge like hildebrand. strength comes first in the scheme of life; it is the joyousness of childhood. step by step strength works knowledge with its groans and tears. and then, in its turn, knowledge works strength, knowledge controls strength, knowledge supersedes strength. it is knowledge which must prevail now. may it not be he who at this moment resumes its whole inheritance--its accumulated opportunities, in himself? he could stand still and dream while he fancied he stood alone; but he knows now that he is part of humanity, and it of him. goito is left behind; ferrara is reached; he must do the one thing that is within his grasp. he must influence salinguerra. he must interest him in the cause of knowledge; which is the people's cause. with this determination, he proceeds once more to the appointed presence. his minstrelsy is at first a failure. he is, as usual, outside his song. he is trying to guide it; it is not carrying him away. he is paralysed by the very consciousness that he is urging the head of the ghibellines to become a guelph. salinguerra's habitual tact and good-nature cannot conceal his own sense of the absurdity of the proposal. sordello sees in "a flash of bitter truth: so fantasies could break and fritter youth that he had long ago lost earnestness, lost will to work, lost power to even express the need of working!" (vol. i. p. .) but he will not be beaten. he tries once more. we see the blood leap to his brain, the heart into his purpose, as he challenges salinguerra to bow before the royalty of song. he owns himself its unworthy representative: for he has frittered away his powers. he has identified himself with existing forms of being, instead of proving his kingship by a new spiritual birth--by a supreme, as yet unknown revelation of the power of human will. he has resigned his function. he is a self-deposed king. he acknowledges the man before him as fitter to help the world than he is. but this is shame enough. he will not see its now elected champion scorn the post he renounces on his behalf. and his art is still royal though he is not. it is the utterance of the spiritual life: of the informing thought--which was in the world before deeds began--which brought order out of chaos--which guided deeds in their due gradation till itself emerged as song: to react in deed; but to need no help of it; to be (so we complete the meaning) as the knowledge which controls strength, which supersedes strength.[ ] the walls of the presence-chamber have fallen away. imaginary faces are crowding around him. he turns to these. he shows them human life as the poet's mirror reflects it: in its varied masquerade, in its mingled good and evil, in its steady advance; in the rainbow brightness of its obstructed lights; the deceptive gloom of its merely repeated shadows. he enforces in every tone that continuity of the plan of creation to which the poet alone holds the clue. finally, in the name of the unlimited truth, the limited opportunity, the one duty which confronts him now, the people whose support, in his performance of it, he may claim for the first time, he forbids the emperor's coming, and invokes salinguerra's protection for the guelph cause. salinguerra is moved at last, though not in the intended way. he does not yield to sordello's enthusiasm, but he sees that it is worth employing. there is no question of his becoming a guelph, but why should not sordello turn ghibelline? the cause requires a youth to "stalk, and bustle, and attitudinize;" and he clearly thinks this is all the youth before him wants to do, whether conscious of the fact or not. he thinks the thought aloud. "palma loves her minstrel; it is written in her eyes; let her marry him. were she romano's son instead of his daughter, she could wear the emperor's badge. himself fate has doomed to a secondary position. to contend against it is useless." before he knows what he has done, without really meaning to do it, he has thrown the badge across sordello's neck, and thus created him eccelino's successor. it was a prophetic act. at the moment of its performance "... each looked on each: up in the midst a truth grew, without speech." (vol. i. p. .) palma's moment is come, and she relates the story, as she received it from adelaide, of sordello's birth. with blanched lips, and sweat-drops on his face, the old soldier takes the hand of his poet-son, and lays its consecrating touch on his own face and brow. then, recovering himself, with his mailed arms on sordello's shoulders, he launches forth in an eager survey of the situation as it may shape itself for both. palma at last draws him away, and sordello, exhausted and speechless, is left alone. the two are in a small stone chamber, below the one they have left. half-drunk with his new emotions, salinguerra paces the narrow floor. his eyes burn; his tread strikes sparks from the stone. the future glows before him. he and sordello combined will break up hildebrand. they will rebuild charlemagne; not in the brute force of earlier days; but as strength adorned with knowledge, as empire imposing law. palma listens in satisfied repose; her task is done. a stamp is heard overhead. book the sixth. sordello is alone--face to face with his memory, with his conscience, and, as we presently find out, with the greatest temptation he has ever known. the moon is slowly rising; and just so the light of truth is overflowing his past life, and laying bare its every recess. he sees no fault in this past, except the want of a uniform purpose in which its various moods could have coalesced, the all-embracing sense of existence been translated into fact; but he unconsciously confesses its selfishness, in deciding that this purpose should have been outside him--a remote and uplifting, though sympathetic influence, such as the moon is to the sea. smaller lives than his have attained a higher completeness, because they have worked for an ideal: because they have had their moon. "where then is _his_ moon? what the love, the fear, the motive, in short, that could match the strength, could sway the full tide, of a nature like his?" he doubts its existence. and if, after all, he has been destined to be a law to himself, must he not in some sense apply this relative standard to the rest of life; and may not the outward motive be at all times the embodiment of an inner want or law, which only the stronger nature can realize as such? he has found his purpose. that purpose is the people. "but the people is himself. the desire to help it comes from within. will he fulfil this the better for regarding its suffering part as an outward motive, as something alien to himself, and for which self must be forsaken?" in plain words: would he not serve it as well by serving his own interests as by forsaking them? this sophistry is so patent that it startles even him; but it is only silenced to reassert itself in another form. "the guelph rule would doubtless be the best. but what can he do to promote it? attest his belief by refusing the emperor's badge? that would be something in the end. but meanwhile, how many sympathies to be broken, how many aversions defied, before the one ideal can be made to prevail. is not the proceeding too arbitrary? would it be justified by the result? the question is only one of ideas. if the men who supported each opposite cause were wholly good or bad, his course would be clear. but such divisions do not exist. all men are composite. all nature is a blending of good and evil, in which the one is often but a different form of the other. evil is in fact indispensable; for it is not only the ground of sympathy, but the active principle of life. joy means the triumph over obstruction. the suspended effort is death, so far as it goes. obstruction and effort must begin again and again. the sphere grows larger. it can never be more complete (more satisfying to those who are imprisoned within it). the only gain of existence is to be extracted from its hindrances, by each individual and for himself." the last plea for self-sacrifice is thus removed. these arguments are often just, even profound; they might also have been sincere in this special case; for there was something to be said in favour of accepting the opportunities which offered themselves, and of guiding the course of events, instead of engaging in a probably fruitless opposition to it. but they are not sincere. sordello is at best deceiving himself, and mr. browning intends us to to see this. he is struggling, if unconsciously, to evade the very trials which he thinks so good for other men. his true object soon stands revealed in a first and last effort at compromise. "the people's good is in the future. his is in the present. can he not speed the one, and yet enjoy the other?" ... the present rises up, in its new-found richness, in its undisguised temptation. the joys which lure him become gigantic; the price of renunciation shrinks to nothing; and at last, the pent up passion breaks forth--that passion for life, for sheer life, which inspired his imagination as a boy, which nerved his ambition as a man; to which his late-found humanities have given voice and shape; which now gathers itself to a supreme utterance in the grasp of death. "the earthly existence now: the transcendent hereafter, if fate will. a man's opportunities--a man's powers--a man's self-consciousness of joy and conflict--these things he craves while he may yet possess them." then a sudden revulsion. "he would drink the very dregs of life! how many have sacrificed it whilst its cup was full, because a better still seemed behind it." "... the death i fly, revealed so oft a better life this life concealed, and which sage, champion, martyr, through each path have hunted fearlessly--...." (vol. i. p. .) "but they had a belief which he has not. they knew what 'masters life.' for him the paramount fact is that of his own being...." this is the last protest of the flesh within him. sordello is dying, and probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation, which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. he already knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual existence. he now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it the exigencies of the spirit. he has striven to obtain infinite consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. he has broken the law of life. he has missed (so we interpret mr. browning's conclusion) the ideal of that divine and human love which would have given the freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. eglamor began with love. will sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course? we know at least that the soul in him has conquered. his stamp upon the floor has brought palma and salinguerra to him in anxious haste. they find him dead: "under his foot the badge: still, palma said, a triumph lingering in the wide eyes, wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies help from above in his extreme despair,...." (vol. i. p. .) sordello is buried at goito castle, in an old font-tomb in which his mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. salinguerra makes peace with the guelphs, marries a daughter of eccelino the monk, and effaces himself once for all in the romano house, leaving its sons eccelino and alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the fate they have deserved. he himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they punish, but do not much resent. we see him for the last time at the age of eighty, a nominal prisoner in venice. the drama is played out. its actors have vanished from the stage. one only lives on in mr. browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure--more human, and therefore more undying than naddo himself: the poet eglamor. sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of failure more rare and more brilliant than that of eglamor, yet more full of the irony of life. in one sense, however, he had lived for a _better thing_, and we are bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with the morning frost, "... singing all the while some unintelligible words to beat the lark, god's poet, swooning at his feet, so worsted is he...." (vol. i. p. - ) the poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely. footnotes: [footnote : the quoted passage is from the works of cornelius agrippa, a well-known professor of occult philosophy, and is indeed introductory to a treatise upon it. the writer is quite aware that his work may be scandalizing, hurtful, and even poisonous to narrow minds, but is sure that readers of a superior understanding will get no little good, and plenty of pleasure from it; and he concludes by claiming indulgence on the score of his youth, in case he should have given even the better judges any cause for offence. for those who read this preface with any previous knowledge of mr. browning's life and character, there will be an obvious inference to his own youthfulness in the exaggerated estimate thus implied of his imaginative sins; for the tendency of "pauline" is both religious and moral; and no man has been more innocent than its author, from boyhood up, of tampering with any belief in the black art. his hatred for that "spiritualism," which is its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. but the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of mysticism.] [footnote : vol. i. of the new uniform edition of - . this will be the one always referred to.] [footnote : the "andromeda," described as "with" the speaker at pages and , is that of polidoro di caravaggio, of which mr. browning possesses an engraving, which was always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. the original was painted on the wall of a garden attached to the palazzo bufalo--or del bufalo--in rome. the wall has been pulled down since mr. browning was last there.] [footnote : aristotle.] [footnote : he rose to meet him from the place at which he stood, saying, "oh mantuan, i am sordello of thy land!" and they embraced each other.] [footnote : the name of naddo occurs in this book, and will often reappear in the course of the story. this personage is the typical philistine--the italian brown, jones, or robinson--and will represent genuine common-sense, or mere popular judgment, as the case may be.] [footnote : elys, the subject of this song, is any woman of the then prevailing type of italian beauty: having fair hair, and a "pear-shaped" face.] [footnote : bocafoli and plara, mannerists: one of the sensuous school, the other of the pompously pure; imaginary personages, but to whom we may give real names.] [footnote : the belief in personal experience is very strong here.] [footnote : the third of these, vol. i. p. , is very characteristic of the state of sordello's, and therefore, at that moment, of his author's mind. the poet who _makes others see_ is he who deals with abstractions: who makes the mood do duty for the man.] [footnote : walter savage landor.] [footnote : the word "eyebright" at page stands for euphrasia its greek equivalent, and refers to one of mr. browning's oldest friends.] [footnote : here, as elsewhere, i give the spirit rather than the letter, or even the exact order of sordello's words. the necessary condensation requires this.] ii. non-classified poems. dramas. our attention is next attracted to mr. browning's dramas; for his first tragedy, "strafford," was published before "sordello," having been written in an interval of its composition, and his first drama, "pippa passes," immediately afterwards. they were published, with the exception of "strafford," and "in a balcony," in the "bells and pomegranates" series, - , together with the "dramatic lyrics," and "dramatic romances," which will be found distributed under various headings in the course of this volume. the dramas are:-- "strafford." . "pippa passes." . "king victor and king charles." . "the return of the druses." . "a blot in the 'scutcheon." . "colombe's birthday." . "a soul's tragedy." . "luria." . "in a balcony." (a fragment.) . the five-act tragedy of "strafford" turns on the impeachment and condemnation of the man whose name it bears. its keynote is strafford's devotion to the king, which mr. browning has represented as the constant motive of his life, and also the cause of his death. when the action opens, england is without a parliament. the question of ship-money is "burning." the scotch parliament has just been dissolved, and charles is determined to subdue the scots by force. wentworth has been summoned from ireland to assist in doing so. he is worn and weary, but the king needs him, and he comes. he accepts the scotch war against his better judgment: and next finds himself entrapped by the king's duplicity and selfishness, not only into the command of the expedition to scotland, but into the appearance of having advised it. pym has vainly tried to win him back to the popular cause. lady carlisle vainly warns him of his danger in subserving the king's designs. no danger can shake his allegiance. he leads the army to the north; is beaten; discovers that the popular party is in league with the scotch; returns home to impeach it, and finds himself impeached. a bill of attainder is passed against him; and charles, who might prove by one word his innocence of the charges conveyed in it, promises to do so, evades his promise, and finally signs the warrant for strafford's death. pym, who loved him best, who trusted him longest, is he who demands the signature. lady carlisle forms a plan for strafford's escape from the tower; but it fails at the last moment, and we see him led away to execution. true to the end, he has no thought but for the master who has betrayed him--whose terrible weakness must betray himself--whose fate he sees foreshadowed in his own. he kneels to pym for the king's life; and, seeing him inexorable, _thanks god that he dies first_. pym's last speech is a tender farewell to the friend whom he has sacrificed to his country's cause, but whom he trusts soon to meet in the better land, where they will walk together as of old, all sin and all error purged away. we are told in the preface to the first edition of strafford that the portraits are, so the author thinks, faithful: his "carlisle," only, being imaginary; and we may add that he regards his conception of her as, in the main, confirmed by a very recent historian of the reign of charles i. the tragedy was performed in , at covent garden theatre, under the direction of macready, by whose desire it had been written, and who sustained the principal part. the appearance of "strafford" coincides so closely with at least the conception of "sordello" as to afford a strong proof of the variety of the author's genius. the evidence is still stronger in "pippa passes," in which he leaps directly from his most abstract mode of conception to his most picturesque; and, from the prolonged strain of a single inward experience, to a quick succession of pictures, in which life is given from a general and external point of view. the humour which found little place in the earlier work has abundant scope here; and the descriptive power which was so vividly apparent in all of them, here shows itself for the first time in those touches of local colour which paint without describing. mr. browning is now fully developed, on the artistic and on the practical side of his genius. mr. browning was walking alone, in a wood near dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of asolo, felippa, or pippa. "pippa passes" represents the course of one day--pippa's yearly holiday; and is divided into what is virtually four acts, being the occurrences of "morning," "noon," "evening," and "night." pippa rises with the sun, determined to make the best of the bright hours before her; and she spends them in wandering through the town, singing as she goes, and all the while thinking of its happiest men and women, and fancying herself they. these happy ones are four, each the object of a different love. ottima, whose aged husband is the owner of the silk mills, has a lover in sebald. phene, betrothed to the french sculptor jules, will be led this morning to her husband's home. luigi (a conspiring patriot) meets his mother at eve in the turret. the bishop, blessed by god, will sleep at asolo to-night. which love would she choose? the lover's? it gives cause for scandal. the husband's? it may not last. the parent's? it alone will guard us to the end of life. god's love? that is best of all. it is monsignore she decides to be. ottima and her lover have murdered her husband at his villa on the hillside. she is the more reckless of the two, and she is striving by the exercise of her attractions to silence sebald's remorse. she has succeeded for the moment, when pippa passes--singing. something in her song strikes his conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force awakens ottima's also. both are spiritually saved. jules has brought home his bride, and is discovering that some students who owed him a grudge have practised a cruel cheat upon him; and that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. her remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently, with all the money he can spare, when pippa passes--singing.[ ] something in her song awakens his truer manhood. why should he dismiss his wife? why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself has called into existence? he does not cast phene away. her salvation and his happiness are secured. luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above asolo. he believes it his mission to kill the austrian emperor. she entreats him to desist; and has nearly conquered his resolution by the mention of the girl he loves, when pippa passes--singing. something in her song revives his flagging patriotism. he rushes from the tower, thus escaping the police, who were on his track; and the virtuous, though mistaken motive, secures his liberty, and perhaps his life. monsignore and his "intendant" are conferring in the palace by the duomo; and the irony of the situation is now at its height. pippa's fancy has been aspiring to three separate existences, which would each in its own way have been wrecked without her. the divinely-guarded one which she especially covets is at this moment bent on her destruction. for she is the child of the brother at whose death the bishop has connived, and whose wealth he is enjoying. she is still in his way, and he is listening to a plan for removing her also, when pippa passes--singing. something in her song stings his conscience or his humanity to life. he starts up, summons his attendants, has his former accomplice bound hand and foot, and the sequel may be guessed. the scene is varied by groups of students, of poor girls, and of austrian policemen, all joking and chatting in characteristic fashion, and all playing their part in the story; and also by the appearance of bluphocks, an english adventurer and spy, who is in league with the police for the detection of luigi, and with the intendant for pippa's ruin; and the saving effect of pippa's songs is the more dramatic that it becomes on one occasion the means of betraying herself. she goes home at sunset, unconscious of all she has effected and escaped, and wondering how near she may ever come to touching for good or evil the lives with which her fancy has been identifying her. "so far, perhaps," she says to herself, "that the silk she will wind to-morrow may some day serve to border ottima's cloak. and if it be only this!" "all service ranks the same with god-- with god, whose puppets, best and worst, are we: there is no last nor first." (vol. iii. p. .) these are her last words as she lies down to sleep. pippa's songs are not impressive in themselves. they are made so in every case by the condition of her hearer's mind; and the idea of the story is obvious, besides being partly stated in the heroine's own words. no man is "great" or "small" in the sight of god--each life being in its own way the centre of creation. nothing should be "great" or "small" in the sight of man; since it depends on personal feeling, or individual circumstance, whether a given thing will prove one or the other. "king victor and king charles" is an historical tragedy in two divisions and four parts, of which the time is and , and the place the castle of rivoli near turin. the episode which it records may be read in any chronicle of the period; and mr. browning adds a preface, in which he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it. king victor ii. (first king of sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly ( ) he abdicated in favour of his son charles. the queen was dead, and he had privately married a lady of the court, to whom he had been long attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have explained the abdication; but mr. browning adopts the idea, which for a time found favour, that it had a deeper cause: that the king's intriguing ambition had involved him in many difficulties, and he had devised this plan for eluding them. charles has become his father's heir through the death of an older and better loved son. he has been thrust into the shade by the favourite, now victor's wife, and by the minister d'ormea; his sensitive nature crushed into weakness, his loftiness of purpose never called into play. he seems precisely the person of whom to make at once a screen and a tool. but he has scarcely been crowned when it is evident that he will be neither. he assumes the character of king at the same time as the function; and by his honesty, courage, and humanity, restores the prosperity of his country, and the honour of his house. he secures even the devotion, interested though it be, of the unscrupulous d'ormea himself. victor, however, is restless in his obscurity; and by the end of the year is scheming for the recovery of his crown. he presents himself before his son, and demands that it be restored to him; denouncing what he considers the weakness of king charles' rule. charles refuses, gently but firmly, to abandon what has become for him the post of duty; and king victor departs, to conspire openly against him. d'ormea is active in detecting the conspiracy and unveiling it; and victor is brought back to the palace, this time a prisoner. but charles does not receive him as such. his filial piety is outraged by the unnatural conflict; and his wife polixena has vainly tried to convince him that there is a higher because less obvious virtue in resisting than in giving way. he once more acknowledges his father as king. and both he and his wife are soon aware that in doing so, he is only humouring the caprice of a dying man. "_i have no friend in the wide world_ is the old king's cry. give me what i have no power to take from you." "so few years give it quietly, my son! it will drop from me. see you not? a crown's unlike a sword to give away-- that, let a strong hand to a weak hand give! but crowns should slip from palsied brows to heads young as this head:...." (vol. iii. p. - .) charles places the crown on his father's head. a strange conflict of gratified ambition, of remorseful tenderness, of dreamy regret, stirs the failing spirit. but command and defiance flash out in the old king's last words. this death on the stage is the only point on which mr. browning diverges from historical truth. king victor lived a year longer, in a modified captivity to which his son had most unwillingly consigned him; and he is made to suggest this story in the half-insanity of his last moments as one which may be told to the world; and will give his son the appearance of reigning, while he remains, in secret, king. "the return of the druses" is a tragedy in five acts, fictitious in plot, but historical in character. the druses of lebanon are a compound of several warlike eastern tribes, owing their religious system to a caliph of egypt, hakeem biamr allah; and probably their name to his confessor darazi, who first attempted to promulgate his doctrine among them; some also impute to the druse nation a dash of the blood of the crusaders. one of their chief religious doctrines was that of divine incarnations. it seems to have originated in the pretension of hakeem to be himself one; and as organized by the persian mystic hamzi, his vizier and disciple, it included ten manifestations of this kind, of which hakeem must have formed the last. mr. browning has assumed that in any great national emergency, the miracle would be expected to recur; and he has here conceived an emergency sufficiently great to call it forth. the druses, according to him, have colonized a small island belonging to the knights of rhodes, and become subject to a prefect appointed by the order. this prefect has almost extirpated the druse sheikhs, and made the remainder of the tribe victims of his cruelty and lust. the cry for rescue and retribution, if not loud, is deep. it finds a passionate response in the soul of djabal, a son of the last emir, who escaped as a child from the massacre of his family, and took refuge in europe; and who now returns, with a matured purpose of patriotic and personal revenge. he has secured an ally in the young lois de dreux--an intended knight of the order, and son of a breton count, whose hospitality he has enjoyed--and induced him to accompany him to the islet, and pass his probation there. this, he considers, will facilitate the murder of the prefect, which is an essential part of his plan; and he has obtained the promise of the venetians, who are hostile to the knights, to lend their ships for his countrymen's escape as soon as the death of the tyrant shall have set them free. so far his course is straight. but he has scarcely returned home, when he falls in love with anael, a druse girl, whose devotion to her tribe is a religion, and who is determined to marry none but the man who will deliver it; and he is then seized by an impulse to heighten the act of deliverance by a semblance of more than human power. he declares himself hakeem, the divine founder of the sect, again present in human form, and who will again be transformed, or "exalted," so soon as by the slaughter of their tyrant he has set the druses free. his bride will be exalted with him. the imposture succeeds only too well. "mystic" as well as "schemer," djabal, for a moment, deceives even himself; and when the crisis is at hand, and reason and conscience reassert themselves, the enthusiasm which he has kindled still forces him on. his only refuge is in flight; and even this proves impossible. he nerves himself, before escaping, to the prefect's murder; and is confronted on the threshold of the prefect's chamber, by his promised wife, who has herself done the deed. anael has loved djabal, believing him divine, with what seemed to her too human a love. she felt unworthy to share his exaltation. she has done that which her humanity disclaimed that she might no longer be so. a few moments more, and they both know that the crime has been superfluous. lois, who also loves anael, and hopes to win her, has procured from the chapter of his order the removal of the tyrant, and been appointed by it in his place; the day of druse oppression was already over. but djabal and anael are inseparably united. the scorn with which she received his now inevitable confession was intense but momentary. the woman's heart in her revels in its new freedom to cherish and to protect; and she embraces her lover's shame with a far greater joy than their common triumph could have aroused in her. she is brought forward as the prefect's murderer in presence of all the personages of the drama; and falls dead with a cry of "hakeem" on her lips. djabal stabs himself on her body, thus "exalting" himself to her. but he has first committed his druses to the care of lois, to be led back to their mountain home. he remains hakeem for them, though branded as an impostor by the rest of the world. directly, or indirectly, he has done the work of the deliverer. "a blot in the 'scutcheon" is a tragedy in three acts, less intricate as well as shorter than those which precede it; and historical only in the simple motive, the uncompromising action, and the mediæval code of honour, which in some degree fix its date. mr. browning places this somewhere in the eighteenth century. lord henry mertoun has fallen in love with mildred tresham. his estates adjoin those of earl tresham, her brother and guardian. he inherits a noble name, and an unsullied reputation; and need only offer himself to be accepted. but the youthful reverence which he entertains for lord tresham makes him shrink from preferring his suit; and he allows himself and mildred to drift into a secret intimacy, which begins in all innocence, but does not end so. then his shyness vanishes. he seeks an interview with the earl, and obtains his joyful consent to the union. all seems to be going well. but mildred's awakened womanhood takes the form of an overpowering remorse and shame; and these become the indirect cause of the catastrophe. gerard, an old retainer of the family, has witnessed lord mertoun's nightly visits to the castle; and, amidst a bitter conflict of feeling, he tells the earl what he has seen. tresham summons his sister. he is writhing under the sense of outraged family honour; but a still stronger fraternal affection commends the culprit to his mercy. he assists her confession with touching delicacy and tenderness; shows himself prepared to share her shame, to help her to live it through--to marry her to the man she loves. he insists only upon this, that mertoun shall not be deceived: and that she shall cancel the promise of an interview which she has given him for the following day. mildred tacitly owns her guilt, and invokes any punishment her brother may adjudge to it; but she will not betray her lover by confessing his name, and she will not forbid mertoun to come. the earl's mind does not connect the two. no extenuating circumstance suggests itself. he has loved his young sister with a chivalrous admiration and trust; and he is one of those men to whom a blot in the 'scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced. he is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister's depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her. he surprises mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and kills him. the reaction of feeling begins when he perceives that mertoun has allowed himself to be killed. remorse and sorrow deepen into despair as the dying youth gasps out the story of his constant love, of his boyish error--of his manly desire of reparation; above all, as he reminds his hearer of the sister whose happiness he has slain; and asks if he has done right to set his "thoughtless foot" upon them both, and say as they perish-- "... had i thought, 'all had gone otherwise'...." (vol iv. p. .) mildred is waiting for her lover. the usual signal has been made: the lighted purple pane of a painted window sends forth its beckoning gleam. but mertoun does not appear; and as the moments pass, a despairing apathy steals over her, which is only the completed certainty of her doom. she has never believed in the promised happiness. in a strange process of self-consciousness she has realized at once the moral and the natural consequences of her transgression; the lost peace of conscience, the lost morning of her love. her paramount desire has been for expiation and rest. in one more pang they are coming. lord tresham breaks in on her solitude. his empty scabbard shows what he has done. but she soon sees that reproach is unnecessary, and that mertoun's death is avenged. it is best so. the cloud has lifted. the friend and the brother are one in heart again. she dies because her own heart is broken, but forgiving her brother, and blessing him. he has taken poison, and survives her by a few minutes only. mildred has a firm friend in her cousin gwendolen: a quick-witted, true-hearted woman, the betrothed of austin tresham, who is next heir to the earldom. she alone has guessed the true state of the case, and, with the help of austin, would have averted the tragedy, if lord tresham's precipitate passion had not rendered this impossible. these two are in no need of their dying kinsman's warning, to remember, if a blot should again come in the 'scutcheon, that "vengeance is god's, not man's." this tragedy was performed in , at drury lane theatre, during the ownership of macready; in , at "sadlers wells," under the direction of mr. phelps, who had played the part of lord tresham in the drury lane performance. colombe's birthday is a play in five acts, of which the scene is the palace at juliers, the time --. colombe of ravestein is ostensibly duchess of juliers and cleves; but her title is neutralized by the salic law under which the duchy is held; and though the duke, her late father, has wished to evade it in her behalf, those about her are aware that he had no power to do so, and that the legal claimant, her cousin, may at any moment assert his rights. this happens on the first anniversary of her accession, which is also her birthday. prince berthold is to arrive in a few hours. he has sent a letter before him from which colombe will learn her fate; and the handful of courtiers who have stayed to see the drama out are disputing as to who shall deliver it. valence, an advocate of cleves, arrives at this juncture, with a petition from his townspeople who are starving; and is allowed to place it in the duchess's hands, on condition of presenting the prince's letter at the same time. he does this in ignorance of its contents; he is very indignant when he knows them; and the incident naturally constitutes him colombe's adviser and friend; while the reverence with which he owns himself her subject, also determines her if possible to remain his sovereign. prince berthold arrives unprepared for any show of resistance; and is a little startled to find that colombe defies him, and that one of her courtiers (not choosing to be outdone by valence) has the courage to tell him so; but he treats the duchess and her adviser with all the courtesy of a man whose right is secure; and valence, to whom he entrusts his credentials, is soon convinced that it is so. but he has a far-sighted ambition which keeps him alive to all possible risks: and it occurs to him as wiser to secure the little sovereignty by marrying its heiress than by dispossessing her. he desires valence to convey to the young duchess the offer of his hand. the offer is worth considering, since as he asserts, it may mean the empire: to which the duchy is, in his case, but a necessary stepping-stone; and valence, who has loved colombe since his first glimpse of her at cleves, a year ago; who has begun to hope that his affection is returned; and who knows that the prince's message is not only a test of her higher nature, but a snare to it, feels nevertheless bound to leave her choice free. this choice lies clearly between love and power; for berthold parades a cynicism half affected, half real; and on being questioned as to his feeling for the lady, has dismissed the question as irrelevant. valence is, throughout the play, an advocate in the best sense of the word. as he has pleaded the wrongs of an oppressed people, he sets forth the happiness of a successful prince--the happiness which the young duchess is invited to share; and he departs from all the conventionalities of fiction, by showing her the true poetry, not the artificial splendours, of worldly success. colombe is almost as grateful as the young prince could desire, for she assumes that he has fallen in love with her, whether he says so or not; and here, too, valence must speak the truth. "the prince does not love her." "how does he know this?" "he knows it by the insight of one who does love." astonished, vaguely pained, colombe questions him as to the object of his attachment, and, in probably real ignorance of who it can be, draws him on to a confession. for a moment she is disenchanted. "so much unselfish devotion to turn out merely love! she will at all events see valence's rival." in the last act she discusses the prince's proposal with himself. he frankly rests it on its advantages for both. he has much to say in favour of such an understanding, and reminds his listener as she questions and temporizes, that if he gives no heart he also asks none. the courtiers now see their opportunity. they inform the prince that by her late father's will the duchess forfeits her rights in the event of marrying a subject. they point to such a marriage as a natural result of the loving service which valence has this day rendered to her, and the love which is its only fitting reward. and colombe, listening to the just if treacherous praises of this man, feels no longer "sure" that she does "not love him." valence is summoned; requested to assert his claim or to deny it; given to understand that the lady's interests demand the latter course. the manly dignity and exalted tenderness with which he resigns her convert, as it seems, the doubt into certainty; and colombe takes him on this her birthday at the sacrifice of "juliers and the world." berthold has a confidant, melchior, a learned and thoughtful man, who is affectionately attached to the young prince, and who views with regret the easy worldly successes which neutralize his higher gifts. melchior has also appreciated the genuineness of colombe's nature, and conducted the last interview with valence as one who desired that loyalty should be attested and love triumph. he now turns to berthold with what seems an appeal to his generosity. but berthold cannot afford to be generous. as he reminds the happy bride before him he wants her duchy much more than she does. he is, however, the sadder, and perhaps the wiser, for having found this out. "colombe's birthday" was performed in , at the haymarket theatre; in or ' , in the united states, at boston. the part of colombe was taken, as had been those of mildred tresham and lady carlisle, by miss helen faucit, now lady martin. "a soul's tragedy" brings us near to the period of the "men and women;" and displays, for the first time in mr. browning's work, a situation quite dramatic in itself, but which is nevertheless made by the characters, and imagined for them. it is a story of moral retrogression; but, setting aside its very humorous treatment, it is no "tragedy" for the reader, because he has never believed in that particular "soul," though its proprietor and his friends are justly supposed to do so. the drama is divided into two acts, of which the first represents the "poetry," the second the prose, of a certain chiappino's life. the scene is faenza; the time --. chiappino is best understood by comparison with luitolfo, his fellow-townsman and friend. luitolfo has a gentle, genial nature; chiappino, if we may judge him by his mood at the time of the action, an ill-conditioned one. luitolfo's gentleness is allied to physical timidity, but his moral courage is always equal to the occasion. chiappino is a man more of words than of deeds, and wants both the courage and the rectitude which ill-conditioned people often possess. faenza is governed by a provost from ravenna. the present provost is a tyrant; and chiappino has been agitating in a somewhat purposeless manner against him. he has been fined for this several times, and is now sentenced to exile, and confiscation of all his goods. luitolfo has helped him until now by paying his fines; but this is an additional grievance to him, for he is in love with eulalia, the woman whom his friend is going to marry, and declares that he has only refrained from urging his own suit, because he was bound by this pecuniary obligation not to do so. he is not too delicate, however, to depreciate luitolfo's generosity, and generally run him down with the woman who is to be his wife; and this is what he is doing in the first scene, under cover of taking leave of her, and while her intended husband is interceding with the provost in his behalf. a hurried knock, which they recognise as luitolfo's, gives a fresh impulse to his spite; and he begins sneering at the milk-and-watery manner in which luitolfo has probably been pleading his cause, and the awful fright in which he has run home, on seeing that the provost "shrugged his shoulders" at the intercession. luitolfo _is_ frightened, for his friendship for chiappino has been carrying him away; and on finding that entreaties were of no use, he has struck at the provost, and, as he thinks, killed him. a crowd which he imagines to be composed of the provost's attendants has followed him from the palace. torture stares him in the face; and his physical sensitiveness has the upper hand again. for a moment chiappino becomes a hero; he is shamed into nobleness. he flings his own cloak over luitolfo, gives him his passport, hurries him from the house, assumes his friend's blood-stained garment, and claims his deed. but he has scarcely done so when he perceives their mistake. luitolfo's fears have distorted a friendly crowd into a hostile one; and the throng which chiappino has nerved himself to defy is the populace of faenza applauding him as its saviour. he postpones the duty of undeceiving it under pretence of the danger being not yet over. the next step will be to refuse to do so. his moral collapse, the "tragedy" of his "soul," has begun. in the second act, a month later, this is complete. the papal legate, ogniben, has ridden on his mule in to faenza to find out what was wanted. "he has not come to punish; there is no harm done: for the provost was not killed after all. he has known twenty-three leaders of revolts," and therefore, so we understand, is not disposed to take such persons too seriously. he has made friends with chiappino, accepting him in this character, and lured him on with the hope of becoming provost himself; and chiappino again rising--or falling--to the situation, has discovered patriotic reasons for accepting the post. he has outgrown his love, as well as modified his ideas of civic duty; and he disposes of the obligations of friendship, by declaring (to eulalia) that the blow imputed to him was virtually his, because luitolfo would fain have avoided striking it, while he would have struck it if he could. the legate draws him out in a humorous dialogue; satirizes his flimsy sophistries under cover of endorsing them, and leads him up to a final self-exposure. this occurs when he reminds chiappino in the hearing of the crowd of the private agreement they have come to: that he is to have the title and privileges of provost on the one hand, and pay implicit obedience to rome, in the person of her legate, on the other; but with the now added condition, that if the actual assailant of the late provost is discovered, he shall be dealt with as he deserves. at which new view of the situation chiappino is silent; and luitolfo, who had missed all the reward of his deed, characteristically comes forward to receive its punishment. the legate orders him to his own house; advises chiappino, with a little more joking at his expense, to leave the town for a short time; takes possession of the key of the provost's palace, to which he does _not_ intend to give a new inmate; bids a cheery goodbye to every one, and rides away as he came. he has "known _four_ and twenty leaders of revolts." (vol. iii. p. .) the tragedy of "luria" is supposed to be enacted at some period of the fifteenth century; being an episode in the historical struggle between florence and pisa. it occupies one day; and the five acts correspond respectively to its "morning," "noon," "afternoon," "evening," and "night." the day is that of a long-expected encounter which is to end the war. the florentine troops are commanded by the moorish mercenary luria. he is encamped between the two cities; and with, or near him, are his moorish friend and confidant husain; puccio--the officer whom he has superseded; braccio--commissary of the republic; his secretary jacopo, or lapo; and a noble florentine lady, domizia. luria is a consummate general, a brave fighter, and a humane man. every soldier of the army is devoted to him, and the triumph of the republic seems secured. but the men who trust him to win the victory cannot trust him not to misuse it. they are afraid that his strength will be turned against themselves so soon as it has disposed of their foreign foe: and braccio is on the spot, in order to watch his movements, to register every deed that can give the slightest hold for an accusation--in short, to supply the signoria with the materials for a trial, which is proceeding step by step with luria's successful campaign, and is to crush him the moment this is completed. everyone but husain is more or less his enemy. for lapo is almost blindly devoted to his chief. puccio is jealous of the stranger for whom he has been set aside. domizia is making him an instrument of revenge. her brothers have been faithful as he is, and condemned as he is to be. they accepted their sentence because it was the mother-city who passed it. she encourages luria to encounter the same ingratitude, because she believes he will resist and punish it. he is not unwarned of his danger. the pisan general, tiburzio, has discovered the conspiracy against him, and brings him, shortly before the battle, an intercepted letter from braccio to the signoria, in which he is convinced that he may read his fate. he urges him to open it; to desert the perfidious city, and to adopt pisa's cause. but luria's loyalty is unshaken. he tears up the letter in the presence of braccio, puccio, and domizia: and only when the battle has been fought and won demands the secret of its contents. at the word "trial" he is carried away by a momentary indignation; but this subsides into a tender regret that "his florentines" should have so misjudged him; that he should have given them cause to do it. he has laboured for their city, not only with the obedience of a son, but with the devotion of a lover. his eastern fancy has been enslaved by her art, her intellect: by the life of educated thought which so far removed her from the blind unrest, and the animal strength of his savage world; domizia's attractions have added to the spell. he has never guarded his love for florence against doubt, for he never dreamed that it could be doubted. he cannot find it in his heart to chastise her now. temptation besets him on every side; for the armies of both florence and pisa are at his command. husain and domizia urge him on to revenge. tiburzio entreats him to give to pisa the head with which florence will only decorate a gateway. him he thanks and dismisses. to the others he prepares his answer. alone for the last time; with eyes fixed on the setting sun--his "own orb" so much nearer to him in his eastern home, and which will shine for him there no more--he drains a phial of poison: the one thing he has brought from his own land to help him in the possible adversity. death was to be his refuge in defeat. he will die on his triumph-day instead. they all gather round him once more: puccio grateful and devoted; for he has seen that though discredited by florence, luria was still working for her success--tiburzio, who returns from florence, where he has tendered his submission to luria's arms, and borne his heartfelt testimony to luria's honour--domizia, who has learned from luria that there are nobler things than retaliation: and now entreats him to forego his vengeance against her city, as she foregoes her own--braccio, repentant for the wrong done, and beseeching that luria will not "punish florence." but they cannot avert the one punishment which that gentle spirit could inflict. he lies dead before them. "in a balcony" is a dramatic fragment, equivalent to the third or fourth act, of what might prove a tragedy or a drama, as the author designed. the personages are "norbert" and "constance," a young man and woman; and the "queen," a woman of a certain age. constance is a relation and protégée of the queen--as we imagine, a poor one. she is loved by norbert; and he has entered the queen's service, for the opportunity of wooing and winning her. his diplomatic exertions have been strenuous. they have secured to his royal mistress the possession of a double crown. the "balcony" echoes with the sound of festivities which are intended to mark the event. constance returns norbert's affection. he thinks the moment come for pleading his and her cause with their sovereign. but constance entreats him to temporize: either to defer the proposal for her hand, or to make it in so indirect a manner, that the queen may only see in it a tribute to herself. he has allowed her to think that he served her for her own sake; she must not be undeceived too roughly. her heart has starved amidst the show of devotion: its hunger must not be roused by the touch of a living love in which she has no part. a shock of this kind would be painful to her--dangerous to themselves. norbert is an honest man, possessed of all the courage of his love: and he finds it hard to believe that the straightforward course would not be the best; but he yields to the dictates of feminine wisdom; and having consented to play a part, plays it with fatal success. the queen is a more unselfish woman than her young cousin suspects. she has guessed norbert's love for constance, and is prepared to sanction it; but her own nature is still only too capable of responding to the faintest touch of affection: and at the seeming declaration that that love is her's, her joy carries all before it. she is married; but as she declares she will dissolve her marriage, merely formal as it has always been; she will cast convention to the winds, and become norbert's wife. she opens her heart to constance; tells her how she has yearned for love, and how she will repay it. constance knows, as she never knew, what a mystery of pain and passion has been that outwardly frozen life; and in a sudden impulse of pity and compunction, she determines that if possible its new happiness shall be permanent--its delusions converted into truth. she meets norbert again; makes him talk of his future; discovers that he only dreams of it as bound up with the political career he has already entered upon; and though she sees that every vision of this future begins and ends in her, she sees, as justly, that its making or marring is in the queen's hands. here is a second motive for self-sacrifice. norbert has no suspicion of what he has done. the queen appears before constance has had time to inform him of it; and the latter has now no choice but to let him learn it from the queen's own lips. she draws her on, accordingly, under plea of norbert's diffidence, to speak of what she believes him to have asked of her, and what she knows to be already granted. she tries to prompt his reply. but norbert will not be prompted. he is slow to understand what is expected of him, very indignant when he does so; and in terror lest he should still be misunderstood--in unconsciousness of the torture he is inflicting--he asserts and re-asserts his respect for the one woman, his absorbing passion for the other. the queen goes out. her looks and silence have been ominous. the shadow of a great dread falls upon the scene. the dance-music stops. heavy footsteps are heard approaching. norbert and constance stand awaiting their doom. but they are united as they have never yet been, and they can defy it; for her love has shown itself as capable of all sacrifice--his as above temptation. various theories have been formed as to the kind of woman mr. browning meant constance to be; but a careful and unbiassed reading of the poem can leave no doubt on the subject. he has given her, not the courage of an exclusively moral nature, but all the self-denial of a devoted one, growing with the demands which are made upon it. how single-hearted is her attempt to sacrifice norbert's love, is sufficiently shown by one sentence, addressed to him after his interview with the queen: "you were mine. now i give myself to you." (vol. vii. p. .) "the ring and the book." - . from the dramas, we pass naturally to the dramatic monologues; poems embodying a lengthened argument or soliloquy, and to which there is already an approach in the tragedies themselves. the dramatic monologue repeats itself in the finest poems of the "men and women," and "dramatis personæ;" and mr. browning's constructive power thus remains, as it were, diffused, till it culminates again in "the ring and the book:" at once his greatest constructive achievement, and the triumph of the monologue form. from this time onwards, the monologue will be his prevailing mode of expression, but each will often form an independent work. "the ring and the book" is thus our next object of interest. mr. browning was strolling one day through a square in florence, the piazza san lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish of one of the stalls. it was the record of a murder which had taken place in rome, and bore inside it an inscription which mr. browning thus transcribes:-- "... a roman murder-case: position of the entire criminal cause of guido franceschini, nobleman, with certain four the cut-throats in his pay, tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death by heading or hanging as befitted ranks, at rome on february twenty-two, since our salvation sixteen ninety-eight: wherein it is disputed if, and when, husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape the customary forfeit." (vol. viii. p. .) the book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days: pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer; and the "instrument of the definitive sentence" which established the perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having been collected and bound together by some person interested in the trial, possibly the very cencini, friend of the franceschini family, to whom the manuscript letters are addressed. mr. browning bought the whole for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what appeared four years later as "the ring and the book." this name is explained as follows:--the story of the franceschini case, as mr. browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. the pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. the ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. mr. browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. it was too _hard_. it was "pure crude fact," secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. in its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. he supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. he breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth. all this was not effected at once. the separate scenes of the franceschini tragedy sprang to life in mr. browning's imagination within a few hours of his reading the book. he saw them re-enacted from his terrace at casa guidi on a sultry summer night--every place and person projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky--but his mind did not yet weave them into a whole. the drama lay by him and in him till the unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in london, he felt what he thus describes:-- "a spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, and lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair, letting me have my will again with these...." (vol. viii. p. .) and "the ring and the book" was born. all this is told in an introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here also mr. browning reviews those broad facts of the franceschini case which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the crude metal of his ring. he has worked into this almost every incident which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement. but the fragmentary view of its contents, which i am reduced to giving, can only be held together by a previous outline of the story. there lived in rome in pietro and violante comparini, an elderly couple of the middle class, fond of show and good living, and who in spite of a fair income had run considerably into debt. they were, indeed at the period in question, in receipt of a papal bounty, employed in the relief of the needy who did not like to beg. creditors were pressing, and only one expedient suggested itself: they must have a child; and thus enable themselves to draw on their capital, now tied up for the benefit of an unknown heir-at-law. the wife conceived this plan, and also carried it out, without taking her husband into her confidence. she secured beforehand the infant of a poor and not very reputable woman, announced her expectation, half miraculous at her past fifty years, and became, to all appearance, the mother of a girl, the francesca pompilia of the story. when pompilia had reached the age of thirteen, there was also in rome count guido franceschini, an impoverished nobleman of arezzo, and the elder of three brothers, of whom the second, abate paolo, and the third, canon girolamo also play some part in the story. count guido himself belonged to the minor ranks of the priesthood, and had spent his best years in seeking preferment in it. preferment had not come, and the only means of building up the family fortunes in his own person, was now a moneyed wife. he was poor, fifty years old, and personally unattractive. a contemporary chronicle describes him as short, thin, and pale, and with a projecting nose. he had nothing to offer but his rank; but in the case of a very obscure heiress, this might suffice, and such a one seemed to present herself in pompilia comparini. he heard of her at the local centre of gossip, the barber's shop; received an exaggerated estimate of her dowry; and made proposals for her hand; being supported in his suit by the abate paul. they did not, on their side, understate the advantages of the connection. they are, indeed, said to have given as their yearly income, a sum exceeding their capital, and violante was soon dazzled into consenting to it. old pietro was more wary. he made inquiries as to the state of the count's fortune, and declined, under plea of his daughter's extreme youth, to think of him as a son-in-law. violante pretended submission, secretly led pompilia to a church, the very church of san lorenzo in lucina, where four years later the murdered bodies of all three were to be displayed, and brought her back as count guido's wife. pietro could only accept the accomplished fact; and he so far resigned himself to it, that he paid down an instalment of his daughter's dowry, and made up the deficiency by transferring to the newly-married couple all that he actually possessed. this left him no choice but to live under their roof, and the four removed together to the franceschini abode at arezzo. the arrangement proved disastrous; and at the end of a few months pietro and violante were glad to return to rome, though with empty pockets, and on money lent them for the journey by their son-in-law. we have conflicting testimony as to the cause of this rupture. the governor of arezzo, writing to the abate paul in rome, lays all the blame of it on the comparini, whom he taxes with vulgar and aggressive behaviour; and mr. browning readily admits that at the beginning there may have been faults on their side. but popular judgment, as well as the balance of evidence, were in favour of the opposite view; and curious details are given by pompilia and by a servant of the family, a sworn witness on pompilia's trial, of the petty cruelties and privations to which both parents and child were subjected. so much, at all events, was clear; violante's sin had overtaken her; and it now occurred to her, apparently for the first time, to cast off its burden by confession. the moment was propitious, for the pope had proclaimed a jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution was to be had for the asking. but the church in this case made conditions. absolution must be preceded by atonement. violante must restore to her legal heirs that of which her pretended motherhood had defrauded them. the first step towards this was to reveal the fraud to her husband; and pietro lost no time in making use of the revelation. he repudiated pompilia, and with her all claims on her husband's part. the case was carried into court. the court decreed a compromise. pietro appealed from the decree, and the question remained unsettled. the chief sufferer by these proceedings was pompilia herself. she already had reason to dread her husband as a tyrant--he to dislike her as a victim; and his discovery of her base birth, with the threatened loss of the greater part of her dowry, could only result, with such a man, in increased aversion towards her. from this moment his one aim seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but in such a manner as not to forfeit any pecuniary advantage he might still derive from their union. this could only be done by convicting her of infielity; and he attacked her so furiously, and so persistently, on the subject of a certain canon giuseppe caponsacchi, whom she barely knew, but whose attentions he declared her to have challenged, that at last she fled from arezzo, with this very man. she had appealed for protection against her husband's violence to the archbishop and to the governor. she had striven to enlist the aid of his brother-in-law, conti. she had implored a priest in confession to write for her to her parents, and induce them to fetch her away. but the whole town was in the interest of the franceschini, or in dread of them. her prayers were useless, and caponsacchi, whom she had heard of as a "resolute man," appeared her last resource. he was, as she knew, contemplating a journey to rome; an opportunity presented itself for speaking to him from her window, or her balcony; and she persuaded him, though not without difficulty, to assist her escape, and conduct her to her old home. on a given night she slipped away from her husband's side, and joined the canon where he awaited her with a carriage. they travelled day and night till they reached castelnuovo, a village within four hours of the journey's end. there they were compelled to rest, and there also the husband overtook them. they were not together at the moment; but the fact of the elopement was patent; and if franceschini had killed his wife there, in the supposed excitement of the discovery, the law might have dealt leniently with him. but it suited him best for the time being to let her live. he procured the arrest of the fugitives, and after a short confinement on the spot, they were conveyed to the new prisons in rome (carceri nuove) and tried on the charge of adultery. it is impossible not to believe that count guido had been working towards this end. pompilia's verbal communications with caponsacchi had been supplemented by letters, now brought to him in her name, now thrown or let down from her window as he passed the house. they were written, as he said, on the subject of the flight, and as he also said, he burned them as soon as read, not doubting their authenticity. but pompilia declared, on examination, that she could neither write nor read; and setting aside all presumption of her veracity, this was more than probable. the writer of the letters must therefore, have been the count, or some one employed by him for the purpose. he now completed the intrigue by producing eighteen or twenty more of a very incriminating character, which he declared to have been left by the prisoners at castelnuovo; and these were not only disclaimed with every appearance of sincerity by both the persons accused, but bore the marks of forgery within themselves. pompilia and caponsacchi answered all the questions addressed to them simply and firmly; and though their statements did not always coincide, these were calculated on the whole to create a moral conviction of their innocence; the facts on which they disagreed being of little weight. but moral conviction was not legal proof; the question of false testimony does not seem to have been even raised; and the court found itself in a dilemma, which it acknowledged in the following way: it was decreed that for his complicity in "the flight and deviation of francesca comparini," and too great intimacy with her, caponsacchi should be banished for three years to civita vecchia; and that pompilia, on her side, should be relegated, for the time being, to a convent. that is to say: the prisoners were pronounced guilty; and a merely nominal punishment was inflicted upon them. the records of this trial contain almost everything of biographical or even dramatic interest in the original book. they are, so far as they go, the complete history of the case; and the result of the trial, ambiguous as it was, supplied the only argument on which an even formal defence of the subsequent murder could be based. the substance of these records appears in full in mr. browning's work; and his readers can judge for themselves whether the letters which were intended to substantiate pompilia's guilt, could, even if she had possessed the power of writing, have been written by a woman so young and so uncultured as herself. they will also see that the count's plot against his wife was still more deeply laid than the above-mentioned circumstances attest. count guido was of course not satisfied. he wanted a divorce; and he continued to sue for it by means of his brother, the abate paul, then residing in rome; but before long he received news which was destined to change his plans. pompilia was about to become a mother; and in consideration of her state, she had been removed from the convent to her paternal home, where she was still to be ostensibly a prisoner. the comparini then occupied a small villa outside one of the city gates. a few months later, in this secluded spot, the countess franceschini gave birth to a son, whom her parents lost no time in conveying to a place of concealment and safety. the murder took place a fortnight after this event. i give the rest of the story in an almost literal translation from a contemporary narrative, which was published, immediately after the count's execution, in the form of a pamphlet[ ]--the then current substitute for a newspaper. "being oppressed by various feelings, and stimulated to revenge, now by honour, now by self-interest, yielding to his wicked thoughts, he (count guido) devised a plan for killing his wife and her nominal parents; and having enlisted in his enterprise four other ruffians,"--labourers on his property, "started with them from arezzo, and on christmas-eve arrived in rome, and took up his abode at ponte milvio, where there was a villa belonging to his brother, and where he concealed himself with his followers till the fitting moment for the execution of his design had arrived. having therefore watched from thence all the movements of the comparini family, he proceeded on thursday, the nd of january, at one o'clock of the night,[ ] with his companions to the comparini's house; and having left biagio agostinelli and domenico gambasini at the gate, he instructed one of the others to knock at the house-door, which was opened to him on his declaring that he brought a letter from canon caponsacchi at civita vecchia. the wicked franceschini, supported by two other of his assassins, instantly threw himself on violante comparini, who had opened the door, and flung her dead upon the ground. pompilia, in this extremity, extinguished the light, thinking thus to elude her assassins, and made for the door of a neighbouring blacksmith, crying for help. seeing franceschini provided with a lantern, she ran and hid herself under the bed, but being dragged from under it, the unhappy woman was barbarously put to death by twenty-two wounds from the hand of her husband, who, not content with this, dragged her to the feet of comparini, who, being similarly wounded by another of the assassins, was crying, '_confession_.'" "at the noise of this horrible massacre people rushed to the spot; but the villains succeeded in flying, leaving behind, however, in their haste, one his cloak, and franceschini his cap, which was the means of betraying them. the unfortunate francesca pompilia, in spite of all the wounds with which she had been mangled, having implored of the holy virgin the grace of being allowed to confess, obtained it, since she was able to survive for a short time and describe the horrible attack. she also related that after the deed, her husband asked the assassin who had helped him to murder her _if she were really dead_; and being assured that she was, quickly rejoined, _let us lose no time, but return to the vineyard_;[ ] and so they escaped. meanwhile the police (forza) having been called, it arrived with its chief officer (bargello), and a confessor was soon procured, together with a surgeon, who devoted himself to the treatment of the unfortunate girl." "monsignore, the governor, being informed of the event, immediately despatched captain patrizj to arrest the culprits; but on reaching the vineyard the police officers discovered that they were no longer there, but had gone towards the high road an hour before. patrizj pursued his journey without rest, and having arrived at the inn, was told by the landlord that franceschini had insisted upon obtaining horses, which were refused to him because he was not supplied with the necessary order; and had proceeded therefore on foot with his companions towards baccano. continuing his march, and taking the necessary precautions, he arrived at the merluzza inn, and there discovered the assassins, who were speedily arrested; their knives still stained with blood, a hundred and fifty scudi in coin being also found on franceschini's person. the arrest, however, cost patrizj his life, for he had heated himself too much, and having received a slight wound, died in a few days." "the knife of franceschini was on the genoese pattern, and triangular; and was notched at the edge, so that it could not be withdrawn from the wounded flesh without lacerating it in such a manner as to render the wound incurable." "the criminals being taken to ponte milvio, they went through a first examination at the inn there at the hands of the notaries and judges sent thither for the purpose, and the chief points of a confession were obtained from them." "when the capture of the delinquents was known in rome, a multitude of the people hastened to see them as they were conveyed bound on horses into the city. it is related that franceschini having asked one of the police officers in the course of the journey _how ever the crime had been discovered_, and being told _that it had been revealed by his wife, whom they had found still living_, was almost stupefied by the intelligence. towards twenty-three o'clock (the last hour before sunset) they arrived at the prisons. a certain francesco pasquini, of città di castello, and allessandro baldeschi, of the same town, both twenty-two years of age, were the assistants of guido franceschini in the murder of the comparini; and gambasini and agostinelli were those who stood on guard at the gate." "meanwhile the corpses of the assassinated comparini were exposed at san lorenzo, in lucina, but so disfigured, and especially franceschini's wife, by their wounds in the face, that they were no longer recognizable. the unhappy francesca, after taking the sacrament, forgiving her murderers, under seventeen years of age, and after having made her will, died on the sixth day of the month, which was that of the epiphany; and was able to clear herself of all the calumnies which her husband had brought against her. the surprise of the people in seeing these corpses was great, from the atrocity of the deed, which made one really shudder, seeing two septuagenarians and a girl of seventeen so miserably put to death." "the trial proceeding meanwhile, many papers were drawn up on the subject, bringing forward all the most incriminating circumstances of this horrible massacre; and others also were written for the defence with much erudition, especially by the advocate of the poor, a certain monsignor spreti, which had the effect of postponing the sentence; also because baldeschi persisted in denial, though he was tortured with the rope, and twice fainted under it. at last he confessed, and so did the others, who also revealed the fact that they had intended in due time to murder franceschini himself, and take his money, because he had not kept his promise of paying them the moment they should have left rome." "on the twenty-second of february there appeared on the piazza del popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. at eight o'clock franceschini and his companions were summoned to their death, and having been placed in the consorteria, and there assisted by the abate panciatici and the cardinal acciajuoli, forthwith disposed themselves to die well. at twenty o'clock the company of death and the misericordia reached the dungeons, and the condemned were let down, placed on separate carts, and conveyed to the place of execution." it is farther stated that franceschini showed the most intrepidity and cold blood of them all, and that he died with the name of jesus on his lips. he wore the same clothes in which he had committed the crime: a close-fitting garment (_juste-au-corps_) of grey cloth, a loose black shirt (_camiciuola_), a goat's hair cloak, a white hat, and a cotton cap. the attempt made by him to defraud his accomplices, poor and helpless as they were, has been accepted by mr. browning as an indication of character which forbade any lenient interpretation of his previous acts. pompilia, on the other hand, is absolved, by all the circumstances of her protracted death, from any doubt of her innocence which previous evidence might have raised. ten different persons attest, not only her denial of any offence against her husband, but, what is of far more value, her christian gentleness, and absolute maiden modesty, under the sufferings of her last days, and the medical treatment to which they subjected her. among the witnesses are a doctor of theology (abate liberate barberito), the apothecary and his assistant, and a number of monks or priests; the first and most circumstantial deposition being that of an augustine, frà celestino angelo di sant' anna, and concluding with these words: "i do not say more, for fear of being taxed with partiality. i know well that god alone can examine the heart. but i know also that from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and that my great st. augustine says: 'as the life was, so is its end.'" it needed all the evidence in pompilia's favour to secure the full punishment of her murderer, strengthened, as he was, by social and ecclesiastical position, and by the acknowledged rights of marital jealousy. we find curious proof of the sympathies which might have prejudiced his wife's cause, in the marginal notes appended to her depositions, and which repeatedly introduce them as lies. "f. _lie concerning the arrival at castelnuovo._" "h. _new lies to the effect that she did not receive the lover's letters, and does not know how to write_," &c., &c.[ ] the significant question, "whether and when a husband may kill his unfaithful wife," was in the present case not thought to be finally answered, till an appeal had been made from the ecclesiastical tribunal to the pope himself. it was innocent xii. who virtually sentenced count franceschini and his four accomplices to death. when mr. browning wrote "the ring and the book," his mind was made up on the merits of the franceschini case; and the unity of purpose which has impressed itself upon his work contributes largely to its power. but he also knew that contemporary opinion would be divided upon it; and he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. he reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter with a tribute to that mystery of human motive and character which so often renders more conclusive judgments impossible. "action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought: man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top, out of the magic fire that lurks inside, shows one tint at a time to take the eye which, let a finger touch the silent sleep, shifted a hair's-breadth shoots you dark for bright, suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so your sentence absolute for shine or shade." (vol. viii. p. .) the three forms of opinion here indicated appear in the three following chapters as the respective utterance of "half-rome," "the other half-rome," and "tertium quid." half-rome has an instinctive sympathy with the husband who has been made ridiculous, and the nobleman who is threatened with an ignominious death; and is disposed throughout to regard him as more sinned against than sinning. "count guido has been unfortunate in everything. he is one of those proud and sensitive men who make few friends, and who meet reverses half-way. he has waited thirty years for advancement in the church, is sick of hope deferred, and is on the point of returning home to end his days, as he thinks, in frugality and peace, when a pretty girl is thrown in his way. visions of domestic cheerfulness and comfort rise up before him. he is entrapped into marriage before he has had time to consider what he is doing, and discovers when it is too late that the parents reputed wealthy have little left but debts; and that in exchange for their daughter's dowry, present and prospective, he must virtually maintain them as well as her." "he is far from rich, but he makes the best of a bad bargain--takes the three with him to arezzo, and lodges them with his mother and his youngest brother, in the old family house. he is repaid with howls of disappointment. pietro and violante want splendour and good-living. they haven't married their daughter to a nobleman and gone to live in his palace, to be duller than they were at home, and have less to eat and drink. they abuse the mother, who won't give up her place in the household, and try to sneer the young brother-priest out of his respect for old-fashioned ways. they go back to rome, trumpeting their wrongs: and, once there, spring a mine upon the luckless count. they refuse to pay the remainder of pompilia's dowry, on the ground that she is not their child. violante comparini has cheated her husband into accepting a base-born girl as his own, and a well-born gentleman into marrying her, but was ready to have qualms of conscience as soon as it should be convenient to tell the truth; and now the moment has come." "count guido, left alone with his nameless and penniless wife, still hopes for the best. pompilia is not guilty of her mock parents' sins. she has been honest enough to take part against them when writing to her brother-in-law in rome.[ ] he and she may still live in peace together. but now the old story begins again--that of the elderly husband and the young wife. canon caponsacchi throws comfits at pompilia in the theatre; brushes against her in the street; has constantly occasion to pass under her window, or to talk to some one opposite to it. he, of course, looks up; pompilia looks down; the neighbours say, 'what of that?' the count is uncomfortable, but he is only laughed at for his pains; the fox prowls round the hen-roost undisturbed. he wakes one morning, after a drugged sleep, to find the house ransacked, and pompilia gone, and everyone able to inform him that she has gone with caponsacchi, and to rome. he pursues them, and overtakes them where they have spent the night together. she brazens the matter out, covers her husband with invective, and threatens him with his own sword. he gives both in charge, and follows them to rome, where he seeks redress from the law. but he does not obtain redress, though the couple's guilt is made as clear as day by a packet of love letters which they had left behind them. they swear that they did not write the letters, and the court believes them. 'they have done wrong, of course, but there is no proof of crime;' and they are let off with a mere show of punishment." "the count returns to arezzo to find the whole story known, and himself the laughing-stock of everybody. he is complimented on his patience under his wife's attack--congratulated on having come out of it with a whole skin. he pushes his claim for a divorce on the obvious ground of infidelity! is met by a counter-claim on the ground of--cruelty! one exasperating circumstance fellows another. at last he hears of the birth of a child, which will be falsely represented as his heir; and then the pent-up passion breaks forth, and in one great avenging wave it washes his name clear." "yet he gives the guilty one a last chance. he utters the name of caponsacchi at her door. if she regrets her offence, that name will bar it. it proves a talisman at which the door flies open. the count and his assistants must be tried for form's sake. but if they are condemned, there is no justice left in rome. if he had taken his wife's life at the moment of provocation, he would have been praised for the act. but he called in the law to do what he was bound to do for himself; and the law has assessed his honour at what seemed to be his own price. the vengeance, too long delayed, has been excessive in consequence. it was clumsy into the bargain, since the canon has escaped alive. well, if harm comes, husbands who are disposed to take the new way instead of the old will have had a lesson; and the count has only himself to thank." the other half-rome is chiefly impressed by the spectacle of a young wife and mother butchered by her husband in cold blood: and can only think of her as having been throughout a victim. it does not absolve violante, but it allows something for honest parental feeling in the old couple's desire for a child; and something for the good done to this human waif by its adoption into a decent home. according to this version, it is the count and his brother who lay the matrimonial trap, and the comparini parents and child who fall into it. "the grim guido is at first kept in the background. abate paolo makes the proposal. he is oily and deferential, and flatters poor foolish violante, and dazzles her at the same time. 'his elder brother,' he says, 'is longing to escape from rome and its pomps and glare. he wants his empty old palace at arezzo, and his breezy villa among the vines,'--and here the emptiness of both is described so as to sound like wealth. 'poor guido! he is always harping upon his home. but he wants a wife to take there--a wife not quite empty-handed, since he is not rich for his rank--but above all, with a true tender heart and an innocent soul--one who will be a child to his mother, and fall into his own ways. many a parent would be glad to welcome him as a son-in-law, but report tells him that violante's daughter is just the girl he wants.'" "the marriage takes place. foolish pietro is talked over and strips himself of everything he has. he and his wife have no choice but to go and live with their son-in-law and his mother and brother. they meet with nothing under his roof but starvation, insult, and cruelty, and return home after a few months, duped and beggared, to ask hospitality of those whom they had once entertained. violante, overwhelmed by these misfortunes, confesses that pompilia is not her child, and pietro proclaims the fact; not that he wishes to leave pompilia in the lurch, but because he thinks this a sure way of getting her back.--count guido is clearly not the man to wish to retain as his wife a base-born girl without a dowry, and whom he has never loved.--but the case must be settled by law, the law pronounces in count guido's favour so far as the actual marriage portion is concerned; and count guido clearly lays his plans so as to half-drive and half-tempt his wife into the kind of misconduct which will rid him of her without prejudicing his right to what she has brought him." this half of rome accepts pompilia's story of all that led to her flight, and caponsacchi's statement that he assisted in it simply to save her life. it thinks the husband's intrigues sufficiently proved by the fact that the canon owns to having received letters which the wife denies having written, and which must, therefore, have been forged. count guido, it declares, has had no wrongs to avenge, and supposing he had wrongs, he has adopted too convenient a mode of avenging them. "he demands protection from the law, and the moment its balance trembles against him he flies out of court, declaring that wounded honour can only be cured by the sword. at all events he has given the law plenty to do: three courts at work for him, and an appeal to the pope besides. if any law is binding on mankind it is that such as he shall be made an end of. he is the common enemy of his fellow-men." tertium quid sees no reason for assuming that the wrong is altogether on either side, and reviews the circumstances in such a manner as to show that there is probably right on both. he lays stress on the expediency of judging the comparini by the morals of their class, and count guido by the peculiarities of his own nature; admits the punishment of the wife and parents to have been excessive, and cannot admit it to have been unprovoked; does not pretend to decide between the conflicting statements, and does not consider that pompilia's dying confession throws much light upon them; seeing that it may be equally true, or false, or neutralized by another reserved for the priest's ear. does not regard putting the count to the torture as the right mode of eliciting the truth: because he may be innocent. but declares that if _he_ does not deserve to undergo the torture, no one ever did or will. tertium quid is sometimes flippant in tone, and his neutral attitude seems chiefly the result of indifference or of caution. he is addressing himself to a highness and an excellency, and is careful not to shock the prejudices of either. still, his statement is the nearest approach to a judicial summing up of which the nature of the work admits. mr. browning now enters on the constructive part of his work. he puts the personages of the drama themselves before us, allowing each to plead his or her own cause. the imaginary occasion is that of count guido's trial; and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. the author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. the motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker are thus in some degree fictitious; but they are always founded upon fact; and the literal truth of a vast number of details is self-evident. we first hear: count guido franceschini. he has been caught red-handed from the murder of his wife. his crime is patent. he has himself confessed it under torture. his only hope of reprieve lies in the colour which he may be able to impart to it; and his speech is cunningly adapted to the nature of the court, and to the moral and mental constitution of those of whom it is composed. his judges are churchmen: neutral on the subject of marriage; rather coarsely masculine in their idea of the destiny of women. he does not profess to have entertained any affection for his wife. he derides the idea of having ill-used her, and thinks she might have liked him better if he had done so, instead of threatening her into good behaviour like a naughty child, with hair powder for poison, and a wooden toy for a sword; has no doubt that, if she had cared to warm his heart, some smouldering embers within it might still have burst into flame; but admits once for all that there was no question of feeling in the case; it was a bargain on both sides, and a fair one as far as he was concerned. paternity, however, is a condition with which his hearers may be supposed to sympathize; and he is absolutely eloquent, when he describes the desire he has cherished for a son, and the burning pain which filled him when he knew that it had been defrauded. he tells the story of his wife's intrigue and flight, much as the opinion of half-rome has reflected it; but he laces the question of his child's legitimacy in such a manner as to extract an equal advantage from either view. in either case it was pompilia's crowning iniquity that she gave birth to a child, and placed it beyond his reach; and in either case it was the outraged paternal feeling which inspired his act. the whole monologue is leavened by a spirit of mock deference for religion, for the church, and for the law which represents the church. count guido is led in from the torture, a mass of mock-patient suffering: wincing as he speaks, but quite in spite of himself--grateful that his pains are not worse--begging his judges not to be too much concerned about him; "since, thanks to his age and shaken health, a fainting fit soon came to his relief--indeed, torture itself is a kind of relief from the moral agonies he has undergone." he reminds his judges that the church was his only mistress for thirty years. he would have served her, he declares, to the end of his life, but that his fidelity had been so long ignored. he trusted to the law--in other words to the church--to avenge his honour when he ought to have done so himself. she deceived his trust, and still he hoped and endured. when he came to rome, in his last frenzy of just revenge, he still stayed his hand, because the feast of the nativity had begun: it was the period at which the church enjoins peace and good-will towards men. the face of the heavenly infant looked down upon him; he prayed that he might not enter into temptation. but the days went by, and the face withered and waned, and the cross alone confronted him. then he felt that the hour had come, and he found his way to his wife's retreat. the door opened to the name of caponsacchi. his worst fears were thus confirmed. even so, had he been admitted by pompilia, weak from her recent sufferings, he might have paused in pity--by pietro, he might have paused in contempt; but it was the hag violante who opened to him: the cheat, the mock-mother, the source of all his wrongs. the impulse to stamp out that one detested life involved all three. and now he triumphs in the deed. he has cast a foul burden from his life. he can look his fellow-men in the face again. far from admitting that he deserves punishment, he claims the sympathy and the approval of those who have met to judge him: for he has done their work--the work of divine justice and of natural law. in a final burst of rhetoric he challenges his judges to restore to him his life, his name, his civil rights, and best of all, his son; and together, he declares, they will rebuild the family honour, and revive the old forgotten tradition of domestic purity and peace. and if one day the son, about to kiss his hand, starts at the marks of violence upon it, he will smile and say, "it was only an accident-- "... just a trip o' the torture-irons in their search for truth,-- hardly misfortune, and no fault at all." (vol. ix. p. .) giuseppe caponsacchi next tells his story. it includes some details of his earlier life, which throw light on what will follow. he is not a priest from choice. he had interest in the church, and grew up in the expectation of entering it. but when the time came for taking his vows, he recoiled from the sacrifice which they involved, and yielded only to the bishop's assurance that he need make no sacrifice; there were two ways of interpreting such vows, and he need not select the harder; a man of polish and accomplishments was as valuable to the church as a scholar or an ascetic. her structure stood firm, and no one need now-a-days break his back in the effort to hold her up. let him write his madrigals (he had a turn for verse-making) and not become a fixture in his seat in the choir through too close an attendance there. the terms were easy, and caponsacchi became a priest, no worse and no better than he was expected to be; but with the feelings and purposes of a truer manhood lying dormant within him. these pompilia was destined to arouse. he relates that he first saw her at the theatre. his attention was attracted by her strange sad beauty: and a friend who sat by him, and was a connection of the husband's, threw comfits at her to make her return his gaze, warning him at the same time to do nothing which could compromise her. he accepted the warning, but could not forget the face. he felt a sudden disgust for the light women and the light pleasures which were alone within his reach, and determined to change his mode of life, and leave arezzo for rome. at this juncture a love-letter was brought to him. it purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[ ] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. the bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in count guido's household. caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. the next day the same messenger appeared with a second letter, reproaching him for his cruelty; he answered in the same strain. but the letters continued, now dropped into his prayer-book, now flung down to him from a window. at length they changed their tone. he had been begged to come: he was now entreated to stay away. the husband, before absent, had returned: indifferent, had become jealous. his vengeance was aroused; and the sooner caponsacchi escaped to rome, the better. this challenge to his courage had the intended effect. he wrote word that the street was public if the house was not, and he would be under the lady's window that evening. he went. she was standing there, lamp in hand, like our lady of sorrows on her altar. she vanished, reappeared on a terrace close above his head, and spoke to him. he had sent her letters, she said, which she could not read; but she had been told that they spoke of love. she thought at first that he must be wicked, and then she felt that he could not be so wicked as to have meant what that woman said; and now that she saw his face she knew he did not write it. still, he meant her well when no one else did. her need was sore; he alone in the world could help her; she had determined to call to him. if he had some feverish fancy for what was not her's to give, he would be cured of it so soon as he knew all. she told him her story, and entreated him to take her to rome, and consign her to her parents' care. he promised, and then his heart misgave him. would it be right in him? would it be good for her? he passed two days in a ceaseless internal conflict, and then determined to see her once more, but only to comfort and advise. she stood again awaiting him at her window. again she spoke, reproaching him for the suspense she had undergone. her manner dispelled all doubt, and he did for her what she desired. the journey, which he describes in detail, was to him one spontaneous and continued revelation of her purity and truth. then came the trial and his banishment. he was compelled to leave her to the protection of the law; to the good offices of the court which confronts him now--of the men who, as he reminds them, laughed in their sleeve at the young priest's escapade, and at the transparent excuses with which he had taxed their credulity,--of the men who, in consideration for his youth, merely sent him to disport himself elsewhere, leaving the woman he had striven to protect, to the husband who was to murder her. the news which summons him from civita vecchia has fallen on him like a thunderbolt. his being is shaken to its foundations. he strives to contain himself in outward deference to the court, but a storm of suppressed sorrow and indignation rages beneath all his words: now uttering itself in pitying tender reverence for pompilia's memory; now in scorn of those who would defame her; now in anger at himself, who is casting suspicion on her innocence by the very passion with which he defends it, now in defiance of those who choose to call the passion by the vulgar name of love. he tears up the flimsy calumnies which have been launched against her and himself; flinging them back in short, contemptuous utterances in the teeth of whosoever may believe them; begs his judges to forget his violence; and makes a last attempt to convince himself and them that no selfish desire underlies it. pompilia is dying: he too is dead--to the world. what can she be to him but a dream--a thinker's dream--of a life not consecrated to the church, but spent, as with her, in one constant domestic revelation of the eternal goodness and truth--a dream from which he will pass content.... and here the whole edifice of self-control and self-deception breaks down, and the agonized heart sends forth its cry:-- "o great, just, good god! miserable me!" (vol. ix. p. .) the third speaker is pompilia. her evidence is the story of her life. it is given from her deathbed; and its half-dreamy reminiscences are uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her heart to her priest. she is full of strange pathetic wonder at the mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass. "husbands are supposed to love their wives and guard them. see how it has been with her! that other man--that friend--they say _he_ loves her; his kindness was all love! she is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying it! her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life: and he is taken from her. he, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach her. it all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and tisbe recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five fingers blossoming into leaves. things are, and are not at the same time." one thing, however, is real amidst the unreality: her joy and pride in finding herself a mother. the event proved that when she left arezzo the hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and mr. browning has combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women, and read it into every impulse of her remaining life. she was wretched. she had vainly sought for help. she had resigned herself to the inevitable. she had lain down at night with the old thought-- "... 'done, another day! how good to sleep and so get nearer death!'-- when, what, first thing at day-break, pierced the sleep with a summons to me? up i sprang alive, light in me, light without me, everywhere change!" (vol. ix. p. .) from this moment, as she tells us, everything was transformed. for days, for weeks, caponsacchi's name had been ringing in her ears: in jealous explosions on her husband's part; in corrupting advice on the part of the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him; in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he could not have written. this, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful dream. but when she awoke on the april morning in that bounding of the spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her, and she said, "let caponsacchi come." she remembers little after that, but the enfolding tenderness which secured the fulfilment of her hope. she describes nothing after the "tap" at the door, which was the beginning of the end. she has attained the crown of her woman's existence, and she can bear no resentment towards him whose cruelty embittered, and whose vengeance has cut it short. the motherly heart in her goes out to the wicked husband who was also once a child, and strives to palliate what he has done. "he was sinned against as well as sinning. her poor parents were blind and unjust in their mode of retaliating upon him. she was blind and foolish in doing nothing to heal the breach. her earthly goods have been a snare to guido; she herself was an importunate presence to him. by god's grace he will be the better for having swept her from his path. she thanks him for destroying in her that bodily life which was his to pollute, and for leaving her soul free. her infant shall have been born of no earthly father. it is the child of its mother's love." and this love for her child overflows in gratitude to him who saved her for it--a gratitude which is also something more. she has recoiled from the idea of being united to a priest by any bond of earthly affection; but the knowledge is growing upon her that her bond to caponsacchi _is_ love, though it assumes an ideal character in her innocence, her ignorance, and the exaltation of feeling which denotes her approaching death. she has recalled the incidents of her flight, but only to bear witness to caponsacchi's virtues: his watchful kindness, his chivalrous courage, the unselfishness which could risk life and honour without thought of reward, the priestly dignity which he never set aside. her last words contain an invocation to himself which has all the passion of earthly tenderness, and all the solemnity of a prayer. she addresses him as her soldier-saint--as the friend "her only, all her own," who is closest to her now on her final journey; whose love shall sustain, whose strong hand shall guide her, on the unknown path she is about to tread. she thinks he would not marry if he could. true marriage is in heaven, where there is no making of contracts, with gold on one side, power or youth or beauty on the other, but one is "man and wife at once when the true time is." would either of them wish the past undone? her soul says "no." "so, let him wait god's instant men call years; meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, do out the duty! through such souls alone god stooping shows sufficient of his light for us i' the dark to rise by. and i rise." (vol. ix. p. .) we have now the written pleadings of two advocates who figure largely in the records of the case; the one enlisted on the count's side, the other on pompilia's they are dominus hyacinthus de archangelis (procurator of the poor) juris doctor johannes baptista bottinius (fisc, or public prosecutor). the subject of these pleadings is the possible justification of the crime for which count franceschini is on trial, but not otherwise the crime itself; for he has owned to its commission; and though the avowal has been drawn from him by torture, it is justly accepted as decisive. all the arguments for and against him hinge therefore on the evidence of pompilia's guilt or innocence as established by the previous enquiry; and as we have seen, the _formal_ result of this enquiry was unfavourable to her. the count obtained his verdict, though the subsequent treatment of the offenders made it almost nugatory; and de archangelis rings the changes on the stock arguments of his client's outraged honour, and his natural if not legal right to avenge it. bottinius, on the other hand, does not admit that the husband's honour has been attacked; but he defends the wife's conduct, more by extenuating the acts of which she is accused, than by denying them. his denials are generally parenthetic: and imply that the whether she did certain things is much less important than the why and the how; and though he professes to present her as a pearl of purity, he shows his standard of female purity to be very low. mr. browning might easily have composed a more genuine defence from the known facts of the case; but he represents these quibblings and counter-quibblings as equally beside the mark. the question of the murderer's guilt was being judged on broader grounds; and the supposed talkers on either side are aware of this. de archangelis and bottinius both know that their cleverness will benefit no one but themselves, and for this reason they are as much concerned to show how good a case they can make out of a doubtful one, as to prove that their case is in itself good. each is thinking of his opponent, and how best to parry his attack; and their arguments are relieved by a brisk exchange of personalities, in which "de archangelis" includes his subordinate "spreti"--"advocate of the poor"--whose learned contribution to this paper warfare has probably aroused his jealousy. mr. browning has also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. he is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions are all centred on an eight-year-old son, whose birthday it is; and his defence of the murder is concocted under frequent interruptions, from the thought of cinuncino (little giacinto, or hyacinth), and the fried liver and herbs which are to form part of his birthday feast. bottinius is a vain man, occupied only with himself, and regretting nothing so much as that he may not display his rhetorical powers, by delivering his speech instead of writing it. count guido, with his accomplices, has been condemned to death. his friends have appealed from the verdict, on the ground of his being, though in a minor degree, a priest. the answer to this appeal rests with the head of the church. the next monologue is therefore that of the pope. the reflections here imagined grow out of a double fact. innocent the twelfth refused to shelter count franceschini with his accomplices from the judgment of the law, and thus assumed the responsibility of his death. he had reached an age at which so heavy a responsibility could not be otherwise than painful. as mr. browning depicts him, his decision is made. from dawn to dark he has been studying the case, piecing together its fragmentary truths, trying its merits with "true sweat of soul." there is no doubt in his mind that guido deserves to die. but he has to nerve himself afresh before he gives the one stroke of his pen, the one touch to his bell, which shall send this soul into eternity; and that is what we see him doing. as he says to himself, he is weighed down by years. he lifts the cares of the whole world on a "loaded branch" for which a bird's nest were a "superfluous burthen." yet this strong man cries to him for life: and he alone has the power to grant it. how easy to reprieve! how hard to deny to this trembling sinner the moment's respite which may save his soul. he wants precedent for such a deed; and he seeks it in the records of the papacy. it is from the popes his predecessors that he must learn how to dare, to suffer, and--to judge. but these records tell him how stephen cursed formosus; how romanus and theodore reinstated the sanctity of formosus and cursed stephen; and how john reinstated stephen and cursed formosus. they could not all be right. there is no guarantee for infallibility--no test of justice--to be found here. how, then, would he defend his condemnation of guido if he himself were now summoned to the judgment-seat? the question is self-answered: no defence would be needed; for god sees into the heart. he appraises the seed of act, which is its motive; not "leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire." the pope knows that his motives will stand the scrutiny of god. how, finally, could he plead his cause with a man like himself: with the man antonio pignatelli, his very self? he must, once for all, marshal the facts, and let them plead for him. next follows the pope's version of the story, which differs from those preceding it, in being the summing up of a spiritual judge, who deals not only with facts but with conditions, and who looks at the thing done, in its special reference to the person who did it. as seen in this light, the blacks of the picture are blacker, the whites, whiter, than they appear from the ordinary point of view. guido has been doubly wicked because his birth, his breeding, and his connection with the church, had surrounded him with incitements to good, and with opportunities for it. pompilia is doubly virtuous because she is a mere "chance-sown," "cleft-nurtured" human weed, owing all her goodness to herself. with guido, the bad end is secured by the worst means. not satisfied to murder his wife, he must use a jagged instrument with which to torture her flesh. not satisfied to torment her in the body, he must imperil her soul by placing desperate temptation in her way. with pompilia the right virtue is always employed for the good end. she is submissive where only her own life is at stake; brave, when a life within her own calls on her for protection. guido's accomplices: his brothers, his mother, the four youths who helped him to kill his wife: the governor, and the archbishop, who abetted his ill-treatment of her, have alike sinned against their age, their character, or their associations. caponsacchi has not been faultless. he has failed somewhat in the dignity of his office, somewhat in its decorum; his mode of rescuing the oppressed has had too much the character of an escapade. but the more disciplined soldier of the church would have erred in the opposite direction. the ear which listens only for the voice of authority becomes obtuse to the cry of suffering. the spirit which only moves to command becomes unfit for spontaneous work. caponsacchi, standing aloof like a man of pleasure, has proved himself the very champion of god, ready to spring into the arena, at the first thud of the false knight's glove upon the ground. he has shown himself possessed of the true courage which does not shrink from temptation, and does not succumb to it. such transgressions as his reflect rather on the limits imposed than on the impatience which transgressed them. he must submit to a slight punishment. he must work--be unhappy--bear life. but he ranks next in grace to pompilia--the "rose" which the old pope "gathers for the breast of god." of count guido's other victims, pietro and violante, the worst that can be said is this: they have halted between good and evil; and, as the way of the world is, suffered through both. the balance of justice once more confirms the pope's decree. yet at this very moment his will relaxes. a sudden dread is upon him--a chill such as comes with the sudden clouding of a long clear sky. the ordeal of a deeper and stranger doubt is yet to be faced. he has judged, as he believed, by the light of divine truth. has he been mistaken? step by step he tests and reconstructs his belief, tracing it back to its beginning. god, the infinite, exists. man, the atom, comprehends him as the conditions of his intelligence permit, but so far truly. man's mind, like a convex glass, reflects him, in an image, smaller or less small, adequate so far as it goes. as revealed in the order of nature, god is perfect in intelligence and in power; but not so in love; and there has come into the mouths and hearts of men, a tale and miracle of divine love which makes the evidence of his perfection complete. the pope believes that tale, whether true in itself, or like man's conception of the infinite, true only for the human mind. he accepts its enigmas as a test of faith: as a sign that life is meant for a training and a passage: as a guarantee of our moral growth, and of the good which evil may produce. christianity stands firm. and yet his heart misgives him; for it is not justified by its results. it is not that the sceptical deny its value: that those bent on earthly good reject it with open eyes. the surprise and terror is this: that those who have found the pearl of price--who have named and known it--will still grovel after the lower gain. such the aretine bishop who sent pompilia back to her tormentor; the friar who refused to save her because he feared the world; the nuns who at first testified to her purity, and were ready to prove her one of dishonest life, when they learned that she possessed riches which by so doing they might confiscate to themselves. nor is the fault in humanity at large: for love and faith have leapt forth profusely in the olden time, at the summons of "unacknowledged," "uncommissioned" powers of good. caponsacchi has shown that they do so still. before paul had spoken and felix heard, euripides had pronounced virtue the law of life, and, in his doctrine of hidden forces, foreshadowed the one god. euripides felt his way in the darkness. he, the pope, walking in the glare of noon, might ask support of him. where does the fault lie? it lies in the excess of certainty--in the too great familiarity with the truth--in that encroachment of earthly natives on the heavenly, which is begotten by the security of belief. between night and noonday there has been the dawn, with its searching illumination, its thrill of faith, the rapture of self-sacrifice in which anchorite and martyr foretasted the joys of heaven. now christianity is hard because it has become too easy; because of the "ignoble confidence," which will enjoy this world and yet count upon the next: the "shallow cowardice," which renders the old heroism impossible. the pope is discursive, as is the manner of his age; and his reflections have been, hitherto, rather suggested by the case before him than directly related to it. but he grasps it again in a burst of prophetic insight which these very reflections have produced. heroism has become impossible, "unless ... what whispers me of times to come? what if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our creed?" (vol. x. p. .) what if earthquake be about to try the towers which lions dare no longer attack: if man be destined to live once more, in the new-born readiness for death? is the time at hand, when the new faith shall be broken up as the old has been; when reported truth shall once more be compared with the actual truth--the portrait of the divine with its reality? is not perhaps the molinist[ ] himself thus striving after the higher light? the pope's fancy conjures up the vision of that coming time. he sees the motley pageant of the age of reason pushing the churchly "masque" aside, impatient of the slowly-trailing garments, in which he, the last actor in it, is passing off the scene. he beholds the trials of that transition stage; the many whose crumbling faith will land them on the lower platform of the material life; the few, who from habit, will preserve the christian level; the fewer still, who, like pompilia, will do so in the inspired conviction of the truth. he sees two men, or rather types of men, both priests, frankly making the new experiment, and adopting nature as their law. under her guidance, one, like caponsacchi acts, in the main, well; the other, like guido franceschini, wallows in every crime.... the "first effects" of the "new cause" are apparent in those murdering five, and in their victims. but the old law is not yet extinct. he (the church) still occupies the stage, though his departure be close at hand: so, in a last act of allegiance to him who placed him there, he _smites with his whole strength once more_, "ending, so far as man may, this offence." (vol. x. p. .) yet again his arm is stayed. voices, whether of friend or foe, are sounding in his ear. they reiterate the sophistries which have been enlisted in the count's defence: the credit of the church, the proprieties of the domestic hearth; the educated sense of honour which is stronger than the moral law; the general relief which will greet the act of mercy. the pope listens. for one moment we may fancy that he yields. "pronounce then," the imaginary speakers have said. a swift answer follows: "i will, sirs: but a voice other than your's quickens my spirit...." (vol. x. p. .) and the death-warrant goes out. a favourite theory of mr. browning's appears in this soliloquy, for the first time since he stated it in "sordello," and in a somewhat different form: that of the inadequacy of words to convey the truth. the pope declares (p. ) that we need "expect nor question nor reply at what we figure as god's judgment-bar! none of this vile way by the barren words which, more than any deed, characterize man as made subject to a curse." and again (p. ) that "... these filthy rags of speech, this coil of statement, comment, query and response, tatters all too contaminate for use, have no renewing: he, the truth, is, too, the word." the scene changes to the prison-cell where count guido has received his final sentence of death. two former friends and fellow-tuscans, cardinal acciajuoli and abate panciatichi, have come to prepare him for execution; but the one is listening awe-struck to the only kind of confession which they can obtain from him, while the other plies his beads in a desperate endeavour to exorcise the spiritual enemy, "ban" the diabolical influences, it is conjuring up. the speaker is no longer count guido franceschini, but guido. he is indeed another man than he was in his first monologue, for he has thrown off the mask. his tone is at first conciliatory, even entreating: for his hearers are men of his own class, and he hopes to persuade them to one more intercession in his behalf. but it changes to one of scorn and defiance, as the hopelessness of his case lays hold of him, and rises, at the end, to a climax of ferocity which is all but grand. "repentance! if he repent for twelve hours, will he die the less on the thirteenth? he has broken the social law, and is about to pay for it. what has he to repent of but that he has made a mistake? religion! who of them all believes in it? not the pope himself; for religion enjoins mercy; it is meant to temper the harshness of the law: and he destroys the life which the law has given over to him to save. what man of them all shows by his acts that he believes; or would be treated otherwise than as a lunatic if he did? let those who will, halt between belief and unbelief. it has not been in him to do so. give him the certainty of another world, and he would have lived for it. owning no such certainty, he has lived for this one; he has sought its pleasures and avoided its pains. only he has carried the thing too far. the world has decreed limits to every man's pleasure; it limits this for the good of all; and it has made unlawful the excess of pleasure which turns to someone else's pain. he has exceeded the lawful amount of pleasure, and he pays for it by an extra dose of pain." "there the matter ends. but his judges want more--a few edifying lies wherewith to show that he did not die impenitent, and stop the mouth of anyone who may hint, the day after the execution, that old men are too fond of putting younger ones out of the way. they shall have his confession; but it must be the truth." "he killed his wife because he hated her; because, whether it were her fault or not, she was a stumbling-block in his path. he had been outraged by her aversion, exasperated by her patience, maddened by her never putting herself in the wrong. while her parents were with her, she resisted and clamoured, and then her presence could be endured; but they were left alone together, and then everything was changed. day by day, and all day, he was confronted by her automatic obedience, by her dumb despair. she rose up and lay down--she spoke or was silent at his bidding; neither a loosened hair, nor a crumple in the dress, giving token of resistance; he might have strangled her without her making a sign. she eloped from him, yet he could not surprise her in the commission of a sin: and he returned from his pursuit of her, ridiculous when he should have been triumphant. he took his revenge at last. and now that he might tell his story and find no one to controvert it--how he came to claim his wife and child, and found no child, but the lover by the wife's side; was attacked, defended himself, struck right and left, and thus did the deed--she survives, by miracle, to confute him, to condemn him, and worst of all, to forgive him." "he has been ensnared by his opportunities from first to last. he failed to save himself from retribution, only because he was drunk with the sudden freedom from this hateful load. and pompilia haunts him still. her stupid purity will freeze him even in death. it will rob him of his hell--where the fiend in him would burn up in fiery rapture--where some lucrezia might meet him as his fitting bride--where the wolf-nature frankly glutted would perhaps leave room for some return to human form. for she cannot hate. it would grieve her to know him there; and--if there be a hell--it will be barred to him in consideration for her." "the cardinal, the abate, they too are petrifactions in their way! he may rave another twelve hours, and it will be useless." yet he makes one more effort to move them. he reminds the cardinal of the crimes he has committed--of the help he will need when a new pope is to be elected; of the possible supporter who may then be in his grave. then fiercely turning on them both; "the cardinal have a chance indeed, when there is an albano in the case! the abate be alive a year hence, with that burning hollow cheek and that hacking cough!--well, _he_ will die bold and honest as he has lived." at this juncture he becomes aware that the fatal moment has arrived. steps and lights are on the stairs. the defiant spirit is quenched. "he has laughed and mocked and said no word of all he had to say." in wild terror he pleads for life--bare life. a final vindication of his wife's goodness bursts from him in the words, "abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god,-- pompilia, will you let them murder me?" (vol. x. p. .) the concluding part of the work reverses the idea of the first, and is entitled the book and the ring. it completes the record of the franceschini case, and gives the concluding touches to the circle of evidence which now assumes its final dramatic form. we have first an account of the execution, conveyed in a gossiping letter from a venetian gentleman on a visit to rome, and who reports it as the last news of the week, and the occasion of his having lost a bet. the writer also discusses the pope's health, the relative merits of his present physician and a former one; the relative chances of various candidates for the papacy; and the pope's possible motives for setting aside "justice, prudence, and esprit de corps," in the manner testified by his recent condemnation of a man of rank. his political likes and dislikes are thrown into the scale, but his predilection for the mob is considered to have turned it. "he allows the people to question him when he takes his walks; and it is said that some of them asked him, on the occasion of his last, whether the privilege of murder was altogether reserved for noblemen." "the austrian ambassador had done his best to avert bloodshed, and pleaded hard for the life of one whom, as he urged, he 'may have dined at table with!' and felt so aggrieved by the pope's answer, that he all but refused to come to the execution, and would barely look at it when he came." various details follow, some of which my readers already know. mr. browning next speaks of the three manuscript letters bound into the original book; selects one of these, written by the count's advocate, de archangelis, and gives it, first, in its actual contents, and next, in an imaginary postscript which we are to think of as destined for the recipient's private ear. the letter itself is written for the count's family and friends; and states, in a tone of solemn regret, that the justifications brought forward by his correspondent arrived too late; that the pope thought it inexpedient to postpone the execution, or to accept the plea of youth urged in favour of the four accomplices; and that they all died that day. it declares that the count suffered in an exemplary manner, amidst the commiseration and respect of all rome, and that the honour of his house will lose nothing through the catastrophe. the supplement is conceived in a very different spirit. the writer laughs at their "pleas" and "proofs," coming, like pisan help, when the man is already dead--"not that twenty such vindications would have done any good-- "when somebody's thick head-piece once was bent on seeing guido's drop into the bag." (vol. x. p. .) well, people enjoyed the show, but saw through it all the same; and meanwhile his (the writer's) superb defence goes for nothing; and though argument is solid and subsists "while obstinacy and ineptitude accompany the owner to his tomb;" (vol. x. p. .) his hands and his pockets are empty. ah well! little cino will gain by it in the long run. he had been promised that if papa couldn't save the count's head, he should go and see it chopped off: and when a patroness of his joked the child on his defeat, and on bottini's ruling the roast, the clever rogue retorted that papa knew better than to baulk the pope of his grudge, and could have argued bottini's nose off if he had chosen. doesn't the fop see that he (de archangelis) can drive right and left horses with one hand? the gomez case shall make it up to him." the two other letters are in the same strain as the first. both are written on the day of the execution. both announce it in a condoling manner. both allude to the justifications which arrived too late: and in one or both, the criminal is spoken of as "poor" signor guido. mr. browning has preferred, however, representing the other side; and the next which he gives is, like don hyacinth's supplement, only such as might have been written. it is supposed to be from pompilia's advocate bottinius (or bottini), and is in keeping with the spirit of his defence. he is clearly jealous of not having had a worse case to plead. "he has won," he says. "how could he do otherwise? with the plain truth on his side, and the pope ready to steady it on his legs again if he let it drop asleep. arcangeli may crow over him, as it is, for having been kept by him a month at bay--though even this much was not his doing; the little dandiprat spreti was the real man." and this is not all. "of course rome must have its joke at the advocate with the case that proved itself: but here is a piece of impertinence he was not prepared for. the barefoot augustinian, whose report of pompilia's dying words took all the freshness out of the best points of his defence, has been preaching on the subject; and the sermon is flying about rome in print." next follows an extract from it. the friar warns his hearers not to trust to human powers of discovering the truth. "it is not the long trial which has revealed pompilia's innocence; god from time to time puts forth his hand, and he has done so here. but earth is not heaven, nor all truth intended to prevail. one dove returned to the ark. how many were lost in the wave? one woman's purity has been rescued from the world. 'how many chaste and noble sister-fames' have lacked 'the extricating hand?' and we must wait god's time for such truth as is destined to appear. when christians worshipped in the catacomb, one man, no worse than the rest, though no less foolish, will have pointed to its mouth, and said, 'obscene rites are practised in that darkness. the devotees of an execrable creed skulk there out of sight.' not till the time was ripe, did lightning split the face of the rock, and lay bare a nook-- "narrow and short, a corpse's length, no more: and by it, in the due receptacle, the little rude brown lamp of earthenware, the cruse, was meant for flowers, but held the blood, the rough-scratched palm-branch, and the legend left _pro christo_." (vol. x. p. ) "and how does human law, in its 'inadequacy' and 'ineptitude' defend the just? how has it attempted to clear pompilia's fame? by submitting, as its best resource, that wickedness was bred in her flesh and bone. for himself he cannot judge, unless by the assurance of christ, if he have not lost much by renouncing the world: for he has lost love, and knowledge, and perhaps the means of bringing goodness from its ideal conception into the actual life of man. but the bubble, fame--worldly praise and appreciation--he has done well to set these aside." "and what is all this preaching," resumes bottinius, "but a way of courting fame? the inflation of it! and the spite! and the molinism! as its first pleasant consequence, gomez, who had intended to appeal from the absurd decision of the court, declines to ask the lawyers for farther help.[ ] there is an end of that job and its fee. nevertheless, his 'blatant brother' shall soon see if law is as inadequate, and advocacy as impotent, as he fancies. providence is this time in their favour. pompilia was consigned to the 'convertite' (converted ones). she was therefore a sinner. guido has been judged guilty: but there was no word as to the innocence of his wife. the sisterhood claims, therefore, the property which accrued to her through her parents' death, and which she has left in trust for her son. who but himself--the fisc--shall support the claim, and show the foul-mouthed friar that his dove was a raven after all." (he too can drive left and right horses on occasion.) this he actually did. but once more the pope intervened: and mr. browning proceeds to give the literal substance of the "instrument" of justification as it lies before him. in this, pompilia's "perfect fame" is restored, and her representative, domenico tighetti, secured against all molestations of her heir and his ward, which the most venerable convent, etc. etc., may commit or threaten. what became of that child, gaetano, as he was called after the new-made saint? did he live a true scion of the paternal stock, whose heraldic symbols mr. browning has described by count guido's mouth?-- "or did he love his mother, the base-born, and fight i' the ranks, unnoticed by the world?" (vol. x. p. .) this question mr. browning asks himself, but is unable to answer. he concludes his book by telling us its intended lesson, and explaining why he has chosen to present it in this artistic form. the lesson is that which we have already learned from his pope's thoughts:-- "... our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation words and wind." (vol. x. p. .) art, with its indirect processes, can alone raise up a living image of that truth which words distort in the stating. and, lastly, he dedicates the completed work to the "lyric love," whose blessing on its performance he has invoked in a memorable passage at the close of his introductory chapter. transcripts from the greek, with "artemis prologizes." another group of works detaches itself from any possible scheme of classification: these are mr. browning's transcripts from the greek. the "alkestis" of euripides, imbedded in the dramatic romance called "balaustion's adventure." . the "herakles" of euripides, introduced into "aristophanes' apology." . the "agamemnon" of Æschylus, published by itself. . they are even outside my subject because they are literal; and therefore show mr. browning as a scholar, but not otherwise as a poet than in the technical power and indirect poetic judgments involved in the work. all i need say about this is, that its literalness detracts in no way from the beauty and transparency of "alkestis" or "herakles," while it makes "agamemnon" very hard to read; and that mr. browning has probably intended his readers to draw their own conclusion, which is so far his, as to the relative quality of the two great classics. some critics contend that a less literal translation of the "agamemnon" would have been not only more pleasing, but more true; but mr. browning clearly thought otherwise. had he not, he would certainly have given his author the benefit of the larger interpretation; and his principal motive for this indirect defence of euripides would have disappeared. mr. browning has also given us an original fragment in the classic manner:-- "artemis prologizes." ("men and women,"[ ] published in "dramatic lyrics," in .) this was suggested by the "hippolytos" of euripides; and destined to become part of a larger poem, which should continue its story. for, according to the legend, hippolytos having perished through the anger of aphrodité (venus), was revived by artemis (diana), though only to disappoint her affection by falling in love with one of her nymphs, aricia. mr. browning imagines that she has removed him in secret to her own forest retreat, and is nursing him back to life by the help of asclepios; and the poem is a monologue in which she describes what has passed, from phaedra's self-betrayal to the present time. hippolytos still lies unconscious; but the power of the great healer has been brought to bear upon him, and the unconsciousness seems only that of sleep. artemis is _awaiting the event_. the ensuing chorus of nymphs, the awakening of hippolytos, and with it the stir of the new passion within him, had already taken shape in mr. browning's mind. unfortunately, something put the inspiration to flight, and it did not return.[ ] footnotes: [footnote : the song professedly refers to catherine cornaro, the venetian queen of cyprus, and is the only one in the poem that is based on any fact at all.] [footnote : this pamphlet has supplied mr. browning with some of his most curious facts. it fell into his hands in london.] [footnote : the first hour after sunset.] [footnote : "villa" is often called "vineyard" or "vigna," on account of the vineyard attached to it.] [footnote : it is difficult to reconcile this explicit denial of pompilia's statements with the belief in her implied in her merely nominal punishment: unless we look on it as part of the formal condemnation which circumstances seemed to exact.] [footnote : a letter written in this strain was also produced on the trial; and pompilia owned to having written it, but only in the sense of writing over in ink what her husband had traced in pencil--being totally ignorant of its contents.] [footnote : count guido thought, or affected to think, that these had been thrown by caponsacchi.] [footnote : the disciple of michael de molinos, not to be confounded with louis molina, who is especially known by his attempt to reconcile the theory of grace with that of free will. molinos was the founder of an exaggerated quietism. he held that the soul could detach itself from the body so as to become indifferent to its action, and therefore non-responsible for it; and it was natural that all who defied the received laws of conduct, or were suspected of doing so, should be stigmatized as his followers. molinism was a favourite bugbear among the orthodox romanists of innocent the twelfth's day.] [footnote : a passing allusion is made to this gomez case in one of the manuscript letters, the writer of which begs cencini (clearly also an advocate), to send him the papers concerning it. the place it occupies in the thoughts of the two lawyers, as mr. browning depicts them, is very characteristic of the manner in which his imagination has embraced and vivified every detail of the situation.] [footnote : the poems to which i refer as now included in "men and women" will be found so in the editions of and - ; though the redistribution made in has much curtailed their number.] [footnote : it was in this poem that mr. browning first adopted the plan of spelling greek names in the greek manner. he did so, as he tells us in the preface to his "agamemnon," "innocently enough;" because the change commended itself to his own eye and ear. he has even assured his friends that if the innovation had been rationally opposed, or simply not accepted, he would probably himself have abandoned it. but when, years later, in "balaustion's adventure," the new spelling became the subject of attacks which all but ignored the existence of the work from any other point of view, the thought of yielding was no longer admissible. the majority of our best scholars now follow mr. browning's example.] classified groups. argumentative poems. special pleadings. the isolated monologues have a special significance, which is almost implied in their form, but is also distinct from it. mr. browning has made them the vehicle for most of the reasonings and reflections which make up so large a part of his imaginative life: whether presented in his own person, or, as is most often the case, in that of his men and women. as such, they are among those of his works which lend themselves to a rough kind of classification; and may be called "argumentative." they divide themselves into two classes: those in which the speaker is defending a preconceived judgment, and an antagonist is implied; and those in which he is trying to form a judgment or to accept one: and the supposed listener, if there be such, is only a confidant. the first kind of argument or discussion is carried on--apparently--as much for victory as for truth; and employs the weapons of satire, or the tactics of special-pleading, as the case demands. the second is an often pathetic and always single-minded endeavour to get at the truth. those monologues in which the human spirit is represented as communing with itself, contain some of mr. browning's noblest dramatic work; but those in which the militant attitude is more pronounced throw the strongest light on what i have indicated as his distinctive intellectual quality: the rejection of all general and dogmatic points of view. his casuistic utterances are often only a vindication of the personal, and therefore indefinite quality of human truth; and their apparent trifling with it is often only the seeking after a larger truth, in which all seeming contradictions are resolved. it was inevitable, however, that this mental quality should play into the hands of his dramatic imagination, and be sometimes carried away by it; so that when he means to tell us what a given person under given circumstances would be justified in saying, he sometimes finds himself including in the statement something which the given person so situated would be only likely to say. the first of these classes, or groups, which we may distinguish as special pleadings, contains poems very different in length, and in literary character; and to avoid the appearance of confusion, i shall reverse the order of their publication, and place the most important first:-- "aristophanes' apology;[ ] or the last adventure of balaustion." ( .) "fifine at the fair." ( .) "prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society." ( .) "bishop blougram's apology" (men and women). ( .) "mr. sludge, the medium." (dramatis personæ.) ( .) "aristophanes' apology" is, as its second title shows, a sequel to "balaustion's adventure" ( ). both turn on the historical fact that euripides was reverenced far more by the non-athenian greeks than by the athenians; and both contain a transcript from him. but the interest of "aristophanes' apology" is independent of its "herakles," while that of "balaustion's adventure" is altogether bound up with its alkestis; and in so far as the "adventure" places balaustion herself before us, it will be best treated as an introduction to her appearance in the later and more important work. balaustion is a rhodian girl, brought up in a worship for euripides, which does not, however, exclude the appreciation of other great greek poets. the peloponnesian war has entered on its second stage. the athenian fleet has been defeated at syracuse. and rhodes, resenting this disgrace, has determined to take part against athens, and join the peloponnesian league. but balaustion will not forsake the mother-city, the life and light of her whole known world; and she persuades her kinsmen to migrate with her to it, and, with her, to share its fate. they accordingly take ship at kaunus, a carian sea-port belonging to rhodes. but the wind turns them from their course, and when it abates, they find themselves in strange waters, pursued by a pirate bark. they fly before it towards what they hope will prove a friendly shore--balaustion heartening the rowers by a song from Æschylus, which was sung at the battle of salamis--and run straight into the hostile harbour of syracuse, where shelter is denied them. the captain pleads in vain that they are kaunians, subjects of rhodes, and that rhodes is henceforward on sparta's side. "kaunian the ship may be: but athenians are on board. all athens echoed in that song from Æschylus which has been ringing across the sea. the voyagers may retire unhurt. but if ten pirate ships were pursuing them, they should not bring those memories of salamis to the athenian captives whom the defeat of nicias has left in syracusan hands." the case is desperate. the rhodians turn to go. suddenly a voice cries, "wait. do they know any verses from euripides?" "more than that, they answer, balaustion can recite a whole play--that strangest, saddest, sweetest song--the 'alkestis.' it does honour to herakles, their god. let them place her on the steps of their temple of herakles, and she will recite it there." the rhodians are brought in, amidst joyous loving laughter, among shouts of "herakles" and "euripides." the recital takes place;[ ] it is repeated a second day and a third; and balaustion and her kinsmen are dismissed with good words and wishes, for, as she declares: "... greeks are greeks, and hearts are hearts, and poetry is power,...." (vol. xi. p. .) the story of alkestis scarcely needs repeating. apollo had incurred the anger of jupiter by avenging the death of his son Æsculapius on the cyclops whose thunder-bolt had slain him; and been condemned to play the part of a common mortal, and serve admetus, king of thessaly, as herdsman. the kind treatment of admetus had made him his friend: and apollo had deceived the fate sisters into promising that whenever the king's life should become their due, they would renounce it on condition of some other person dying in his stead. when the play opens, the fatal moment has come. alkestis, wife of admetus, has offered herself to save him; and admetus, though he does so with a heavy heart, has been weak enough to accept the sacrifice. death enters the palace, from which even apollo can no longer turn him away. but just as alkestis has breathed her last, herakles appears; and his great cheery voice is heard on the threshold of the house of mourning, inquiring if the master be within. admetus suppresses all signs of emotion, that he may receive him as hospitality demands; and herakles, hearing what has happened from a servant of the house, is moved to gratitude and pity. he wrestles with death; conquers him; and brings back alkestis into her husband's presence, veiled, and in the guise of a second companion. admetus will at first neither touch nor look at her. he has promised his dying wife to give her no successor; and her memory is even dearer to him than she herself has been. the god however reasons, persuades, and insists; and at length, very reluctantly, admetus gives his hand to the stranger, whom he is then told to unveil. herakles has delayed the recognition, that alkestis might be enabled to probe her husband's fidelity, and convince herself that sorrow had made him worthier of her. balaustion half recites the play, half describes it, "as she has seen it at kameiros this very year," occasionally compressing an unimportant scene, but always closely adhering to the original. she knows that she is open to the reproach of describing more than the masked faces of the actors could allow her to see; but she meets it in these words:-- "what's poetry except a power that makes? and, speaking to one sense, inspires the rest, pressing them all into its service:" (vol. xi. pp. , .) the whole work is a vindication of the power of poetry, as exerted in itself, and as reproduced in those who have received its fruits (pages , ); and balaustion herself displays it in this secondary form, by suggesting a version of the story of alkestis, more subtly, if less simply, beautiful than the original. she makes _love_ the conqueror of death. according to her, the music made by apollo among admetus's flocks has tamed every selfish passion in the king's soul; and when the time comes for his wife to die, he refuses the sacrifice. "zeus has decreed that their two lives shall be one; and if they must be severed, he must go who was the body, not she, who was the soul, of their joint existence." but alkestis declares that the reality of that existence lies not in her but in him, and she bids him look at her once more before his decision is made. in this look, her soul enters into his; and, thus subduing him, she expires. but when she reaches the nether world she is rejected as a deceiver. "the death she brings to it is a mockery, since it doubles the life she has left behind." proserpine sends her back to her husband's side; and the "lost eyes" re-open beneath his gaze, while it still embraces her. apollo smiles sadly at the ingenuousness of mortals, who thus imagine that the chain of eternal circumstance could snap in one human life; at their blindness to those seeds of pity and tenderness which the crushed promise of human happiness sets free. yet he seems to think they lose nothing by either. "they do well to value their little hour. they do well to treasure the warm heart's blood, of which no outpouring could tinge the paleness or fill the blank of eternity, the power of love which transforms their earthly homes, their ... hopes and fears, so blind and yet so sweet with death about them." (p. .) "balaustion" means wild pomegranate flower; and the girl has been so called on account of her lyric gifts. she recalls the pomegranate tree, because its leaves are cooling to the brow, its seed and blossom grateful to the sense, and because the nightingale is never distant from it. she will keep the name for life--so she tells her friends--and with it a better thing which her songs have gained her. one youth came daily to the temple-steps at syracuse to hear her. he was at her side at athens when she landed. they will be married at this next full moon. "alkestis" failed "to get the prize" when its author was competing with sophocles. "but euripides has had his reward: in the sympathies which he has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired. his crown came direct from zeus." we need not name the poetess whom mr. browning quotes at the close of this poem. the painter so generously eulogized is f. leighton. when we meet balaustion again, in "aristophanes' apology," many things have happened. she has seen her poet in his retirement (this was mentioned in her "adventure"), kissed his hand, and received from it, together with other gifts, his tragedy of herakles. euripides has died; athens has fallen; and balaustion, with her memories in her heart, and her husband, euthykles, by her side, is speeding back towards rhodes. she is deeply shocked by the fate of her adoptive city, to which her fancy pays a tribute of impassioned reverence, too poetic to be given in any but mr. browning's words. yet she has a growing belief that that fate was just. sea and air and the blue expanse of heaven are full of suggestion of that spirit-life, with its larger struggles or its universal peace, which is above the world's crowd and noise. and she determines that sorrow for what is fleeting shall not gnaw at her heart. but in order to overcome the sorrow, she must loosen it from her. the tragedy she has witnessed must enact itself once more for euthykles and her, he writing as she dictates. it will have for prologue a second adventure of her own, which he also has witnessed; and this adventure will constitute the book. it is prefaced in its turn by a backward glance at the circumstances, (so different from the present) in which she related the first. it was the night on which athens received the news that euripides was dead: euthykles had brought this home to her from the theatre. they were pondering it gravely, but not sadly, for their poet was now at rest, in the companionship of Æschylus, safe from the petty spites which had frothed and fretted about his life. he had lived and worked, to the end, true to his own standard of right, heedless of the reproach that he was a man-hater and a recluse, without regard for civic duty, and with no object but his art. he had left it to sophocles to play poet and commander at the same time, and be laughed at for the result. he had first taken the prize of "contemplation" in his all but a hundred plays; then, grasping the one hand offered him which held a heart, had shown at the court of archelaus of macedon whether or not the power of active usefulness was in him. his last notes of music had also been struck for that one friend. even athens did him justice now. the reaction had set in; one would have his statue erected in the theatre; another would have him buried in the piræus; etc. etc. not so euthykles and balaustion. his statue was in their hearts. their concern was not with his mortal vesture, but with the liberated soul, which now watched over their world. they would hail this, they said, in the words of his own song, his "herakles." the reading was about to begin, when suddenly there was torch-light--a burst of comic singing--and a knocking at the door; bacchus bade them open; they delayed. then a name was uttered, of "authoritative" sound, of "immense significance;" and the door was opened to--aristophanes. he was returning from the performance of his "thesmophoriazusae,"[ ] last year a failure, but this time, thanks to some new and audacious touches, a brilliant success. his chorus trooped before him--himself no more sober than was his wont--crowned, triumphant, and drunk; a group of flute-boys and dancing-girls making up the scene. all these, however, slunk away before balaustion's glance, aristophanes alone confronting her. and, as she declares, it was "no ignoble presence." for the broad brow, the flushed cheek, the commanding features, the defiant attitude, all betokened a mind, wantoning among the lower passions, but yet master of them. he addresses balaustion in a tone of mock deference; banters her on her poetic name, her dignified mien, and the manner in which she has scared his chorus and its followers away; "not indeed that that matters, since the archon's economy and the world's squeamishness will soon abolish it altogether."[ ] then struck by a passing thought, he stands grave, silent--another man in short--awaiting what she has to say. in this sober moment, balaustion welcomes him to her house. she welcomes him as the good genius: as genius of the kindly, though purifying humour, which, like summer lighting, illumines, but does not destroy. she knows and implies that he is not only this. but she greets the light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. she reverences the god who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this feeling. the gravity, however, is short-lived. the lower self in aristophanes springs up again, and his "apology" begins. "aristophanes' apology" is a defence of comedy, as understood and practised by himself: that is, as a broad expression of the natural life, and a broad satire upon those who directly or indirectly condemn it. it is addressed to euripides in the person of his disciple. it is at the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a great deal of ground. for the dispute does not lie simply between comedy and tragedy--which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the naturalism of comedy on a larger scale--but between naturalism and humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new ones which euripides, the friend of socrates, had imported into them; and the question at issue involved, therefore, not only art and morals, but the entire philosophy of life. the "apology" derives farther interest and significance from the varied emotions by which it is inspired. the speaker (as is the case in "fifine at the fair") is answering not only his opponent, but his own conscience. how the conscience of aristophanes has been aroused he presently tells: first struggling a little with the false shame which the experience has left behind. this is the scene which he describes. a festive supper had followed the successful play. jollity was at its height. the cup was being crowned to aristophanes as the "triumphant," when a knock came to the door: and there entered no "asker of questions," no casual passer-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped figure of sophocles himself. slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,[ ] and announced to him, that since euripides was "dead to-day," and as a fitting spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast, next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. then silently, and amidst silence, he passed out again. this, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own way. euripides was no more! but neither the news nor he who brought it could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead. aristophanes alone remained grave. the value of the man whom he had aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of death. he recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by euripides which brought home its lesson.[ ] the archon, "master of the feast," judging that its "glow" was "extinct," had risen to conclude it by crowning the parting cup. he had crowned it with judicious reserve to the "good genius;" and strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an eulogium of the comic muse which claimed the title of good genius for her--when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he (aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the tragic muse and her ministrant euripides should receive the libation instead; justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the _tragic_ poet can represent. but he found no response. the listeners mistook his seriousness for satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had wept with the "lord of tears;" and desired that the cup be consecrated to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one. it was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack at the hermai[ ]--to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and the sensuous life in man. and from this new vantage-ground he launched another bolt at euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the gods. yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts. he wanted to go over the old ground with him, and put himself in the right. balaustion and her husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian. that was why he had come. he was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment even felt, all that he had just repeated. "drunk he was with the good thasian, and drunk he probably had been." nevertheless, the impulse he had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered depths in his soul. up to this moment his defence has been carried on in a disjointed manner, and consists rather in defying attack than in resisting it: the defiant mood being only another aspect of the perturbed condition which has brought him to balaustion's door. it finds its natural starting-point in the coarse treatment of things and persons which his "thesmophoriazusae," with its "monkeying" of euripides,[ ] has so recently displayed. but he reminds balaustion that the art of comedy is young. it is only three generations since susarion gave it birth. (he explains this more fully later on.) it began when he and his companions daubed their faces with wine lees, mounted a cart, and drove by night through the villages: crying from house to house, how this man starved his labourers, that other kissed his neighbour's wife, and so on. the first comedian battered with big stones. he, aristophanes, is at the stage of the wooden club which he has taken pains to plane smooth, and inlay with shining studs. the mere polished steel will be for his successors. "and is he approaching the age of steel?" balaustion asks, well knowing that he is not. "his play failed last year. was his triumph to-night due to a gentler tone? is he teaching mankind that brute blows are not human fighting, still less the expression of godlike power; and that ignorance and folly are convicted by their opposites, not by themselves?" "not he, indeed," he replies; "he improves on his art: he does not turn it topsy-turvy. _he_ does not work on abstractions. _his_ power is not that of the recluse. he wants human beings with their approbation and their sympathy, and his athens, to be pleased in her own way. he leaves the rest to euripides. real life is the grist to _his_ mill. it is clear enough, however, that the times are against him. every year more restrictions; euripides with his priggishness; socrates with his books and his moonshine, and his supercilious ways: never resenting his (aristophanes') fun, nor seeming even to notice it[ ], not condescending to take exception to any but the 'tragedians;' as if he, the author of the 'birds,' was a mere comic poet!" then follows a tirade on the variety of his subjects; their depth, their significance, and the mawkishness and pedantry which they are intended to confute. "drunk! yes, he owns that he is." this in answer to a look from balaustion, which has rebuked a too hazardous joke--"drink is the proper inspiration. how else was he beaten in the 'clouds,' his masterpiece, but that his opponent had inspired himself with drink, and he this time had not?[ ] purity! he has learned what that is worth"--with more in the same strain. now, however, that his adventure is told, the tumult of feeling in some degree subsides, and the more serious aspects of the apology will come into play. balaustion and her husband, seeing the sober mood return, once more welcome "the glory of aristophanes" to their house, and bid him on his side share in their solemnity, and commemorate euripides with them. this calls his attention to the portrait of the dead poet; those implements of his work which were his tokens of friendship to balaustion; the papyrus leaf inscribed with the herakles itself; and he cannot resist a sneer at this again unsuccessful play. his hostess rebukes him grandly for completing the long outrage on the living man by this petty attack on his "supreme calm;" and as supreme calmness means death, he begins musing on the immunities which death confers, and their injustice. "give him only time and he will pulverize his opponents; _he_ will show them whether this work of his is unintelligible, or that other will not live. but let them die; and they slink out of his reach with their malice, stupidity, and ignorance, while survivors croak 'respect the dead' over the hole in which they are laid. at all events, he retorts on them when he can--unwisely perhaps, since those he flings mud at are only immortalized by the process. euripides knew better than to follow his example." again balaustion has her answer. "he has volleyed mud at euripides himself while pretending to defend the same cause: the cause of art, of knowledge, of justice, and of truth;" and she makes his cheek burn by reminding him of what petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was made up. at last he begins in real earnest. "balaustion, he understands, condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained. here are his arguments in its favour." "it claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with liberty--born of the feast of bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts of the earth--a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of chastising without doing harm. it claims respect by its advance from simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching modes of attack. the men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. the comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up whirligig[ ] in the place of zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) to those who call saperdion the empousa, he shows her in a kimberic robe;[ ] in other words, he exposes her charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those who malign them." and here lies his grudge against euripides. euripides is one of those who call saperdion a monster--who slander the world of sense with its beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside. "born on the day of salamis--when heroes walked the earth; and gods were reverenced and not discussed--when greeks guarded their home with its abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation--he has lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time. he has joined himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very foundations away. he exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or, if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name." "moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him, only forms of nature. zeus _is_ the atmosphere. poseidon _is_ the sea. necessity rules the universe. duty, once the will of the gods, is now a voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no inducement to do so." "he reasons away morality, for he shows there is neither right nor wrong, neither 'yours' nor 'mine,' nor natural privilege, nor natural subjection, that may not be argued equally for or against. why be in such a hurry to pay one's debt, to attend one's mother, to bring a given sacrifice?" "he reasons away social order, for he declares the slave as good as his master, woman equal to man, and even the people competent to govern itself. 'why should not the tanner, the lampseller, or the mealman, who knows his own business so well, know that of the state too?'" "he ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to create it: for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty. he drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence. the world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him. he spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx." "how are such proceedings to be dealt with? they appeal to the mob. the mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints. we don't scare sparrows with a zeus' head, though the eagle may recognize it as his lord's. a big priapus is the figure required." "and this," so aristophanes resumes his defence, "comedy supplies. comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction: and the wilder, the more effective: since it is the worship of life, of the originative power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent law. even euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been obliged to pay tribute to the real. he could not shake it off all at once. he tacked a satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."[ ] for the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates, aristophanes chooses the "meaner muse" for his exponent. "and who, after all, is the worse for it? does he strangle the enemies of the truth? no. he simply doses them with comedy, _i.e._ with words. those who offend in words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other's terms, because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant use. and what is the ground of difference between balaustion and himself? slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if they were discussing the question for themselves alone. as it is, euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob. his defence is addressed to it: he uses the arguments it can understand. it does not follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views. euripides is not the only man who is free from superstition. he too on occasion can show up the gods;" and he describes the manner in which he will do this in his next play. all that is serious in the apology is given in the concluding passage. "whomever else he is hard upon, he will level nothing worse than a harmless parody at sophocles, for he has no grudge against him:-- 'he founds no anti-school, upsets no faith, but, living, lets live,' (vol. xiii. p. .) and all his, aristophanes', teaching is this:-- '... accept the old, contest the strange! acknowledge work that's done, misdoubt men who have still their work to do!' (p. .) he has summed up his case. euripides must own himself beaten. if balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent." balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge: and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader's mind. her tone is at first deprecating. "it is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself. it is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends. she does not forget that the poet-class is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good. she does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing. lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them. she may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind. she may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which passes unhurt through flame. she may judge falsely from what she sees." "but," she continues,[ ] "let us imagine a remote future, and a far-away place--say the cassiterides[ ]--and men and women, lonely and ignorant--strangers in very deed--but with feelings similar to our own. let us suppose that some work of zeuxis or pheidias has been transported to their shores, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view--its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type--its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? and may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though you be?" "you declare comedy to be a prescriptive rite, coeval in its birth with liberty. but the great days of greek national life had been reached when comedy began. you declare also that you have refined on the early practice, and imported poetry into it. comedy is therefore, as you defend it, not only a new invention, but your own. and, finally, you declare your practice of it inspired by a fixed purpose. you must stand or fall by the degree in which this purpose has been attained." "you would, by means of comedy, discredit war. do you stand alone in this endeavour?" and she quotes a beautiful passage from 'cresphontes,' a play written by euripides for the same end. "and how, respectively, have you sought your end? euripides, by appealing to the nobler feelings which are outraged by war; you, by expatiating on the animal enjoyments which accompany peace. the 'lysistrata' is your equivalent for 'cresphontes.' do you imagine that its obscene allurements will promote the cause of peace? not till heroes have become mean voluptuaries, and cleonymos,[ ] whom you yourself have derided, becomes their type." "you would discredit vice and error, hypocrisy, sophistry and untruth. you expose the one in all its seductions, and the other in grotesque exaggerations, which are themselves a lie; showing yourself the worst of sophists--one who plays false to his own soul." "you would improve on former methods of comedy. you have returned to its lowest form. for you profess to strike at folly, not at him who commits it: yet your tactics are precisely to belabour every act or opinion of which you disapprove, in the form of some one man. you pride yourself, in fact, on giving personal blows, instead of general and theoretical admonitions; and even here you seem incapable of hitting fair; you libel where you cannot honestly convict, and do not care how ignoble or how irrelevant the libel may be. does the poet deserve criticism as such? does he write bad verse, does he inculcate foul deeds? the cry is, 'he cannot read or write;' 'he is extravagant in buying fish;' 'he allows someone to help him with his verse, and make love to his wife in return;' 'his uncle deals in crockery;' 'his mother sold herbs' (one of his pet taunts against euripides); 'he is a housebreaker, a footpad, or, worst of all, a stranger;'"--a term of contempt which, as balaustion reminds him has been repeatedly bestowed upon himself. "what have you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self. such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause. its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame. its uselessness is proved by the result: your jokes have recoiled upon yourself. the statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them. war still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace. such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe. public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty." and now her tone changes. "has euripides succeeded any better? none can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd. if he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, i am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.[ ] your nature, too, is kingly." she concludes with a tribute to the "poet's power," which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he. he too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he assert his proper sway. "nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue, but that the other king stands suddenly in all the grand investiture of death, bowing your knee beside my lowly head-- equals one moment!" (vol. xiii. p. .) then she bids him "arise and go." both have done homage to euripides. "not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. she has defended euripides obliquely by attacking himself. let her do it in a more direct fashion." this leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible: that reading of the "herakles" which the entrance of aristophanes had suspended. its closing lines set aristophanes musing. the chorus has said: "the greatest of all our friends of yore, we have lost for evermore!" (p. .) "who," he asks, "has been athens' best friend? he who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" he answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of cottabos.[ ] "the one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its rotations. euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of 'high' and 'right.' aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'low' and 'wrong,' and reproduced all in their turn. some poet of the future, born perhaps in those cassiterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place himself in such a position as to see high and low at once--be tragic and comic at the same time. but he meanwhile has been athens' best friend--her wisest also--since he has not challenged failure by attempting what he could not perform. he has not risked the fate of thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as if his vision had been equal to their own."[ ] and he recites a fragment of song, which mr. browning unfortunately has not completed, describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all unconscious, to his doom. some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the couple farewell till the coming year. that year has come and gone. sophocles has died: and aristophanes has attained his final triumph in the "frogs"--a play flashing with every variety of his genius--as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as croaking in that of the frogs--in which bacchus himself is ridiculed, and euripides is more coarsely handled than ever. and once more the voice of euripides has interposed between the athenians and their doom.[ ] when Ægos potamos had been fought, and athens was in spartan hands, euthykles flung the "choric flower" of the "electra" in the face of the foe, and "... because greeks are greeks, though sparté's brood, and hearts are hearts, though in lusandros' breast, and poetry is power,...." (p. .) the city itself was spared. but when tragedy ceased, comedy was allowed its work, and it danced away the piræan bulwarks, which were demolished, by lysander's command, to the sound of the flute. and now euthykles and balaustion are nearing rhodes. their master lies buried in the land to which they have bidden farewell; but the winds and waves of their island home bear witness to his immortality: for theirs seems the voice of nature, re-echoing the cry, "there are no gods, no gods!" his prophetic, if unconscious, tribute to the one god, "who saves" him. balaustion has no genuine historic personality. she is simply what mr. browning's purpose required: a large-souled woman, who could be supposed to echo his appreciation of these two opposite forms of genius, and express his judgments upon them. but the euripides she depicts is entirely constructed from his works; while her portrait of aristophanes shows him not only as his works reflect, but as contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of mr. browning's characters. the two transcripts from euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change. aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them. he was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self. such a man might easily fancy that one like euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. the impression we receive from aristophanes' apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, mr. browning is in sympathy with him. at the same time, balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open. the poem bristles with local allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader. i add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it. vol. xiii. p. . _koré._ (virgin.) name given to persephoneé. in latin, proserpina. p. . _dikast_ and _heliast._ dicast=judge, heliast=juryman, in athens. p. . . _kordax-step._ . _propulaia._ (propylaia.) . an indecent dance. . gateway of the acropolis. . _pnux._ (pnyx.) . _bema._ . place for the popular assembly. . place whence speeches were made. p. _makaria._ heroine in a play of euripides, who killed herself for her country's sake. p. . . _milesian smart-place._ . _phrunikos._ (phrynicus.) . the painful remembrance of the capture of miletus. . a dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed ( ), so painfully wrung the feelings of the athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of , drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[ ] he is derided by aristophanes in the "frogs" for his method of introducing his characters. p. . _amphitheos, deity, and dung._ a character in the acharnians of aristophanes--"not a god, and yet immortal." p. . . _diaulos._ . _stade._ . a double line of the race-course. . the _stadium_, on reaching which, the runner went back again. p. . _city of gapers._ nickname of athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants. p. . _koppa-marked._ race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter koppa. p. . _comic platon._ the comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, _not_ the plato. p. . _salabaccho._ name of a courtesan. p. . _cheek-band._ band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks. _cuckoo-apple._ fruit so-called=fool-making food. _threttanelo_, _neblaretai_. imitative sounds: . of a harp-string. . of any joyous cry. _three-days' salt-fish slice._ allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (it was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.) p. . _goat's breakfast and other abuse._ indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained. p. . _sham ambassadors._ characters in the acharnians. _kudathenian._ famous athenian. _pandionid._ descendant of pandion, king of athens. _goat-song._ tragoedia--tradegy. it was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it. the expression occurs in shelley. p. . _willow-wicker flask._ nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper. p. . _lyric shell or tragic barbiton._ lesser and larger lyre. p. . _sousarion._ susarion of megara, inventor of attic comedy. _chionides._ his successor. p. . _little-in-the-fields._ the dionysian feast; a lesser one than the city dionysia. p. . _ameipsias._ a comic poet, contemporary with aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat. p. . _iostephanos._ "violet-crowned," name of athens. _kleophon._ a demagogue of bad character, attacked by aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. _kleonumos._ a similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward. p. . _telekleides._ old comic poet, on the same side as aristophanes. _mullos and euetes._ comic poets who revived the art of comedy in athens after susarion. p. . _morucheides._ son of morychus--like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. _sourakosios._ another comic poet. p. . _trilophos._ wearer of three crests on his helmet. p. . _ruppapai._ word used by the crew in rowing--hence, the crew itself. p. . _free dinner in the prutaneion._ (prytaneion.) such was accorded to certain privileged persons. _ariphrades._ a man of infamous character, singer to the harp: persistently attacked by aristophanes. _karkinos._ comic actor: had famous dancing sons. p. . _exomis._ a woman's garment. _parachoregema._ subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. _aristullos._ bad character satirized by aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of plato. this incident, and plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. of the apology. p. . _murrhine_, _akalantis_. female names in the thesmophoriazusae. _new kalligeneia._ name given to ceres, meaning, "bearer of lovely children." _the toxotes._ a syrian archer in the "thesmophoriazusae." _the great king's eye._ mock name given to an ambassador from persia in the acharnians. _kompolakuthes._ bully-boaster: with a play on the name of lamachus. p. . _silphion._ a plant used as a relish. _kleon-clapper._ corrector of kleon. p. . _trugaios._ epithet of bacchus, "vintager;" here name of a person in the comedy of "peace." _story of simonides._ simonides, the lyric poet, sang an ode to his patron, scopas, at a feast; and as he had introduced into it the praises of castor and pollux, scopas declared that he would only pay his own half-share of the ode, and the demi-gods might pay the remainder. presently it was announced to simonides that two youths desired to see him outside the palace; on going there he found nobody, but meanwhile the palace fell in, killing his patron. thus was he _paid_. p. . _maketis._ capital of macedonia. p. . _lamachos._ general who fell at the siege of syracuse; satirized by aristophanes as a brave, but boastful man. p. . _sophroniskos' son._ socrates. p. . _kephisophon._ actor, and friend of euripides; enviously reported to help him in writing his plays. p. . _palaistra._ a wrestling-school, or place of exercise. p. . _san._ letter distinguishing race-horses. _thearion's meal-tub politics._ politics of thearion the baker. _pisthetarios._ character in the "birds," alias "mr. persuasive." _strephsiades._ character in the "clouds." p. . _rocky ones._ epithet given to the athenians. p. . _promachos._ champion. p. . _the boulé._ state council. _prodikos._ prodicus. a sophist, satirized in the "birds" and "clouds." p. . _choes._ festival at athens. "the pitchers." p. . _plataian help._ the platæans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at marathon. the term stands for _timely_ help. p. . _plethron square._ feet square. p. . _palaistra tool._ tool used at the palaistra, or wrestling school: in this case the strigil. p. . _phales._ _iacchos._ two epithets of bacchus--the former indecent. p. . _kinesias._ according to aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric poet, notable for his leanness. p. . _rattei._ like "neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. _aristonumos._ _sannurion._ two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by aristophanes for his leanness. p. . _parabasis._ movement of the chorus, wherein the coryphoeus came forward and spoke in the poet's name. p. . _skiadeion._ sunshade. parasol. p. . _theoria._ _opora._ characters in the eirené or "peace:" the first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty, fruitful autumn, and so on. p. . _philokleon._ lover of kleon. (cleon.) _bdelukleon._ reviler of kleon. p. . _logeion._ front of the stage occupied by the actors. p. . _kukloboros-roaring._ roaring like the torrent cycloborus (in attica). p. . _konnos._ the play by ameipsias which beat the "clouds." _euthumenes._ one who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he tripled that of those who attended at the assembly. _argurrhios._ as before. _kinesias._ as before. p. . _triballos._ a supposed _country_ and clownish god. p. . _propula._ (propyla.) gateway to the acropolis. p. . _elaphebolion month._ the "stag-striking" month. p. . _bakis prophecy._ foolish prophecies attributed to one bacis, rife at that time; a collective name for all such. p. . _kommos._ general weeping--by the chorus and an actor. "fifine at the fair." "fifine at the fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. the speaker's implied name of don juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. this character is nevertheless a standing puzzle to mr. browning's readers, because that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be distinguished from each other. it is impossible to see where mr. browning ends and where don juan begins. the reasoning is scarcely ever that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays an unconsciously selfish one. it treats love as an education still more than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and even the religious nature. its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. we can only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the idea of the poem arose. mr. browning was, with his family, at pornic many years ago, and there saw the gipsy who is the original of fifine. his fancy was evidently sent roaming, by her audacity, her strength--the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. as he laid down the theory, mr. browning would be speaking in his own person. but he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified don juan would grow up under his pen, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at the end of the poem. the higher type of womanhood must appear in the story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by fifine; and mr. browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first suggested or emphasized the contrast. he would soon, however, feel that the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. he would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing elvire by her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the dramatic don juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one sense, elvire is always felt to be. this is what actually occurs; and only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary, which characterizes the work. a fanciful prologue, "amphibian," strikes its key-note. the writer imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. a strange beautiful butterfly floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. he sees little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him. so also will elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her don juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. this prologue is preceded by a quotation from molière's "don juan," in which elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence--or something not unlike it--which mr. browning's hero will adopt. don juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame. he then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show. elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can scarcely account for it. "beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. it is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them." still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "there is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the divine light with one answering ray." but no heavenly spark can be detected in fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact. if she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. if she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. his fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned: a helen, a cleopatra, some christian saint; he bids elvire see herself as part of it--as the true helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of troy--and be satisfied that she is "best" of all. "all alike are wanting in one grace which fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. helen and cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. his love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. fifine says,'you come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs. pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.' so simply honest an appeal must touch his heart." don juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her. "fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him. he is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib." but he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent to the higher. he shows this by reminding her of a picture of raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of doré's; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million dorés, perhaps of his own life. and now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it. elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. he has established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass. he discovers them by the eye of love--in other words--by the artist soul within him." all beauty, don juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound. the feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them. it is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it. the fancy is not on that account a delusion. it is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer. that is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. the eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. it reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out. he illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand. at first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of elvire. "these completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. by this method don juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art. a block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of michael angelo. "... one hand,--the master's,--smoothed and scraped that mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world, death still,--...." (vol. xi. p. .) not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess eidotheé.[ ] and as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out." mr. browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "the life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. the mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this don juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. one blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth." here again don juan imagines a retort. elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" he entreats music to take his part. "it alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. and now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words." the case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "how do we rise from falseness into truth?" "we do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. but if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. if the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. but through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge." "suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. the piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. this is precisely what fifine has done. of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. we have thus no right to despise her" this discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "childe harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean. elvire is still dissatisfied. the suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. this he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. women, whether fifines or elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. you master men only by reducing yourself to their level. you captivate women by showing yourself at your best. their power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'true woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked arion to the corinthian coast. men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. they resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. in their feminine characteristics elvire stands far higher than fifine; but fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for elvire may be trusted implicitly; fifine teaches one to take care of himself. they are to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." this comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide. don juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness. "all men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. all you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham." don juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. he now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. the dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with schumann's carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every passing emotion of the human soul. he notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new. the dream carries him to venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some pinnacle above st. mark's square, overlooking the carnival. here his power of artistic divination--alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or passion. he throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. the human asserts itself; the brute-like becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather than disgust. he finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults. another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he becomes aware that he is looking not on venice, but on the world, and that what seemed her carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. the change goes on. halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. the systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. he sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often changing forms of error. the vision seems to declare that change is the law of life. "not so," it was about to say. "that law is permanence." the scene has resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of a pile of sunset clouds. like these, when the sun has set, it is subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity. temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary granite pile, a druid monument. this monument, as mr. browning describes it,[ ] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other. the one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death. the latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is therefore consecrated to life. it symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial form. it means the force which aspires to heaven, and the strength which is rooted in the earth. it means that impulse of all being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all change, uniform amidst all variety. it means the last word of the scheme of creation, and therefore also the first. it repeats and concludes the utterance already sounding in the spectator's ear:-- "... 'all's change, but permanence as well.' --grave note whence--list aloft!--harmonics sound, that mean: truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. the individual soul works through the shows of sense, (which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) up to an outer soul as individual too; and, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, and reach at length 'god, man, or both together mixed,'"[ ] (p. .) the condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's subsequent words. the words which i have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of "fifine at the fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side. they declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. they are the burden of don juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. they are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say. don juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream. "inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. the ripe soul evolves the infinite from a fixed point. it finds the many in the one. elvire is the _one_ who includes the _many_. elvire is the ocean: while fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. elvire shall henceforth suffice to him." but here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. it turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into fifine's tambourine. the result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand. he claims five minutes to go and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home. this at least, we seem intended to infer. for elvire has already startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. the story ends here; but its epilogue "the householder" depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his identity with don juan seems unmistakable. this scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "fifine at the fair" are summed up in its closing words. the "householder" is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "love is all, and death is nought." "prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society." "prince hohenstiel-schwangau" is a defence of the doctrine of expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late emperor of the french, under this feigned name. louis napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream. he seems in exile again. but the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of "inscrutable." a young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of leicester square. some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "this wearer of crinoline seems destined to play oedipus to the sphinx he is supposed to be;" or better still, as he gallantly adds, the "lais" for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked. the situation he thus assumes is not dignified; but as mr. browning probably felt, his choice of a _confidante_ suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circumstances in which he tells it. politically, he has lived from hand to mouth. so in a different way has she. a very trifling incident enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener's part. they are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. among these lies a piece of waste-paper. prince hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. this simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma. his constant principle has been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it. in other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer of society. many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it. prince hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his creator to do that only which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which god has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is god's work, and no man can improve upon it. there have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. let each of these be content with its limited sphere. god is with each and all. and prince hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. he finds it good. he loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. he reveres that temple of god's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life. if the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this: "throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves. but do not burn them away." he considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a small scale the patience of an atlas, if not the showy courage of a hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones. thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles mr. browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page , in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. he lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which _can_ be uttered. the lines from "childe harold" which will be satirized in "fifine at the fair" are clearly haunting him here. but we shall now pass on to more historic ground. it is a natural result of these opinions that prince hohenstiel-schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. he does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him. "it seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns. it could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view." "but what is true in theory is not always so in practice. he has loved a cause, and believed in it--the cause of united italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this--so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way--he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. but with the power to act--with the firm ground wheron to act--came also the responsibilities of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. he saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread. he felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of italian deliverance remained incomplete. it was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him." "he broke faith with his people too"--so his critics continue--"for he supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls." and again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. he gave them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and without which such freedom would have been useless. he concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome. "the body dies if it be thwarted. mind--in other words, intellectual truth--triumphs through opposition. envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. abstract thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours." the prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best he can of the lower. but if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was once passed on the famous statue of the laocoon. some artist had covered the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. one man said as he looked upon it, "... i think the gesture strives against some obstacle we cannot see." (p. .) every other spectator pronounced the "gesture" a yawn. prince hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief in the ideal. he accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its scientific sense. he likes the idea of having felt his way up to humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. he likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which attracts him to all created things. it also completes his vision of mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the natural life are paramount. as he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness steals over him that he has been washing himself very white; and that his self-defence has been principally self-praise--at least, to his listener's ears. so he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might have been no less censured for the opposite. he imagines that his life has been written by some romancing historian of the thiers and victor hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or sagacity, is made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not. hohenstiel-schwangau (france) had made him her head-servant: president of the assembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was faithful to his bond. he, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by sagacity, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his mistress, the state, and begging her to allow him to do their work as well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire for a more popular government could be fulfilled. but in so doing he would have deceived her, and he chose the truth. he knew that he had no right to substitute himself for the multitude, his knowledge for their ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of god's creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general scheme. (here and through the following pages, - , the real and the imaginary prince appear merged into each other.) he performed his strict duty, and left things to their natural course. his position grew worse and worse. his fellow-servants made no secret of their plans--to be carried into execution when his time of service should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them. each had his own mine of tyranny--whether popedom, socialism, or other--which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free. the head servant was silent. they took fright at his silence. "it meant mischief." "it meant counterplot." "it meant some stroke of state." "he must be braved and bullied. his re-election must be prevented; the sword of office must be wrested from his grasp." at length his time expired, and _then_ he acted and spoke. he made no "stroke of state." he stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that hohenstiel-schwangau should give him the needful authority for protecting her. the proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and submission. but now sagacity found fault: "he had not taken the evil in time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and liberty had been enormous." he replied that he had been checked by his allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however slightly, he was bound to see it broken. and so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. he had received his authority from the people; he governed first for them. (here again, and at the following page , we seem to recognize the real hohenstiel or louis napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) he walked reverently--superstitiously, if spectators will--in the path marked out for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for correction. hohenstiel-schwangau--herself a republic--had attacked the liberties of rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. on his accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant." sagacity suggested that he should leave it untouched. "it was no work of his; he was not answerable for its existence. it had its political advantages for his own country." but he would not hear of such a course. there was a canker in the body politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe. "why so rough and precipitate?" again sagacity interposed, "though the right were on your side? why not temporize, persuade, even threaten, before coming to blows?" "yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on." sagacity defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at issue with her. hohenstiel-schwangau had a passion for fighting. she would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew how. give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready for the fray. prince hohenstiel and sagacity both agreed that this evil temper must be destroyed; but sagacity advised him to undermine--prince hohenstiel chose to combat it. sagacity said, "here is an interval of peace. prolong it, make it delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short. if you would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress. you bid it enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so, because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of danger. and the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion. the mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life. just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile the value of peace." "not so," the prince replied; "my people shall not be cheated into virtue. truth is the one good thing. i will tell them the truth. i will tell them that war, for war's sake, is damnable; that glory at its best is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might prick, but the breath of a foolish multitude buoys up beyond its reach." "and what," he asked, "is the glory, what the greatness, which this foolish nation seeks? that of making every other small; not that of holding its place among others which are themselves great. shall such a thing be possible as that the nation which earth loves best--a people so aspiring, so endowed; so magnetic in its attraction for its fellow-men--shall think its primacy endangered because another selects a ruler it has not patronized, or chooses to sell steel untaxed?" "but this does not mean that hohenstiel is to relinquish the power of war. the aggressiveness which is damnable in herself is to be condemned in others, and to be punished in them. therefore, for the sake of austria who sins, of italy who suffers, of hohenstiel-schwangau who has a duty to perform, the war which sagacity deprecates must be waged, and austria smitten till italy is free." "at least," rejoins sagacity, "you secure some reward from the country you have freed; say, the cession of nice and savoy; something to satisfy those at home who doubt the market-value of right and truth." "no," is the reply, "you may preach that to metternich and remain with him." and so the prince worked on; determined that neither fear, nor treachery, nor much less blundering, on his part, should imperil the precarious balance of the world's life. once more, and for the last time, sagacity lifts up her voice. "you were the fittest man to rule. give solidity to your life's work by leaving a fit successor to carry it on. secure yourself this successor in a son. the world is open to you for the choice of your bride." and again the ideal prince retorts on the suggestion. "the fit successor is not secured in this way. all experience proves it. the spark of genius is dropped where god will. it may find hereditary (hence accumulated) faculties ready to be ignited. it may fire the barren rock." and, changing the metaphor, "... the seed o' the apple-tree brings forth another tree which bears a crab: 'tis the great gardener grafts the excellence on wildings where he will." (p. .) he ends by calling up the vision of an italian wayside temple, in which, as the legend declares, succession was carried on after a very different principle. each successive high priest has become so by murdering his predecessor, his qualification being found in that simple fact; or in the qualities of cunning or courage of which it has been the test.[ ] and now the dream is lived through, and prince hohenstiel-schwangau awakens in his own palace: not much better pleased with his own plain speaking than with the imaginary heroics of messrs. hugo and thiers. "one's case is so much stronger before it is put into words. motives which seem sufficient in the semi-darkness of one's own consciousness, are so feeble in the light of day. when we reason with ourselves, we subordinate outward claims without appearing to do so: since the necessity of making the best of life for our own sake supplies unconsciously to ourselves the point of view from which all our reasonings proceed. when forced to think aloud, we stoop to what is probably an untruth. we say that our motives were--what they should have been; what perhaps we have fancied them to be." these closing pages convey the author's comment on prince hohenstiel's defence. they present it, in his well-known manner, as what such a man might be tempted to say; rather than what this particular man was justified in saying. but he takes the prince's part in the lines beginning, "alack, one lies oneself even in the stating that one's end was truth," (p. .) for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot always be trusted to hit it. the best cannon ever rifled will sometimes deflect. words do this also. we recognize the conviction of the inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the pope's soliloquy in "the ring and the book," but in what seems a more defined form. "bishop blougram's apology." "bishop blougram's apology" is a defence of religious conformity in those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers of belief, but ate not throughout opposed to them; its point of view being that of a roman catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment by this kind of compromise. it is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself with romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and bishop blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus despised; and least of all by the person before him. the argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. but it is supposed to lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in which it is uttered: for bishop blougram was suggested by cardinal wiseman;[ ] and the literary hack, gigadibs, is the kind of critic by whom a cardinal wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young, shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as bishop blougram himself. the monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything which mr. gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question. we must therefore treat it as a conversation. mr. gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "_he_ does not believe in dogmas, and he says so. the bishop cannot believe in them, but does not say so. he is true to his own convictions: the bishop is not true to his." and the bishop's defence is as follows. "mr. gigadibs aims at living his own life: in other words, the ideal life. and this means that he is living no life at all. for a man, in order to live, must make the best of the world he is born in; he must adapt himself to its capabilities as a cabin-passenger to those of his cabin. he must not load himself with moral and intellectual fittings which the ship cannot carry, and which will therefore have to be thrown overboard. he (the bishop) has chosen to live a real life; and has equipped himself accordingly." "and, supposing he displays what mr. gigadibs considers the courage of his convictions, and flings his dogmas overboard,--what will he have gained? simply that his uncertainty has changed sides. believing, he had shocks of unbelief. disbelieving, he will have shocks of belief (note a fine passage, vol. iv. p. ): since no certainty in these matters is possible." "but," says gigadibs; "on that principle, your belief is worth no more than my unbelief." "yes," replies the bishop, "it is worth much more in practice, if no more in theory. life cannot be carried on by negations. least of all will religious negations be tolerated by those we live with. and the more definite the religion affirmed, the better will the purposes of life be advanced by it." "not those of a noble life," argues gigadibs, "nor in the judgment of the best men. you are debasing your standard by living for the many fools who cannot see through you, instead of the wiser few who can." to which the bishop replies that he lives according to the nature which god has given him, and which is not so ignoble after all; and that he succeeds with wise men as well as with fools, because they do not see through him either: because their judgment is kept in constant suspension as to whether he can believe what he professes or cannot; whether, in short, he is a knave or a fool. the proposition is vividly illustrated; and a few more obvious sophistries complete this portion of the argument. gigadibs still harps upon the fact that conformity cannot do the work of belief; and the bishop now changes his ground. "he conforms to christianity in the _wish_ that it may be true; and he thinks that this wish has all the value of belief, and brings him as near to it as the creator intends. the human mind cannot bear the full light of truth; and it is only in the struggle with doubt and error that its spiritual powers can be developed." he concedes, in short, that he is much more in earnest than he appeared; and the concession is confirmed when he goes on to declare that we live by our instincts and not by our beliefs. this is proved--he alleges--by such a man as gigadibs, who has no warrant in his belief for living a moral life, and does so because his instincts compel it. just so the bishop's instincts compel a believing life. they demand for him a living, self-proving god (here the doctrine of expediency re-asserts itself), and they tell him that the good things which his position confers are the gift of that god, and intended by him for his enjoyment. "you," he adds, "who live for something which never is, but always is _to be_, are like a traveller, who casts off, in every country he passes through, the covering that will be too warm for him in the next; and is comfortable nowhen and nowhere." one of his latest arguments is the best. gigadibs has said: "if you must hold a dogmatic faith, at all events reform it. prune its excrescences away." "and where," he retorts, "am i to stop, when once that process has begun? i put my knife to the _liquefaction_,[ ] and end, like fichte, by slashing at god himself. and meanwhile, we have to control a mass of ignorant persons whose obedience is linked to the farthest end of the chain (to the first superstition which i am called upon to lop off). we have here again a question of making the best of our cabin-fittings, the best of the opportunities which life places to our hand." in conclusion, he draws a contemptuous picture of the obscure and inconsequent existence which gigadibs accepts, as the apostle without genius and without enthusiasm, of what is, if it be one at all, a _non-working_ truth. gigadibs is silenced, and, as it proves, impressed; but the bishop is too clever to be very proud of his victory; for he knows it has been a personal, much more than a real one. his strength has lain chiefly in the assumption (which only the entire monologue can justify or even convey) that his opponent would change places with him if he could; and he knows that in arguing from this point of view he has been only half sincere. his reasonings have been good enough for the occasion. that is the best he can say for them. mr. sludge, the medium. "sludge, the medium," is intended to show that even so ignoble a person as a sham medium may have something to say in his own defence; and so far as argument goes, sludge defends himself successfully on two separate lines. but in the one case he excuses his imposture: in the other, he in great measure disproves it. and this second part of the monologue has been construed by some readers into a genuine plea for the theory and practice of "spiritualism." nothing, however, could be more opposed to the general tenour of mr. browning's work. he is simply showing us what such a man might say in his own behalf, supposing that the credulity of others had tempted him into a cheat, or that his own credulity had made him a self-deceiver; or, what was equally possible, in even the present case, that both processes had gone on at the same time. the amount of abstract truth which the monologue is intended to convey is in itself small, and more diluted with exaggeration and falsehood than in any other poem of this group. sludge has been found cheating in the house of his principal patron and dupe. the raps indicating the presence of a departed mother have been distinctly traced to the medium's toes. there is no lying himself out of it this time, so he offers to confess, on condition that the means of leaving the country are secured to him. there is a little bargaining on this subject, and he then begins:-- "he never meant to cheat. it is the gentlefolk who have teased him into doing it; they _would_ be taken in. if a poor boy like him tells a lie about money, or anything else in which they are 'up,' they are ready enough to thrash it out of him; but when it is something out of their way, like saying: he has had a vision--he has seen a ghost--it's 'oh, how curious! tell us all about it. sit down, my boy. don't be frightened, &c. &c.;' and so they lead him on. presently he is obliged to invent. they have found out he is a medium. a medium he has got to be. 'couldn't you hear this? didn't you see that? try again. other mediums have done it, perhaps you may.' and, of course, the next night he sees and hears what is expected of him." "he gets well into his work. he sees visions; peeps into the glass ball; makes spirits write and rap, and the rest of it. there is nothing to stop him. if he mixes up bacon and cromwell, it only proves that they are both trying to speak through him at once. if he makes locke talk gibberish, and beethoven play the shakers' hymn, and a dozen other such things: 'oh! the spirits are using him and suiting themselves out of his stock.' when he guesses right, it shows his truth. when he doesn't, it shows his honesty. a hit is good and a miss is better. when he boggles outright, 'he is confused with the phenomena.' and when this has gone on for weeks, and he has been clothed and cosseted, and his patrons have staked their penetration upon him; how is he to turn round and say he has been cheating all the time? 'i should like to see you do it!' it isn't that he wouldn't often have liked to be in the gutter again!" this amusing account is diversified with expressions of sludge's hearty contempt for all the men and women he has imposed upon: above all, for their absurd fancy that any scrap of unexpected information must have come to him in a supernatural way. "as if a man could hold his nose out of doors, and one smut out of the millions not stick to it; sit still for a whole day, and one atom of news not drift into his ear!" this idea recurs in various forms. well! he owns that he has cheated; and now that he has done so, he is not at all sure that it _was_ all cheating, that there wasn't something real in it after all. "we are all taught to believe that there is another world; and the bible shows that men have had dealings with it. we are told this can't happen now, because we are under another law. but i don't believe we are under another law. some men 'see' and others don't, that's the only difference. i see a sign and a message in everything that happens to me; but i take a small message where you want a big one. i am the servant who comes at a tap of his master's knuckle on the wall; you are the servant who only comes when the bell rings. of course i mistake the sign sometimes. but what does that matter if i sometimes don't mistake? you say: one fact doesn't establish a system. you are like the indian who picked up a scrap of gold, and never dug for more. you pick up one sparkling fact, and let it go again. i pick up one such, then another and another, and let go the dirt which makes up the rest of life." sludge combats the probable objection that the heavenly powers are too great, and he is too small for the kind of services he expects of them. everything, he delares, serves a small purpose as well as a great one. moreover, nothing nowadays _is_ small. it is at all events the lesser things and not the greater which are spoken of with awe. the simple creature which is only a sac is the nearest to the creative power; and since also man's filial relation to the creator is that most insisted on, the more familiar and confiding attitude is the right one. he lastly declares and illustrates his view that many a truth may stagnate for want of a lie to set it going, and thinks it likely enough that god allows him to imagine he is wielding a sham power, because he would die of fright if he knew it was a real one. he adds one or two somewhat irrelevant items to his defence; then finding his patron unconvinced, discharges on him a volley of abuse, and decides to try his luck elsewhere. "there must be plenty more fools in other parts of the world." argumentative poems continued. (reflections.) to the second class of these poems, which are of the nature of reflections, belong--taking them in the order of their importance:-- "christmas-eve and easter-day." ( .) "la saisiaz." ( .) "cleon." ("men and women.") ( .) "an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician." ("men and women.") ( .) "caliban upon setebos; or natural theology in the island." (dramatis personæ.) ( .) christmas-eve and easter-day are two distinct poems, printed under this one head: and each describing a spiritual experience appropriate to the day, and lived through in a vision of christ. this vision presents itself to the reader as a probable or obvious hallucination, or even a simple dream; but its utterances are more or less dogmatic; they contain much which is in harmony with mr. browning's known views; and it is difficult at first sight to regard them in either case as proceeding from an imaginary person who is only feeling his way to the truth. this, however, they prove themselves to be. the first poem is a narrative. its various scenes are enacted on a stormy christmas eve; and it opens with a humorous description of a little dissenting chapel, supposed to stand at the edge of a common; and of the various types of squalid but self-satisfied humanity which find their spiritual pasture within its walls. the narrator has just "burst out" of it. he never meant to go in. but the rain had forced him to take shelter in its porch, as evening service was about to begin: and the defiant looks of the elect as they pushed past him one by one, had impelled him to assert his rights as a christian, and push in too. the stupid ranting irreverence of the pastor, and the snuffling satisfaction of the flock, were soon, however, too much for him, and in a very short time he was again--where we find him--out in the fresh night air. free from the constraint of the chapel, he takes a more tolerant view of what he has seen and heard there. he gives the preacher credit for having said a great deal that was true, and in the manner most convincing to the already convinced who were assembled to hear him. for his own part, he declares, nature is his church, as she has been his teacher; and he surrenders himself with a joyful sense of relief to the religious influences of the solitude and the night: his heart glowing with the consciousness of the unseen love which everywhere appeals to him in the visible power of the creator. suddenly a mighty spectacle unfolds itself. the rain and wind have ceased. the barricade of cloud which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her feet. she herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. there is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. then the rapture overflows the spectator's brain, and the master, arrayed in a serpentining garment, appears in the path before him. but the face is averted. "has he despised the friends of christ? and is this his punishment?" he prostrates himself before him; grasps the hem of the garment; entreats forgiveness for what was only due to the reverence of his love, to his desire that his lord should be worshipped in all spiritual beauty and truth. the face turns towards him in a flood of light. the vesture encloses him in its folds, and he is borne onwards till he finds himself at rome, and in front of st. peter's church. he sees the interior without entering. it swarms with worshippers, packed into it as in the hollow of a hive. all there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of the mass is in process of consummation, and in another moment the tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the actual presence of their lord; will open to them the vision of the coming heavenly day. here, too, is faith, though obscured in a different manner. here, too, is _love_: the love which in bygone days hurled intellect from its throne, and trampled on the glories of ancient art--which instructed its votaries to feel blindly for its new and all-sufficient life, as does the babe for its mother's breast--which consecrates even now the deepest workings of the heart and mind to the service of god. and christ enters the basilica, into which, after a momentary doubt, he himself follows him. they float onwards again, and again he is left alone but for the hem of the garment; for christ has entered the lecture-hall of a rationalistic german professor, and into this he will not bid his disciple follow him; but the interior of the building is open, as before, to the disciple's mental sight. the lecturer is refreshing his hearers' convictions by an inquiry into the origin of the christian myth and the foundation of fact on which it rests; and he arrives at the conclusion that christ was a man, but whose work proved him all but divine; his gospel quite other than those who heard it believed, but in value nearly the same. the spectator begins musing on the anomalies of this view. "christ, only a man, is to be reverenced as something more. on what ground?--the ground of intellect?--yet he teaches us only what a hundred others have taught, without claiming to be worshipped on account of it--the ground of goodness?--but goodness is due from each man to his fellows; it is no title to sovereignty over them." and he thus sums up his own conviction. "he may be called a _saint_ who best teaches us to keep our lives pure; he a _poet_ whose insight dims that of his fellow-men. he is no less than this, though guided by an instinct no higher than that of the bat; no more, though inspired by god. all gifts are from god, and no multiplying of gifts can convert the creature into the creator. between him who created goodness, and made it binding on the conscience of man: and him who reduces it to a system, of which the merits may be judged by man: lies the interval which separates nature, who decrees the circulation of the blood, from the observer harvey, who discovered it. one man is christ, another pilate; beyond their dust is the divinity of god." "and the 'god-function' with regard to virtue was first to impress its truths on every human breast; and secondly, to give a motive for carrying them out; and this motive could be given only by one, who, being life's lord, died for the sake of men. whoever conceives this love, and takes this proof to his heart, has found a new motive, and has also gained a truth." but christ lingers within the hall "is there something after all in that lecture which finds an echo in the christian soul? yes, even there. there is the ghost of love, if nothing more, in the utterance of that virgin-minded man, with the 'wan, pure look,' and the frail life burning itself away in the striving after truth. for his critical tests have reduced the pearl of price to ashes, and yet left it, in his judgment, a pearl; and he bids his followers gather up their faith as an almost perfect whole; go home and venerate the myth on which he has experimented, adore the man whom he has proved to be one. and if his learning itself be loveless, it may claim our respect when a tricksy demon has let it loose on the epistles of st. paul, as it claims our gratitude when expended on secular things. it is at least better than the ignorance which hates the word of god, if it cannot wholly accept it; while these, his disciples, who renounce the earth, and chain up the natural man on a warrant no more divine than this, are by so much better than he who at this moment judges them. let them carry the doctrine by which they think themselves carried, as does the child his toy-horse. he will not deride nor disturb them." the subject of these experiences has reached a state of restful indifference. "he will adhere to his own belief, and be tolerant towards his neighbour's: since the two only differ as do two different refractions of a single ray of light. he will study, instead of criticizing, the different creeds which are fused into one before the universal father's throne." but this is not the lesson he has been intended to learn. the storm, breaking out afresh, catches up and dashes him to the ground, while the vesture, which he had let slip during his last musings, recedes swiftly from his sight. then he knows that there is one "way," and he knows also that he may find it; and in this new conviction he regains his hold of the garment, and at one bound has reentered the little chapel, which he seems never indeed to have left. the sermon is ending, and he has heard it all. he still appreciates its faults of matter and manner; but he no longer rejects the draught of living water, because it comes to him with some taste of earth. what the draught can do is evidenced by those wrecks of humanity which are finding renewal there. there his choice shall rest; for, nowhere else, so he seems to conclude, is the message of love so simply and so directly conveyed. a great part of the narrative is written in a humorous tone, which shows itself, not only in thought and word, but in a jolting measure, and even grotesque rhymes. the speaker desires it to be understood that he is not the less in earnest for this apparent "levity;" and the levity is quite consistent with religious seriousness in such a person as the poem depicts. but, as i have shown, it is alone enough to prove that the author is not depicting himself. the poem reflects him more or less truly in the doctrine of divine love, the belief in personal guidance, and the half-contemptuous admiration with which the speaker regards those who will mortify the flesh in obedience to a christ-_man_. but it belies the evidence of his whole work when, as in section xvii., it represents moral truth as either innate to the human spirit, or directly revealed to it; and we shall presently notice a still greater discrepancy which it shares with its companion poem.[ ] "_easter-day_"[ ] deals with the deeper issues of scepticism and faith; and opens with a dialogue in which the two opposite positions are maintained. both speakers start from the belief in god, and the understanding that christianity is unproved; but the one accepts it in faith: the other regards it as, for the time being, negatived. the man of faith begins by exclaiming, how hard it is to be (practically) a christian; and how disproportionate to our endeavour is our success in becoming so. the sceptic replies that to his mind the only difficulty is belief. "let the least of god's commands be proved authentic: and only an idiot would shrink from martyrdom itself, with the certain bliss that would reward it." the man of faith, who is clearly the greater pessimist of the two, thinks the world too full of suffering to be placed, by any knowledge, beyond the reach of faith--beyond the necessity of being taken upon trust. and his adversary concedes that absolute knowledge would--where it was applicable--destroy its own end. in social life, for instance, it would do away with all those acts of faith, those instinctive judgments and feelings, which are the essence _of_ life. but he thinks one may fairly desire a better touchstone for the purposes of god than human judgment or feeling; and that, if we cannot know them with scientific certainty, one must wish the balance of probability to lie clearly on one side. the man of faith is of opinion that this much of proof exists for everyone who chooses to seek it. "the burning question is how we are to shape our lives. for himself he is impelled to follow the christian precept, and renounce the world." the sceptic denies that god demands such a sacrifice, and sees only man's ingratitude in the impression that he does so. the man of faith admits that it would be hard to have made the sacrifice, and be rewarded only by death; while the many unbelievers who have virtually made it for one or other of the hobbies which he describes, have at least its success to repay them. but even so, he continues, he would have chosen the better part; for he would have chosen hope,--the hope which aspires to a loftier end. "his opponent, it is true, hopes also; but _his_ hopes are blind. they are not those of st. paul, but those which, according to Æschylus, the titan gave to men, to spice therewith the meal of life, and prevent their devouring it in too bitter haste; and if hope--or faith--is meant to be something more than a relish...!" the opponent protests against this attack upon the "trusting ease" of his existence, and declares that his interlocutor is not doing as he would be done by. whereupon the first speaker relates something which befell him on the easter-eve of three years ago, and which startled him out of precisely such a condition. he was crossing the common, lately spoken of by their friend, and musing on life and the last judgment: when the following question occured to him: what would be his case if he died and were judged at that very moment? "from childhood," he continues, "i have always insisted on knowing the worst; and i now plunged straight into the recesses of my conscience, prepared for what spectre might be hidden there. but all i encountered was _common sense_, which did its best to assure me that i had nothing to fear: that, considering all the difficulties of life, i had kept my course through it as straight, and advanced as rapidly as could be expected." (more reflections, half serious half playful ensue.) "suddenly i threw back my head, and saw the midnight sky on fire. it was a _sea_ of fire, now writhing and surging; now sucked back into the darkness, now overflowing it till its rays poured downwards on to the earth. i felt that the judgment day had come. i felt also, in that supreme moment of consciousness, that i had chosen the world, and must take my stand upon the choice. i defended it with the courage of despair. 'god had framed me to appreciate the beauties of life; i could not put the cup untasted aside; he had not plainly commanded me to do so; he knew how i had struggled to resign myself to leaving it half full; hell could be no just punishment for such a mood as that.'" "another burst of fire. a brief ecstasy which confounded earth and heaven. then ashes everywhere. and amid the wreck--like the smoke pillared over sodom--mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which turned to grey the blackness of the night--pity mingled with judgment in the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed--he stood before me. i fell helpless at his feet. he spoke: 'the judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were its object. _thy_ sin has been the love of earth. thou hast preferred the finite to the infinite--the fleshly joys to the spiritual. be this choice thy punishment. thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. the earth is thine for ever.'" "my first impulse was one of delighted gratitude. 'all the wonders--the treasures of the natural world, are _mine_?'" "'thine,' the vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee over the barrier of that eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'" "'not so,' i answered. 'if the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my choice shall be with art--art which imparts to nature the value of human life. i will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'" "'obtain that,' the vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce the part.'" and again the vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly existence--the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock--the destined shattering of the prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of a hitherto unknown world--the spiritual hunger with which the saints, content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of deliverance. "'let me grasp at mind,' i then entreated,--'whirl enraptured through its various spheres. yet no. i know what thou wilt say. mind, too, is of the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another world--are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. i will catch no more at broken reeds. i will relinquish the world, and take love for my portion. i will love on, though love too may deceive me, remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in the future.'" "'at last,' the vision exclaimed, 'thou choosest love. and hast thou not seen that the mightiness of love was curled inextricably about the power and the beauty which attached thee to the world--that through them it has vainly striven to clasp thee? abide by thy choice. take the show for the name's sake. reject the reality as manifested in him who created, and then died for thee. reject that tale, as more fitly invented by the sons of cain--as proving too much love on the part of god.'" "terrified and despairing, i cowered before him, imploring the remission of the sentence, praying that the old life might be restored to me, with its trials, its limitations; but with their accompanying hope that it might lead to the life everlasting." "when i 'lived' again, the plain was silvered over with dew; the dawn had broken." looking back on this experience, the narrator is disposed to regard it as having been a dream. it has nevertheless been a turning-point in his existence; for it has taught him to hear in every blessing which attaches him to the earth, a voice which bids him renounce it. and though he still finds it hard to be a christian, and is often discouraged by the fact, he welcomes his consciousness of this: since it proves that he is not spiritually stagnating--not cut off from the hope of heaven. mr. browning is, for the time being, outside the discussion. his own feelings might equally have dictated some of the arguments on either side; and although he silences the second speaker, he does not mean to prove him in the wrong. he is at one with the first speaker, when he suggests that certainty in matters of belief is no more to be desired than to be attained; but that personage regards uncertainty as justifying presumptions of a dogmatic kind; while its value to mr. browning lies precisely in its right to exclude them. and, again; while the value of spiritual conflict is largely emphasized in his works, he disagrees with the man of faith in "easter-day" as with the dogmatic believer in "christmas-eve," as to the manner in which it is to be carried on. according to these the spirit fights against life: according to him it fights in, and by means of, its opportunities. from his point of view human experience is an education: from theirs it is a snare. so much of personal truth as these poems contain will be found re-stated in "la saisiaz," written twenty-eight years later, and which impresses on it the seal of maturer thought and more direct expression. "la saisiaz" (savoyard for "the sun") is the name of a villa among the mountains near geneva, where mr. browning, with his sister and a friend of many years standing, spent part of the summer of . the poem so christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death: which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there together. the shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had long before been solved by mr. browning's mind: and within sight of the new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is another life for the soul. the argument is marked by a strong sense of the personal and therefore relative character of human experience and knowledge. it accepts the "subjective synthesis" of some non-theistic thinkers, though excluding, of course, the negations on which this rests; and its greater maturity is shown by the philosophic form in which the author's old religious doctrine of personal (or subjective) truth has been re-cast. he assumes here, it is true, that god and the soul exist. he considers their existence as given, in the double fact that there is something in us which thinks or perceives,[ ] and something outside and beyond us, which is perceived by it; and this subject and object, which he names the soul and god, are to him beyond the necessity of farther proof, because beyond the reach of it. he might therefore challenge for his conclusions something more than an optional belief. he guards himself, nevertheless, against imposing the verdict of his own experience on any other man: and both the question and the answer into which the poem resolves itself begin for his own spirit and end so. mr. browning knows himself a single point in the creative series of effect and cause: at the same moment one and the other: all behind and before him a blank. or, more helpless still, he is the rush, floated by a current, of which the whence and whither are independent of it, and which may land it to strike root again, or cast it ashore a wreck. he asks himself, as he is whirled on his "brief, blind voyage" down the stream of life, which of these fates it has in store for him. knowing this, that god and the soul exist--no less than this, and no more--he asks himself whether he is justified in believing that, because his present existence is beyond a doubt, its renewal is beyond doubt also: that the current, which has brought him thus far, will land him, not in destruction, but in another life. "everything," he declares, "in my experience--and i speak only of my own--testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. the strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. the soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have taken for such. every sweet brings its bitter, every light its shade; love is cut short by death:"-- "i must say--or choke in silence--'howsoever came my fate, sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well-weighed,--preponderate.' by necessity ordained thus? i shall bear as best i can; by a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? no, as i am man! such were god: and was it goodness that the good within my range or had evil in admixture or grew evil's self by change? wisdom--that becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance from a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance? power? 'tis just the main assumption reason most revolts at! power unavailing for bestowment on its creature of an hour, man, of so much proper action rightly aimed and reaching aim, so much passion,--no defect there, no excess, but still the same,-- as what constitutes existence, pure perfection bright as brief for yon worm, man's fellow-creature, on yon happier world--its leaf! no, as i am man, i mourn the poverty i must impute: goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!" (vol. xiv. p. .) "if we regard this life as final, we must relinquish our conception of the power of god: for his work is then open to human judgment, in the light of which it yields only imperfect results." "but let us once assume that our present state is one of probation, intended by god as such: and every difficulty is solved. evil is no longer a mark of failure in the execution of the divine scheme: it becomes essential to it; my experience indeed represents it as such. i cannot conceive evil as abolished without abrogation of the laws of life. for it is not only bound up with all the good of life; it is often its vehicle. gain is enhanced by recent loss. ignorance places us nearest to knowledge. beauty is most precious, truth most potent, where ugliness and falsehood prevail; and what but the loss of love teaches us what its true value has been?" "may i then accept the conclusion that this life will be supplemented by a better one?" mr. browning initiates his final inquiry by declaring that he will accept only the testimony of fact. he rejects surmise, he seeks no answer in the beauties or in the voices of nature; none in the minds of his fellow-men; none even in the depths of his sentient self with its "aspiration" and "reminiscence:" its plausible assurances that god would be "unjust," and man "wronged," if a second life were not granted to us. and here he seems for a moment to deny, what he has elsewhere stated, and everywhere implied, in the poem: that his own spirit must be to him, despite its isolation and weakness, the one messenger of divine truth. but he is only saying the same thing in a different way. he rejects the spontaneous utterance of his own spirit; but relies on its conclusions. he rejects it as pleader; but constitutes it judge. and this distinction is carried out in a dialogue, in which fancy speaks for the spontaneous self; reason for the judicial--the one making its _thrusts_, and the other _parrying_ them. the question at issue has, however, slightly shifted its ground; and we find ourselves asking: not, "is the soul immortal?" but "what would be the consequence to life of its being proved so?" fancy. "the soul exists after death. i accept the surmise as certainty: and would see it put to use during life." reason. "the 'use' of it will be that the wise man will die at once: since death, in the absence of any supernatural law to the contrary, must be clear gain. the soul must fare better when it has ceased to be thwarted by the body; and we have no reason to suppose that the obstructions which have their purpose in this life would be renewed in a future one. are we happy? death rescues our happiness from its otherwise certain decay. are we sad? death cures the sadness. is life simply for us a weary compromise between hope and fear, between failure and attainment? death is still the deliverer. it must come some day. why not invoke it in a painless form when the first cloud appears upon our sky?" fancy. "then i concede this much: the certainty of the future life shall be saddled with the injunction to live out the present, or accept a proportionate penalty." reason. "in that case the wise man will live. but whether the part he chooses in it be that of actor or of looker-on, he will endure his life with indifference. relying on the promises of the future, he will take success or failure as it comes, and accept ignorance as a matter of course." fancy. "i concede more still. man shall not only be compelled to live: he shall know the value of life. he shall know that every moment he spends in it is gain or loss for the life to come--that every act he performs involves reward or punishment in it." reason. "then you abolish good and evil in their relation to man; for you abolish freedom of choice. no man is good because he obeys a law so obvious and so stringent as to leave him no choice; and such would be the moral law, if punishment were _demonstrated_ as following upon the breach of it; reward on its fulfilment. man is free, in his present state, to choose between good and evil--free therefore to be good; because he may believe, but has no demonstrated _certainty_, that his future welfare depends on it." it is thus made clear that only in man's present state of limited knowledge is a life of probation conceivable; while only on the hypothesis that this life is one of probation, can that of a future existence be maintained. mr. browning ends where he began, with a _hope_, which is practically a _belief_, because to his mind the only thinkable approach to it. a vivid description of the scenes amidst which the tragedy took place accompanies this discussion. "cleon" is a protest against the inadequacy of the earthly life; and the writer is supposed to be one of those greek poets or thinkers to whom st. paul alludes, in a line quoted from aratus in the acts, and which stands at the head of the poem. cleon believes in zeus under the attributes of the one god; but he sees nothing in his belief to warrant the hope of immortality; and his love of life is so intense and so untiring that this fact is very grievous to him. he is stating his case to an imaginary king--protus--his patron and friend; whose convictions are much the same as his own, but who thinks him in some degree removed from the common lot: since his achievements in philosophy and in art must procure him not only a more perfect existence, but in one sense a more lasting one. cleon protests against this idea. "he has," he admits, "done all which the king imputes to him. if he has not been a homer, a pheidias, or a terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing a smaller man." "but his life has not been the more perfect on that account. perfection exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is unconscious, but also self-sufficing. to grow in consciousness is to grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather than advance, in the physical power of attaining it. man's soul expands; his 'physical recipiency' remains for ever bounded." "nor are his works a source of life to him either now or for the future. the conception of youth and strength and wisdom is not its reality: the knowing (and depicting) what joy is, is not the possession of it. and the surviving of his work, when he himself is dead, is but a mockery the more." it is all so horrible that he sometimes imagines another life, as unlimited in capability, as this in the desire, for joy, and dreams that zeus has revealed it. "but he has not revealed it, and therefore it will not be." st. paul is preaching at this very time, and protus sends a letter to be forwarded to him; but cleon does not admit that knowledge can reside in a "barbarian jew;" and gently rebukes his royal friend for inclining to such doctrine, which, as he has gathered from one who heard it, "can be held by no sane man." cleon constantly uses the word soul as antithesis to body: but he uses it in its ancient rather than its modern sense, as expressing the sentient life, not the spiritual; and this perhaps explains the anomaly of his believing that it is independent of the lower physical powers, and yet not destined to survive them. the epistle of karshish is addressed to a certain abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. it is written from bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the _case_ of lazarus, whom karshish has seen there. lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. he labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no other than god: who for love's sake had taken human form, and worked and died for men. karshish regards the madness of this idea as beyond rational doubt: but he is perplexed and haunted by its consistency: by the manner in which this supposed vision of the heavenly life has transformed, even inverted the man's judgment of earthly things. he combats the impression as best he can: recounts his scientific discoveries--the new plants, minerals, sicknesses, or cures to which his travels in judea have introduced him; half apologizes for his digression from these more important matters; tries to excuse the hold which lazarus has taken upon him by the circumstances in which they met; and breaks out at last in this agitated appeal to abib and the truth:-- "the very god! think, abib; dost thou think so, the all-great, were the all-loving too-- * * * * * the madman saith he said so: it is strange." (vol. iv. p. .) the solitary sage alluded to is of course imaginary. like the doubtful messenger to whom the letter will be entrusted, he helps to mark the incidental character with which karshish strives to invest his "experience." "caliban upon setebos" carries us into an opposite sphere of thought. it has for its text these words from psalm : _thou thoughtest that i was altogether such an one as thyself_: and is the picture of an acute but half savage mind, building up the deity on its own pattern. caliban is much exercised by the government of the world, and by the probable nature of its ruler; and he has niched an hour from his tasks, on a summer noon, when prospero and miranda are taking his diligence upon trust, to go and sprawl full length in the mud of some cave, and talk the problem out. the attitude is described, as his reflections are carried on, in his own words; but he speaks as children do, in the third person. caliban worships setebos, god of the patagonians, as did his mother before him; but her creed was the higher of the two, because it included what his does not: the idea of a future life. he differs from her also in a more original way. for she held that a greater power than setebos had made the world, leaving setebos merely to "vex" it; while he contends that whoever made the world and its weakness, did so for the pleasure of vexing it himself; and that this greater power, the "quiet," if it really exists, is above pain or pleasure, and had no motive for such a proceeding. setebos is thus, according to caliban, a secondary divinity. he may have been created by the quiet, or may have driven it off the field; but in either case his position is the same. he is one step nearer to the human nature which he cannot assume. he lives in the moon, caliban thinks, and dislikes its "cold," while he cannot escape from it. to relieve his discomfort, half in impatience half in sport, he has made human beings; thus giving himself the pleasure of seeing others do what he cannot, and of mocking them as his playthings at the same time. this theory of creation is derived from caliban's own experience. in like manner, when he has got drunk on fermented fruits, and feels he would like to fly, he pinches up a clay bird, and sends it into the air; and if its leg snaps off, and it entreats him to stop the smarting, or make the leg grow again, he may give it two more, or he may break off the remaining one; just to show the thing that he can do with it what he likes. he also presumes that setebos is envious, because _he_ is so; as for instance: if he made a pipe to catch birds with, and the pipe boasted: "_i_ catch the birds. _i_ make a cry which my maker can't make unless he blows through me," he would smash it on the spot. for the rest he imagines that setebos, like himself, is neither kind nor cruel, but simply acts on all possible occasions as his fancy prompts him. the one thing which would arouse his own hostility, and therefore that of setebos, would be that any creature should think he is ever prompted by anything else; or that his adopting a certain course one day would be a reason for following it on the next. guided by these analogies--which he illustrates with much quaintness and variety--caliban humours setebos, always pretending to be envious of him, and never allowing himself to seem too happy. he moans in the sunlight, gets under holes to laugh, and only ventures to think aloud, when out of sight and hearing, as he is at the present moment. thus sheltered, however, he makes too free with his tongue. he risks the expression of a hope that old age, or the quiet, will some day make an end of his creator, whom he loves none the better for being so like himself. and in another moment he is crouching in abject fear: for an awful thunderstorm has broken out. "that raven scudding away 'has told him all.'" "lo! 'lieth flat and loveth setebos!" (vol. vii. p. .) and will do anything to please him so that he escape this time. the most impressive of the dramatic monologues, "a death in the desert," detaches itself from this double group. it is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of mr. browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic." didactic poems. the poems contained in this group are, taking them in the order of their importance, "a death in the desert." dramatis personæ. . "rabbi ben ezra." dramatis personæ. . "deaf and dumb: a group by woolner." dramatis personæ. . "the statue and the bust." dramatic romances. published in "men and women." . "a death in the desert" is the record of an imaginary last scene in the life of st. john. it is conceived in perfect harmony with the facts of the case: the great age which the evangelist attained: the mystery which shrouded his death: the persecutions which had overtaken the church: the heresies which already threatened to disturb it; but mr. browning has given to st. john a foreknowledge of that age of philosophic doubt in which its very foundations would be shaken; and has made him the exponent of his own belief--already hinted in "easter eve" and "bishop blougram:" to be fully set forth in "the ring and the book" and "la saisiaz"--that such doubt is ordained for the maturer mind, as the test of faith, and its preserver. the supposed last words of the evangelist, and the circumstances in which they were spoken, are reported by loving simplicity as by one who heard them, and who puts forward this evidence of st. john's death against the current belief that he lingers yet upon earth. the account, first spoken, then written, has passed apparently from hand to hand, as one disciple after the other died the martyr's death; and we find the ms. in the possession of an unnamed person, and prefaced by him with a descriptive note, in which religious reverence and bibliographical interest are touchingly blended with each other. st. john is dying in the desert, concealed in an inmost chamber of the rock. four grown disciples and a boy are with him. he lies as if in sleep. but, as the end approaches, faint signs of consciousness appear about the mouth and eyes, and the patient and loving ministrations of those about him nurse the flickering vital spark into a flame. st. john returns to life, feeling, as it were, the retreating soul forced back upon the ashes of his brain, and taxing the flesh to one supreme exertion. but he lives again in a far off time when "john" is dead, and there is no one left who _saw_. and he lives in a sense as of decrepit age, seeking a "foot-hold through a blank profound;" grasping at facts which snap beneath his touch; in strange lands, and among people yet unborn, who ask, "was john at all, and did he say he saw?" (vol vii. p. .) and will believe nothing till the proof be proved. this prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory of his former self. john knows himself the man who _heard_ and _saw_--receiving the words of christ from his own mouth, and enduring those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear, and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and those he guessed as points expanding into stars. and the life-long faith regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him; as he sees its children "... stand conversing, each new face either in fields, of yellow summer eves, on islets yet unnamed amid the sea; or pace for shelter 'neath a portico out of the crowd in some enormous town where now the larks sing in a solitude: or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand idly conjectured to be ephesus:...." (vol. vii. p. .) and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his own life and work. the subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own conviction--in his loving desire to impart it--he assumes a great deal of what he tries to prove. "he has _seen_ it all--the miracle of that life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the constant presence of the divine love; those things which not only _were_ to him, but _are_. and he is called upon to prove it to those who _cannot see_: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength, while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the heavenly light. he must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye." "life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. but the soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. for the flesh has little time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. man needs no second proof of the worth of fire: once found, he would not part with it for gold. but the highest spiritual certainty is not like our conviction of a bodily fact; and though we know the worth of christ as we know the preciousness of fire, we may not in like manner grasp this truth, acknowledging it in our lives. he--john--in whose sight his lord had been transfigured, had walked upon the waters, and raised the dead to life: _he, too_, forsook him when the 'noise' and 'torchlight,' and the 'sudden roman faces,' and the 'violent hands' were upon them...." the doubter, he imagines, will argue thus, taking "john's" gospel for his starting-point:-- (_a_) "your story is proved inaccurate, if not untrue. the doctrine which rests upon it is therefore unproved, except in so far as it is attested by the human heart. and this proof again is invalid. for the doctrine is that of divine love; and we, who believe in love, because we ourselves possess it, may read it into a record in which it has no place. man, in his mental infancy, read his own emotions and his own will into the forces of nature, as he clothed their supposed personal existence in his own face and form. but his growing understanding discarded the idea of these material gods. it now replaces the idea of the one divine intelligence by that of universal law. god is proved to us as law--'named,' but 'not known.' a divinity, which we can recognize by like attributes to our own, is disproved by them." (_b_) "and granting that there is truth in your teaching: why is this allowed to mislead us? why are we left to hit or miss the truth, according as our insight is weak or strong, instead of being plainly told this thing _was_, or it _was not_? does 'john' proceed with us as did the heathen bard, who drew a fictitious picture of the manner in which fire had been given to man; and left his readers to discover that the fact was not the fable itself, but only contained in it?" and john replies: (_a_) "man is made for progress, and receives therefore, step by step, such spiritual assistance as is proportionate to his strength. the testimony of miracles is granted when it is needed to assist faith. it is withdrawn so soon as it would compel it. he who rejects god's love in christ because _he_ has learned the need of love, is as the lamp which overswims with oil, the stomach which flags from excess of food: his mind is being starved by the very abundance of what was meant to nourish it. man was spiritually living, when he shrank appalled from the spectacle of nature, and needed to be assured that there was a might beyond _its_ might. but when he says, 'since might is everywhere, there is no need of will;' though he knows from his own experience how might may combine with will, then is he spiritually dead. and man is spiritually living, when he asks if there be love "behind the will and might, as real as they?" (vol. vii. p. .) but when he reasons: since love is everywhere, and we love and would be loved, we make the love which we recognize as christ: and christ was _not_; then is he spiritually dead. for the loss which comes through gain is death, and the sole death." (_b_) the second objection he answers by reverting to his first statement. "man is made for progress. he could not progress if his doubtings were at once changed to certainties, and all he struggles for at once found. he must yearn for truth, and grasp at error as a 'midway help' to it. he must learn and unlearn. he must creep from fancies on to fact; and correct to-day's facts by the light of to-morrow's knowledge. he must be as the sculptor, who evokes a life-like form from a lump of clay, ever seeing the reality in a series of false presentments; attaining it through them, god alone makes the live shape at a jet." the tenderness which has underlain even john's remonstrances culminates in his closing words. "if there be a greater woe than this (the doubt) which he has lived to see, may he," he says, "be 'absent,' though it were for another hundred years, plucking the blind ones from the abyss." "but he was dead." (vol. vii. p. .) the record has a postscript, written not by the same person, but in his name, confronting the opinions of st. john with those of cerinthus, his noted opponent in belief, into whose hands the ms. is also supposed to have fallen. it is chiefly interesting as heightening the historical effect of the poem.[ ] "rabbi ben ezra" is the expression of a religious philosophy which, being, from another point of view, mr. browning's own, has much in common with that which he has imputed to st. john; and, as "a death in the desert" only gave the words which the evangelist might have spoken, so is "rabbi ben ezra" only the possible utterance of that pious and learned jew. but the christian doctrine of the one poem brings into strong relief the pure theism of the other; and the religious imagination in "rabbi ben ezra" is strongly touched with the gorgeous and solemn realism which distinguishes the old testament from the new. the most striking feature of rabbi ben ezra's philosophy is his estimate of age. according to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close. age is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition. "spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth. it is well that youth should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the endeavour to improve what is. he would be a brute whose body could keep pace with his soul. the highest test of man's bodily powers is the distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must travel alone." "but life in the flesh is good, showering gifts alike on sense and brain. it is right that at some period of its existence man's heart should beat in unison with it; that having seen god's power in the scheme of creation, he should also see the perfectness of his love; that he should thank him for his manhood, for the power conferred on him to live and learn. and this boon must be granted by age, which gathers in the inheritance of youth." "the inheritance is not one of earthly wisdom. man learns to know the right and the good, but he does not learn how outwardly to apply the knowledge; for human judgments are formed to differ, and there is no one who can arbitrate between them. man's failure or success must be sought in the unseen life--not in that which he has done, but in that which he has aspired to do." "nothing dies or changes which has truly been. the flight of time is but the spinning of the potter's wheel to which we are as clay. this fleeing circumstance is but the machinery which stamps the soul (that vessel moulded for the great master's hand). and its latest impress is the best: though the base of the cup be adorned with laughing loves, while skull-like images constitute its rim." "look not thou down but up! to uses of a cup, the festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's-peal, the new wine's foaming flow, the master's lips a-glow! thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?" (vol. vii. p. ) "deaf and dumb" conveys, in a single stanza, the crowning lesson of the life of paracelsus, and indeed of every human life: for the sculptured figures to which it refers have supplied the poet with an example of the "glory" which may "arise" from "defect," the power from limitation. it needs, he says, the obstructing prism to set free the rainbow hues of the sunbeam. only dumbness can give to love the full eloquence of the eyes; only deafness can impress love's yearnings on the movements of neck and face. "the statue and the bust" is a warning against infirmity of purpose. its lesson is embodied in a picturesque story, in which fact and fiction are combined. in the piazza of the ss. annunziata at florence is an equestrian statue of the grand duke ferdinand the first, representing him as riding away from the church, and with his head turned in the direction of the once riccardi palace, which occupies a corner of the square. tradition asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner there, and whom he could only see at her window; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her. in mr. browning's expanded version, the love is returned, and the lovers determine to fly together. but each day brings fresh motives for postponing the flight, and each day they exchange glances with each other--he passing by on his horse, she looking down from her window--and comfort themselves with the thought of the morrow. and as the days slip by, their love grows cooler, and they learn to be content with expectation. they realize at last that the love has been a dream, and that they have spent their youth in dreaming it; and in order that the dream may continue, and the memory of their lost youth be preserved, they cause, he his statue to be cast, she her bust to be moulded, and each placed in the attitude in which they have daily looked upon each other. they feel the irony of the proceeding, though they find satisfaction in it. their image will do all that the reality has done. mr. browning blames these lovers for not carrying out their intention, whether or not it could be pronounced a good one. "man should carry his best energies into the game of life, whether the stake he is playing for be good or bad--a reality or a sham. as a test of energy, the one has no value above the other." he leaves the "bust" in the region of fancy, by stating that it no longer exists. but he tells us that it was executed in "della robbia" ware, specimens of which, still, at the time he wrote, adorned the outer cornice of the palace. the statue is one of the finest works of john of bologna. the partial darkening of the via larga by the over-hanging mass of the riccardi (formerly medici) palace[ ] is figuratively connected in the poem with the "crime" of two of its inmates: the "murder," by cosimo dei medici and his (grand) son lorenzo, of the liberties of the florentine republic. the smallness of this group, and its chiefly dramatic character, show how little direct teaching mr. browning's works contain. there is, however, direct instructiveness in another and larger group, which has too much in common with all three foregoing to be included in either, and will be best indicated by the term "critical." in certain respects, indeed, this applies to several, perhaps to most, of those which i have placed under other heads; and i use it rather to denote a lighter tone and more incidental treatment, than any radical difference of subject or intention. critical poems. "old pictures in florence." } dramatic lyrics. "respectability." } published in "men "popularity." } and women." "master hugues of saxe-gotha." } . "a light woman." dramatic romances. published in "men and women." . "transcendentalism." ("men and women.") . "how it strikes a contemporary." ("men and women.") . "dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours." ("dramatis personæ.") . "at the mermaid." } "house." } "shop." } "pacchiarotto, and other "pisgah sights," i. and ii. } poems." . "bifurcation." } "epilogue." } the first and fourth of these are significant from the insight they give into mr. browning's conception of art. we must allow, in reading them, for the dramatic and therefore temporary mood in which they were written, and deduct certain utterances which seem inconsistent with the breadth of the author's views. but they reflect him truly in this essential fact, that he considers art as subordinate to life, and only valuable in so far as it expresses it. this means, not that his standard is realistic: but that it is entirely human; it could scarcely be otherwise in a mind so devoted to the study of human life; but these very poems display also, on mr. browning's part, a loving familiarity with the works of painters, sculptors, and musicians, and a practical understanding of them, which might easily have resulted in a partial acceptance of artistic standards as such, and of the policy of art for art; and it is only through the breadth and strength of his dramatic genius, that artistic sympathies in themselves so strong could be subjected to it. in music, this position appears at first sight to be reversed; for mr. browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. here, however, the poet in him comes into play. he leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. in this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. but this only means that, in his opinion, the relation of music to human life is different from that of plastic art: the one revealing the unknown, while the other embodies what is known. "old pictures in florence" is a fanciful monologue, spoken as by one who is looking down upon florence, through her magical atmosphere, from a villa on the neighbouring heights. the sight of her campanile brings giotto to his mind; and with giotto comes a vision of all the dead old masters who mingle in spirit with her living men. he sees them each haunting the scene of his former labours in church or chapter-room, cloister or crypt; and he sees them grieving over the decay of their works, as these fade and moulder under the hand of time. he is also conscious that they do not grieve for themselves. earthly praise or neglect cannot touch them more. but they have had a lesson to teach; and so long as the world has not learnt the lesson, their souls may not rest in heaven. "greek art had _its_ lesson to teach, and it taught it. it reasserted the dignity of the human form. it re-stated _the truth_ of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible, and to renounce the hope of attaining it. in this experience the first stage was progress; the second was stagnation. progress began again, when men looked on these images of themselves and said: "we are not inferior to these. we are greater than they. for what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to _grow_." the soul which has eternity within its grasp cannot express itself in a single glance; nor can its consciousness be petrified into an unchanging sorrow or joy. the painters who set aside greek art undertook to vindicate the activity of the soul. they made its hopes and fears shine through the flesh, though the flesh they shone through were frayed and torn by the process. this was the work which they had to do; and which remains undone, while men speak of them as "old master" this, and "early" the other, and do not dream that "old" and "new" are fellows: "that all are links in the chain of the one progressive art life; the one spiritual revelation." the speaker now relapses into the playful mood which his more serious reflections have scarcely interrupted. he thinks of the removable paintings which lie hidden in cloister or church, and which a sympathizing purchaser might rescue from decay; and he reproaches those melancholy ghosts for not guiding such purchasers to them. he, for instance, does not aspire to the works of the very great; but a number of lesser lights, whose name and quality he recites, might, he thinks, have lent themselves to the fulfilment of his artistic desires;[ ] and he declares himself particularly hurt by the conduct of his old friend giotto, who has allowed some picture he had been hunting through every church in florence to fall into other hands. he concludes with an invocation to a future time when the grand duke will have been pitched across the alps, when art and the republic will revive together, and when giotto's campanile will be completed--which glorious consummation, though he may not live to see, he considers himself the first to predict. mr. browning alludes, in the course of this monologue, to the two opposite theories of human probation: one confining it to this life, the other extending it through a series of future existences; and without pronouncing on their relative truth, he owns himself in sympathy with the former. he is tired and likes to think of rest. the sentiment is, however, not in harmony with his general views, and belongs to the dramatic aspect of the poem.[ ] master hugues of saxe gotha, also a monologue, is christened after an imaginary composer; and consists of a running comment on one of his fugues, as performed by the organist of some unnamed church. the latter has just played it through: the scored brow and deep-set eyes of master hugues fixed on him, as he fancied, from the shade; and he now imagines he hears him say, "you have done justice to the notes of my piece, but you must grasp its meaning to understand where my merit lies;" so he plays the fugue again, listening for the meaning, and reading it as out of a book. from this literary or dramatic point of view, the impression received is as follows. some one lays down a proposition, unimportant in itself, and not justly open to either praise or blame. nevertheless a second person retorts on it, a third interposes, a fourth rejoins, and a fifth thrusts his nose into the matter. the five are fully launched into a quarrel. the quarrel grows broader and deeper. number one restates his case somewhat differently. number two takes it up on its new ground. argument is followed by vociferation and abuse; a momentary self-restraint by a fresh outbreak of self-assertion. all tempers come into play, all modes of attack are employed, from pounding with a crowbar to pricking with a pin. and where all this time is music? where is the gold of truth? spun over and blackened by the tissue of jangling sounds, as is the ceiling of the old church by cobwebs. "is it your moral of life? such a web, simple and subtle, weave we on earth here in impotent strife, backward and forward each throwing his shuttle, death ending all with a knife?" (vol. vi. p. ) the organist admires master hugues, and approaches his creations with an open mind; but he cannot help feeling that this mode of composition represents the tortuousness of existence, and that its "truth" spreads golden above and about us, whether we accept her or not. he ends by bidding master hugues and the five speakers clear the arena; and leave him to "unstop the full organ," and "blare out," in the "mode palestrina," what another musician has had to say. this scene in an organ loft has many humorous touches which would in any case forbid our taking it too seriously; and we must no more think of mr. browning as indifferent to the possible merits of a fugue than as indifferent to the beauties of a greek statue. but the dramatic situation has in this, as in the foregoing case, a strong basis of personal truth. two more of these poems show the irony of circumstance as embodied in popular opinion. "popularity" is an expression of admiring tenderness for some person whom the supposed speaker knows and loves as a poet, though it is the coming, not the present age, which will bow to him as such. but the main idea of the poem is set forth in a comparison. the speaker "sees" his friend in the character of an ancient fisherman landing the murex-fish on the tyrian shore. "the 'murex' contains a dye of miraculous beauty; and this once extracted and bottled, hobbs, nobbs, and co. may trade in it and feast; but the poet who (figuratively) brought the murex to land, and created its value, may, as keats probably did, eat porridge all his life." "how it strikes a contemporary" describes a poet whose personality was not ignored, but mistaken; and the irony of circumstance is displayed both in the extent of this mistake, and the colour which circumstance has given to it. this poet is a mysterious personage, who constantly wanders through the city, seeing everything without appearing to use his eyes. his clothing, though old and worn, has been of the fashion of the court. he writes long letters, which are obviously addressed to "our lord the king," and "which, no doubt, have had to do with the disappearance of a., and the fate of b." he can be, people think, no other than a _spy_. a spy, we must admit, might proceed in much the same manner. mr. browning does, however, full justice to the excesses of popular imagination, once directed into a given channel, in the parallel touches which depict the portentous luxury in which the spy is supposed to live: the poor though decent garret in which the poet dies. "transcendentalism" is addressed to a young poet, who is accused of presenting his ideas "naked," instead of draping them, in poetic fashion, in sights and sounds: in other words, of talking across his harp instead of singing to it. he acts on the supposition that, if the young want imagery, older men want rational thoughts. and his critic is declaring this a mistake. "youth, indeed, would be wasted in studying the transcendental jacob boehme for the deeper meaning of things which life gives it to see and feel; but when youth is past, we need all the more to be made to see and feel. it is not a thinker like boehme who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like john of halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up."[ ] there is a strong vein of humour in the argument, which gives the impression of being consciously overstated. it is neverthess a genuine piece of criticism. "at the mermaid" and the "epilogue" deal with public opinion in its general estimate of poets and poetry; and they expose its fallacies in a combative spirit, which would exclude them from a more rigorous definition of the term "critical." in the first of these mr. browning speaks under the mask of shakespeare, and gives vent to the natural irritation of any great dramatist who sees his various characters identified with himself. he repudiates the idea that the writings of a dramatic poet reveal him as a man, however voluminous they may be; and on this ground he even rejects the transcendent title to fame which his contemporaries have adjudged to him. they know him in his work. they cannot, he says, know him in his _life_. he has never given them the opportunity of doing so. he has allowed no one to slip inside his soul, and "label" and "catalogue" what he found there. this is truer for shakespeare than for mr. browning, who has often addressed his public with comparative directness, and would be grieved to have it thought that in the long course of his writings he has never spoken from his heart. he would also be the first to admit that, in the course of his writings, the poet must, indirectly, reveal the man. but he has too often had to defend himself against the impression that whatever he wrote as a poet must directly reflect him as a man. he has too often had to repeat, that poetry is an art which "_makes_" not one which merely _records_; and that the feelings it conveys are no more necessarily supplied by direct experience than are its facts by the cyclopædia. and with the usual deduction for the dramatic mood, we may accept the retort as genuine. i have departed in the case of this poem from the mere statement of contents, which is all that my plan admits of, or my readers usually can desire: because it expresses an indifference to general sympathy which belies the author's feeling in the matter. mr. browning speaks equally for himself and shakespeare, when he derides another idea which he considers to be popular: that the fit condition of the poet is melancholy. "i," he declares, "have found life joyous, and i speak of it as such. let those do otherwise who have wasted its opportunities, or been less richly endowed with them." the "epilogue" is a criticism on critics, and is spoken distinctly by mr. browning himself. he takes for his text a line from mrs. browning:[ ] "the poets pour us wine," and denounces those consumers of the wine of poetry, who expect it to combine strength and sweetness in an impossible degree. body and bouquet, he affirms, may be found on the label of a bottle, but not in the vat from which the bottle was filled. "mighty" and "mellow" may be born at once; but the one is for now, the other only for after-time. the earth, he declares, is his vineyard; his grape, the loves, the hates, and the thoughts of man; his wine, what these have made it. bouquet may, he admits, be artificially given. flowers grow everywhere which will supplement the flavour of the grape; and his life holds flowers of memory, which blossom with every spring. but he denies that his brew would be the more popular if he stripped his meadow to make it so. how much do his public drink of that which they profess to approve? they declare shakespeare and milton fit beverage for man and boy. "look into their cellars, and see how many barrels are unbroached of the one brand, what drippings content them of the other. he will be true to his task, and to him who set it." "wine, pulse in might from me! it may never emerge in must from vat, never fill cask nor furnish can, never end sweet, which strong began-- god's gift to gladden the heart of man; but spirit's at proof, i promise that! no sparing of juice spoils what should be fit brewage--mine for me." (vol. xiv. p. ) at the th stanza the figure is changed, and mr. browning speaks of his work (by implication) as a stretch of country which is moor above and mine below; and in which men will find--what they dig for. "house" is written in much the same spirit as "at the mermaid." it reminds us that the whole front of a dwelling must come down before the life within it can be gauged by the vulgar eye; however we may fancy that this or that poetic utterance has unlocked the door--that it opens to a "sonnet-key."[ ] "shop" is a criticism on those writers, poets or otherwise, who are so disproportionately absorbed by the material cares of existence as to place the good of literature in its money-making power; and depicts such in the character of the shopman who makes the shop his home, instead of leaving it for some mansion or villa as soon as business hours are past. "the flesh must live, but why should not the spirit have its dues also?" "respectability" is a comment on the price paid for social position. a pair of lovers have been enjoying a harmless escapade; and one remarks to the other that, if their relation had been recognized by the world, they might have wasted their youth in the midst of proprieties which they would never have learned the danger and the pleasure of infringing. the situation is barely sketched in; but the sentiment of the poem is well marked, and connects it with the foregoing group. "a light woman," "dÎs aliter visum," and "bifurcation" raise questions of conduct. a man desires to extricate his friend from the toils of "a light woman;" and to this end he courts her himself. he is older and more renowned than her present victim, and trusts to her vanity to ensure his success. but his attentions arouse in her something more. he discovers too late that he has won her heart. he can only cast it away, and a question therefore arises: he knows how he appears to his friend; he knows how he will appear to the woman whom his friend loved; "how does he appear to himself?" in other words, did the end for which he has acted justify the means employed? he doubts it. "dÎs aliter visum" records the verdict of later days on a decision which recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. a man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be, on the point of offering her his hand. but caution checks the impulse. they drift asunder. he forms a connection with an opera-dancer. she makes a loveless marriage. ten years later they meet again; and she reminds him of what passed between them, and taxes him with the ruin of four souls. he has thought only of the drawbacks to _present_ enjoyment, which the unequal union would have involved; he never thought or cared how its bitter-sweetness might quicken the striving for eternity. this criticism reflects the woman's point of view, and was probably intended to justify it. it does not follow that the author would not, in another dramatic mood, have justified the man, in his more practical estimate of the situation. mr. browning's poetic self is, however, expressed in the woman's belief: that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul. the stereotyped completeness of the lower existences supplies him here also with a warning. the title of "bifurcation" refers to two paths in life, followed respectively by two lovers whom circumstances divide. the case is not unusual. the woman sacrifices love to duty, and expects her lover to content himself with her choice. why not, she thinks? she will be constant to him; they will be united in the life to come. and meanwhile, she is choosing what for her is the smoother and safer path, while for him it is full of stumbling-blocks. love's guidance is refused him, and he falls. which of these two has been the sinner: he who sinned unwillingly, or she who caused the sin? we feel that mr. browning condemns the apparent saint. "pisgah sights. i." depicts life as it may _seem_ to one who is leaving it; who is, as it were, "looking over the ball." as seen from this position, good and evil are reconciled, and even prove themselves indispensable to each other. the seer becomes aware that it is unwise to strive against the mixed nature of existence; vain to speculate on its cause. but the knowledge is bittersweet, for it comes too late. "pisgah sights. ii." is a view of life as it _might_ be, if the knowledge just described did not come too late; and shows that according to mr. browning's philosophy it would be no life at all. the speaker declares that if he had to live again, he would take everything as he found it. he would neither dive nor soar; he would strive neither to teach nor to reform. he would keep to the soft and shady paths; learn by quiet observation; and allow men of all kinds to pass him by, while he remained a fixture. he would gain the benefit of the distance with those below and above him, since he would be magnified for the one class, while seen from a softening point of view by the other. and so also he would admire the distant brightness, "the mightiness yonder," the more for keeping his own place. if seen too closely, _the star might prove a glow-worm_. emotional poems. love. those of mr. browning's poems which are directly prompted by thought have their counterpart in a large number which are specially inspired by emotion; and must be noticed as such. but this group will perhaps be the most artificial of all; for while thought is with him often uncoloured by feeling, he seldom expresses feeling as detached from thought. the majority, for instance, of his love poems are introduced by the title "dramatic," and describe love as bound up with such varieties of life and character, that questions of life and character are necessarily raised by them; the emotion thus conveyed being really more intense, because more individual, than could be given in any purely lyric effusion not warmed by the poet's own life. some few, however, are genuine lyrics, whether regarded as personal utterances or not; and in the case of two or three of these, the personal utterance is unmistakable. under the head of lyrical love poems must be placed "one word more," to e. b. b. ("men and women." .) "prospice." ("dramatis personæ." .) "numpholeptos." } "prologue." } "pacchiarotto and other poems." "natural magic." } . "magical nature." } "introduction." } "the two poets of croisic." "a tale." } . "one word more" is a message of love, as direct as it is beautiful; but as such it also expresses an idea which makes it a fitting object of study. most men and women lay their highest gift at the feet of him or of her they love, and with it such honour as the world may render it. they value both, as making them more worthy of those they love, and for their sake rejoice in the possession. mr. browning feels otherwise. according to him the gifts by which we are known to the world have lost graciousness through its contact. their exercise is marred by its remembered churlishness and ingratitude. every artist, he declares, longs "once" and for "one only," to utter himself in a language distinct from his art; to "gain" in this manner, "the man's joy," while escaping "the artist's sorrow." so raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of sonnets to be seen only by one. dante, poet of the "inferno," drew an angel in memory of the one (of beatrice). he--mr. browning--has only his verse to offer. but as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to paint flowerets on his lady's missal--as he who blows through bronze may also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may _he_ lend his talent to a different use. he has completed his volume of "men" and "women." he dedicates it to her to whom this poem is addressed. but his special offering to her is not the book itself, in which he speaks with the mouth of fifty other persons, but the word of dedication--the "one word more"--in which he speaks to her from his own. the dramatic turns lyric poet for the _one only_. and what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. the moon, he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant above the hills of florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely hurrying to her death over london house-tops. but for the "moonstruck mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may be--unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among the rest of mankind. so she, who is his moon of poets, has also her world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest; "but the best is when i glide from out them, cross a step or two of dubious twilight, come out on the other side, the novel silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, where i hush and bless myself with silence." (vol. iv. p. .) "prospice" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of re-union with one whom death has sent before. we cannot doubt that this poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart. "numpholeptos" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic, circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. it is the almost despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity; and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its experiences. this woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the "fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. she stands, in passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of earthly existence. these radiate from her, many-hued with passion and adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. she bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that it promises love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. he rebels at last, but the rebellion is momentary. he renews his hopeless quest. "prologue" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of mr. browning's study, and was before him when he wrote. "natural magic" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment, summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life. "magical nature" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying the hand of time. the introduction to the "two poets of croisic," (reprinted under the title of "apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "natural magic." the "tale" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. its circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it exists in latin or greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. a famous poet was singing to his lyre. one of its strings snapped. the melody would have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the lyre and chirped the missing note. the note, thus sounded, was more beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. the poet, in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. they were thus immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had crowned. love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life. the dramatic setting of the majority of the love poems serves, as i have said, to bring out the vitality of mr. browning's conception of love; and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling it is made to illustrate. it will be seen that the dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances, which supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been largely recruited from the first collection of "men and women;" having first, in several instances, contributed to that work. dramatic love poems. "cristina." (love as the special gain of life.) "dramatic lyrics." . "evelyn hope." (love as conquering time.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "love among the ruins." (love as the one lasting reality.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "a lover's quarrel." (love as the great harmony which triumphs over smaller discords.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "by the fireside." (love in its ideal maturity.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "any wife to any husband." (love in its ideal of constancy.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "two in the campagna." (love as an unsatisfied yearning.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "love in a life." (love as indomitable purpose.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "life in a love." (love as indomitable purpose.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "the lost mistress." (love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "dramatic lyrics." . "a woman's last word." (love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "a serenade at the villa." (love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "one way of love." (love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "rudel to the lady of tripoli." (love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "men and women." published in "dramatic lyrics." . "in three days." (love as the intensity of expectant hope.) "dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." . "in a gondola." (love as the intensity of a precarious joy.) "dramatic romances." published in "dramatic lyrics." . "porphyria's lover." (love as the tyranny of spiritual appropriation.) "dramatic romances." published in "dramatic lyrics." . "james lee's wife." (love as saddened by the presentiment and the consciousness of change.) "dramatis personæ." "the worst of it." (love as the completeness of self-effacement.) "dramatis personnæ." . "too late." (love as the sense of a loss which death has rendered irrevocable.) "dramatis personæ." . the two first of these are inspired by the belief in the distinctness and continuity of the soul's life; and represent love as a condition of the soul with which positive experience has very little to do; but in all the others it is treated as part of this experience, and subject for the time being to its laws. the situation sketched--for it is nothing more--in "cristina" is that of a man and woman whom a glance has united, and who both have recognized in this union the predestined object of their life. the knowledge has only flashed on the woman's mind, to be extinguished by worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. but the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. she has spiritually lost him, but _he_ has gained _her_; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (this poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) it is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with this world. "evelyn hope" is the utterance of a love which has missed its fruition in this life, but confidently anticipates it for a life to come. the beloved is a young girl. the lover is three times her age, and was a stranger to her; she is lying dead. but god, he is convinced, creates love to reward love: and no matter what worlds must be traversed, what lives lived, what knowledge gained or lost, before that moment is reached, evelyn hope will, in the end, be given to him. "love among the ruins" depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, fabulous in magnificence and in strength. a ruined turret marks the site of a mighty tower, from which the king of that city overlooked his domains, or, with his court, watched the racing chariots as they encircled it in their course. in that turret, in the evening grey, amidst the tinkling of the sheep, a yellow-haired maiden is waiting for him she loves; and as they bury sight and speech in each other's arms, he bids the human heart shut in the centuries, with their triumphs and their follies, their glories and their sins, for "love is best." "a lover's quarrel" describes, not the quarrel itself, but the impression it leaves on him who has unwittingly provoked it: one of amazement as well as sorrow, that such a thing could have occurred. the speaker, apostrophizing his absent love, reminds her how happy they have been together, with no society but their own; no pleasures but those of sympathy; no amusements but those which their common fancy supplied; and he asks her if it be possible that so perfect a union can be destroyed by a hasty word with which his deeper self has had nothing to do. he believes this so little that he is sure she will, in some way, come back to him; and then they will part no more. a vein of playfulness runs through this monologue, which represents the lovers before their quarrel as more like children enjoying a long holiday, than a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities of life. it conveys, nevertheless, a truth deeply rooted in the author's mind: that the foundation of a real love can never be shaken. "by the fireside" is a retrospect, in which the speaker is carried from middle-age to youth, and from his, probably english, fireside to the little alpine gorge in which he confessed his love; and he summons the wife who received and sanctioned the avowal to share with him the joy of its remembrance. he describes the scene of his declaration, the conflict of feeling which its risks involved, the generous frankness with which she cut the conflict short. he dwells on the blessings which their union has brought to him, and which make his youth seem barren by the richness of his maturer years; and he asks her if there exist another woman, with whom he could thus have retraced the descending path of life, and found nothing to regret in what he had left behind. he declares that their mutual love has been for him that crisis in the life of the soul to which all experience tends--the predestined test of its quality. it is his title to honour as well as his guarantee of everlasting joy. the subtler realities of life and love are reflected throughout the poem in picturesque impressions often no less subtle, and the whole is dramatic, i.e., imaginary, as far as conception goes; but the obvious genuineness of the sentiment is confirmed by the allusion to the "perfect wife" who, "reading by firelight, that great brow and the spirit-small hand propping it," (vol. vi. p. .) is known to all of us. "any wife to any husband" might be the lament of any woman about to die, who believes that her husband will remain true to her in heart, but will lack courage to be so in his life. she anticipates the excuses he will offer for seeking temporary solace in the society of other women; but these all, to her mind, resolve themselves into a confession of weakness; and it grieves her that such a confession should proceed from one, in all other respects, so much stronger than she. "were she the survivor, it would be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!" her grief is unselfish. the wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is "three parts" overcome will break down under this final test. she accepts it, however, as the inevitable. "two in the campagna." the sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words: "infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." (vol. vi. p. .) for its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary: ever seeking to grasp the infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it. the sufferer is a man. he longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again. he asks the meaning of it all--where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. the campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery grasses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of passion and of peace. the clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. he traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. but just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. his doom is endless change. the tired, tantalized spirit must accept it. "love in a life" represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her. "life in a love" might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him. she may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life. "the lost mistress" is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship. its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness. "a woman's last word" is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender. she has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention. what, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her eden? she begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears--a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty. "a serenade at the villa" has a tinge of melancholy humour, which makes it the more pathetic. a lover has been serenading the lady of his affections through a sultry night, in which earth seemed to turn painfully in her sleep, and the silent darkness was unbroken, except by an occasional flash of lightning, and a few drops of thundery rain. he wishes his music may have told her that whenever life is dark or difficult there will be one near to help and guide her: one whose patience will never tire, and who will serve her best when there are none to witness his devotion. but her villa looks very dark; its closed windows are very obdurate. the gate ground its teeth as it let him pass. and he fears she only said to herself, that if the silence of a thundery night was oppressive, such noise was a worse infliction. "one way of love." this lover has strewn the roses of a month's gathering on his lady's path, only for the chance of her seeing them: as he has conquered the difficulties of the lute, only for the chance of her liking its sound; thrown his whole life into a love, which is hers to accept or reject. she cares for none of these things. so the roses may lie, the lute-string break. the lover can still say, "blest is he who wins her." "rudel to the lady of tripoli" is a pathetic declaration, in which the lover compares himself to a sunflower, and proclaims it as his badge. the french poet rudel loves the "lady of tripoli;"[ ] and she is dear to him as is the sun to that foolish flower, which by constant contemplation has grown into its very resemblance. and he bids a pilgrim tell her that, as bees bask on the sunflower, men are attracted by his song; but, as the sunflower looks ever towards the sun, so does he, disregarding men's applause, look towards the east, and her. "in three days" is a note of joyful expectation, and doubtless a pure lyric, though classed as dramatic-lyrical. the lover will see his love in three days; and his complex sense of the delay, as meaning both _all_ this time, and _only_ this, is leavened by the joyful consciousness that the reunion will be as absolute as the union has been. he knows that life is full of chance and change. the possibilities of three days are a great deal to encounter, very little to have escaped. unsuspected dangers may lurk in the coming year. but--he will see her in three days; and in that thought he can laugh all misgiving and all fear to scorn. "in a gondola" is a love scene, beginning with a serenade from a gondola, and continued by the two lovers in it, after the venetian fashion of the olden time. they are escaping, as they think, the vigilance of a certain "three"--one of whom we may conjecture to be the lady's husband or father--and have already regained her home, and fixed the signal for to-morrow's meeting, when the lover is surprised and stabbed. as they glide through the canals of the city, by its dark or illuminated palaces, each concealing perhaps some drama of love or crime--the sense of danger never absent from them,--the tense emotion relieves itself in playful though impassioned fancies, in which the man and the woman vie with each other. but when the blow has fallen, the light tone gives way, on the lover's side, to one of solemn joy in the happiness which has been realized. "... the three, i do not scorn to death, because they never lived: but i have lived indeed, and so--(yet one more kiss)--can die!" (vol. v. p. .) "porphyria's lover" is an episode which, with one of the poems of "men and women," "johannes agricola in meditation," first appeared under the head of "madhouse cells."[ ] porphyria is deeply attached to her "lover," but has not courage to break the ties of an artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. it is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. the distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. a madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity. "james lee's wife" is the study of a female character developed by circumstances, and also impressing itself on them; the circumstances being those of an unfortunate marriage, in which the love has been mutual, but the constancy is all on the woman's side. "james lee" is (as we understand) a man of shallow nature, whose wife's earnestness repels him when its novelty has ceased to charm. the "wife" is keenly alive to his change of feeling towards her: and even anticipates it, in melancholy forebodings which probably hasten its course. i. james lee's wife speaks at the window. love carries already the seed of doubt. the wife addresses her husband, who is approaching from outside, in words of anxious tenderness. the season is changing; coming winter is in the air. will his love change too? ii. by the fireside. the note of apprehension deepens. the fire they are sitting by is supplied by ship-wood. it suggests the dangers of the sea, the sailor's longing for land and home. "but the life in port has its dangers too. there are worms which gnaw the ship in harbour, as the heart in sleep. did some woman before her, in this very house perhaps, begin love's voyage full sail, and then suddenly see the ship's planks start, and hell open beneath the man she loves?" iii. in the doorway. she remonstrates with her fear. winter is drawing nearer: nature becoming cold and bare. but they two have all the necessaries of life, and love besides. the human spirit (the spirit of love) was meant by god to resist change, to put its life into the darkness and the cold. it should fear neither. iv. along the beach. the fear has become a certainty. the wife reasons with her husband as they walk together. "he wanted her love, and she gave it to him. he has it, and yet is not content. why so? she is not blind to his faults, but she does not love him the less for them. she has taken him as he was, with the good seed in him and the bad, waiting patiently for the good to bring its harvest; enduring patiently when the harvest failed. whether praiseworthy or blameworthy, he has been her world!" "that is what condemns her in his eyes: she loves too well; she watches too patiently. his nature is impatient of bondage. such devotion as hers is a bond." v. on the cliff. she reflects on the power of love. a cricket and a butterfly settle down before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. the barren surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. just so will love settle on the low or barren in life, and transform it. vi. reading a book under the cliff. she has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation. she accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. we discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some verses are introduced.[ ] the author apostrophizes a moaning wind which appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily, its sighs are trying to convey. james lee's wife regards the mood here expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. such a one, she says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the promise of its beauty. "nothing can be as it has been before; better, so call it, only not the same. to draw one beauty into our hearts' core, and keep it changeless! such our claim; so answered,--never more!" she who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the soul; if it be sent to us in probation. she cannot answer. god alone knows. the fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words. vii. among the rocks. she accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. a sunny autumn morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of self-effacement awakens in her. as earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it. its rewards must be sought in heaven. viii. beside the drawing-board. she accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. she has been drawing from the cast of a hand--enraptured with its delicate beauty--thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. "she has been a fool to think she must be loved or die." ix. on deck. she makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. but in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. she knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. she knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. their positions might even have been reversed. if one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. she would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her. we learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that james lee's wife was a plain woman. this may throw some light on the situation. "the worst of it" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. the strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. but the burden of his lament--"the worst of it" all--is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. in his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of heaven." he implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. for himself he renounces her even in paradise. he "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there. the pathos of "too late" is all conveyed in its title. the loved woman is dead. she was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. but so long as there was life there was hope. the lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. if the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. she might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. but all this is at an end. hope and opportunity are alike gone. he remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. the husband is probably writing her epitaph. "too late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "edith" was not considered a beauty. she was not one even in her lover's eyes. this fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation. footnotes: [footnote : the classification of this poem is open to the obvious objection that it is not a monologue; but a dialogue or alternation of monologues, in which the second speaker, balaustion (who is also the narrator), is, for the time being, as real as the first. its conception is, however, expressed in the first title; and the arguments and descriptions which balaustion supplies only contribute to the vividness with which aristophanes and his defence are brought before us. "aristophanes' apology" is identical in spirit with the other poems of this group.] [footnote : this incident is founded on fact. it is related in plutarch's lives, that after the defeat of nicias, all those of the captives who could recite something from euripides were kindly treated by the syracusans.] [footnote : the name signifies celebration of the festival of the thesmophoria. this was held by women only, in honour of ceres and proserpine.] [footnote : the chorus of each new play was supplied to its author by the government, when considered worth the outlay. sketches of this and other plays alluded to in the course of the work may be read in the first volume of mahaffy's "history of classical greek literature."] [footnote : the plays were performed at the lesser and greater festivals of bacchus; this, the lenaia, being the smaller one. hence, the presence of priest as well as archon at the ensuing banquet] [footnote : the failure here alluded to is his ploutos or plutus--an inoffensive but tame comedy written when aristophanes was advanced in years, and of which the ill-success has been imputed to this fact. mr. browning, however, treats it as a proof that the author's ingrained habit of coarse fun had unfitted him for the more serious treatment of human life.] [footnote : figures placed above the entrance of athenian houses, and symbolizing the double life. it was held as sacrilege to deface them, as had been recently and mysteriously done.] [footnote : introducing him into the play, as in the disguise of a disreputable woman.] [footnote : aristophanes' comedy of the "clouds" was written especially at socrates, who stood up unconcernedly in the theatre that the many strangers present might understand what was intended.] [footnote : mr. mahaffy's description of the "clouds" contains an account of this defeat, which sets forth the amusing conceit and sophistry of aristophanes' explanation of it. he alludes here to the prevailing custom of several dramatic writers competing for a prize.] [footnote : whirligig is a parody of the word "vortex." vortex itself is used in derision of socrates, who is represented in the "clouds" as setting up this non-rational force in the place of zeus--the clouds themselves being subordinate divinities.] [footnote : saperdion was a famous hetaira, the empousa, a mythological monster. kimberic or cimberic means transparent.] [footnote : a pure libel on this play, which is noted for its novel and successful attempt to represent humour without indecency. aristophanes here alludes to the prevailing custom of concluding every group of three tragedies with a play in which the chorus consisted of satyrs: a custom which euripides broke through.] [footnote : the inverted commas include here, as elsewhere in the apology, only the very condensed substance of mr. browning's words.] [footnote : tin-islands. scilly islands, loosely speaking, great britain.] [footnote : a demagogue of bad character attacked by aristophanes: a big fellow and great coward.] [footnote : white was the greek colour of victory. this passage, not easily paraphrased, is a poetic recognition of the latent sympathy of aristophanes with the good cause.] [footnote : a game said to be of sicilian origin and played in many ways. details of it may be found in becker's "charikles," vol. ii.] [footnote : thamyris of thrace, said to have been blinded by the muses for contending with them in song. the incident is given in the "iliad," and was treated again by sophocles, as aristophanes also relates.] [footnote : this also is historical.] [footnote : grote's "history of greece," vol. iii. p. .] [footnote : eidotheé or eidothea, is the daughter of proteus--the old man of the sea. a legend concerning her is found in the th book of the odyssey.] [footnote : there is such a monument at pornic.] [footnote : these words are taken from a line in the prometheus of Æschylus.] [footnote : mr. browning desires me to say that he has been wrong in associating this custom with the little temple by the river clitumnus which he describes from personal knowledge. that to which the tradition refers stood by the lake of nemi.] [footnote : the cardinal himself reviewed this poem, not disapprovingly, in a catholic publication of the time] [footnote : this refers to the popular neapolitan belief that a crystallized drop of the blood of the patron saint, januarius, is miraculously liquefied on given occasions.] [footnote : the "iketides" (suppliants), mentioned in section xviii., is a tragedy by Æschylus, the earliest extant: and of which the text is especially incomplete: hence, halting, and "maimed."] [footnote : this poem, like "aristophanes' apology," belongs in spirit more than in form to its particular group. each contains a dialogue, and in the present case we have a defence, though not a specious one of the judgment attained] [footnote : we recognize the _cogito ergo sum_ of descartes.] [footnote : the narrator, in a parenthetic statement, imputes a doctrine to st. john, which is an unconscious approach on mr. browning's part to the "animism" of some ancient and mediæval philosophies. it carries the idea of the trinity into the individual life, by subjecting this to three souls, the lowest of which reigns over the body, and is that which "does:" the second and third being respectively that which "knows" and "is." the reference to the "glossa of theotypas" is part of the fiction.] [footnote : the present riccardi palace in the via larga was built by cosmo dei medici in ; and remained in the possession of the medici till , when it was sold to marchese riccardi. the original riccardi palace in the piazza s. s. annunziata is now (since ) palazzo antinori. in my first edition, the "crime" is wrongly interpreted as the murder of alexander, duke of florence, in ; and the confusion, i regret to find, increased by a wrong figure ( for ), which has slipped into the date.] [footnote : mr. browning possesses or possessed pictures by all the artists mentioned in this connection.] [footnote : (verses , , .) "bigordi" is the family name of domenico called "ghirlandajo," from the family trade of wreath-making. "sandro" stands for alessandro botticelli. "lippino" was son of fra lippo lippi. mr. browning alludes to him as "wronged," because others were credited with some of his best work. "lorenzo monaco" (the monk) was a contemporary, or nearly so, of fra angelico, but more severe in manner. "pollajolo" was both painter and sculptor. "margheritone of arezzo" was one of the earlier old masters, and died, as vasari states, "infastidito" (deeply annoyed), by the success of giotto and the "new school." hence the funeral garb in which mr. browning depicts him.] [footnote : the "magic" symbolized is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or "mage," is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the middle ages, if not of himself. "johannes teutonicus, a canon of halberstadt in germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same christmas day to say mass in halberstadt, in mayntz, and in cologne" ("heywood's hierarchy," bk. iv., p. ). the "prestigious feat" of causing flowers to appear in winter was a common one. "in the year , the emperor lewis then reigning, there was one zedechias, by religion a jew, by profession a physician, but indeed a magician. in the midst of winter, in the emperor's palace, he suddenly caused a most pleasant and delightful garden to appear, with all sorts of trees, plants, herbs, and flowers, together with the singing of all sorts of birds, to be seen and heard." (delrio, "disquisitio magicæ," bk. i., chap, iv., and elsewhere; and many other authorities.)] [footnote : "wine of cyprus." the quotation heading the poem qualifies it as 'wine for the superiors in age and station.'] [footnote : such as wordsworth assumed to have been in use with shakespeare.] [footnote : this is told in the tales of the troubadours.] [footnote : published, simultaneously, in mr. fox's "monthly repository." the song in "pippa passes" beginning "a king lived long ago," and the verses introduced in "james lee's wife," were also first published in this magazine, edited by the generous and very earliest encourager of mr. browning's boyish attempts at poetry.] [footnote : these verses were written when mr. browning was twenty-three.] emotional poems (continued). religious, artistic, and expressive of the fiercer emotions. the emotions which, after that of love, are most strongly represented in mr. browning's works are the religious and the artistic: emotions closely allied in every nature in which they happen to co-exist, and which are so in their proper degree in mr. browning's; the proof of this being that two poems which i have placed in the artistic group almost equally fit into the religious. but the religious poems impress us more by their beauty than by their number, if we limit it to those which are directly inspired by this particular emotion. religious questions have occupied, as we have seen, some of mr. browning's most important reflective poems. religious belief forms the undercurrent of many of the emotional poems. and it was natural therefore, that religious feeling should not often lay hold of him in a more exclusive form. it does so only in three cases; those of "saul." ("dramatic lyrics." published in part in "dramatic romances and lyrics," ; wholly, in "men and women," .) "epilogue." ("dramatis personæ." .) "fears and scruples." ("pacchiarotto and other poems." .) the religious sentiment in "saul" anticipates christianity. it begins with the expression of an exalted human tenderness, and ends in a prophetic vision of divine love, as manifested in christ. the speaker is david. he has been sent into the presence of saul to sing and play to him; for saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only david's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting its transformation. david tells his story, re-enacting the scene which it describes, in strong, simple, picturesque words which rise naturally into the language of prophecy. he tells how first he tried the influence of pastoral tunes: those which call the sheep back to the pen, and stir the sense of insect and bird; how he passed to the song of the reapers--their challenge to mutual help and fellowship; to the warrior's march; the burial and marriage chants; the chorus of the levites advancing towards the altar; and how at this moment saul sent forth a groan, though the lights which leapt from the jewels of his turban were his only sign of motion. then--the tale continues--david changes his theme. he sings of the goodness of human life, as attested by the joyousness of youth, the gratitude of old age. he sings of labour and success, of hope and fulfilment, of high ambitions and of great deeds; of the great king in whom are centred all the gifts and the powers of human nature--of saul himself. and at these words the tense body relaxes, the arms cross themselves on the breast. but the eyes of saul still gaze vacantly before him, without consciousness of life, without desire for it. david's song has poured forth the full cup of material existence; he has yet to infuse into it that draught of "soul wine" which shall make it desirable. in a fresh burst of inspiration, he challenges his hearer to follow him beyond the grave. "the tree is known by its fruits; life by its results. life, like the palm fruit, must be crushed before its wine can flow. saul will die. but his passion and his power will thrill the generations to come. his achievements will live in the hearts of his people; for whom their record, though covering the whole face of a rock, will still seem incomplete." and as the "soul wine" works, as the vision of this earthly immortality unfolds itself before the sufferer's sight, he becomes a king again. the old attitude and expression assert themselves. the hand is gently laid on the young singer's forehead; the eyes fix themselves in grave scrutiny upon him. then the heart of david goes out to the suffering monarch in filial, pitying tenderness; and he yearns to give him more than this present life--a new life equal to it in goodness, and which shall be everlasting. and the yearning converts itself into prophecy. what he, as man, can desire for his fellow-man, god will surely give. what he would suffer for those he loves, surely god would suffer. human nature in its power of love would otherwise outstrip the divine. he cries for the weakness to be engrafted upon strength, the human to be manifested in the divine. and exulting in the consciousness that his cry is answered, he hails the advent of christ. he bids saul "see" that a face like his who now speaks to him awaits him at the threshold of an eternal life; that a hand like his hand opens to him its gates. david's prophecy has rung through the universe; and as he seeks his home in the darkness, unseen "cohorts" press everywhere upon him. a tumultuous expectation is filling earth and hell and heaven. the hand guides him through the tumult. he sees it die out in the birth of the young day. but the hushed voices of nature attest the new dispensation. the seal of the new promise is on the face of the earth. the epilogue is spoken by three different persons, and embodies as many phases of the religious life. the "first speaker, _as david_," represents the old testament theism, with its solemn celebrations, its pompous worship, and the strong material faith which bowed down the thousands as one man, before the visible glory of the lord. the "second speaker, _as renan_" represents nineteenth-century scepticism, and the longing of the heart for the old belief which scientific reason has dispelled. this belief is symbolized by a "face" which once looked down from heights of glory upon men; by a star which shone down upon them in responsive life and love. the face has vanished into darkness. the star, gradually receding, has lost itself in the multitude of the lesser lights of heaven. and centuries roll past while the forsaken watchers vainly question the heavenly vault for the sign of love no longer visible there. this lament assumes that theism, having grown into christianity, must disappear with it; and the pathetic sense of bereavement gives way to shuddering awe, as the farther significance of the sceptical position reveals itself. _man_ becomes the summit of creation; the sole successor to the vacant throne of god. the "third speaker," mr. browning himself, corrects both the material faith of the old testament, and the scientific doubt of the nineteenth century, by the idea of a more mystical and individual intercourse between god and man. observers have noted in the arctic seas that the whole field of waters seem constantly hastening towards some central point of rock, to envelope it in their playfulness and their force; in the blackness they have borrowed from the nether world, or the radiance they have caught from heaven; then tearing it up by the roots, to sweep onwards towards another peak, and make _it_ their centre for the time being. so do the forces of life and nature circle round the individual man, doing in each the work of experience, reproducing for each the divine face which is inspired by the spirit of creation. and, as the speaker declares, he needs no "temple," because the world is that. nor, as he implies, needs he look beyond the range of his own being for the lost divinity. "that one face, far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows!" (vol. vii. p. .) "fears and scruples" illustrates this personal religion in an opposite manner. it is the expression of a tender and very simple religious feeling, saddened by the obscurity which surrounds its object, and still more by the impossibility of proving to other minds that this object is a real one. it is described as the devotion to an unseen friend, known only by his letters and reported deeds, but whom one loves as by instinct, believes in without testimony, and trusts to as accepting the allegiance of the smaller being, and sure sooner or later to acknowledge it in the present case the days are going by. no sign of acknowledgment has been given. sceptics assure the believer that his faith rests on letters which were forged, on actions which others equally have performed; he can only yearn for some word or token which would enable him to shut their mouth. but when some one hints that the friend is only concealing himself to test his power of vision, and will punish him if he does not see; and another objects that this would prove the friend a monster; he crushes the objector with a word: "and what if the friend be god?" the next group is fuller and still more characteristic: for it displays the love of art in its special conditions, and, at the same time, in its union with all the general human instincts in which artistic emotion can be merged. we find it in its relation to the general love of life in "fra lippo lippi." ("men and women." .) in its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in "abt vogler." ("dramatis personæ." .) as a transformation of human tenderness in "pictor ignotus." ("men and women." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) in its directly sensuous effects in "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church." ("men and women." published as "the tomb at saint praxed's" in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .)[ ] in its associative power in "a toccata of galuppi's." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) in its representative power in "the guardian-angel: a picture at fano." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "eurydice to orpheus: a picture by leighton." ("dramatis personæ." .) "a face." ("dramatis personæ." .) "fra lippo lippi" is a lively monologue, supposed to be uttered by that friar himself, on the occasion of a night frolic in which he has been surprised. cosmo dei medici had locked him up in one room of the palace till some pictures he was painting for him should be finished;[ ] and on this particular night he has found the confinement intolerable. he has whipped his bed clothes into a rope, scrambled down from his window, and run after a girlish face which laughingly invited him from the street; and was about to return from the equivocal neighbourhood into which the fun had led him, when his monkish dress caught the attention of the guard, and he was captured and called to account. he proceeds to give a sketch of his life and opinions, which supplies a fair excuse for the escapade. the facts he relates are, including this one, historical. fra lippo lippi had no vocation for the priesthood. he was enticed into a carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat. there he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the prior, glad to turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint. but the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets. his first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks, and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and legs. his conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the prior's ideal of christian art. the men and women he painted were all true to life. the simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized each familar type. but the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding of the flesh; and the prior clearly laid down his theory that painting was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image forth the soul. fra lippo lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly life. "he will never believe that the world, with all its life and beauty, is an unmeaning blank. he is sure, 'it means intensely and means good.' he is sure, too, that to reproduce what is beautiful in it is the mission of art. if anyone objects, that the world being god's work, art cannot improve on it, and the painter will best leave it alone: he answers that some things are the better for being painted; because, as we are made, we love them best when we see them so. the artist has lent his mind for us to see with. that is what art means; what god wills in giving it to us." nevertheless (he continues) he rubbed out his men and women; and though now, with a medici for his patron, he may paint as he likes, the old schooling sticks to him.[ ] and he works away at his saints, till something comes to remind him that life is not a dream, and he kicks the traces, as he has done now. he ends with a half-joking promise to make the church a gainer through his misconduct (supposing that the secret has been kept from her), by a beautiful picture which he will paint by way of atonement. this picture, which he describes very humorously, is that of the coronation of the virgin, now in the "belle arti" at florence.[ ] abt vogler is depicted at the moment when this composer of the last century has "been extemporizing on the musical instrument of his invention." his emotion has not yet subsided; and it is that of the inspired musician, to whom harmonized sound is as the opening of a heavenly world. his touch upon the keys has been as potent to charm, as the utterance of that name which summoned into solomon's presence the creatures of earth, heaven, and hell, and made them subservient to his will. and the "slaves of the sound," whom he has conjured up, have built him a palace more evanescent than solomon's, but, as he describes it, far more beautiful. they have laid its foundations below the earth. they have carried its transparent walls up to the sky. they have tipped each summit with meteoric fire. as earth strove upwards towards heaven, heaven, in this enchanted structure, has yearned downwards towards the earth. the great dead came back; and those conceived for a happier future walked before their time. new births of life and splendour united far and near; the past, the present, and the to-come. the vision has disappeared with the sounds which called it forth, and the musician feels sorrowfully that it cannot be recalled: for the effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common with each other. we can trace the processes of painting and verse; we can explain their results. art, however triumphant, is subject to natural laws. but that which frames out of three notes of music "not a fourth sound, but a star" is the will, which is above law. and, therefore, so abt vogler consoles himself, the music persists, though it has passed from the sense of him who called it forth: for it is an echo of the eternal life; a pledge of the reality of every imagined good--of the continuance of whatever good has existed. human passion and aspiration are music sent up to heaven, to be continued and completed there. the secret of the scheme of creation is in the musician's hands. having recognized this, abt vogler can subside, proudly and patiently, on the common chord--the commonplace realities, of life. "pictor ignotus" (florence, --), is the answer of an unknown painter to the praise which he hears lavished on another man. he admits its justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected touch has set free. he, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to his power of attaining it. but he saw, by some flash of intuition, that it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments, share in the pettiness of their lives. he has remained obscure, that his creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "he paints madonnas and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. there, where his pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall, blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." he asks himself, as he again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it entails. "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church" (rome, --) displays the artistic emotion in its least moral form: the love of the merely beautiful as such; and it shows also how this may be degraded: by connecting it in the mind of the given person, with the passion for luxury, and the pride and jealousies of possession. the bishop is at the point of death. his sons (nominally nephews) are about him; and he is urging on them anxious and minute directions for the tomb they are to place for him in st. praxed's church. this tomb, as the bishop has planned it, is a miracle of costliness and beauty; for it is to secure him a double end: the indulgence of his own tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried in the same church. in the delirium of his weakness, these motives, which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. his limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument; and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. he pleads, as for dear life, with those who are to inherit his wealth, and who may at their pleasure fulfil his last wishes or disregard them: that he may have jasper for his tomb--basalt (black antique) for its slab--the rosiest marble for its columns--the richest design for its bronze frieze! a certain ball of lapis-lazuli (such as never yet was seen) is to "poise" between his knees; and he gasps forth the secret of how he saved this from the burning of his church, and buried it out of sight in a vineyard, as if he were staking his very life on the revelation. but in his heart he knows that his entreaties are useless: that his sons will keep all they can; and the tone of entreaty is dashed with all the petulance of foreseen disappointment. weakness prevails at last. he resigns himself to the inevitable; blesses his undutiful sons; and dismisses them. other strongly dramatic details complete the picture.[ ] "a toccata of galuppi's" is a fantastic little vision of bygone venice, evoked by the music of an old venetian master, and filling us with the sense of a joyous ephemeral existence, in which the glow of life is already struck by the shuddering chill of annihilation. this sense is created by the sounds, as mr. browning describes them: and their directly expressive power must stand for what it is worth. still, the supposed effect is mainly that of association; and the listener's fancy the medium through which it acts. "a face" describes a beautiful head and throat in its pictorial details--those which painting might reproduce. "the guardian-angel" and "eurydice to orpheus" describe each an actual picture in the emotions it expresses or conveys. the former represents an angel, standing with outstretched wings by a little child. the child is half kneeling on a kind of pedestal, while the angel joins its hands in prayer: its gaze directed upward towards the sky, from which cherubs are looking down. the picture was painted by guercino, and is now in the church of st. augustine, at fano, on the italian coast. mr. browning relates to an absent friend (who appears in the "dramatic romances" as waring) how he saw it in the company of his own "angel;" and how it occurred to him to develop into a poem one of the thoughts which the picture had "struck out." the thought resolves itself into a feeling: the yearning for guidance and protection. the poet dreams himself in the place of that praying child. the angel wings cover his head: the angel hands upon his eyes press back the excess of thought which has made his brain too big. he feels how thankfully those eyes would rest on the "gracious face" instead of looking to the opening sky beyond it; and how purely beautiful the world would seem when that healing touch had been upon them. the second was painted by f. leighton. it represents orpheus leading eurydice away from the infernal regions, but with an implied variation on the story of her subsequent return to them. she was restored to orpheus on the condition of his not looking at her till they had reached the upper world; and, as the legend goes, the condition proved too hard for him to fulfil. but the face of leighton's eurydice wears an intensity of longing which seems to challenge the forbidden look, and make her responsible for it. the poem thus interprets the expression, and translates it into words. "andrea del sarto" ("men and women," ) lays down the principle, asserted by mr. browning as far back as in "sordello," that the soul of the true artist must exceed his technical powers; that in art, as in all else, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp." and on this ground the poem might be classed as critical. but it is still more an expression of feeling; the lament of an artist who has fallen short of his ideal--of a man who feels himself the slave of circumstance--of a lover who is sacrificing his moral, and in some degree his artistic, conscience to a woman who does not return his love. it is the harmonious utterance of a many-sided sadness which has become identified with even the pleasures of the man's life; and is hopeless, because he is resigned to it. andrea del sarto was called the "faultless painter." his execution was as easy as it was perfect; and michael angelo is reported to have said to raphael, of the insignificant little personage andrea then was: that he would bring the sweat to his (raphael's) brow, if urged on in like manner by popes and kings. but he lacked strength and loftiness of purpose; and as mr. browning depicts him, is painfully conscious of these deficiencies. he feels that even an ill-drawn picture of raphael's--and he has such a one before him--has qualities of strength and inspiration which he cannot attain. his wife might have incited him to nobler work; but lucrezia is not the woman from whom such incentives proceed; she values her husband's art for what it brings her. remorse has added itself in his soul to the sense of artistic failure. he has not only abandoned the french court, and, for lucrezia's sake, broken his promise to return to it; he has cheated his kind friend and patron, francis i., of the money with which he was entrusted by him for the purchase of works of art. he has allowed his parents to die of want. all this, and more, reflects itself in the monologue he is addressing to his wife, but no conscious reproach is conveyed by it. she has consented to sit by him at their window, with her hand in his, while he drinks in her beauty, and finds in it rest and inspiration at the same time. she will leave him presently for one she cares for more; but the spell is deepening upon him. the fiesole hills are melting away in the twilight; the evening stillness is invading his whole soul. he scarcely even desires to fight against the inevitable. yet there might be despair in his concluding words: "another chance may be given to him in heaven, with leonardo, michael angelo, and raphael. but he will still have lucrezia, and therefore they will still conquer him." the facts adduced are all matter of history; though a later chronicle than that which mr. browning has used, is more favourable in its verdict on andrea's wife. the fiercer emotions also play a part, though seldom an exclusive one, in mr. browning's work. jealousy forms the subject of "the laboratory." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .)[ ] "my last duchess." ("dramatic romances." published as "italy" in "dramatic lyrics." .) the first of these shows the passion as distorted love: the frenzy of a woman who has been supplanted. the jealous wife (if wife she is) has come to the laboratory to obtain a dose of poison, which she means to administer to her rival; and she watches its preparation with an eager, ferocious joy, dashed only by the fear of its being inadequate. the quantity is minute; and it is (as we guess) the "magnificent" strength of that other one which has won _him_ away. in the second we find a jealousy which has no love in it; which means the exactingness of self-love, and the tyranny of possession. a widowed duke of ferrara is exhibiting the portrait of his former wife, to the envoy of some nobleman whose daughter he proposes to marry; and his comments on the countenance of his last duchess plainly state what he will expect of her successor. "that earnest, impassioned, and yet smiling glance went alike to everyone. she who sent it, knew no distinction of things or persons. everything pleased her: everyone could arouse her gratitude. and it seemed to her husband, from her manner of showing it, that she ranked his gift, the 'gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name,' with that of everyone else. it was below his dignity to complain of this state of things, so he put an end to it. he: 'gave commands;' and the smiles, too evenly dispensed, stopped all together." he does not fear to admit, as he does parenthetically, that there may have been some right on her side. this was below his concern. the duke touches, in conclusion, on the dowry which he will expect with his second wife; and, with a suggestive carelessness, bids his guest remark--as they are about to descend the staircase--a rare work in bronze, which a noted sculptor has cast for him. hatred, born of jealousy, has its fullest expression in the "soliloquy of the spanish cloister" ("dramatic lyrics." published in "bells and pomegranates." to ): a venomous outbreak of jealous hatred, directed by one monk against another whom he is watching at some innocent occupation. the speaker has no ground of complaint against brother lawrence, except that his life _is_ innocent: that he is orderly and clean, that he loves his garden, is free from debasing superstitions, and keeps his passions, if he has any, in check. but that, precisely, is a rebuke and an exasperation to the fierce, coarse nature of this other man; and he declares to himself, that if hate could kill, brother lawrence would not live long. meanwhile, as we also hear, he spites him when he can, and fondly dreams of tripping him up somewhere, or somehow, on his way to the better world. he is turning over some pithy expedients, when the vesper bell cuts short his meditations. wrath, as inspired by a desperate sense of wrong, finds utterance in "the confessional." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "bells and pomegranates." to .) a loved and loving girl has been made the instrument of her lover's destruction. he held a treasonable secret, which the church was anxious to possess; and her priest has assured her that if this is fully revealed to him, he will, by prayer and fasting, purge its guilt from the young man's soul. she obtains the desired knowledge, reveals it, and joyfully anticipates the result. when next she sees her lover, he is on the scaffold. they have stifled her denunciations in a prison-cell. her body is wrenched with torture, as her soul with anguish. she is scarcely human any more. but she hurls at them unceasingly a cry which will yet reach the world. "their pope and their saints, their heaven and their hell, their--everything they teach, and everything they say, is lies, and again lies." "a forgiveness" ("pacchiarotto, and other poems," ) might serve equally as a study for jealousy, self-reproach, contempt, and revenge; the love which is made to underlie these feelings, and the forgiveness with which it will be crowned. it is a story told in confession. he who tells it had once a wife, who was dearer to him than anything else in the world. he had also public duties, which he discharged with diligence and with success; but it was the thought of the wife's love which nerved him to the fulfilment of these duties, and which rewarded it. one day he discovered that she was unfaithful to him. a man (whose face was but imperfectly concealed) was stealing away from his house as he returned to it; and the wife, confronting him at the same moment, bade him kill her, but spare the man she loved. he did not kill her--then: for she had turned his love into contempt. he despised her too much to inflict even a lesser punishment, which should compromise the dignity, or disturb the outward calmness, of his life. but from that moment their union was a form; and while he worked as those do who have something to forget, and she shared the position which his labours procured for him, an impassable, if unseen, gulf lay between them. three years had passed, when suddenly, one night, the wife begged to speak with her husband alone. her request was granted; and then the truth broke forth. she loved--had loved--no one but him; but she was jealous of his devotion to the state. she imagined herself second to it in his affections; and it was the jealousy in her which had made her strive to arouse it in him. that other man had been nothing to her but a tool. her secret, she now knew, was killing her. conscience forbade her to elude her punishment by death. she therefore spoke. "would she write this?" he asked; and he dictated to her the confession she had just made, in the terms most humiliating to him who was intended to hear it. "could she but write it in her blood!" this, too, was possible. he put into her hand a dainty eastern weapon, one prick of which, he said, would draw so much blood as was required. it did more than this, for it was poisoned. but, before she died, she knew that her explanation had raised her husband's contempt into hatred, and that the revenge of which she was now found worthy had quenched the hatred in forgiveness. "she lies as erst beloved" (the narrative concludes) "in the church of him who hears this confession; whom his grate conceals as little as that cloak once did--whom vengeance overtakes at last." the poisoned dagger, which was the instrument of revenge--the pledge of forgiveness--is spoken of as part of a collection preserved in the so-called study, which was the scene of the interview; and the speaker dwells at some length on the impression of deadly purpose combined with loving artistic care, which their varied form and fantastic richness convey. this collection is actually in mr. browning's possession; and he values it, perhaps, for the reason he imputes to its imagined owner: that those who are accustomed to the slower processes of thought, like to play with the suggestions of prompt (if murderous) action; as the soldier, tired of wielding the sword, will play with paper and pen. historical poems, or poems founded on fact. many of mr. browning's poems are founded on fact, whether historical, or merely of known occurrence; but few of them can be classed by their historic quality, because it is seldom their most important. in "prince hohenstiel-schwangau," for instance, we have a chapter in recent history: but we only read it as an abstract discussion, to which a chapter in history has given rise; and in "pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper," and "filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial" (published in the same volume), we find two incidents, each of them true, and each full of historic significance; but which owe all their vitality to the critical and humorous spirit, in which mr. browning has described them. the small list of poems which are historical more than anything else, might be recruited from the dramatic idyls; but, for various reasons, this publication must stand alone; and even here, it is often difficult to disengage the actual fact, from the imaginary conditions in which it appears. our present group is therefore reduced to-- "red cotton night-cap country; or, turf and towers." ( .) "the inn album." ( .) "the two poets of croisic." ( .) "cenciaja." ("pacchiarotto, and other poems." .) we may also place here, as it is historical in character, "the heretic's tragedy; a middle age interlude" ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) the real-life drama which mr. browning has reproduced under the title of "red cotton night-cap country," was enacted partly in paris, partly in a retired corner of normandy, where he spent the late summer of ; and ended in a trial which had been only a fortnight closed, when he supposes himself to be relating it. his whole story is true, except that in it which reality itself must have left to the imagination. only the names of persons and places are fictitious.[ ] the principal actor in this drama, léonce miranda, was son and heir to a wealthy spanish jeweller in the place vendôme. he was southern by temperament as by descent; but a dash of the more mercantile parisian spirit had come to him from his french mother; and while keenly susceptible to the incitements of both religious and earthly passion, he began life with the deliberate purpose of striking a compromise between them. at an early age he determined to live for this world now, and for the other when he was older; and in the meantime to be moderate in his enjoyments. in conformity with this plan he ran riot on sunday; but worked diligently during the rest of the week. he bestowed his fancy on five women at once; but represented himself, when in their company, as a poor artist or musician, and wasted no money upon them. one day, however, he fell in love. the object of his affections, clara mulhausen, or, as she first calls herself, "de millefleurs," was an adventuress; but she did not at first allow him to find this out; and when he did so, her hold upon him had become too strong to be affected by the discovery. a succession of circumstances, which mr. browning describes, first cemented the bond, then destroyed its secrecy; and since clara had a husband, and the position could not be legalized, léonce miranda had no choice but to accept the social interdict, and with her retire from paris. he placed a substitute in the business, which had devolved on him through his father's death; and the pair took up their abode at clairvaux, an ancient priory, which the father had bought. here miranda built and improved; indulged his amateur propensities for painting and music; remained devoted to his love, and was rewarded by her devotion. for five years they were very happy. the first interruption to their happiness was a summons to miranda, from his mother in paris, to come and answer for his excessive expenditure. the immorality of his life she had condoned (a curious proof of this is given), for she hoped it would be its own cure. but "his architectural freaks, above all, a belvedere which he had constructed in his grounds, were a reckless waste of substance which she could not witness without displeasure." she had immense influence with her son; and he took her rebuke so much to heart, that he only left her to fling himself into the seine. he was brought out alive; but lay for a month at death's door, and made no progress towards recovery till he had been restored to clara's care; and clara was painfully winning him back to health, when the telegraphic wires flashed a second summons upon him. his presence was again demanded in the maternal home. "the business was urgent. its nature he would learn on arrival." he hastened to his mother's house, to find her a corpse--laid out with all the ghastly ceremonial which catholic fancy could devise--and to be told that his misconduct had killed her. the tribe of cousins, who had planned the _coup de théâtre_, were there to enjoy its result. this did not fail them. miranda fainted away. as soon as consciousness returned, he made his act of atonement. he foreswore the illegal bond. he willed away his fortune to his kinsfolk; and would retain of it, from that moment, only a pittance for himself, and the means of honourable subsistence for clara. they were to meet in the same house a week later, to arrange in what manner that sinful woman should be acquainted with the facts. the day came. the cousins arrived. miranda did not appear. he had broken down at the funeral in a fresh outburst of frenzied grief; but from this he had had time to recover. someone peeped into his room. there he stood, by a blazing fire, a small empty coffer by his side, engaged in reading some letters which he had taken from it. whose they were, and what the reading had told him, was quickly shown. he replaced them in the box, plunged this in the fire; and reiterating the words, "burn, burn and purify my past!" held it there till both his hands had been consumed; no sign of pain escaping him. he was dragged away by main force, protesting against this hindrance to his salvation. "he was not yet purified. she was not yet burned out of him." in his bed he raved and struggled against the image which again rose before his eyes, which again grew and formed itself in his flesh. the delirium was followed by three months of exhaustion. the moment the sick man could "totter" out of his room, he found his way to her whom he had abjured, and who was in paris calmly awaiting his return to her. she came back with him. he introduced her to his kinsmen. "it was all right," he said; "clara would henceforth be--his brother; he would still fulfil his bond." from this, however, he departed, in so far as not to content himself with a pittance. he sold his business to the "cousinry," and, as they considered, on hard terms. he and clara then returned to clairvaux. and now, as mr. browning interprets the situation, his experience had entered on a new phase. he had tested the equal strength of the earthly and the heavenly powers, and he knew that he could elude neither, and that neither could be postponed to the other. he no longer strove to compromise between these opposing realities, but threw his whole being into the struggle to unite them. he adhered to his unlawful love. his acts of piety and charity became grotesque in their excessiveness. (of these again particulars are given.) two years went by; and then, one april morning, miranda climbed his belvedere, and was found, soon after, dead, on the turf below. there seemed no question of accident. the third attempt at suicide had succeeded. on this fact, however, mr. browning puts a construction of his own. he asserts the poet's privilege of seeing into the man's mind; and makes him think before us in a long and impassioned soliloquy, which sets forth the hidden motive of his deed. as mr. browning conceives him, he did not mean to kill himself. he did so in a final, irresistible impulse to manifest his faith, and to test the foundations of it. it has had for its object, not the spiritual truths of christianity, but its miraculous powers; and these powers have of late been symbolized to his mind by the virgin of the ravissante.[ ] the conflict of despotisms has thus been waged between the natural woman and the supernatural: each a monarch in her way. as he looks from his tower towards the church of the ravissante, he apostrophizes her who is enthroned there. he imagines her to have reproached him for his divided allegiance; and asserts, in answer, that he has been subject to her all his life. "he could not part with his soul's treasure. but he has, for her sake, lavished his earthly goods, burned away his flesh. if his sacrifice has been incomplete, it was because another power, mysterious and unnamed, but yet as absolute as she, had cast its spells about him. he would have resisted the enchantress, if she, the despot, had made a sign. but what token has he ever received, of her acceptance, her approbation? she exacts from her servants the surrender of both body and soul; the least deficiency in the offering neutralizes its sum. and what does she give in exchange for body and soul? promises? is a man to starve while the life-apple is withheld from him, if even husks are within his reach? miracles? will she make a finger grow on his maimed hand? would he not be called a madman if he expected it?" and yet he believes. he summons her to justify his belief. he claims of her a genuine miracle--a miracle of power, which will silence scepticism, and re-establish the royalty of the church--a miracle of mercy, which will wipe away the past; reconcile duty and love; give clara into his hands as his pure and lawful wife. "she is to carry him through the air to the space before her church as she was herself conveyed there...." then come the leap and the catastrophe. he had by a second will bequeathed all his possessions to the church, reserving in them a life-interest for his virtual wife; and when the cousinry swooped down on what they thought their prey, madame mulhausen could receive them and their condolences with the indignant scorn which their greed and cruelty deserved. they disputed the will on the alleged plea of the testator's insanity. the trial was interrupted by the events of , but finally settled in the lady's favour; the verdict being uncompromising as to her moral, as well as legal claim to the inheritance. mr. browning had lately stood outside the grounds of clairvaux, and seen its lady pass. she was insignificant in face and expression; and he was reduced to accounting for the power she had exercised, by that very fact. she seemed a blank surface, on which a man could inscribe, or fancy he was inscribing, himself; and it is a matter of fact that, whether from strength of will, or from the absence of it, she presented such a surface to her lover's hand. she humoured his every inclination, complied with his every wish. and because she did no more than this, and also no less, mr. browning pronounces her far from the best of women, but by no means one of the worst. the two had, after all, up to a certain point, redeemed each other. the title of the book arose as follows. the narrative is addressed (as the volume is dedicated) to miss annie thackeray; and its supposed occasion is that of a meeting which took place at st. rambert--actually st. aubin--between her and mr. browning, in the summer of . she had laughingly called the district "white cotton night-cap country," from its sleepy appearance, and the universal white cap of even its male inhabitants. mr. browning, being acquainted with the tragedy of clairvaux, thought "_red_ cotton night-cap country" would be a more appropriate name; and adopted it for his story, as miss thackeray had adopted hers for one which she promised to write. but he represents himself as playing at first with the idea; and as leading the listener's mind, from the suggestions of white night-caps to those of the red one: and null the outward calmness of the neighbouring country, to the tragic possibilities which that calmness conceals. the supplementary heading, "turf and towers," must have been inspired by the literal facts of the case; but it supplies an analogy for the contrasted influences which fought for miranda's soul. the "tower" represents the militant or religious life. the "turf," the self-indulgent; and the figure appears and reappears at every stage of the man's career. the attempt at compromise is symbolized by a pavilion: a structure aping solidity, but only planted on the turf. the final attempt at union is spoken of as an underground passage connecting the two, and by which the fortress may be entered instead of scaled. the difficulty of making one's way through life amidst the ruins of old beliefs and the fanciful overgrowth in which time has clothed them; the equal danger of destroying too much and clearing away too little; also find their place in the allegory. the possible friend and adviser, to whom miranda is referred at vol. xii. p. , was m. joseph milsand, who always at that time passed the bathing season at st. aubin.[ ] "the inn album" is a tragedy in eight parts or scenes: the dialogue interspersed with description; and carried on by four persons not named. it is chiefly enacted in the parlour of a country inn; and the inn "album," in spite of its grotesque or prosaic character, becomes an important instrument in it. four years before the tragedy occurred--so we learn from the dialogue--a gentlemanly adventurer of uncertain age had won and abused the affections of a motherless girl, whom he thought too simple to resent the treachery. he was mistaken in this; for her nature was as proud as it was confiding; and her indignation when she learned that he had not intended marriage was such as to surprise him into offering it. she rejected the offer with contempt. he went his way, mortified and embittered. a month later she had buried herself in a secluded and squalid village, as wife of the old, poor, overworked, and hopelessly narrow-minded clergyman, whose cure it was. she abstained, however, for his own sake, from making any painful disclosures to her husband; and the daily and hourly expiation brought no peace with it; for she remained in her deceiver's power. three years went by. the elderly adventurer then fell in with a young, wealthy, and inexperienced man, who had loved the same woman, and whose honourable addresses had been declined for his sake; and he acquired over this youth an influence almost as strong as that which he had exercised over the young girl. he found him grieving over his disappointment, and undertook to teach him how to forget it; became his master in the art of dissipation; helped to empty his pockets while he filled his own; and finally induced him to form a mercenary engagement to a cousin whom he did not love. when the story opens, the young man has come to visit his bride-elect in her country home; and his mephistopheles has followed him, under a transparent pretext, to secure a last chance of winning money from him at cards. the presence of the latter is to be a secret, because he is too ill-famed a personage to be admitted into the lady's house; so they have arrived on the eve of the appointed day, and put up at a village inn on the outskirts of the cousin's estate. there they have spent the night in play. there also the luck has turned; and the usual winner has lost ten thousand pounds. his friend insists on cancelling the debt. he affects to scout the idea. "the money shall, by some means or other, be paid." the discussion is renewed with the same result, as they loiter near the station, at which the younger will presently make a feint of arriving; and for the first time he asks the elder why, with such abilities as his, he has made no mark in life. the latter replies that he found and lost his opportunity four years ago, in a woman, who, he feels more and more, would have quickened his energies to better ends. he then, with tolerable frankness, relates his story. the younger follows with his own. but, for a reason which explains itself at the time, the connection between the two escapes them. the woman herself next appears on the scene, and with her, the girl cousin. they are friends of old; and the married one has emerged from her seclusion at the entreaty of the betrothed, to pass judgment on her intended husband. the young girl is not satisfied with her own feeling towards him whom she has promised to marry; though she has no misgiving as to his sentiments towards her. she is to bring him for inspection to the inn. and the friend, entering its parlour alone, is confronted by her former lover, who has temporarily returned there. a stormy dialogue ensues. she denounces him as the destroyer, ever lying in wait for her soul. he taunts her with the malignant hatred with which for years past from the height of her own prosperity she has been weighing down his. she retorts in a powerful description of the love with which he once inspired her, of the living death in which she has been expiating her mistake. and as he listens, the old feeling in him revives, and he kneels to her, imploring that she will break her bonds, and secure their joint happiness by flying with him. she sees nothing, however, in this, but a second attempt to ensnare her; and is repulsing the entreaty with the scorn which she believes it to deserve, when the younger man bursts merrily into the room. a wave of angry pain passes over him as he recognizes the heroine of his own romance, and hastily infers from the circumstances in which he finds her, that he has been the victim of a double deception. the truth gradually shapes itself in his mind; but meanwhile the older man has grasped the situation, and determined to make capital of it--to avenge his rebuff and to rid himself of his debt at the same time. he begs the lady to leave the room for a few moments, handing her, for her entertainment, the inn "album," over which he and his friend were exchanging jokes a few hours ago; and in which he has, at this moment, inscribed some lines. the purport of these is that this young man loves her; and that unless she responds to his advances, the secret of her past life shall be revealed to her husband. alone with the younger man, he exhausts himself in coarse libels against the woman, of whom that morning only he was speaking, as the lost opportunity of his life; bids him ask of her what he desires, and have it; and calls on him to admit, that in preserving him from marrying her, and placing her nevertheless at his disposal, he will have earned his gratitude, and paid the value of the ten thousand pounds. when the woman returns, the album in her hand, the calm of death is upon her. she has lived prepared for this emergency, provided also with the means of escaping from it. but she will not die without entreating her young admirer to shake off, before it is too late, the evil influence to which both, though in different ways, have succumbed; and her dignity, her kindness, the instinctive reverence, and now chivalrous pity, with which she has inspired him carry all before them. he renews his declaration; implores her to accept him as her husband, if she is free--her friend if she is not; her husband even if the relation she is living in be something less than marriage; to exact any delay, to impose any probation, so that in the end she accepts him. she replies by putting her hand into his, _to remain there_, as she says, _till death shall part them_. the older man, who has just re-entered the room, congratulates them on having arrived at so sensible an understanding. the woman, now very pale, contrives to point to the fatal entry in the album which she still grasps; and asks her friend--after quoting the writer's words--how, but in her own way, the mouth of such a one could have been stopped. "so," exclaims the youth. and he flies at the man's throat, and strangles him. she has only time to thank her deliverer; to tell him why his devotion is unavailing--to provide for his safety by writing in the album from which he has torn the fatal page, that he has slain a man who would have outraged her: and that her last breath is spent in blessing him. a merry voice is heard; and the young, light-hearted girl comes all unconscious to the scene of the tragedy. the curtain falls before she has entered upon it. the betrayal of the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in english high life, which occurred in the present century. "the two poets of croisic" is an extract from the history of two writers of verse, whose respective works obtained from circumstances a brilliant but short-lived renown. it forms part of a reminiscence, supposed to be conjured up by a wood fire near which the narrator, with his wife, is sitting. the fire, as he describes it, is made of ship-wood: for it burns in all the beautiful colours which denote the presence of metallic substances and salts; and as his fancy reconstructs the ship, it also raises the vision of a distant coast well known to his companion and to himself. he sees le croisic--the little town it is--the poor village it was[ ]--with its storm-tossed sea--its sandy strip of land, good only for the production of salt--its solitary menhir, which recalls, and in some degree perpetuates, the wild life and the barbarous druid worship of old breton times.[ ] and in the bright-hued flames, which leap up and vanish before his bodily eyes, he sees also the two ephemeral reputations which flashed forth and expired there. rené gentilhomme, born , was a rhymer, as his father had been before him. he became page to the prince of condé, and occupied his spare time by writing complimentary verse. one day, as he was hammering at an ode, a violent storm broke out; and the lightning shattered a ducal crown in marble which stood on a pedestal in the room in which he sat. condé was regarded as future king of france: for louis xiii. was childless, and his brother gaston believed to be so; in consideration of this fact, men called him "duke." rené took the incident as an omen, and turned his ode into a prophecy which he delivered to his master as the utterance of god. "the prince's hopes were at an end: a dauphin would be born in the ensuing year." a dauphin was born; and rené, who had at first been terrified at his own boldness, received the title of royal poet, and the honours due to a seer. but he wrote little or no more; and he and the tiny volume which composed his works soon disappeared from sight. the narrator, however, judges that this oblivion may not have been unsought, since one who had believed himself the object of a direct message from god, would have little taste for intercourse with his fellow men; and he suspends his story for a moment to ask himself how such a one would bear the weight of his experience; and how far the knowledge conveyed by it might be true. he decides (as we should expect) that a direct revelation is forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our "simulated thunder-claps," all our "counterfeited truths," all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind: darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence. and so rené gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher than rhyming and its rewards. paul desforges maillard was born nearly a century later, and wrote society verses till the age of thirty, when the desire for wider fame took possession of him. he competed for a prize which the academy had offered to the poet who should best commemorate the progress made by the art of navigation during the last reign. his poem was returned. it was offered, through the agency of a friend, to a paper called "the mercury." the editor, la roque, praised the work in florid terms, but said he dared not offend the academy; he, too, returned the ms. paul, mistaking the polite fiction for truth, wrote back an angry tirade against the editor's cowardice; and the latter, retorting in as frank a fashion, told the writer that his poem was execrable, and that it was only consideration for his feelings which had hitherto prevented his hearing so. at this juncture paul's sister interposed. he was wrong, she declared, to proceed in such a point-blank manner. in cases like these, it was only wile which conquered. he must resume his incognito, and try, this time, the effect of a feminine disguise. she picked out and copied the feeblest of his songs or sonnets, and sent it to la roque, as from a girl-novice who humbly sued for his literary protection. she was known by another name than her brother's (mr. browning explains why); the travesty was therefore complete. the poem was accepted; then another and another. the lady's fame grew. la roque made her, by letter, a declaration of love. voltaire also placed himself at her feet. paul now refused to efface himself any longer. the clever sister urged in vain that it was her petticoats which had conquered, and not his verse. he went to paris to claim his honours, and introduce himself as the admired poetess to la roque and voltaire. voltaire bitterly resented the joke; la roque affected to enjoy it; but nevertheless advised its perpetrator to get out of paris as fast as possible. the trick had answered for once. it would not be wise to repeat it. again paul disregarded his sister's advice, and reprinted the poems in his own name. "they had been praised and more than praised. the world could not eat its own printed words!" he discovered, however, that the world _could_ eat its words; or, at least, forget them. the only fame--the speaker adds--which a great man cannot destroy, is that which he has had no hand in making. paul's light, with his sister's, went out as did that of his predecessor. mr. browning gives, in conclusion, a test by which the relative merit of any two real poets may be gauged. _the greater is he who leads the happier life_. to be a poet is to see and feel. to see and feel is to suffer. his is the truest poetic existence who enslaves his sufferings, and makes their strength his own. he who yokes them to his chariot shall win the race.[ ] "cenciaja" signifies matter relating to the "cenci;"[ ] and the poem describes an incident extraneous to the "cenci" tragedy, but which strongly influenced its course. this incident was the murder of the widowed marchesa dell' oriolo, by her younger son, paolo santa croce, who thus avenged her refusal to invest him with his elder brother's rights. he escaped the hands of justice, though only to perish in some other disastrous way. but the matricide had been committed on the very day which closed the trial of the cenci family for the assassination of its head; and it sealed beatrice's fate. her sentence seemed about to be remitted. the pope now declared that she must die. ... "paolo santo croce murdered his mother also yestereve, and he is fled: she shall not flee at least!" (vol. xiv. p. .) the elder son of the marchesa, onofrio marchese dell' oriolo, was arrested on the strength of an ambiguous scrap of writing, which appeared to implicate him in his brother's guilt; and subjected in prison to such a daily and day-long examination on the subject of this letter, that his mind gave way, and the desired avowal was extracted from him. he confessed to having implied, under reserves and conditions which practically neutralized the confession, his assent to his mother's death. he was beheaded accordingly; and the governor of rome, taverna, who had conducted the inquisition, was rewarded by a cardinal's hat. other motives were, however, involved in the proceeding than the pope's quickened zeal for justice. he had entrusted the case to his nephew, cardinal aldobrandini; and it was known that the cardinal and the marchese had courted the same lady, and the latter unwisely flaunted the possession of a ring which was his pledge of victory. this story, with other details which i have not space to give, was taken from a contemporary italian chronicle, of which some lines are literally transcribed. the heretic of "the heretic's tragedy" was jacques du bourg-molay, last grand master of the order of knights templars, and against whom preposterous accusations had been brought. this "jacques," whom the speaker erroneously calls "john," and who might stand for any victim of middle-age fanaticism, was burned in paris in ; and the "interlude," we are told, "would seem to be a reminiscence of this event, as distorted by two centuries of refraction from flemish brain to brain." the scene is carried on by one singer, in a succession of verses, and by a chorus which takes up the last and most significant words of each verse; the organ accompanying in a plagal cadence,[ ] which completes its effect. the chant is preceded by an admonition from the abbot, which lays down its text: that god is unchanging, and his justice as infinite as his mercy; and singer and chorus both denounce the impious heresy of "john:" who admitted only the love, and sinned the "unknown sin," in his confidence in it. how the logs are fired; how the victim roasts; amidst what hideous and fantastic torments the damned soul "flares forth into the dark" is quaintly and powerfully described. romantic poems. the prevalence of thought in mr. browning's poetry has created in many minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the intellectual value of what his work conveys. for in a poet's imagination, the thought and the thing--the idea and its image--grow up at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other.[ ] he sees, therefore, the truths of nature, as nature herself gives them; while the thinker, who conceives an idea first, and finds an illustration for it afterwards, gives truth only as it presents itself to the human mind--in a more definite, but much narrower form. mr. browning often _treats_ his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always _conceived_ it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain.[ ] this fact may be recognized in many of the smaller poems, which, for that reason, i shall find it impossible to class; but it is best displayed in a couple of longer ones, which i have placed under the head "romantic." they are distinct from the majority of the "dramatic romances," although included in them. for with these the word "romantic" denotes an imaginary experience, which may be frankly supernatural, as in "the boy and the angel;" or only improbable, as in "mesmerism;" or semi-historical and local, as in "in a gondola;" or simply human, and possible anywhere and anywhen, as in "the last ride together;" or in "dîs aliter visum," and "james lee's wife," which might be classed with them. i am now using it to mark certain cases, in which the author's imagination has not brought itself to the test of _any_ consistent experience, but simply presents us with certain groups of material and mental--of real and ideal possibilities, which we may each interpret for ourselves. they occur in "childe roland to the dark tower came." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "the flight of the duchess." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .)[ ] the first of these has been taken by some intelligent critics to be a moralizing allegory; the second, a moralizing fairy-tale. they are, therefore, a useful type both of mr. browning's poetic genius, and of the misunderstanding, to which its constantly intellectual employment has exposed him. "childe roland to the dark tower came," describes a brave knight performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have failed. the way through which he struggles is unknown to him; its features are hideous; a deadly sense of difficulty and danger hangs over every step; and though childe roland's courage is pledged to the undertaking, the thought of failure at last comes to him as a relief. he reaches the goal just as failure appears inevitable. the plain has suddenly closed in; weird and unsightly eminences encompass him on every side. in one flash he perceives that he is in a trap; in another, that the tower stands before him; while round it, against the hill-sides, are ranged the "lost adventurers" who have preceded him--their names and story clanging loudly and more loudly in his ears--their forms revealed with ghastly clearness in the last fires of the setting sun. so far the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface discrepancies appear. the tower is much nearer and more accessible than childe roland has thought; a sinister-looking man, of whom he asked the way, and who, as he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on the right track; and as he describes the country through which he passes, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself. we are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest, have not done so through the very act of attainment in it; and when, dauntless, childe roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom. we can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy, built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind.[ ] but these picturesque impressions had, also, their ideal side, which mr. browning as spontaneously reproduced; and we may all recognize under the semblance of the enchanted country and the adventurous knight, a poetic vision of life: with its conflicts, contradictions, and mockeries; its difficulties which give way when they seem most insuperable; its successes which look like failures, and its failures which look like success. the thing we may not do is to imagine that an intended lesson is conveyed by it. "the flight of the duchess" is the adventure of a young girl, who was brought out of a convent to marry a certain duke. the duke was narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. the young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the sunshine of a labourer's home. she pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity of escape from it. a retainer of the duke's, whose chivalry her position had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story of it. the duke had decreed a hunt. custom prescribed that his wife should attend it. she had excused herself on the plea of her ill-health; and he was riding forth in no amiable mood, when an old gipsy woman, well known in the neighbourhood, accosted him with the usual prayer for alms. he was curtly dismissing her, when she mentioned her desire to pay her respects to the young duchess. it then occurred to him that the sight of this ragged crone, and the chronicle of her woes, might be an excellent medicine for his "froward," ungrateful wife, and teach her to know when she was well off; and after speaking in confidence with the old woman, he bade him who recounts the adventure escort her into the lady's presence. the interview took place. the duchess accompanied her visitor to the castle gate, ordered her palfrey to be saddled, mounted it with the gipsy behind her, and bounded away, never to return. the attendant had watched and obeyed her as in a dream. she left in his hand, in gratitude for what she knew he felt for her, a little plait of hair. these are the real facts of the story. but we have also its ideal possibilities, as reflected by the imagination of the narrator. he had seen the gipsy metamorphosed as she received the duke's command, from a ragged, decrepit crone into a stately woman, whose clothing bore the appearance of wealth; and as he mounted guard on the balcony which commanded the duchess's room, he saw the wonder grow. a sound as of music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the duchess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head upturned--her whole being expanding--as the gipsy's hands waved over her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods of life into her own. then the music broke up into words, and he knew what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard what the gipsy said. she was telling the young duchess that she was one of themselves--that she bore their mystic mark in the two veins which met and parted on her brow--that after fiery trial she should return to her tribe, and be shielded by their devotion for evermore. she was telling her how good a thing is love--how strong and beautiful the double existence of those whom love has welded together--how full of restful memories the old age of those who have lived in and for it--how sure and gentle their awakening into the better world.... here the words again lost themselves in music, and he understood no more. when the two appeared at the castle gate, the gipsy had shrunk back into her original character; but the duchess remained transformed. she had become, in her turn, a queen. the suggestion of her gipsy origin forms a connecting link between the real and the ideal aspects of the duchess's flight. we might imagine her fervid nature as being affected by the message of deliverance precisely in the manner described: while the beautified image of her deliverer transferred itself through some magnetic influence to the spectator's mind from her own. he does not, however, present himself as a probable subject for such impressions. he is a jovial, matter-of-fact person, in spite of the vein of sentiment which runs through him; and the imaginative part of his narrative was more probably the result of a huntsman's breakfast which had found its way into his brain. as in the case of childe roland, the poetic truth of the duchess's romance is incompatible with rational explanation, and independent of it. various dramatic details complete the story. satirical or humorous poems. humour is a constant characteristic of mr. browning's work,[ ] and it sometimes takes the form of direct and intentional satire; but his sympathy with human beings and his hopeful view of their future destiny, are opposed to any development of the satirical mood. the impression of sympathy will even neutralize the satire, in poems in which the latter is directly and conciously conveyed: as, for instance, in "caliban upon setebos," and "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church." of grim or serious satire, there is, i think, only one specimen among his works: the first part of "holy-cross day." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women," .) we may class as playful satires (which i give in the order of their importance): "pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper." ( .) "filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial." ("pacchiarotto, and other poems." .) "up at a villa--down in the city." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "another way of love." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) we have a purely humorous picture in "garden fancies, ii. sibrandus schafnaburgensis." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "holy-cross day" was the occasion of an "annual christian sermon," which the jews in rome were forced to attend; and the poem which bears this title is prefaced by an extract from an imaginary "diary by a bishop's secretary," dated ; and expatiating on the merciful purpose, and regenerating effect of this sermon. what the assembled jews may have really felt about it, mr. browning sets forth in the words of one of the congregation. this man describes the hustling and bustling, the crowding and packing--the suppressed stir as of human vermin imprisoned in a small space; the sham groans, and sham conversions which follow in their due course; and as he thus dwells on his national and personal degradation, his tone has the bitter irony of one who has both realized and accepted it. but the irony recoils on those who have inflicted the degradation--on the so-called christians who would throttle the jew's creed while they "gut" his purse, and make him the instrument of their own sins; and is soon lost in the emotion of a pathetic and solemn prayer; the supposed death-bed utterance of rabbi ben ezra. the prayer is an invocation to the justice, and to the sympathy of christ. it claims his help against the enemies who are also his own. it concedes, as possible, that he was in truth the messiah, crucified by the nation of which he claimed a crown. but it points to his christian followers as inflicting on him a still deeper outrage: a belief which the lips profess, and which the life derides and discredits. it urges, in the jew's behalf, the ignorance, the fear, in which the deed was done; the bitter sufferings by which it has been expiated. it pleads his long endurance, as testimony to the fact, that he withstands barabbas now, as he withstood christ "then;" that he strives to wrest christ's name from the "devil's crew," though the shadow of his face be upon him. the invocation concludes with an expression of joyful confidence in god and the future. (giacomo) "pacchiarotto" was a painter of siena.[ ] his story is told in the "commentary on the life of sodoma" by the editors of vasari; florence, ; and this contains all, or nearly all, the incidents of mr. browning's "pacchiarotto," as well as others of a similar kind but of later occurrence, which are not mentioned in it. this painter was a restless, aggressive personage, with a craze for reform; and a conspicuous member of the "bardotti:" a society of uncommissioned reformers, whose occupation was to cry down abuses, and prescribe wholesale theoretical measures for removing them. (hence their title; which signifies "spare" horses or "freed" ones: they walk by the side of the waggon while others drudge at, and drag it along). but he discovered that men would not be reformed; and bethought himself, after a time, of a new manner of testifying to the truth. he selected a room in his own house, whitewashed it (we conclude); and, working in "distemper" or fresco, painted it with men and women of every condition and kind. he then harangued these on their various shortcomings. they answered him, as he imagined, in a humble and apologetic manner; and he then proceeded to denounce their excuses, and strip the mask from their sophistries and hypocrisies--doing so with every appearance of success. but he presumed too much on his victory. a famine had broken out in siena. the magistrates were, of course, held responsible for it. the bardotti assembled, and prescribed the fitting remedies. everything would come right if only the existing social order was turned topsy-turvy, and men were released from every tie. pacchiarotto was conspicuous by his eloquence. but when he denounced the chief of the municipal force, and hinted that if the right man were in the right place, that officer would be he, all the other "spare horses" rushed upon him and he was obliged to run for his life. the first hiding-place which presented itself was a sepulchre, in which a corpse had just been laid. he squeezed himself into this, and crawled forth from it at at the end of two days, starving, covered with vermin, and thoroughly converted to the policy of living and letting live. the authentic part of the narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed. but mr. browning allows fancy the just employment of telling how the superior improved the occasion, and how his lesson was received. "it is a great mistake," this reverend person assures his guest--though one from which his own youth has not been free--"to imagine that any one man can preach another out of his folly. if such endeavours could succeed, heaven would have begun on earth. whereas, every man's task is to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it. man, in short, is to be not the 'spare horse,' but the 'mill-horse' plodding patiently round and round on the same spot." and pacchiarotto replies that his monitor's arguments are, by his own account, doomed to be ineffectual: but that he is addressing himself to one already convinced. he (pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but he has been convinced by a dead one. that corpse has seemed to ask him by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not all made on the same pattern: "because, above, one's jack and one--john." and the same grin has reminded him that this life is the rehearsal, not the real performance: just an hour's trial of who is fit, and who isn't, to play his part; that the parts are distributed by the author, whose purpose will be explained in proper time; and that when his brother has been cast for a fool's part, he is no sage who would persuade him to give it up. he is now going back to his paint-pot, and will mind his own business in future. by an easy transition, mr. browning turns the laugh against his own critics, whom he professes to recognize on this may morning, as flocking into his garden in the guise of sweeps. he does not, he says, grudge them their fun or their one holiday of the year, the less so that their rattling and drumming may give him some inkling how music sounds; and he flings them, by way of a gift, the story he has just told, bidding them dance, and "dust" his "jacket" for a little while. but that done, he bids them clear off, lest his housemaid should compel them to do so. he has her authority for suspecting that in their professional character they bring more dirt into the house than they remove from it[ ]. "filippo baldinucci" was the author of a history of art ("notizie dei professori del disegno da cimabue in qua"); and the incident which mr. browning relates as "a reminiscence of a.d. ," appears there in a notice of the life of the painter buti. (vol. iii. p. .) the jewish burial ground in florence was a small field at the foot of the monte oliveto. a path ascending the hill skirted its upper end, and at an angle of this stood a shrine with one side blank, the other adorned by a painting of the virgin mary. the painting was intended to catch the eye of all believers who approached from the neighbouring city-gate (porta san friano or frediano); and was therefore so turned that it overlooked the jewish cemetery at the same time. the jews, objecting to this, negotiated for its removal with the owner of the ground; and his steward, acting in his name, received a hundred ducats as the price of his promise that the virgin should be transferred to the opposite side of the shrine. the task was undertaken by buti, but carried on in the privacy of a curtained scaffolding; and when the curtains were withdrawn, it was seen that the picture _had_ been transferred; but that a painting of the crucifixion occupied its original place. four rabbis, the "sourest and ugliest" of the lot, were deputed to remonstrate with the steward; but this person coolly replied that they had no ground of complaint whatever. "his master had amply fulfilled his bond. did they fancy their 'sordid' money had bought his freedom to do afterwards what he thought fit?" and he advised them to remove themselves before worse befell them. the jews retired discomfited; and, as the writer hopes, took warning by what had happened, never again to tempt with their ill-earned wealth "the religious piety of good christians." mr. browning gives this story, with unimportant variations, in the manner of baldinucci himself; and does full justice to the hostile and contemptuous spirit in which the attitude of the jews is described by him. but he also heightens the unconscious self-satire of the narrative by infusing into this attitude a genuine dignity and pathos. he enlists all our sympathy by the chief rabbi's prayer that his people, so sorely tried in life, may be allowed rest from persecution in their graves; and he concludes with an imaginary incident which leaves them masters of the situation. on the day after what the historian calls this "pleasing occurrence," the son of the high priest presented himself at buti's shop, where he and the so-called "farmer" were still laughing over the event; and in tones of ominous mildness begged to purchase that pretty thing--the picture in oils, from which the fresco painting of the virgin had been made. he was a herculean young man, and buti, who white and trembling had tried to slip out of his way, was so bewildered by the offer, that he asked only the proper price for his work. the farmer, however, broke forth in expressions of pious delight, "mary had surely wrought a miracle, and _converted_ the jew!" the jew turned like a trodden worm. "truly," he replied, "a miracle has been wrought, by a power which no canvas yet possessed, in that i have resisted the desire to throttle you. but my purchase of your picture is not due to a miracle. it means simply that i have been cured of my prejudices in respect to art. christians hang up pictures of heathen gods. their 'titians' paint them. a cardinal will value his leda or his ganymede beyond everything else which he possesses. if i express wonder at this sacrifice of the truth, i am told that the truth of a picture is in its drawing and painting, and that these are valued precisely because they _are_ true. why then should not your mary take her place among my ledas and the rest; be judged as a picture, and, since--as i fear--master buti is not a titian, laughed at accordingly?" "so now," the speaker concludes, "jews buy what pictures they like, and hang them up where they please, and,"--with an inward groan--"no, boy, you must not pelt them." this warning, which is supposed to be addressed by the historian in his old age to a nephew with a turn for throwing stones, reveals the motive of the story: a sudden remembrance of the good old pious time, when jews _might_ be pelted. "up at a villa--down in the city" is a lively description of the amusements of the city, and the dulness of villa life, as contrasted by an italian of quality, who is bored to death in his country residence, but cannot afford the town. his account of the former gives a genuine impression of dreariness and monotony, for the villa is stuck on a mountain edge, where the summer is scorching and the winter bleak, where a "lean cypress" is the most conspicuous object in the foreground, and hills "smoked over" with "faint grey olive trees" fill in the back; where on hot days the silence is only broken by the shrill chirp of the cicala, and the whining of bees around some adjacent firs. but the other side of the picture, though sympathetically drawn, is a perfect parody of what it is meant to convey. for the speaker's ideal "city" might be a big village, with its primitive customs, and its life all concentrated in the market-place or square; and it is precisely in the square that he is ambitious to live. there the church-bells sound, and the diligence rattles in, and the travelling doctor draws teeth or gives pills; there the punch-show or the church procession displays itself, and the last proclamation of duke or archbishop is posted up. it is never too hot, because of the fountain always plashing in the centre; and the bright white houses, and green blinds, and painted shop-signs are a perpetual diversion to the eye.... but alas! the price of food is prohibitive; and a man must live where he can. "another way of love" is the complement to "one way of love," and displays the opposite mood. the one lover patiently gathers june roses in case they may catch his lady's eye. the other grows tired of such patience even when devoted to himself; he tires of june roses, which are always red and sweet. his lady-love is bantering him on this frame of mind. it is true, she says, that such monotony is trying to a man's temper: there is no comfort in anything that can't be quarrelled with; and the person she addresses is free to "go." she reminds him, however, that june may repair her bower which his hand has rifled, and the next time "consider" which of two courses she prefers: to bestow her flowers on one who will accept their sweetness, or use her lightnings to kill the spider who is weaving his films about them. "sibrandus schafnaburgensis" is apparently the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form the subject of the poem. some wag relates how he read it a month ago, having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself by dropping it through a crevice in a tree, and enjoying a picnic lunch and a chapter of "rabelais" on the grass close by. to-day, in a fit of compunction, he has raked the "treatise" out; but meanwhile it has blistered in the sun, and run all colours in the rain. toadstools have grown in it; and all the creatures that creep have towzed it and browsed on it, and devoted bits of it to their different domestic use. it is altogether a melancholy sight. so the wag thinks his victim has sufficiently suffered, and carries it back to his book-shelf, to "dry-rot" there in all the comfort it deserves. descriptive poems. mr. browning's poems abound in descriptive passages, and his power of word-painting is very vivid, as well as frequently employed. but we have here another instance of a quality diffused throughout his work, yet scarcely ever asserting itself in a distinct form. the reason is, that he deals with men and women first--with nature afterwards; and that the details of a landscape have little meaning for him, except in reference to the mental or dramatic situation of which they form a part. this is very apparent in such lyrics or romances as: "by the fire-side," "in a gondola," and "childe roland to the dark tower came." we find three poems only which might have been written for the sake of the picturesque impressions which they convey: "de gustibus--" ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "home-thoughts, from abroad." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "the englishman in italy." ("dramatic romances." published as "england in italy" in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) and even here we receive the picture with a lyric and dramatic colouring, which makes it much less one of facts than of associations. it is also to be remarked that, in these poems, the associations are of two opposite kinds, and mr. browning is in equal sympathy with both. he feels english scenery as an englishman does: italian, as an italian might be supposed to, feel it. "de gustibus--" illustrates the difference of tastes by the respective attractions of these two kinds of scenery, and of the ideas and images connected with them. some one is apostrophizing a friend, whose ghost he is convinced will be found haunting an english lane, with its adjoining corn-field and hazel coppice: where in the early summer the blackbird sings, and the bean-flower scents the air. and he declares at the same time that italy is the land of his own love, whether his home there be a castle in the apennine, or some house on its southern shore; among "wind-grieved" heights, or on the edge of an opaque blue sea: amidst a drought and stillness in which the very cicala dies, and the cypress seems to rust; and scorpions drop and crawl from the peeling walls ... and where "a bare-footed girl tumbles green melons on to the ground before you, as she gives news of the last attack on the bourbon king." "home-thoughts, from abroad" is a longing reminiscence of an english april and may, with their young leaves and their blossoms, their sunshine and their dew, their song of the chaffinch and their rapturous music of the thrush. appreciation is heightened by contrast; and the buttercup--england's gift to her little children--is pronounced far brighter than the "gaudy melon-flower" which the exiled englishman has at this moment before him. "the englishman in italy" is a vivid picture of italian peasant-life on the plain of sorrento: the occasion being an outbreak of the well-known hot wind--the "scirocco"--which, in this case, has brought with it a storm of rain. a little frightened peasant girl has taken refuge by the side of the englishman, who is apparently lodging in her mother's cottage. and he is diverting her attention by describing his impressions of the last twenty-four hours: how everything looked before the rain; how he knew while yet in bed that the rain had come, by the rattling down of the quail-nets,[ ] which were to be tugged into shelter, while girls ran on to the housetops to fetch the drying figs; how the black churning waters forbade the fishermen to go to sea (what strange creatures they bring home when they do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet grass, which will appear with fried pumpkin at the labourer's supper; how, yesterday, he climbed mount calvano--that very brother of hers for his guide--his mule carrying him with dainty steps through the plain--past the woods--up a path ever wilder and stonier, where sorb and myrtle fall away, but lentisk and rosemary still cling to the face of the rock--the head and shoulders of some new mountain ever coming into view; how he emerged, at last, where there were mountains all around; below, the green sea; above, the crystal solitudes of heaven; and, down in that green sea, the slumbering siren islands: the three which stand together, and the one which swam to meet them, but has always remained half-way. these, and other reminiscences, beguile the time till the storm has passed, and the sun breaks over the great mountain which the englishman has just described. he and little "fortú" can now go into the village, and see the preparations being made for to-morrow's feast--that of the virgin of the rosary--which primitive solemnity he also (by anticipation) describes. he concludes with a brief allusion to the political scirocco which is blackening the english sky, and will not vanish so quickly as this has done; and thus hints at a reason, if the reader desires one, for his temporary rustication in a foreign land. footnotes: [footnote : first in "hood's magazine."] [footnote : two of these are now in the national gallery; one presented to it by sir charles eastlake, the other after his death by lady eastlake.] [footnote : mr. browning thus skilfully accounts for the discrepancy between the coarseness of his life and the refined beauty of much of his work.] [footnote : the painter spoken of as "hulking tom" is the celebrated one known as "masaccio" (tommasaccio), who learned in the convent from lippo lippi, and has been wrongly supposed to be his teacher. he is also one of those who were credited with the work of lippino, lippo lippi's son.] [footnote : the bishop's tomb is entirely fictitious; but something which is made to stand for it is now shown to credulous sight-seers in st. praxed's church.] [footnote : first in "hood's magazine."] [footnote : these were correctly given in the ms., and appeared so in the first proofs of the book; but were changed from considerations of prudence.] [footnote : a feigned name for one of the three wonder working images which are worshipped in france.] [footnote : mr. browning allows me to give the true names of the persons and places concerned in the story. vol. xii. page . the firm miranda--mellerio, brothers. " " . st rambert--st. aubin. " " . joyeux, joyous-gard--lion, lionesse. " " . vire-caen. " " . st. rambertese--st. aubinese " " . londres--douvres. " " . london--dover. " " . la roche--courcelle. " " . monlieu--bernières. " " . villeneuve--langrune. " " . pons--luc. " " . la ravissante--la délivrande. " " . raimbaux--bayeux. " " . morillon--hugonin. " " . mirecourt--bonnechose. " " . miranda--mellerio. " " . new york--madrid. " " . clairvaux--tailleville. " " . gonthier--bény. " " . rousseau--voltaire. " " . léonce--antoine. " " . of "firm miranda, london and new york"--"mellerio brothers"--meller, people say. " " . rare vissante--dell yvrande. " " . aldabert--regnobert. " " . eldebert--ragnebert. " " . mailleville--beaudoin. " " . chaumont--quelen. " " . vertgalant--talleyrand. " " . ravissantish--delivrandish. " " . clara de millefleurs--anna de beaupré. " " . coliseum street--miromesnil street. " " . sterner--mayer. " " . commercy--larocy. " " . sierck--metz. " " . muhlhausen--debacker. " " . carlino centofanti--miranda di mongino. " " . portugal--italy. " " . vaillant-mériel. " " . thirty-three--twenty-five. " " . beaumont--pasquier. " " . sceaux--garges. " " . luc de la maison rouge--jean de la becquetière. " " . claise--vire. " " . maude--anne. " " . dionysius--eliezer. " " . scolastica--elizabeth. " " . twentieth--thirteenth. " " . fricquot--picot. ] [footnote : le croisic is in the loire inférieure, at the south-east corner of brittany. it has now a good bathing establishment, and is much frequented by french people; but sardine-fishing and the crystallizing of sea-salt are still its standing occupations.] [footnote : the details of this worship as carried on in the island opposite le croisic, and which mr. browning describes, are mentioned by strabo.] [footnote : the story of paul desforges maillard forms the subject of a famous play, piron's "métromanie."] [footnote : it is also, and perhaps chiefly, in this case, a pun on the meaning of the plural noun "cenci," "rags," or "old rags." the cry of this, frequent in rome, was at first mistaken by shelley for a voice urging him to go on with his play. mr. browning has used it to indicate the comparative unimportance of his contribution to the cenci story. the quoted italian proverb means something to the same effect: that every trifle will press in for notice among worthier matters.] [footnote : that of the gregorian chant: a cadence concluding on the dominant instead of the key-note.] [footnote : we have a conspicuous instance of this in "pippa passes."] [footnote : this spontaneous mode of conception may seem incompatible with the systematic adherence to a fixed class of subjects referred to in an earlier chapter. but it by no means is so. with mr. browning the spontaneous creative impulse conforms to the fixed rule. the present remarks properly belong to that earlier chapter. but it was difficult to divide them from their illustrations.] [footnote : first in "hood's magazine."] [footnote : i may venture to state that these picturesque materials included a tower which mr. browning once saw in the carrara mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded together in the remembrance of the line from "king lear" which forms the heading of the poem.] [footnote : instances of it occur in the "dramatic idyls" and "jocoseria;" and will be noticed later.] [footnote : generally confounded with his contemporary and fellow-citizen, girolamo del pacchia.] [footnote : the (baron) kirkup mentioned at vol. xiv. page was a florence friend of mr. browning's, and a connoisseur in literature and art. he was ennobled by the king of italy for his liberal views and for his services to italian literature. it was he who discovered the portrait of dante in the bargello at florence.] [footnote : nets spread to catch quails as they fly to or from the other side of the mediterranean. they are slung by rings on to poles, and stand sufficiently high for the quails to fly into them. this, and every other detail of the poem, are given from personal observation.] non-classified poems (continued). miscellaneous poems. even so imperfect, not to say arbitrary, a classification as i have been able to attempt, excludes a number of mr. browning's minor poems; for its necessary condition was the presence of some distinctive mood of thought or feeling by which the poem could be classed; and in many, even of the most striking and most characteristic, this condition does not exist. in one group, for instance, the prevailing mood is either too slightly indicated, or too fugitive, or too complex, or even too fantastic, to be designated by any term but "poetic." others, again, such as songs and legends, depict human emotion in too simple or too general a form, to be thought of as anything but "popular;" and a third group may be formed of dramatic pictures or episodes, which unite the qualities of the other two. in the first of these groups we must place-- "the lost leader." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "nationality in drinks." ("dramatic lyrics." published as "claret and tokay," without rd part, in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "garden fancies. i. the flower's name." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .)[ ] "earth's immortalities." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "home-thoughts, from the sea." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "bells and pomegranates." or .) "my star." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "misconceptions." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "a pretty woman." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "in a year." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "women and roses." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "before." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "after." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "memorabilia." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "men and women." .) "the last ride together." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "a grammarian's funeral." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "johannes agricola in meditation." ("men and women." published in "dramatic lyrics." .) "confessions." ("dramatis personæ." .) "may and death." ("dramatis personæ." .) "youth and art." ("dramatis personæ." .) "a likeness." ("dramatis personæ." .) "appearances." ("pacchiarotto, and other poems." .) "st. martin's summer." ("pacchiarotto, and other poems." .) "prologue to 'la saisiaz.'" . in the second group:-- "cavalier tunes." ("dramatic lyrics." .) "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "song." ("dramatic lyrics." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "incident of the french camp." ("dramatic romances." published as first part of "camp and cloister," in "dramatic lyrics." .) "count gismond." ("dramatic romances." published as "france" in "dramatic lyrics." .) "the boy and the angel." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .)[ ] "the glove." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "the twins." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "the pied piper of hamelin; a child's story." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic lyrics." .) "gold hair: a story of pornic." ("dramatis personæ." .) "hervé riel." ("pacchiarotto, and other poems," written at croisic, . published in the "cornhill magazine." .) in the third group:-- "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr." ("dramatic lyrics." .) "meeting at night." ("dramatic lyrics." published as "night" in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "parting at morning." ("dramatic lyrics." published as "morning" in "dramatic romances and lyrics.") "the patriot. an old story." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "instans tyrannus." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "mesmerism." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "time's revenges." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "the italian in england." ("dramatic romances." published as "italy in england" in "dramatic romances and lyrics." .) "protus." ("dramatic romances." published in "men and women." .) "apparent failure." ("dramatis personæ." .) "waring." ("dramatic romances." published in "dramatic lyrics." .) this poem is a personal effusion of feeling and reminiscence, which can stand for nothing but itself. _first group._ "the lost leader" is a lament over the defection of a loved and honoured chief. it breathes a tender regret for the moral injury he has inflicted on himself; and a high courage, saddened by the thought of lost support and lost illusions, but not shaken by it. the language of the poem shows the lost "leader" to have been a poet. it was suggested by wordsworth, in his abandonment (with southey and others) of the liberal cause. "nationality in drinks." a fantastic little comment on the distinctive national drinks--claret, tokay, and beer. the beer is being drunk off cape trafalgar to the health of nelson, and introduces an authentic and appropriate anecdote of him. but the laughing little claret flask, which the speaker has on another occasion seen plunged for cooling into a black-faced pond, suggests to him the image of a "gay french lady," dropped, with straightened limbs, into the silent ocean of death; while the hungarian tokay (tokayer ausbruch), in its concentrated strength, seems to jump on to the table as a stout pigmy castle-warder, strutting and swaggering in his historic costume, and ready to defy twenty men at once if the occasion requires. "the flower's name. garden fancies," i. a lover's reminiscence of a garden in which he and his lady-love have walked together, and of a flower which she has consecrated by her touch and voice: its dreamy spanish name, which she has breathed upon it, becoming part of the charm. "earth's immortalities." a sad and subtle little satire on the vaunted permanence of love and fame. the poet's grave falls to pieces. the words: "love me for ever," appeal to us from a tombstone which records how spring garlands are severed by the hand of june, and june's fever is quenched in winter's snow. "home-thoughts, from the sea." an utterance of patriotic pride and gratitude, aroused in the mind of an englishman, by the sudden appearance of trafalgar in the blood-red glow of the southern setting sun. "my star" may be taken as a tribute to the personal element in love: the bright peculiar light in which the sympathetic soul reveals itself to the object of its sympathy. "misconceptions" illustrates the false hopes which may be aroused in the breast of any devoted creature by an incidental and momentary acceptance of its devotion. "a pretty woman" is the picture of a simple, compliant, exquisitely pretty, and hopelessly shallow woman: incapable of love, though a mere nothing will win her liking. and the question is raised, whether such a creature is not perfect in itself, and would not be marred by any attempt to improve it, or extract from it a different use. the author decides in the affirmative. a rose is best "graced," not by reproducing its petals in precious stones for a king to preserve; not by plucking it to "smell, kiss, wear," and throw away; but by simply leaving it where it grows. a "pretty" woman is most appropriately treated when nothing is asked of her, but to be so. "in a year" is a wondering and sorrowful little comment on a man's shallowness and inconstancy. "women and roses" is the impression of a dream, and both vague and vivid, as such impressions are. the author _dreams_ of a "red rose-tree," with three roses upon it: one withered, the second full-blown, the third still in the bud; and, floating round each, a generation of women: those famed in the past; the loved and loving of the present; the "beauties yet unborn." he casts his passion at the feet of the dead; but they float past him unmoved. he enfolds in it the glowing forms of the living; but these also elude him. he pours it into the budding life, which may thus respond to his own; but the procession of maidens drifts past him too. they all circle unceasingly round their own rose. "before" and "after" are companion poems, which show how differently an act may present itself in prospect and in remembrance, whether regarded in its abstract justification, or in its actual results. the question is that of a duel; and "before" is the utterance of a third person to whom the propriety of fighting it seems beyond a doubt. "a great wrong has been done. the wronged man, who is also the better one, is bound to assert himself in defence of the right. if he is killed, he will have gained his heaven. for his slayer, hell will have begun: for he will feel the impending judgment, in the earth which still offers its fruits; in the sky, which makes no sign; in the leopard-like conscience[ ] which leers in mock obeisance at his side, ready to spring on him whenever the moment comes. there has been enough of delay and extenuation. let the culprit acknowledge his guilt, or take its final consequences." the duel is fought, but it is the guilty one who falls; and "after" gives the words of his adversary--his boyhood's friend--struck with bitter remorse for what he has done. as the man who wronged him lies wrapped in the majesty of death, his offence dwindles into insignificance; and the survivor can only feel how disproportionate has been the punishment, and above all, how unavailing. "would," he exclaims, "that the past could be recalled, and they were boys again together! it would be so easy then to endure!" "memorabilia" shows the perspective of memory in a tribute to the poet shelley. his fugitive contact with a commonplace life, like the trace of an eagle's passage across the moor, leaves an illumined spot amidst blankness. "the last ride together" depicts the emotions of a ride, which a finally dismissed lover has been allowed to take with his beloved. he has vainly passed his youth in loving her. but as this boon is granted, she lies for a moment on his breast. "she might have loved him more; she might also have liked him less." as they ride away side by side, a sense of resignation comes over him. his life is not alone in its failure. every one strives. few or none succeed. the best success proves itself to be shallow. and if it were otherwise--if the goal could be reached on earth--what care would one take for heaven? then the peace which is in him absorbs the consciousness of reality. he fancies himself riding with the loved one till the end of time; and he asks himself if his destined heaven may not prove to be this. "a grammarian's funeral" describes the rendering of the last honours to one whose life has consumed itself in the pursuit of knowledge. the knowledge pursued has been pedantic and minute, but for him it represented a mighty truth; and he has refused to live, in the world's sense, till he had mastered that truth, co-extensive, as he believed it, with life everlasting. like sordello, though in a different way, he would know before he allowed himself to be. he would realize the whole; he would not discount it. his disciples are bearing him to a mountain-top, that the loftiness of his endeavour may be symbolized by his last resting-place. he is to lie "where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened." (vol. v. p. .) where the new morning for which he waited will figuratively first break upon him. "johannes agricola in meditation" is a glowing and fantastic description of the privileges of the "elect," cast in the form of a monologue, and illustrated in the person of the speaker. johannes agricola was a german reformer of the sixteenth century, and alleged founder of the sect of the antinomians: a class of christians who extended the low church doctrine of the insufficiency of good works, and declared the children of god to be exempt from the necessity of performing them; absolved from doing right, because unable to do wrong; because no sin would be accounted to them as such. some authorities contend that he personally rejected only the mosaic, not the moral law; but mr. browning has credited him with the full measure of antinomian belief, and makes him specially exult in the divine assurance that the concentrated venom of the worst committed sins can only work in him for salvation. he also comments wonderingly on the state of the virtuous man and woman, and of the blameless child, "undone," as he was saved, before the world began; whose very striving is turned to sin; whose life-long prayer and sacrifice can only end in damnation. but, as he declares, he praises god the more that he cannot understand him; that his ways are inscrutable, that his love may not be bought. "confessions" is the answer of a dying man to the clergyman's question: does he "view the world as a vale of tears?" his fancy is living through a romance of past days, of which the scene comes back to him in the arrangement of physic-bottles on a table beside him, while the curtain, which may be green, but to his dying eyes is blue, makes the june weather about it all. he is seeing the girl he loved, as watching for him from a terrace near the stopper of that last and tallest bottle in the row; and he is retracing the path by which he could creep, unseen by any eyes but hers, to the "rose-wreathed" gate which was their trysting-place. "no, reverend sir," is the first and last word of his reply, "the world has been no vale of tears to me." "may and death" expresses a mourner's wish, so natural to the egotism of a deep sorrow, that the season which robbed him of his friend's life should bury all its sweetness with him. the speaker retracts this wish, in justice to the many pairs of friends who have each their right to happiness. but there is, he says, one red-streaked plant which their may might spare, since one wood alone would miss it. for its leaf is dashed as with the blood of spring; and whenever henceforth it grows in that same place, the drop will have been drawn from his heart.[ ] "youth and art" is a humorous, but regretful reminiscence of "bohemian" days, addressed by a great singer to a sculptor, also famous, who once worked in a garret opposite to her own. they were young then, as well as poor and obscure; and they watched and coquetted with each other, though they neither spoke nor met; and perhaps played with the idea of a more serious courtship. caution and ambition, however, prevailed; and they have reached the summit of their respective professions, and accepted the social honours which the position insures. but she thinks of all that might have been, if they had listened to nature, and cast in their lot with each other; of the sighs and the laughter, the starvation and the feasting, the despairs and the joys of the struggling artist's career; and she feels that in its fullest and freest sense, their artist life has remained incomplete. "a likeness" describes the feelings which are inspired by the familiar or indifferent handling of any object sacred to our own mind. they are illustrated by the idea of a print or picture, bought for the sake of a resemblance; and which may be hanging against a wall, or stowed away in a portfolio: and, in either case, provoke comment, contemptuous or admiring, which will cause a secret and angry pain to its possessor. "appearances," a little poem in two stanzas, illustrates the power of association. its contents can only be given in its own words. "st. martin's summer" represents a lover, with his beloved, striving to elude the memory of a former attachment, and finding himself cheated by it. as the fires of a departed summer will glow once more, in the countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. and when the ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask of love remains to him. the poem would seem intended to deny that a second love can be genuine: were not its light tone and fantastic circumstance incompatible with serious intention. prologue to "la saisiaz," reprinted as "pisgah-sights," iii., is a fantastic little vision of the body and the soul, as disengaged from each other by death: the soul wandering at will through the realms of air; the body consigned to the "ferns of all feather, mosses and heather," (vol. xiv. p. .) of its native earth. _second group._ "cavalier tunes" consists of three songs, with chorus, full of rousing enthusiasm for the cause of king charles, and of contemptuous defiance for the roundheads who are opposing him: i. "marching along." ii. "give a rouse." iii. "boot and saddle." "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix" is an imaginary picture, which would gain nothing in force by being true. it is that of three horsemen galloping to save the life of their town; galloping without rest, from moonset to sunrise, from sunrise into the blaze of noon; one horse dropping dead on the way, the second, within sight of the goal; and the third, roland, urged on by frantic exertions on his rider's part--the blood filling his nostrils, and starting in red circles round his eyes--galloping into the market-place of aix; to rest there with his head between his master's knees: while the last measure of wine which the city contains is being poured down his throat. "song" is a lover's assertion of his lady's transcendent charms, which he challenges those even to deny who do not love her. "incident of the french camp." a boy soldier of the army of napoleon has received his death wound in planting the imperial flag within the walls of ratisbon. he contrives by a supreme effort to gallop out to the emperor--who has watched the storming of the city from a mound a mile or two away--fling himself from the horse, and, holding himself erect by its mane, announce the victory. no sign of pain escapes him. but when napoleon suddenly exclaims: "you are wounded," the soldier's pride in him is touched. "i am killed, sire," he replies; and, smiling, falls dead at the emperor's feet. the story is true; but its actual hero was a man. "count gismond" is an imaginary episode of the days of chivalry. it relates how a young girl had been chosen queen of a tournament; and how a false knight, instigated by two cousins who were jealous of her beauty, accused her, in the open field, of being unfit to bestow a crown; how a true knight who loved her, killed the lie by a blow struck at the liar's mouth; and then, mortally wounding him in single combat, dragged him to retract it at the lady's feet; how he laid his protecting arm around her, and led her away to the southern home where she is now his proud and happy wife, with sons growing up to resemble him. the fearless confidence with which she has awaited the result of the duel, as bearing god's testimony to the truth, is very characteristic of the time. "the boy and the angel" is an imaginary legend which presents one of mr. browning's deepest convictions in a popular form. theocrite was a poor boy, who worked diligently at his craft, and praised god as he did so. he dearly wished to become pope, that he might praise him better, and god granted the wish. theocrite sickened and seemed to die. and he awoke to find himself a priest, and also, in due time, pope. but god missed the praise, which had gone up to him from the boy craftsman's cell; and the angel gabriel came down to earth, and took theocrite's former place. and god was again not satisfied; for the angelic praise could not replace for him the human. "the silencing of that one weak voice had stopped the chorus of creation." so theocrite returned to his old self; and the angel gabriel became pope instead of him. "the glove" is the well-known story[ ] of a lady of the court of francis i., who, in order to test the courage of her suitor, threw her glove into the enclosure in which a captive lion stood; and describes the suitor--one de lorge--as calmly rescuing the glove, but only to fling it in the lady's face; this protest against her heartlessness and vanity being endorsed by both the king and court. but at this point mr. browning departs from the usual version: for he takes the woman's part. the supposed witness and narrator of the incident, the poet ronsard, sees a look in her face which seems to say that the experiment, if painful, has been worth making; and he gives her the opportunity of declaring so. she had too long, she explains, been expected to take words for deeds, and to believe on his mere assertion, that her admirer was prepared to die for her; and when the sight of this lion brought before her the men who had risked their lives in capturing it, without royal applause to sustain them, the moment seemed opportune for discovering what this one's courage was worth. she marries a youth, so the poet continues, whose love reveals itself at this moment of her disgrace; and (he is disposed to believe) will live happily, though away from the court. de lorge, rendered famous by the incident, woos and wins a beauty who is admired by the king, and acquires practice in seeking her gloves--where he is not meant to find them--at the moments in which his presence is superfluous. "the twins" is a parable told by luther in his "table talk," to show that charity and prosperity go hand in hand: and that to those who cease to give it will no longer be given. "dabitur" only flourishes where "date" is well-fed. "the pied piper of hamelin" (hameln)[ ] is the story of a mysterious piper who is said to have appeared at hameln in the fourteenth century, at a moment when the city was infested by rats. according to the legend, he freed it from this nuisance, by shrill notes of his pipe which lured the rats after him to the edge of the river weser, where they plunged in and were drowned; and then, to punish the corporation, which had refused him the promised pay, enticed away all its children, by sweet notes from his pipe; and disappeared with them into the koppelberg, a neighbouring mountain, which opened and then closed on them for ever. the legend also asserts that these facts (to which mr. browning has made some imaginative additions), were recorded on a church window, and in the name of a street. but the assertion no longer finds belief. "gold hair" is a true "story of pornic," which may be read in guide-books to the place. a young girl of good family died there in odour of sanctity; she seemed too pure and fragile for earth. but she had one earthly charm, that of glorious golden hair; and one earthly feeling, which was her apparent pride in it. as she lay on her deathbed, she entreated that it might not be disturbed; and she was buried near the high altar of the church of st. gilles[ ] with the golden tresses closely swathed about her. years afterwards, the church needed repair. part of the pavement was taken up. a loose coin drew attention to the spot in which the coffin lay. its boards had burst, and scattered about, lay thirty double louis, which had been hidden in the golden hair. so the saint-like maiden was a miser. "hervÉ riel" commemorates the skill, courage, and singleness of heart of a breton sailor, who saved the french squadron when beaten at cape la hogue and flying before the english to st. malo, by guiding it through the shallows of the river rance, in a manner declared impracticable by the maloese themselves; being all the while so unconscious of the service he was rendering, that, when desired to name his reward, he begged for a _whole day's holiday_, to run home and see his wife. his home was le croisic. _third group._ "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr" represents a follower of abd-el-kadr hastening through the desert to join his chief. mystic fancies crowd upon him as he "rides" and "rides": his pulses quickened by the end in view, and by the swift unresting motion of a horse which never needs the spur; and as he describes his experience in his own excited words, we receive not only the mental picture, but the physical impression of it. this poem is a strong instance of mr. browning's power of conveying sense by sound, when he sees occasion for doing so. "meeting at night" is a glimpse of moonlight and repose; and of the appropriate seclusion in the company of the one woman loved. "parting at morning" asserts the need of "men" and their "world," which is born again with the sunshine. "the patriot" tells, as its second title informs us, "an old story." only this day year, the "patriot" entered the city as its hero, amidst a frenzy of gratitude and joy. to-day he passes out of it through comparatively silent streets; for those for whom he has laboured last as first, are waiting for him at the foot of the scaffold. no infliction of physical pain or moral outrage is spared him as he goes. he is "safer so," he declares. the reward men have withheld awaits him at the hand of god. "instans tyrannus"[ ] is the confession of a king, who has been possessed by an unreasoning and uncontrolled hatred for one man. this man was his subject, but so friendless and obscure that no hatred could touch, so stupid or so upright that no temptation could lure him into his enemy's power. the king became exasperated by the very smallness of the creature which thus kept him at bay; drew the line of persecution closer and closer; and at last ran his victim to earth. but, at the critical moment, the man so long passive and cowering threw himself on the protection of god. the king saw, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, an arm thrown out from the sky, and the "wretch" he had striven to crush, safely enfolded in it then he in his turn--was "afraid." "mesmerism" is a fanciful but vivid description of an act of mesmeric power, which draws a woman, alone, in the darkness, and through every natural obstacle, to the presence of the man who loves her. "time's revenges" is also a confession made in the form of a soliloquy. the speaker has a friend whose devotion is equal to any test, and whose love he barely repays with liking; and he has a lady-love by whom this friend is avenged; for he has given up to his passion for her his body and his soul, his peace and his renown, every laudable ambition, every rational aim; and he knows she would let him roast by a slow fire if this would procure her an invitation to a certain ball. "the italian in england" is the supposed adventure of a leading italian patriot, told by himself in later years. he tells how he was hiding from the austrians, who had put a price upon his head, and were scouring the country in pursuit of him; how, impelled by hunger, he disclosed his place of concealment to a peasant girl--the last of a troop of villagers who were passing by; and how she saved his life at the risk of her own, and when she would have been paid in gold for betraying him. he relates also that his first thought was to guard himself against betrayal by not telling her who he was; but that her loyal eyes, her dignified form and carriage (perhaps too, the consummate tact with which she had responded to his signal) in another moment had put the thought to flight, and he fearlessly placed his own, and his country's destiny in her hands. he is an exile in england now. friends and brothers have made terms with the oppressor, and his home is no longer theirs. but among the wishes which still draw him to his native land, is one, less acknowledged than the rest and which perhaps lies deeper, that he may see that noble woman once more; talk to her of the husband who was then her lover, of her children, and her home; and, once more, as he did in parting from her, kiss her hand in gratitude, and lay his own in blessing on her head.[ ] "protus" is a fragment of an imaginary chronicle: recording in the same page and under the head of the same year, how the child-emperor, protus, descended from a god, was growing in beauty and in grace, worshipped by the four quarters of the known world; and how john, the pannonian blacksmith's bastard, came and took the empire; but, as "some think," let protus live--to be heard of later as dependent in a foreign court; or perhaps to become the monk, whom rumour speaks of as bearing his name, and who died at an advanced age in thrace. a fit comment on this empire lost and won, is supplied by two busts, also imaginary, one showing a "rough hammered" coarse-jawed head; the other, a baby face, crowned with a wreath of violets. "apparent failure" is mr. browning's verdict on three drowned men, whose bodies he saw exposed at the morgue[ ] in paris, in the summer of . he justly assumes that the death was suicide; and as he reads in each face its special story of struggle and disappointment, "poor men, god made, and all for that!" (vol. vii. p. ) the conviction lays hold of him that their doom is not final, that the life god blessed in the beginning cannot end accursed of him; that even a despair and a death like these, record only a seeming failure. the poem was professedly written to save the memory of the morgue, then about to be destroyed. the friend, to whom "waring" refers, is a restless, aspiring, sensitive person, who has planned great works, though he has completed none: who feels his powers always in excess of his performance, and who is hurt if those he loves refuse them credit for being so. he is gone now, no one knows whither; and the speaker, who is conscious that his own friendship has often seemed critical or cold, vainly wishes that he could recall him. his fancy travels longingly to those distant lands, in one of which waring may be playing some new and romantic part; and back again to england, where he tries to think that he is lying concealed, while preparing to surprise the world with some great achievement in literature or art. then someone solves the problem by saying that he has seen him--for one moment--on the illyrian coast; seated in a light bark, just bounding away into the sunset. and the speaker rejoins "oh, never star was lost here but it rose afar!" (vol. v. p. .) and, we conclude, takes comfort from the thought. footnotes: [footnote : both of these first in "hood's magazine."] [footnote : first in "hood's magazine."] [footnote : i here use the word "conscience" in its intellectual rather than its moral sense; as signifying that _consciousness_ of a wrong done, which may, for a time, be evaded or pushed aside.] [footnote : this poem was a personal utterance, provoked by the death of a relative whom mr. browning dearly loved.] [footnote : told by schiller and leigh hunt.] [footnote : written for and inscribed to a little son of the actor, william macready.] [footnote : a picturesque old church which has since been destroyed.] [footnote : the "threatening tyrant." suggested by some words in horace: th ode, ii. book.] [footnote : mr. browning is proud to remember that mazzini informed him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow-exiles in england to show how an englishman could sympathize with them.] [footnote : a small, square building on one of the quays, in which the bodies of drowned persons were placed for identification.] concluding group. "dramatic idyls." "jocoseria." "dramatic idyls." the dramatic idyls form, like the dramas, a natural group; and though, unlike these, they might be distributed under various heads, it would not be desirable to thus disconnect them; for their appearing together at this late period of mr. browning's career, constitutes them a landmark in it. they each consist of a nucleus of fact--supplied by history or by romance, as the case may be--and of material, and in most cases, mental circumstance, which mr. browning's fancy has engrafted on it; and in both their material and their mental aspect they display a concentrated power, which clearly indicates what i have spoken of as the "crystallizing" process mr. browning's genius has undergone. a comparison of these poems with "pauline," "paracelsus," or even "pippa passes," will be found to justify this assertion. the idyls consist of two series, occupying each a volume. the first, published , contains:-- "martin relph." "pheidippides." "halbert and hob." "ivàn ivànovitch." "tray." "ned bratts." the hero of "martin relph" is an old man, whose life is haunted by something which happened to him when little more than a boy. a girl of his own village had been falsely convicted of treason, and the guns were already levelled for her execution, when martin relph, who had stolen round on to some rising ground behind the soldiers and villagers who witnessed the scene, saw what no one else could see: a man, about a quarter of mile distant, rushing onwards in staggering haste, and waving a white object over his head. he knew this was vincent parkes, rosamond page's lover, bearing the expected proofs of her innocence. he knew also that by a shout he might avert her doom. but something paralyzed his tongue, and the girl fell. the man who would have rescued her but for delays and obstacles, which no power of his could overcome, was found dead where martin relph had seen him. the remembrance of these two deaths leaves martin relph no rest; for conscience tells him that his part in them was far worse than it appeared. it tells him that what struck him dumb at that awful moment was not, as others said, the simple cowardice of a boy: he loved in secret the girl whom vincent parkes was coming to save; and if _he_ had saved her, it would have been for that other man. but that thought could only flash on him in one second of fiery consciousness; he had no time to recognize it as a motive; and he clings madly to the hope that his conscience is mistaken, and it was not that which silenced him. every year, at the same spot, he re-enacts the scene, striving to convince himself--with those who hear him--that he has been a coward, but not a murderer; and in the moral and physical reaction from the renewed agony, half-succeeds in doing so. the story, thus told in martin relph's words, is supposed to have been repeated to the present narrator by a grandfather, who heard them. it embodies a vague remembrance of something read by mr. browning when he was himself a boy. the facts related in "pheidippides" belong to greek legendary history, and are told by herodotus and other writers. when athens was threatened by the invading persians, she sent a running messenger to sparta, to demand help against the foreign foe. the mission was unsuccessful. but the "runner," pheidippides, fell in on his return, with the god pan; and though alone among greeks the athenians had refused to honour him, he promised to fight with them in the coming battle. pheidippides was present, when this battle--that of marathon--was fought and won. he "ran" once more, to announce the victory at athens; and fell, dead, with the words, "rejoice, we conquer!" on his lips. this death followed naturally on the excessive physical strain; but mr. browning has used it as a connecting link between the historic and the imaginary parts of the idyl. according to this, pheidippides himself tells his first adventure, to the assembled rulers of athens: depicting, in vivid words, the emotions which winged his course, and bore him onwards over mountains and through valleys, with the smooth swiftness of running fire; and he also relates that pan promised him a personal reward for his "toil," which was to consist in release from it. this release he interprets as freedom to return home, and to marry the girl he loves. it meant a termination to his labours, more tragic, but far more glorious: to die, proclaiming the victory which they had helped to secure. pan is also made to present him with a sprig of fennel--symbol of marathon, or the "fennel-field"--as pledge of his promised assistance. "halbert and hob" is the story of a fierce father and son who lived together in solitude, shunned by their fellow-men. one christmas night they drifted into a quarrel, in the course of which the son seized his father, and was about to turn him out of doors: when the latter, with unaccustomed mildness, bade him stay his hand. just so, he said, in his youth, had he proceeded against his own father; and at just this stage of the proceeding had a voice in his heart bidden him desist.... and the son thus appealed to desisted also. this fact is told by aristotle[ ] as an instance of the hereditary nature of anger. but mr. browning sees more in it than that. if, he declares, nature creates hard hearts, it is a power beyond hers which softens them; and in his version of "halbert and hob" this supernatural power completes the work it has begun. the two return in silence to their fireside. the next morning the father is found dead. the son has become a harmless idiot, to remain so till the end of his life. "ivan ivanovitch" is the reproduction, with fictitious names and imaginary circumstances, of a popular russian story, known as "the judgment of god." a young woman travelling through the forest on a winter's night, is attacked by wolves, and saves her own life by throwing her children to them. but when she reaches her village, and either confesses the deed or stands convicted of it, one of its inhabitants, by trade a carpenter and the ivàn ivànovitch of the idyl, lifts the axe which he is plying, and strikes off her head: this informal retribution being accepted, by those present, as in conformity with the higher law. mr. browning has raised the mother's act out of the sphere of vulgar crime, by the characteristic method of making her tell her story: and show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature was powerless against the fear of pain, and the impulse to self-preservation. she describes with appalling vividness the experiences of the night: the moonlit forest--the snow-covered ground--the wolves approaching with a whispering tread, which seems at first but the soughing of a gentle wind--the wedge-like, ever-widening mass, which emerges from the trees; then the flight, and the pursuit: the latter arrested for one moment by the sacrifice of each victim; to be renewed the next, till none is left to sacrifice: one child dragged from the mother's arms; another shielded by her whole body, till the wolf's teeth have fastened in her flesh; and though she betrays, in the very effort to conceal it, how little she has done to protect her children's lives, we realize the horror of her situation, and pity even while we condemn, her. but some words of selfish rejoicing at her own deliverance precede the fatal stroke, and in some degree challenge it. and mr. browning farther preserves the spirit of the tradition, by giving to her sentence the sanction of the village priest or "pope," into whose presence the decapitated body has been conveyed. the secular authorities are also on the spot, and condemn the murder as contrary both to justice and to law. but the pope declares that the act of ivàn ivànovitch has been one of the higher justice which is above law. he himself is an aged man--so aged, he says, that he has passed through the clouds of human convention, and stands on the firm basis of eternal truth. looking down upon the world from this vantage-ground, he sees that no gift of god is equal to that of life; no privilege so high as that of reproducing its "miracle;" and that the mother who has cast away her maternal crown, and given over to destruction the creatures which she has borne, has sinned an "unexampled sin," for which a "novel punishment" was required. no otherwise than did moses of old, has ivàn ivànovitch interpreted the will--shown himself the servant--of god. how mr. browning's ivàn ivànovitch himself judges the case, is evidenced by this fact, that after wiping the blood from his axe, he betakes himself to playing with his children; and that when the lord of the village has--reluctantly--sent a deputation to inform him that he is free, the words, "how otherwise?" are his only answer. "tray" describes an instance of animal courage and devotion which a friend of mr. browning's actually witnessed in paris. a little girl had fallen into the river. none of the bystanders attempted to rescue her. but a dog, bouncing over the balustrade, brought the child to land; dived again, no one could guess why; and after battling with a dangerous current, emerged with the child's doll; then trotted away as if nothing had occurred. this "tray" is made to illustrate mr. browning's ideal of a hero, in opposition to certain showy and conventional human types; and the little narrative contains some scathing reflections on those who talk of such a creature as merely led by instinct, or would dissect its brain alive to discover how the "soul" is secreted there. "ned bratts" was suggested by the remembrance of a passage in john bunyan's "life and death of mr. badman." bunyan relates there that some twenty years ago, "at a summer assizes holden at hertford, while the judge was sitting on the bench," a certain old tod came into the court, and declared himself "the veriest rogue that breathes upon the earth"--a thief from childhood, &c., &c.; that the judge first thought him mad, but after conferring with some of the justices, agreed to indict him "of several felonious actions;" and that as he heartily confessed to all of these, he was hanged, with his wife, at the same time. mr. browning has turned hertford into bedford; made the time of the occurrence coincide with that of bunyan's imprisonment; and supposed the evident conversion of this man and woman to be among the many which he effected there. the blind daughter of bunyan, who plays an important part in "ned bratts," is affectingly spoken of in her father's work; and the tag-laces, which have subserved the criminal purposes of bratts and his wife, represent an industry by which he is known to have supported himself in prison. mr. browning, finally, has used the indications bunyan gives, of the incident taking place on a very hot day, so as to combine the sense of spiritual stirring with one of unwholesome and grotesque physical excitement; and this, as he describes it, is the genuine key-note of the situation. the character of ned bratts is made a perfect vehicle for these impressions. his "tab" (tabitha) has had an interview with john bunyan, and been really moved by his majestic presence, and warning, yet hope-inspiring words. but he himself has been principally worked upon by the reading of the "pilgrim's progress;" and we see in him throughout, an unregenerate ruffian, whose carnal energies have merely transferred themselves to another field; and whose blood is fired to this act of martyrdom both by yesterday's potations, and to-day's virtuously endured thirst. "a mug," he cries, in the midst of his confessions; or, "no (addressing his wife), a prayer!" "dip for one out of the book!..." (vol. xv. p. .) the precarious nature of his conversion is, indeed, vividly present to his own mind. it is borne in upon him that he is "christmas," and must escape from the city of destruction. he would like nothing better, in his present mood, than to undertake the whole pilgrimage, and, as it were, cudgel his way through; and since it is late in the day for this, he chooses the short cut by the gallows, as the next best thing. but he is, above all, desirous to be taken while the penitent fit is on him: and urgently sets forth those past misdeeds, which constitute his and his wife's claim to a speedy despatch, such as will place them beyond the danger of backsliding. already, he declares, satan is whispering to him of the pleasures he is leaving behind; and the seductions of to-morrow's brawl and bear-baiting are threatening to turn the scale. another moment, and instead of going up to heaven, like faithful, in a chariot and pair, he will be the lost man in the iron cage! when the two have had their wish, and been hanged "out of hand," the bystanders are edified to tears. but the loyalty of the chief justice forbids any imputing of the act of grace to the influence of john bunyan. its cause lies rather, he asserts, in the twelve years' pious reign of the restored charles. the second series of the "dramatic idyls" was published in , and contains:-- "echetlos." "clive." "muléykeh." "pietro of abano." "doctor ----" "pan and luna." it has also a little prologue and epilogue: the former satirizing the pretension to understand the soul, which we cannot see, while we are baffled by the workings of the bodily organs, which we can see; the latter directed against the popular idea that the more impressible and more quickly responsive natures are the soil of which "song" is born. the true poet, it declares, is as the pine tree which has grown out of a rock. "echetlos" (holder of the ploughshare) is another legend of the battle of marathon. it tells, in mr. browning's words, how one with the goat-skin garment, and the broad bare limbs of a "clown," was seen on the battle-field ploughing down the enemy's ranks: the ploughshare flashing now here, now there, wherever the grecian lines needed strengthening; how he vanished when the battle was won; and how the oracle, of which his name was asked, bade the inquirers not care for it: "say but just this: we praise one helpful whom we call the holder of the ploughshare. the great deed ne'er grows small." (vol. xv. p. .) miltiades and themistocles had shown that a great name could do so.[ ] the anecdote which forms the basis of "clive," was told to mr. browning in by mrs. jameson, who had shortly before heard it at lansdowne house, from macaulay. it is cursorily mentioned in macaulay's "essays." when robert clive was first in india, a boy of fifteen, clerk in a merchant's office at st. david's, he accused an officer with whom he was playing, of cheating at cards, and was challenged by him in consequence. clive fired, as it seems, prematurely, and missed his aim. the officer, at whose mercy he had thus placed himself, advanced to within arm's length, held the muzzle of his pistol to the youth's forehead, and summoned him to repeat his accusation. clive did repeat it, and with such defiant courage that his adversary was unnerved. he threw down the weapon, confessed that he had cheated, and rushed out of the room. a chorus of indignation then broke forth among those who had witnessed the scene. they declared that the "wronged civilian" should be righted; and that he who had thus disgraced her majesty's service should be drummed--if needs be, kicked--out of the regiment. but here clive interposed. not one, he said, of the eleven, whom he addressed by name and title, had raised a finger to save his life. he would clear scores with any or all among them who breathed a word against the man who had spared it. nor, as the narrative continues, and as the event proved, was such a word ever spoken. clive is supposed to relate this experience, a week before his self-inflicted death, to a friend who is dining with him; and who, struck by his depressed mental state, strives to arouse him from it by the question: which of his past achievements constitutes, in his own judgment, the greatest proof of courage. he gives the moment in which the pistol was levelled at his head, as that in which he felt, not most courage, but most fear. but, as he explains to his astonished listener, it was not the almost certainty of death, which, for one awful minute, made a coward of him; it was the bare possibility of a reprieve, which would have left no appeal from its dishonour. his opponent refused to fire. he might have done so with words like these: "keep your life, calumniator!--worthless life i freely spare: mine you freely would have taken--murdered me and my good fame both at once--and all the better! go, and thank your own bad aim which permits me to forgive you!..." (vol. xv. p. .) what course would have remained to him but to seize the pistol, and himself send the bullet into his brain? this tremendous mental situation is, we need hardly say, mr. browning's addition to the episode. the poem contains also some striking reflections on the risks and responsibilities of power; and concludes with an expression of reverent pity for the "great unhappy hero" for whom they proved too great. "mulÉykeh" is an old arabian story. the name which heads it is that of a swift, beautiful mare, who was hóseyn--her owner's, "pearl." he loved her so dearly, that, though a very poor man, no price would tempt him to sell her; and in his fear of her being stolen, he slept always with her head-stall thrice wound round his wrist: and buhéyseh, her sister, saddled for instantaneous pursuit. one night she was stolen; and duhl, the thief, galloped away on her and felt himself secure: for the pearl's speed was such that even her sister had never overtaken her. she chafed, however, under the strange rider, and slackened her pace. buhéyseh, bearing hóseyn, gained fast upon them; the two mares were already "neck by croup." then the thought of his darling's humiliation flashed on hóseyn's mind. he shouted angrily to duhl in what manner he ought to urge her. and the pearl, obeying her master's voice, no less than the familiar signal prescribed by him, bounded forward, and was lost to him forever. hóseyn returned home, weeping sorely, and the neighbours told him he had been a fool. why not have kept silence and got his treasure back? "'and--beaten in speed!' wept hóseyn: 'you never have loved my pearl.'" (vol. xv. p. .) the man who gives his name to "pietro of abano" was the greatest italian philosopher and physician of the thirteenth century.[ ] he was also an astrologer, pretending to magical knowledge, and persecuted, as mr. browning relates. but the special story he tells of him has been told of others also. pietro of abano had the reputation of being a wizard; and though his skill in curing sickness, as in building, star-reading, and yet other things, conferred invaluable services on his fellow-men, he received only kicks and curses for his reward. his power seemed, nevertheless, so enviable, that he was one day, in the archway of his door, accosted by a young greek, who humbly and earnestly entreated that the secret of that power might be revealed to him. he promised to repay his master with loving gratitude; and hinted that the bargain might be worth the latter's consideration, since nature, in all else his slave, forbade his drinking milk (this is told of the true pietro): in other words, denied him the affection which softens and sweetens the dry bread of human life. pietro pretended to consent, and began, to utter, by way of preface, the word "benedicite." the young greek lost consciousness at its second syllable; and awoke to find himself alone, and with a first instalment of peter's secret in his mind. "good is product of evil, and to be effected through it." acting upon this doctrine, he traded on the weaknesses of his fellow-creatures wherever the opportunity occurred; and attained by this means, first, wealth; next temporal, and then spiritual, power; rising finally to the dignity of pope. at each stage of this progress, peter came to him in apparent destitution, and claimed the promised gratitude in an urgent, but very modest prayer for assistance. and each time peter's presence infused into him a fresh power of unscrupulousness, and sent him a step farther on his way. but each time also the pupil postponed his obligation, till he at last disclaimed it; and--enthroned in the lateran--was dismissing his benefactor with insult: when the closing syllables--"dicite"--sounded in his ear; and he became conscious of peter's countenance smiling back at him over his shoulder, and peter's door being banged in his face. and he then knew that he had lived a lifetime in the fraction of a minute, and that the magician, by means of whom he had done so, justly declined to trust him. mr. browning, however, bids the young greek persevere; since he might ransack peter's books, without discovering a better secret for gaining power over the masses, than the "cleverness uncurbed by conscience," which he perhaps already possesses.[ ] "doctor ----" is an old hebrew legend, founded upon the saying that a bad wife is stronger than death. satan complains, in his character of death, that man has the advantage of him: since he may baffle him, whenever he will, by the aid of a bad woman; and he undertakes to show this in his own person. he comes to earth, marries, and has a son, who in due time must be supplied with a profession. this son is too cowardly to be a soldier, and too lazy to be a lawyer; divinity is his father's sphere. so satan decides that he shall be a doctor; and endows him with a faculty which will enable him to practise medicine, without any knowledge of it at all. the moment he enters a sick room, he will see his father spiritually present there; and unless he finds him seated at the sick's man's head, that man is not yet doomed. thus endowed, doctor ----can cure a patient who was despaired of, with a dose of penny-royal, and justly predict death for one whose only ailment is a pimple. his success carries all before it. one day, however, he is summoned to the emperor, who lies sick; and the emperor offers gold, and power, and, lastly, his daughter's hand, as the price of his recovery. but this time satan sits at the head of the bed, and not even such an appeal to his pride and greed will induce him to grant the patient even a temporary reprieve. the son, thus driven to bay, pretends to be struck by a sudden thought. "he will try the efficacy of the mystic jacob's staff." he whispers to an attendant to bid his mother bring it; and as satan's bad wife enters the room, satan vanishes through the ceiling, leaving a smell of sulphur behind him. the emperor gets well; but doctor ----renounces the promised gold: for it was to be the princess's dowry; and he is too wise to accept it on the condition of saddling himself with a wife. "pan and luna" describes a mythical adventure of luna--the moon, given by virgil in the georgics; and has for its text a line from them (iii. ): "si credere dignum est."[ ] according to the legend, luna was one night entrapped by pan who lay in wait for her in the form of a cloud, soft and snowy as the fleece of a certain breed of sheep; and, virgil continues, followed him to the woodland, "by no means spurning him." but mr. browning tells the story in a manner more consonant with the traditional modesty of the "girl-moon." she was, he says, distressed by the exposure of her full-orbed charms, as she flew bare through the vault of heaven: the protecting darkness ever vanishing before her; and she took refuge for concealment in the cloud of which the fleecy billows were to close and contract about her, in the limbs of the goat-god. how little she accepted this her first eclipse, may be shown, he thinks, by the fact that she never now lingers within a cloud longer than is necessary to "rip" it through. "jocoseria." the volume so christened (grave and gay), published , shows a greater variety of subject and treatment than do the dramatic idyls, and its contents might be still more easily broken up; but they are also best given in their original form. they are-- "wanting is--what?" "donald." "solomon and balkis." "cristina and monaldeschi." "mary wollstonecraft and fuseli." "adam, lilith, and eve." "ixion." "jochanan hakkadosh." "never the time and the place." "pambo." "wanting is--what?" is an invocation to love, as the necessary supplement to whatever is beautiful in life. it may equally be addressed to the spirit of love, or to its realization in the form of a beloved person. "donald" is a true story, repeated to mr. browning by one who had heard it from its hero the so-called donald, himself. this man, a fearless sportsman in the flush of youth and strength, found himself one day on a narrow mountain ledge--a wall of rock above, a precipice below, and the way barred by a magnificent stag approaching from the opposite side. neither could retrace his steps. there was not space enough for them to pass each other. one expedient alone presented itself: that the man should lie flat, and the stag (if it would) step over him. and so it might have been. donald slipped sideways on to his back. the stag, gently, cautiously, not grazing him with the tip of a hoof, commenced the difficult transit; the feat was already half accomplished. but the lifted hind legs laid bare the stomach of the stag; and donald, who was sportsman first, and man long afterwards, raised himself on his elbow, and stabbed it. the two rolled over into the abyss. the stag, for the second time, saved its murderer's life; for it broke his fall. he came out of the hospital into which he had been carried, a crippled, patched-up wretch, but able to crawl on hands and knees to wherever his "pluck" might be appreciated, and earn a beggar's livelihood by telling how it was last displayed. these facts are supposed to be related in a scotch bothie, to a group of young men already fired by the attractions of sport; and are the narrator's comment on the theory, that moral soundness as well as physical strength, is promoted by it. "solomon and balkis" is the talmudic version[ ] of the dialogue, which took place between solomon and the queen of sheba, on the occasion of her visit to the wise king. they begin by talking for effect: and when questioned by each other as to the kind of persons they most readily admit to their respective courts, solomon answers that he welcomes the wise, whatever be their social condition; and balkis declares that her sympathies are all with the good. but a chance (?) movement on her part jostles the hand of solomon; and the ring it bears slips round, so that the truth-compelling name is turned outwards instead of in. then he confesses that he loves the wise just so long as he is the object of their appreciation; she that she loves the good so long as they bear the form of young and handsome men. he acknowledges, with a sigh, that the soul, which will soar in heaven, must crawl while confined to earth; she owns, with a laugh and a blush, that she has not travelled thus far to hold mental communion with him.[ ] "cristina[ ] and monaldeschi" gives the closing scene of the life of monaldeschi, in what might be cristina's own words. she is addressing the man whom she has convicted of betraying her, and at whose murder she is about to assist; and the monologue reflects the outward circumstance of this murder, as well as the queen's deliberate cruelty, and her victim's cowardice. they are in the palace of fontainebleau. its internal decorations record the loves of diane de poitiers and the french king, in their frequent repetition of the crescent and the salamander,[ ] and of the accompanying motto, "quis separabit;" and cristina, with ghastly irony, calls her listener's attention to the appropriateness of these emblems to their own case. then she plays with the idea that his symbol is the changing moon, hers the fire-fed salamander, dangerous to those only who come too close. changing the metaphor, she speaks of herself as a peak, which monaldeschi has chosen to scale, and which he wrongly hoped to descend when he should be weary of the position, by the same ladder by which he climbed; and her half-playful words assume a still more sinister import, as she depicts the whirling waters, the frightful rocky abyss, into which a moment's giddiness on his part, a touch from her, might precipitate him. she bids him cure the dizziness, ward off the danger, by kneeling, even crouching, at her feet; act the lover, though he no longer is one. and all the while she is drawing him towards the door of that "gallery of the deer," where the priest who is to confess, the soldiers who are to slay, are waiting for him. cristina's last words are addressed, in vindication of her deed, to the priest (lebel), who is aghast at its ferocity. he, she says, has received the culprit's confession, and would not divulge it for a crown. the church at avon[ ] must tell how _her_ secrets have been guarded by him to whom she had entrusted them. "mary wollstonecraft and fuseli" is the mournful yet impassioned expression of an unrequited love. "adam, lilith, and eve" illustrates the manner in which the typical man and woman will proceed towards each other: the latter committing herself by imprudent disclosures when under the influence of fear, and turning them into a joke as soon as the fear is past; the former pretending that he never regarded them as serious. "ixion" is an imaginary protest of this victim of the anger of zeus, wrung from him by his torments, as he whirls on the fiery wheel.[ ] he has been sentenced to this punishment for presuming on the privileges which zeus had conferred upon him, and striving to win heré's[ ] love; and he declares that the punishment is undeserved: "he was encouraged to claim the love of heré, together with the friendship of zeus; he has erred only in his trust in their professions. and granting that it were otherwise--that he had sinned in arrogance--that, befriended by the gods, he had wrongly fancied himself their equal: one touch from them of pitying power would have sufficed to dispel the delusion, born of the false testimony of the flesh!" he asks, with indignant scorn, what need there is of accumulated torment, to prove to one who has recovered his sight, that he was once blind; and in this scorn and indignation he denounces the gods, whose futile vindictiveness would shame the very nature of man; he denounces them as hollow imitations of him whom they are supposed to create: as mere phantoms to which he imparts the light and warmth of his own life. then rising from denunciation to prophecy, he bids his fellow-men take heart. "let them struggle and fall! let them press on the limits of their own existence, to find only human passions and human pettiness in the sphere beyond; let them expiate their striving in hell! the end is not yet come. of his vapourized flesh, of the 'tears, sweat, and blood' of his agony, is born a rainbow of hope; of the whirling wreck of his existence, the pale light of a coming joy. beyond the weakness of the god his tormenter he descries a power, unobstructed, all-pure. "thither i rise, whilst thou--zeus, keep the godship and sink!" if any doubt were still possible as to mr. browning's attitude towards the doctrine of eternal punishment, this poem must dispel it. "jochanan hakkadosh" relates how a certain rabbi was enabled to extend his life for a year and three months beyond its appointed term, and what knowledge came to him through the extension. mr. browning professes to rest his narrative on a rabbinical work, of which the title, given by him in hebrew, means "collection of many lies;" and he adds, by way of supplement, three sonnets, supposed to fantastically illustrate the old hebrew proverb, "from moses to moses[ ] never was one like moses," and embodying as many fables of wildly increasing audacity. the main story is nevertheless justified by traditional jewish belief; and mr. browning has made it the vehicle of some poetical imagery and much serious thought. jochanan hakkadosh was at the point of death. he had completed his seventy-ninth year. but his faculties were unimpaired; and his pupils had gathered round him to receive the last lessons of his experience; and to know with what feelings he regarded the impending change. jochanan hakkadosh had but one answer to give: his life had been a failure. he had loved, learned, and fought; and in every case his object had been ill-chosen, his energies ill-bestowed. he had shared the common lot, which gives power into the hand of folly, and places wisdom in command when no power is left to be commanded. with this desponding utterance he bade his "children" farewell. but here a hubbub of protestation arose. "this must not be the rabbi's last word. it need not be so;" for, as tsaddik, one of the disciples, reminded his fellows, there existed a resource against such a case. their "targums" (commentaries) assured them that when one thus combining the nine points of perfection was overtaken by years before the fruits of his knowledge had been matured, respite might be gained for him by a gift from another man's life: the giver being rewarded for the wisdom to which he ministered by a corresponding remission of ill-spent time. the sacrifice was small, viewed side by side with the martyrdoms endured in rome for the glory of the jewish race.[ ] "who of those present was willing to make it?" again a hubbub arose. the disciples within, the mixed crowd without, all clamoured for the privilege of lengthening the rabbi's life from their own. tsaddik deprecated so extensive a gift. "their teacher's patience should not be overtaxed, like that of perida (whose story he tells), by too long a spell of existence." he accepted from the general bounty exactly one year, to be recruited in equal portions from a married lover, a warrior, a poet, and a statesman; and, the matter thus settled, jochanan hakkadosh fell asleep. four times the rabbi awoke, in renewed health and strength: and four times again he fell asleep: and at the close of each waking term tsaddik revisited him as he sat in his garden--amidst the bloom or the languors, the threatenings or the chill, of the special period of the year--and questioned him of what he had learned. and each time the record was like that of the previous seventy-nine years, one of disappointment and failure. for the gift had been drawn in every case from a young life, and been neutralized by its contact with the old. as a lover, the rabbi declares, he has dreamed young dreams, and his older self has seen through them. he has known beforehand that the special charms of his chosen one would prove transitory, and that the general attraction of her womanhood belonged to her sex and not to her. as a warrior, he has experienced the same process of disenchantment. for the young believe that the surest way to the right and good, is that, always, which is cut by the sword: and that the exercise of the sword is the surest training for those self-devoting impulses which mark the moral nature of man. the old have learned that the most just war involves, in its penalties, the innocent no less than the guilty; that violence rights no wrong which time and patience would not right more fully; and that for the purposes of self devotion, unassisted love is more effective than hate. (picturesque illustrations are made to support this view.) as poet, he has recalled the glow of youthful fancy to feel it quenched by the experience of age: to see those soaring existences whose vital atmosphere is the future, frozen by their contact with a dead past. as statesman, he has looked out upon the forest of life, again seeing the noble trees by which the young trace their future path. and, seeing these, he has known, that the way leads, not by them, but among the brushwood and briars which fill the intervening space; that the statist's work is among the mindless many who will obstruct him at every step, not among the intellectual few by whom his progress would be assisted. as he completes his testimony another change comes over him; and tsaddik, kissing the closing eyelids, leaves his master to die. the rumour of a persecution scatters the jewish inhabitants of the city. not till three months have expired do they venture to return to it; and when tsaddik and the other disciples seek the cave where their master lies, they find him, to their astonishment, alive. then tsaddik remembers that even children urged their offering upon him, and concludes that some urchin or other contrived to make it "stick;" and he anxiously disclaims any share in the "foisting" this crude fragment of existence on the course of so great a life. hereupon the rabbi opens his eyes, and turns upon the bystanders a look of such absolute relief, such utter happiness, that, as tsaddik declares, only a second miracle can explain it. it is a case of the three days' survival of the "ruach" or spirit, conceded to those departed saints whose earthly life has anticipated the heavenly; who have died, as it were, half in the better world.[ ] tsaddik has, however, missed the right solution of the problem. jochanan hakkadosh can only define his state as one of _ignorance confirmed by knowledge_; but he makes it very clear that it is precisely the gift of the child's consciousness, which has produced this ecstatic calm. the child's soul in him has reconciled the differing testimony of youth and manhood: solving their contradictions in its unquestioning faith and hope. it has lifted him into that region of harmonized good and evil, where bliss is greater than the human brain can bear. and this is how he feels himself to be dying; bearing with him a secret of perfect happiness, which he vainly wishes he could impart.[ ] "never the time and the place" is a fanciful expression of love and longing, provoked by the opposition of circumstances. the name of "pambo" or "pambus" is known to literature,[ ] as that of a foolish person, who spent months--mr. browning says years--in pondering a simple passage from psalm xxxix.; and remained baffled by the difficulty of its application. the passage is an injunction that man look to his ways, so that he do not offend with his tongue. and pambo finds it easy to practise the first part of this precept, but not at all so the second. mr. browning declares himself in the same case. "he also looks to his ways, and is guided along them by the critic's torch. but he offends with his tongue, notwithstanding." footnotes: [footnote : ethics, vii. vi. .] [footnote : the story is told in pausanias. a painting of echetlos was to be seen in the poecile at athens.] [footnote : petrus aponensis: author of a work quoted in the idyl: conciliator differentiarum. abano is a village near padua.] [footnote : some expressions in this idyl may require explaining. "salomo si nôsset" (novisset) (p. ). "had solomon but known this." "teneo, vix" (p. ). "i scarcely contain myself." "hact[=e]nus" (p. ). the "e" is purposely made long. "hitherto." "peason" (p. ). the old english plural of "pea." "pou sto" (p. ). "where i may stand:" the alleged saying of archimedes--"i could move the world had i a place for my _fulcrum_--'where i might stand' to move it." "tithon" (p. ). tithonus--aurora's lover: for whom she procured the gift of eternal life. "apage, sathanas!" (p. ). "depart satan." customary adjuration. the term "venus," as employed in the postscript to the idyl, signified in roman phraseology, the highest throw of the dice. it signified, therefore the highest promise to him, who, in obedience to the oracle, had tested his fortunes at the fount at abano, by throwing golden dice into it. the "crystal," to which mr. browning refers, is the water of the well or fount, at the bottom of which, as suetonius declared, the dice thrown by tiberius, and their numbers, were still visible. the little air which concludes the post-script reflects the careless or "lilting" mood in which mr. browning had thrown the "fancy dice" which cast themselves into the form of the poem.] [footnote : "if it is proper to be credited."] [footnote : this version is more crudely reproduced by the persian poet jami.] [footnote : the word "conster," which rhymes in the poem with "monster," is old english for "construe."] [footnote : daughter of gustavus adolphus, and queen of sweden.] [footnote : some confusion has here arisen between francis i., whose emblem was the salamander, and henry ii., the historic lover of diane de poitiers. but francis was also said to have been, for a short time, attached to her; and the poetic contrast of the frigid moon and the fiery salamander was perhaps worth the dramatic sacrifice of cristina's accuracy.] [footnote : a village close to fontainebleau, in the church of which monaldeschi was buried.] [footnote : "winged" or "fiery:" fiery from the rapidity of its motion.] [footnote : juno.] [footnote : that is, to moses maimonides.] [footnote : the names and instances given are, as well as the main fact, historical.] [footnote : a talmudic doctrine still held among the jews. the "halaphta," with whom mr. browning connects it, was a noted rabbi.] [footnote : the "bier" and the "three daughters" was a received jewish name for the constellation of the great bear. hence the simile derived from this (vol. xv. pp. - ). the "salem," mentioned at p. , is the mystical new jerusalem to be built of the spirits of the great and good.] [footnote : "chetw. hist. collect.," cent. i., p. . quoted by nath. wanley, "wonders of the little world," p. .] supplement. "ferishtah's fancies." the idea of "ferishtah's fancies" grew out of a fable by pilpay, which mr. browning read when a boy. he lately put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the dervish, who is first introduced as a learner, should reappear in the character of a teacher. ferishtah's "fancies" are the familiar illustrations, by which his teachings are enforced. each fancy or fable, with its accompanying dialogue, is followed by a lyric, in which the same or cognate ideas are expressed in an emotional form; and the effect produced by this combination of moods is itself illustrated in a prologue by the blended flavours of a favourite italian dish, which is fully described there. an introductory passage from "king lear" seems to tell us what we soon find out for ourselves, that ferishtah's opinions are in the main mr. browning's own. fancy . "the eagle," contains the lesson which determined ferishtah, not yet a dervish, to become one. he has learned from the experience which it describes, that it is man's mission to feed those hungry ones who are unable to feed themselves. "the soul often starves as well as the body. he will minister to the hunger of the soul. and to this end he will leave the solitude of the woods in which the lesson came to him, and seek the haunts of men." the lyric deprecates the solitude which united souls may enjoy, by a selfish or fastidious seclusion from the haunts of men. . "the melon-seller," records an incident referred to in a letter from the "times'" correspondent, written many years ago. it illustrates the text--given by mr. browning in hebrew--"shall we receive good at the hands of god, and shall we not receive evil?" and marks the second stage in ferishtah's progress towards dervish-hood. the lyric bids the loved one be unjust for once if she will. "the lover's heart preserves so many looks and words, in which she gave him more than justice." . "shah abbas" shows ferishtah, now full dervish, expounding the relative character of belief. "we wrongly give the name of belief to the easy acquiescence in those reported facts, to the truth of which we are indifferent; or the name of unbelief to that doubting attitude towards reported facts, which is born of our anxious desire that they may be true. it is the assent of the heart, not that of the head, which is valued by the creator." lyric. love will guide us smoothly through the recesses of another's heart. without it, as in a darkened room, we stumble at every step, wrongly fancying the objects misplaced, against which we are stumbling. . "the family" again defends the heart against the head. it defends the impulse to pray for the health and safety of those we love, though such prayer may imply rebellion to the will of god. "he, in whom anxiety for those he loves cannot for the moment sweep all before it, will sometimes be more than man, but will much more often be less." lyric. "let me love, as man may, content with such perfection as may fill a human heart; not looking beyond it for that which only an angel's sense can apprehend." . "the sun" justifies the tendency to think of god as in human form. life moves us to many feelings of love and praise. these embrace in an ascending scale all its beneficent agencies, unconscious and conscious, and cannot stop short of the first and greatest of all. this first cause must be thought of as competent to appreciate our praise and love, and as moved by a beneficent purpose to the acts which have inspired them. the sun is a symbol of this creative power--by many even imagined to be its reality. but that mighty orb is unconscious of the feelings it may inspire; and the divine omnipotence, which it symbolizes, must be no less incompetent to earn them. for purpose is the negation of power, implying something which power has not attained; and would imply deficiency in an existence which presents itself to our intelligence as complete. reason therefore tells us that god can have no resemblance with man; but it tells us, as plainly, that, without a fiction of resemblance, the proper relation between creator and creature, between god and man, is unattainable.[ ] if one exists, for whom the fiction or fancy has been converted into fact--for whom the unknowable has proved itself to contain the knowable: the ball of fire to hold within it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the magnitude, not scorn for the extravagance, of his conception. lyric. "fire has been cradled in the flint, though its ethereal splendours may disclaim the association." . "mihrab shah" vindicates the existence of physical suffering as necessary to the consciousness of well-being; and also, and most especially, as neutralizing the differences, and thus creating the one complete bond of sympathy, between man and man. lyric. "your soul is weighed down by a feeble body. in me a strong body is allied to a sluggish soul. you would fitly leave me behind. impeded as you also are, i may yet overtake you." . "a camel-driver" declares the injustice of punishment, in regard to all cases in which the offence has been committed in ignorance; and shows also that, while a timely warning would always have obviated such an offence, it is often sufficiently punished by the culprit's too tardy recognition of it. "god's justice distinguishes itself from that of man in the acknowledgment of this fact." the lyric deals specially with the imperfections of human judgment. "you have overrated my small faults, you have failed to detect the greater ones." . "two camels" is directed against asceticism. "an ill-fed animal breaks down in the fulfilment of its task. a man who deprives himself of natural joys, not for the sake of his fellow-men, but for his own, is also unfitted for the obligations of life. for he cannot instruct others in its use and abuse. nor, being thus ignorant of earth, can he conceive of heaven." the lyric shows how the finite may prefigure the infinite, by illustrations derived from science and from love. . "cherries" illustrates the axiom that a gift must be measured, not by itself, but by the faculty of the giver, and by the amount of loving care which he has bestowed upon it. man's general performance is to be judged from the same point of view. the lyric connects itself with the argument less closely and less seriously in this case than in the foregoing ones. the speaker has striven to master the art of poetry, and found life too short for it. "he contents himself with doing little, only because doing nothing is worse. but when he turns from verse-making to making love, or, as the sense implies, seeks to express in love what he has failed to express in poetry, all limitations of time and power are suspended; every moment's realization is absolute and lasting." . "plot-culture" is a distinct statement of the belief in a purely personal relation between god and man. it justifies every experience which bears moral fruit, however immoral from human points of view; and refers both the individual and his critic to the final harvest, on which alone the divine judgment will be passed. the lyric repeats the image in which this idea is clothed, more directly than the idea itself. a lover pleads permission to love with his whole being--with sense as well as with soul. . "a pillar at sebzevar" lays down the proposition that the pursuit of knowledge is invariably disappointing: while love is always, and in itself, a gain. the lyric modifies this idea into the advocacy of a silent love: one which reveals itself without declaration. . "a bean-stripe: also apple-eating" is a summary of mr. browning's religious and practical beliefs. we cannot, it says, determine the prevailing colour of any human life, though we have before us a balanced record of its bright and dark days. for light or darkness is only absolute in so far as the human spirit can isolate or, as it were, stand still within, it. every living experience, actual or remembered, takes something of its hue from those which precede or follow it: now catching the reflection of the adjoining lights and shades; now brighter or darker by contrast with them. the act of living fuses black and white into grey; and as we grasp the melting whole in one backward glance, its blackness strikes most on the sense of one man, its whiteness on that of another. ferishtah admits that there are lives which seem to be, perhaps are, stained with a black so deep that no intervening whiteness can affect it; and he declares that this possibility of absolute human suffering is a constant chastener to his own joys. but when called upon to reconcile the avowed optimism of his views with the actual as well as sympathetic experience of such suffering, he shows that he does not really believe in it. one race, he argues, will flourish under conditions which another would regard as incompatible with life; and the philosophers who most cry down the value of life are sometimes the least willing to renounce it. he cannot resist the conviction that the same compensating laws are at work everywhere. in explanation of the fact, that nothing given in our experience affords a stable truth--that the black or white of one moment is always the darker or lighter grey of another--ferishtah refers his disciples to the will of god. our very scheme of goodness is a fiction, which man the impotent cannot, god the all-powerful does not, convert into reality. but it is a fiction created by god within the human mind, that it may work for truth there; so also is it with the fictitious conceptions which blend the qualities of man with those of god. to the objection "a power, confessed past knowledge, nay, past thought, --thus thought and known!" (vol. xvi. p. .) ferishtah replies that to know the power by its operation, is all we _need_ in the case of a human benefactor or lord: all we _can_ in the case of those natural forces which we recognize in every act of our life. and when reminded that the sense of indebtedness implies a debtor--one ready to receive his due: and that we need look no farther for the recipient than the great men who have benefited our race: his answer is, that such gratitude to his fellow-men would be gratitude to himself, in whose perception half their greatness lies. "he might as well thank the starlight for the impressions of colour, which have been supplied by his own brain." the lyric disclaims, in the name of one of the world's workers, all excessive--_i.e._, loving recognition of his work. the speaker has not striven for the world's sake, nor sought his ideals there. "those who have done so may claim its love. for himself he asks only a just judgment on what he has achieved." mr. browning here expresses for the first time his feeling towards the "religion of humanity;" and though this was more or less to be inferred from his general religious views, it affords, as now stated, a new, as well as valuable, illustration of them. the theistic philosophy which makes the individual the centre of the universe, is, perhaps, nowhere in his works, so distinctly set forth as in this latest of them. but nowhere either has he more distinctly declared that the fullest realization of the individual life is self-sacrifice. "renounce joy for my fellows sake? that's joy beyond joy;" (_two camels_, vol. xvi p. .) the lyrical supplement to fancy somewhat obscures the idea on which it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view. but here, as in the remainder of the book, we must regard the lyric as suggested by the argument, not necessarily as part of it. the epilogue is a vision of present and future, in which the woe and conflict of our mortal existence are absorbed in the widening glory of an eternal day. the vision comes to one cradled in the happiness of love; and he is startled from it by a presentiment that it has been an illusion created by his happiness. but we know that from mr. browning's point of view, love, even in its illusions, may be accepted as a messenger of truth. index to names and titles in "ferishtah's fancies;"-- p. . "shah abbas." an historical personage used fictitiously. p. . "story of tahmasp." fictitious. p. . "ishak son of absal." fictitious. p. . "the householder of shiraz." fictitious. p. . "mihrab shah." fictitious. p. . "simorgh." a fabulous creature in persian mythology. p. . the "pilgrim's soldier-guide." fictitious. p. . "raksh." rustum's horse in the "shah nemeh." (firdausi's "epic of kings.") p. . (_anglicé_), "does job serve god for nought?" hebrew word at p. , line , "m[=e] el[=o]h[=i]m": "from god." p. . "mushtari." the planet jupiter. p. . "hudhud." fabulous bird of solomon. p. . "sitara." persian for "a star." p. . "shalim shah." persian for "king of kings." p. . "rustem," "gew," "gudarz," "sindokht," "sulayman," "kawah." heroes in the "shah nemeh." p. . the "seven thrones." ursa major. "zurah." venus. "parwin." the pleiades. "mubid." a kind of mage. p. . "zerdusht." "zoroaster." "parleyings with certain people of importance in their day." this volume occupies, even more than its predecessor, a distinctive position in mr. browning's work. it does not discard his old dramatic methods, but in a manner it inverts them; mr. browning has summoned his group of men not for the sake of drawing their portraits, but that they might help him to draw his own. it seems as if the accumulated convictions which find vent in the "parleyings" could no longer endure even the form of dramatic disguise; and they appear in them in all the force of direct reiterated statement, and all the freshness of novel points of view. and the portrait is in some degree a biography; it is full of reminiscences. the "people" with whom mr. browning parleys, important in their day, virtually unknown in ours, are with one exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his very earliest youth. the parleyings are: i. "with bernard de mandeville." ii. "with daniel bartoli." iii. "with christopher smart." iv. "with george bubb dodington." v. "with francis furini." vi. "with gerard de lairesse." vii. "with charles avison." they are enclosed between a prologue and an epilogue both dramatic and fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental personality than the body of the work. "apollo and the fates." "fust and his friends." in "apollo and the fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element preponderates. it represents apollo as descending into the realms of darkness and pleading with the fate sisters for the life of admetus, the thread of which atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. the sequel to this incident has been given in mr. browning's transcript from "alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of euripides, to the "eumenides" of Æschylus and to homer's "hymn to mercury": the general sense of the passages indicated being this:-- euripides.--"admetus--whom, cheating the fates, i saved from death." Æschylus (to apollo).--"aye, such were your feats in the house of pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal: you it was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the goddesses with wine." homer.--"the fates are three virgin sisters,--winged and white-haired,--dwelling below parnassus: they feed on honey, and so get drunk, and readily tell the truth. if deprived of it they delude." mr. browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the fates find truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by assuming that they never knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it: profoundly intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been. apollo urges his request that admetus, now threatened with premature death, may live out the appointed seventy years. the fates retort on him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon. they enumerate the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man's earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the delusive sunshine, the glamour of hope, with which he (apollo) gilds it. apollo owns that human happiness may rest upon illusion, but undertakes to show that man holds the magic within himself; and to that end persuades the sisters to drain a bowl of wine which he has brought with him. in the moment's intoxication the scales fall from their eyes, and they see that life is good. they see that if its earlier course means conflict, old age is its recorded victory. they see it enriched by the joys which are only remembered as by the good which only might have been. they praise the actual and still more the potential--the infinite possibilities to which man is born and which imagination alone can anticipate; and joining hands with apollo in a delirious dance, proclaim the discovery of the lost secret: _fancy compounded with fact._ this philosophy is, however, ill-suited to the dark ministers of fate; and an oracular explosion from the earth's depths startles them back into sobriety; in which condition they repudiate the new knowledge which has been born of them, flinging it back on their accomplice with various expressions of disgust. they admit, nevertheless, that the web of human destiny often defeats their spinning; its intended good and evil change places with each other; the true significance of life is only revealed by death; and though they still refuse to yield to apollo's demand, they compromise with it: admetus shall live, if someone else will voluntarily die for him. it is true they neutralize their concession by deriding the idea of such a devoted person being found; and apollo also shows himself a stranger to the decrees of the higher powers by making wrong guesses as to the event; but the whole episode is conceived in a humorous and very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the attitude of the contending parties towards each other. the fates display throughout a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them. apollo finally vindicates mr. browning's optimistic theism by claiming the gifts of bacchus, youngest of the gods, for the beneficent purpose and anterior wisdom of zeus. the one serious idea which runs through the poem is conveyed in its tribute to the power of wine: in other words, to the value of imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact. its partial, tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is vividly illustrated by apollo: and he only changes his imagery when he speaks of reason as doing the same work. it is the imaginative, not the scientific "reason" which mr. browning invokes as help in the perplexities of experience;[ ] as it is the spiritual, and not scientific "experience" on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will so emphatically take his stand.[ ] in the first "parleying" mr. browning invokes the wisdom of bernard de mandeville on certain problems of life: mainly those of the existence of evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in which he believes dr. mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear on the more gloomy philosophy of carlyle, some well-known utterances of whom are brought forward for confutation. the chief points of the argument are as follows:-- carlyle complains that god never intervenes to check the tyranny of evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to come. it would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms; better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at the birth. mr. browning (alias mandeville) replies by the parable of a garden in which beneficent and noxious plants grow side by side. "you must either," he declares, "admit--which you do not--that both good and evil were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or pre-ordained connection between them. in the latter case you may use your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the intentions of him who placed it there." carlyle reminds his opponent of that other parable, according to which it was an enemy who surreptitiously sowed the tares of evil, and these grow because no one can pull them out. divine power and foresight are, in his opinion, incompatible with either theory, and both of these mistaken efforts on man's part to "cram" the infinite within the limits of his own mind and understand what passes understanding. he deprecates the folly of linking divine and human together on the strength of the short space which they may tread side by side, and the anthropomorphic spirit which subjects the one to the other by presenting the illimitable in human form. mr. browning defends his position by an illustration of the use (as also abuse) of symbols spiritual and material; carlyle retorts somewhat impatiently that in thinking of god we have no need of symbolism; we know him as immensity, eternity, and other abstract qualities, and to fancy him under human attributes is superfluous; and mr. browning dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have accompanied it, in a modification of the promethean myth--such a one as the more "human" euripides might have imagined. "when the sun's light first broke upon the earth, and everywhere in and on this there was life, man was the only creature which did not rejoice: for he said, i alone am incomplete in my completeness; i am subject to a power which i alone have the intellect to recognize, hence the desire to grasp. i do not aspire to penetrate the hidden essence, the underlying mystery of the sun's force; but i crave possession of one beam of its light wherewith to render palpable to myself its unseen action in the universe. and prometheus then revealed to him the 'artifice' of the burning-glass, through which henceforward he might enslave the sun's rays to his service while disrobing them of the essential brilliancy which no human sight could endure." in the material uses of the burning-glass we have a parallel for the value of an intellectual or religious symbol. this too is a gathering point for impressions otherwise too diffuse; or, inversely conceived, a sign guiding the mental vision through spaces which would otherwise be blank. its reduced or microcosmic presentment of facts too large for man's mental grasp suggests also an answer to those who bemoan the limitations of human knowledge. characteristic remarks on this subject occur at the beginning of the poem. bernard de mandeville figures throughout the "parleying" as author of "the fable of the bees"; and it is in this work that mr. browning discovers their special ground of sympathy. "the fable of the bees," also entitled "private vices public benefits," and again "the grumbling hive, or knaves turned honest," is meant to show that self-indulgence and self-seeking carried even to the extent of vice are required to stimulate the activities and secure the material well-being of a community. the doctrine, as originally set forth, had at least an appearance of cynicism, and is throughout not free from conscious or unconscious sophistry; and though the theological condemnation evoked by it was nothing short of insane, we cannot wonder that the morality of the author's purpose was impugned. he defends this, however, in successive additions to the work, asserting and re-asserting, by statement and illustration, that his object has been to expose the vices inherent to human society--in no sense to justify them; and mr. browning fully accepts the vindication and even regards it as superfluous. he sees nothing, either in the fable itself or the commentary first attached to it, which may not equally be covered by the christian doctrine of original sin, or the philosophic acceptance of evil as a necessary concomitant, or condition, of good: and finds fresh guarantees for a sound moral intention in the bright humour and sound practical sense in which the book abounds. this judgment was formed (as i have already implied) very early in mr. browning's life, even before the appearance of "pauline," and supplies a curious comment on any impression of mental immaturity which his own work of that period may have produced. bernard de mandeville was a dutch physician, born at dort in the second half of the last century, but who settled in england after taking his degree. he published, besides "the fable of the bees," some works of a more professional kind. his name, as we know it, must have been anglicized. daniel bartoli was a jesuit and historian of his order. mr. browning characterizes him in a footnote as "a learned and ingenious writer," and while acknowledging his blindness in matters of faith would gladly testify to his penetration in those of knowledge;[ ] but the don's editor, angelo cerutti, declares in the same note that his historical work so overflows with superstition and is so crammed with accounts of prodigious miracles as to make the reading it an infliction; and the saint-worship involved in this kind of narrative is the supposed text of the "parleying." mr. browning claims don bartoli's allegiance for a secular saint: a woman more divine in her non-miraculous virtues than some at least of those whom the church has canonized, and whose existence has the merit of not being legendary. the saint in question was marianne pajot, daughter of the apothecary of gaston duke of orleans; and her story, as mr. browning relates it, a well-known episode in the lives of charles iv., duke of lorraine, and the marquis de lassay. charles of lorraine fell violently in love with marianne pajot, whom he met at the "luxembourg" when visiting madame d'orleans, his sister. she was "so fair, so modest, so virtuous, and so witty" that he did not hesitate to offer her his hand; and they were man and wife so far as legal formalities could make them when the monarch (louis xiv.) intervened. charles had by a recent treaty made louis his heir. this threatened no obstacle to his union, since a clause in the marriage contract barred all claims to succession on the part of the children who might be born of it. but "madame" resented the mésalliance; she joined her persuasions with those of the minister le tellier; and the latter persuaded the young king, not absolutely to prevent the marriage, but to turn it to account. a paper was drawn up pledging the duke to fresh concessions, and the bride was challenged in the king's name to obtain his signature to it. on this condition she was to be recognized as duchess with all the honours due to her rank; failing this, she was to be banished to a convent. the alternative was offered to her at the nuptial banquet, at which le tellier had appeared--a carriage and military escort awaiting him outside. she emphatically declined taking part in so disgraceful a compact:[ ] and after doing her best to allay the duke's wrath (which was for the moment terrible), calmly allowed the minister to lead her away, leaving all the bystanders in tears. a few days later marianne returned the jewels which charles had given her, saying, it was not suitable that she should keep them "since she had not the honour of being his wife." he seems to have resigned her without farther protest. de lassay was much impressed by this occurrence, though at the time only ten years old. he too conceived an attachment for marianne pajot, and married her, being already a widower, at the age of twenty-three. their union, dissolved a few years later by her death, was one of unclouded happiness on his part, of unmixed devotion on hers; and the moral dignity by which she had subjugated this somewhat weak and excitable nature was equally attested by the intensity of her husband's sorrow and by its transitoriness. the military and still more amorous adventures of the marquis de lassay make him a conspicuous figure in the annals of french court life. he is indirectly connected with our own through a somewhat pale and artificial passion for sophia dorothea, the young princess of hanover, whose husband became ultimately george i. mr. browning indicates the later as well as earlier stages of de lassay's career; he only follows that of the duke of lorraine into an imaginary though not impossible development. charles had shown himself a being of smaller spiritual stature than his intended wife; and it was only too likely, mr. browning thinks, that the diamonds which should have graced her neck soon sparkled on that of some venal beauty whose challenge to his admiration proceeded from the opposite pole of womanhood. nevertheless he feels kindly towards him. the nobler love was not dishonoured by the more ignoble fancy, since it could not be touched by it. duke charles was still faithful as a man may be. with christopher smart is an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "a song to david," was produced in a mad-house[ ]. of this "song" rossetti has said (i quote the "athenæum" of feb. , ) in a published letter to mr. caine, "this wonderful poem of smart's is the only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century. the _un_accomplished ones are chatterton's--of course i mean earlier than blake or coleridge, and without reckoning so exceptional a genius as burns. a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound." how mr. browning was impressed by such a work of genius, springing up from the dead level of the author's own and his contemporary life, he describes in a simile. he is exploring a large house. he goes from room to room, finding everywhere evidence of decent taste and sufficient, but moderate, expenditure: nothing to repel and nothing to attract him in what he sees. he suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is massed, all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one perfection. he passes from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again meet him on every side. thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of christopher smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of its sanity; and he now asks the author of "a song to david" how one who had thus touched the absolute in art could so decline from it. he assumes that the madness had but revealed the poet: whether or not the fiery outbreak was due to force suppressed or to particles of brain substance disturbed. why was he after as before silent? it might be urged in answer that the full glory of that vision did not return--that the strength and beauty of the universe never came to him again with so direct a message for the eye and ear of his fellow men. but, mr. browning continues, impressions of strength and beauty are only the materials of knowledge. they contain the lesson of life. and that lesson is not given in the reiterated vision of what is beautiful, but in the patient conversion into knowledge and motive of such impressions of beauty--in other words, of strength or power--as man's natural existence affords. the poet's privilege, as the poet's duty, is not merely to impart the pleasure, but to aid the process of instruction. he only suggests the explanation to disclaim it in smart's name. these arguments are very typical of mr. browning's philosophy of art: of his conviction that art has no mission, its intuitions have no authority, distinct from moral and intellectual truth. he concludes the little sermon by denouncing that impatience of fancy which would grasp the end of things before the beginning, and scale the heights of knowledge, while rejecting experience, through which, as by a ladder, we scale them step by step. the lines in "paracelsus," vol. ii., p. , which are in this view so appropriate to the case of christopher smart, bore reference to him. the main facts of his life may be found in any biographical dictionary. with george bubb dodington is a lesson in the philosophy of intrigue, or the art of imposing on our fellow men. it is addressed to bubb dodington[ ] as to an ambitious, obsequious, unscrupulous, and only partially successful courtier; and undertakes to show that, being (more or less) a knave, his conduct also proclaimed him a fool, and lost him the rewards of knavery. mr. browning does not concern himself with the moralities of the case; these, for the time being, are put out of court. he assumes, for the purposes of the discussion, that everyone is selfish and no one need be sincere, and that "george" was justified in labouring for his own advancement and cheating others, if possible, into subservience to it; but he argues that the aim being right, the means employed were wrong, and could only result in failure. the argument begins and ends in the proposition, in itself a truism but which receives here a novel significance, that nothing in creation obeys its like, and that he who would mount by the backs of his fellow men must show some reason why they should lend them. in the olden time, we are reminded, such reasons were supplied by physical force; later, force was superseded by intelligence, _i.e._, wit or cunning; and this must now be supplemented by something deeper, because it has become the property of so many persons as to place no one person at an advantage. bubb dodington's methods have been those of simple cunning, and therefore they have not availed him. the multitude whom he cajoled have seen through his cajoleries, and have resented in these both the attempt to deceive them and the pretension--unfounded as it proved--to exalt himself at their expense. how then can the multitude be deceived into subservience?--by the pretence of indifference to them. an impostor is always supposed to be in earnest. the commonplace impostor is so: he has staked everything on the appearance of being sincere. he, on the other hand, who is reckless in mendacity, who cheats with a laughing eye; who, while silently strenuous in a given cause, appears to take seriously neither it, himself, nor those on whom both depend, irresistibly strikes the vulgar as moved by something greater than himself or they. a "quack" he may be, but like the spiritualistic quack, he invokes the belief in the supernatural, and perhaps shares it. he has the secret which bubb dodington had not. it may be wondered why mr. browning treats the shallower political cunning as merely a foil to the deeper, instead of opposing to it something better than both: but he finds the natural contrast to the half-successful schemer in the wholly triumphant one: and the second picture, like the first, has been drawn from life. it is that of the late lord beaconsfield--as mr. browning sees him. with francis furini is a defence of the study of the nude, based on the life and work of this florentine painter (born ), who at the age of forty also became a priest. according to his biographer, filippo baldinucci,[ ] furini was not only a skilful artist, but a conscientious priest, and a good man. no reproach attached to him but that he attained a special charm of colouring through the practice of painting very young women undraped; and we may infer that he repented this from the current report that when he felt himself dying he entreated those about him to have his pictures burnt. but baldinucci also relates that he had a specious answer ready for whoever remonstrated with him on thus endangering his soul. the answer, which he frankly quotes, is by no means "specious" in the sense in which it is made; and mr. browning cannot believe that a man so inspired by the true artistic passion as those words imply, could in any circumstances become ashamed of the acts to which they refer. "if," furini says, "those scrupulous persons only knew what is the agony of endeavour with which the artist strives at faithfully imitating what he sees, they would also know how little room this leaves in him for the intrusion of alien" (immoral) "thoughts." mr. browning goes farther still. he asserts not only the innocence, but the religiousness, of the painter's art when directed towards the marvels of the female form. he declares its exercise, so directed, to be a subject, not of shame in the sight of the creator, but of thanksgiving to him, and also the best form in which human thanks can be conveyed; and he employs all the vividness of his illustration and all the force of his invective against the so-called artist who sees in the divineness of female beauty only incitement to low desires; in the art which seeks to reproduce it only a cloak for their indulgence. his argument is very strong, and would be unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which baldinucci by anticipation detects in it: mr. browning--as did furini--regards the breach of formal chastity exclusively from the artist's point of view. but he may also argue that this will in the long run determine that of the spectator and that the model herself is from the first amenable to it. mr. browning lays stress upon the technical skill which results from the close copying of nature, and by virtue of which furini must be styled a good painter, whether or not a great one: and though he has never underrated the positive value of technical skill, we do not feel that in this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as high a relative place as in his earlier works. the old convictions reappear at pages - of vol. xvi., when he asserts the danger in which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling its insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the "sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. he still, however, maintains that the true offender against art will ever be the mock artist--the philistine--who sees cause of offence in it. after proclaiming the religiousness of art, furini is called upon to unfold his theology: and he then passes to a confession of faith in which mr. browning's known personal theism is contrasted with the scientific doctrines of evolution. the scientist and the believer would as he distinguishes them join issue on the value of the artistic study of man, since man is for both of them the one essential object of knowledge; but the study (artistic or scientific) is, mr. browning considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary results in the other. according to the scientist, man reigns supreme by his intelligence; according to the believer, he is subject to all the helplessness of his ignorance. in reasoning, therefore, each from his own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. the scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. the _believer_ refers that impulse to a conscious external first cause, and is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) by the progressive revelations which these convey to him. it is so that furini has lived and learned. he has found his lesson in the study of the human frame. there, as on a rock of experience, he has planted his foot, finding confusion and instability wherever he projected this beyond it; striking out sparks of knowledge at every stamp on the firm ground. he has learned that the cause of life is external, because he has seen how the soul permeates and impels the body, how it makes it an instrument of its own raptures and a sharer in them; and he believes that that which caused the soul and thus gifted it will ultimately silence the spiritual conflict with evil and perfect its own creation. he believes this because evil has revealed itself to him as the necessary complement of good--the antitype through which alone the type defines itself; as a condition of knowledge; as a test of what is right; as a motive to life and virtue so indispensable that it must exist as illusion if it did not exist as fact; because, therefore, its existence cannot detract from the goodness of the first cause or the promise which that contains. this constant assertion of the necessity of evil would land mr. browning in a dilemma, if the axiom were presented by him in any character of dogmatic truth: since it claims priority for certain laws of thought over a being which, if omnipotent, must have created them. but the anomaly disappears in the more floating outlines of a poetic personal experience; and mr. browning (alias furini) once more assures us that what he "knows" of the nature and mode of action of the first cause he knows for himself only. how it operates for others is of the essence of the mystery which enfolds him. whether even the means of his own instruction is reality or illusion, fiction or fact, is beyond his ken; he is satisfied that it should be so. mr. browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a picture--exhibited last year at the grosvenor gallery--the subject of which he offers to furini for treatment in the manner described.[ ] with gerard de lairesse is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and mythological in art, and its immediate subject a belgian painter, born at liege, but who nourished at amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century. de lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-classical spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a subject for embellishment by it. this is curiously apparent in a treatise on the art of painting, which he composed, and, by a form of dictation, also illustrated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his sight. an english version of this fell into mr. browning's hands while he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem. foremost in his memory is an imaginary "walk,"[ ] in which the exercise of fancy which the author practises and, mr. browning tells us, enjoins, is strikingly displayed by his "conjecturing" phaeton's tomb from the evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains of the "chariot of the sun" from a piece of broken wheel and some similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground. the remembrance converts itself into a question: the poet's fancy no longer peoples the earth with gods and goddesses; has his insight become less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back? the answer is unwavering; retrogression is not in the creative plan. the poet does not go back. he is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible unrealities, but the realities which are unseen. he can still, if he pleases, evoke those as these, and mr. browning proceeds to show it by calling up a series of dissolving views representing another "walk." a majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights of a long summer's day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene. in the early dawn we see prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to his rock:[ ] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside him; in the dews of morning, artemis triumphant in her double character of huntress-queen and goddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon, lyda and the satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his passion and her indifference;[ ] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of the armies of darius and alexander;[ ]--in the falling night, a dim, silent, deprecating figure: in other words, a ghost. and here mr. browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the point of extreme divergence between the classic spirit and his own. the pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. _his_ religion, as we are again reminded, is one of hope. let us, he says, do and not dream, look forward and not back; ascend the tree of existence into its ripening glory, not hastening over leaf or blossom, not dallying with them; leave greek lore buried in its own ashes, and accept the evidence of life itself that extinction is impossible; that death--mystery though it is, calamity though it may be--ends nothing which has once begun. we may then greet the spring which we do not live to see in other words than those of the greek bard; and the words suggested are those of a dainty lyric, in which the note of gladness seems to break with a little sob, and rings, perhaps, on that account the truer.[ ] with charles avison might be called a reverie on music and musicians, but for the extraordinary vividness of the images and emotions which it conveys. it was induced, mr. browning tells us, by a picturesque little incident which set his thoughts vibrating to the impressions of the word "march": and supplies a parable for their instinctive flight into a discredited and forgotten past. they have been feeling for a piece of march-music; they have bridged the gulf which separates the school of wagner and brahms from that of handel or buononcini; they alight on charles avison's "grand march."[ ] it is a simple continuous air, such as hearts could beat to in the olden time, though flat and somewhat thin, and unrelieved by those caprices of modulation which are essential to modern ears; and as it repeats itself in mr. browning's brain, the persistent melody gains force from its very persistence: till it fills with the sound, as it were glows with the aerial clashings, of many martial instruments, till it strides in the lengthening, drum-accentuated motion of many marching feet. he ponders the fact that such melody has lost its power, and asks himself why this must be: since the once perfected can never be surpassed, and the music of charles avison was in its own day as inspiring and inspired--in other words, as perfect--as that for which it has been cast aside. he finds his answer in the special relation of this art to the life of man. music resembles painting and poetry in the essential characteristic that her province is not mind but soul--the swaying sea of emotion which underlies the firm ground of attainable, if often recondite, fact. all three have this in common with the activities of mind that they strive for the same result; they aim at recording feeling as science registers facts. the two latter in some measure attain this end, because they deal with those definite moments of the soul's experience which share the nature of fact. but music dredges deeper in the emotional sea. she draws forth and embodies the more mysterious, more evanescent, more fluid realities of the soul's life; and so, effecting more than the sister arts, she yet succeeds less. her forms remain; the spirit ebbs away from them. as, however, mr. browning's own experience has shown, the departed spirit may return-- "... off they steal-- how gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they full-blooded with new crimson of broad day-- passion made palpable once more." (p. .) the revived passion may breathe under the name of another man; it may stir again in the utterance of one dead and forgotten; and mr. browning, borrowing the language of chemistry, invokes the reactive processes through which its many-coloured flamelets may spring to life.[ ] he then passes by an insensible--because to him very natural--transition from the realities of feeling to those of thought, and to the underlying truth from which both series derive: and combats the idea that in thought, any more than in feeling, the present can disprove the past, the once true reveal itself as delusion. time--otherwise growth--widens the range as it complicates the necessities of musical, _i.e._ emotional expression. it destroys the enfolding fictions which shield without concealing the earlier stages of intellectual truth. but the emotions were in existence before music began; and truth was potentially "at full" within us when as it were reborn to grow and bud and blossom for the mind of man.[ ] therefore, he has said, addressing avison's march, "blare it forth, bold c major!" and "therefore," he continues, in a swift return of fancy:-- "... bang the drums, blow the trumps, avison! march-motive? that's truth which endures resetting. sharps and flats, lavish at need, shall dance athwart thy score when ophicleide and bombardon's uproar mate the approaching trample, even now big in the distance--or my ears deceive-- of federated england, fitly weave march-music for the future!" (p. .) the musical transformation is for a moment followed back to the days of elizabethan plain-song, and then arrested at those of avison, where he may be imagined as joining chorus with bach in celebrating the struggle for english liberty. the closing stanzas are written to the music of avison's march, which is also given[ ] at the end of the poem, and throws a helpful light on its more technical parts. fust and his friends is based on a version of the faust legend which identifies the inventor of printing with dr. faust, and contains allusions to some of the incidents of goethe's double poem: the magical drinking bout of the first part, and the appearance of the grecian helen in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes fust's great discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of evil, mr. browning represents it as an act of atonement for the figurative devil-worship which was involved in a disorderly and ostentatious life. fust has by his own admission sinned to this extent.[ ] he has obeyed the father of lies. he has also accepted with thankfulness the chance of redeeming his soul by a signal service rendered to the cause of truth. the process of engraving on gold, furtively witnessed in a tuscan workshop, has suggested to him the manufacture of metallic types, and he has been for years secluded with the conception of his printing-press, and glowing visions of that winged word which should one day fly forth at his command. complacent ignorance and stupidity have buzzed freely about him as he sat unaided and alone in what mr. browning poetically depicts as the prolonged travail of a portentous mental birth; and, as we are led to imagine, much well-meant remonstrance and advice rebounded from his closed door. but at the moment in question the door is open, for the work of fust is complete. seven "friends" present themselves prepared to lecture him for his good and for that of their city (mayence) which is endangered by his compact with the devil; and the ensuing intensely humorous colloquy supplies him with the fitting occasion for distributing specimens of his new art and displaying the mechanism through which its apparent magic is achieved. he then pours forth his soul in an impassioned utterance, half soliloquy, half prayer, in which gratitude for his own redemption tempers the sense of triumph in the world-wide intellectual deliverance he has been privileged to effect, and becomes a tribute of adoration to that absolute of creative knowledge, the law of which he has obeyed; which stirs in the unconsciousness of the ore and plant, and impels man to its realization step by step in the ever-receding, ever-present vision of his own ignorance. he owns, however, when the talk is resumed, that his happiness is not free from cloud: since the wings which he has given to truth will also aid the diffusion of falsehood; and the note of humour returns to the situation when this contingency asserts itself in the mind of some of the "friends." these worthies have passed through the descending scale of feeling proper to such persons on such an occasion. they have received fust's invention as diabolical--as wonderful--as very simple after all; and now the fact stares them in the face that, printing being so simple, the hussite may publish his heresies as well as the churchman his truth, and the old sure remedy of burning him and his talk together will no longer avail. one of the two divines on whom this impresses itself had indeed "been struck by it from the first." the poem concludes with a joke on the name of huss, which (i am told) is the bohemian equivalent for "goose," and his reported prophecy of the advent and the triumph of luther: which prophecy fust re-echoes.[ ] footnotes: [footnote : we must remark that these arguments are not directed against atheism and its naturalistic philosophy, which supplies, in mr. browning's judgment, a consistent, if erroneous, solution of the problem. they only attack the position of those who would retain the belief in a personal god, and yet divest him of every quality which makes such a being thinkable.] [footnote : it has been wrongly inferred from the passage in question that mr. browning admits the pretensions of science to solve the problems of the universe.] [footnote : the "goddess-sent plague" woven by lachesis into the destiny of admetus was a vengeance of artemis which befell him on the day of his marriage. he had slighted her by omitting the usual sacrifice, and in punishment of this she sent a crowd of serpents to meet him in the nuptial chamber; but apollo effected a reconciliation between them.] [footnote : he had, as a young man, so great an admiration for one of bartoli's works, "de' simboli trasportati al morale," that when he travelled he always carried it with him.] [footnote : her reply was that if she possessed any influence over m. de lorraine she would never use it to make him do anything so contrary to his honour and to his interests; she already sufficiently reproached herself for the marriage to which his friendship for her had impelled him; and would rather be "marianne" to the end of her days than become duchess on such conditions the reply has been necessarily modified in mr. browning's more poetic rendering of the scene] [footnote : indented,--for want of writing materials,--with a key on the wainscot of his cell.] [footnote : created lord melcombe a year before his death: sufficiently known by his diary from march, , to feb., . see its character in the preface to the original edition by his relation, henry penruddocke wyndham, . other notices will be found in "edgeworth on education," belsham's "george ii.," and hawkins' "life of johnson."] [footnote : furini is also honourably mentioned in pilkington's "dictionary of painters," revised by fuseli, and till the middle of the present century the authoritative work on the subject. it is stated in the edition of that "many of his paintings are in florence, which are deemed to add honour to the valuable collections of the nobility of that city."] [footnote : the allusion in vol. xvi. p. , to the old artificer who could make men "believe" instead of merely "fancy" that what he presented to them was real, refers especially to the greek painter zeuxis; but it is suggested by the generally realistic character of greek art.] [footnote : described at p. and onwards under the heading "painter-like beauty in the open air."] [footnote : the last line and a half of the eighth stanza was directly suggested by the tragedy of Æschylus; the thunderstorm by another version of the promethean myth.] [footnote : see shelley's translation from moschus.] [footnote : battle of arbela.] [footnote : these lines were published in in the little volume entitled "the new amphion."] [footnote : organist of newcastle about ; author of "an essay on musical expression" and other works.] [footnote : the "relfe" spoken of in this connection was mr. browning's music-master: a learned contrapuntist.] [footnote : in interpreting this passage i have somewhat exceeded the letter, but only to emphasize the spirit of mr. browning's words.] [footnote : from an ms. copy formerly in the possession of mr. browning's father.] [footnote : the wealth to which he alludes was justly imputed to him, as the real fust was a goldsmith's son.] [footnote : the relation of john fust to the popular legend is pleasantly set forth in mr. sutherland edwards' little book, "the faust legend: its origin and development."] note. the following note shows mr. browning in a more pronounced attitude towards the opponents of the new greek spelling than does that which, by his desire, i inserted in my first edition; but the last mood was in this case only a natural development of the first:-- "i have just noticed in this month's 'nineteenth century' that it is inquired by a humorous objector to the practice of spelling (under exceptional conditions) greek proper names as they are spelt in greek literature, why the same principle should not be adopted by 'Ægyptologists, hebraists, sanscrittists, accadians, moabites, hittites, and cuneiformists?' adopt it, by all means, whenever the particular language enjoyed by any fortunate possessor of these shall, like greek, have been for about three hundred years insisted upon in england as an acquisition of paramount importance, at school and college, for every aspirant to distinction in learning, even at the cost of six or seven years' study--a sacrifice considered well worth making for even an imperfect acquaintance with 'the most perfect language in the world.' further, it will be adopted whenever the letters substituted for those in ordinary english use shall do no more than represent to the unscholarly what the scholar accepts without scruple when, for the hundredth time, he reads the word which, for once, he has occasion to write in english, and which he concludes must be as euphonic as the rest of a language renowned for euphony. and, finally, the practice will be adopted whenever the substituted letters effect no sort of organic change so as to jostle the word from its pride of place in english verse or prose. 'themistokles' fits in quietly everywhere, with or without the _k_: but in a certain poetical translation i remember, by a young friend, of the anabasis, beginning thus felicitously, '_cyrus the great and artaxerxes (whose temper bloodier than a turk's is) were children both of the mild, pious, and happy monarch, king darius_,'--who fails to see that, although a correct 'kuraush' may pass, yet 'darayavush' disturbs the metre as well as the rhyme? it seems, however, that 'themistokles' may be winked at: not so the 'harsh and subversive kirke.' but let the objector ask somebody with no knowledge to subvert, how he supposes 'circe' is spelt in greek, and the answer will be 'with a soft _c_.' inform him that no such letter exists, and he guesses, 'then with _s_, if there be anything like it' tell him that, to eye and ear equally, his own _k_ answers the purpose, and you have, at all events, taught him that much, if little enough--and why does he live unless to learn a little?" "r. b." _jan. , ._ a chronological bibliography of browning's works. . pauline; a fragment of a confession. vo. saunders and otley, . dated at the end "richmond, oct. , ." reprinted in the six vol. editions of the _poetical works_, , and later. also reprinted from the original edition and edited by t. j. wise, . . sonnet, "eyes calm beside thee (lady couldst thou know!") dated aug. , , and signed "z." _monthly repository_, vol. viii., n.s., , p. . not reprinted by mr. browning. . paracelsus. by robert browning. vo. effingham wilson, . reprinted in _poems_, vols. , and in _poetical works_ later, but without preface, dated th march, . . the king. "a king lived long ago." lines signed "z," in the _monthly repository_, vol. ix., n.s., , pp. - . afterwards given in _pippa passes_ (sc. i, act iii.) with six additional lines. . porphyria. "the rain set early in to-night." sixty lines signed "z," in _monthly repository_, vol. x., n.s., , pp. - . afterwards appeared in _bells and pomegranates_ under the heading "madhouse cells ii." was called "porphyria's lover" in the _works_, and after. . johannes agricola. "there's heaven above; and night by night." sixty lines signed "z," in _monthly repository_, vol. x., n.s., , pp. - . reprinted in _bells and pomegranates_ under the heading "madhouse cells i." . lines. "still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no?" six stanzas signed "z," in the _monthly repository_, vol. x., n.s., , pp. - . reappeared in _dramatis personæ_ ( ) as the first six stanzas of section vi. of "james lee." . strafford: an historical tragedy. by robert browning. vo. longmans, . acted at covent garden theatre, may , . reprinted without preface in _poetical works_, , and later. acting edition, for the north london collegiate school for girls, , vo. an edition (including preface of ) with notes and preface by miss e. h. hickey, and introduction by s. r. gardiner, ll.d., , vo. . sordello. by robert browning. vo. e. moxon, . revised edition with prefatory letter to j. milsand, in _poetical works_, vols. , and later. - . bells and pomegranates. eight numbers in wrappers, rl. vo., - , as follows:-- . no. . pippa passes. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . . no. . king victor and king charles. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . . no. . dramatic lyrics. by robert browning, london, e. moxon, . contents: _cavalier times._ i. _marching along_, p. .--ii. _give a rouse_, p. .--iii. _my wife gertrude_, p. . [iii. afterwards "boot and saddle."] _italy and france._ i. _italy_ ["my last duchess."]--ii. _france_ ["count gismond"], p. . _camp and cloister._ i. _camp_ (_french_), p. .--ii. _cloister (spanish)_, p. . _in a gondola_, p. . _artemis prologuizes_, p. . _waring._ i. "what's becomes of waring?"--ii. "when i last saw waring," p. . _queen worship._ i. _rudel and the lady of tripoli._--ii. _cristina_, p. . _madhouse cells._ i. _johannes agricola_ [of .] ii. _porphyria_ [of ], p. . _through the metidja to abd-el-kadr_, p. . _the pied piper of hamelin_, p. . . no. . the return of the druses. a tragedy in five acts. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . . no. . a blot in the 'scutcheon. a tragedy in three acts. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . acted at drury lane theatre, feb. , . . no. . colombe's birthday; a play in five acts. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . acted at the haymarket, april , . . no. . dramatic romances and lyrics by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . contents: _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, p. . _pictor ignotus._ _florence_, --, p. . _italy in england._ [called "the italian in england" in the _poems_, ], p. . _england in italy._ [called "the englishman in italy" in _poems_, ], p. . _the lost leader_, p. . _the lost mistress_, p. . _home thoughts from abroad._ i. "oh, to be in england."--ii. "here's to nelson's memory." [put after _claret and tokay_, in _poet. works_, , under "nationality in drinks."]--iii. "nobly, nobly cape st. vincent," p. . ["home thoughts from the sea."] _the tomb at st. praxed's_, p. . _garden fancies._ i. _the flower's name._--ii. _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_, p. . _france and spain._ i. _the laboratory_ (_ancien régime_).--ii. _the confessional_, p. . _the flight of the duchess_, p. . _earth's immortalities._ i. "see, as the prettiest graves."--ii. "so the year's done with," p. . _song._ "nay, but you, who do not love her," p. . _the boy and the angel._ [a fresh couplet added on republication in _poet. works_, ,] p. . _night and morning._ i. _night._--ii. _morning._ [called "meeting at night" and "parting at morning" in ], p. . _claret and tokay._ i. "my heart sunk with our claret-flask." ii. "up jumped tokay on our table." [these grouped together, with "here's to nelson's memory," as "nationality in drinks," no. in _poet. works_, ,] p. . _saul_ [part the first, only; completed in _men and women_, ,] p. . _time's revenges_, p. . _the glove._ (peter ronsard _loquitur_), p . . no. , and last. luria; and a soul's tragedy. by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . _luria._ a tragedy in five acts, p. . _a soul's tragedy._ part first, being what was called the poetry of chiappino's life; and part second, its prose. [with preface to _a soul's tragedy_ not reprinted], p. . . the laboratory (ancien régime). by robert browning, in _hood's magazine_, vol. i., , pp. - . reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ (_bells and pomegranates_, no. ), , as the first of two poems called _france and spain_. . claret and tokay. by robert browning. ["my heart sunk with our claret-flask," and "up jumped tokay on our table"], in _hood's magazine_, vol. i., , p. . reprinted in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ (_bells and pomegranates_, no. ), . . garden fancies. by robert browning. i. _the flower's name._--ii. _sibrandus schafnaburgensis._ in _hood's magazine_, vol. ii., pp. - , . revised and enlarged in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ (_bells and pom._, no. ), . . the boy and the angel. by robert browning. in _hood's magazine_, vol. ii., pp. - . enlarged in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ (_bells and pomegranates_, no. ), . . the tomb at st. praxed's (rome --). by robert browning. in _hood's magazine_, vol. iii., pp. - , . enlarged in _dramatic romances and lyrics_ (_bells and pomegranates_, no. ) in same year. reappeared in _works_, , and after, with the title "the bishop orders his tomb in st. praxed's church." . the flight of the duchess. by robert browning. part the first, in _hood's magazine_, vol. iii., pp. - , . part ii. appeared when the first part was reprinted in _bells and pomegranates_, no. , in the same year, _dramatic romances and lyrics_. . poems by robert browning. a new edition [but the first collection under a collective title]. vols., vo. chapman and hall, . _contents_: vol. i. paracelsus, p. . pippa passes, a drama, p. . king victor and king charles, a tragedy, p. . colombe's birthday, a play, p. . vol. ii. a blot in the 'scutcheon, a tragedy, p. . the return of the druses, a tragedy, p. . luria, a tragedy, p. . a soul's tragedy, p. . dramatic romances and lyrics, p. ; of the pieces in _bells and pomegranates_, nos. and , the three omitted being _claret_, _tokay_, and _here's to nelson's memory_. . christmas-eve and easter-day. a poem. by robert browning. vo. chapman and hall, . reprinted in _works_, , and after. . letters of percy bysshe shelley. with an introductory essay by robert browning. london, e. moxon, . vo. [the essay is on shelley--not on the "letters," which were afterwards discovered to be spurious, with one exception.] the essay was reprinted in the _browning society's papers_, part i., . edited by dr. f. j. furnivall. another reprint, edited by w tyas harden, appeared in , vo. . two poems. by elizabeth barrett and robert browning. vo. london, chapman and hall, . price sixpence. the poem by robert browning here is "the twins," and is dated "rome, march th, ." reprinted in _men and women_, , and in _works_, and after. the "two poems" were printed by miss arabella barrett for sale at a bazaar in aid of a "refuge for young destitute girls." mrs. browning's contribution was "a plea for the ragged schools of london." . men and women. by robert browning. in two vols. vo. london, chapman and hall. contents: vol. i.-- _love among the ruins_, p. . _a lover's quarrel_, p. . _evelyn hope_, p. . _up at a villa--down in the city_, p. . _a woman's last word_, p. . _fra lippo lippi_, p. . _a toccata of galuppi's_, p. . _by the fire-side_, p. . _any wife to any husband_, p. . _an epistle concerning the strange medical experience of karshish the arab physician_, p. . _mesmerism_, p. . _a serenade at the villa_, p. . _my star_, p. . _instans tyrannus_, p. . _a pretty woman_, p. . "_childe roland to the dark tower came_," p. . _respectability_, p. . _a light woman_, p. . _the statue and the bust_, p. . _love in a life_, p. _life in a love_, p. . _how it strikes a contemporary_, p. _the last ride together_, p. . _the patriot._ an old story, p. . _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, p. . _bishop blougram's apology_, p. . _memorabilia_, p. . contents of vol. ii.: _andrea del sarto_, p. . _before_, p. . _after_, p. . _in three days_, p. . _in a year_, p. . _old pictures in florence_, p. . _in a balcony_, p. . _saul_, p. . "_de gustibus_," p. . _women and roses_, p. . _protus_, p. . _holy-cross day_, p. . _the guardian angel_, p . _cleon_, p. . _the twins_, p. . _popularity_, p. . _the heretic's tragedy_, p. . _two in the campagna_, p. . _a grammarian's funeral_, p. . _one way of love_, p. . _another way of love_, p. . "_transcendentalism_" p. . _misconceptions_, p. . _one word more._ _to e. b. b._, p. . . ben karshook's wisdom. by robert browning. twenty lines in _the keepsake_ for , edited by miss power. never reprinted by mr. browning. the poem seems to be alluded to in "one word more." . may and death. by robert browning. in _the keepsake_ for . reprinted in _dramatis personæ_, , and in _works_ , and after. . the poetical works of robert browning. third edition. three vols., vo. london, chapman and hall, . no new poems in this collection. it was re-issued as "fourth edition" in . contents: vol. i. lyrics. _cavalier times_:-- i. _marching along_, p. . ii. _give a rouse_, p. . iii. _boot and saddle_, p. . _the lost leader_, p. . _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, p. . _through the metidja to abd-el-kader,_ p. . _nationality in drinks_:-- i. _claret_, p. . ii. _tokay_, p. . iii. _beer_ (_nelson_), p. . _garden fancies_:-- i. _the flower's name_, p. . ii. _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_, p. . iii. _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_, p. . _the laboratory_, p. . _the confessional_, p. . _cristina_, p. . _the lost mistress_, p. _earth's immortalities_, p. . _meeting at night_, p. . _parting at morning_, p. . _song_ ("_nay but you_"), p. . _a woman's last word_, p. . _evelyn hope_, p. . _love among the ruins_, p. . _a lover's quarrel_, p. . _up at a villa--down in the city_, p. _a toccata of galuppi's_, p. . _old pictures in florence_, p. . "_de gustibus_ ----" p. . _home thoughts, from abroad_, p. . _home thoughts, from the sea_, p. . _saul_, p. . _my star_, p. . _by the fireside_, p. . _any wife to any husband_, p. . _two in the campagna_, p. . _misconceptions_, p. . _a serenade at the villa_, p. . _one way of love_, p. . _another way of love_, p. . _a pretty woman_, p. . _respectability_, p. . _love in a life_, p. . _life in a love_, p. . _in three days_, p. . _in a year_, p. . _women and roses_, p. . _before_, p. . _after_, p. . _the guardian angel_--a picture at fano, p. . _memorabilia_, p. . _popularity_, p. . _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, p. . romances. _incident of the french camp_, p. _the patriot._ an old story, p. . _my last duchess._ ferrara, p. . _count gismond._ aix in provence, p. . _the boy and the angel_, p. . _instans tyrannus_, p. . _mesmerism_, p. . _the glove_, p. . _time's revenge_, p. . _the italian in england_, p. . _the englishman in italy_--piano di sorrento, p. . _in a gondola_, p. . _waring_, p. . _the twins_, p. . _a light woman_, p. . _the last ride together_, p. . _the pied piper of hamelin; a child's story_, p. . _the flight of the duchess_, . _a grammarian's funeral_, p. . _johannes agricola in meditation_, p. . _the heretic's tragedy_--a middle-age interlude, p. . _holy-cross day_, p. . _protus_, p. . _the statue and the bust_, p. . _porphyria's lover_, p. . "_child roland to the dark tower came_," p. . contents of vol. ii. tragedies and other plays. _pippa passes--a drama_, p. . _king victor and king charles--a tragedy_, p. . _the return of the druses--a tragedy_, p. . _a blot in the 'scutcheon--a tragedy_, p. . _colombe's birthday--a play_, p. . _luria--a tragedy_, p. . _a soul's tragedy_, p. . _in a balcony--a scene_, p. . _strafford--a tragedy_, p. . contents of vol. iii. _paracelsus_, p. . _christmas-eve and easter-day_, p. . _sordello_, p. . . selections from the poetical works of robert browning. vo. london, chapman and hall, . the editors of this first selection were john foster and b. w. procter ("barry cornwall"). the volume was re-issued in with the imprint of smith, elder & co. . dramatis personÆ. by robert browning. vo. london, chapman and hall, . second edition published same year. contents. _james lee_, p. . [this appears as "james lee's wife" in the _poetical works_, and after.] _gold hair: a legend of pornic_, p. . _the worst of it_, p. . _dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours_, p. . _too late_, p. . _abt vogler_, p. . _rabbi ben ezra_, p. . _death in the desert_, p. . _caliban upon setebos; or, natural theology in the island_, p. . _confessions_, p. . _may and death_, p. . _prospice_, p. . _youth and art_, p. . _a face_, p. . _a likeness_, p. . _mr. sludge_, "_the medium_," p. . _apparent failure_, p. . _epilogue_, p. . three of the above poems were reprinted from advance sheets in the _atlantic monthly_ (boston, u. s.), vol. xiii., , viz., _gold hair_, may, pp. - ; _prospice_, may, p. ; _under the cliff_ (part of _james lee_), may, pp. - . . orpheus and eurydice. eight lines in the royal academy catalogue for , in f. leighton's (now p.r.a.) picture so named. first collected in _poetical works_, , under the title of "eurydice to orpheus, a picture by fred leighton, a.r.a." . poetical works of robert browning. fourth edition. a reprint of the third edition (which see under " "). . a selection from the works of robert browning. square post vo. "moxon's miniature poets," e. moxon & co., . with dedication to alfred tennyson; and a photographic portrait of robert browning. . a selection from the poetry of elizabeth barrett browning. vo. london, chapman and hall, . edited by robert browning, and has a preface signed "r. b.," and dated "london, november, ." . last poems by elizabeth barrett browning. vo. london, chapman & hall, . the dedication ("to grateful florence," etc.), and "advertisement" (dated "london, february, "), written by robert browning. see _browning soc. papers_ [additions to bibliography], parts i. and ii., , pp. , . . the poetical works of robert browning. six vols. london, smith, elder and co., . there is only one new piece in this collection, viz., _deaf and dumb_; written for a marble group of two children by t. woolner in the international exhibition of . contents of vol. i. _pauline_, p. . _paracelsus_, p. . _strafford_, p. . contents of vol. ii. _sordello_, p. . _pippa passes_, p. . contents of vol. iii. _king victor and king charles_, p. . _dramatic lyrics_:-- _cavalier tunes,_ p. . _the lost leader_, p. . _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_, p. . _through the metidja to abd-el-kadr_, p. . _nationality in drinks_, p. . _garden fancies_, p. . _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_, p. . _the laboratory_, p. . _the confessional_, p. . _cristina_, p. . _the lost mistress_, p. . _earth's immortalities_, p. . _meeting at night_, p, . _parting at morning_, p. . _song_ ("nay but you "), p. . _a woman's last word_, p. . _evelyn hope_, p. . _love among the ruins_, p. . _a lovers' quarrel_, . _up at a villa-down in the city_, p. . _a toccata of galuppi's_, p. . _old pictures in florence_, p. . "_de gustibus_ ----" p. . _home thoughts from abroad_, p. . _home thoughts from the sea_, p. . _saul_, p. . _my star_, p. . _by the fire-side_, p. . _any wife to any husband_, p. _two in the campagna_, p. . _misconceptions_, p. . _a serenade at the villa_, p. . _one way of love_, p. . _another way of love_, p. . _a pretty woman_, p. . _respectability_, p. . _love in a life_, p. . _life in a love_, p. . _in three days_, p. . _in a year_, p. . _women and roses_, p. . _before_, p. . _after_, p. . _the guardian angel_, p. . _memorabilia_, p. . _popularity_, p. . _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, p. . _the return of the druses_, p. . contents of vol. iv. _a blot in the 'scutcheon_, . _colombe's birthday_, p. . _dramatic romances_:-- _incident of the french camp_, p. . _the patriot_, p. . _my last duchess_, p. . _count gismond_, p. . _the boy and the angel_, p. . _instans tyrannus_, p. . _mesmerism_, p. . _the glove_, p. . _time's revenges_, p. . _the italian in england_, p. . _the englishman in italy_, p. . _in a gondola_, p. . _waring_, p. . _the twins_, p. . _a light woman_, p. . _the last ride together_, p. . _the pied piper of hamelin_, p. . _the flight of the duchess_, . _a grammarian's funeral_, p. . _the heretic's tragedy_, p. . _holy-cross day_, p. . _protus_, p. . _the statue and the bust_, p. . _porphyria's lover_, p. . "_childe roland to the dark tower came_," p. . contents of vol. v. _a soul's tragedy_, p. . _luria_, p. . _christmas-eve and easter-day_, p. . _men and women:-- "transcendentalism; a poem in twelve books_," p. . _how it strikes a contemporary_, p. . _artemis prologizes_, p. . _an epistle (karshish)_, p. . _johannes agricola in meditation_, p. . _pictor ignotus_, p. . _fra lippo lippi_, p. . _andrea del sarto_, p. . _the bishop orders his tomb at st. praxed's church_, p. . _bishop blougram's apology_, p. . _cleon_, p. . _rudel to the lady of tripoli_, p. . _one word more_, p. . contents of vol. vi. _in a balcony_, p. . _dramatis personæ_:-- _james lee's wife_, p. . _gold hair; a story of pornic_, p. . _the worst of it_, p. . _dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours_, p. . _too late_, p. . _abt vogler_, p. . _rabbi ben ezra_, p. . _a death in the desert_, p. . _caliban upon setebos_, p. . _confessions_, p. . _may and death_, p. . _deaf and dumb: a group by woolner_, p. _prospice_, p. . _eurydice to orpheus; a picture by leighton_, p. . _youth and art_, p. . _a face_, p. . _a likeness_, p. . _mr. sludge_, "_the medium_," p. . _apparent failure_, p. . _epilogue_ (three speakers) p. . - . the ring and the book. by robert browning. in four vols., vo. london, smith, elder & co., vols. i., ii., ; vols. iii., iv., . the volumes were issued one by one, between november and february . a "second edition," four volumes, appeared . . hervÉ riel. in the _cornhill magazine_, march, , pp. - . is dated "croisic, sept. th, ." reprinted in _pacchiarotto_, &c., . . balaustion's adventure: including a transcript from euripides. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . with dedication to the countess cowper dated july , . a third edition appeared in . _the last adventure of balaustion_, in _aristophanes' apology_, &c., , in a sequel to this work. . prince hohenstiel-schwangau: saviour of society. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . . fifine at the fair. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co. . . selections from the poetical works of robert browning. london, smith, elder & co., . with a preface dated "london, may th, ." "dedicated to alfred tennyson." . the poetical works of robert browning. (the tauchnitz selection). two vols., vo. leipzig; "collection of british authors." as this is a "copyright edition," the selection must have been either made or sanctioned by mr. browning. - . complete works of robert browning. a reprint from the latest english edition. vo. chicago. nos. - of the "official guide of the chicago and alton r.r. and monthly reprint and advertiser." edited by the manager of the railway, mr. james charlton. a copy is in the british museum. . red cotton night-cap country, or turf and towers. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . dated at the end "january , ." dedicated "to miss thackeray." . aristophanes' apology, including a transcript from euripides, being the last adventure of balaustion. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . the "transcript" is "herakles." . the inn album. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . a translation of this work into german by e. leo: "das fremdenbuch," hamburg, . . pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper: with other poems. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . contents. _prologue._ ("o the old wall here.") [called "a wall" in the selection of ], p. . _of pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper_, p. . _at the_ "_mermaid_," p. . _house_, p. . _shop_, p. . _pisgah-sights_, i., p. . _pisgah-sights_, ii., p. . _fears and scruples_, p. . _natural magic_, p. . _magical nature_, p. . _bifurcation_, p. . _numpholeptos_, p. . _appearances_, p. . _st. martin's summer_, p. _hervé riel_, p. . _a forgiveness_, p. . _cenciaja_, p. . _filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial_, p. _epilogue_ ["'the poets pour us wine,'"] p. . . the agamemnon of Æschylus, transcribed by robert browning. vo., smith, elder & co., , with preface dated london, october st, . . favourite poems. by robert browning. [a selection]. illustrated, pp. , mo. boston, james r. osgood & co., . [the vest-pocket series of standard and popular authors]. . la saisiaz: the two poets of croisic. by robert browning. vo. smith, elder & co., . "dedicated to mrs. sutherland orr." _la saisiaz_ is dated "november th, ," and _the two poets of croisic_, "january th, ." the proem to the _two poets of croisic_ was named "apparitions" in the _selections_ of . . "oh love, love." _two stanzas--eighteen lines translated from the hippolytus of euripides_, contributed to mr. j. p. mahaffy's _euripides_, p. , macmillan, . not included in any collection of robert browning's poems. reprinted in _browning soc. (bibliography) papers_, pt. , , p. . . dramatic idyls. by robert browning. post vo. london, smith, elder & co., . contents. _martin relph_, p. . _pheidippides_, p. . _halbert and hob_, p. . _ivàn ivànovitch_, p. . _tray_, p. . _ned bratts_, p. . . "the blind man to the maiden said." poem, twenty lines, in "the hour will come," by wilhelmine von hillern, translated from the german by mrs. clara bell (vol. ii., p. ). london, vo. quoted in _whitehall review_, march , , with statement that the english version of the poem is by mr. browning. reprinted with some particulars in the _browning society's papers_, pt. ii., p. , . . dramatic idyls. second series. by robert browning. post vo. london, smith, elder & co., . contents. [_proem_] ("you are sick, that's sure"), p. vii. _echetlos_, p. . _clive_, p. . _muléykeh_, p. . _pietro of abano_, p. . _doctor_ ----, p. . _pan and luna_, p. . [_epilogue_], ("touch him ne'er so lightly"), p. . ten additional lines to this epilogue have been published--"thus i wrote in london, musing," &c. these lines appeared in the _century magazine_ (scribner's), vol. , , pp. , , and were there said to have been written in an autograph album, october th, . they were reprinted in the _browning society's papers_, pt. iii., p. *, november, , but have been withdrawn from the society's later issues. . selections from the poetical works of robert browning. second series. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . the first series appeared in . both were reprinted in . . a selection from the works of robert browning. with a memoir of the author, and explanatory notes, by f. h. ahn, vo. berlin, . this is vol. viii. of ahn's _collection of british and american standard authors_. . jocoseria. by robert browning. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . contents. _wanting is--what?_ p. . _donald_, p. . _solomon and balkis_, p. . _cristina and monaldeschi_, p. . _mary wollstonecraft and fuseli_, p. . _adam, lilith, and eve_, p. . _ixion_, p. . _jochanan hakkadosh_, p. . _never the time and the place_, p. . _pambo_, p. . . lyrical and dramatic poems selected from the works of robert browning. edited by e. t. mason. vo. new york, . [ .] selections from the poetry of robert browning. with an introduction by r. g. white, vo. new york. . sonnet on goldoni. dated "venice, nov. , ," and written for the album of the committee of the goldoni monument at venice, where it appears upon the first page. printed in the _pall mall gazette_, dec. , , and in the _browning society's papers_, pt. v., p. *, . . paraphrase from horace. (on singers). [horace's "_omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus_," etc.] four lines written impromptu for mr. felix moscheles. published in the _pall mall gazette_, dec. , , and in the _browning society's papers_, pt. v. p. *, . . sonnet on rawdon brown. dated nov. . , and published in the. _century magazine_, vol. , feb. , p. . reprinted in the _browning society's papers_, pt. v., p. *, . . the founder of the feast.--a sonnet. inscribed by mr. browning in the album presented to mr. arthur chappell, director of the st. james's hall popular concerts, etc. (_the world_, april , ). reprinted in the _browning society's papers_, pt. vii., p. *, . the sonnet is dated "april th, ." . the names. sonnet on shakspeare. on page of the "shaksperian show book" of the shaksperian show held at the albert hall, may - , . the poem is dated "march , ' ," and was published in the _pall mall gazette_, may , , and in the _browning society's papers_, pt. v., p. *. . "the divine order, and other sermons and addresses. by the late thomas jones." edited by brynmor jones; with a short introduction by robert browning. london, , vo. . ferishtah's fancies. by robert browning vo. smith, elder & co., . contents: _prologue_ ("pray reader"), p . . _the eagle_, p. . . _the melon-seller_, p. . . _shah abbas_, p . . _the family_, p. . . _the sun_, p. . . _mihrab shah_, p. . . _a camel-driver_, p. , . _two camels_, p. . . _cherries_, p. . . _plot-culture_, p. . . _a pillar at sebzevah_, p. . . _a bean-stripe_; _also apple-eating_, p. . _epilogue_ ["oh, love--no love!"] p. . . selections from the poetical works of robert browning. two series. vols. vo. london, smith, elder & co., . a reprint of the two series, which appeared respectively in and . . the pied piper of hamelin. by robert browning. london, robert dunthorne, . small to. not published for sale, but printed by mr. browning's permission "to accompany mr. macbeth's etchings, after the late g. j. pinwell's drawings illustrating its subject." . pomegranates from an english garden: a selection from the poems of robert browning. with introduction and notes by john munro gibson. new york, , vo. . why i am a liberal. sonnet contributed to "why i am a liberal," edited by andrew reid. london, cassell & co., n.d. [ ]. not collected by mr. browning, but reprinted in _browning society's papers_, october, , p. *, and in "sonnets of the century," edited by w. sharp, . . spring song ("dance, yellows and whites and reds!") contributed to _the new amphion: being the book of the_ edinburgh university union _fancy fair_. edinburgh university press, , p. . (reappeared in _lairesse_ in _parleyings_, &c., p. ). . select poems of robert browning, with notes by w. j. rolfe and h. e. mersey. new york, , vo. . parleyings with certain people of importance in their day; to wit: _bernard de mandeville_, _daniel bartoli_, _christopher smart_, _george bubb dodington_, _francis furini_, _gerard de lairesse_, and _charles avison_. introduced by _a dialogue between apollo and the fates_; concluded by another between _john fust and his friends_. by robert browning. london, smith, elder & co., , vo. dedicated "in memoriam j. milsand, obit. iv. sept. mdccclxxxvi. _absens absentem auditque videtque._" - . the poetical works of robert browning. sixteen vols. vo. smith, elder & co., - . all the works collected by the author, excepting only _asolando_. contents. _pauline_, vol. i., p. . _sordello_, vol. i., p. . _paracelsus_, vol. ii., p. . _strafford_, vol. ii., p. . _pippa passes_, vol. iii., p. _king victor and king charles_, vol. iii., p. . _return of the druses_, vol. iii., p. . _a soul's tragedy_, vol. iii., p. . _a blot in the 'scutcheon_, vol. iv., p. . _colombe's birthday_, vol. iv., p. . _men and women_, vol. iv., p. . _dramatic romances_, vol. v., p. . _christmas-eve and easter-day_, vol. v., p. . _dramatic lyrics_, vol. vi., p. . _luria_, vol. vi., p. . _in a balcony_, vol. vii., p. . _dramatis personæ_, vol. vii., p. . _the ring and the book._ books to , vol. viii., p. . " " books to , vol. ix., p. . " " books to , vol. x., p. . _balaustion's adventure_, vol xi., p. . _prince hohenstiel-schwangau,_ vol. xi., p. . _fifine at the fair_, vol. xi., p. . _red cotton night-cap country_, vol. xii., p. . _the inn album_, vol. xii., p. . _aristophanes' apology_, including a transcript from euripides, being the _last adventure of balaustion_, vol. xiii., p. . _the agamemnon of Æschylus_, vol. xiii., p. . _pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_; with other poems, vol. xiv., p. . _la saisiaz_: and _the two poets of croisic_, vol. xiv., p. . _dramatic idyls._ first series, vol. xv., p. . " " second series, vol. xv., p. . _jocoseria_, vol. xv., p. . _ferishtah's fancies_, vol. xvi., p. . _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_, vol. xvi., p. . [ ]. the pied piper of hamelin. by robert browning. with illustrations by kate greenaway. pp. , routledge & sons, to. . five lines (beginning "wind wafted from the sunset"), on a picture by mr. felix moscheles, "the isle's enchantress." printed in the _pall mall gazette_ for march , . - . the poetical works of elizabeth barrett browning. in six volumes. london, smith, elder & co., - . vo. vol. i. contains a prefatory note signed "r. b.," and dated " , de vere gardens, w., december , " [" " must be a misprint for , as the "prefatory note" mentions a memoir of e. b. browning by john h. ingram, which was published in september, ]. . asolando: fancies and facts. by robert browning. vo. smith, elder & co., . with dedication "to mrs. arthur bronson." now ( ) in its eighth edition. the dedication is dated "asolo, october , ." the volume was published on the day of the poet's death, december , . contents. _prologue_ ("the poet's age is sad; for why?") p. . _rosny_, p. . _dubiety_, p. . _now_, p. . _humility_, p. . _poetics_, p. . _summum bonum_, p. . _a pearl, a girl_, p. . _speculative_, p. . _white witchcraft_, p. . _bad dreams_, i., ii., iii., iv., p. . _inapprehensiveness_, p. . _which?_ p. . _the cardinal and the dog_, p. . _the pope and the net_, p. _the bean-feast_, p. . _muckle-mouth meg_, p. . _arcades ambo_, p. . _the lady and the painter_, p. . _ponte dell' angelo_, _venice_, p. . _beatrice signorini_, p. . _flute music, with an accompaniment_, p. . "_imperante augusto natus est_ ----," p. . _development_, p. . _rephan_, p. . _reverie_, p. . _epilogue_ ("at the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time"), p. . . poems by elizabeth barrett browning. with prefatory note by r. b. mo. london, smith, elder & co., . . pocket volume of selections from the poetical works of robert browning. london, smith, elder & co., , mo. *** in the "bibliography" attached to mr. william sharp's "life of robert browning" (london, w. scott, ), under section ii., "single works," appear the following entries:-- ( ) "cleon. moxon: london, . vo. reprinted in _men and women_." ( ) "gold hair: a legend of pornic. [london], . vo. reprinted in _dramatis personæ_." ( ) "the statue and the bust. moxon: london, . vo. reprinted in _men and women_." ( ) mr. sharp also (p. ) mentions a leaflet containing "prospice." pamphlets bearing the titles of the first and third certainly exist, and this may also be the case with regard to the second and fourth; but as nothing is known of the history of any one of the four, all are excluded from the foregoing bibliography. an alphabetical list of robert browning's works, being an index to the foregoing bibliography and to the collected editions of and - . page of in vols. in vols. bibliography. title. date. edit. edit. - vol. & page. vol. & page. abd-el-kadr, through the metidja to iii. vi. abt vogler vi. vii. adam, lilith, and eve xv. Æschylus, the agamemnon of xiii. after iii. vi. agamemnon of Æschylus, the xiii. ahn, f. h., selections by aix in provence. _see_ count gismond iv. v. alkestis, euripides', a translation from. _see_ balaustion's adventure xi. amphibian (prol. to _fifine_) xi. amphion, the new contribution to, "spring song" xvi. andrea del sarto v. iv. another way of love iii. vi. any wife to any husband iii. vi. apollo and the fates, dialogue between xvi. apparent failure vi. vii. apparitions (proem, _two poets of croisic_) xiv. appearances xiv. apple-eating xvi. arcades ambo aristophanes' apology xiii. artemis prologuizes v. iv. _atlantic monthly_, _see_ "dramatis personæ" asolando: fancies and facts at the "mermaid" xiv. avison, charles, parleying with xvi. "at the midnight" (epilogue to asolando) b., e. b. (mrs. browning), to ["one word more"] v. iv. bad dreams balaustion, the last adventure of. _see_ aristophanes' apology. xiii. balaustion's adventure xi. bartoli, daniel, parleying with xvi. bean-feast, the bean-stripe, a xvi. beatrice signorini beer, nationality in drinks iii. vi. before iii. vi. bells and pomegranates - ben karshook's wisdom bifurcation xiv. bishop blougram's apology v. iv. bishop (the) orders his tomb at st. praxed's v. iv. "blind man (the) to the maiden said" (translation) blot (a) in the scutcheon iv. iv. boot and saddle ["my wife," etc.] iii. vi. boy and the angel, the iv. v. brown, rawdon, sonnet on b[rowning], e. b., to v. iv. browning, mrs. selection from her poetry. edited by r. b. ---- last poems. edited by r. b. ---- edition of the poems of ( vols.) - burial, the privilege of. _see_ filippo baldinucci xiv. by the fire-side iii. vi. byron (le) de nos jours vi. vii. caliban upon setebos vi. vii. camel-driver, a xvi. camp and cloister iv. v. cardinal (the) and the dog cavalier tunes iii. vi. cenciaja xiv. chappell, (arthur,) sonnet to cherries xvi. "childe roland to the dark tower came" iv. v. christmas-eve and easter-day v. v. claret and tokay iii. vi. cleon v. iv. clive xv. cloister (spanish) iii. vi. colombe's birthday iv. iv. confessional, the iii. vi. confessions vi. vii. count gismond, aix in provence iv. v. cristina iii. vi. cristina and monaldeschi xv. croisic, the two poets of xiv. _cornhill magazine_, contribution to. _see_ hervé riel david, etc. (epil. to _dram. personæ_) vi. vii. deaf and dumb vi. vii. death in the desert, a vi. vii. "de gustibus ----" iii. vi. development dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours vi. vii. "divine order," introduction to doctor ---- xv. dodington, george bubb, parleying with xvi. donald xv. dramatic idyls [first series] xv. ---- second series xv. dramatic lyrics iii. vi. dramatic romances and lyrics { iii. v. { iv. vi. dramatis personæ vi. vii. drinks, nationality in iii. vi. dubiety duchess, flight of the iv. v. eagle, the xv. earth's immortalities iii. vi. echetlos xv. england in italy iv. v. "england, oh to be in," iii. vi. englishman in italy, the iv. v. epilogue ("_dram. personæ_") vi. vii. ---- (_pacchiarotto_) xiv. ---- (_la saisiaz_) xiv. ---- (_dramatic idyls ii._) xv. ---- (_ferishtah's fancies_) xvi. ---- (_parleyings_, _etc._) xvi. ---- (_asolando_) epistle (an) concerning the strange medical experience of karshish, etc. v. iv. eurydice to orpheus vi. vii. euripides, a transcript from (alkestis). _see_ balaustion's adventure xi. ---- a transcript from (herakles mainomenos) xiii. ---- two stanzas from hippolytus evelyn hope iii. vi. "eyes calm beside thee" (sonnet) face, a vi. vii. fame and love. _see_ earth's immortalities iii. vi. family, the xvi. fears and scruples xiv. ferishtah's fancies xvi. fifine at the fair xi. filippo baldinucci xiv. fireside, by the iii. vi. flight of the duchess, the iv. v. flower's name, the iii. vi. flute-music, with an accompaniment forgiveness, a xiv. founder of the feast, the fra lippo lippi v. iv. france [italy and france] iv. v. france and spain. _see_ "confessional" and "laboratory" french camp, incident of the iv. v. furini (francis), parleying with xvi. furnivall, dr. f. j., his edition of browning's essay on shelley fuseli, m. wollstonecraft and xv. fust and his friends, dialogue between xvi. gardiner, s. r., and miss e. h. hickey, edition of _strafford_ by garden fancies iii. vi. ghent to aix, how they brought the good news from iii. vi. gibson, j. m., selection by give a rouse iii. vi. glove, the iv. v. gold hair: a legend of pornic vi. vii. goldoni, sonnet on gondola, in a iv. v. "good to forgive" (prol. to _la saisiaz_) xiv. grammarian's funeral, a iv. v. greenaway, miss kate, illustrated edition of the pied piper [ ] guardian-angel, the iii. vi. halbert and hob xv. herakles. _see_ aristophanes' apology xiii. "here's to nelson's memory" iii. vi. heretic's tragedy, the iv. v. hersey, h. e., and rolfe, w .j., selection by hervé riel xiv. hickey, miss e. h., and gardiner, s. r., edit. of _strafford_ by hohenstiel-schwangau (prince) xi. holy-cross day iv. v. home-thoughts, from abroad iii. vi. home thoughts, from the sea iii. vi. _hood's magazine_, contributions to ---- (_the laboratory_) iii. vi. ---- (_claret, etc._) iii. vi. ---- (_garden fancies_) iii. vi. ---- (_boy and the angel_) iv. v. ---- (_tomb at st. praxed's_) v. iv. ---- (_flight of the duchess_) iv. v. horace, paraphrase from "hour will come, the," translation in house xiv. householder, the (epil. to _fifine_) xi. how it strikes a contemporary v. iv. "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix" iii. vi. hugues (master) of saxe-gotha iii. vi. humility hippolytus, two stanzas from introduction [on shelley] introduction to the "divine order" "imperante augusto natus est--" in a balcony vi. vii. in a gondola iv. v. in a year iii. vi. in three days iii. vi. inapprehensiveness incident in the french camp iv. v. inn album, the xii. ---- translation of, by leo instans tyrannus iv. v. italian in england, the iv. v. italy [italy and france] iv. v. italy in england iv. v. ivàn ivànovitch xv. ixion xv. james lee [james lee's wife] vi. vii. jochanan hakkadosh xv. johannes agricola v. iv. jocoseria xv. jones's "divine order." introduction to karshish, the arab physician v. iv. karshook's (ben) wisdom _keepsake, the_, contribution to ---- ---- vi. vii. "kentish sir byng." ["marching along"] iii. vi. king, the (_pippa passes_) ii. iii. king victor and king charles iii. iii. "king charles, and who'll do him right now?" ["give a rouse"] iii. vi. la saisiaz xiv. laboratory, the iii. vi. lady (the) and the painter "lady, could'st thou know!" lairesse, gerard de, ("parleying") xvi. last ride together, the iv. v. leighton, a picture by fred. _see_ orpheus and eurydice vi. vii. leo, e., translation of the _inn album_ life in a love iii. vi. light woman, a iv. v. likeness, a vi. vii. lost leader, the iii. vi. lost mistress, the iii. vi. love, another way of iii. vi. love and fame. _see_ earth's immortalities iii. vi. love among the ruins iii. vi. love in a life iii. vi. love, one way of iii. vi. lovers' quarrel, a iii. vi. luria v. vi. macbeth's etchings, _pied piper_ madhouse cells v. iv. magical nature xiv. mandeville, bernard de, parleying with xvi. marching along iii. vi. martin relph xv. mason, e. t., selection by master hugues of saxe-gotha iii. vi. may and death vi. vii. meeting at night iii. vi. melon-seller, the xvi. memorabilia iii. vi. men and women v. iv. "mermaid," at the xi. mesmerism iv. v. mihrab shah xvi. misconceptions iii. vi. morning [night and morning] iii. vi. moscheles, f., lines on a picture by mr. sludge, the "medium" vi. vii. _monthly repository_, poem in ---- _see_ "a king lived long ago" (in _pippa passes_) ii. iii. ----- "porphyria" iv. v. ----- "_johannes agricola_" v. iv. ----- "still ailing, wind?" _see_ james lee vi. vii. muckle-mouth meg muléykeh xv. my last duchess iv. v. my star iii. vi. "my wife gertrude" (afterwards _boot and saddle_) iii. vi. names, the (sonnet) nationality in drinks iii. vi. natural magic xiv. natural theology (_caliban upon setebos_) vi. xiv. "nay, but you who do not love her" iii. vi. ned bratts xv. "nelson's memory, here's to" iii. vi. never the time and the place xv. night [night and morning] iii. vi. "nobly cape st. vincent" iii. vi. now numpholeptos xiv. "oh love, love" "oh, love--no, love!" xvi. "oh to be in england" iii. vi. old pictures in florence iii. vi. one way of love iii. vi. one word more v. iv. orpheus and eurydice vi. vii. "o the old wall here" xiv. pacchiarotto xiv. pambo xv. pan and luna xv. paracelsus i. ii. parleyings with certain people of importance xvi. parting at morning iii. vi. patriot, the iv. v. pauline i. i. pearl (a), a girl pheidippides xv. pictor ignotus v. iv. pied piper of hamelin iv. v. ---- (separate reprint) ---- (with illustrations) pietro of abano xv. pillar (a) at sebzevah vi. pinwell and macbeth's illustrations to _pied piper_ pippa passes ii. iii. pisgah-sights, i. and ii. xiv. plot-culture xvi. poems and poetical works. _see under_ "works," also "selections" poetics "poets, (the), pour us wine" xiv. pomegranates (selections by gibson) ponte dell' angelo, venice popularity iii. vi. pope (the) and the net pornic. gold hair, a legend of vi. vii. porphyria ["porphyria's lover"] iv. v. pretty woman, a iii. vi. prince hohenstiel-schwangau xi. "pray, reader, have you eaten ortolans?" (prologue) xvi. prologue (_fifine at the fair_) xi. ---- (_pacchiarotto_) xiv. ---- (_la saisiaz_) xiv. ---- (_two poets_) xiv. ---- (_dramatic idyls ii._) xv. ---- (_jocoseria_) xv. ---- (_ferishtah's fancies_) xvi. ---- (_parleyings_, _etc._) xvi. ---- (_asolando_) prospice vi. vii. protus iv. v. queen worship [rudel, etc.] v. iv. rabbi ben-ezra vi. vii. red cotton night-cap country xii. rephan respectability iii. vi. return of the druses, the iii. iii. reverie ring and the book, the - viii. ix. x. rolfe, w. j., and hersey, h. e., selections by rosny rudel and the lady of tripoli v. iv. st. martin's summer xiv. st. praxed's, the tomb at v. iv. "st. vincent, nobly cape" iii. vi. saisiaz, la xiv. saul, part i. iii. vi. ---- part ii. iii. vi. selections from browning's works ---- (moxon's) ---- (tauchnitz, leipzig) ---- [first series] and ---- (boston, u. s.) ---- second series and ---- by f. h. ahn ---- by e. t. mason ---- by r. g. white ---- by j. m. gibson ---- by rolfe and hersey ---- pocket volume serenade (a) at the villa iii. vi. shah abbas xvi. shakespeare, sonnet on shelley, essay on shop xiv. sibrandus schafnaburgensis iii. vi. sludge, mr., the "medium" vi. vii. smart, christopher, parleying with xvi. solomon and balkis xv. soliloquy of the spanish cloister iii. vi. song, "nay but," etc iii. vi. sonnet ("eyes calm besides thee") sordello ii. i. soul's tragedy, a v. iii. speculative spring song xvi. statue and the bust, the iv. v. "still ailing, wind?" (_james lee_) vi. vii. strafford i. ii. "such a starved bank of moss" [proem to _two poets of croisic_] xiv. summum bonum sun, the xvi. "the poet's age is sad" through the metidja to abd-el-kadr iii. vi. time's revenges iv. v. toccata (a) of galuppi's iii. vi. tokay, claret and iii. vi. tomb (the) at saint praxed's v. iv. too late vi. vii. "touch him ne'er so lightly" xv. "transcendentalism" v. iv. tray xv. twins, the iv. v. two camels xvi. two in the campagna iii. vi. two poems. _see_ "the twins" two poets of croisic xiv. up at a villa--down in the city iii. vi. wall, a. (prologue) xiv. wanting is--what? xv. waring iv. v. "what a pretty tale you told me" [epil. to _two poets of croisic_] xiv. which? white, r. g., selections by white witchcraft why i am a liberal "wind wafted from the sunset" wise, t. j., edition of _pauline_ woman, a pretty iii. vi. woman's last word, a iii. vi. women and roses iii. vi. wollstonecraft (mary) and fuseli xv. woolner, a group by. _see_ deaf and dumb vi. vii. works (collective editions), vols ---- vols ---- vols ---- vols ---- (chicago) - ---- vols - ---- _see also_ selections. worst of it, the vi. vi. "you are sick" (prologue) xv. youth and art vi. vii. "z," poems so signed. _see_ "monthly repository," index to first lines of shorter poems. new uniform edition. a certain neighbour lying sick to death xvi. a rabbi told me: on the day allowed xv. ah, but how each loved each, marquis! xv. ah, did you once see shelley plain vi. ah, love, but a day vii. all i believed is true! v. all i can say is--i saw it! xiv. all june i bound the rose in sheaves vi. all's over, then: does truth sound bitter vi. all that i know vi. among these latter busts we count by scores v. and so you found that poor room dull xiv. "and what might that bold man's announcement be" xvi. anyhow, once full dervish, youngsters came xvi. as i ride, as i ride vi. "as like as a hand to another hand!" vii. "ay, but, ferishtah,"--a disciple smirked xvi. beautiful evelyn hope is dead! vi. boot, saddle, to horse, and away! vi. but do not let us quarrel any more iv. but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! vii. christ god who savest man, save most v. cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles) iv. could i but live again xiv. dear and great angel, wouldst thou only leave vi. dear, had the world in its caprice vi. dervish--(though yet un-dervished, call him so xvi. escape me? vi. fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat vii. fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! v. first i salute this soil of the blessed, river and rock! xv. flower--i never fancied, jewel--i profess you! xiv. fortù, fortù, my beloved one v. going his rounds one day in ispahan xvi. grand rough old martin luther v. grow old along with me! vii. gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! vi. had i but plenty of money, money enough and to spare vi. hamelin town's in brunswick v. "heigho!" yawned one day king francis v. here is a story shall stir you! stand up, greeks dead and gone xv. here is a thing that happened. like wild beasts whelped, for den xv. here's my case. of old i used to love him xiv. here's the garden she walked across vi. here was i with my arm and heart vii. high in the dome, suspended, of hell, sad triumph, behold us! xv. hist, but a word, fair and soft! vi. how of his fate, the pilgrims' soldier-guide xvi. how very hard it is to be v. how well i know what i mean to do vi. i and clive were friends--and why not? friends! i think you laugh, my lad xv. i am a goddess of the ambrosial courts iv. i am indeed the personage you know xiv. i am poor brother lippo, by your leave! iv. i could have painted pictures like that youth's iv. i dream of a red-rose tree vi. i know a mount, the gracious sun perceives iv. i leaned on the turf vii. i--"next poet?" no, my hearties xiv. i only knew one poet in my life iv. i said--then, dearest, since 't is so v. i send my heart up to thee, all my heart v. i sprang to the stirrup, and joris, and he vi. i've a friend, over the sea v. i will be quiet and talk with you vii. i wish that when you died last may vii. i wonder do you feel to-day vi. if a stranger passed the tent of hóseyn, he cried "a churl's!" xv. if one could have that little head of hers vii. is all our fire of shipwreck wood vii. it is a lie--their priests, their pope vi. it once might have been, once only vii. it was roses, roses, all the way v. june was not over vi. just for a handful of silver he left us vi. karshish, the picker up of learning's crumbs iv. kentish sir byng stood for his king vi. king charles, and who'll do him right now? vi. "knowledged deposed, then!"--groaned whom that most grieved xvi. let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far vi. let's contend no more, love vi. let us begin and carry up this corps v. "look, i strew beans" xvi. may i print, shelley, how it came to pass xiv. morning, evening, noon and night v. moses the meek was thirty cubits high xv. my first thought was, he lied in every word v. my grandfather says he remembers he saw, when a youngster long ago xv. my heart sank with our claret-flask vi. my love, this is the bitterest, that thou vi. nay but you, who do not love her vi. never any more vi. never the time and the place xv. nobly, nobly cape saint vincent to the north-west died away vi. "no boy, we must not"--so began xiv. no, for i'll save it! seven years since vii. no more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk iv. no protesting, dearest! xiv. now, don't, sir! don't expose me! just this once! vii. now that i, tying thy glass mask tightly vi. o the old wall here! how i could pass xiv. o worthy of belief i hold it was xv. of the million or two, more or less v. oh but is it not hard, dear? xv. oh galuppi, baldassaro, this is very sad to find! vi. oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth vii. oh, love--no, love! all the noise below, love xvi. oh, the beautiful girl, too white vii. oh, to be in england vi. oh, what a dawn of day! vi. on the first of the feast of feasts vii. on the sea and at the hogue, sixteen hundred ninety two xiv. one day it thundered and lightened xv. only the prism's obstruction shows aright vii. out of the little chapel i burst v. over the ball of it xiv. _petrus aponensis_--there was a magician! xv. plague take all your pedants, say i! vi. pray, reader, have you eaten ortolans xvi. query: was ever a quainter xiv. quoth an inquirer, "praise the merciful!" xvi. quoth one: "sir, solve a scruple! no true sage xvi. room after room vi. round the cape of a sudden came the sea vi. said abner, "at last that art come! ere i tell, ere thou speak vi. see, as the prettiest graves will do in time vi. shall i sonnet-sing you about myself? xiv. she should never have looked at me vi. sing me a hero! quench my thirst xv. so far as our story approaches the end v. so, friend, your shop was all your house! xiv. so, i shall see her in three days vi. solomon king of the jews and the queen of sheba balkis xv. some people hang portraits up vii. stand still, true poet that you are! vi. still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no? vii. still you stand, still you listen, still you smile! xiv. stop, let me have the truth of that! vii. stop playing, poet! may a brother speak? iv. suppose that we part (work done, comes play) xv. [supposed of pamphylax the antiochene vii. take the cloak from his face, and at first vi. that fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers vi. that second time they hunted me v. that's my last duchess painted on the wall v. that was i, you heard last night vi. the grey sea and the long black land vi. the lord, we look to once for all v. the morn when first it thunders in march vi. "the poets pour us wine--" xiv. the rain set early in to-night v. the swallow has set her six young on the rail vii. there is nothing to remember in me vii. there's a palace in florence, the world knows well v. there's heaven above, and night by night iv. there they are, my fifty men and women iv. "they tell me, your carpenters," quoth i to my friend the russ xv. this is a spray the bird clung to vi. this now, this other story makes amends xv. touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke xv. 'twas bedford special assize, one daft midsummer's day xv. vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! iv. wanting is--what? xv. we were two lovers; let me lie by her xiv. what, i disturb thee at thy morning-meal xvi. what is he buzzing in my ears? vii. what's become of waring v. where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles vi. 'will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best vii. will you hear my story also xv. would it were i had been false, not you! vii. would that the structure brave, the manifold music i build vii. "you are sick, that's sure"--they say xv. you know, we french stormed ratisbon v. your ghost will walk, you lover of trees vi. you're my friend v. index. abt vogler, . adam, lilith and eve, . after, - . andrea del sarto, . another way of love, . any wife to any husband, . apparent failure, . appearances, . aristophanes' apology; or, the last adventure of balaustion, with the "herakles," - . artemis prologizes, . at the "mermaid," . balaustion's adventure, with the "alkestis," . before, . bifurcation, . bishop blougram's apology, . bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church, the, . blot in the 'scutcheon a, . boy and the angel, the, . by the fireside, . caliban upon setebos; or, natural theology in the island, . cavalier tunes, . cenciaja, . "childe roland to the dark tower came, . christmas eve and easter-day, . cleon, . clive, . colombe's birthday, . confessional, the, . confessions, . count gismond, . cristina, . cristina and monaldeschi, . deaf and dumb: a group by woolner, . death in the desert, a, . "de gustibus ----" . dîs aliter visum; or, le byron de nos jours, . doctor ----, . donald, . earth's immortalities, . echetlos, . englishman in italy, the, . epilogue to "dramatic idyls," nd series, . epilogue to "dramatis personæ," . epilogue to "pacchiarotto and other poems," , . epilogue to "the two poets of croisic" (a tale), . epistle, an, . eurydice to orpheus: a picture by leighton, . evelyn hope, . face, a, . fears and scruples, . ferishtah's fancies, . fifine at the fair, . filippo baldinucci on the privilege of burial, . flight of the duchess, the, . flower's name, the, (garden fancies, i.), . forgiveness, a, . fra lippo lippi, . glove, the, . gold hair: a story of pornic, . grammarian's funeral, a, . guardian-angel, the: a picture at fano, halbert and hob, . heretic's tragedy, the; a middle-age interlude, . hervé kiel, . holy-cross day, . home-thoughts, from abroad, . home-thoughts, from the sea, . house, . how it strikes a contemporary, . "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," . in a balcony, . in a gondola, . incident of the french camp, . inn album, the, . instans tyrannus, . in three days, . introduction to "the two poets of croisic" (apparitions), . italian in england, the, . ivàn ivànovitch, . ixion, . james lee's wife, . jochanan hakkadosh, . johannes agricola in meditation, . king victor and king charles, . laboratory, the, . la saisiaz, . last ride together, the, . life in a love, . light woman, a, . likeness, a, . lost leader, the, . lost mistress, the, . love among the ruins, . love in a life, . love, one way of, . lover's quarrel, a, . luria, . magical nature, . martin relph, . mary wollstonecraft and fuseli, . master hugues of saxe-gotha, . may and death, . meeting at night, . memorabilia, . mesmerism, . misconceptions, . mr. sludge, "the medium," . muléykeh, . my last duchess, . my star, . nationality in drinks, . natural magic, . ned bratts, . never the time and the place, . numpholeptos, . old pictures in florence, . one word more. to e. b. b., . pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper, . pambo, . pan and luna, . paracelsus, . parleyings with certain people of importance in their day, . parting at morning, . patriot, the; an old story, . pauline, . pheidippides, . pictor ignotus, . pied piper of hamelin, the; a child's story, . pietro of abano, . pippa passes, . pisgah-sights, i., . pisgah-sights, ii., . popularity, . porphyria's lover, . pretty woman, a, . prince hohenstiel-schwangau, saviour of society, . prologue to "dramatic idyls," nd series, . prologue to "pacchiarotto and other poems," . prologue to "la saisiaz" (pisgah-sights, iii.), . prospice, . protus, . rabbi ben ezra, . red cotton night-cap country; or, turf and towers, . respectability, . return of the druses, the, . ring and the book, the, . rudel to the lady of tripoli, . saul, . serenade at the villa, a, . shop, . sibrandus schafnaburgens's (garden fancies, ii.), . soliloquy of the spanish cloister, . solomon and balkis, . song, . sordello, . soul's tragedy, a, . statue and the bust, the, . st. martin's summer, . strafford, . through the metidja to abd-el-kadr, . time's revenges, . toccata of galuppi's, a, . too late, . "transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books," . transcripts from the greek, . tray, . twins, the, . two in the campagna, . two poets of croisic, the, . up at a villa--down in the city, . wanting is--what? . waring, . woman's last word, a, . women and roses, . worst of it, the, . year, in a, . youth and art, . none [illustration: robert browning] robert browning: how to know him by william lyon phelps, m.a., ph.d. lampton professor of english literature at yale with portrait to james whitcomb riley with sincere affection and respect preface in this volume i have attempted to give an account of browning's life and an estimation of his character: to set forth, with sufficient illustration from his poems, his theory of poetry, his aim and method: to make clear some of the leading ideas in his work: to show his fondness for paradox: to exhibit the nature and basis of his optimism. i have given in complete form over fifty of his poems, each one preceded by my interpretation of its meaning and significance. w. l. p. [illistration: seven gables, lake huron] contents chapter i the man ii browning's theory of poetry iii lyrics iv dramatic lyrics v dramatic monologues vi poems of paradox vii browning's optimism index list of poems abt vogler andrea del sarto apparent failure bad dreams bishop orders his tomb, the caliban upon setebos cavalier tunes "childe roland to the dark tower came" confessions count gismond cristina epilogue to asolando epilogue to fefine at the fair epistle (an) containing the strange medical experience of karshish evelyn hope eyes calm beside thee face, a glove, the grammarian's funeral, a guardian-angel, the home-thoughts, from abroad home-thoughts, from the sea how it strikes a contemporary "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix" james lee's wife (two stanzas from) johannes agricola in meditation laboratory, the last ride together, the lost leader, the lost mistress, the love among the ruins meeting at night my last duchess my star never the time and the place one way of love one word more over the sea our galleys went parting at morning porphyria's lover prologue to asolando prologue to jocoseria prologue to la saisiaz prologue to pacchiarotto prologue to the two poets of croisic prospice rabbi ben ezra rephan respectability saul sibrandus schafnaburgensis soliloquy of the spanish cloister song from a blot in the 'scutcheon songs from paracelsus songs from pippa passes statue (the) and the bust summum bonum "transcendentalism" up at a villa--down in the city which? browning i the man if we enter this world from some other state of existence, it seems certain that in the obscure pre-natal country, the power of free choice--so stormily debated by philosophers and theologians here--does not exist. millions of earth's infants are handicapped at the start by having parents who lack health, money, brains, and character; and in many cases the environment is no better than the ancestry. "god plants us where we grow," said pompilia, and we can not save the rose by placing it on the tree-top. robert browning, who was perhaps the happiest man in the nineteenth century, was particularly fortunate in his advent. of the entire population of the planet in the year of grace , he could hardly have selected a better father and mother than were chosen for him; and the place of his birth was just what it should have been, the biggest town on earth. all his life long he was emphatically a city man, dwelling in london, florence, paris, and venice, never remaining long in rural surroundings. browning was born on may , , in southampton street, camberwell, london, a suburb on the southern side of the river. one hundred years later, as i traversed the length of this street, it looked squalid in the rain, and is indeed sufficiently unlovely. but in it was a good residential locality, and not far away were fresh woods and pastures.... the good health of browning's father may be inferred from the fact that he lived to be eighty-four, "without a day's illness;" he was a practical, successful business man, an official in the bank of england. his love of literature and the arts is proved by the fact that he practised them constantly for the pure joy of the working; he wrote reams and reams of verse, without publishing a line. he had extraordinary facility in composition, being able to write poetry even faster than his son. rossetti said that he had "a real genius for drawing." he owned a large and valuable library, filled with curiosities of literature. robert was brought up among books, even in earliest youth turning over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. his latest biographers have shown the powerful and permanent effects on his poetry of this early reading. browning's father--while not a rich man--had sufficient income to give his son every possible advantage in physical and intellectual training, and to enable him to live without earning a cent; after robert grew up, he was absolutely free to devote his entire time and energy to writing poetry, which, even to the day of his death, did not yield a livelihood. the young poet was free from care, free from responsibility, and able from childhood to old age to bring out the best that was in him. a curious and exact parallel is found in the case of the great pessimist, schopenhauer, who never ceased to be grateful to his father for making his whole life-work possible. in his later years, browning wrote: "it would have been quite unpardonable in any case not to have done my best. my dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work i was capable of. when i think of the many authors who had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties i have no reason to be proud of my achievements." browning's mother, whom he loved with passionate adoration, was a healthy and sensible woman; better than all these gifts, she was deeply religious, with sincere and unaffected piety. she was a dissenter, a congregationalist, and brought up robert in the nurture and admonition of the lord, herself a noble example of her teachings. this evangelical training had an incalculably strong influence on the spirit of browning's poetry. she loved music ardently, and when robert was a boy, used to play the piano to him in the twilight. he always said that he got his devotion to music from her. in these days, when there is such a strong reaction everywhere against the elective system in education, it is interesting to remember that browning's education was simply the elective system pushed to its last possibility. it is perhaps safe to say that no learned man in modern times ever had so little of school and college. his education depended absolutely and exclusively on his inclinations; he was encouraged to study anything he wished. his father granted him perfect liberty, never sent him to any "institution of learning," and allowed him to do exactly as he chose, simply providing competent private instruction in whatever subject the youth expressed any interest. thus he learned greek, latin, the modern languages, music (harmony and counterpoint, as well as piano and organ), chemistry (a private laboratory was fitted up in the house), history and art. now every one knows that; so far as definite acquisition of knowledge is concerned, our schools and colleges-at least in america--leave much to be desired; our boys and girls study the classics for years without being able to read a page at sight; and the modern languages show a similarly meagre harvest. if one wishes positive and practical results one must employ a private tutor, or work alone in secret. the great advantages of our schools and colleges--except in so far as they inspire intellectual curiosity--are not primarily of a scholarly nature; their strength lies in other directions. the result of browning's education was that at the age of twenty he knew more than most college graduates ever know; and his knowledge was at his full command. his favorite reading on the train, for example, was a greek play; one of the reasons why his poetry sometimes seems so pedantic is simply because he never realised how ignorant most of us really are. i suppose he did not believe that men could pass years in school and university training and know so little. yet the truth is, that most boys, brought up as browning was, would be utterly unfitted for the active duties and struggles of life, and indeed for the amenities of social intercourse. with ninety-nine out of a hundred, such an education, so far as it made for either happiness or efficiency, would be a failure. but browning was the hundredth man. he was profoundly learned without pedantry and without conceit; and he was primarily a social being, his physical training was not neglected. the boy had expert private instruction in fencing, boxing, and riding. he was at ease on the back of a spirited horse. he was particularly fond of dancing, which later aroused the wonder of elizabeth barrett, who found it difficult to imagine the author of _paracelsus_ dancing the polka. in appeared browning's first poem, _pauline_, which had been completed before he was twenty-one years old. his aunt, mrs. silverthorne, gave him one hundred and fifty dollars, which paid the expenses of publication. not a single copy was sold, and the unbound sheets came home to roost. the commercial worth of _pauline_ was exactly zero; today it is said that only five copies exist. one was sold recently for two thousand four hundred dollars. in browning visited russia, going by steamer to rotterdam, and then driving fifteen hundred miles with horses. although he was in russia about three months, and at the most sensitive time of life, the country made surprisingly little impression upon him, or at least upon his poetry. the dramatic idyl, _ivan ivànovitch_, is practically the only literary result of this journey. it was the south, and not the north, that was to be the inspiration of browning. he published his second poem, _paracelsus_, in . although this attracted no general attention, and had no sale, it was enthusiastically reviewed by john forster, who declared that its author was a man of genius. the most fortunate result of its appearance was that it brought browning within the pale of literary society, and gave him the friendship of some of the leading men in london. the great actor macready was charmed with the poem, and young browning haunted macready's dressing-room at the theatre for years; but their friendship ceased in when _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ was acted. browning wrote four plays for macready, two of which were accepted. although browning late in life remarked in a casual conversation that he had visited italy in , he must have been mistaken, for it is impossible to find any record of such a journey. to the best of our knowledge, he first saw the land of his inspiration in , sailing from london on april th, passing through the straits of gibraltar on the twenty-ninth, and reaching trieste on may th. on the first of june he entered venice. it was on a walking-trip that he first saw the village of asolo, about thirty miles to the northeast of venice. little did he then realise how closely his name would be forever associated with this tiny town. the scenes of _pippa passes_ he located there: the last summer of his life, in , was spent in asolo, his last volume he named in memory of the village; and on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, the street where he lived and wrote in was formally named via roberto browning. his son, robert barrett browning, lived to see this event, and died at asolo on july , . the long and obscure poem _sordello_ was published in ; and then for thirty years browning produced poetry of the highest order: poetry that shows scarcely any obscurity, and that in lyric and dramatic power has given its author a fixed place among the greatest names in english literature. the story of the marriage and married life of elizabeth barrett and robert browning is one of the greatest love stories in the world's history; their love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of heloise and abelard, aucassin and nicolette, paul and virginia. there was a mysterious bond between them long before the personal acquaintance: each admired the other's poetry. miss barrett had a picture of browning in her sickroom, and declared that the adverse criticism constantly directed against his verse hurt her like a lash across her own back. in a new volume of poems, she made a complimentary reference to his work, and in january, , he wrote her a letter properly beginning with the two words, "i love." it was her verses that he loved, and said so. in may he saw her and illustrated his own doctrine by falling in love with her at first sight. she was in her fortieth year, and an invalid; but if any one is surprised at the passion she aroused in the handsome young poet, six years her junior, one has only to read her letters. she was a charming woman, feminine from her soul to her finger-tips, the incarnation of _das ewigweibliche_. her intimate friends were mostly what were then known as strong-minded women--i suppose to-day they would seem like timid, shy violets. she was modest, gentle, winsome, irresistible: profoundly learned, with the eager heart of a child. wimpole street in london, "the long, unlovely street," as tennyson calls it, is holy ground to the lover of literature: for at number lived arthur henry hallam, and diagonally opposite, at number , lived elizabeth barrett. this street--utterly commonplace in appearance--is forever associated with the names of our two great victorian poets: and the association with tennyson is death: with browning, love. not only was elizabeth believed to be a hopeless invalid, but her father had forbidden any of his children to marry. he was a religious man, whose motto in his own household was apparently "thou shalt have no other gods before me." he had the particular kind of piety that is most offensive to ordinary humanity. he gave his children, for whom he had a stern and savage passion, everything except what they wanted. he had an insane jealousy of any possible lover, and there is no doubt that he would have preferred to attend the funeral of any one of his children rather than a marriage. but browning's triumphant love knew no obstacles, and he persuaded elizabeth barrett to run away with him. they were married in september, , and shortly after left for italy. her father refused to see either of them in subsequent years, and returned his daughter's letters unopened. is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts? browning's faith wrought a miracle. instead of dying on the journey to italy, mrs. browning got well, and the two lived together in unclouded happiness for fifteen years, until , when she died in his arms. not a scrap of writing passed between them from the day of her marriage to the day of her death: for they were never separated. she said that all a woman needed to be perfectly happy was three things--life, love, italy--and she had all three. the relations between elizabeth barrett and robert browning had all the wonder and beauty of a mediaeval romance, with the notable addition of being historically true. the familiar story of a damosel imprisoned in a gloomy dungeon, guarded by a cruel dragon--and then, when all her hope had vanished, rescued by the sudden appearance of the brilliant knight, who carried her away from her dull prison to a land of sunshine and happiness--this became the literal experience of elizabeth barrett. her love for her husband was the passionate love of a woman for a man, glorified by adoration for the champion who had miraculously transformed her life from the depths of despair to the topmost heights of joy. he came, "pouring heaven into this shut house of life." she expressed the daily surprise of her happiness in her sonnets, which one day she put shyly into his hands: i thought once how theocritus had sung of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, who each one in a gracious hand appears to bear a gift for mortals, old or young: and, as i mused it in his antique tongue, i saw, in gradual vision through my tears, the sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, those of my own life, who by turns had flung a shadow across me. straightway i was 'ware, so weeping, how a mystic shape did move behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; and a voice said in mastery while i strove, ... "guess now who holds thee?"--"death!" i said. but, there, the silver answer rang ... "not death, but love." my own beloved, who hast lifted me from this drear flat of earth where i was thrown, and in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown a life-breath, till the forehead hopefully shines out again, as all the angels see, before thy saving kiss! my own, my own, who camest to me when the world was gone, and i who looked for only god, found _thee_! i find thee: i am safe, and strong, and glad. as one who stands in dewless asphodel looks backward on the tedious time he had in the upper life ... so i, with bosom-swell, make witness here between the good and bad, that love, as strong as death, retrieves as well. browning replied to this wonderful tribute by appending to the fifty poems published in his _one word more_. he wrote this in a metre different from any he had ever used, for he meant the poem to be unique in his works, a personal expression of his love. he remarked that rafael wrote sonnets, that dante painted a picture, each man going outside the sphere of his genius to please the woman he loved, to give her something entirely apart from his gifts to the world. he wished that he could do something other than poetry for his wife, and in the next life he believed that it would be possible. but here god had given him only one gift--verse: he must therefore present her with a specimen of the only art he could command; but it should be utterly unlike all his other poems, for they were dramatic; here just once, and for one woman only, he would step out from behind the scenes, and address her directly in his own person. of course browning could have modelled a statue, or written a piece of music for elizabeth, for in both of these arts he had attained moderate proficiency: but he wished not only to make a gift just for her, but to give it to her in public, with the whole world regarding; therefore it must be of his best. he calls her his _moon_ of poets. he reminds her how a few days ago, they had seen the crescent moon in florence, how they had seen it nightly waxing until it lamped the facade of san miniato, while the nightingales, in ecstasy among the cypress trees, gave full-throated applause. then they had travelled together to london, and now saw the same dispirited moon, saving up her silver parsimoniously, sink in gibbous meanness behind the chimney-tops. the notable thing about the moon is that whereas the earth, during one revolution about the sun, turns on its own axis three hundred and sixty-five times, the shy moon takes exactly the same length of time to turn around as she takes to circle once around the earth. for this reason, earth's inhabitants have never seen but one side of the moon, and never will. elizabeth browning is _his_ moon, because she shows the other side to him alone. the radiant splendor of her poetry fills the whole earth with light; but to her husband she shows the other side, the loving, domestic woman, the unspeakably precious and intimate associate of his daily life. the world thinks it knows her; but it has seen only one side; it knows nothing of the marvellous depth and purity of her real nature. one word more to e.b.b. i there they are, my fifty men and women naming me the fifty poems finished! take them, love, the book and me together: where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. ii rafael made a century of sonnets, made and wrote them in a certain volume dinted with the silver-pointed pencil else he only used to draw madonnas: these, the world might view--but one, the volume. who that one, you ask? your heart instructs you. did she live and love it all her life-time? did she drop, his lady of the sonnets, die, and let it drop beside her pillow where it lay in place of rafael's glory, rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving-- cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's, rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's? iii you and i would rather read that volume, (taken to his beating bosom by it) lean and list the bosom-beats of rafael, would we not? than wonder at madonnas-- her, san sisto names, and her, foligno, her, that visits florence in a vision, her, that's left with lilies in the louvre-- seen by us and all the world in circle. iv you and i will never read that volume. guido reni, like his own eye's apple guarded long the treasure-book and loved it guido reni dying, all bologna cried, and the world cried too, "ours, the treasure!" suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. v dante once prepared to paint an angel: whom to please? you whisper "beatrice." while he mused and traced it and retraced it, (peradventure with a pen corroded still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for, when, his left-hand i' the hair o' the wicked, back he held the brow and pricked its stigma, bit into the live man's flesh for parchment, loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, let the wretch go festering through florence)-- dante, who loved well because he hated, hated wickedness that hinders loving, dante standing, studying his angel,-- in there broke the folk of his inferno. says he--"certain people of importance" (such he gave his daily dreadful line to) "entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." says the poet-"then i stopped my painting." vi you and i would rather see that angel, painted by the tenderness of dante, would we not?--than read a fresh inferno. vii you and i will never see that picture. while he mused on love and beatrice, while he softened o'er his outlined angel, in they broke, those "people of importance": we and bice bear the loss for ever. viii what of rafael's sonnets, dante's picture? this: no artist lives and loves, that longs not once, and only once, and for one only, (ah, the prize!) to find his love a language fit and fair and simple and sufficient-- using nature that's an art to others, not, this one time, art that's turned his nature. ay, of all the artists living, loving, none but would forego his proper dowry,-- does he paint? he fain would write a poem,-- does he write? he fain would paint a picture, put to proof art alien to the artist's, once, and only once, and for one only, so to be the man and leave the artist, gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow. ix wherefore? heaven's gift takes earth's abatement! he who smites the rock and spreads the water, bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him, even he, the minute makes immortal, proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute, desecrates, belike, the deed in doing. while he smites, how can he but remember, so he smote before, in such a peril, when they stood and mocked--"shall smiting help us?" when they drank and sneered--"a stroke is easy!" when they wiped their mouths and went their journey, throwing him for thanks--"but drought was pleasant." thus old memories mar the actual triumph; thus the doing savours of disrelish; thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat; o'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate, carelessness or consciousness--the gesture. for he bears an ancient wrong about him, sees and knows again those phalanxed faces, hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude-- "how shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save us?" guesses what is like to prove the sequel-- "egypt's flesh-pots--nay, the drought was better." x oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant! theirs, the sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance, right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat. never dares the man put off the prophet. xi did he love one face from out the thousands, (were she jethro's daughter, white and wifely, were she but the Æthiopian bondslave,) he would envy yon dumb patient camel, keeping a reserve of scanty water meant to save his own life in the desert; ready in the desert to deliver (kneeling down to let his breast be opened) hoard and life together for his mistress. xii i shall never, in the years remaining, paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, make you music that should all-express me; so it seems: i stand on my attainment. this of verse alone, one life allows me; verse and nothing else have i to give you. other heights in other lives, god willing: all the gifts from all the heights, your own, love! xiii yet a semblance of resource avails us-- shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, lines i write the first time and the last time. he who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, makes a strange art of an art familiar, fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. he who blows thro' bronze, may breathe thro' silver, fitly serenade a slumbrous princess. he who writes, may write for once as i do. xiv love, you saw me gather men and women, live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, enter each and all, and use their service, speak from every mouth,--the speech, a poem. hardly shall i tell my joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving: i am mine and yours--the rest be all men's, karshish, cleon, norbert and the fifty. let me speak this once in my true person, not as lippo, roland or andrea, though the fruit of speech be just this sentence: pray you, look on these my men and women, take and keep my fifty poems finished; where my heart lies, let my brain lie also! poor the speech; be how i speak, for all things. xv not but that you know me! lo, the moon's self! here in london, yonder late in florence, still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. curving on a sky imbrued with colour, drifted over fiesole by twilight, came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. full she flared it, lamping samminiato, rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, perfect till the nightingales applauded. now, a piece of her old self, impoverished, hard to greet, she traverses the houseroofs, hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver, goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. xvi what, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy? nay: for if that moon could love a mortal, use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy), all her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos) she would turn a new side to her mortal, side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman-- blank to zoroaster on his terrace, blind to galileo on his turret, dumb to homer, dumb to keats--him, even! think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal-- when she turns round, comes again in heaven, opens out anew for worse or better! proves she like some portent of an iceberg swimming full upon the ship it founders, hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? proves she as the paved work of a sapphire seen by moses when he climbed the mountain? moses, aaron, nadab and abihu climbed and saw the very god, the highest, stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. like the bodied heaven in his clearness shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work, when they ate and drank and saw god also! xvii what were seen? none knows, none ever shall know. only this is sure--the sight were other, not the moon's same side, born late in florence, dying now impoverished here in london. god be thanked, the meanest of his creatures boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her! xviii this i say of me, but think of you, love! this to you--yourself my moon of poets! ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder, thus they see you, praise you, think they know you! there, in turn i stand with them and praise you-- out of my own self, i dare to phrase it. but the best is when i glide from out them, cross a step or two of dubious twilight, come out on the other side, the novel silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, where i hush and bless myself with silence. xix oh, their rafael of the dear madonnas, oh, their dante of the dread inferno, wrote one song--and in my brain i sing it, drew one angel--borne, see, on my bosom! r. b. the brownings travelled a good deal: they visited many places in italy, venice, ancona, fano, siena, and spent several winters in rome. the winter of - was passed at paris, where on the third of january browning wrote one of his most notable poems, _childe roland to the dark tower came_. one memorable evening at london in there were gathered together in an upper room mr. and mrs. browning, mr. and mrs. tennyson, dante and william rossetti. tennyson had just published _maud_ and browning the two volumes called _men and women_. each poet was invited to read from his new work. tennyson, with one leg curled under him on the sofa, chanted _maud_, the tears running down his cheeks; and then browning read in a conversational manner his characteristic poem, _fra lippo lippi_. rossetti made a pen-and-ink sketch of the laureate while he was intoning. on one of the journeys made by the brownings from london to paris they were accompanied by thomas carlyle, who wrote a vivid and charming account of the transit. the poet was the practical member of the party: the "brave browning" struggled with the baggage, and the customs, and the train arrangements; while the scot philosopher smoked infinite tobacco. the best account of the domestic life of the brownings at casa guidi in florence was written by nathaniel hawthorne, and published in his _italian note-books_. on a june evening, mr. and mrs. browning, william cullen bryant, and nathaniel hawthorne ate strawberries and talked spiritualism. hawthorne and browning stood on the little balcony overlooking the street, and heard the priests chanting in the church of san felice, the chant heard only in june, which browning was to hear again on the night of the june day when he found the old yellow book. both chant and terrace were to be immortalised in browning's epic. hawthorne said that browning had an elfin wife and an elf child. "i wonder whether he will ever grow up, whether it is desirable that he should." like all visitors at casa guidi, the american was impressed by the extraordinary sweetness, gentleness, and charity of elizabeth browning, and by the energy, vivacity, and conversational powers of her husband. hawthorne said he seemed to be in all parts of the room at once. mr. barrett browning told me in that he remembered his mother, elizabeth barrett browning, as clearly as though he had seen her yesterday. he was eleven years old at the time of her death. he would have it that her ill health had been greatly exaggerated. she was an invalid, but did not give the impression of being one. she was able to do many things, and had considerable power of endurance. one day in florence she walked from her home out through the porta romana, clear up on the heights, and back to casa guidi. "that was pretty good, wasn't it?" said he. she was of course the idol of the household, and everything revolved about her. she was "intensely loved" by all her friends. her father was a "very peculiar man." the son's account of her health differs radically from that written by the mother of e. c. stedman, who said that mrs. browning was kept alive only by opium, which she had to take daily. this writer added, however, that in spite of mrs. browning's wretched health, she had never heard her speak ill of any one, though she talked with her many times. after the death of his wife, browning never saw florence again. he lived in london, and after a few years was constantly seen in society, tennyson, who hated society, said that browning would die in a dress suit. his real fame did not begin until the year , with the publication of _dramatis personæ_. during the first thirty years of his career, from the publication of _pauline_ in to the appearance of _dramatis personæ_, he received always tribute from the few, and neglect, seasoned with ridicule, from the many. _pauline, paracelsus, pippa passes, a blot in the 'scutcheon, christmas-eve, men and women_--each of these volumes was greeted enthusiastically by men and women whose own literary fame is permanent. but the world knew him not. how utterly obscure he was may be seen by the fact that so late as , when the publisher's statement came in for _men and women_, it appeared that during the preceding six months not a single copy had been sold! the best was yet to be. _the dramatis personæ_ was the first of his books to go into a genuine second edition. then four years later came _the ring and the book_, which a contemporary review pronounced to be the "most precious and profound spiritual treasure which england has received since the days of shakespeare." fame, which had shunned him for thirty years, came to him in extraordinary measure during the last part of his life: another exact parallel between him and the great pessimist schopenhauer. it was naturally sweet, its sweetness lessened only by the thought that his wife had not lived to see it. each had always believed in the superiority of the other: and the only cloud in mrs. browning's mind was the (to her) incomprehensible neglect of her husband by the public. at the time of the marriage, it was commonly said that a young literary man had eloped with a great poetess: during their married life, her books went invariably into many editions, while his did not sell at all. and even to the last day of browning's earthly existence, her poems far outsold his, to his unspeakable delight. "the demand for my poems is nothing like so large," he wrote cheerfully, in correcting a contrary opinion that had been printed. even so late as , i found this passage in an account of mrs. browning's life, published that year, it appears that "she was married in to robert browning, who was also a poet and dramatic writer of some note, though his fame seems to have been almost totally eclipsed by the superior endowments of his gifted wife." this reminds us of the time when mr. and mrs. schumann were presented to a scandinavian king: mrs. schumann played on the piano, and his majesty, turning graciously to the silent husband, enquired "are you also musical?" the last summer of browning's life, the summer of , was passed at asolo: in the autumn he moved into his beautiful house in venice, the palazzo rezzonico, which had the finest situation of all venetian residences, built at an angle in the grand canal. although seventy-seven years old, he was apparently as vigorous as ever: no change had taken place in his appearance, manner or habits. one day he caught a bad cold walking on the lido in a bitter wind; and with his usual vehement energy declined to take any proper care of his throat. instead of staying in, he set out for long tramps with friends, constantly talking in the raw autumn air. in order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him, he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him. nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice. when we are children, we reject with scorn the suggestions of our parents; when we are old, we reject with equal scorn the advice of our children. man is apparently an animal more fit to give advice than to take it. browning's impulsive rashness proved fatal. bronchitis with heart trouble finally sent him to bed, though on the last afternoon of his life he rose and walked about the room. during the last few days he told many good stories and talked with his accustomed eagerness. he died at ten o'clock in the evening of the twelfth of december, , a few moments before his death came a cablegram from london announcing that his last volume of poems had been published that day, and that the evening papers were speaking in high terms of its contents. "that is very gratifying," said he. browning's life was healthy, comfortable, and happy. with the exception of frequent headaches in his earlier years, he never knew sickness or physical distress. his son said that he had never seen him in bed in the daytime until the last illness. he had a truly wonderful digestion; it was his firm belief that one should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the infallible sign that the food was healthful. "my father was a man of _bonne fourchette_" said barrett browning to me; "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all kinds of italian dishes, especially with rich sauces. he always ate freely of rich and delicate things. he could make a whole meal off mayonnaise." it is pleasant to remember that emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast. unlike carlyle and tennyson, who smoked constantly, browning never used tobacco; he drank wine with his meals, but sparingly, and never more than one kind of wine at a dinner. while physically robust, fond of riding and walking, never using a cab or public conveyance if he could help it, he was like most first-class literary men in caring nothing whatever for competitive sports. he did not learn to swim until late in life; his son taught him at pornic, in brittany. he was venturesome for a man well on in years, swimming far out with boyish delight, as he has himself described it in the _prologue to fifine at the fair_. browning's eyes were peculiar, one having a long focus, the other very short. he had the unusual accomplishment (try it and prove) of closing either eye without "squinching," and without any apparent effort, though sometimes on the street in strong sunshine his face would be a bit distorted. he did all his reading and writing with one eye, closing the long one as he sat down at his desk. he never wore glasses, and was proud of his microscopic eye. he often wrote minutely, to show off his powers. when he left the house to go for a walk, he shut the short eye and opened the long one, with which he could see an immense distance. he never suffered with any pain in his eyes except once, when a boy, he was trying to be a vegetarian in imitation of his youthful idol, shelley. contrary to the oft-repeated statement, browning was not a really fine pianist. as a very young man, he used to play several instruments, and once he had been able to play all of beethoven's sonatas on the piano. in later life he became ambitious to improve his skill with this instrument, and had much trouble, for his fingers were clumsy and stiff. he therefore used to rise at six, and practise finger-exercises for an hour! he loved first-class music ardently, had a profound knowledge of it, and was a good judge. if the performance was fine, he would express his praise with the utmost enthusiasm; but bad work caused him acute pain. sometimes at a concert he would put his fingers in his ears, his suffering being apparently uncontrollable. the salient feature of his character was his boyish vivacity and enthusiasm. if he looked out of the window and saw a friend coming along the street to call, he would often rush out and embrace him. in conversation he was extraordinarily eager and impulsive, with a great flow of talk on an enormous range of subjects. if he liked anything, he spoke of it in the heartiest manner, laughing aloud with delight. he was very generous in his appreciation and praise of other men's work, being beautifully free from that jealousy which is one of the besetting sins of artists. he always tried to see what was good. occasionally he was enraged at reading a particularly hostile criticism of himself, but on the whole he stood abuse very well, and had abundant opportunity to exercise the gift of patience. a great admirer of tennyson's poetry and of tennyson's character--they were dear and intimate friends--he never liked the stock comparison. "tennyson and i are totally unlike," he used to say. no letter from one rival to another was ever more beautiful than the letter browning wrote to tennyson on the occasion of the laureate's eightieth birthday: "my dear tennyson--to-morrow is your birthday--indeed, a memorable one. let me say i associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us--secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. and for my own part, let me further say, i have loved you dearly. may god bless you and yours. "at no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have i had any other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter--that i am and ever shall be, my dear tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours, "robert browning." what i have said of browning's impulsiveness is borne out not only by the universal testimony of those who knew him well, but particularly by a letter of mrs. browning to mrs. jameson. the manuscript of this letter was bought in london by an american, and went down with the _titanic_ in . an extract from it appeared in a bookseller's catalogue--"you must learn robert--he is made of moods--chequered like a chess-board; and the colour goes for too much--till you learn to treat it as a game." no man--little or great--was ever more free from pose. his appearance, in clothes and in hair, was studiously normal. no one in his later years would ever have guessed that he was a poet, either in seeing him on the street, or in meeting him at dinner. he was interested in multitudinous things, but never spoke of poetry--either in general or in his own particular--if he could avoid doing so. the fact that strangers who were presented to him and talked with him did not guess that he was _the_ mr. browning, gave rise to numberless humorous situations. perhaps the best thing that can be said of his personal character is the truthful statement that he stood in the finest manner two searching tests of manhood--long neglect and sudden popularity, the long years of oblivion, during which he was producing much of his best work, made him neither angry nor sour, though he must have suffered deeply. on the other hand, when his fame reached prodigious proportions, he was neither conceited nor affected. he thoroughly believed in himself, and in his work; and he cared more about it than he did for its reception. the crushing grief that came to him in the death of his wife he bore with that christian resignation of which we hear more often than perhaps we see in experience. for browning was a christian, not only in faith but in conduct; it was the mainspring of his art and of his life. there are so many writers whose lives show so painful a contrast with the ideal tone of their written work, that it is refreshing and inspiring to be so certain of browning; to know that the author of the poems which thrill us was as great in character as he was in genius. ii browning's theory of poetry with one exception, the economic law of supply and demand governs the production of literature exactly as it determines the price of wheat. for many years the novel has been the chief channel of literary expression, the dominant literary form: in the days of queen elizabeth, the drama was supreme. during the early part of the eighteenth century, theological poetry enjoyed a great vogue; pope's _essay on man_ circulated with the rapidity of a modern detective story. consider the history of the english sonnet. this form of verse was exceedingly popular in , by it had vanished, and remained obsolete for nearly a hundred years; about the middle of the eighteenth century it was revived by thomas edwards and others; in the nineteenth century it became fashionable, and still holds its place, as one may see by opening current magazines. why is it that writers put their ideas on god, nature, and woman in the form of a drama in , and in the form of a novel in ? why is it that an inspired man should make poems of exactly fourteen lines in and in , and not do it in ? if we do not attempt an ultimate metaphysical analysis, the answer is clear. the bookseller supplies the public, the publisher supplies the bookseller, the author supplies the publisher. a bookseller has in his window what the people want, and the publisher furnishes material in response to the same desire; just as a farmer plants in his fields some foodstuffs for which there is a sharp demand. authors are compelled to write for the market, whether they like it or not, otherwise their work can not appear in print. the reason why the modern novel, with all its shortcomings, is the mirror of ideas on every conceivable topic in religious, educational, economic, and sociological thought, is because the vast majority of writers are at this moment compelled by the market to put their reflections into the form of novels, just as marlowe and chapman were forced to write plays. with one exception, the law of supply and demand determines the metrical shape of the poet's frenzy, and the prose mould of the philosopher's ideas. the exception is so rare that it establishes the rule. the exception is genius--next to radium the scarcest article on earth. and even genius often follows the market--it takes the prevailing literary fashion, and adapts itself to the form in vogue in a more excellent way. such genius--the genius for adaptation--never has to wait long for recognition, simply because it supplies a keen popular demand. such a genius was shakespeare: such a genius was pope: such a genius was scott: such a genius was byron: such a genius was tennyson. but the true exception to the great economic law is seen in the man of original genius, who cares not at all for the fashion except perhaps to destroy it. this man is outside the law of supply and demand, because he supplies no demand, and there exists no demand for him. he therefore has to create the demand as well as the supply. such a man in music was wagner: such a man in drama was ibsen: such a man in poetry was browning. these three men were fortunate in all reaching the age of seventy, for had they died midway in their careers, even after accomplishing much of their best work, they would have died in obscurity. they had to wait long for recognition, because nobody was looking for them, nobody wanted them. there was no demand for wagner's music--but there is now, and he made it. there was no demand for plays like those of ibsen; and there was not the slightest demand for poetry like _pauline_ and the _dramatic lyrics_. the reason why the public does not immediately recognise the greatness of a work of original genius, is because the public at first--if it notices the thing at all--apprehends not its greatness, but its strangeness. it is so unlike the thing the public is seeking, that it seems grotesque or absurd--many indeed declare that it is exactly the opposite of what it professes to be. thus, many insisted that ibsen's so-called dramas were not really plays: they were merely conversations on serious and unpleasant themes. in like manner, the critics said that wagner, whatever he composed, did not compose music; for instead of making melodies, he made harsh and discordant sounds. for eighty years, many men of learning and culture have been loudly proclaiming that browning, whatever he was, was not a poet; he was ingenious, he was thoughtful, a philosopher, if you like, but surely no poet. when _the ring and the book_ was published, a thoroughly respectable british critic wrote, "music does not exist for him any more than for the deaf." on the other hand, the accomplished poet, musician, and critic, sidney lanier, remarked: "have you seen browning's _the ring and the book_? i am confident that at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one--as in the old tale--crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist i' the neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a marvellous tortuous passage. out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't, and can't, come straight. a hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock. but what a shock it is! did you ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? in a thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch him! that is the way robert browning catches you. the first sixty or seventy pages of _the ring and the book_ are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the english language; and yet the monologue of giuseppe caponsacchi, that of pompilia comparini, and the two of guido franceschini, are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, _me judice_. here browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect. you get lightning glimpses--and, as one naturally expects from lightning, zigzag glimpses--into the intense night of the passion of these souls. it is entirely wonderful and without precedent." [ ] one of the most admirable things about browning's admirable career as poet and man is that he wrote not to please the critics, as tennyson often did, not to please the crowd, as the vast horde of ephemeral writers do, but to please himself. the critics and the crowd professed that they could not understand him; but he had no difficulty in understanding them. he knew exactly what they wanted, and declined to supply it. instead of giving them what he thought they wanted, he gave them what he thought they needed. that illustrates the difference between the literary caterer and the literary master. some poets, critics, dramatists, and novelists are born to be followers of the public taste; they have their reward. only a few, and one at a time, are leaders. this is entirely as it should be, for, with followers, the more the merrier; with leaders it is quite otherwise. in the case of a man of original genius, the first evidence of approaching fame is seen in the dust raised by contempt, scorn, ridicule, and various forms of angry resistance from those who will ultimately be converts. people resist him as they resist the gospel. he comes unto his own, and his own receive him not. the so-called reading public have the stupid cruelty of schoolboys, who will not tolerate on the part of any newcomer the slightest divergence in dress, manners, or conversation from the established standard. conformity is king; for schoolboys are the most conservative mass of inertia that can be found anywhere on earth. and they are thorough masters of ridicule--the most powerful weapon known to humanity. but as in schoolboy circles the ostracising laughter is sometimes a sign that a really original boy has made his appearance, so the unthinking opposition of the conventional army of readers is occasionally a proof that the new man has made a powerful impression which can not be shaken off. [footnote : life of sidney lanier, by professor edwin mims.] this is what browning did with his "lasso" style. it was suitably adapted to his purposes, and the public behaved somewhat like the buffalo. they writhed, kicked, struggled, plunged, and the greater the uproar, the more evident it was that they were caught. shortly before his death, professor f.j. child, a scholar of international fame, told me angrily that wagner was no musician at all; that he was a colossal fraud; that the growing enthusiasm for him was mere affectation, which would soon pass away. he spoke with extraordinary passion. i wondered at his rage, but i understand it now. it was the rage of a king against the incoming and inexorable tide. nothing is more singular to contemplate than the variations in form of what the public calls melody, both in notation and in language. what delights the ears of one generation distresses or wearies the ears of another. elizabethan audiences listened with rapture to long harangues in bombastic blank verse: a modern audience can not endure this. the senses of queen anne englishmen were charmed by what they called the melody of pope's verse--by its even regularity and steady flow. to us pope's verse is full of wit and cerebration, but we find the measure intolerably monotonous. indeed, by a curious irony of fate, pope, who regarded himself as a supreme poet, has since frequently been declared to be no poet at all. keats wrote _endymion_ in the heroic couplet--the very measure employed by pope. but his use of it was so different that this poem would have seemed utterly lacking in melody to augustan ears--pope would have attempted to "versify" it. and yet we enjoy it. it seems ridiculous to say that the man who wrote _der fliegende holländer and tannhäuser_ could not write melody, and yet it was almost universally said. it seems strange that critics should have declared that the man who wrote _love among the ruins_ could not write rhythmical verse, yet such was once almost the general opinion. still, the rebellious instinct of the public that condemned wagner in music and browning in poetry was founded on something genuine; for wagner was unlike other musicians, and browning was unlike other poets. _fraser's magazine_, for december, , contained a review of browning's first poem, _pauline_, which had been published that year. the critic decided that the new poet was mad: "you being, beyond all question, as mad as cassandra, without any of the power to prophesy like her, or to construct a connected sentence like anybody else. we have already had a monomaniac; and we designate you 'the mad poet of the batch;' as being mad not in one direction only, but in all. a little lunacy, like a little knowledge, would be a dangerous thing." yet it was in this despised and rejected poem that a great, original genius in english poetry was first revealed. it is impossible to understand browning or even to read him intelligently without firmly fixing in the mind his theory of poetry, and comprehending fully his ideal and his aim. all this he set forth clearly in _pauline_, and though he was only twenty years old when he wrote it, he never wavered from his primary purpose as expressed in two lines of the poem, two lines that should never be forgotten by those who really wish to enjoy the study of browning: and then thou said'st a perfect bard was one who chronicled the stages of all life. what is most remarkable about this definition of poetry is what it omits. the average man regards poetry as being primarily concerned with the creation of beauty. not a word is said about beauty in browning's theory. the average man regards poetry as being necessarily melodious, rhythmical, tuneful, above all, pleasing to the senses; but browning makes no allusion here to rime or rhythm, nor to melody or music of any sort. to him the bard is a reporter of life, an accurate historian of the soul, one who observes human nature in its various manifestations, and gives a faithful record. sound, rhythm, beauty are important, because they are a part of life; and they are to be found in browning's works like wild flowers in a field; but they are not in themselves the main things. the main thing is human life in its totality. exactly in proportion to the poet's power of portraying life, is the poet great; if he correctly describes a wide range of life, he is greater than if he has succeeded only in a narrow stretch; and the perfect bard would be the one who had chronicled the stages of all life. shakespeare is the supreme poet because he has approached nearer to this ideal than any one else--he has actually chronicled most phases of humanity, and has truthfully painted a wide variety of character. browning therefore says of him in _christmas-eve_-- as i declare our poet, him whose insight makes all others dim: a thousand poets pried at life, and only one amid the strife rose to be shakespeare. browning's poetry, as he elsewhere expresses it, was always dramatic in principle, always an attempt to interpret human life. with that large number of highly respectable and useful persons who do not care whether they understand him or not, i have here no concern: but to those who really wish to learn his secret, i insist that his main intention must ever be kept in mind. much of his so-called obscurity, harshness, and uncouthness falls immediately into its proper place, is indeed necessary. the proof of his true greatness not as a philosopher, thinker, psychologist, but as a poet, lies in the simple fact that when the subject-matter he handles is beautiful or sublime, his style is usually adequate to the situation. browning had no difficulty in writing melodiously when he placed the posy in the ring, o lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire, although just a moment before, when he was joking about his lack of readers, he was anything but musical. _the ring and the book_ is full of exquisite beauty, amazing felicity of expression, fluent rhythm and melody; full also of crudities, jolts, harshness, pedantry, wretched witticisms, and coarseness. why these contrasts? because it is a study of human testimony. the lawyers in this work speak no radiant or spiritual poetry; they talk like tiresome, conceited pedants because they were tiresome, conceited pedants; pompilia's dying speech of adoring passion for caponsacchi is sublime music, because she was a spiritual woman in a glow of exaltation. guido speaks at first with calm, smiling irony, and later rages like a wild beast caught in a spring-trap; in both cases the verse fits his mood. if pompilia's tribute to caponsacchi had been expressed in language as dull and flat as the pleas of the lawyers, then we should be quite sure that browning, whatever he was, was no poet. for it would indicate that he could not create the right diction for the right situation and character. now, his picture of the triple light of sunset in _the last ride together_ is almost intolerably beautiful, because such a scene fairly overwhelms the senses. i hear the common and unintelligent comment, "ah, if he had only always written like that!" he would have done so, if he had been interested in only the beautiful aspects of this world. "how could the man who wrote such lovely music as that have also written such harsh stuff as _mr. sludge, the medium_"? the answer is that in the former he was chronicling a stage of life that in its very essence was beauty: in the latter, something exactly the opposite. life has its trivialities and its ugliness, as well as its sublime aspirations. in browning's poetry, whenever the thought rises, the style automatically rises with it, compare the diction of _holy cross day_ with that in _love among the ruins_. cleon is an old greek poet, and he speaks noble, serene verse: bishop blougram is a subtle dialectician, a formidable antagonist in a joint debate, and he has the appropriate manner and language. would you have him talk like the lover in _evelyn hope_? browning was a great artist, and the grotesque is an organic part of his structures. to find fault with the grotesque excrescences in browning's poetry is exactly like condemning a cathedral because it has gargoyles. how could the architect that dreamed those wonderful columns and arches have made those hideous gargoyles? did he flatter himself they were beautiful? when _macbeth_ was translated into german, the translator was aghast at the coarse language of the drunken porter. how could the great shakespeare, who had proved so often his capacity as an artist, have made such an appalling blunder? so the translator struck out the offensive words, and made the porter sing a sweet hymn to the dawn. the theory of poetry originally stated in _pauline_ browning not only endeavored to exemplify in his work; he often distinctly repeated it. in _the glove_, all the courtiers, hide-bound by conventional ideas, unite in derisive insults howled at the lady. she goes out 'mid hooting and laughter. only two men follow her: one, because he loves her; the other, for purely professional reasons. to-day, he would of course be a society reporter. "i beg your pardon, madam, but would you kindly grant me an interview? i represent the _new york flash_, and we shall be glad to present your side of this story in our next sunday issue." with equal professional zeal, peter ronsard is keenly interested in discovering the motives that underlay the lady's action. he simply must know, and in defense of his importunity, he presents his credentials. he is a poet, and therefore the strange scene that has just been enacted comes within his special domain. i followed after, and asked, as a grace, what it all meant? if she wished not the rash deed's recallment? "for i"--so i spoke--"am a poet: human nature,--behoves that i know it!" in _transcendentalism_, a poem which is commonly misunderstood, browning informs us that the true poet must deal, not with abstract thought, but with concrete things. a young poet informs an elder colleague that he has just launched a huge philosophical poem, called _transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books_. his wiser critic tells him that he is on the wrong track altogether; what he has written is prose, not poetry. poetry is not a discussion of abstract ideas, but the creation of individual things. transcendentalism is not a fit subject for poetry, because it deals with metaphysical thought, instead of discussing men and women. to illustrate his point, he makes a comparison between botany and roses. which is the more interesting, to read a heavy treatise on botany, or to behold roses? a few pedants may like botany better, but ordinary humanity is quite right in preferring flowers. browning indicates that the poet should not compose abstract treatises, but should create individual works of art, like the stout mage of halberstadt, john, who made things boehme wrote thoughts about. he with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side, nay, in and out the tables and the chairs and musty volumes, boehme's book and all,-- buries us with a glory, young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. many have failed to understand this poem, because they think that browning himself is constantly guilty of the sin specifically condemned here. browning has indeed often been called a thinker, a philosopher: but a moment's serious reflection will prove that of all english poetry outside of the drama, browning's is the least abstract and the most concrete. poetry is not condemned because it arouses thought, but only when it is abstract in method. browning often deals with profound ideas, but always by concrete illustrations. for example, he discusses the doctrine of predestination by giving us the individual figure of johannes-agricola in meditation: the royalist point of view in the seventeenth century by cavaliers singing three songs: the damnation of indecision by two laodicaean lovers in _the statue and the bust_. when browning is interested in any doctrine, idea, or system of thought, he creates a person to illustrate it. browning's theory of poetry is further reenforced by his poem _how it strikes a contemporary_, which, in the final rearrangement of his works, he placed directly after _transcendentalism_, as though to drive his doctrine home. here is a picture of a real poet. where does he live, whence does he get his sources of inspiration, and how does he pass his time? the poem answers these questions in a most instructive manner, if only we keep in mind the original definition given in _pauline_. it is conventionally believed that the country is more poetic than the city: that an ideal residence for a poet would be in lonely, lovely, romantic scenery; and that in splendid solitude and isolation he should clothe his thoughts in forms of beauty. now browning's own life and methods of work were in exact contrast to these popular ideas; because his theory of poetry requires the poet to live in the very midst of human activities, and to draw his inspiration not from a mountain or the stars, but from all sorts and conditions of men. thus, in the poem, _how it strikes a contemporary_, the poet lives in a noisy city, spends his time walking the streets, and instead of being lost in a trance, he is intensely aware of everything that happens in the town. the poet is an observer, not a dreamer. indeed, the citizens think this old poet is a royal spy, because he notices people and events with such sharp attention. browning would seem to say that the mistake is a quite natural one; the poet ought to act like a spy, for, if he be a true poet, he is a spy--a spy on human life. he takes upon himself the mystery of things, as if he were god's spy. he walked and tapped the pavement with his cane, scenting the world, looking it full in face.... he glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye, and fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string, and broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. he took such cognizance of men and things, if any beat a horse, you felt he saw; if any cursed a woman, he took note. this is an exact description of the way robert browning walked the streets of florence. only a few years after this poem was printed, he was glancing o'er the books on stalls in the square of san lorenzo, and found the old yellow volume which he turned into an epic of humanity. the true poet "scents" the world, smells it out, as a dog locates game. a still stronger expression is used in _christmas-eve_, where the poets "pried" at life, turned up its surface in order to disclose all its hidden treasures of meaning. "transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books" stop playing, poet! may a brother speak? 'tis you speak, that's your error. song's our art: whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds. --true thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up! but why such long prolusion and display, such turning and adjustment of the harp, and taking it upon your breast, at length, only to speak dry words across its strings? stark-naked thought is in request enough: speak prose and hollo it till europe hears! the six-foot swiss tube, braced about with bark, which helps the hunter's voice from alp to alp-- exchange our harp for that,--who hinders you? but here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think; thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse. boys seek for images and melody, men must have reason--so, you aim at men. quite otherwise! objects throng our youth, 'tis true; we see and hear and do not wonder much: if you could tell us what they mean, indeed! as german boehme never cared for plants until it happed, a-walking in the fields, he noticed all at once that plants could speak, nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. that day the daisy had an eye indeed-- colloquized with the cowslip on such themes! we find them extant yet in jacob's prose. but by the time youth slips a stage or two while reading prose in that tough book he wrote (collating and emendating the same and settling on the sense most to our mind), we shut the clasps and find life's summer past. then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss-- another boehme with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say,-- or some stout mage like him of halberstadt, john, who made things boehme wrote thoughts about? he with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side, nay, in and out the tables and the chairs and musty volumes, boehme's book and all,-- buries us with a glory, young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. so come, the harp back to your heart again! you are a poem, though your poem's naught. the best of all you showed before, believe, was your own boy-face o'er the finer chords bent, following the cherub at the top that points to god with his paired half-moon wings. how it strikes a contemporary i only knew one poet in my life: and this, or something like it, was his way. you saw go up and down valladolid, a man of mark, to know next time you saw. his very serviceable suit of black was courtly once and conscientious still, and many might have worn it, though none did: the cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads, had purpose, and the ruff, significance. he walked and tapped the pavement with his cane, scenting the world, looking it full in face, an old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels. they turned up, now, the alley by the church, that leads nowhither; now, they breathed themselves on the main promenade just at the wrong time: you'd come upon his scrutinizing hat, making a peaked shade blacker than itself against the single window spared some house intact yet with its mouldered moorish work,-- or else surprise the ferrel of his stick trying the mortar's temper 'tween the chinks of some new shop a-building, french and fine. he stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, the man who slices lemons into drink, the coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys that volunteer to help him turn its winch. he glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye, and fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string, and broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. he took such cognizance of men and things, if any beat a horse, you felt he saw; if any cursed a woman, he took note; yet stared at nobody,--you stared at him, and found, less to your pleasure than surprise, he seemed to know you and expect as much. so, next time that a neighbour's tongue was loosed, it marked the shameful and notorious fact, we had among us, not so much a spy, as a recording chief-inquisitor, the town's true master if the town but knew! we merely kept a governor for form, while this man walked about and took account of all thought, said and acted, then went home, and wrote it fully to our lord the king who has an itch to know things, he knows why, and reads them in his bedroom of a night. oh, you might smile! there wanted not a touch, a tang of ... well, it was not wholly ease as back into your mind the man's look came. stricken in years a little,--such a brow his eyes had to live under!--clear as flint on either side the formidable nose curved, cut and coloured like an eagle's claw. had he to do with a.'s surprising fate? when altogether old b. disappeared and young c. got his mistress,--was't our friend, his letter to the king, that did it all? what paid the bloodless man for so much pains? our lord the king has favourites manifold, and shifts his ministry some once a month; our city gets new governors at whiles,-- but never word or sign, that i could hear, notified to this man about the streets the king's approval of those letters conned the last thing duly at the dead of night. did the man love his office? frowned our lord, exhorting when none heard--"beseech me not! too far above my people,--beneath me! i set the watch,--how should the people know? forget them, keep me all the more in mind!" was some such understanding 'twixt the two? i found no truth in one report at least-- that if you tracked him to his home, down lanes beyond the jewry, and as clean to pace, you found he ate his supper in a room blazing with lights, four titians on the wall, and twenty naked girls to change his plate! poor man, he lived another kind of life in that new stuccoed third house by the bridge, fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! the whole street might o'erlook him as he sat, leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog's back, playing a decent cribbage with his maid (jacynth, you're sure her name was) o'er the cheese and fruit, three red halves of starved winter-pears, or treat of radishes in april. nine, ten, struck the church clock, straight to bed went he. my father, like the man of sense he was, would point him out to me a dozen times; "'st--'st," he'd whisper, "the corregidor!" i had been used to think that personage was one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt, and feathers like a forest in his hat, who blew a trumpet and proclaimed the news, announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn, and memorized the miracle in vogue! he had a great observance from us boys; we were in error; that was not the man. i'd like now, yet had haply been afraid, to have just looked, when this man came to die, and seen who lined the clean gay garret-sides and stood about the neat low truckle-bed, with the heavenly manner of relieving guard. here had been, mark, the general-in-chief, thro' a whole campaign of the world's life and death, doing the king's work all the dim day long, in his old coat and up to knees in mud, smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,-- and, now the day was won, relieved at once! no further show or need for that old coat, you are sure, for one thing! bless us, all the while how sprucely we are dressed out, you and i! a second, and the angels alter that. well, i could never write a verse,--could you? let's to the prado and make the most of time. in common with all english poets--there is no exception--browning loved nature. but he loved human nature so much more that when he contemplates natural objects he thinks of them _in terms of humanity_. this is exactly contrary to the conventional method. most poets and novelists describe human faces in terms of outdoor nature: the heroine has "stormy eyes," "rainy eyes," her face is swept by "gusts of passion," and so on, _ad infinitum_. i do not say that browning's is the better way; i say it is his way, because he was obsessed by humanity. to take instances only from his first poem: thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs, so dark in the bare wood, when glistening in the sunshine were white with coming buds, like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks had violets opening from sleep like eyes. autumn has come like spring returned to us won from her girlishness. ... the trees bend o'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl. so, when spring comes with sunshine back again like an old smile. i am to sing whilst ebbing day dies soft, as a lean scholar dies worn o'er his book, and in the heaven stars steal out one by one as hunted men steal to their mountain watch. browning's love for the dramatic was so intense that he carried it into every kind of poetry that he wrote. various classes of his works he called _dramas, dramatic lyrics, dramatic romances, dramatic idyls, dramatis personae_. in one of her prefaces, elizabeth barrett had employed--for the first time in english literature, i think--the term _dramatic lyric_. this naturally appealed to browning, and he gave the title in to his first published collection of short poems. at first blush "dramatic lyric" sounds like a contradiction in terms, like "non-mathematical algebra." drama is the most objective branch of poetry, and the lyric the most subjective: but browning was so intent upon the chronicling of all stages of life that he carried the methods of the drama into the lyric form, of which _meeting at night_ may serve as an excellent example. many of his short poems have the lyrical beauty of shelley and heine; but they all represent the soul of some historical or imaginary person. at the very end of _the ring and the book_, browning declared that human testimony was false, a statement that will be supported by any lawyer or judge of much court experience. human testimony being worthless, there remains but one way for the poet to tell the truth about humanity, and that is through his art. the poet should use his skill not primarily with the idea of creating something beautiful, but with the main purpose of expressing the actual truth concerning human life and character. the highest art is the highest veracity, and this conforms to browning's theory of poetry. this was his ideal, and by adhering to this he hoped to save his soul. browning believed that by living up to our best capacity we attained unto salvation. the man who hid his talent in the earth was really a lost soul. like many truly great artists, browning felt deeply the responsibility of his splendid endowment. in one of his letters to miss barrett, he said, "i must write poetry and save my soul." in the last lines of _the ring and the book_ we find this thought repeated: so, british public, who may like me yet, (marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence of many which whatever lives should teach: this lesson, that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation words and wind. why take the artistic way to prove so much? because, it is the glory and good of art, that art remains the one way possible of speaking truth, to minds like mine at least.... but art,--wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,--art may tell a truth obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. so may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall,-- so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever e'en beethoven dived,-- so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside. and save the soul! from first to last browning understood the prevailing criticism of his poetry, directed against its so-called lack of musical rhythm. he commented on it more than once. but he answered it always in the same way, in _pippa passes_, in the last stanzas of _pacchiarotto_, and in the _epilogue_ to the same volume. he insisted that what the critics meant by melody was a childish jingle of rimes like mother goose. referring to _sordello_, he makes the second student in _pippa passes_ remark, "instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.... one strip cools your lip.... one bottle clears your throttle." in _pacchiarotto_, he calls to critics: and, what with your rattling and tinkling, who knows but you give me an inkling how music sounds, thanks to the jangle of regular drum and triangle? whereby, tap-tap, chink-chink, 'tis proven i break rule as bad as beethoven. "that chord now--a groan or a grunt is't? schumann's self was no worse contrapuntist. no ear! or if ear, so tough-gristled-- he thought that he sung while he whistled!" browning felt that there was at times a certain virtue in mere roughness: that there were ideas, which, if expressed in harsh phrase, would make a deeper impression, and so be longer remembered. the opening stanza of _the twins_ was meant to emphasise this point: grand rough old martin luther bloomed fables--flowers on furze, the better the uncouther: do roses stick like burrs? such a theory may help to explain the powerful line in _rabbi ben ezra_: irks care the cropfull bird? frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? of course browning's theory of poetry does not justify or explain all the unmusical passages in his works. he felt, as every poet must, the difficulty of articulation--the disparity between his ideas and the verbal form he was able to give them. browning had his trials in composition, and he placed in the mouth of the pope his own ardent hope that in the next world there will be some means of communication better than language: expect nor question nor reply at what we figure as god's judgment bar! none of this vile way by the barren words which, more than any deed, characterise man as made subject to a curse: no speech. over and over again, however, browning declared that poetry should not be all sweetness. flowers growing naturally here and there in a pasture are much more attractive than cut and gathered into a nosegay. as luther's long disquisitions are adorned with pretty fables, that bloom like flowers on furze, so, in the _epilogue to pacchiarotto_, browning insisted that the wide fields of his verse are not without cowslips: and, friends, beyond dispute i too have the cowslips dewy and dear. punctual as springtide forth peep they: but i ought to pluck and impound them, eh? not let them alone, but deftly shear and shred and reduce to--what may suit children, beyond dispute? now, there are many law-abiding and transparently honest persons who prefer anthologies to "works," who love to read tiny volumes prettily bound, called "beauties of ruskin," and who have substituted for the out-of-fashion "daily food" books, painted bits of cardboard with sweet sayings culled from popular idols of the day, with which they embellish the walls of their offices and bedrooms, in the hope that they may hoist themselves into a more hallowed frame of mind. this is the class--always with us, though more prosperous than the poor--who prefer a cut bouquet to the natural flowers in wood and meadow, and for whose comfort and convenience browning declined to work. his poetry is too stiff for these readers, partly because they start with a preconceived notion of the function of poetry. instead of being charmed, their first sensation is a shock. they honestly believe that the attitude of the mind in apprehending poetry should be passive, not active: is not the poet a public entertainer? did we not buy the book with the expectation of receiving immediate pleasure? the anticipated delight of many persons when they open a volume of poems is almost physical, as it is when they settle themselves to hear certain kinds of music. they feel presumably as a comfortable cat does when her fur is fittingly stroked. the torture that many listeners suffered when they heard wagner for the first time was not imaginary, it was real; "oh, if somebody would only play a tune!" yet wagner converted thousands of these quondam sufferers, and conquered them without making any compromises. he simply enlarged their conception of what opera-music might mean. he gave them new sources of happiness without robbing them of the old. for my part, although i prefer wagner's to all other operas, i keenly enjoy mozart's _don giovanni_, charpentier's _louise_, gounod's _faust_, strauss's _salomé_, verdi's _aida_, and i never miss an opportunity to hear gilbert and sullivan. almost all famous operas have something good in them except the works of meyerbeer. we all have moods when the mind wishes to be lulled, soothed, charmed, hypnotised with agreeable melody, and in english literature we fortunately have many great poets who can perform this service. that strain again! it had a dying fall. tennyson was a veritable magician, who charmed with his genius hundreds and thousands of people. no arduous mental effort is necessary for the enjoyment of his verse, which is one reason why he is and will remain a popular poet. browning can not be taken in just that way, any more than a man completely exhausted with the day's work can enjoy _siegfried_ or _hedda gabler_. active, constant cerebration on the part of the listener or the reader is essential. this excludes at once a considerable number to whom the effort of real thinking is as strange as it is oppressive. browning is a stimulus, not a sedative; his poetry is like an electric current which naturally fails to affect those who are non-conductors of poetry. as one of my undergraduate students tersely expressed it, "tennyson soothes our senses: browning stimulates our thoughts." poetry is in some ways like medicine. tennyson quiets the nerves: browning is a tonic: some have found thomson's _seasons_ invaluable for insomnia: the poetry of swift is an excellent emetic. i do not quite understand the intense anger of many critics and readers over the eternal question of browning's obscurity. they have been harping on this theme for eighty years and show no more sign of exhaustion than a dog barking in the night. why do the heathen rage? why do they not let browning alone, and read somebody they can understand? browning is still gravely rebuked by many critics for having written _sordello_. over and over again we have been informed that the publication of this poem shattered his reputation for twenty-five years. well, what of it? what difference does it make now? he seems to have successfully survived it. this huge work, which william sharp called "that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry," is destined to have an immortality all its own. from one point of view, we ought to be grateful for its publication. it has aroused inextinguishable laughter among the blessed gods. it is not witty in itself, but it is the cause of wit in many. douglas jerrold and carlyle commented delightfully on it; even tennyson succeeded for once in saying something funny. one critic called it a fine house in which the architect had forgotten to put any stairs. another called it a huge boil in which all the impurities in browning's system came to an impressive head, after which the patient, pure from poison, succeeded in writing the clear and beautiful _pippa passes_. besides innumerable parodies that have been forgotten, browning's obscurity was the impenetrable flint that struck two mental flashes that belong to literature, calverley's _cock and the bull_, and swinburne's _john jones_, a brilliant exposition of the perversities in that tedious poem, _james lee's wife_. not long ago, a young man sat by the lamplight, studying a thick volume with evident discomfort. to the friend who asked what he was doing, he replied, "i'm studying browning." "why, no, you idiot, that isn't browning: you are reading the index of first lines to the works of wordsworth." "by jove! you're right! but it sounds just like browning." browning's place in english literature is not with the great verse-sculptors, not with the masters of imperishable beauty of form; he does not belong to the glorious company where reign supreme milton, keats, and tennyson; his place is rather with the interpreters of life, with the poets who use their art to express the shine and shade of life's tragicomedy--to whom the base, the trivial, the frivolous, the grotesque, the absurd seem worth reporting along with the pure, the noble, and the sublime, since all these elements are alike human. in this wide field of art, with the exception of shakespeare, who is the exception to everything, the first-born and the last-born of all the great english poets know no equal in the five centuries that rolled between them. the first person to say this publicly was himself a poet and a devoted student of form--walter savage landor. when he said it, people thought it was mere hyperbole, the stressed language of compliment; but we know now that landor's words are as true as they are beautiful: shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's, therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, browning! since chaucer was alive and hale, no man hath walk'd along our roads with step so active, so enquiring eye, or tongue so varied in discourse. many critics who are now dead, and some that are yet alive, have predicted the speedy death of browning's reputation. this prediction seems to afford a certain class of critics a calm and holy joy. some years ago, mr. james douglas, of london, solemnly announced the approaching demise. browning will die, said he, even as donne is dead, and for the same reason. but donne is not quite dead. i must survive a thing ere know it dead. i think donne will survive all our contemporary criticisms about him. ben jonson said that donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging. but donne, though he forgot to keep step with the procession of poets, has survived many poets who tripped a regular measure. he has survived even pope's "versification" of his poems, one of the most unconsciously humorous things in english literature. accent alone will not keep a man alive. which poet of these latter days stands the better chance to remain, francis thompson, whose spiritual flame occasionally burned up accent, or alfred austin, who studied to preserve accent through a long life? accent is indeed important; but raiment is of little value unless it clothes a living body. does browning's best poetry smell of mortality? nearly every new novel i read in english has quotations from browning without the marks, sure evidence that the author has read him and assumes that the readers of the novel have a like acquaintance. when maeterlinck wrote his famous play, _monna vanna_, he took one of the scenes directly from browning's _luria_: he said that he had been inspired by browning: that browning is one of the greatest poets that england has ever produced: that to take a scene from him is a kind of public homage, such as we pay to homer, aeschylus, and shakespeare. with the exception of shakespeare, any other english poet could now be spared more easily than browning. for, owing to his aim in poetry, and his success in attaining it, he gave us much vital truth and beauty that we should seek elsewhere in vain; and, as he said in the _epilogue_ to _pacchiarotio_, the strong, heady wine of his verse may become sweet in process of time. iii lyrics a pure lyric, as distinguished from other kinds of poetry, narrative, descriptive, epic, dramatic, should have three characteristic qualities, immediately evident on the first reading: it should be short, it should be melodious, it should express only one mood. a very long lyrical poem has never been written, and probably could not be: a lyric without fluent melody is unthinkable: and a poem representing a great variety of moods would more properly be classed as descriptive or dramatic than lyrical. examples of the perfect lyric in nineteenth century english poetry are shelley's _i arise from dreams of thee_; keats's _bright star_; byron's _she walks in beauty_; tennyson's _break, break, break_. in each one of these notable illustrations the poem is a brief song of passion, representing the mood of the singer at that moment. there are innumerable _lyrical_ passages in browning's long poems, and in his dramatic monologues; there are splendid outbursts of melody. he could not be ranked among the greatest english poets if he had not been one of our greatest singers. but we do not go to browning primarily for song. he is not one of our greatest lyrical poets. it is certain, however, that he could have been had he chosen to be. he wrote a sufficient number of pure lyrics to prove his quality and capacity. but he was so much more deeply interested in the study of the soul than in the mere expression of beauty--he was so essentially, from _pauline_ to _asolando_--a dramatic poet, that his great contribution to literature is seen in profound and subtle interpretations of the human heart. it is fortunate that he made the soul his specialty, because english literature is wonderfully rich in song: there are many poets who can thrill us with music: but there is only one browning, and there is no group of writers in any literature among which he can be classed. browning's dramatic lyrics differ from tennyson's short poems as the lyrics of donne differed from those of campion; but browning occasionally tried his hand at the composition of a pure lyric, as if to say, "you see i can write like this when i choose." therein lies his real superiority to almost all other english poets: he could do their work, but they could not do his. it is significant that his first poem, _pauline_, should have deeply impressed two men of precisely opposite types of mind. these two were john stuart mill and dante gabriel rossetti--their very names illustrating beautifully the difference in their mental tastes and powers. carlyle called mill a "logic-chopping engine," because his intellectual processes were so methodical, systematic, hard-headed: rossetti was a master of color and harmony. yet mill found in _pauline_ the workings of a powerful mind: and rossetti's sensitive temperament was charmed with the wonderful pictures and lovely melodies it contained. i like to think that mill read, paused, re-read and meditated on this passage: i am made up of an intensest life, of a most clear idea of consciousness of self, distinct from all its qualities, from all affections, passions, feelings, powers; and thus far it exists, if tracked, in all: but linked, in me, to self-supremacy existing as a centre to all things, most potent to create and rule and call upon all things to minister to it; and to a principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all-- this is myself; and i should thus have been though gifted lower than the meanest soul. i like to think that rossetti was thrilled with this picture of andromeda: andromeda! and she is with me: years roll, i shall change, but change can touch her not--so beautiful with her fixed eyes, earnest and still, and hair lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze, and one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven, resting upon her eyes and hair, such hair, as she awaits the snake on the wet beach by the dark rock and the white wave just breaking at her feet; quite naked and alone; a thing i doubt not, nor fear for, secure some god to save will come in thunder from the stars. it is rather singular, in view of the great vogue of the sonnet in the nineteenth century, that neither tennyson nor browning should have succeeded in this form. the two men wrote very few sonnets--browning fewer than tennyson--and neither ever wrote a great one. longfellow, so inferior in most respects to his two great english contemporaries, was an incomparably superior sonnetteer. tennyson's sonnets are all mediocre: browning did not publish a single sonnet in the final complete edition of his works. he did however print a very few on special occasions, and when he was twenty-two years old, between the composition of _pauline_ and _paracelsus_, there appeared in the _monthly repository_ a sonnet beginning eyes calm beside thee (lady, could'st thou know!) which is the best example from his pen that has been preserved. although he did not think much of it in later years, it has been frequently reprinted, and is worth keeping; both for the ardor of its passion, and because it is extraordinary that he should have begun so very early in his career a form of verse that he practically abandoned. this sonnet may have been addressed to a purely imaginary ideal; but it is possible that the young man had in mind eliza flower, for whom he certainly had a boyish love, and who was probably the original of pauline. she and her sister, sarah flower, the author of _nearer, my god, to thee_, were both older than browning, and both his intimate friends during the period of his adolescence. sonnet eyes calm beside thee (lady, could'st thou know!) may turn away thick with fast-gathering tears: i glance not where all gaze: thrilling and low their passionate praises reach thee--my cheek wears alone no wonder when thou passest by; thy tremulous lids bent and suffused reply to the irrepressible homage which doth glow on every lip but mine: if in thine ears their accents linger--and thou dost recall me as i stood, still, guarded, very pale, beside each votarist whose lighted brow wore worship like an aureole, "o'er them all my beauty," thou wilt murmur, "did prevail save that one only:"--lady, could'st thou know! it is perhaps characteristic of browning that this early sonnet should be so irregular in its rime-scheme. the songs in _paracelsus_ ( ) prove that browning was a genuine lyrical poet: the best of them, _over the sea our galleys went_, is more properly a dramatic monologue: but the song in the second act, by aprile (who i think stands for keats) is a pure lyric, and so are the two stanzas sung by paracelsus in the fourth act. there are lines here which suggest something of the drowsy music of tennyson's _lotos-eaters_, published in : .... such balsam falls down sea-side mountain pedestals, from tree-tops where tired winds are fain, spent with the vast and howling main, to treasure half their island-gain. songs from paracelsus (aprile sings) i hear a voice, perchance i heard long ago, but all too low, so that scarce a care it stirred if the voice were real or no: i heard it in my youth when first the waters of my life outburst: but, now their stream ebbs faint, i hear that voice, still low, but fatal-clear-- as if all poets, god ever meant should save the world, and therefore lent great gifts to, but who, proud, refused to do his work, or lightly used those gifts, or failed through weak endeavour, so, mourn cast off by him for ever,-- as if these leaned in airy ring to take me; this the song they sing. "lost, lost! yet come, with our wan troop make thy home. come, come! for we will not breathe, so much as breathe reproach to thee, knowing what thou sink'st beneath. so sank we in those old years, we who bid thee, come! thou last who, living yet, hast life o'erpast. and altogether we, thy peers, will pardon crave for thee, the last whose trial is done, whose lot is cast with those who watch but work no more, who gaze on life but live no more. yet we trusted thou shouldst speak the message which our lips, too weak, refused to utter,--shouldst redeem our fault: such trust, and all a dream! yet we chose thee a birthplace where the richness ran to flowers: couldst not sing one song for grace? not make one blossom man's and ours? must one more recreant to his race die with unexerted powers, and join us, leaving as he found the world, he was to loosen, bound? anguish! ever and for ever; still beginning, ending never. yet, lost and last one, come! how couldst understand, alas, what our pale ghosts strove to say, as their shades did glance and pass before thee night and day? thou wast blind as we were dumb: once more, therefore, come, o come! how should we clothe, how arm the spirit shall next thy post of life inherit-- how guard him from thy speedy ruin? tell us of thy sad undoing here, where we sit, ever pursuing our weary task, ever renewing sharp sorrow, far from god who gave our powers, and man they could not save!" (paracelsus sings) heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes of labdanum, and aloe-balls, smeared with dull nard an indian wipes from out her hair: such balsam falls down sea-side mountain pedestals, from tree-tops where tired winds are fain, spent with the vast and howling main, to treasure half their island-gain. and strew faint sweetness from some old egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud which breaks to dust when once unrolled; or shredded perfume, like a cloud from closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung, mouldering her lute and books among, as when a queen, long dead, was young. (song by festus) thus the mayne glideth where my love abideth. sleep's no softer: it proceeds on through lawns, on through meads, on and on, whate'er befall, meandering and musical, though the niggard pasturage bears not on its shaven ledge aught but weeds and waving grasses to view the river as it passes, save here and there a scanty patch of primroses too faint to catch a weary bee. and scarce it pushes its gentle way through strangling rushes where the glossy kingfisher flutters when noon-heats are near, glad the shelving banks to shun, red and steaming in the sun, where the shrew-mouse with pale throat burrows, and the speckled stoat; where the quick sandpipers flit in and out the marl and grit that seems to breed them, brown as they: nought disturbs its quiet way, save some lazy stork that springs, trailing it with legs and wings, whom the shy fox from the hill rouses, creep he ne'er so still. the songs in _pippa passes_ ( ) are ail exquisite works of art. the one on the king had been printed in the _monthly repository_ in ; the others appeared for the first time in the published drama. all of them are vitally connected with the action of the plot, differing in this respect from the elizabethan custom of simple interpolation. the song sung in the early morning by the girl in her chamber all service ranks the same with god contains the philosophy of the play--human lives are inextricably intertwined, and all are dependent on the will of god. no individual can separate himself either from other men and women, or can sever the connection between himself and his father in heaven. the first stanza repeats the teaching of milton in the sonnet on his blindness: the second is more definitely connected with pippa's professional work. untwine me from the mass of deeds which make up life, refers to her daily duty as a girl in the silk-mill, for she naturally thinks of the complexity of life as a tangled skein. all service ranks the same with god: if now, as formerly he trod paradise, his presence fills our earth, each only as god wills can work--god's puppets, best and worst, are we; there is no last nor first. say not "a small event!" why "small"? costs it more pain that this, ye call a "great event," should come to pass, than that? untwine me from the mass of deeds which make up life, one deed power shall fall short in or exceed! other songs from pippa passes you'll love me yet!--and i can tarry your love's protracted growing: june reared that bunch of flowers you carry, from seeds of april's sowing. i plant a heartful now: some seed at least is sure to strike, and yield--what you'll not pluck indeed, not love, but, may be, like. you'll look at least on love's remains, a grave's one violet: your look?--that pays a thousand pains. what's death? you'll love me yet! overhead the tree-tops meet, flowers and grass spring 'neath one's feet; there was nought above me, nought below, my childhood had not learned to know: for, what are the voices of birds --ay, and of beasts,--but words, our words, only so much more sweet? the knowledge of that with my life begun. but i had so near made out the sun, and counted your stars, the seven and one, like the fingers of my hand: nay, i could all but understand wherefore through heaven the white moon ranges; and just when out of her soft fifty changes no unfamiliar face might overlook me-- suddenly god took me. the most famous song in the play, which simply sings itself, is: the year's at the spring and day's at the morn; morning's at seven; the hill-side's dew-pearled; the lark's on the wing; the snail's on the thorn: god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world! the last line is unfortunately very often misquoted all's well with the world! a remark never made either by pippa or by browning. in browning's philosophy all may be right with the world, and yet far from well. perhaps it is too prosaically minute to point out in so beautiful a poem, a scientific error, but at seven o'clock on the first of january in asolo the sun is still below the horizon. mertoun's song from a blot in the 'scutcheon there's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest; and her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest: and her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of lustre hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild-grape cluster, gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck's rose-misted marble: then her voice's music ... call it the well's bubbling, the bird's warble! and this woman says, "my days were sunless and my nights were moonless, parched the pleasant april herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, if you loved me not!" and i who--(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her-- i may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes me, and by noontide as by midnight make her mine, as hers she makes me! the two lyrics, _home-thoughts, from the sea_ and _home-thoughts, from abroad_, were written during browning's first italian journey in ; and it seems strange that he did not print them among the _dramatic lyrics_ of but reserved them for the _dramatic romances_ of ; especially as he subsequently transferred them to the _lyrics_. they are both notable on account of the strong feeling for england which they express. no great english poet has said so little of england as browning, though his own feelings were always keenly patriotic. even in _pauline_, a poem without a country, there occur the two lines ... and i cherish most my love of england--how her name, a word of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat! the allusion to the english thrush has given immortality to _home-thoughts, from abroad_. many had observed that the thrush sings a lilt, and immediately repeats it: but browning was the first to give a pretty reason for it. the thrush seems to say, "you think that beautiful melody is an accident? well, i will show you it is no fluke, i will sing it correctly right over again." browning was not in italy in april--perhaps he wrote the first stanza on the voyage, as he wrote _home-thoughts, from the sea_, and added the second stanza about may and june after he had reached the country of his quest. home-thoughts, from the sea nobly, nobly cape saint vincent to the north-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into cadiz bay; bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face trafalgar lay; in the dimmest north-east distance dawned gibraltar grand and gray; "here and here did england help me: how can i help england?"--say, whoso turns as i, this evening, turn to god to praise and pray, while jove's planet rises yonder, silent over africa. home-thoughts, from abroad i oh, to be in england now that april's there, and whoever wakes in england sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough in england--now! ii and after april, when may follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge-- that's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture! and though the fields look rough with hoary dew. all will be gay when noontide wakes anew the buttercups, the little children's dower --far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! the collection of poems called _james lee's wife_, published in the _dramatis personae_ ( ), seems to me illustrative of browning's worst faults; it is obscure, harsh, and dull. but it contains one fine lyric descriptive of an autumn morning, a morning, by the way, much commoner in america during autumn than anywhere in europe. the second stanza is nobly ethical in its doctrine of love--that we should not love only those persons whom we can respect, for true love seeks no profit. it must be totally free from the prospect of gain. a beautiful face inspired another lyric in this volume, and browning drew upon his memories of correggio to give the perfect tone to the poem. from james lee's wife i oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, this autumn morning! how he sets his bones to bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet for the ripple to run over in its mirth; listening the while, where on the heap of stones the white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. ii that is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true; such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows. if you loved only what were worth your love, love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: make the low nature better by your throes! give earth yourself, go up for gain above! a face if one could have that little head of hers painted upon a background of pale gold, such as the tuscan's early art prefers! no shade encroaching on the matchless mould of those two lips, which should be opening soft in the pure profile; not as when she laughs, for that spoils all: but rather as if aloft yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff's burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss and capture 'twixt the lips apart for this. then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround, how it should waver on the pale gold ground up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts! i know, correggio loves to mass, in rifts of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb breaking its outline, burning shades absorb: but these are only massed there, i should think, waiting to see some wonder momently grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky (that's the pale ground you'd see this sweet face by), all heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink. one of the most original and powerful of browning's lyrical pieces comes just where we should least expect it, at the end of that dark, dreary, and all but impenetrable wilderness of verse, _fifine at the fair_. it serves as an _epilogue_, but it would be difficult and unprofitable to attempt to discover its connection with the poem to which is appended. its metre is unique in browning, and stirs the heart with inexpressible force. in music it most closely resembles the swift thrilling roll of a snare drum, and can be read aloud in exact accord with that instrument. browning calls it _the householder_, and of course it represents in his own life the anticipated moment when the soul leaves its house to unite with its mate. out of the catastrophe of death appears a radiant vision which really seems too good to be true. "what, and is it really you again?" quoth i: "i again, what else did you expect?" quoth she. the man is weary of his old patched up body, now no longer needed: weary of the noisy nuisances of life, and the tiresome and futile gabble of humanity: resentful, now that his spirit has actually survived death, when he remembers the scientific books he had read which almost struck despair in him. he petulantly says, "if you knew but how i dwelt down here!" quoth i: "and was i so better off up there?" quoth she. he is for immediate departure, leaving his empty carcass where it lies; but she reminds him of the necessity for decent burial. much is to be done before they can begin to enjoy together their new and freer existence. there is the body to be buried; the obituary notices to be written for the papers: the parson and undertaker to be summoned: the formalities of the funeral: the selection of a proper tombstone, with care for the name and accurate carving of the date of death thereupon: and finally a bit of verse in the way of final flourish. so these two spirits look on with impatience at the funeral exercises, at the weeping friends left behind, and not until the coffin is under ground, are they at liberty to depart from terrestial scenes. if we do survive the death of the body, with what curious sensations must we regard the solemn ceremonies of its interment! epilogue to fifine the householder i savage i was sitting in my house, late, lone: dreary, weary with the long day's work: head of me, heart of me, stupid as a stone: tongue-tied now, now blaspheming like a turk; when, in a moment, just a knock, call, cry, half a pang and all a rapture, there again were we!-- "what, and is it really you again?" quoth i: "i again, what else did you expect?" quoth she. ii "never mind, hie away from this old house-- every crumbling brick embrowned with sin and shame! quick, in its corners ere certain shapes arouse! let them--every devil of the night--lay claim, make and mend, or rap and rend, for me! good-bye! god be their guard from disturbance at their glee, till, crash, comes down the carcass in a heap!" quoth i: "nay, but there's a decency required!" quoth she. iii "ah, but if you knew how time has dragged, days, nights! all the neighbour-talk with man and maid--such men! all the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights; all the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then, all the fancies ... who were they had leave, dared try darker arts that almost struck despair in me? if you knew but how i dwelt down here!" quoth i: "and was i so better off up there?" quoth she, iv "help and get it over! _re-united to his wife_ (how draw up the paper lets the parish-people know?) _lies m., or n., departed from this life, day the this or that, month and year the so and so_. what i' the way of final flourish? prose, verse? try! _affliction sore long time he bore_, or, what is it to be? _till god did please to grant him ease_. do end!" quoth i: "i end with--love is all and death is nought!" quoth she. the same thought--the dramatic contrast between the free spirit and its prison-house--is the basis of the two lyrics that serve as prologues to _pacchiarotto_ and to _la saisiaz_. as dryden's prefaces are far better than his plays, so browning's _prologues_ to _pacchiarotto_, to _la saisiaz_, to _the two poets of croisic_, to _jocoseria_ are decidedly superior in poetic art and beauty to the volumes they introduce. indeed the prologue to _the two poets of croisic_ is one of the most beautiful and perfect lyrics in the english language. prologue i such a starved bank of moss till that may-morn, blue ran the flash across: violets were born! ii sky--what a scowl of cloud till, near and far, ray on ray split the shroud. splendid, a star! iii world--how it walled about life with disgrace till god's own smile came out: that was thy face! prologue to _pacchiarotto_ i o the old wall here! how i could pass life in a long midsummer day, my feet confined to a plot of grass, my eyes from a wall not once away! ii and lush and lithe do the creepers clothe yon wall i watch, with a wealth of green: its bald red bricks draped, nothing loth, in lappets of tangle they laugh between. iii now, what is it makes pulsate the robe? why tremble the sprays? what life o'erbrims the body,--the house, no eye can probe,-- divined as, beneath a robe, the limbs? iv and there again! but my heart may guess who tripped behind; and she sang perhaps: so, the old wall throbbed, and its life's excess died out and away in the leafy wraps. v wall upon wall are between us: life and song should away from heart to heart. i--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife at breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start-- vi hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; account as wood, brick, stone, this ring of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee! prologue to _la saisiaz_ i good, to forgive; best, to forget! living, we fret; dying, we live. fretless and free, soul, clap thy pinion! earth have dominion, body, o'er thee! ii wander at will, day after day,-- wander away, wandering still-- soul that canst soar! body may slumber: body shall cumber soul-flight no more. iii waft of soul's wing! what lies above? sunshine and love, skyblue and spring! body hides--where? ferns of all feather, mosses and heather, yours be the care! prologue to _jocoseria_ wanting is--what? summer redundant, blueness abundant, --where is the blot? beamy the world, yet a blank all the same, --framework which waits for a picture to frame: what of the leafage, what of the flower? roses embowering with nought they embower! come then, complete incompletion, o comer, pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! breathe but one breath rose-beauty above. and all that was death grows life, grows love, grows love! never the time and the place never the time and the place and the loved one all together! this path--how soft to pace! this may--what magic weather! where is the loved one's face? in a dream that loved one's face meets mine, but the house is narrow, the place is bleak where, outside, rain and wind combine with a furtive ear, if i strive to speak, with a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, with a malice that marks each word, each sign! o enemy sly and serpentine, uncoil thee from the waking man! do i hold the past thus firm and fast yet doubt if the future hold i can? this path so soft to pace shall lead thro' the magic of may to herself indeed! or narrow if needs the house must he, outside are the storms and strangers: we-- oh, close, safe, warm sleep i and she, --i and she! iv dramatic lyrics browning's poetic career extended from to , nearly sixty years of fairly continuous composition. we may make a threefold division: first, the thirteen years before his marriage in ; second, the fifteen years of married life, closing in ; third, the remaining twenty-eight years. during the first period he published twelve works; during the second, two; during the third, eighteen. the fact that so little was published during the years when his wife was alive may be accounted for by the fact that the condition of her health required his constant care, and that after the total failure of _men and women_ ( ) to attract any popular attention, browning for some time spent most of his energy in clay-modelling, giving up poetry altogether. not long before the death of mrs. browning, he was busy writing _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, although he did not publish it until the right moment, which came in . after the appearance of _dramatis personae_ ( ), and _the ring and the book_ ( - ), browning's fame spread like a prairie fire; and it was quite natural that his immense reputation was a sharp spur to composition. one is more ready to speak when one is sure of an audience. capricious destiny, however, willed that the books which sold the fastest after publication, were, with few exceptions, the least interesting and valuable of all the poet's performances. perhaps he did not take so much care now that his fame was assured; perhaps the fires in his own mind were dying; perhaps the loss of his wife robbed him of necessary inspiration, as it certainly robbed him of the best critic he ever had, and the only one to whom he paid any serious attention. when we remember that some of the _dramatic romances_, _luria_, _a soul's tragedy_, _christmas-eve_, _men and women_, and some of the _dramatis personae_ were read by her in manuscript, and that _the ring and the book_ was written in the shadow of her influence, we begin to realise how much she helped him. their love-letters during the months that preceded their marriage indicate the excellence of her judgment, her profound and sympathetic understanding of his genius and his willingness to listen to her advice. he did not intend to publish _a soul's tragedy_ at all, though it is one of his most subtle and interesting dramas, and only did so at her request; part of the manuscript of _christmas-eve_ is in her handwriting, it is worth remembering too that in later years browning hated to write poetry, and nothing but a sense of duty kept him during the long mornings at his desk. he felt the responsibility of genius without its inspiration. browning has given a little trouble to bibliographers by redistributing the poems originally published in the three works, _dramatic lyrics_ ( ), _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ), and _men and women_ ( ). the _dramatic lyrics_ at first contained sixteen pieces; the _dramatic romances and lyrics_ twenty-three; the _men and women_ fifty-one. in the final arrangement the first of these included fifty; the second, called simply _dramatic romances_, twenty-five; whilst the last was reduced to thirteen. he also changed the titles of many of the poems, revised the text somewhat, classified two separate poems under one title, _claret and tokay_, and _here's to nelson's memory_, under the heading _nationality in drinks_, and united the two sections of _saul_ in one poem. it is notable that he omitted not one, and indeed it is remarkable that with the exception of _the boy and the angel_, _a lover's quarrel_, _mesmerism_, and _another way of love_, every poem in the long list has the indubitable touch of genius; and even these four are not the worst of browning's compositions. it would have seemed to us perhaps more fitting if browning had grouped the contents of all three works under the one heading _men and women_; for that would fairly represent the sole subject of his efforts. perhaps he felt that the title was too general, and as a matter of fact, it would apply equally well to his complete poetical works. i think, however, that he especially loved the appellation _dramatic lyrics_, for he put over half of the poems finally under that category. the word "dramatic" obsessed browning. what is a dramatic lyric? when tennyson published in his _ulysses_, a yankee farmer in america made in one sentence three remarks about it: a statement and two prophecies. he said that _ulysses_ belonged to a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more cultivated in the next generation. now _ulysses_ is both a dramatic lyric and a dramatic monologue, and tennyson never wrote anything better than this poem. as it became increasingly evident that the nineteenth century was not going to have a great literary dramatic movement on the stage, while at the same time the interest in human nature had never been keener, the poets began to turn their attention to the interpretation of humanity by the representation of historical or imaginary individuals speaking: and their speech was to reveal the secrets of the human soul, in its tragedy and comedy, in its sublimity and baseness, in its nobility and folly. later in life tennyson cultivated sedulously the dramatic monologue; and browning, the most original force in literature that the century produced, after abandoning his early attempts at success on the stage, devoted practically the entire strength of his genius to this form of poetry. emerson was a wise man. in reshuffling the short poems in the three works mentioned above, it is not always easy to see the logic of the distribution and it would be interesting if we could know the reasons that guided the poet in the classification of particular poems. thus it is perfectly clear why _incident of the french camp_, _count gismond_, and _in a gondola_ were taken from the _dramatic lyrics_ and placed among the _dramatic romances_; it is easy to see why _the lost leader_ and _home-thoughts, from abroad_ were taken from the _romances_ and placed among the _lyrics_; it is not quite so clear why _rudel_ and _artemis prologizes_ were taken from the _lyrics_ and classed among _men and women_, when nearly all the poems originally published under the latter head were changed to _lyrics_ and _ romances_. in changing _how they brought the good news_ from the _dramatic romances_, where it was originally published, to _ dramatic lyrics_, browning probably felt that the lyrical sound of the piece was more important than the story: but it really is a dramatic romance. furthermore, _my last duchess_ would seem to fall more properly under the heading _men and women_; browning, however, took it from the _dramatic lyrics_ and placed it among the _dramatic romances_. in most cases, however, the reason for the transfer of individual poems is clear; and a study of the classification is of positive assistance toward the understanding of the piece. in the eight volumes published from to , which browning called _bells and pomegranates_, meaning simply sound and sense, meat and music, only two are collections of short poems and the other six contain exclusively plays--seven in all, two being printed together in the last volume. browning intended the whole _bells and pomegranates_ series to be devoted to the drama, as one may see by the original preface to _pippa passes_: but that drama and the next did not sell, and the publisher suggested that he include some short poems. this explains why the third volume is filled with lyrics; and in a note published with it, browning half apologised for what might seem a departure from his original plan, saying these two might properly fall under the head of dramatic pieces; being, although lyrical in expression, "always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." he means then by a dramatic lyric a poem that is short, that is musical, but that is absolutely not subjective--does not express or betray the writer's own ideas nor even his mood, as is done in tennyson's ideal lyric, _crossing the bar_. a dramatic lyric is a composition lyrical in form, and dramatic in subject-matter; remembering all the time that by dramatic we do not necessarily mean anything exciting but simply something objective, something entirely apart from the poet's own feelings. on the stage this is accomplished by the creation of separate characters who _in propria persona_ express views that may or may not be in harmony with the poet's own. thus, macbeth's speech, beginning out, out, brief candle! is really a dramatic lyric; because it is lyrical in form, and it expresses views on the value of life which could hardly have been held by shakespeare, though they seem eminently fitting from the lips of a man who had tried to gain the whole world by losing his soul, and had succeeded in losing both. in view of browning's love for this form of verse, it is interesting to remember that the first two independent short poems that he ever wrote and retained in his works are both genuine dramatic lyrics. these are _porphyria's lover_ and _johannes agricola_, printed in the _monthly repository_ in , when browning was twenty-four years old. thus early did he show both aptitude for this form and excellence in it, for each of these pieces is a work of genius. they were meant to be studies in abnormal psychology, for they were printed together in the _dramatic lyrics_ under the caption _ madhouse cells_. browning was very young then, and naturally thought a man who believed in predestination and a man who killed the woman he loved were both insane; but after a longer experience of life, and seeing how many strange creatures walk the streets, he ceased to call these two men, obsessed by religion and obsessed by love, mad. if porphyria's lover is mad, there is method in his madness. her superior social rank has stifled hitherto the instincts of the heart; she has never given her lover any favors; but to-night, at the dinner-dance, by one of those strange and inexplicable caprices that make woman the very genius of the unexpected, she has a vision. in the midst of the lights and the laughter, she sees her lonely lover sitting dejectedly in his cold and cheerless cottage, thinking of her. she slips away from the gay company, trips through the pouring rain, and enters the dark room like an angel of light. after kindling a blazing fire in the grate, she kindles her lover's hope-dead heart; she draws him to her and places his head on her naked shoulder. suddenly a thought comes to him; one can see the light of murder in his eyes. at this moment she is sublime, fit for heaven: for the first time in her life, a noble impulse has triumphed over the debasing conventions of society; if he lets her go, she will surely fall from grace, and become a lost soul. he strangles her with her yellow hair, risking damnation for her salvation. so the quick and the dead sit together through the long night. porphyria's lover the rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake: i listened with heart fit to break. when glided in porphyria; straight she shut the cold out and the storm, and kneeled and made the cheerless grate blaze up, and all the cottage warm; which done, she rose, and from her form withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, and laid her soiled gloves by, untied her hat and let the damp hair fall, and, last, she sat down by my side and called me. when no voice replied, she put my arm about her waist, and made her smooth white shoulder bare, and all her yellow hair displaced, and, stooping, made my cheek lie there, and spread, o'er all, her yellow hair, murmuring how she loved me--she too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, to set its struggling passion free from pride, and vainer ties dissever, and give herself to me for ever. but passion sometimes would prevail, nor could to-night's gay feast restrain a sudden thought of one so pale for love of her, and all in vain: so, she was come through wind and rain. be sure i looked up at her eyes happy and proud; at last i knew porphyria worshipped me; surprise made my heart swell, and still it grew while i debated what to do. that moment she was mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good: i found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string i wound three times her little throat around, and strangled her. no pain felt she; i am quite sure she felt no pain. as a shut bud that holds a bee, i warily oped her lids: again laughed the blue eyes without a stain. and i untightened next the tress about her neck; her cheek once more blushed bright beneath my burning kiss: i propped her head up as before, only, this time my shoulder bore her head, which droops upon it still; the smiling rosy little head, so glad it has its utmost will, that all it scorned at once is fled, and i, its love, am gained instead! porphyria's love: she guessed not how her darling one wish would be heard. and thus we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirred, and yet god has not said a word! what is the meaning of that last enigmatical line? does it mean that the expected bolt from the sky has not fallen, that god approves of the murder? or does it mean that the man is vaguely disappointed, that he had hoped to hear a voice from heaven, saying, "this is my beloved son, in whom i am well pleased"? or does it mean that the power above is wholly indifferent, "when the sky, which noticed all, makes no disclosure"? in _johannes agricola_, browning wrote a lyric setting forth the strange and yet largely accepted doctrine that almighty god before the foundations of the earth were laid, predestined a few of the coming population to everlasting bliss and the vast majority to eternal torture. this is by no means a meditation in a madhouse cell, as browning first believed; but might logically be the reflections of a nineteenth century presbyterian clergyman, seated in his comfortable library. it is the ecstatic mystical joy of one who realises, that through no merit of his own, he is numbered among the elect. sir thomas browne quaintly pictured to himself the surprise of the noble, upright men of antiquity, when they wake up in hell simply because they did not believe on one of whom they had never heard; so johannes speculates on the ironical fate of monks, ascetics, women and children, whose lives were full of innocence and purity, who nevertheless reach ultimately the lake of fire. praise god for it! for if i could understand him, i could not praise him. how much more noble this predestinating god is than one who should reward virtue, and thus make eternal bliss a matter of calculation and bargain! johannes agricola in meditation there's heaven above, and night by night i look right through its gorgeous roof; no suns and moons though e'er so bright avail to stop me; splendour-proof i keep the broods of stars aloof: for i intend to get to god, for 'tis to god i speed so fast, for in god's breast, my own abode, those shoals of dazzling glory passed, i lay my spirit down at last. i lie where i have always lain, god smiles as he has always smiled; ere suns and moons could wax and wane, ere stars were thundergirt, or piled the heavens, god thought on me his child; ordained a life for me, arrayed its circumstances every one to the minutest; ay, god said this head this hand should rest upon thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. and having thus created me, thus rooted me, he bade me grow, guiltless for ever, like a tree that buds and blooms, nor seeks to know the law by which it prospers so: but sure that thought and word and deed all go to swell his love for me, me, made because that love had need of something irreversibly pledged solely its content to be. yes, yes, a tree which must ascend, no poison-gourd foredoomed to stoop! i have god's warrant, could i blend all hideous sins, as in a cup, to drink the mingled venoms up; secure my nature will convert the draught to blossoming gladness fast: while sweet dews turn to the gourd's hurt, and bloat, and while they bloat it, blast, as from the first its lot was cast. for as i lie, smiled on, full-fed by unexhausted power to bless, i gaze below on hell's fierce bed, and those its waves of flame oppress, swarming in ghastly wretchedness; whose life on earth aspired to be one altar-smoke, so pure!--to win if not love like god's love for me, at least to keep his anger in; and all their striving turned to sin. priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white with prayer, the broken-hearted nun, the martyr, the wan acolyte, the incense-swinging child,--undone before god fashioned star or sun! god, whom i praise; how could i praise, if such as i might understand, make out and reckon on his ways, and bargain for his love, and stand, paying a price, at his right hand? the religious exaltation of the opening lines there's heaven above, and night by night i look right through its gorgeous roof; ... for i intend to get to god, for 'tis to god i speed so fast, for in god's breast, my own abode, those shoals of dazzling glory, passed, i lay my spirit down at last reminds one infallibly of tennyson's beautiful dramatic lyric, _st. agnes' eve_: deep on the convent roof the snows are sparkling to the moon: my breath to heaven like vapour goes, may my soul follow soon! it is interesting to remember that the former was published in , the latter in , and each in a periodical. perhaps browning attempted to show the dramatic quality of his lyrics by finally placing at the very beginning the _cavalier tunes_ and _the lost leader_; for the former voice in eloquent language the hatred of democratic ideas, and the latter, in language equally strenuous, is a glorification of democracy. imagine browning himself saying what he places in the mouth of his gallant cavaliers-- "hampden to hell!" in the second, _the lost leader_, nothing was farther from browning's own feelings than a personal attack on wordsworth, whom he regarded with reverence; in searching for an example of a really great character who had turned from the popular to the aristocratic party, he happened to think of the change from radicalism to conservatism exhibited by wordsworth. love for the lost leader is still strong in the breasts of his quondam followers who now must fight him; in heaven he will not only be pardoned, he will be first there as he was always first here. in the following lines, the prepositions are interesting: shakespeare was _of_ us, milton was _for_ us, burns, shelley, were _with_ us. shakespeare was indeed of the common people, but so far as we can conjecture, certainly not for them; milton was not of them, but was wholly for them, being indeed regarded as an anarchist; burns was a peasant, and shelley a blue-blood, but both were with the popular cause. browning himself, as we happen to know from one of his personal sonnets, was an intense liberal in feeling. cavalier tunes i. marching along i kentish sir byng stood for his king, bidding the crop-headed parliament swing: and, pressing a troop unable to stoop and see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, marched them along, fifty-score strong, great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. ii god for king charles! pym and such carles to the devil that prompts 'em their treasonous parles! cavaliers, up! lips from the cup, hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup till you're-- chorus.--_marching along, fifty-score strong_, _great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song_. iii hampden to hell, and his obsequies' knell serve hazelrig, fiennes, and young harry as well! england, good cheer! rupert is near! kentish and loyalists, keep we not here chorus.--_marching along, fifty-score strong_, _great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song_? iv then, god for king charles! pym and his snarls to the devil that pricks on such pestilent carles! hold by the right, you double your might; so, onward to nottingham, fresh for the fight, chorus.--_march we along, fifty-score strong_, _great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song_! ii. give a rouse i king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles! ii who gave me the goods that went since? who raised me the house that sank once? who helped me to gold i spent since? who found me in wine you drank once? chorus.--_king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles_! iii to whom used my boy george quaff else, by the old fool's side that begot him? for whom did he cheer and laugh else, while noll's damned troopers shot him? chorus.--_king charles, and who'll do him right now? king charles, and who's ripe for fight now? give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, king charles_! iii. boot and saddle i boot, saddle, to horse, and away! rescue my castle before the hot day brightens to blue from its silvery grey, chorus.--_boot, saddle, to horse, and away_! ii ride past the suburbs, asleep as you'd say; many's the friend there, will listen and pray "god's luck to gallants that strike up the lay--" chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away_!" iii forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay, flouts castle brancepeth the roundheads' array: who laughs, "good fellows ere this, by my fay," chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away_!" iv who? my wife gertrude; that, honest and gay, laughs when you talk of surrendering, "nay! i've better counsellors; what counsel they?" chorus.--"_boot, saddle, to horse, and away_!" the lost leader i just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a riband to stick in his coat-- found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, lost all the others she lets us devote; they, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, so much was theirs who so little allowed: how all our copper had gone for his service! rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud! we that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye, learned his great language, caught his clear accents, made him our pattern to live and to die! shakespeare was of us, milton was for us, burns, shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves! he alone breaks from the van and the freemen, --he alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! ii we shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence; songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre; deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence, still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, one task more declined, one more footpath untrod, one more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, one wrong more to man, one more insult to god! life's night begins: let him never come back to us! there would be doubt, hesitation and pain, forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight, never glad confident morning again! best fight on well, for we taught him--strike gallantly, menace our heart ere we master his own; then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! the poem _cristina_ ( ), while not very remarkable as poetry, is notable because it contains thus early in browning's career, four of his most important doctrines. the more one studies browning, the more one is convinced that the poet's astonishing mental vigor is shown not in the number and variety of his ideas, but rather in the number and variety of illustrations of them. i can not at this moment think of any poet, dramatist or novelist who has invented so many plots as browning. he seems to present to us a few leading ideas in a vast series of incarnations. over and over again the same thoughts, the same doctrines are repeated; but the scenery, the situations, and the characters are never alike. here is where he remains true to the theory set forth in _transcendentalism_; the poet should not produce thoughts but rather concrete images of them; or, as he says in the closing lines of _the ring and the book_, art must do the thing that breeds the thought. in _cristina_, four of browning's fundamental articles of faith are expressed: the doctrine of the elective affinities; the doctrine of success through failure; the doctrine that time is measured not by the clock and the calendar, but by the intensity of spiritual experiences; the doctrine that life on earth is a trial and a test, the result of which will be seen in the higher and happier development when the soul is freed from the limitations of time and space. the expression "elective affinities" as applied to human beings was first brought into literature, i believe, by no less a person than goethe, who in his novel, published in , which he called _ elective affinities (wahlverwandschaften_), showed the tremendous force which tends to draw together certain persons of opposite sexes. the term was taken from chemistry, where an elective affinity means the "force by which the atoms of bodies of dissimilar nature unite"; elective affinity is then simply a chemical force. in goethe's novel, charlotte thus addresses the captain: "would you tell me briefly what is meant here by affinities?" the captain replied, "in all natural objects with which we are acquainted, we observe immediately that they have a certain relation." charlotte: "let me try and see whether i can understand where you are bringing me. as everything has a reference to itself, so it must have some relation to others." edward interrupts: "and that will be different according to the natural differences of the things themselves. sometimes they will meet like friends and old acquaintances; they will come rapidly together, and unite without either having to alter itself at all--as wine mixes with water." charlotte: "one can almost fancy that in these simple forms one sees people that one is acquainted with." the captain: "as soon as our chemical chest arrives, we can show you a number of entertaining experiments, which will give you a clearer idea than words, and names, and technical expressions." charlotte: "it appears to me that if you choose to call these strange creatures of yours related, the relationship is not so much a relationship of blood as of soul or of spirit." the captain: "we had better keep to the same instances of which we have already been speaking. thus, what we call limestone is a more or less pure calcareous earth in combination with a delicate acid, which is familiar to us in the form of a gas. now, if we place a piece of this stone in diluted sulphuric acid, this will take possession of the lime, and appear with it in the form of gypsum, the gaseous acid at the same time going off in vapour. here is a case of separation: a combination arises, and we believe ourselves now justified in applying to it the words 'elective affinity;' it really looks as if one relation had been deliberately chosen in preference to another." charlotte: "forgive me, as i forgive the natural philosopher. i can not see any choice in this; i see a natural necessity rather, and scarcely that. opportunity makes relations as it makes thieves: and as long as the talk is only of natural substances, the choice appears to be altogether in the hands of the chemist who brings the creatures together. once, however, let them be brought together, and then god have mercy on them." the scientific conversation is summed up by their all agreeing that the chemical term "elective affinities" can properly be applied in analogy to human beings. an elective affinity as applied to men and women may result in happiness or misery; or may be frustrated by a still superior prudential or moral force. the law of elective affinity being a force, it is naturally unaware of any human artificial obstacles, such as a total difference in social rank, or the previous marriage of one or both of the parties. if two independent individuals meet and are drawn together by the law of elective affinities, they may marry and live happily forever after; if another marriage has already taken place, as in goethe's story, the result may be tragedy. in _cristina_, the elective affinities assert their force between a queen and a private individual; the result is, at least temporarily, unfortunate for the simple reason that the lady, although drawn toward the man by the workings of this mysterious force, is controlled even more firmly by the bondage of social convention; she behaves in a contrary manner to that shown by the stooping lady in maurice hewlett's story. this force needs only one moment, one glance, to assert its power: she should never have looked at me if she meant i should not love her! love in browning is often love at first sight; no prolonged acquaintance is necessary; not even a spoken word, or any physical contact. doubt you whether this she felt as, _looking at me_, mine and her souls rushed together? in tennyson's _locksley hall_ (published the same year), contact was important: and our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips. browning's portrayal of love shows that it can be a wireless telegraphy, that, in the instance of cristina and her lover, exerted its force across a crowded room; in _the statue and the bust_, it is equally powerful across a public square in florence. the glance, or as donne expresses it, the "twisted eye-beams," is an important factor in browning's poetry--sufficient to unite two souls throughout all eternity, as it does in _tristan und isolde_. browning repeats his favorite doctrine of the elective affinities in _evelyn hope_, _count gismond_, _in a gondola_, _dis aliter visum_, _youth and art_, and other poems; and its noblest expression is perhaps in that wonderful scene in the crowded theatre at arezzo; whilst the flippant audience are gazing at a silly musical comedy, the sad eyes of pompilia encounter the grave, serious regard of caponsacchi, and the two young hearts are united forever. another leading idea in browning's philosophy is _success in failure_. this paradox is indeed a corner-stone in the construction of his thought. every noble soul must fail in life, because every noble soul has an ideal. we may be encouraged by temporary successes, but we must be inspired by failure. browning can forgive any daring criminal; but he can not forgive the man who is selfishly satisfied with his attainments and his position, and thus accepts compromises with life. the soul that ceases to grow is utterly damned. the damnation of contentment is shown with beauty and fervor in one of browning's earliest lyrics, _over the sea our galleys went_. the voyagers were weary of the long journey, they heeded not the voice of the pilot conscience, they accommodated their ideals to their personal convenience. the reason why browning could not forgive andrea was not because he was andrea del sarto, the son of a tailor; it was because he was known as the faultless painter, because he could actually realise his dreams. the text of that whole poem is found in the line ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. in _cristina_, the man's love is not rewarded here, he fails; but he has aimed high, he has loved a queen. he will always love her--in losing her he has found a guiding principle for his own life, which will lead him ever up and on. she has lost me, i have gained her; her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, i shall pass my life's remainder. her body i have lost: some other man will possess that: but her soul i gained in the moment when our eyes met, and my life has reached a higher plane and now has a higher motive. in failure i reach real success. this doctrine, illustrated repeatedly in browning's works, is stated explicitly in _rabbi ben ezra_: for thence,--a paradox which comforts while it mocks,-- shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: what i aspired to be, and was not, comforts me: a brute i might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. the thought that life is not measured by length of days is brought out clearly in _cristina_. we constantly read in the paper interviews with centenarians, who tell us how to prolong our lives by having sufficient sleep, by eating moderately, by refraining from worry. but, as a writer in a southern journal expressed it, why do these aged curiosities never tell us what use they have made of this prolonged existence? mark twain said cheerfully, "methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years; but what of that? there was nothing doing." no drama on the stage is a success unless it has what we call a supreme moment; and the drama of our individual lives can not be really interesting or important unless it has some moments when we live intensely, when we live longer than some persons live in years; moments that settle our purpose and destiny. oh, we're sunk enough here, god knows! but not quite so sunk that moments, sure, tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing. there are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noondays kindle, whereby piled-up honours perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle. an american public man who one day fell in public esteem as far as lucifer, said that it had taken him fifty years to build up a great reputation, and that he had lost it all in one forenoon. the dying courtier in _paracelsus_ had such a moment. finally, in _cristina_, we find that ardent belief in a future life that lifts its head so often and so resolutely in browning's poetry, and on which, as we shall see later, his optimism is founded. science tells us that the matter of which the universe is composed is indestructible; browning believes even more strongly in the permanence of spirit. aspiration, enthusiasm, love would not be given to us to have their purposes broken off, not if this is a rational and economic universe; the important thing is not to have our hopes fulfilled here, the important thing is to keep hoping. such love as the man had for cristina must eventually find its full satisfaction so long as it remains the guiding principle of his life, which will serve as a test of his tenacity. life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended: and then, come next life quickly! this world's use will have been ended. precisely the same situation and the same philosophical result of it are illustrated in the exquisite lyric, _evelyn hope_. the lover is frustrated not by social distinctions, but by death. the girl is lost to him here, but the power of love is not quenched nor even lessened by this disaster. the man's ardor will steadily increase during the remaining years of his earthly existence; and then his soul will start out confident on its quest. god above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love: i claim you still, for my own love's sake! delayed it may be for more lives yet, through worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn, much to forget, ere the time be come for taking you. this doctrine, that earthly existence is a mere test of the soul to determine its fitness for entering upon an eternal and freer stage of development, is frequently set forth in browning. the apostle john makes it quite clear in _a death in the desert_; and in _abt vogler_, the inspired musician sings and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonised? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discords in but that harmony might be prized? from the above discussion it should be plain that the short poem _cristina_ deserves patient and intense study, for it contains in the form of a dramatic lyric, some of browning's fundamental ideas. cristina i she should never have looked at me if she meant i should not love her! there are plenty ... men, you call such, i suppose ... she may discover all her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found them: but i'm not so, and she knew it when she fixed me, glancing round them. ii what? to fix me thus meant nothing? but i can't tell (there's my weakness) what her look said!--no vile cant, sure, about "need to strew the bleakness of some lone shore with its pearl-seed, that the sea feels"--no "strange yearning that such souls have, most to lavish where there's chance of least returning." iii oh, we're sunk enough here, god knows! but not quite so sunk that moments, sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing. iv there are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noondays kindle, whereby piled-up honours perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, while just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled, seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled. v doubt you if, in some such moment, as she fixed me, she felt clearly, ages past the soul existed, here an age 'tis resting merely, and hence fleets again for ages, while the true end, sole and single, it stops here for is, this love-way, with some other soul to mingle? vi else it loses what it lived for, and eternally must lose it; better ends may be in prospect, deeper blisses (if you choose it), but this life's end and this love-bliss have been lost here. doubt you whether this she felt as, looking at me, mine and her souls rushed together? vii oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in derision, trampled out the light for ever: never fear but there's provision of the devil's to quench knowledge lest we walk the earth in rapture! --making those who catch god's secret just so much more prize their capture! viii such am i: the secret's mine now! she has lost me, i have gained her; her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, i shall pass my life's remainder. life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended: and then, come the next life quickly! this world's use will have been ended. song from _paracelsus_ over the sea our galleys went, with cleaving prows in order brave to a speeding wind and a bounding wave, a gallant armament: each bark built out of a forest-tree left leafy and rough as first it grew, and nailed all over the gaping sides, within and without, with black bull-hides, seethed in fat and suppled in flame, to bear the playful billows' game: so, each good ship was rude to see, rude and bare to the outward view, but each upbore a stately tent where cedar pales in scented row kept out the flakes of the dancing brine, and an awning drooped the mast below, in fold on fold of the purple fine, that neither noontide nor starshine nor moonlight cold which maketh mad, might pierce the regal tenement. when the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad we set the sail and plied the oar; but when the night-wind blew like breath, for joy of one day's voyage more, we sang together on the wide sea, like men at peace on a peaceful shore; each sail was loosed to the wind so free, each helm made sure by the twilight star, and in a sleep as calm as death, we, the voyagers from afar, lay stretched along, each weary crew in a circle round its wondrous tent whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent, and with light and perfume, music too: so the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past, and at morn we started beside the mast, and still each ship was sailing fast. now, one morn, land appeared--a speck dim trembling betwixt sea and sky: "avoid it," cried our pilot, "check the shout, restrain the eager eye!" but the heaving sea was black behind for many a night and many a day, and land, though but a rock, drew nigh; so, we broke the cedar pales away, let the purple awning flap in the wind, and a statue bright was on every deck! we shouted, every man of us, and steered right into the harbour thus, with pomp and paean glorious. a hundred shapes of lucid stone! all day we built its shrine for each, a shrine of rock for every one, nor paused till in the westering sun we sat together on the beach to sing because our task was done. when lo! what shouts and merry songs! what laughter all the distance stirs! a loaded raft with happy throngs of gentle islanders! "our isles are just at hand," they cried, "like cloudlets faint in even sleeping: our temple-gates are opened wide, our olive-groves thick shade are keeping for these majestic forms"--they cried. oh, then we awoke with sudden start from our deep dream, and knew, too late, how bare the rock, how desolate, which had received our precious freight: yet we called out--"depart! our gifts, once given, must here abide. our work is done; we have no heart to mar our work,"--we cried, evelyn hope i beautiful evelyn hope is dead! sit and watch by her side an hour. that is her book-shelf, this her bed; she plucked that piece of geranium-flower, beginning to die too, in the glass; little has yet been changed, i think: the shutters are shut, no light may pass save two long rays thro' the hinge's chink. ii sixteen years old when she died! perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; it was not her time to love; beside, her life had many a hope and aim, duties enough and little cares, and now was quiet, now astir, till god's hand beckoned unawares,-- and the sweet white brow is all of her. iii is it too late then, evelyn hope? what, your soul was pure and true, the good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire and dew-- and, just because i was thrice as old and our paths in the world diverged so wide, each was nought to each, must i be told? we were fellow mortals, nought beside? iv no, indeed! for god above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love: i claim you still, for my own love's sake! delayed it may be for more lives yet, through worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn, much to forget ere the time be come for taking you. v but the time will come,--at last it will, when, evelyn hope, what meant (i shall say) in the lower earth, in the years long still, that body and soul so pure and gay? why your hair was amber, i shall divine, and your mouth of your own geranium's red-- and what you would do with me, in fine, in the new life come in the old one's stead. vi i have lived (i shall say) so much since then, given up myself so many times, gained me the gains of various men, ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, either i missed or itself missed me: and i want and find you, evelyn hope! what is the issue? let us see! vii i loved you, evelyn, all the while. my heart seemed full as it could hold? there was place and to spare for the frank young smile, and the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. so, hush,--i will give you this leaf to keep: see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand! there, that is our secret: go to sleep! you will wake, and remember, and understand. the dramatic lyric in two parts called _meeting at night_ and _parting at morning_ contains only sixteen lines and is a flawless masterpiece. of the four dimensions of mathematics, one only has nothing to do with poetry. the length of a poem is of no importance in estimating its value. i do not fully understand what is meant by saying that a poem is too long or too short. it depends entirely on the art with which the particular subject is treated. a short poem of no value is too long; a long poem of genius is not too long. richardson's _clarissa_ in eight volumes is not too long, as is proved by the fact that the numerous attempts to abridge it are all failures; whereas many short stories in our magazines are far too long. browning's _night and morning_ is not too short, because it contains in sixteen lines everything necessary; _the ring and the book_ is not too long, because the twenty thousand and odd lines are all needed to make the study of testimony absolutely complete. but whilst the mathematical dimension of length is not a factor in poetry, the dimensions of breadth and depth are of vital importance, and the mysterious fourth dimension is the quality that determines whether or not a poem is a work of genius. poems of the highest imagination can not be measured at all except in the fourth dimension. the first part of browning's lyric is notable for its shortness, its breadth and its depth; the second part possesses these qualities even more notably, and also takes the reader's thoughts into a world entirely outside the limits of time and space. browning has often been called a careless writer and although he maintained that the accusation was untrue, the condition of some of the manuscripts he sent to the press--notably _mr. sludge, the medium_ --is proof positive that he did not work at each one of his poems at his highest level of patient industry. he was however in general a fastidious artist; much more so than is commonly supposed. he was one of our greatest impromptu poets, like shakespeare, writing hot from the brain; he was not a polisher and reviser, like chaucer and tennyson. but he studied with care the sound of his words. many years ago, mrs. le moyne, who has done so much to increase the number of intelligent browning lovers in america, met the poet in europe, and told him she would like to recite to him one of his own poems. "go ahead, my dear." so she began to repeat in her beautiful voice _meeting at night_; she spoke the third line and the little startled waves that leap "stop!" said browning, "that isn't right." she then learned from him the sharp difference between "little startled waves" as she read it, and "startled little waves" as he wrote it. he was trying to produce the effect of a warm night on the beach with no wind, where the tiny wavelets simply crumble in a brittle fashion on the sand. "startled little waves" produces this effect; "little startled waves" does not. the impressionistic colors in this poem add much to its effect; the grey sea, the black land, the yellow moon, the fiery ringlets, the blue spurt of the match, the golden light of morning. the sounds and smells are realistic; one hears the boat cut harshly into the slushy sand; the sharp scratch of the match; one inhales the thick, heavy odor radiating from the sea-scented beach that has absorbed all day the hot rays of the sun. it is probable that the rendezvous is not at dusk, as is commonly supposed, but at midnight. owen wister, in his fine novel, _the virginian_, speaks of the lover's journey as taking place at dusk. now the half-moon could not scientifically be low at that early hour, and although most poets care nothing at all for the moon except as a decorative object, browning was generally precise in such matters. an american poet submitted to the _century magazine_ a poem that was accepted, the last line of each stanza reading and in the west the waning moon hangs low. one of the editorial staff remembered that the waning moon does not hang low in the west; he therefore changed the word to "weary," which made the poet angry. he insisted that he was a poet, not a man of science, and vowed that he would place his moon exactly where he chose. the editors replied, "you can have a waning moon in the west in some magazines, perhaps, but you can not have it there in the _century_." so it was published "weary," as any one may see who has sufficient time and patience. furthermore the contrast in this poem is not between evening and morning, but between night and morning. the english commonly draw a distinction between evening and night that we do not observe in america. _pippa passes_ is divided into four sections, morning, noon, evening, night. furthermore the meeting is a clandestine one; not the first one, for the man's soliloquy of his line of march shows how often he has travelled this way before, and now his eager mind, leaping far ahead of his feet, repeats to him each stage of the journey. the cottage is shrouded in absolute darkness until the lover's tap is heard; then comes the sound and the sight of the match, and the sudden thrill of the mad embrace, when the wild heart-beats are louder than the love-whispers. the dramatic contrast in this poem is between the man's feelings at night, and his mood in the morning. both parts of the lyric, therefore, come from the man's heart. it is absurd to suppose, as many critics seem to think, that the second part is uttered by the woman. such a mistake could never have arisen if it had not been for the word "him" in the penultimate line, which does not of course, refer to the man, but to the sun. to have the woman repeat in her heart these lines not only destroys the true philosophy of life set forth in the lyric, but the last reflection, and the need of a world of men for me would seem to make her taste rather catholic for an ideal sweetheart. the real meaning of the poem is simply this: the passionate intensity of love can not be exaggerated; in the night's meeting all other thoughts, duties, and pleasures are as though they were not; but with the day comes the imperious call of life and even if the woman could be content to live forever with her lover in the lonely cottage, he could not; he loves her honestly with fervor and sincerity, but he simply must go out into the world where men are, and take his share of the excitement and the struggle; he would soon be absolutely miserable if marooned from life, even with the woman he loves. those novels that represent a man as having no interest in life but love are false to human nature. in this poem browning represents facts as they are; it is not simply that the man wants to go out and live among other men, it is a natural law that he must, as truly a natural law as gravitation. and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me. just as the sun must take his prescribed course through the sky, so must i run my circle of duties in the world of men. it is not a moral call of duty; it is the importunate pull of necessity. there is still the possibility of another interpretation of the last line, though i think the one just given is correct, "i need the world of men; it is a natural law." now it is just possible that we could interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and i must go to do my share." this would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. i have never quite surrendered to the cavalier's words i could not love thee, dear, so much, loved i not honour more. are we sure it is honor, and not himself, he loves more? it is impossible to improve on the cowboy's comment on these lines in mr. wister's _virginian_; after molly has read them aloud to the convalescing male, he remarks softly, "that is very, very true." molly does not see why the virginian admires these verses so much more than the others. "i could scarcely explain," says he, "but that man does know something." molly wants to know if the lovers had quarrelled. "oh, no! he will come back after he has played some more of the game." "the game?" "life, ma'am. whatever he was adoin' in the world of men. that's a bed-rock piece, ma'am." the virginian is much happier in his literary criticism of this lyric than he is of the _good news_ or of the _incident of the french camp_; in the latter instance, he misses the point altogether. the boy was not a poseur. the boy was so happy to think he had actually given his life for his master that he smilingly corrected napoleon's cry "you're wounded!" it is as though one should congratulate an athletic contestant, and say "my felicitations! you won the second prize!" "no, indeed: i won the first." _night and morning_ suggests so many thoughts that we could continue our comments indefinitely; but time suffices for only one more. the nature picture of the dawn is absolutely perfect. round the cape of a sudden came the sea. he does not say that finally the cape became visible, but that the sea suddenly came round the cape. any one who has stood on the ocean-shore before dawn, and gazed along the indented coast in the grey light, has observed the precise effect mentioned in these words. at first one sees only the blur of land where the cape is, and nothing beyond it; suddenly the light increases, and the sea actually appears to come around the point. meeting at night the grey sea and the long black land; and the yellow half-moon large and low; and the startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep, as i gain the cove with pushing prow, and quench its speed i' the slushy sand. then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; three fields to cross till a farm appears; a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch and blue spurt of a lighted match, and a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, than the two hearts beating each to each! parting at morning round the cape of a sudden came the sea, and the sun looked over the mountain's rim: and straight was a path of gold for him, and the need of a world of men for me. it is interesting to remember that browning, of all poets most intellectual, should be so predominantly the poet of love. this passion is the motive power of his verse, as he believed it to be the motive power of the universe. he exhibits the love of men and women in all its manifestations, from baseness and folly to the noblest heights of self-renunciation. it is natural that the most masculine and the most vigorous and the most intellectual of all our poets should devote his powers mainly to the representation of love. for love is the essence of force, and does not spring from effeminate weakness or febrile delicacy. any painter can cover a huge canvas, but, as has been observed, only the strong hand can do the fine and tender work. to discuss at length the love-poems of browning would take us far beyond the limits of this volume; but certain of the dramatic lyrics may be selected to illustrate salient characteristics. as various poets in making portraits emphasise what is to them the most expressive features, the eyes or the lips, so browning, the poet of the mind, loves best of all in his women and men, the brow. in _evelyn hope_, and the sweet white brow is all of her. in _the last ride together_, my mistress bent that brow of hers. in _by the fireside_, reading by firelight, that great brow and the spirit-small hand propping it. in _the statue and the bust_, hair in heaps lay heavily over a pale brow spirit-pure. in _count gismond_, they, too, so beauteous! each a queen by virtue of her brow and breast. and the wonderful description of pompilia by caponsacchi: her brow had not the right line, leaned too much, painters would say; they like the straight-up greek: this seemed bent somewhat with an invisible crown of martyr and saint, not such as art approves. in _eurydice_, but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! in _count gismond_, our elder boy has got the clear great brow. in _the statue and the bust_, on his steady brow and quiet mouth. his ideally beautiful women generally have yellow hair. the lady _in a gondola_ had coiled hair, "a round smooth cord of gold." in _evelyn hope_, the "hair's young gold:" in _love among the ruins_, "eager eyes and yellow hair:" in _a toccata_, dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? and we must not forget his poem, _gold hair_. his descriptions of women's faces are never conventional, rosy cheeks and bright eyes, but always definite and specific. in _time's revenges_, the unfortunate lover is maddened by the vision of the girl's face: so is my spirit, as flesh with sin, filled full, eaten out and in with the face of her, the eyes of her, the lips, the little chin, the stir of shadow round her mouth. browning's rejected lovers are such splendid fellows that one wonders at their ill luck. tennyson's typical lovers, as seen in _locksley hall_, _lady clara vere de vere_, and the first part of _maud_, behave in a manner that quite justifies the woman. they whine, they rave, and they seem most of all to be astonished at the woman's lack of judgment in not recognising their merits. instead of a noble sorrow, they exhibit peevishness; they seem to say, "you'll be sorry some day." browning's rejected lovers never think of themselves and their own defeat; they think only of the woman, who is now more adorable than ever. it never occurs to them that the woman is lacking in intelligence because of her refusal; nor that the man she prefers is a lowbrowed scoundrel. they are chivalrous; they do their best to win. when they lose, they would rather have been rejected by this woman than accepted by any other; and they are always ready to congratulate the man more fortunate than they. they are in fact simply irresistible, and one can not help believing in their ultimate success. in _the lost mistress_, which swinburne said was worth a thousand _lost leaders_, the lover has just been rejected, and instead of thinking of his own misery, he endeavours to make the awkward situation easier for the girl by small-talk about the sparrows and the leaf-buds. she has urged that their friendship continue; that this episode need not put an end to their meetings, and that he can come to see her as often as he likes, only there must be no nonsense; he must promise to be sensible, and treat her only as a friend. instead of rejecting this suggestion with scorn, he accepts, and agrees to do his best. tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest? may i take your hand in mine? mere friends are we ... yet i will but say what mere friends say, or only a thought stronger; i will hold your hand but as long as all may, or so very little longer! "i will do my best to please you, but remember i'm made of flesh and blood." in _one way of love_, the same kind of man appears. pauline likes flowers, music, and fine speeches. he is just a mere man, who has never noticed a flower in his life, who is totally indifferent to music, and never could talk with eloquence. but if pauline likes these things, he must endeavor to impress her, if not with his skill, at all events with his devotion. he sends her a beautiful bouquet; she does not even notice it. for months he tries to learn the instrument, until finally he can play "his tune." she does not even listen; he throws the lute away, for he cares nothing for music except for her sake. at last comes the supreme moment when he makes his declaration, on which the whole happiness of his life depends. this hour my utmost art i prove and speak my passion-heaven or hell? many lovers, on being rejected, would simply repeat the last word just quoted. this fine sportsmanlike hero remarks, she will not give me heaven? 'tis well lose who may--i still can say, those who win heaven, blest are they! "i can not reproach myself, for i did my best, and lost: still less can i reproach her; all i can say is, the man who gets her is lucky." finally, the same kind of character appears in one of the greatest love-poems in all literature, _the last ride together_. the situation just before the opening lines is an exact parallel to that of _the lost mistress_. every day this young pair have been riding together. the man has fallen in love, and has mistaken the girl's camaraderie for a deeper feeling. he has just discovered his error, and without minimising the force of the blow that has wrecked his life's happiness, this is what he says: then, dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all, my life seemed meant for, fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to (curse, oh, no!) rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave,--i claim only a memory of the same, --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me. what does the rejected lover mean by such brave words as "pride" and "thankfulness"? he means that it is a great honor to be rejected by such a woman, as mr. birrell says it is better to be knocked down by doctor johnson than to be picked up by mr. froude. he is thankful, too, to have known such a wonderful woman; and to show that he can control himself, and make the situation easier for her, he requests that to-day for the last time they ride just as usual--indeed they had met for that purpose, are properly accoutred, and were about to start, when he astonished her with his sudden and no longer controllable declaration. right! we shall ride together. i am not yet banished from the sight of her. perhaps the world will end to-night. in the course of this poem, browning develops one of his favorite ideas, that life is always greater than art. a famous poet may sit at his desk, and write of love in a way to thrill the hearts of his readers; but we should place him lower than rustic sweethearts meeting in the moonlight, because they are having in reality something which exists for the poet only in dreams. the same is true of sculpture and all pictorial art; men will turn from the greatest masterpiece of the chisel or the brush to look at a living woman. and you, great sculptor,--so, you gave a score of years to art, her slave, and that's your venus, whence we turn to yonder girl that fords the burn! i was once seated in the square room in the gallery at dresden that holds the most famous picture in the world, rafael's sistine madonna. a number of tourists were in the place, and we were all gazing steadfastly at the immortal virgin, when a pretty, fresh-colored young american girl entered the room. every man's head twisted away from the masterpiece of art, and every man's eyes stared at the commonplace stranger, because she was alive! i was much amused, and could not help thinking of browning's lines. this doctrine, that life is greater than art, is repeated by browning in _cleon_, and it forms the whole content of ibsen's last drama, _when we dead awaken_. the lover's reasoning at the close of browning's poem, that rejection may be better for him because now he has an unrealised ideal, and that the race itself is better than the victor's garland, reminds us of lessing's noble saying, that if god gave him the choice between the knowledge of all truth and the search for it, he would humbly take the latter. one must lead some life beyond, have a bliss to die with, _dim_-descried. browning's rejected lovers the lost mistress all's over, then; does truth sound bitter as one at first believes? hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter about your cottage eaves! and the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly, i noticed that, to-day; one day more bursts them open fully --you know the red turns gray. to-morrow we meet the same then, dearest? may i take your hand in mine? mere friends are we,--well, friends the merest keep much that i resign: for each glance of the eye so bright and black though i keep with heart's endeavour,-- your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back, though it stay in my soul forever!-- yet i will but say what mere friends say, or only a thought stronger; i will hold your hand but as long as all may, or so very little longer! one way of love i all june i bound the rose in sheaves. now, rose by rose, i strip the leaves and strew them where pauline may pass. she will not turn aside? alas! let them lie. suppose they die? the chance was they might take her eye, ii. how many a month i strove to suit these stubborn fingers to the lute! to-day i venture all i know. she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing: suppose pauline had bade me sing! iii. my whole life long i learned to love. this hour my utmost art i prove and speak my passion--heaven or hell? she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! lose who may--i still can say, those who win heaven, blest are they! the last ride together i i said--then, dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all, my life seemed meant for, fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave,--i claim only a memory of the same, --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me. ii my mistress bent that brow of hers; those deep dark eyes where pride demurs when pity would be softening through, fixed me a breathing-while or two with life or death in the balance: right! the blood replenished me again; my last thought was at least not vain: i and my mistress, side by side shall be together, breathe and ride, so, one day more am i deified. who knows but the world may end to-night? iii hush! if you saw some western cloud all billowy-bosomed, over-bowed by many benedictions--sun's and moon's and evening-star's at once-- and so, you, looking and loving best, conscious grew, your passion drew cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too, down on you, near and yet more near, till flesh must fade for heaven was here!-- thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear! thus lay she a moment on my breast. iv then we began to ride. my soul smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll freshening and fluttering in the wind. past hopes already lay behind. what need to strive with a life awry? had i said that, had i done this, so might i gain, so might i miss. might she have loved me? just as well she might have hated, who can tell! where had i been now if the worst befell? and here we are riding, she and i. v fail i alone, in words and deeds? why, all men strive and who succeeds? we rode; it seemed my spirit flew, saw other regions, cities new. as the world rushed by on either side. i thought,--all labour, yet no less bear up beneath their unsuccess. look at the end of work, contrast the petty done, the undone vast, this present of theirs with the hopeful past! i hoped she would love me; here we ride. vi what hand and brain went ever paired? what heart alike conceived and dared? what act proved all its thought had been? what will but felt the fleshly screen? we ride and i see her bosom heave. there's many a crown for who can reach. ten lines, a statesman's life in each! the flag stuck on a heap of bones, a soldier's doing! what atones? they scratch his name on the abbey-stones. my riding is better, by their leave. vii what does it all mean, poet? well, your brains beat into rhythm, you tell what we felt only; you expressed you hold things beautiful the best, and pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 'tis something, nay 'tis much: but then, have you yourself what's best for men? are you--poor, sick, old ere your time-- nearer one whit your own sublime than we who never have turned a rhyme? sing, riding's a joy! for me, i ride. viii and you, great sculptor--so, you gave a score of years to art, her slave, and that's your venus, whence we turn to yonder girl that fords the burn! you acquiesce, and shall i repine? what, man of music, you grown grey with notes and nothing else to say, is this your sole praise from a friend, "greatly his opera's strains intend, put in music we know how fashions end!" i gave my youth; but we ride, in fine. ix who knows what's fit for us? had fate proposed bliss here should sublimate my being--had i signed the bond-- still one must lead some life beyond, have a bliss to die with, dim-descried. this foot once planted on the goal, this glory-garland round my soul, could i descry such? try and test! i sink back shuddering from the quest. earth being so good, would heaven seem best? now, heaven and she are beyond this ride. x and yet--she has not spoke so long! what if heaven be that, fair and strong at life's best, with our eyes upturned whither life's flower is first discerned, we, fixed so, ever should so abide? what if we still ride on, we two with life for ever old yet new, changed not in kind but in degree, the instant made eternity,-- and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, for ever ride? browning's lovers, as has been illustrated, are usually chivalrous, whether their passions have or have not the sanction of law. the poem _in a gondola_, which has been more often translated into foreign languages than perhaps any other of browning's works, gives us a picture of a night in venice. the fluent rhythms of the verse indicate the lazy glide of the gondola through the dark waters of the canal. the lovers speak, sing, and muse; and their conversation is full of the little language characteristic of those who are in complete possession of each other, soul and body. they delight in passionate reminiscences: they love to recall their first chance meeting: ah, the autumn day i, passing, saw you overhead! the wind blew out the curtains of her apartment, and her pet parrot escaped, giving the man his opportunity. they rehearse over again the advancing stages of their drama. she asks him to kiss her like a moth, then like a bee--in the attempt to recapture the first shy sweetness of their dawning passion. they play little love-games. he pretends he is a jew, carrying her away from her family to a tribal feast; then that they twain are spirits of stars, meeting in the thin air aloft. the intensity of their bliss is sharpened by the black cloud of danger in which they move: for if the three, husband, father, and brother of the lady become aware of this secret liaison, there can be only one end to it--a tragedy of blood. the lighted taper held in the window by the trusted maid shows that they are "safe," and for the last time they play again their little comedy of formality. she pretends to be the formal _grande dame_, the lady with the colder breast than snow: he is the bashful gallant, who hardly dares touch the tips of her fingers. in this laughing moment, the dagger of the husband is driven deep into his back. like all of browning's lovers, he gives, even on the edge of the eternal darkness, no thought to himself, but only to her. gathering his dying energies, he speaks in a loud tone, so that the conspirators, invisible in the venetian night, may hear him: care not for the cowards! care only to put aside thy beauteous hair my blood will hurt! and in the last agony, he comforts her with the thought that all this, the joy of love and the separation by murder, have been ordained. in _love among the ruins_, with which _men and women_ originally opened, and which some believe to be browning's masterpiece, love is given its place as the supreme fact in human history. this is a scene in the roman campagna at twilight, and the picture in the first stanza reminds us of gray's _elegy_ in the perfection of its quiet silver tone. with a skill nothing short of genius, browning has maintained in this poem a double parallel. up to the fifth stanza, the contrast is between the present peace of the vast solitary plain, and its condition years ago when it was the centre of a city's beating heart: from the fifth stanza to the close, the contrast is between this same vanished civilisation and the eternal quality of love. i do not remember any other work in literature where a double parallel is given with such perfect continuity and beauty; the first half of each stanza is in exact antithesis to the last. the parenthesis--_so they say_--is a delicate touch of dramatic irony. no one would dream that this quiet plain was once the site of a great city, for no proofs remain: we have to take the word of the archæologists for it. some day a japanese shepherd may pasture his sheep on manhattan island. after a poetic discourse on the text _sic transit gloria mundi_--the love motive is suddenly introduced in the fifth stanza; and now the contrast changes, and becomes a comparison between the ephemeral nature of civilisation and the permanent fact of love. at the exact spot where the grandstand formerly stood at the finish of the horse-race, where the king, surrounded by courtiers, watched the whirling chariots, now remains motionless, breathless, a yellow-haired girl. the proud king's eyes looked over the stadium and beheld the domes and pinnacles of his city, the last word of civilisation; the girl's eager eyes look over the silent plain searching for the coming of her lover. and browning would have us believe that this latter fact is far more important historically than the former. suppose an american professor of archæology is working on the grassy expanse, collecting material for his new book; he looks up for a moment and sees a pair of rustic lovers kissing in the twilight; he smiles, and resumes what seems to him his important labor. little does he imagine that this love-scene is more significant than all the broken bits of pottery he digs out of the ground; yet such is the fact. for all he can do at his very best is to reconstruct a vanished past, while the lovers are acting a scene that belongs to eternity. love is best. love among the ruins i where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, miles and miles on the solitary pastures where our sheep half-asleep tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop as they crop-- was the site once of a city great and gay, (so they say) of our country's very capital, its prince ages since held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far peace or war. ii now,--the country does not even boast a tree as you see, to distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills from the hills intersect and give a name to, (else they run into one) where the domed and daring palace shot its spires up like fires o'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall bounding all, made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, twelve abreast. iii and such plenty and perfection, see, of grass never was! such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreads and embeds every vestige of the city, guessed alone, stock or stone-- where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe long ago; lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame struck them tame; and that glory and that shame alike, the gold bought and sold. iv now,--the single little turret that remains on the plains, by the caper overrooted, by the gourd overscored, while the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks through the chinks-- marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time sprang sublime, and a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced as they raced, and the monarch and his minions and his dames viewed the games. v and i know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve smiles to leave to their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece in such peace, and the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey melt away-- that a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret whence the charioteers caught soul for the goal, when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb till i come. vi but he looked upon the city, every side, far and wide, all the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' colonnades, all the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then, all the men! when i do come, she will speak not, she will stand, either hand on my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace of my face, ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech each on each. vii in one year they sent a million fighters forth south and north, and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force-- gold, of course. oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! earth's returns for whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! shut them in, with their triumphs and their glories and the rest! love is best. in the poem _respectability_ browning gives us a more vulgar, but none the less vital aspect of love. this is no peaceful twilit harmony; this scene is set on a windy, rainy night in noisy paris, on the left bank of the seine, directly in front of the institute of france. two reckless lovers--either old comrades or picked-up acquaintances of this very night, it matters not which--come tripping along gaily, arm in arm. the man chaffs at worldly conventions, at the dullness of society, at the hypocrisy of so-called respectable people, and congratulates himself and his fair companion on the fun they are having. what fools they would have been had they waited through a long, formal courtship for the sanction of an expensive marriage! the world, he says, does not forbid kisses, only it says, you must see the magistrate first. my finger must not touch your soft lips until it is covered with the glove of marriage. bah! what do we care for the world's good word? at this moment they reach the lighted windows of the institute, and like a pair of sparrows, they glance within at the highly proper but terribly tedious company. what do they see? they see guizot compelled by political exigency to shake hands hypocritically with his enemy montalembert. but before them down a dim court shine three lamps, an all-night dance resort. come on! run for it! that's the place for us! no dull formalities, no hypocrisies there! something doing! respectability i dear, had the world in its caprice deigned to proclaim "i know you both, have recognized your plighted troth, am sponsor for you: live in peace!"-- how many precious months and years of youth had passed, that speed so fast, before we found it out at last, the world, and what it fears? ii how much of priceless life were spent with men that every virtue decks, and women models of their sex, society's true ornament,-- ere we dared wander, nights like this, thro' wind and rain, and watch the seine, and feel the boulevart break again to warmth and light and bliss? iii i know! the world proscribes not love; allows my finger to caress your lips' contour and downiness, provided it supply a glove. the world's good word!--the institute! guizot receives montalembert! eh? down the court three lampions flare: put forward your best foot! in the list of _dramatis personae_, browning placed _confessions_ shortly after _a death in the desert_, as if to show the enormous contrast in two death-bed scenes. after a presentation of the last noble, spiritual, inspired moments of the apostle john, we have portrayed for us the dying delirium of an old sinner, whose thought travels back to the sweetest moments of his life, his clandestine meetings with the girl he loved. the solemn voice of the priest is like the troublesome buzzing of a fly. do i view the world as a vale of tears? not much! like matthew arnold's _wish_, the brother-doctor of the soul who is called in to canvass with official breath is simply a nuisance in these last minutes of life. the row of medicine bottles, all useless now for practical purposes, represents to his fevered eyes the topography of the scene where the girl used to come running to meet him. "i know, sir, it's improper,"--i ought not to talk this way to a clergyman, my mind isn't right, i'm dying, and this is all i can think of. how sad and bad and mad it was-- but then, how it was sweet! confessions what is he buzzing in my ears? "now that i come to die, do i view the world as a vale of tears?" ah, reverend sir, not i! what i viewed there once, what i view again where the physic bottles stand on the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, with a wall to my bedside hand. that lane sloped, much as the bottles do, from a house you could descry o'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue or green to a healthy eye? to mine, it serves for the old june weather blue above lane and wall; and that farthest bottle labelled "ether" is the house o'ertopping all. at a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, there watched for me, one june, a girl: i know, sir, it's improper, my poor mind's out of tune. only, there was a way ... you crept close by the side, to dodge eyes in the house, two eyes except: they styled their house "the lodge." what right had a lounger up their lane? but, by creeping very close, with the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain and stretch themselves to oes, yet never catch her and me together, as she left the attic, there, by the rim of the bottle labelled "ether," and stole from stair to stair, and stood by the rose-wreathed gate. alas, we loved, sir--used to meet: how sad and bad and mad it was-- but then, how it was sweet! we may close our considerations of the dramatic lyrics with three love-poems. whenever in his later years browning was asked to write a selection with his autograph, he used to say playfully that the only one of his poems that he could remember was _my star_; hence more copies of this exist in manuscript than any other of his productions. it was of course a tribute to his wife; she shone upon his life like a star of various colors; but the moment the world attempted to pry into the secret of her genius, she shut off the light altogether. let the world regard saturn, the most wonderful star in the heavens. my star shines for me alone. the first and best of the series of _bad dreams_ gives us again in browning's last volume his doctrine of love. love is its own reward: it may be sad not to have love returned, but the one unspeakable tragedy is to lose the capacity for loving. in a terrible dream, the face of the woman changes from its familiar tenderness to a glance of stony indifference, and in response to his agonised enquiry, she declares that her love for him is absolutely dead. then comes a twofold bliss: one was in the mere waking from such desolation, but the other consisted in the fact that even if the dream were true, his love for her knew no diminution. thank god, i loved on the same! the most audacious poem of browning's old age is _summum bonum_. since the dawn of human speculative thought, philosophers have asked this question, what is the highest good? it has been answered in various ways. omar khayyam said it was wine: john stuart mill said it was the greatest happiness of the greatest number: the westminster catechism said it was to glorify god and enjoy him forever. browning says it is the kiss of one girl. this kiss is the concentrated essence of all the glory, beauty, and sweetness of life. in order to understand such a paradox, we must remember that in browning's philosophy, love is the engine of the whole universe. i have no doubt that love meant to him more than it has ever meant to any other poet or thinker; just as i am sure that the word beauty revealed to keats a vision entirely beyond the range of even the greatest seers. love is the supreme fact; and every manifestation of it on earth, from the divine incarnation down to a chance meeting of lovers, is more important than any other event or idea. now we have seen that it is browning's way invariably to represent an abstract thought by a concrete illustration. therefore in this great and daring lyric we find the imaginary lover calling the kiss of the woman he loves the highest good in life. my star all that i know of a certain star is, it can throw (like the angled spar) now a dart of red, now a dart of blue; till my friends have said they would fain see, too, my star that dartles the red and the blue! then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: they must solace themselves with the saturn above it. what matter to me if their star is a world? mine has opened its soul to me; therefore i love it. bad dreams last night i saw you in my sleep: and how your charm of face was changed! i asked "some love, some faith you keep?" you answered "faith gone, love estranged." whereat i woke--a twofold bliss: waking was one, but next there came this other: "though i felt, for this, my heart break, i loved on the same." summum bonum all the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: all the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: in the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and--how far above them-- truth, that's brighter than gem, trust, that's purer than pearl,-- brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me in the kiss of one girl. v dramatic monologues although browning was not a failure as a dramatist--_a blot in the 'scutcheon_ and _in a balcony_ are the greatest verse tragedies in the language since the elizabethans--he found the true channel for his genius in the dramatic monologue. he takes a certain critical moment in one person's life, and by permitting the individual to speak, his character, the whole course of his existence, and sometimes the spirit of an entire period in the world's history are revealed in a brilliant searchlight. with very few exceptions, one of which will be given in our selections, a dramatic monologue is not a meditation nor a soliloquy; it is a series of remarks, usually confessional, addressed either orally or in an epistolary form to another person or to a group of listeners. these other figures, though they do not speak, are necessary to the understanding of the monologue; we often see them plainly, and see their faces change in expression as the monologue advances. at the dinner table of bishop blougram, the little man gigadibs is conspicuously there; and lucrezia is so vividly before us in _andrea del sarto_, that a clever actress has actually assumed this silent rôle on the stage, and exhibited simply by her countenance the effect of andrea's monologue. this species of verse is perhaps the highest form of poetic art, as it is the most difficult; for with no stage setting, no descriptions, no breaks in the conversation, the depths of the human heart are exposed. one of the greatest dramatic monologues in all literature is _my last duchess_, and it is astounding that so profound a life-drama should have been conceived and faultlessly expressed by so young a poet. the whole poem contains only fifty-six lines, but it could easily be expanded into a three-volume novel. indeed it exhibits browning's genius for condensation as impressively as _the ring and the book_ proves his genius for expansion. the metre is interesting. it is the heroic couplet, the same form exactly in which pope wrote his major productions. yet the rime, which is as evident as the recurring strokes of a tack-hammer in pope, is scarcely heard at all in _my last duchess_. its effect is so muffled, go concealed, that i venture to say that many who are quite familiar with the poem, could not declare offhand whether it were written in rime or in blank verse. this technical trick is accomplished by what the french call overflow, the running on of the sense from one line to another, a device so dear to the heart of milton. some one has well said that dryden's couplets are links in a chain, whilst pope's are pearls on a string. pope enclosed nearly every couplet, so that they are quite separate, which is one reason why he has given us such a vast number of aphorisms. to see how totally different in effect the heroic couplet is when it is closed and when it is open, one may compare almost any selection from pope with the opening lines of keats's _endymion_, and then silently marvel that both poems are written in exactly the same measure. pope peace to all such! but were there one whose fires true genius kindles, and fair fame inspires; blest with each talent and each art to please, and born to write, converse, and live with ease: should such a man, too fond to rule alone, bear, like the turk, no brother near the throne, view him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, and hate for arts that caused himself to rise. keats a thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth. one has only to glance at the printed page of _my last duchess_, and see how few of the lines end in punctuation points, to discover the method employed when a poet wishes to write a very strict measure in a very free manner. i have sometimes thought that george eliot took a hint from this poem in the composition of _daniel deronda_, for the relations between grandcourt and gwendolen are exactly the same as existed between the duke and his late wife; a more recent, though not so great an example, may be found in mrs. burnett's novel, _the shuttle_. the poem is a study in cold, systematic torture of a warm human soul by an icy-hearted tyrant. browning adopts one of his favorite methods of character-revelation here. all that we know of the duchess is the testimony given by her worst enemy, her husband; and yet, in attempting to describe her, he has succeeded in painting only his own narrow and hideous heart. slander is often greater in the recoil than in the discharge; when a man attempts to give an unfavorable portrait of another, he usually gives us an exact likeness of himself. pope meant his picture of addison to be correct; but although he made the picture with immortal art, it is no more like addison than it resembles st. francis; it is, however, an absolutely faithful image of pope himself. this is one reason why slander is such an exceedingly dangerous weapon to handle. the duke tells the envoy that his late duchess was flirtatious, plebeian in her enthusiasm, not sufficiently careful to please her husband; but the evident truth is that he had a satanic pride, that he was yellow with jealousy, that he was methodically cruel. his jealousy is shown by the fact that he would allow only a monk to paint her: "i said 'frà pandolf' by design," and he required the monk to do the whole task in one day. his pride is shown in the fact that although her expansive nature displeased him, he would never stoop to remonstrate with her. his cruelty is shown in the fact that he coldly repressed her little enthusiasms, and finally murdered her. i suppose she was really a frank, charming girl, who came from a happy home, a bright and eager bride; she was one of those lovely women whose kindness and responsiveness are as natural as the sunlight. she loved to watch the sunset from the terrace; she loved to pet the white mule; she was delighted when some one brought her a gift of cherries. then she was puzzled, bewildered, when she found that all her expressions of delight in life received a cold, disapproving glance of scorn from her husband; her lively talk at dinner, her return from a ride, flushed and eager, met invariably this icy stare of hatred. she smiled too much to please him. then all smiles stopped together. what difference does it make whether he deliberately poisoned her, or whether he simply broke her heart by the daily chill of silent contempt? for her, at all events, death must have been a release. she would have been happier with a drunken husband, with a brute who kicked her, rather than with this supercilious cold-hearted patrician. toward the end of the poem, in his remarks about the dowry, we see that the duke is as avaricious as he is cruel; though he says with a disagreeable smile, that the woman herself is his real object. the touch to make this terrible man complete comes at the very end. the duke and the envoy prepare to descend the staircase; the latter bows, to give precedence to the man with the nine hundred years' old name: but the duke, with a purr like a tiger, places his arm around the shoulder of the visitor, and they take the first step. just then the master of the palace calls attention casually to a group of statuary. it is neptune taming a sea-horse. that's the way i break them in! throughout the whole monologue, the duke speaks in a quiet, steady, ironical tone; the line the depth and passion of its earnest glance is pronounced in intense irony, in ridicule of the conventional remark made by previous visitors. only once or twice do we see the teeth of this monster flash, revealing his horrible heart. when he speaks of the "officious fool" who brought the cherries, and when he says "all smiles stopped together"; then the envoy looks at him with a fearful question in his eyes, but the duke's face immediately resumes its mask of stone. my last duchess ferrara that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will't please you sit and look at her? i said "frà pandolf" by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus. sir, 'twas not her husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek: perhaps frà pandolf chanced to say "her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much," or "paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. she had a heart--how shall i say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. sir, 'twas all one! my favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. she thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--i know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling? even had you skill in speech--(which i have not)--to make your will quite clear to such an one, and say, "just this or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, or there exceed the mark"--and if she let herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, --e'en then would be some stooping; and i choose never to stoop. oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene'er i passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? this grew; i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. there she stands as if alive. will't please you rise? we'll meet the company below, then. i repeat, the count your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretence of mine for dowry will be disallowed; though his fair daughter's self, as i avowed at starting, is my object. nay, we'll go together down, sir. notice neptune, though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which claus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me! to turn from _my last duchess_ to _count gismond_ is like coming out of a damp cellar into god's own sunshine. originally browning called these two poems _italy_ and _france_; but he later fell madly in love with italy, and i suppose could not bear to have so cold-blooded a tragedy represent the country graven on his heart. the charm and brightness of _count gismond_ are properly connected with one of the loveliest towns in the world, the old city of aix in provence, a jewel on the hills rising from the mediterranean sea. gismond is browning's hero. he is the resolute man who does not hesitate, who makes himself instantly master of the situation, who appears like lohengrin in the moment of elsa's sharp distress, a messenger from heaven. or, if virtue feeble were, heaven itself would stoop to her. when the lady was publicly accused by the scoundrel gauthier, i suppose many men said, "what a pity that so fair a woman should be so foul!" others said gravely, "this matter ought to be judicially examined." gismond was the only man who realised that a defenseless orphan was insulted, and the words were hardly out of gauthier's mouth when he received "the fist's reply to the filth." the lovers walked away from the "shouting multitude," the fickle, cowardly, contemptible public, who did not dare to defend the lady in her need, but had lungs enough for the victor, whoever he might be. it is pleasant to notice the prayer of the lady for the dead gauthier. "i hope his soul is in heaven." this is no mere christian forgiveness. gauthier had proved to be the means of her life-happiness. had it not been for his shameful accusation, she would never have met gismond. out of her agony came her richest blessing. all this happened years ago, but when her husband appears with the children she tells him a white lie. "i have just been boasting to adela about the skill of my hunting hawk." she has been doing nothing of the kind; but she can not talk about the great event of her life before the children. count gismond aix in provence i christ god who savest man, save most of men count gismond who saved me! count gauthier, when he chose his post, chose time and place and company to suit it; when he struck at length my honour, 'twas with all his strength. ii and doubtlessly ere he could draw all points to one, he must have schemed! that miserable morning saw few half so happy as i seemed, while being dressed in queen's array to give our tourney prize away. iii i thought they loved me, did me grace to please themselves; 'twas all their deed; god makes, or fair or foul, our face; if showing mine so caused to bleed my cousins' hearts, they should have dropped a word, and straight the play had stopped. iv they, too, so beauteous! each a queen by virtue of her brow and breast; not needing to be crowned, i mean, as i do. e'en when i was dressed, had either of them spoke, instead of glancing sideways with still head! v but no: they let me laugh, and sing my birthday song quite through, adjust the last rose in my garland, fling a last look on the mirror, trust my arms to each an arm of theirs, and so descend the castle-stairs-- vi and come out on the morning-troop of merry friends who kissed my cheek, and called me queen, and made me stoop under the canopy--(a streak that pierced it, of the outside sun, powdered with gold its gloom's soft dun)-- vii and they could let me take my state and foolish throne amid applause of all come there to celebrate my queen's-day--oh i think the cause of much was, they forgot no crowd makes up for parents in their shroud! viii however that be, all eyes were bent upon me, when my cousins cast theirs down; 'twas time i should present the victor's crown, but ... there, 'twill last no long time ... the old mist again blinds me as then it did. how vain! ix see! gismond's at the gate, in talk with his two boys: i can proceed. well, at that moment, who should stalk forth boldly--to my face, indeed-- but gauthier, and he thundered "stay!" and all stayed. "bring no crowns, i say!" x "bring torches! wind the penance-sheet about her! let her shun the chaste, or lay herself before their feet! shall she whose body i embraced a night long, queen it in the day? for honour's sake no crowns, i say!" xi i? what i answered? as i live, i never fancied such a thing as answer possible to give. what says the body when they spring some monstrous torture-engine's whole strength on it? no more says the soul. xii till out strode gismond; then i knew that i was saved. i never met his face before, but, at first view, i felt quite sure that god had set himself to satan; who would spend a minute's mistrust on the end? xiii he strode to gauthier, in his throat gave him the lie, then struck his mouth with one back-handed blow that wrote in blood men's verdict there. north, south, east, west, i looked. the lie was dead, and damned, and truth stood up instead. xiv this glads me most, that i enjoyed the heart of the joy, with my content in watching gismond unalloyed by any doubt of the event: god took that on him--i was bid watch gismond for my part: i did. xv did i not watch him while he let his armourer just brace his greaves, rivet his hauberk, on the fret the while! his foot ... my memory leaves no least stamp out, nor how anon he pulled his ringing gauntlets on. xvi and e'en before the trumpet's sound was finished, prone lay the false knight, prone as his lie, upon the ground: gismond flew at him, used no sleight o' the sword, but open-breasted drove, cleaving till out the truth he clove. xvii which done, he dragged him to my feet and said "here die, but end thy breath in full confession, lest thou fleet from my first, to god's second death! say, hast thou lied?" and, "i have lied to god and her," he said, and died. xviii then gismond, kneeling to me, asked --what safe my heart holds, though no word could i repeat now, if i tasked my powers for ever, to a third dear even as you are. pass the rest until i sank upon his breast. xix over my head his arm he flung against the world; and scarce i felt his sword (that dripped by me and swung) a little shifted in its belt: for he began to say the while how south our home lay many a mile. xx so 'mid the shouting multitude we two walked forth to never more return. my cousins have pursued their life, untroubled as before i vexed them. gauthier's dwelling-place god lighten! may his soul find grace i xxi our elder boy has got the clear great brow; tho' when his brother's black full eye shows scorn, it ... gismond here? and have you brought my tercel back? i just was telling adela how many birds it struck since may. the _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_ differs from most of the dramatic monologues in not being addressed to a listener; but the difference is more apparent than real; for the other person is in plain view all the time, and the soliloquy would have no point were it not for the peaceful activities of friar lawrence. this poem, while it deals ostensibly with the lives of only two monks, gives us a glimpse into the whole monastic system. when a number of men retired into a monastery and shut out the world forever, certain sins and ambitions were annihilated, while others were enormously magnified. all outside interests vanished; but sin remained, for it circulates in the human heart as naturally as blood in the body. the cloister was simply a little world, with the nobleness and meanness of human nature exceedingly conspicuous. when the men were once enclosed in the cloister walls, they knew that they must live in that circumscribed spot till the separation of death. naturally therefore political ambitions, affections, envies, jealousies, would be writ large; human nature would display itself in a manner most interesting to a student, if only he could live there in a detached way. this is just what browning tries to do; he tries to live imaginatively with the monks, and to practise his profession as the chronicler of life. the only way to realise what the monastic life really meant would be to imagine a small modern college situated in the country, and the passage of a decree that not a single student should leave the college grounds until his body was committed to the tomb. the outside interests of the world would quickly grow dim and eventually vanish; and everything would be concentrated within the community. i suppose that the passions of friendship, hatred, and jealousy would be prodigiously magnified. there must have been friendships among the monks of the middle ages compared to which our boasted college friendships are thin and pale; and there must have been frightful hatreds and jealousies. in all communities there are certain persons that get on the nerves of certain others; the only way to avoid this acute suffering is to avoid meeting the person who causes it. but imagine a cloister where dwells a. man you simply can not endure: every word he says, every motion he makes, every single mannerism of walk and speech is intolerable. now you must live with this man until one of you dies: you must sit opposite to him at meals, you can not escape constant contact. your only resource is profane soliloquies: but if you have a sufficiently ugly disposition, you can revenge yourself upon him in a thousand secret ways. friar lawrence unconsciously and innocently fans the flames of hatred in our speaker's heart, simply because he does not dream of the effect he produces. every time he talks at table about the weather, the cork-crop, latin names, and other trivialities, the man sitting opposite to him would like to dash his plate in his face: every time friar lawrence potters around among his roses, the other looking down from his window, with a face distorted with hate, would like to kill him with a glance. poor lawrence drives our soliloquist mad with his deliberate table manners, with his deliberate method of speech, with his care about his own goblet and spoon. and all the time lawrence believes that his enemy loves him! from another point of view, this poem resembles _my last duchess_ in that it is a revelation of the speaker's heart. we know nothing about friar lawrence except what his deadly enemy tells us; but it is quite clear that lawrence is a dear old man, innocent as a child; while the speaker, simply in giving his testimony against him, reveals a heart jealous, malicious, lustful; he is like a thoroughly bad boy at school, with a pornographic book carefully concealed. just at the moment when his rage and hatred reach a climax, the vesper bell sounds; and the speaker, who is an intensely strict formalist and ritualist, presents to us an amusing spectacle; for out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. soliloquy of the spanish cloister i gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! water your damned flower-pots, do! if hate killed men, brother lawrence, god's blood, would not mine kill you! what? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? oh, that rose has prior claims-- needs its leaden vase filled brimming? hell dry you up with its flames! ii at the meal we sit together: _salve tibi_! i must hear wise talk of the kind of weather, sort of season, time of year: _not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely dare me hope oak-galls, i doubt: what's the latin name for "parsley_?" what's the greek name for swine's snout? iii whew! we'll have our platter burnished, laid with care on our own shelf! with a fire-new spoon we're furnished, and a goblet for ourself, rinsed like something sacrificial ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps-- marked with l. for our initial! (he-he! there his lily snaps!) iv _saint_, forsooth! while brown dolores squats outside the convent bank with sanchicha, telling stories, steeping tresses in the tank, blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, --can't i see his dead eye glow, bright as 'twere a barbary corsair's? (that is, if he'd let it show!) v when he finishes refection, knife and fork he never lays cross-wise, to my recollection, as do i, in jesu's praise. i the trinity illustrate, drinking watered orange-pulp-- in three sips the arian frustrate; while he drains his at one gulp. vi oh, those melons? if he's able we're to have a feast! so nice! one goes to the abbot's table, all of us get each a slice. how go on your flowers? none double not one fruit-sort can you spy? strange!--and i, too, at such trouble, keep them close-nipped on the sly! vii there's a great text in galatians, once you trip on it, entails twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails: if i trip him just a-dying, sure of heaven as sure can be, spin him round and send him flying off to hell, a manichee? viii or, my scrofulous french novel on grey paper with blunt type! simply glance at it, you grovel hand and foot in belial's gripe: if i double down its pages at the woeful sixteenth print, when he gathers his greengages, ope a sieve and slip it in't? ix or, there's satan!--one might venture pledge one's soul to him, yet leave such a flaw in the indenture as he'd miss till, past retrieve, blasted lay that rose-acacia we're so proud of! _hy, zy, him_ ... 'st, there's vespers! _plena gratiâ ave, virgo_! gr-r-r--you swine! everybody loves browning's _ghent to aix_ poem. even those who can not abide the poet make an exception here; and your thorough-going browningite never outgrows this piece. it is the greatest horseback poem in the literature of the world: compared to this, _paul revere's ride_ is the amble of a splayfooted nag. it sounds as though it had been written in the saddle: but it was really composed during a hot day on the deck of a vessel in the mediterranean, and written off on the flyleaf of a printed book that the poet held in his hand. poets are always most present with the distant, as mrs. browning said; and browning, while at sea, thought with irresistible longing of his good horse eating his head off in the stable at home. everything about this poem is imaginary; there never had been any such good news brought, and it is probable that no horse could cover the distance in that time. but the magnificent gallop of the verse: the change from moonset to sunrise: the scenery rushing by: the splendid spirit of horse and man: and the almost insane joy of the rider as he enters aix--these are more true than history itself. browning is one of our greatest poets of motion--whether it be the glide of a gondola, the swift running of the marathon professional pheidippides, the steady advance of the galleys over the sea in _paracelsus_, the sharp staccato strokes of the horse's hoofs through the metidja, or the swinging stride of the students as they carry the dead grammarian up the mountain. not only do the words themselves express the sound of movement; but the thought, in all these great poems of motion, travels steadily and naturally with the advance. it is interesting to compare a madly-rushing poem like _ghent to aix_ with the absolute calm of _andrea del sarto_. it gives one an appreciation of browning's purely technical skill. no one has ever, so far as i know, criticised _ghent to aix_ adversely except owen wister's virginian; and his strictures are hypercritical. as roland threw his head back fiercely to scatter the spume-flakes, it would be easy enough for the rider to see the eye-sockets and the bloodfull nostrils. every one has noticed how a horse will do the ear-shift, putting one ear forward and one back at the same moment. browning has an imaginative reason for it. one ear is pushed forward to listen for danger ahead; the other bent back, to catch his master's voice. was there ever a greater study in passionate cooperation between man and beast than this splendid poem? "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix" i sprang to the stirrup, and joris, and he; i galloped, dirck galloped, we galloped all three; "good speed!" cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew; "speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through; behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, and into the midnight we galloped abreast. not a word to each other; we kept the great pace neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place; i turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit, nor galloped less steadily roland a whit 'twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear; at boom, a great yellow star came out to see; at duffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be; and from mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime, so joris broke silence with, "yet there is time!" at aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun, and against him the cattle stood black every one, to stare through the mist at us galloping past, and i saw my stout galloper roland at last, with resolute shoulders, each butting away the haze, as some bluff river headland its spray: and his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back for my voice, and the other pricked out on his track; and one eye's black intelligence,--ever that glance o'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance! and the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon his fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. by hasselt, dirck groaned; and cried joris, "stay spur! your roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her, we'll remember at aix"--for one heard the quick wheeze of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees, and sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, as down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. so, we were left galloping, joris and i, past looz and past tongres, no cloud in the sky; the broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; till over by dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, and "gallop," gasped joris, "for aix is in sight!" "how they'll greet us!"--and all in a moment his roan rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone; and there was my roland to bear the whole weight of the news which alone could save aix from her fate, with his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim, and with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim. then i cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall, shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all, stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear, called my roland his pet-name, my horse without peer; clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good, till at length into aix roland galloped and stood. and all i remember is--friends flocking round as i sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground; and no voice but was praising this roland of mine, as i poured down his throat our last measure of wine, which (the burgesses voted by common consent) was no more than his due who brought good news from ghent. the monologue of the dying bishop is as great a masterpiece as _my last duchess_; it has not a superfluous word, and in only a few lines gives us the spirit of the italian renaissance. ruskin said that browning is "unerring in every sentence he writes about the middle ages, always vital, right, and profound." he added, "i know no other piece of modern english, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the renaissance spirit." yet browning had never seen rome until a few months before this poem was published. it is an example, not of careful study, but of the inexplicable divination of genius. browning permits a delirious old bishop to talk a few lines, and a whole period of history is written. the church of saint prassede is in a dirty little alley in rome, hard by the great church of saint maria maggiore. you push through the group of filthy, importunate beggars, open a leather door, and you drop from the twentieth to the sixteenth century. it is one of the most ornate churches in rome; the mosaic angels in the choir are precisely as the poet describes them. the tomb of the imaginary gandolf may be identified with a bishop's tomb on the south side of the church, and the latin inscription under it, while it does not contain the form "elucescebat," is not pure tully, but rather belongs to the latin of ulpian's time. the recumbent figure is in exact accord with the description by browning. skeptics are essential to the welfare of the church; it is only in periods of sharp, skilful hostility that the church becomes pure. in the middle ages, when it ran riot with power, there were plenty of churchmen as corrupt as our dying man. his love for a greek manuscript is as sensual as his love for his mistress; and having lived a life of physical delight, it is natural that his last thoughts should concern themselves with the abode of his body rather than with the destination of his soul. of course his mind is wandering, or he would not speak with quite such shameless cynicism. browning has made him talk of saint praxed at _his_ sermon on the mount, in order to prove the delirium. s. praxed was a female saint. the constant confusion of greek mythology with the ritual of the christian church is a characteristic feature both of this poem and of the period of history it represents. kipling is particularly fond of this work, and it will be remembered what use he makes of it in _stalky and co_. the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church rome, -- vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! draw round my bed: is anselm keeping back? nephews--sons mine ... ah god, i know not! well-- she, men would have to be your mother once, old gandolf envied me, so fair she was! what's done is done, and she is dead beside, dead long ago, and i am bishop since, and as she died so must we die ourselves, and thence ye may perceive the world's a dream. life, how and what is it? as here i lie in this state-chamber, dying by degrees, hours and long hours in the dead night, i ask "do i live, am i dead?" peace, peace seems all. saint praxed's ever was the church for peace; and so, about this tomb of mine. i fought with tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: --old gandolf cozened me, despite my care; shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south he graced his carrion with, god curse the same! yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence one sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, and somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, and up into the aery dome where live the angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: and i shall fill my slab of basalt there, and 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, with those nine columns round me, two and two, the odd one at my feet where anselm stands: peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe as fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. --old gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, put me where i may look at him! true peach, rosy and flawless: how i earned the prize! draw close: that conflagration of my church --what then? so much was saved if aught were missed! my sons, ye would not be my death? go dig the white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, drop water gently till the surface sink, and if ye find ... ah god, i know not, i! ... bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, and corded up in a tight olive-frail, some lump, ah god, of _lapis lazuli_, big as a jew's head cut off at the nape, blue as a vein o'er the madonna's breast ... sons, all have i bequeathed you, villas, all, that brave frascati villa with its bath, so, let the blue lump poise between my knees, like god the father's globe on both his hands ye worship in the jesu church so gay, for gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: man goeth to the grave, and where is he? did i say basalt for my slab, sons? black-- 'twas ever antique-black i meant! how else shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? the bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, those pans and nymphs ye wot of, and perchance some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, the saviour at his sermon on the mount, saint praxed in a glory, and one pan ready to twitch the nymph's last garment off, and moses with the tables ... but i know ye mark me not! what do they whisper thee, child of my bowels, anselm? ah, ye hope to revel down my villas while i gasp bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine which gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then! tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest i grieve. my bath must needs be left behind, alas! one block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, there's plenty jasper somewhere in the world-- and have i not saint praxed's ear to pray horses for ye, and brown greek manuscripts, and mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? --that's if ye carve my epitaph aright, choice latin, picked phrase, tully's every word, no gaudy ware like gandolf's second line-- tully, my masters? ulpian serves his need! and then how i shall lie through centuries, and hear the blessed mutter of the mass, and see god made and eaten all day long, and feel the steady candle-flame, and taste good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! for as i lie here, hours of the dead night, dying in state and by such slow degrees, i fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, and stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, and let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: and as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts grow, with a certain humming in my ears, about the life before i lived this life, and this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, saint praxed at his sermon on the mount, your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, and new-found agate urns as fresh as day, and marble's language, latin pure, discreet, --aha, elucescebat quoth our friend? no tully, said i, ulpian at the best! evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. all _lapis_, all, sons! else i give the pope my villas! will ye ever eat my heart? ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, they glitter like your mother's for my soul, or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, piece out its starved design, and fill my vase with grapes, and add a vizor and a term, and to the tripod ye would tie a lynx that in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, to comfort me on my entablature whereon i am to lie till i must ask "do i live, am i dead?" there, leave me, there! for ye have stabbed me with ingratitude to death--ye wish it--god, ye wish it! stone-- gritstone, a-crumble! clammy squares which sweat as if the corpse they keep were oozing through-- and no more _lapis_ to delight the world! well go! i bless ye. fewer tapers there, but in a row: and, going, turn your backs --ay, like departing altar-ministrants, and leave me in my church, the church for peace, that i may watch at leisure if he leers-- old gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, as still he envied me, so fair she was! browning gives us a terrible study of jealousy in _the laboratory_. the chemist says nothing, but the contrast between the placid face of the old scientist, intent only upon his work, and the wildly passionate countenance of the little woman with him, is sufficiently impressive. those were the days when murder was a fine art. she plans the public death of the woman she hates so that the lover will never be able to forget the dying face. radiant in queenly beauty, with the smile of satisfaction that accompanies the inner assurance of beauty and power--in a moment she will be convulsively rolling on the floor, her swollen face purplish-black with the poison, her mouth emitting foam like a mad dog. there is no doubt that the little murderess intends to follow her rival to the tomb. she has given the chemist her entire fortune as pay for the drop of poison; he may kiss her, if he likes! all shame, all womanly reserve are gone: what does anything matter now? it is a true study of jealousy, because the little creature does not dream of attacking the _man_ who deserted her; all her hellish energy is directed against the woman. indeed the poison that she buys will not transform her rival more completely than the dreadful poison of jealousy has already transformed her from what she was to what she is. the language and metre fit the thought. tennyson passed a severe judgment on the first line now that i, tying thy glass mask tightly saying that it lacked smoothness, that it was a very difficult mouthful. but is this not intentional and absolutely right? the woman is speaking slowly with compressed lips, her voice convulsed with terrible hatred and the terrible resolution for revenge. the laboratory ancien regime i now that i, tying thy glass mask tightly, may gaze thro' these faint smokes curling whitely, as thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy-- which is the poison to poison her, prithee? ii he is with her, and they know that i know where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow while they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear empty church, to pray god in, for them!--i am here. iii grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, pound at thy powder,--i am not in haste! better sit thus, and observe thy strange things, than go where men wait me and dance at the king's. iv that in the mortar--you call it a gum? ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! and yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, sure to taste sweetly,--is that poison too? v had i but all of them, thee and thy treasures, what a wild crowd of invisible pleasures! to carry pure death in an earring, a casket, a signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket! vi soon, at the king's, a mere lozenge to give, and pauline should have just thirty minutes to live! but to light a pastile, and elise, with her head and her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead! vii quick--is it finished? the colour's too grim! why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim? let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir, and try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer! viii what a drop! she's not little, no minion like me! that's why she ensnared him: this never will free the soul from those masculine eyes,--say, "no!" to that pulse's magnificent come-and-go. ix for only last night, as they whispered, i brought my own eyes to bear on her so, that i thought could i keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all! x not that i bid you spare her the pain; let death be felt and the proof remain: brand, burn up, bite into its grace-- he is sure to remember her dying face! xi is it done? take my mask off! nay, be not morose; it kills her, and this prevents seeing it close: the delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee! if it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me? xii now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, you may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will! but brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings ere i know it--next moment i dance at the king's! _fra lippo lippi_ and _andrea del sarto_ are both great art poems, and both in striking contrast. the former is dynamic, the latter static. the tumultuous vivacity of the gamin who became a painter contrasts finely with the great technician, a fellow almost damned in a fair wife. fra lippo lippi was a street mucker, like gavroche; he unconsciously learned to paint portraits by the absolute necessity of studying human faces on the street. nothing sharpens observation like this. he had to be able to tell at a glance whether the man he accosted would give him food or a kick. when they took him to the cloister, he obtained a quite new idea about religion. he naturally judged that, as he judged everything else in life, from the practical point of view. heretofore, like many small boys, he had rather despised religion, and thought the monks were fools. "don't you believe it," he cries: "there is a lot in religion. you get free clothes, free shelter, three meals a day, and you don't have to work! why, it's the easiest thing i know." the monks discovered his talent with pencil and brush, and they made him decorate the chapel. when the work was done, he called them in. to their amazement and horror, the saints and angels, instead of being ideal faces, were the living portraits of the familiar figures about the cloister. "why, there's the iceman! there's the laundress!" he rebelled when they told him this was wicked: he said it was all a part of god's world, that the business of the artist was to interpret life; he wished they would let him enter the pulpit, take the prior's place, and preach a sermon that would make them all sit up. the philosophy of æsthetics has never been more truly or more succinctly stated than in these lines: or say there's beauty with no soul at all-- (i never saw it--put the case the same--) if you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing god invents: that's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed, within yourself, when you return him thanks. contemplation of beautiful objects in nature, art, and literature, which perhaps at first sight have no significance, gradually awakens in our own hearts a dawning sense of what beauty may mean; and thus enlarges and develops our minds, and makes them susceptible to the wonder and glory of life. the relation of art to life--art being the teacher that makes us understand life--is perfectly well understood by fra lippo lippi. for, don't you mark? we're made so that we love first when we see them painted, things we have passed perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see. if one stands to-day in the ancient and modern gallery in florence, and contemplates fra lippo lippi's masterpiece, _the coronation of the virgin_, and reads the lines about it in this poem, one will get a new idea of the picture. it is a representation of the painter's whole nature, half genius, half mucker--the painting is a glory of form and color, and then in the corner the artist had the assurance to place himself in his monk's dress among the saints and angels, where he looks as much out of place as a bowery boy in a fifth avenue drawing-room. not content with putting himself in the picture, he stuck a latin tag on himself, which means, "this fellow did the job." browning loves fra lippo lippi, in spite of the man's impudence and debauchery; because the painter loved life, had a tremendous zest for it, and was not ashamed of his enthusiasm. the words he speaks came from the poet's own heart: the world and life's too big to pass for a dream.... it makes me mad to see what men shall do and we in our graves! this world's no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink. the change from _fra lippo lippi_ to _andrea del sarto_ is the change from a blustering march day to a mild autumn twilight. the original picture in florence which inspired the poem represents andrea and his wife sitting together, while she is holding the letter from king francis. this is a poem of acquiescence, as the other is a poem of protest, and never was language more fittingly adapted to the mood in each instance. one can usually recognise andrea's pictures clear across the gallery rooms; he has enveloped them all in a silver-grey gossamer mist, and in some extraordinary manner browning has contrived to clothe his poem in the same diaphanous garment. it is a poem of twilight, of calm, of failure in success. andrea's pictures are superior technically to those of his great contemporaries--rafael, michel angelo, leonardo da vinci--but their imperfect works have a celestial glory, the glory of aspiration, absent from his perfect productions. his work indeed is, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection, no more. it is natural, that he, whose paintings show perfection of form without spirit, should have married a woman of physical beauty devoid of soul. she has ruined him, but she could not have ruined him had he been a different man. he understands her, however, in the quiet light of his own failure. he tells her she must not treat him so badly that he can not paint at all; and adds the necessary explanation that his ceasing to paint would stop her supplies of cash. for although it is incomprehensible to her, people are willing to give large sums of money for her ridiculous husband's ridiculous daubs. his mind, sensitive to beauty, is drunk with his wife's loveliness of face and form; and like all confirmed drunkards, he can not conquer himself now, though otherwise he knows it means death and damnation. he has a complete knowledge of the whole range of his powers, and of his limitations. he can not help feeling pride in his marvellous technique, that he can do what other men dream of doing; but he knows that without aspiration the soul is dead. poor andrea! history has treated him harshly. he is known throughout all time as "the tailor's son," and browning has given him in this immortal poem a condemnation that much of his work does not really deserve. for there is inspiration in many of andrea's madonnas. browning, with his fixed idea of the glory of the imperfect, the divine evidence of perpetual development, could not forgive andrea for being called the "faultless painter." thus browning has made of him a horrible example, has used him merely as the text for a sermon. there was just enough truth to give browning his opportunity. the superiority of rafael over andrea lies precisely in the aspiration of the former's work. schopenhauer says the whole christian religion is in the face of rafael's _saint cecilia_, "an entire and certain gospel." andrea's virgins have more of the beauty of this world: rafael's have the beauty of holiness. andrea del sarto (called "the faultless painter") but do not let us quarrel any more, no, my lucrezia; bear with me for once: sit down and all shall happen as you wish. you turn your face, but does it bring your heart? i'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, treat his own subject after his own way, fix his own time, accept too his own price, and shut the money into this small hand when next it takes mine. will it? tenderly? oh, i'll content him,--but to-morrow, love! i often am much wearier than you think, this evening more than usual, and it seems as if--forgive now--should you let me sit here by the window with your hand in mine and look a half-hour forth on fiesole, both of one mind, as married people use, quietly, quietly the evening through, i might get up to-morrow to my work cheerful and fresh as ever. let us try. to-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! your soft hand is a woman of itself, and mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve for each of the five pictures we require: it saves a model. so! keep looking so-- my serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! --how could you ever prick those perfect ears, even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet-- my face, my moon, my everybody's moon, which everybody looks on and calls his, and, i suppose, is looked on by in turn, while she looks--no one's: very dear, no less. you smile? why, there's my picture ready made, there's what we painters call our harmony! a common greyness silvers everything,-- all in a twilight, you and i alike --you, at the point of your first pride in me (that's gone you know),--but i, at every point; my youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down to yonder sober pleasant fiesole. there's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; that length of convent-wall across the way holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; the last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, and autumn grows, autumn in everything. eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape as if i saw alike my work and self and all that i was born to be and do, a twilight-piece. love, we are in god's hand. how strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; so free we seem, so fettered fast we are! i feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! this chamber for example--turn your head-- all that's behind us! you don't understand nor care to understand about my art, but you can hear at least when people speak: and that cartoon, the second from the door --it is the thing, love! so such things should be-- behold madonna!--i am bold to say. i can do with my pencil what i know, what i see, what at bottom of my heart i wish for, if i ever wish so deep-- do easily, too--when i say, perfectly, i do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, who listened to the legate's talk last week, and just as much they used to say in france. at any rate 'tis easy, all of it! no sketches first, no studies, that's long past: i do what many dream of, all their lives, --dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing. i could count twenty such on twice your fingers, and not leave this town, who strive--you don't know how the others strive to paint a little thing like that you smeared carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-- yet do much less, so much less, someone says, (i know his name, no matter)--so much less! well, less is more, lucrezia: i am judged. there burns a truer light of god in them, in their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt this low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. their works drop groundward, but themselves, i know, reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, enter and take their place there sure enough, though they come back and cannot tell the world. my works are nearer heaven, but i sit here. the sudden blood of these men! at a word-- praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. i, painting from myself and to myself, know what i do, am unmoved by men's blame or their praise either. somebody remarks morello's outline there is wrongly traced, his hue mistaken; what of that? or else, rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? speak as they please, what does the mountain care? ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? all is silver-grey placid and perfect with my art: the worse! i know both what i want and what might gain, and yet how profitless to know, to sigh "had i been two, another and myself, our head would have o'erlooked the world!" no doubt. yonder's a work now, of that famous youth the urbinate who died five years ago. ('tis copied, george vasari sent it me.) well, i can fancy how he did it all, pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, above and through his art--for it gives way; that arm is wrongly put--and there again-- a fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, its body, so to speak: its soul is right, he means right--that, a child may understand. still, what an arm! and i could alter it: but all the play, the insight and the stretch-- out of me, out of me! and wherefore out? had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, we might have risen to rafael, i and you! nay, love, you did give all i asked, i think-- more than i merit, yes, by many times. but had you--oh, with the same perfect brow, and perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, and the low voice my soul hears, as a bird the fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare-- had you, with these the same, but brought a mind! some women do so. had the mouth there urged "god and the glory! never care for gain, the present by the future, what is that? live for fame, side by side with agnolo! rafael is waiting: up to god, all three!" i might have done it for you. so it seems: perhaps not. all is as god over-rules. beside, incentives come from the soul's self; the rest avail not. why do i need you? what wife had rafael, or has agnolo? in this world, who can do a thing, will not; and who would do it, cannot, i perceive: yet the will's somewhat--somewhat, too, the power-- and thus we half-men struggle. at the end, god, i conclude, compensates, punishes. 'tis safer for me, if the award be strict, that i am something underrated here, poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. i dared not, do you know, leave home all day, for fear of chancing on the paris lords. the best is when they pass and look aside; but they speak sometimes; i must bear it all. well may they speak! that francis, that first time, and that long festal year at fontainebleau! i surely then could sometimes leave the ground, put on the glory, rafael's daily wear, in that humane great monarch's golden look,-- one finger in his beard or twisted curl over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, one arm about my shoulder, round my neck, the jingle of his gold chain in my ear, i painting proudly with his breath on me, all his court round him, seeing with his eyes, such frank french eyes, and such a fire of souls profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,-- and, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, this in the background, waiting on my work, to crown the issue with a last reward! a good time, was it not, my kingly days? and had you not grown restless ... but i know-- "tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said; too live the life grew, golden and not grey, and i'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt out of the grange whose four walls make his world. how could it end in any other way? you called me, and i came home to your heart. the triumph was--to reach and stay there; since i reached it ere the triumph, what is lost? let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, you beautiful lucrezia that are mine! rafael did this, andrea painted that; the roman's is the better when you pray, but still the other's virgin was his wife--" men will excuse me. i am glad to judge both pictures in your presence; clearer grows my better fortune, i resolve to think. for, do you know, lucrezia, as god lives, said one day agnolo, his very self, to rafael ... i have known it all these years ... (when the young man was flaming out his thoughts upon a palace-wall for rome to see, too lifted up in heart because of it) "friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub goes up and down our florence, none cares how, who, were he set to plan and execute as you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!" to rafael's!--and indeed the arm is wrong. i hardly dare ... yet, only you to see, give the chalk here--quick, thus the line should go! ay, but the soul! he's rafael! rub it out! still, all i care for, if he spoke the truth, (what he? why, who but michel agnolo? do you forget already words like those?) if really there was such a chance, so lost,-- is, whether you're--not grateful--but more pleased. well, let me think so. and you smile indeed! this hour has been an hour! another smile? if you would sit thus by me every night i should work better, do you comprehend? i mean that i should earn more, give you more. see, it is settled dusk now; there's a star; morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall, the cue-owls speak the name we call them by. come from the window, love,--come in, at last, inside the melancholy little house we built to be so gay with. god is just. king francis may forgive me: oft at nights when i look up from painting, eyes tired out, the walls become illumined, brick from brick distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, that gold of his i did cement them with! let us but love each other. must you go? that cousin here again? he waits outside? must see you--you, and not with me? those loans? more gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? while hand and eye and something of a heart are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? i'll pay my fancy. only let me sit the grey remainder of the evening out, idle, you call it, and muse perfectly how i could paint, were i but back in france, one picture, just one more--the virgin's face, not yours this time! i want you at my side to hear them--that is, michel agnolo-- judge all i do and tell you of its worth. will you? to-morrow, satisfy your friend. i take the subjects for his corridor, finish the portrait out of hand--there, there, and throw him in another thing or two if he demurs; the whole should prove enough to pay for this same cousin's freak. beside, what's better and what's all i care about, get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! love, does that please, you? ah, but what does he, the cousin! what does he to please you more? i am grown peaceful as old age to-night. i regret little, i would change still less. since there my past life lies, why alter it? the very wrong to francis!--it is true i took his coin, was tempted and complied, and built this house and sinned, and all is said. my father and my mother died of want. well, had i riches of my own? you see how one gets rich! let each one bear his lot. they were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died: and i have laboured somewhat in my time and not been paid profusely. some good son paint my two hundred pictures--let him try! no doubt, there's something strikes a balance. yes, you loved me quite enough, it seems to-night. this must suffice me here. what would one have? in heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-- four great walls in the new jerusalem, meted on each side by the angel's reed, for leonard, rafael, agnolo and me to cover--the three first without a wife, while i have mine! so--still they overcome because there's still lucrezia,--as i choose. again the cousin's whistle! go, my love. _karshish_ and _cleon_ are studies of the early days of christianity. each man writes a letter--one to a professor, one to a king--which reveals both his own nature and the steady advance of the kingdom of god. the contrast between the scientist and the man of letters is not favorable to the latter. karshish is an ideal scientist, with a naturally skeptical mind, yet wide open, willing to learn from any and every source, thankful for every new fact; cleon is an intellectual snob. his mind is closed by its own culture, and he regards it as absurd that any man in humble circumstances can teach him anything. learning, which has made the scientist modest, has made cleon arrogant. such is the difference between the ideal man of science, and the typical man of culture. young karshish was the best student in his department at the university; he has won a travelling fellowship, and writes letters home to professor abib, the dean of the graduate school. this is the twenty-second letter, and although we have not seen the others, we may easily conjecture their style and contents. they resemble darwin's method of composition describing his tour around the world--one fact is noted accurately and then another. this particular letter is entrusted to a messenger who had the pink-eye; the young doctor easily cured him, and the man having no money, begged to give some service. he winks his eyes gladly in the strong sunlight which had hurt him so cruelly until the doctor came to his relief. very well! he shall run with an epistle. karshish has met lazarus: and it is significant of browning's method that it is not the resurrection from the grave which interests him, nor what happened to lazarus in the tomb; it is the profound spiritual change in the man. lazarus does not act like a faker; he is not sensational, does not care whether you believe his story or not, is a thoroughly quiet, intelligent, sensible man. only his conduct has ceased to be swayed by any selfish interest, and there is some tremendous force working in his life that puzzles the physician. it is amusing how the latter tries to shake off his obsession, how he tries to persuade himself that lazarus had a prolonged epileptic fit, or that he is now mad; how he tries to interest himself once more in the fauna and flora of the country. impossible! the story of lazarus dominates him. his letter is naturally full of apologies for writing to the great abib on such a theme. he is afraid abib will be disgusted with him, will call him home, as a disgrace to the university he represents. what! my favorite student, carefully trained in science, to swallow the story of the first madman or swindler he meets? a man raised from the dead? such cases are diurnal. what would a modern professor think if one of his travelling fellows wrote home from south america that he had met a man raised from the dead, and was really impressed by his story? his fellowship would be instantly taken away from him. he anticipates abib's suggestions. if you think there is really anything interesting in the yarn, why don't you seek out the magician who brought him back to life? oh, naturally, i thought of that the first thing. but i discovered that the doctor who wrought the cure of lazarus is dead, lost his life in some obscure tumult. it is with the utmost difficulty that karshish finally brings himself to write what will seem much worse even than the acceptance of the story of lazarus. but something impels him to out with it. lazarus says--god forgive me for uttering such nonsensical blasphemy--that the doctor who cured him was no doctor at all--was ... was ... was almighty god himself! he says god appeared on the earth in human form, that lazarus knew him personally, spoke with him, ate meals with him--and then suddenly in a revulsion of feeling at his daring to write such trash to abib, he tries to force his mind back to report on scientific observations. he thinks indeed he has ended his letter; when the stupendous idea of jesus christ rushes over his mind like a flood, and he adds a postscript. would it not be wonderful, professor, if lazarus were right? if the supreme force we recognise were really a god of love, who died to save us? the madman saith he said so: it is strange, ... it is strange ... and so we leave karshish in a muse: but surely he is not far from the kingdom of god. as this poem indicates the manner in which christianity in the early days spread from man to man, while many are amazed and many doubt, so _cleon_ gives us the picture of the gospel as carried over the world by paul, cleon in his own distinguished person sums up the last word of greek culture, in its intellectual prowess, its serene beauty, its many-sided charm, and its total inability to save the world. cleon is an absolute pessimist. he is sincere; such cant as the "choir invisible" means nothing to him, for death will turn his splendid mind into a pinch of dust. death is far more horrible to poets and artists than to the ignorant, he assures the king, who had thought just the opposite: is it not dreadful to think that after my death people will be singing the songs that i have written, while all that remains of me is in a little urn? he does not deceive himself with phrases. death is the end of us, and therefore self-consciousness is a mistake. the animals without it are happier and better than we. how terrible it is to think that a man like me who has developed steadily throughout my whole life should now face the blank wall of annihilation just when my mind is at its best, when my senses are most keen to profit by the richness and wonder of life! the thought that individual development is thus meaningless is so repugnant not merely to his heart's desire but to his mental sense of the fitness of things, that it has sometimes seemed as if there must be a future life where the soul can pursue its natural course ahead. but he dismisses this thought as impossible; for if there were a future life, i should be the first to know of it. it would certainly have been revealed to a splendid mind like mine. it is the mountain peak that catches the first flush of the dawn, not the valley: it is the topmost branch of the great tree that gets the first whisper of the coming breeze. it is a pity that cleon had not heard the gospel. i thank thee, o father, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. even so, father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. it was not through men like cleon that the gospel made its first advance. his postscript, like that of karshish, is interesting, though strikingly different. the king had enclosed a letter to paul, but as he did not know paul's address, he wondered if cleon would not be kind enough to see that the evangelist obtained the letter. cleon was decidedly vexed. i neither know nor care where paul may be. you don't suppose for a moment that paul knows anything i don't know? you don't suppose anything paul could say would have any weight for men like me? oh, i have heard of him; i was taking a constitutional one day, and i saw a little group of persons listening to an orator. i touched a man on the shoulder, and i said, what is that idiot talking about? and he replied that the man said that a person named jesus christ had risen from the dead, and could save all those who believed on him from death. what crazy nonsense people swallow! so cleon smiled in his wisdom and went on his way. but through the lines of his speech we feel the rising tide of christianity, where far back, through creeks and inlets making, comes silent, flooding in, the main. an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, the not-incurious in god's handiwork (this man's-flesh he hath admirably made, blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, to coop up and keep down on earth a space that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul) --to abib, all-sagacious in our art, breeder in me of what poor skill i boast; like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, whereby the wily vapour fain would slip back and rejoin its source before the term,-- and aptest in contrivance (under god) to baffle it by deftly stopping such:-- the vagrant scholar to his sage at home sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) three samples of true snake-stone--rarer still, one of the other sort, the melon-shaped, (but fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) and writeth now the twenty-second time. my journeyings were brought to jericho: thus i resume. who studious in our art shall count a little labour unrepaid? i have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone on many a flinty furlong of this land. also, the country-side is all on fire with rumours of a marching hitherward: some say vespasian cometh, some, his son. a black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear; lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls: i cried and threw my staff and he was gone. twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, and once a town declared me for a spy; but at the end, i reach jerusalem, since this poor covert where i pass the night, this bethany, lies scarce the distance thence a man with plague-sores at the third degree runs till he drops down dead. thou laughest here! 'sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe, to void the stuffing of my travel-scrip and share with thee whatever jewry yields. a viscid choler is observable in tertians, i was nearly bold to say; and falling-sickness hath a happier cure than our school wots of: there's a spider here weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; take five and drop them,.. but who knows his mind, the syrian runagate i trust this to? his service payeth me a sublimate blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. best wait: i reach jerusalem at morn, there set in order my experiences, gather what most deserves, and give thee all-- or i might add, judaa's gum-tragacanth scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry, in fine exceeds our produce. scalp-disease confounds me, crossing so with leprosy-- thou hadst admired one sort i gained at zoar-- but zeal outruns discretion. here i end. yet stay: my syrian blinketh gratefully, protesteth his devotion is my price-- suppose i write what harms not, though he steal? i half resolve to tell thee, yet i blush, what set me off a-writing first of all. an itch i had, a sting to write, a tang! for, be it this town's barrenness--or else the man had something in the look of him-- his case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. so, pardon if--(lest presently i lose in the great press of novelty at hand the care and pains this somehow stole from me) i bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind, almost in sight--for, wilt thou have the truth? the very man is gone from me but now, whose ailment is the subject of discourse. thus then, and let thy better wit help all! tis but a case of mania--subinduced by epilepsy, at the turning-point of trance prolonged unduly some three days: when, by the exhibition of some drug or spell, exorcization, stroke of art, unknown to me and which 'twere well to know, the evil thing out-breaking all at once left the man whole and sound of body indeed,-- but, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide, making a clear house of it too suddenly, the first conceit that entered might inscribe whatever it was minded on the wall so plainly at that vantage, as it were, (first come, first served) that nothing subsequent attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls the just-returned and new-established soul hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart that henceforth she will read or these or none. and first--the man's own firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) --that he was dead and then restored to life by a nazarene physician of his tribe: --'sayeth, the same bade "rise," and he did rise. "such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. not so this figment!--not, that such a fume, instead of giving way to time and health, should eat itself into the life of life, as saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all! for see, how he takes up the after-life. the man--it is one lazarus a jew, sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, the body's habit wholly laudable, as much, indeed, beyond the common health as he were made and put aside to show. think, could we penetrate by any drug and bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh, and bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep! whence has the man the balm that brightens all? this grown man eyes the world now like a child. some elders of his tribe, i should premise, led in their friend, obedient as a sheep, to bear my inquisition. while they spoke, now sharply, now with sorrow,--told the case,-- he listened not except i spoke to him, but folded his two hands and let them talk, watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool. and that's a sample how his years must go. look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life, should find a treasure,--can he use the same with straitened habits and with tastes starved small, and take at once to his impoverished brain the sudden element that changes things, that sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand and puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust? is he not such an one as moves to mirth-- warily parsimonious, when no need, wasteful as drunkenness at undue times? all prudent counsel as to what befits the golden mean, is lost on such an one: the man's fantastic will is the man's law. so here--we call the treasure knowledge, say, increased beyond the fleshly faculty-- heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: the man is witless of the size, the sum, the value in proportion of all things, or whether it be little or be much. discourse to him of prodigious armaments assembled to besiege his city now, and of the passing of a mule with gourds-- 'tis one! then take it on the other side, speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt with stupour at its very littleness, (far as i see) as if in that indeed he caught prodigious import, whole results; and so will turn to us the bystanders in ever the same stupour (note this point) that we too see not with his opened eyes. wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, preposterously, at cross purposes. should his child sicken unto death,--why, look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or pretermission of the daily craft! while a word, gesture, glance from that same child at play or in the school or laid asleep will startle him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like. demand the reason why--"'tis but a word," object-- "a gesture"--he regards thee as our lord who lived there in the pyramid alone, looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young, we both would unadvisedly recite some charm's beginning, from that book of his, able to bid the sun throb wide and burst all into stars, as suns grown old are wont. thou and the child have each a veil alike thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match over a mine of greek fire, did ye know i he holds on firmly to some thread of life-- (it is the life to lead perforcedly) which runs across some vast distracting orb of glory on either side that meagre thread, which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-- the spiritual life around the earthly life: the law of that is known to him as this, his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. so is the man perplext with impulses sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, proclaiming what is right and wrong across, and not along, this black thread through the blaze-- "it should be" balked by "here it cannot be." and oft the man's soul springs into his face as if he saw again and heard again his sage that bade him "rise" and he did rise. something, a word, a tick o' the blood within admonishes: then back he sinks at once to ashes, who was very fire before, in sedulous recurrence to his trade whereby he earneth him the daily bread; and studiously the humbler for that pride, professedly the faultier that he knows god's secret, while he holds the thread of life. indeed the especial marking of the man is prone submission to the heavenly will-- seeing it, what it is, and why it is. 'sayeth, he will wait patient to the last for that same death which must restore his being to equilibrium, body loosening soul divorced even now by premature full growth: he will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live so long as god please, and just how god please. he even seeketh not to please god more (which meaneth, otherwise) than as god please. hence, i perceive not he affects to preach the doctrine of his sect whate'er it be, make proselytes as madmen thirst to do: how can he give his neighbour the real ground, his own conviction? ardent as he is-- call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "be it as god please" reassureth him. i probed the sore as thy disciple should: "how, beast," said i, "this stolid carelessness sufficeth thee, when rome is on her march to stamp out like a little spark thy town, thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" he merely looked with his large eyes on me. the man is apathetic, you deduce? contrariwise, he loves both old and young, able and weak, affects the very brutes and birds--how say i? flowers of the field-- as a wise workman recognises tools in a master's workshop, loving what they make. thus is the man as harmless as a lamb: only impatient, let him do his best, at ignorance and carelessness and sin-- an indignation which is promptly curbed: as when in certain travel i have feigned to be an ignoramus in our art according to some preconceived design, and happed to hear the land's practitioners, steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, prattle fantastically on disease, its cause and cure-and i must hold my peace! thou wilt object--why have i not ere this sought out the sage himself, the nazarene who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source, conferring with the frankness that befits? alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech perished in a tumult many years ago, accused--our learning's fate--of wizardry, rebellion, to the setting up a rule and creed prodigious as described to me. his death, which happened when the earthquake fell (prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss to occult learning in our lord the sage who lived there in the pyramid alone) was wrought by the mad people--that's their wont! on vain recourse, as i conjecture it, to his tried virtue, for miraculous help-- how could he stop the earthquake? that's their way! the other imputations must be lies: but take one, though i loathe to give it thee, in mere respect for any good man's fame. (and after all, our patient lazarus is stark mad; should we count on what he says? perhaps not: though in writing to a leech 'tis well to keep back nothing of a case.) this man so cured regards the curer, then, as--god forgive me! who but god himself, creator and sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile! --'sayeth that such an one was born and lived, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died, with lazarus by, for aught i know, and yet was ... what i said nor choose repeat, and must have so avouched himself, in fact, in hearing of this very lazarus who saith--but why all this of what he saith? why write of trivial matters, things of price calling at every moment for remark? i noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage, the aleppo sort, aboundeth, very nitrous. it is strange! thy pardon for this long and tedious case, which, now that i review it, needs must seem unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth! nor i myself discern in what is writ good cause for the peculiar interest and awe indeed this man has touched me with. perhaps the journey's end, the weariness had wrought upon me first. i met him thus: i crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills like an old lion's cheek teeth. out there came a moon made like a face with certain spots multiform, manifold, and menacing: then a wind rose behind me. so we met in this old sleepy town at unaware, the man and i. i send thee what is writ. regard it as a chance, a matter risked to this ambiguous syrian--he may lose, or steal, or give it thee with equal good. jerusalem's repose shall make amends for time this letter wastes, thy time and mine; till when, once more thy pardon and farewell! the very god i think, abib; dost thou think? so, the all-great, were the all-loving too-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying, "o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee!" the madman saith he said so: it is strange. the poem _childe roland_ is unique among browning's monologues. his poetry usually is of the noonday and the market-place; but this might have been written by coleridge, or maeterlinck, or edgar allan poe. it has indeed the "wizard twilight coleridge knew." the atmosphere is uncanny and ghoul-haunted: the scenery is a series of sombre and horrible imaginings. no consistent allegory can be made out of it, for which fact we should rejoice. it is a poem, not a sermon; it is intended to stimulate the imagination, rather than awaken the conscience. and as we accompany the knight on his lonely and fearful journey, we feel thrills caused only by works of genius. the poem is an example of the power of creative imagination. out of one line from an old ballad quoted by shakespeare, browning has built up a marvellous succession of vivid pictures. the twilight deepens as childe roland advances; one can feel the darkness coming on. .... hands unseen were hanging the night around us fast. although the poem means nothing specifically except a triumphant close to a heart-shaking experience, the close is so solemnly splendid that it is difficult to repress a shout of physical exultation. one lonely man, in the presence of all the powers of the air, sends out an honest blast of defiance--the individual will against the malignant forces of the whole universe. what happened when he blew his horn? did the awful mountains in the blood-red sunset dissolve as the walls of jericho fell to a similar sound? did the round, squat tower vanish like a dream-phantom? or was the sound of the horn the last breath of the hero? if we believe the former, then childe roland is telling his experience to a listener; it is the song of the man "who came whither he went." if the latter, which seems to me more dramatic, and more like browning, then the monologue is murmured by the solitary knight as he advances on his darkening path. three entirely different interpretations may be made of the poem. first, the tower is the quest, and success is found only in the moment of failure. second, the tower is the quest, and when found is worth nothing: the hero has spent his life searching something that in the end is seen to be only a round, squat, blind turret--for such things do men throw away their lives! third, the tower is not the quest at all--it is damnation, and when the knight turns _aside_ from the true road to seek the tower, he is a lost soul steadily slipping through increasing darkness to hell. whilst i do not believe this third interpretation, for it seems to me contrary to the whole spirit of the piece, it is surprising that if one reads through the poem with that idea and none other in mind, how much support can be found for it. the hoary cripple is the devil, meant to lead us into temptation; and the third stanza seems for the moment to complete this thought. if at his counsel i should turn aside into that ominous tract, which, all agree hides the dark tower. yet acquiescingly i did turn as he pointed: if all knew that the ominous tract contained the dark tower, why was the knight outside of it, if the tower were his quest? he turns aside, acquiescingly: he has given up a life of noble aspiration, and now hands over his despairing heart in surrender to the powers of darkness. he goes on his way a beaten man, only hoping that the end may not be long delayed. much in the letter of the poem may support this view; but the whole spirit of it is opposed to such an interpretation, and the ringing close does not sound like spiritual failure. nor do i believe in the second interpretation; for it is quite unlike browning to write a magnificent poem with a cynical conclusion. no, i believe that once upon a time, roland, giles, cuthbert, and other knights in solemn assembly took an oath to go on the quest of the dark tower: to find it or perish on the way. all but these three have apparently kept their word; they have never returned, and when roland is on the last stages of his journey, he sees why; they have died a horrible death. the quest is indeed an unspeakably perilous thing: for all but giles and cuthbert are dead, and these two suffered a fate worse than death--the awful fear inspired by something hideous on the march changed these splendid specimens of manhood into craven traitors. roland remembers with cruel agony the ruddy young face of cuthbert, glowing under its yellow hair: was there ever such a magnificent fellow? but the path to the tower had shaken his manhood, and disgraced him forever. how well roland remembers the morning when giles took the oath to find the tower! that was ten years ago. the frank, manly young knight stepped forth, and declared proudly that he dared do all that might become a man. but he had some awful experience in the course of the quest that changed him from the soul of honor to a whimpering coward. his own companions spat upon him and cursed him. roland alone is left. and he has experienced so many disappointments that now all hope of finding the tower is dead in his breast. just one spark of manhood remains. he can not succeed, but god grant that he may be fit to fail. ... just to fail as they, seemed best, and all the doubt was now--should i be fit? as he advances, the country becomes an abomination of desolation; then appear evidences of struggle, the marks of monsters: then the awful, boiling river, with the nerve-shattering shriek from its depths as he thrust in his spear. on the other bank, fresh evidences of fearful combats, followed farther along by the appearance of engines of torture. those of his companions who had survived the beasts had there perished in this frightful manner. nevertheless, roland advances, his eyes on the ground. suddenly the wide wing of some dreadful bird of the night brushed his cap, and he looked up--to his overwhelming amazement, _he sees the tower_! he sees it as the sailor sees the rocks on a dark night, only when the ship is lost. he sees it in a sudden glare of hell; the air is full of mocking laughter, the scorn of fiends mingling with the sound of the names of their victims, his peers and comrades, all lost! the ugly misshapen mountains look like sinister giants, lying chin upon hand, lazily awaiting his destruction. but this atom of humanity, in the presence of all the material forces of this world and the supernatural powers of darkness, places the horn to his lips, and sends out on the evening air a shrill blast of utter defiance. he that endureth to the end shall be saved. not his possessions, not his happiness, not his bodily frame--they all succumb: but _he_ shall be saved. thus we may take this wholly romantic poem as one more noble illustration of browning's favorite doctrine--success in failure. "childe roland to the dark tower came" (see edgar's song in _lear_) my first thought was, he lied in every word, that hoary cripple, with malicious eye askance to watch the working of his lie on mine, and mouth scarce able to afford suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. what else should he be set for, with his staff? what, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare all travellers who might find him posted there, and ask the road? i guessed what skull-like laugh would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph for pastime in the dusty thoroughfare, if at his counsel i should turn aside into that ominous tract which, all agree, hides the dark tower. yet acquiescingly i did turn as he pointed: neither pride nor hope rekindling at the end descried, so much as gladness that some end might be. for, what with thy whole world-wide wandering, what with my search drawn out through years, my hope dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope with that obstreperous joy success would bring,-- i hardly tried now to rebuke the spring my heart made, finding failure in its scope. as when a sick man very near to death seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end the tears, and takes the farewell of each friend, and hears one bid the other go, draw breath freelier outside, ("since all is o'er," he saith, "and the blow fallen no grieving can amend;") while some discuss if near the other graves be room enough for this, and when a day suits best for carrying the corpse away, with care about the banners, scarves and staves: and still the man hears all, and only craves he may not shame such tender love and stay. thus, i had so long suffered in this quest, heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ so many times among "the band"--to wit, the knights who to the dark tower's search addressed their steps--that just to fail as they, seemed best, and all the doubt was now--should i be fit? so, quiet as despair, i turned from him, that hateful cripple, out of his highway into the path he pointed. all the day had been a dreary one at best, and dim was settling to its close, yet shot one grim red leer to see the plain catch its estray. for mark! no sooner was i fairly found pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, than, pausing to throw backward a last view o'er the safe road, 'twas gone; gray plain all round: nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. i might go on; naught else remained to do. so, on i went. i think i never saw such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: for flowers--as well expect a cedar grovel but cockle, spurge, according to their law might propagate their kind, with none to awe, you'd think: a burr had been a treasure trove. no! penury, inertness and grimace, in some strange sort, were the land's portion. "see or shut your eyes," said nature peevishly, "it nothing skills: i cannot help my case: tis the last judgment's fire must cure this place, calcine its clods and set my prisoners free." if there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents were jealous else. what made those holes and rents in the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk all hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud which underneath looked kneaded up with blood, one stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, stood stupefied, however he came there: thrust out past service from the devil's stud! alive? he might be dead for aught i know, with that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, and shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; i never saw a brute i hated so; he must be wicked to deserve such pain. i shut my eyes and turned them on my heart. as a man calls for wine before he fights, i asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, ere fitly i could hope to play my part. think first, fight afterwards--the soldier's art: one taste of the old time sets all to rights. not it! i fancied cuthbert's reddening face beneath its garniture of curly gold, dear fellow, till i almost felt him fold an arm in mine to fix me to the place, that way he used. alas, one night's disgrace! out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. giles then, the soul of honour--there he stands frank as ten years ago when knighted first. what honest man should dare (he said) he durst. good--but the scene shifts--faugh! what hangman hands pin to his breast a parchment? his own bands read it. poor traitor, spit upon and curst! better this present than a past like that; back therefore to my darkening path again! no sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. will the night send a howlet or a bat? i asked: when something on the dismal flat came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. a sudden little river crossed my path as unexpected as a serpent comes. no sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; this, as it frothed by, might have been a bath for the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. so petty yet so spiteful! all along, low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit of mute despair, a suicidal throng: the river which had done them all the wrong, whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. which, while i forded,--good saints, how i feared to set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, each step, or feel the spear i thrust to seek for hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! --it may have been a water-rat i speared, but, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek. glad was i when i reached the other bank. now for a better country. vain presage! who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, whose savage trample thus could pad the dank soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank, or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage-- the fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. what penned them there, with all the plain to choose? no footprint leading to that horrid mews, none out of it. mad brewage set to work their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the turk pits for his pastime, christians against jews. and more than that--a furlong on--why, there! what bad use was that engine for, that wheel, or brake, not wheel--that harrow fit to reel men's bodies out like silk? with all the air of tophet's too!, on earth left unaware, or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth desperate and done with: (so a fool finds mirth, makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood changes and off he goes!) within a rood-- bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, now patches where some leanness of the soil's broke into moss or substances like boils; then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him like a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. and just as far as ever from the end! naught in the distance but the evening, naught to point my footstep further! at the thought, a great black bird, apollyon's bosom-friend, sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned that brushed my cap--perchance the guide i sought. for, looking up, aware i somehow grew, 'spite of the dusk, the plain had given place all round to mountains--with such name to grace mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. how thus they had surprised me,--solve it, you! how to get from them was no clearer case. yet half i seemed to recognize some trick of mischief happened to me, god knows when-- in a bad dream perhaps. here ended, then, progress this way. when, in the very nick of giving up, one time more, came a click as when a trap shuts--you're inside the den! burningly it came on me all at once, this was the place! those two hills on the right, crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; while to the left, a tall scalped mountain ... dunce, dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, after a life spent training for the sight! what in the midst lay but the tower itself? the round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, built of brown stone, without a counterpart in the whole world. the tempest's mocking elf points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf he strikes on, only when the timbers start. not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day came back again for that! before it left, the dying sunset kindled through a cleft: the hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,-- "now stab and end the creature--to the heft!" not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled increasing like a bell. names in my ears, of all the lost adventurers my peers,-- how such a one was strong, and such was bold, and such was fortunate, yet each of old lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. there they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met to view the last of me, a living frame for one more picture in a sheet of flame i saw them and i knew them all. and yet dauntless the slug-horn to my lips i set, and blew. "_childe roland to the dark tower came_." vi poems of paradox the word paradox comes from two greek words, meaning simply, "beyond belief." as every one ought to know, a paradox is something that read literally is absurd, but if taken in the spirit in which it is uttered, may contain profound truth. paradox is simply over-emphasis: and is therefore a favorite method of teaching. by the employment of paradox the teacher wishes to stress forcibly some aspect of the truth which otherwise may not be seen at all. fine print needs a magnifying-glass; and the deep truth hidden in a paradox can not perhaps become clear unless enlarged by powerful emphasis. all teachers know the value of _italics_. socrates was very fond of paradox: the works of ibsen, nietzsche, shaw and chesterton are full of paradoxes: our lord's utterances in the new testament are simply one paradox after another. no wonder his disciples were often in a maze. it requires centuries for the truth in some paradoxes to become manifest. "this was some time a paradox, but now the time gives it proof." browning loved a paradox with all his heart. the original nature of his mind, his fondness for taking the other side, his over-subtlety, all drove him toward the paradox. he would have made a wonderful criminal lawyer. he loves to put some imaginary or historical character on the stand, and permit him to speak freely in his own defence; and he particularly loves to do this, when the person has received universal condemnation. browning seems to say, "i wonder if the world is entirely right in this judgment: what would this individual say if given an opportunity for apologetic oratory?" browning is the greatest master of special pleading in all literature. although he detested count guido, he makes him present his case in the best possible light, so that for the moment he arouses our intellectual sympathy. the glove story is one of the best-known anecdotes in history; besides its french source, it has been told in german by schiller, in english by leigh hunt, and has received thousands of allusory comments--but always from one point of view. the hooting and laughter that followed the lady as she left the court, have been echoed in all lands. browning pondered over this story, and took the woman's part. this may be accounted for by two causes. he is the most chivalrous poet that ever lived, and would naturally defend the lady. what de lorge ought to have done when he brought the glove back was to remind the lady that she had another, and permit him the honor of retrieving that. but browning saw also in this incident a true paradox--the lady was right after all! right in throwing the glove, right in her forecast of the event. like a good lawyer, he first proves that the knight's achievement was slight. in the pit the lion was not at that moment dangerous, because he was desperately homesick. he was lost in thoughts of his wild home, in imagination driving the flocks up the mountain, and took not the slightest notice of the glove. then a page had leaped into the pit simply to recover his hat; and he had done that because he could not afford to buy a new one. no one applauded him. think of the man who had originally caught the lion! he went out alone and trapped a lion, simply that his rude boys might be amused at the spectacle. in our degenerate days, we give our children a teddy bear. but in those strenuous times, the father said to his boys, "come out into the back yard, and see the present i've got for you!" they came eagerly, and found a live lion. that man and his children were a hardy family. how they would have laughed at de lorge's so-called heroism! but the real truth of the matter is that de lorge was a liar. the lady suspected it all the time, and was saddened to have her judgment confirmed by the result. de lorge had been boasting of his love, and of his eagerness to prove it. he had begged the lady to test him--he would gladly die for her. now it is important that a woman should know before marriage rather than after whether a lover's protestations are genuine or not--in short whether he is sincere and reliable, or whether he is a liar. the reason why men lie to women and not to men is because they know that a lie to a woman can not be avenged, they can not be made to pay any penalty; but when they lie to other men--in business affairs, for example--the penalty is severe. how could the lady satisfy her mind? how could she know whether de lorge was sincere or not? there was no war, there was no tournament, there was no quest. suddenly one method presented itself. she tossed her glove into the pit. he had to go--he could never have held up his head otherwise. but when he returned, he dashed the glove in the lady's face, ostensibly to teach her that a brave man's life should not be risked by a woman's vanity. this was even a better gallery-play than the recovery of the glove, and succeeded splendidly. but the lady turned sadly away. the blow a glove gives is but weak: does the mark yet discolour my cheek? but when the heart suffers a blow, will the pain pass so soon, do you know? what was the pain in her heart? her wounded vanity, her anguish at the court's ostracism? not in the least. it was her pain at finding her opinion of de lorge justified. he was then, just as she thought, a liar; he never meant to be taken at his word. all his protestations of love and service were mere phrases. his anger at the first test of his boasting proves this. the pain in her heart is the pain we all feel at reading of some cowardly or disloyal act; one more man unfaithful, one more man selfish, one more who lowers the level of human nature. the paradox teaches us the very simple lesson that if we boast of our prowess, we must not be angry when some one insists that we prove it. the glove (peter ronsard _loquitur_) "heigho!" yawned one day king francis, "distance all value enhances! when a man's busy, why, leisure strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 'faith, and at leisure once is he? straightway he wants to be busy. here we've got peace; and aghast i'm caught thinking war the true pastime. is there a reason in metre? give us your speech, master peter!" i who, if mortal dare say so, ne'er am at loss with my naso, "sire," i replied, "joys prove cloudlets: men are the merest ixions"-- here the king whistled aloud, "let's --heigho--go look at our lions!" such are the sorrowful chances if you talk fine to king francis. and so, to the courtyard proceeding, our company, francis was leading, increased by new followers tenfold before he arrived at the penfold; lords, ladies, like clouds which bedizen at sunset the western horizon. and sir de lorge pressed 'mid the foremost with the dame he professed to adore most. oh, what a face! one by fits eyed her, and the horrible pitside; for the penfold surrounded a hollow which led where the eye scarce dared follow, and shelved to the chamber secluded where bluebeard, the great lion, brooded. the king hailed his keeper, an arab as glossy and black as a scarab, and bade him make sport and at once stir up and out of his den the old monster. they opened a hole in the wire-work across it, and dropped there a firework, and fled: one's heart's beating redoubled; a pause, while the pit's mouth was troubled, the blackness and silence so utter, by the firework's slow sparkling and sputter; then earth in a sudden contortion gave out to our gaze her abortion. such a brute! were i friend clement marot (whose experience of nature's but narrow, and whose faculties move in no small mist when he versifies david the psalmist) i should study that brute to describe you _illum juda leonem de tribu._ one's whole blood grew curdling and creepy to see the black mane, vast and heapy, the tail in the air stiff and straining, the wide eyes, nor waxing nor waning, as over the barrier which bounded his platform, and us who surrounded the barrier, they reached and they rested on space that might stand him in best stead: for who knew, he thought, what the amazement, the eruption of clatter and blaze meant, and if, in this minute of wonder, no outlet, 'mid lightning and thunder, lay broad, and, his shackles all shivered, the lion at last was delivered? ay, that was the open sky o'erhead! and you saw by the flash on his forehead, by the hope in those eyes wide and steady, he was leagues in the desert already, driving the flocks up the mountain, or catlike couched hard by the fountain to waylay the date-gathering negress: so guarded he entrance or egress. "how he stands!" quoth the king: "we may well swear, (no novice, we've won our spurs elsewhere and so can afford the confession,) we exercise wholesome discretion in keeping aloof from his threshold; once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold, their first would too pleasantly purloin the visitor's brisket or sirloin: but who's he would prove so fool-hardy? not the best man of marignan, pardie!" the sentence no sooner was uttered, than over the rails a glove fluttered, fell close to the lion, and rested: the dame 'twas, who flung it and jested with life so, de lorge had been wooing for months past; he sat there pursuing his suit, weighing out with nonchalance fine speeches like gold from a balance. sound the trumpet, no true knight's a tarrier! de lorge made one leap at the barrier, walked straight to the glove,--while the lion ne'er moved, kept his far-reaching eye on the palm-tree-edged desert-spring's sapphire, and the musky oiled skin of the kaffir,-- picked it up, and as calmly retreated, leaped back where the lady was seated, and full in the face of its owner flung the glove. "your heart's queen, you dethrone her?" "so should i!"--cried the king--"'twas mere vanity, not love, set that task to humanity!" lords and ladies alike turned with loathing from such a proved wolf in sheep's clothing. not so, i; for i caught an expression in her brow's undisturbed self-possession amid the court's scoffing and merriment,-- as if from no pleasing experiment she rose, yet of pain not much heedful so long as the process was needful,-- as if she had tried in a crucible, to what "speeches like gold" were reducible, and, finding the finest prove copper, felt the smoke in her face was but proper; to know what she had _not_ to trust to, was worth all the ashes and dust too. she went out 'mid hooting and laughter; clement marot stayed; i followed after, and asked, as a grace, what it all meant? if she wished not the rash deed's recalment? "for i"--so i spoke--"am a poet: human nature,--behoves that i know it!" she told me, "too long had i heard of the deed proved alone by the word: for my love--what de lorge would not dare! with my scorn--what de lorge could compare! and the endless descriptions of death he would brave when my lip formed a breath, i must reckon as braved, or, of course, doubt his word--and moreover, perforce, for such gifts as no lady could spurn, must offer my love in return. when i looked on your lion, it brought all the dangers at once to my thought, encountered by all sorts of men, before he was lodged in his den,-- from the poor slave whose club or bare hands dug the trap, set the snare on the sands, with no king and no court to applaud, by no shame, should he shrink, overawed, yet to capture the creature made shift, that his rude boys might laugh at the gift, --to the page who last leaped o'er the fence of the pit, on no greater pretence than to get back the bonnet he dropped, lest his pay for a week should be stopped. so, wiser i judged it to make one trial what 'death for my sake' really meant, while the power was yet mine, than to wait until time should define such a phrase not so simply as i, who took it to mean just 'to die.' the blow a glove gives is but weak: does the mark yet discolour my cheek? but when the heart suffers a blow, will the pain pass so soon, do you know?" i looked, as away she was sweeping, and saw a youth eagerly keeping as close as he dared to the doorway. no doubt that a noble should more weigh his life than befits a plebeian; and yet, had our brute been nemean-- (i judge by a certain calm fervour the youth stepped with, forward to serve her) --he'd have scarce thought you did him the worst turn if you whispered "friend, what you'd get, first earn!" and when, shortly after, she carried her shame from the court, and they married, to that marriage some happiness, maugre the voice of the court, i dared augur. for de lorge, he made women with men vie, those in wonder and praise, these in envy; and in short stood so plain a head taller that he wooed and won ... how do you call her? the beauty, that rose in the sequel to the king's love, who loved her a week well. and 'twas noticed he never would honour de lorge (who looked daggers upon her) with the easy commission of stretching his legs in the service, and fetching his wife, from her chamber, those straying sad gloves she was always mislaying, while the king took the closet to chat in,-- but of course this adventure came pat in. and never the king told the story, how bringing a glove brought such glory, but the wife smiled--"his nerves are grown firmer: mine he brings now and utters no murmur." _venienti occurrite morbo!_ with which moral i drop my theorbo. browning wrote two poems on pedantry; the former, in _garden fancies_, takes the conventional view. how can a man with any blood in him pore over miserable books, when life is so sweet? the other, _a grammarian's funeral_, is the apotheosis of the scholar. the paradox here is that browning has made a hero out of what seems at first blush impossible material. it is easy to make a hero out of a noble character; it is equally easy to make a hero out of a thorough scoundrel, a train-robber, or a murderer. milton made a splendid hero out of the devil, but a hero out of a nincompoop? a hero out of a dull, sexless pedant? but this is exactly what browning has done, nay, he has made this grammarian exactly the same kind of hero as a dashing cavalry officer leading a forlorn hope. observe that browning has purposely made his task as difficult as possible. had the scholar been a great discoverer in science, a great master in philosophical thought, a great interpreter in literature--then we might all take off our hats: but this hero was a grammarian. he spent his life not on greek drama or greek philosophy, but on greek grammar. he is dead: his pupils carry his body up the mountain, as the native disciples of stevenson carried their beloved tusitala to the summit of the island peak. these students are not weeping; they sing and shout as they march, for they are carrying their idol on their shoulders. his life and his death were magnificent, an inspiration to all humanity. hurrah! hurrah! the swinging movement of the young men is in exact accord with the splendid advance of the thought. they tell us the history of their teacher from his youth to his last breath: this is our master, famous calm and dead, borne on our shoulders. it is a common error to suppose that missionaries, nuns, and scholars follow their chosen callings because they are unfit for anything else. the judgment of the wise world is not always correct. it assumes that these strange folk never hear the call of the blood. when john c. calhoun was a student at yale, his comrades, returning at midnight from a wild time, found him at his books. "why don't you come out, john, and be a man? you'll never be young again." "i regard my work as more important," said john quietly. milton's bitter cry were it not better done, as others use, to sport with amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of neæra's hair? shows that it was not the absence of temptation, but a tremendously powerful will, that kept him at his desk. when a spineless milksop becomes a missionary, when a gawk sticks to his books, when an ugly woman becomes a nun, the world makes no objection; but when a socially prominent man goes in for missions or scholarship, when a lovely girl takes the veil, the wise world says, "ah, what a pity!" browning's grammarian did not take up scholarship as a last resort. he could have done anything he liked. he was a man born with thy face and throat, lyric apollo! he might have been an athlete, a social leader, a man of pleasure. he chose greek grammar. in the pursuit of this prize, he squandered his time and youth and health as recklessly as men squander these treasures on wine and women. when a young man throws away his youth and health in gambling, drink, and debauchery, the world expresses no surprise; he is known as a "splendid fellow," and is often much admired. but when a man spends all his gifts in scholarship, scientific discovery, or altruistic aims, he is regarded as an eccentric, lacking both blood and judgment. i say that browning has given his grammarian not only courage and heroism, but the reckless, dashing, magnificent bravery of a cavalry leader. in the march for learning, this man lost his youth and health, and acquired painful diseases. finally he comes to the end. when an officer in battle falls, and his friends bend over him to catch his last breath, he does not say, "i commend my soul to god," or "give my love to my wife,"--he says, "_did we win_?" and we applaud this passion in the last agony. so our grammarian, full of diseases, paralysed from the waist down, the death rattle in his throat--what does he say to the faithful watchers? what are his last words? _he dictates greek grammar_. the solitary student may be a paragon of courage, headstrong, reckless, tenacious as a bulldog, with a resolution entirely beyond the range of the children of this world. * * * * * sibrandus schafnaburgensis plague take all your pedants, say i! he who wrote what i hold in my hand, centuries back was so good as to die, leaving this rubbish to cumber the land; this, that was a book in its time, printed on paper and bound in leather, last month in the white of a matin-prime, just when the birds sang all together. into the garden i brought it to read, and under the arbute and laurustine read it, so help me grace in my need, from title-page to closing line. chapter on chapter did i count, as a curious traveller counts stonehenge; added up the mortal amount; and then proceeded to my revenge. yonder's a plum-tree with a crevice an owl would build in, were he but sage; for a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis in a castle of the middle age, joins to a lip of gum, pure amber; when he'd be private, there might he spend hours alone in his lady's chamber: into this crevice i dropped our friend. splash, went he, as under he ducked, --at the bottom, i knew, rain-drippings stagnate; next, a handful of blossoms i plucked to bury him with, my bookshelf's magnate; then i went in-doors, brought out a loaf, half a cheese, and a bottle of chablis; lay on the grass and forgot the oaf over a jolly chapter of rabelais. now, this morning, betwixt the moss and gum that locked our friend in limbo, a spider had spun his web across, and sat in the midst with arms akimbo: so, i took pity, for learning's sake, and, _de profundis, accentibus lætis, cantate_! quoth i, as i got a rake; and up i fished his delectable treatise. here you have it, dry in the sun, with all the binding all of a blister, and great blue spots where the ink has run, and reddish streaks that wink and glister o'er the page so beautifully yellow: oh, well have the droppings played their tricks! did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow? here's one stuck in his chapter six! how did he like it when the live creatures tickled and toused and browsed him all over, and worm, slug, eft, with serious features, came in, each one, for his right of trover? --when the water-beetle with great blind deaf face made of her eggs the stately deposit, and the newt borrowed just so much of the preface as tiled in the top of his black wife's closet? all that life and fun and romping, all that frisking and twisting and coupling, while slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping and clasps were cracking and covers suppling! as if you had carried sour john knox to the play-house at paris, vienna or munich, fastened him into a front-row box, and danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic. come, old martyr! what, torment enough is it? back to my room shall you take your sweet self. good-bye, mother-beetle; husband-eft, _sufficit_! see the snug niche i have made on my shelf! a's book shall prop you up, b's shall cover you, here's c to be grave with, or d to be gay, and with e on each side, and f right over you, dry-rot at ease till the judgment-day! * * * * * a grammarian's funeral shortly after the revival of learning in europe let us begin and carry up this corpse, singing together. leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes each in its tether sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, cared-for till cock-crow: look out if yonder be not day again rimming the rock-row! that's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, rarer, intenser, self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, chafes in the censer. leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; seek we sepulture on a tall mountain, citied to the top, crowded with culture! air the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; clouds overcome it; no! yonder sparkle is the citadel's circling its summit. thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: wait ye the warning? our low life was the level's and the night's; he's for the morning. step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 'ware the beholders! this is our master, famous calm and dead, borne on our shoulders. "sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, safe from the weather! he, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, singing together, he was a man born with thy face and throat, lyric apollo! long he lived nameless: how should spring take note winter would follow? till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! cramped and diminished," moaned he, "new measures, other feet anon! my dance is finished?" no, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side, make for the city!) he knew the signal, and stepped on with pride over men's pity; left play for work, and grappled with the world bent on escaping: "what's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled? show me their shaping," theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,-- "give!"--so, he gowned him, straight got by heart that book to its last page: learned, we found him. yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, accents uncertain: "time to taste life," another would have said, "up with the curtain!" this man said rather, "actual life comes next? patience a moment! grant i have mastered learning's crabbed text, still there's the comment. let me know all! prate not of most or least, painful or easy! even to the crumbs i'd fain eat up the feast, ay, nor feel queasy." oh, such a life as he resolved to live, when he had learned it, when he had gathered all books had to give! sooner, he spurned it. image the whole, then execute the parts-- fancy the fabric quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz, ere mortar dab brick! (here's the town-gate reached: there's the market-place gaping before us.) yea, this in him was the peculiar grace (hearten our chorus!) that before living he'd learn how to live-- no end to learning: earn the means first--god surely will contrive use for our earning. others mistrust and say, "but time escapes: live now or never!" he said, "what's time? leave now for dogs and apes! man has forever." back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: _calculus_ racked him: leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: _tussis_ attacked him. "now, master, take a little rest!"--not he! (caution redoubled, step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) not a whit troubled back to his studies, fresher than at first, fierce as a dragon he (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst) sucked at the flagon. oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain! was it not great? did not he throw on god, (he loves the burthen)-- god's task to make the heavenly period perfect the earthen? did not he magnify the mind, show clear just what it all meant? he would not discount life, as fools do here, paid by instalment he ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success found, or earth's failure: "wilt thou trust death or not?" he answered "yes: hence with life's pale lure!" that low man seeks a little thing to do, sees it and does it: this high man, with a great thing to pursue, dies ere he knows it. that low man goes on adding one to one, his hundred's soon hit: this high man, aiming at a million, misses an unit. that, has the world here--should he need the next, let the world mind him! this, throws himself on god, and unperplexed seeking shall find him. so, with the throttling hands of death at strife, ground he at grammar; still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife: while he could stammer he settled _hoti's_ business--let it be!-- properly based _oun_-- gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _de_, dead from the waist down. well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: hail to your purlieus, all ye highfliers of the feathered race, swallows and curlews! here's the top-peak; the multitude below live, for they can, there: this man decided not to live but know-- bury this man there? here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send! lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying. in the amusing poem, _up at a villa--down in the city_, browning compares the beauty of city and country life from an unusual point of view. it is generally assumed that the country is more poetical than the city; but it would be difficult to prove this, if we were put to the test. natural scenery is now much admired, and mountains are in the height of fashion; every one is forced to express raptures, whether one feels them or not. but this has not always been the case. when addison travelled to italy, he regarded the alps as disgusting; they were a disagreeable and dangerous barrier, that must be crossed before he could reach the object of his journey. he wrote home from italy that he was delighted at the sight of a plain--a remark that would damn a modern pilgrim. the first man in english literature to bring out the real beauty of mountains was thomas gray. very few people have a sincere and genuine love of the country--as is proved by the way they flock to the cities. we love the country for a change, for a rest, for its novelty: how many of us would be willing to live there the year around? we know that wordsworth loved the country, for he chose to live among the lonely lakes when he could have lived in london. but most intelligent persons live in towns, and take to the country for change and recreation. the speaker in browning's poem is an absolutely honest philistine, who does not know that every word he says spells artistic damnation. he is disgusted with the situation of his house: .... stuck like the horn of a bull just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature's skull. in other words the site is so magnificent that to-day expensive hotels are built there, and people come from all over the world to enjoy the view. in fact it is just this situation which browning admires in the poem _de gustibus_. what i love best in all the world is a castle, precipice-encurled, in a gash of the wind-grieved apennine. but our man does not know what he _ought_ to say; he says simply what he really thinks. the views of a sincere philistine on natural scenery, works of art, pieces of music, are interesting because they are sincere. the conventional admiration may or may not be genuine. this man says the city is much cooler in summer than the country: that spring visits the city earlier: that what we call the monotonous row of houses in a city street is far more beautiful than the irregularity of the country. it appeals to his sense of beauty. houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry. but his real rapture over the city is because city life is interesting. there is something going on every moment of the blessed day. it is a perpetual theatre, admission free. this is undoubtedly the real reason why the poor prefer crowded, squalid city tenements to the space, fresh air and hygienic advantages of the country. many well-meaning folk wonder why men with their families remain in city slums, when they could easily secure work on farms, where there would be abundance of fresh air, wholesome food, and cool nights for sleep. our italian gives the correct answer. people can not stand dullness and loneliness: they crave excitement, and this is supplied day and night by the city street. indeed in some cases, where by the fresh air fund, children are taken for a vacation to the country, they become homesick for the slums. * * * * * up at a villa--down in the city (as distinguished by an italian person of quality) i had i but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, the house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there! ii something to see, by bacchus, something to hear, at least! there, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; while up at a villa one lives, i maintain it, no more than a beast. iii well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature's skull, save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull! --i scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's turned wool. iv but the city, oh the city--the square with the houses! why? they are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's something to take the eye! houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry; you watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by; green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; and the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly. v what of a villa? though winter be over in march by rights, 'tis may perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights: you've the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze, and the hills over-smoked behind by the faint grey olive-trees. vi is it better in may, i ask you? you've summer all at once; in a day he leaps complete with a few strong april suns. 'mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well, the wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell. vii is it ever hot in the square? there's a fountain to spout and splash! in the shade it sings and springs; in the shine such foam-bows flash on the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash round the lady atop in her conch--fifty gazers do not abash, though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash. viii all the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you linger, except yon cypress that points like death's lean lifted forefinger. some think fireflies pretty, when they mix i' the corn and mingle, or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem a-tingle. late august or early september, the stunning cicida is shrill, and the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill. enough of the seasons,--i spare you the months of the fever and chill. ix ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church-bells begin: no sooner the bells leave off than the diligence rattles in: you get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin. by-and-by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth; or the pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath. at the post-office such a scene-picture--the new play, piping hot! and a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot. above it, behold the archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, and beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the duke's! or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the reverend don so-and-so who is dante, boccaccio, petrarca, saint jerome and cicero, "and moreover," (the sonnet goes rhyming,) "the skirts of saint paul has reached, having preached us those six lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached," noon strikes,--here sweeps the procession! our lady borne smiling and smart with a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! _bang-whang-whang_ goes the drum, _tootle-te-tootle_ the fife; no keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure in life. x but bless you, it's dear--it's dear! fowls, wine, at double the rate. they have clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil pays passing the gate it's a horror to think of. and so, the villa for me, not the city! beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still--ah, the pity, the pity! look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and sandals, and the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding the yellow candles; one, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles, and the duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention of scandals: _bang-whang-whang_ goes the drum, _tootle-te-tootle_ the fife. oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life! no poem of browning's has given more trouble to his whole-souled admirers than _the statue and the bust_: and yet, if this is taken as a paradox, its meaning is abundantly clear. the square spoken of in the poem is the piazza annunziata in florence: in the midst of the square stands the equestrian statue of the duke: and if one follows the direction of the bronze eyes of the man, it will appear that they rest steadfastly on the right hand window in the upper storey of the palace. this is the farthest window facing the east. there is no bust there; but it is in this window that the lady sat and regarded the daily passage of the duke. the reason why this poem has troubled the minds of many good people is because it seems (on a very superficial view) to sympathise with unlawful love; even in certain circumstances to recommend the pursuit of it to fruition. let us see what the facts are. before the duke saw the bride, he was, as browning says, empty and fine like a swordless sheath. this is a good description of many young men. they are like an empty sheath. the sheath may be beautiful, it may be exquisitely and appropriately enchased; but a sheath is no good without a sword. so, many young men are attractive and accomplished, their minds are cultivated by books and travel, but they have no driving purpose in life, no energy directed to one aim, no end; and therefore all their attractiveness is without positive value. they are empty like a handsome sheath minus the sword. the moment the duke saw the lady a great purpose filled his life: he became temporarily a resolute, ambitious man, with capacity for usefulness. no moral scruple kept the lovers apart; and they determined to fly. this purpose was frustrated by procrastination, trivial hindrances, irresolution, till it was forever too late. now the statue and the bust gaze at each other in eternal ironical mockery, for these lovers in life might as well have been made of bronze and stone; they never really lived. contrary to his usual custom--it is only very seldom as in this poem and in _bishop blougram's apology_, and in both cases because he knew he would otherwise be misunderstood--browning added a personal postscript. where are these lovers now? how do they spend their time in the spiritual world? i do not know where they are, says browning, but i know very well where they are _not_: they are not with god. no, replies the reader, because they wanted to commit adultery. ah, says browning, they are not exiled from god because they wanted to commit adultery: they are exiled because they did not actually do it. this is the paradox. browning takes a crime to test character; for a crime can test character as well as a virtue. we must draw a clear distinction here between society and the individual. it is a good thing for society that people are restrained from crime by what are really bad motives--fear, presence of police, irresolution, love of ease, selfishness: furthermore, society and the law do not consider men's motives, but only their actual deeds. a white-souled girl and a blackhearted villain with no criminal record are exactly equal in the eyes of the law, both perfectly innocent. but from the point of view of the individual, or as a christian would say, in the sight of god, it is the heart that makes all the difference between virtue and depravity. in the case of our lovers delay was best for society, but bad for them: the purposed crime was a test of their characters, and they added the sin of cowardice to the sin of adultery, which they had already committed in their hearts. suppose four men agree to hold up a train. when the light of the locomotive appears, three lose their courage: the fourth stops the train, and single-handed takes the money from the express-car and from the passengers, killing the conductor and the express-messenger. after the train has been sent on its way, the three timid ones divide up with the man who actually committed the crimes. who is the most virtuous among the four? which has the best chance to be with god? manifestly the brave one, although he is a robber and a murderer. from the point of view of the people who owned the money, from the point of view of the families of the dead men, it would have been better if all four of the would-be robbers had been cowards: but for that criminal's individual soul, he was better than his mates, because the crime tested his character and found him sound: he did not add the sin of cowardice to the sins of robbery and murder. browning changes the figure. if you choose to play a game--no one is obliged to play, but if you do choose to play--then play with all your energy, whether the stakes are money or worthless counters. now our lovers chose to play. the stake they played for was not the true coin of marriage, but the false counter of adultery. still, the game was a real test of their characters, and it proved them lacking in every true quality that makes men and women noble and useful. even now browning knew that some readers would not understand him: so he added the last two lines, which ought to make his lesson clear. you virtuous people (i see by your expression you disapprove and are ready to quarrel with me) how strive you? _de te, fabula_! my whole story concerns you. you say that the lovers should have remained virtuous: you say that virtue should be the great aim of life. very well, do _you_ act as if you believed what you say? is virtue the greatest thing in _your_ life? do you strive to the uttermost toward that goal? do you really prefer virtue to your own ease, comfort and happiness? i find browning's poem both clear and morally stimulating. my one objection would be that he puts rather too much value on mere energy. i do not believe that the greatest thing in life is striving, struggle, and force: there are deep, quiet souls who accomplish much in this world without being especially strenuous. but in the sphere of virtue browning was essentially a fighting man. the statue and the bust there's a palace in florence, the world knows well, and a statue watches it from the square, and this story of both do our townsmen tell. ages ago, a lady there, at the farthest window facing the east asked, "who rides by with the royal air?" the bridesmaids' prattle around her ceased; she leaned forth, one on either hand; they saw how the blush of the bride increased-- they felt by its beats her heart expand-- as one at each ear and both in a breath whispered, "the great-duke ferdinand." the selfsame instant, underneath, the duke rode past in his idle way, empty and fine like a swordless sheath. gay he rode, with a friend as gay, till he threw his head back--"who is she?" --"a bride the riccardi brings home to-day." hair in heaps lay heavily over a pale brow spirit-pure-- carved like the heart of the coal-black tree, crisped like a war-steed's encolure-- and vainly sought to dissemble her eyes of the blackest black our eyes endure, and lo, a blade for a knight's emprise filled the fine empty sheath of a man,-- the duke grew straightway brave and wise. he looked at her, as a lover can; she looked at him, as one who awakes: the past was a sleep, and her life began. now, love so ordered for both their sakes, a feast was held that selfsame night in the pile which the mighty shadow makes. (for via larga is three-parts light, but the palace overshadows one, because of a crime, which may god requite! to florence and god the wrong was done, through the first republic's murder there by cosimo and his cursed son.) the duke (with the statue's face in the square) turned in the midst of his multitude at the bright approach of the bridal pair. face to face the lovers stood a single minute and no more, while the bridegroom bent as a man subdued-- bowed till his bonnet brushed the floor-- for the duke on the lady a kiss conferred, as the courtly custom was of yore. in a minute can lovers exchange a word? if a word did pass, which i do not think, only one out of a thousand heard. that was the bridegroom. at day's brink he and his bride were alone at last in a bed chamber by a taper's blink. calmly he said that her lot was cast, that the door she had passed was shut on her till the final catafalk repassed. the world meanwhile, its noise and stir, through a certain window facing the east she could watch like a convent's chronicler. since passing the door might lead to a feast, and a feast might lead to so much beside, he, of many evils, chose the least. "freely i choose too," said the bride-- "your window and its world suffice," replied the tongue, while the heart replied-- "if i spend the night with that devil twice, may his window serve as my loop of hell whence a damned soul looks on paradise!" "i fly to the duke who loves me well, sit by his side and laugh at sorrow ere i count another ave-bell." "'tis only the coat of a page to borrow, and tie my hair in a horse-boy's trim. and i save my soul--but not to-morrow"-- (she checked herself and her eye grew dim) "my father tarries to bless my state: i must keep it one day more for him." "is one day more so long to wait? moreover the duke rides past, i know; we shall see each other, sure as fate." she turned on her side and slept. just so! so we resolve on a thing and sleep: so did the lady, ages ago. that night the duke said, "dear or cheap as the cost of this cup of bliss may prove to body or soul, i will drain it deep." and on the morrow, bold with love, he beckoned the bridegroom (close on call, as his duty bade, by the duke's alcove) and smiled "twas a very funeral, your lady will think, this feast of ours,-- a shame to efface, whate'er befall!" "what if we break from the arno bowers, and try if petraja, cool and green, cure last night's fault with this morning's flowers?" the bridegroom, not a thought to be seen on his steady brow and quiet mouth, said, "too much favor for me so mean!" "but, alas! my lady leaves the south; each wind that comes from the apennine is a menace to her tender youth:" "nor a way exists, the wise opine, if she quits her palace twice this year, to avert the flower of life's decline." quoth the duke, "a sage and a kindly fear. moreover petraja is cold this spring: be our feast to-night as usual here!" and then to himself--"which night shall bring thy bride to her lover's embraces, fool-- or i am the fool, and thou art the king!" "yet my passion must wait a night, nor cool-- for to-night the envoy arrives from france whose heart i unlock with thyself, my tool." "i need thee still and might miss perchance to-day is not wholly lost, beside, with its hope of my lady's countenance:" "for i ride--what should i do but ride? and passing her palace, if i list, may glance at its window--well betide!" so said, so done: nor the lady missed one ray that broke from the ardent brow, nor a curl of the lips where the spirit kissed. be sure that each renewed the vow, no morrow's sun should arise and set and leave them then as it left them now. but next day passed, and next day yet, with still fresh cause to wait one day more ere each leaped over the parapet. and still, as love's brief morning wore, with a gentle start, half smile, half sigh, they found love not as it seemed before. they thought it would work infallibly, but not in despite of heaven and earth: the rose would blow when the storm passed by. meantime they could profit in winter's dearth by store of fruits that supplant the rose: the world and its ways have a certain worth: and to press a point while these oppose were simple policy; better wait: we lose no friends and we gain no foes. meantime, worse fates than a lover's fate, who daily may ride and pass and look where his lady watches behind the grate! and she--she watched the square like a book holding one picture and only one, which daily to find she undertook: when the picture was reached the book was done, and she turned from the picture at night to scheme of tearing it out for herself next sun. so weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam the glory dropped from their youth and love, and both perceived they had dreamed a dream; which hovered as dreams do, still above: but who can take a dream for a truth? oh, hide our eyes from the next remove! one day as the lady saw her youth depart, and the silver thread that streaked her hair, and, worn by the serpent's tooth, the brow so puckered, the chin so peaked, and wondered who the woman was, hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked, fronting her silent in the glass-- "summon here," she suddenly said, "before the rest of my old self pass," "him, the carver, a hand to aid, who fashions the clay no love will change, and fixes a beauty never to fade." "let robbia's craft so apt and strange arrest the remains of young and fair, and rivet them while the seasons range." "make me a face on the window there, waiting as ever, mute the while, my love to pass below in the square!" "and let me think that it may beguile dreary days which the dead must spend down in their darkness under the aisle," "to say, 'what matters it at the end? i did no more while my heart was warm than does that image, my pale-faced friend.'" "where is the use of the lip's red charm, the heaven of hair, the pride of the brow, and the blood that blues the inside arm--" "unless we turn, as the soul knows how, the earthly gift to an end divine? a lady of clay is as good, i trow." but long ere robbia's cornice, fine, with flowers and fruits which leaves enlace, was set where now is the empty shrine-- (and, leaning out of a bright blue space, as a ghost might lean from a chink of sky, the passionate pale lady's face-- eying ever, with earnest eye and quick-turned neck at its breathless stretch, some one who ever is passing by--) the duke had sighed like the simplest wretch in florence, "youth--my dream escapes! will its record stay?" and he bade them fetch some subtle moulder of brazen shapes-- "can the soul, the will, die out of a man ere his body find the grave that gapes?" "john of douay shall effect my plan, set me on horseback here aloft, alive, as the crafty sculptor can," "in the very square i have crossed so oft: that men may admire, when future suns shall touch the eyes to a purpose soft," "while the mouth and the brow stay brave in bronze-- admire and say, 'when he was alive how he would take his pleasure once!'" "and it shall go hard but i contrive to listen the while, and laugh in my tomb at idleness which aspires to strive." * * * * * so! while these wait the trump of doom, how do their spirits pass, i wonder, nights and days in the narrow room? still, i suppose, they sit and ponder what a gift life was, ages ago, six steps out of the chapel yonder. only they see not god, i know, nor all that chivalry of his, the soldier-saints who, row on row, burn upward each to his point of bliss-- since, the end of life being manifest, he had burned his way through the world to this. i hear you reproach, "but delay was best, for their end was a crime."--oh, a crime will do as well, i reply, to serve for a test, as a virtue golden through and through, sufficient to vindicate itself and prove its worth at a moment's view! must a game be played for the sake of pelf? where a button goes, 'twere an epigram to offer the stamp of the very guelph. the true has no value beyond the sham: as well the counter as coin, i submit, when your table's a hat, and your prize, a dram. stake your counter as boldly every whit, venture as warily, use the same skill, do your best, whether winning or losing it, if you choose to play!--is my principle. let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will! the counter our lovers staked was lost as surely as if it were lawful coin: and the sin i impute to each frustrate ghost is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, though the end in sight was a vice, i say. you of the virtue (we issue join) how strive you? _de te, fabula_! the two volumes of _dramatic idyls_ are full of paradoxes, for browning became fonder and fonder of the paradox as he descended into the vale of years. the russian poem _ivan ivanovitch_ justly condemns mothers who prefer their own safety to that of their children. when a stranger gives up his life for another, as happens frequently in crises of fire and shipwreck, we applaud: but when a mother sacrifices her life for that of her child, she does the natural and expected thing. the woman in this poem was a monster of wickedness and did not deserve to live. she started with three children and arrived with none. now there are some things in life for which no apology and no explanation suffice. what do we care about her story? who cares to hear her defence? what difference does it make whether she actively threw out the children or allowed the wolves to take them? she arrives safe and sound without them and there is no mistaking the fact that she rejoices in her own salvation. she does not rejoice long, however, for ivan, who is browning's ideal of resolution, neatly removes her head. practically and literally ivan is a murderer: but paradoxically he is god's servant, for the woman is not fit to live, and he eliminates her. from the practical point of view there is a difficulty ahead. the husband is due; when he hears that the children are lost, he will suffer horribly, and will enquire anxiously as to the fate of his wife. when he learns that she arrived in good condition and that then ivan knocked her head off, he may not fully appreciate the ethical beauty of ivan's deed. but this detail does not affect the moral significance of the story. yet i can not help thinking that a man with such strong convictions as ivan ought not to carry an axe. ivan, however, is still needed in russia. two or three years ago, immediately after a wedding ceremony, the bride and groom, with the whole wedding party, set out in sledges for the next town. the wolves attacked them and ate every member of the party except the four in the first sledge--husband, wife, and two men. as the wolves drew near, these two heroes advised the husband to throw out the bride, for if he did so, the three left might be saved, as their haven was almost in sight. naturally the bridegroom declined. then the two men threw out both bride and groom, and just managed to reach the town in safety, the sole survivors of the whole party. i wish that ivan had been there to give them the proper welcome. the poem _clive_ is a psychological analysis of courage and fear, two of the most interesting of human sensations. clive seems to have been an instrument in the hands of destiny. when an obscure young man, he twice tried to commit suicide, and both times the pistol missed fire. a born gambler, he judged that he was reserved for something great. he was: he conquered india. then, after his life-work was fully accomplished, his third attempt at suicide was successful. after describing the dramatic incident at card-play, which he gave to the old buck as the only time in his life when he felt afraid, his companion remarked that it was enough to scare anybody to face a loaded pistol. but here comes the paradox. clive was intensely angry because his friend failed to see the point. "why, i wasn't afraid he would shoot, i was afraid he wouldn't." suppose the general had said contemptuously that young clive was not worth the powder and ball it would take to kill him--suppose he had sent him away wholly safe and wholly disgraced. then clive would have instantly killed himself. either the general was not clever enough to play this trump, or the clear unwinking eyes of his victim convicted him of sin. clive was one of those exceedingly rare individuals who have never known the sensation of physical fear. but i do not think he was really so brave as those men, who, cursed with an imagination that fills their minds with terror, nevertheless advance toward danger. for your real hero is one who does not allow the desires of his body to control his mind. the body, always eager for safety, comfort, and pleasure, cries out against peril: but the mind, up in the conning-tower of the brain, drives the protesting and shivering body forward. napoleon, who was a good judge of courage, called ney the bravest of the brave: and i admired ney more intensely when i learned that in battle he was in his heart always afraid. the courage of soldiers in the mass seems sublime, but it is the commonest thing on earth: all nations show it: it is probably an inexplicable compound of discipline, pride, shame, and rage: but individuals differ from one another as sharply in courage as they do in mental ability. in sheer physical courage dive has never been surpassed, and browning, who loved the manly virtues, saw in this corrupt and cruel man a great hero. the poem _muléykeh_, which is one of the oldest of oriental stories, is really an analysis of love. the mare was dearer to her owner than life itself: yet he intentionally surrendered her to his rival rather than have her disgraced. his friends called him an idiot and a fool: but he replied, "you never have loved my pearl." and indeed, from his point of view, they did not know the meaning of love. what is love? simply the desire for possession, or the desire that the beloved object should be incomparably pure and unsullied by defeat and disgrace? the man who owned muléykeh really loved her, since her honor was more precious to him than his own happiness. the short poem _which_? published on the last day of browning's life, is a splendid paradox. in the middle ages, when house-parties assembled, an immense amount of time was taken up by the telling of stories and by the subsequent discussions thereupon. the stock subject was love, and the ideal lover was a favorite point of debate. in this instance, the three court ladies argue, and to complete the paradox, a priest is chosen for referee. perhaps he was thought to be out of it altogether, and thus ready to judge with an unprejudiced mind. the duchess declares that her lover must be a man she can respect: a man of religion and patriotism. he must love his god, and his country; then comes his wife, who holds the third place in his affections. i could not love thee, dear, so much, loved i not honour more. the marquise insists that her lover must be a man who has done something. he must not only be a man inspired by religious and patriotic motives, but must have actually suffered in her service. he has received wounds in combat, he is pointed out everywhere as the man who has accomplished great deeds. i can not love him unless i can be proud of his record. the comtesse says that her ideal lover must love her first: he must love her more than he loves god, more than he loves his country, more than he loves his life--yes, more than he loves his own honor. he must be willing, if necessary, not only to sacrifice his health and life in her behalf, indeed, any true knight would do that: he must be willing to sacrifice his good name, be false to his religion and a traitor to his country. what do i care whether he be a coward, a craven, a scoundrel, a hissing and a byword, so long as he loves me most of all? this is a difficult position for the abbé, the man of god: but he does not flinch. his decision is that the third lover is the one of whom almighty god would approve. one thing is certain: the third man really loved his lady. we do not know whether the other two loved or not. when a man talks a great deal about his honor, his self-respect, it is just possible that he loves himself more than he loves any one else. but the man who would go through hell to win a woman really loves that woman. browning abhors selfishness. he detests a man who is kept from a certain course of action by thoughts of its possible results to his reputation. ibsen has given us the standard example of what the first and second lover in this poem might sink to in a real moral crisis. in _a doll's house_, the husband curses his wife because she has committed forgery, and his good name will suffer. she replied that she committed the crime to save his life--her motive was love: and she had hoped that when the truth came out the miracle would happen: her husband would step forward and take the blame all on himself. "what fools you women are," said he, angrily: "you know nothing of business. i would work my fingers to the bone for you: i would give up my life for you: but you can't expect a man to sacrifice his _honor_ for a woman." her retort is one of the greatest in literature. "millions of women have done it." which? so, the three court-ladies began their trial of who judged best in esteeming the love of a man: who preferred with most reason was thereby confessed boy-cupid's exemplary catcher and cager; an abbé crossed legs to decide on the wager. first the duchesse: "mine for me-- who were it but god's for him, and the king's for--who but he? both faithful and loyal, one grace more shall brim his cup with perfection: a lady's true lover, he holds--save his god and his king--none above her." "i require"--outspoke the marquise-- "pure thoughts, ay, but also fine deeds: play the paladin must he, to please my whim, and--to prove my knight's service exceeds your saint's and your loyalist's praying and kneeling-- show wounds, each wide mouth to my mercy appealing." then the comtesse: "my choice be a wretch, mere losel in body and soul, thrice accurst! what care i, so he stretch arms to me his sole saviour, love's ultimate goal, out of earth and men's noise--names of 'infidel,' 'traitor,' cast up at him? crown me, crown's adjudicator!" and the abbé uncrossed his legs, took snuff, a reflective pinch, broke silence: "the question begs much pondering ere i pronounce. shall i flinch? the love which to one and one only has reference seems terribly like what perhaps gains god's preference." vii browning's optimism among all modern thinkers and writers, browning is the foremost optimist. he has left not the slightest doubt on this point; his belief is stated over and over again, running like a vein of gold through all his poems from _pauline_ to _asolando_. the shattered man in _pauline_ cries at the very last, i believe in god and truth and love. this staunch affirmation, "i believe!" is the common chord in browning's music. his optimism is in striking contrast to the attitude of his contemporaries, for the general tone of nineteenth century literature is pessimistic. amidst the wails and lamentations of the poets, the clear, triumphant voice of browning is refreshing even to those who are not convinced. browning suffered for his optimism. it is generally thought that the optimist must be shallow and superficial; whilst pessimism is associated with profound and sincere thinking. browning felt this criticism, and replied to it with a scriptural insult in his poem _at the mermaid_. i cannot possibly be a great poet, he said sneeringly, because i have never said i longed for death; i have enjoyed life and loved it, and have never assumed a peevish attitude. in another poem he declared that pessimists were liars, because they really loved life while pretending it was all suffering. it is only fair to browning to remember that his optimism has a philosophical basis, and is the logical result of a firmly-held view of the universe. many unthinking persons declare that browning, with his jaunty good spirits, gets on their nerves; he dodges or leaps over the real obstacles in life, and thinks he has solved difficulties when he has only forgotten them. they miss in browning the note of sorrow, of internal struggle, of despair; and insist that he has never accurately portrayed the real bitterness of the heart's sufferings. these critics have never read attentively browning's first poem. the poem _pauline_ shows that browning had his _sturm und drang_, in common with all thoughtful young men. keats' immortal preface to _endymion_ would be equally applicable to this youthful work. "the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men i speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages." the astonishing thing is, that browning emerged from the slough of despond at just the time when most young men are entering it. he not only climbed out, but set his face resolutely toward the celestial city. the poem _pauline_ shows that young browning passed through skepticism, atheism, pessimism, cynicism, and that particularly dark state when the mind reacts on itself; when enthusiasms, high hopes, and true faith seem childish; when wit and mockery take the place of zeal, this diabolical substitution seeming for the moment to be an intellectual advance. but although he suffered from all these diseases of the soul, he quickly became convalescent and _paracelsus_ proves that his cure was complete. browning's optimism is not based on any discount of the sufferings of life, nor any attempt to overlook such gross realities as sin and pain. no pessimist has realised these facts more keenly than he. the pope, who is the poet's mouthpiece, calls the world a dread machinery of sin and sorrow. the world is full of sin and sorrow, but it is machinery--and machinery is meant to make something; in this instance the product is human character, which can not be made without obstacles, struggles, and torment. in _reverie_, browning goes even farther than this in his description of terrestrial existence. head praises, but heart refrains from loving's acknowledgment whole losses outweigh half-gains: earth's good is with evil blent: good struggles but evil reigns. such an appraisal of life can hardly be called a blind and jaunty optimism. browning declares repeatedly that the world shows clearly two attributes of god: immense force and immense intelligence. we can not worship god, however, merely because he is strong and wise; he must be better than we are to win our respect and homage. the third necessary attribute, love, is not at all clear in the spectacle furnished by science and history. where then shall we seek it? his answer is, in the revelation of god's love through jesus christ. what lacks then of perfection fit for god but just the instance which this tale supplies of love without a limit? browning's philosophy therefore is purely christian. the love of god revealed in the incarnation and in our own ethical natures--our imperfect souls containing here and now the possibilities of infinite development--makes browning believe that this is god's world and we are god's children. he conceives of our life as an eternal one, our existence here being merely probation. no one has ever believed more rationally and more steadfastly in the future life than our poet; and his optimism is based solidly on this faith. the man who believes in the future life, he seems to say, may enjoy whole-heartedly and enthusiastically the positive pleasures of this world, and may endure with a firm mind its evils and its terrible sufferings. take christianity out of browning, and his whole philosophy, with its cheerful outlook, falls to the ground. of all true english poets, he is the most definitely christian, the most sure of his ground. he wrote out his own evangelical creed in _christmas-eve_ and _easter day_; but even if we did not have these definite assurances, poems like _a death in the desert_ and _gold hair_ would be sufficient. sequels are usually failures: the sequel to _saul_ is a notable exception to the rule. the first part of the poem, including the first nine stanzas, was published among the _dramatic romances_ in : in , among the _men and women_, appeared the whole work, containing ten additional stanzas. this sequel is fully up to the standard of the original in artistic beauty, and contains a quite new climax, of even greater intensity. the ninth stanza closes with the cry "king saul!"--he represents the last word of physical manhood, the finest specimen on earth of the athlete. the eighteenth stanza closes with the cry "see the christ stand!"--he represents the climax of all human history, the appearance on earth of god in man. the first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the lord from heaven. and as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. no modern pagan has ever sung the joy of life with more gusto than browning trolls it out in the ninth stanza. the glorious play of the muscles, the rapture of the chase, the delight of the plunge into cold water, the delicious taste of food and wine, the unique sweetness of deep sleep. no shame attaches to earthly delights: let us rejoice in our health and strength, in exercise, recreation, eating and sleeping. saul was a cowboy before he was a king; and young david in his music takes the great monarch back to the happy carefree days on the pasture, before the responsibilities of the crown had given him melancholia. the effect of music on patients suffering from nervous depression is as well known now as it was in saul's day; shakespeare knew something about it. his physicians are sometimes admirable; the great nervous specialist called in on lady macbeth's case is a model of wisdom and discretion: the specialist that queen cordelia summoned to prescribe for her father, after giving him trional, or something of that nature, was careful to have his return to consciousness accompanied by suitable music. such terrible fits of melancholy as afflicted saul were called in the old testament the visitations of an evil spirit; and there is no better diagnosis today. the russian novelist turgenev suffered exactly in the manner in which browning describes saul's sickness of heart: for several days he would remain in an absolute lethargy, like the king-serpent in his winter sleep. and, as in the case of saul, music helped him more than medicine. when david had carried the music to its fullest extent, the spirit of prophecy came upon him, as in the messianic psalms, and in the eighteenth stanza, he joyfully infers from the combination of man's love and man's weakness, that god's love is equal to god's power. man's will is powerless to change the world of atoms: from god's will stream the stars. yet if man's will were equal in power to his benevolence, how quickly would i, david, restore saul to happiness! the fact that i love my king with such intensity, whilst i am powerless to change his condition, makes me believe in the coming of him who shall have my wish to help humanity with the accompanying power. man is contemptible in his strength, but divine in his ideals. 'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do! the last stanza of the poem has been thought by some critics to be a mistake, worse than superfluous. for my part, i am very glad that browning added it. up to this point, we have had exhibited the effect of the music on saul: now we see the effect on the man who produced it, david. while it is of course impossible even to imagine how a genius must feel immediately after releasing some immortal work that has swollen his heart, we can not help making conjectures. if we are so affected by _hearing_ the ninth symphony, what must have been the sensations of beethoven at its birth? when händel wrote the hallelujah chorus, he declared that he saw the heavens opened, and the son of god sitting in glory, and i think he spoke the truth. after thackeray had written a certain passage in _vanity fair_, he rushed wildly about the room, shouting "that's genius!" now no man in the history of literature has been more reticent than browning in describing his emotions after virtue had passed out of him. he never talked about his poetry if he could help it; and the hundreds of people who met him casually met a fluent and pleasant conversationalist, who gave not the slightest sign of ever having been on the heights. we know, for example, that on the third day of january, , browning wrote in his paris lodgings to the accompaniment of street omnibuses the wonderful poem _childe roland_: what a marvellous day that must have been in his spiritual life! in what a frenzy of poetic passion must have passed the hours when he saw those astounding visions, and heard the blast of the horn in the horrible sunset! he must have been inspired by the very demon of poetry. and yet, so far as we know, he never told any one about that day, nor left any written record either of that or any other of the great moments in his life. in _the ring and the book_, he tells us of the passion, mystery and wonder that filled his soul on the night of the day when he had found the old yellow volume: but he has said nothing of his sensations when he wrote the speech of pompilia. this is why i am glad he added the last stanza to _saul_. it purports to be a picture of david's drunken rapture, when, after the inspiration had flowed through his soul, he staggered home through the night. about him were angels, powers, unuttered, unseen, alive, aware. the whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews; the stars of night beat with emotion. david is browning himself; and the poet is trying to tell us, in the only way possible to a man like browning, how the floods of his own genius affected him. he gives a somewhat similar picture in _abt vogler_. it is not in the least surprising that he could not write or talk to his friends about such marvellous experiences. can a man who has looked on the face of god, and dwelt in the heavenly places, talk about it to others? furthermore this nineteenth stanza of _saul_ contains a picture of the dawn that has never been surpassed in poetry. only those who have spent nights in the great woods can really understand it. saul - i said abner, "at last thou art come! ere i tell, ere thou speak, kiss my cheek, wish me well!" then i wished it, and did kiss his cheek. and he: "since the king, o my friend, for thy countenance sent, neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent thou return with the joyful assurance the king liveth yet, shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet for out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of praise, to betoken that saul and the spirit have ended their strife, and that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life." ii "yet now my heart leaps, o beloved! god's child with his dew on thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat were now raging to torture the desert!" iii then i, as was meet, knelt down to the god of my fathers, and rose on my feet, and ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. the tent was unlooped; i pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under i stooped; hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone, that extends to the second enclosure, i groped my way on till i felt where the foldskirts fly open. then once more i prayed, and opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid but spoke, "here is david, thy servant!" and no voice replied. at the first i saw naught but the blackness: but soon i descried a something more black than the blackness--the vast, the upright main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. then a sunbeam, that burst through the tent-roof, showed saul. iv he stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide on the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side; he relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his pangs and waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs, far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come with the spring-time,--so agonized saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb. v then i tuned my harp,--took off the lilies we twine round its chords lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide--those sunbeams like swords! and i first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one, so docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. they are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed; and now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far! vi --then the tune for which quails on the corn-land will each leave his mate to fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate till for boldness they fight one another; and then, what has weight to set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house-- there are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse! god made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear, to give sign, we and they are his children, one family here. vii then i played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, when hand grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great hearts expand and grow one in the sense of this world's life.--and then, the last song when the dead man is praised on his journey--"bear, bear him along, with his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! are balm seeds not here to console us? the land has none left such as he on the bier. oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!"--and then, the glad chaunt of the marriage,--first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt as the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.--and then, the great march wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? then, the chorus intoned as the levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. but i stopped here: for here in the darkness saul groaned. viii and i paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart; and the tent shook, for mighty saul shuddered: and sparkles 'gan dart from the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a start, all its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. so the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there erect. and i bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked, as i sang:-- ix "oh, our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste, not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, the strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, and the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. and the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine, and the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine, and the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell that the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. how good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword thou didst guard when he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward? didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung the low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint tongue joining in while it could to the witness, 'let one more attest, i have lived, seen god's hand through a lifetime, and all was for best'? then they sung through their tears in strong triumph, not much, but the rest. and thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working whence grew such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit strained true: and the friends of thy boyhood--that boyhood of wonder and hope, present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,-- till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; and all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine! on one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe that, a-work in the rock, helps its labour and lets the gold go) high ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,--all brought to blaze on the head of one creature--king saul!" x and lo, with that leap of my spirit,--heart, hand, harp and voice, each lifting saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice saul's fame in the light it was made for--as when, dare i say, the lord's army, in rapture of service, strains through its array, and upsoareth the cherubim-chariot--"saul!" cried i, and stopped, and waited the thing that should follow. then saul, who hung propped by the tent's cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name. have ye seen when spring's arrowy summons goes right to the aim, and some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone, while the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone a year's snow bound about for a breastplate,--leaves grasp of the sheet? fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet, and there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old, with his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold-- yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest--all hail, there they are! --now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his crest for their food in the ardours of summer. one long shudder thrilled all the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled at the king's self left standing before me, released and aware. what was gone, what remained? all to traverse 'twixt hope and despair, death was past, life not come: so he waited. awhile his right hand held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to remand to their place what new objects should enter: 'twas saul as before. i looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, we watch from the shore, at their sad level gaze o'er the ocean--a sun's slow decline over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely; so, arm folded arm o'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. xi what spell or what charm, (for awhile there was trouble within me,) what next should i urge to sustain him where song had restored him?--one filled to the verge his cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty; beyond, on what fields, glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by? he saith, "it is good;" still he drinks not: he lets me praise life, gives assent, yet would die for his own part. xii then fancies grew rife which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep; and i lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie 'neath his ken, though i saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky: and i laughed--"since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks, let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks, dream the life i am never to mix with, and image the show of mankind as they live in those fashions i hardly shall know! schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains, and the prudence that keeps what men strive for." and now these old trains of vague thought came again; i grew surer; so, once more the string of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus-- xiii "yea, my king," i began--"thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that spring from the mere mortal life held in common by man and by brute: in our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,--how its stem trembled first till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely outburst the fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn, broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more was to learn, e'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. our dates shall we slight, when their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? not so! stem and branch shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch every wound of man's spirit in winter. i pour thee such wine. leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine! by the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy more indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy. crush that life, and behold its wine running! each deed thou hast done dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the sun looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface, can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace the results of his past summer-prime,--so, each ray of thy will, every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth a like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the south and the north with the radiance thy deed was the germ of. carouse in the past! but the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last: as the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height, so with man--so his power and his beauty forever take flight. no! again a long draught of my soul-wine! look forth o'er the years! thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's! is saul dead? in the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise a gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies, let it mark where the great first king slumbers: whose fame would ye know? up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall go in great characters cut by the scribe,--such was saul, so he did; with the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,-- for not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there! which fault to amend, in the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend (see, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and record with the gold of the graver, saul's story,--the statesman's great word side by side with the poet's sweet comment. the river's a-wave with smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave: so the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part in thy being! then, first of the mighty, thank god that thou art!" xiv and behold while i sang ... but o thou who didst grant me that day, and before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay, carry on and complete an adventure,--my shield and my sword in that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,-- still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavour and scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever on the new stretch of heaven above me--till, mighty to save, just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance--god's throne from man's grave! let me tell out my tale to its ending--my voice to my heart which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night i took part, as this morning i gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, and still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep! for i wake in the gray dewy covert, while hebron upheaves the dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and kidron retrieves slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. xv i say then,--my song while i sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more strong made a proffer of good to console him--he slowly resumed his old motions and habitudes kingly. the right hand re-plumed his black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the swathes of his turban, and see--the huge sweat that his countenance bathes, he wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as of yore, and feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set before. he is saul, ye remember in glory,--ere error had bent the broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, god did choose, to receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose. so sank he along by the tent-prop till, stayed by the pile of his armour and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there awhile, and sat out my singing,--one arm round the tent-prop, to raise his bent head, and the other hung slack--till i touched on the praise i foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient there; and thus ended, the harp falling forward. then first i was 'ware that he sat, as i say, with my head just above his vast knees which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak roots which please to encircle a lamb when it slumbers. i looked up to know if the best i could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but slow lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: through my hair the large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power-- all my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized mine-- and oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign? i yearned--"could i help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, i would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this; i would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, as this moment,--had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!" xvi then the truth came upon me. no harp more--no song more! outbroke-- xvii "i have gone the whole round of creation: i saw and i spoke: i, a work of god's hand for that purpose, received in my brain and pronounced on the rest of his handwork--returned him again his creation's approval or censure: i spoke as i saw: i report, as a man may of god's work--all's love, yet all's law. now i lay down the judgeship he lent me. each faculty tasked to perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. have i knowledge? confounded it shrivels at wisdom laid bare. have i forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the infinite care! do i task any faculty highest, to image success? i but open my eyes,--and perfection, no more and no less, in the kind i imagined, full-fronts me, and god is seen god in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. and thus looking within and around me, i ever renew (with that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) the submission of man's nothing-perfect to god's all-complete, as by each new obeisance in spirit, i climb to his feet. yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, i shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. there's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, i am fain to keep still in abeyance, (i laugh as i think) lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, i worst e'en the giver in one gift--behold, i could love if i durst! but i sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake god's own speed in the one way of love: i abstain for love's sake. --what, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall? in the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? do i find love so full in my nature, god's ultimate gift, that i doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift? here, the creature surpass the creator,--the end, what began? would i fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, and dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, to bestow on this saul what i sang of, the marvellous dower of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul, such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole? and doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) these good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best? ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height this perfection,--succeed with life's day-spring, death's minute of night? interpose at the difficult minute, snatch saul the mistake, saul the failure, the ruin he seems now,--and bid him awake from the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set clear and safe in new light and new life,--a new harmony yet to be run, and continued, and ended--who knows?--or endure! the man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure; by the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss, and the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles in this." xviii "i believe it! 'tis thou, god, that givest, 'tis i who receive: in the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. all's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer as i breathe out this breath, as i open these arms to the air. from thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread sabaoth: _i_ will?--the mere atoms despise me! why am i not loth to look that, even that in the face too? why is it i dare think but lightly of such impuissance? what stops my despair? this;--'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do! see the king--i would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through. could i wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, to fill up his life, starve my own out, i would--knowing which, i know that my service is perfect. oh, speak through me now! would i suffer for him that i love? so wouldst thou--so wilt thou! so shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown-- and thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down one spot for the creature to stand in! it is by no breath, turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death! as thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved! he who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. 'tis the weakness in strength, that i cry for! my flesh, that i seek in the godhead! i seek and i find it. o saul, it shall be a face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me, thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the christ stand!" xix i know not too well how i found my way home in the night. there were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: i repressed, i got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, as a runner beset by the populace famished for news-- life or death. the whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews; and the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but i fainted not, for the hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed all the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth-- not so much, but i saw it die out in the day's tender birth; in the gathered intensity brought to the grey of the hills; in the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills; in the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill that rose heavily, as i approached them, made stupid with awe: e'en the serpent that slid away silent,--he felt the new law. the same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers; the same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers: and the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, with their obstinate, all but hushed voices--"e'en so, it is so!" on a clear, warm day in march, , i stood on the piazza michel angelo in florence, with a copy of browning in my hand, and gazed with delight on the panorama of the fair city below. then i read aloud the first two stanzas of _old pictures in florence_, and realised for the thousandth time the definiteness of browning's poetry. this particular poem is a mixture of art and doggerel; but even the latter is interesting to lovers of florence. not a churlish saint, lorenzo monaco? did you ever stand in front of the picture by lorenzo that browning had in mind, and observe the churlish saints? most saints in italian pictures look either happy or complacent; because they have just been elected to the society of heaven and are in for life. but for some strange reason, lorenzo's saints, although in the presence, and worshipping with music, look as if they were suffering from acute indigestion. if one will wander about the galleries of florence, and take along browning, one will find the poet more specifically informing than baedeker. the philosophy of this poem is browning's favorite philosophy of development. he compares the perfection of greek art with the imperfection of the real human body. we know what a man ought to look like; and if we have forgotten, we may behold a representation by a greek sculptor. stand at the corner of a city street, and watch the men pass; they are caricatures of the manly form. yet ludicrously ugly as they are, the intention is clear; we see even in these degradations, what the figure of a man ought to be. in greek art: the truth of man, as by god first spoken, which the actual generations garble, was reuttered. _which the actual generations garble_--men as we see them are clumsy and garbled versions of the original. but there is no value in lamenting this; it is idle for men to gaze with regret and longing at the apollo belvedere. it is much better to remember that perfection and completion spell death: only imperfection has a future. what if the souls in our ridiculously ugly bodies become greater and grander than the marble men of pheidias? giotto's unfinished campanile is nobler than the perfect zero he drew for the pope. in our imperfect minds, housed in our over-fat, over-lean, and always commonplace bodies, exists the principle of development, for whose steady advance eternity is not too long. statues belong to time: man has forever. for some strange reason, no tourist ever goes to fano. one reason why i went there was simply because i had never met a person of any nationality who had ever seen the town. yet it is easily accessible, very near ancona, the scene of the _grammarian's funeral_, and the place where browning wrote _the guardian angel_. one day mr. and mrs. browning, walking about fano, came to the church of san agostino, in no way a remarkable edifice, and there in the tiny chapel, over the altar, they found guercino's masterpiece. its calm and serene beauty struck an immortal poem out of browning's heart; and thanks to the poet, the picture is now one of the most familiar in the world. but no copy comes near the ineffable charm of the original, as one sees it in the dim light of the chapel. the child on the tomb is looking past the angel's face into the glory of heaven; but the poet, who wishes that he might take the place of the little child, declares that he would gaze, not toward heaven, but into the gracious face of the bird of god. if we could only see life as the angel sees it, if we could only see the whole course of history, we should then realise that: all is beauty: and knowing this, is love, and love is duty. we can not see the forest for the trees: the last place to obtain an idea of the range, grandeur, and beauty of a forest, is in it: one should climb a high mountain and look over its vast extent. so we, in life, "where men sit and hear each other groan," believe that the world is some dreadful mistake, full of meaningless anguish. this is because we are in the midst of it all: we can not see far: the nearest objects, though infinitesimal in size, loom enormous, as with the palm of your hand you can cut off the sun. but if we could only see the end from the beginning, if we could get the angel's view-point, the final result would be beauty. browning is not satisfied with keats's doctrine: "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. he shows us what happened to aprile with this philosophy. browning adds the doctrine of love. the moment we realise that the universe is conceived in terms of beauty, love fills our hearts: love for our fellow-beings, who are making the journey through life with us; and love for god, the author of it all, just as a child loves one who gives it the gift of its heart's desire. that the supreme duty of life is love is simply one more illustration of browning's steadfast adherence to the gospel of christ. the guardian-angel a picture at fano i dear and great angel, wouldst thou only leave that child, when thou hast done with him, for me! let me sit all the day here, that when eve shall find performed thy special ministry, and time come for departure, thou, suspending thy flight, mayst see another child for tending, another still, to quiet and retrieve. ii then i shall feel thee step one step, no more, from where thou standest now, to where i gaze, --and suddenly my head is covered o'er with those wings, white above the child who prays now on that tomb--and i shall feel thee guarding me, out of all the world; for me, discarding yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door. iii i would not look up thither past thy head because the door opes, like that child, i know, for i should have thy gracious face instead, thou bird of god! and wilt thou bend me low like him, and lay, like his, my hands together, and lift them up to pray, and gently tether me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread? iv if this was ever granted, i would rest my head beneath thine, while thy healing hands close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast, pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, back to its proper size again, and smoothing distortion down till every nerve had soothing, and all lay quiet, happy and suppressed. v how soon all worldly wrong would be repaired! i think how i should view the earth and skies and sea, when once again my brow was bared after thy healing, with such different eyes. o world, as god has made it! all is beauty: and knowing this, is love, and love is duty. what further may be sought for or declared? vi guercino drew this angel i saw teach (alfred, dear friend!)--that little child to pray, holding the little hands up, each to each pressed gently,--with his own head turned away over the earth where so much lay before him of work to do, though heaven was opening o'er him, and he was left at fano by the beach. vii we were at fano, and three times we went to sit and see him in his chapel there, and drink his beauty to our soul's content --my angel with me too: and since i care for dear guercino's fame (to which in power and glory comes this picture for a dower, fraught with a pathos so magnificent)-- viii and since he did not work thus earnestly at all times, and has else endured some wrong-- i took one thought his picture struck from me, and spread it out, translating it to song. my love is here. where are you, dear old friend? how rolls the wairoa at your world's far end? this is ancona, yonder is the sea. the three poems, _caliban on setebos, rabbi ben ezra_, and _a death in the desert_, should be read in that order; for there is a logical order in the thought. the first is god as an amphibious brute would imagine him: the second is noble hebrew theism: the third is the christian god of love. whilst the second is the finest poem of the three, the first is the most original. the word "upon" is ironical: it is caliban's treatise on theology. we read caliban on god, as we read mill on political economy: for caliban, like many a human theologian, does not scruple to speak the last word on the nature of the supreme being. the citation from the psalms is a rebuke to gross anthropomorphism: caliban, like the puritans, has simply made god in his own image. the difference between shakespeare's and browning's caliban is simply the difference between shakespeare and browning. shakespeare made the monster for decorative purposes, to satisfy his love of the grotesque, as an architect placed gargoyles on a cathedral: the grotesque is an organic part of romantic art. browning is interested not in caliban's appearance, but in his processes of thought. suppose a monster, half fish, half beast, living with supreme comfort in the slime, could think: what kind of god would he imagine had created this world? caliban speaks in the third person (does browning make a slip when he changes occasionally to the first?) in order to have indicated the low order of his intelligence; just as a little child says, "don't hurt her: she hasn't done anything wrong." he is lying in liquid refuse, with little lizards deliciously tickling his spine (such things are entirely a matter of taste, what would be odious to us would be heaven to a sow) and having nothing to do for the moment, like a man in absolute leisure, turns his thoughts to god. he believes that god is neither good nor bad, but simply capricious. what's the use of being god, if you can't do what you like? he treats earth's creatures as a wanton boy treats his toys; they belong to me; why shouldn't i break them if i choose? no one ought to complain of misfortunes: you can not expect god is going to reward the virtuous and punish the guilty. he has no standards whatever. just as i, caliban, sit here and watch a procession of crabs: i might lazily make up my mind, in a kind of sporting interest, to count them as they pass; to let twenty go in safety, and smash the twenty-first, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. when i feel like it, i help some creatures; if in another mood, i torment others; that's the way god treats us, that's the way i would act if i were god. as caliban's theology has much of the human in it, so his practical reasoning is decidedly human in its superstition. granted that we are in the hands of a childish and capricious god, who amuses himself with torturing us, who laughs at our faces distorted with pain, what is the thing we ought to do? how shall we best manage? caliban's advice is dear: don't let him notice you: don't get prominent: above all, never boast of your good fortune, for that will surely draw god's attention, and he will put you where you belong. this superstition, that god is against us, is deep-seated in human nature, as the universal practice of "touching wood" sufficiently demonstrates. if a man says, "i haven't had a cold this winter," his friends will advise him to touch wood; and if he wakes up the next morning snuffling, he will probably soliloquise, "what a fool i was! why couldn't i keep still? why did i have to mention it? now see what i've got!" caliban disagreed with his mother sycorax on one important point. she believed in the future life. caliban says such a belief is absurd. there can be nothing worse than this life. its good moments are simply devices of god to strengthen us so that he can torture us again, just as in the good old times the executioners gave the sufferers they were tormenting some powerful stimulant, so that they might return to consciousness and suffer; for nothing cheated the spectators worse than to have the victim die during the early stages of the torture. the object was to keep the wretch alive as long as possible. thus in this life we have moments of comparative ease and rest, wherein we recuperate a little, just as the cat lets the mouse recover strength enough to imagine he is going to get away. caliban is of course an absolute and convinced pessimist. a malevolent giant is not so bad a god as an insane child. and browning means that pessimism is what we should naturally expect from so rudimentary an intellect as caliban's, which judges the whole order of the universe from proximate and superficial evidences. the close of the poem is a good commentary on some human ideas of what kind of service is pleasing to god. poor caliban! he had saved up some quails, meaning to have a delicious meal. but in his fear he cries to god, i will let them fly, if you will only spare me this time! i will not eat whelks for a month, i will eat no chocolates during lent, anything to please god! caliban upon setebos; or, natural theology in the island "thou thoughtest that i was altogether such a one as thyself." ['will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. and, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, and feels about his spine small eft-things course, run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: and while above his head a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,-- he looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) and talks to his own self, howe'er he please, touching that other, whom his dam called god. because to talk about him, vexes--ha, could he but know! and time to vex is now, when talk is safer than in winter-time. moreover prosper and miranda sleep in confidence he drudges at their task, and it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.] setebos, setebos, and setebos! 'thinketh, he dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon. 'thinketh he made it, with the sun to match, but not the stars; the stars came otherwise; only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, and snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. 'thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: he hated that he cannot change his cold, nor cure its ache. 'hath spied an icy fish that longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, and thaw herself within the lukewarm brine o' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, a crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; only, she ever sickened, found repulse at the other kind of water, not her life, (green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, and in her old bounds buried her despair, hating and loving warmth alike: so he thinketh, he made thereat the sun, this isle, trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds; a certain badger brown he hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that build a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole--he made all these and more, made all we see, and us, in spite: how else? he could not, himself, make a second self to be his mate; as well have made himself: he would not make what he mislikes or slights, an eyesore to him, or not worth his pains: but did, in envy, listlessness or sport, make what himself would fain, in a manner, be-- weaker in most points, stronger in a few, worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, things he admires and mocks too,--that is it. because, so brave, so better though they be, it nothing skills if he begin to plague. look now, i melt a gourd-fruit into mash, add honeycomb and pods, i have perceived, which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,-- then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme, and wanton, wishing i were born a bird. put case, unable to be what i wish, i yet could make a live bird out of clay: would not i take clay, pinch my caliban able to fly?--for, there, see, he hath wings, and great comb like the hoopoe's to admire, and there, a sting to do his foes offence, there, and i will that he begin to live, fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns of grigs high up that make the merry din, saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not. in which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, and he lay stupid-like,--why, i should laugh; and if he, spying me, should fall to weep, beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,-- well, as the chance were, this might take or else not take my fancy: i might hear his cry, and give the mankin three sound legs for one, or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg, and lessoned he was mine and merely clay. were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, drinking the mash, with brain become alive, making and marring clay at will? so he. 'thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in him, nor kind, nor cruel: he is strong and lord. 'am strong myself compared to yonder crabs that march now from the mountain to the sea; 'let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 'say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 'say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, and two worms he whose nippers end in red; as it likes me each time, i do: so he. well then, 'supposeth he is good i' the main, placable if his mind and ways were guessed, but rougher than his handiwork, be sure! oh, he hath made things worthier than himself, and envieth that, so helped, such things do more than he who made them! what consoles but this? that they, unless through him, do nought at all, and must submit: what other use in things? 'hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint that, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay when from her wing you twitch the feathers blue: sound this, and little birds that hate the jay flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt: put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth "i catch the birds, i am the crafty thing, i make the cry my maker cannot make with his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!" would not i smash it with my foot? so he. but wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? aha, that is a question! ask, for that, what knows,--the something over setebos that made him, or he, may be, found and fought, worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance. there may be something quiet o'er his head, out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief, since both derive from weakness in some way. i joy because the quails come; would not joy could i bring quails here when i have a mind: this quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. 'esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch, but never spends much thought nor care that way. it may look up, work up,--the worse for those it works on! 'careth but for setebos the many-handed as a cuttle-fish, who, making himself feared through what he does, looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar to what is quiet and hath happy life; next looks down here, and out of very spite makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, these good things to match those as hips do grapes. 'tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport. himself peeped late, eyed prosper at his books careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; has peeled a wand and called it by a name; weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe the eyed skin of a supple oncelot; and hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, a four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, and saith she is miranda and my wife: 'keeps for his ariel a tall pouch-bill crane he bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, and split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge in a hole o' the rock and calls him caliban; a bitter heart that bides its time and bites. 'plays thus at being prosper in a way, taketh his mirth with make-believes: so he. his dam held that the quiet made all things which setebos vexed only: 'holds not so. who made them weak, meant weakness he might vex, had he meant other, while his hand was in, why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint, like an orc's armour? ay,--so spoil his sport! he is the one now: only he doth all. 'saith, he may like, perchance, what profits him. ay, himself loves what does him good; but why? 'gets good no otherwise. this blinded beast loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose, but, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate or love, just as it liked him: he hath eyes. also it pleaseth setebos to work, use all his hands, and exercise much craft, by no means for the love of what is worked. 'tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world when all goes right, in this safe summer-time, and he wants little, hungers, aches not much, than trying what to do with wit and strength. 'falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs, and squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, and, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, and set up endwise certain spikes of tree, and crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top, found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill. no use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake; 'shall some day knock it down again: so he. 'saith he is terrible: watch his feats in proof! one hurricane will spoil six good months' hope. he hath a spite against me, that i know, just as he favours prosper, who knows why? so it is, all the same, as well i find. 'wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm with stone and stake to stop she-tortoises crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, feeling the foot of him upon its neck, gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue, and licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite. 'saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies) where, half an hour before, i slept i' the shade: often they scatter sparkles: there is force! 'dug up a newt he may have envied once and turned to stone, shut up inside a stone. please him and hinder this?--what prosper does? aha, if he would tell me how! not he! there is the sport: discover how or die! all need not die, for of the things o' the isle some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees; those at his mercy,--why, they please him most when ... when ... well, never try the same way twice! repeat what act has pleased, he may grow wroth. you must not know his ways, and play him off, sure of the issue. 'doth the like himself: 'spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears but steals the nut from underneath my thumb, and when i threat, bites stoutly in defence: 'spareth an urchin that contrariwise, curls up into a ball, pretending death for fright at my approach: the two ways please. but what would move my choler more than this, that either creature counted on its life to-morrow and next day and all days to come, saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, "because he did so yesterday with me, and otherwise with such another brute, so must he do henceforth and always."--ay? would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means! 'doth as he likes, or wherefore lord? so he. 'conceiveth all things will continue thus, and we shall have to live in fear of him so long as he lives, keeps his strength: no change, if he have done his best, make no new world to please him more, so leave off watching this,-- if he surprise not even the quiet's self some strange day,--or, suppose, grow into it as grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we, and there is he, and nowhere help at all. 'believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. his dam held different, that after death he both plagued enemies and feasted friends: idly! he doth his worst in this our life, giving just respite lest we die through pain, saving last pain for worst,--with which, an end. meanwhile, the best way to escape his ire is, not to seem too happy. 'sees, himself, yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both. 'sees two black painful beetles roll their ball on head and tail as if to save their lives: moves them the stick away they strive to clear. even so, 'would have him misconceive, suppose this caliban strives hard and ails no less, and always, above all else, envies him; wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights, moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh, and never speaks his mind save housed as now: outside, 'groans, curses. if he caught me here, o'erheard this speech, and asked "what chucklest at?" 'would, to appease him, cut a finger off, or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, or push my tame beast for the ore to taste: while myself lit a fire, and made a song and sung it, "_what i hate, be consecrate to celebrate thee and thy state, no mate for thee; what see for envy in poor me_"? hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, that some strange day, will either the quiet catch and conquer setebos, or likelier he decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. * * * * * [what, what? a curtain o'er the world at once! crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes, there scuds his raven that has told him all! it was fool's play, this prattling! ha! the wind shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, and fast invading fires begin! white blaze-- a tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, his thunder follows! fool to gibe at him! lo! 'lieth flat and loveth setebos! 'maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, will let those quails fly, will not eat this month one little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!] in the great poem _rabbi ben ezra_, a quite different reason from that of caliban's is suggested for the drawbacks and sufferings of life. they are a part of the divine machinery employed by infinite wisdom to further human development, to make us ultimately fit to see his face. there can be no true progress without obstacles: no enjoyment without its opposite: no vacation without duties: no virtue without sin. the second line of the poem is startling in its direct contradiction of the language and lamentation of conventional poetry. regret for lost youth and terror before old age are stock ideas in poetry, and in human meditation; but here we are invited to look forward to old age as the best time of life. not to grow old gracefully, in resignation, but to grow old eagerly, in triumph--this is the rabbi's suggestion. there is not the slightest doubt that he is right, provided one lives a mental, rather than an animal existence. a short time ago, mr. joseph h. choate was addressing a large company in new york: he said, "unquestionably the best period of life is the time between seventy and eighty years of age: and i advise you all to hurry up and get there as soon as you can." god loveth whom he chasteneth. our doubts and fears, our sorrows and pains, are spurs, stimulants to advance; rejoice that we have them, for they are proofs that we are alive and moving! in the seventh stanza comes an audacious but cheering thought. many thinkers regard the deepest sorrow of life as rising from the disparity between our ideals and our achievement; schiller, in his poem, _das ideal und das leben_, has expressed this cause of woe in beautiful language. browning says boldly, what i aspired to be, and was not, _comforts_ me: this paradox, which comforts while it mocks, means, "my achievements are ridiculously small in comparison with my hopes, my ambitions, my dreams: thank god for all this! thank god i was not content with low aims, thank god i had my aspirations and have them still: they point to future development." in the twenty-third, twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth stanzas, browning suddenly returns to this idea: in the appraisement of the human soul, efforts, which if unsuccessful, count for nothing in worldly estimation, pay an enormous ultimate dividend, and must therefore be rated high. the reason why the world counts only things done and not things attempted, is because the world's standards are too coarse: they are adapted only for gross and obvious results. you can not weigh diamonds on hay scales: the indicator would show precisely nothing. and yet one diamond, too fine for these huge scales, might be of more value than thousands of tons of hay. from the twenty-sixth stanza to the end, browning takes up the figure of the potter, the wheel, and the clay. i think that he was drawn to use this metaphor, not from scripture, but as a protest against the use of it in fitzgerald's _omar khayyám_. fitzgerald published his translation in ; and although it attracted no public attention, it is certainly possible that browning saw it. he would have enjoyed its melodious beauty, but the philosophy of the poem would have been to him detestable and abhorrent. much is made there of the potter, meaning blind destiny: and the moral is, "drink! the past gone, seize to-day!" browning explicitly rejects and scorns this teaching: it is propounded by fools for the benefit of other fools. fool! all that is, at all, lasts ever, past recall; earth changes, but thy soul and god stand sure: what entered into thee, _that_ was, is, and shall be: time's wheel runs back or stops: potter and clay endure. in browning's metaphor, the potter is god: the wheel is the whirling course of life's experiences: the clay is man. god holds us on the wheel to turn us into the proper shape. owing to our flaws, the strain is sometimes too great, and some of us are warped and twisted by this stern discipline: other characters, made of better material, constantly grow more beautiful and more serviceable under the treatment. browning had suffered the greatest sorrow of his life when he wrote this poem, and yet he had faith enough to say in the thirty-first stanza, that _not even while the whirl was worst_, did he, bound dizzily to the terrible wheel of life, once lose his belief that he was in god's hands and that the deep cuttings were for his ultimate benefit. in the making of a cup, the potter engraved around the base lovely images of youth and pleasure, and near the rim skulls and signs of death: but what is a cup for? it is meant for the master's lips. the nearer therefore we approach to death, the nearer we are to god's presence, who is making us fit to slake his thirst. finished at last, we are done forever with life's wheel: we come to the banquet, the festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, the glorious appearance of the master. rabbi ben ezra i grow old along with me! the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made: our times are in his hand who saith "a whole i planned, youth shows but half; trust god: see all nor be afraid!" ii not that, amassing flowers, youth sighed "which rose make ours, which lily leave and then as best recall?" not that, admiring stars, it yearned "nor jove, nor mars; mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" iii not for such hopes and fears annulling youth's brief years, do i remonstrate: folly wide the mark! rather i prize the doubt low kinds exist without, finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. iv poor vaunt of life indeed, were man but formed to feed on joy, to solely seek and find and feast: such feasting ended, then as sure an end to men; irks care the crop-full bird? frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? v rejoice we are allied to that which doth provide and not partake, effect and not receive! a spark disturbs our clod; nearer we hold of god who gives, than of his tribes that take, i must believe. vi then, welcome each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough, each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! be our joys three-parts pain! strive, and hold cheap the strain; learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! vii for thence,--a paradox which comforts while it mocks,-- shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: what i aspired to be, and was not, comforts me: a brute i might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. viii what is he but a brute whose flesh has soul to suit, whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? to man, propose this test-- thy body at its best, how far can that project thy soul on its lone way? ix yet gifts should prove their use: i own the past profuse of power each side, perfection every turn: eyes, ears took in their dole, brain treasured up the whole; should not the heart beat once "how good to live and learn?" x not once beat "praise be thine! i see the whole design, i, who saw power, see now love perfect too: perfect i call thy plan: thanks that i was a man! maker, remake, complete,--i trust what thou shalt do!" xi for pleasant is this flesh; our soul, in its rose-mesh pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; would we some prize might hold to match those manifold possessions of the brute,--gain most, as we did best! xii let us not always say "spite of this flesh to-day i strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" as the bird wings and sings, let us cry "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" xiii therefore i summon age to grant youth's heritage, life's struggle having so far reached its term: thence shall i pass, approved a man, for aye removed from the developed brute; a god though in the germ. xiv and i shall thereupon take rest, ere i be gone once more on my adventure brave and new: fearless and unperplexed, when i wage battle next, what weapons to select, what armour to indue. xv youth ended, i shall try my gain or loss thereby; leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: and i shall weigh the same, give life its praise or blame: young, all lay in dispute; i shall know, being old. xvi for note, when evening shuts, a certain moment cuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey: a whisper from the west shoots--"add this to the rest, take it and try its worth: here dies another day." xvii so, still within this life, though lifted o'er its strife, let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, "this rage was right i' the main, that acquiescence vain: the future i may face now i have proved the past" xviii for more is not reserved to man, with soul just nerved to act to-morrow what he learns to-day: here, work enough to watch the master work, and catch hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. xix as it was better, youth should strive, through acts uncouth, toward making, than repose on aught found made: so, better, age, exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. thou waitedest age: wait death nor be afraid! xx enough now, if the right and good and infinite be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, with knowledge absolute, subject to no dispute from fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. xxi be there, for once and all, severed great minds from small, announced to each his station in the past! was i, the world arraigned, were they, my soul disdained, right? let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! xxii now, who shall arbitrate? ten men love what i hate, shun what i follow, slight what i receive; ten, who in ears and eyes match me: we all surmise, they this thing, and i that: whom shall my soul believe? xxiii not on the vulgar mass called "work," must sentence pass, things done, that took the eye and had the price; o'er which, from level stand, the low world laid its hand, found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: xxiv but all, the world's coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb, so passed in making up the main account; all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: xxv thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act, fancies that broke through language and escaped; all i could ever be, all, men ignored in me, this, i was worth to god, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. xxvi ay, note that potter's wheel, that metaphor! and feel why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,-- thou, to whom fools propound, when the wine makes its round, "since life fleets, all is change; the past gone, seize to-day!" xxvii fool! all that is, at all, lasts ever, past recall; earth changes, but thy soul and god stand sure: what entered into thee, _that_ was, is, and shall be: time's wheel runs back or stops: potter and clay endure. xxviii he fixed thee mid this dance of plastic circumstance, this present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: machinery just meant to give thy soul its bent, try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. xxix what though the earlier grooves which ran the laughing loves around thy base, no longer pause and press? what though, about thy rim, scull-things in order grim grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? xxx look not thou down but up! to uses of a cup, the festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, the new wine's foaming flow, the master's lips a-glow! thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? xxxi but i need, now as then, thee, god, who mouldest men; and since, not even while the whirl was worst, did i,--to the wheel of life with shapes and colours rife, bound dizzily,--mistake my end, to slake thy thirst: xxxii so, take and use thy work: amend what flaws may lurk, what strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! my times be in thy hand! perfect the cup as planned! let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! browning wrote four remarkable poems dealing with music: _a toccata of galuppi's_, _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, _abt vogler_, and _charles avison_. in _abt vogler_ the miracle of extemporisation has just been accomplished. the musician sits at the keys, tears running down his face: tears of weakness, because of the storm of divine inspiration that has passed through him: tears of sorrow, because he never can recapture the fine, careless rapture of his unpremeditated music: tears of joy, because he knows that on this particular day he has been the channel chosen by the infinite god. if he had only been an architect, his dream would have remained in a permanent form. the armies of workmen would have done his will, and the world would have admired it for ages. if he had only been a poet or a painter, his inspiration would have taken the form of fixed type or enduring shape and color: but in the instance of music, the armies of thoughts that have worked together in absolute harmony to elevate the noble building of sound, which has risen like an exhalation, have vanished together with the structure they animated. it has gone like the wonderful beauty of some fantastic cloud. his sorrow at this particular irreparable loss gives way to rapture as he reflects on the source whence came the inspiration. he could not possibly have _constructed_ such wonderful music: it was the god welling up within him: for this past hour divine inspiration has spoken through him. he has had one glimpse at the celestial radiance. how can he now think that the same god who expanded his heart lacks the power to fill it? the source from whence this river came must be inexhaustible, and it was vouchsafed to him to feel for a short time its infinite richness. the broken arcs on earth are the earnest of the perfect round in heaven. abt vogler says that the philosophers may each make his guess at the meaning of this earthly scheme of weal and woe: but the musicians, the musicians who have felt in their own bosoms the presence of the divine power and heard its marvellous voice,--why, the philosophers may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know! abt vogler (after he has been extemporising upon the musical instrument of his invention) i would that the structure brave, the manifold music i build, bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work, claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when solomon willed armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk, man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim, adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,-- should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable name, and pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved! ii would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine, this which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise! ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine, zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise! and one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell, burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things, then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well, founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs. iii and another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was, ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest, raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass, eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest: for higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire, when a great illumination surprises a festal night-- outlined round and round rome's dome from space to spire) up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight. iv in sight? not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth, nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as i; and the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, as the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky: novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star; meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine, for earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far. v nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the protoplast, furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last; or else the wonderful dead who have passed through the body and gone, but were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new: what never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon; and what is,--shall i say, matched both? for i was made perfect too. vi all through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, all through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, all through music and me! for think, had i painted the whole, why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: had i written the same, made verse--still, effect proceeds from cause, ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; it is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:-- vii but here is the finger of god, a flash of the will that can, existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! and i know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, that out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught: it is everywhere in the world--loud, soft, and all is said: give it to me to use! i mix it with two in my thought: and there! ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head! viii well, it is gone at last, the palace of music i reared; gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow; for one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, that he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go. never to be again! but many more of the kind as good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me? to me, who must be saved because i cling with my mind to the same, same self, same love, same god: ay, what was, shall be. ix therefore to whom turn i but to thee, the ineffable name. builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! what, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same? doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? there shall never be one lost good! what was, shall live as before; the evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; what was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; on the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. x all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity affirms the conception of an hour. the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by. xi and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonized? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized? sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know. xii well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: i will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. give me the keys. i feel for the common chord again, sliding by semitones till i sink to the minor,--yes, and i blunt it into a ninth, and i stand on alien ground, surveying awhile the heights i rolled from into the deep; which, hark, i have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, the c major of this life: so, now i will try to sleep. in the autumn following his wife's death browning wrote the poem _prospice_, which title means _look forward_! this is the most original poem on death in english literature. it shows that browning strictly and consistently followed the moral appended to _the glove_ --_venienti occurrite morbo_, run to meet approaching disaster! although the prayer-book expresses the wish that the good lord will deliver us from battle, murder, and sudden death, that hope was founded on the old superstition that it was more important how a man died than how he lived. if a man who had lived a righteous, sober and godly life died while playing cards or in innocent laughter, with no opportunity for the ministrations of a priest, his chances for the next world were thought to be slim. on the other hand, a damnable scoundrel on the scaffold, with the clergyman's assurances assented to, was supposed to be jerked into heaven. this view of life and death was firmly held even by so sincere and profound a thinker as hamlet: which explains his anguish at the fate of his father killed in his sleep, and his own refusal to slay the villain claudius at prayer. it is probable that thousands of worshippers who now devoutly pray to be delivered from sudden death, would really prefer that exit to any other. the reason is clear enough: it is to avoid the pain of slow dissolution, the sufferings of the death-bed, and the horrible fear of the dark. now browning boldly asks that he may be spared nothing of all these grim terrors. true to his conception of a poet, as a man who should understand all human experiences, he hopes that he may pass conscious and aware through the wonderful experience of dying. most sick folk become unconscious hours before death and slip over the line in total coma: browning wants to stay awake. i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. i want to taste it all, the physical suffering, the fear of the abyss: i want to hear the raving of the fiend-voices, to be in the very thick of the fight. he adds the splendid line, for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. brave hearts turn defeat into victory. browning died twenty-eight years after he wrote this poem, and his prayer was granted. he was conscious almost up to the last second, and fully aware of the nearness of death. even the manner of death, as described in the first line of the poem, came to be his own experience: for he died of bronchitis. prospice fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face, when the snows begin, and the blasts denote i am nearing the place, the power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe; where he stands, the arch fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go: for the journey is done and the summit attained, and the barriers fall, though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, the reward of it all. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. no! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers the heroes of old, bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness and cold. for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minute's at end, and the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest! one can hardly repress a smile at browning's thorough-going optimism, when he reads the poem, _apparent failure_, and then glances back at the title. _apparent_ failure! of all the defeated sons of earth, the nameless suicides whose wretched bodies are taken to the public morgue, ought surely, we should imagine, to be classed as absolute failures. but browning does not think so. it is possible, he says, that the reason why these poor outcasts abandoned life, was because their aspirations were so tremendously high that dull reality overpowered their spirits. goodness is better than badness: meekness better than ferocity: calm sense than mad ravings. but, after all, these poor fellows were god's creatures. his sun will eventually pierce the darkest cloud earth can stretch. somewhere, after many ages in the next life, these men will develop into something better under the sunshine of the smile of god. apparent failure "we shall soon lose a celebrated building." _paris newspaper_. i no, for i'll save it! seven years since, i passed through paris, stopped a day to see the baptism of your prince; saw, made my bow, and went my way: walking the heat and headache off, i took the seine-side, you surmise, thought of the congress, gortschakoff, cavour's appeal and buol's replies, so sauntered till--what met my eyes? ii only the doric little morgue! the dead-house where you show your drowned: petrarch's vaucluse makes proud the sorgue, your morgue has made the seine renowned. one pays one's debt in such a case; i plucked up heart and entered,--stalked, keeping a tolerable face compared with some whose cheeks were chalked: let them! no briton's to be baulked! iii first came the silent gazers; next, a screen of glass, we're thankful for; last, the sight's self, the sermon's text, the three men who did most abhor their life in paris yesterday, so killed themselves: and now, enthroned each on his copper couch, they lay fronting me, waiting to be owned. i thought, and think, their sin's atoned. iv poor men, god made, and all for that! the reverence struck me; o'er each head religiously was hung its hat, each coat dripped by the owner's bed, sacred from touch: each had his berth, his bounds, his proper place of rest, who last night tenanted on earth some arch, where twelve such slept abreast,-- unless the plain asphalte seemed best. v how did it happen, my poor boy? you wanted to be buonaparte and have the tuileries for toy, and could not, so it broke your heart? you, old one by his side, i judge, were, red as blood, a socialist, a leveller! does the empire grudge you've gained what no republic missed? be quiet, and unclench your fist! vi and this--why, he was red in vain, or black,--poor fellow that is blue! what fancy was it turned your brain? oh, women were the prize for you! money gets women, cards and dice get money, and ill-luck gets just the copper couch and one clear nice cool squirt of water o'er your bust, the right thing to extinguish lust! vii it's wiser being good than bad; it's safer being meek than fierce: it's fitter being sane than mad. my own hope is, a sun will pierce the thickest cloud earth ever stretched; that, after last, returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched; that what began best, can't end worst, nor what god blessed once, prove accurst. the poem _rephan_, the title of which was taken from the book of acts, has the same pleasant teaching we find in the play by ludwig fulda, called _schlaraffenland_, published in . in this drama, a boy, ragged, cold, and chronically hungry, falls asleep in a miserable room, and dreams that he is in a country of unalloyed delight. broiled chickens fly slowly by, easy to clutch and devour: expensive wardrobes await his immediate pleasure, and every conceivable wish is instantly and completely fulfilled. for a short time the boy is in ecstasies of joy: then the absence of effort, of counterbalancing privation, begins to make his heart dull: finally the paradise becomes so intolerable that he wakes with a scream--wakes in a dark, cold room, wakes in rags with his belly empty: and wakes in rapture at finding the good old earth of struggle and toil around him. contentment is stagnation: development is happiness. the mystery of life, its uncertainty, its joys paid for by effort, these make human existence worth while. browning delights to prove that the popular longing for static happiness would result in misery: that the sharp sides of life sting us into the real joy of living. he loves to take popular proverbs, which sum up the unconscious pessimism of humanity, and then show how false they are to fact. for example, we hear every day the expression, "no rose without a thorn," and we know very well what is meant. in _the ring and the book_, browning says: so a thorn comes to the aid of and completes the rose. rephan how i lived, ere my human life began in this world of yours,--like you, made man,-- when my home was the star of my god rephan? come then around me, close about, world-weary earth-born ones! darkest doubt or deepest despondency keeps you out? nowise! before a word i speak, let my circle embrace your worn, your weak, brow-furrowed old age, youth's hollow cheek-- diseased in the body, sick in soul, pinched poverty, satiate wealth,--your whole array of despairs! have i read the roll? all here? attend, perpend! o star of my god rephan, what wonders are in thy brilliance fugitive, faint and far! far from me, native to thy realm, who shared its perfections which o'erwhelm mind to conceive. let drift the helm, let drive the sail, dare unconfined embark for the vastitude, o mind, of an absolute bliss! leave earth behind! here, by extremes, at a mean you guess: there, all's at most--not more, not less: nowhere deficiency nor excess. no want--whatever should be, is now: no growth--that's change, and change comes--how to royalty born with crown on brow? nothing begins--so needs to end: where fell it short at first? extend only the same, no change can mend! i use your language: mine--no word of its wealth would help who spoke, who heard, to a gleam of intelligence. none preferred, none felt distaste when better and worse were uncontrastable: bless or curse what--in that uniform universe? can your world's phrase, your sense of things forth-figure the star of my god? no springs, no winters throughout its space. time brings no hope, no fear: as to-day, shall be to-morrow: advance or retreat need we at our stand-still through eternity? all happy: needs must we so have been, since who could be otherwise? all serene: what dark was to banish, what light to screen? earth's rose is a bud that's checked or grows as beams may encourage or blasts oppose: our lives leapt forth, each a full-orbed rose-- each rose sole rose in a sphere that spread above and below and around--rose-red: no fellowship, each for itself instead. one better than i--would prove i lacked somewhat: one worse were a jarring fact disturbing my faultlessly exact. how did it come to pass there lurked somehow a seed of change that worked obscure in my heart till perfection irked?-- till out of its peace at length grew strife-- hopes, fears, loves, hates,--obscurely rife,-- my life grown a-tremble to turn your life? was it thou, above all lights that are, prime potency, did thy hand unbar the prison-gate of rephan my star? in me did such potency wake a pulse could trouble tranquillity that lulls not lashes inertion till throes convulse soul's quietude into discontent? as when the completed rose bursts, rent by ardors till forth from its orb are sent new petals that mar--unmake the disc-- spoil rondure: what in it ran brave risk, changed apathy's calm to strife, bright, brisk, pushed simple to compound, sprang and spread till, fresh-formed, facetted, floretted, the flower that slept woke a star instead? no mimic of star rephan! how long i stagnated there where weak and strong, the wise and the foolish, right and wrong, are merged alike in a neutral best, can i tell? no more than at whose behest the passion arose in my passive breast, and i yearned for no sameness but difference in thing and thing, that should shock my sense with a want of worth in them all, and thence, startle me up, by an infinite discovered above and below me-height and depth alike to attract my flight, repel my descent: by hate taught love. oh, gain were indeed to see above supremacy ever--to move, remove, not reach--aspire yet never attain to the object aimed at! scarce in vain-- as each stage i left nor touched again. to suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss, wring knowledge from ignorance,--just for this-- to add one drop to a love-abyss! enough: for you doubt, you hope, o men, you fear, you agonize, die: what then? is an end to your life's work out of ken? have you no assurance that, earth at end, wrong will prove right? who made shall mend in the higher sphere to which yearnings tend? why should i speak? you divine the test. when the trouble grew in my pregnant breast a voice said "so wouldst thou strive, not rest?" "burn and not smoulder, win by worth, not rest content with a wealth that's dearth? thou art past rephan, thy place be earth!" browning was an optimist with his last breath. in the _prologue_ to _asolando_, a conventional person is supposed to be addressing the poet: he says, "of course your old age must be sad, because you have now lost all your youthful illusions. once you looked on the earth with rose-colored spectacles, but now you see the naked and commonplace reality of the things you used to think so radiant." browning's answer is significant, and the figure he uses wonderfully apt. suppose you are going to travel in europe: you go to the optician, and you ask for a first-rate magnifying-glass, that you may scan the ocean, and view the remote corners of cathedrals. now imagine him saying that he has for you something far better than that: he has a lovely kaleidoscope: apply your eye to the orifice, turn a little wheel, and you will behold all sorts of pretty colored rosettes. you would be naturally indignant. "do you take me for a child to be amused with a rattle? i don't want pretty colors: i want something that will bring the object, _exactly as it is_, as near to my eyes as it can possibly be brought." indeed, when one buys a glass for a telescope, if one has sufficient cash, one buys a glass made of crown and flint glass placed together, which destroys color, which produces what is called an _achromatic_ lens. now just as we judge of the value of a glass by its ability to bring things as they are within the range of our vision, so, says browning, old age is much better than youth. in age our old eyes become achromatic. the rosy illusions of youth vanish, thank god for it! the colors which we imagined belonged to the object were in reality in our imperfect eyes--as we grow older these pretty colors disappear and we see what? we see life itself. life is a greater and grander thing than any fool's illusion about it. the world of nature and man is infinitely more interesting and wonderful as it is than in any mistaken view of it. therefore old age is better than youth. prologue the poet's age is sad: for why? in youth, the natural world could show no common object but his eye at once involved with alien glow-- his own soul's iris-bow. "and now a flower is just a flower: man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man-- simply themselves, uncinct by dower of dyes which, when life's day began, round each in glory ran." friend, did you need an optic glass, which were your choice? a lens to drape in ruby, emerald, chrysopras, each object--or reveal its shape clear outlined, past escape, the naked very thing?--so clear that, when you had the chance to gaze, you found its inmost self appear through outer seeming-truth ablaze, not falsehood's fancy-haze? how many a year, my asolo, since--one step just from sea to land-- i found you, loved yet feared you so-- for natural objects seemed to stand palpably fire-clothed! no-- no mastery of mine o'er these! terror with beauty, like the bush burning but unconsumed. bend knees, drop eyes to earthward! language? tush! silence 'tis awe decrees. and now? the lambent flame is--where? lost from the naked world: earth, sky, hill, vale, tree, flower,--italia's rare o'er-running beauty crowds the eye-- but flame? the bush is bare. hill, vale, tree, flower--they stand distinct, nature to know and name. what then? a voice spoke thence which straight unlinked fancy from fact: see, all's in ken: has once my eyelid winked? no, for the purged ear apprehends earth's import, not the eye late dazed: the voice said "call my works thy friends! at nature dost thou shrink amazed? god is it who transcends." it is an interesting and dramatic parallel in literary history that tennyson and browning should each have published the last poem that appeared in his life-time in the same month of the same year, and that each farewell to the world should be so exactly characteristic of the poetic genius and spiritual temperament of the writer. in december, , came from the press _demeter and other poems_, closing with _crossing the bar_--came also _asolando_, closing with the _epilogue_. tennyson's lyric is exquisite in its tints of sunset, a serene close to a long and calmly beautiful day. it is the perfect tone of dignified departure, with the admonition to refrain from weeping, with the quiet assurance that all is well. browning's _epilogue_ is full of excitement and strenuous rage: there is no hint of acquiescence; it is a wild charge with drum and trumpet on the hidden foe. firm in the faith, full of plans for the future, he looks not on the darkening night, but on to-morrow's sunrise. he tells us not to pity him. he is angry at the thought that people on the streets of london, when they hear of his death will say, "poor browning! he's gone! how he loved life!" rather he wishes that just as in this life when a friend met him in the city with a face lighted up by the pleasure of the sudden encounter, with a shout of hearty welcome--so now, when your thoughts perhaps turn to me, let it not be with sorrow or pity, but with eager recognition. i shall be striving there as i strove here: greet me with a cheer! epilogue at the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, when you set your fancies free, will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, --pity me? oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! what had i on earth to do with the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did i drivel --being--who? one who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. no, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time greet the unseen with a cheer! bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "strive and thrive!" cry "speed,--fight on, fare ever there as here!" index _abt vogler_. addison, j., disgust for the alps. _andrea del sarto_. _another way of love_. _apparent failure_. _artemis prologises_. _asolando, prologue and epilogue_. asolo: browning's visits to, its place in his work; last summer passed there. austin, alfred, compared with f. thompson. _bad dreams_. _bells and pomegranates_, meaning of title. _bishop blougram's apology_. _bishop orders his tomb, the_. _blot in the 'scutcheon, a_. _boy and the angel, the_. browning, elizabeth barrett: engagement; her sonnets; described by her son; her ill health; invented name "dramatic lyric;" her assistance in r. browning's poems. browning, robert: parentage and early life; education; visit to russia; play-writing; first visit to italy; marriage; travels in italy and lives at paris; domestic life in florence described by hawthorne; death; personal habits; peculiarities; piano-playing; enthusiasm; friendship with tennyson; normality in appearance; excellence in character; his theory of poetry; his sonnets; his favorite feature the brow; fondness for yellow hair; his "rejected lovers,". browning, robert barrett: death at asolo; my conversation with. bryant, w. c., visits browning. byron, lord, lyrical power. _by the fireside_. _caliban on setebos_. campion, t., his lyrical power compared with donne's. carlyle, t.: travels to paris with the brownings; his smoking. _cavalier tunes_. _charles avison_. "_childe roland_." choate, j. h., his remark on old age. _christmas-eve_. _cleon_. _clive_. _confessions_. _count gismond_. _cristina_. _death in the desert, a_. _de gustibus_. _dis aliter visum_. donne, j.: compared with browning; compared with campion. dramatic lyric, origin of name. _dramatic lyrics_. _dramatic romances_. _dramatis persons_. eliot, george, _daniel deronda and my last duchess_. emerson, r. w.: pie and optimism; his opinion of tennyson's _ulysses_. _epistle, an, containing strange medical experience of karshish_. _eurydice_. _evelyn hope_. "_eyes calm beside thee_". _face, a_. fano: seldom visited; scene of picture of _guardian angel_. _fifine at the fair_; _epilogue to_. forster, j., his praise of _paracelsus_. _fra lippo lippi_. fulda, l., his play _schlaraffenland_ compared with _rephan_. _garden fancies, sibrandus schafnaburgensis_. _glove, the_ goethe, doctrine of elective affinities. _gold hair_. _grammarian's funeral, a_. gray, t., early appreciation of mountain scenery. _guardian angel, the_, hallam, a. h., home in wimpole street. hawthorne, n., visits browning in florence. _holy cross day_. _home-thoughts, from, abroad_. _home-thoughts, from the sea_. _how it strikes a contemporary_. "_how they brought the good news_." ibsen, h.: an original genius; _when we dead awaken_, _a doll's house_. _in a balcony_. _in a gondola_. _incident of the french camp_. _ivàn ivanovitch_. _james lee's wife_. _jocoseria, prologue to_. _johannes agricola in meditation_. jonson, b., his remarks on donne. _karshish (see epistle, an_). keats, j.: prosody in _endymion_; _bright star_; his conception of beauty; preface to _endymion_; his doctrine; of beauty. kipling, r., allusions to browning in _stalky and co_. _laboratory, the_. landor, w. s., his poetic tribute to browning. lanier, s., his criticism of _the ring and the book_. _la saisiag, prologue_ to. _last ride together, the_. lemoyne, sarah gowell, her reading aloud _meeting at night_. lessing, g. e., his: remark about truth. longfellow, h. w.: a better sonneteer than either tennyson or browning; _paul revere's ride_ compared with "_how they brought," etc_. _lost leader, the_. _lost mistress, the_. _love among the ruins_. _lover's quarrel, a_. _luria_. _macbeth_: german translation of; pessimistic speech by. macready, w. c., relations with browning. maeterlinck, m.: scene in _monna vanna_ taken from _luria_; his praise of browning's poetry. _master hugues of saxe-gotha_ _meeting at night_ _men and women_ _mesmerism_ mill, j. s., his opinion of _pauline_ _mulèykeh_ _my last duchess_ _my star_ _nationality in drinks_ _old pictures in florence_ omar khayyam, his figure of the potter compared with browning's, _one way of love_ _one word more_ _pacchiarotto_: _epilogue_ to, _prologue_ to, _paracelsus_ _parting at morning (see meeting at night_) _pauline_ _pippa passes_ pope: popularity of _essay on man_, his prosody compared with that of keats. _porphyria's lover_ _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ _prospice_ _rabbi ben ezra_ _rephan_ _respectability_ _reverie_ _ring and the book, the_ rossetti, d. g.: draws picture of tennyson; his opinion of _pauline_. rossetti, w. m., meets the brownings and the tennysons. _rudel to the lady of tripoli_ ruskin, j., his remark on _the bishop orders his tomb_. _saul_ schiller, f.: his poem _der handschuh_; his poem _das ideal und das leben_. schopenhauer, a.: father's financial help similar to browning's; his late-coming fame similar to browning's, his remark on rafael's _st. cecilia_. schumann, r. and mrs., presentation to the scandinavian king. shakespeare, w., browning declares him to be the supreme poet. sharp, w., characterization of _sordello_. shelley, p. b.: his vegetarianism imitated by browning; his lyrical power. _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_ (see _garden fancies_). _sludge (mr. ) the medium_. _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_. _soul's tragedy, a_. _sordello_. _statue and the bust, the_. stedman (mother of the poet, e.c.), her remarks on the health of mrs. browning in florence. _summum bonum_. tennyson, a.: reading aloud from _maud_; browning's letter to him; a genius for adaptation; wrote to please critics; compared with browning; his lyrical power; his lyrics compared with browning's; wrote no good sonnets; _lotos-eaters_; _ulysses_; _crossing the bar_; _st. agnes' eve_ compared with _johannes agricola_; _locksley hall_; his "rejected lovers" compared with browning's; his criticism of _the laboratory_; _crossing the bar_ compared with _epilogue to asolando_. thackeray, _vanity fair_. thompson, f., his poetry compared with austin's. _time's revenges_. _toccata of galuppi's_. _transcendentalism_. _twins, the_. _two poets of croisic_, the _epilogue_ to. _up at a villa--down in the city_. wagner, r.: his originality; his slow-coming fame; his operas. _which_. wister, o., criticism of browning's poetry in his novel _the virginian_. wordsworth, w.: served as model for _the lost leader_; his sincere love of the country. _youth and art_. life and letters of robert browning by mrs. sutherland orr second edition preface such letters of mr. browning's as appear, whole or in part, in the present volume have been in most cases given to me by the persons to whom they were addressed, or copied by miss browning from the originals under her care; but i owe to the daughter of the rev. w. j. fox--mrs. bridell fox--those written to her father and to miss flower; the two interesting extracts from her father's correspondence with herself and mr. browning's note to mr. robertson. for my general material i have been largely indebted to miss browning. her memory was the only existing record of her brother's boyhood and youth. it has been to me an unfailing as well as always accessible authority for that subsequent period of his life which i could only know in disconnected facts or his own fragmentary reminiscences. it is less true, indeed, to say that she has greatly helped me in writing this short biography than that without her help it could never have been undertaken. i thank my friends mrs. r. courtenay bell and miss hickey for their invaluable assistance in preparing the book for, and carrying it through the press; and i acknowledge with real gratitude the advantages derived by it from mr. dykes campbell's large literary experience in his very careful final revision of the proofs. a. orr. april , . contents chapter origin of the browning family--robert browning's grandfather--his position and character--his first and second marriage--unkindness towards his eldest son, robert browning's father--alleged infusion of west indian blood through robert browning's grandmother--existing evidence against it--the grandmother's portrait. chapter robert browning's father--his position in life--comparison between him and his son--tenderness towards his son--outline of his habits and character--his death--significant newspaper paragraph--letter of mr. locker--lampson--robert browning's mother--her character and antecedents--their influence upon her son--nervous delicacy imparted to both her children--its special evidences in her son. chapter - birth of robert browning--his childhood and schooldays--restless temperament--brilliant mental endowments--incidental peculiarities--strong religious feeling--passionate attachment to his mother; grief at first separation--fondness for animals--experiences of school life--extensive reading--early attempts in verse--letter from his father concerning them--spurious poems in circulation--'incondita'--mr. fox--miss flower. chapter - first impressions of keats and shelley--prolonged influence of shelley--details of home education--its effects--youthful restlessness--counteracting love of home--early friendships: alfred domett, joseph arnould, the silverthornes--choice of poetry as a profession--alternative suggestions; mistaken rumours concerning them--interest in art--love of good theatrical performances--talent for acting--final preparation for literary life. chapter - 'pauline'--letters to mr. fox--publication of the poem; chief biographical and literary characteristics--mr. fox's review in the 'monthly repository'; other notices--russian journey--desired diplomatic appointment--minor poems; first sonnet; their mode of appearance--'the trifler'--m. de ripert-monclar--'paracelsus'--letters to mr. fox concerning it; its publication--incidental origin of 'paracelsus'; its inspiring motive; its relation to 'pauline'--mr. fox's review of it in the 'monthly repository'--article in the 'examiner' by john forster. chapter - removal to hatcham; some particulars--renewed intercourse with the second family of robert browning's grandfather--reuben browning--william shergold browning--visitors at hatcham--thomas carlyle--social life--new friends and acquaintance--introduction to macready--new year's eve at elm place--introduction to john forster--miss fanny haworth--miss martineau--serjeant talfourd--the 'ion' supper--'strafford'--relations with macready--performance of 'strafford'--letters concerning it from mr. browning and miss flower--personal glimpses of robert browning--rival forms of dramatic inspiration--relation of 'strafford' to 'sordello'--mr. robertson and the 'westminster review'. chapter - first italian journey--letters to miss haworth--mr. john kenyon--'sordello'--letter to miss flower--'pippa passes'--'bells and pomegranates'. chapter - 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'--letters to mr. frank hill; lady martin--charles dickens--other dramas and minor poems--letters to miss lee; miss haworth; miss flower--second italian journey; naples--e. j. trelawney--stendhal. chapter - introduction to miss barrett--engagement--motives for secrecy--marriage--journey to italy--extract of letter from mr. fox--mrs. browning's letters to miss mitford--life at pisa--vallombrosa--florence; mr. powers; miss boyle--proposed british mission to the vatican--father prout--palazzo guidi--fano; ancona--'a blot in the 'scutcheon' at sadler's wells. chapter - death of mr. browning's mother--birth of his son--mrs. browning's letters continued--baths of lucca--florence again--venice--margaret fuller ossoli--visit to england--winter in paris--carlyle--george sand--alfred de musset. chapter - m. joseph milsand--his close friendship with mr. browning; mrs. browning's impression of him--new edition of mr. browning's poems--'christmas eve and easter day'--'essay' on shelley--summer in london--dante gabriel rossetti--florence; secluded life--letters from mr. and mrs. browning--'colombe's birthday'--baths of lucca--mrs. browning's letters--winter in rome--mr. and mrs. story--mrs. sartoris--mrs. fanny kemble--summer in london--tennyson--ruskin. chapter - 'men and women'--'karshook'--'two in the campagna'--winter in paris; lady elgin--'aurora leigh'--death of mr. kenyon and mr. barrett--penini--mrs. browning's letters to miss browning--the florentine carnival--baths of lucca--spiritualism--mr. kirkup; count ginnasi--letter from mr. browning to mr. fox--havre. chapter - mrs. browning's illness--siena--letter from mr. browning to mr. leighton--mrs. browning's letters continued--walter savage landor--winter in rome--mr. val prinsep--friends in rome: mr. and mrs. cartwright--multiplying social relations--massimo d'azeglio--siena again--illness and death of mrs. browning's sister--mr. browning's occupations--madame du quaire--mrs. browning's last illness and death. chapter - miss blagden--letters from mr. browning to miss haworth and mr. leighton--his feeling in regard to funeral ceremonies--establishment in london--plan of life--letter to madame du quaire--miss arabel barrett--biarritz--letters to miss blagden--conception of 'the ring and the book'--biographical indiscretion--new edition of his works--mr. and mrs. procter. chapter - pornic--'james lee's wife'--meeting at mr. f. palgrave's--letters to miss blagden--his own estimate of his work--his father's illness and death; miss browning--le croisic--academic honours; letter to the master of balliol--death of miss barrett--audierne--uniform edition of his works--his rising fame--'dramatis personae'--'the ring and the book'; character of pompilia. chapter - lord dufferin; helen's tower--scotland; visit to lady ashburton--letters to miss blagden--st.-aubin; the franco-prussian war--'herve riel'--letter to mr. g. m. smith--'balaustion's adventure'; 'prince hohenstiel--schwangau'--'fifine at the fair'--mistaken theories of mr. browning's work--st.-aubin; 'red cotton nightcap country'. chapter - london life--love of music--miss egerton-smith--periodical nervous exhaustion--mers; 'aristophanes' apology'--'agamemnon'--'the inn album'--'pacchiarotto and other poems'--visits to oxford and cambridge--letters to mrs. fitz-gerald--st. andrews; letter from professor knight--in the savoyard mountains--death of miss egerton-smith--'la saisiaz'; 'the two poets of croisic'--selections from his works. chapter - he revisits italy; asolo; letters to mrs. fitz-gerald--venice--favourite alpine retreats--mrs. arthur bronson--life in venice--a tragedy at saint-pierre--mr. cholmondeley--mr. browning's patriotic feeling; extract from letter to mrs. charles skirrow--'dramatic idyls'--'jocoseria'--'ferishtah's fancies'. chapter - the browning society; mr. furnivall; miss e. h. hickey--his attitude towards the society; letter to mrs. fitz-gerald--mr. thaxter, mrs. celia thaxter--letter to miss hickey; 'strafford'--shakspere and wordsworth societies--letters to professor knight--appreciation in italy; professor nencioni--the goldoni sonnet--mr. barrett browning; palazzo manzoni--letters to mrs. charles skirrow--mrs. bloomfield moore--llangollen; sir theodore and lady martin--loss of old friends--foreign correspondent of the royal academy--'parleyings with certain people of importance in their day'. chapter constancy to habit--optimism--belief in providence--political opinions--his friendships--reverence for genius--attitude towards his public--attitude towards his work--habits of work--his reading--conversational powers--impulsiveness and reserve--nervous peculiarities--his benevolence--his attitude towards women. chapter - marriage of mr. barrett browning--removal to de vere gardens--symptoms of failing strength--new poems; new edition of his works--letters to mr. george bainton, mr. smith, and lady martin--primiero and venice--letters to miss keep--the last year in london--asolo--letters to mrs. fitz-gerald, mrs. skirrow, and mr. g. m. smith. chapter proposed purchase of land at asolo--venice--letter to mr. g. moulton-barrett--lines in the 'athenaeum'--letter to miss keep--illness--death--funeral ceremonial at venice--publication of 'asolando'--interment in poets' corner. conclusion index portrait of robert browning ( ) mr. browning's study in de vere gardens life and letters of robert browning chapter origin of the browning family--robert browning's grandfather--his position and character--his first and second marriage--unkindness towards his eldest son, robert browning's father--alleged infusion of west indian blood through robert browning's grandmother--existing evidence against it--the grandmother's portrait. a belief was current in mr. browning's lifetime that he had jewish blood in his veins. it received outward support from certain accidents of his life, from his known interest in the hebrew language and literature, from his friendship for various members of the jewish community in london. it might well have yielded to the fact of his never claiming the kinship, which could not have existed without his knowledge, and which, if he had known it, he would, by reason of these very sympathies, have been the last person to disavow. the results of more recent and more systematic inquiry have shown the belief to be unfounded. our poet sprang, on the father's side, from an obscure or, as family tradition asserts, a decayed branch, of an anglo-saxon stock settled, at an early period of our history, in the south, and probably also south-west, of england. a line of brownings owned the manors of melbury-sampford and melbury-osmond, in north-west dorsetshire; their last representative disappeared--or was believed to do so--in the time of henry vii., their manors passing into the hands of the earls of ilchester, who still hold them.* the name occurs after in different parts of the country: in two cases with the affix of 'esquire', in two also, though not in both coincidently, within twenty miles of pentridge, where the first distinct traces of the poet's family appear. its cradle, as he called it, was woodyates, in the parish of pentridge, on the wiltshire confines of dorsetshire; and there his ancestors, of the third and fourth generations, held, as we understand, a modest but independent social position. * i am indebted for these facts, as well as for some others referring to, or supplied by, mr. browning's uncles, to some notes made for the browning society by dr. furnivall. this fragment of history, if we may so call it, accords better with our impression of mr. browning's genius than could any pedigree which more palpably connected him with the 'knightly' and 'squirely' families whose name he bore. it supplies the strong roots of english national life to which we instinctively refer it. both the vivid originality of that genius and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as, in some sense, the product of virgin soil; and although the varied elements which entered into its growth were racial as well as cultural, and inherited as well as absorbed, the evidence of its strong natural or physical basis remains undisturbed. mr. browning, for his own part, maintained a neutral attitude in the matter. he neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family. he preserved the old framed coat-of-arms handed down to him from his grandfather; and used, without misgiving as to his right to do so, a signet-ring engraved from it, the gift of a favourite uncle, in years gone by. but, so long as he was young, he had no reason to think about his ancestors; and, when he was old, he had no reason to care about them; he knew himself to be, in every possible case, the most important fact in his family history. roi ne suis, ni prince aussi, suis le seigneur de conti, he wrote, a few years back, to a friend who had incidentally questioned him about it. our immediate knowledge of the family begins with mr. browning's grandfather, also a robert browning, who obtained through lord shaftesbury's influence a clerkship in the bank of england, and entered on it when barely twenty, in . he served fifty years, and rose to the position of principal of the bank stock office, then an important one, and which brought him into contact with the leading financiers of the day. he became also a lieutenant in the honourable artillery company, and took part in the defence of the bank in the gordon riots of . he was an able, energetic, and worldly man: an englishman, very much of the provincial type; his literary tastes being limited to the bible and 'tom jones', both of which he is said to have read through once a year. he possessed a handsome person and, probably, a vigorous constitution, since he lived to the age of eighty-four, though frequently tormented by gout; a circumstance which may help to account for his not having seen much of his grandchildren, the poet and his sister; we are indeed told that he particularly dreaded the lively boy's vicinity to his afflicted foot. he married, in , margaret, daughter of a mr. tittle by his marriage with miss seymour; and who was born in the west indies and had inherited property there. they had three children: robert, the poet's father; a daughter, who lived an uneventful life and plays no part in the family history; and another son who died an infant. the creole mother died also when her eldest boy was only seven years old, and passed out of his memory in all but an indistinct impression of having seen her lying in her coffin. five years later the widower married a miss smith, who gave him a large family. this second marriage of mr. browning's was a critical event in the life of his eldest son; it gave him, to all appearance, two step-parents instead of one. there could have been little sympathy between his father and himself, for no two persons were ever more unlike, but there was yet another cause for the systematic unkindness under which the lad grew up. mr. browning fell, as a hard man easily does, greatly under the influence of his second wife, and this influence was made by her to subserve the interests of a more than natural jealousy of her predecessor. an early instance of this was her banishing the dead lady's portrait to a garret, on the plea that her husband did not need two wives. the son could be no burden upon her because he had a little income, derived from his mother's brother; but this, probably, only heightened her ill-will towards him. when he was old enough to go to a university, and very desirous of going--when, moreover, he offered to do so at his own cost--she induced his father to forbid it, because, she urged, they could not afford to send their other sons to college. an earlier ambition of his had been to become an artist; but when he showed his first completed picture to his father, the latter turned away and refused to look at it. he gave himself the finishing stroke in the parental eyes, by throwing up a lucrative employment which he had held for a short time on his mother's west indian property, in disgust at the system of slave labour which was still in force there; and he paid for this unpractical conduct as soon as he was of age, by the compulsory reimbursement of all the expenses which his father, up to that date, had incurred for him; and by the loss of his mother's fortune, which, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her. it was probably in despair of doing anything better, that, soon after this, in his twenty-second year, he also became a clerk in the bank of england. he married and settled in camberwell, in ; his son and daughter were born, respectively, in and . he became a widower in ; and when, four years later, he had completed his term of service at the bank, he went with his daughter to paris, where they resided until his death in . dr. furnivall has originated a theory, and maintains it as a conviction, that mr. browning's grandmother was more than a creole in the strict sense of the term, that of a person born of white parents in the west indies, and that an unmistakable dash of dark blood passed from her to her son and grandson. such an occurrence was, on the face of it, not impossible, and would be absolutely unimportant to my mind, and, i think i may add, to that of mr. browning's sister and son. the poet and his father were what we know them, and if negro blood had any part in their composition, it was no worse for them, and so much the better for the negro. but many persons among us are very averse to the idea of such a cross; i believe its assertion, in the present case, to be entirely mistaken; i prefer, therefore, touching on the facts alleged in favour of it, to passing them over in a silence which might be taken to mean indifference, but might also be interpreted into assent. we are told that mr. browning was so dark in early life, that a nephew who saw him in paris, in , mistook him for an italian. he neither had nor could have had a nephew; and he was not out of england at the time specified. it is said that when mr. browning senior was residing on his mother's sugar plantation at st. kitt's, his appearance was held to justify his being placed in church among the coloured members of the congregation. we are assured in the strongest terms that the story has no foundation, and this by a gentleman whose authority in all matters concerning the browning family dr. furnivall has otherwise accepted as conclusive. if the anecdote were true it would be a singular circumstance that mr. browning senior was always fond of drawing negro heads, and thus obviously disclaimed any unpleasant association with them. i do not know the exact physical indications by which a dark strain is perceived; but if they are to be sought in the colouring of eyes, hair, and skin, they have been conspicuously absent in the two persons who in the present case are supposed to have borne them. the poet's father had light blue eyes and, i am assured by those who knew him best, a clear, ruddy complexion. his appearance induced strangers passing him in the paris streets to remark, 'c'est un anglais!' the absolute whiteness of miss browning's skin was modified in her brother by a sallow tinge sufficiently explained by frequent disturbance of the liver; but it never affected the clearness of his large blue-grey eyes; and his hair, which grew dark as he approached manhood, though it never became black, is spoken of, by everyone who remembers him in childhood and youth, as golden. it is no less worthy of note that the daughter of his early friend mr. fox, who grew up in the little social circle to which he belonged, never even heard of the dark cross now imputed to him; and a lady who made his acquaintance during his twenty-fourth year, wrote a sonnet upon him, beginning with these words: thy brow is calm, young poet--pale and clear as a moonlighted statue. the suggestion of italian characteristics in the poet's face may serve, however, to introduce a curious fact, which can have no bearing on the main lines of his descent, but holds collateral possibilities concerning it. his mother's name wiedemann or wiedeman appears in a merely contracted form as that of one of the oldest families naturalized in venice. it became united by marriage with the rezzonico; and, by a strange coincidence, the last of these who occupied the palace now owned by mr. barrett browning was a widman-rezzonico. the present contessa widman has lately restored her own palace, which was falling into ruin. that portrait of the first mrs. browning, which gave so much umbrage to her husband's second wife, has hung for many years in her grandson's dining-room, and is well known to all his friends. it represents a stately woman with an unmistakably fair skin; and if the face or hair betrays any indication of possible dark blood, it is imperceptible to the general observer, and must be of too slight and fugitive a nature to enter into the discussion. a long curl touches one shoulder. one hand rests upon a copy of thomson's 'seasons', which was held to be the proper study and recreation of cultivated women in those days. the picture was painted by wright of derby. a brother of this lady was an adventurous traveller, and was said to have penetrated farther into the interior of africa than any other european of his time. his violent death will be found recorded in a singular experience of the poet's middle life. chapter robert browning's father--his position in life--comparison between him and his son--tenderness towards his son--outline of his habits and character--his death--significant newspaper paragraph--letter of mr. locker-lampson--robert browning's mother--her character and antecedents--their influence upon her son--nervous delicacy imparted to both her children--its special evidences in her son. it was almost a matter of course that robert browning's father should be disinclined for bank work. we are told, and can easily imagine, that he was not so good an official as the grandfather; we know that he did not rise so high, nor draw so large a salary. but he made the best of his position for his family's sake, and it was at that time both more important and more lucrative than such appointments have since become. its emoluments could be increased by many honourable means not covered by the regular salary. the working-day was short, and every additional hour's service well paid. to be enrolled on the night-watch was also very remunerative; there were enormous perquisites in pens, paper, and sealing-wax.* mr. browning availed himself of these opportunities of adding to his income, and was thus enabled, with the help of his private means, to gratify his scholarly and artistic tastes, and give his children the benefit of a very liberal education--the one distinct ideal of success in life which such a nature as his could form. constituted as he was, he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness which had forced him into an uncongenial career. its only palpable result was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own time came. * i have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious reverence. he could never endure to see a scrap of writing- paper wasted. many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet a happier childhood and youth than his father had had. his path was to be smoothed not only by natural affection and conscientious care, but by literary and artistic sympathy. the second mr. browning differed, in certain respects, as much from the third as from the first. there were, nevertheless, strong points in which, if he did not resemble, he at least distinctly foreshadowed him; and the genius of the one would lack some possible explanation if we did not recognize in great measure its organized material in the other. much, indeed, that was genius in the son existed as talent in the father. the moral nature of the younger man diverged from that of the older, though retaining strong points of similarity; but the mental equipments of the two differed far less in themselves than in the different uses to which temperament and circumstances trained them. the most salient intellectual characteristic of mr. browning senior was his passion for reading. in his daughter's words, 'he read in season, and out of season;' and he not only read, but remembered. as a schoolboy, he knew by heart the first book of the 'iliad', and all the odes of horace; and it shows how deeply the classical part of his training must have entered into him, that he was wont, in later life, to soothe his little boy to sleep by humming to him an ode of anacreon. it was one of his amusements at school to organize homeric combats among the boys, in which the fighting was carried on in the manner of the greeks and trojans, and he and his friend kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields, and hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves to battle by insulting speeches derived from the homeric text.* * this anecdote is partly quoted from mrs. andrew crosse, who has introduced it into her article 'john kenyon and his friends', 'temple bar', april . she herself received it from mr. dykes campbell. mr. browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying, and taught his son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember, by joining them to a grotesque rhyme; the child learned all his latin declensions in this way. his love of art had been proved by his desire to adopt it as a profession; his talent for it was evidenced by the life and power of the sketches, often caricatures, which fell from his pen or pencil as easily as written words. mr. barrett browning remembers gaining a very early elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic illustrated rhymes (now in the possession of their old friend, mrs. fraser corkran) through which his grandfather impressed upon him the names and position of the principal bones of the human body. even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in which mr. browning read. he carried into it all the preciseness of the scholar. it was his habit when he bought a book--which was generally an old one allowing of this addition--to have some pages of blank paper bound into it. these he filled with notes, chronological tables, or such other supplementary matter as would enhance the interest, or assist the mastering, of its contents; all written in a clear and firm though by no means formal handwriting. more than one book thus treated by him has passed through my hands, leaving in me, it need hardly be said, a stronger impression of the owner's intellectual quality than the acquisition by him of the finest library could have conveyed. one of the experiences which disgusted him with st. kitt's was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited. in his faculties and attainments, as in his pleasures and appreciations, he showed the simplicity and genuineness of a child. he was not only ready to amuse, he could always identify himself with children, his love for whom never failed him in even his latest years. his more than childlike indifference to pecuniary advantages had been shown in early life. he gave another proof of it after his wife's death, when he declined a proposal, made to him by the bank of england, to assist in founding one of its branch establishments in liverpool. he never indeed, personally, cared for money, except as a means of acquiring old, i.e. rare books, for which he had, as an acquaintance declared, the scent of a hound and the snap of a bulldog. his eagerness to possess such treasures was only matched by the generosity with which he parted with them; and his daughter well remembers the feeling of angry suspicion with which she and her brother noted the periodical arrival of a certain visitor who would be closeted with their father for hours, and steal away before the supper time, when the family would meet, with some precious parcel of books or prints under his arm. it is almost superfluous to say that he was indifferent to creature comforts. miss browning was convinced that, if on any occasion she had said to him, 'there will be no dinner to-day,' he would only have looked up from his book to reply, 'all right, my dear, it is of no consequence.' in his bank-clerk days, when he sometimes dined in town, he left one restaurant with which he was not otherwise dissatisfied, because the waiter always gave him the trouble of specifying what he would have to eat. a hundred times that trouble would not have deterred him from a kindly act. of his goodness of heart, indeed, many distinct instances might be given; but even this scanty outline of his life has rendered them superfluous. mr. browning enjoyed splendid physical health. his early love of reading had not precluded a wholesome enjoyment of athletic sports; and he was, as a boy, the fastest runner and best base-ball player in his school. he died, like his father, at eighty-four (or rather, within a few days of eighty-five), but, unlike him, he had never been ill; a french friend exclaimed when all was over, 'il n'a jamais ete vieux.' his faculties were so unclouded up to the last moment that he could watch himself dying, and speculate on the nature of the change which was befalling him. 'what do you think death is, robert?' he said to his son; 'is it a fainting, or is it a pang?' a notice of his decease appeared in an american newspaper. it was written by an unknown hand, and bears a stamp of genuineness which renders the greater part of it worth quoting. 'he was not only a ruddy, active man, with fine hair, that retained its strength and brownness to the last, but he had a courageous spirit and a remarkably intelligent mind. he was a man of the finest culture, and was often, and never vainly, consulted by his son robert concerning the more recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet liked so well to disturb. his knowledge of old french, spanish, and italian literature was wonderful. the old man went smiling and peaceful to his long rest, preserving his faculties to the last, insomuch that the physician, astonished at his continued calmness and good humour, turned to his daughter, and said in a low voice, "does this gentleman know that he is dying?" the daughter said in a voice which the father could hear, "he knows it;" and the old man said with a quiet smile, "death is no enemy in my eyes." his last words were spoken to his son robert, who was fanning him, "i fear i am wearying you, dear."' four years later one of his english acquaintances in paris, mr. frederick locker, now mr. locker-lampson, wrote to robert browning as follows: dec. , . my dear browning,--i have always thought that you or miss browning, or some other capable person, should draw up a sketch of your excellent father so that, hereafter, it might be known what an interesting man he was. i used often to meet you in paris, at lady elgin's. she had a genuine taste for poetry, and she liked being read to, and i remember you gave her a copy of keats' poems, and you used often to read his poetry to her. lady elgin died in , and i think it was in that year that lady charlotte and i saw the most of mr. browning.* he was then quite an elderly man, if years could make him so, but he had so much vivacity of manner, and such simplicity and freshness of mind, that it was difficult to think him old. * mr. locker was then married to lady charlotte bruce, lady elgin's daughter. i remember, he and your sister lived in an apartment in the rue de grenelle, st. germain, in quite a simple fashion, much in the way that most people live in paris, and in the way that all sensible people would wish to live all over the world. your father and i had at least one taste and affection in common. he liked hunting the old bookstalls on the 'quais', and he had a great love and admiration for hogarth; and he possessed several of hogarth's engravings, some in rare and early states of the plate; and he would relate with glee the circumstances under which he had picked them up, and at so small a price too! however, he had none of the 'petit-maitre' weakness of the ordinary collector, which is so common, and which i own to!--such as an infatuation for tall copies, and wide margins. i remember your father was fond of drawing in a rough and ready fashion; he had plenty of talent, i should think not very great cultivation; but quite enough to serve his purpose, and to amuse his friends. he had a thoroughly lively and _healthy_ interest in your poetry, and he showed me some of your boyish attempts at versification. taking your dear father altogether, i quite believe him to have been one of those men--interesting men--whom the world never hears of. perhaps he was shy--at any rate he was much less known than he ought to have been; and now, perhaps, he only remains in the recollection of his family, and of one or two superior people (like myself!) who were capable of appreciating him. my dear browning, i really hope you will draw up a slight sketch of your father before it is too late. yours, frederick locker. the judgments thus expressed twenty years ago are cordially re-stated in the letter in which mr. locker-lampson authorizes me to publish them. the desired memoir was never written; but the few details which i have given of the older mr. browning's life and character may perhaps stand for it. with regard to the 'strict dissent' with which her parents have been taxed, miss browning writes to me: 'my father was born and educated in the church of england, and, for many years before his death, lived in her communion. he became a dissenter in middle life, and my mother, born and brought up in the kirk of scotland, became one also; but they could not be called bigoted, since we always in the evening attended the preaching of the rev. henry melvill* (afterwards canon of st. paul's), whose sermons robert much admired.'** * at camden chapel, camberwell. ** mr. browning was much interested, in later years, in hearing canon, perhaps then already archdeacon, farrar extol his eloquence and ask whether he had known him. mr. ruskin also spoke of him with admiration. little need be said about the poet's mother. she was spoken of by carlyle as 'the true type of a scottish gentlewoman.' mr. kenyon declared that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it wherever they were. but her character was all resumed in her son's words, spoken with the tremulous emotion which so often accompanied his allusion to those he had loved and lost: 'she was a divine woman.' she was scotch on the maternal side, and her kindly, gentle, but distinctly evangelical christianity must have been derived from that source. her father, william wiedemann, a ship-owner, was a hamburg german settled in dundee, and has been described by mr. browning as an accomplished draughtsman and musician. she herself had nothing of the artist about her, though we hear of her sometimes playing the piano; in all her goodness and sweetness she seems to have been somewhat matter-of-fact. but there is abundant indirect evidence of mr. browning's love of music having come to him through her, and we are certainly justified in holding the scottish-german descent as accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality so early apparent in the poet's mind, and of which we find no evidence in that of his father. his strong religious instincts must have been derived from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by his mother. there is yet another point on which mrs. browning must have influenced the life and destinies of her son, that of physical health, or, at least, nervous constitution. she was a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was perhaps a symptom of this condition. the acute ailment reproduced itself in her daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution. with the brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present, if more difficult to trace. we have been accustomed to speaking of him as a brilliantly healthy man; he was healthy, even strong, in many essential respects. until past the age of seventy he could take long walks without fatigue, and endure an amount of social and general physical strain which would have tried many younger men. he carried on until the last a large, if not always serious, correspondence, and only within the latest months, perhaps weeks of his life, did his letters even suggest that physical brain-power was failing him. he had, within the limits which his death has assigned to it, a considerable recuperative power. his consciousness of health was vivid, so long as he was well; and it was only towards the end that the faith in his probable length of days occasionally deserted him. but he died of no acute disease, more than seven years younger than his father, having long carried with him external marks of age from which his father remained exempt. till towards the age of forty he suffered from attacks of sore-throat, not frequent, but of an angry kind. he was constantly troubled by imperfect action of the liver, though no doctor pronounced the evil serious. i have spoken of this in reference to his complexion. during the last twenty years, if not for longer, he rarely spent a winter without a suffocating cold and cough; within the last five, asthmatic symptoms established themselves; and when he sank under what was perhaps his first real attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very severe, but because the heart was exhausted. the circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him. this would perhaps be a mistake. it is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his younger body and mind. any symptom of organic disease could scarcely, in his case, have been overlooked. but so much is certain: he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father nor grandfather could have bequeathed to him. he imputed to this, or, in other words, to an undue physical sensitiveness to mental causes of irritation, his proneness to deranged liver, and the asthmatic conditions which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be produced by it. he was perhaps mistaken in some of his inferences, but he was not mistaken in the fact. he had the pleasures as well as the pains of this nervous temperament; its quick response to every congenial stimulus of physical atmosphere, and human contact. it heightened the enjoyment, perhaps exaggerated the consciousness of his physical powers. it also certainly in his later years led him to overdraw them. many persons have believed that he could not live without society; a prolonged seclusion from it would, for obvious reasons, have been unsuited to him. but the excited gaiety which to the last he carried into every social gathering was often primarily the result of a moral and physical effort which his temperament prompted, but his strength could not always justify. nature avenged herself in recurrent periods of exhaustion, long before the closing stage had set in. i shall subsequently have occasion to trace this nervous impressibility through various aspects and relations of his life; all i now seek to show is that this healthiest of poets and most real of men was not compounded of elements of pure health, and perhaps never could have been so. it might sound grotesque to say that only a delicate woman could have been the mother of robert browning. the fact remains that of such a one, and no other, he was born; and we may imagine, without being fanciful, that his father's placid intellectual powers required for their transmutation into poetic genius just this infusion of a vital element not only charged with other racial and individual qualities, but physically and morally more nearly allied to pain. perhaps, even for his happiness as a man, we could not have wished it otherwise. chapter - birth of robert browning--his childhood and schooldays--restless temperament--brilliant mental endowments--incidental peculiarities--strong religious feeling--passionate attachment to his mother; grief at first separation--fondness for animals--experiences of school life--extensive reading--early attempts in verse--letter from his father concerning them--spurious poems in circulation--'incondita'--mr. fox--miss flower. robert browning was born, as has been often repeated, at camberwell, on may , , soon after a great comet had disappeared from the sky. he was a handsome, vigorous, fearless child, and soon developed an unresting activity and a fiery temper. he clamoured for occupation from the moment he could speak. his mother could only keep him quiet when once he had emerged from infancy by telling him stories--doubtless bible stories--while holding him on her knee. his energies were of course destructive till they had found their proper outlet; but we do not hear of his ever having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so. his first recorded piece of mischief was putting a handsome brussels lace veil of his mother's into the fire; but the motive, which he was just old enough to lisp out, was also his excuse: 'a pitty baze [pretty blaze], mamma.' imagination soon came to his rescue. it has often been told how he extemporized verse aloud while walking round and round the dining-room table supporting himself by his hands, when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it. he remembered having entertained his mother in the very first walk he was considered old enough to take with her, by a fantastic account of his possessions in houses, &c., of which the topographical details elicited from her the remark, 'why, sir, you are quite a geographer.' and though this kind of romancing is common enough among intelligent children, it distinguishes itself in this case by the strong impression which the incident had left on his own mind. it seems to have been a first real flight of dramatic fancy, confusing his identity for the time being. the power of inventing did not, however, interfere with his readiness to learn, and the facility with which he acquired whatever knowledge came in his way had, on one occasion, inconvenient results. a lady of reduced fortunes kept a small elementary school for boys, a stone's-throw from his home; and he was sent to it as a day boarder at so tender an age that his parents, it is supposed, had no object in view but to get rid of his turbulent activity for an hour or two every morning and afternoon. nevertheless, his proficiency in reading and spelling was soon so much ahead of that of the biggest boy, that complaints broke out among the mammas, who were sure there was not fair play. mrs.----was neglecting her other pupils for the sake of 'bringing on master browning;' and the poor lady found it necessary to discourage master browning's attendance lest she should lose the remainder of her flock. this, at least, was the story as he himself remembered it. according to miss browning his instructress did not yield without a parting shot. she retorted on the discontented parents that, if she could give their children 'master browning's intellect', she would have no difficulty in satisfying them. after this came the interlude of home-teaching, in which all his elementary knowledge must have been gained. as an older child he was placed with two misses ready, who prepared boys for entering their brother's (the rev. thomas ready's) school; and in due time he passed into the latter, where he remained up to the age of fourteen. he seems in those early days to have had few playmates beyond his sister, two years younger than himself, and whom his irrepressible spirit must sometimes have frightened or repelled. nor do we hear anything of childish loves; and though an entry appeared in his diary one sunday in about the seventh or eighth year of his age, 'married two wives this morning,' it only referred to a vague imaginary appropriation of two girls whom he had just seen in church, and whose charm probably lay in their being much bigger than he. he was, however, capable of a self-conscious shyness in the presence of even a little girl; and his sense of certain proprieties was extraordinarily keen. he told a friend that on one occasion, when the merest child, he had edged his way by the wall from one point of his bedroom to another, because he was not fully clothed, and his reflection in the glass could otherwise have been seen through the partly open door.* * another anecdote, of a very different kind, belongs to an earlier period, and to that category of pure naughtiness which could not fail to be sometimes represented in the conduct of so gifted a child. an old lady who visited his mother, and was characterized in the family as 'aunt betsy', had irritated him by pronouncing the word 'lovers' with the contemptuous jerk which the typical old maid is sometimes apt to impart to it, when once the question had arisen why a certain 'lovers' walk' was so called. he was too nearly a baby to imagine what a 'lover' was; he supposed the name denoted a trade or occupation. but his human sympathy resented aunt betsy's manner as an affront; and he determined, after probably repeated provocation, to show her something worse than a 'lover', whatever this might be. so one night he slipped out of bed, exchanged his nightgown for what he considered the appropriate undress of a devil, completed this by a paper tail, and the ugliest face he could make, and rushed into the drawing-room, where the old lady and his mother were drinking tea. he was snatched up and carried away before he had had time to judge the effect of his apparition; but he did not think, looking back upon the circumstances in later life, that aunt betsy had deserved quite so ill of her fellow-creatures as he then believed. his imaginative emotions were largely absorbed by religion. the early biblical training had had its effect, and he was, to use his own words, 'passionately religious' in those nursery years; but during them and many succeeding ones, his mother filled his heart. he loved her so much, he has been heard to say, that even as a grown man he could not sit by her otherwise than with an arm round her waist. it is difficult to measure the influence which this feeling may have exercised on his later life; it led, even now, to a strange and touching little incident which had in it the incipient poet no less than the loving child. his attendance at miss ready's school only kept him from home from monday till saturday of every week; but when called upon to confront his first five days of banishment he felt sure that he would not survive them. a leaden cistern belonging to the school had in, or outside it, the raised image of a face. he chose the cistern for his place of burial, and converted the face into his epitaph by passing his hand over and over it to a continuous chant of: 'in memory of unhappy browning'--the ceremony being renewed in his spare moments, till the acute stage of the feeling had passed away. the fondness for animals for which through life he was noted, was conspicuous in his very earliest days. his urgent demand for 'something to do' would constantly include 'something to be caught' for him: 'they were to catch him an eft;' 'they were to catch him a frog.' he would refuse to take his medicine unless bribed by the gift of a speckled frog from among the strawberries; and the maternal parasol, hovering above the strawberry bed during the search for this object of his desires, remained a standing picture in his remembrance. but the love of the uncommon was already asserting itself; and one of his very juvenile projects was a collection of rare creatures, the first contribution to which was a couple of lady-birds, picked up one winter's day on a wall and immediately consigned to a box lined with cotton-wool, and labelled, 'animals found surviving in the depths of a severe winter.' nor did curiosity in this case weaken the power of sympathy. his passion for birds and beasts was the counterpart of his father's love of children, only displaying itself before the age at which child-love naturally appears. his mother used to read croxall's fables to his little sister and him. the story contained in them of a lion who was kicked to death by an ass affected him so painfully that he could no longer endure the sight of the book; and as he dared not destroy it, he buried it between the stuffing and the woodwork of an old dining-room chair, where it stood for lost, at all events for the time being. when first he heard the adventures of the parrot who insisted on leaving his cage, and who enjoyed himself for a little while and then died of hunger and cold, he--and his sister with him--cried so bitterly that it was found necessary to invent a different ending, according to which the parrot was rescued just in time and brought back to his cage to live peacefully in it ever after. as a boy, he kept owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle, and even a couple of large snakes, constantly bringing home the more portable creatures in his pockets, and transferring them to his mother for immediate care. i have heard him speak admiringly of the skilful tenderness with which she took into her lap a lacerated cat, washed and sewed up its ghastly wound, and nursed it back to health. the great intimacy with the life and habits of animals which reveals itself in his works is readily explained by these facts. mr. ready's establishment was chosen for him as the best in the neighbourhood; and both there and under the preparatory training of that gentleman's sisters, the young robert was well and kindly cared for. the misses ready especially concerned themselves with the spiritual welfare of their pupils. the periodical hair-brushings were accompanied by the singing, and fell naturally into the measure, of watts's hymns; and mr. browning has given his friends some very hearty laughs by illustrating with voice and gesture the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would swoop down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines: lord, 'tis a pleasant thing to stand in gardens planted by thy hand. . . . . . fools never raise their thoughts so high, like 'brutes' they live, like _brutes_ they die. he even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things.* he had become a bigger boy since the episode of the cistern, and had probably in some degree outgrown the intense piety of his earlier childhood. this little incident seems to prove it. on the whole, however, his religious instincts did not need strengthening, though his sense of humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of teachers as from the other. i do not suppose that the mental training at mr. ready's was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant abilities of robert browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it, as also for the average schoolboy intelligence to which it was apparently adapted. it must be for this reason that, as he himself declared, he never gained a prize, although these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them; and if he did not make friends at school (for this also has been somewhere observed),** it can only be explained in the same way. he was at an intolerant age, and if his schoolfellows struck him as more backward or more stupid than they need be, he is not likely to have taken pains to conceal the impression. it is difficult, at all events, to think of him as unsociable, and his talents certainly had their amusing side. miss browning tells me that he made his schoolfellows act plays, some of which he had written for them; and he delighted his friends, not long ago, by mimicking his own solemn appearance on some breaking-up or commemorative day, when, according to programme, 'master browning' ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition. * in spite of this ludicrous association mr. browning always recognized great merit in watts's hymns, and still more in dr. watts himself, who had devoted to this comparatively humble work intellectual powers competent to far higher things. ** it was in no case literally true. william, afterwards sir william, channel was leaving mr. ready when browning went to him; but a friendly acquaintance began, and was afterwards continued, between the two boys; and a closer friendship, formed with a younger brother frank, was only interrupted by his death. another school friend or acquaintance recalled himself as such to the poet's memory some ten or twelve years ago. a man who has reached the age at which his boyhood becomes of interest to the world may even have survived many such relations. and during the busy idleness of his schooldays, or, at all events, in the holidays in which he rested from it, he was learning, as perhaps only those do learn whose real education is derived from home. his father's house was, miss browning tells me, literally crammed with books; and, she adds, 'it was in this way that robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.' he read omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance. one of the books he best and earliest loved was 'quarles' emblemes', which his father possessed in a seventeenth century edition, and which contains one or two very tentative specimens of his early handwriting. its quaint, powerful lines and still quainter illustrations combined the marvellous with what he believed to be true; and he seemed specially identified with its world of religious fancies by the fact that the soul in it was always depicted as a child. on its more general grounds his reading was at once largely literary and very historical; and it was in this direction that the paternal influence was most strongly revealed. 'quarles' emblemes' was only one of the large collection of old books which mr. browning possessed; and the young robert learnt to know each favourite author in the dress as well as the language which carried with it the life of his period. the first edition of 'robinson crusoe'; the first edition of milton's works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet 'killing no murder' ( ), which carlyle borrowed for his 'life of cromwell'; an equally early copy of bernard mandeville's 'bees'; very ancient bibles--are some of the instances which occur to me. among more modern publications, 'walpole's letters' were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the 'letters of junius' and all the works of voltaire. ancient poets and poetry also played their necessary part in the mental culture superintended by robert browning's father: we can indeed imagine no case in which they would not have found their way into the boy's life. latin poets and greek dramatists came to him in their due time, though his special delight in the greek language only developed itself later. but his loving, lifelong familiarity with the elizabethan school, and indeed with the whole range of english poetry, seems to point to a more constant study of our national literature. byron was his chief master in those early poetic days. he never ceased to honour him as the one poet who combined a constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which the byronic influence was predominant. the young author gave his work the title of 'incondita', which conveyed a certain idea of deprecation. he was, nevertheless, very anxious to see it in print; and his father and mother, poetry-lovers of the old school, also found in it sufficient merit to justify its publication. no publisher, however, could be found; and we can easily believe that he soon afterwards destroyed the little manuscript, in some mingled reaction of disappointment and disgust. but his mother, meanwhile, had shown it to an acquaintance of hers, miss flower, who herself admired its contents so much as to make a copy of them for the inspection of her friend, the well-known unitarian minister, mr. w. j. fox. the copy was transmitted to mr. browning after mr. fox's death by his daughter, mrs. bridell-fox; and this, if no other, was in existence in , when, at his urgent request, that lady also returned to him a fragment of verse contained in a letter from miss sarah flower. nor was it till much later that a friend, who had earnestly begged for a sight of it, definitely heard of its destruction. the fragment, which doubtless shared the same fate, was, i am told, a direct imitation of coleridge's 'fire, famine, and slaughter'. these poems were not mr. browning's first. it would be impossible to believe them such when we remember that he composed verses long before he could write; and a curious proof of the opposite fact has recently appeared. two letters of the elder mr. browning have found their way into the market, and have been bought respectively by mr. dykes campbell and sir f. leighton. i give the more important of them. it was addressed to mr. thomas powell: dear sir,--i hope the enclosed may be acceptable as curiosities. they were written by robert when quite a child. i once had nearly a hundred of them. but he has destroyed all that ever came in his way, having a great aversion to the practice of many biographers in recording every trifling incident that falls in their way. he has not the slightest suspicion that any of his very juvenile performances are in existence. i have several of the originals by me. they are all extemporaneous productions, nor has any one a single alteration. there was one amongst them 'on bonaparte'--remarkably beautiful--and had i not seen it in his own handwriting i never would have believed it to have been the production of a child. it is destroyed. pardon my troubling you with these specimens, and requesting you never to mention it, as robert would be very much hurt. i remain, dear sir, your obedient servant, r. browning. bank: march , . the letter was accompanied by a sheet of verses which have been sold and resold, doubtless in perfect good faith, as being those to which the writer alludes. but miss browning has recognized them as her father's own impromptu epigrams, well remembered in the family, together with the occasion on which they were written. the substitution may, from the first, have been accidental. we cannot think of all these vanished first-fruits of mr. browning's genius without a sense of loss, all the greater perhaps that there can have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought; and mr. fox, who had read 'incondita' and been struck by its promise, confessed afterwards to mr. browning that he had feared these tendencies as his future snare. but the imitative first note of a young poet's voice may hold a rapture of inspiration which his most original later utterances will never convey. it is the child sordello, singing against the lark. not even the poet's sister ever saw 'incondita'. it was the only one of his finished productions which miss browning did not read, or even help him to write out. she was then too young to be taken into his confidence. its writing, however, had one important result. it procured for the boy-poet a preliminary introduction to the valuable literary patron and friend mr. fox was subsequently to be. it also supplies the first substantial record of an acquaintance which made a considerable impression on his personal life. the miss flower, of whom mention has been made, was one of two sisters, both sufficiently noted for their artistic gifts to have found a place in the new dictionary of national biography. the elder, eliza or lizzie, was a musical composer; the younger, best known as sarah flower adams, a writer of sacred verse. her songs and hymns, including the well-known 'nearer, my god, to thee', were often set to music by her sister.* they sang, i am told, delightfully together, and often without accompaniment, their voices perfectly harmonizing with each other. both were, in their different ways, very attractive; both interesting, not only from their talents, but from their attachment to each other, and the delicacy which shortened their lives. they died of consumption, the elder in , at the age of forty-three; the younger a year later. they became acquainted with mrs. browning through a common friend, miss sturtevant; and the young robert conceived a warm admiration for miss flower's talents, and a boyish love for herself. she was nine years his senior; her own affections became probably engaged, and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have subsided into one of warm and very loyal friendship. we hear, indeed, of his falling in love, as he was emerging from his teens, with a handsome girl who was on a visit at his father's house. but the fancy died out 'for want of root.' the admiration, even tenderness, for miss flower had so deep a 'root' that he never in latest life mentioned her name with indifference. in a letter to mr. dykes campbell, in , he spoke of her as 'a very remarkable person.' if, in spite of his denials, any woman inspired 'pauline', it can have been no other than she. he began writing to her at twelve or thirteen, probably on the occasion of her expressed sympathy with his first distinct effort at authorship; and what he afterwards called 'the few utterly insignificant scraps of letters and verse' which formed his part of the correspondence were preserved by her as long as she lived. but he recovered and destroyed them after his return to england, with all the other reminiscences of those early years. some notes, however, are extant, dated respectively, , , and , and will be given in their due place. * she also wrote a dramatic poem in five acts, entitled 'vivia perpetua', referred to by mrs. jameson in her 'sacred and legendary art', and by leigh hunt, when he spoke of her in 'blue-stocking revels', as 'mrs. adams, rare mistress of thought and of tears.' mr. fox was a friend of miss flower's father (benjamin flower, known as editor of the 'cambridge intelligencer'), and, at his death, in , became co-executor to his will, and a kind of guardian to his daughters, then both unmarried, and motherless from their infancy. eliza's principal work was a collection of hymns and anthems, originally composed for mr. fox's chapel, where she had assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service. her abilities were not confined to music; she possessed, i am told, an instinctive taste and judgment in literary matters which caused her opinion to be much valued by literary men. but mr. browning's genuine appreciation of her musical genius was probably the strongest permanent bond between them. we shall hear of this in his own words. chapter - first impressions of keats and shelley--prolonged influence of shelley--details of home education--its effects--youthful restlessness--counteracting love of home--early friendships: alfred domett, joseph arnould, the silverthornes--choice of poetry as a profession--alternative suggestions; mistaken rumours concerning them--interest in art--love of good theatrical performances--talent for acting--final preparation for literary life. at the period at which we have arrived, which is that of his leaving school and completing his fourteenth year, another and a significant influence was dawning on robert browning's life--the influence of the poet shelley. mr. sharp writes,* and i could only state the facts in similar words, 'passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as "mr. shelley's atheistical poem: very scarce."' . . . 'from vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called shelley; that he had written several volumes; that he was dead.' . . . 'he begged his mother to procure him shelley's works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet's name. ultimately, however, mrs. browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the olliers', in vere street, london.' * 'life of browning', pp. , . mrs. browning went to messrs. ollier, and brought back 'most of shelley's writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of "the cenci".' she brought also three volumes of the still less known john keats, on being assured that one who liked shelley's works would like these also. keats and shelley must always remain connected in this epoch of mr. browning's poetic growth. they indeed came to him as the two nightingales which, he told some friends, sang together in the may-night which closed this eventful day: one in the laburnum in his father's garden, the other in a copper beech which stood on adjoining ground--with the difference indeed, that he must often have listened to the feathered singers before, while the two new human voices sounded from what were to him, as to so many later hearers, unknown heights and depths of the imaginative world. their utterance was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say; and no one who has ever heard him read the 'ode to a nightingale', and repeat in the same subdued tones, as if continuing his own thoughts, some line from 'epipsychidion', can doubt that they retained a lasting and almost equal place in his poet's heart. but the two cannot be regarded as equals in their relation to his life, and it would be a great mistake to impute to either any important influence upon his genius. we may catch some fleeting echoes of keats's melody in 'pippa passes'; it is almost a commonplace that some measure of shelleyan fancy is recognizable in 'pauline'. but the poetic individuality of robert browning was stronger than any circumstance through which it could be fed. it would have found nourishment in desert air. with his first accepted work he threw off what was foreign to his poetic nature, to be thenceforward his own never-to-be-subdued and never-to-be-mistaken self. if shelley became, and long remained for him, the greatest poet of his age--of almost any age--it was not because he held him greatest in the poetic art, but because in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration. it is difficult to trace the process by which this conviction formed itself in the boy's mind; still more to account for the strong personal tenderness which accompanied it. the facts can have been scarcely known which were to present shelley to his imagination as a maligned and persecuted man. it is hard to judge how far such human qualities as we now read into his work, could be apparent to one who only approached him through it. but the extra-human note in shelley's genius irresistibly suggested to the browning of fourteen, as it still did to the browning of forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of higher things. there was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the consecration of an early death was upon him. and so the worship rooted itself and grew. it was to find its lyrical expression in 'pauline'; its rational and, from the writer's point of view, philosophic justification in the prose essay on shelley, published eighteen years afterwards. it may appear inconsistent with the nature of this influence that it began by appealing to him in a subversive form. the shelley whom browning first loved was the shelley of 'queen mab', the shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist, and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. he returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. the atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how. what we do know is, that it was with him a passing state of moral or imaginative rebellion, and not one of rational doubt. his mind was not so constituted that such doubt could fasten itself upon it; nor did he ever in after-life speak of this period of negation except as an access of boyish folly, with which his maturer self could have no concern. the return to religious belief did not shake his faith in his new prophet. it only made him willing to admit that he had misread him. this shelley period of robert browning's life--that which intervened between 'incondita' and 'pauline'--remained, nevertheless, one of rebellion and unrest, to which many circumstances may have contributed besides the influence of the one mind. it had been decided that he was to complete, or at all events continue, his education at home; and, knowing the elder mr. browning as we do, we cannot doubt that the best reasons, of kindness or expediency, led to his so deciding. it was none the less, probably, a mistake, for the time being. the conditions of home life were the more favourable for the young poet's imaginative growth; but there can rarely have been a boy whose moral and mental health had more to gain by the combined discipline and freedom of a public school. his home training was made to include everything which in those days went to the production of an accomplished gentleman, and a great deal therefore that was physically good. he learned music, singing, dancing, riding, boxing, and fencing, and excelled in the more active of these pursuits. the study of music was also serious, and carried on under two masters. mr. john relfe, author of a valuable work on counterpoint, was his instructor in thorough-bass; mr. abel, a pupil of moscheles, in execution. he wrote music for songs which he himself sang; among them donne's 'go and catch a falling star'; hood's 'i will not have the mad clytie'; peacock's 'the mountain sheep are sweeter'; and his settings, all of which he subsequently destroyed, were, i am told, very spirited. his education seems otherwise to have been purely literary. for two years, from the age of fourteen to that of sixteen, he studied with a french tutor, who, whether this was intended or not, imparted to him very little but a good knowledge of the french language and literature. in his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two, a greek class at the london university. his classical and other reading was probably continued. but we hear nothing in the programme of mathematics, or logic--of any, in short, of those subjects which train, even coerce, the thinking powers, and which were doubly requisite for a nature in which the creative imagination was predominant over all the other mental faculties, great as these other faculties were. and, even as poet, he suffered from this omission: since the involutions and overlappings of thought and phrase, which occur in his earlier and again in his latest works, must have been partly due to his never learning to follow the processes of more normally constituted minds. it would be a great error to suppose that they ever arose from the absence of a meaning clearly felt, if not always clearly thought out, by himself. he was storing his memory and enriching his mind; but precisely in so doing he was nourishing the consciousness of a very vivid and urgent personality; and, under the restrictions inseparable from the life of a home-bred youth, it was becoming a burden to him. what outlet he found in verse we do not know, because nothing survives of what he may then have written. it is possible that the fate of his early poems, and, still more, the change of ideals, retarded the definite impulse towards poetic production. it would be a relief to him to sketch out and elaborate the plan of his future work--his great mental portrait gallery of typical men and women; and he was doing so during at least the later years which preceded the birth of 'pauline'. but even this must have been the result of some protracted travail with himself; because it was only the inward sense of very varied possibilities of existence which could have impelled him towards this kind of creation. no character he ever produced was merely a figment of the brain. it was natural, therefore, that during this time of growth he should have been, not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other. the always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness. he behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders' minds. he set the judgments of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not. all this subdued itself as time advanced, and the coming man in him could throw off the wayward child. it was all so natural that it might well be forgotten. but it distressed his mother, the one being in the world whom he entirely loved; and deserves remembering in the tender sorrow with which he himself remembered it. he was always ready to say that he had been worth little in his young days; indeed, his self-depreciation covered the greater part of his life. this was, perhaps, one reason of the difficulty of inducing him to dwell upon his past. 'i am better now,' he has said more than once, when its reminiscences have been invoked. one tender little bond maintained itself between his mother and himself so long as he lived under the paternal roof; it was his rule never to go to bed without giving her a good-night kiss. if he was out so late that he had to admit himself with a latch-key, he nevertheless went to her in her room. nor did he submit to this as a necessary restraint; for, except on the occasions of his going abroad, it is scarcely on record that he ever willingly spent a night away from home. it may not stand for much, or it may stand to the credit of his restlessness, that, when he had been placed with some gentleman in gower street, for the convenience of attending the university lectures, or for the sake of preparing for them, he broke through the arrangement at the end of a week; but even an agreeable visit had no power to detain him beyond a few days. this home-loving quality was in curious contrast to the natural bohemianism of youthful genius, and the inclination to wildness which asserted itself in his boyish days. it became the more striking as he entered upon the age at which no reasonable amount of freedom can have been denied to him. something, perhaps, must be allowed for the pecuniary dependence which forbade his forming any expensive habits of amusement; but he also claims the credit of having been unable to accept any low-life pleasures in place of them. i do not know how the idea can have arisen that he willingly sought his experience in the society of 'gipsies and tramps'. i remember nothing in his works which even suggests such association; and it is certain that a few hours spent at a fair would at all times have exhausted his capability of enduring it. in the most audacious imaginings of his later life, in the most undisciplined acts of his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves. there was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not allow him to trifle consciously with other lives. work must also have been his safeguard when the habit of it had been acquired, and when imagination, once his master, had learned to serve him. one tangible cause of his youthful restlessness has been implied in the foregoing remarks, but deserves stating in his sister's words: 'the fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. they were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them.' he was not, however, quite without congenial society even before the turning-point in his outward existence which was reached in the publication of 'pauline'; and one long friendly acquaintance, together with one lasting friendship, had their roots in these early camberwell days. the families of joseph arnould and alfred domett both lived at camberwell. these two young men were bred to the legal profession, and the former, afterwards sir joseph arnould, became a judge in bombay. but the father of alfred domett had been one of nelson's captains, and the roving sailor spirit was apparent in his son; for he had scarcely been called to the bar when he started for new zealand on the instance of a cousin who had preceded him, but who was drowned in the course of a day's surveying before he could arrive. he became a member of the new zealand parliament, and ultimately, for a short time, of its cabinet; only returning to england after an absence of thirty years. this mr. domett seems to have been a very modest man, besides a devoted friend of robert browning's, and on occasion a warm defender of his works. when he read the apostrophe to 'alfred, dear friend,' in the 'guardian angel', he had reached the last line before it occurred to him that the person invoked could be he. i do not think that this poem, and that directly addressed to him under the pseudonym of 'waring', were the only ones inspired by the affectionate remembrance which he had left in their author's mind. among his boy companions were also the three silverthornes, his neighbours at camberwell, and cousins on the maternal side. they appear to have been wild youths, and had certainly no part in his intellectual or literary life; but the group is interesting to his biographer. the three brothers were all gifted musicians; having also, probably, received this endowment from their mother's father. mr. browning conceived a great affection for the eldest, and on the whole most talented of the cousins; and when he had died--young, as they all did--he wrote 'may and death' in remembrance of him. the name of 'charles' stands there for the old, familiar 'jim', so often uttered by him in half-pitying, and all-affectionate allusion, in his later years. mrs. silverthorne was the aunt who paid for the printing of 'pauline'. it was at about the time of his short attendance at university college that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made. it was a foregone conclusion in the young robert's mind; and little less in that of his father, who took too sympathetic an interest in his son's life not to have seen in what direction his desires were tending. he must, it is true, at some time or other, have played with the thought of becoming an artist; but the thought can never have represented a wish. if he had entertained such a one, it would have met not only with no opposition on his father's part, but with a very ready assent, nor does the question ever seem to have been seriously mooted in the family councils. it would be strange, perhaps, if it had. mr. browning became very early familiar with the names of the great painters, and also learned something about their work; for the dulwich gallery was within a pleasant walk of his home, and his father constantly took him there. he retained through life a deep interest in art and artists, and became a very familiar figure in one or two london studios. some drawings made by him from the nude, in italy, and for which he had prepared himself by assiduous copying of casts and study of human anatomy, had, i believe, great merit. but painting was one of the subjects in which he never received instruction, though he modelled, under the direction of his friend mr. story; and a letter of his own will presently show that, in his youth at least, he never credited himself with exceptional artistic power. that he might have become an artist, and perhaps a great one, is difficult to doubt, in the face of his brilliant general ability and special gifts. the power to do a thing is, however, distinct from the impulse to do it, and proved so in the present case. more importance may be given to an idea of his father's that he should qualify himself for the bar. it would naturally coincide with the widening of the social horizon which his university college classes supplied; it was possibly suggested by the fact that the closest friends he had already made, and others whom he was perhaps now making, were barristers. but this also remained an idea. he might have been placed in the bank of england, where the virtual offer of an appointment had been made to him through his father; but the elder browning spontaneously rejected this, as unworthy of his son's powers. he had never, he said, liked bank work himself, and could not, therefore, impose it on him. we have still to notice another, and a more mistaken view of the possibilities of mr. browning's life. it has been recently stated, doubtless on the authority of some words of his own, that the church was a profession to which he once felt himself drawn. but an admission of this kind could only refer to that period of his childhood when natural impulse, combined with his mother's teaching and guidance, frequently caused his fancy and his feelings to assume a religious form. from the time when he was a free agent he ceased to be even a regular churchgoer, though religion became more, rather than less, an integral part of his inner life; and his alleged fondness for a variety of preachers meant really that he only listened to those who, from personal association or conspicuous merit, were interesting to him. i have mentioned canon melvill as one of these; the rev. thomas jones was, as will be seen, another. in venice he constantly, with his sister, joined the congregation of an italian minister of the little vaudois church there.* * mr. browning's memory recalled a first and last effort at preaching, inspired by one of his very earliest visits to a place of worship. he extemporized a surplice or gown, climbed into an arm-chair by way of pulpit, and held forth so vehemently that his scarcely more than baby sister was frightened and began to cry; whereupon he turned to an imaginary presence, and said, with all the sternness which the occasion required, 'pew-opener, remove that child.' it would be far less surprising if we were told, on sufficient authority, that he had been disturbed by hankerings for the stage. he was a passionate admirer of good acting, and would walk from london to richmond and back again to see edmund kean when he was performing there. we know how macready impressed him, though the finer genius of kean became very apparent to his retrospective judgment of the two; and it was impossible to see or hear him, as even an old man, in some momentary personation of one of shakespeare's characters, above all of richard iii., and not feel that a great actor had been lost in him. so few professions were thought open to gentlemen in robert browning's eighteenth year, that his father's acquiescence in that which he had chosen might seem a matter scarcely less of necessity than of kindness. but we must seek the kindness not only in this first, almost inevitable, assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career. 'paracelsus', 'sordello', and the whole of 'bells and pomegranates' were published at his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought no return to him. this was vividly present to mr. browning's mind in what mrs. kemble so justly defines as those 'remembering days' which are the natural prelude to the forgetting ones. he declared, in the course of these, to a friend, that for it alone he owed more to his father than to anyone else in the world. words to this effect, spoken in conversation with his sister, have since, as it was right they should, found their way into print. the more justly will the world interpret any incidental admission he may ever have made, of intellectual disagreement between that father and himself. when the die was cast, and young browning was definitely to adopt literature as his profession, he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of johnson's dictionary. we cannot be surprised to hear this of one who displayed so great a mastery of words, and so deep a knowledge of the capacities of the english language. chapter - 'pauline'--letters to mr. fox--publication of the poem; chief biographical and literary characteristics--mr. fox's review in the 'monthly repository'; other notices--russian journey--desired diplomatic appointment--minor poems; first sonnet; their mode of appearance--'the trifler'--m. de ripert-monclar--'paracelsus'--letters to mr. fox concerning it; its publication--incidental origin of 'paracelsus'; its inspiring motive; its relation to 'pauline'--mr. fox's review of it in the 'monthly repository'--article in the 'examiner' by john forster. before mr. browning had half completed his twenty-first year he had written 'pauline, a fragment of a confession'. his sister was in the secret, but this time his parents were not. this is why his aunt, hearing that 'robert' had 'written a poem,' volunteered the sum requisite for its publication. even this first instalment of success did not inspire much hope in the family mind, and miss browning made pencil copies of her favourite passages for the event, which seemed only too possible, of her never seeing the whole poem again. it was, however, accepted by saunders and otley, and appeared anonymously in . meanwhile the young author had bethought himself of his early sympathizer, mr. fox, and he wrote to him as follows (the letter is undated): dear sir,--perhaps by the aid of the subjoined initials and a little reflection, you may recollect an oddish sort of boy, who had the honour of being introduced to you at hackney some years back--at that time a sayer of verse and a doer of it, and whose doings you had a little previously commended after a fashion--(whether in earnest or not god knows): that individual it is who takes the liberty of addressing one whose slight commendation then, was more thought of than all the gun drum and trumpet of praise would be now, and to submit to you a free and easy sort of thing which he wrote some months ago 'on one leg' and which comes out this week--having either heard or dreamed that you contribute to the 'westminster'. should it be found too insignificant for cutting up, i shall no less remain, dear sir, your most obedient servant, r. b. i have forgotten the main thing--which is to beg you not to spoil a loophole i have kept for backing out of the thing if necessary, 'sympathy of dear friends,' &c. &c., none of whom know anything about it. monday morning; rev.--fox. the answer was clearly encouraging, and mr. browning wrote again: dear sir,--in consequence of your kind permission i send, or will send, a dozen copies of 'pauline' and (to mitigate the infliction) shelley's poem--on account of what you mentioned this morning. it will perhaps be as well that you let me know their safe arrival by a line to r. b. junior, hanover cottage, southampton street, camberwell. you must not think me too encroaching, if i make the getting back 'rosalind and helen' an excuse for calling on you some evening--the said 'r. and h.' has, i observe, been well thumbed and sedulously marked by an acquaintance of mine, but i have not time to rub out his labour of love. i am, dear sir, yours very really, r. browning. camberwell: o'clock. at the left-hand corner of the first page of this note is written: 'the parcel--a "pauline" parcel--is come. i send one as a witness.' on the inner page is written: 'impromptu on hearing a sermon by the rev. t. r.--pronounced "heavy"-- 'a _heavy_ sermon!--sure the error's great, for not a word tom uttered _had its weight_.' a third letter, also undated, but post-marked march , , refers probably to the promise or announcement of a favourable notice. a fourth conveys mr. browning's thanks for the notice itself: my dear sir,--i have just received your letter, which i am desirous of acknowledging before any further mark of your kindness reaches me;--i can only offer you my simple thanks--but they are of the sort that one can give only once or twice in a life: all things considered, i think you are almost repaid, if you imagine what i must feel--and it will have been worth while to have made a fool of myself, only to have obtained a 'case' which leaves my fine fellow mandeville at a dead lock. as for the book--i hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your goodness. in the meantime i shall not forget the extent to which i am, dear sir, your most obliged and obedient servant r. b. s. & o.'s, conduit st., thursday m-g. i must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than i had intended--but a notice like the one i have read will have its effect at all hazards. i can only say that i am very proud to feel as grateful as i do, and not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least, your most generous 'coming forward'. hazlitt wrote his essays, as he somewhere tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country who had 'always prophesied he would be something'!--i shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured. i am, dear sir, yours most truly and obliged, robert browning. march , . mr. fox was then editor of a periodical called the 'monthly repository', which, as his daughter, mrs. bridell-fox, writes in her graceful article on robert browning, in the 'argosy' for february , he was endeavouring to raise from its original denominational character into a first-class literary and political journal. the articles comprised in the volume for are certainly full of interest and variety, at once more popular and more solid than those prescribed by the present fashion of monthly magazines. he reviewed 'pauline' favourably in its april number--that is, as soon as it had appeared; and the young poet thus received from him an introduction to what should have been, though it probably was not, a large circle of intelligent readers. the poem was characterized by its author, five years later, in a fantastic note appended to a copy of it, as 'the only remaining crab of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise.' this name is ill bestowed upon a work which, however wild a fruit of mr. browning's genius, contains, in its many lines of exquisite fancy and deep pathos, so much that is rich and sweet. it had also, to discard metaphor, its faults of exaggeration and confusion; and it is of these that mr. browning was probably thinking when he wrote his more serious apologetic preface to its reprint in . but these faults were partly due to his conception of the character which he had tried to depict; and partly to the inherent difficulty of depicting one so complex, in a succession of mental and moral states, irrespectively of the conditions of time, place, and circumstance which were involved in them. only a very powerful imagination could have inspired such an attempt. a still more conspicuous effort of creative genius reveals itself at its close. the moment chosen for the 'confession' has been that of a supreme moral or physical crisis. the exhaustion attendant on this is directly expressed by the person who makes it, and may also be recognized in the vivid, yet confusing, intensity of the reminiscences of which it consists. but we are left in complete doubt as to whether the crisis is that of approaching death or incipient convalescence, or which character it bears in the sufferer's mind; and the language used in the closing pages is such as to suggest, without the slightest break in poetic continuity, alternately the one conclusion and the other. this was intended by browning to assist his anonymity; and when the writer in 'tait's magazine' spoke of the poem as a piece of pure bewilderment, he expressed the natural judgment of the philistine, while proving himself such. if the notice by j. s. mill, which this criticism excluded, was indeed--as mr. browning always believed--much more sympathetic, i can only record my astonishment; for there never was a large and cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of 'pauline'. but this is a digression. mr. fox, though an accomplished critic, made very light of the artistic blemishes of the work. his admiration for it was as generous as it was genuine; and, having recognized in it the hand of a rising poet, it was more congenial to him to hail that poet's advent than to register his shortcomings. 'the poem,' he says, 'though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.' but it had also, in his mind, a distinguishing characteristic, which raised it above the sphere of merely artistic criticism. the article continues: 'we have never read anything more purely confessional. the whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. the scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.' and we learn from the context that he accepted this confessional and introspective quality as an expression of the highest emotional life--of the essence, therefore, of religion. on this point the sincerest admirers of the poem may find themselves at issue with mr. fox. its sentiment is warmly religious; it is always, in a certain sense, spiritual; but its intellectual activities are exercised on entirely temporal ground, and this fact would generally be admitted as the negation of spirituality in the religious sense of the word. no difference, however, of opinion as to his judgment of 'pauline' can lessen our appreciation of mr. fox's encouraging kindness to its author. no one who loved mr. browning in himself, or in his work, can read the last lines of this review without a throb of affectionate gratitude for the sympathy so ungrudgingly, and--as he wrote during his latest years--so opportunely given: 'in recognizing a poet we cannot stand upon trifles nor fret ourselves about such matters [as a few blemishes]. time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and hiero's crown, but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted 'eureka!'' many persons have discovered mr. browning since he has been known to fame. one only discovered him in his obscurity. next to that of mr. fox stands the name of john forster among the first spontaneous appreciators of mr. browning's genius; and his admiration was, in its own way, the more valuable for the circumstances which precluded in it all possible, even unconscious, bias of personal interest or sympathy. but this belongs to a somewhat later period of our history. i am dwelling at some length on this first experience of mr. browning's literary career, because the confidence which it gave him determined its immediate future, if not its ultimate course--because, also, the poem itself is more important to the understanding of his mind than perhaps any other of his isolated works. it was the earliest of his dramatic creations; it was therefore inevitably the most instinct with himself; and we may regard the 'confession' as to a great extent his own, without for an instant ignoring the imaginative element which necessarily and certainly entered into it. at one moment, indeed, his utterance is so emphatic that we should feel it to be direct, even if we did not know it to be true. the passage beginning, 'i am made up of an intensest life,' conveys something more than the writer's actual psychological state. the feverish desire of life became gradually modified into a more or less active intellectual and imaginative curiosity; but the sense of an individual, self-centred, and, as it presented itself to him, unconditioned existence, survived all the teachings of experience, and often indeed unconsciously imposed itself upon them. i have already alluded to that other and more pathetic fragment of distinct autobiography which is to be found in the invocation to the 'sun-treader'. mr. fox, who has quoted great part of it, justly declares that 'the fervency, the remembrance, the half-regret mingling with its exultation, are as true as its leading image is beautiful.' the 'exultation' is in the triumph of shelley's rising fame; the regret, for the lost privilege of worshipping in solitary tenderness at an obscure shrine. the double mood would have been characteristic of any period of mr. browning's life. the artistic influence of shelley is also discernible in the natural imagery of the poem, which reflects a fitful and emotional fancy instead of the direct poetic vision of the author's later work. 'pauline' received another and graceful tribute two months later than the review. in an article of the 'monthly repository', and in the course of a description of some luxuriant wood-scenery, the following passage occurs: 'shelley and tennyson are the best books for this place. . . . they are natives of this soil; literally so; and if planted would grow as surely as a crowbar in kentucky sprouts tenpenny nails. 'probatum est.' last autumn l----dropped a poem of shelley's down there in the wood,* amongst the thick, damp, rotting leaves, and this spring some one found a delicate exotic-looking plant, growing wild on the very spot, with 'pauline' hanging from its slender stalk. unripe fruit it may be, but of pleasant flavour and promise, and a mellower produce, it may be hoped, will follow.' * mr. browning's copy of 'rosalind and helen', which he had lent to miss flower, and which she lost in this wood on a picnic. this and a bald though well-meant notice in the 'athenaeum' exhaust its literary history for this period.* * not quite, it appears. since i wrote the above words, mr. dykes campbell has kindly copied for me the following extract from the 'literary gazette' of march , : 'pauline: a fragment of a confession', pp. . london, . saunders and otley. 'somewhat mystical, somewhat poetical, somewhat sensual, and not a little unintelligible,--this is a dreamy volume, without an object, and unfit for publication.' the anonymity of the poem was not long preserved; there was no reason why it should be. but 'pauline' was, from the first, little known or discussed beyond the immediate circle of the poet's friends; and when, twenty years later, dante gabriel rossetti unexpectedly came upon it in the library of the british museum, he could only surmise that it had been written by the author of 'paracelsus'. the only recorded event of the next two years was mr. browning's visit to russia, which took place in the winter of - . the russian consul-general, mr. benckhausen, had taken a great liking to him, and being sent to st. petersburg on some special mission, proposed that he should accompany him, nominally in the character of secretary. the letters written to his sister during this, as during every other absence, were full of graphic description, and would have been a mine of interest for the student of his imaginative life. they are, unfortunately, all destroyed, and we have only scattered reminiscences of what they had to tell; but we know how strangely he was impressed by some of the circumstances of the journey: above all, by the endless monotony of snow-covered pine-forest, through which he and his companion rushed for days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without seeming to move from one spot. he enjoyed the society of st. petersburg, and was fortunate enough, before his return, to witness the breaking-up of the ice on the neva, and see the czar perform the yearly ceremony of drinking the first glass of water from it. he was absent about three months. the one active career which would have recommended itself to him in his earlier youth was diplomacy; it was that which he subsequently desired for his son. he would indeed not have been averse to any post of activity and responsibility not unsuited to the training of a gentleman. soon after his return from russia he applied for appointment on a mission which was to be despatched to persia; and the careless wording of the answer which his application received made him think for a moment that it had been granted. he was much disappointed when he learned, through an interview with the 'chief', that the place was otherwise filled. in he began a little series of contributions to the 'monthly repository', extending into - , and consisting of five poems. the earliest of these was a sonnet, not contained in any edition of mr. browning's works, and which, i believe, first reappeared in mr. gosse's article in the 'century magazine', december ; now part of his 'personalia'. the second, beginning 'a king lived long ago', was to be published, with alterations and additions, as one of 'pippa's' songs. 'porphyria's lover' and 'johannes agricola in meditation' were reprinted together in 'bells and pomegranates' under the heading of 'madhouse cells'. the fifth consisted of the lines beginning 'still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no?' afterwards introduced into the sixth section of 'james lee's wife'. the sonnet is not very striking, though hints of the poet's future psychological subtlety are not wanting in it; but his most essential dramatic quality reveals itself in the last three poems. this winter of - witnessed the birth, perhaps also the extinction, of an amateur periodical, established by some of mr. browning's friends; foremost among these the young dowsons, afterwards connected with alfred domett. the magazine was called the 'trifler', and published in monthly numbers of about ten pages each. it collapsed from lack of pocket-money on the part of the editors; but mr. browning had written for it one letter, february , signed with his usual initial z, and entitled 'some strictures on a late article in the 'trifler'.' this boyish production sparkles with fun, while affecting the lengthy quaintnesses of some obsolete modes of speech. the article which it attacks was 'a dissertation on debt and debtors', where the subject was, i imagine, treated in the orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. it is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent, proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent in twice, and who would always have preferred ready-money payment to receiving a bill at all, that i may be forgiven for quoting some passages from it. for to be man is to be a debtor:--hinting but slightly at the grand and primeval debt implied in the idea of a creation, as matter too hard for ears like thine, (for saith not luther, what hath a cow to do with nutmegs?) i must, nevertheless, remind thee that all moralists have concurred in considering this our mortal sojourn as indeed an uninterrupted state of debt, and the world our dwelling-place as represented by nothing so aptly as by an inn, wherein those who lodge most commodiously have in perspective a proportionate score to reduce,* and those who fare least delicately, but an insignificant shot to discharge--or, as the tuneful quarles well phraseth it-- he's most in _debt_ who lingers out the day, who dies betimes has less and less to pay. so far, therefore, from these sagacious ethics holding that debt cramps the energies of the soul, &c. as thou pratest, 'tis plain that they have willed on the very outset to inculcate this truth on the mind of every man,--no barren and inconsequential dogma, but an effectual, ever influencing and productive rule of life,--that he is born a debtor, lives a debtor--aye, friend, and when thou diest, will not some judicious bystander,--no recreant as thou to the bonds of nature, but a good borrower and true--remark, as did his grandsire before him on like occasions, that thou hast 'paid the _debt_ of nature'? ha! i have thee 'beyond the rules', as one (a bailiff) may say! * miss hickey, on reading this passage, has called my attention to the fact that the sentiment which it parodies is identical with that expressed in these words of 'prospice', . . . in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold. such performances supplied a distraction to the more serious work of writing 'paracelsus', which was to be concluded in march , and which occupied the foregoing winter months. we do not know to what extent mr. browning had remained in communication with mr. fox; but the following letters show that the friend of 'pauline' gave ready and efficient help in the strangely difficult task of securing a publisher for the new poem. the first is dated april , . dear sir,--i beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter:--sardanapalus 'could not go on multiplying kingdoms'--nor i protestations--but i thank you very much. you will oblige me indeed by forwarding the introduction to moxon. i merely suggested him in particular, on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written--as the americans say--'more poetry 'an you can shake a stick at.' so i hope we shall come to terms. i also hope my poem will turn out not utterly unworthy your kind interest, and more deserving your favour than anything of mine you have as yet seen; indeed i all along proposed to myself such an endeavour, for it will never do for one so distinguished by past praise to prove nobody after all--'nous verrons'. i am, dear sir, yours most truly and obliged robt. browning. on april he wrote again as follows: dear sir, your communication gladdened the cockles of my heart. i lost no time in presenting myself to moxon, but no sooner was mr. clarke's letter perused than the moxonian visage loured exceedingly thereat--the moxonian accent grew dolorous thereupon:--'artevelde' has not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds. tennyson's poetry is 'popular at cambridge', and yet of copies which were printed of his last, some only have gone off: mr. m. hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, &c. &c., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, &c. &c. i called on saunders and otley at once, and, marvel of marvels, do really think there is some chance of our coming to decent terms--i shall know at the beginning of next week, but am not over-sanguine. you will 'sarve me out'? two words to that; being the man you are, you must need very little telling from me, of the real feeling i have of your criticism's worth, and if i have had no more of it, surely i am hardly to blame, who have in more than one instance bored you sufficiently: but not a particle of your article has been rejected or neglected by your observant humble servant, and very proud shall i be if my new work bear in it the marks of the influence under which it was undertaken--and if i prove not a fit compeer of the potter in horace who anticipated an amphora and produced a porridge-pot. i purposely keep back the subject until you see my conception of its capabilities--otherwise you would be planning a vase fit to give the go-by to evander's best crockery, which my cantharus would cut but a sorry figure beside--hardly up to the ansa. but such as it is, it is very earnest and suggestive--and likely i hope to do good; and though i am rather scared at the thought of a _fresh eye_ going over its , lines--discovering blemishes of all sorts which my one wit cannot avail to detect, fools treated as sages, obscure passages, slipshod verses, and much that worse is,--yet on the whole i am not much afraid of the issue, and i would give something to be allowed to read it some morning to you--for every rap o' the knuckles i should get a clap o' the back, i know. i have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, i conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two--so i decide on trying the question with this:--i really shall _need_ your notice, on this account; i shall affix my name and stick my arms akimbo; there are a few precious bold bits here and there, and the drift and scope are awfully radical--i am 'off' for ever with the other side, but must by all means be 'on' with yours--a position once gained, worthier works shall follow--therefore a certain writer* who meditated a notice (it matters not laudatory or otherwise) on 'pauline' in the 'examiner', must be benignant or supercilious as he shall choose, but in no case an idle spectator of my first appearance on any stage (having previously only dabbled in private theatricals) and bawl 'hats off!' 'down in front!' &c., as soon as i get to the proscenium; and he may depend that tho' my 'now is the winter of our discontent' be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff--that i shall warm as i get on, and finally wish 'richmond at the bottom of the seas,' &c. in the best style imaginable. * mr. john stuart mill. excuse all this swagger, i know you will, and (the signature has been cut off; evidently for an autograph.) mr. effingham wilson was induced to publish the poem, but more, we understand, on the ground of radical sympathies in mr. fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth. the title-page of 'paracelsus' introduces us to one of the warmest friendships of mr. browning's life. count de ripert-monclar was a young french royalist, one of those who had accompanied the duchesse de berri on her chouan expedition, and was then, for a few years, spending his summers in england; ostensibly for his pleasure, really--as he confessed to the browning family--in the character of private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their friends in france. he was four years older than the poet, and of intellectual tastes which created an immediate bond of union between them. in the course of one of their conversations, he suggested the life of paracelsus as a possible subject for a poem; but on second thoughts pronounced it unsuitable, because it gave no room for the introduction of love: about which, he added, every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say. mr. browning decided, after the necessary study, that he would write a poem on paracelsus, but treating him in his own way. it was dedicated, in fulfilment of a promise, to the friend to whom its inspiration had been due. the count's visits to england entirely ceased, and the two friends did not meet for twenty years. then, one day, in a street in rome, mr. browning heard a voice behind him crying, 'robert!' he turned, and there was 'amedee'. both were, by that time, married; the count--then, i believe, marquis--to an english lady, miss jerningham. mrs. browning, to whom of course he was introduced, liked him very much.* * a minor result of the intimacy was that mr. browning became member, in , of the institut historique, and in of the societe francaise de statistique universelle, to both of which learned bodies his friend belonged. mr. browning did treat paracelsus in his own way; and in so doing produced a character--at all events a history--which, according to recent judgments, approached far nearer to the reality than any conception which had until then been formed of it. he had carefully collected all the known facts of the great discoverer's life, and interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. we are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled 'paracelsus, the reformer of medicine', written by dr. edward berdoe for the browning society, and read at its october meeting in ; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of mr. browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an interesting comment upon it. dr. berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real paracelsus without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in illustration a passage from the writings of that bishop of spanheim who was the instructor of paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. the passage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man. the same clue will guide us, as no other can, through what is apparently conflicting in the aims and methods, anomalous in the moral experience, of the paracelsus of the poem. his feverish pursuit, among the things of nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in the real life. the language of mr. browning's paracelsus, his attitude towards himself and the world, are not, however, quite consonant with the alleged facts. they are more appropriate to an ardent explorer of the world of abstract thought than to a mystical scientist pursuing the secret of existence. he preserves, in all his mental vicissitudes, a loftiness of tone and a unity of intention, difficult to connect, even in fancy, with the real man, in whom the inherited superstitions and the prognostics of true science must often have clashed with each other. dr. berdoe's picture of the 'reformer' drawn more directly from history, conveys this double impression. mr. browning has rendered him more simple by, as it were, recasting him in the atmosphere of a more modern time, and of his own intellectual life. this poem still, therefore, belongs to the same group as 'pauline', though, as an effort of dramatic creation, superior to it. we find the poet with still less of dramatic disguise in the deathbed revelation which forms so beautiful a close to the story. it supplies a fitter comment to the errors of the dramatic paracelsus, than to those of the historical, whether or not its utterance was within the compass of historical probability, as dr. berdoe believes. in any case it was the direct product of mr. browning's mind, and expressed what was to be his permanent conviction. it might then have been an echo of german pantheistic philosophies. from the point of view of science--of modern science at least--it was prophetic; although the prophecy of one for whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine creation operating on this progressive plan. the more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality are the evidences of imaginative sympathy, even direct human insight, in which the poem abounds. festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature: the man--it might have been the woman--of unambitious intellect and large intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us have found comfort and help. we often feel, in reading 'pauline', that the poet in it was older than the man. the impression is more strongly and more definitely conveyed by this second work, which has none of the intellectual crudeness of 'pauline', though it still belongs to an early phase of the author's intellectual life. not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so much in advance of his uncompleted twenty-third year. to the first edition of 'paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. it also anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, he selected for it. 'i am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset--mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common--judge it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. i therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis i desire to produce, i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. i have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and i cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. i do not very well understand what is called a dramatic poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves--and all new facilities placed at an author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. . . .' mr. fox reviewed this also in the 'monthly repository'. the article might be obtained through the kindness of mrs. bridell-fox; but it will be sufficient for my purpose to refer to its closing paragraph, as given by her in the 'argosy' of february . it was a final expression of what the writer regarded as the fitting intellectual attitude towards a rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond the range of the conventional rules of poetry. the great event in the history of 'paracelsus' was john forster's article on it in the 'examiner'. mr. forster had recently come to town. he could barely have heard mr. browning's name, and, as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in reading the poem by the question of whether its author was an old or a young man; but he knew that a writer in the 'athenaeum' had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism. what he did write can scarcely be defined as praise. it was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work. this mutual experience was the introduction to a long and, certainly on mr. browning's part, a sincere friendship. chapter - removal to hatcham; some particulars--renewed intercourse with the second family of robert browning's grandfather--reuben browning--william shergold browning--visitors at hatcham--thomas carlyle--social life--new friends and acquaintance--introduction to macready--new year's eve at elm place--introduction to john forster--miss fanny haworth--miss martineau--serjeant talfourd--the 'ion' supper--'strafford'--relations with macready--performance of 'strafford'--letters concerning it from mr. browning and miss flower--personal glimpses of robert browning--rival forms of dramatic inspiration--relation of 'strafford' to 'sordello'--mr. robertson and the 'westminster review'. it was soon after this time, though the exact date cannot be recalled, that the browning family moved from camberwell to hatcham. some such change had long been in contemplation, for their house was now too small; and the finding one more suitable, in the latter place, had decided the question. the new home possessed great attractions. the long, low rooms of its upper storey supplied abundant accommodation for the elder mr. browning's six thousand books. mrs. browning was suffering greatly from her chronic ailment, neuralgia; and the large garden, opening on to the surrey hills, promised her all the benefits of country air. there were a coach-house and stable, which, by a curious, probably old-fashioned, arrangement, formed part of the house, and were accessible from it. here the 'good horse', york, was eventually put up; and near this, in the garden, the poet soon had another though humbler friend in the person of a toad, which became so much attached to him that it would follow him as he walked. he visited it daily, where it burrowed under a white rose tree, announcing himself by a pinch of gravel dropped into its hole; and the creature would crawl forth, allow its head to be gently tickled, and reward the act with that loving glance of the soft full eyes which mr. browning has recalled in one of the poems of 'asolando'. this change of residence brought the grandfather's second family, for the first time, into close as well as friendly contact with the first. mr. browning had always remained on outwardly friendly terms with his stepmother; and both he and his children were rewarded for this forbearance by the cordial relations which grew up between themselves and two of her sons. but in the earlier days they lived too far apart for frequent meeting. the old mrs. browning was now a widow, and, in order to be near her relations, she also came to hatcham, and established herself there in close neighbourhood to them. she had then with her only a son and a daughter, those known to the poet's friends as uncle reuben and aunt jemima; respectively nine years, and one year, older than he. 'aunt jemima' married not long afterwards, and is chiefly remembered as having been very amiable, and, in early youth, to use her nephew's words, 'as beautiful as the day;' but kindly, merry 'uncle reuben', then clerk in the rothschilds' london bank,* became a conspicuous member of the family circle. this does not mean that the poet was ever indebted to him for pecuniary help; and it is desirable that this should be understood, since it has been confidently asserted that he was so. so long as he was dependent at all, he depended exclusively on his father. even the use of his uncle's horse, which might have been accepted as a friendly concession on mr. reuben's part, did not really represent one. the animal stood, as i have said, in mr. browning's stable, and it was groomed by his gardener. the promise of these conveniences had induced reuben browning to buy a horse instead of continuing to hire one. he could only ride it on a few days of the week, and it was rather a gain than a loss to him that so good a horseman as his nephew should exercise it during the interval. * this uncle's name, and his business relations with the great jewish firm, have contributed to the mistaken theory of the poet's descent. uncle reuben was not a great appreciator of poetry--at all events of his nephew's; and an irreverent remark on 'sordello', imputed to a more eminent contemporary, proceeded, under cover of a friend's name, from him. but he had his share of mental endowments. we are told that he was a good linguist, and that he wrote on finance under an assumed name. he was also, apparently, an accomplished classic. lord beaconsfield is said to have declared that the inscription on a silver inkstand, presented to the daughter of lionel rothschild on her marriage, by the clerks at new court, 'was the most appropriate thing he had ever come across;' and that whoever had selected it must be one of the first latin scholars of the day. it was mr. reuben browning. another favourite uncle was william shergold browning, though less intimate with his nephew and niece than he would have become if he had not married while they were still children, and settled in paris, where his father's interest had placed him in the rothschild house. he is known by his 'history of the huguenots', a work, we are told, 'full of research, with a reference to contemporary literature for almost every occurrence mentioned or referred to.' he also wrote the 'provost of paris', and 'hoel morven', historical novels, and 'leisure hours', a collection of miscellanies; and was a contributor for some years to the 'gentleman's magazine'. it was chiefly from this uncle that miss browning and her brother heard the now often-repeated stories of their probable ancestors, micaiah browning, who distinguished himself at the siege of derry, and that commander of the ship 'holy ghost' who conveyed henry v. to france before the battle of agincourt, and received the coat-of-arms, with its emblematic waves, in reward for his service. robert browning was also indebted to him for the acquaintance of m. de ripert-monclar; for he was on friendly terms with the uncle of the young count, the marquis de fortia, a learned man and member of the institut, and gave a letter of introduction--actually, i believe, to his brother reuben--at the marquis's request.* * a grandson of william shergold, robert jardine browning, graduated at lincoln college, was called to the bar, and is now crown prosecutor in new south wales; where his name first gave rise to a report that he was mr. browning's son, while the announcement of his marriage was, for a moment, connected with mr. browning himself. he was also intimate with the poet and his sister, who liked him very much. the friendly relations with carlyle, which resulted in his high estimate of the poet's mother, also began at hatcham. on one occasion he took his brother, the doctor, with him to dine there. an earlier and much attached friend of the family was captain pritchard, cousin to the noted physician dr. blundell. he enabled the young robert, whom he knew from the age of sixteen, to attend some of dr. blundell's lectures; and this aroused in him a considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine, though, as i shall have occasion to show, no knowledge of either disease or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life. a captain lloyd is indirectly associated with 'the flight of the duchess'. that poem was not completed according to its original plan; and it was the always welcome occurrence of a visit from this gentleman which arrested its completion. mr. browning vividly remembered how the click of the garden gate, and the sight of the familiar figure advancing towards the house, had broken in upon his work and dispelled its first inspiration. the appearance of 'paracelsus' did not give the young poet his just place in popular judgment and public esteem. a generation was to pass before this was conceded to him. but it compelled his recognition by the leading or rising literary men of the day; and a fuller and more varied social life now opened before him. the names of serjeant talfourd, horne, leigh hunt, barry cornwall (procter), monckton milnes (lord houghton), eliot warburton, dickens, wordsworth, and walter savage landor, represent, with that of forster, some of the acquaintances made, or the friendships begun, at this period. prominent among the friends that were to be, was also archer gurney, well known in later life as the rev. archer gurney, and chaplain to the british embassy in paris. his sympathies were at present largely absorbed by politics. he was contesting the representation of some county, on the conservative side; but he took a very vivid interest in mr. browning's poems; and this perhaps fixes the beginning of the intimacy at a somewhat later date; since a pretty story by which it was illustrated connects itself with the publication of 'bells and pomegranates'. he himself wrote dramas and poems. sir john, afterwards lord, hanmer was also much attracted by the young poet, who spent a pleasant week with him at bettisfield park. he was the author of a volume entitled 'fra cipollo and other poems', from which the motto of 'colombe's birthday' was subsequently taken. the friends, old and new, met in the informal manner of those days, at afternoon dinners, or later suppers, at the houses of mr. fox, serjeant talfourd, and, as we shall see, mr. macready; and mr. fox's daughter, then only a little girl, but intelligent and observant for her years, well remembers the pleasant gatherings at which she was allowed to assist, when first performances of plays, or first readings of plays and poems, had brought some of the younger and more ardent spirits together. miss flower, also, takes her place in the literary group. her sister had married in , and left her free to live for her own pursuits and her own friends; and mr. browning must have seen more of her then than was possible in his boyish days. none, however, of these intimacies were, at the time, so important to him as that formed with the great actor macready. they were introduced to each other by mr. fox early in the winter of - ; the meeting is thus chronicled in macready's diary, november .* * 'macready's reminiscences', edited by sir frederick pollock; . 'went from chambers to dine with rev. william fox, bayswater. . . . mr. robert browning, the author of 'paracelsus', came in after dinner; i was very much pleased to meet him. his face is full of intelligence. . . . i took mr. browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. he expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal, wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.' on december he writes: 'read 'paracelsus', a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, and diction, but occasionally obscure; the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time. . . .' he invited mr. browning to his country house, elm place, elstree, for the last evening of the year; and again refers to him under date of december . '. . . our other guests were miss henney, forster, cattermole, browning, and mr. munro. mr. browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention, and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man i ever saw.' this new-year's-eve visit brought browning and forster together for the first time. the journey to elstree was then performed by coach, and the two young men met at the 'blue posts', where, with one or more of mr. macready's other guests, they waited for the coach to start. they eyed each other with interest, both being striking in their way, and neither knowing who the other was. when the introduction took place at macready's house, mr. forster supplemented it by saying: 'did you see a little notice of you i wrote in the 'examiner'?' the two names will now be constantly associated in macready's diary, which, except for mr. browning's own casual utterances, is almost our only record of his literary and social life during the next two years. it was at elm place that mr. browning first met miss euphrasia fanny haworth, then a neighbour of mr. macready, residing with her mother at barham lodge. miss haworth was still a young woman, but her love and talent for art and literature made her a fitting member of the genial circle to which mr. browning belonged; and she and the poet soon became fast friends. her first name appears as 'eyebright' in 'sordello'. his letters to her, returned after her death by her brother, mr. frederick haworth, supply valuable records of his experiences and of his feelings at one very interesting, and one deeply sorrowful, period of his history. she was a thoroughly kindly, as well as gifted woman, and much appreciated by those of the poet's friends who knew her as a resident in london during her last years. a portrait which she took of him in is considered by some persons very good. at about this time also, and probably through miss haworth, he became acquainted with miss martineau. soon after his introduction to macready, if not before, mr. browning became busy with the thought of writing for the stage. the diary has this entry for february , : 'forster and browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy, which browning had begun to think of: the subject, narses. he said that i had _bit_ him by my performance of othello, and i told him i hoped i should make the blood come. it would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which i have endured in my profession, if, by its exercise, i had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. may it be!' but narses was abandoned, and the more serious inspiration and more definite motive were to come later. they connect themselves with one of the pleasant social occurrences which must have lived in the young poet's memory. on may 'ion' had been performed for the first time and with great success, mr. macready sustaining the principal part; and the great actor and a number of their common friends had met at supper at serjeant talfourd's house to celebrate the occasion. the party included wordsworth and landor, both of whom mr. browning then met for the first time. toasts flew right and left. mr. browning's health was proposed by serjeant talfourd as that of the youngest poet of england, and wordsworth responded to the appeal with very kindly courtesy. the conversation afterwards turned upon plays, and macready, who had ignored a half-joking question of miss mitford, whether, if she wrote one, he would act in it, overtook browning as they were leaving the house, and said, 'write a play, browning, and keep me from going to america.' the reply was, 'shall it be historical and english; what do you say to a drama on strafford?' this ready response on the poet's part showed that strafford, as a dramatic subject, had been occupying his thoughts. the subject was in the air, because forster was then bringing out a life of that statesman, with others belonging to the same period. it was more than in the air, so far as browning was concerned, because his friend had been disabled, either through sickness or sorrow, from finishing this volume by the appointed time, and he, as well he might, had largely helped him in its completion. it was, however, not till august that macready wrote in his diary: 'forster told me that browning had fixed on strafford for the subject of a tragedy; he could not have hit upon one that i could have more readily concurred in.' a previous entry of may , the occasion of which is only implied, shows with how high an estimate of mr. browning's intellectual importance macready's professional relations to him began. 'arriving at chambers, i found a note from browning. what can i say upon it? it was a tribute which remunerated me for the annoyances and cares of years: it was one of the very highest, may i not say the highest, honour i have through life received.' the estimate maintained itself in reference to the value of mr. browning's work, since he wrote on march , : 'read before dinner a few pages of 'paracelsus', which raises my wonder the more i read it. . . . looked over two plays, which it was not possible to read, hardly as i tried. . . . read some scenes in 'strafford', which restore one to the world of sense and feeling once again.' but as the day of the performance drew near, he became at once more anxious and more critical. an entry of april comments somewhat sharply on the dramatic faults of 'strafford', besides declaring the writer's belief that the only chance for it is in the acting, which, 'by possibility, might carry it to the end without disapprobation,' though he dares not hope without opposition. it is quite conceivable that his first complete study of the play, and first rehearsal of it, brought to light deficiencies which had previously escaped him; but so complete a change of sentiment points also to private causes of uneasiness and irritation; and, perhaps, to the knowledge that its being saved by collective good acting was out of the question. 'strafford' was performed at covent garden theatre on may . mr. browning wrote to mr. fox after one of the last rehearsals: may day, lincoln's inn fields. dear sir,--all my endeavours to procure a copy before this morning have been fruitless. i send the first book of the first bundle. _pray_ look over it--the alterations to-night will be considerable. the complexion of the piece is, i grieve to say, 'perfect gallows' just now--our _king_, mr. dale, being . . . but you'll see him, and, i fear, not much applaud. your unworthy son, in things literary, robert browning. p.s. (in pencil).--a most unnecessary desire, but urged on me by messrs. longman: no notice on str. in to-night's true sun,* lest the other papers be jealous!!! * mr. fox reviewed 'strafford' in the 'true sun'. a second letter, undated, but evidently written a day or two later, refers to the promised notice, which had then appeared. tuesday night. no words can express my feelings: i happen to be much annoyed and unwell--but your most generous notice has almost made 'my soul well and happy now.' i thank you, my most kind, most constant friend, from my heart for your goodness--which is brave enough, just now. i am ever and increasingly yours, robert browning. you will be glad to see me on the earliest occasion, will you not? i shall certainly come. a letter from miss flower to miss sarah fox (sister to the rev. william fox), at norwich, contains the following passage, which evidently continues a chapter of london news: 'then 'strafford'; were you not pleased to hear of the success of one you must, i think, remember a very little boy, years ago. if not, you have often heard us speak of robert browning: and it is a great deal to have accomplished a successful tragedy, although he seems a good deal annoyed at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a play again, as long as he lives. you have no idea of the ignorance and obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his having to write out the meaning of the word 'impeachment', as some of them thought it meant 'poaching'.' on the first night, indeed, the fate of 'strafford' hung in the balance; it was saved by macready and miss helen faucit. after this they must have been better supported, as it was received on the second night with enthusiasm by a full house. the catastrophe came after the fifth performance, with the desertion of the actor who had sustained the part of pym. we cannot now judge whether, even under favourable circumstances, the play would have had as long a run as was intended; but the casting vote in favour of this view is given by the conduct of mr. osbaldistone, the manager, when it was submitted to him. the diary says, march , that he caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay. the terms he offered to the author must also have been considered favourable in those days. the play was published in april by longman, this time not at the author's expense; but it brought no return either to him or to his publisher. it was dedicated 'in all affectionate admiration' to william c. macready. we gain some personal glimpses of the browning of - ; one especially through mrs. bridell-fox, who thus describes her first meeting with him: 'i remember . . . when mr. browning entered the drawing-room, with a quick light step; and on hearing from me that my father was out, and in fact that nobody was at home but myself, he said: "it's my birthday to-day; i'll wait till they come in," and sitting down to the piano, he added: "if it won't disturb you, i'll play till they do." and as he turned to the instrument, the bells of some neighbouring church suddenly burst out with a frantic merry peal. it seemed, to my childish fancy, as if in response to the remark that it was his birthday. he was then slim and dark, and very handsome; and--may i hint it--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite "the glass of fashion and the mould of form." but full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what's more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.' i do not think his memory ever taxed him with foppishness, though he may have had the innocent personal vanity of an attractive young man at his first period of much seeing and being seen; but all we know of him at that time bears out the impression mrs. fox conveys, of a joyous, artless confidence in himself and in life, easily depressed, but quickly reasserting itself; and in which the eagerness for new experiences had freed itself from the rebellious impatience of boyish days. the self-confidence had its touches of flippancy and conceit; but on this side it must have been constantly counteracted by his gratitude for kindness, and by his enthusiastic appreciation of the merits of other men. his powers of feeling, indeed, greatly expended themselves in this way. he was very attractive to women and, as we have seen, warmly loved by very various types of men; but, except in its poetic sense, his emotional nature was by no means then in the ascendant: a fact difficult to realize when we remember the passion of his childhood's love for mother and home, and the new and deep capabilities of affection to be developed in future days. the poet's soul in him was feeling its wings; the realities of life had not yet begun to weight them. we see him again at the 'ion' supper, in the grace and modesty with which he received the honours then adjudged to him. the testimony has been said to come from miss mitford, but may easily have been supplied by miss haworth, who was also present on this occasion. mr. browning's impulse towards play-writing had not, as we have seen, begun with 'strafford'. it was still very far from being exhausted. and though he had struck out for himself another line of dramatic activity, his love for the higher theatrical life, and the legitimate inducements of the more lucrative and not necessarily less noble form of composition, might ultimately in some degree have prevailed with him if circumstances had been such as to educate his theatrical capabilities, and to reward them. his first acted drama was, however, an interlude to the production of the important group of poems which was to be completed by 'sordello'; and he alludes to this later work in an also discarded preface to 'strafford', as one on which he had for some time been engaged. he even characterizes the tragedy as an attempt 'to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch.' 'sordello' again occupied him during the remainder of and the beginning of ; and by the spring of this year he must have been thankful to vary the scene and mode of his labours by means of a first visit to italy. he announces his impending journey, with its immediate plan and purpose, in the following note: to john robertson, esq. good friday, . dear sir,--i was not fortunate enough to find you the day before yesterday--and must tell you very hurriedly that i sail this morning for venice--intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes. i shall have your good wishes i know. believe me, in return, dear sir, yours faithfully and obliged, robert browning. mr. john robertson had influence with the 'westminster review', either as editor, or member of its staff. he had been introduced to mr. browning by miss martineau; and, being a great admirer of 'paracelsus', had promised careful attention for 'sordello'; but, when the time approached, he made conditions of early reading, &c., which mr. browning thought so unfair towards other magazines that he refused to fulfil them. he lost his review, and the goodwill of its intending writer; and even miss martineau was ever afterwards cooler towards him, though his attitude in the matter had been in some degree prompted by a chivalrous partisanship for her. chapter - first italian journey--letters to miss haworth--mr. john kenyon--'sordello'--letter to miss flower--'pippa passes'--'bells and pomegranates'. mr. browning sailed from london with captain davidson of the 'norham castle', a merchant vessel bound for trieste, on which he found himself the only passenger. a striking experience of the voyage, and some characteristic personal details, are given in the following letter to miss haworth. it is dated , and was probably written before that year's summer had closed. tuesday evening. dear miss haworth,--do look at a fuchsia in full bloom and notice the clear little honey-drop depending from every flower. i have just found it out to my no small satisfaction,--a bee's breakfast. i only answer for the long-blossomed sort, though,--indeed, for this plant in my room. taste and be titania; you can, that is. all this while i forget that you will perhaps never guess the good of the discovery: i have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves--some leaves--that i every now and then, in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits--so there will be some sense in that. how i remember the flowers--even grasses--of places i have seen! some one flower or weed, i should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them. snowdrops and tilsit in prussia go together; cowslips and windsor park, for instance; flowering palm and some place or other in holland. now to answer what can be answered in the letter i was happy to receive last week. i am quite well. i did not expect you would write,--for none of your written reasons, however. you will see 'sordello' in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. i did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro' the straits of gibraltar)--but i did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the queen*--the whole to go in book iii--perhaps. i called you 'eyebright'--meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of "euphrasia" into my own language: folks would know who euphrasia, or fanny, was--and i should not know ianthe or clemanthe. not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. shall i say 'eyebright'? * i know no lines directly addressed to the queen. i was disappointed in one thing, canova. what companions should i have? the story of the ship must have reached you 'with a difference' as ophelia says; my sister told it to a mr. dow, who delivered it to forster, i suppose, who furnished macready with it, who made it over &c., &c., &c.--as short as i can tell, this way it happened: the captain woke me one bright sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. both met halfway, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. our men made the wreck fast in high glee at having 'new trousers out of the sails,' and quite sure she was a french boat, broken from her moorings at algiers, close by. ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk!) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour's pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month under a blazing african sun--don't imagine the wretched state of things. they were, these six, the 'watch below'--(i give you the result of the day's observation)--the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. one or two were algerines, the rest spaniards. the vessel was a smuggler bound for gibraltar; there were two stupidly disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and--nay, look you! (a rough pen-and-ink sketch of the different parts of the wreck is here introduced) these are the gun-rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. (all the 'bulwarks' or sides of the top, carried away by the waves.) well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft-deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don't you call it, till the captain was half-frightened--he would get at the ship's papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other to 'cover the faces',--no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton, &c., that would have taken a day to get out, but the captain vowed that after five o'clock she should be cut adrift: accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you hardly can conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned round, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel french surgeon's lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there; only thank me for not taking you at your word, and giving you the whole 'story'.--'what i did?' i went to trieste, then venice--then through treviso and bassano to the mountains, delicious asolo, all my places and castles, you will see. then to vicenza, padua, and venice again. then to verona, trent, innspruck (the tyrol), munich, salzburg in franconia, frankfort and mayence; down the rhine to cologne, then to aix-la-chapelle, liege and antwerp--then home. shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? i shall be off again as soon as my book is out, whenever that will be. i never read that book of miss martineau's, so can't understand what you mean. macready is looking well; i just saw him the other day for a minute after the play; his kitely was kitely--superb from his flat cap down to his shining shoes. i saw very few italians, 'to know', that is. those i did see i liked. your friend pepoli has been lecturing here, has he not? i shall be vexed if you don't write soon, a long elstree letter. what are you doing, writing--drawing? ever yours truly r. b. to miss haworth, barham lodge, elstree. miss browning's account of this experience, supplied from memory of her brother's letters and conversations, contains some vivid supplementary details. the drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance between it and the ship; hence the necessity of 'sailing away' from it. 'of the dead pirates, one had his hands clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. the captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and sight. they stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, &c. the captain said privately to robert, "i cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so i mean quietly in the night to sail away." robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. at the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. the day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. captain davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at trieste.' miss browning also relates that the weather was stormy in the bay of biscay, and for the first fortnight her brother suffered terribly. the captain supported him on to the deck as they passed through the straits of gibraltar, that he might not lose the sight. he recovered, as we know, sufficiently to write 'how they brought the good news from ghent to aix'; but we can imagine in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him. the poem was pencilled on the cover of bartoli's "de' simboli trasportati al morale", a favourite book and constant companion of his; and, in spite of perfect effacement as far as the sense goes, the pencil dints are still visible. the little poem 'home thoughts from the sea' was written at the same time, and in the same manner. by the time they reached trieste, the captain, a rough north-countryman, had become so attached to mr. browning that he offered him a free passage to constantinople; and after they had parted, carefully preserved, by way of remembrance, a pair of very old gloves worn by him on deck. mr. browning might, on such an occasion, have dispensed with gloves altogether; but it was one of his peculiarities that he could never endure to be out of doors with uncovered hands. the captain also showed his friendly feeling on his return to england by bringing to miss browning, whom he had heard of through her brother, a present of six bottles of attar of roses. the inspirations of asolo and venice appear in 'pippa passes' and 'in a gondola'; but the latter poem showed, to mr. browning's subsequent vexation, that venice had been imperfectly seen; and the magnetism which asolo was to exercise upon him, only fully asserted itself at a much later time. a second letter to miss haworth is undated, but may have been written at any period of this or the ensuing year. i have received, a couple of weeks since, a present--an album large and gaping, and as cibber's richard says of the 'fair elizabeth': 'my heart is empty--she shall fill it'--so say i (impudently?) of my grand trouble-table, which holds a sketch or two by my fine fellow monclar, one lithograph--his own face of faces,--'all the rest was amethyst.' f. h. everywhere! not a soul beside 'in the chrystal silence there,' and it locks, this album; now, don't shower drawings on m., who has so many advantages over me as it is: or at least don't bid _me_ of all others say what he is to have. the 'master' is somebody you don't know, w. j. fox, a magnificent and poetical nature, who used to write in reviews when i was a boy, and to whom my verses, a bookful, written at the ripe age of twelve and thirteen, were shown: which verses he praised not a little; which praise comforted me not a little. then i lost sight of him for years and years; then i published _anonymously_ a little poem--which he, to my inexpressible delight, praised and expounded in a gallant article in a magazine of which he was the editor; then i found him out again; he got a publisher for 'paracelsus' (i read it to him in manuscript) and is in short 'my literary father'. pretty nearly the same thing did he for miss martineau, as she has said somewhere. god knows i forget what the 'talk', table-talk was about--i think she must have told you the results of the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at ascot, and that day's, the dinner-day's morning at elstree and st. albans. she is to give me advice about my worldly concerns, and not before i need it! i cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me--do go on, and tell me all sorts of things, 'the story' for a beginning; but your moralisings on 'your age' and the rest, are--now what _are_ they? not to be reasoned on, disputed, laughed at, grieved about: they are 'fanny's crotchets'. i thank thee, jew (lia), for teaching me that word. i don't know that i shall leave town for a month: my friend monclar looks piteous when i talk of such an event. i can't bear to leave him; he is to take my portrait to-day (a famous one he _has_ taken!) and very like he engages it shall be. i am going to town for the purpose. . . . now, then, do something for me, and see if i'll ask miss m----to help you! i am going to begin the finishing 'sordello'--and to begin thinking a tragedy (an historical one, so i shall want heaps of criticisms on 'strafford') and i want to have _another_ tragedy in prospect, i write best so provided: i had chosen a splendid subject for it, when i learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and i accordingly throw it up. i want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one i mean to have ready in a short time. i have many half-conceptions, floating fancies: give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting; should it be a woman who loves thus, or a man? what circumstances will best draw out, set forth this feeling? . . . the tragedies in question were to be 'king victor and king charles', and 'the return of the druses'. this letter affords a curious insight into mr. browning's mode of work; it is also very significant of the small place which love had hitherto occupied in his life. it was evident, from his appeal to miss haworth's 'notion' on the subject, that he had as yet no experience, even imaginary, of a genuine passion, whether in woman or man. the experience was still distant from him in point of time. in circumstance he was nearer to it than he knew; for it was in that he became acquainted with mr. kenyon. when dining one day at serjeant talfourd's, he was accosted by a pleasant elderly man, who, having, we conclude, heard who he was, asked leave to address to him a few questions: 'was his father's name robert? had he gone to school at the rev. mr. bell's at cheshunt, and was he still alive?' on receiving affirmative answers, he went on to say that mr. browning and he had been great chums at school, and though they had lost sight of each other in after-life, he had never forgotten his old playmate, but even alluded to him in a little book which he had published a few years before.* * the volume is entitled 'rhymed plea for tolerance' ( ), and contains a reference to mr. kenyon's schooldays, and to the classic fights which mr. browning had instituted. the next morning the poet asked his father if he remembered a schoolfellow named john kenyon. he replied, 'certainly! this is his face,' and sketched a boy's head, in which his son at once recognized that of the grown man. the acquaintance was renewed, and mr. kenyon proved ever afterwards a warm friend. mr. browning wrote of him, in a letter to professor knight of st. andrews, jan. , : 'he was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. he enjoyed the friendship of wordsworth, of southey, of landor, and, in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of eminence.' it was at mr. kenyon's house that the poet saw most of wordsworth, who always stayed there when he came to town. in 'sordello' appeared. it was, relatively to its length, by far the slowest in preparation of mr. browning's poems. this seemed, indeed, a condition of its peculiar character. it had lain much deeper in the author's mind than the various slighter works which were thrown off in the course of its inception. we know from the preface to 'strafford' that it must have been begun soon after 'paracelsus'. its plan may have belonged to a still earlier date; for it connects itself with 'pauline' as the history of a poetic soul; with both the earlier poems, as the manifestation of the self-conscious spiritual ambitions which were involved in that history. this first imaginative mood was also outgrowing itself in the very act of self-expression; for the tragedies written before the conclusion of 'sordello' impress us as the product of a different mental state--as the work of a more balanced imagination and a more mature mind. it would be interesting to learn how mr. browning's typical poet became embodied in this mediaeval form: whether the half-mythical character of the real sordello presented him as a fitting subject for imaginative psychological treatment, or whether the circumstances among which he moved seemed the best adapted to the development of the intended type. the inspiration may have come through the study of dante, and his testimony to the creative influence of sordello on their mother-tongue. that period of italian history must also have assumed, if it did not already possess, a great charm for mr. browning's fancy, since he studied no less than thirty works upon it, which were to contribute little more to his dramatic picture than what he calls 'decoration', or 'background'. but the one guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background; and the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of sordello has been proved by his continued belief that its prominence was throughout maintained. he could still declare, so late as , in his preface to the reprint of the work, that his 'stress' in writing it had lain 'on the incidents in the development of a soul, little else' being to his mind 'worth study'. i cannot therefore help thinking that recent investigations of the life and character of the actual poet, however in themselves praiseworthy and interesting, have been often in some degree a mistake; because, directly or indirectly, they referred mr. browning's sordello to an historical reality, which his author had grasped, as far as was then possible, but to which he was never intended to conform. sordello's story does exhibit the development of a soul; or rather, the sudden awakening of a self-regarding nature to the claims of other men--the sudden, though slowly prepared, expansion of the narrower into the larger self, the selfish into the sympathetic existence; and this takes place in accordance with mr. browning's here expressed belief that poetry is the appointed vehicle for all lasting truths; that the true poet must be their exponent. the work is thus obviously, in point of moral utterance, an advance on 'pauline'. its metaphysics are, also, more distinctly formulated than those of either 'pauline' or 'paracelsus'; and the frequent use of the term will in its metaphysical sense so strongly points to german associations that it is difficult to realize their absence, then and always, from mr. browning's mind. but he was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the german philosophers nor their reflection in coleridge, who would have seemed a likely medium between them and him. miss martineau once said to him that he had no need to study german thought, since his mind was german enough--by which she possibly meant too german--already. the poem also impresses us by a gothic richness of detail,* the picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for this very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. mr. browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular character had served to conceal; and he was glad to find, some years ago, that 'sordello' was represented in a collection of descriptive passages which a friend of his was proposing to make. 'there is a great deal of that in it,' he said, 'and it has always been overlooked.' * the term gothic has been applied to mr. browning's work, i believe, by mr. james thomson, in writing of 'the ring and the book', and i do not like to use it without saying so. but it is one of those which must have spontaneously suggested themselves to many other of mr. browning's readers. it was unfortunate that new difficulties of style should have added themselves on this occasion to those of subject and treatment; and the reason of it is not generally known. mr. john sterling had made some comments on the wording of 'paracelsus'; and miss caroline fox, then quite a young woman, repeated them, with additions, to miss haworth, who, in her turn, communicated them to mr. browning, but without making quite clear to him the source from which they sprang. he took the criticism much more seriously than it deserved, and condensed the language of this his next important publication into what was nearly its present form. in leaving 'sordello' we emerge from the self-conscious stage of mr. browning's imagination, and his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have hitherto felt it to be. 'festus' and 'salinguerra' have already given promise of the world of 'men and women' into which he will now conduct us. they will be inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing will. we have, indeed, already lost the sense of disparity between the man and the poet; for the browning of 'sordello' was growing older, while the defects of the poem were in many respects those of youth. in 'pippa passes', published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. each has entered on the inheritance of the other. neither the imagination nor the passion of what mr. gosse so fitly calls this 'lyrical masque'* gives much scope for tenderness; but the quality of humour is displayed in it for the first time; as also a strongly marked philosophy of life--or more properly, of association--from which its idea and development are derived. in spite, however, of these evidences of general maturity, mr. browning was still sometimes boyish in personal intercourse, if we may judge from a letter to miss flower written at about the same time. * these words, and a subsequent paragraph, are quoted from mr. gosse's 'personalia'. monday night, march (? ). my dear miss flower,--i have this moment received your very kind note--of course, i understand your objections. how else? but they are somewhat lightened already (confess--nay 'confess' is vile--you will be rejoiced to holla from the house-top)--will go on, or rather go off, lightening, and will be--oh, where _will_ they be half a dozen years hence? meantime praise what you can praise, do me all the good you can, you and mr. fox (as if you will not!) for i have a head full of projects--mean to song-write, play-write forthwith,--and, believe me, dear miss flower, yours ever faithfully, robert browning. by the way, you speak of 'pippa'--could we not make some arrangement about it? the lyrics _want_ your music--five or six in all--how say you? when these three plays are out i hope to build a huge ode--but 'all goeth by god's will.' the loyal alfred domett now appears on the scene with a satirical poem, inspired by an impertinent criticism on his friend. i give its first two verses: on a certain critique on 'pippa passes'. (query--passes what?--the critic's comprehension.) ho! everyone that by the nose is led, automatons of which the world is full, ye myriad bodies, each without a head, that dangle from a critic's brainless skull, come, hearken to a deep discovery made, a mighty truth now wondrously displayed. a black squat beetle, vigorous for his size, pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong the dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along his tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies-- has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering trouble, against a mountain he can neither double nor ever hope to scale. so like a free, pert, self-conceited scarabaeus, he takes it into his horny head to swear there's no such thing as any mountain there. the writer lived to do better things from a literary point of view; but these lines have a fine ring of youthful indignation which must have made them a welcome tribute to friendship. there seems to have been little respectful criticism of 'pippa passes'; it is less surprising that there should have been very little of 'sordello'. mr. browning, it is true, retained a limited number of earnest appreciators, foremost of whom was the writer of an admirable notice of these two works, quoted from an 'eclectic review' of , in dr. furnivall's 'bibliography'. i am also told that the series of poems which was next to appear was enthusiastically greeted by some poets and painters of the pre-raphaelite school; but he was now entering on a period of general neglect, which covered nearly twenty years of his life, and much that has since become most deservedly popular in his work. 'pippa passes' had appeared as the first instalment of 'bells and pomegranates', the history of which i give in mr. gosse's words. this poem, and the two tragedies, 'king victor and king charles' and 'the return of the druses'--first christened 'mansoor, the hierophant'--were lying idle in mr. browning's desk. he had not found, perhaps not very vigorously sought, a publisher for them. 'one day, as the poet was discussing the matter with mr. edward moxon, the publisher, the latter remarked that at that time he was bringing out some editions of the old elizabethan dramatists in a comparatively cheap form, and that if mr. browning would consent to print his poems as pamphlets, using this cheap type, the expense would be very inconsiderable. the poet jumped at the idea, and it was agreed that each poem should form a separate brochure of just one sheet--sixteen pages in double columns--the entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds. in this fashion began the celebrated series of 'bells and pomegranates', eight numbers of which, a perfect treasury of fine poetry, came out successively between and . 'pippa passes' led the way, and was priced first at sixpence; then, the sale being inconsiderable, at a shilling, which greatly encouraged the sale; and so, slowly, up to half-a-crown, at which the price of each number finally rested.' mr. browning's hopes and intentions with respect to this series are announced in the following preface to 'pippa passes', of which, in later editions, only the dedicatory words appear: 'two or three years ago i wrote a play, about which the chief matter i care to recollect at present is, that a pit-full of good-natured people applauded it:--ever since, i have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. what follows i mean for the first of a series of dramatical pieces, to come out at intervals, and i amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of pit-audience again. of course, such a work must go on no longer than it is liked; and to provide against a certain and but too possible contingency, let me hasten to say now--what, if i were sure of success, i would try to say circumstantially enough at the close--that i dedicate my best intentions most admiringly to the author of "ion"--most affectionately to serjeant talfourd.' a necessary explanation of the general title was reserved for the last number: and does something towards justifying the popular impression that mr. browning exacted a large measure of literary insight from his readers. 'here ends my first series of "bells and pomegranates": and i take the opportunity of explaining, in reply to inquiries, that i only meant by that title to indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred. it is little to the purpose, that such is actually one of the most familiar of the many rabbinical (and patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because i confess that, letting authority alone, i supposed the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired meaning. "faith and good works" is another fancy, for instance, and perhaps no easier to arrive at: yet giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of dante, and raffaelle crowned his theology (in the 'camera della segnatura') with blossoms of the same; as if the bellari and vasari would be sure to come after, and explain that it was merely "simbolo delle buone opere--il qual pomogranato fu pero usato nelle vesti del pontefice appresso gli ebrei."' the dramas and poems contained in the eight numbers of 'bells and pomegranates' were: i. pippa passes. . ii. king victor and king charles. . iii. dramatic lyrics. . cavalier tunes; i. marching along; ii. give a rouse; iii. my wife gertrude. ['boot and saddle'.] italy and france; i. italy; ii. france. camp and cloister; i. camp (french); ii. cloister (spanish). in a gondola. artemis prologuizes. waring; i.; ii. queen worship; i. rudel and the lady of tripoli; ii. cristina. madhouse cells; i. [johannes agricola.]; ii. [porphyria.] through the metidja to abd-el-kadr. . the pied piper of hamelin; a child's story. iv. the return of the druses. a tragedy, in five acts. . v. a blot in the 'scutcheon. a tragedy, in three acts. . [second edition, same year.] vi. colombe's birthday. a play, in five acts. . vii. dramatic romances and lyrics. . 'how they brought the good news from ghent to aix. ( --.)' pictor ignotus. (florence, --.) italy in england. england in italy. (piano di sorrento.) the lost leader. the lost mistress. home thoughts, from abroad. the tomb at st. praxed's: (rome, --.) garden fancies; i. the flower's name; ii. sibrandus schafnaburgensis. france and spain; i. the laboratory (ancien regime); ii. spain--the confessional. the flight of the duchess. earth's immortalities. song. ('nay but you, who do not love her.') the boy and the angel. night and morning; i. night; ii. morning. claret and tokay. saul. (part i.) time's revenges. the glove. (peter ronsard loquitur.) viii. and last. luria; and a soul's tragedy. . this publication has seemed entitled to a detailed notice, because it is practically extinct, and because its nature and circumstance confer on it a biographical interest not possessed by any subsequent issue of mr. browning's works. the dramas and poems of which it is composed belong to that more mature period of the author's life, in which the analysis of his work ceases to form a necessary part of his history. some few of them, however, are significant to it; and this is notably the case with 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'. chapter - 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'--letters to mr. frank hill; lady martin--charles dickens--other dramas and minor poems--letters to miss lee; miss haworth; miss flower--second italian journey; naples--e. j. trelawney--stendhal. 'a blot in the 'scutcheon' was written for macready, who meant to perform the principal part; and we may conclude that the appeal for it was urgent, since it was composed in the space of four or five days. macready's journals must have contained a fuller reference to both the play and its performance (at drury lane, february ) than appears in published form; but considerable irritation had arisen between him and mr. browning, and he possibly wrote something which his editor, sir frederick pollock, as the friend of both, thought it best to omit. what occurred on this occasion has been told in some detail by mr. gosse, and would not need repeating if the question were only of re-telling it on the same authority, in another person's words; but, through the kindness of mr. and mrs. frank hill, i am able to give mr. browning's direct statement of the case, as also his expressed judgment upon it. the statement was made more than forty years later than the events to which it refers, but will, nevertheless, be best given in its direct connection with them. the merits, or demerits, of 'a blot in the 'scutcheon' had been freshly brought under discussion by its performance in london through the action of the browning society, and in washington by mr. laurence barrett; and it became the subject of a paragraph in one of the theatrical articles prepared for the 'daily news'. mr. hill was then editor of the paper, and when the article came to him for revision, he thought it right to submit to mr. browning the passages devoted to his tragedy, which embodied some then prevailing, but, he strongly suspected, erroneous impressions concerning it. the results of this kind and courteous proceeding appear in the following letter. , warwick crescent: december , . my dear mr. hill,--it was kind and considerate of you to suppress the paragraph which you send me,--and of which the publication would have been unpleasant for reasons quite other than as regarding my own work,--which exists to defend or accuse itself. you will judge of the true reasons when i tell you the facts--so much of them as contradicts the statements of your critic--who, i suppose, has received a stimulus from the notice, in an american paper which arrived last week, of mr. laurence barrett's intention 'shortly to produce the play' in new york--and subsequently in london: so that 'the failure' of forty-one years ago might be duly influential at present--or two years hence perhaps. the 'mere amateurs' are no high game. macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the haymarket, and retained it for drury lane, of which i was ignorant that he was about to become the manager: he accepted it 'at the instigation' of nobody,--and charles dickens was not in england when he did so: it was read to him after his return, by forster--and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in forster's book some thirty years after. when the drury lane season began, macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others--'the patrician's daughter', and 'plighted troth': having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had 'smashed his arrangements altogether': but he would still produce my play. i had--in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by macready's professional acquaintances--i had no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to 'release him from his promise'; on the contrary, i should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. soon after, macready begged that i would call on him: he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, 'and laughed at from beginning to end': on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning--which he did, and very adequately--but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by mr. phelps; and again i failed to understand,--what forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,--that to allow at macready's theatre any other than macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,--and really believed i was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. at the rehearsal, macready announced that mr. phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part: on the third rehearsal, mr. phelps appeared for the first time, and sat in a chair while macready more than read, rehearsed the part. the next morning mr. phelps waylaid me at the stage-door to say, with much emotion, that it never was intended that _he_ should be instrumental in the success of a new tragedy, and that macready would play tresham on the ground that himself, phelps, was unable to do so. he added that he could not expect me to waive such an advantage,--but that, if i were prepared to waive it, 'he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the words in his memory by next day.' i bade him follow me to the green-room, and hear what i decided upon--which was that as macready had given him the part, he should keep it: this was on a thursday; he rehearsed on friday and saturday,--the play being acted the same evening,--_of the fifth day after the 'reading' by macready_. macready at once wished to reduce the importance of the 'play',--as he styled it in the bills,--tried to leave out so much of the text, that i baffled him by getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by moxon's assistance. he wanted me to call it 'the sister'!--and i have before me, while i write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid the tragical ending--tresham was to announce his intention of going into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that macready, and macready alone, could produce a veritable 'tragedy', unproduced before. not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses--and a striking scene which had been used for the 'patrician's daughter', did duty a second time. if your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of 'the failure of powerful and experienced actors' to ensure its success,--i can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a friendship of many years--a friendship which had a right to be plainly and simply told that the play i had contributed as a proof of it, would through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend's advantage,--all i could possibly care for. only recently, when by the publication of macready's journals the extent of his pecuniary embarrassments at that time was made known, could i in a measure understand his motives for such conduct--and less than ever understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. if 'applause' means success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was successful enough: it 'made way' for macready's own benefit, and the theatre closed a fortnight after. having kept silence for all these years, in spite of repeated explanations, in the style of your critic's, that the play 'failed in spite of the best endeavours' &c. i hardly wish to revive a very painful matter: on the other hand,--as i have said; my play subsists, and is as open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago: is it necessary to search out what somebody or other,--not improbably a jealous adherent of macready, 'the only organizer of theatrical victories', chose to say on the subject? if the characters are 'abhorrent' and 'inscrutable'--and the language conformable,--they were so when dickens pronounced upon them, and will be so whenever the critic pleases to re-consider them--which, if he ever has an opportunity of doing, apart from the printed copy, i can assure you is through no motion of mine. this particular experience was sufficient: but the play is out of my power now; though amateurs and actors may do what they please. of course, this being the true story, i should desire that it were told _thus_ and no otherwise, if it must be told at all: but _not_ as a statement of mine,--the substance of it has been partly stated already by more than one qualified person, and if i have been willing to let the poor matter drop, surely there is no need that it should be gone into now when macready and his athenaeum upholder are no longer able to speak for themselves: this is just a word to you, dear mr. hill, and may be brought under the notice of your critic if you think proper--but only for the facts--not as a communication for the public. yes, thank you, i am in full health, as you wish--and i wish you and mrs. hill, i assure you, all the good appropriate to the season. my sister has completely recovered from her illness, and is grateful for your enquiries. with best regards to mrs. hill, and an apology for this long letter, which however,--when once induced to write it,--i could not well shorten,--believe me, yours truly ever robert browning. i well remember mr. browning's telling me how, when he returned to the green-room, on that critical day, he drove his hat more firmly on to his head, and said to macready, 'i beg pardon, sir, but you have given the part to mr. phelps, and i am satisfied that he should act it;' and how macready, on hearing this, crushed up the ms., and flung it on to the ground. he also admitted that his own manner had been provocative; but he was indignant at what he deemed the unjust treatment which mr. phelps had received. the occasion of the next letter speaks for itself. december , . my dear mr. hill,--your goodness must extend to letting me have the last word--one of sincere thanks. you cannot suppose i doubted for a moment of a good-will which i have had abundant proof of. i only took the occasion your considerate letter gave me, to tell the simple truth which my forty years' silence is a sign i would only tell on compulsion. i never thought your critic had any less generous motive for alluding to the performance as he did than that which he professes: he doubtless heard the account of the matter which macready and his intimates gave currency to at the time; and which, being confined for a while to their limited number, i never chose to notice. but of late years i have got to _read_,--not merely _hear_,--of the play's failure 'which all the efforts of my friend the great actor could not avert;' and the nonsense of this untruth gets hard to bear. i told you the principal facts in the letter i very hastily wrote: i could, had it been worth while, corroborate them by others in plenty, and refer to the living witnesses--lady martin, mrs. stirling, and (i believe) mr. anderson: it was solely through the admirable loyalty of the two former that . . . a play . . . deprived of every advantage, in the way of scenery, dresses, and rehearsing--proved--what macready himself declared it to be--'a complete success'. _so_ he sent a servant to tell me, 'in case there was a call for the author at the end of the act'--to which i replied that the author had been too sick and sorry at the whole treatment of his play to do any such thing. such a call there truly _was_, and mr. anderson had to come forward and 'beg the author to come forward if he were in the house--a circumstance of which he was not aware:' whereat the author laughed at him from a box just opposite. . . . i would submit to anybody drawing a conclusion from one or two facts past contradiction, whether that play could have thoroughly failed which was not only not withdrawn at once but acted three nights in the same week, and years afterwards, reproduced at his own theatre, during my absence in italy, by mr. phelps--the person most completely aware of the untoward circumstances which stood originally in the way of success. why not enquire how it happens that, this second time, there was no doubt of the play's doing as well as plays ordinarily do? for those were not the days of a 'run'. . . . . . . . . this 'last word' has indeed been an aristophanic one of fifty syllables: but i have spoken it, relieved myself, and commend all that concerns me to the approved and valued friend of whom i am proud to account myself in corresponding friendship, his truly ever robert browning. mr. browning also alludes to mr. phelps's acting as not only not having been detrimental to the play, but having helped to save it, in the conspiracy of circumstances which seemed to invoke its failure. this was a mistake, since macready had been anxious to resume the part, and would have saved it, to say the least, more thoroughly. it must, however, be remembered that the irritation which these letters express was due much less to the nature of the facts recorded in them than to the manner in which they had been brought before mr. browning's mind. writing on the subject to lady martin in february , he had spoken very temperately of macready's treatment of his play, while deprecating the injustice towards his own friendship which its want of frankness involved: and many years before this, the touch of a common sorrow had caused the old feeling, at least momentarily, to well up again. the two met for the first time after these occurrences when mr. browning had returned, a widower, from italy. mr. macready, too, had recently lost his wife; and mr. browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, 'o macready!' lady martin has spoken to me of the poet's attitude on the occasion of this performance as being full of generous sympathy for those who were working with him, as well as of the natural anxiety of a young author for his own success. she also remains convinced that this sympathy led him rather to over-than to under-rate the support he received. she wrote concerning it in 'blackwood's magazine', march : 'it seems but yesterday that i sat by his [mr. elton's] side in the green-room at the reading of robert browning's beautiful drama, 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'. as a rule mr. macready always read the new plays. but owing, i suppose, to some press of business, the task was entrusted on this occasion to the head prompter,--a clever man in his way, but wholly unfitted to bring out, or even to understand, mr. browning's meaning. consequently, the delicate, subtle lines were twisted, perverted, and sometimes even made ridiculous in his hands. my "cruel father" [mr. elton] was a warm admirer of the poet. he sat writhing and indignant, and tried by gentle asides to make me see the real meaning of the verse. but somehow the mischief proved irreparable, for a few of the actors during the rehearsals chose to continue to misunderstand the text, and never took the interest in the play which they would have done had mr. macready read it.' looking back on the first appearance of his tragedy through the widening perspectives of nearly forty years, mr. browning might well declare as he did in the letter to lady martin to which i have just referred, that her '_perfect_ behaviour as a woman' and her 'admirable playing as an actress' had been (or at all events were) to him 'the one gratifying circumstance connected with it.' he also felt it a just cause of bitterness that the letter from charles dickens,* which conveyed his almost passionate admiration of 'a blot in the 'scutcheon', and was clearly written to mr. forster in order that it might be seen, was withheld for thirty years from his knowledge, and that of the public whose judgment it might so largely have influenced. nor was this the only time in the poet's life that fairly earned honours escaped him. * see forster's 'life of dickens'. 'colombe's birthday' was produced in at the haymarket;* and afterwards in the provinces, under the direction of miss helen faucit, who created the principal part. it was again performed for the browning society in ,** and although miss alma murray, as colombe, was almost entirely supported by amateurs, the result fully justified miss mary robinson (now madame james darmesteter) in writing immediately afterwards in the boston 'literary world':*** * also in or at boston. ** it had been played by amateurs, members of the browning society, and their friends, at the house of mr. joseph king, in january . *** december , ; quoted in mr. arthur symons' 'introduction to the study of browning'. '"colombe's birthday" is charming on the boards, clearer, more direct in action, more full of delicate surprises than one imagines it in print. with a very little cutting it could be made an excellent acting play.' mr. gosse has seen a first edition copy of it marked for acting, and alludes in his 'personalia' to the greatly increased knowledge of the stage which its minute directions displayed. they told also of sad experience in the sacrifice of the poet which the play-writer so often exacts: since they included the proviso that unless a very good valence could be found, a certain speech of his should be left out. that speech is very important to the poetic, and not less to the moral, purpose of the play: the triumph of unworldly affections. it is that in which valence defies the platitudes so often launched against rank and power, and shows that these may be very beautiful things--in which he pleads for his rival, and against his own heart. he is the better man of the two, and colombe has fallen genuinely in love with him. but the instincts of sovereignty are not outgrown in one day however eventful, and the young duchess has shown herself amply endowed with them. the prince's offer promised much, and it held still more. the time may come when she will need that crowning memory of her husband's unselfishness and truth, not to regret what she has done. 'king victor and king charles' and 'the return of the druses' are both admitted by competent judges to have good qualifications for the stage; and mr. browning would have preferred seeing one of these acted to witnessing the revival of 'strafford' or 'a blot in the 'scutcheon', from neither of which the best amateur performance could remove the stigma of past, real or reputed, failure; and when once a friend belonging to the browning society told him she had been seriously occupied with the possibility of producing the eastern play, he assented to the idea with a simplicity that was almost touching, 'it _was_ written for the stage,' he said, 'and has only one scene.' he knew, however, that the single scene was far from obviating all the difficulties of the case, and that the society, with its limited means, did the best it could. i seldom hear any allusion to a passage in 'king victor and king charles' which i think more than rivals the famous utterance of valence, revealing as it does the same grasp of non-conventional truth, while its occasion lends itself to a far deeper recognition of the mystery, the frequent hopeless dilemma of our moral life. it is that in which polixena, the wife of charles, entreats him for _duty's_ sake to retain the crown, though he will earn, by so doing, neither the credit of a virtuous deed nor the sure, persistent consciousness of having performed one. four poems of the 'dramatic lyrics' had appeared, as i have said, in the 'monthly repository'. six of those included in the 'dramatic lyrics and romances' were first published in 'hood's magazine' from june to april , a month before hood's death. these poems were, 'the laboratory', 'claret and tokay', 'garden fancies', 'the boy and the angel', 'the tomb at st. praxed's', and 'the flight of the duchess'. mr. hood's health had given way under stress of work, and mr. browning with other friends thus came forward to help him. the fact deserves remembering in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never to write for magazines. he might always have made exceptions for friendly or philanthropic objects; the appearance of 'herve riel' in the 'cornhill magazine', , indeed proves that it was so. but the offer of a blank cheque would not have tempted him, for his own sake, to this concession, as he would have deemed it, of his integrity of literary purpose. 'in a gondola' grew out of a single verse extemporized for a picture by maclise, in what circumstances we shall hear in the poet's own words. the first proof of 'artemis prologuizes' had the following note: 'i had better say perhaps that the above is nearly all retained of a tragedy i composed, much against my endeavour, while in bed with a fever two years ago--it went farther into the story of hippolytus and aricia; but when i got well, putting only thus much down at once, i soon forgot the remainder.'* * when mr. browning gave me these supplementary details for the 'handbook', he spoke as if his illness had interrupted the work, not preceded its conception. the real fact is, i think, the more striking. mr. browning would have been very angry with himself if he had known he ever wrote 'i _had_ better'; and the punctuation of this note, as well as of every other unrevised specimen which we possess of his early writing, helps to show by what careful study of the literary art he must have acquired his subsequent mastery of it. 'cristina' was addressed in fancy to the spanish queen. it is to be regretted that the poem did not remain under its original heading of 'queen worship': as this gave a practical clue to the nature of the love described, and the special remoteness of its object. 'the pied piper of hamelin' and another poem were written in may for mr. macready's little eldest son, willy, who was confined to the house by illness, and who was to amuse himself by illustrating the poems as well as reading them;* and the first of these, though not intended for publication, was added to the 'dramatic lyrics', because some columns of that number of 'bells and pomegranates' still required filling. it is perhaps not known that the second was 'crescentius, the pope's legate': now included in 'asolando'. * miss browning has lately found some of the illustrations, and the touching childish letter together with which her brother received them. mr. browning's father had himself begun a rhymed story on the subject of 'the pied piper'; but left it unfinished when he discovered that his son was writing one. the fragment survives as part of a letter addressed to mr. thomas powell, and which i have referred to as in the possession of mr. dykes campbell. 'the lost leader' has given rise to periodical questionings continued until the present day, as to the person indicated in its title. mr. browning answered or anticipated them fifteen years ago in a letter to miss lee, of west peckham, maidstone. it was his reply to an application in verse made to him in their very young days by herself and two other members of her family, the manner of which seems to have unusually pleased him. villers-sur-mer, calvados, france: september , ' . dear friends,--your letter has made a round to reach me--hence the delay in replying to it--which you will therefore pardon. i have been asked the question you put to me--tho' never asked so poetically and so pleasantly--i suppose a score of times: and i can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that i undoubtedly had wordsworth in my mind--but simply as 'a model'; you know, an artist takes one or two striking traits in the features of his 'model', and uses them to start his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman who happens to be 'sitting' for nose and eye. i thought of the great poet's abandonment of liberalism, at an unlucky juncture, and no repaying consequence that i could ever see. but--once call my fancy-portrait 'wordsworth'--and how much more ought one to say,--how much more would not i have attempted to say! there is my apology, dear friends, and your acceptance of it will confirm me truly yours, robert browning. some fragments of correspondence, not all very interesting, and his own allusion to an attack of illness, are our only record of the poet's general life during the interval which separated the publication of 'pippa passes' from his second italian journey. an undated letter to miss haworth probably refers to the close of . '. . . i am getting to love painting as i did once. do you know i was a young wonder (as are eleven out of the dozen of us) at drawing? my father had faith in me, and over yonder in a drawer of mine lies, i well know, a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant jam-juice (paint being rank poison, as they said when i sucked my brushes) with his (my father's) note in one corner, "r. b., aetat. two years three months." "how fast, alas, our days we spend--how vain they be, how soon they end!" i am going to print "victor", however, by february, and there is one thing not so badly painted in there--oh, let me tell you. i chanced to call on forster the other day, and he pressed me into committing verse on the instant, not the minute, in maclise's behalf, who has wrought a divine venetian work, it seems, for the british institution. forster described it well--but i could do nothing better, than this wooden ware--(all the "properties", as we say, were given, and the problem was how to catalogue them in rhyme and unreason). i send my heart up to thee, all my heart in this my singing! for the stars help me, and the sea bears part; the very night is clinging closer to venice' streets to leave me space above me, whence thy face may light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place. singing and stars and night and venice streets and joyous heart, are properties, do you please to see. and now tell me, is this below the average of catalogue original poetry? tell me--for to that end of being told, i write. . . . i dined with dear carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people "dear" in a hurry, except in letter-beginnings!) yesterday. i don't know any people like them. there was a son of burns there, major burns whom macready knows--he sung "of all the airts", "john anderson", and another song of his father's. . . .' in the course of he wrote the following note to miss flower, evidently relating to the publication of her 'hymns and anthems'. new cross, hatcham, surrey: tuesday morning. dear miss flower,--i am sorry for what must grieve mr. fox; for myself, i beg him earnestly not to see me till his entire convenience, however pleased i shall be to receive the letter you promise on his part. and how can i thank you enough for this good news--all this music i shall be so thoroughly gratified to hear? ever yours faithfully, robert browning. his last letter to her was written in ; the subject being a concert of her own sacred music which she was about to give; and again, although more slightly, i anticipate the course of events, in order to give it in its natural connection with the present one. mr. browning was now engaged to be married, and the last ring of youthful levity had disappeared from his tone; but neither the new happiness nor the new responsibility had weakened his interest in his boyhood's friend. miss flower must then have been slowly dying, and the closing words of the letter have the solemnity of a last farewell. sunday. dear miss flower,--i was very foolishly surprized at the sorrowful finical notice you mention: foolishly; for, god help us, how else is it with all critics of everything--don't i hear them talk and see them write? i dare-say he admires you as he said. for me, i never had another feeling than entire admiration for your music--entire admiration--i put it apart from all other english music i know, and fully believe in it as _the_ music we all waited for. of your health i shall not trust myself to speak: you must know what is unspoken. i should have been most happy to see you if but for a minute--and if next wednesday, i might take your hand for a moment.-- but you would concede that, if it were right, remembering what is now very old friendship. may god bless you for ever (the signature has been cut off.) in the autumn of mr. browning set forth for italy, taking ship, it is believed, direct to naples. here he made the acquaintance of a young neapolitan gentleman who had spent most of his life in paris; and they became such good friends that they proceeded to rome together. mr. scotti was an invaluable travelling companion, for he engaged their conveyance, and did all such bargaining in their joint interest as the habits of his country required. 'as i write,' mr. browning said in a letter to his sister, 'i hear him disputing our bill in the next room. he does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.' at rome they spent most of their evenings with an old acquaintance of mr. browning's, then countess carducci, and she pronounced mr. scotti the handsomest man she had ever seen. he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous. but he blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and i do not think the act was ever fully accounted for. it must have been on his return journey that mr. browning went to leghorn to see edward john trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction. he described the interview long afterwards to mr. val prinsep, but chiefly in his impressions of the cool courage which mr. trelawney had displayed during its course. a surgeon was occupied all the time in probing his leg for a bullet which had been lodged there some years before, and had lately made itself felt; and he showed himself absolutely indifferent to the pain of the operation. mr. browning's main object in paying the visit had been, naturally, to speak with one who had known byron and been the last to see shelley alive; but we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part the subject of their conversation. he reached england, again, we suppose, through germany--since he avoided paris as before. it has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed, that on this, if not on his previous italian journey, mr. browning became acquainted with stendhal, then french consul at civita vecchia, and that he imbibed from the great novelist a taste for curiosities of italian family history, which ultimately led him in the direction of the franceschini case. it is certain that he profoundly admired this writer, and if he was not, at some time or other, introduced to him it was because the opportunity did not occur. but there is abundant evidence that no introduction took place, and quite sufficient proof that none was possible. stendhal died in paris in march ; and granting that he was at civita vecchia when the poet made his earlier voyage--no certainty even while he held the appointment--the ship cannot have touched there on its way to trieste. it is also a mistake to suppose that mr. browning was specially interested in ancient chronicles, as such. this was one of the points on which he distinctly differed from his father. he took his dramatic subjects wherever he found them, and any historical research which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of verification. 'sordello' alone may have been conceived on a rather different plan, and i have no authority whatever for admitting that it was so. the discovery of the record of the franceschini case was, as its author has everywhere declared, an accident. a single relic exists for us of this visit to the south--a shell picked up, according to its inscription, on one of the syren isles, october , ; but many of its reminiscences are embodied in that vivid and charming picture 'the englishman in italy', which appeared in the 'bells and pomegranates' number for the following year. naples always remained a bright spot in the poet's memory; and if it had been, like asolo, his first experience of italy, it must have drawn him in later years the more powerfully of the two. at one period, indeed, he dreamed of it as a home for his declining days. chapter - introduction to miss barrett--engagement--motives for secrecy--marriage--journey to italy--extract of letter from mr. fox--mrs. browning's letters to miss mitford--life at pisa--vallombrosa--florence; mr. powers; miss boyle--proposed british mission to the vatican--father prout--palazzo guidi--fano; ancona--'a blot in the 'scutcheon' at sadler's wells. during his recent intercourse with the browning family mr. kenyon had often spoken of his invalid cousin, elizabeth barrett,* and had given them copies of her works; and when the poet returned to england, late in , he saw the volume containing 'lady geraldine's courtship', which had appeared during his absence. on hearing him express his admiration of it, mr. kenyon begged him to write to miss barrett, and himself tell her how the poems had impressed him; 'for,' he added, 'my cousin is a great invalid, and sees no one, but great souls jump at sympathy.' mr. browning did write, and, a few months, probably, after the correspondence had been established, begged to be allowed to visit her. she at first refused this, on the score of her delicate health and habitual seclusion, emphasizing the refusal by words of such touching humility and resignation that i cannot refrain from quoting them. 'there is nothing to see in me, nothing to hear in me. i am a weed fit for the ground and darkness.' but her objections were overcome, and their first interview sealed mr. browning's fate. * properly e. barrett moulton-barrett. the first of these surnames was that originally borne by the family, but dropped on the annexation of the second. it has now for some years been resumed. there is no cause for surprize in the passionate admiration with which miss barrett so instantly inspired him. to begin with, he was heart-whole. it would be too much to affirm that, in the course of his thirty-two years, he had never met with a woman whom he could entirely love; but if he had, it was not under circumstances which favoured the growth of such a feeling. she whom he now saw for the first time had long been to him one of the greatest of living poets; she was learned as women seldom were in those days. it must have been apparent, in the most fugitive contact, that her moral nature was as exquisite as her mind was exceptional. she looked much younger than her age, which he only recently knew to have been six years beyond his own; and her face was filled with beauty by the large, expressive eyes. the imprisoned love within her must unconsciously have leapt to meet his own. it would have been only natural that he should grow into the determination to devote his life to hers, or be swept into an offer of marriage by a sudden impulse which his after-judgment would condemn. neither of these things occurred. the offer was indeed made under a sudden and overmastering impulse. but it was persistently repeated, till it had obtained a conditional assent. no sane man in mr. browning's position could have been ignorant of the responsibilities he was incurring. he had, it is true, no experience of illness. of its nature, its treatment, its symptoms direct and indirect, he remained pathetically ignorant to his dying day. he did not know what disqualifications for active existence might reside in the fragile, recumbent form, nor in the long years lived without change of air or scene beyond the passage, not always even allowed, from bed-room to sitting-room, from sofa to bed again. but he did know that miss barrett received him lying down, and that his very ignorance of her condition left him without security for her ever being able to stand. a strong sense of sympathy and pity could alone entirely justify or explain his act--a strong desire to bring sunshine into that darkened life. we might be sure that these motives had been present with him if we had no direct authority for believing it; and we have this authority in his own comparatively recent words: 'she had so much need of care and protection. there was so much pity in what i felt for her!' the pity was, it need hardly be said, at no time a substitute for love, though the love in its full force only developed itself later; but it supplied an additional incentive. miss barrett had made her acceptance of mr. browning's proposal contingent on her improving in health. the outlook was therefore vague. but under the influence of this great new happiness she did gain some degree of strength. they saw each other three times a week; they exchanged letters constantly, and a very deep and perfect understanding established itself between them. mr. browning never mentioned his visits except to his own family, because it was naturally feared that if miss barrett were known to receive one person, other friends, or even acquaintances, would claim admittance to her; and mr. kenyon, who was greatly pleased by the result of his introduction, kept silence for the same reason. in this way the months slipped by till the summer of was drawing to its close, and miss barrett's doctor then announced that her only chance of even comparative recovery lay in spending the coming winter in the south. there was no rational obstacle to her acting on this advice, since more than one of her brothers was willing to escort her; but mr. barrett, while surrounding his daughter with every possible comfort, had resigned himself to her invalid condition and expected her also to acquiesce in it. he probably did not believe that she would benefit by the proposed change. at any rate he refused his consent to it. there remained to her only one alternative--to break with the old home and travel southwards as mr. browning's wife. when she had finally assented to this course, she took a preparatory step which, in so far as it was known, must itself have been sufficiently startling to those about her: she drove to regent's park, and when there, stepped out of the carriage and on to the grass. i do not know how long she stood--probably only for a moment; but i well remember hearing that when, after so long an interval, she felt earth under her feet and air about her, the sensation was almost bewilderingly strange. they were married, with strict privacy, on september , , at st. pancras church. the engaged pair had not only not obtained mr. barrett's sanction to their marriage; they had not even invoked it; and the doubly clandestine character thus forced upon the union could not be otherwise than repugnant to mr. browning's pride; but it was dictated by the deepest filial affection on the part of his intended wife. there could be no question in so enlightened a mind of sacrificing her own happiness with that of the man she loved; she was determined to give herself to him. but she knew that her father would never consent to her doing so; and she preferred marrying without his knowledge to acting in defiance of a prohibition which, once issued, he would never have revoked, and which would have weighed like a portent of evil upon her. she even kept the secret of her engagement from her intimate friend miss mitford, and her second father, mr. kenyon, that they might not be involved in its responsibility. and mr. kenyon, who, probably of all her circle, best understood the case, was grateful to her for this consideration. mr. barrett was one of those men who will not part with their children; who will do anything for them except allow them to leave the parental home. we have all known fathers of this type. he had nothing to urge against robert browning. when mr. kenyon, later, said to him that he could not understand his hostility to the marriage, since there was no man in the world to whom he would more gladly have given his daughter if he had been so fortunate as to possess one,* he replied: 'i have no objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking of another world;' and, given his conviction that miss barrett's state was hopeless, some allowance must be made for the angered sense of fitness which her elopement was calculated to arouse in him. but his attitude was the same, under the varying circumstances, with all his daughters and sons alike. there was no possible husband or wife whom he would cordially have accepted for one of them. * mr. kenyon had been twice married, but he had no children. mr. browning had been willing, even at that somewhat late age, to study for the bar, or accept, if he could obtain it, any other employment which might render him less ineligible from a pecuniary point of view. but miss barrett refused to hear of such a course; and the subsequent necessity for her leaving england would have rendered it useless. for some days after their marriage mr. and mrs. browning returned to their old life. he justly thought that the agitation of the ceremony had been, for the moment, as much as she could endure, and had therefore fixed for it a day prior by one week to that of their intended departure from england. the only difference in their habits was that he did not see her; he recoiled from the hypocrisy of asking for her under her maiden name; and during this passive interval, fortunately short, he carried a weight of anxiety and of depression which placed it among the most painful periods of his existence. in the late afternoon or evening of september , mrs. browning, attended by her maid and her dog, stole away from her father's house. the family were at dinner, at which meal she was not in the habit of joining them; her sisters henrietta and arabel had been throughout in the secret of her attachment and in full sympathy with it; in the case of the servants, she was also sure of friendly connivance. there was no difficulty in her escape, but that created by the dog, which might be expected to bark its consciousness of the unusual situation. she took him into her confidence. she said: 'o flush, if you make a sound, i am lost.' and flush understood, as what good dog would not?--and crept after his mistress in silence. i do not remember where her husband joined her; we may be sure it was as near her home as possible. that night they took the boat to havre, on their way to paris. only a short time elapsed before mr. barrett became aware of what had happened. it is not necessary to dwell on his indignation, which at that moment, i believe, was shared by all his sons. nor were they the only persons to be agitated by the occurrence. if there was wrath in the barrett family, there was consternation in that of mr. browning. he had committed a crime in the eyes of his wife's father; but he had been guilty, in the judgment of his own parents, of one of those errors which are worse. a hundred times the possible advantages of marrying a miss barrett could never have balanced for them the risks and dangers he had incurred in wresting to himself the guardianship of that frail life which might perish in his hands, leaving him to be accused of having destroyed it; and they must have awaited the event with feelings never to be forgotten. it was soon to be apparent that in breaking the chains which bound her to a sick room, mr. browning had not killed his wife, but was giving her a new lease of existence. his parents and sister soon loved her dearly, for her own sake as well as her husband's; and those who, if in a mistaken manner, had hitherto cherished her, gradually learned, with one exception, to value him for hers. it would, however, be useless to deny that the marriage was a hazardous experiment, involving risks of suffering quite other than those connected with mrs. browning's safety: the latent practical disparities of an essentially vigorous and an essentially fragile existence; and the time came when these were to make themselves felt. mrs. browning had been a delicate infant. she had also outgrown this delicacy and developed into a merry, and, in the harmless sense, mischief-loving child. the accident which subsequently undermined her life could only have befallen a very active and healthy girl.* her condition justified hope and, to a great extent, fulfilled it. she rallied surprisingly and almost suddenly in the sunshine of her new life, and remained for several years at the higher physical level: her natural and now revived spirits sometimes, i imagine, lifting her beyond it. but her ailments were too radical for permanent cure, as the weak voice and shrunken form never ceased to attest. they renewed themselves, though in slightly different conditions; and she gradually relapsed, during the winters at least, into something like the home-bound condition of her earlier days. it became impossible that she should share the more active side of her husband's existence. it had to be alternately suppressed and carried on without her. the deep heart-love, the many-sided intellectual sympathy, preserved their union in rare beauty to the end. but to say that it thus maintained itself as if by magic, without effort of self-sacrifice on his part or of resignation on hers, would be as unjust to the noble qualities of both, as it would be false to assert that its compensating happiness had ever failed them. * her family at that time lived in the country. she was a constant rider, and fond of saddling her pony; and one day, when she was about fourteen, she overbalanced herself in lifting the saddle, and fell backward, inflicting injuries on her head, or rather spine, which caused her great suffering, but of which the nature remained for some time undiscovered. mr. browning's troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust themselves in that week of apprehension. they assumed a deeper reality when his delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping, and the long hours on steamboat and in diligence were before them. what she suffered in body, and he in mind, during the first days of that wedding-journey is better imagined than told. in paris they either met, or were joined by, a friend, mrs. anna jameson (then also en route for italy), and mrs. browning was doubly cared for till she and her husband could once more put themselves on their way. at genoa came the long-needed rest in southern land. from thence, in a few days, they went on to pisa, and settled there for the winter. even so great a friend as john forster was not in the secret of mr. browning's marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph in a letter from mr. fox, written soon after it had taken place: 'forster never heard of the browning marriage till the proof of the newspaper ('examiner') notice was sent; when he went into one of his great passions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor to have a swear at him, and demanded to see the ms. from which it was taken: so it was brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of browning's sister. next day came a letter from r. b., saying he had often meant to tell him or write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both. 'she was better, and a winter in italy had been recommended some months ago. 'it seems as if made up by their poetry rather than themselves.' many interesting external details of mr. browning's married life must have been lost to us through the wholesale destruction of his letters to his family, of which mention has been already made, and which he carried out before leaving warwick crescent about four years ago; and mrs. browning's part in the correspondence, though still preserved, cannot fill the gap, since for a long time it chiefly consisted of little personal outpourings, inclosed in her husband's letters and supplementary to them. but she also wrote constantly to miss mitford; and, from the letters addressed to her, now fortunately in mr. barrett browning's hands, it has been possible to extract many passages of a sufficiently great, and not too private, interest for our purpose. these extracts--in some cases almost entire letters--indeed constitute a fairly complete record of mr. and mrs. browning's joint life till the summer of , when miss mitford's death was drawing near, and the correspondence ceased. their chronological order is not always certain, because mrs. browning never gave the year in which her letters were written, and in some cases the postmark is obliterated; but the missing date can almost always be gathered from their contents. the first letter is probably written from paris. oct. (' ). '. . . and he, as you say, had done everything for me--he loved me for reasons which had helped to weary me of myself--loved me heart to heart persistently--in spite of my own will . . . drawn me back to life and hope again when i had done with both. my life seemed to belong to him and to none other, at last, and i had no power to speak a word. have faith in me, my dearest friend, till you know him. the intellect is so little in comparison to all the rest--to the womanly tenderness, the inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble aspiration of every hour. temper, spirits, manners--there is not a flaw anywhere. i shut my eyes sometimes and fancy it all a dream of my guardian angel. only, if it had been a dream, the pain of some parts of it would have wakened me before now--it is not a dream. . . .' the three next speak for themselves. pisa: (' ). '. . . for pisa, we both like it extremely. the city is full of beauty and repose,--and the purple mountains gloriously seem to beckon us on deeper into the vine land. we have rooms close to the duomo, and leaning down on the great collegio built by facini. three excellent bed-rooms and a sitting-room matted and carpeted, looking comfortable even for england. for the last fortnight, except the last few sunny days, we have had rain; but the climate is as mild as possible, no cold with all the damp. delightful weather we had for the travelling. mrs. jameson says she won't call me improved but transformed rather. . . . i mean to know something about pictures some day. robert does, and i shall get him to open my eyes for me with a little instruction--in this place are to be seen the first steps of art. . . .' pisa: dec. (' ). '. . . within these three or four days we have had frost--yes, and a little snow--for the first time, say the pisans, within five years. robert says the mountains are powdered towards lucca. . . .' feb. (' ). '. . . robert is a warm admirer of balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly he does not in a general way appreciate our french people quite with my warmth. he takes too high a standard, i tell him, and won't listen to a story for a story's sake--i can bear, you know, to be amused without a strong pull on my admiration. so we have great wars sometimes--i put up dumas' flag or soulie's or eugene sue's (yet he was properly impressed by the 'mysteres de paris'), and carry it till my arms ache. the plays and vaudevilles he knows far more of than i do, and always maintains they are the happiest growth of the french school. setting aside the 'masters', observe; for balzac and george sand hold all their honours. then we read together the other day 'rouge et noir', that powerful work of stendhal's, and he observed that it was exactly like balzac 'in the raw'--in the material and undeveloped conception . . . we leave pisa in april, and pass through florence towards the north of italy . . .' (she writes out a long list of the 'comedie humaine' for miss mitford.) mr. and mrs. browning must have remained in florence, instead of merely passing through it; this is proved by the contents of the two following letters: aug. (' ). '. . . we have spent one of the most delightful of summers notwithstanding the heat, and i begin to comprehend the possibility of st. lawrence's ecstasies on the gridiron. very hot certainly it has been and is, yet there have been cool intermissions, and as we have spacious and airy rooms, as robert lets me sit all day in my white dressing-gown without a single masculine criticism, and as we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon water-melons and iced water and figs and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience. we tried to make the monks of vallombrosa let us stay with them for two months, but the new abbot said or implied that wilson and i stank in his nostrils, being women. so we were sent away at the end of five days. so provoking! such scenery, such hills, such a sea of hills looking alive among the clouds--which rolled, it was difficult to discern. such fine woods, supernaturally silent, with the ground black as ink. there were eagles there too, and there was no road. robert went on horseback, and wilson and i were drawn on a sledge--(i.e. an old hamper, a basket wine-hamper--without a wheel) by two white bullocks, up the precipitous mountains. think of my travelling in those wild places at four o'clock in the morning! a little frightened, dreadfully tired, but in an ecstasy of admiration. it was a sight to see before one died and went away into another world. but being expelled ignominiously at the end of five days, we had to come back to florence to find a new apartment cooler than the old, and wait for dear mr. kenyon, and dear mr. kenyon does not come after all. and on the th of september we take up our knapsacks and turn our faces towards rome, creeping slowly along, with a pause at arezzo, and a longer pause at perugia, and another perhaps at terni. then we plan to take an apartment we have heard of, over the tarpeian rock, and enjoy rome as we have enjoyed florence. more can scarcely be. this florence is unspeakably beautiful . . .' oct. (' ). '. . . very few acquaintances have we made in florence, and very quietly lived out our days. mr. powers, the sculptor, is our chief friend and favourite. a most charming, simple, straightforward, genial american--as simple as the man of genius he has proved himself to be. he sometimes comes to talk and take coffee with us, and we like him much. the sculptor has eyes like a wild indian's, so black and full of light--you would scarcely marvel if they clove the marble without the help of his hands. we have seen, besides, the hoppners, lord byron's friends at venice; and miss boyle, a niece of the earl of cork, an authoress and poetess on her own account, having been introduced to robert in london at lady morgan's, has hunted us out, and paid us a visit. a very vivacious little person, with sparkling talk enough . . .' in this year, , the question arose of a british mission to the vatican; and mr. browning wrote to mr. monckton milnes begging him to signify to the foreign office his more than willingness to take part in it. he would be glad and proud, he said, to be secretary to such an embassy, and to work like a horse in his vocation. the letter is given in the lately published biography of lord houghton, and i am obliged to confess that it has been my first intimation of the fact recorded there. when once his 'paracelsus' had appeared, and mr. browning had taken rank as a poet, he renounced all idea of more active work; and the tone and habits of his early married life would have seemed scarcely consistent with a renewed impulse towards it. but the fact was in some sense due to the very circumstances of that life: among them, his wife's probable incitement to, and certain sympathy with, the proceeding. the projected winter in rome had been given up, i believe against the doctor's advice, on the strength of the greater attractions of florence. our next extract is dated from thence, dec. , . '. . . think what we have done since i last wrote to you. taken two houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, presigning the contract. you will set it down to excellent poet's work in the way of domestic economy, but the fault was altogether mine, as usual. my husband, to please me, took rooms which i could not be pleased with three days through the absence of sunshine and warmth. the consequence was that we had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go away ourselves--any alternative being preferable to a return of illness--and i am sure i should have been ill if we had persisted in staying there. you can scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in italy. so away we came into the blaze of him in the piazza pitti; precisely opposite the grand duke's palace; i with my remorse, and poor robert without a single reproach. any other man, a little lower than the angels, would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing--but as to _his_ being angry with _me_ for any cause except not eating enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way first. so here we are in the pitti till april, in small rooms yellow with sunshine from morning till evening, and most days i am able to get out into the piazza and walk up and down for twenty minutes without feeling a breath of the actual winter . . . and miss boyle, ever and anon, comes at night, at nine o'clock, to catch us at hot chestnuts and mulled wine, and warm her feet at our fire--and a kinder, more cordial little creature, full of talent and accomplishment never had the world's polish on it. very amusing she is too, and original; and a good deal of laughing she and robert make between them. and this is nearly all we see of the face divine--i can't make robert go out a single evening. . . .' we have five extracts for . one of these, not otherwise dated, describes an attack of sore-throat which was fortunately mr. browning's last; and the letter containing it must have been written in the course of the summer. '. . . my husband was laid up for nearly a month with fever and relaxed sore-throat. quite unhappy i have been over those burning hands and languid eyes--the only unhappiness i ever had by him. and then he wouldn't see a physician, and if it had not been that just at the right moment mr. mahoney, the celebrated jesuit, and "father prout" of fraser, knowing everything as those jesuits are apt to do, came in to us on his way to rome, pointed out to us that the fever got ahead through weakness, and mixed up with his own kind hand a potion of eggs and port wine; to the horror of our italian servant, who lifted up his eyes at such a prescription for fever, crying, "o inglesi! inglesi!" the case would have been far worse, i have no kind of doubt, for the eccentric prescription gave the power of sleeping, and the pulse grew quieter directly. i shall always be grateful to father prout--always.'* * it had not been merely a case of relaxed sore-throat. there was an abscess, which burst during this first night of sleep. may . '. . . and now i must tell you what we have done since i wrote last, little thinking of doing so. you see our problem was, to get to england as much in summer as possible, the expense of the intermediate journeys making it difficult of solution. on examination of the whole case, it appeared manifest that we were throwing money into the arno, by our way of taking furnished rooms, while to take an apartment and furnish it would leave us a clear return of the furniture at the end of the first year in exchange for our outlay, and all but a free residence afterwards, the cheapness of furniture being quite fabulous at the present crisis. . . . in fact we have really done it magnificently, and planted ourselves in the guidi palace in the favourite suite of the last count (his arms are in scagliola on the floor of my bedroom). though we have six beautiful rooms and a kitchen, three of them quite palace rooms and opening on a terrace, and though such furniture as comes by slow degrees into them is antique and worthy of the place, we yet shall have saved money by the end of this year. . . . now i tell you all this lest you should hear dreadful rumours of our having forsaken our native land, venerable institutions and all, whereas we remember it so well (it's a dear land in many senses), that we have done this thing chiefly in order to make sure of getting back comfortably, . . . a stone's throw, too, it is from the pitti, and really in my present mind i would hardly exchange with the grand duke himself. by the bye, as to street, we have no spectators in windows in just the grey wall of a church called san felice for good omen. 'now, have you heard enough of us? what i claimed first, in way of privilege, was a spring-sofa to loll upon, and a supply of rain water to wash in, and you shall see what a picturesque oil-jar they have given us for the latter purpose; it would just hold the captain of the forty thieves. as for the chairs and tables, i yield the more especial interest in them to robert; only you would laugh to hear us correct one another sometimes. "dear, you get too many drawers, and not enough washing-stands. pray don't let us have any more drawers when we've nothing more to put in them." there was no division on the necessity of having six spoons--some questions passed themselves. . . .' july. '. . . i am quite well again and strong. robert and i go out often after tea in a wandering walk to sit in the loggia and look at the perseus, or, better still, at the divine sunsets on the arno, turning it to pure gold under the bridges. after more than twenty months of marriage, we are happier than ever. . . .' aug. '. . . as for ourselves we have hardly done so well--yet well--having enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. murray, the traitor, sent us to fano as "a delightful summer residence for an english family," and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched into paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. a "circulating library" which "does not give out books," and "a refined and intellectual italian society" (i quote murray for that phrase) which "never reads a book through" (i quote mrs. wiseman, dr. wiseman's mother, who has lived in fano seven years) complete the advantages of the place. yet the churches are very beautiful, and a divine picture of guercino's is worth going all that way to see. . . . we fled from fano after three days, and finding ourselves cheated out of our dream of summer coolness, resolved on substituting for it what the italians call "un bel giro". so we went to ancona--a striking sea city, holding up against the brown rocks, and elbowing out the purple tides--beautiful to look upon. an exfoliation of the rock itself you would call the houses that seem to grow there--so identical is the colour and character. i should like to visit ancona again when there is a little air and shadow. we stayed a week, as it was, living upon fish and cold water. . . .' the one dated florence, december , is interesting with reference to mr. browning's attitude when he wrote the letters to mr. frank hill which i have recently quoted. 'we have been, at least i have been, a little anxious lately about the fate of the 'blot in the 'scutcheon' which mr. phelps applied for my husband's permission to revive at sadler's. of course putting the request was mere form, as he had every right to act the play--only it made me anxious till we heard the result--and we both of us are very grateful to dear mr. chorley, who not only made it his business to be at the theatre the first night, but, before he slept, sat down like a true friend to give us the story of the result, and never, he says, was a more legitimate success. the play went straight to the hearts of the audience, it seems, and we hear of its continuance on the stage, from the papers. you may remember, or may not have heard, how macready brought it out and put his foot on it, in the flush of a quarrel between manager and author; and phelps, knowing the whole secret and feeling the power of the play, determined on making a revival of it in his own theatre. mr. chorley called his acting "fine". . . .' chapter - death of mr. browning's mother--birth of his son--mrs. browning's letters continued--baths of lucca--florence again--venice--margaret fuller ossoli--visit to england--winter in paris--carlyle--george sand--alfred de musset. on march , , mr. browning's son was born. with the joy of his wife's deliverance from the dangers of such an event came also his first great sorrow. his mother did not live to receive the news of her grandchild's birth. the letter which conveyed it found her still breathing, but in the unconsciousness of approaching death. there had been no time for warning. the sister could only break the suddenness of the shock. a letter of mrs. browning's tells what was to be told. florence: april (' ). '. . . this is the first packet of letters, except one to wimpole street, which i have written since my confinement. you will have heard how our joy turned suddenly into deep sorrow by the death of my husband's mother. an unsuspected disease (ossification of the heart) terminated in a fatal way--and she lay in the insensibility precursive of the grave's when the letter written with such gladness by my poor husband and announcing the birth of his child, reached her address. "it would have made her heart bound," said her daughter to us. poor tender heart--the last throb was too near. the medical men would not allow the news to be communicated. the next joy she felt was to be in heaven itself. my husband has been in the deepest anguish, and indeed, except for the courageous consideration of his sister who wrote two letters of preparation, saying "she was not well" and she "was very ill" when in fact all was over, i am frightened to think what the result would have been to him. he has loved his mother as such passionate natures only can love, and i never saw a man so bowed down in an extremity of sorrow--never. even now, the depression is great--and sometimes when i leave him alone a little and return to the room, i find him in tears. i do earnestly wish to change the scene and air--but where to go? england looks terrible now. he says it would break his heart to see his mother's roses over the wall and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves--which i understand so thoroughly that i can't say "let us go to england." we must wait and see what his father and sister will choose to do, or choose us to do--for of course a duty plainly seen would draw us anywhere. my own dearest sisters will be painfully disappointed by any change of plan--only they are too good and kind not to understand the difficulty--not to see the motive. so do you, i am certain. it has been very, very painful altogether, this drawing together of life and death. robert was too enraptured at my safety and with his little son, and the sudden reaction was terrible. . . .' bagni di lucca. '. . . we have been wandering in search of cool air and a cool bough among all the olive trees to build our summer nest on. my husband has been suffering beyond what one could shut one's eyes to, in consequence of the great mental shock of last march--loss of appetite, loss of sleep--looks quite worn and altered. his spirits never rallied except with an effort, and every letter from new cross threw him back into deep depression. i was very anxious, and feared much that the end of it all would be (the intense heat of florence assisting) nervous fever or something similar; and i had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to leave florence for a month or two. he who generally delights in travelling, had no mind for change or movement. i had to say and swear that baby and i couldn't bear the heat, and that we must and would go away. "ce que femme veut, _homme_ veut," if the latter is at all amiable, or the former persevering. at last i gained the victory. it was agreed that we two should go on an exploring journey, to find out where we could have most shadow at least expense; and we left our child with his nurse and wilson, while we were absent. we went along the coast to spezzia, saw carrara with the white marble mountains, passed through the olive-forests and the vineyards, avenues of acacia trees, chestnut woods, glorious surprises of the most exquisite scenery. i say olive-forests advisedly--the olive grows like a forest-tree in those regions, shading the ground with tints of silvery network. the olive near florence is but a shrub in comparison, and i have learnt to despise a little too the florentine vine, which does not swing such portcullises of massive dewy green from one tree to another as along the whole road where we travelled. beautiful indeed it was. spezzia wheels the blue sea into the arms of the wooded mountains; and we had a glance at shelley's house at lerici. it was melancholy to me, of course. i was not sorry that the lodgings we inquired about were far above our means. we returned on our steps (after two days in the dirtiest of possible inns), saw seravezza, a village in the mountains, where rock river and wood enticed us to stay, and the inhabitants drove us off by their unreasonable prices. it is curious--but just in proportion to the want of civilization the prices rise in italy. if you haven't cups and saucers, you are made to pay for plate. well--so finding no rest for the soles of our feet, i persuaded robert to go to the baths of lucca, only to see them. we were to proceed afterwards to san marcello, or some safer wilderness. we had both of us, but he chiefly, the strongest prejudice against the baths of lucca; taking them for a sort of wasp's nest of scandal and gaming, and expecting to find everything trodden flat by the continental english--yet, i wanted to see the place, because it is a place to see, after all. so we came, and were so charmed by the exquisite beauty of the scenery, by the coolness of the climate, and the absence of our countrymen--political troubles serving admirably our private requirements, that we made an offer for rooms on the spot, and returned to florence for baby and the rest of our establishment without further delay. here we are then. we have been here more than a fortnight. we have taken an apartment for the season--four months, paying twelve pounds for the whole term, and hoping to be able to stay till the end of october. the living is cheaper than even in florence, so that there has been no extravagance in coming here. in fact florence is scarcely tenable during the summer from the excessive heat by day and night, even if there were no particular motive for leaving it. we have taken a sort of eagle's nest in this place--the highest house of the highest of the three villages which are called the bagni di lucca, and which lie at the heart of a hundred mountains sung to continually by a rushing mountain stream. the sound of the river and of the cicale is all the noise we hear. austrian drums and carriage-wheels cannot vex us, god be thanked for it! the silence is full of joy and consolation. i think my husband's spirits are better already, and his appetite improved. certainly little babe's great cheeks are growing rosier and rosier. he is out all day when the sun is not too strong, and wilson will have it that he is prettier than the whole population of babies here. . . . then my whole strength has wonderfully improved--just as my medical friends prophesied,--and it seems like a dream when i find myself able to climb the hills with robert, and help him to lose himself in the forests. ever since my confinement i have been growing stronger and stronger, and where it is to stop i can't tell really. i can do as much or more than at any point of my life since i arrived at woman's estate. the air of the place seems to penetrate the heart, and not the lungs only: it draws you, raises you, excites you. mountain air without its keenness--sheathed in italian sunshine--think what that must be! and the beauty and the solitude--for with a few paces we get free of the habitations of men--all is delightful to me. what is peculiarly beautiful and wonderful, is the variety of the shapes of the mountains. they are a multitude--and yet there is no likeness. none, except where the golden mist comes and transfigures them into one glory. for the rest, the mountain there wrapt in the chestnut forest is not like that bare peak which tilts against the sky--nor like the serpent-twine of another which seems to move and coil in the moving coiling shadow. . . .' she writes again: bagni di lucca: oct. (' ). '. . . i have performed a great exploit--ridden on a donkey five miles deep into the mountain, to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. robert on horseback, and wilson and the nurse (with baby) on other donkies,--guides of course. we set off at eight in the morning, and returned at six p.m. after dining on the mountain pinnacle, i dreadfully tired, but the child laughing as usual, burnt brick colour for all bad effect. no horse or ass untrained for the mountains could have kept foot a moment where we penetrated, and even as it was, one could not help the natural thrill. no road except the bed of exhausted torrents--above and through the chestnut forests precipitous beyond what you would think possible for ascent or descent. ravines tearing the ground to pieces under your feet. the scenery, sublime and wonderful, satisfied us wholly, as we looked round on the world of innumerable mountains, bound faintly with the grey sea--and not a human habitation. . . .' the following fragment, which i have received quite without date, might refer to this or to a somewhat later period. 'if he is vain about anything in the world it is about my improved health, and i say to him, "but you needn't talk so much to people, of how your wife walked here with you, and there with you, as if a wife with a pair of feet was a miracle of nature."' florence: feb. (' ). '. . . you can scarcely imagine to yourself the retired life we live, and how we have retreated from the kind advances of the english society here. now people seem to understand that we are to be left alone. . . .' florence: april (' ). '. . . we drive day by day through the lovely cascine, just sweeping through the city. just such a window where bianca capello looked out to see the duke go by--and just such a door where tasso stood and where dante drew his chair out to sit. strange to have all that old world life about us, and the blue sky so bright. . . .' venice: june (probably ' ). '. . . i have been between heaven and earth since our arrival at venice. the heaven of it is ineffable--never had i touched the skirts of so celestial a place. the beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water up between all that gorgeous colour and carving, the enchanting silence, the music, the gondolas--i mix it all up together and maintain that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second venice in the world. 'do you know when i came first i felt as if i never could go away. but now comes the earth-side. 'robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous, unable to eat or sleep, and poor wilson still worse, in a miserable condition of sickness and headache. alas for these mortal venices, so exquisite and so bilious. therefore i am constrained away from my joys by sympathy, and am forced to be glad that we are going away on friday. for myself, it did not affect me at all. take the mild, soft, relaxing climate--even the scirocco does not touch me. and the baby grows gloriously fatter in spite of everything. . . . as for venice, you can't get even a "times", much less an "athenaeum". we comfort ourselves by taking a box at the opera (a whole box on the grand tier, mind) for two shillings and eightpence, english. also, every evening at half-past eight, robert and i are sitting under the moon in the great piazza of st. mark, taking excellent coffee and reading the french papers.' if it were possible to draw more largely on mrs. browning's correspondence for this year, it would certainly supply the record of her intimacy, and that of her husband, with margaret fuller ossoli. a warm attachment sprang up between them during that lady's residence in florence. its last evenings were all spent at their house; and, soon after she had bidden them farewell, she availed herself of a two days' delay in the departure of the ship to return from leghorn and be with them one evening more. she had what seemed a prophetic dread of the voyage to america, though she attached no superstitious importance to the prediction once made to her husband that he would be drowned; and learned when it was too late to change her plans that her presence there was, after all, unnecessary. mr. browning was deeply affected by the news of her death by shipwreck, which took place on july , ; and wrote an account of his acquaintance with her, for publication by her friends. this also, unfortunately, was lost. her son was of the same age as his, little more than a year old; but she left a token of the friendship which might some day have united them, in a small bible inscribed to the baby robert, 'in memory of angelo ossoli.' the intended journey to england was delayed for mr. browning by the painful associations connected with his mother's death; but in the summer of he found courage to go there: and then, as on each succeeding visit paid to london with his wife, he commemorated his marriage in a manner all his own. he went to the church in which it had been solemnized, and kissed the paving-stones in front of the door. it needed all this love to comfort mrs. browning in the estrangement from her father which was henceforth to be accepted as final. he had held no communication with her since her marriage, and she knew that it was not forgiven; but she had cherished a hope that he would so far relent towards her as to kiss her child, even if he would not see her. her prayer to this effect remained, however, unanswered. in the autumn they proceeded to paris; whence mrs. browning wrote, october and november . , avenue des champs elysees. '. . . it was a long time before we could settle ourselves in a private apartment. . . . at last we came off to these champs elysees, to a very pleasant apartment, the window looking over a large terrace (almost large enough to serve the purpose of a garden) to the great drive and promenade of the parisians when they come out of the streets to sun and shade and show themselves off among the trees. a pretty little dining-room, a writing and dressing-room for robert beside it, a drawing-room beyond that, with two excellent bedrooms, and third bedroom for a "femme de menage", kitchen, &c. . . . so this answers all requirements, and the sun suns us loyally as in duty bound considering the southern aspect, and we are glad to find ourselves settled for six months. we have had lovely weather, and have seen a fire only yesterday for the first time since we left england. . . . we have seen nothing in paris, except the shell of it. yet, two evenings ago we hazarded going to a reception at lady elgin's, in the faubourg st. germain, and saw some french, but nobody of distinction. 'it is a good house, i believe, and she has an earnest face which must mean something. we were invited to go every monday between eight and twelve. we go on friday to madame mohl's, where we are to have some of the "celebrites". . . . carlyle, for instance, i liked infinitely more in his personality than i expected to like him, and i saw a great deal of him, for he travelled with us to paris, and spent several evenings with us, we three together. he is one of the most interesting men i could imagine, even deeply interesting to me; and you come to understand perfectly when you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn, sensibility. highly picturesque, too, he is in conversation; the talk of writing men is very seldom so good. 'and, do you know, i was much taken, in london, with a young authoress, geraldine jewsbury. you have read her books. . . . she herself is quiet and simple, and drew my heart out of me a good deal. i felt inclined to love her in our half-hour's intercourse. . . .' , avenue des champs elysees: (nov. ). '. . . robert's father and sister have been paying us a visit during the last three weeks. they are very affectionate to me, and i love them for his sake and their own, and am very sorry at the thought of losing them, as we are on the point of doing. we hope, however, to establish them in paris, if we can stay, and if no other obstacle should arise before the spring, when they must leave hatcham. little wiedemann 'draws', as you may suppose . . . he is adored by his grandfather, and then, robert! they are an affectionate family, and not easy when removed one from another. . . .' on their journey from london to paris, mr. and mrs. browning had been joined by carlyle; and it afterwards struck mr. browning as strange that, in the 'life' of carlyle, their companionship on this occasion should be spoken of as the result of a chance meeting. carlyle not only went to paris with the brownings, but had begged permission to do so; and mrs. browning had hesitated to grant this because she was afraid her little boy would be tiresome to him. her fear, however, proved mistaken. the child's prattle amused the philosopher, and led him on one occasion to say: 'why, sir, you have as many aspirations as napoleon!' at paris he would have been miserable without mr. browning's help, in his ignorance of the language, and impatience of the discomforts which this created for him. he couldn't ask for anything, he complained, but they brought him the opposite. on one occasion mr. carlyle made a singular remark. he was walking with mr. browning, either in paris or the neighbouring country, when they passed an image of the crucifixion; and glancing towards the figure of christ, he said, with his deliberate scotch utterance, 'ah, poor fellow, _your_ part is played out!' two especially interesting letters are dated from the same address, february and april , . '. . . beranger lives close to us, and robert has seen him in his white hat, wandering along the asphalte. i had a notion, somehow, that he was very old, but he is only elderly--not much above sixty (which is the prime of life, nowadays) and he lives quietly and keeps out of scrapes poetical and political, and if robert and i had a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. but we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. we could never follow the fashion of certain authors, who send their books about with intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not--of which practice poor tennyson knows too much for his peace. if, indeed, a letter of introduction to beranger were vouchsafed to us from any benign quarter, we should both be delighted, but we must wait patiently for the influence of the stars. meanwhile, we have at last sent our letter [mazzini's] to george sand, accompanied with a little note signed by both of us, though written by me, as seemed right, being the woman. we half-despaired in doing this--for it is most difficult, it appears, to get at her, she having taken vows against seeing strangers, in consequence of various annoyances and persecutions, in and out of print, which it's the mere instinct of a woman to avoid--i can understand it perfectly. also, she is in paris for only a few days, and under a new name, to escape from the plague of her notoriety. people said, "she will never see you--you have no chance, i am afraid." but we determined to try. at least i pricked robert up to the leap--for he was really inclined to sit in his chair and be proud a little. "no," said i, "you _sha'n't_ be proud, and i _won't_ be proud, and we _will_ see her--i won't die, if i can help it, without seeing george sand." so we gave our letter to a friend, who was to give it to a friend who was to place it in her hands--her abode being a mystery, and the name she used unknown. the next day came by the post this answer: '"madame, j'aurai l'honneur de vous recevoir dimanche prochain, rue racine, . c'est le seul jour que je puisse passer chez moi; et encore je n'en suis pas absolument certaine--mais je ferai tellement mon possible, que ma bonne etoile m'y aidera peut-etre un peu. agreez mille remerciments de coeur ainsi que monsieur browning, que j'espere voir avec vous, pour la sympathie que vous m'accordez. george sand. paris: fevrier ' ." 'this is graceful and kind, is it not?--and we are going to-morrow--i, rather at the risk of my life, but i shall roll myself up head and all in a thick shawl, and we shall go in a close carriage, and i hope i shall be able to tell you the result before shutting up this letter. 'monday.--i have seen g. s. she received us in a room with a bed in it, the only room she has to occupy, i suppose, during her short stay in paris. she received us very cordially with her hand held out, which i, in the emotion of the moment, stooped and kissed--upon which she exclaimed, "mais non! je ne veux pas," and kissed me. i don't think she is a great deal taller than i am,--yes, taller, but not a great deal--and a little over-stout for that height. the upper part of the face is fine, the forehead, eyebrows and eyes--dark glowing eyes as they should be; the lower part not so good. the beautiful teeth project a little, flashing out the smile of the large characteristic mouth, and the chin recedes. it never could have been a beautiful face robert and i agree, but noble and expressive it has been and is. the complexion is olive, quite without colour; the hair, black and glossy, divided with evident care and twisted back into a knot behind the head, and she wore no covering to it. some of the portraits represent her in ringlets, and ringlets would be much more becoming to the style of face, i fancy, for the cheeks are rather over-full. she was dressed in a sort of woollen grey gown, with a jacket of the same material (according to the ruling fashion), the gown fastened up to the throat, with a small linen collarette, and plain white muslin sleeves buttoned round the wrists. the hands offered to me were small and well-shaped. her manners were quite as simple as her costume. i never saw a simpler woman. not a shade of affectation or consciousness, even--not a suffusion of coquetry, not a cigarette to be seen! two or three young men were sitting with her, and i observed the profound respect with which they listened to every word she said. she spoke rapidly, with a low, unemphatic voice. repose of manner is much more her characteristic than animation is--only, under all the quietness, and perhaps by means of it, you are aware of an intense burning soul. she kissed me again when we went away. . . .' 'april .--george sand we came to know a great deal more of. i think robert saw her six times. once he met her near the tuileries, offered her his arm and walked with her the whole length of the gardens. she was not on that occasion looking as well as usual, being a little too much "endimanchee" in terrestrial lavenders and super-celestial blues--not, in fact, dressed with the remarkable taste which he has seen in her at other times. her usual costume is both pretty and quiet, and the fashionable waistcoat and jacket (which are respectable in all the "ladies' companions" of the day) make the only approach to masculine wearings to be observed in her. 'she has great nicety and refinement in her personal ways, i think--and the cigarette is really a feminine weapon if properly understood. 'ah! but i didn't see her smoke. i was unfortunate. i could only go with robert three times to her house, and once she was out. he was really very good and kind to let me go at all after he found the sort of society rampant around her. he didn't like it extremely, but being the prince of husbands, he was lenient to my desires, and yielded the point. she seems to live in the abomination of desolation, as far as regards society--crowds of ill-bred men who adore her, 'a genoux bas', betwixt a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva--society of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical. she herself so different, so apart, so alone in her melancholy disdain. i was deeply interested in that poor woman. i felt a profound compassion for her. i did not mind much even the greek, in greek costume, who 'tutoyed' her, and kissed her i believe, so robert said--or the other vulgar man of the theatre, who went down on his knees and called her "sublime". "caprice d'amitie," said she with her quiet, gentle scorn. a noble woman under the mud, be certain. _i_ would kneel down to her, too, if she would leave it all, throw it off, and be herself as god made her. but she would not care for my kneeling--she does not care for me. perhaps she doesn't care much for anybody by this time, who knows? she wrote one or two or three kind notes to me, and promised to 'venir m'embrasser' before she left paris, but she did not come. we both tried hard to please her, and she told a friend of ours that she "liked us". only we always felt that we couldn't penetrate--couldn't really _touch_ her--it was all vain. 'alfred de musset was to have been at m. buloz' where robert was a week ago, on purpose to meet him, but he was prevented in some way. his brother, paul de musset, a very different person, was there instead, but we hope to have alfred on another occasion. do you know his poems? he is not capable of large grasps, but he has poet's life and blood in him, i assure you. . . . we are expecting a visit from lamartine, who does a great deal of honour to both of us in the way of appreciation, and was kind enough to propose to come. i will tell you all about it.' mr. browning fully shared his wife's impression of a want of frank cordiality on george sand's part; and was especially struck by it in reference to himself, with whom it seemed more natural that she should feel at ease. he could only imagine that his studied courtesy towards her was felt by her as a rebuke to the latitude which she granted to other men. another eminent french writer whom he much wished to know was victor hugo, and i am told that for years he carried about him a letter of introduction from lord houghton, always hoping for an opportunity of presenting it. the hope was not fulfilled, though, in , mr. browning crossed to saint malo by the channel islands and spent three days in jersey. chapter - m. joseph milsand--his close friendship with mr. browning; mrs. browning's impression of him--new edition of mr. browning's poems--'christmas eve and easter day'--'essay' on shelley--summer in london--dante gabriel rossetti--florence; secluded life--letters from mr. and mrs. browning--'colombe's birthday'--baths of lucca--mrs. browning's letters--winter in rome--mr. and mrs. story--mrs. sartoris--mrs. fanny kemble--summer in london--tennyson--ruskin. it was during this winter in paris that mr. browning became acquainted with m. joseph milsand, the second frenchman with whom he was to be united by ties of deep friendship and affection. m. milsand was at that time, and for long afterwards, a frequent contributor to the 'revue des deux mondes'; his range of subjects being enlarged by his, for a frenchman, exceptional knowledge of english life, language, and literature. he wrote an article on quakerism, which was much approved by mr. william forster, and a little volume on ruskin called 'l'esthetique anglaise', which was published in the 'bibliotheque de philosophie contemporaine'.* shortly before the arrival of mr. and mrs. browning in paris, he had accidentally seen an extract from 'paracelsus'. this struck him so much that he procured the two volumes of the works and 'christmas eve', and discussed the whole in the 'revue' as the second part of an essay entitled 'la poesie anglaise depuis byron'. mr. browning saw the article, and was naturally touched at finding his poems the object of serious study in a foreign country, while still so little regarded in his own. it was no less natural that this should lead to a friendship which, the opening once given, would have grown up unassisted, at least on mr. browning's side; for m. milsand united the qualities of a critical intellect with a tenderness, a loyalty, and a simplicity of nature seldom found in combination with them. * he published also an admirable little work on the requirements of secondary education in france, equally applicable in many respects to any country and to any time. the introduction was brought about by the daughter of william browning, mrs. jebb-dyke, or more directly by mr. and mrs. fraser corkran, who were among the earliest friends of the browning family in paris. m. milsand was soon an 'habitue' of mr. browning's house, as somewhat later of that of his father and sister; and when, many years afterwards, miss browning had taken up her abode in england, he spent some weeks of the early summer in warwick crescent, whenever his home duties or personal occupations allowed him to do so. several times also the poet and his sister joined him at saint-aubin, the seaside village in normandy which was his special resort, and where they enjoyed the good offices of madame milsand, a home-staying, genuine french wife and mother, well acquainted with the resources of its very primitive life. m. milsand died, in , of apoplexy, the consequence, i believe, of heart-disease brought on by excessive cold-bathing. the first reprint of 'sordello', in , had been, as is well known, dedicated to him. the 'parleyings', published within a year of his death, were inscribed to his memory. mr. browning's affection for him finds utterance in a few strong words which i shall have occasion to quote. an undated fragment concerning him from mrs. browning to her sister-in-law, points to a later date than the present, but may as well be inserted here. '. . . i quite love m. milsand for being interested in penini. what a perfect creature he is, to be sure! he always stands in the top place among our gods--give him my cordial regards, always, mind. . . . he wants, i think--the only want of that noble nature--the sense of spiritual relation; and also he puts under his feet too much the worth of impulse and passion, in considering the powers of human nature. for the rest, i don't know such a man. he has intellectual conscience--or say--the conscience of the intellect, in a higher degree than i ever saw in any man of any country--and this is no less robert's belief than mine. when we hear the brilliant talkers and noisy thinkers here and there and everywhere, we go back to milsand with a real reverence. also, i never shall forget his delicacy to me personally, nor his tenderness of heart about my child. . . .' the criticism was inevitable from the point of view of mrs. browning's nature and experience; but i think she would have revoked part of it if she had known m. milsand in later years. he would never have agreed with her as to the authority of 'impulse and passion', but i am sure he did not underrate their importance as factors in human life. m. milsand was one of the few readers of browning with whom i have talked about him, who had studied his work from the beginning, and had realized the ambition of his first imaginative flights. he was more perplexed by the poet's utterance in later years. 'quel homme extraordinaire!' he once said to me; 'son centre n'est pas au milieu.' the usual criticism would have been that, while his own centre was in the middle, he did not seek it in the middle for the things of which he wrote; but i remember that, at the moment in which the words were spoken, they impressed me as full of penetration. mr. browning had so much confidence in m. milsand's linguistic powers that he invariably sent him his proof-sheets for final revision, and was exceedingly pleased with such few corrections as his friend was able to suggest. with the name of milsand connects itself in the poet's life that of a younger, but very genuine friend of both, m. gustave dourlans: a man of fine critical and intellectual powers, unfortunately neutralized by bad health. m. dourlans also became a visitor at warwick crescent, and a frequent correspondent of mr. or rather of miss browning. he came from paris once more, to witness the last sad scene in westminster abbey. the first three years of mr. browning's married life had been unproductive from a literary point of view. the realization and enjoyment of the new companionship, the duties as well as interests of the dual existence, and, lastly, the shock and pain of his mother's death, had absorbed his mental energies for the time being. but by the close of he had prepared for publication in the following year a new edition of 'paracelsus' and the 'bells and pomegranates' poems. the reprint was in two volumes, and the publishers were messrs. chapman and hall; the system, maintained through mr. moxon, of publication at the author's expense, being abandoned by mr. browning when he left home. mrs. browning writes of him on this occasion that he is paying 'peculiar attention to the objections made against certain obscurities.' he himself prefaced the edition by these words: 'many of these pieces were out of print, the rest had been withdrawn from circulation, when the corrected edition, now submitted to the reader, was prepared. the various poems and dramas have received the author's most careful revision. december .' in , in florence, he wrote 'christmas eve and easter day'; and in december , in paris, the essay on shelley, to be prefixed to twenty-five supposed letters of that poet, published by moxon in .* * they were discovered, not long afterwards, to be spurious, and the book suppressed. the reading of this essay might serve to correct the frequent misapprehension of mr. browning's religious views which has been based on the literal evidence of 'christmas eve', were it not that its companion poem has failed to do so; though the tendency of 'easter day' is as different from that of its precursor as their common christianity admits. the balance of argument in 'christmas eve' is in favour of direct revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it; while the 'easter day' vision makes a tentative and unresting attitude the first condition of the religious life; and if mr. browning has meant to say--as he so often did say--that religious certainties are required for the undeveloped mind, but that the growing religious intelligence walks best by a receding light, he denies the positive basis of christian belief, and is no more orthodox in the one set of reflections than in the other. the spirit, however, of both poems is ascetic: for the first divorces religious worship from every appeal to the poetic sense; the second refuses to recognize, in poetry or art, or the attainments of the intellect, or even in the best human love, any practical correspondence with religion. the dissertation on shelley is, what 'sordello' was, what its author's treatment of poets and poetry always must be--an indirect vindication of the conceptions of human life which 'christmas eve and easter day' condemns. this double poem stands indeed so much alone in mr. browning's work that we are tempted to ask ourselves to what circumstance or impulse, external or internal, it has been due; and we can only conjecture that the prolonged communion with a mind so spiritual as that of his wife, the special sympathies and differences which were elicited by it, may have quickened his religious imagination, while directing it towards doctrinal or controversial issues which it had not previously embraced. the 'essay' is a tribute to the genius of shelley; it is also a justification of his life and character, as the balance of evidence then presented them to mr. browning's mind. it rests on a definition of the respective qualities of the objective and the subjective poet. . . . while both, he says, are gifted with the fuller perception of nature and man, the one endeavours to 'reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an immediate reference, in every case, to the common eye and apprehension of his fellow-men, assumed capable of receiving and profiting by this reproduction'--the other 'is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below, as to the one above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth,--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. not what man sees, but what god sees--the 'ideas' of plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the divine hand--it is toward these that he struggles. not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands,--preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak.' the objective poet is therefore a fashioner, the subjective is best described as a seer. the distinction repeats itself in the interest with which we study their respective lives. we are glad of the biography of the objective poet because it reveals to us the power by which he works; we desire still more that of the subjective poet, because it presents us with another aspect of the work itself. the poetry of such a one is an effluence much more than a production; it is 'the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated. therefore, in our approach to the poetry, we necessarily approach the personality of the poet; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him.' the reason of mr. browning's prolonged and instinctive reverence for shelley is thus set forth in the opening pages of the essay: he recognized in his writings the quality of a 'subjective' poet; hence, as he understands the word, the evidence of a divinely inspired man. mr. browning goes on to say that we need the recorded life in order quite to determine to which class of inspiration a given work belongs; and though he regards the work of shelley as carrying its warrant within itself, his position leaves ample room for a withdrawal of faith, a reversal of judgment, if the ascertained facts of the poet's life should at any future time bear decided witness against him. he is also careful to avoid drawing too hard and fast a line between the two opposite kinds of poet. he admits that a pure instance of either is seldom to be found; he sees no reason why 'these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works. . . . a mere running-in of the one faculty upon the other' being, meanwhile, 'the ordinary circumstance.' i venture, however, to think, that in his various and necessary concessions, he lets slip the main point; and for the simple reason that it is untenable. the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' denote a real and very important difference on the ground of judgment, but one which tends more and more to efface itself in the sphere of the higher creative imagination. mr. browning might as briefly, and i think more fully, have expressed the salient quality of his poet, even while he could describe it in these emphatic words: 'i pass at once, therefore, from shelley's minor excellencies to his noblest and predominating characteristic. 'this i call his simultaneous perception of power and love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom i have knowledge . . . i would rather consider shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal than . . .' this essay has, in common with the poems of the preceding years, the one quality of a largely religious and, in a certain sense, christian spirit, and in this respect it falls naturally into the general series of its author's works. the assertion of platonic ideas suggests, however, a mood of spiritual thought for which the reference in 'pauline' has been our only, and a scarcely sufficient preparation; nor could the most definite theism to be extracted from platonic beliefs ever satisfy the human aspirations which, in a nature like that of robert browning, culminate in the idea of god. the metaphysical aspect of the poet's genius here distinctly reappears for the first time since 'sordello', and also for the last. it becomes merged in the simpler forms of the religious imagination. the justification of the man shelley, to which great part of the essay is devoted, contains little that would seem new to his more recent apologists; little also which to the writer's later judgments continued to recommend itself as true. it was as a great poetic artist, not as a great poet, that the author of 'prometheus' and 'the cenci', of 'julian and maddalo', and 'epipsychidion' was finally to rank in mr. browning's mind. the whole remains nevertheless a memorial of a very touching affection; and whatever intrinsic value the essay may possess, its main interest must always be biographical. its motive and inspiration are set forth in the closing lines: 'it is because i have long held these opinions in assurance and gratitude, that i catch at the opportunity offered to me of expressing them here; knowing that the alacrity to fulfil an humble office conveys more love than the acceptance of the honour of a higher one, and that better, therefore, than the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to render to his fame and memory, may be the saying of a few, inadequate words upon these scarcely more important supplementary letters of _shelley_.' if mr. browning had seen reason to doubt the genuineness of the letters in question, his introduction could not have been written. that, while receiving them as genuine, he thought them unimportant, gave it, as he justly discerned, its full significance. mr. and mrs. browning returned to london for the summer of , and we have a glimpse of them there in a letter from mr. fox to his daughter. july , ' . '. . . i had a charming hour with the brownings yesterday; more fascinated with her than ever. she talked lots of george sand, and so beautifully. moreover she silver-electroplated louis napoleon!! they are lodging at welbeck street; the house has a queer name on the door, and belongs to some belgian family. 'they came in late one night, and r. b. says that in the morning twilight he saw three portraits on the bedroom wall, and speculated who they might be. light gradually showed the first, beatrice cenci, "good!" said he; "in a poetic region." more light: the second, lord byron! who can the third be? and what think you it was, but your sketch (engraved chalk portrait) of me? he made quite a poem and picture of the affair. 'she seems much better; did not put her hand before her mouth, which i took as a compliment: and the young florentine was gracious . . .' it need hardly be said that this valued friend was one of the first whom mr. browning introduced to his wife, and that she responded with ready warmth to his claims on her gratitude and regard. more than one joint letter from herself and her husband commemorates this new phase of the intimacy; one especially interesting was written from florence in , in answer to the announcement by mr. fox of his election for oldham; and mr. browning's contribution, which is very characteristic, will appear in due course. either this or the preceding summer brought mr. browning for the first time into personal contact with an early lover of his works: mr. d. g. rossetti. they had exchanged letters a year or two before, on the subject of 'pauline', which rossetti (as i have already mentioned) had read in ignorance of its origin, but with the conviction that only the author of 'paracelsus' could have produced it. he wrote to mr. browning to ascertain the fact, and to tell him he had admired the poem so much as to transcribe it whole from the british museum copy. he now called on him with mr. william allingham; and doubly recommended himself to the poet's interest by telling him that he was a painter. when mr. browning was again in london, in , rossetti began painting his portrait, which he finished in paris in the ensuing winter. the winter of - saw the family once more in florence, and at casa guidi, where the routine of quiet days was resumed. mrs. browning has spoken in more than one of her letters of the comparative social seclusion in which she and her husband had elected to live. this seclusion was much modified in later years, and many well-known english and american names become associated with their daily life. it referred indeed almost entirely to their residence in florence, where they found less inducement to enter into society than in london, paris, and rome. but it is on record that during the fifteen years of his married life, mr. browning never dined away from home, except on one occasion--an exception proving the rule; and we cannot therefore be surprised that he should subsequently have carried into the experience of an unshackled and very interesting social intercourse, a kind of freshness which a man of fifty has not generally preserved. the one excitement which presented itself in the early months of was the production of 'colombe's birthday'. the first allusion to this comes to us in a letter from the poet to lady, then mrs. theodore, martin, from which i quote a few passages. florence: jan. , ' . 'my dear mrs. martin,--. . . be assured that i, for my part, have been in no danger of forgetting my promises any more than your performances--which were admirable of all kinds. i shall be delighted if you can do anything for "colombe"--do what you think best with it, and for me--it will be pleasant to be in such hands--only, pray follow the corrections in the last edition--(chapman and hall will give you a copy)--as they are important to the sense. as for the condensation into three acts--i shall leave that, and all cuttings and the like, to your own judgment--and, come what will, i shall have to be grateful to you, as before. for the rest, you will play the part to heart's content, i _know_. . . . and how good it will be to see you again, and make my wife see you too--she who "never saw a great actress" she says--unless it was dejazet! . . .' mrs. browning writes about the performance, april : '. . . i am beginning to be anxious about 'colombe's birthday'. i care much more about it than robert does. he says that no one will mistake it for his speculation; it's mr. buckstone's affair altogether. true--but i should like it to succeed, being robert's play, notwithstanding. but the play is subtle and refined for pits and galleries. i am nervous about it. on the other hand, those theatrical people ought to know,--and what in the world made them select it, if it is not likely to answer their purpose? by the way, a dreadful rumour reaches us of its having been "prepared for the stage by the author." don't believe a word of it. robert just said "yes" when they wrote to ask him, and not a line of communication has passed since. he has prepared nothing at all, suggested nothing, modified nothing. he referred them to his new edition, and that was the whole. . . .' she communicates the result in may: '. . . yes, robert's play succeeded, but there could be no "run" for a play of that kind. it was a "succes d'estime" and something more, which is surprising perhaps, considering the miserable acting of the men. miss faucit was alone in doing us justice. . . .' mrs. browning did see 'miss faucit' on her next visit to england. she agreeably surprised that lady by presenting herself alone, one morning, at her house, and remaining with her for an hour and a half. the only person who had 'done justice' to 'colombe' besides contributing to whatever success her husband's earlier plays had obtained, was much more than 'a great actress' to mrs. browning's mind; and we may imagine it would have gone hard with her before she renounced the pleasure of making her acquaintance. two letters, dated from the baths of lucca, july and august , ' , tell how and where the ensuing summer was passed, besides introducing us, for the first time, to mr. and mrs. william story, between whose family and that of mr. browning so friendly an intimacy was ever afterwards to subsist. july . '. . . we have taken a villa at the baths of lucca after a little holy fear of the company there--but the scenery, and the coolness, and convenience altogether prevail, and we have taken our villa for three months or rather more, and go to it next week with a stiff resolve of not calling nor being called upon. you remember perhaps that we were there four years ago just after the birth of our child. the mountains are wonderful in beauty, and we mean to buy our holiday by doing some work. 'oh yes! i confess to loving florence, and to having associated with it the idea of home. . . .' casa tolomei, alta villa, bagni di lucca: aug. . '. . . we are enjoying the mountains here--riding the donkeys in the footsteps of the sheep, and eating strawberries and milk by basinsful. the strawberries succeed one another throughout the summer, through growing on different aspects of the hills. if a tree is felled in the forests, strawberries spring up, just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing. . . . then our friends mr. and mrs. story help the mountains to please us a good deal. he is the son of judge story, the biographer of his father, and for himself, sculptor and poet--and she a sympathetic graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought. we go backwards and forwards to tea and talk at one another's houses. '. . . since i began this letter we have had a grand donkey excursion to a village called benabbia, and the cross above it on the mountain-peak. we returned in the dark, and were in some danger of tumbling down various precipices--but the scenery was exquisite--past speaking of for beauty. oh, those jagged mountains, rolled together like pre-adamite beasts and setting their teeth against the sky--it was wonderful. . . .' mr. browning's share of the work referred to was 'in a balcony'; also, probably, some of the 'men and women'; the scene of the declaration in 'by the fireside' was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which he walked or rode. a fortnight's visit from mr., now lord, lytton, was also an incident of this summer. the next three letters from which i am able to quote, describe the impressions of mrs. browning's first winter in rome. rome: via bocca di leone, piano. jan. , . '. . . well, we are all well to begin with--and have been well--our troubles came to us through sympathy entirely. a most exquisite journey of eight days we had from florence to rome, seeing the great monastery and triple church of assisi and the wonderful terni by the way--that passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still. in the highest spirits we entered rome, robert and penini singing actually--for the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and scene. . . . you remember my telling you of our friends the storys--how they and their two children helped to make the summer go pleasantly at the baths of lucca. they had taken an apartment for us in rome, so that we arrived in comfort to lighted fires and lamps as if coming home,--and we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening. in the morning before breakfast, little edith was brought over to us by the manservant with a message, "the boy was in convulsions--there was danger." we hurried to the house, of course, leaving edith with wilson. too true! all that first day we spent beside a death-bed; for the child never rallied--never opened his eyes in consciousness--and by eight in the evening he was gone. in the meanwhile, edith was taken ill at our house--could not be moved, said the physicians . . . gastric fever, with a tendency to the brain--and within two days her life was almost despaired of--exactly the same malady as her brother's. . . . also the english nurse was apparently dying at the story's house, and emma page, the artist's youngest daughter, sickened with the same disease. '. . . to pass over the dreary time, i will tell you at once that the three patients recovered--only in poor little edith's case roman fever followed the gastric, and has persisted ever since in periodical recurrence. she is very pale and thin. roman fever is not dangerous to life, but it is exhausting. . . . now you will understand what ghostly flakes of death have changed the sense of rome to me. the first day by a death-bed, the first drive-out, to the cemetery, where poor little joe is laid close to shelley's heart ("cor cordium" says the epitaph) and where the mother insisted on going when she and i went out in the carriage together--i am horribly weak about such things--i can't look on the earth-side of death--i flinch from corpses and graves, and never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. when i look deathwards i look _over_ death, and upwards, or i can't look that way at all. so that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sat so calmly--not to drop from the seat. well--all this has blackened rome to me. i can't think about the caesars in the old strain of thought--the antique words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, everyday tears and fresh grave-clay. rome is spoilt to me--there's the truth. still, one lives through one's associations when not too strong, and i have arrived at almost enjoying some things--the climate, for instance, which, though pernicious to the general health, agrees particularly with me, and the sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the great gaps and rifts of ruins. . . . we are very comfortably settled in rooms turned to the sun, and do work and play by turns, having almost too many visitors, hear excellent music at mrs. sartoris's (a. k.) once or twice a week, and have fanny kemble to come and talk to us with the doors shut, we three together. this is pleasant. i like her decidedly. 'if anybody wants small talk by handfuls, of glittering dust swept out of salons, here's mr. thackeray besides! . . .' rome: march . '. . . we see a good deal of the kembles here, and like them both, especially fanny, who is looking magnificent still, with her black hair and radiant smile. a very noble creature indeed. somewhat unelastic, unpliant to the age, attached to the old modes of thought and convention--but noble in qualities and defects. i like her much. she thinks me credulous and full of dreams--but does not despise me for that reason--which is good and tolerant of her, and pleasant too, for i should not be quite easy under her contempt. mrs. sartoris is genial and generous--her milk has had time to stand to cream in her happy family relations, which poor fanny kemble's has not had. mrs. sartoris' house has the best society in rome--and exquisite music of course. we met lockhart there, and my husband sees a good deal of him--more than i do--because of the access of cold weather lately which has kept me at home chiefly. robert went down to the seaside, on a day's excursion with him and the sartorises--and i hear found favour in his sight. said the critic, "i like browning--he isn't at all like a damned literary man." that's a compliment, i believe, according to your dictionary. it made me laugh and think of you directly. . . . robert has been sitting for his picture to mr. fisher, the english artist who painted mr. kenyon and landor. you remember those pictures in mr. kenyon's house in london. well, he has painted robert's, and it is an admirable likeness. the expression is an exceptional expression, but highly characteristic. . . .' may . '. . . to leave rome will fill me with barbarian complacency. i don't pretend to have a ray of sentiment about rome. it's a palimpsest rome, a watering-place written over the antique, and i haven't taken to it as a poet should i suppose. and let us speak the truth above all things. i am strongly a creature of association, and the associations of the place have not been personally favourable to me. among the rest, my child, the light of my eyes, has been more unwell than i ever saw him. . . . the pleasantest days in rome we have spent with the kembles, the two sisters, who are charming and excellent both of them, in different ways, and certainly they have given us some excellent hours in the campagna, upon picnic excursions--they, and certain of their friends; for instance, m. ampere, the member of the french institute, who is witty and agreeable, m. goltz, the austrian minister, who is an agreeable man, and mr. lyons, the son of sir edmund, &c. the talk was almost too brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonized entirely with the mayonnaise and champagne. . . .' it must have been on one of the excursions here described that an incident took place, which mr. browning relates with characteristic comments in a letter to mrs. fitz-gerald, of july , . the picnic party had strolled away to some distant spot. mrs. browning was not strong enough to join them, and her husband, as a matter of course, stayed with her; which act of consideration prompted mrs. kemble to exclaim that he was the only man she had ever known who behaved like a christian to his wife. she was, when he wrote this letter, reading his works for the first time, and had expressed admiration for them; but, he continued, none of the kind things she said to him on that subject could move him as did those words in the campagna. mrs. kemble would have modified her statement in later years, for the sake of one english and one american husband now closely related to her. even then, perhaps, she did not make it without inward reserve. but she will forgive me, i am sure, for having repeated it. mr. browning also refers to her memoirs, which he had just read, and says: 'i saw her in those [i conclude earlier] days much oftener than is set down, but she scarcely noticed me; though i always liked her extremely.' another of mrs. browning's letters is written from florence, june (' ): '. . . we mean to stay at florence a week or two longer and then go northward. i love florence--the place looks exquisitely beautiful in its garden ground of vineyards and olive trees, sung round by the nightingales day and night. . . . if you take one thing with another, there is no place in the world like florence, i am persuaded, for a place to live in--cheap, tranquil, cheerful, beautiful, within the limits of civilization yet out of the crush of it. . . . we have spent two delicious evenings at villas outside the gates, one with young lytton, sir edward's son, of whom i have told you, i think. i like him . . . we both do . . . from the bottom of our hearts. then, our friend, frederick tennyson, the new poet, we are delighted to see again. . . . . . '. . . mrs. sartoris has been here on her way to rome, spending most of her time with us . . . singing passionately and talking eloquently. she is really charming. . . .' i have no record of that northward journey or of the experiences of the winter of - . in all probability mr. and mrs. browning remained in, or as near as possible to, florence, since their income was still too limited for continuous travelling. they possibly talked of going to england, but postponed it till the following year; we know that they went there in , taking his sister with them as they passed through paris. they did not this time take lodgings for the summer months, but hired a house at dorset street, portman square; and there, on september , tennyson read his new poem, 'maud', to mrs. browning, while rossetti, the only other person present besides the family, privately drew his likeness in pen and ink. the likeness has become well known; the unconscious sitter must also, by this time, be acquainted with it; but miss browning thinks no one except herself, who was near rossetti at the table, was at the moment aware of its being made. all eyes must have been turned towards tennyson, seated by his hostess on the sofa. miss arabel barrett was also of the party. some interesting words of mrs. browning's carry their date in the allusion to mr. ruskin; but i cannot ascertain it more precisely: 'we went to denmark hill yesterday to have luncheon with them, and see the turners, which, by the way, are divine. i like mr. ruskin much, and so does robert. very gentle, yet earnest,--refined and truthful. i like him very much. we count him one among the valuable acquaintances made this year in england.' chapter - 'men and women'--'karshook'--'two in the campagna'--winter in paris; lady elgin--'aurora leigh'--death of mr. kenyon and mr. barrett--penini--mrs. browning's letters to miss browning--the florentine carnival--baths of lucca--spiritualism--mr. kirkup; count ginnasi--letter from mr. browning to mr. fox--havre. the beautiful 'one word more' was dated from london in september; and the fifty poems gathered together under the title of 'men and women' were published before the close of the year, in two volumes, by messrs. chapman and hall.* they are all familiar friends to mr. browning's readers, in their first arrangement and appearance, as in later redistributions and reprints; but one curious little fact concerning them is perhaps not generally known. in the eighth line of the fourteenth section of 'one word more' they were made to include 'karshook (ben karshook's wisdom)', which never was placed amongst them. it was written in april ; and the dedication of the volume must have been, as it so easily might be, in existence, before the author decided to omit it. the wrong name, once given, was retained, i have no doubt, from preference for its terminal sound; and 'karshook' only became 'karshish' in the tauchnitz copy of , and in the english edition of . * the date is given in the edition of as london -; in the tauchnitz selection of , london and florence - and -; in the new english edition -and -. 'karshook' appeared in in 'the keepsake', edited by miss power; but, as we are told on good authority, has been printed in no edition or selection of the poet's works. i am therefore justified in inserting it here. i 'would a man 'scape the rod?' rabbi ben karshook saith, 'see that he turn to god the day before his death.' 'ay, could a man inquire when it shall come!' i say. the rabbi's eye shoots fire-- 'then let him turn to-day!' ii quoth a young sadducee: 'reader of many rolls, is it so certain we have, as they tell us, souls?' 'son, there is no reply!' the rabbi bit his beard: 'certain, a soul have _i_-- _we_ may have none,' he sneer'd. thus karshook, the hiram's-hammer, the right-hand temple-column, taught babes in grace their grammar, and struck the simple, solemn. among this first collection of 'men and women' was the poem called 'two in the campagna'. it is a vivid, yet enigmatical little study of a restless spirit tantalized by glimpses of repose in love, saddened and perplexed by the manner in which this eludes it. nothing that should impress one as more purely dramatic ever fell from mr. browning's pen. we are told, nevertheless, in mr. sharp's 'life', that a personal character no less actual than that of the 'guardian angel' has been claimed for it. the writer, with characteristic delicacy, evades all discussion of the question; but he concedes a great deal in his manner of doing so. the poem, he says, conveys a sense of that necessary isolation of the individual soul which resists the fusing power of the deepest love; and its meaning cannot be personally--because it is universally--true. i do not think mr. browning meant to emphasize this aspect of the mystery of individual life, though the poem, in a certain sense, expresses it. we have no reason to believe that he ever accepted it as constant; and in no case could he have intended to refer its conditions to himself. he was often isolated by the processes of his mind; but there was in him no barrier to that larger emotional sympathy which we think of as sympathy of the soul. if this poem were true, 'one word more' would be false, quite otherwise than in that approach to exaggeration which is incidental to the poetic form. the true keynote of 'two in the campagna' is the pain of perpetual change, and of the conscious, though unexplained, predestination to it. mr. browning could have still less in common with such a state, since one of the qualities for which he was most conspicuous was the enormous power of anchorage which his affections possessed. only length of time and variety of experience could fully test this power or fully display it; but the signs of it had not been absent from even his earliest life. he loved fewer people in youth than in advancing age: nature and circumstance combined to widen the range, and vary the character of his human interests; but where once love or friendship had struck a root, only a moral convulsion could avail to dislodge it. i make no deduction from this statement when i admit that the last and most emphatic words of the poem in question, only i discern-- infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn, did probably come from the poet's heart, as they also found a deep echo in that of his wife, who much loved them. from london they returned to paris for the winter of - . the younger of the kemble sisters, mrs. sartoris, was also there with her family; and the pleasant meetings of the campagna renewed themselves for mr. browning, though in a different form. he was also, with his sister, a constant visitor at lady elgin's. both they and mrs. browning were greatly attached to her, and she warmly reciprocated the feeling. as mr. locker's letter has told us, mr. browning was in the habit of reading poetry to her, and when his sister had to announce his arrival from italy or england, she would say: 'robert is coming to nurse you, and read to you.' lady elgin was by this time almost completely paralyzed. she had lost the power of speech, and could only acknowledge the little attentions which were paid to her by some graceful pathetic gesture of the left hand; but she retained her sensibilities to the last; and miss browning received on one occasion a serious lesson in the risk of ever assuming that the appearance of unconsciousness guarantees its reality. lady augusta bruce had asked her, in her mother's presence, how mrs. browning was; and, imagining that lady elgin was unable to hear or understand, she had answered with incautious distinctness, 'i am afraid she is very ill,' when a little sob from the invalid warned her of her mistake. lady augusta quickly repaired it by rejoining, 'but she is better than she was, is she not?' miss browning of course assented. there were other friends, old and new, whom mr. browning occasionally saw, including, i need hardly say, the celebrated madame mohl. in the main, however, he led a quiet life, putting aside many inducements to leave his home. mrs. browning was then writing 'aurora leigh', and her husband must have been more than ever impressed by her power of work, as displayed by her manner of working. to him, as to most creative writers, perfect quiet was indispensable to literary production. she wrote in pencil, on scraps of paper, as she lay on the sofa in her sitting-room, open to interruption from chance visitors, or from her little omnipresent son; simply hiding the paper beside her if anyone came in, and taking it up again when she was free. and if this process was conceivable in the large, comparatively silent spaces of their italian home, and amidst habits of life which reserved social intercourse for the close of the working day, it baffles belief when one thinks of it as carried on in the conditions of a parisian winter, and the little 'salon' of the apartment in the rue du colisee in which those months were spent. the poem was completed in the ensuing summer, in mr. kenyon's london house, and dedicated, october , in deeply pathetic words to that faithful friend, whom the writer was never to see again. the news of his death, which took place in december , reached mr. and mrs. browning in florence, to be followed in the spring by that of mrs. browning's father. husband and wife had both determined to forego any pecuniary benefit which might accrue to them from this event; but they were not called upon to exercise their powers of renunciation. by mr. kenyon's will they were the richer, as is now, i think, generally known, the one by six thousand, the other by four thousand guineas.* of that cousin's long kindness mrs. browning could scarcely in after-days trust herself to speak. it was difficult to her, she said, even to write his name without tears. * mr. kenyon had considerable wealth, derived, like mr. barrett's, from west indian estates. i have alluded, perhaps tardily, to mr. browning's son, a sociable little being who must for some time have been playing a prominent part in his parents' lives. i saw him for the first time in this winter of - , and remember the grave expression of the little round face, the outline of which was common, at all events in childhood, to all the members of his mother's family, and was conspicuous in her, if we may trust an early portrait which has recently come to light. he wore the curling hair to which she refers in a later letter, and pretty frocks and frills, in which she delighted to clothe him. it is on record that, on one of the journeys of this year, a trunk was temporarily lost which contained peni's embroidered trousers, and the ms., whole or in part, of 'aurora leigh'; and that mrs. browning had scarcely a thought to spare for her poem, in face of the damage to her little boy's appearance which the accident involved. how he came by his familiar name of penini--hence peni, and pen--neither signifies in itself, nor has much bearing on his father's family history; but i cannot refrain from a word of comment on mr. hawthorne's fantastic conjecture, which has been asserted and reasserted in opposition to mr. browning's own statement of the case. according to mr. hawthorne, the name was derived from apennino, and bestowed on the child in babyhood, because apennino was a colossal statue, and he was so very small. it would be strange indeed that any joke connecting 'baby' with a given colossal statue should have found its way into the family without father, mother, or nurse being aware of it; or that any joke should have been accepted there which implied that the little boy was not of normal size. but the fact is still more unanswerable that apennino could by no process congenial to the italian language be converted into penini. its inevitable abbreviation would be pennino with a distinct separate sounding of the central n's, or nino. the accentuation of penini is also distinctly german. during this winter in paris, little wiedemann, as his parents tried to call him--his full name was robert wiedemann barrett--had developed a decided turn for blank verse. he would extemporize short poems, singing them to his mother, who wrote them down as he sang. there is no less proof of his having possessed a talent for music, though it first naturally showed itself in the love of a cheerful noise. his father had once sat down to the piano, for a serious study of some piece, when the little boy appeared, with the evident intention of joining in the performance. mr. browning rose precipitately, and was about to leave the room. 'oh!' exclaimed the hurt mother, 'you are going away, and he has brought his three drums to accompany you upon.' she herself would undoubtedly have endured the mixed melody for a little time, though her husband did not think she seriously wished him to do so. but if he did not play the piano to the accompaniment of pen's drums, he played piano duets with him as soon as the boy was old enough to take part in them; and devoted himself to his instruction in this, as in other and more important branches of knowledge. peni had also his dumb companions, as his father had had before him. tortoises lived at one end of the famous balcony at casa guidi; and when the family were at the baths of lucca, mr. browning would stow away little snakes in his bosom, and produce them for the child's amusement. as the child grew into a man, the love of animals which he had inherited became conspicuous in him; and it gave rise to many amusing and some pathetic little episodes of his artist life. the creatures which he gathered about him were generally, i think, more highly organized than those which elicited his father's peculiar tenderness; it was natural that he should exact more pictorial or more companionable qualities from them. but father and son concurred in the fondness for snakes, and in a singular predilection for owls; and they had not been long established in warwick crescent, when a bird of that family was domesticated there. we shall hear of it in a letter from mr. browning. of his son's moral quality as quite a little child his father has told me pretty and very distinctive stories, but they would be out of place here.* * i am induced, on second thoughts, to subjoin one of these, for its testimony to the moral atmosphere into which the child had been born. he was sometimes allowed to play with a little boy not of his own class--perhaps the son of a 'contadino'. the child was unobjectionable, or neither penini nor his parents would have endured the association; but the servants once thought themselves justified in treating him cavalierly, and pen flew indignant to his mother, to complain of their behaviour. mrs. browning at once sought little alessandro, with kind words and a large piece of cake; but this, in pen's eyes, only aggravated the offence; it was a direct reflection on his visitor's quality. 'he doesn't tome for take,' he burst forth; 'he tomes because he is my friend.' how often, since i heard this first, have we repeated the words, 'he doesn't tome for take,' in half-serious definition of a disinterested person or act! they became a standing joke. mrs. browning seems now to have adopted the plan of writing independent letters to her sister-in-law; and those available for our purpose are especially interesting. the buoyancy of tone which has habitually marked her communications, but which failed during the winter in rome, reasserts itself in the following extract. her maternal comments on peni and his perfections have hitherto been so carefully excluded, that a brief allusion to him may be allowed on the present occasion. . 'my dearest sarianna, . . . here is penini's letter, which takes up so much room that i must be sparing of mine--and, by the way, if you consider him improved in his writing, give the praise to robert, who has been taking most patient pains with him indeed. you will see how the little curly head is turned with carnival doings. so gay a carnival never was in our experience, for until last year (when we were absent) all masks had been prohibited, and now everybody has eaten of the tree of good and evil till not an apple is left. peni persecuted me to let him have a domino--with tears and embraces--he "_almost never_ in all his life had had a domino," and he would like it so. not a black domino! no--he hated black--but a blue domino, trimmed with pink! that was his taste. the pink trimming i coaxed him out of, but for the rest, i let him have his way. . . . for my part, the universal madness reached me sitting by the fire (whence i had not stirred for three months), and you will open your eyes when i tell you that i went (in domino and masked) to the great opera-ball. yes! i did, really. robert, who had been invited two or three times to other people's boxes, had proposed to return their kindness by taking a box himself at the opera this night, and entertaining two or three friends with galantine and champagne. just as he and i were lamenting the impossibility of my going, on that very morning the wind changed, the air grew soft and mild, and he maintained that i might and should go. there was no time to get a domino of my own (robert himself had a beautiful one made, and i am having it metamorphosed into a black silk gown for myself!) so i sent out and hired one, buying the mask. and very much amused i was. i like to see these characteristic things. (i shall never rest, sarianna, till i risk my reputation at the 'bal de l'opera' at paris). do you think i was satisfied with staying in the box? no, indeed. down i went, and robert and i elbowed our way through the crowd to the remotest corner of the ball below. somebody smote me on the shoulder and cried "bella mascherina!" and i answered as impudently as one feels under a mask. at two o'clock in the morning, however, i had to give up and come away (being overcome by the heavy air) and ingloriously left robert and our friends to follow at half-past four. think of the refinement and gentleness--yes, i must call it _superiority_ of this people--when no excess, no quarrelling, no rudeness nor coarseness can be observed in the course of such wild masked liberty; not a touch of licence anywhere, and perfect social equality! our servant ferdinando side by side in the same ball-room with the grand duke, and no class's delicacy offended against! for the grand duke went down into the ball-room for a short time. . . .' the summer of saw the family once more at the baths of lucca, and again in company with mr. lytton. he had fallen ill at the house of their common friend, miss blagden, also a visitor there; and mr. browning shared in the nursing, of which she refused to entrust any part to less friendly hands. he sat up with the invalid for four nights; and would doubtless have done so for as many more as seemed necessary, but that mrs. browning protested against this trifling with his own health. the only serious difference which ever arose between mr. browning and his wife referred to the subject of spiritualism. mrs. browning held doctrines which prepared her to accept any real or imagined phenomena betokening intercourse with the spirits of the dead; nor could she be repelled by anything grotesque or trivial in the manner of this intercourse, because it was no part of her belief that a spirit still inhabiting the atmosphere of our earth, should exhibit any dignity or solemnity not belonging to him while he lived upon it. the question must have been discussed by them on its general grounds at a very early stage of their intimacy; but it only assumed practical importance when mr. home came to florence in or . mr. browning found himself compelled to witness some of the 'manifestations'. he was keenly alive to their generally prosaic and irreverent character, and to the appearance of jugglery which was then involved in them. he absolutely denied the good faith of all the persons concerned. mrs. browning as absolutely believed it; and no compromise between them was attainable, because, strangely enough, neither of them admitted as possible that mediums or witnesses should deceive themselves. the personal aspect which the question thus received brought it into closer and more painful contact with their daily life. they might agree to differ as to the abstract merits of spiritualism; but mr. browning could not resign himself to his wife's trustful attitude towards some of the individuals who at that moment represented it. he may have had no substantial fear of her doing anything that could place her in their power, though a vague dread of this seems to have haunted him; but he chafed against the public association of her name with theirs. both his love for and his pride in her resented it. he had subsided into a more judicial frame of mind when he wrote 'sludge the medium', in which he says everything which can excuse the liar and, what is still more remarkable, modify the lie. so far back as the autumn of i heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to have witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person might have done so. the experience must even before that have passed out of the foreground of his conjugal life. he remained, nevertheless, subject, for many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would sweep over him whenever the question of 'spirits' or 'spiritualism' was revived; and we can only understand this in connection with the peculiar circumstances of the case. with all his faith in the future, with all his constancy to the past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than any other. a single discordant note in the harmony of that married love, though merged in its actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations through his remembrance of it. and the pain had not been, in this instance, that of simple disagreement. it was complicated by mrs. browning's refusal to admit that disagreement was possible. she never believed in her husband's disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably annoyed by her always assuming it to be feigned. but his doubt of spiritualistic sincerity was not feigned. she cannot have thought, and scarcely can have meant to say so. she may have meant to say, 'you believe that these are tricks, but you know that there is something real behind them;' and so far, if no farther, she may have been in the right. mr. browning never denied the abstract possibility of spiritual communication with either living or dead; he only denied that such communication had ever been proved, or that any useful end could be subserved by it. the tremendous potentialities of hypnotism and thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them. the natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into discussion. he may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. and if this was so, he would necessarily regard the whole system of manifestations with an apprehensive hostility, which was not entire negation, but which rebelled against any effort on the part of others, above all of those he loved, to interpret it into assent. the pain and anger which could be aroused in him by an indication on the part of a valued friend of even an impartial interest in the subject points especially to the latter conclusion. he often gave an instance of the tricks played in the name of spiritualism on credulous persons, which may amuse those who have not yet heard it. i give the story as it survives in the fresher memory of mr. val prinsep, who also received it from mr. browning. 'at florence lived a curious old savant who in his day was well known to all who cared for art or history. i fear now few live who recollect kirkup. he was quite a mine of information on all kinds of forgotten lore. it was he who discovered giotto's portrait of dante in the bargello. speaking of some friend, he said, "he is a most ignorant fellow! why, he does not know how to cast a horoscope!" of him browning told me the following story. kirkup was much taken up with spiritualism, in which he firmly believed. one day browning called on him to borrow a book. he rang loudly at the storey, for he knew kirkup, like landor, was quite deaf. to his astonishment the door opened at once and kirkup appeared. '"come in," he cried; "the spirits told me there was some one at the door. ah! i know you do not believe! come and see. mariana is in a trance!" 'browning entered. in the middle room, full of all kinds of curious objects of "vertu", stood a handsome peasant girl, with her eyes fixed as though she were in a trance. '"you see, browning," said kirkup, "she is quite insensible, and has no will of her own. mariana, hold up your arm." 'the woman slowly did as she was bid. '"she cannot take it down till i tell her," cried kirkup. '"very curious," observed browning. "meanwhile i have come to ask you to lend me a book." 'kirkup, as soon as he was made to hear what book was wanted, said he should be delighted. '"wait a bit. it is in the next room." 'the old man shuffled out at the door. no sooner had he disappeared than the woman turned to browning, winked, and putting down her arm leaned it on his shoulder. when kirkup returned she resumed her position and rigid look. '"here is the book," said kirkup. "isn't it wonderful?" he added, pointing to the woman. '"wonderful," agreed browning as he left the room. 'the woman and her family made a good thing of poor kirkup's spiritualism.' something much more remarkable in reference to this subject happened to the poet himself during his residence in florence. it is related in a letter to the 'spectator', dated january , , and signed j. s. k. 'mr. robert browning tells me that when he was in florence some years since, an italian nobleman (a count ginnasi of ravenna), visiting at florence, was brought to his house without previous introduction, by an intimate friend. the count professed to have great mesmeric and clairvoyant faculties, and declared, in reply to mr. browning's avowed scepticism, that he would undertake to convince him somehow or other of his powers. he then asked mr. browning whether he had anything about him then and there, which he could hand to him, and which was in any way a relic or memento. this mr. browning thought was perhaps because he habitually wore no sort of trinket or ornament, not even a watchguard, and might therefore turn out to be a safe challenge. but it so happened that, by a curious accident, he was then wearing under his coat-sleeves some gold wrist-studs which he had quite recently taken into wear, in the absence (by mistake of a sempstress) of his ordinary wrist-buttons. he had never before worn them in florence or elsewhere, and had found them in some old drawer where they had lain forgotten for years. one of these studs he took out and handed to the count, who held it in his hand a while, looking earnestly in mr. browning's face, and then he said, as if much impressed, "c'equalche cosa che mi grida nell' orecchio 'uccisione! uccisione!'" ("there is something here which cries out in my ear, 'murder! murder!'") '"and truly," says mr. browning, "those very studs were taken from the dead body of a great uncle of mine who was violently killed on his estate in st. kitt's, nearly eighty years ago. . . . the occurrence of my great uncle's murder was known only to myself of all men in florence, as certainly was also my possession of the studs."' a letter from the poet, of july , , affirms that the account is correct in every particular, adding, 'my own explanation of the matter has been that the shrewd italian felt his way by the involuntary help of my own eyes and face.' the story has been reprinted in the reports of the psychical society. a pleasant piece of news came to brighten the january of . mr. fox was returned for oldham, and at once wrote to announce the fact. he was answered in a joint letter from mr. and mrs. browning, interesting throughout, but of which only the second part is quite suited for present insertion. mrs. browning, who writes first and at most length, ends by saying she must leave a space for robert, that mr. fox may be compensated for reading all she has had to say. the husband continues as follows: . . . 'a space for robert' who has taken a breathing space--hardly more than enough--to recover from his delight; he won't say surprise, at your letter, dear mr. fox. but it is all right and, like you, i wish from my heart we could get close together again, as in those old days, and what times we would have here in italy! the realization of the children's prayer of angels at the corner of your bed (i.e. sofa), one to read and one (my wife) to write,* and both to guard you through the night of lodging-keeper's extortions, abominable charges for firing, and so on. (observe, to call oneself 'an angel' in this land is rather humble, where they are apt to be painted as plumed cutthroats or celestial police--you say of gabriel at his best and blithesomest, 'shouldn't admire meeting _him_ in a narrow lane!') * mr. fox much liked to be read to, and was in the habit of writing his articles by dictation. i say this foolishly just because i can't trust myself to be earnest about it. i would, you know, i would, always would, choose you out of the whole english world to judge and correct what i write myself; my wife shall read this and let it stand if i have told her so these twelve years--and certainly i have not grown intellectually an inch over the good and kind hand you extended over my head how many years ago! now it goes over my wife's too. how was it tottie never came here as she promised? is it to be some other time? do think of florence, if ever you feel chilly, and hear quantities about the princess royal's marriage, and want a change. i hate the thought of leaving italy for one day more than i can help--and satisfy my english predilections by newspapers and a book or two. one gets nothing of that kind here, but the stuff out of which books grow,--it lies about one's feet indeed. yet for me, there would be one book better than any now to be got here or elsewhere, and all out of a great english head and heart,--those 'memoirs' you engaged to give us. will you give us them? goodbye now--if ever the whim strikes you to 'make beggars happy' remember us. love to tottie, and love and gratitude to you, dear mr. fox, from yours ever affectionately, robert browning. in the summer of this year, the poet with his wife and child joined his father and sister at havre. it was the last time they were all to be together. chapter - mrs. browning's illness--siena--letter from mr. browning to mr. leighton --mrs. browning's letters continued--walter savage landor--winter in rome--mr. val prinsep--friends in rome: mr. and mrs. cartwright--multiplying social relations--massimo d'azeglio--siena again--illness and death of mrs. browning's sister--mr. browning's occupations--madame du quaire--mrs. browning's last illness and death. i cannot quite ascertain, though it might seem easy to do so, whether mr. and mrs. browning remained in florence again till the summer of , or whether the intervening months were divided between florence and rome; but some words in their letters favour the latter supposition. we hear of them in september from mr. val prinsep, in siena or its neighbourhood; with mr. and mrs. story in an adjacent villa, and walter savage landor in a 'cottage' close by. how mr. landor found himself of the party belongs to a little chapter in mr. browning's history for which i quote mr. colvin's words.* he was then living at fiesole with his family, very unhappily, as we all know; and mr. colvin relates how he had thrice left his villa there, determined to live in florence alone; and each time been brought back to the nominal home where so little kindness awaited him. * 'life of landor', p. . '. . . the fourth time he presented himself in the house of mr. browning with only a few pauls in his pocket, declaring that nothing should ever induce him to return. 'mr. browning, an interview with the family at the villa having satisfied him that reconciliation or return was indeed past question, put himself at once in communication with mr. forster and with landor's brothers in england. the latter instantly undertook to supply the needs of their eldest brother during the remainder of his life. thenceforth an income sufficient for his frugal wants was forwarded regularly for his use through the friend who had thus come forward at his need. to mr. browning's respectful and judicious guidance landor showed himself docile from the first. removed from the inflictions, real and imaginary, of his life at fiesole, he became another man, and at times still seemed to those about him like the old landor at his best. it was in july, , that the new arrangements for his life were made. the remainder of that summer he spent at siena, first as the guest of mr. story, the american sculptor and poet, next in a cottage rented for him by mr. browning near his own. in the autumn of the same year landor removed to a set of apartments in the via nunziatina in florence, close to the casa guidi, in a house kept by a former servant of mrs. browning's, an englishwoman married to an italian.* here he continued to live during the five years that yet remained to him.' * wilson, mrs. browning's devoted maid, and another most faithful servant of hers and her husband's, ferdinando romagnoli. mr. landor's presence is also referred to, with the more important circumstance of a recent illness of mrs. browning's, in two characteristic and interesting letters of this period, one written by mr. browning to frederic leighton, the other by his wife to her sister-in-law. mr.-- now sir f.-- leighton had been studying art during the previous winter in italy. kingdom of piedmont, siena: oct. , ' . 'my dear leighton--i hope--and think--you know what delight it gave me to hear from you two months ago. i was in great trouble at the time about my wife who was seriously ill. as soon as she could bear removal we brought her to a villa here. she slowly recovered and is at last _well_ --i believe--but weak still and requiring more attention than usual. we shall be obliged to return to rome for the winter--not choosing to risk losing what we have regained with some difficulty. now you know why i did not write at once--and may imagine why, having waited so long, i put off telling you for a week or two till i could say certainly what we do with ourselves. if any amount of endeavour could induce you to join us there--cartwright, russell, the vatican and all--and if such a step were not inconsistent with your true interests--you should have it: but i know very well that you love italy too much not to have had weighty reasons for renouncing her at present--and i want your own good and not my own contentment in the matter. wherever you are, be sure i shall follow your proceedings with deep and true interest. i heard of your successes--and am now anxious to know how you get on with the great picture, the 'ex voto'--if it does not prove full of beauty and power, two of us will be shamed, that's all! but _i_ don't fear, mind! do keep me informed of your progress, from time to time--a few lines will serve--and then i shall slip some day into your studio, and buffet the piano, without having grown a stranger. another thing--do take proper care of your health, and exercise yourself; give those vile indigestions no chance against you; keep up your spirits, and be as distinguished and happy as god meant you should. can i do anything for you at rome--not to say, florence? we go thither (i.e. to florence) to-morrow, stay there a month, probably, and then take the siena road again.' the next paragraph refers to some orders for photographs, and is not specially interesting. cartwright arrived here a fortnight ago--very pleasant it was to see him: he left for florence, stayed a day or two and returned to mrs. cartwright (who remained at the inn) and they all departed prosperously yesterday for rome. odo russell spent two days here on his way thither--we liked him much. prinsep and jones--do you know them?--are in the town. the storys have passed the summer in the villa opposite,--and no less a lion than dear old landor is in a house a few steps off. i take care of him--his amiable family having clawed him a little too sharply: so strangely do things come about! i mean his fiesole 'family'--a trifle of wife, sons and daughter--not his english relatives, who are generous and good in every way. take any opportunity of telling dear mrs. sartoris (however unnecessarily) that i and my wife remember her with the old feeling--i trust she is well and happy to heart's content. pen is quite well and rejoicing just now in a sardinian pony on which he gallops like puck on a dragon-fly's back. my wife's kind regard and best wishes go with those of, dear leighton, yours affectionately ever, r. browning. october . mrs. to miss browning. '. . . after all, it is not a cruel punishment to have to go to rome again this winter, though it will be an undesirable expense, and we did wish to keep quiet this winter,--the taste for constant wanderings having passed away as much for me as for robert. we begin to see that by no possible means can one spend as much money to so small an end--and then we don't work so well, don't live to as much use either for ourselves or others. isa blagden bids us observe that we pretend to live at florence, and are not there much above two months in the year, what with going away for the summer and going away for the winter. it's too true. it's the drawback of italy. to live in one place there is impossible for us, almost just as to live out of italy at all, is impossible for us. it isn't caprice on our part. siena pleases us very much--the silence and repose have been heavenly things to me, and the country is very pretty--though no more than pretty--nothing marked or romantic--no mountains, except so far off as to be like a cloud only on clear days--and no water. pretty dimpled ground, covered with low vineyards, purple hills, not high, with the sunsets clothing them. . . . we shall not leave florence till november--robert must see mr. landor (his adopted son, sarianna) settled in his new apartments with wilson for a duenna. it's an excellent plan for him and not a bad one for wilson. . . . forgive me if robert has told you this already. dear darling robert amuses me by talking of his "gentleness and sweetness". a most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very affectionate to robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint, he has not a grain, and of suspiciousness, many grains. wilson will run many risks, and i, for one, would rather not run them. what do you say to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? and the contadini at whose house he is lodging now have been already accused of opening desks. still upon that occasion (though there was talk of the probability of mr. landor's "throat being cut in his sleep"--) as on other occasions, robert succeeded in soothing him--and the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roaring softly, to beguile the time, in latin alcaics against his wife and louis napoleon. he laughs carnivorously when i tell him that one of these days he will have to write an ode in honour of the emperor, to please me.' mrs. browning writes, somewhat later, from rome: '. . . we left mr. landor in great comfort. i went to see his apartment before it was furnished. rooms small, but with a look-out into a little garden, quiet and cheerful, and he doesn't mind a situation rather out of the way. he pays four pounds ten (english) the month. wilson has thirty pounds a year for taking care of him--which sounds a good deal, but it is a difficult position. he has excellent, generous, affectionate impulses--but the impulses of the tiger, every now and then. nothing coheres in him--either in his opinions, or, i fear, his affections. it isn't age--he is precisely the man of his youth, i must believe. still, his genius gives him the right of gratitude on all artists at least, and i must say that my robert has generously paid the debt. robert always said that he owed more as a writer to landor than to any contemporary. at present landor is very fond of him--but i am quite prepared for his turning against us as he has turned against forster, who has been so devoted for years and years. only one isn't kind for what one gets by it, or there wouldn't be much kindness in this world. . . .' mr. browning always declared that his wife could impute evil to no one, that she was a living denial of that doctrine of original sin to which her christianity pledged her; and the great breadth and perfect charity of her views habitually justified the assertion; but she evidently possessed a keen insight into character, which made her complete suspension of judgment on the subject of spiritualism very difficult to understand. the spiritualistic coterie had found a satisfactory way of explaining mr. browning's antagonistic attitude towards it. he was jealous, it was said, because the spirits on one occasion had dropped a crown on to his wife's head and none on to his own. the first instalment of his long answer to this grotesque accusation appears in a letter of mrs. browning's, probably written in the course of the winter of - . '. . . my brother george sent me a number of the "national magazine" with my face in it, after marshall wood's medallion. my comfort is that my greatest enemy will not take it to be like me, only that does not go far with the indifferent public: the portrait i suppose will have its due weight in arresting the sale of "aurora leigh" from henceforth. you never saw a more determined visage of a strong-minded woman with the neck of a vicious bull. . . . still, i am surprised, i own, at the amount of success, and that golden-hearted robert is in ecstasies about it, far more than if it all related to a book of his own. the form of the story, and also, something in the philosophy, seem to have caught the crowd. as to the poetry by itself, anything good in that repels rather. i am not so blind as romney, not to perceive this . . . give peni's and my love to the dearest 'nonno' (grandfather) whose sublime unselfishness and want of common egotism presents such a contrast to what is here. tell him i often think of him, and always with touched feeling. (when _he_ is eighty-six or ninety-six, nobody will be pained or humbled by the spectacle of an insane self-love resulting from a long life's ungoverned will.) may god bless him!--. . . robert has made his third bust copied from the antique. he breaks them all up as they are finished--it's only matter of education. when the power of execution is achieved, he will try at something original. then reading hurts him; as long as i have known him he has not been able to read long at a time--he can do it now better than at the beginning. the consequence of which is that an active occupation is salvation to him. . . . nobody exactly understands him except me, who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe. for the peculiarity of our relation is, that he thinks aloud with me and can't stop himself. . . . i wanted his poems done this winter very much, and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to his use. but he had a room all last summer, and did nothing. then, he worked himself out by riding for three or four hours together--there has been little poetry done since last winter, when he did much. he was not inclined to write this winter. the modelling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy. so i couldn't be much in opposition against the sculpture--i couldn't in fact at all. he has material for a volume, and will work at it this summer, he says. 'his power is much in advance of "strafford", which is his poorest work of art. ah, the brain stratifies and matures, even in the pauses of the pen. 'at the same time, his treatment in england affects him, naturally, and for my part i set it down as an infamy of that public--no other word. he says he has told you some things you had not heard, and which i acknowledge i always try to prevent him from repeating to anyone. i wonder if he has told you besides (no, i fancy not) that an english lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours, (observe that!) asked, the other day, the american minister, whether "robert was not an american." the minister answered--"is it possible that _you_ ask me this? why, there is not so poor a village in the united states, where they would not tell you that robert browning was an englishman, and that they were sorry he was not an american." very pretty of the american minister, was it not?--and literally true, besides. . . . ah, dear sarianna--i don't complain for myself of an unappreciating public. i _have no reason_. but, just for _that_ reason, i complain more about robert--only he does not hear me complain--to _you_ i may say, that the blindness, deafness and stupidity of the english public to robert are amazing. of course milsand had heard his name--well the contrary would have been strange. robert _is_. all england can't prevent his existence, i suppose. but nobody there, except a small knot of pre-raffaellite men, pretend to do him justice. mr. forster has done the best,--in the press. as a sort of lion, robert has his range in society--and--for the rest, you should see chapman's returns!--while, in america he is a power, a writer, a poet--he is read--he lives in the hearts of the people. '"browning readings" here in boston--"browning evenings" there. for the rest, the english hunt lions, too, sarianna, but their lions are chiefly chosen among lords and railway kings. . . .' we cannot be surprised at mrs. browning's desire for a more sustained literary activity on her husband's part. we learn from his own subsequent correspondence that he too regarded the persevering exercise of his poetic faculty as almost a religious obligation. but it becomes the more apparent that the restlessness under which he was now labouring was its own excuse; and that its causes can have been no mystery even to those 'outside' him. the life and climate of italy were beginning to undermine his strength. we owe it perhaps to the great and sorrowful change, which was then drawing near, that the full power of work returned to him. during the winter of - , mr. val prinsep was in rome. he had gone to siena with mr. burne jones, bearing an introduction from rossetti to mr. browning and his wife; and the acquaintance with them was renewed in the ensuing months. mr. prinsep had acquired much knowledge of the popular, hence picturesque aspects of roman life, through a french artist long resident in the city; and by the help of the two young men mr. browning was also introduced to them. the assertion that during his married life he never dined away from home must be so far modified, that he sometimes joined mr. prinsep and his friend in a bohemian meal, at an inn near the porta pinciana which they much frequented; and he gained in this manner some distinctive experiences which he liked long afterwards to recall. i am again indebted to mr. prinsep for a description of some of these. 'the first time he honoured us was on an evening when the poet of the quarter of the "monte" had announced his intention of coming to challenge a rival poet to a poetical contest. such contests are, or were, common in rome. in old times the monte and the trastevere, the two great quarters of the eternal city, held their meetings on the ponte rotto. the contests were not confined to the effusions of the poetical muse. sometimes it was a strife between two lute-players, sometimes guitarists would engage, and sometimes mere wrestlers. the rivalry was so keen that the adverse parties finished up with a general fight. so the papal government had forbidden the meetings on the old bridge. but still each quarter had its pet champions, who were wont to meet in private before an appreciative, but less excitable audience, than in olden times. 'gigi (the host) had furnished a first-rate dinner, and his usual tap of excellent wine. ('vino del popolo' he called it.) the 'osteria' had filled; the combatants were placed opposite each other on either side of a small table on which stood two 'mezzi'--long glass bottles holding about a quart apiece. for a moment the two poets eyed each other like two cocks seeking an opportunity to engage. then through the crowd a stalwart carpenter, a constant attendant of gigi's, elbowed his way. he leaned over the table with a hand on each shoulder, and in a neatly turned couplet he then addressed the rival bards. '"you two," he said, "for the honour of rome, must do your best, for there is now listening to you a great poet from england." 'having said this, he bowed to browning, and swaggered back to his place in the crowd, amid the applause of the on-lookers. 'it is not necessary to recount how the two improvisatori poetized, even if i remembered, which i do not. 'on another occasion, when browning and story were dining with us, we had a little orchestra (mandolins, two guitars, and a lute,) to play to us. the music consisted chiefly of well-known popular airs. while they were playing with great fervour the hymn to garibaldi--an air strictly forbidden by the papal government, three blows at the door resounded through the 'osteria'. the music stopped in a moment. i saw gigi was very pale as he walked down the room. there was a short parley at the door. it opened, and a sergeant and two papal gendarmes marched solemnly up to the counter from which drink was supplied. there was a dead silence while gigi supplied them with large measures of wine, which the gendarmes leisurely imbibed. then as solemnly they marched out again, with their heads well in the air, looking neither to the right nor the left. most discreet if not incorruptible guardians of the peace! when the door was shut the music began again; but gigi was so earnest in his protestations, that my friend browning suggested we should get into carriages and drive to see the coliseum by moonlight. and so we sallied forth, to the great relief of poor gigi, to whom it meant, if reported, several months of imprisonment, and complete ruin. 'in after-years browning frequently recounted with delight this night march. '"we drove down the corso in two carriages," he would say. "in one were our musicians, in the other we sat. yes! and the people all asked, 'who are these who make all this parade?' at last some one said, 'without doubt these are the fellows who won the lottery,' and everybody cried, 'of course these are the lucky men who have won.'"' the two persons whom mr. browning saw most, and most intimately, during this and the ensuing winter, were probably mr. and mrs. story. allusion has already been made to the opening of the acquaintance at the baths of lucca in , to its continuance in rome in ' and ' , and to the artistic pursuits which then brought the two men into close and frequent contact with each other. these friendly relations were cemented by their children, who were of about the same age; and after mrs. browning's death, miss browning took her place in the pleasant intercourse which renewed itself whenever their respective visits to italy and to england again brought the two families together. a no less lasting and truly affectionate intimacy was now also growing up with mr. cartwright and his wife--the cartwrights (of aynhoe) of whom mention was made in the siena letter to f. leighton; and this too was subsequently to include their daughter, now mrs. guy le strange, and mr. browning's sister. i cannot quite ascertain when the poet first knew mr. odo russell, and his mother, lady william russell, who was also during this, or at all events the following winter, in rome; and whom afterwards in london he regularly visited until her death; but the acquaintance was already entering on the stage in which it would spread as a matter of course through every branch of the family. his first country visit, when he had returned to england, was paid with his son to woburn abbey. we are now indeed fully confronted with one of the great difficulties of mr. browning's biography: that of giving a sufficient idea of the growing extent and growing variety of his social relations. it is evident from the fragments of his wife's correspondence that during, as well as after, his married life, he always and everywhere knew everyone whom it could interest him to know. these acquaintances constantly ripened into friendliness, friendliness into friendship. they were necessarily often marked by interesting circumstances or distinctive character. to follow them one by one, would add not chapters, but volumes, to our history. the time has not yet come at which this could even be undertaken; and any attempt at systematic selection would create a false impression of the whole. i must therefore be still content to touch upon such passages of mr. browning's social experience as lie in the course of a comparatively brief record; leaving all such as are not directly included in it to speak indirectly for themselves. mrs. browning writes again, in : 'massimo d'azeglio came to see us, and talked nobly, with that noble head of his. i was far prouder of his coming than of another personal distinction you will guess at,* though i don't pretend to have been insensible to that.' * an invitation to mr. browning to dine in company with the young prince of wales. dr.--afterwards cardinal--manning was also among the distinguished or interesting persons whom they knew in rome. another, undated extract might refer to the early summer of or , when a meeting with the father and sister must have been once more in contemplation. casa guidi. 'my dearest sarianna,--i am delighted to say that we have arrived, and see our dear florence--the queen of italy, after all . . . a comfort is that robert is considered here to be looking better than he ever was known to look--and this, notwithstanding the greyness of his beard . . . which indeed, is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. this greyness was suddenly developed--let me tell you how. he was in a state of bilious irritability on the morning of his arrival in rome, from exposure to the sun or some such cause, and in a fit of suicidal impatience shaved away his whole beard . . . whiskers and all!! i _cried_ when i saw him, i was so horror-struck. i might have gone into hysterics and still been reasonable--for no human being was ever so disfigured by so simple an act. of course i said when i recovered heart and voice, that everything was at an end between him and me if he didn't let it all grow again directly, and (upon the further advice of his looking-glass) he yielded the point,--and the beard grew--but it grew white--which was the just punishment of the gods--our sins leave their traces. 'well, poor darling robert won't shock you after all--you can't choose but be satisfied with his looks. m. de monclar swore to me that he was not changed for the intermediate years. . . .' the family returned, however, to siena for the summer of , and from thence mrs. browning writes to her sister-in-law of her great anxiety concerning her sister henrietta, mrs. surtees cook,* then attacked by a fatal disease. * the name was afterwards changed to altham. '. . . there is nothing or little to add to my last account of my precious henrietta. but, dear, you think the evil less than it is--be sure that the fear is too reasonable. i am of a very hopeful temperament, and i never could go on systematically making the worst of any case. i bear up here for a few days, and then comes the expectation of a letter, which is hard. i fight with it for robert's sake, but all the work i put myself to do does not hinder a certain effect. she is confined to her bed almost wholly and suffers acutely. . . . in fact, i am living from day to day, on the merest crumbs of hope--on the daily bread which is very bitter. of course it has shaken me a good deal, and interfered with the advantages of the summer, but that's the least. poor robert's scheme for me of perfect repose has scarcely been carried out. . . .' this anxiety was heightened during the ensuing winter in rome, by just the circumstance from which some comfort had been expected--the second postal delivery which took place every day; for the hopes and fears which might have found a moment's forgetfulness in the longer absence of news, were, as it proved, kept at fever-heat. on one critical occasion the suspense became unbearable, because mr. browning, by his wife's desire, had telegraphed for news, begging for a telegraphic answer. no answer had come, and she felt convinced that the worst had happened, and that the brother to whom the message was addressed could not make up his mind to convey the fact in so abrupt a form. the telegram had been stopped by the authorities, because mr. odo russell had undertaken to forward it, and his position in rome, besides the known liberal sympathies of mr. and mrs. browning and himself, had laid it open to political suspicion. mrs. surtees cook died in the course of the winter. mr. browning always believed that the shock and sorrow of this event had shortened his wife's life, though it is also possible that her already lowered vitality increased the dejection into which it plunged her. her own casual allusions to the state of her health had long marked arrested progress, if not steady decline. we are told, though this may have been a mistake, that active signs of consumption were apparent in her even before the illness of , which was in a certain sense the beginning of the end. she was completely an invalid, as well as entirely a recluse, during the greater part if not the whole of this last stay in rome. she rallied nevertheless sufficiently to write to miss browning in april, in a tone fully suggestive of normal health and energy. '. . . in my own opinion he is infinitely handsomer and more attractive than when i saw him first, sixteen years ago. . . . i believe people in general would think the same exactly. as to the modelling--well, i told you that i grudged a little the time from his own particular art. but it does not do to dishearten him about his modelling. he has given a great deal of time to anatomy with reference to the expression of form, and the clay is only the new medium which takes the place of drawing. also, robert is peculiar in his ways of work as a poet. i have struggled a little with him on this point, for i don't think him right; that is to say, it would not be right for me . . . but robert waits for an inclination, works by fits and starts; he can't do otherwise he says, and his head is full of ideas which are to come out in clay or marble. i yearn for the poems, but he leaves that to me for the present. . . . you will think robert looking very well when you see him; indeed, you may judge by the photographs meanwhile. you know, sarianna, how i used to forbid the moustache. i insisted as long as i could, but all artists were against me, and i suppose that the bare upper lip does not harmonise with the beard. he keeps the hair now closer, and the beard is pointed. . . . as to the moony whiteness of the beard, it is beautiful, _i_ think, but then i think him all beautiful, and always. . . .' mr. browning's old friend, madame du quaire,* came to rome in december. she had visited florence three years before, and i am indebted to her for some details of the spiritualist controversy by which its english colony was at that time divided. she was now a widow, travelling with her brother; and mr. browning came whenever he could, to comfort her in her sorrow, and, as she says, discourse of nature, art, the beautiful, and all that 'conquers death'. he little knew how soon he would need the same comfort for himself. he would also declaim passages from his wife's poems; and when, on one of these occasions, madame du quaire had said, as so many persons now say, that she much preferred his poetry to hers, he made this characteristic answer, to be repeated in substance some years afterwards to another friend: 'you are wrong--quite wrong--she has genius; i am only a painstaking fellow. can't you imagine a clever sort of angel who plots and plans, and tries to build up something--he wants to make you see it as he sees it--shows you one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to understand; and whilst this bother is going on god almighty turns you off a little star--that's the difference between us. the true creative power is hers, not mine.' * formerly miss blackett, and sister of the member for new castle. mrs. browning died at casa guidi on june , , soon after their return to florence. she had had a return of the bronchial affection to which she was subject; and a new doctor who was called in discovered grave mischief at the lungs, which she herself had long believed to be existent or impending. but the attack was comparatively, indeed actually, slight; and an extract from her last letter to miss browning, dated june , confirms what her family and friends have since asserted, that it was the death of cavour which gave her the final blow. '. . . we come home into a cloud here. i can scarcely command voice or hand to name 'cavour'. that great soul which meditated and made italy has gone to the diviner country. if tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. i feel yet as if i could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy. a hundred garibaldis for such a man!' her death was signalized by the appearance--this time, i am told, unexpected--of another brilliant comet, which passed so near the earth as to come into contact with it. chapter - miss blagden--letters from mr. browning to miss haworth and mr. leighton--his feeling in regard to funeral ceremonies--establishment in london--plan of life--letter to madame du quaire--miss arabel barrett--biarritz--letters to miss blagden--conception of 'the ring and the book'--biographical indiscretion--new edition of his works--mr. and mrs. procter. the friend who was nearest, at all events most helpful, to mr. browning in this great and sudden sorrow was miss blagden--isa blagden, as she was called by all her intimates. only a passing allusion to her could hitherto find place in this fragmentary record of the poet's life; but the friendship which had long subsisted between her and mrs. browning brings her now into closer and more frequent relation to it. she was for many years a centre of english society in florence; for her genial, hospitable nature, as well as literary tastes (she wrote one or two novels, i believe not without merit), secured her the acquaintance of many interesting persons, some of whom occasionally made her house their home; and the evenings spent with her at her villa on bellosguardo live pleasantly in the remembrance of those of our older generation who were permitted to share in them. she carried the boy away from the house of mourning, and induced his father to spend his nights under her roof, while the last painful duties detained him in florence. he at least gave her cause to deny, what has been so often affirmed, that great griefs are necessarily silent. she always spoke of this period as her 'apocalyptic month', so deeply poetic were the ravings which alternated with the simple human cry of the desolate heart: 'i want her, i want her!' but the ear which received these utterances has long been closed in death. the only written outbursts of mr. browning's frantic sorrow were addressed, i believe, to his sister, and to the friend, madame du quaire, whose own recent loss most naturally invoked them, and who has since thought best, so far as rested with her, to destroy the letters in which they were contained. it is enough to know by simple statement that he then suffered as he did. life conquers death for most of us; whether or not 'nature, art, and beauty' assist in the conquest. it was bound to conquer in mr. browning's case: first through his many-sided vitality; and secondly, through the special motive for living and striving which remained to him in his son. this note is struck in two letters which are given me to publish, written about three weeks after mrs. browning's death; and we see also that by this time his manhood was reacting against the blow, and bracing itself with such consoling remembrance as the peace and painlessness of his wife's last moments could afford to him. florence: july , ' . dear leighton,--it is like your old kindness to write to me and to say what you do--i know you feel for me. i can't write about it--but there were many alleviating circumstances that you shall know one day--there seemed no pain, and (what she would have felt most) the knowledge of separation from us was spared her. i find these things a comfort indeed. i shall go away from italy for many a year--to paris, then london for a day or two just to talk with her sister--but if i can see you it will be a great satisfaction. don't fancy i am 'prostrated', i have enough to do for the boy and myself in carrying out her wishes. he is better than one would have thought, and behaves dearly to me. everybody has been very kind. tell dear mrs. sartoris that i know her heart and thank her with all mine. after my day or two at london i shall go to some quiet place in france to get right again and then stay some time at paris in order to find out leisurely what it will be best to do for peni--but eventually i shall go to england, i suppose. i don't mean to live with anybody, even my own family, but to occupy myself thoroughly, seeing dear friends, however, like you. god bless you. yours ever affectionately, robert browning. the second is addressed to miss haworth. florence: july , . my dear friend,--i well know you feel as you say, for her once and for me now. isa blagden, perfect in all kindness to me, will have told you something perhaps--and one day i shall see you and be able to tell you myself as much as i can. the main comfort is that she suffered very little pain, none beside that ordinarily attending the simple attacks of cold and cough she was subject to--had no presentiment of the result whatever, and was consequently spared the misery of knowing she was about to leave us; she was smilingly assuring me she was 'better', 'quite comfortable--if i would but come to bed,' to within a few minutes of the last. i think i foreboded evil at rome, certainly from the beginning of the week's illness--but when i reasoned about it, there was no justifying fear--she said on the last evening 'it is merely the old attack, not so severe a one as that of two years ago--there is no doubt i shall soon recover,' and we talked over plans for the summer, and next year. i sent the servants away and her maid to bed--so little reason for disquietude did there seem. through the night she slept heavily, and brokenly--that was the bad sign--but then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me and sleep again. at four o'clock there were symptoms that alarmed me, i called the maid and sent for the doctor. she smiled as i proposed to bathe her feet, 'well, you _are_ determined to make an exaggerated case of it!' then came what my heart will keep till i see her again and longer--the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's--and in a few minutes she died in my arms; her head on my cheek. these incidents so sustain me that i tell them to her beloved ones as their right: there was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but god took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark, uneasy bed into your arms and the light. thank god. annunziata thought by her earnest ways with me, happy and smiling as they were, that she must have been aware of our parting's approach--but she was quite conscious, had words at command, and yet did not even speak of peni, who was in the next room. her last word was when i asked 'how do you feel?' --'beautiful.' you know i have her dearest wishes and interests to attend to _at once_--her child to care for, educate, establish properly; and my own life to fulfil as properly,--all just as she would require were she here. i shall leave italy altogether for years--go to london for a few days' talk with arabel--then go to my father and begin to try leisurely what will be the best for peni--but no more 'housekeeping' for me, even with my family. i shall grow, still, i hope--but my root is taken and remains. i know you always loved her, and me too in my degree. i shall always be grateful to those who loved her, and that, i repeat, you did. she was, and is, lamented with extraordinary demonstrations, if one consider it. the italians seem to have understood her by an instinct. i have received strange kindness from everybody. pen is very well--very dear and good, anxious to comfort me as he calls it. he can't know his loss yet. after years, his will be worse than mine--he will want what he never had--that is, for the time when he could be helped by her wisdom, and genius and piety--i _have_ had everything and shall not forget. god bless you, dear friend. i believe i shall set out in a week. isa goes with me--dear, true heart. you, too, would do what you could for us were you here and your assistance needful. a letter from you came a day or two before the end--she made me enquire about the frescobaldi palace for you,--isa wrote to you in consequence. i shall be heard of at , rue de grenelle st. germain. faithfully and affectionately yours, robert browning. the first of these displays even more self-control, it might be thought less feeling, than the second; but it illustrates the reserve which, i believe, habitually characterized mr. browning's attitude towards men. his natural, and certainly most complete, confidants were women. at about the end of july he left florence with his son; also accompanied by miss blagden, who travelled with them as far as paris. she herself must soon have returned to italy; since he wrote to her in september on the subject of his wife's provisional disinterment,* in a manner which shows her to have been on the spot. * required for the subsequent placing of the monument designed by f. leighton. sept. ' . '. . . isa, may i ask you one favour? will you, whenever these dreadful preliminaries, the provisional removement &c. when they are proceeded with,--will you do--all you can--suggest every regard to decency and proper feeling to the persons concerned? i have a horror of that man of the grave-yard, and needless publicity and exposure--i rely on you, dearest friend of ours, to at least lend us your influence when the time shall come--a word may be invaluable. if there is any show made, or gratification of strangers' curiosity, far better that i had left the turf untouched. these things occur through sheer thoughtlessness, carelessness, not anything worse, but the effect is irreparable. i won't think any more of it--now--at least. . . .' the dread expressed in this letter of any offence to the delicacies of the occasion was too natural to be remarked upon here; but it connects itself with an habitual aversion for the paraphernalia of death, which was a marked peculiarity of mr. browning's nature. he shrank, as his wife had done, from the 'earth side' of the portentous change; but truth compels me to own that her infinite pity had little or no part in his attitude towards it. for him, a body from which the soul had passed, held nothing of the person whose earthly vesture it had been. he had no sympathy for the still human tenderness with which so many of us regard the mortal remains of those they have loved, or with the solemn or friendly interest in which that tenderness so often reflects itself in more neutral minds. he would claim all respect for the corpse, but he would turn away from it. another aspect of this feeling shows itself in a letter to one of his brothers-in-law, mr. george moulton-barrett, in reference to his wife's monument, with which mr. barrett had professed himself pleased. his tone is characterized by an almost religious reverence for the memory which that monument enshrines. he nevertheless writes: 'i hope to see it one day--and, although i have no kind of concern as to where the old clothes of myself shall be thrown, yet, if my fortune be such, and my survivors be not unduly troubled, i should like them to lie in the place i have retained there. it is no matter, however.' the letter is dated october , . he never saw florence again. mr. browning spent two months with his father and sister at st.-enogat, near dinard, from which place the letter to miss blagden was written; and then proceeded to london, where his wife's sister, miss arabel barrett, was living. he had declared in his first grief that he would never keep house again, and he began his solitary life in lodgings which at his request she had engaged for him; but the discomfort of this arrangement soon wearied him of it; and before many months had passed, he had sent to florence for his furniture, and settled himself in the house in warwick crescent, which possessed, besides other advantages, that of being close to delamere terrace, where miss barrett had taken up her abode. this first period of mr. browning's widowed life was one of unutterable dreariness, in which the smallest and yet most unconquerable element was the prosaic ugliness of everything which surrounded him. it was fifteen years since he had spent a winter in england; he had never spent one in london. there had been nothing to break for him the transition from the stately beauty of florence to the impressions and associations of the harrow and edgware roads, and of paddington green. he might have escaped this neighbourhood by way of westbourne terrace; but his walks constantly led him in an easterly direction; and whether in an unconscious hugging of his chains, or, as was more probable, from the desire to save time, he would drag his aching heart and reluctant body through the sordidness or the squalor of this short cut, rather than seek the pleasanter thoroughfares which were open to him. even the prettiness of warwick crescent was neutralized for him by the atmosphere of low or ugly life which encompassed it on almost every side. his haunting dream was one day to have done with it all; to have fulfilled his mission with his son, educated him, launched him in a suitable career, and to go back to sunshine and beauty again. he learned by degrees to regard london as a home; as the only fitting centre for the varied energies which were reviving in him; to feel pride and pleasure in its increasingly picturesque character. he even learned to appreciate the outlook from his house--that 'second from the bridge' of which so curious a presentment had entered into one of the poems of the 'men and women'*--in spite of the refuse of humanity which would sometimes yell at the street corner, or fling stones at his plate-glass. but all this had to come; and it is only fair to admit that twenty-nine years ago the beauties of which i have spoken were in great measure to come also. he could not then in any mood have exclaimed, as he did to a friend two or three years ago: 'shall we not have a pretty london if things go on in this way?' they were driving on the kensington side of hyde park. * 'how it strikes a contemporary'. the paternal duty, which, so much against his inclination, had established mr. browning in england, would in every case have lain very near to his conscience and to his heart; but it especially urged itself upon them through the absence of any injunction concerning it on his wife's part. no farewell words of hers had commended their child to his father's love and care; and though he may, for the moment, have imputed this fact to unconsciousness of her approaching death, his deeper insight soon construed the silence into an expression of trust, more binding upon him than the most earnest exacted promise could have been. the growing boy's education occupied a considerable part of his time and thoughts, for he had determined not to send him to school, but, as far as possible, himself prepare him for the university. he must also, in some degree, have supervised his recreations. he had therefore, for the present, little leisure for social distractions, and probably at first very little inclination for them. his plan of life and duty, and the sense of responsibility attendant on it, had been communicated to madame du quaire in a letter written also from st.-enogat. m. chauvin, st.-enogat pres dinard, ile et vilaine: aug. , ' . dear madame du quaire,--i got your note on sunday afternoon, but found myself unable to call on you as i had been intending to do. next morning i left for this place (near st.-malo, but i give what they say is the proper address). i want first to beg you to forgive my withholding so long your little oval mirror--it is safe in paris, and i am vexed at having stupidly forgotten to bring it when i tried to see you. i shall stay here till the autumn sets in, then return to paris for a few days--the first of which will be the best, if i can see you in the course of it--afterward, i settle in london. when i meant to pass the winter in paris, i hoped, the first thing almost, to be near you--it now seems to me, however, that the best course for the boy is to begin a good english education at once. i shall take quiet lodgings (somewhere near kensington gardens, i rather think) and get a tutor. i want, if i can (according to my present very imperfect knowledge) to get the poor little fellow fit for the university without passing thro' a public school. i, myself, could never have done much by either process, but he is made differently--imitates and emulates and all that. how i should be grateful if you would help me by any word that should occur to you! i may easily do wrong, begin ill, thro' too much anxiety--perhaps, however, all may be easier than seems to me just now. i shall have a great comfort in talking to you--this writing is stiff, ineffectual work. pen is very well, cheerful now,--has his little horse here. the place is singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's content. i wish you were here!--and if you knew exactly what such a wish means, you would need no assuring in addition that i am yours affectionately and gratefully ever robert browning. the person of whom he saw most was his sister-in-law, whom he visited, i believe, every evening. miss barrett had been a favourite sister of mrs. browning's, and this constituted a sufficient title to her husband's affection. but she was also a woman to be loved for her own sake. deeply religious and very charitable, she devoted herself to visiting the poor--a form of philanthropy which was then neither so widespread nor so fashionable as it has since become; and she founded, in , the first training school or refuge which had ever existed for destitute little girls. it need hardly be added that mr. and miss browning co-operated in the work. the little poem, 'the twins', republished in in 'men and women', was first printed (with mrs. browning's 'plea for the ragged schools of london') for the benefit of this refuge. it was in miss barrett's company that mr. browning used to attend the church of mr. thomas jones, to a volume of whose 'sermons and addresses' he wrote a short introduction in . on february , , he writes again to miss blagden. feb. , ' . '. . . while i write, my heart is sore for a great calamity just befallen poor rossetti, which i only heard of last night--his wife, who had been, as an invalid, in the habit of taking laudanum, swallowed an overdose--was found by the poor fellow on his return from the working-men's class in the evening, under the effects of it--help was called in, the stomach-pump used; but she died in the night, about a week ago. there has hardly been a day when i have not thought, "if i can, to-morrow, i will go and see him, and thank him for his book, and return his sister's poems." poor, dear fellow! . . . '. . . have i not written a long letter, for me who hate the sight of a pen now, and see a pile of unanswered things on the table before me? --on this very table. do you tell me in turn all about yourself. i shall be interested in the minutest thing you put down. what sort of weather is it? you cannot but be better at your new villa than in the large solitary one. there i am again, going up the winding way to it, and seeing the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees! once more, good-bye. . . .' the hatred of writing of which he here speaks refers probably to the class of letters which he had lately been called upon to answer, and which must have been painful in proportion to the kindness by which they were inspired. but it returned to him many years later, in simple weariness of the mental and mechanical act, and with such force that he would often answer an unimportant note in person, rather than make the seemingly much smaller exertion of doing so with his pen. it was the more remarkable that, with the rarest exceptions, he replied to every letter which came to him. the late summer of the former year had been entirely unrefreshing, in spite of his acknowledgment of the charms of st.-enogat. there was more distraction and more soothing in the stay at cambo and biarritz, which was chosen for the holiday of . years afterwards, when the thought of italy carried with it less longing and even more pain, mr. browning would speak of a visit to the pyrenees, if not a residence among them, as one of the restful possibilities of his later and freer life. he wrote to miss blagden: biarritz, maison gastonbide: sept. , ' . '. . . i stayed a month at green pleasant little cambo, and then came here from pure inability to go elsewhere--st.-jean de luz, on which i had reckoned, being still fuller of spaniards who profit by the new railway. this place is crammed with gay people of whom i see nothing but their outsides. the sea, sands, and view of the spanish coast and mountains, are superb and this house is on the town's outskirts. i stay till the end of the month, then go to paris, and then get my neck back into the old collar again. pen has managed to get more enjoyment out of his holiday than seemed at first likely--there was a nice french family at cambo with whom he fraternised, riding with the son and escorting the daughter in her walks. his red cheeks look as they should. for me, i have got on by having a great read at euripides--the one book i brought with me, besides attending to my own matters, my new poem that is about to be; and of which the whole is pretty well in my head,--the roman murder story you know. '. . . how i yearn, yearn for italy at the close of my life! . . .' the 'roman murder story' was, i need hardly say, to become 'the ring and the book'. it has often been told, though with curious confusion as regards the date, how mr. browning picked up the original parchment-bound record of the franceschini case, on a stall of the piazza san lorenzo. we read in the first section of his own work that he plunged instantly into the study of this record; that he had mastered it by the end of the day; and that he then stepped out on to the terrace of his house amid the sultry blackness and silent lightnings of the june night, as the adjacent church of san felice sent forth its chants, and voices buzzed in the street below,--and saw the tragedy as a living picture unfold itself before him. these were his last days at casa guidi. it was four years before he definitely began the work. the idea of converting the story into a poem cannot even have occurred to him for some little time, since he offered it for prose treatment to miss ogle, the author of 'a lost love'; and for poetic use, i am almost certain, to one of his leading contemporaries. it was this slow process of incubation which gave so much force and distinctness to his ultimate presentment of the characters; though it infused a large measure of personal imagination, and, as we shall see, of personal reminiscence, into their historical truth. before 'the ring and the book' was actually begun, 'dramatis personae' and 'in a balcony' were to be completed. their production had been delayed during mrs. browning's lifetime, and necessarily interrupted by her death; but we hear of the work as progressing steadily during this summer of . a painful subject of correspondence had been also for some time engaging mr. browning's thoughts and pen. a letter to miss blagden written january , ' , is so expressive of his continued attitude towards the questions involved that, in spite of its strong language, his family advise its publication. the name of the person referred to will alone be omitted. '. . . ever since i set foot in england i have been pestered with applications for leave to write the life of my wife--i have refused--and there an end. i have last week received two communications from friends, enclosing the letters of a certain . . . of . . ., asking them for details of life and letters, for a biography he is engaged in--adding, that he "has secured the correspondence with her old friend . . ." think of this beast working away at this, not deeming my feelings or those of her family worthy of notice--and meaning to print letters written years and years ago, on the most intimate and personal subjects to an "old friend"--which, at the poor . . . [friend's] death fell into the hands of a complete stranger, who, at once wanted to print them, but desisted through ba's earnest expostulation enforced by my own threat to take law proceedings--as fortunately letters are copyright. i find this woman died last year, and her son writes to me this morning that . . . got them from him as autographs merely--he will try and get them back. . . , evidently a blackguard, got my letter, which gave him his deserts, on saturday--no answer yet,--if none comes, i shall be forced to advertise in the 'times', and obtain an injunction. but what i suffer in feeling the hands of these blackguards (for i forgot to say another man has been making similar applications to friends) what i undergo with their paws in my very bowels, you can guess, and god knows! no friend, of course, would ever give up the letters--if anybody ever is forced to do that which _she_ would have writhed under--if it ever _were_ necessary, why, _i_ should be forced to do it, and, with any good to her memory and fame, my own pain in the attempt would be turned into joy--i should _do_ it at whatever cost: but it is not only unnecessary but absurdly useless--and, indeed, it shall not be done if i can stop the scamp's knavery along with his breath. 'i am going to reprint the greek christian poets and another essay--nothing that ought to be published shall be kept back,--and this she certainly intended to correct, augment, and re-produce--but _i_ open the doubled-up paper! warn anyone you may think needs the warning of the utter distress in which i should be placed were this scoundrel, or any other of the sort, to baffle me and bring out the letters--i can't prevent fools from uttering their folly upon her life, as they do on every other subject, but the law protects property,--as these letters are. only last week, or so, the bishop of exeter stopped the publication of an announced "life"--containing extracts from his correspondence--and so i shall do. . . .' mr. browning only resented the exactions of modern biography in the same degree as most other right-minded persons; but there was, to his thinking, something specially ungenerous in dragging to light any immature or unconsidered utterance which the writer's later judgment would have disclaimed. early work was always for him included in this category; and here it was possible to disagree with him; since the promise of genius has a legitimate interest from which no distance from its subsequent fulfilment can detract. but there could be no disagreement as to the rights and decencies involved in the present case; and, as we hear no more of the letters to mr. . . ., we may perhaps assume that their intending publisher was acting in ignorance, but did not wish to act in defiance, of mr. browning's feeling in the matter. in the course of this year, , mr. browning brought out, through chapman and hall, the still well-known and well-loved three-volume edition of his works, including 'sordello', but again excluding 'pauline'. a selection of his poems which appeared somewhat earlier, if we may judge by the preface, dated november , deserves mention as a tribute to friendship. the volume had been prepared by john forster and bryan waller procter (barry cornwall), 'two friends,' as the preface states, 'who from the first appearance of 'paracelsus' have regarded its writer as among the few great poets of the century.' mr. browning had long before signalized his feeling for barry cornwall by the dedication of 'colombe's birthday'. he discharged the present debt to mr. procter, if such there was, by the attentions which he rendered to his infirm old age. for many years he visited him every sunday, in spite of a deafness ultimately so complete that it was only possible to converse with him in writing. these visits were afterwards, at her urgent request, continued to mr. procter's widow. chapter - pornic--'james lee's wife'--meeting at mr. f. palgrave's--letters to miss blagden--his own estimate of his work--his father's illness and death; miss browning--le croisic--academic honours; letter to the master of balliol--death of miss barrett--audierne--uniform edition of his works--his rising fame--'dramatis personae'--'the ring and the book'; character of pompilia. the most constant contributions to mr. browning's history are supplied during the next eight or nine years by extracts from his letters to miss blagden. our next will be dated from ste.-marie, near pornic, where he and his family again spent their holiday in and . some idea of the life he led there is given at the close of a letter to frederic leighton, august , , in which he says: 'i live upon milk and fruit, bathe daily, do a good morning's work, read a little with pen and somewhat more by myself, go to bed early, and get up earlyish--rather liking it all.' this mention of a diet of milk and fruit recalls a favourite habit of mr. browning's: that of almost renouncing animal food whenever he went abroad. it was partly promoted by the inferior quality of foreign meat, and showed no sign of specially agreeing with him, at all events in his later years, when he habitually returned to england looking thinner and more haggard than before he left it. but the change was always congenial to his taste. a fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic pornic days comes to us through miss blagden, august : '. . . this is a wild little place in brittany, something like that village where we stayed last year. close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles. our house is the mayor's, large enough, clean and bare. if i could, i would stay just as i am for many a day. i feel out of the very earth sometimes as i sit here at the window; with the little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea. on a weekday there is nobody in the village, plenty of hay-stacks, cows and fowls; all our butter, eggs, milk, are produced in the farm-house. such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind! 'i wrote a poem yesterday of lines, and mean to keep writing whether i like it or not. . . .' that 'window' was the 'doorway' in 'james lee's wife'. the sea, the field, and the fig-tree were visible from it. a long interval in the correspondence, at all events so far as we are concerned, carries us to the december of , and then mr. browning wrote: '. . . on the other hand, i feel such comfort and delight in doing the best i can with my own object of life, poetry--which, i think, i never could have seen the good of before, that it shows me i have taken the root i _did_ take, _well_. i hope to do much more yet--and that the flower of it will be put into her hand somehow. i really have great opportunities and advantages--on the whole, almost unprecedented ones--i think, no other disturbances and cares than those i am most grateful for being allowed to have. . . .' one of our very few written reminiscences of mr. browning's social life refers to this year, , and to the evening, february , on which he signed his will in the presence of mr. francis palgrave and alfred tennyson. it is inscribed in the diary of mr. thomas richmond, then chaplain to st. george's hospital; and mr. reginald palgrave has kindly procured me a copy of it. a brilliant party had met at dinner at the house of mr. f. palgrave, york gate, regent's park; mr. richmond, having fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later. 'there were, in order,' he says, 'round the dinner-table (dinner being over), gifford palgrave, tennyson, dr. john ogle, sir francis h. doyle, frank palgrave, w. e. gladstone, browning, sir john simeon, monsignor patterson, woolner, and reginald palgrave.' mr. richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening. the names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be sooner or later numbered among the poet's friends, were indeed enough to stamp it as worthy of recollection. one or two characteristic utterances of mr. browning are, however, the only ones which it seems advisable to repeat here. the conversation having turned on the celebration of the shakespeare ter-centenary, he said: 'here we are called upon to acknowledge shakespeare, we who have him in our very bones and blood, our very selves. the very recognition of shakespeare's merits by the committee reminds me of nothing so apt as an illustration, as the decree of the directoire that men might acknowledge god.' among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys write english verses as well as latin and greek. 'woolner and sir francis doyle were for this; gladstone and browning against it.' work had now found its fitting place in the poet's life. it was no longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end. we hear something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of august ' , again from ste.-marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him which miss blagden had connected with his then growing fame. '. . . i suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years" comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say--but i hardly think it: for remember i was uninterruptedly (almost) in london from the time i published 'paracelsus' till i ended that string of plays with 'luria'--and i used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics &c. than i do now,--but what came of it? there were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed twenty-five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word; but at last a new set of men arrive who don't mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another--chapman says, "the new orders come from oxford and cambridge," and all my new cultivators are young men--more than that, i observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths "which they always meant to say" and never did. when there gets to be a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him, such notice as it is--but what poor work, even when doing its best! i mean poor in the failure to give a general notion of the whole works; not a particular one of such and such points therein. as i begun, so i shall end,--taking my own course, pleasing myself or aiming at doing so, and thereby, i hope, pleasing god. 'as i never did otherwise, i never had any fear as to what i did going ultimately to the bad,--hence in collected editions i always reprinted everything, smallest and greatest. do you ever see, by the way, the numbers of the selection which moxons publish? they are exclusively poems omitted in that other selection by forster; it seems little use sending them to you, but when they are completed, if they give me a few copies, you shall have one if you like. just before i left london, macmillan was anxious to print a third selection, for his golden treasury, which should of course be different from either--but _three_ seem too absurd. there--enough of me-- 'i certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before i die; for one reason, that i may help old pen the better; i was much struck by the kind ways, and interest shown in me by the oxford undergraduates,--those introduced to me by jowett.--i am sure they would be the more helpful to my son. so, good luck to my great venture, the murder-poem, which i do hope will strike you and all good lovers of mine. . . .' we cannot wonder at the touch of bitterness with which mr. browning dwells on the long neglect which he had sustained; but it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this high positive estimate of the value of his poetry with the relative depreciation of his own poetic genius which constantly marks his attitude towards that of his wife. the facts are, however, quite compatible. he regarded mrs. browning's genius as greater, because more spontaneous, than his own: owing less to life and its opportunities; but he judged his own work as the more important, because of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its production. he was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he underrated the creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature, while claiming primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he overrated the amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife. he failed to see that, given her intellectual endowments, and the lyric gift, the characteristics of her genius were due to circumstances as much as those of his own. actual life is not the only source of poetic inspiration, though it may perhaps be the best. mrs. browning as a poet became what she was, not in spite of her long seclusion, but by help of it. a touching paragraph, bearing upon this subject, is dated october ' . '. . . another thing. i have just been making a selection of ba's poems which is wanted--how i have done it, i can hardly say--it is one dear delight to know that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever--her books are more and more read--certainly, sold. a new edition of aurora leigh is completely exhausted within this year. . . .' of the thing next dearest to his memory, his florentine home, he had written in the january of this year: '. . . yes, florence will never be _my_ florence again. to build over or beside poggio seems barbarous and inexcusable. the fiesole side don't matter. are they going to pull the old walls down, or any part of them, i want to know? why can't they keep the old city as a nucleus and build round and round it, as many rings of houses as they please,--framing the picture as deeply as they please? is casa guidi to be turned into any public office? i should think that its natural destination. if i am at liberty to flee away one day, it will not be to florence, i dare say. as old philipson said to me once of jerusalem--"no, i don't want to go there,--i can see it in my head." . . . well, goodbye, dearest isa. i have been for a few minutes--nay, a good many,--so really with you in florence that it would be no wonder if you heard my steps up the lane to your house. . . .' part of a letter written in the september of ' from ste.-marie may be interesting as referring to the legend of pornic included in 'dramatis personae'. '. . . i suppose my "poem" which you say brings me and pornic together in your mind, is the one about the poor girl--if so, "fancy" (as i hear you say) they have pulled down the church since i arrived last month--there are only the shell-like, roofless walls left, for a few weeks more; it was very old--built on a natural base of rock--small enough, to be sure--so they build a smart new one behind it, and down goes this; just as if they could not have pitched down their brick and stucco farther away, and left the old place for the fishermen--so here--the church is even more picturesque--and certain old norman ornaments, capitals of pillars and the like, which we left erect in the doorway, are at this moment in a heap of rubbish by the road-side. the people here are good, stupid and dirty, without a touch of the sense of picturesqueness in their clodpolls. . . .' the little record continues through . feb. , ' . '. . . i go out a great deal; but have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with tennyson, who, with his wife and one son, is staying in town for a few weeks,--and she is just what she was and always will be--very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. i met him at a large party on saturday--also carlyle, whom i never met at a "drum" before. . . . pen is drawing our owl--a bird that is the light of our house, for his tameness and engaging ways. . . .' may , ' . '. . . my father has been unwell,--he is better and will go into the country the moment the east winds allow,--for in paris,--as here,--there is a razor wrapped up in the flannel of sunshine. i hope to hear presently from my sister, and will tell you if a letter comes: he is eighty-five, almost,--you see! otherwise his wonderful constitution would keep me from inordinate apprehension. his mind is absolutely as i always remember it,--and the other day when i wanted some information about a point of mediaeval history, he wrote a regular bookful of notes and extracts thereabout. . . .' june , ' . 'my dearest isa, i was telegraphed for to paris last week, and arrived time enough to pass twenty-four hours more with my father: he died on the th--quite exhausted by internal haemorrhage, which would have overcome a man of thirty. he retained all his faculties to the last--was utterly indifferent to death,--asking with surprise what it was we were affected about since he was perfectly happy?--and kept his own strange sweetness of soul to the end--nearly his last words to me, as i was fanning him, were "i am so afraid that i fatigue you, dear!" this, while his sufferings were great; for the strength of his constitution seemed impossible to be subdued. he wanted three weeks exactly to complete his eighty-fifth year. so passed away this good, unworldly, kind-hearted, religious man, whose powers natural and acquired would so easily have made him a notable man, had he known what vanity or ambition or the love of money or social influence meant. as it is, he was known by half-a-dozen friends. he was worthy of being ba's father--out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. she loved him,--and _he_ said, very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints. my sister will come and live with me henceforth. you see what she loses. all her life has been spent in caring for my mother, and seventeen years after that, my father. you may be sure she does not rave and rend hair like people who have plenty to atone for in the past; but she loses very much. i returned to london last night. . . .' during his hurried journey to paris, mr. browning was mentally blessing the emperor for having abolished the system of passports, and thus enabled him to reach his father's bedside in time. his early italian journeys had brought him some vexatious experience of the old order of things. once, at venice, he had been mistaken for a well-known liberal, dr. bowring, and found it almost impossible to get his passport 'vise'; and, on another occasion, it aroused suspicion by being 'too good'; though in what sense i do not quite remember. miss browning did come to live with her brother, and was thenceforward his inseparable companion. her presence with him must therefore be understood wherever i have had no special reason for mentioning it. they tried dinard for the remainder of the summer; but finding it unsuitable, proceeded by st.-malo to le croisic, the little sea-side town of south-eastern brittany which two of mr. browning's poems have since rendered famous. the following extract has no date. le croisic, loire inferieure. '. . . we all found dinard unsuitable, and after staying a few days at st. malo resolved to try this place, and well for us, since it serves our purpose capitally. . . . we are in the most delicious and peculiar old house i ever occupied, the oldest in the town--plenty of great rooms--nearly as much space as in villa alberti. the little town, and surrounding country are wild and primitive, even a trifle beyond pornic perhaps. close by is batz, a village where the men dress in white from head to foot, with baggy breeches, and great black flap hats;--opposite is guerande, the old capital of bretagne: you have read about it in balzac's 'beatrix',--and other interesting places are near. the sea is all round our peninsula, and on the whole i expect we shall like it very much. . . .' later. '. . . we enjoyed croisic increasingly to the last--spite of three weeks' vile weather, in striking contrast to the golden months at pornic last year. i often went to guerande--once sarianna and i walked from it in two hours and something under,--nine miles:--though from our house, straight over the sands and sea, it is not half the distance. . . .' in mr. browning received his first and greatest academic honours. the m.a. degree by diploma, of the university of oxford, was conferred on him in june;* and in the month of october he was made honorary fellow of balliol college. dr. jowett allows me to publish the, as he terms it, very characteristic letter in which he acknowledged the distinction. dr. scott, afterwards dean of rochester, was then master of balliol. * 'not a lower degree than that of d.c.l., but a much higher honour, hardly given since dr. johnson's time except to kings and royal personages. . . .' so the keeper of the archives wrote to mr. browning at the time. , warwick crescent: oct. , ' . dear dr. scott,--i am altogether unable to say how i feel as to the fact you communicate to me. i must know more intimately than you can how little worthy i am of such an honour,--you hardly can set the value of that honour, you who give, as i who take it. indeed, there _are_ both 'duties and emoluments' attached to this position,--duties of deep and lasting gratitude, and emoluments through which i shall be wealthy my life long. i have at least loved learning and the learned, and there needed no recognition of my love on their part to warrant my professing myself, as i do, dear dr. scott, yours ever most faithfully, robert browning. in the following year he received and declined the virtual offer of the lord rectorship of the university of st. andrews, rendered vacant by the death of mr. j. s. mill. he returned with his sister to le croisic for the summer of . in june , miss arabel barrett died, of a rheumatic affection of the heart. as did her sister seven years before, she passed away in mr. browning's arms. he wrote the event to miss blagden as soon as it occurred, describing also a curious circumstance attendant on it. th june, ' . '. . . you know i am not superstitious--here is a note i made in a book, tuesday, july , . "arabel told me yesterday that she had been much agitated by a dream which happened the night before, sunday, july . she saw her and asked 'when shall i be with you?' the reply was, 'dearest, in five years,' whereupon arabella woke. she knew in her dream that it was not to the living she spoke."--in five years, within a month of their completion--i had forgotten the date of the dream, and supposed it was only three years ago, and that two had still to run. only a coincidence, but noticeable. . . .' in august he writes again from audierne, finisterre (brittany). '. . . you never heard of this place, i daresay. after staying a few days at paris we started for rennes,--reached caen and halted a little--thence made for auray, where we made excursions to carnac, lokmariaker, and ste.-anne d'auray; all very interesting of their kind; then saw brest, morlaix, st.-pol de leon, and the sea-port roscoff,--our intended bathing place--it was full of folk, however, and otherwise impracticable, so we had nothing for it, but to "rebrousser chemin" and get to the south-west again. at quimper we heard (for a second time) that audierne would suit us exactly, and to it we came--happily, for "suit" it certainly does. look on the map for the most westerly point of bretagne--and of the mainland of europe--there is niched audierne, a delightful quite unspoiled little fishing-town, with the open ocean in front, and beautiful woods, hills and dales, meadows and lanes behind and around,--sprinkled here and there with villages each with its fine old church. sarianna and i have just returned from a four hours' walk in the course of which we visited a town, pont croix, with a beautiful cathedral-like building amid the cluster of clean bright breton houses,--and a little farther is another church, "notre dame de comfort", with only a hovel or two round it, worth the journey from england to see; we are therefore very well off--at an inn, i should say, with singularly good, kind, and liberal people, so have no cares for the moment. may you be doing as well! the weather has been most propitious, and to-day is perfect to a wish. we bathe, but somewhat ingloriously, in a smooth creek of mill-pond quietude, (there being no cabins on the bay itself,) unlike the great rushing waves of croisic--the water is much colder. . . .' the tribute contained in this letter to the merits of le pere batifoulier and his wife would not, i think, be endorsed by the few other english travellers who have stayed at their inn. the writer's own genial and kindly spirit no doubt partly elicited, and still more supplied, the qualities he saw in them. the six-volume, so long known as 'uniform' edition of mr. browning's works, was brought out in the autumn of this year by messrs. smith, elder & co.; practically mr. george murray smith, who was to be thenceforward his exclusive publisher and increasingly valued friend. in the winter months appeared the first two volumes (to be followed in the ensuing spring by the third and fourth) of 'the ring and the book'. with 'the ring and the book' mr. browning attained the full recognition of his genius. the 'athenaeum' spoke of it as the 'opus magnum' of the generation; not merely beyond all parallel the supremest poetic achievement of the time, but the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that england had produced since the days of shakespeare. his popularity was yet to come, so also the widespread reading of his hitherto neglected poems; but henceforth whatever he published was sure of ready acceptance, of just, if not always enthusiastic, appreciation. the ground had not been gained at a single leap. a passage in another letter to miss blagden shows that, when 'the ring and the book' appeared, a high place was already awaiting it outside those higher academic circles in which its author's position was secured. '. . . i want to get done with my poem. booksellers are making me pretty offers for it. one sent to propose, last week, to publish it at his risk, giving me _all_ the profits, and pay me the whole in advance--"for the incidental advantages of my name"--the r. b. who for six months once did not sell one copy of the poems! i ask pounds for the sheets to america, and shall get it. . . .' his presence in england had doubtless stimulated the public interest in his productions; and we may fairly credit 'dramatis personae' with having finally awakened his countrymen of all classes to the fact that a great creative power had arisen among them. 'the ring and the book' and 'dramatis personae' cannot indeed be dissociated in what was the culminating moment in the author's poetic life, even more than the zenith of his literary career. in their expression of all that constituted the wide range and the characteristic quality of his genius, they at once support and supplement each other. but a fact of more distinctive biographical interest connects itself exclusively with the later work. we cannot read the emotional passages of 'the ring and the book' without hearing in them a voice which is not mr. browning's own: an echo, not of his past, but from it. the remembrance of that past must have accompanied him through every stage of the great work. its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. it had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, through those of his keenest sorrow. it was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation. he knew the joy with which his wife would have witnessed the diligent performance of this his self-imposed task. the beautiful dedication contained in the first and last books was only a matter of course. but mrs. browning's spiritual presence on this occasion was more than a presiding memory of the heart. i am convinced that it entered largely into the conception of 'pompilia', and, so far as this depended on it, the character of the whole work. in the outward course of her history, mr. browning proceeded strictly on the ground of fact. his dramatic conscience would not have allowed it otherwise. he had read the record of the case, as he has been heard to say, fully eight times over before converting it into the substance of his poem; and the form in which he finally cast it, was that which recommended itself to him as true--which, within certain limits, _was_ true. the testimony of those who watched by pompilia's death-bed is almost conclusive as to the absence of any criminal motive to her flight, or criminal circumstance connected with it. its time proved itself to have been that of her impending, perhaps newly expected motherhood, and may have had some reference to this fact. but the real pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him. unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. if it appeared there at all, it was as a merely practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety. the sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and her culture; it was not suggested by the facts; and, what is more striking, it was not a natural development of mr. browning's imagination concerning them. the parental instinct was among the weakest in his nature--a fact which renders the more conspicuous his devotion to his own son; it finds little or no expression in his work. the apotheosis of motherhood which he puts forth through the aged priest in 'ivan ivanovitch' was due to the poetic necessity of lifting a ghastly human punishment into the sphere of divine retribution. even in the advancing years which soften the father into the grandfather, the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him. he would admire its flower-like beauty, but not linger over it. he had no special emotion for its helplessness. when he was attracted by a child it was through the evidence of something not only distinct from, but opposed to this. 'it is the soul' (i see) 'in that speck of a body,' he said, not many years ago, of a tiny boy--now too big for it to be desirable that i should mention his name, but whose mother, if she reads this, will know to whom i allude--who had delighted him by an act of intelligent grace which seemed beyond his years. the ingenuously unbounded maternal pride, the almost luscious maternal sentiment, of pompilia's dying moments can only associate themselves in our mind with mrs. browning's personal utterances, and some notable passages in 'casa guidi windows' and 'aurora leigh'. even the exalted fervour of the invocation to caponsacchi, its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion, has, i think, no parallel in her husband's work. 'pompilia' bears, still, unmistakably, the stamp of her author's genius. only he could have imagined her peculiar form of consciousness; her childlike, wondering, yet subtle, perception of the anomalies of life. he has raised the woman in her from the typical to the individual by this distinguishing touch of his supreme originality; and thus infused into her character a haunting pathos which renders it to many readers the most exquisite in the whole range of his creations. for others at the same time, it fails in the impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them. so much, however, is certain: mr. browning would never have accepted this 'murder story' as the subject of a poem, if he could not in some sense have made it poetical. it was only in an idealized pompilia that the material for such a process could be found. we owe it, therefore, to the one departure from his usual mode of dramatic conception, that the poet's masterpiece has been produced. i know no other instance of what can be even mistaken for reflected inspiration in the whole range of his work, the given passages in 'pauline' excepted. the postscript of a letter to frederic leighton written so far back as october , , is interesting in its connection with the preliminary stages of this great undertaking. 'a favour, if you have time for it. go into the church st. lorenzo in lucina in the corso--and look attentively at it--so as to describe it to me on your return. the general arrangement of the building, if with a nave--pillars or not--the number of altars, and any particularity there may be--over the high altar is a famous crucifixion by guido. it will be of great use to me. i don't care about the _outsid_.' chapter - lord dufferin; helen's tower--scotland; visit to lady ashburton--letters to miss blagden--st.-aubin; the franco-prussian war--'herve riel'--letter to mr. g. m. smith--'balaustion's adventure'; 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau'--'fifine at the fair'--mistaken theories of mr. browning's work--st.-aubin; 'red cotton nightcap country'. from to mr. browning published nothing; but in april he wrote the sonnet called 'helen's tower', a beautiful tribute to the memory of helen, mother of lord dufferin, suggested by the memorial tower which her son was erecting to her on his estate at clandeboye. the sonnet appeared in , in the 'pall mall gazette', and was reprinted in , in 'sonnets of the century', edited by mr. sharp; and again in the fifth part of the browning society's 'papers'; but it is still i think sufficiently little known to justify its reproduction. who hears of helen's tower may dream perchance how the greek beauty from the scaean gate gazed on old friends unanimous in hate, death-doom'd because of her fair countenance. hearts would leap otherwise at thy advance, lady, to whom this tower is consecrate! like hers, thy face once made all eyes elate, yet, unlike hers, was bless'd by every glance. the tower of hate is outworn, far and strange; a transitory shame of long ago; it dies into the sand from which it sprang; but thine, love's rock-built tower, shall fear no change. god's self laid stable earth's foundations so, when all the morning-stars together sang. april , . lord dufferin is a warm admirer of mr. browning's genius. he also held him in strong personal regard. in the summer of the poet, with his sister and son, changed the manner of his holiday, by joining mr. story and his family in a tour in scotland, and a visit to louisa, lady ashburton, at loch luichart lodge; but in the august of he was again in the primitive atmosphere of a french fishing village, though one which had little to recommend it but the society of a friend; it was m. milsand's st.-aubin. he had written, february , to miss blagden, under the one inspiration which naturally recurred in his correspondence with her. '. . . so you, too, think of naples for an eventual resting-place! yes, that is the proper basking-ground for "bright and aged snakes." florence would be irritating, and, on the whole, insufferable--yet i never hear of any one going thither but my heart is twitched. there is a good, charming, little singing german lady, miss regan, who told me the other day that she was just about revisiting her aunt, madame sabatier, whom you may know, or know of--and i felt as if i should immensely like to glide, for a long summer-day through the streets and between the old stone-walls,--unseen come and unheard go--perhaps by some miracle, i shall do so--and look up at villa brichieri as arnold's gypsy-scholar gave one wistful look at "the line of festal light in christ church hall," before he went to sleep in some forgotten grange. . . . i am so glad i can be comfortable in your comfort. i fancy exactly how you feel and see how you live: it _is_ the villa geddes of old days, i find. i well remember the fine view from the upper room--that looking down the steep hill, by the side of which runs the road you describe--that path was always my preferred walk, for its shortness (abruptness) and the fine old wall to your left (from the villa) which is overgrown with weeds and wild flowers--violets and ground-ivy, i remember. oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny sunday afternoon, with my face turned to florence--"ten minutes to the gate, ten minutes _home_!" i think i should fairly end it all on the spot. . . .' he writes again from st.-aubin, august , : 'dearest isa,--your letter came prosperously to this little wild place, where we have been, sarianna and myself, just a week. milsand lives in a cottage with a nice bit of garden, two steps off, and we occupy another of the most primitive kind on the sea-shore--which shore is a good sandy stretch for miles and miles on either side. i don't think we were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as here--the weather is fine, and we do well enough. the sadness of the war and its consequences go far to paralyse all our pleasure, however. . . . 'well, you are at siena--one of the places i love best to remember. you are returned--or i would ask you to tell me how the villa alberti wears, and if the fig-tree behind the house is green and strong yet. i have a pen-and-ink drawing of it, dated and signed the last day ba was ever there--"my fig tree--" she used to sit under it, reading and writing. nine years, or ten rather, since then! poor old landor's oak, too, and his cottage, ought not to be forgotten. exactly opposite this house,--just over the way of the water,--shines every night the light-house of havre--a place i know well, and love very moderately: but it always gives me a thrill as i see afar, _exactly_ a particular spot which i was at along with her. at this moment, i see the white streak of the phare in the sun, from the window where i write and i _think_. . . . milsand went to paris last week, just before we arrived, to transport his valuables to a safer place than his house, which is near the fortifications. he is filled with as much despondency as can be--while the old dear and perfect kindness remains. i never knew or shall know his like among men. . . .' the war did more than sadden mr. and miss browning's visit to st.-aubin; it opposed unlooked-for difficulties to their return home. they had remained, unconscious of the impending danger, till sedan had been taken, the emperor's downfall proclaimed, and the country suddenly placed in a state of siege. one morning m. milsand came to them in anxious haste, and insisted on their starting that very day. an order, he said, had been issued that no native should leave the country, and it only needed some unusually thick-headed maire for mr. browning to be arrested as a runaway frenchman or a prussian spy. the usual passenger boats from calais and boulogne no longer ran; but there was, he believed, a chance of their finding one at havre. they acted on this warning, and discovered its wisdom in the various hindrances which they found on their way. everywhere the horses had been requisitioned for the war. the boat on which they had relied to take them down the river to caen had been stopped that very morning; and when they reached the railroad they were told that the prussians would be at the other end before night. at last they arrived at honfleur, where they found an english vessel which was about to convey cattle to southampton; and in this, setting out at midnight, they made their passage to england. some words addressed to miss blagden, written i believe in , once more strike a touching familiar note. '. . . but _no_, dearest isa. the simple truth is that _she_ was the poet, and i the clever person by comparison--remember her limited experience of all kinds, and what she made of it. remember on the other hand, how my uninterrupted health and strength and practice with the world have helped me. . . .' 'balaustion's adventure' and 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau' were published, respectively, in august and december . they had been preceded in the march of the same year by a ballad, 'herve riel', afterwards reprinted in the 'pacchiarotto' volume, and which mr. browning now sold to the 'cornhill magazine' for the benefit of the french sufferers by the war. the circumstances of this little transaction, unique in mr. browning's experience, are set forth in the following letter: feb. , ' . 'my dear smith,--i want to give something to the people in paris, and can afford so very little just now, that i am forced upon an expedient. will you buy of me that poem which poor simeon praised in a letter you saw, and which i like better than most things i have done of late?--buy,--i mean,--the right of printing it in the pall mall and, if you please, the cornhill also,--the copyright remaining with me. you remember you wanted to print it in the cornhill, and i was obstinate: there is hardly any occasion on which i should be otherwise, if the printing any poem of mine in a magazine were purely for my own sake: so, any liberality you exercise will not be drawn into a precedent against you. i fancy this is a case in which one may handsomely puff one's own ware, and i venture to call my verses good for once. i send them to you directly, because expedition will render whatever i contribute more valuable: for when you make up your mind as to how liberally i shall be enabled to give, you must send me a cheque and i will send the same as the "product of a poem"--so that your light will shine deservedly. now, begin proceedings by reading the poem to mrs. smith,--by whose judgment i will cheerfully be bound; and, with her approval, second my endeavour as best you can. would,--for the love of france,--that this were a "song of a wren"--then should the guineas equal the lines; as it is, do what you safely may for the song of a robin--browning--who is yours very truly, into the bargain. 'p.s. the copy is so clear and careful that you might, with a good reader, print it on monday, nor need my help for corrections: i shall however be always at home, and ready at a moment's notice: return the copy, if you please, as i promised it to my son long ago.' mr. smith gave him guineas as the price of the poem. he wrote concerning the two longer poems, first probably at the close of this year, and again in january , to miss blagden. '. . . by this time you have got my little book ('hohenstiel') and seen for yourself whether i make the best or worst of the case. i think, in the main, he meant to do what i say, and, but for weakness,--grown more apparent in his last years than formerly,--would have done what i say he did not.* i thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_: better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. i think him very weak in the last miserable year. at his worst i prefer him to thiers' best. i am told my little thing is succeeding--sold , in the first five days, and before any notice appeared. i remember that the year i made the little rough sketch in rome, ' , my account for the last six months with chapman was--_nil_, not one copy disposed of! . . . * this phrase is a little misleading. '. . . i am glad you like what the editor of the edinburgh calls my eulogium on the second empire,--which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be "a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of england"--it is just what i imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself.' mr. browning continues: 'spite of my ailments and bewailments i have just all but finished another poem of quite another kind, which shall amuse you in the spring, i hope! i don't go sound asleep at all events. 'balaustion'--the second edition is in the press i think i told you. , in five months, is a good sale for the likes of me. but i met henry taylor (of artevelde) two days ago at dinner, and he said he had never gained anything by his books, which surely is a shame--i mean, if no buyers mean no readers. . . .' 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau' was written in scotland, where mr. browning was the guest of mr. ernest benzon: having left his sister to the care of m. and madame milsand at st.-aubin. the ailment he speaks of consisted, i believe, of a severe cold. another of the occurrences of was mr. browning's election as life governor of the london university. a passage from a letter dated march , ' , bears striking testimony to the constant warmth of his affections. '. . . the misfortune, which i did not guess when i accepted the invitation, is that i shall lose some of the last days of milsand, who has been here for the last month: no words can express the love i have for him, you know. he is increasingly precious to me. . . . waring came back the other day, after thirty years' absence, the same as ever,--nearly. he has been prime minister at new zealand for a year and a half, but gets tired, and returns home with a poem.'* * 'ranolf and amohia'. this is my last extract from the correspondence with miss blagden. her death closed it altogether within the year. it is difficult to infer from letters, however intimate, the dominant state of the writer's mind: most of all to do so in mr. browning's case, from such passages of his correspondence as circumstances allow me to quote. letters written in intimacy, and to the same friend, often express a recurrent mood, a revived set of associations, which for the moment destroys the habitual balance of feeling. the same effect is sometimes produced in personal intercourse; and the more varied the life, the more versatile the nature, the more readily in either case will a lately unused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch. we may even fancy we read into the letters of that eerie, haunting sadness of a cherished memory from which, in spite of ourselves, life is bearing us away. we may also err in so doing. but literary creation, patiently carried on through a given period, is usually a fair reflection of the general moral and mental conditions under which it has taken place; and it would be hard to imagine from mr. browning's work during these last ten years that any but gracious influences had been operating upon his genius, any more disturbing element than the sense of privation and loss had entered into his inner life. some leaven of bitterness must, nevertheless, have been working within him, or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism, 'fifine at the fair'--the poem referred to as in progress in a letter to miss blagden, and which appeared in the spring of . the disturbing cause had been also of long standing; for the deeper reactive processes of mr. browning's nature were as slow as its more superficial response was swift; and while 'dramatis personae', 'the ring and the book', and even 'balaustion's adventure', represented the gradually perfected substance of his poetic imagination, 'fifine at the fair' was as the froth thrown up by it during the prolonged simmering which was to leave it clear. the work displays the iridescent brightness as well as the occasional impurity of this froth-like character. beauty and ugliness are, indeed, almost inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves upon us. the author has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a much slighter attempt at dramatic disguise than his special pleadings generally assume; and while allowing circumstances to expose the sophistry of the position, and punish its attendant act, he does not sufficiently condemn it. but, in identifying himself for the moment with the conception of a don juan, he has infused into it a tenderness and a poetry with which the true type had very little in common, and which retard its dramatic development. those who knew mr. browning, or who thoroughly know his work, may censure, regret, fail to understand 'fifine at the fair'; they will never in any important sense misconstrue it. but it has been so misconstrued by an intelligent and not unsympathetic critic; and his construction may be endorsed by other persons in the present, and still more in the future, in whom the elements of a truer judgment are wanting. it seems, therefore, best to protest at once against the misjudgment, though in so doing i am claiming for it an attention which it may not seem to deserve. i allude to mr. mortimer's 'note on browning' in the 'scottish art review' for december . this note contains a summary of mr. browning's teaching, which it resolves into the moral equivalent of the doctrine of the conservation of force. mr. mortimer assumes for the purpose of his comparison that the exercise of force means necessarily moving on; and according to him mr. browning prescribes action at any price, even that of defying the restrictions of moral law. he thus, we are told, blames the lovers in 'the statue and the bust' for their failure to carry out what was an immoral intention; and, in the person of his 'don juan', defends a husband's claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves: the result being 'the negation of that convention under which we habitually view life, but which for some reason or other breaks down when we have to face the problems of a goethe, a shelley, a byron, or a browning.' mr. mortimer's generalization does not apply to 'the statue and the bust', since mr. browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this case, the intended act is postponed without reference to its morality, and simply in consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been as paralyzing to a good purpose as it was to the bad one; but it is not without superficial sanction in 'fifine at the fair'; and the part which the author allowed himself to play in it did him an injustice only to be measured by the inference which it has been made to support. there could be no mistake more ludicrous, were it less regrettable, than that of classing mr. browning, on moral grounds, with byron or shelley; even in the case of goethe the analogy breaks down. the evidence of the foregoing pages has rendered all protest superfluous. but the suggested moral resemblance to the two english poets receives a striking comment in a fact of mr. browning's life which falls practically into the present period of our history: his withdrawal from shelley of the devotion of more than forty years on account of an act of heartlessness towards his first wife which he held to have been proved against him. the sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very close to each other at the sources of mr. browning's inspiration. both proceeded, in great measure, from his spiritual allegiance to the past--that past by which it was impossible that he should linger, but which he could not yet leave behind. the present came to him with friendly greeting. he was unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. the injustice reacted upon himself, and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy which became manifest in 'fifine at the fair'. it is true that, in the light of this explanation, we see an effect very unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion is like that of natural life. it will often form a compound in which neither of its constituents can be recognized. this perverse poem was the last as well as the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of mr. browning's mind. a slight exception may be made for some passages in 'red cotton nightcap country', and for one of the poems of the 'pacchiarotto' volume; but otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his subsequent work. the past and the present gradually assumed for him a more just relation to each other. he learned to meet life as it offered itself to him with a more frank recognition of its good gifts, a more grateful response to them. he grew happier, hence more genial, as the years advanced. it was not without misgiving that mr. browning published 'fifine at the fair'; but many years were to pass before he realized the kind of criticism to which it had exposed him. the belief conveyed in the letter to miss blagden that what proceeds from a genuine inspiration is justified by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion which had been engendered in him by its long neglect, made him slow to anticipate the results of external judgment, even where he was in some degree prepared to endorse them. for his value as a poet, it was best so. the august of and of again found him with his sister at st.-aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one: since it supplied him with the materials of his next work, of which miss annie thackeray, there also for a few days, suggested the title. the tragic drama which forms the subject of mr. browning's poem had been in great part enacted in the vicinity of st.-aubin; and the case of disputed inheritance to which it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals of caen. the prevailing impression left on miss thackeray's mind by this primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps (the habitual headgear of the normandy peasants). she engaged to write a story called 'white cotton nightcap country'; and mr. browning's quick sense of both contrast and analogy inspired the introduction of this emblem of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic existence, and of the ghastly spiritual conflict to which it had served as background. he employed a good deal of perhaps strained ingenuity in the opening pages of the work, in making the white cap foreshadow the red, itself the symbol of liberty, and only indirectly connected with tragic events; and he would, i think, have emphasized the irony of circumstance in a manner more characteristic of himself, if he had laid his stress on the remoteness from 'the madding crowd', and repeated miss thackeray's title. there can, however, be no doubt that his poetic imagination, no less than his human insight, was amply vindicated by his treatment of the story. on leaving st.-aubin he spent a month at fontainebleau, in a house situated on the outskirts of the forest; and here his principal indoor occupation was reading the greek dramatists, especially aeschylus, to whom he had returned with revived interest and curiosity. 'red cotton nightcap country' was not begun till his return to london in the later autumn. it was published in the early summer of . chapter - london life--love of music--miss egerton-smith--periodical nervous exhaustion--mers; 'aristophanes' apology'--'agamemnon'--'the inn album'--'pacchiarotto and other poems'--visits to oxford and cambridge--letters to mrs. fitz-gerald--st. andrews; letter from professor knight--in the savoyard mountains--death of miss egerton-smith--'la saisiaz'; 'the two poets of croisic'--selections from his works. the period on which we have now entered, covering roughly the ten or twelve years which followed the publication of 'the ring and the book', was the fullest in mr. browning's life; it was that in which the varied claims made by it on his moral, and above all his physical energies, found in him the fullest power of response. he could rise early and go to bed late--this, however, never from choice; and occupy every hour of the day with work or pleasure, in a manner which his friends recalled regretfully in later years, when of two or three engagements which ought to have divided his afternoon, a single one--perhaps only the most formally pressing--could be fulfilled. soon after his final return to england, while he still lived in comparative seclusion, certain habits of friendly intercourse, often superficial, but always binding, had rooted themselves in his life. london society, as i have also implied, opened itself to him in ever-widening circles, or, as it would be truer to say, drew him more and more deeply into its whirl; and even before the mellowing kindness of his nature had infused warmth into the least substantial of his social relations, the imaginative curiosity of the poet--for a while the natural ambition of the man--found satisfaction in it. for a short time, indeed, he entered into the fashionable routine of country-house visiting. besides the instances i have already given, and many others which i may have forgotten, he was heard of, during the earlier part of this decade, as the guest of lord carnarvon at highclere castle, of lord shrewsbury at alton towers, of lord brownlow and his mother, lady marian alford, at belton and ashridge. somewhat later, he stayed with mr. and lady alice gaisford at a house they temporarily occupied on the sussex downs; with mr. cholmondeley at condover, and, much more recently, at aynhoe park with mr. and mrs. cartwright. kind and pressing, and in themselves very tempting invitations of this nature came to him until the end of his life; but he very soon made a practice of declining them, because their acceptance could only renew for him the fatigues of the london season, while the tantalizing beauty and repose of the country lay before his eyes; but such visits, while they continued, were one of the necessary social experiences which brought their grist to his mill. and now, in addition to the large social tribute which he received, and had to pay, he was drinking in all the enjoyment, and incurring all the fatigue which the london musical world could create for him. in italy he had found the natural home of the other arts. the one poem, 'old pictures in florence', is sufficiently eloquent of long communion with the old masters and their works; and if his history in florence and rome had been written in his own letters instead of those of his wife, they must have held many reminiscences of galleries and studios, and of the places in which pictures are bought and sold. but his love for music was as certainly starved as the delight in painting and sculpture was nourished; and it had now grown into a passion, from the indulgence of which he derived, as he always declared, some of the most beneficent influences of his life. it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that he attended every important concert of the season, whether isolated or given in a course. there was no engagement possible or actual, which did not yield to the discovery of its clashing with the day and hour fixed for one of these. his frequent companion on such occasions was miss egerton-smith. miss smith became only known to mr. browning's general acquaintance through the dedicatory 'a. e. s.' of 'la saisiaz'; but she was, at the time of her death, one of his oldest women friends. he first met her as a young woman in florence when she was visiting there; and the love for and proficiency in music soon asserted itself as a bond of sympathy between them. they did not, however, see much of each other till he had finally left italy, and she also had made her home in london. she there led a secluded life, although free from family ties, and enjoying a large income derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper. mr. browning was one of the very few persons whose society she cared to cultivate; and for many years the common musical interest took the practical, and for both of them convenient form, of their going to concerts together. after her death, in the autumn of , he almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him. the special motive and special facility were gone--she had been wont to call for him in her carriage; the habit was broken; there would have been first pain, and afterwards an unwelcome exertion in renewing it. time was also beginning to sap his strength, while society, and perhaps friendship, were making increasing claims upon it. it may have been for this same reason that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether. yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one who not only had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional influences, so conversant with its scientific construction and its multitudinous forms, but who was acknowledged as 'musical' by those who best knew the subtle and complex meaning of that often misused term. mr. browning could do all that i have said during the period through which we are now following him; but he could not quite do it with impunity. each winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough; each summer reduced him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy of which i have already spoken, and which at once rendered change imperative, and the exertion of seeking it almost intolerable. his health and spirits rebounded at the first draught of foreign air; the first breath from an english cliff or moor might have had the same result. but the remembrance of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort. the conviction renewed itself with the close of every season, that the best thing which could happen to him would be to be left quiet at home; and his disinclination to face even the idea of moving equally hampered his sister in her endeavour to make timely arrangements for their change of abode. this special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which their summer resort could be chosen. it precluded all idea of 'pension'-life, hence of any much-frequented spot in switzerland or germany. it was tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed in england. italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities of a moderately short absence; the resources of the northern french coast were becoming exhausted; and as the august of approached, the question of how and where this and the following months were to be spent was, perhaps, more than ever a perplexing one. it was now miss smith who became the means of its solution. she had more than once joined mr. and miss browning at the seaside. she was anxious this year to do so again, and she suggested for their meeting a quiet spot called mers, almost adjoining the fashionable treport, but distinct from it. it was agreed that they should try it; and the experiment, which they had no reason to regret, opened also in some degree a way out of future difficulties. mers was young, and had the defect of its quality. only one desirable house was to be found there; and the plan of joint residence became converted into one of joint housekeeping, in which mr. and miss browning at first refused to concur, but which worked so well that it was renewed in the three ensuing summers: miss smith retaining the initiative in the choice of place, her friends the right of veto upon it. they stayed again together in at villers, on the coast of normandy; in at the isle of arran; in at a house called la saisiaz--savoyard for the sun--in the saleve district near geneva. the autumn months of were marked for mr. browning by an important piece of work: the production of 'aristophanes' apology'. it was far advanced when he returned to london in november, after a visit to antwerp, where his son was studying art under m. heyermans; and its much later appearance must have been intended to give breathing time to the readers of 'red cotton nightcap country'. mr. browning subsequently admitted that he sometimes, during these years, allowed active literary occupation to interfere too much with the good which his holiday might have done him; but the temptations to literary activity were this time too great to be withstood. the house occupied by him at mers (maison robert) was the last of the straggling village, and stood on a rising cliff. in front was the open sea; beyond it a long stretch of down; everywhere comparative solitude. here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, mr. browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall. and during this time he was living, not only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it. the image of aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence, the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the reader's mind, was present to him from the first moment in which the defence was conceived. what was still more interesting, he could see him, hear him, think with him, speak for him, and still inevitably condemn him. no such instance of always ingenious, and sometimes earnest pleading foredoomed to complete discomfiture, occurs in mr. browning's works. to aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life can extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms. to euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth, to his work the tribute of the more pathetic human emotion. even these for a moment ministered to the greatness of aristophanes, in the tear shed by him to the memory of his rival, in the hour of his own triumph; and we may be quite sure that when mr. browning depicted that scene, and again when he translated the great tragedian's words, his own eyes were dimmed. large tears fell from them, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read aloud the transcript of the 'herakles' to a friend, who was often privileged to hear him. mr. browning's deep feeling for the humanities of greek literature, and his almost passionate love for the language, contrasted strongly with his refusal to regard even the first of greek writers as models of literary style. the pretensions raised for them on this ground were inconceivable to him; and his translation of the 'agamemnon', published , was partly made, i am convinced, for the pleasure of exposing these claims, and of rebuking them. his preface to the transcript gives evidence of this. the glee with which he pointed to it when it first appeared was no less significant. at villers, in , he only corrected the proofs of 'the inn album' for publication in november. when the party started for the isle of arran, in the autumn of , the 'pacchiarotto' volume had already appeared. when mr. browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting away from home, he made an exception in favour of the universities. his occasional visits to oxford and cambridge were maintained till the very end of his life, with increasing frequency in the former case; and the days spent at balliol and trinity afforded him as unmixed a pleasure as was compatible with the interruption of his daily habits, and with a system of hospitality which would detain him for many hours at table. a vivid picture of them is given in two letters, dated january and march , , and addressed to one of his constant correspondents, mrs. fitz-gerald, of shalstone manor, buckingham. dear friend, i have your letter of yesterday, and thank you all i can for its goodness and graciousness to me unworthy . . . i returned on thursday--the hospitality of our master being not easy to set aside. but to begin with the beginning: the passage from london to oxford was exceptionally prosperous--the train was full of men my friends. i was welcomed on arriving by a fellow who installed me in my rooms,--then came the pleasant meeting with jowett who at once took me to tea with his other guests, the archbishop of canterbury, bishop of london, dean of westminster, the airlies, cardwells, male and female. then came the banquet--(i enclose you the plan having no doubt that you will recognise the name of many an acquaintance: please return it)--and, the dinner done, speechifying set in vigorously. the archbishop proposed the standing 'floreat domus de balliolo'--to which the master made due and amusing answer, himself giving the health of the primate. lord coleridge, in a silvery speech, drank to the university, responded to by the vice-chancellor. i forget who proposed the visitors--the bishop of london, perhaps lord cardwell. professor smith gave the two houses of parliament,--jowett, the clergy, coupling with it the name of your friend mr. rogers--on whom he showered every kind of praise, and mr. rogers returned thanks very characteristically and pleasantly. lord lansdowne drank to the bar (mr. bowen), lord camperdown to--i really forget what: mr. green to literature and science delivering a most undeserved eulogium on myself, with a more rightly directed one on arnold, swinburne, and the old pride of balliol, clough: this was cleverly and almost touchingly answered by dear mat arnold. then the dean of westminster gave the fellows and scholars--and then--twelve o'clock struck. we were, counting from the time of preliminary assemblage, six hours and a half engaged: _fully_ five and a half nailed to our chairs at the table: but the whole thing was brilliant, genial, and suggestive of many and various thoughts to me--and there was a warmth, earnestness, and yet refinement about it which i never experienced in any previous public dinner. next morning i breakfasted with jowett and his guests, found that return would be difficult: while as the young men were to return on friday there would be no opposition to my departure on thursday. the morning was dismal with rain, but after luncheon there was a chance of getting a little air, and i walked for more than two hours, then heard service in new coll.--then dinner again: my room had been prepared in the master's house. so, on thursday, after yet another breakfast, i left by the noon-day train, after all sorts of kindly offices from the master. . . . no reporters were suffered to be present--the account in yesterday's times was furnished by one or more of the guests; it is quite correct as far as it goes. there were, i find, certain little paragraphs which must have been furnished by 'guessers': swinburne, set down as present--was absent through his father's illness: the cardinal also excused himself as did the bishop of salisbury and others. . . . ever yours r. browning. the second letter, from cambridge, was short and written in haste, at the moment of mr. browning's departure; but it tells the same tale of general kindness and attention. engagements for no less than six meals had absorbed the first day of the visit. the occasion was that of professor joachim's investiture with his doctor's degree; and mr. browning declares that this ceremony, the concert given by the great violinist, and his society, were 'each and all' worth the trouble of the journey. he himself was to receive the cambridge degree of ll.d. in , the oxford d.c.l. in . a passage in another letter addressed to the same friend, refers probably to a practical reminiscence of 'red cotton nightcap country', which enlivened the latter experience, and which mrs. fitz-gerald had witnessed with disapprobation.* * an actual red cotton nightcap had been made to flutter down on to the poet's head. . . . you are far too hard on the very harmless drolleries of the young men, licensed as they are moreover by immemorial usage. indeed there used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'filius terrae' he was called, whose business it was to jibe and jeer at the honoured ones, by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded bubbles and must not be fancied metal. you saw that the reverend dons escaped no more than the poor poet--or rather i should say than myself the poor poet--for i was pleased to observe with what attention they listened to the newdigate. . . . ever affectionately yours, r. browning. in he was unanimously nominated by its independent club, to the office of lord rector of the university of glasgow; and in he again received the offer of the rectorship of st. andrews, couched in very urgent and flattering terms. a letter addressed to him from this university by dr. william knight, professor of moral philosophy there, which i have his permission to publish, bears witness to what had long been and was always to remain a prominent fact of mr. browning's literary career: his great influence on the minds of the rising generation of his countrymen. the university, st. andrews n.b.: nov. , . my dear sir,--. . . the students of this university, in which i have the honour to hold office, have nominated you as their lord rector; and intend unanimously, i am told, to elect you to that office on thursday. i believe that hitherto no rector has been chosen by the undivided suffrage of any scottish university. they have heard however that you are unable to accept the office: and your committee, who were deeply disappointed to learn this afternoon of the way in which you have been informed of their intentions, are, i believe, writing to you on the subject. so keen is their regret that they intend respectfully to wait upon you on tuesday morning by deputation, and ask if you cannot waive your difficulties in deference to their enthusiasm, and allow them to proceed with your election. their suffrage may, i think, be regarded as one sign of how the thoughtful youth of scotland estimate the work you have done in the world of letters. and permit me to say that while these rectorial elections in the other universities have frequently turned on local questions, or been inspired by political partisanship, st. andrews has honourably sought to choose men distinguished for literary eminence, and to make the rectorship a tribute at once of intellectual and moral esteem. may i add that when the 'perfervidum ingenium' of our northern race takes the form not of youthful hero-worship, but of loyal admiration and respectful homage, it is a very genuine affair. in the present instance i may say it is no mere outburst of young undisciplined enthusiasm, but an honest expression of intellectual and moral indebtedness, the genuine and distinct tribute of many minds that have been touched to some higher issues by what you have taught them. they do not presume to speak of your place in english literature. they merely tell you by this proffered honour (the highest in their power to bestow), how they have felt your influence over them. my own obligations to you, and to the author of aurora leigh, are such, that of them 'silence is golden'. yours ever gratefully. william knight. mr. browning was deeply touched and gratified by these professions of esteem. he persisted nevertheless in his refusal. the glasgow nomination had also been declined by him. on august , , he wrote to mrs. fitz-gerald from la saisiaz: 'how lovely is this place in its solitude and seclusion, with its trees and shrubs and flowers, and above all its live mountain stream which supplies three fountains, and two delightful baths, a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees--i bathe there twice a day--and then what wonderful views from the chalet on every side! geneva lying under us, with the lake and the whole plain bounded by the jura and our own saleve, which latter seems rather close behind our house, and yet takes a hard hour and a half to ascend--all this you can imagine since you know the environs of the town; the peace and quiet move me the most--and i fancy i shall drowse out the two months or more, doing no more of serious work than reading--and that is virtuous renunciation of the glorious view to my right here--as i sit aerially like euripides, and see the clouds come and go and the view change in correspondence with them. it will help me to get rid of the pain which attaches itself to the recollections of lucerne and berne "in the old days when the greeks suffered so much," as homer says. but a very real and sharp pain touched me here when i heard of the death of poor virginia march whom i knew particularly, and parted with hardly a fortnight ago, leaving her affectionate and happy as ever. the tones of her voice as on one memorable occasion she ejaculated repeatedly 'good friend!' are fresh still. poor virginia! . . .' mr. browning was more than quiescent during this stay in the savoyard mountains. he was unusually depressed, and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment; and he tried subsequently to account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes casts before it. it was more probably due to the want of the sea air which he had enjoyed for so many years, and to that special oppressive heat of the swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their highest level. when he said that the saleve seemed close behind the house, he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from, and the air was intercepted by it. we see, nevertheless, in his description of the surrounding scenery, a promise of the contemplative delight in natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience, and which seemed a new feature in it. he had hitherto approached every living thing with curious and sympathetic observation--this hardly requires saying of one who had animals for his first and always familiar friends. flowers also attracted him by their perfume. but what he loved in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence, or its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his works or his conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms--by even those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter dwells. such beauty as most appealed to him he had left behind with the joys and sorrows of his italian life, and it had almost inevitably passed out of his consideration. during years of his residence in london he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions, other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to which he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for lack of food. but when a friend once said to him: 'you have not a great love for nature, have you?' he had replied: 'yes, i have, but i love men and women better;' and the admission, which conveyed more than it literally expressed, would have been true i believe at any, up to the present, period of his history. even now he did not cease to love men and women best; but he found increasing enjoyment in the beauties of nature, above all as they opened upon him on the southern slopes of the alps; and the delight of the aesthetic sense merged gradually in the satisfied craving for pure air and brilliant sunshine which marked his final struggle for physical life. a ring of enthusiasm comes into his letters from the mountains, and deepens as the years advance; doubtless enhanced by the great--perhaps too great--exhilaration which the alpine atmosphere produced, but also in large measure independent of it. each new place into which the summer carries him he declares more beautiful than the last. it possibly was so. a touch of autumnal freshness had barely crept into the atmosphere of the saleve, when a moral thunderbolt fell on the little group of persons domiciled at its base: miss egerton-smith died, in what had seemed for her unusually good health, in the act of preparing for a mountain excursion with her friends--the words still almost on her lips in which she had given some directions for their comfort. mr. browning's impressionable nervous system was for a moment paralyzed by the shock. it revived in all the emotional and intellectual impulses which gave birth to 'la saisiaz'. this poem contains, besides its personal reference and association, elements of distinctive biographical interest. it is the author's first--as also last--attempt to reconstruct his hope of immortality by a rational process based entirely on the fundamental facts of his own knowledge and consciousness--god and the human soul; and while the very assumption of these facts, as basis for reasoning, places him at issue with scientific thought, there is in his way of handling them a tribute to the scientific spirit, perhaps foreshadowed in the beautiful epilogue to 'dramatis personae', but of which there is no trace in his earlier religious works. it is conclusive both in form and matter as to his heterodox attitude towards christianity. he was no less, in his way, a christian when he wrote 'la saisiaz' than when he published 'a death in the desert' and 'christmas eve and easter day'; or at any period subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had learned at his mother's knee. he has repeatedly written or declared in the words of charles lamb:* 'if christ entered the room i should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of napoleon: 'i am an understander of men, and _he_ was no man.' he has even added: 'if he had been, he would have been an impostor.' but the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in 'la saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a christian revelation on the subject. christ remained for mr. browning a mystery and a message of divine love, but no messenger of divine intention towards mankind. * these words have more significance when taken with their context. 'if shakespeare was to come into the room, we should all rise up to meet him; but if that person [meaning christ] was to come into the room, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of his garment.' the dialogue between fancy and reason is not only an admission of uncertainty as to the future of the soul: it is a plea for it; and as such it gathers up into its few words of direct statement, threads of reasoning which have been traceable throughout mr. browning's work. in this plea for uncertainty lies also a full and frank acknowledgment of the value of the earthly life; and as interpreted by his general views, that value asserts itself, not only in the means of probation which life affords, but in its existing conditions of happiness. no one, he declares, possessing the certainty of a future state would patiently and fully live out the present; and since the future can be only the ripened fruit of the present, its promise would be neutralized, as well as actual experience dwarfed, by a definite revelation. nor, conversely, need the want of a certified future depress the present spiritual and moral life. it is in the nature of the soul that it would suffer from the promise. the existence of god is a justification for hope. and since the certainty would be injurious to the soul, hence destructive to itself, the doubt--in other words, the hope--becomes a sufficient approach to, a working substitute for it. it is pathetic to see how in spite of the convictions thus rooted in mr. browning's mind, the expressed craving for more knowledge, for more light, will now and then escape him. even orthodox christianity gives no assurance of reunion to those whom death has separated. it is obvious that mr. browning's poetic creed could hold no conviction regarding it. he hoped for such reunion in proportion as he wished. there must have been moments in his life when the wish in its passion overleapt the bounds of hope. 'prospice' appears to prove this. but the wide range of imagination, no less than the lack of knowledge, forbade in him any forecast of the possibilities of the life to come. he believed that if granted, it would be an advance on the present--an accession of knowledge if not an increase of happiness. he was satisfied that whatever it gave, and whatever it withheld, it would be good. in his normal condition this sufficed to him. 'la saisiaz' appeared in the early summer of , and with it 'the two poets of croisic', which had been written immediately after it. the various incidents of this poem are strictly historical; they lead the way to a characteristic utterance of mr. browning's philosophy of life to which i shall recur later. in mr. browning had published a first series of selections from his works; it was to be followed by a second in . in a preface to the earlier volume, he indicates the plan which he has followed in the choice and arrangement of poems; and some such intention runs also through the second; since he declined a suggestion made to him for the introduction or placing of a special poem, on the ground of its not conforming to the end he had in view. it is difficult, in the one case as in the other, to reconstruct the imagined personality to which his preface refers; and his words on the later occasion pointed rather to that idea of a chord of feeling which is raised by the correspondence of the first and last poems of the respective groups. but either clue may be followed with interest. chapter - he revisits italy; asolo; letters to mrs. fitz-gerald--venice--favourite alpine retreats--mrs. arthur bronson--life in venice--a tragedy at saint-pierre--mr. cholmondeley--mr. browning's patriotic feeling; extract from letter to mrs. charles skirrow--'dramatic idyls'--'jocoseria'--'ferishtah's fancies'. the catastrophe of la saisiaz closed a comprehensive chapter in mr. browning's habits and experience. it impelled him finally to break with the associations of the last seventeen autumns, which he remembered more in their tedious or painful circumstances than in the unexciting pleasure and renewed physical health which he had derived from them. he was weary of the ever-recurring effort to uproot himself from his home life, only to become stationary in some more or less uninteresting northern spot. the always latent desire for italy sprang up in him, and with it the often present thought and wish to give his sister the opportunity of seeing it. florence and rome were not included in his scheme; he knew them both too well; but he hankered for asolo and venice. he determined, though as usual reluctantly, and not till the last moment, that they should move southwards in the august of . their route lay over the spluegen; and having heard of a comfortable hotel near the summit of the pass, they agreed to remain there till the heat had sufficiently abated to allow of the descent into lombardy. the advantages of this first arrangement exceeded their expectations. it gave them solitude without the sense of loneliness. a little stream of travellers passed constantly over the mountain, and they could shake hands with acquaintances at night, and know them gone in the morning. they dined at the table d'hote, but took all other meals alone, and slept in a detached wing or 'dependance' of the hotel. their daily walks sometimes carried them down to the via mala; often to the top of the ascent, where they could rest, looking down into italy; and would even be prolonged over a period of five hours and an extent of seventeen miles. now, as always, the mountain air stimulated mr. browning's physical energy; and on this occasion it also especially quickened his imaginative powers. he was preparing the first series of 'dramatic idylls'; and several of these, including 'ivan ivanovitch', were produced with such rapidity that miss browning refused to countenance a prolonged stay on the mountain, unless he worked at a more reasonable rate. they did not linger on their way to asolo and venice, except for a night's rest on the lake of como and two days at verona. in their successive journeys through northern italy they visited by degrees all its notable cities, and it would be easy to recall, in order and detail, most of these yearly expeditions. but the account of them would chiefly resolve itself into a list of names and dates; for mr. browning had seldom a new impression to receive, even from localities which he had not seen before. i know that he and his sister were deeply struck by the deserted grandeurs of ravenna; and that it stirred in both of them a memorable sensation to wander as they did for a whole day through the pinewoods consecrated by dante. i am nevertheless not sure that when they performed the repeated round of picture-galleries and palaces, they were not sometimes simply paying their debt to opportunity, and as much for each other's sake as for their own. where all was italy, there was little to gain or lose in one memorial of greatness, one object of beauty, visited or left unseen. but in asolo, even in venice, mr. browning was seeking something more: the remembrance of his own actual and poetic youth. how far he found it in the former place we may infer from a letter to mrs. fitz-gerald. sept. , . and from 'asolo', at last, dear friend! so can dreams come _false_.--s., who has been writing at the opposite side of the table, has told you about our journey and adventures, such as they were: but she cannot tell you the feelings with which i revisit this--to me--memorable place after above forty years' absence,--such things have begun and ended with me in the interval! it was _too_ strange when we reached the ruined tower on the hill-top yesterday, and i said 'let me try if the echo still exists which i discovered here,' (you can produce it from only _one_ particular spot on a remainder of brickwork--) and thereupon it answered me plainly as ever, after all the silence: for some children from the adjoining 'podere', happening to be outside, heard my voice and its result--and began trying to perform the feat--calling 'yes, yes'--all in vain: so, perhaps, the mighty secret will die with me! we shall probably stay here a day or two longer,--the air is so pure, the country so attractive: but we must go soon to venice, stay our allotted time there, and then go homeward: you will of course address letters to venice, not this place: it is a pleasure i promise myself that, on arriving i shall certainly hear you speak in a letter which i count upon finding. the old inn here, to which i would fain have betaken myself, is gone--levelled to the ground: i remember it was much damaged by a recent earthquake, and the cracks and chasms may have threatened a downfall. this stella d'oro is, however, much such an unperverted 'locanda' as its predecessor--primitive indeed are the arrangements and unsophisticate the ways: but there is cleanliness, abundance of goodwill, and the sweet italian smile at every mistake: we get on excellently. to be sure never was such a perfect fellow-traveller, for my purposes, as s., so that i have no subject of concern--if things suit me they suit her--and vice-versa. i daresay she will have told you how we trudged together, this morning to possagno--through a lovely country: how we saw all the wonders--and a wonder of detestability is the paint-performance of the great man!--and how, on our return, we found the little town enjoying high market day, and its privilege of roaring and screaming over a bargain. it confuses me altogether,--but at venice i may write more comfortably. you will till then, dear friend, remember me ever as yours affectionately, robert browning. if the tone of this does not express disappointment, it has none of the rapture which his last visit was to inspire. the charm which forty years of remembrance had cast around the little city on the hill was dispelled for, at all events, the time being. the hot weather and dust-covered landscape, with the more than primitive accommodation of which he spoke in a letter to another friend, may have contributed something to this result. at venice the travellers fared better in some essential respects. a london acquaintance, who passed them on their way to italy, had recommended a cool and quiet hotel there, the albergo dell' universo. the house, palazzo brandolin-rota, was situated on the shady side of the grand canal, just below the accademia and the suspension bridge. the open stretches of the giudecca lay not far behind; and a scrap of garden and a clean and open little street made pleasant the approach from back and side. it accommodated few persons in proportion to its size, and fewer still took up their abode there; for it was managed by a lady of good birth and fallen fortunes whose home and patrimony it had been; and her husband, a retired austrian officer, and two grown-up daughters did not lighten her task. every year the fortunes sank lower; the upper storey of the house was already falling into decay, and the fine old furniture passing into the brokers' or private buyers' hands. it still, however, afforded sufficiently comfortable, and, by reason of its very drawbacks, desirable quarters to mr. browning. it perhaps turned the scale in favour of his return to venice; for the lady whose hospitality he was to enjoy there was as yet unknown to him; and nothing would have induced him to enter, with his eyes open, one of the english-haunted hotels, in which acquaintance, old and new, would daily greet him in the public rooms or jostle him in the corridors. he and his sister remained at the universo for a fortnight; their programme did not this year include a longer stay; but it gave them time to decide that no place could better suit them for an autumn holiday than venice, or better lend itself to a preparatory sojourn among the alps; and the plan of their next, and, though they did not know it, many a following summer, was thus sketched out before the homeward journey had begun. mr. browning did not forget his work, even while resting from it; if indeed he did rest entirely on this occasion. he consulted a russian lady whom he met at the hotel, on the names he was introducing in 'ivan ivanovitch'. it would be interesting to know what suggestions or corrections she made, and how far they adapted themselves to the rhythm already established, or compelled changes in it; but the one alternative would as little have troubled him as the other. mrs. browning told mr. prinsep that her husband could never alter the wording of a poem without rewriting it, indeed, practically converting it into another; though he more than once tried to do so at her instigation. but to the end of his life he could at any moment recast a line or passage for the sake of greater correctness, and leave all that was essential in it untouched. seven times more in the eleven years which remained to him, mr. browning spent the autumn in venice. once also, in , he had proceeded towards it as far as verona, when the floods which marked the autumn of that year arrested his farther course. each time he had halted first in some more or less elevated spot, generally suggested by his french friend, monsieur dourlans, himself an inveterate wanderer, whose inclinations also tempted him off the beaten track. the places he most enjoyed were saint-pierre la chartreuse, and gressoney saint-jean, where he stayed respectively in and , and . both of these had the drawbacks, and what might easily have been the dangers, of remoteness from the civilized world. but this weighed with him so little, that he remained there in each case till the weather had broken, though there was no sheltered conveyance in which he and his sister could travel down; and on the later occasions at least, circumstances might easily have combined to prevent their departure for an indefinite time. he became, indeed, so attached to gressoney, with its beautiful outlook upon monte rosa, that nothing i believe would have hindered his returning, or at least contemplating a return to it, but the great fatigue to his sister of the mule ride up the mountain, by a path which made walking, wherever possible, the easier course. they did walk _down_ it in the early october of , and completed the hard seven hours' trudge to san martino d'aosta, without an atom of refreshment or a minute's rest. one of the great attractions of saint-pierre was the vicinity of the grande chartreuse, to which mr. browning made frequent expeditions, staying there through the night in order to hear the midnight mass. miss browning also once attempted the visit, but was not allowed to enter the monastery. she slept in the adjoining convent. the brother and sister were again at the universo in , , and ; but the crash was rapidly approaching, and soon afterwards it came. the old palazzo passed into other hands, and after a short period of private ownership was consigned to the purposes of an art gallery. in , however, they had been introduced by mrs. story to an american resident, mrs. arthur bronson, and entered into most friendly relations with her; and when, after a year's interval, they were again contemplating an autumn in venice, she placed at their disposal a suite of rooms in the palazzo giustiniani recanati, which formed a supplement to her own house--making the offer with a kindly urgency which forbade all thought of declining it. they inhabited these for a second time in , keeping house for themselves in the simple but comfortable foreign manner they both so well enjoyed, only dining and spending the evening with their friend. but when, in , they were going, as they thought, to repeat the arrangement, they found, to their surprise, a little apartment prepared for them under mrs. bronson's own roof. this act of hospitality involved a special kindness on her part, of which mr. browning only became aware at the close of a prolonged stay; and a sense of increased gratitude added itself to the affectionate regard with which his hostess had already inspired both his sister and him. so far as he is concerned, the fact need only be indicated. it is fully expressed in the preface to 'asolando'. during the first and fresher period of mr. browning's visits to venice, he found a passing attraction in its society. it held an historical element which harmonized well with the decayed magnificence of the city, its old-world repose, and the comparatively simple modes of intercourse still prevailing there. mrs. bronson's 'salon' was hospitably open whenever her health allowed; but her natural refinement, and the conservatism which so strongly marks the higher class of americans, preserved it from the heterogeneous character which anglo-foreign sociability so often assumes. very interesting, even important names lent their prestige to her circle; and those of don carlos and his family, of prince and princess iturbide, of prince and princess metternich, and of princess montenegro, were on the list of her 'habitues', and, in the case of the royal spaniards, of her friends. it need hardly be said that the great english poet, with his fast spreading reputation and his infinite social charm, was kindly welcomed and warmly appreciated amongst them. english and american acquaintances also congregated in venice, or passed through it from london, florence, and rome. those resident in italy could make their visits coincide with those of mr. browning and his sister, or undertake the journey for the sake of seeing them; while the outward conditions of life were such as to render friendly intercourse more satisfactory, and common social civilities less irksome than they could be at home. mr. browning was, however, already too advanced in years, too familiar with everything which the world can give, to be long affected by the novelty of these experiences. it was inevitable that the need of rest, though often for the moment forgotten, should assert itself more and more. he gradually declined on the society of a small number of resident or semi-resident friends; and, due exception being made for the hospitalities of his temporary home, became indebted to the kindness of sir henry and lady layard, of mr. and mrs. curtis of palazzo barbaro, and of mr. and mrs. frederic eden, for most of the social pleasure and comfort of his later residences in venice. part of a letter to mrs. fitz-gerald gives an insight into the character of his life there: all the stronger that it was written under a temporary depression which it partly serves to explain. albergo dell' universo, venezia, italia: sept. , ' . 'dear friend,--on arriving here i found your letter to my great satisfaction--and yesterday brought the 'saturday review'--for which, many thanks. 'we left our strange but lovely place on the th, reaching chambery at evening,--stayed the next day there,--walking, among other diversions to "les charmettes", the famous abode of rousseau--kept much as when he left it: i visited it with my wife perhaps twenty-five years ago, and played so much of "rousseau's dream" as could be effected on his antique harpsichord: this time i attempted the same feat, but only two notes or thereabouts out of the octave would answer the touch. next morning we proceeded to turin, and on wednesday got here, in the middle of the last night of the congress carnival--rowing up the canal to our albergo through a dazzling blaze of lights and throng of boats,--there being, if we are told truly, , strangers in the city. rooms had been secured for us, however: and the festivities are at an end, to my great joy,--for venice is resuming its old quiet aspect--the only one i value at all. our american friends wanted to take us in their gondola to see the principal illuminations _after_ the "serenade", which was not over before midnight--but i was contented with _that_--being tired and indisposed for talking, and, having seen and heard quite enough from our own balcony, went to bed: s. having betaken her to her own room long before. 'next day we took stock of our acquaintances,--found that the storys, on whom we had counted for company, were at vallombrosa, though the two sons have a studio here--other friends are in sufficient number however--and last evening we began our visits by a very classical one--to the countess mocenigo, in her palace which byron occupied: she is a charming widow since two years,--young, pretty and of the prettiest manners: she showed us all the rooms byron had lived in,--and i wrote my name in her album _on_ the desk himself wrote the last canto of 'ch. harold' and 'beppo' upon. there was a small party: we were taken and introduced by the layards who are kind as ever, and i met old friends--lord aberdare, charles bowen, and others. while i write comes a deliciously fresh 'bouquet' from mrs. bronson, an american lady,--in short we shall find a week or two amusing enough; though--where are the pinewoods, mountains and torrents, and wonderful air? venice is under a cloud,--dull and threatening,--though we were apprehensive of heat, arriving, as we did, ten days earlier than last year. . . .' the evening's programme was occasionally varied by a visit to one of the theatres. the plays given were chiefly in the venetian dialect, and needed previous study for their enjoyment; but mr. browning assisted at one musical performance which strongly appealed to his historical and artistic sensibilities: that of the 'barbiere' of paisiello in the rossini theatre and in the presence of wagner, which took place in the autumn of . although the manner of his sojourn in the italian city placed all the resources of resident life at his command, mr. browning never abjured the active habits of the english traveller. he daily walked with his sister, as he did in the mountains, for walking's sake, as well as for the delight of what his expeditions showed him; and the facilities which they supplied for this healthful pleasurable exercise were to his mind one of the great merits of his autumn residences in italy. he explored venice in all directions, and learned to know its many points of beauty and interest, as those cannot who believe it is only to be seen from a gondola; and when he had visited its every corner, he fell back on a favourite stroll along the riva to the public garden and back again; never failing to leave the house at about the same hour of the day. later still, when a friend's gondola was always at hand, and air and sunshine were the one thing needful, he would be carried to the lido, and take a long stretch on its farther shore. the letter to mrs. fitz-gerald, from which i have already quoted, concludes with the account of a tragic occurrence which took place at saint-pierre just before his departure, and in which mr. browning's intuitions had played a striking part. 'and what do you think befell us in this abode of peace and innocence? our journey was delayed for three hours in consequence of the one mule of the village being requisitioned by the 'juge d'instruction' from grenoble, come to enquire into a murder committed two days before. my sister and i used once a day to walk for a couple of hours up a mountain-road of the most lovely description, and stop at the summit whence we looked down upon the minute hamlet of st.-pierre d'entremont,--even more secluded than our own: then we got back to our own aforesaid. and in this paradisial place, they found, yesterday week, a murdered man--frightfully mutilated--who had been caught apparently in the act of stealing potatoes in a field: such a crime had never occurred in the memory of the oldest of our folk. who was the murderer is the mystery--whether the field's owner--in his irritation at discovering the robber,--or one of a band of similar 'charbonniers' (for they suppose the man to be a piedmontese of that occupation) remains to be proved: they began by imprisoning the owner, who denies his guilt energetically. now the odd thing is, that, either the day of, or after the murder,--as i and s. were looking at the utter solitude, i had the fancy "what should i do if i suddenly came upon a dead body in this field? go and proclaim it--and subject myself to all the vexations inflicted by the french way of procedure (which begins by assuming that you may be the criminal)--or neglect an obvious duty, and return silently." i, of course, saw that the former was the only proper course, whatever the annoyance involved. and, all the while, there was just about to be the very same incident for the trouble of somebody.' here the account breaks off; but writing again from the same place, august , , he takes up the suspended narrative with this question: 'did i tell you of what happened to me on the last day of my stay here last year?' and after repeating the main facts continues as follows: 'this morning, in the course of my walk, i entered into conversation with two persons of whom i made enquiry myself. they said the accused man, a simple person, had been locked up in a high chamber,--protesting his innocence strongly,--and troubled in his mind by the affair altogether and the turn it was taking, had profited by the gendarme's negligence, and thrown himself out of the window--and so died, continuing to the last to protest as before. my presentiment of what such a person might have to undergo was justified you see--though i should not in any case have taken _that_ way of getting out of the difficulty. the man added, "it was not he who committed the murder, but the companions of the man, an italian charcoal-burner, who owed him a grudge, killed him, and dragged him to the field--filling his sack with potatoes as if stolen, to give a likelihood that the field's owner had caught him stealing and killed him,--so m. perrier the greffier told me." enough of this grim story. . . . . . 'my sister was anxious to know exactly where the body was found: "vouz savez la croix au sommet de la colline? a cette distance de cela!" that is precisely where i was standing when the thought came over me.' a passage in a subsequent letter of september clearly refers to some comment of mrs. fitz-gerald's on the peculiar nature of this presentiment: 'no--i attribute no sort of supernaturalism to my fancy about the thing that was really about to take place. by a law of the association of ideas--_contraries_ come into the mind as often as _similarities_--and the peace and solitude readily called up the notion of what would most jar with them. i have often thought of the trouble that might have befallen me if poor miss smith's death had happened the night before, when we were on the mountain alone together--or next morning when we were on the proposed excursion--only _then_ we should have had companions.' the letter then passes to other subjects. 'this is the fifth magnificent day--like magnificence, unfit for turning to much account--for we cannot walk till sunset. i had two hours' walk, or nearly, before breakfast, however: it is the loveliest country i ever had experience of, and we shall prolong our stay perhaps--apart from the concern for poor cholmondeley and his friends, i should be glad to apprehend no long journey--besides the annoyance of having to pass florence and rome unvisited, for s.'s sake, i mean: even naples would have been with its wonderful environs a tantalizing impracticability. 'your "academy" came and was welcomed. the newspaper is like an electric eel, as one touches it and expects a shock. i am very anxious about the archbishop who has always been strangely kind to me.' he and his sister had accepted an invitation to spend the month of october with mr. cholmondeley at his villa in ischia; but the party assembled there was broken up by the death of one of mr. cholmondeley's guests, a young lady who had imprudently attempted the ascent of a dangerous mountain without a guide, and who lost her life in the experiment. a short extract from a letter to mrs. charles skirrow will show that even in this complete seclusion mr. browning's patriotism did not go to sleep. there had been already sufficient evidence that his friendship did not; but it was not in the nature of his mental activities that they should be largely absorbed by politics, though he followed the course of his country's history as a necessary part of his own life. it needed a crisis like that of our egyptian campaign, or the subsequent irish struggle, to arouse him to a full emotional participation in current events. how deeply he could be thus aroused remained yet to be seen. 'if the george smiths are still with you, give them my love, and tell them we shall expect to see them at venice,--which was not so likely to be the case when we were bound for ischia. as for lady wolseley--one dares not pretend to vie with her in anxiety just now; but my own pulses beat pretty strongly when i open the day's newspaper--which, by some new arrangement, reaches us, oftener than not, on the day after publication. where is your bertie? i had an impassioned letter, a fortnight ago, from a nephew of mine, who is in the second division [battalion?] of the black watch; he was ordered to edinburgh, and the regiment not dispatched, after all,--it having just returned from india; the poor fellow wrote in his despair "to know if i could do anything!" he may be wanted yet: though nothing seems wanted in egypt, so capital appears to be the management.' in mr. browning published the first series of his 'dramatic idyls'; and their appearance sent a thrill of surprised admiration through the public mind. in 'la saisiaz' and the accompanying poems he had accomplished what was virtually a life's work. for he was approaching the appointed limit of man's existence; and the poetic, which had been nourished in him by the natural life--which had once outstripped its developments, but on the whole remained subject to them--had therefore, also, passed through the successive phases of individual growth. he had been inspired as dramatic poet by the one avowed conviction that little else is worth study but the history of a soul; and outward act or circumstance had only entered into his creations as condition or incident of the given psychological state. his dramatic imagination had first, however unconsciously, sought its materials in himself; then gradually been projected into the world of men and women, which his widening knowledge laid open to him; it is scarcely necessary to say that its power was only fully revealed when it left the remote regions of poetical and metaphysical self-consciousness, to invoke the not less mysterious and far more searching utterance of the general human heart. it was a matter of course that in this expression of his dramatic genius, the intellectual and emotional should exhibit the varying relations which are developed by the natural life: that feeling should begin by doing the work of thought, as in 'saul', and thought end by doing the work of feeling, as in 'fifine at the fair'; and that the two should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity in such works of an intermediate period as 'cleon', 'a death in the desert', the 'epistle of karshish', and 'james lee's wife'; the sophistical ingenuities of 'bishop blougram', and 'sludge'; and the sad, appealing tenderness of 'andrea del sarto' and 'the worst of it'. it was also almost inevitable that so vigorous a genius should sometimes falsify calculations based on the normal life. the long-continued force and freshness of mr. browning's general faculties was in itself a protest against them. we saw without surprise that during the decade which produced 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau', 'fifine at the fair', and 'red cotton nightcap country', he could give us 'the inn album', with its expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed, rarely equalled, in the whole range of his work: or those two unique creations of airy fancy and passionate symbolic romance, 'saint martin's summer', and 'numpholeptos'. it was no ground for astonishment that the creative power in him should even ignore the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly possible, its natural laws of modification. but in the 'dramatic idyls' he did more than proceed with unflagging powers on a long-trodden, distinctive course; he took a new departure. mr. browning did not forsake the drama of motive when he imagined and worked out his new group of poems; he presented it in a no less subtle and complex form. but he gave it the added force of picturesque realization; and this by means of incidents both powerful in themselves, and especially suited for its development. it was only in proportion to this higher suggestiveness that a startling situation ever seemed to him fit subject for poetry. where its interest and excitement exhausted themselves in the external facts, it became, he thought, the property of the chronicler, but supplied no material for the poet; and he often declined matter which had been offered him for dramatic treatment because it belonged to the more sensational category. it is part of the vital quality of the 'dramatic idyls' that, in them, the act and the motive are not yet finally identified with each other. we see the act still palpitating with the motive; the motive dimly striving to recognize or disclaim itself in the act. it is in this that the psychological poet stands more than ever strongly revealed. such at least is the case in 'martin relph', and the idealized russian legend, 'ivan ivanovitch'. the grotesque tragedy of 'ned bratts' has also its marked psychological aspects, but they are of a simpler and broader kind. the new inspiration slowly subsided through the second series of 'idyls', , and 'jocoseria', . in 'ferishtah's fancies', , mr. browning returned to his original manner, though carrying into it something of the renewed vigour which had marked the intervening change. the lyrics which alternate with its parables include some of the most tender, most impassioned, and most musical of his love-poems. the moral and religious opinions conveyed in this later volume may be accepted without reserve as mr. browning's own, if we subtract from them the exaggerations of the figurative and dramatic form. it is indeed easy to recognize in them the under currents of his whole real and imaginative life. they have also on one or two points an intrinsic value which will justify a later allusion. chapter - the browning society; mr. furnivall; miss e. h. hickey--his attitude towards the society; letter to mrs. fitz-gerald--mr. thaxter, mrs. celia thaxter--letter to miss hickey; 'strafford'--shakspere and wordsworth societies--letters to professor knight--appreciation in italy; professor nencioni--the goldoni sonnet--mr. barrett browning; palazzo manzoni--letters to mrs. charles skirrow--mrs. bloomfield moore--llangollen; sir theodore and lady martin--loss of old friends--foreign correspondent of the royal academy--'parleyings with certain people of importance in their day'. this indian summer of mr. browning's genius coincided with the highest manifestation of public interest, which he, or with one exception, any living writer, had probably yet received: the establishment of a society bearing his name, and devoted to the study of his poetry. the idea arose almost simultaneously in the mind of dr., then mr. furnivall, and of miss e. h. hickey. one day, in the july of , as they were on their way to warwick crescent to pay an appointed visit there, miss hickey strongly expressed her opinion of the power and breadth of mr. browning's work; and concluded by saying that much as she loved shakespeare, she found in certain aspects of browning what even shakespeare could not give her. mr. furnivall replied to this by asking what she would say to helping him to found a browning society; and it then appeared that miss hickey had recently written to him a letter, suggesting that he should found one; but that it had miscarried, or, as she was disposed to think, not been posted. being thus, at all events, agreed as to the fitness of the undertaking, they immediately spoke of it to mr. browning, who at first treated the project as a joke; but did not oppose it when once he understood it to be serious. his only proviso was that he should remain neutral in respect to its fulfilment. he refused even to give mr. furnivall the name or address of any friends, whose interest in himself or his work might render their co-operation probable. this passive assent sufficed. a printed prospectus was now issued. about two hundred members were soon secured. a committee was elected, of which mr. j. t. nettleship, already well known as a browning student, was one of the most conspicuous members; and by the end of october a small society had come into existence, which held its inaugural meeting in the botanic theatre of university college. mr. furnivall, its principal founder, and responsible organizer, was chairman of the committee, and miss e. h. hickey, the co-founder, was honorary secretary. when, two or three years afterwards, illness compelled her to resign this position, it was assumed by mr. j. dykes campbell. although nothing could be more unpretending than the action of this browning society, or in the main more genuine than its motive, it did not begin life without encountering ridicule and mistrust. the formation of a ruskin society in the previous year had already established a precedent for allowing a still living worker to enjoy the fruits of his work, or, as some one termed it, for making a man a classic during his lifetime. but this fact was not yet generally known; and meanwhile a curious contradiction developed itself in the public mind. the outer world of mr. browning's acquaintance continued to condemn the too great honour which was being done to him; from those of the inner circle he constantly received condolences on being made the subject of proceedings which, according to them, he must somehow regard as an offence. this was the last view of the case which he was prepared to take. at the beginning, as at the end, he felt honoured by the intentions of the society. he probably, it is true, had occasional misgivings as to its future. he could not be sure that its action would always be judicious, still less that it would be always successful. he was prepared for its being laughed at, and for himself being included in the laughter. he consented to its establishment for what seemed to him the one unanswerable reason, that he had, even on the ground of taste, no just cause for forbidding it. no line, he considered, could be drawn between the kind of publicity which every writer seeks, which, for good or evil, he had already obtained, and that which the browning society was conferring on him. his works would still, as before, be read, analyzed, and discussed 'viva voce' and in print. that these proceedings would now take place in other localities than drawing-rooms or clubs, through other organs than newspapers or magazines, by other and larger groups of persons than those usually gathered round a dinner-or a tea-table, involved no real change in the situation. in any case, he had made himself public property; and those who thus organized their study of him were exercising an individual right. if his own rights had been assailed he would have guarded them also; but the circumstances of the case precluded such a contingency. and he had his reward. how he felt towards the society at the close of its first session is better indicated in the following letter to mrs. fitz-gerald than in the note to mr. yates which mr. sharp has published, and which was written with more reserve and, i believe, at a rather earlier date. even the shade of condescension which lingers about his words will have been effaced by subsequent experience; and many letters written to dr. furnivall must, since then, have attested his grateful and affectionate appreciation of kindness intended and service done to him. . . . they always treat me gently in 'punch'--why don't you do the same by the browning society? i see you emphasize miss hickey's acknowledgement of defects in time and want of rehearsal: but i look for no great perfection in a number of kindly disposed strangers to me personally, who try to interest people in my poems by singing and reading them. they give their time for nothing, offer their little entertainment for nothing, and certainly get next to nothing in the way of thanks--unless from myself who feel grateful to the faces i shall never see, the voices i shall never hear. the kindest notices i have had, or at all events those that have given me most pleasure, have been educed by this society--a. sidgwick's paper, that of professor corson, miss lewis' article in this month's 'macmillan'--and i feel grateful for it all, for my part,--and none the less for a little amusement at the wonder of some of my friends that i do not jump up and denounce the practices which must annoy me so much. oh! my 'gentle shakespeare', how well you felt and said--'never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.' so, dear lady, here is my duty and simplicity tendering itself to you, with all affection besides, and i being ever yours, r. browning. that general disposition of the london world which left the ranks of the little society to be three-fourths recruited among persons, many living at a distance, whom the poet did not know, became also in its way a satisfaction. it was with him a matter of course, though never of indifference, that his closer friends of both sexes were among its members; it was one of real gratification that they included from the beginning such men as dean boyle of salisbury, the rev. llewellyn davies, george meredith, and james cotter morison--that they enjoyed the sympathy and co-operation of such a one as archdeacon farrar. but he had an ingenuous pride in reading the large remainder of the society's lists of names, and pointing out the fact that there was not one among them which he had ever heard. it was equivalent to saying, 'all these people care for me as a poet. no social interest, no personal prepossession, has attracted them to my work.' and when the unknown name was not only appended to a list; when it formed the signature of a paper--excellent or indifferent as might be--but in either case bearing witness to a careful and unobtrusive study of his poems, by so much was the gratification increased. he seldom weighed the intrinsic merit of such productions; he did not read them critically. no man was ever more adverse to the seeming ungraciousness of analyzing the quality of a gift. in real life indeed this power of gratitude sometimes defeated its own end, by neutralizing his insight into the motive or effort involved in different acts of kindness, and placing them all successively on the same plane. in the present case, however, an ungraduated acceptance of the labour bestowed on him was part of the neutral attitude which it was his constant endeavour to maintain. he always refrained from noticing any erroneous statement concerning himself or his works which might appear in the papers of the society: since, as he alleged, if he once began to correct, he would appear to endorse whatever he left uncorrected, and thus make himself responsible, not only for any interpretation that might be placed on his poems, but, what was far more serious, for every eulogium that was bestowed upon them. he could not stand aloof as entirely as he or even his friends desired, since it was usual with some members of the society to seek from him elucidations of obscure passages which, without these, it was declared, would be a stumbling-block to future readers. but he disliked being even to this extent drawn into its operation; and his help was, i believe, less and less frequently invoked. nothing could be more false than the rumour which once arose that he superintended those performances of his plays which took place under the direction of the society. once only, and by the urgent desire of some of the actors, did he witness a last rehearsal of one of them. it was also a matter of course that men and women brought together by a pre-existing interest in mr. browning's work should often ignore its authorized explanations, and should read and discuss it in the light of personal impressions more congenial to their own mind; and the various and circumstantial views sometimes elicited by a given poem did not serve to render it more intelligible. but the merit of true poetry lies so largely in its suggestiveness, that even mistaken impressions of it have their positive value and also their relative truth; and the intellectual friction which was thus created, not only in the parent society, but in its offshoots in england and america, was not their least important result. these societies conferred, it need hardly be said, no less real benefits on the public at large. they extended the sale of mr. browning's works, and with it their distinct influence for intellectual and moral good. they not only created in many minds an interest in these works, but aroused the interest where it was latent, and gave it expression where it had hitherto found no voice. one fault, alone, could be charged against them; and this lay partly in the nature of all friendly concerted action: they stirred a spirit of enthusiasm in which it was not easy, under conditions equally genuine, to distinguish the individual element from that which was due to contagion; while the presence among us of the still living poet often infused into that enthusiasm a vaguely emotional element, which otherwise detracted from its intellectual worth. but in so far as this was a drawback to the intended action of the societies, it was one only in the most negative sense; nor can we doubt, that, to a certain extent, mr. browning's best influence was promoted by it. the hysterical sensibilities which, for some years past, he had unconsciously but not unfrequently aroused in the minds of women, and even of men, were a morbid development of that influence, which its open and systematic extension tended rather to diminish than to increase. it is also a matter of history that robert browning had many deep and constant admirers in england, and still more in america,* long before this organized interest had developed itself. letters received from often remote parts of the united states had been for many years a detail of his daily experience; and even when they consisted of the request for an autograph, an application to print selections from his works, or a mere expression of schoolboy pertness or schoolgirl sentimentality, they bore witness to his wide reputation in that country, and the high esteem in which he was held there.** the names of levi and celia thaxter of boston had long, i believe, been conspicuous in the higher ranks of his disciples, though they first occur in his correspondence at about this date. i trust i may take for granted mrs. thaxter's permission to publish a letter from her. * the cheapening of his works in america, induced by the absence of international copyright, accounts of course in some degree for their wider diffusion, and hence earlier appreciation there. ** one of the most curious proofs of this was the californian railway time-table edition of his poems. newtonville, massachusetts: march , . my dear mr. browning: your note reached me this morning, but it belonged to my husband, for it was he who wrote to you; so i gave it to him, glad to put into his hands so precious a piece of manuscript, for he has for you and all your work an enthusiastic appreciation such as is seldom found on this planet: it is not possible that the admiration of one mortal for another can exceed his feeling for you. you might have written for him, i've a friend over the sea, . . . . it all grew out of the books i write, &c. you should see his fine wrath and scorn for the idiocy that doesn't at once comprehend you! he knows every word you have ever written; long ago 'sordello' was an open book to him from title-page to closing line, and _all_ you have printed since has been as eagerly and studiously devoured. he reads you aloud (and his reading is a fine art) to crowds of astonished people, he swears by you, he thinks no one save shakspere has a right to be mentioned in the same century with you. you are the great enthusiasm of his life. pardon me, you are smiling, i dare say. you hear any amount of such things, doubtless. but a genuine living appreciation is always worth having in this old world, it is like a strong fresh breeze from off the brine, that puts a sense of life and power into a man. you cannot be the worse for it. yours very sincerely, celia thaxter. when mr. thaxter died, in february , his son wrote to mr. browning to beg of him a few lines to be inscribed on his father's tombstone. the little poem by which the request was answered has not yet, i believe, been published. 'written to be inscribed on the gravestone of levi thaxter.' thou, whom these eyes saw never,--say friends true who say my soul, helped onward by my song, though all unwittingly, has helped thee too? i gave but of the little that i knew: how were the gift requited, while along life's path i pace, could'st thou make weakness strong, help me with knowledge--for life's old, death's new! r. b. april , ' . a publication which connected itself with the labours of the society, without being directly inspired by it, was the annotated 'strafford' prepared by miss hickey for the use of students. it may be agreeable to those who use the little work to know the estimate in which mr. browning held it. he wrote as follows: , warwick crescent, w.: february , . dear miss hickey,--i have returned the proofs by post,--nothing can be better than your notes--and with a real wish to be of use, i read them carefully that i might detect never so tiny a fault,--but i found none--unless (to show you how minutely i searched,) it should be one that by 'thriving in your contempt,' i meant simply 'while you despise them, and for all that, they thrive and are powerful to do you harm.' the idiom you prefer--quite an authorized one--comes to much the same thing after all. you must know how much i grieve at your illness--temporary as i will trust it to be--i feel all your goodness to me--or whatever in my books may be taken for me--well, i wish you knew how thoroughly i feel it--and how truly i am and shall ever be yours affectionately, robert browning. from the time of the foundation of the new shakspere society, mr. browning was its president. in he became a member of the wordsworth society. two interesting letters to professor knight, dated respectively and , connect themselves with the working of the latter; and, in spite of their distance in time, may therefore be given together. the poem which formed the subject of the first was 'the daisy';* the selection referred to in the second was that made in by professor knight for the wordsworth society, with the co-operation of mr. browning and other eminent literary men. * that beginning 'in youth from rock to rock, i went.' , warwick crescent, w.: july , ' . my dear sir,--you pay me a compliment in caring for my opinion--but, such as it is, a very decided one it must be. on every account, your method of giving the original text, and subjoining in a note the variations, each with its proper date, is incontestably preferable to any other. it would be so, if the variations were even improvements--there would be pleasure as well as profit in seeing what was good grow visibly better. but--to confine ourselves to the single 'proof' you have sent me--in every case the change is sadly for the worse: i am quite troubled by such spoilings of passage after passage as i should have chuckled at had i chanced upon them in some copy pencil-marked with corrections by jeffrey or gifford: indeed, they are nearly as wretched as the touchings-up of the 'siege of corinth' by the latter. if ever diabolic agency was caught at tricks with 'apostolic' achievement (see page )--and 'apostolic', with no 'profanity' at all, i esteem these poems to be--surely you may bid it 'aroint' 'about and all about' these desecrated stanzas--each of which, however, thanks to your piety, we may hail, i trust, with a hearty thy long-lost praise thou shalt regain nor be less dear to future men than in old time! believe me, my dear sir, yours very sincerely, robert browning. , warwick crescent, w.: march , ' . dear professor knight,--i have seemed to neglect your commission shamefully enough: but i confess to a sort of repugnance to classifying the poems as even good and less good: because in my heart i fear i should do it almost chronologically--so immeasureably superior seem to me the 'first sprightly runnings'. your selection would appear to be excellent; and the partial admittance of the later work prevents one from observing the too definitely distinguishing black line between supremely good and--well, what is fairly tolerable--from wordsworth, always understand! i have marked a few of the early poems, not included in your list--i could do no other when my conscience tells me that i never can be tired of loving them: while, with the best will in the world, i could never do more than try hard to like them.* * by 'them' mr. browning clearly means the later poems, and probably has omitted a few words which would have shown this. you see, i go wholly upon my individual likings and distastes: that other considerations should have their weight with other people is natural and inevitable. ever truly yours, robert browning. many thanks for the volume just received--that with the correspondence. i hope that you restore the swan simile so ruthlessly cut away from 'dion'. in he was again invited, and again declined, to stand for the lord rectorship of the university of st. andrews. in the same year he received the ll.d. degree of the university of edinburgh; and in the following was made honorary president of the associated societies of that city.* during the few days spent there on the occasion of his investiture, he was the guest of professor masson, whose solicitous kindness to him is still warmly remembered in the family. * this association was instituted in , and is a union of literary and debating societies. it is at present composed of five: the dialectic, scots law, diagnostic, philosophical, and philomathic. the interest in mr. browning as a poet is beginning to spread in germany. there is room for wonder that it should not have done so before, though the affinities of his genius are rather with the older than with the more modern german mind. it is much more remarkable that, many years ago, his work had already a sympathetic exponent in italy. signor nencioni, professor of literature in florence, had made his acquaintance at siena, and was possibly first attracted to him through his wife, although i never heard that it was so. he was soon, however, fascinated by mr. browning's poetry, and made it an object of serious study; he largely quoted from, and wrote on it, in the roman paper 'fanfulla della domenica', in and ; and published last winter what is, i am told, an excellent article on the same subject, in the 'nuova antologia'. two years ago he travelled from rome to venice (accompanied by signor placci), for the purpose of seeing him. he is fond of reciting passages from the works, and has even made attempts at translation: though he understands them too well not to pronounce them, what they are for every latin language, untranslatable. in mr. browning added another link to the 'golden' chain of verse which united england and italy. a statue of goldoni was about to be erected in venice. the ceremonies of the occasion were to include the appearance of a volume--or album--of appropriate poems; and cavaliere molmenti, its intending editor, a leading member of the 'erection committee', begged mr. browning to contribute to it. it was also desired that he should be present at the unveiling.* he was unable to grant this request, but consented to write a poem. this sonnet to goldoni also deserves to be more widely known, both for itself and for the manner of its production. mr. browning had forgotten, or not understood, how soon the promise concerning it must be fulfilled, and it was actually scribbled off while a messenger, sent by signor molmenti, waited for it. * it was, i think, during this visit to venice that he assisted at a no less interesting ceremony: the unveiling of a commemorative tablet to baldassaro galuppi, in his native island of burano. goldoni,--good, gay, sunniest of souls,--glassing half venice in that verse of thine,--what though it just reflect the shade and shine of common life, nor render, as it rolls grandeur and gloom? sufficient for thy shoals was carnival: parini's depths enshrine secrets unsuited to that opaline surface of things which laughs along thy scrolls. there throng the people: how they come and go lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb,--see,--on piazza, calle, under portico and over bridge! dear king of comedy, be honoured! thou that didst love venice so, venice, and we who love her, all love thee! venice, nov. , . a complete bibliography would take account of three other sonnets, 'the founder of the feast', , 'the names', , and 'why i am a liberal', , to which i shall have occasion to refer; but we decline insensibly from these on to the less important or more fugitive productions which such lists also include, and on which it is unnecessary or undesirable that any stress should be laid. in he was joined in venice by his son. it was 'penini's' first return to the country of his birth, his first experience of the city which he had only visited in his nurse's arms; and his delight in it was so great that the plan shaped itself in his father's mind of buying a house there, which should serve as 'pied-a-terre' for the family, but more especially as a home for him. neither the health nor the energies of the younger mr. browning had ever withstood the influence of the london climate; a foreign element was undoubtedly present in his otherwise thoroughly english constitution. everything now pointed to his settling in italy, and pursuing his artist life there, only interrupting it by occasional visits to london and paris. his father entered into negotiations for the palazzo manzoni, next door to the former hotel de l'univers; and the purchase was completed, so far as he was concerned, before he returned to england. the fact is related, and his own position towards it described in a letter to mrs. charles skirrow, written from venice. palazzo giustiniani recanati, s. moise: nov. , ' . my two dear friends will have supposed, with plenty of reason, that i never got the kind letter some weeks ago. when it came, i was in the middle of an affair, conducted by letters of quite another kind, with people abroad: and as i fancied that every next day might bring me news very interesting to me and likely to be worth telling to the dear friends, i waited and waited--and only two days since did the matter come to a satisfactory conclusion--so, as the irish song has it, 'open your eyes and die with surprise' when i inform you that i have purchased the manzoni palace here, on the canal grande, of its owner, marchese montecucculi, an austrian and an absentee--hence the delay of communication. i did this purely for pen--who became at once simply infatuated with the city which won my whole heart long before he was born or thought of. i secure him a perfect domicile, every facility for his painting and sculpture, and a property fairly worth, even here and now, double what i gave for it--such is the virtue in these parts of ready money! i myself shall stick to london--which has been so eminently good and gracious to me--so long as god permits; only, when the inevitable outrage of time gets the better of my body--(i shall not believe in his reaching my soul and proper self)--there will be a capital retreat provided: and meantime i shall be able to 'take mine ease in mine own inn' whenever so minded. there, my dear friends! i trust now to be able to leave very shortly; the main business cannot be formally concluded before two months at least--through the absence of the marchese,--who left at once to return to his duties as commander of an austrian ship; but the necessary engagement to sell and buy at a specified price is made in due legal form, and the papers will be sent to me in london for signature. i hope to get away the week after next at latest,--spite of the weather in england which to-day's letters report as 'atrocious',--and ours, though variable, is in the main very tolerable and sometimes perfect; for all that, i yearn to be at home in poor warwick crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new abode. i forget you don't know venice. well then, the palazzo manzoni is situate on the grand canal, and is described by ruskin,--to give no other authority,--as 'a perfect and very rich example of byzantine renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.' and again--'an exquisite example (of byzantine renaissance) as applied to domestic architecture.' so testify the 'stones of venice'. but we will talk about the place, over a photograph, when i am happy enough to be with you again. of venetian gossip there is next to none. we had an admirable venetian company,--using the dialect,--at the goldoni theatre. the acting of zago, in his various parts, and zenon-palladini, in her especial character of a venetian piece of volubility and impulsiveness in the shape of a servant, were admirable indeed. the manager, gallina, is a playwright of much reputation, and gave us some dozen of his own pieces, mostly good and clever. s. is very well,--much improved in health: we walk sufficiently in this city where walking is accounted impossible by those who never attempt it. have i tired your good temper? no! you ever wished me well, and i love you both with my whole heart. s.'s love goes with mine--who am ever yours robert browning. he never, however, owned the manzoni palace. the austrian gentlemen* whose property it was, put forward, at the last moment, unexpected and to his mind unreasonable claims; and he was preparing to contest the position, when a timely warning induced him to withdraw from it altogether. the warning proceeded from his son, who had remained on the spot, and was now informed on competent authority that the foundations of the house were insecure. * two or three brothers. in the early summer of , and again in , miss browning had a serious illness; and though she recovered, in each case completely, and in the first rapidly, it was considered desirable that she should not travel so far as usual from home. she and her brother therefore accepted for the august and september of the urgent invitation of an american friend, mrs. bloomfield moore, to stay with her at a villa which she rented for some seasons at st. moritz. mr. browning was delighted with the engadine, where the circumstances of his abode, and the thoughtful kindness of his hostess, allowed him to enjoy the benefits of comparative civilization together with almost perfect repose. the weather that year was brilliant until the end of september, if not beyond it; and his letters tell the old pleasant story of long daily walks and a general sense of invigoration. one of these, written to mr. and mrs. skirrow, also contains some pungent remarks on contemporary events, with an affectionate allusion to one of the chief actors in them. 'anyhow, i have the sincerest hope that wolseley may get done as soon, and kill as few people, as possible,--keeping himself safe and sound--brave dear fellow--for the benefit of us all.' he also speaks with great sympathy of the death of mr. charles sartoris, which had just taken place at st.-moritz. in , miss browning was not allowed to leave england; and she and mr. browning established themselves for the autumn at the hand hotel at llangollen, where their old friends, sir theodore and lady martin, would be within easy reach. mr. browning missed the exhilarating effects of the alpine air; but he enjoyed the peaceful beauty of the welsh valley, and the quiet and comfort of the old-fashioned english inn. a new source of interest also presented itself to him in some aspects of the life of the english country gentleman. he was struck by the improvements effected by its actual owner* on a neighbouring estate, and by the provisions contained in them for the comfort of both the men and the animals under his care; and he afterwards made, in reference to them, what was for a professing liberal, a very striking remark: 'talk of abolishing that class of men! they are the salt of the earth!' every sunday afternoon he and his sister drank tea--weather permitting--on the lawn with their friends at brintysilio; and he alludes gracefully to these meetings in a letter written in the early summer of , when lady martin had urged him to return to wales. * i believe a captain best. the poet left another and more pathetic remembrance of himself in the neighbourhood of llangollen: his weekly presence at the afternoon sunday service in the parish church of llantysilio. churchgoing was, as i have said, no part of his regular life. it was no part of his life in london. but i do not think he ever failed in it at the universities or in the country. the assembling for prayer meant for him something deeper in both the religious and the human sense, where ancient learning and piety breathed through the consecrated edifice, or where only the figurative 'two or three' were 'gathered together' within it. a memorial tablet now marks the spot at which on this occasion the sweet grave face and the venerable head were so often seen. it has been placed by the direction of lady martin on the adjoining wall. it was in the september of this year that mr. browning heard of the death of m. joseph milsand. this name represented for him one of the few close friendships which were to remain until the end, unclouded in fact and in remembrance; and although some weight may be given to those circumstances of their lives which precluded all possibility of friction and risk of disenchantment, i believe their rooted sympathy, and mr. browning's unfailing powers of appreciation would, in all possible cases, have maintained the bond intact. the event was at the last sudden, but happily not quite unexpected. many other friends had passed by this time out of the poet's life--those of a younger, as well as his own and an older generation. miss haworth died in . charles dickens, with whom he had remained on the most cordial terms, had walked between him and his son at thackeray's funeral, to receive from him, only seven years later, the same pious office. lady augusta stanley, the daughter of his old friend, lady elgin, was dead, and her husband, the dean of westminster. so also were 'barry cornwall' and john forster, alfred domett, and thomas carlyle, mr. cholmondeley and lord houghton; others still, both men and women, whose love for him might entitle them to a place in his biography, but whom i could at most only mention by name. for none of these can his feeling have been more constant or more disinterested than that which bound him to carlyle. he visited him at chelsea in the last weary days of his long life, as often as their distance from each other and his own engagements allowed. even the man's posthumous self-disclosures scarcely availed to destroy the affectionate reverence which he had always felt for him. he never ceased to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that in the matter of their domestic unhappiness she was the more responsible of the two.* yet carlyle had never rendered him that service, easy as it appears, which one man of letters most justly values from another: that of proclaiming the admiration which he privately expresses for his works. the fact was incomprehensible to mr. browning--it was so foreign to his own nature; and he commented on it with a touch, though merely a touch, of bitterness, when repeating to a friend some almost extravagant eulogium which in earlier days he had received from him tete-a-tete. 'if only,' he said, 'those words had been ever repeated in public, what good they might have done me!' * he always thought her a hard and unlovable woman, and i believe little liking was lost between them. he told a comical story of how he had once, unintentionally but rather stupidly, annoyed her. she had asked him, as he was standing by her tea-table, to put the kettle back on the fire. he took it out of her hands, but, preoccupied by the conversation he was carrying on, deposited it on the hearthrug. it was some time before he could be made to see that this was wrong; and he believed mrs. carlyle never ceased to think that he had a mischievous motive for doing it. in the spring of , he accepted the post of foreign correspondent to the royal academy, rendered vacant by the death of lord houghton. he had long been on very friendly terms with the leading academicians, and a constant guest at the banquet; and his fitness for the office admitted of no doubt. but his nomination by the president, and the manner in which it was ratified by the council and general body, gave him sincere pleasure. early in , the 'parleyings' appeared. their author is still the same robert browning, though here and there visibly touched by the hand of time. passages of sweet or majestic music, or of exquisite fancy, alternate with its long stretches of argumentative thought; and the light of imagination still plays, however fitfully, over statements of opinion to which constant repetition has given a suggestion of commonplace. but the revision of the work caused him unusual trouble. the subjects he had chosen strained his powers of exposition; and i think he often tried to remedy by mere verbal correction, what was a defect in the logical arrangement of his ideas. they would slide into each other where a visible dividing line was required. the last stage of his life was now at hand; and the vivid return of fancy to his boyhood's literary loves was in pathetic, perhaps not quite accidental, coincidence with the fact. it will be well to pause at this beginning of his decline, and recall so far as possible the image of the man who lived, and worked, and loved, and was loved among us, during that brief old age, and the lengthened period of level strength which had preceded it. the record already given of his life and work supplies the outline of the picture; but a few more personal details are required for its completion. chapter constancy to habit--optimism--belief in providence--political opinions--his friendships--reverence for genius--attitude towards his public--attitude towards his work--habits of work--his reading--conversational powers--impulsiveness and reserve--nervous peculiarities--his benevolence--his attitude towards women. when mr. browning wrote to miss haworth, in the july of , he had said: 'i shall still grow, i hope; but my root is taken, and remains.' he was then alluding to a special offshoot of feeling and association, on the permanence of which it is not now necessary to dwell; but it is certain that he continued growing up to a late age, and that the development was only limited by those general roots, those fixed conditions of his being, which had predetermined its form. this progressive intellectual vitality is amply represented in his works; it also reveals itself in his letters in so far as i have been allowed to publish them. i only refer to it to give emphasis to a contrasted or corresponding characteristic: his aversion to every thought of change. i have spoken of his constancy to all degrees of friendship and love. what he loved once he loved always, from the dearest man or woman to whom his allegiance had been given, to the humblest piece of furniture which had served him. it was equally true that what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing. the devotion to habits of feeling extended to habits of life; and although the lower constancy generally served the purposes of the higher, it also sometimes clashed with them. it conspired with his ready kindness of heart to make him subject to circumstances which at first appealed to him through that kindness, but lay really beyond its scope. this statement, it is true, can only fully apply to the latter part of his life. his powers of reaction must originally have been stronger, as well as freer from the paralysis of conflicting motive and interest. the marked shrinking from effort in any untried direction, which was often another name for his stability, could scarcely have coexisted with the fresher and more curious interest in men and things; we know indeed from recorded facts that it was a feeling of later growth; and it visibly increased with the periodical nervous exhaustion of his advancing years. i am convinced, nevertheless, that, when the restiveness of boyhood had passed away, mr. browning's strength was always more passive than active; that he habitually made the best of external conditions rather than tried to change them. he was a 'fighter' only by the brain. and on this point, though on this only, his work is misleading. the acquiescent tendency arose in some degree from two equally prominent characteristics of mr. browning's nature: his optimism, and his belief in direct providence; and these again represented a condition of mind which was in certain respects a quality, but must in others be recognized as a defect. it disposed him too much to make a virtue of happiness. it tended also to the ignoring or denying of many incidental possibilities, and many standing problems of human suffering. the first part of this assertion is illustrated by 'the two poets of croisic', in which mr. browning declares that, other conditions being equal, the greater poet will have been he who led the happier life, who most completely--and we must take this in the human as well as religious sense--triumphed over suffering. the second has its proof in the contempt for poetic melancholy which flashes from the supposed utterance of shakespeare in 'at the mermaid'; its negative justification in the whole range of his work. such facts may be hard to reconcile with others already known of mr. browning's nature, or already stated concerning it; but it is in the depths of that nature that the solution of this, as of more than one other anomaly, must be sought. it is true that remembered pain dwelt longer with him than remembered pleasure. it is true that the last great sorrow of his life was long felt and cherished by him as a religion, and that it entered as such into the courage with which he first confronted it. it is no less true that he directly and increasingly cultivated happiness; and that because of certain sufferings which had been connected with them, he would often have refused to live his happiest days again. it seems still harder to associate defective human sympathy with his kind heart and large dramatic imagination, though that very imagination was an important factor in the case. it forbade the collective and mathematical estimate of human suffering, which is so much in favour with modern philanthropy, and so untrue a measure for the individual life; and he indirectly condemns it in 'ferishtah's fancies' in the parable of 'bean stripes'. but his dominant individuality also barred the recognition of any judgment or impression, any thought or feeling, which did not justify itself from his own point of view. the barrier would melt under the influence of a sympathetic mood, as it would stiffen in the atmosphere of disagreement. it would yield, as did in his case so many other things, to continued indirect pressure, whether from his love of justice, the strength of his attachments, or his power of imaginative absorption. but he was bound by the conditions of an essentially creative nature. the subjectiveness, if i may for once use that hackneyed word, had passed out of his work only to root itself more strongly in his life. he was self-centred, as the creative nature must inevitably be. he appeared, for this reason, more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life, though even in the former certain grounds of vicarious feeling remained untouched. the sympathy there displayed was creative and obeyed its own law. that which was demanded from him by reality was responsive, and implied submission to the law of other minds. such intellectual egotism is unconnected with moral selfishness, though it often unconsciously does its work. were it otherwise, i should have passed over in silence this aspect, comprehensive though it is, of mr. browning's character. he was capable of the largest self-sacrifice and of the smallest self-denial; and would exercise either whenever love or duty clearly pointed the way. he would, he believed, cheerfully have done so at the command, however arbitrary, of a higher power; he often spoke of the absence of such injunction, whether to endurance or action, as the great theoretical difficulty of life for those who, like himself, rejected or questioned the dogmatic teachings of christianity. this does not mean that he ignored the traditional moralities which have so largely taken their place. they coincided in great measure with his own instincts; and few occasions could have arisen in which they would not be to him a sufficient guide. i may add, though this is a digression, that he never admitted the right of genius to defy them; when such a right had once been claimed for it in his presence, he rejoined quickly, 'that is an error! _noblesse oblige_.' but he had difficulty in acknowledging any abstract law which did not derive from a higher power; and this fact may have been at once cause and consequence of the special conditions of his own mind. all human or conventional obligation appeals finally to the individual judgment; and in his case this could easily be obscured by the always militant imagination, in regard to any subject in which his feelings were even indirectly concerned. no one saw more justly than he, when the object of vision was general or remote. whatever entered his personal atmosphere encountered a refracting medium in which objects were decomposed, and a succession of details, each held as it were close to the eye, blocked out the larger view. we have seen, on the other hand, that he accepted imperfect knowledge as part of the discipline of experience. it detracted in no sense from his conviction of direct relations with the creator. this was indeed the central fact of his theology, as the absolute individual existence had been the central fact of his metaphysics; and when he described the fatal leap in 'red cotton nightcap country' as a frantic appeal to the higher powers for the 'sign' which the man's religion did not afford, and his nature could not supply, a special dramatic sympathy was at work within him. the third part of the epilogue to 'dramatis personae' represented his own creed; though this was often accentuated in the sense of a more personal privilege, and a perhaps less poetic mystery, than the poem conveys. the evangelical christian and the subjective idealist philosopher were curiously blended in his composition. the transition seems violent from this old-world religion to any system of politics applicable to the present day. they were, nevertheless, closely allied in mr. browning's mind. his politics were, so far as they went, the practical aspect of his religion. their cardinal doctrine was the liberty of individual growth; removal of every barrier of prejudice or convention by which it might still be checked. he had been a radical in youth, and probably in early manhood; he remained, in the truest sense of the word, a liberal; and his position as such was defined in the sonnet prefixed in to mr. andrew reid's essay, 'why i am a liberal', and bearing the same name. its profession of faith did not, however, necessarily bind him to any political party. it separated him from all the newest developments of so-called liberalism. he respected the rights of property. he was a true patriot, hating to see his country plunged into aggressive wars, but tenacious of her position among the empires of the world. he was also a passionate unionist; although the question of our political relations with ireland weighed less with him, as it has done with so many others, than those considerations of law and order, of honesty and humanity, which have been trampled under foot in the name of home rule. it grieved and surprised him to find himself on this subject at issue with so many valued friends; and no pain of lost leadership was ever more angry or more intense, than that which came to him through the defection of a great statesman whom he had honoured and loved, from what he believed to be the right cause. the character of mr. browning's friendships reveals itself in great measure in even a simple outline of his life. his first friends of his own sex were almost exclusively men of letters, by taste if not by profession; the circumstances of his entrance into society made this a matter of course. in later years he associated on cordial terms with men of very various interests and professions; and only writers of conspicuous merit, whether in prose or poetry, attracted him as such. no intercourse was more congenial to him than that of the higher class of english clergymen. he sympathized in their beliefs even when he did not share them. above all he loved their culture; and the love of culture in general, of its old classic forms in particular, was as strong in him as if it had been formed by all the natural and conventional associations of a university career. he had hearty friends and appreciators among the dignitaries of the church--successive archbishops and bishops, deans of westminster and st. paul's. they all knew the value of the great freelance who fought like the gods of old with the regular army. no name, however, has been mentioned in the poet's family more frequently or with more affection than that of the rev. j. d. w. williams, vicar of bottisham in cambridgeshire. the mutual acquaintance, which was made through mr. browning's brother-in-law, mr. george moulton-barrett, was prepared by mr. williams' great love for his poems, of which he translated many into latin and greek; but i am convinced that mr. browning's delight in his friend's classical attainments was quite as great as his gratification in the tribute he himself derived from them. his love of genius was a worship: and in this we must include his whole life. nor was it, as this feeling so often is, exclusively exercised upon the past. i do not suppose his more eminent contemporaries ever quite knew how generous his enthusiasm for them had been, how free from any under-current of envy, or impulse to avoidable criticism. he could not endure even just censure of one whom he believed, or had believed to be great. i have seen him wince under it, though no third person was present, and heard him answer, 'don't! don't!' as if physical pain were being inflicted on him. in the early days he would make his friend, m. de monclar, draw for him from memory the likenesses of famous writers whom he had known in paris; the sketches thus made of george sand and victor hugo are still in the poet's family. a still more striking and very touching incident refers to one of the winters, probably the second, which he spent in paris. he was one day walking with little pen, when beranger came in sight, and he bade the child 'run up to' or 'run past that gentleman, and put his hand for a moment upon him.' this was a great man, he afterwards explained, and he wished his son to be able by-and-by to say that if he had not known, he had at all events touched him. scientific genius ranked with him only second to the poetical. mr. browning's delicate professional sympathies justified some sensitiveness on his own account; but he was, i am convinced, as free from this quality as a man with a poet-nature could possibly be. it may seem hazardous to conjecture how serious criticism would have affected him. few men so much 'reviewed' have experienced so little. he was by turns derided or ignored, enthusiastically praised, zealously analyzed and interpreted: but the independent judgment which could embrace at once the quality of his mind and its defects, is almost absent--has been so at all events during later years--from the volumes which have been written about him. i am convinced, nevertheless, that he would have accepted serious, even adverse criticism, if it had borne the impress of unbiassed thought and genuine sincerity. it could not be otherwise with one in whom the power of reverence was so strongly marked. he asked but one thing of his reviewers, as he asked but one thing of his larger public. the first demand is indicated in a letter to mrs. frank hill, of january , . dear mrs. hill,--could you befriend me? the 'century' prints a little insignificance of mine--an impromptu sonnet--but prints it _correctly_. the 'pall mall' pleases to extract it--and produces what i enclose: one line left out, and a note of admiration (!) turned into an i, and a superfluous 'the' stuck in--all these blunders with the correctly printed text before it! so does the charge of unintelligibility attach itself to your poor friend--who can kick nobody. robert browning. the carelessness often shown in the most friendly quotation could hardly be absent from that which was intended to support a hostile view; and the only injustice of which he ever complained, was what he spoke of as falsely condemning him out of his own mouth. he used to say: 'if a critic declares that any poem of mine is unintelligible, the reader may go to it and judge for himself; but, if it is made to appear unintelligible by a passage extracted from it and distorted by misprints, i have no redress.' he also failed to realize those conditions of thought, and still more of expression, which made him often on first reading difficult to understand; and as the younger generation of his admirers often deny those difficulties where they exist, as emphatically as their grandfathers proclaimed them where they did not, public opinion gave him little help in the matter. the second (unspoken) request was in some sense an antithesis to the first. mr. browning desired to be read accurately but not literally. he deprecated the constant habit of reading him into his work; whether in search of the personal meaning of a given passage or poem, or in the light of a foregone conclusion as to what that meaning must be. the latter process was that generally preferred, because the individual mind naturally seeks its own reflection in the poet's work, as it does in the facts of nature. it was stimulated by the investigations of the browning societies, and by the partial familiarity with his actual life which constantly supplied tempting, if untrustworthy clues. it grew out of the strong personal as well as literary interest which he inspired. but the tendency to listen in his work for a single recurrent note always struck him as analogous to the inspection of a picture gallery with eyes blind to every colour but one; and the act of sympathy often involved in this mode of judgment was neutralized for him by the limitation of his genius which it presupposed. his general objection to being identified with his works is set forth in 'at the mermaid', and other poems of the same volume, in which it takes the form of a rather captious protest against inferring from the poet any habit or quality of the man; and where also, under the impulse of the dramatic mood, he enforces the lesson by saying more than he can possibly mean. his readers might object that his human personality was so often plainly revealed in his poetic utterance (whether or not that of shakespeare was), and so often also avowed by it, that the line which divided them became impossible to draw. but he again would have rejoined that the poet could never express himself with any large freedom, unless a fiction of impersonality were granted to him. he might also have alleged, he often did allege, that in his case the fiction would hold a great deal of truth; since, except in the rarest cases, the very fact of poetic, above all of dramatic reproduction, detracts from the reality of the thought or feeling reproduced. it introduces the alloy of fancy without which the fixed outlines of even living experience cannot be welded into poetic form. he claimed, in short, that in judging of his work, one should allow for the action in it of the constructive imagination, in the exercise of which all deeper poetry consists. the form of literalism, which showed itself in seeking historical authority for every character or incident which he employed by way of illustration, was especially irritating to him. i may (as indeed i must) concede this much, without impugning either the pleasure or the gratitude with which he recognized the increasing interest in his poems, and, if sometimes exhibited in a mistaken form, the growing appreciation of them. there was another and more striking peculiarity in mr. browning's attitude towards his works: his constant conviction that the latest must be the best, because the outcome of the fullest mental experience, and of the longest practice in his art. he was keenly alive to the necessary failings of youthful literary production; he also practically denied to it that quality which so often places it at an advantage over that, not indeed of more mature manhood, but at all events of advancing age. there was much in his own experience to blind him to the natural effects of time; it had been a prolonged triumph over them. but the delusion, in so far as it was one, lay deeper than the testimony of such experience, and would i think have survived it. it was the essence of his belief that the mind is superior to physical change; that it may be helped or hindered by its temporary alliance with the body, but will none the less outstrip it in their joint course; and as intellect was for him the life of poetry, so was the power of poetry independent of bodily progress and bodily decline. this conviction pervaded his life. he learned, though happily very late, to feel age an impediment; he never accepted it as a disqualification. he finished his work very carefully. he had the better right to resent any garbling of it, that this habitually took place through his punctuation, which was always made with the fullest sense of its significance to any but the baldest style, and of its special importance to his own. i have heard him say: 'people accuse me of not taking pains! i take nothing _but_ pains!' and there was indeed a curious contrast between the irresponsible, often strangely unquestioned, impulse to which the substance of each poem was due, and the conscientious labour which he always devoted to its form. the laborious habit must have grown upon him; it was natural that it should do so as thought gained the ascendency over emotion in what he had to say. mrs. browning told mr. val prinsep that her husband 'worked at a great rate;' and this fact probably connected itself with the difficulty he then found in altering the form or wording of any particular phrase; he wrote most frequently under that lyrical inspiration in which the idea and the form are least separable from each other. we know, however, that in the later editions of his old work he always corrected where he could; and if we notice the changed lines in 'paracelsus' or 'sordello', as they appear in the edition of , or the slighter alterations indicated for the last reprint of his works, we are struck by the care evinced in them for greater smoothness of expression, as well as for greater accuracy and force. he produced less rapidly in later life, though he could throw off impromptu verses, whether serious or comical, with the utmost ease. his work was then of a kind which required more deliberation; and other claims had multiplied upon his time and thoughts. he was glad to have accomplished twenty or thirty lines in a morning. after lunch-time, for many years, he avoided, when possible, even answering a note. but he always counted a day lost on which he had not written something; and in those last years on which we have yet to enter, he complained bitterly of the quantity of ephemeral correspondence which kept him back from his proper work. he once wrote, on the occasion of a short illness which confined him to the house, 'all my power of imagination seems gone. i might as well be in bed!' he repeatedly determined to write a poem every day, and once succeeded for a fortnight in doing so. he was then in paris, preparing 'men and women'. 'childe roland' and 'women and roses' were among those produced on this plan; the latter having been suggested by some flowers sent to his wife. the lyrics in 'ferishtah's fancies' were written, i believe, on consecutive days; and the intention renewed itself with his last work, though it cannot have been maintained. he was not as great a reader in later as in earlier years; he had neither time nor available strength to be so if he had wished; and he absorbed almost unconsciously every item which added itself to the sum of general knowledge. books had indeed served for him their most important purpose when they had satisfied the first curiosities of his genius, and enabled it to establish its independence. his mind was made up on the chief subjects of contemporary thought, and what was novel or controversial in its proceeding had no attraction for him. he would read anything, short of an english novel, to a friend whose eyes required this assistance; but such pleasure as he derived from the act was more often sympathetic than spontaneous, even when he had not, as he often had, selected for it a book which he already knew. in the course of his last decade he devoted himself for a short time to the study of spanish and hebrew. the spanish dramatists yielded him a fund of new enjoyment; and he delighted in his power of reading hebrew in its most difficult printed forms. he also tried, but with less result, to improve his knowledge of german. his eyesight defied all obstacles of bad paper and ancient type, and there was anxiety as well as pleasure to those about him in his unfailing confidence in its powers. he never wore spectacles, nor had the least consciousness of requiring them. he would read an old closely printed volume by the waning light of a winter afternoon, positively refusing to use a lamp. indeed his preference of the faintest natural light to the best that could be artificially produced was perhaps the one suggestion of coming change. he used for all purposes a single eye; for the two did not combine in their action, the right serving exclusively for near, the left for distant objects. this was why in walking he often closed the right eye; while it was indispensable to his comfort in reading, not only that the light should come from the right side, but that the left should be shielded from any luminous object, like the fire, which even at the distance of half the length of a room would strike on his field of vision and confuse the near sight. his literary interest became increasingly centred on records of the lives of men and women; especially of such men and women as he had known; he was generally curious to see the newly published biographies, though often disappointed by them. he would also read, even for his amusement, good works of french or italian fiction. his allegiance to balzac remained unshaken, though he was conscious of lengthiness when he read him aloud. this author's deep and hence often poetic realism was, i believe, bound up with his own earliest aspirations towards dramatic art. his manner of reading aloud a story which he already knew was the counterpart of his own method of construction. he would claim his listener's attention for any apparently unimportant fact which had a part to play in it: he would say: 'listen to this description: it will be important. observe this character: you will see a great deal more of him or her.' we know that in his own work nothing was thrown away; no note was struck which did not add its vibration to the general utterance of the poem; and his habitual generosity towards a fellow-worker prompted him to seek and recognize the same quality, even in productions where it was less conspicuous than in his own. the patient reading which he required for himself was justified by that which he always demanded for others; and he claimed it less in his own case for his possible intricacies of thought or style, than for that compactness of living structure in which every detail or group of details was essential to the whole, and in a certain sense contained it. he read few things with so much pleasure as an occasional chapter in the old testament. mr. browning was a brilliant talker; he was admittedly more a talker than a conversationalist. but this quality had nothing in common with self-assertion or love of display. he had too much respect for the acquirements of other men to wish to impose silence on those who were competent to speak; and he had great pleasure in listening to a discussion on any subject in which he was interested, and on which he was not specially informed. he never willingly monopolized the conversation; but when called upon to take a prominent part in it, either with one person or with several, the flow of remembered knowledge and revived mental experience, combined with the ingenuous eagerness to vindicate some point in dispute would often carry him away; while his hearers, nearly as often, allowed him to proceed from absence of any desire to interrupt him. this great mental fertility had been prepared by the wide reading and thorough assimilation of his early days; and it was only at a later, and in certain respects less vigorous period, that its full bearing could be seen. his memory for passing occurrences, even such as had impressed him, became very weak; it was so before he had grown really old; and he would urge this fact in deprecation of any want of kindness or sympathy, which a given act of forgetfulness might seem to involve. he had probably always, in matters touching his own life, the memory of feelings more than that of facts. i think this has been described as a peculiarity of the poet-nature; and though this memory is probably the more tenacious of the two, it is no safe guide to the recovery of facts, still less to that of their order and significance. yet up to the last weeks, even the last conscious days of his life, his remembrance of historical incident, his aptness of literary illustration, never failed him. his dinner-table anecdotes supplied, of course, no measure for this spontaneous reproductive power; yet some weight must be given to the number of years during which he could abound in such stories, and attest their constant appropriateness by not repeating them. this brilliant mental quality had its drawback, on which i have already touched in a rather different connection: the obstacle which it created to even serious and private conversation on any subject on which he was not neutral. feeling, imagination, and the vividness of personal points of view, constantly thwarted the attempt at a dispassionate exchange of ideas. but the balance often righted itself when the excitement of the discussion was at an end; and it would even become apparent that expressions or arguments which he had passed over unheeded, or as it seemed unheard, had stored themselves in his mind and borne fruit there. i think it is mr. sharp who has remarked that mr. browning combined impulsiveness of manner with much real reserve. he was habitually reticent where his deeper feelings were concerned; and the impulsiveness and the reticence were both equally rooted in his poetic and human temperament. the one meant the vital force of his emotions, the other their sensibility. in a smaller or more prosaic nature they must have modified each other. but the partial secretiveness had also occasionally its conscious motives, some unselfish, and some self-regarding; and from this point of view it stood in marked apparent antagonism to the more expansive quality. he never, however, intentionally withheld from others such things as it concerned them to know. his intellectual and religious convictions were open to all who seriously sought them; and if, even on such points, he did not appear communicative, it was because he took more interest in any subject of conversation which did not directly centre in himself. setting aside the delicacies which tend to self-concealment, and for which he had been always more or less conspicuous; excepting also the pride which would co-operate with them, all his inclinations were in the direction of truth; there was no quality which he so much loved and admired. he thought aloud wherever he could trust himself to do so. impulse predominated in all the active manifestations of his nature. the fiery child and the impatient boy had left their traces in the man; and with them the peculiar childlike quality which the man of genius never outgrows, and which, in its mingled waywardness and sweetness, was present in robert browning till almost his dying day. there was also a recurrent touch of hardness, distinct from the comparatively ungenial mood of his earlier years of widowhood; and this, like his reserve, seemed to conflict with his general character, but in reality harmonized with it. it meant, not that feeling was suspended in him, but that it was compressed. it was his natural response to any opposition which his reasonings could not shake nor his will overcome, and which, rightly or not, conveyed to him the sense of being misunderstood. it reacted in pain for others, but it lay with an aching weight on his own heart, and was thrown off in an upheaval of the pent-up kindliness and affection, the moment their true springs were touched. the hardening power in his composition, though fugitive and comparatively seldom displayed, was in fact proportioned to his tenderness; and no one who had not seen him in the revulsion from a hard mood, or the regret for it, knew what that tenderness could be. underlying all the peculiarities of his nature, its strength and its weakness, its exuberance and its reserves, was the nervous excitability of which i have spoken in an earlier chapter. i have heard him say: 'i am nervous to such a degree that i might fancy i could not enter a drawing-room, if i did not know from long experience that i can do it.' he did not desire to conceal this fact, nor need others conceal it for him; since it was only calculated to disarm criticism and to strengthen sympathy. the special vital power which he derived from this organization need not be reaffirmed. it carried also its inevitable disablements. its resources were not always under his own control; and he frequently complained of the lack of presence of mind which would seize him on any conventional emergency not included in the daily social routine. in a real one he was never at fault. he never failed in a sympathetic response or a playful retort; he was always provided with the exact counter requisite in a game of words. in this respect indeed he had all the powers of the conversationalist; and the perfect ease and grace and geniality of his manner on such occasions, arose probably far more from his innate human and social qualities than from even his familiar intercourse with the world. but he could not extemporize a speech. he could not on the spur of the moment string together the more or less set phrases which an after-dinner oration demands. all his friends knew this, and spared him the necessity of refusing. he had once a headache all day, because at a dinner, the night before, a false report had reached him that he was going to be asked to speak. this alone would have sufficed to prevent him from accepting any public post. he confesses the disability in a pretty note to professor knight, written in reference to a recent meeting of the wordsworth society. , warwick crescent, w.: may , ' . my dear professor knight,--i seem ungracious and ungrateful, but am neither; though, now that your festival is over, i wish i could have overcome my scruples and apprehensions. it is hard to say--when kind people press one to 'just speak for a minute'--that the business, so easy to almost anybody, is too bewildering for oneself. ever truly yours, robert browning. a rectorial address need probably not have been extemporized, but it would also have been irksome to him to prepare. he was not accustomed to uttering himself in prose except within the limits, and under the incitements, of private correspondence. the ceremonial publicity attaching to all official proceedings would also have inevitably been a trial to him. he did at one of the wordsworth society meetings speak a sentence from the chair, in the absence of the appointed chairman, who had not yet arrived; and when he had received his degree from the university of edinburgh he was persuaded to say a few words to the assembled students, in which i believe he thanked them for their warm welcome; but such exceptions only proved the rule. we cannot doubt that the excited stream of talk which sometimes flowed from him was, in the given conditions of mind and imagination, due to a nervous impulse which he could not always restrain; and that the effusiveness of manner with which he greeted alike old friends and new, arose also from a momentary want of self-possession. we may admit this the more readily that in both cases it was allied to real kindness of intention, above all in the latter, where the fear of seeming cold towards even a friend's friend, strove increasingly with the defective memory for names and faces which were not quite familiar to him. he was also profoundly averse to the idea of posing as a man of superior gifts; having indeed, in regard to social intercourse, as little of the fastidiousness of genius as of its bohemianism. he, therefore, made it a rule, from the moment he took his place as a celebrity in the london world, to exert himself for the amusement of his fellow-guests at a dinner-table, whether their own mental resources were great or small; and this gave rise to a frequent effort at conversation, which converted itself into a habit, and ended by carrying him away. this at least was his own conviction in the matter. the loud voice, which so many persons must have learned to think habitual with him, bore also traces of this half-unconscious nervous stimulation.* it was natural to him in anger or excitement, but did not express his gentler or more equable states of feeling; and when he read to others on a subject which moved him, his utterance often subsided into a tremulous softness which left it scarcely audible. * miss browning reminds me that loud speaking had become natural to him through the deafness of several of his intimate friends: landor, kirkup, barry cornwall, and previously his uncle reuben, whose hearing had been impaired in early life by a blow from a cricket ball. this fact necessarily modifies my impression of the case, but does not quite destroy it. the mental conditions under which his powers of sympathy were exercised imposed no limits on his spontaneous human kindness. this characteristic benevolence, or power of love, is not fully represented in mr. browning's works; it is certainly not prominent in those of the later period, during which it found the widest scope in his life; but he has in some sense given its measure in what was intended as an illustration of the opposite quality. he tells us, in 'fifine at the fair', that while the best strength of women is to be found in their love, the best product of a man is only yielded to hate. it is the 'indignant wine' which has been wrung from the grape plant by its external mutilation. he could depict it dramatically in more malignant forms of emotion; but he could only think of it personally as the reaction of a nobler feeling which has been gratuitously outraged or repressed. he more directly, and still more truly, described himself when he said at about the same time, 'i have never at any period of my life been deaf to an appeal made to me in the name of love.' he was referring to an experience of many years before, in which he had even yielded his better judgment to such an appeal; and it was love in the larger sense for which the concession had been claimed. it was impossible that so genuine a poet, and so real a man, should be otherwise than sensitive to the varied forms of feminine attraction. he avowedly preferred the society of women to that of men; they were, as i have already said, his habitual confidants, and, evidently, his most frequent correspondents; and though he could have dispensed with woman friends as he dispensed with many other things--though he most often won them without knowing it--his frank interest in their sex, and the often caressing kindness of manner in which it was revealed, might justly be interpreted by individual women into a conscious appeal to their sympathy. it was therefore doubly remarkable that on the ground of benevolence, he scarcely discriminated between the claim on him of a woman, and that of a man; and his attitude towards women was in this respect so distinctive as to merit some words of notice. it was large, generous, and unconventional; but, for that very reason, it was not, in the received sense of the word, chivalrous. chivalry proceeds on the assumption that women not only cannot, but should not, take care of themselves in any active struggle with life; mr. browning had no theoretical objection to a woman's taking care of herself. he saw no reason why, if she was hit, she should not hit back again, or even why, if she hit, she should not receive an answering blow. he responded swiftly to every feminine appeal to his kindness or his protection, whether arising from physical weakness or any other obvious cause of helplessness or suffering; but the appeal in such cases lay first to his humanity, and only in second order to his consideration of sex. he would have had a man flogged who beat his wife; he would have had one flogged who ill-used a child--or an animal: he was notedly opposed to any sweeping principle or practice of vivisection. but he never quite understood that the strongest women are weak, or at all events vulnerable, in the very fact of their sex, through the minor traditions and conventions with which society justly, indeed necessarily, surrounds them. still less did he understand those real, if impalpable, differences between men and women which correspond to the difference of position. he admitted the broad distinctions which have become proverbial, and are therefore only a rough measure of the truth. he could say on occasion: 'you ought to _be_ better; you are a woman; i ought to _know_ better; i am a man.' but he had had too large an experience of human nature to attach permanent weight to such generalizations; and they found certainly no expression in his works. scarcely an instance of a conventional, or so-called man's woman, occurs in their whole range. excepting perhaps the speaker in 'a woman's last word', 'pompilia' and 'mildred' are the nearest approach to it; and in both of these we find qualities of imagination or thought which place them outside the conventional type. he instinctively judged women, both morally and intellectually, by the same standards as men; and when confronted by some divergence of thought or feeling, which meant, in the woman's case, neither quality nor defect in any strict sense of the word, but simply a nature trained to different points of view, an element of perplexity entered into his probable opposition. when the difference presented itself in a neutral aspect, it affected him like the casual peculiarities of a family or a group, or a casual disagreement between things of the same kind. he would say to a woman friend: 'you women are so different from men!' in the tone in which he might have said, 'you irish, or you scotch, are so different from englishmen;' or again, 'it is impossible for a man to judge how a woman would act in such or such a case; you are so different;' the case being sometimes one in which it would be inconceivable to a normal woman, and therefore to the generality of men, that she should act in any but one way. the vague sense of mystery with which the poet's mind usually invests a being of the opposite sex, had thus often in him its counterpart in a puzzled dramatic curiosity which constituted an equal ground of interest. this virtual admission of equality between the sexes, combined with his liberal principles to dispose him favourably towards the movement for female emancipation. he approved of everything that had been done for the higher instruction of women, and would, not very long ago, have supported their admission to the franchise. but he was so much displeased by the more recent action of some of the lady advocates of women's rights, that, during the last year of his life, after various modifications of opinion, he frankly pledged himself to the opposite view. he had even visions of writing a tragedy or drama in support of it. the plot was roughly sketched, and some dialogue composed, though i believe no trace of this remains. it is almost implied by all i have said, that he possessed in every mood the charm of perfect simplicity of manner. on this point he resembled his father. his tastes lay also in the direction of great simplicity of life, though circumstances did not allow of his indulging them to the same extent. it may interest those who never saw him to know that he always dressed as well as the occasion required, and always with great indifference to the subject. in florence he wore loose clothes which were adapted to the climate; in london his coats were cut by a good tailor in whatever was the prevailing fashion; the change was simply with him an incident of the situation. he had also a look of dainty cleanliness which was heightened by the smooth healthy texture of the skin, and in later life by the silvery whiteness of his hair. his best photographic likenesses were those taken by mr. fradelle in , mr. cameron and mr. william grove in and . chapter - marriage of mr. barrett browning--removal to de vere gardens--symptoms of failing strength--new poems; new edition of his works--letters to mr. george bainton, mr. smith, and lady martin--primiero and venice--letters to miss keep--the last year in london--asolo--letters to mrs. fitz-gerald, mrs. skirrow, and mr. g. m. smith. the last years of mr. browning's life were introduced by two auspicious events, in themselves of very unequal importance, but each in its own way significant for his happiness and his health. one was his son's marriage on october , , to miss fannie coddington, of new york, a lady towards whom mr. barrett browning had been strongly attracted when he was a very young man and she little more than a child; the other, his own removal from warwick crescent to de vere gardens, which took place in the previous june. the change of residence had long been with him only a question of opportunity. he was once even in treaty for a piece of ground at kensington, and intended building a house. that in which he had lived for so many years had faults of construction and situation which the lapse of time rendered only more conspicuous; the regent's canal bill had also doomed it to demolition; and when an opening presented itself for securing one in all essentials more suitable, he was glad to seize it, though at the eleventh hour. he had mentally fixed on the new locality in those earlier days in which he still thought his son might eventually settle in london; and it possessed at the same time many advantages for himself. it was warmer and more sheltered than any which he could have found on the north side of the park; and, in that close vicinity to kensington gardens, walking might be contemplated as a pleasure, instead of mere compulsory motion from place to place. it was only too soon apparent that the time had passed when he could reap much benefit from the event; but he became aware from the first moment of his installation in the new home that the conditions of physical life had become more favourable for him. he found an almost pathetic pleasure in completing the internal arrangements of the well-built, commodious house. it seems, on looking back, as if the veil had dropped before his eyes which sometimes shrouds the keenest vision in face of an impending change; and he had imagined, in spite of casual utterances which disclaimed the hope, that a new lease of life was being given to him. he had for several years been preparing for the more roomy dwelling which he would probably some day inhabit; and handsome pieces of old furniture had been stowed away in the house in warwick crescent, pending the occasion for their use. he loved antiquities of this kind, in a manner which sometimes recalled his father's affection for old books; and most of these had been bought in venice, where frequent visits to the noted curiosity-shops had been his one bond of habit with his tourist countrymen in that city. they matched the carved oak and massive gildings and valuable tapestries which had carried something of casa guidi into his first london home. brass lamps that had once hung inside chapels in some catholic church, had long occupied the place of the habitual gaselier; and to these was added in the following year one of silver, also brought from venice--the jewish 'sabbath lamp'. another acquisition, made only a few months, if indeed so long, before he left london for the last time, was that of a set of casts representing the seasons, which were to stand at intervals on brackets in a certain unsightly space on his drawing-room wall; and he had said of these, which i think his son was procuring for him: 'only my four little heads, and then i shall not buy another thing for the house'--in a tone of childlike satisfaction at his completed work. this summer he merely went to st. moritz, where he and his sister were, for the greater part of their stay, again guests of mrs. bloomfield moore. he was determined to give the london winter a fuller trial in the more promising circumstances of his new life, and there was much to be done in de vere gardens after his return. his father's six thousand books, together with those he had himself accumulated, were for the first time to be spread out in their proper array, instead of crowding together in rows, behind and behind each other. the new bookcases, which could stand in the large new study, were waiting to receive them. he did not know until he tried to fulfil it how greatly the task would tax his strength. the library was, i believe, never completely arranged. during this winter of - his friends first perceived that a change had come over him. they did not realize that his life was drawing to a close; it was difficult to do so when so much of the former elasticity remained; when he still proclaimed himself 'quite well' so long as he was not definitely suffering. but he was often suffering; one terrible cold followed another. there was general evidence that he had at last grown old. he, however, made no distinct change in his mode of life. old habits, suspended by his longer imprisonments to the house, were resumed as soon as he was set free. he still dined out; still attended the private view of every, or almost every art exhibition. he kept up his unceasing correspondence--in one or two cases voluntarily added to it; though he would complain day after day that his fingers ached from the number of hours through which he had held his pen. one of the interesting letters of this period was written to mr. george bainton, of coventry, to be used, as that gentleman tells me, in the preparation of a lecture on the 'art of effective written composition'. it confirms the statement i have had occasion to make, that no extraneous influence ever permanently impressed itself on mr. browning's style. , de vere gardens: oct. , ' . dear sir,--i was absent from london when your kind letter reached this house, to which i removed some time ago--hence the delay in acknowledging your kindness and replying, in some degree, to your request. all i can say, however, is this much--and very little--that, by the indulgence of my father and mother, i was allowed to live my own life and choose my own course in it; which, having been the same from the beginning to the end, necessitated a permission to read nearly all sorts of books, in a well-stocked and very miscellaneous library. i had no other direction than my parents' taste for whatever was highest and best in literature; but i found out for myself many forgotten fields which proved the richest of pastures: and, so far as a preference of a particular 'style' is concerned, i believe mine was just the same at first as at last. i cannot name any one author who exclusively influenced me in that respect,--as to the fittest expression of thought--but thought itself had many impulsions from very various sources, a matter not to your present purpose. i repeat, this is very little to say, but all in my power--and it is heartily at your service--if not as of any value, at least as a proof that i gratefully feel your kindness, and am, dear sir yours very truly, robert browning. in december he wrote 'rosny', the first poem in 'asolando', and that which perhaps most displays his old subtle dramatic power; it was followed by 'beatrice signorini' and 'flute-music'. of the 'bad dreams' two or three were also written in london, i think, during that winter. the 'ponte dell' angelo' was imagined during the next autumn in venice. 'white witchcraft' had been suggested in the same summer by a letter from a friend in the channel islands which spoke of the number of toads to be seen there. in the spring of he began revising his works for the last, and now entirely uniform edition, which was issued in monthly volumes, and completed by the july of . important verbal corrections were made in 'the inn album', though not, i think, in many of the later poems; but that in which he found most room for improvement was, very naturally, 'pauline'; and he wrote concerning it to mr. smith the following interesting letter. , de vere gardens, w.: feb. , ' . my dear smith,--when i received the proofs of the st. vol. on friday evening, i made sure of returning them next day--so accurately are they printed. but on looking at that unlucky 'pauline', which i have not touched for half a century, a sudden impulse came over me to take the opportunity of just correcting the most obvious faults of expression, versification and construction,--letting the _thoughts_--such as they are--remain exactly as at first: i have only treated the imperfect expression of these just as i have now and then done for an amateur friend, if he asked me and i liked him enough to do so. not a line is displaced, none added, none taken away. i have just sent it to the printer's with an explanatory word: and told him that he will have less trouble with all the rest of the volumes put together than with this little portion. i expect to return all the rest to-morrow or next day. as for the sketch--the portrait--it admits of no very superior treatment: but, as it is the only one which makes me out youngish,--i should like to know if an artist could not strengthen the thing by a pencil touch or two in a few minutes--improve the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth somewhat. the head too wants improvement: were pen here he could manage it all in a moment. ever truly yours, robert browning. any attempt at modifying the expressed thoughts of his twenty-first year would have been, as he probably felt, a futile tampering with the work of another man; his literary conscience would have forbidden this, if it had been otherwise possible. but he here proves by his own words what i have already asserted, that the power of detail correction either was, or had become by experience, very strong in him. the history of this summer of is partly given in a letter to lady martin. , de vere gardens, w.: aug. , ' . dear lady martin,--the date of your kind letter,--june ,--would affect me indeed, but for the good conscience i retain despite of appearances. so uncertain have i been as to the course we should take,--my sister and myself--when the time came for leaving town, that it seemed as if 'next week' might be the eventful week when all doubts would disappear--perhaps the strange cold weather and interminable rain made it hard to venture from under one's roof even in fancy of being better lodged elsewhere. this very day week it was the old story--cold--then followed the suffocating eight or nine tropical days which forbade any more delay, and we leave to-morrow for a place called primiero, near feltre--where my son and his wife assure us we may be comfortably--and coolly--housed, until we can accompany them to venice, which we may stay at for a short time. you remember our troubles at llangollen about the purchase of a venetian house . . . ? my son, however, nothing daunted, and acting under abler counsels than i was fortunate enough to obtain,* has obtained a still more desirable acquisition, in the shape of the well-known rezzonico palace (that of pope clement th)--and, i believe, is to be congratulated on his bargain. i cannot profess the same interest in this as in the earlier object of his ambition, but am quite satisfied by the evident satisfaction of the 'young people'. so,--by the old law of compensation,--while we may expect pleasant days abroad--our chance is gone of once again enjoying your company in your own lovely vale of llangollen;--had we not been pulled otherwise by the inducements we could not resist,--another term of delightful weeks--each tipped with a sweet starry sunday at the little church leading to the house beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably--this might have been our fortunate lot once again! as it is, perhaps we need more energetic treatment than we should get with you --for both of us are more oppressed than ever by the exigencies of the lengthy season, and require still more bracing air than the gently lulling temperature of wales. may it be doing you, and dear sir theodore, all the good you deserve--throwing in the share due to us, who must forego it! with all love from us both, ever affectionately yours robert browning. * those of mr. alexander malcolm. he did start for italy on the following day, but had become so ill, that he was on the point of postponing his departure. he suffered throughout the journey as he had never suffered on any journey before; and during his first few days at primiero, could only lead the life of an invalid. he rallied, however, as usual, under the potent effects of quiet, fresh air, and sunshine; and fully recovered his normal state before proceeding to venice, where the continued sense of physical health combined with many extraneous circumstances to convert his proposed short stay into a long one. a letter from the mountains, addressed to a lady who had never been abroad, and to whom he sometimes wrote with more descriptive detail than to other friends, gives a touching glimpse of his fresh delight in the beauties of nature, and his tender constant sympathy with the animal creation. primiero: sept. , ' . . . . . . 'the weather continues exquisitely temperate, yet sunny, ever since the clearing thunderstorm of which i must have told you in my last. it is, i am more and more confirmed in believing, the most beautiful place i was ever resident in: far more so than gressoney or even st.-pierre de chartreuse. you would indeed delight in seeing the magnificence of the mountains,--the range on either side, which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold,--i mean what i say. their utterly bare ridges of peaks and crags of all shape, quite naked of verdure, glow like yellow ore; and, at times, there is a silver change, as the sun prevails or not. 'the valley is one green luxuriance on all sides; indian corn, with beans, gourds, and even cabbages, filling up the interstices; and the flowers, though not presenting any novelty to my uninstructed eyes, yet surely more large and purely developed than i remember to have seen elsewhere. for instance, the tiger-lilies in the garden here must be above ten feet high, every bloom faultless, and, what strikes me as peculiar, every leaf on the stalk from bottom to top as perfect as if no insect existed to spoil them by a notch or speck. . . . '. . . did i tell you we had a little captive fox,--the most engaging of little vixens? to my great joy she has broken her chain and escaped, never to be recaptured, i trust. the original wild and untameable nature was to be plainly discerned even in this early stage of the whelp's life: she dug herself, with such baby feet, a huge hole, the use of which was evident, when, one day, she pounced thence on a stray turkey--allured within reach by the fragments of fox's breakfast,--the intruder escaping with the loss of his tail. the creature came back one night to explore the old place of captivity,--ate some food and retired. for myself,--i continue absolutely well: i do not walk much, but for more than amends, am in the open air all day long.' no less striking is a short extract from a letter written in venice to the same friend, miss keep. ca' alvise: oct. , ' . 'every morning at six, i see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which everybody glorifies. my bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of s. giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins.' we feel, as we read these late, and even later words, that the lyric imagination was renewing itself in the incipient dissolution of other powers. it is the browning of 'pippa passes' who speaks in them. he suffered less on the whole during the winter of - . it was already advanced when he returned to england; and the attacks of cold and asthma were either shorter or less frequent. he still maintained throughout the season his old social routine, not omitting his yearly visit, on the anniversary of waterloo, to lord albemarle, its last surviving veteran. he went for some days to oxford during the commemoration week, and had for the first, as also last time, the pleasure of dr. jowett's almost exclusive society at his beloved balliol college. he proceeded with his new volume of poems. a short letter written to professor knight, june , and of which the occasion speaks for itself, fitly closes the labours of his life; for it states his view of the position and function of poetry, in one brief phrase, which might form the text to an exhaustive treatise upon them. , de vere gardens, w.: june , . my dear professor knight,--i am delighted to hear that there is a likelihood of your establishing yourself in glasgow, and illustrating literature as happily as you have expounded philosophy at st. andrews. it is certainly the right order of things: philosophy first, and poetry, which is its highest outcome, afterward--and much harm has been done by reversing the natural process. how capable you are of doing justice to the highest philosophy embodied in poetry, your various studies of wordsworth prove abundantly; and for the sake of both literature and philosophy i wish you success with all my heart. believe me, dear professor knight, yours very truly, robert browning. but he experienced, when the time came, more than his habitual disinclination for leaving home. a distinct shrinking from the fatigue of going to italy now added itself to it; for he had suffered when travelling back in the previous winter, almost as much as on the outward journey, though he attributed the distress to a different cause: his nerves were, he thought, shaken by the wearing discomforts incidental on a broken tooth. he was for the first time painfully sensitive to the vibration of the train. he had told his friends, both in venice and london, that so far as he was able to determine, he would never return to italy. but it was necessary he should go somewhere, and he had no alternative plan. for a short time in this last summer he entertained the idea of a visit to scotland; it had indeed definitely shaped itself in his mind; but an incident, trivial in itself, though he did not think it so, destroyed the first scheme, and it was then practically too late to form another. during the second week in august the weather broke. there could no longer be any question of the northward journey without even a fixed end in view. his son and daughter had taken possession of their new home, the palazzo rezzonico, and were anxious to see him and miss browning there; their wishes naturally had weight. the casting vote in favour of venice was given by a letter from mrs. bronson, proposing asolo as the intermediate stage. she had fitted up for herself a little summer retreat there, and promised that her friends should, if they joined her, be also comfortably installed. the journey was this time propitious. it was performed without imprudent haste, and mr. browning reached asolo unfatigued and to all appearance well. he saw this, his first love among italian cities, at a season of the year more favourable to its beauty than even that of his first visit; yet he must himself have been surprised by the new rapture of admiration which it created in him, and which seemed to grow with his lengthened stay. this state of mind was the more striking, that new symptoms of his physical decline were now becoming apparent, and were in themselves of a depressing kind. he wrote to a friend in england, that the atmosphere of asolo, far from being oppressive, produced in him all the effects of mountain air, and he was conscious of difficulty of breathing whenever he walked up hill. he also suffered, as the season advanced, great inconvenience from cold. the rooms occupied by himself and his sister were both unprovided with fireplaces; and though the daily dinner with mrs. bronson obviated the discomfort of the evenings, there remained still too many hours of the autumnal day in which the impossibility of heating their own little apartment must have made itself unpleasantly felt. the latter drawback would have been averted by the fulfilment of mr. browning's first plan, to be in venice by the beginning of october, and return to the comforts of his own home before the winter had quite set in; but one slight motive for delay succeeded another, till at last a more serious project introduced sufficient ground of detention. he seemed possessed by a strange buoyancy--an almost feverish joy in life, which blunted all sensations of physical distress, or helped him to misinterpret them. when warned against the imprudence of remaining where he knew he suffered from cold, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that his asthmatic tendencies were increased, he would reply that he was growing acclimatized--that he was quite well. and, in a fitful or superficial sense, he must have been so. his letters of that period are one continuous picture, glowing with his impressions of the things which they describe. the same words will repeat themselves as the same subject presents itself to his pen; but the impulse to iteration scarcely ever affects us as mechanical. it seems always a fresh response to some new stimulus to thought or feeling, which he has received. these reach him from every side. it is not only the asolo of this peaceful later time which has opened before him, but the asolo of 'pippa passes' and 'sordello'; that which first stamped itself on his imagination in the echoes of the court life of queen catharine,* and of the barbaric wars of the eccelini. some of his letters dwell especially on these early historical associations: on the strange sense of reopening the ancient chronicle which he had so deeply studied fifty years before. the very phraseology of the old italian text, which i am certain he had never glanced at from that distant time, is audible in an account of the massacre of san zenone, the scene of which he has been visiting. to the same correspondent he says that his two hours' drive to asolo 'seemed to be a dream;' and again, after describing, or, as he thinks, only trying to describe some beautiful feature of the place, 'but it is indescribable!' * catharine cornaro, the dethroned queen of cyprus. a letter addressed to mrs. fitzgerald, october , , is in part a fitting sequel to that which he had written to her from the same spot, eleven years before. '. . . fortunately there is little changed here: my old albergo,--ruinous with earthquake--is down and done with--but few novelties are observable--except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere--to cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. no more pippas--at least of the silk-winding sort! 'but the pretty type is far from extinct. 'autumn is beginning to paint the foliage, but thin it as well; and the sea of fertility all round our height, which a month ago showed pomegranates and figs and chestnuts,--walnuts and apples all rioting together in full glory,--all this is daily disappearing. i say nothing of the olive and the vine. i find the turret rather the worse for careful weeding--the hawks which used to build there have been "shot for food"--and the echo is sadly curtailed of its replies; still, things are the same in the main. shall i ever see them again, when--as i suppose--we leave for venice in a fortnight? . . .' in the midst of this imaginative delight he carried into his walks the old keen habits of observation. he would peer into the hedges for what living things were to be found there. he would whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them. on the th of october he wrote to mrs. skirrow, after some preliminary description: then--such a view over the whole lombard plain; not a site in view, or _approximate_ view at least, without its story. autumn is now painting all the abundance of verdure,--figs, pomegranates, chestnuts, and vines, and i don't know what else,--all in a wonderful confusion,--and now glowing with all the colours of the rainbow. some weeks back, the little town was glorified by the visit of a decent theatrical troop who played in a theatre _in_side the old palace of queen catharine cornaro--utilized also as a prison in which i am informed are at present full five if not six malefactors guilty of stealing grapes, and the like enormities. well, the troop played for a fortnight together exceedingly well--high tragedy and low comedy--and the stage-box which i occupied cost francs. the theatre had been out of use for six years, for we are out of the way and only a baiting-place for a company pushing on to venice. in fine, we shall stay here probably for a week or more,--and then proceed to pen, at the rezzonico; a month there, and then homewards! . . . i delight in finding that the beloved husband and precious friend manages to do without the old yoke about his neck, and enjoys himself as never anybody had a better right to do. i continue to congratulate him on his emancipation and ourselves on a more frequent enjoyment of his company in consequence.* give him my true love; take mine, dearest friend,--and my sister's love to you both goes with it. ever affectionately yours robert browning. * mr. skirrow had just resigned his post of master in chancery. the cry of 'homewards!' now frequently recurs in his letters. we find it in one written a week later to mr. g. m. smith, otherwise very expressive of his latest condition of mind and feeling. asolo, veneto, italia: oct. , ' . my dear smith,--i was indeed delighted to get your letter two days ago-- for there _are_ such accidents as the loss of a parcel, even when it has been despatched from so important a place as this city--for a regular city it is, you must know, with all the rights of one,--older far than rome, being founded by the euganeans who gave their name to the adjoining hills. 'fortified' is was once, assuredly, and the walls still surround it most picturesquely though mainly in utter ruin, and you even overrate the population, which does not now much exceed souls--in the city proper, that is--for the territory below and around contains some , . but we are at the very top of things, garlanded about, as it were, with a narrow line of houses,--some palatial, such as you would be glad to see in london,--and above all towers the old dwelling of queen cornaro, who was forced to exchange her kingdom of cyprus for this pretty but petty dominion where she kept state in a mimic court, with bembo, afterwards cardinal, for her secretary--who has commemorated the fact in his 'asolani' or dialogues inspired by the place: and i do assure you that, after some experience of beautiful sights in italy and elsewhere i know nothing comparable to the view from the queen's tower and palace, still perfect in every respect. whenever you pay pen and his wife the visit you are pledged to, * it will go hard but you spend five hours in a journey to asolo. the one thing i am disappointed in is to find that the silk-cultivation with all the pretty girls who were engaged in it are transported to cornuda and other places,--nearer the railway, i suppose: and to this may be attributed the decrease in the number of inhabitants. the weather when i wrote last _was_ 'blue and blazing--(at noon-day)--' but we share in the general plague of rain,--had a famous storm yesterday: while to-day is blue and sunny as ever. lastly, for your admonition: we _have_ a perfect telegraphic communication; and at the passage above, where i put a * i was interrupted by the arrival of a telegram: thank you all the same for your desire to relieve my anxiety. and now, to our immediate business-- which is only to keep thanking you for your constant goodness, present and future: do with the book just as you will. i fancy it is bigger in bulk than usual. as for the 'proofs'--i go at the end of the month to venice, whither you will please to send whatever is necessary. . . . i shall do well to say as little as possible of my good wishes for you and your family, for it comes to much the same thing as wishing myself prosperity: no matter, my sister's kindest regards shall excuse mine, and i will only add that i am, as ever, affectionately yours robert browning. a general quickening of affectionate impulse seemed part of this last leap in the socket of the dying flame. chapter proposed purchase of land at asolo--venice--letter to mr. g. moulton-barrett--lines in the 'athenaeum'--letter to miss keep--illness--death-- funeral ceremonial at venice--publication of 'asolando'--interment in poets' corner. he had said in writing to mrs. fitzgerald, 'shall i ever see them' (the things he is describing) 'again?' if not then, soon afterwards, he conceived a plan which was to insure his doing so. on a piece of ground belonging to the old castle, stood the shell of a house. the two constituted one property which the municipality of asolo had hitherto refused to sell. it had been a dream of mr. browning's life to possess a dwelling, however small, in some beautiful spot, which should place him beyond the necessity of constantly seeking a new summer resort, and above the alternative of living at an inn, or accepting--as he sometimes feared, abusing--the hospitality of his friends. he was suddenly fascinated by the idea of buying this piece of ground; and, with the efficient help which his son could render during his absence, completing the house, which should be christened 'pippa's tower'. it was evident, he said in one of his letters, that for his few remaining years his summer wanderings must always end in venice. what could he do better than secure for himself this resting-place by the way? his offer of purchase was made through mrs. bronson, to count loredano and other important members of the municipality, and their personal assent to it secured. but the town council was on the eve of re-election; no important business could be transacted by it till after this event; and mr. browning awaited its decision till the end of october at asolo, and again throughout november in venice, without fully understanding the delay. the vote proved favourable; but the night on which it was taken was that of his death. the consent thus given would have been only a first step towards the accomplishment of his wish. it was necessary that it should be ratified by the prefecture of treviso, in the district of which asolo lies; and mr. barrett browning, who had determined to carry on the negotiations, met with subsequent opposition in the higher council. this has now, however, been happily overcome. a comprehensive interest attaches to one more letter of the asolo time. it was addressed to mr. browning's brother-in-law, mr. george moulton-barrett. asolo, veneto: oct. , ' . my dear george,--it was a great pleasure to get your kind letter; though after some delay. we were not in the tyrol this year, but have been for six weeks or more in this little place which strikes me,--as it did fifty years ago, which is something to say, considering that, properly speaking, it was the first spot of italian soil i ever set foot upon-- having proceeded to venice by sea--and thence here. it is an ancient city, older than rome, and the scene of queen catharine cornaro's exile, where she held a mock court, with all its attendants, on a miniature scale; bembo, afterwards cardinal, being her secretary. her palace is still above us all, the old fortifications surround the hill-top, and certain of the houses are stately--though the population is not above , souls: the province contains many more of course. but the immense charm of the surrounding country is indescribable--i have never seen its like--the alps on one side, the asolan mountains all round,--and opposite, the vast lombard plain,--with indications of venice, padua, and the other cities, visible to a good eye on a clear day; while everywhere are sites of battles and sieges of bygone days, described in full by the historians of the middle ages. we have a valued friend here, mrs. bronson, who for years has been our hostess at venice, and now is in possession of a house here (built into the old city wall)--she was induced to choose it through what i have said about the beauties of the place: and through her care and kindness we are comfortably lodged close by. we think of leaving in a week or so for venice--guests of pen and his wife; and after a short stay with them we shall return to london. pen came to see us for a couple of days: i was hardly prepared for his surprise and admiration which quite equalled my own and that of my sister. all is happily well with them--their palazzo excites the wonder of everybody, so great is pen's cleverness, and extemporised architectural knowledge, as apparent in all he has done there; why, _why_ will you not go and see him there? he and his wife are very hospitable and receive many visitors. have i told you that there was a desecrated chapel which he has restored in honour of his mother-- putting up there the inscription by tommaseo now above casa guidi? fannie is all you say,--and most dear and precious to us all. . . . pen's medal to which you refer, is awarded to him in spite of his written renunciation of any sort of wish to contend for a prize. he will now resume painting and sculpture--having been necessarily occupied with the superintendence of his workmen--a matter capitally managed, i am told. for the rest, both sarianna and myself are very well; i have just sent off my new volume of verses for publication. the complete edition of the works of e. b. b. begins in a few days. the second part of this letter is very forcibly written, and, in a certain sense, more important than the first; but i suppress it by the desire of mr. browning's sister and son, and in complete concurrence with their judgment in the matter. it was a systematic defence of the anger aroused in him by a lately published reference to his wife's death; and though its reasonings were unanswerable as applied to the causes of his emotion, they did not touch the manner in which it had been displayed. the incident was one which deserved only to be forgotten; and if an injudicious act had not preserved its memory, no word of mine should recall it. since, however, it has been thought fit to include the 'lines to edward fitzgerald' in a widely circulated bibliography of mr. browning's works,* i owe it to him to say--what i believe is only known to his sister and myself--that there was a moment in which he regretted those lines, and would willingly have withdrawn them. this was the period, unfortunately short, which intervened between his sending them to the 'athenaeum', and their appearance there. when once public opinion had expressed itself upon them in its too extreme forms of sympathy and condemnation, the pugnacity of his mind found support in both, and regret was silenced if not destroyed. in so far as his published words remained open to censure, i may also, without indelicacy, urge one more plea in his behalf. that which to the merely sympathetic observer appeared a subject for disapprobation, perhaps disgust, had affected him with the directness of a sharp physical blow. he spoke of it, and for hours, even days, was known to feel it, as such. the events of that distant past, which he had lived down, though never forgotten, had flashed upon him from the words which so unexpectedly met his eye, in a vividness of remembrance which was reality. 'i felt as if she had died yesterday,' he said some days later to a friend, in half deprecation, half denial, of the too great fierceness of his reaction. he only recovered his balance in striking the counter-blow. that he could be thus affected at an age usually destructive of the more violent emotions, is part of the mystery of those closing days which had already overtaken him. * that contained in mr. sharp's 'life'. a still more recent publication gives the lines in full. by the first of november he was in venice with his son and daughter; and during the three following weeks was apparently well, though a physician whom he met at a dinner party, and to whom he had half jokingly given his pulse to feel, had learned from it that his days were numbered. he wrote to miss keep on the th of the month: '. . . mrs. bronson has bought a house at asolo, and beautified it indeed,--niched as it is in an old tower of the fortifications still partly surrounding the city (for a city it is), and eighteen towers, more or less ruinous, are still discoverable there: it is indeed a delightful place. meantime, to go on,--we came here, and had a pleasant welcome from our hosts--who are truly magnificently lodged in this vast palazzo which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements: the whole is all but complete, decorated,--that is, renewed admirably in all respects. 'what strikes me as most noteworthy is the cheerfulness and comfort of the huge rooms. 'the building is warmed throughout by a furnace and pipes. 'yesterday, on the lido, the heat was hardly endurable: bright sunshine, blue sky,--snow-tipped alps in the distance. no place, i think, ever suited my needs, bodily and intellectual, so well. 'the first are satisfied--i am _quite_ well, every breathing inconvenience gone: and as for the latter, i got through whatever had given me trouble in london. . . .' but it was winter, even in venice, and one day began with an actual fog. he insisted, notwithstanding, on taking his usual walk on the lido. he caught a bronchial cold of which the symptoms were aggravated not only by the asthmatic tendency, but by what proved to be exhaustion of the heart; and believing as usual that his liver alone was at fault, he took little food, and refused wine altogether.* * he always declined food when he was unwell; and maintained that in this respect the instinct of animals was far more just than the idea often prevailing among human beings that a failing appetite should be assisted or coerced. he did not yield to the sense of illness; he did not keep his bed. some feverish energy must have supported him through this avoidance of every measure which might have afforded even temporary strength or relief. on friday, the th, he wrote to a friend in london that he had waited thus long for the final answer from asolo, but would wait no longer. he would start for england, if possible, on the wednesday or thursday of the following week. it was true 'he had caught a cold; he felt sadly asthmatic, scarcely fit to travel; but he hoped for the best, and would write again soon.' he wrote again the following day, declaring himself better. he had been punished, he said, for long-standing neglect of his 'provoking liver'; but a simple medicine, which he had often taken before, had this time also relieved the oppression of his chest; his friend was not to be uneasy about him; 'it was in his nature to get into scrapes of this kind, but he always managed, somehow or other, to extricate himself from them.' he concluded with fresh details of his hopes and plans. in the ensuing night the bronchial distress increased; and in the morning he consented to see his son's physician, dr. cini, whose investigation of the case at once revealed to him its seriousness. the patient had been removed two days before, from the second storey of the house, which the family then inhabited, to an entresol apartment just above the ground-floor, from which he could pass into the dining-room without fatigue. its lower ceilings gave him (erroneously) an impression of greater warmth, and he had imagined himself benefited by the change. a freer circulation of air was now considered imperative, and he was carried to mrs. browning's spacious bedroom, where an open fireplace supplied both warmth and ventilation, and large windows admitted all the sunshine of the grand canal. everything was done for him which professional skill and loving care could do. mrs. browning, assisted by her husband, and by a young lady who was then her guest,* filled the place of the trained nurses until these could arrive; for a few days the impending calamity seemed even to have been averted. the bronchial attack was overcome. mr. browning had once walked from the bed to the sofa; his sister, whose anxiety had perhaps been spared the full knowledge of his state, could send comforting reports to his friends at home. but the enfeebled heart had made its last effort. attacks of faintness set in. special signs of physical strength maintained themselves until within a few hours of the end. on wednesday, december , a consultation took place between dr. cini, dr. da vigna, and dr. minich; and the opinion was then expressed for the first time that recovery, though still possible, was not within the bounds of probability. weakness, however, rapidly gained upon him towards the close of the following day. two hours before midnight of this thursday, december , he breathed his last. * miss evelyn barclay, now mrs. douglas giles. he had been a good patient. he took food and medicine whenever they were offered to him. doctors and nurses became alike warmly interested in him. his favourite among the latter was, i think, the venetian, a widow, margherita fiori, a simple kindly creature who had known much sorrow. to her he said, about five hours before the end, 'i feel much worse. i know now that i must die.' he had shown at intervals a perception, even conviction, of his danger; but the excitement of the brain, caused by exhaustion on the one hand and the necessary stimulants on the other, must have precluded all systematic consciousness of approaching death. he repeatedly assured his family that he was not suffering. a painful and urgent question now presented itself for solution: where should his body find its last rest? he had said to his sister in the foregoing summer, that he wished to be buried wherever he might die: if in england, with his mother; if in france, with his father; if in italy, with his wife. circumstances all pointed to his removal to florence; but a recent decree had prohibited further interment in the english cemetery there, and the town had no power to rescind it. when this was known in venice, that city begged for itself the privilege of retaining the illustrious guest, and rendering him the last honours. for the moment the idea even recommended itself to mr. browning's son. but he felt bound to make a last effort in the direction of the burial at florence; and was about to despatch a telegram, in which he invoked the mediation of lord dufferin, when all difficulties were laid at rest by a message from the dean of westminster, conveying his assent to an interment in the abbey.* he had already telegraphed for information concerning the date of the funeral, with a view to the memorial service, which he intended to hold on the same day. nor would the further honour have remained for even twenty-four hours ungranted, because unasked, but for the belief prevailing among mr. browning's friends that there was no room for its acceptance. * the assent thus conveyed had assumed the form of an offer, and was characterized as such by the dean himself. it was still necessary to provide for the more immediate removal of the body. local custom forbade its retention after the lapse of two days and nights; and only in view of the special circumstances of the case could a short respite be granted to the family. arrangements were therefore at once made for a private service, to be conducted by the british chaplain in one of the great halls of the rezzonico palace; and by two o'clock of the following day, sunday, a large number of visitors and residents had assembled there. the subsequent passage to the mortuary island of san michele had been organized by the city, and was to display so much of the character of a public pageant as the hurried preparation allowed. the chief municipal officers attended the service. when this had been performed, the coffin was carried by eight firemen (pompieri), arrayed in their distinctive uniform, to the massive, highly decorated municipal barge (barca delle pompe funebri) which waited to receive it. it was guarded during the transit by four 'uscieri' in 'gala' dress, two sergeants of the municipal guard, and two of the firemen bearing torches: the remainder of these following in a smaller boat. the barge was towed by a steam launch of the royal italian marine. the chief officers of the city, the family and friends in their separate gondolas, completed the procession. on arriving at san michele, the firemen again received their burden, and bore it to the chapel in which its place had been reserved. when 'pauline' first appeared, the author had received, he never learned from whom, a sprig of laurel enclosed with this quotation from the poem, trust in signs and omens. very beautiful garlands were now piled about his bier, offerings of friendship and affection. conspicuous among these was the ceremonial structure of metallic foliage and porcelain flowers, inscribed 'venezia a roberto browning', which represented the municipality of venice. on the coffin lay one comprehensive symbol of the fulfilled prophecy: a wreath of laurel-leaves which his son had placed there. a final honour was decreed to the great english poet by the city in which he had died; the affixing of a memorial tablet to the outer wall of the rezzonico palace. since these pages were first written, the tablet has been placed. it bears the following inscription: a roberto browning morto in questo palazzo il dicembre venezia pose below this, in the right-hand corner appear two lines selected from his works: open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, 'italy'. nor were these the only expressions of italian respect and sympathy. the municipality of florence sent its message of condolence. asolo, poor in all but memories, itself bore the expenses of a mural tablet for the house which mr. browning had occupied. it is now known that signor crispi would have appealed to parliament to rescind the exclusion from the florentine cemetery, if the motive for doing so had been less promptly removed. mr. browning's own country had indeed opened a way for the reunion of the husband and wife. the idea had rapidly shaped itself in the public mind that, since they might not rest side by side in italy, they should be placed together among the great of their own land; and it was understood that the dean would sanction mrs. browning's interment in the abbey, if a formal application to this end were made to him. but mr. barrett browning could not reconcile himself to the thought of disturbing his mother's grave, so long consecrated to florence by her warm love and by its grateful remembrance; and at the desire of both surviving members of the family the suggestion was set aside. two days after his temporary funeral, privately and at night, all that remained of robert browning was conveyed to the railway station; and thence, by a trusted servant, to england. the family followed within twenty-four hours, having made the necessary preparations for a long absence from venice; and, travelling with the utmost speed, arrived in london on the same day. the house in de vere gardens received its master once more. 'asolando' was published on the day of mr. browning's death. the report of his illness had quickened public interest in the forthcoming work, and his son had the satisfaction of telling him of its already realized success, while he could still receive a warm, if momentary, pleasure from the intelligence. the circumstances of its appearance place it beyond ordinary criticism; they place it beyond even an impartial analysis of its contents. it includes one or two poems to which we would gladly assign a much earlier date; i have been told on good authority that we may do this in regard to one of them. it is difficult to refer the 'epilogue' to a coherent mood of any period of its author's life. it is certain, however, that by far the greater part of the little volume was written in - , and i believe all that is most serious in it was the product of the later year. it possesses for many readers the inspiration of farewell words; for all of us it has their pathos. he was buried in westminster abbey, in poets' corner, on the st of december, . in this tardy act of national recognition england claimed her own. a densely packed, reverent and sympathetic crowd of his countrymen and countrywomen assisted at the consignment of the dead poet to his historic resting place. three verses of mrs. browning's poem, 'the sleep', set to music by dr. bridge, were sung for the first time on this occasion. conclusion a few words must still be said upon that purport and tendency of robert browning's work, which has been defined by a few persons, and felt by very many as his 'message'. the definition has been disputed on the ground of art. we are told by mr. sharp, though in somewhat different words, that the poet, qua poet, cannot deliver a 'message' such as directly addresses itself to the intellectual or moral sense; since his special appeal to us lies not through the substance, but through the form, or presentment, of what he has had to say; since, therefore (by implication), in claiming for it an intellectual--as distinct from an aesthetic--character, we ignore its function as poetry. it is difficult to argue justly, where the question at issue turns practically on the meaning of a word. mr. sharp would, i think, be the first to admit this; and it appears to me that, in the present case, he so formulates his theory as to satisfy his artistic conscience, and yet leave room for the recognition of that intellectual quality so peculiar to mr. browning's verse. but what one member of the aesthetic school may express with a certain reserve is proclaimed unreservedly by many more; and mr. sharp must forgive me, if for the moment i regard him as one of these; and if i oppose his arguments in the words of another poet and critic of poetry, whose claim to the double title is i believe undisputed--mr. roden noel. i quote from an unpublished fragment of a published article on mr. sharp's 'life of browning'. 'browning's message is an integral part of himself as writer; (whether as poet, since we agree that he is a poet, were surely a too curious and vain discussion;) but some of his finest things assuredly are the outcome of certain very definite personal convictions. "the question," mr. sharp says, "is not one of weighty message, but of artistic presentation." there seems to be no true contrast here. "the primary concern of the artist must be with his vehicle of expression"--no--not the primary concern. since the critic adds--(for a poet) "this vehicle is language emotioned to the white heat of rhythmic music by impassioned thought or sensation." exactly--"thought" it may be. now part of this same "thought" in browning is the message. and therefore it is part of his "primary concern". "it is with presentment," says mr. sharp, "that the artist has fundamentally to concern himself." granted: but it must surely be presentment of _something_. . . . i do not understand how to separate the substance from the form in true poetry. . . . if the message be not well delivered, it does not constitute literature. but if it be well delivered, the primary concern of the poet lay with the message after all!' more cogent objection has been taken to the character of the 'message' as judged from a philosophic point of view. it is the expression or exposition of a vivid a priori religious faith confirmed by positive experience; and it reflects as such a double order of thought, in which totally opposite mental activities are often forced into co-operation with each other. mr. sharp says, this time quoting from mr. mortimer ('scottish art review', december ): 'his position in regard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent. he is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. his processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept.' this statement is relatively true. mr. browning's positive reasonings often do end with transcendental conclusions. they also start from transcendental premises. however closely his mind might follow the visible order of experience, he never lost what was for him the consciousness of a supreme eternal will as having existed before it; he never lost the vision of an intelligent first cause, as underlying all minor systems of causation. but such weaknesses as were involved in his logical position are inherent to all the higher forms of natural theology when once it has been erected into a dogma. as maintained by mr. browning, this belief held a saving clause, which removed it from all dogmatic, hence all admissible grounds of controversy: the more definite or concrete conceptions of which it consists possessed no finality for even his own mind; they represented for him an absolute truth in contingent relations to it. no one felt more strongly than he the contradictions involved in any conceivable system of divine creation and government. no one knew better that every act and motive which we attribute to a supreme being is a virtual negation of his existence. he believed nevertheless that such a being exists; and he accepted his reflection in the mirror of the human consciousness, as a necessarily false image, but one which bears witness to the truth. his works rarely indicate this condition of feeling; it was not often apparent in his conversation. the faith which he had contingently accepted became absolute for him from all practical points of view; it became subject to all the conditions of his humanity. on the ground of abstract logic he was always ready to disavow it; the transcendental imagination and the acknowledged limits of human reason claimed the last word in its behalf. this philosophy of religion is distinctly suggested in the fifth parable of 'ferishtah's fancies'. but even in defending what remains, from the most widely accepted point of view, the validity of mr. browning's 'message', we concede the fact that it is most powerful when conveyed in its least explicit form; for then alone does it bear, with the full weight of his poetic utterance, on the minds to which it is addressed. his challenge to faith and hope imposes itself far less through any intellectual plea which he can advance in its support, than through the unconscious testimony of all creative genius to the marvel of conscious life; through the passionate affirmation of his poetic and human nature, not only of the goodness and the beauty of that life, but of its reality and its persistence. we are told by mr. sharp that a new star appeared in orion on the night on which robert browning died. the alleged fact is disproved by the statement of the astronomer royal, to whom it has been submitted; but it would have been a beautiful symbol of translation, such as affectionate fancy might gladly cherish if it were true. it is indeed true that on that twelfth of december, a vivid centre of light and warmth was extinguished upon our earth. the clouded brightness of many lives bears witness to the poet spirit which has departed, the glowing human presence which has passed away. we mourn the poet whom we have lost far less than we regret the man: for he had done his appointed work; and that work remains to us. but the two beings were in truth inseparable. the man is always present in the poet; the poet was dominant in the man. this fact can never be absent from our loving remembrance of him. no just estimate of his life and character will fail to give it weight. index [the index is included only as a rough guide to what is in this book. the numbers in brackets indicate the number of index entries: as each reference, short or long, is counted as one, the numbers may be misleading if observed too closely.] abel, mr. (musician) [ ] adams, mrs. sarah flower [ ] albemarle, lord [ ] alford, lady marian [ ] allingham, mr. william [ ] american appreciation of browning [ ] ampere, m. [ ] ancona [ ] anderson, mr. (actor) [ ] arnold, matthew [ ] arnould, mr. (afterwards sir joseph) [ ] ashburton, lady [ ] asolo [ ] associated societies of edinburgh, the [ ] athenaeum, the (review of 'pauline') [ ] audierne (finisterre, brittany) [ ] azeglio, massimo d' [ ] balzac's works, the brownings' admiration of [ ] barrett, miss arabel [ ] barrett, miss henrietta (afterwards mrs. surtees cook [altham]) [ ] barrett, mr. (the poet's father-in-law) [ ] barrett, mr. laurence (actor) [ ] bartoli's 'de' simboli trasportati al morale' [ ] benckhausen, mr. (russian consul-general) [ ] benzon, mr. ernest [ ] beranger, m. [ ] berdoe, dr. edward: his paper on 'paracelsus, the reformer of medicine' [ ] biarritz [ ] blackwood's magazine (on 'a blot in the 'scutcheon') [ ] blagden, miss isa [ ] blundell, dr. (physician) [ ] boyle, dean (salisbury) [ ] boyle, miss (niece of the earl of cork) [ ] bridell-fox, mrs. [ ] bronson, mrs. arthur [ ] browning, robert (grandfather of the poet): account of his life, two marriages, and two families [ ] browning, mrs. (step-grandmother of the poet) [ ] browning, robert (father of the poet): marriage; clerk in the bank of england; comparison between him and his son; scholarly and artistic tastes; simplicity and genuineness of his character; his strong health; mr. locker-lampson's account of him; his religious opinions; renewed relations with his father's widow and second family; death [ ] browning, mrs. (the poet's mother): her family; her nervous temperament transmitted to her son; her death [ ] browning, mr. reuben (the poet's uncle), (incl. lord beaconsfield's appreciation of his latinity) [ ] browning, mr. william shergold (the poet's uncle), (incl. his literary work) [ ] browning, miss jemima (the poet's aunt) [ ] browning, miss (the poet's sister), (incl. comes to live with her brother) [ ] browning, robert: - --the notion of his jewish extraction disproved; his family anciently established in dorsetshire; his carelessness as to genealogical record; account of his grandfather's life and second marriage; his father's unhappy youth; his paternal grandmother; his father's position; comparison of father and son; the father's use of grotesque rhymes in teaching him; qualities he inherited from his mother; weak points in regard to health throughout his life; characteristics in early childhood; great quickness in learning; an amusing prank; passion for his mother; fondness for animals; his collections; experiences of school life; extensive reading in his father's library; early acquaintance with old books; his early attempts in verse; spurious poems in circulation; 'incondita', the production of the twelve-year-old poet; introduction to mr. fox; his boyish love and lasting affection for miss flower; first acquaintance with shelley's and keats' works; his admiration for shelley; home education under masters, his manly accomplishments; his studies chiefly literary; love of home; associates of his youth: arnould and domett; the silverthornes; his choice of poetry as a profession; other possible professions considered; admiration for good acting; his father's support in his literary career; reads and digests johnson's dictionary by way of preparation [ ] browning, robert: - --publication of 'pauline'; correspondence with mr. fox; the poet's later opinion of it; characteristics of the poem; mr. fox's review of it; other notices; browning's visit to russia; contributions to the 'monthly repository': his first sonnet; the 'trifler' (amateur periodical); a comic defence of debt; preparing to publish 'paracelsus'; friendship with count de ripert-monclar; browning's treatment of 'paracelsus'; the original preface; john forster's article on it in the 'examiner' [ ] browning, robert: - --removal of the family to hatcham; renewed intimacy with his grandfather's second family; friendly relations with carlyle; recognition by men of the day; introduction to macready; first meeting with forster; miss euphrasia fanny haworth; at the 'ion' supper; prospects of 'strafford'; its production and reception; a personal description of him at this period; mr. john robertson and the 'westminster review' [ ] browning, robert: - --first italian journey; a striking experience of the voyage; preparations for writing other tragedies; meeting with mr. john kenyon; appearance of 'sordello'; mental developments; 'pippa passes'; alfred domett on the critics; 'bells and pomegranates'; explanation of its title. list of the poems; 'a blot in the 'scutcheon', written for macready; browning's later account and discussion of the breach between him and macready; 'colombe's birthday'; other dramas; the 'dramatic lyrics'; 'the lost leader'; browning's life before his second italian journey; in naples; visit to mr. trelawney at leghorn [ ] browning, robert: - --introduction to miss barrett; his admiration for her poetry; his proposal to her; reasons for concealing the engagement; their marriage; journey to italy; life at pisa; florence; browning's request for appointment on a british mission to the vatican; settling in casa guidi; fano and ancona; 'a blot in the 'scutcheon' at sadler's wells; birth of browning's son, and death of his mother; wanderings in italy: the baths of lucca; venice; friendship with margaret fuller ossoli; winter in paris; carlyle; george sand. close friendship with m. joseph milsand; milsand's appreciation of browning; new edition of browning's poems; 'christmas eve and easter day'; the essay on shelley; summer in london; introduction to dante g. rossetti; again in florence; production of 'colombe's birthday' ( ); again at lucca, mr. and mrs. w. story; first winter in rome; the kembles; again in london ( ): tennyson, ruskin [ ] browning, robert: - --publication of 'men and women'; 'karshook'; 'two in the campagna'; another winter in paris: lady elgin; legacies to the brownings from mr. kenyon; mr. browning's little son; a carnival masquerade; spiritualism; 'sludge the medium'; count ginnasi's clairvoyance; at siena; walter savage landor; illness of mrs. browning; american appreciation of browning's works; his social life in rome; last winter in rome; madame du quaire; mrs. browning's illness and death; the comet of [ ] browning, robert: - --miss blagden's helpful sympathy; journey to england; feeling in regard to funeral ceremonies; established in london with his son; miss arabel barrett; visit to biarritz; origin of 'the ring and the book'; his views as to the publication of letters; new edition of his works, selection of poems. residence at pornic; a meeting at mr. f. palgrave's; his literary position in ; his own estimate of it; death of his father; with his sister at le croisic; academic honours: letter to the master of balliol (dr. scott); curious circumstance connected with the death of miss a. barrett; at audierne; the uniform edition of his works; publication of 'the ring and the book'; inspiration of pompilia [ ] browning, robert: - --'helen's tower'; at st.-aubin; escape from france during the war ( ); publication of 'balaustion's adventure' and 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau'; 'herve riel' sold for the benefit of french sufferers by the war; 'fifine at the fair'; mistaken theories of that work; 'red cotton nightcap country' [ ] browning, robert: - --his manner of life in london; his love of music; friendship with miss egerton-smith; summers spent at mers, villers, isle of arran, and la saisiaz; 'aristophanes' apology'; 'pacchiarotto', 'the inn album', the translation of the 'agamemnon'; description of a visit to oxford; visit to cambridge; offered the rectorships of the universities of glasgow and st. andrews; description of la saisiaz; sudden death of miss egerton-smith; the poem 'la saisiaz': browning's position towards christianity; 'the two poets of croisic', and selections from his works [ ] browning, robert: - --he revisits italy; spluegen; asolo; venice; favourite alpine retreats; friendly relations with mrs. arthur bronson; life in venice; a tragedy at saint-pierre; the first series of 'dramatic idyls'; the second series, 'jocoseria', and 'ferishtah's fancies' [ ] browning, robert: - --the browning society; browning's attitude in regard to it; similar societies in england and america; wide diffusion of browning's works in america; lines for the gravestone of mr. levi thaxter; president of the new shakspere society, and member of the wordsworth society; honorary president of the associated societies of edinburgh; appreciation of his works in italy; sonnet to goldoni; attempt to purchase the palazzo manzoni, venice; saint-moritz; mrs. bloomfield moore; at llangollen; loss of old friends; foreign correspondent to the royal academy; publication of 'parleyings' [ ] browning, robert: his character--constancy in friendship; optimism and belief in a direct providence; political principles; character of his friendships; attitude towards his reviewers and his readers; attitude towards his works; his method of work; study of spanish, hebrew, and german; conversational powers and the stores of his memory; nervous peculiarities; his innate kindliness; attitude towards women; final views on the women's suffrage question [ ] browning, robert: his last years--marriage of his son; his change of abode; symptoms of declining strength; new poems, and revision of the old; journey to italy: primiero and venice; last winter in england: visit to balliol college; last visit to italy: asolo once more; proposed purchase of land there; the 'lines to edward fitzgerald'; with his son at palazzo rezzonico; last illness; death; funeral honours in italy; 'asolando' published on the day of his death; his burial in westminster abbey; the purport and tendency of his work [ ] browning, robert: letters to--bainton, mr. george (coventry) [ ] blagden, miss isa [ ] fitz-gerald, mrs. [ ] flower, miss [ ] fox, mr. [ ] haworth, miss e. f. [ ] hickey, miss e. h. [ ] hill, mr. frank (editor of the 'daily news') [ ] hill, mrs. frank [ ] keep, miss [ ] knight, professor (st. andrews) [ ] lee, miss (maidstone) [ ] leighton, mr. (afterwards sir frederic) [ ] martin, mrs. theodore (afterwards lady) [ ] moulton-barrett, mr. g. [ ] quaire, madame du [ ] robertson, mr. john (editor of 'westminster review', ) [ ] scott, rev. dr. [ ] skirrow, mrs. charles [ ] smith, mr. g. m. [ ] browning, robert: works of--'a blot in the 'scutcheon' [ ] 'a death in the desert' [ ] 'agamemnon' [ ] 'andrea del sarto' [ ] 'aristophanes' apology' [ ] 'artemis prologuizes' [ ] 'asolando' [ ] 'at the mermaid' [ ] 'a woman's last word' [ ] 'bad dreams' [ ] 'balaustion's adventure' [ ] 'bean stripes' [ ] 'beatrice signorini' [ ] 'bells and pomegranates' (incl. meaning of the title, and list of the dramas and poems) [ ] 'ben karshook's wisdom' [ ] 'bishop blougram' [ ] 'by the fireside' [ ] 'childe roland' [ ] 'christmas eve and easter day' [ ] 'cleon' [ ] 'colombe's birthday' [ ] 'crescentius, the pope's legate' [ ] 'cristina' [ ] 'dramatic idyls' [ ] 'dramatic lyrics' [ ] 'dramatis personae' [ ] 'essay on shelley' [ ] 'ferishtah's fancies' [ ] 'fifine at the fair' [ ] 'flute-music' [ ] 'goldoni', sonnet to [ ] 'helen's tower' (sonnet) [ ] 'herve riel' (ballad) [ ] 'home thoughts from the sea' [ ] 'how they brought the good news from ghent to aix' [ ] 'in a balcony' [ ] 'in a gondola' [ ] 'ivan ivanovitch' [ ] 'james lee's wife' [ ] 'jocoseria' [ ] 'johannes agricola in meditation' [ ] 'king victor and king charles' [ ] 'la saisiaz' [ ] 'luria' [ ] 'madhouse cells' [ ] 'martin relph' [ ] 'may and death' [ ] 'men and women' [ ] 'ned bratts' [ ] 'numpholeptos' [ ] 'one word more' [ ] 'pacchiarotto' [ ] 'paracelsus' [ ] 'parleyings' [ ] 'pauline' [ ] 'pippa passes' (incl. the preface to) [ ] 'ponte dell' angelo' [ ] 'porphyria's lover' [ ] 'prince hohenstiel-schwangau' [ ] 'red cotton nightcap country' [ ] 'rosny' [ ] 'saint martin's summer' [ ] 'saul' [ ] 'sludge the medium' [ ] 'sordello' [ ] 'strafford' [ ] 'the epistle of karshish' [ ] 'the flight of the duchess' [ ] 'the inn album' [ ] 'the lost leader' [ ] 'the pied piper of hamelin' [ ] 'the return of the druses' [ ] 'the ring and the book' [ ] 'the two poets of croisic' [ ] 'the worst of it' [ ] 'two in the campagna' [ ] 'white witchcraft' [ ] 'why i am a liberal' (sonnet) [ ] 'women and roses' [ ] browning, mrs. (the poet's wife: elizabeth barrett moulton-barrett): browning's introduction to her; her ill health; the reasons for their secret marriage; causes of her ill health; happiness of her married life; estrangement from her father; her visit to mrs. theodore martin; 'aurora leigh': her methods of work; a legacy from mr. kenyon; her feeling about spiritualism; success of 'aurora leigh'; her sister's illness and death; her own death; proposed reinterment in westminster abbey [ ] browning, mrs.: extracts from her letters--on her husband's devotion; life in pisa, and on french literature; vallombrosa; their acquaintances in florence; their dwelling in piazza pitti; 'father prout's' cure for a sore throat; apartments in the casa guidi; visits to fano and ancona; phelps's production of 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'; birth of her son; the effect of his mother's death on her husband; wanderings in northern italy; the neighbourhood of lucca; venice; life in paris ( ); esteem for her husband's family; description of george sand; the personal appearance of that lady; her impression of m. joseph milsand; the first performance of 'colombe's birthday' ( ); rome: death in the story family; mrs. sartoris and the kembles; society in rome; a visit to mr. ruskin; about 'penini'; description of a carnival masquerade (florence, ); impressions of landor; tribute to the unselfish character of her father-in-law; on her husband's work; on the contrast of his (then) appreciation in england and america; massimo d' azeglio; on her sister henrietta (mrs. surtees cook); on the death of count cavour [ ] browning, mr. robert wiedemann barrett (the poet's son): his birth; incidents of his childhood; his pet-name--penini, peni, pen; in charge of miss isa blagden on his mother's death; taken to england by his father; manner of his education; studying art in antwerp; with his father in venice ( ); his marriage; purchase of the rezzonico palace (venice); death of his father there [ ] browning, mrs. r. barrett [ ] browning, mr. robert jardine (crown prosecutor in new south wales) [ ] browning society, the: its establishment [ ] brownlow, lord [ ] bruce, lady augusta [ ] bruce, lady charlotte (wife of mr. f. locker) [ ] buckstone, mr. (actor) [ ] buloz, m. [ ] burne jones, mr. [ ] burns, major (son of the poet) [ ] californian railway time-table edition of browning's poems [ ] cambo [ ] cambridge, browning's visit to [ ] campbell dykes, mr. j. [ ] carducci, countess (rome) [ ] carlyle, mr. thomas [ ] carlyle, mrs. thomas (incl. anecdote) [ ] carnarvon, lord [ ] carnival masquerade, a [ ] cartwright, mr. and mrs. (of aynhoe) [ ] casa guidi (browning's residence at florence) [ ] cattermole, mr. [ ] cavour, count, death of [ ] channel, mr. (afterwards sir william), and frank [ ] chapman & hall, messrs. (publishers) [ ] cholmondeley, mr. (condover) [ ] chorley, mr. [ ] cini, dr. (venice) [ ] clairvoyance, an instance of [ ] coddington, miss fannie (afterwards mrs. r. barrett browning) [ ] colvin, mr. sidney [ ] corkran, mrs. fraser [ ] cornaro, catharine [ ] cornhill magazine: why 'herve riel' appeared in it [ ] corson, professor [ ] crosse, mrs. andrew [ ] 'croxall's fables', browning's early fondness for [ ] curtis, mr. [ ] dale, mr. (actor) [ ] davidson, captain (of the 'norham castle', ) [ ] davies, rev. llewellyn [ ] debt, browning's mock defence of (in the 'trifler') [ ] dickens, charles [ ] domett, alfred (incl. 'on a certain critique of pippa passes') [ ] dourlans, m. gustave [ ] doyle, sir francis h. [ ] dufferin, lord [ ] dulwich gallery [ ] eclectic review, the (review of browning's works) [ ] eden, mr. frederic [ ] egerton-smith, miss [ ] elgin, lady [ ] elstree (macready's residence) [ ] elton, mr. (actor) [ ] engadine, the [ ] examiner (review of 'paracelsus') [ ] fano [ ] 'father prout' (mr. mahoney) [ ] faucit, miss helen--as lady carlisle in 'strafford'; as mildred in 'a blot in the 'scutcheon'; as colombe in 'colombe's birthday' [ ] fiori, margherita (browning's nurse) [ ] fisher, mr. (artist) [ ] fitzgerald, mr. edward [ ] fitz-gerald, mrs. [ ] florence [ ] flower, miss [ ] flower, mr. benjamin (editor of the 'cambridge intelligencer') [ ] fontainebleau [ ] forster, mr. john [ ] fortia, marquis de [ ] fox, miss caroline [ ] fox, miss sarah [ ] fox, mr. w. j. (incl. election for oldham) [ ] furnivall, dr. [ ] gaisford, mr., and lady alice [ ] galuppi, baldassaro [ ] gibraltar [ ] ginnasi, count (ravenna) [ ] giustiniani-recanati, palazzo (venice) [ ] gladstone, mr. [ ] glasgow, university of [ ] goldoni, browning's sonnet to [ ] goltz, m. (austrian minister at rome) [ ] gosse's 'personalia' [ ] green, mr. [ ] gressoney saint-jean [ ] guerande (brittany) [ ] guidi palace (casa guidi) [ ] gurney, rev. archer [ ] hanmer, sir john (afterwards lord hanmer) [ ] haworth, miss euphrasia fanny [ ] haworth, mr. frederick [ ] hawthorne, nathaniel [ ] hazlitt, mr. [ ] heyermans, m. (artist; antwerp) [ ] hickey, miss e. h. [ ] hill, mr. frank (editor of the 'daily news', ) [ ] hood, mr. thomas [ ] horne, mr. [ ] hugo, victor [ ] ion, the ion supper [ ] jameson, mrs. anna [ ] jebb-dyke, mrs. [ ] jerningham, miss [ ] jersey [ ] jewsbury, miss geraldine [ ] joachim, professor [ ] jones, mr. edward burne [ ] jones, rev. thomas [ ] jowett, dr. [ ] kean, mr. edmund [ ] keats [ ] keepsake, the [ ] kemble, mrs. fanny [ ] kenyon, mr. john [ ] king, mr. joseph [ ] kirkup, mr. [ ] knight, professor (st. andrews) [ ] lamartine, m. de [ ] lamb, charles [ ] landor, walter savage [ ] la saisiaz [ ] layard, sir henry and lady [ ] le croisic (brittany) [ ] leigh hunt [ ] leighton, mr. (afterwards sir frederic) [ ] 'les charmettes' (chambery: rousseau's residence) [ ] le strange, mrs. guy [ ] lewis, miss (harpton) [ ] literary gazette (review of 'pauline') [ ] literary world, the boston, u.s. (on 'colombe's birthday') [ ] llangollen [ ] llantysilio church [ ] lloyd, captain [ ] locker, mr. f. (now mr. locker-lampson) [ ] lockhart [ ] lucca [ ] lyons, mr. (son of sir edmund) [ ] lytton, mr. (now lord) [ ] maclise, mr. (artist) [ ] macready, mr. [ ] macready, willy (eldest son of the actor): his illustrations to the 'pied piper' [ ] mahoney, rev. francis ('father prout') [ ] manning, rev. dr. (afterwards cardinal) [ ] manzoni palace (venice) [ ] martin, lady [ ] martin, sir theodore [ ] martineau, miss [ ] mazzini, signor [ ] melvill, rev. h. (afterwards canon) [ ] meredith, mr. george [ ] mill, mr. j. s. [ ] milnes, mr. monckton (afterwards lord houghton) [ ] milsand, m. joseph [ ] minich, dr. (venice) [ ] mitford, miss [ ] mocenigo, countess (venice) [ ] mohl, madame [ ] monthly repository (incl. browning's contributions to) [ ] moore, mrs. bloomfield [ ] morgan, lady [ ] morison, mr. james cotter [ ] mortimer, mr. [ ] moulton-barrett, mr. george [ ] moxon, mr. (publisher) [ ] murray, miss alma (actress) [ ] musset, alfred and paul de [ ] naples [ ] national magazine, the: mrs. browning's portrait in ( ) [ ] nencioni, professor (florence) [ ] nettleship, mr. j. t. [ ] new shakspere society [ ] noel, mr. roden [ ] ogle, dr. john [ ] ogle, miss (author of 'a lost love') [ ] osbaldistone, mr. (manager of covent garden theatre, ) [ ] ossoli, countess margaret fuller [ ] oxford (incl. browning's visit to, ) [ ] palgrave, mr. francis [ ] palgrave, mr. reginald [ ] paris [ ] patterson, monsignor [ ] phelps, mr. (actor) [ ] pirate-ship, wreck of [ ] pisa [ ] poetical contest, a roman [ ] pollock, sir frederick ( ) [ ] pornic [ ] powell, mr. thomas [ ] power, miss (editor of 'the keepsake') [ ] powers, mr. (american sculptor) [ ] primiero [ ] prinsep, mr. val [ ] pritchard, captain [ ] procter, mr. bryan waller (barry cornwall) [ ] quaire, madame du [ ] quarles' emblemes [ ] ravenna [ ] ready, the two misses, preparatory school [ ] ready, rev. thomas (browning's first schoolmaster) [ ] regan, miss [ ] reid, mr. andrew [ ] relfe, mr. john (musician) [ ] rezzonico palace (venice), the [ ] richmond, rev. thomas [ ] ripert-monclar, count de [ ] robertson, mr. john (editor of 'westminster review', ) [ ] robinson, miss mary (now mrs. james darmesteter) [ ] rome [ ] rossetti, mr. dante gabriel (incl. death of his wife) [ ] ruskin, mr. [ ] russell, lady william [ ] russell, mr. odo (afterwards lord ampthill) [ ] sabatier, madame [ ] saleve, the [ ] sand, george [ ] sartoris, mrs. [ ] saunders & otley, messrs. [ ] scott, rev. dr. (master of balliol, ) [ ] scotti, mr. [ ] scottish art review, the, mr. mortimer's 'note on browning' in [ ] seraverra [ ] sharp, mr. [ ] shelley (incl. browning's essay on; his grave) [ ] shrewsbury, lord [ ] sidgwick, mr. a. [ ] siena [ ] silverthorne, mrs. [ ] simeon, sir john [ ] smith, miss (second wife of the poet's grandfather) [ ] smith, mr. george murray [ ] southey [ ] spezzia [ ] spiritualism (incl. a pretending medium) [ ] spluegen [ ] st. andrews university [ ] st.-aubin (m. milsand's residence) [ ] st.-enogat (near dinard) [ ] st.-pierre la chartreuse (incl. a tragic occurrence there) [ ] stanley, dean [ ] stanley, lady augusta [ ] stendhal, henri [ ] sterling, mr. john [ ] stirling, mrs. (actress) [ ] story, mr. and mrs. william [ ] sturtevant, miss [ ] sue, eugene [ ] tablets, memorial [ ] tait's magazine [ ] talfourd, serjeant [ ] taylor, sir henry [ ] tennyson, mr. alfred (afterwards lord tennyson) [ ] tennyson, mr. frederick [ ] thackeray, miss annie [ ] thackeray, mr. w. m. [ ] thaxter, mrs. (celia) (boston, u.s.) [ ] thaxter, mr. levi (boston, u.s.) [ ] thomson, mr. james: his application of the term 'gothic' to browning's work [ ] tittle, miss margaret [ ] trelawney, mr. e. j. ( ) [ ] trifler, the (amateur magazine) [ ] true sun, the (review of 'strafford') [ ] universo, hotel dell' (venice) [ ] vallombrosa [ ] venice [ ] vigna, dr. da (venice) [ ] wagner [ ] warburton, mr. eliot [ ] watts, dr. [ ] westminster, dean of [ ] widman, counts [ ] wiedemann, mr. william [ ] williams, rev. j. d. w. (vicar of bottisham, cambs.) [ ] wilson (mrs. browning's maid) [ ] wilson, mr. effingham (publisher) [ ] wiseman, mrs. (mother of cardinal wiseman) [ ] wolseley, lady [ ] wolseley, lord [ ] woolner, mr. [ ] wordsworth [ ] wordsworth society, the [ ] the temple biographies edited by dugald macfadyen, m.a. robert browning [illustration: _robert browning, from a portrait in oil, for which he sat to r.w. curtis at venice ._] robert browning by edward dowden litt.d., d.c.l., ll.d. professor of english literature in the university of dublin if i, too, should try and speak at times, leading your love to where my love, perchance, climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew, why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake. --_balaustion's adventure_. editor's preface "in the case of those whom the public has learned to honour and admire, there is a _biography of the mind_--the phrase is mr gladstone's--that is a matter of deep interest." in a life of robert browning it is especially true that the biography we want is of this nature, for its events are to be classed rather among achievements of the human spirit than as objective incidents, and its interest depends only in a secondary sense on circumstance or movement in the public eye. the special function of the present book in the growing library of browning literature is to give such a biography of browning's mind, associating his poems with their date and origin, as may throw some light on his inward development. browning has become to many, in a measure which he could hardly have conceived possible himself, one of the authoritative interpreters of the spiritual factors in human life. his tonic optimism dissipates the grey atmosphere of materialism, which has obscured the sunclad heights of life as effectually as a fog. to see life through browning's eyes is to see it shot through and through with spiritual issues, with a background of eternal destiny; and to come appreciably nearer than the general consciousness of our time to seeing it steadily and seeing it whole. those who prize his influence know how to value everything which throws light on the path by which he reached his resolute and confident outlook. it is almost possible to count on the fingers of one hand the few men who could successfully write a book of this character and scope. the editor believes that, in the present case, one of the very few has been found who had the qualifications required. much of the apparent obscurity of browning is due to his habit of climbing up a precipice of thought, and then kicking away the ladder by which he climbed. dr dowden has with singular success readjusted the steps, so that readers may follow the poet's climb. those who are not daunted by the paracelsus and sordello chapter, where the subject requires some close and patient attention, will find vigorous narrative and pellucid exposition interwoven in such a way as to keep them in intimate and constantly closer touch with the "biography of browning's mind." d.m. preface an attempt is made in this volume to tell the story of browning's life, including, as part of it, a notice of his books, which may be regarded as the chief of "his acts and all that he did." i have tried to keep my reader in constant contact with browning's mind and art, and thus a sense of the growth and development of his genius ought to form itself before the close. the materials accessible for a biography, apart from browning's published writings, are not copious. he destroyed many letters; many, no doubt, are in private hands. for some parts of his life i have been able to add little to what mrs orr tells. but since her biography of browning was published a good deal of interesting matter has appeared. the publication of "the letters of robert browning and elizabeth barrett browning" has enabled me to construct a short, close-knit narrative of the incidents that led up to browning's marriage. from that date until the death of mrs browning her "letters," edited by mr kenyon, has been my chief source. my method has not been that of quotation, but the substance of many letters is fused, as far as was possible, into a brief, continuous story. two privately issued volumes of browning's letters, edited by mr t.j. wise, and mr wise's "browning bibliography" have been of service to me. mr gosse's "robert browning, personalia," mrs ritchie's "tennyson, ruskin and browning," the "life of tennyson" by his son, mr henry james's volumes on w.w. story, letters of dante rossetti, the diary of mr w.m. rossetti, with other writings of his, memoirs, reminiscences or autobiographies of lady martin, f.t. palgrave, jowett, sir james paget, gavan duffy, robert buchanan, rudolf lehmann, w.j. stillman, t.a. trollope, miss f.p. cobbe, miss swanwick, and others have been consulted. and several interesting articles in periodicals, in particular mrs arthur bronson's articles "browning in venice" and "browning in asolo," have contributed to my narrative. for some information about browning's father and mother, and his connection with york street independent chapel, i am indebted to mr f. herbert stead, warden of "the robert browning settlement," walworth. i thank messrs smith, elder and co., as representing mr r. barrett browning, for permission to make such quotations as i have ventured to make from copyright letters. i thank the general editor of this series, the rev. d. macfadyen, for kind and valuable suggestions. my study of browning's poems is chronological. i recognise the disadvantages of this method, but i also perceive certain advantages. many years ago in "studies in literature" i attempted a general view of browning's work, and wrote, as long ago as , a careful study of _sordello_. what i now write may suffer as well as gain from a familiarity of so many years with his writings. but to make them visible objects to me i have tried to put his poems outside myself, and approach them with a fresh mind. whether i have failed or partly succeeded i am unable to determine. the analysis of _la saisiaz_ appeared--substantially--in the little magazine of the home reading union, and one or two other short passages are recovered from uncollected articles of mine. i have incorporated in my criticism a short passage from one of my wife's articles on browning in _the dark blue magazine_, making such modifications as suited my purpose, and she has contributed a passage to the pages which close this volume. i had the privilege of some personal acquaintance with browning, and have several cordial letters of his addressed to my wife and to myself. these i have not thought it right to use. e.d. contents chapter i childhood and youth ancestry--parents--boyhood--influence of shelley--pauline chapter ii paracelsus and sordello visit to russia--paracelsus--his failures and attainments--sordello, a companion poem--its obscurity--imaginative qualities--the history of a soul chapter iii the maker of plays new acquaintances--hatcham--macready--strafford--venice--bells and promegranates--a blot on the 'scutcheon--characters of passion--characters of intellect chapter iv the maker of plays--_(continued)_ women of the dramas--dramatic style--pippa passes--dramatic lyrics and romances--poems of love and of art chapter v love and marriage first letters to miss barrett--meeting--progress in friendship--obstacles--marriage chapter vi early years in italy correspondence of r.b. and e.b.b.--journey to italy--pisa--florence--vallombrosa--italian politics--casa guidi-friends--son born--death of browning's mother--wanderings. chapter vii christmas eve and easter day publication--movements of religious thought--dissent--catholicism--criticism--difficulties of christian life--imaginative power of the poems--in venice--paris--england--paris again--coup d'état chapter viii from to essay on shelley--new acquaintances--milsand--george sand--london--casa guidi--spiritualism--mr sludge the medium--baths of lucca--rome--london--tennyson's maud chapter ix men and women rossetti's admiration--beauty before teaching--the poet behind his poems--isolated poems--groups--poems of love--poems of art--poems of religion chapter x close of mrs browning's life paris--kenyon's death--legacies--death of mr barrett--winter in florence--havre--rome--louis napoleon--landor--siena--poems before congress--rome again--modelling in clay--casa guidi--death of mrs browning chapter xi london: dramatis personae desolation--return to london--pornic--social life--dramatis personae--poems of music--poems of hope and aspiration--a death in the desert--epilogue--caliban upon setebos--poems of love chapter xii the ring and the book holiday excursions--sainte marie--miss barrett dies--balliol college and jowett--origin of the ring and the book--its plan--the persons--count guido--pompilia--caponsacchi--the pope--falsehood subserving truth chapter xiii poems on classical subjects saint-aubin--milsand--miss thackeray--hervé riel--miss egerton-smith--summer wanderings--balaustion's adventure--aristophanes' apology--the agamemnon chapter xiv problem and narrative poems prince hohenstiel-schwangau--fifine at the fair--red cotton night-cap country--the inn album--pachiarotto and other poems chapter xv solitude and society la saisiaz--immortality--two poets of croisic--browning in society--daily habits--browning as a talker--italy--asolo--mountain retreats--mrs bronson--venice chapter xvi poet and teacher in old age popularity--browning society--public honours--dramatic idyls--spirit of acquiescence--jocoseria--ferishtah's fancies chapter xvii closing works and days parleyings--asolando--mrs bronson--at asolo--venice--death--place in nineteenth-century poetry list of illustrations robert browning, _from a portrait in oil, for which he sat to r.w. curtis at venice, , reproduced by kind permission of d.s. curtis, esq. (photogravure)_ main street of asolo, showing browning's house, _from a drawing by miss d. noyes_ elizabeth barrett browning, _from a drawing in chalk by field talfourd in the national portrait gallery_ robert browning, _from an engraving by j.g. armytage_ the via bocca di leone, rome, in which the brownings stayed, _a photograph_ portrait of filippo lippi, by himself, _a detail from the fresco in the cathedral at prato, from a photograph by alinari_ andrea del sarto, _from a print after the portrait by himself in the uffizi gallery, florence_ piazza di san lorenzo, florence, where "the book" was found by browning, _from a photograph by alinari_ the palazzo giustiniani, venice, _from a drawing by miss n. erichsen_ specimen of browning's handwriting, _from a letter to d.s. curtis, esq._ robert browning, _from a photograph (photogravure)_ the palazzo rezzonico, venice, _from a drawing by miss katherine kimball_ chapter i childhood and youth the ancestry of robert browning has been traced[ ] to an earlier robert who lived in the service of sir john bankes of corfe castle, and died in . his eldest son, thomas, "was granted a lease for three lives of the little inn, in the little hamlet of east woodyates and parish of pentridge, nine miles south-west of salisbury on the road to exeter." robert, born in , the son of this thomas, and grandfather of the poet, became a clerk in the bank of england, and rose to be principal in the bank stock office. at the age of twenty-nine he married margaret tittle, a lady born in the west indies and possessed of west indian property. he is described by mrs orr as an able, energetic, and worldly man. he lived until his grandson was twenty-one years old. his first wife was the mother of another robert, the poet's father, born in . when the boy had reached the age of seven he lost his mother, and five years later his father married again. this younger robert when a youth desired to become an artist, but such a career was denied to him. he longed for a university education, and, through the influence of his stepmother, this also was refused. they shipped the young man to st kitts, purposing that he should oversee the west indian estate. there, as browning on the authority of his mother told miss barrett, "he conceived such a hatred to the slave-system ... that he relinquished every prospect, supported himself while there in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father's profound astonishment and rage."[ ] at the age of twenty-two he obtained a clerkship in the bank of england, an employment which, his son says, he always detested. eight years later he married sarah anna, daughter of william wiedemann, a dundee shipowner, who was the son of a german merchant of hamburg. the young man's father, on hearing that his son was a suitor to miss wiedemann, had waited benevolently on her uncle "to assure him that his niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged."[ ] in the new-married pair settled in camberwell, and there in a house in southampton street robert browning--an only son--was born on may , . two years later (jan. , ) his sister, sarah anna--an only daughter--known in later years as sarianna, a form adopted by her father, was born. she survived her brother, dying in venice on the morning of april , .[ ] robert browning's father and mother were persons who for their own sakes deserve to be remembered. his father, while efficient in his work in the bank, was a wide and exact reader of literature, classical as well as modern. we are told by mrs orr of his practice of soothing his little boy to sleep "by humming to him an ode of anacreon," and by dr moncure conway that he was versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known paracelsus, faustus, and even talmudic personages with an intimate familiarity. he wrote verses in excellent couplets of the eighteenth century manner, and strung together fantastic rhymes as a mode of aiding his boy in tasks which tried the memory. he was a dexterous draughtsman, and of his amateur handiwork in portraiture and caricature--sometimes produced, as it were, instinctively, with a result that was unforeseen--much remains to prove his keen eye and his skill with the pencil. besides the curious books which he eagerly collected, he also gathered together many prints--those of hogarth especially, and in early states. he had a singular interest, such as may also be seen in the author of _the ring and the book_, in investigating and elucidating complex criminal cases.[ ] he was a lover of athletic sports and never knew ill-health. for the accumulation of riches he had no talent and no desire, but he had a simple wealth of affection which he bestowed generously on his children and his friends. "my father," wrote browning, "is tender-hearted to a fault.... to all women and children he is chivalrous." "he had," writes mr w.j. stillman, who knew browning's father in paris in his elder years, "the perpetual juvenility of a blessed child. if to live in the world as if not of it indicates a saintly nature, then robert browning the elder was a saint; a serene, untroubled soul, conscious of no moral or theological problem to disturb his serenity, and as gentle as a gentle woman; a man in whom, it seemed to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank acceptance of life, as he found it come to him.... his unworldliness had not a flaw."[ ] to dante rossetti he appeared, as an old man, "lovable beyond description," with that "submissive yet highly cheerful simplicity of character which often ... appears in the family of a great man, who uses at last what the others have kept for him." he is, rossetti continues, "a complete oddity--with a real genius for drawing--but caring for nothing in the least except dutch boors,--fancy, the father of browning!--and as innocent as a child." browning himself declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his father--"in pictures, he goes 'souls away' to brauwer, ostade, teniers ... he would turn from the sistine altar-piece to these--in music he desiderates a tune 'that has a story connected with it.'" yet browning inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains. in _development_, one of the poems of his last volume, he recalls his father's sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of piled-up chairs and tables--the cat for helen, and towzer and tray as the atreidai,--the story of the siege of troy, and, later, his urging the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of homer by his favourite poet, pope. he lived almost to the close of his eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son's poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older, and he had for long the satisfaction of enjoying his son's fame. the attachment of robert browning to his mother--"the true type of a scottish gentlewoman," said carlyle--was deep and intimate. for him she was, in his own phrase, "a divine woman"; her death in was to browning almost an overwhelming blow. she was of a nature finely and delicately strung. her nervous temperament seems to have been transmitted--robust as he was in many ways--to her son. the love of music, which her scottish-german father possessed in a high degree, leaping over a generation, reappeared in robert browning. his capacity for intimate friendships with animals--spider and toad and lizard--was surely an inheritance from his mother. mr stillman received from browning's sister an account of her mother's unusual power over both wild creatures and household pets. "she could lure the butterflies in the garden to her," which reminds us of browning's whistling for lizards at asolo. a fierce bull-dog intractable to all others, to her was docile and obedient. in her domestic ways she was gentle yet energetic. her piety was deep and pure. her husband had been in his earlier years a member of the anglican communion; she was brought up in the scottish kirk. before her marriage she became a member of the independent congregation, meeting for worship at york street, lock's fields, walworth, where now stands the robert browning hall. her husband attached himself to the same congregation; both were teachers in the sunday school. mrs browning kept, until within a few years of her death, a missionary box for contributions to the london missionary society. the conditions of membership implied the acceptance of "those views of doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called calvinistic." thus over the poet's childhood and youth a religious influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy was in those early days, as he himself declared, "passionately religious." their excellent pastor was an entirely "unimaginative preacher of the georgian era," who held fast by the approved method of "three heads and a conclusion." browning's indifference to the ministrations of mr clayton was not concealed, and on one occasion he received a rebuke in the presence of the congregation. yet the spirit of religion which surrounded and penetrated him was to remain with him, under all its modifications, to the end. "his face," wrote the rev. edward white, "is vividly present to my memory through the sixty years that have intervened. it was the most wonderful face in the whole congregation--pale, somewhat mysterious, and shaded with black, flowing hair, but a face whose expression you remember through a life-time. scarcely less memorable were the countenances of his father, mother and sister."[ ] robert browning, writes mrs orr, "was a handsome, vigorous, fearless child, and soon developed an unresting activity and a fiery temper." his energy of mind made him a swift learner. after the elementary lessons in reading had been achieved, he was prepared for the neighbouring school of the rev. thomas ready by mr ready's sisters. having entered this school as a day-boarder, he remained under mr ready's care until the year . to facile companionship with his school-fellows browning was not prone, but he found among them one or two abiding friends. as for the rest, though he was no winner of school prizes, he seems to have acquired a certain intellectual mastery over his comrades; some of them were formed into a dramatic _troupe_ for the performance of his boyish plays. perhaps the better part of his education was that of his hours at home. he read widely in his father's excellent library. the favourite books of his earliest years, croxall's _fables_ and quarles's _emblems_, were succeeded by others which made a substantial contribution to his mind. a list given by mrs orr includes walpole's _letters_, junius, voltaire, and mandeville's _fable of the bees_. the first book he ever bought with his own money was macpherson's _ossian_, and the first composition he committed to paper, written years before his purchase of the volume, was an imitation of ossian, "whom," says browning, "i had not read, but conceived, through two or three scraps in other books." his early feeling for art was nourished by visits to the dulwich gallery, to which he obtained an entrance when far under the age permitted by the rules; there he would sit for an hour before some chosen picture, and in later years he could recall the "wonderful rembrandt of jacob's vision," the giorgione music-lesson, the "triumphant murillo pictures," "such a watteau," and "all the poussins."[ ] among modern poets byron at first with him held the chief place. boyish verses, written under the byronic influence, were gathered into a group when the writer was but twelve years old; a title--_incondita_--was found, and browning's parents had serious intentions of publishing the manuscript. happily the manuscript, declined by publishers, was in the end destroyed, and editors have been saved from the necessity of printing or reprinting these crudities of a great poet's childhood. their only merit, he assured mr gosse, lay in "their mellifluous smoothness." it was an event of capital importance in the history of browning's mind when--probably in his thirteenth year--he lighted, in exploring a book-stall, upon a copy of one of the pirated editions of shelley's _queen mab_ and other poems. through the zeal of his good mother on the boy's behalf the authorised editions were at a later time obtained; and she added to her gift the works, as far as they were then in print, of keats.[ ] if ever there was a period of _sturm und drang_ in browning's life, it was during the years in which he caught from shelley the spirit of the higher revolt. a new faith and unfaith came to him, radiant with colour, luminous with the brightness of dawn, and uttered with a new, keen, penetrating melody. the outward conduct of his life was obedient in all essentials to the good laws of use and wont. he pursued his various studies--literature, languages, music--with energy. he was diligent--during a brief attendance--in professor long's greek class at university college--"a bright, handsome youth," as a classfellow has described him, "with long black hair falling over his shoulders." he sang, he danced, he rode, he boxed, he fenced. but below all these activities a restless inward current ran. for a time he became, as mrs orr has put it, "a professing atheist and a practising vegetarian;" and together with the growing-pains of intellectual independence there was present a certain aggressive egoism. he loved his home, yet he chafed against some of its social limitations. of friendships outside his home we read of that with alfred domett, the 'waring' of his poems, afterwards the poet and the statesman of new zealand; with joseph arnould, afterwards the indian judge; and with his cousin james silverthorne, the 'charles' of browning's pathetic poem _may and death_. we hear also of a tender boyish sentiment, settling into friendship, for miss eliza flower, his senior by nine years, for whose musical compositions he had an ardent admiration: "i put it apart from all other english music i know," he wrote as late as , "and fully believe in it as _the_ music we all waited for." with her sister sarah, two years younger than eliza, best known by her married name sarah flower adams and remembered by her hymn, written in , "nearer my god to thee," he discussed as a boy his religious difficulties, and in proposing his own doubts drew forth her latent scepticism as to the orthodox beliefs. "it was in answering robert browning;" she wrote, "that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy." something of this period of browning's _sturm und drang_ can be divined through the ideas and imagery of _pauline._[ ] the finer influence of shelley upon the genius of browning in his youth proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire abstractions--the formulas of revolution--which shelley had caught up from godwin and certain french thinkers of the eighteenth century. browning's spirit from first to last was one which was constantly reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay beyond them. a climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared. he could in those early days have addressed to shelley words written later, and suggested, one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife: you must be just before, in fine, see and make me see, for your part, new depths of the divine! shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable best. browning's only piece of prose criticism--apart from scattered comments in his letters--is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously ascribed to shelley, which was published when browning was but little under forty years old. it expresses his mature feelings and convictions; and these doubtless contain within them as their germ the experience of his youth.[ ] shelley appears to him as a poet gifted with a fuller perception of nature and man than that of the average mind, and striving to embody the thing he perceives "not so much with reference to the many below, as to the one above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul." if shelley was deficient in some subordinate powers which support and reinforce the purely poetic gifts, he possessed the highest faculty and in this he lived and had his being. "his spirit invariably saw and spoke from the last height to which it had attained." what was "his noblest and predominating characteristic" as a poet? browning attempts to give it definition: it was "his simultaneous perception of power and love in the absolute, and of beauty and good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom i have knowledge." in other words it was shelley's special function to fling an aerial bridge from reality, as we commonly understand that word, to the higher reality which we name the ideal; to set up an aerial ladder--not less solid because it is aerial--upon the earth, whose top reached to heaven. such was browning's conception of shelley, and it pays little regard either to atheistic theory or vegetarian practice. a time came when robert browning must make choice of a future career. his interests in life were manifold, but in some form or another art was the predominant interest. his father remembered his own early inclinations, and how they had been thwarted; he recognised the rare gifts of his son, and he resolved that he should not be immured in the office of a bank. should he plead at the bar? should he paint? should he be a maker of music, as he at one time desired, and for music he always possessed an exceptional talent? when his father spoke to him, robert browning knew that his sister was not dependent on any effort of his to provide the means of living. "he appealed," writes mr gosse, "to his father, whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training, foreign to that aim. ... so great was the confidence of the father in the genius of his son that the former at once acquiesced in the proposal." it was decided that he should take to what an old woman of the lake district, speaking of "mr wudsworth," described as "the poetry business." the believing father was even prepared to invest some capital in the concern. at his expense _paracelsus, sordello_, and _bells and pomegranates_ were published. a poet may make his entrance into literature with small or large inventions, by carving cherry-stones or carving a colossus. browning, the creator of men and women, the fashioner of minds, would be a sculptor of figures more than life-size rather than an exquisite jeweller; the attempt at a perseus of this cellini was to precede his brooches and buttons. he planned, mr gosse tells us, "a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls." in a modification of this vast scheme _paracelsus_, which includes more speakers than one, and _sordello_, which is not dramatic in form, find their places. they were preceded by _pauline_, in the strictest sense a monodrama, a poem not less large in conception than either of the others, though this "fragment of a confession" is wrought out on a more contracted scale. _pauline_, published without the writer's name--his aunt silverthorne bearing the cost of publication--was issued from the press in january .[ ] browning had not yet completed his twenty-first year. when including it among his poetical works in , he declared that he did so with extreme repugnance and solely with a view to anticipate unauthorised republication of what was no more than a "crude preliminary sketch," entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling. for the edition of twenty years later, , he revised and corrected _pauline_ without re-handling it to any considerable extent. in truth _pauline_ is a poem from which browning ought not to have desired to detach his mature self. rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve better to be read for its own sake. it is an interesting document in the history of its author's mind. it gives promises and pledges which were redeemed in full. it shows what dropped away from the poet and what, being an essential part of his equipment, was retained. it exhibits his artistic method in the process of formation. it sets forth certain leading thoughts which are dominant in his later work. the first considerable production of a great writer must always claim attention from the student of his mind and art. the poem is a study in what browning in his _fifine_ terms "mental analysis"; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of the dying man, a series of spiritual states. the psychology is sometimes crude; subtle, but clumsily subtle; it is, however, essentially the writer's own. to construe clearly the states of mind which are adumbrated rather than depicted is difficult, for browning had not yet learnt to manifest his generalised conceptions through concrete details, to plunge his abstractions in reality. the speaker in the poem tells us that he "rudely shaped his life to his immediate wants"; this is intelligible, yet only vaguely intelligible, for we do not know what were these wants, and we do not see any rude shaping of his life. we are told of "deeds for which remorse were vain"; what were these deeds? did he, like bunyan, play cat on sunday, or join the ringers of the church bells? "instance, instance," we cry impatiently. and so the story remains half a shadow. the poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of browning's work, it is not pure drama coming from profound sympathy with a spirit other than the writer's own; it is only hybrid drama, in which the _dramatis persona_ thinks and moves and acts under the necessity of expounding certain ideas of the poet. browning's puppets are indeed too often in his earlier poems moved by intellectual wires; the hands are the hands of luria or djabal, but the voice is the showman's voice. a certain intemperance in the pursuit of poetic beauty, strange and lovely imagery which obscures rather than interprets, may be regarded as in _pauline_ the fault or the glory of youth; a young heir arrived at his inheritance will scatter gold pieces. the verse has caught something of its affluent flow, its wavelike career, wave advancing upon wave, from shelley: 'tis he, i ken the manner of his gait; he rises on the toe; that spirit of his in aspiration lifts him from the earth. the aspiration in browning's later verse is a complex of many forces; here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm. by virtue of its central theme _pauline_ is closely related to the poems which at no great distance followed--_paracelsus_ and _sordello_. each is a study of the flaws which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. in each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises--for browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed--rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service in worlds other than ours which he may hereafter traverse. he has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. shelley in _alastor_, the influence of which on browning in writing _pauline_ is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love. browning in _pauline_ also recognises this danger, but he indicates others--the risk of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender to that which is higher than self. it is quite right and needful to speak of the "lesson" of browning's poem, and the lesson of _pauline_ is designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man's highest power, and secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends himself, named by the speaker in _pauline_ by the old and simple name of god. was it the problem of his own life--that concerning the conduct of high, intellectual and spiritual powers--which browning transferred to his art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his theme? we cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from poem to poem. the poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his fragment of a confession in _pauline_, is more than a poet; he is rather of the sordello type than of the type represented in eglamor and aprile.[ ] through his imagination he would comprehend and possess all forms of life, of beauty, of joy in nature and in humanity; but he must also feel himself at the centre of these, the lord and master of his own perceptions and creations; and yet, at the same time, this man is made for the worship and service of a power higher than self. how is such a nature as this to attain its true ends? what are its special dangers? if he content himself with the exercise of the subordinate faculties, intellectual dexterity, wit, social charm and mastery, he is lost; if he should place himself at the summit, and cease to worship and to love, he is lost. he cannot alter his own nature; he cannot ever renounce his intense consciousness of self, nor even the claim of self to a certain supremacy as the centre of its own sympathies and imaginings. so much is inevitable, and is right. but if he be true to his calling as poet, he will task his noblest faculty, will live in it, and none the less look upward, in love, in humility, in the spirit of loyal service, in the spirit of glad aspiration, to that power which leans above him and has set him his earthly task. such reduced to a colourless and abstract statement is the theme dealt with in _pauline_. the young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening, lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet never wholly faithless. as the pallid light declines, he studies his own soul, he reviews his past, he traces his wanderings from the way, and all has become clear. he has failed for the uses of earth; but he recognises in himself capacities and desires for which no adequate scope could ever have been found in this life; and restored to the spirit of love, of trust, by such love, such trust as he can give pauline, he cannot deny the witnessing audible within his own heart to a future life which may redeem the balance of his temporal loss. the thought which plays so large a part in browning's later poetry is already present and potent here. two incidents in the history of a soul--studied by the speaker under the wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of passion--are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. he describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter pleasure--few of us do not know it--which the intellectual faculties sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they, higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common tests of sense and understanding. the witchcraft of the brain degrades the god in us: and then i was a young witch whose blue eyes, as she stood naked by the river springs, drew down a god: i watched his radiant form growing less radiant, and it gladdened me. what he presents with such intensity of imaginative power browning must have known--even if it were but for moments--by experience. and again, there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the state of the poet's mind which succeeded the wreck of his early faith and early hopes inspired by the voice of shelley--the revolutionary faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility. wordsworth in _the prelude_--unpublished when browning wrote _pauline_--which is also the history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. the poet of _pauline_ turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane as that of despair. he falls back, with a certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly and "without heart-wreck ": first went my hopes of perfecting mankind, next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self and virtue's self, then my own motives, ends, and aims and loves, and human love went last. i felt this no decay, because new powers rose as old feelings left--wit, mockery, light-heartedness; for i had oft been sad, mistrusting my resolves, but now i cast hope joyously away; i laughed and said "no more of this!" it is difficult to believe that browning is wholly dramatic here; we seem to discover something of that period of _sturm und drang_, when his mood grew restless and aggressive. the homage paid to shelley, whose higher influence browning already perceived to be in large measure independent of his creed of revolution, has in it certainly something of the spirit of autobiography. in this enthusiastic admiration for shelley there is nothing to regret, except the unhappy extravagance of the name "suntreader," which he invented as a title for the poet of _alastor_ and _prometheus unbound._ the attention of mr w.j. fox, a unitarian minister of note, had been directed to browning's early unpublished verse by miss flower. in the _monthly repository_ (april ) which he then edited, mr fox wrote of _pauline_ with admiration, and browning was duly grateful for this earliest public recognition of his genius as a poet. in the _athenaeum_ allen cunningham made an effort to be appreciative and sympathetic. john stuart mill desired to be the reviewer of _pauline_ in _taifs magazine_; there, however, the poem had been already dismissed with one contemptuous phrase. it found few readers, but the admiration of one of these, who discovered _pauline_ many years later, was a sufficient compensation for the general indifference or neglect. "when mr browning was living in florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of a poem called _pauline_, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in the british museum reading-room. the letter was signed d.g. rossetti, and thus began mr browning's acquaintance with this eminent man."[ ] footnotes: [footnote : by dr furnivall; see _the academy_, april , .] [footnote : "letters of r.b. and e.b.b.," ii. .] [footnote : letter of r.b. to e.b.b.] [footnote : dr moncure conway states that browning told him that the original name of the family was de buri. according to mrs orr, browning "neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family."] [footnote : quoted by mr sharp in his "life of browning," p. , _n_., from mrs fraser cockran.] [footnote : "autobiography of a journalist," i. .] [footnote : for my quotations and much of the above information i am indebted to mr f. herbert stead, warden of the robert browning settlement, walworth. in robert browning hall are preserved the baptismal registers of robert (june th, ), and sarah anna browning, with other documents from which i have quoted.] [footnote : _letters of r.b. and e.b.b_., i. , ; and (for ossian), ii. .] [footnote : browning in a letter to mr wise says that this happened "some time before (or even earlier). the books," he says, "were obtained in the _regular way_, from hunt and clarke." mr gosse in _personalia_ gives a different account, pp. , .] [footnote : the quotations from letters above are taken from j.c. hadden's article "some friends of browning" in _macmillan's magazine_, jan. .] [footnote : later in life browning came to think unfavourably of shelley as a man and to esteem him less highly as a poet. he wrote in december to dr furnivall: "for myself i painfully contrast my notions of shelley the _man_ and shelley, well, even the _poet_, with what they were sixty years ago." he declined dr furnivall's invitation to him to accept the presidency of "the shelley society."] [footnote : even the publishers--saunders and otley--did not know the author's name.--"letters of r.b. and e.b.b.," i. .] [footnote : "v.a. xx," following the quotation from cornelius agrippa means "vixi annos xx," _i.e._ "the imaginary subject of the poem was of that age."--browning to mr t.j. wise.] [footnote : edmund gosse: "robert browning personalia," pp. , . mr w. m. rossetti in "d.g. rossetti, his family letters," i. , gives the summer of as the date of his brother's letter; and says, no doubt correctly, that browning was in venice at the time. mr sharp prints a letter of browning's on his early acquaintance with rossetti, and on the incident recorded above. i may here note that "richmond," appended, with a date, to _pauline_, was a fancy or a blind; browning never resided at richmond.] chapter ii paracelsus and sordello there is little of incident in browning's life to be recorded for the period between the publication of _pauline_ and the publication of _paracelsus_. during the winter of - he spent three months in russia, "nominally," says mrs orr, "in the character of secretary" to the russian consul-general, mr benckhausen. memories of the endless pine-forests through which he was driven on the way to st petersburg may have contributed long afterwards to descriptive passages of _ivan ivanovitch._ in or he wrote a drama in five acts to which was given the name "only a player-girl"; the manuscript lay for long in his portfolio and never saw the light. "it was russian," he tells miss barrett, "and about a fair on the neva, and booths and droshkies and fish-pies and so forth, with the palaces in the background."[ ] late in life, at venice, browning became acquainted with an old russian, prince gagarin, with whom he competed successfully for an hour in recalling folk-songs and national airs of russia caught up during the visit of - . "his memory," said gagarin, "is better than my own, on which i have hitherto piqued myself not a little."[ ] perhaps it was his wanderings abroad that made browning at this time desire further wanderings. he thought of a diplomatic career, and felt some regret when he failed to obtain an appointment for which he had applied in connection with a mission to persia. in the winter of browning was at work on _paracelsus_, which, after disappointments with other houses, was accepted, on terms that secured the publisher from risk, by effingham wilson, and appeared before midsummer of the following year. the subject had been suggested by count amédée de ripert-monclar, a young french royalist, engaged in secret service on behalf of the dethroned bourbons. to him the poem is dedicated. for a befitting treatment of the story of paracelsus special studies were necessary, and browning entered into these with zeal, taking in his poem--as he himself believed--only trifling liberties with the matter of history. in solitary midnight walks he meditated his theme and its development. "there was, in particular," mr sharp tells us, "a wood near dulwich, whither he was wont to go." mr sharp adds that at this time browning composed much in the open air, and that "the glow of distant london" at night, with the thought of its multitudinous human life, was an inspiring influence. the sea which spoke to browning with most expressive utterances was always the sea of humanity. in its combination of thought with passion, and not less in its expression of a certain premature worldly wisdom, _paracelsus_ is an extraordinary output of mind made by a writer who, when his work was accomplished, had not completed his twenty-third year. the poem is the history of a great spirit, who has sought lofty and unattainable ends, who has fallen upon the way and is bruised and broken, but who rises at the close above his ruined self, and wrings out of defeat a pledge of ultimate victory. in a preface to the first edition, a preface afterwards omitted, browning claims originality, or at least novelty, for his artistic method; "instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis i desire to produce, i have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded." the poem, though dramatic, is not a drama, and canons which are applicable to a piece intended for stage-representation would here--browning pleads--be rather a hindrance than a help. perhaps browning regarded the action which can be exhibited on the stage as something external to the soul, and imagined that the naked spirit can be viewed more intimately than the spirit clothed in deed and in circumstance. if this was so, his conceptions were somewhat crude; with the true dramatic poet action is the hieroglyph of the soul, and many a secret may be revealed in this language, amassing as it does large meanings into one luminous symbol, which cannot be set forth in an elaborate intellectual analysis. we think to probe the depths, and perhaps never get far below the surface. but the flash and outbreak of a fiery spirit, amid a tangle of circumstance, springs to the surface from the very centre, and reveals its inmost energies. paracelsus, as presented in the poem, is a man of pre-eminent genius, passionate intellect, and inordinate intellectual ambition. if it is meant that he should be the type of the modern man of science, browning has missed his mark, for paracelsus is in fact almost as much the poet as the man of science; but it is true that the cautious habits of the inductive student of nature were rare among the enthusiastic speculators of renaissance days, and the italian successor of paracelsus--giordano bruno--was in reality, in large measure, what browning has here conceived and exhibited. paracelsus is a great revolutionary spirit in an epoch of intellectual revolution; it is as much his task to destroy as to build up; he has broken with the past, and gazes with wild-eyed hopes into the future, expecting the era of intellectual liberty to dawn suddenly with the year one, and seeing in himself the protagonist of revolution. such men as paracelsus, whether their sphere be in the political, the religious, or the intellectual world, are men of faith; a task has been laid on each of them; a summons, a divine mandate, has been heard. but is the summons authentic? is the mandate indeed divine? in the quiet garden at würzburg, while the autumn sun sinks behind st saviour's spire, festus--the faithful horatio to this hamlet of science--puts his questions and raises his doubts first as to the end and aim of paracelsus, his aspiration towards absolute knowledge, and secondly, as to the means proposed for its attainment--means which reject the service of all predecessors in the paths of knowledge; which depart so widely from the methods of his contemporaries; which seek for truth through strange and casual revelations; which leave so much to chance. very nobly has browning represented the overmastering force of that faith which genius has in itself, and which indeed is needed to sustain it in the struggle with an incredulous or indifferent world. the end itself is justified by the mandate of god; and as for the means, truth is not to be found only or chiefly by gathering up stray fragments from without; truth lies buried within the soul, as jewels in the mine, and the chances and changes and shocks of life are required to open a passage for the shining forth of this inner light. festus is overpowered less by reason than by the passion of faith in his younger and greater fellow-student; and the gentle michal is won from her prophetic fears half by her affectionate loyalty to the man, half by the glow and inspiration of one who seems to be a surer prophet than her mistrusting self. and in truth the summons to paracelsus is authentic; he is to be a torch-bearer in the race. his errors are his own, errors of the egoism of genius in an age of intellectual revolution; he casts away the past, and that is not wise, that is not legitimate; he anticipates for himself the full attainment of knowledge, which belongs not to him but to humanity during revolving centuries; and although he sets before himself the service of man as the outcome of all his labours--and this is well--at the same time he detaches himself from his fellow-men, regards them from a regal height, would decline even their tribute of gratitude, and would be the lofty benefactor rather than the loving helpmate of his brethren. is it meant then that paracelsus ought to have contented himself with being like his teacher trithemius and the common masters of the schools? no, for these rested with an easy self-satisfaction in their poor attainments, and he is called upon to press forward, and advance from strength to strength, through attainment or through failure to renewed and unending endeavour. his dissatisfaction, his failure is a better thing than their success and content in that success. but why should he hope in his own person to forestall the slow advance of humanity, and why should the service of the brain be alienated from the service of the heart? there are many ways in which browning could have brought paracelsus to a discovery of his error. he might have learnt from his own experience the aridity of a life which is barren of love. some moment of supreme pity might have come to him, in which he, the possessor of knowledge, might have longed to offer consolation to some suffering fellow, and have found the helplessness of knowledge to console. browning's imagination as a romantic poet craved a romantic incident and a romantic _mise-en-scène_. in the house of the greek conjuror at constantinople, paracelsus, now worn by his nine years' wanderings, with all their stress and strain, his hair already streaked with grey, his spirit somewhat embittered by the small success attending a vast effort, his moral nature already somewhat deteriorated and touched with the cynicism of experience and partial failure, shall encounter the strange figure of aprile, the living wraith of a poet who has also failed, who "would love infinitely and be loved," and who in gazing upon the end has neglected all the means of attainment; and from him, or rather by a reflex ray from this aprile, his own error shall be flashed on the consciousness of the foiled seeker for knowledge. the invention of browning is certainly not lacking in the quality of strangeness in beauty; yet some readers will perhaps share the feeling that it strains, without convincing, the imagination. as we read the first speeches addressed by the moon-struck poet to the wandering student of science, and read the moon-struck replies, notwithstanding the singular beauty of certain dramatic and lyrical passages, we are inclined to ask--is this, indeed, a conjuror's house at constantinople, or one of browning's "mad-house cells?" and from what delusions are the harmless, and the apparently dangerous, lunatic suffering? the lover here is typified in the artist; but the artist may be as haughtily isolated from true human love as the man of science, and the fellowship with his kind which paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as aprile. it is indeed aprile's example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his wild words which startle paracelsus into a recognition of his own error. but the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no guarantee that he will ever acquire the fervour and the infinite patience of love. the whole scene, with its extravagant poetic beauties and high-pitched rhetoric, leaves a painful impression of unreality, not in the shallower but in the deepest sense of that word. for a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss. these could find no place in browning's presentation of aprile, but it is certain that browning himself was a much more complex person than the dying lover of love who became the instructor of paracelsus. when the scene shifts from constantinople to basil, and the illustrious professor holds converse with festus by the blazing logs deep into the night, and at length morning arises "clouded, wintry, desolate and cold," we listen with unflagging attention and entire imaginative conviction; and, when silence ensues, a wonder comes upon us as to where a young man of three-and-twenty acquired this knowledge of the various bitter tastes of life which belong to maturer experience, and how he had mastered such precocious worldly wisdom. paracelsus, the wondrous paracelsus, life's dispenser, fate's commissary, idol of the schools and courts, chews upon his worldly success and extracts its acrid juices. this is not the romantic melancholy of youth, which dreams of infinite things, but the pain of manhood, which feels the limitations of life, which can laugh at the mockery of attainment, which is sensible of the shame that dwells at the heart of glory, yet which already has begun to hanker after the mean delights of the world, and cannot dispense with the sorry pleasures of self-degradation. the kind, calm pastor of einsiedeln sees at first only the splendour that hangs around the name of his early comrade, the hero of his hopes. and paracelsus for a while would forbear with tender ruth to shatter his friend's illusion, would veil, if that were possible, the canker which has eaten into his own heart. but in the tumult of old glad memories and present griefs, it ceases to be possible; from amid the crew of foolish praisers he must find one friend having the fidelity of genuine insight; he must confess his failure, and once for all correct the prophecy of michal that success would come and with it wretchedness-- i have not been successful, and yet am most miserable; 'tis said at last. a certain manly protectiveness towards festus and michal, with their happy aennchen and aureole in the quiet home at einsiedeln, remains to paracelsus; there is in it now more than a touch of "the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." when, driven from basil as a quack amid the hootings of the crowd, paracelsus once again "aspires"; but it is from a lower level, with energy less certain, and with a more turbid passion. upon such soiled and draggled wings can he ever soar again? his strength is the strength of fever; his gaiety is wild and bitter; he urges his brain with artificial stimulants. and he, whose need was love, has learnt hatred and scorn. in his earlier quest for truth he had parted with youth and joy; he had grown grey-haired and lean-handed before the time. now, in his new scheme of life, he will not sever truth from enjoyment; he will snatch at the meanest delights; before death comes, something at least shall thus be gained. and yet he has almost lost the capacity for pleasures apart from those of a wolfish hunger for knowledge; and he despises his baser aims and his extravagant speeches. could life only be begun anew with temperate hopes and sane aspirings! but he has given his pledges and will abide by them; he must submit to be hunted by the gods to the end. before he parts from festus at the alsatian inn, a softer mood overtakes him. blinded by his own passion, paracelsus has had no sense to divine the sorrow of his friend, and festus has had no heart to obtrude such a sorrow as this. only at the last moment, and in all gentleness, it must be told--michal is dead. in browning's earliest poem pauline is no more than a name and a shadow. the creator of ottima and colombe, of balaustion and pompilia had much to tell of womanhood. michal occupies, as is right, but a small space in the history of paracelsus, yet her presence in the poem and her silent withdrawal have a poignant influence. we see her as maiden and hear of her as mother, her face still wearing that quiet and peculiar light like the dim circlet floating round a pearl. and now, as the strong men of shakespeare's play spoke of the dead portia in the tent, paracelsus and festus talk of the pastor of einsiedeln's gentle wife. festus speaks in assured hope, paracelsus in daring surmise, of a life beyond the grave, and finally with a bitter return upon himself from his sense of her tranquillity in death: and michal sleeps among the roots and dews, while i am moved at basil, and full of schemes for nuremberg, and hoping and despairing, as though it mattered how the farce plays out, so it be quickly played! it is the last cry of his distempered egoism before the closing scene. in the dim and narrow cell of the hospital of st sebastian, where he lies dying, paracelsus at last "attains"--attains something higher than a professor's chair at basil, attains a rapture, not to be expressed, in the joy which draws him onward, and a lucid comprehension of the past that lies behind. all night the faithful festus has watched beside the bed; the mind of the dying man is working as the sea works after a tempest, and strange wrecks of memory float past in troubled visions. in the dawning light the clouds roll away, a great calm comes upon his spirit, and he recognises his friend. it is laid upon him, before he departs, to declare the meaning of his life. this life of his had been no farce or failure; in his degree he has served mankind, and what _is_ the service of man but the true praise of god? he perceives now the errors of the way; he had been dazzled by knowledge and the power conferred by knowledge; he had not understood god's plan of gradual evolution through the ages; he had laboured for his race in pride rather than in love; he had been maddened by the intellectual infirmities, the moral imperfections of men, whereas he ought to have recognised even in these the capacities of a creature in progress to a higher development. now, at length, he can follow in thought the great circle of god's creative energy, ever welling forth from him in vast undulations, ever tending to return to him again, which return godwards is already foretold in the nature of man by august anticipations, by strange gleams of splendour, by cares and fears not bounded by this our earth. were _paracelsus_ a poem of late instead of early origin in browning's poetical career, we should probably have received no such open prophecy as this. the scholar of the renaissance, half-genius, half-charlatan, would have casuistically defended or apologised for his errors, and through the wreathing mists of sophistry would have shot forth ever and anon some ray of truth. we receive from _paracelsus_ an impression of the affluence of youth. there is no husbanding of resources, and perhaps too little reserve of power. where the poet most abandons himself to his ardour of thought and imagination he achieves his highest work. the stress and tension of his enthusiasm are perhaps too continuous, too seldom relieved by spaces of repose. it is all too much of a mazeppa ride; there are times when we pray for a good quarter of an hour of comfortable dulness, or at least of wholesome bovine placidity. the laws of such a poem are wholly determined from within. the only question we have a right to ask is this--has the poet adequately dealt with his subject, adequately expressed his idea? the division of the whole into five parts may seem to have some correspondency with the five acts of a tragedy; but here the stage is one of the mind, and the acts are free to contract or to expand themselves as the gale of thought or passion rises or subsides. if a spiritual anemometer were invented it would be found that the wind which drives through the poem maintains often and for long an astonishing pace. the strangely beautiful lyric passages interspersed through the speeches are really of a slower movement than the dramatic body of the poem; they are, by comparison, resting-places. the perfumed closet of the song of paracelsus in part iv. is "vowed to quiet" (did browning ever compose another romanza as lulling as this?), and the maine glides so gently in the lyric of festus (part v.) that its murmuring serves to bring back sanity to the distracted spirit of the dying aureole. there are youthful excesses in _paracelsus_; some vague, rhetorical grandeurs; some self-conscious sublimities which ought to have been oblivious of self; some errors of over-emphasis; some extravagances of imagery and of expression. the wonderful passage which describes "spring-wind, as a dancing psaltress," passing over the earth, is marred by the presence of "young volcanoes" "cyclops-like staring together with their eyes on flame," which young volcanoes were surely the offspring of the "young earthquake" of byron. but these are, as the french phrase has it, defects of the poem's qualities. a few pieces of base metal are flung abroad unawares together with the lavish gold. a companion poem to _paracelsus_--so described by browning to leigh hunt--was conceived by the poet soon after the appearance of the volume of . when _strafford_ was published two years later, we learn from a preface, afterwards omitted, that he had been engaged on _sordello_. browning desired to complete his studies for this poem of italy among the scenes which it describes. the manuscript was with him in italy during his visit of ; but the work was not to be hastily completed. _sordello_ was published in , five years after _paracelsus_. in the chronological order of browning's poems, by virtue of the date of origin, it lies close to the earlier companion piece; in the logical order it is the completion of a group of poems--_pauline, paracelsus, sordello_--which treat of the perplexities, the trials, the failures, the ultimate recovery of men endowed with extraordinary powers; it is one more study of the conduct of genius amid the dangers and temptations of life. here we may rightly disregard the order of publication, and postpone the record of external incidents in browning's poetical development, in order to place _sordello_ in its true position, side by side with _paracelsus_. how the subject of _sordello_ was suggested to browning we do not know; the study of dante may have led him to a re-creation of the story of dante's predecessor; after having occupied in imagination the old towns of germany and switzerland--würzburg and basil, colmar and salzburg--he may have longed for the warmth and colour of italy; after the renaissance with its revolutionary speculations, he may have wished to trace his way back to the middle age, when men lived and moved under the shadow of one or the other of two dominant powers, apparently fixed in everlasting rivalry--the emperor and the pope. "the historical decoration," wrote browning, in the dedicatory letter of , to his friend milsand, "was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study." undoubtedly the history of a soul is central in the poem; but the drawings of italian landscape, so sure in outline, so vivid in colour; the views of old italian city life, rich in the tumult of townsfolk, military chieftains, men-at-arms; the pictures of sombre interiors, and southern gardens, the hillside castle amid its vines, the court of love with its contending minstrels, the midnight camp lit by its fires; and, added to these, the titianesque portraits of portly magnifico and gold-haired maiden, and thought-worn statist make up an environment which has no inconsiderable poetic value of its own, feeding, as it does, the inner eye with various forms and dyes, and leaving the "spirit in sense" more wealthy. with a theme so remote from the common consciousness of his own day, browning conceived that there would be an advantage in being his own commentator and interpreter, and hence he chose the narrative in preference to the dramatic form; thus, he supposed he could act the showman and stand aside at times, to expound his own intentions. unhappily, in endeavouring to strengthen and concentrate his style, he lost that sense of the reader's distance from himself which an artist can never without risk forget; in abbreviating his speech his utterance thickened; he created new difficulties by a legerdemain in the construction of sentences; he assumed in his public an alertness of intelligence equal to his own. when it needs a leaping-pole to pass from subject to verb across the chasm of a parenthesis, when a reader swings himself dubiously from relative to some one of three possible antecedents, when he springs at a meaning through the fissure of an undeveloped exclamatory phrase, and when these efforts are demanded again and again, some muscular fatigue naturally ensues. yet it is true that when once the right connections in these perplexing sentences have been established, the sense is flashed upon the mind with singular vividness; then the difficulty has ceased to exist. and thus, in two successive stages of study, the same reader may justly censure _sordello_ for its obscurity of style, and justly applaud it for a remarkable lucidity in swiftness. intelligent, however, as browning was, it implied a curious lack of intelligence to suppose that a poem of many thousand lines written i in shorthand would speedily find decipherers. if we may trust the words of westland marston, recorded by mr w.m. rossetti in _the preraphaelite brotherhood journal_ ( february ), browning imagined that his shorthand was roman type of unusual clearness: "marston says that browning, before publishing _sordello_, sent it to him to read, saying that this time i the public should not accuse him at any rate of being unintelligible." what follows in the _journal_ is of interest, but can hardly be taken as true to the letter: "browning's system of composition is to write down on a slate, in prose, what he wants to say, and then turn it into verse, striving after the greatest amount of condensation possible; thus, if an exclamation will suggest his meaning, he substitutes this for a whole sentence." in climbing an antique tower we may obtain striking flashes of prospect through the slits and eyelet-holes which dimly illuminate the winding stair, but to combine these into an intelligible landscape is not always easy. browning's errors of style are in part attributable to his unhappy application of a passage in a letter of caroline fox which a friend had shown him. she stated that her acquaintance john sterling had been repelled by the "verbosity" of _paracelsus_: "doth mr browning know," she asked, "that wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"[ ] browning was determined to avoid "verbosity"; but the method which seems to have occurred to him was that of omitting many needful though seemingly insignificant words, and jamming together the words that gleam and sparkle; with the result that the mind is at once dazzled and fatigued. sordello, the italian singer of the thirteenth century, is conceived by browning as of the type which he had already presented in the speaker of _pauline_, only that here the poet is not infirm in will, and, though loved by palma, he is hardly a lover. like the speaker of _pauline_ he is preoccupied with an intense self-consciousness, the centre of his own imaginative creations, and claiming supremacy over these. he craves some means of impressing himself upon the world, some means of deploying the power that lies coiled within him, not through any gross passion for rule but in order that he may thus manifest himself to himself at the full. he is as far as possible removed from that type of the worshipping spirit exhibited in aprile, and in the poet eglamor, whom sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. the fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws sordello out of his goito solitude to the worldly society of mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in _pauline_, and exhibited more fully--and yet with a difference--in the basil experiences of paracelsus. like the poet of _pauline_, after his immersion in worldliness, sordello again seeks solitude, and recovers a portion of his higher self; but solitude cannot content one who is unable to obtain the self-manifestation which his nature demands without the aid of others who may furnish an external body for the forces that lie suppressed within him. suddenly and unexpectedly the prospect of a political career opens before him. may it not be that he will thus obtain what he needs, and find in the people the instrument of his own thoughts, his passions, his aspirations, his imaginings, his will? may not the people become the body in which his spirit, with all its forces, shall incarnate itself? coming into actual acquaintance with the people for the first time, the sight of their multiform miseries, their sorrows, even their baseness lays hold of sordello; it seems as if it were they who were about to make _him_ their instrument, the voice through which their inarticulate griefs should find expression; he is captured by those whom he thought to capture. by all his personal connections he is of the imperial party--a ghibellin; but, studying the position of affairs, he becomes convinced that the cause of the pope is one with the cause of the people. at this moment vast possibilities of political power suddenly widen upon his view; sordello, the minstrel, a poor archer's son, is discovered to be in truth the only son of the great ghibellin chieftain, salinguerra; he is loved by palma, who, with her youth and beauty, brings him eminent station, authority, and a passion of devoted ambition on his behalf; his father flings upon sordello's neck the baldric which constitutes him the emperor's representative in northern italy. the heart and brain of sordello become the field of conflict between fierce, contending forces. all that is egoistic in his nature cries out for a life of pride and power and joy. at best it is but little that he could ever do to serve the suffering multitude. and yet should he falter because he cannot gain for them the results of time? is it not his part to take the single step in their service, though it can be no more than a step? in the excitement of this supreme hour of inward strife sordello dies; but he dies a victor; like paracelsus he also has "attained"; the imperial baldric is found cast below the dead singer's feet. this, in brief, is the "history of a soul" which browning has imagined in his _sordello_. and the conclusion of the whole matter can be briefly stated: the primary need of such a nature as sordello's--and we can hardly doubt that browning would have assigned himself a place in the class to which the poet of his imagination belongs--is that of a power above himself, which shall deliver him from egoism, and whose loyal service shall concentrate and direct his various faculties, and this a power not unknown or remote, but one brought near and made manifest; or, in other words, it is the need of that which old religion has set forth as god in christ. sordello in his final decision in favour of true service to the people had, like paracelsus, given his best praise to god, had given his highest pledge of loyalty to whatever is divine in life. and therefore, though he has failed in all his high designs, his failure is in the end a success. he, like paracelsus, had read that bitter sentence which declares that "collective man outstrips the individual":-- "god has conceded two sights to a man-- one, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, the other, of the minute's work, man's first step to the plan's completion." and the poor minute's work assigned him by the divine law of justice and pity he accepts as his whole life's task. it is true that though he now clearly sees the end, he has not perhaps recognised the means. if sordello contemplated political action as his mode of effecting that minute's work, he must soon have discovered, were his life prolonged, that not thus can a poet live in his highest faculty, or render his worthiest service. the poet--and speaking in his own person browning makes confession of his faith--can adequately serve his mistress, "suffering humanity," only as a poet. sordello failed to render into song the highest thoughts and aspirations of italy; but dante was to follow and was not to fail. the minstrel's last act--his renunciation of selfish power and pleasure, his devotion to what he held to be the cause of the people, the cause of humanity, was indeed his best piece of poetry; by virtue of that act sordello was not a beaten man but a conqueror. these prolonged studies--_paracelsus, sordello_, and, on a more contracted scale, _pauline_--each a study in "the development of a soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer. he had, as yet, brought only certain of his faculties into play, or, at least, he had not as yet connected with his art certain faculties which become essential characteristics of his later work. there is no humour in these early poems, or (since naddo and the critic tribe of _sordello_ came to qualify the assertion) but little; there is no wise casuistry, in which falsehood is used as the vehicle of truth; the psychology, however involved it may seem, is really too simple; the central personages are too abstract--knowledge and love and volition do not exhaust the soul; action and thought are not here incorporated one with the other; a deed is not the interpreter of an idea; an idea is first exhibited by the poet and the deed is afterwards set forth as its consequence; the conclusions are too patently didactic or doctrinaire; we suspect that they have been motives determining the action; our scepticism as to the disinterested conduct of the story is aroused by its too plainly deduced moral. we catch the powers at play which ought to be invisible; we fiddle with the works of the clock till it ceases to strike. yet if only a part of browning's mind is alive in these early poems, the faculties brought into exercise are the less impeded by one another; the love of beauty is not tripped up by a delight in the grotesque. and there is a certain pleasure in attending to prophecy which has not learnt to hide itself in casuistry. the analysis of a state of mind, pursued in _sordello_ with an effort that is sometimes fatiguing and not always successful, is presently followed by a superb portrait--like that of salinguerra--painted by the artist, not the analyst, and so admirable is it that in our infirmity we are tempted to believe that the process of flaying and dissection alters the person of a man or woman as swift has said, considerably for the worse. footnotes: [footnote : the supposition of mr sharp and mr gosse that browning visited italy after having seen st petersburg is an error. his first visit to italy was that of . i may note here that in a letter to e.b.b. (vol. ii. ) browning refers to having been in holland some ten years since; the date of his letter is august , .] [footnote : mrs bronson; browning in venice. _cornhill magazine_, feb. . pp. , .] [footnote : mrs orr's "handbook to browning," pp. , .] chapter iii the maker of plays the publication of _paracelsus_ did not gain for browning a large audience, but it brought him friends and acquaintances who gave his life a delightful expansion in its social relations. john forster, the critic, biographer and historian, then unknown to him, reviewed the poem in the _examiner_ with full recognition of its power and promise. browning gratefully commemorated a lifelong friendship with forster, nearly a score of years later, in the dedication of the edition of his poetical works. mrs orr recites the names of carlyle, talfourd, r. hengist horne, leigh hunt, procter, monckton milnes, dickens, wordsworth, landor, among those of distinguished persons who became known to browning at this period.[ ] his "simple and enthusiastic manner" is referred to by the actor macready in his diary; "he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man i ever saw." browning's face was one of rare intelligence and full of changing expression. he was not tall, but in early years he was slight, was graceful in his movements, and held his head high. his dark brown hair hung in wavy masses upon his neck. his voice had in early manhood a quality, afterwards lost, which mr sharp describes as "flute-like, clear, sweet and resonant." slim, dark, and very handsome are the words chosen by mrs bridell-fox to characterise the youthful browning as he reappeared to her memory; "and--may i hint it?"--she adds, "just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form.' but full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." yet the correct and conventional browning could also fire up for lawlessness--"frenetic to be free." he was hail-fellow well-met, we are told--but is this part of a browning legend?--with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into little bethels and other tents of spiritual ishmael. from camberwell browning's father moved to a house at hatcham, transporting thither his long rows of books, together with those many volumes which lay still unwritten in the "celle fantastyk" of his son. "there is a vast view from our greatest hill," wrote browning; a vast view, though wordsworth had scorned the londoner's hill--"hill? _we_ call that, such as that, a _rise_." here he read and wrote, enjoyed his rides on the good horse "york," and cultivated friendship with a toad in the pleasant garden, for he had a peculiar interest, as his poems show, in creatures that live a shy, mysterious life apart from that of man, and the claim of beauty, as commonly understood, was not needed to win his regard. browning's eye was an instrument made for exact and minute records of natural phenomena. "i have heard him say," mr sharp writes, "that at that time"--speaking of his earlier years--"his faculty of observation would not have appeared despicable to a seminole or an iroquois." such activity of the visual nerve differs widely from the wise passiveness or brooding power of the wordsworthian mode of contemplation. browning's life was never that of a recluse who finds in nature and communion with the anima mundi a counterpoise to the attractions of human society. society fatigued him, yet he would not abandon its excitements. a mystic--though why it should be so is hard to say--does not ordinarily affect lemon-coloured kid gloves, as did the browning of mrs bridell-fox's recollection. the mysticism of browning's temper of mind came not by withdrawal from the throng of positive facts, but by pushing through these to the light beyond them, or by the perception of some spear-like shaft of light piercing the denseness, which was serviceable as the sheathe or foil. and of course it was among men and women that he found suggestions for some of his most original studies. an introduction to macready which took place at mr fox's house towards the close of november was fruitful in consequences. a month later browning was macready's guest at elstree, the actor's resting-place in the country. his fellow-traveller, then unknown to him, in the coach from london was john forster; in macready's drawing-room the poet and his critic first formed a personal acquaintance. browning had for long been much interested in the stage, but only as a spectator. his imagination now turned towards dramatic authorship with a view to theatrical performance. a play on a subject from later roman history, _narses_, was thought of and was cast aside. the success of talfourd's _ion_, after the first performance of which (may , ) browning supped in the author's rooms with macready, wordsworth, and landor, probably raised high hopes of a like or a greater success for some future drama of his own. "write a play, browning," said macready, as they left the house, "and keep me from going to america." "shall it be historical or english?" browning questioned, as the incident is related by mrs orr, "what do you say to a drama on strafford?" the life of stafford by his friend forster, just published, which during an illness of the author had been revised in manuscript by browning, probably determined the choice of a subject. by august the poet had pledged himself to achieve this first dramatic adventure. the play was produced at covent garden on may st, , by macready, who himself took the part of strafford. helen faucit, then a novice on the stage, gave an adequate rendering of the difficult part of lady carlisle. for the rest, the complexion of the piece, as browning describes it, after one of the latest rehearsals, was "perfect gallows." great historical personages were presented by actors who strutted or slouched, who whimpered or drawled. the financial distress at covent garden forbade any splendour or even dignity of scenery or of costumes.[ ] the text was considerably altered--and not always judiciously--from that of the printed play, which had appeared before its production on the stage. yet on the first night _strafford_ was not damned, and on the second it was warmly applauded.[ ] after the fifth performance the wretched pym refused to save his mother england even once more, and the play was withdrawn. browning declared to his friends that never again, as long as he might live, would he write a play. whining not being to his taste, he averted his eyes and set himself resolutely to work upon _sordello_. "i sail this morning for venice," browning wrote to a friend on good friday, . he voyaged as sole passenger on a merchantman, and soon was on friendliest terms with the rough kindly captain. for the first fortnight the sea was stormy and browning suffered much; as they passed through the straits of gibraltar, captain davidson aided him to reach the deck, and a pulsing of home-pride--not home-sickness--gave their origin to the patriotic lines beginning, "nobly, nobly cape saint vincent to the north-west died away." under the bulwark of the _norham castle_, off the african coast, when the fancy of a gallop on his uncle reuben's horse suddenly presented itself in pleasant contrast with the tedium of the hours on shipboard, he wrote in pencil, on the flyleaf of bartoli's simboli, that most spirited of poems which tell of the glory of motion--_how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_. the only adventure of the voyage was the discovery of an algerine pirate ship floating keel uppermost; it righted suddenly under the stress of ropes from the _norham castle_, and the ghastly and intolerable dead--algerines and spaniards--could not scare the british sailors eager for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world." having visited venice, vicenza and padua--cities and mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished poem--browning returned home by way of tyrol, the rhine, liege and antwerp. it was his first visit to italy and was a time of enchantment. fifty years later he recalled the memories of these early days when his delight had something insubstantial, magical in it, and the vision was half perceived with the eye and half projected from within:-- how many a year my asolo, since--one step just from sea to land-- i found you, loved yet feared you so-- for natural objects seemed to stand palpably fire-clothed![ ] of evenings soon after his return to london mrs bridell-fox writes: "he was full of enthusiasm for venice, that queen of cities. he used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced." the anticipations of genius had already produced a finer etching than any of these, in those lines of marvellous swiftness and intensity in _paracelsus_, which describe constantinople at the hour of sunset. [illustration: main street of asolo, showing browning's house. _from a drawing by_ miss d. noyes.] the publication of _sordello_ ( ) did not improve browning's position with the public. the poem was a challenge to the understanding of an aspirant reader, and the challenge met with no response. an excuse for not reading a poem of five or six thousand lines is grateful to so infirm and shortlived a being as man. and, indeed, a prophet, if prudent, may do well to postpone the privilege of being unintelligible until he has secured a considerable number of disciples of both sexes. the reception of _sordello_ might have disheartened a poet of less vigorous will than browning; he merely marched breast forward, and let _sordello_ lie inert, until a new generation of readers had arisen. the dramas, _king victor and king charles_ and _the return of the druses_ (at first named "mansoor the hierophant") now occupied his thoughts. short lyrical pieces were growing under his hand, and began to form a considerable group. and one fortunate day as he strolled alone in the dulwich wood--his chosen resort of meditation--"the image flashed upon him of one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it."[ ] in other words pippa had suddenly passed her poet in the wood. a cheap mode of issuing his works now in manuscript was suggested to browning by the publisher moxon. they might appear in successive pamphlets, each of a single sheet printed in double-column, and the series might be discontinued at any time if the public ceased to care for it. the general title _bells and pomegranates_ was chosen; "beneath upon the hem of the robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about." browning, as he explained to his readers in the last number, meant to indicate by the title, "something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought"--such having been, in fact, one of the most familiar of the rabbinical interpretations designed to expound the symbolism of this priestly decoration prescribed in "exodus." from to the numbers of _bells and pomegranates_ successively appeared; with the eighth the series closed. the first number--_pippa passes_--was sold for sixpence; when _king victor and king charles_ was published in the following year ( ), the price was raised to one shilling. the third and the seventh numbers were made up of short pieces--_dramatic lyrics_ ( ), _dramatic romances and lyrics_ ( ). _the return of the druses_ and _a blot in the 'scutcheon_--numbers and --followed each other in the same year . _colombe's birthday_--the only number which is known to survive in manuscript--came next in order ( ). the last to appear was that which included _luna_, browning's favourite among his dramas, and _a soul's tragedy_.[ ] his sister, except in the instance of _colombe_, was browning's amanuensis. on each title-page he is named robert browning "author of paracelsus"--the "wholly unintelligible" _sordello_ being passed over. talfourd, "barry cornwall," and john kenyon (the cousin of elizabeth barrett) were honoured with dedications. in these pamphlets of moxon, browning's wonderful apples of gold were certainly not presented to the public in pictures or baskets of silver; yet the possessor of the eight parts in their yellow paper wrappers may now be congratulated. only one of the numbers--_a blot in the 'scutcheon_--attained the distinction of a second edition, and this probably because the drama as published was helped to a comparative popularity by its representation on the stage. this tragedy of young love and death was written hastily--in four or five days--for macready. browning while at work on his play, as we learn from a letter of dante rossetti to allingham, was kept indoors by a slight indisposition; his father on going to see him "was each day received boisterously and cheerfully with the words: 'i have done another act, father.'"[ ] forster read the tragedy aloud from the manuscript for dickens, who wrote of it with unmeasured enthusiasm in a letter, known to browning only when printed after the lapse of some thirty years: "browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow.... i know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it." things had gone ill with macready at drury lane, and when the time for _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly have been released from his promise to produce the play; but browning failed to divine the true state of affairs. the tragedy was read to the company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was greeted with laughter. to make amends, macready himself undertook to read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of his mind, to appear before the public: his part--that of lord tresham--must be taken by phelps. from certain rehearsals phelps was unavoidably absent through illness. macready who read his lines on these occasions, now was caught by the play, and saw possibilities in the part of tresham which fired his imagination. he chose, almost at the last moment, to displace his younger and less distinguished colleague. browning, on the other hand, insisted that phelps, having been assigned the part, should retain it. to baffle macready in his design of presenting the play to the public in a mutilated form, browning, aided by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours.[ ] a rupture of the long-standing friendship with macready followed, nor did author and actor meet again until after the great sorrow of browning's life. "mr macready too"--writes mrs orr--"had recently lost his wife, and mr browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, 'o macready!'" the tragedy was produced at drury lane on february nth, , with phelps, who acted admirably as tresham, and helen faucit as mildred. although it had been ill rehearsed and not a shilling had been spent on scenery or dresses, it was received with applause. to a call for the author, browning, seated in his box, declined to make any response. thus, not without some soreness of heart, closed his direct connection with the theatre. he heard with pleasure when in italy that _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ was given by phelps at sadler's wells theatre in november , and with unquestionable success. a rendering of _colombe's birthday_ was projected by charles kean in , but the long delays, which were inevitable, could not be endured by browning, who desired to print his play forthwith among the _bells and pomegranates_. it was not until nine years later that this play, a veritable "all for love, or the world well lost," was presented at the haymarket, helen faucit appearing as the duchess. soon after _colombe's birthday_ had been published, browning sailed once more, in the autumn of , for italy.[ ] as he journeyed northwards and homewards, from naples (where they were performing an opera named _sordello_) and rome he sought and obtained at leghorn an interview with trelawny, the generous-hearted friend of shelley, by whose grave he had lately stood.[ ] browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later _in a balcony_, is sufficiently ample to enable us to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. dramatic, in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate his most intimate ideas or impulses, he effected this indirectly, by detaching them from his own personality and giving them a brain and a heart other than his own in which to live and move and have their being. there is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another kind which we may term dynamic. the former deals especially with characters in position, the latter with characters in movement.[ ] passion and thought may be exhibited and interpreted by dramatic genius of either type; to represent passion and thought and action--action incarnating and developing thought and passion--the dynamic power is required. and by action we are to understand not merely a visible deed, but also a word, a feeling, an idea which has in it a direct operative force. the dramatic genius of browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with character in movement. the _dramatis personae_ are ready at almost every moment, except the culminating moments of passion, to fall away from action into reflection and self-analysis. the play of mind upon mind he recognises of course as a matter of profound interest and importance; but he catches the energy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the actual moment of transference than after it has arrived. thought and emotion with him do not circulate freely through a group of persons, receiving some modification from each. he deals most successfully with each individual as a single and separate entity; each maintains his own attitude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to scrutinise it. mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action. the progress of the drama is now retarded; and again, as if the author perceived that the story had fallen behind or remained stationary, it is accelerated by sudden jerks. a dialogue of retrospection is a common device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set before him. with browning for the purpose of mental analysis a dialogue of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses towards the future. the invisible is for him more important than the visible; and so in truth it may often be; but the highest dramatist will not choose to separate the two. the invisible is best captured and is most securely held in the visible. as a writer of drama, browning, who delights to study the noblest attitudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triumph out of apparent failure, finds his proper field in tragedy rather than in comedy. _colombe's birthday_ has a joyous ending, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious pleadings and serious hopes and fears. there is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of browning. pippa's gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright _is_ also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world. bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. the genial cynicism of ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not--we may ask--wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom? no--this is not gaiety; if browning smiles with his ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver. browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains. the world is here the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares wherewith to entangle its victims, to lure down their mounting aspirations, to dull their vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to make them prosperous and portly gentlemen, easy-going, and amiably cynical, tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good. yet truth is truth, and fact is fact; worldly wisdom is genuine wisdom after its kind; we shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure. ogniben can blandly and skilfully conduct a chiappino to his valley of humiliation--"let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." but what would the wisdom of ogniben be worth in its pronouncements on a luria or a colombe? perhaps even in such a case not wholly valueless. the self-pleased, keen-sighted legate might after all have applauded a moral heroism or a high-hearted gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile spirit. bishop blougram--sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist--was not insensible to the superior merits of "rough, grand, old martin luther." in browning's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a passion for high ideals. in creating his chief _dramatis persona_ he distributes among them what he found within himself, and they fall into two principal groups--characters in which the predominating power is intellect, and characters in which the mastery lies with some lofty emotion. the intellect dealing with things that are real and positive, those persons in whom intelligence is supreme may too easily become the children of this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them. the passionate natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment--the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and space? prophet and casuist--browning is both; and to each he will endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this cannot be in favour of the casuist. every self-transcending passion has in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul. it is ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries--"not me--to him, o god, be merciful." the region of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow," is, for browning's imagination, the east. the nations of the west--and, before all others, the italian race--are those of a subtly developed intelligence. the worldly art of a church-man, ingenuities of theology having aided in refining ingenuities of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western brain-craft. but italy is also a land of passion; and therefore at once, for its ardours of the heart--seen not in love alone but in carven capital and on frescoed wall--and for its casuistries of intellect, browning looks to italy for the material best fitted to his artistry. between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of passion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie certain figures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children of the east, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree, of the characteristics of the west--a djabal, with his oriental heart entangled by prankish tricks of sophistry; a luria, whose moorish passion is enthralled by the fascination of florentine intellect, and who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western self-consciousness. loyalties, devotions, to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, temporal successes to these--such, stated in a broad and general way, is the theme of special interest to browning in his dramas. these loyalties may be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain a portion of error and illusion. but in either case they furnish a test of manly and womanly virtue. with a woman the test is often proposed by love--by love as set over against ease, or high station, or the pride of power. colombe of ravestein is offered on the one hand the restoration of her forfeited duchy, the prospective rank of empress and partnership with a man, who, if he cannot give love, is yet no ignoble wooer, a man of honour, of intellect, and of high ambition; on the other hand pleads the advocate of cleves, a nameless provincial, past his days of youth, lean and somewhat worn, and burdened with the griefs and wrongs of his townsfolk. mere largeness in a life is something, is much; but the quality of a life is more. valence has set the cause of his fellow-citizens above himself; he has made the heart of the duchess for the first time thrill in sympathy with the life of her people; he has placed his loyalty to her far above his own hopes of happiness; he has urged his rival's claims with unfaltering fidelity. it is not with any backward glances of regret, any half-doubts, prudent reserves, or condescending qualifications that colombe gives herself to the advocate of the poor. she, in her youth and beauty, has been happy during her year of idlesse as play-duchess of juliers; she is happier now as she abandons the court and, sure in her grave choice, turns with a light and joyous laugh to welcome the birthday gift of freedom and of love that has so unexpectedly come to her. having once made her election, colombe can throw away the world as gaily as in some girlish frolic she might toss aside a rose. the loyalty of men, their supreme devotion and their test may, as with women, spring from the passion of love; but other tests than this are often proposed to them. with king charles of sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown. he has strength to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him. and if he falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it, the crown which god alone should have removed, shall we assert confidently that browning's dramatic instinct has erred? the pity of it--that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of charles. he has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile europe; is not this enough? or was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the dust? the test again of luigi, in the third part of _pippa passes_, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short. to him that overcometh and endureth unto the end will god give the morning-star: the gift of the morning-star! have i god's gift of the morning-star? and luigi will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as a doomsman commissioned by god to free his italy. the devotion of luria to florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with something of illusion. but the actual florence, with her astute politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him before the end. shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the sword he wields, joined with the forces of pisa, against the beautiful, faithless city? or will his passionate loyalty endure the test? luria withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the victory of florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close everyone is true to him: the only fault's with time; all men become good creatures: but so slow.[ ] once again in browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot pym lies in the choice between two loyalties--one to england and to freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics. his faith in strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his hopes for the grand traitor to england beyond the confines of this life, and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains. browning's pym is a figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric. but the writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions. the loyalty of strafford to the king is too fatuous an instinct to gain our complete sympathy. he rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of nilus, will do its kind. and yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as browning conceives, lies the test of strafford. a self-renouncing passion of any kind is not so common that we can afford to look on his king-worship with scorn. over against these devotees of the ideal browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of duchess colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the nuncio who confronts djabal with his druses, or the papal legate whose easier and half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at lugo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt. to the same breed with the courtiers of colombe belong old vane and savile of the court of charles. to the same breed with the nuncio and the legate, belongs monsignor, who proves himself more than a match for his hireling, the scoundrel intendant. in a happy moment monsignor is startled into indignant wrath; he does not exclaim with the edmund of shakespeare's tragedy "some good i mean to do before i die;" but his "gag the villain!" is a substantial contribution to the justice of our world. under the ennobling influence of charles and his polyxena, the craft of d'ormea is uplifted to a level of real dignity; if he cannot quite attain the position of a martyr for the truth, he becomes something better than one who serves god at the devil's bidding. and braccio, plotter and betrayer, yet always with a certain fidelity towards his mother-city, is won over to the side of simple truth and righteousness by the overmastering power of luria's magnanimity. so precious, after all--browning would say--is the mere capacity to recognise facts; if only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane. browning's vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his eastern luria. in djabal, at once enthusiast and impostor, browning may seem, as often afterwards, to offer an apology for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver who would fain half-deceive himself. footnotes: [footnote : dr moncure conway in "the nation" vol. i. (an article written on the occasion of browning's death) says that he was told by carlyle of his first meeting with browning--as carlyle rode upon wimbledon common a "beautiful youth," walking there alone, stopped him and asked for his acquaintance. the incident has a somewhat legendary air.] [footnote : lady martin (helen faucit), however, wrote in to mrs ritchie: "the play was mounted in all matters with great care ... minute attention to accuracy of costume prevailed.... the scenery was alike accurate."] [footnote : on which occasion browning--muffled up in a cloak--was asked by a stranger in the pit whether he was not the author of "romeo and juliet" and "othello." "no, so far as i am aware," replied browning. two burlesques of shakespeare by a mr brown or brownley were in course of performance in london. _letters of r.b. and e.b.b._, ii. .] [footnote : from the prologue to _asolando_, browning's last volume.] [footnote : mrs orr, "handbook to the works of robert browning," p. ( st ed.).] [footnote : _a soul's tragedy_ was written in or , and revised immediately before publication. see letters of r.b. and e.b.b., i. .] [footnote : letters of d.g. rossetti to william allingham, p. .] [footnote : the above statement is substantially that of browning; but on certain points his memory misled him. whoever is interested in the matter should consult professor lounsbury's valuable article "a philistine view of a browning play" in _the atlantic monthly_, december , where questions are raised and some corrections are ingeniously made.] [footnote : an uncle seems to have accompanied him. see _letters of r.b. and e.b.b_., i. : and (for shelley's grave) i. ; for "sordello" at naples, i., .] [footnote : in later years no friendship existed between the two. we read in mr. w.m. rossetti's diary for , " th july.... i see browning dislikes trelawny quite as much as trelawny dislikes him (which is not a little.)" _rossetti papers_, p. .] [footnote : see mr r. holt hutton's article on browning in "essays theological and literary."] [footnote : luria withdraws from life "to prevent the harm florence will do herself by striking him." _letters of r.b. and e.b.b_., i. .] chapter iv the maker of plays--_(continued)_ the women of the dramas, with one or two exceptions, are composed of fewer elements than the men. a variety of types is presented, but each personality is somewhat constrained and controlled by its idea; the free movement, the iridescence, the variety in oneness, the incalculable multiplicity in unity, of real character are not always present. they admit of definition to a degree which places them at a distance from the inexplicable open secrets of shakespeare's creation; they lack the simple mysteriousness, the transparent obscurity of nature. with a master-key the chambers of their souls can one after another be unlocked. ottima is the carnal passion of womanhood, full-blown, dazzling in the effrontery of sin, yet including the possibility, which browning conceives as existing at the extreme edge of every expansive ardour, of being translated into a higher form of passion which abolishes all thought of self. anael, of _the return of the druses_, is pure and measureless devotion. the cry of "hakeem!" as she falls, is not an act of faith but of love; it pierces through the shadow of the material falsehood to her one illuminated truth of absolute love, like that other falsehood which sanctifies the dying lips of desdemona. the sin of mildred is the very innocence of sin, and does not really alter the simplicity of her character; it is only the girlish rapture of giving, with no limitation, whatever may prove a bounty to him whom she loves:-- come what, come will, you have been happy. the remorse of mildred is the remorse of innocence, the anguish of one wholly unlearned in the dark colours of guilt. this tragedy of mildred and mertoun is the _romeo and juliet_ of browning's cycle of dramas. but mildred's cousin guendolen, by virtue of her swift, womanly penetration and her brave protectiveness of distressed girlhood, is a kinswoman of beatrice who supported the injured daughter of leonato in a comedy of shakespeare which rings with laughter. polyxena, the queen of sardinia--a daughter not of italy but of the rhineland--is, in her degree, an eighteenth century representative of the woman of the ancient teutonic tribes, grave, resolute, wise, and possessing the authority of wisdom. she, whose heart and brain work bravely together like loyal comrades, is strongly but also simply, conceived as the helpmate, the counsellor, and, in the old sense of the word, the comforter of her husband. something of almost maternal feeling, as happens at times in real life, mingles with her wifely affection for charles, who indeed may prove on occasions a fractious son. like a wise guardian-angel she remembers on these occasions that he is only a man, and that men in their unwisdom may grow impatient of unalleviated guardian-angelhood; he will by and by discover his error, and she can bide her time. perhaps, like other heroines of browning, polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. the queen of the english charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked for one admirable speech--her first--when strafford, worn and fevered in the royal service, has just arrived from ireland, and passing out from his interview with the king is encountered by her:-- is it over then? why he looks yellower than ever! well at least we shall not hear eternally of service--services: he's paid at least. the lady carlisle of the same play--a creature in the main of browning's imagination--had the play been elizabethan or jacobean would have followed her lord in a page's dress, have lived on half a smile a day, and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a beaumont and fletcher personage of the boards--and as such effective--than a shakespearian piece of nature. the theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is capacious. in browning's dramatic scene of , _in a balcony_, he created with unqualified success "a very woman" in the enamoured queen, whose heart at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl's.[ ] the young lovers, constance and norbert, are a highly meritorious pair, who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have seen their like before, and since. but the queen, with her unslaked thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure--a royal mlle. de lespinasse, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain. although she has returned the "glare" of constance with the glare of "a panther," the queen is large-hearted. the guards, it is true, arrive as the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons, whom mother nature can easily replace, are mistaken. if the queen does not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours, haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her passion will, heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.[ ] little more, however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene. of browning's full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman--the play-duchess of juliers, no longer duchess, but ever our lady of dear ravestein. colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. even the too fortunate valence--all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate--will for ever be finding her anew. in the development of his dramatic style browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind. _strafford_, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate--not always successfully--the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit. the opening scene expounds the situation. in the second wentworth and pym confront each other; the king surprises them; wentworth lets fall the hand of pym, as the stage tradition requires; as wentworth withdraws the queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of charles: come, dearest!--look, the little fairy, now that cannot reach my shoulder! dearest, come! and so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy. the pathos of the closing scene where strafford is discovered in the tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little william and little anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word "see, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it." the hastily written _a blot in the 'scutcheon_ is, perhaps, of browning's dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation. yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain passages are almost ludicrously undramatic. if romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways' and other eyes would not have winked, and that old capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword. yet _a blot in the 'scutcheon_, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary passions--love and wrath and pride and pity--gives us assurance that browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. if it is weak in construction so--though in a less degree--are webster's _duchess of malfi_, and shakespeare's _cymbeline_. in _king victor and king charles_ browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject. the political background of this play and that of _strafford_ hardly entitles either drama to be named political. browning was a student of history, but it was individuals and not society that interested him. the affairs of england and the affairs of sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief _dramatis persons_; those affairs are not considered for their own sake. certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual. the bishop who orders his tomb at st praxed's is in part a product of the italian renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person. if the plain, substantial style of _king victor and king charles_ is proper to a play with such a hero as charles and such a heroine as polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in _the return of the druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the passion of love. but already browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage. certain pages where djabal and khalil, djabal and anael, anael and loys are the speakers, might be described as dialogues conducted by means of "asides," and even the imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible. with the "very tragical mirth" of the second part of chiappino's story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and the stage have wholly disappeared from browning's theatre; the imaginary dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of faenza by sitting in an easy chair. _pippa passes_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of god. the idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. the magic practised by the unconscious pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the renaissance men of science named "magia naturalis." it is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. let this fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination render it into a symbol--we catch sight of pippa with her songs passing down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of asolo. her only service to god on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. she misconceives everything that concerns "asolo's four happiest ones"--to her fancy ottima is blessed with love, jules is no victim of an envious trick, luigi's content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of god. her own service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours' gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences--here embodied in the symbol of a song--are among the precious realities of our life. nowhere in literature has the virtue of mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? with god all service ranks the same, and she shall serve him all this long day by gaiety and gratitude. _pippa passes_ is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are "ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood" of song. but before his _bells and pomegranates_ were brought to a close browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought. here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a passion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,--it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might assert his independence and be wholly original. and original, in the best sense of the word--entirely true to his highest self--browning was in the "dramatic lyrics" of , and the "dramatic romances and lyrics" of . his senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form--and not least in fantastic form--and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour. in these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. having returned from his first visit to southern italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _englishman in italy_, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.[ ] the fisherman from amalfi pitches down his basket before us, all trembling alive with pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit, --you touch the strange lumps, and mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner of horns and of humps. or it is the "quick rustle-down of the quail-nets," or the "whistling pelt" of the olives, when scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. and by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter: god's own profound was above me, and round me the mountains, and under, the sea, and within me, my heart to bear witness hat was and shall be. not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside triest, in which waring--the flying englishman--is seen "with great grass hat and kerchief black," looking up for a moment, showing his "kingly throat," till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, "into the rose and golden half of the sky." and what animal-painter has given more of the leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than browning has conveyed into his lion of king francis with three strokes of the brush? or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed, and we get the word of rudel: and therefore bask the bees on my flower's breast, as on a platform broad. or--a grief to booklovers!--the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree's crevice of browning's _garden fancy_, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[ ] or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment--before love enters--all the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye: the grey sea and the long black land; and the yellow half-moon large and low; and the startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep as i gain the cove with pushing prow. if browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits--and in the letters to miss barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror--he had certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living," sung by the young harper david in that poem of _saul_, which appeared as a fragment in the _bells and pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.[ ] of these poems of and one _the pied piper_, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in _bells and pomegranates_ only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. one or two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of france and hungary, _claret_ and _tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy. one, _the lost lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to pym in relation to strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to wordsworth, expresses browning's liberal sentiment in politics. one, the stately _artemis prologuizes_, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama, "hippolytus and aricia," composed in , "much against my endeavour," wrote the poet,--a somewhat enigmatical phrase--"while in bed with a fever." a considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which is the passion of love. a few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. nor is the interpretation of religious emotion--though in a phase that may be called abnormal--wholly forgotten. with every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy. the reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the _cavalier tunes_, is true to england and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness. the leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in his emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the french camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted. and side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy--the _soliloquy in a spanish cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be--a brother in religion! a noble hatred, transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn love--the passion of country--in the italian exile's record of his escape from austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the italian woman who was his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. the examples of abnormal passion are two--that of the amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _porphyria's lover_, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, johannes agricola, whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism. browning's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser--love. when love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the main stream. with browning the passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being. his dramatic method requires that each single faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance. and since love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of association, its occult symbolisms, browning knows how to press into the service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque. in _rudel to the lady of tripoli_ love which cometh by the hearing of the ear (for rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. in _count gismond_ love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the perseus and andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. in _cristine_ love is the interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. from a few lines written to illustrate a venetian picture by maclise _in a gondola_ was evolved. if browning was not entirely accurate in his topography of venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the depth and opulence of its colour. here the abandonment to passion is relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of a venetian painter it glows with colour. the motives of two narrative poems, _the glove_ and _the flight of the duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the world of convention and the world of reality. in each the insulter of proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape from what is false to what is true. in restating the incident of the glove browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _the flight of the duchess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'following the queen of the gipsies, o!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a guy fawkes' day." some two hundred lines were given to hood for his magazine, at a time when hood needed help, and death was approaching him. the poem was completed some months later. it is written, like _the glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhymes. the little duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted wirework of artificial modes and forms. she is a prisoner who is starved for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief. such a small prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered from her cage in wimpole street, and robert browning himself, growing in stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy. another duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved duke's lips in the _dramatic lyrics_ of . _my last duchess_ was there made a companion poem to _count gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the freed-woman in marriage. the italian duchess revolts from the law of wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush, betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens "then all smiles stopped together." never was an agony hinted with more gentlemanly reserve. but the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation. the duke is italian of renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the beautiful humanity alive before him; yet a connoisseur of art to his finger-tips; and after all a duchess can be replaced, while the bronze of glaus of innsbruck--but the glory of his possessions must not be pressed, as though his nine hundred years old name were not enough. the true gift of art--browning in later poems frequently insists upon this--is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses through his own work to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures him forward. in _pictor ignotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was made by the poet. the world is gross, its touch unsanctifies the sanctities of art; yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world with spiritual fire. browning's unknown painter is a delicate spirit, who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. but his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his virgin, babe, and saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm, beautiful regard." and yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth--the urbinate--men praise so! more remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _my last duchess_, is the address of the worldling bishop, who lies dying, to the "nephews" who are sons of his loins. in its paganism of christianity--which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine paganism--that portion of the artistic renaissance which leans towards the world and the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form. the feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing recollection. footnotes: [footnote : _in a balcony_, published in _men and women_, , is said to have been written two years previously at the baths of lucca.] [footnote : i had written the above--and i leave it as i wrote it--before i noticed the following quoted from the letter of a friend by mrs arthur bronson in her article browning in venice: "browning seemed as full of dramatic interest in reading 'in a balcony' as if he had just written it for our benefit. one who sat near him said that it was a natural sequence that the step of the guard should be heard coming to take norbert to his doom, as, with a nature like the queen's, who had known only one hour of joy in her sterile life, vengeance swift and terrible would follow on the sudden destruction of her happiness. 'now i don't quite think that,' answered browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator. 'the queen has a large and passionate temperament, which had only once been touched and brought into intense life. she would have died by a knife in her heart. the guard would have come to carry away her dead body.' 'but i imagine that most people interpret it as i do,' was the reply. 'then,' said browning, with quick interest, 'don't you think it would be well to put it in the stage directions, and have it seen that they were carrying her across the back of the stage?'"] [footnote : browning's eyes were in a remarkable degree unequal in their power of vision; one was unusually long-sighted; the other, with which he could read the most microscopic print, unusually short-sighted.] [footnote : see a very interesting passage on browning's "odd liking for 'vermin'" in _letters of r.b. and e.b.b._. i. , : "i always liked all those wild creatures god '_sets up for themselves_.'" "it seemed awful to watch that bee--he seemed so _instantly_ from the teaching of god."] [footnote : of the first part of _saul_ mr kenyon said finely that "it reminded him of homer's shield of achilles thrown into lyrical whirl and life" _(letters r.b. and e.b.b_. i. ).] chapter v love and marriage in , john kenyon, formerly a school-fellow of browning's father, now an elderly lover of literature and of literary society, childless, wealthy, generous-hearted, proposed to browning that he should call upon elizabeth barrett, kenyon's cousin once removed, who was already distinguished as a writer of ardent and original verse. browning consented, but the poetess "through some blind dislike of seeing strangers"--as she afterwards told a correspondent--declined, alleging, not untruly, as a ground of refusal, that she was then ailing in health.[ ] three years later kenyon sent his cousin's new volumes of _poems_ as a gift to sarianna browning; her brother, lately returned from italy, read these volumes with delight and admiration, and found on one of the pages a reference in verse to his "pomegranates" of a kind that could not but give him a vivid moment of pleasure. might he not relieve his sense of obligation by telling miss barrett, in a letter, that he admired her work? mr kenyon encouraged the suggestion, and though to love and be silent might on the whole have been more to browning's liking, he wrote--january , --and writing truthfully he wrote enthusiastically.[ ] miss barrett, never quite recovered from a riding accident in early girlhood, and stricken down for long in both soul and body by the shock of her brother's death by drowning, lay from day to day and month to month, in an upper room of her father's house in wimpole street, occupied, upon her sofa, with her books and papers--her greek dramatists and her elizabethan poets--shut out from the world, with windows for ever closed, and with only an occasional female visitor, to gossip of the social and literary life of london. never was a spirit of more vivid fire enclosed within a tomb. the letter from browning, "the author of _paracelsus_ and king of the mystics," threw her, she says, "into ecstasics." her reply has a thrill of pleasure running through its graceful half-restraint, and she holds out a hope that when spring shall arrive a meeting in the invalid chamber between her and her new correspondent may be possible. [illustration: elizabeth barrett browning. _from a drawing in chalk by_ field talfourd _in the national portrait gallery_.] from the first a headlong yet delicate speed was in her pen; from the first there was much to say. "oh, for a horse with wings!" mr browning, who had praised her poems, must tell her their faults. he must himself speak out in noble verse, not merely utter himself through the masks of _dramatis personae_. can she, as he alleges, really help him by her sympathy, by her counsel? let him put ceremony aside and treat her _en bon camerade_; he will find her "an honest man on the whole." she intends to set about knowing him as much as possible immediately. what poets have been his literary sponsors? are not the critics wrong to deny contemporary genius? what poems are those now in his portfolio? is not Æschylus the divinest of divine greek spirits? but how inadequately her correspondent has spoken of dante! shall they indeed--as he suggests--write something together? and then--is he duly careful of his health, careful against overwork? and is not gladness a duty? to give back to the world the joy that god has given to his poet? though, indeed, to lean out of the window of this house of life is for some the required, perhaps the happiest attitude. and why--replies the second voice--lean out of the window? his own foot is only on the stair. where are the faults of her poems, of which she had inquired? yes, he will speak out, and he is now planning such a poem as she demands. but she it is, who has indeed spoken out in her verse? in his portfolio is a drama about a moor of othello's country, one luria, with strange entanglings among his florentines. see this, and this, how grandly it is said in the greek of eschylus! but dante, all dante is in his heart and head. and he has seen tennyson face to face; and he knows and loves carlyle; and he has visited sorrento and trod upon monte calvano. oh, the world in this year must be studied, though solitude is best. he has been "polking" all night, and walked home while the morning thrushes piped; and it is true that his head aches. she shall read and amend his manuscript poems. to hear from her is better than to see anybody else. but when shall he see her too? so proceed from january to may the letters of rudel and the still invisible lady of wimpole street. it was happy comradeship on her part, but on his it was already love. his spirit had recognised, had touched, a spirit, which included all that he most needed, and union with which would be the most certain and substantial prize offered by life. there was nothing fatuous in this inward assurance; it was the simplest and most self-evidencing truth. the word "mistrustful"--"do not see me as long as you are mistrustful of"--with its implied appeal to her generous confidence, precipitated the visit. how could she be mistrustful? of course he may come: but the wish to do so was unwisely exorbitant. on the afternoon of may th, , browning first set eyes on his future wife, a little figure, which did not rise from the sofa, pale ringleted face, great eager, wistfully pathetic eyes. he believed that she was suffering from some incurable disease of the spine, and that whatever remained to her of life must be spent in this prostrate manner of an invalid. a movement of what can only be imperfectly described as pity entered into his feeling for her: it was less pity than the joy of believing that he could confer as well as receive. but his first thought on leaving was only the fear that he might have stayed too long or might have spoken too loud. the visit was on tuesday. on thursday, browning wrote the only letter of the correspondence which has been destroyed, one which overflowed with gratitude, and was immediately and rightly interpreted by the receiver as tending towards an offer, implied here, but not expressed, of marriage. it was read in pain and agitation; her heart indeed, but not her will, was shaken; and, after a sleepless night, she wrote words effective to bar--as she believed--all further advance in a direction fatal to his happiness. the intemperate things he had said must be wholly forgotten between them; or else she will not see him again; friends, comrades in the life of the intellect they might continue to be. for once and once only browning lied to miss barrett, and he lied a little awkwardly; his letter was only one of too boisterous gratitude; his punishment--that of one infinitely her inferior--was undeserved; let her return to him the offending letter. returned accordingly it was, and immediately destroyed by the writer. in happier days, miss barrett hoped to recover what then would have been added to a hoard which she treasured; but, browning could not preserve the words which she had condemned. wise guardian-angels smile at each other, gently and graciously, when a lover is commanded to withdraw and to reappear in the character of a friend. an incoming tide may seem for a while to pause; but by and by we look and the rock is covered. browning very dutifully submitted and became a literary counsellor and comrade. the first stadium in the progress of his fortunes opened in january and closed before the end of may; the second closed at the end of august. to a friend miss barrett, assured that he never could be more, might well be generous; visits were permitted, and it was left to browning to fix the days; the postal shuttle threw swift and swifter threads between new cross, hatcham, and wimpole street. the verse of tennyson, the novels of george sand were discussed; her translations from the greek were considered; his manuscript poems were left for her corrections; but transcription must not weary him into headaches; she would herself by and by act as an amanuensis. each of the correspondents could not rest happy until the other had been proved to be in every intellectual and moral quality the superior. browning's praise could not be withheld; it seemed to his friend--and she wrote always with crystalline sincerity--to be an illusion which humbled her. glad memories of italy, sad memories of england and the invalid life were exchanged; there is nothing that she can teach him--she declares--except grief. and yet to him the day of his visit is his light through the dark week. he is like an eastern jew who creeps through alleys in the meanest garb, destitute to all wayfarers' eyes, who yet possesses a hidden palace-hall of marble and gold. even in matters ecclesiastical, the footsteps of the two friends had moved with one consent; each of them preferred a chapel to a church; each was puritan in a love of simplicity in the things of religion; each disowned the puritan narrowness, and the grey aridity of certain schools of dissent. on june --with the warranty of her published poem which had told of flowers sent in a letter--browning encloses in his envelope a yellow rose; and again and again summer flowers arrive bringing colour and sweetness into the dim city room. once miss barrett can report that she has been out of doors, and with no fainting-fit, yet unable to venture in the carriage as far as the park; still her bodily strength is no better than that of a tired bird; she is moreover, years older than her friend (the difference was in fact that between thirty-nine and thirty-three); and the thunder of a july storm has shaken her nerves. there is some thought of her seeking health as far off as malta or even alexandria; but her father will jestingly have it that there is nothing wrong with her except "obstinacy and dry toast." thus cordially, gladly, sadly, and always with quick leapings of the indomitable flame of the spirit, these letters of friend to friend run on during the midsummer days. browning was willing and happy to wait; a confidence possessed him that in the end he would be known fully and aright. on august th came a great outpouring of feeling from miss barrett. she took her friend so far into her confidence as to speak plainly of the household difficulties caused by her father's autocratic temper. the conversation was immediately followed by a letter in which she endeavoured to soften or qualify the impression her words had given, and her heart, now astir and craving sympathy, led her on to write of her most sorrowful and sacred memories--those connected with her brother's death. browning was deeply moved, most grateful for her trust in him, but she had forbidden him to notice the record of her grief. he longed to return confidence with confidence, to tell what was urgent in his heart. but the bar of three months since had not been removed, and he hesitated to speak. his two days' silence was unintelligible to his friend and caused her inexpressible anxiety. could any words of hers have displeased him? or was he seriously unwell? she wrote on august th a little letter asking "the alms of just one line" to relieve her fears. when snow-wreaths are loosened, a breath will bring down the avalanche. it was impossible to receive this appeal and not to declare briefly, decisively, his unqualified trust in her, his entire devotion, his assured knowledge of what would constitute his supreme happiness. miss barrett's reply is perfect in its disinterested safe-guarding of his freedom and his future good as she conceived it. she is deeply grateful, but she cannot allow him to empty his water-gourds into the sand. what could she give that it would not be ungenerous to give? yet his part has not been altogether the harder of the two. the subject must be left. such subjects, however, could not be left until the facts were ascertained. browning would not urge her a step beyond her actual feelings, but he must know whether her refusal was based solely on her view of his supposed interests. and with the true delicacy of frankness she admits that even the sense of her own unworthiness is not the insuperable obstacle. no--but is she not a confirmed invalid? she thought that she had done living when he came and sought her out. if he would be wise, all these thoughts of her must be abandoned. such an answer brought a great calm to browning's heart; he did not desire to press her further; let things rest; it is for her to judge; if what she regards as an obstacle should be removed, she will certainly then act in his best interests; to himself this matter of health creates no difficulty; to sit by her for an hour a day, to write out what was in him for the world, and so to save his soul, would be to attain his ideal in life. what woman would not be moved to the inmost depths by such words? she insists that his noble extravagances must in no wise bind him; but all the bitternesses of life have been taken away from her; henceforth she is his for everything except to do him harm; the future rests with god and with him. and amid the letters containing these grave sentences, so full of fate, first appears a reference to the pet name of her childhood--the "ba" which is all that here serves, like swift's "little language," to indulge a foolish tenderness; and the translator of _prometheus_ is able to put greek characters to their most delightful use in her "[greek: o philtate]." in love-poetry of the middle age the allegorical personage named "danger" plays a considerable part, and it is to be feared that danger too often signified a husband. in wimpole street that alarming personage always meant a father. edward moulton barrett was a man of integrity in business, of fortitude in adversity, of a certain stern piety, and from the superior position of a domestic autocrat he could even indulge himself in occasional fiats of affection. we need not question that there were springs of water in the rock, and in earlier days they had flowed freely. but now if at night he visited his ailing daughter's room for a few minutes and prayed with her and for her, it meant that on such an occasion she was not too criminal to merit the pious intercession. if he called her "puss," it meant that she had not recently been an undutiful child of thirty-nine or forty years old. a circus-trainer probably rewards his educated dogs and horses with like amiable familiarities, and he is probably regarded by his troupe with affection mingled with awe. mr barrett had been appointed circus-trainer by the divine authority of parentage. no one visited wimpole street, where there were grown-up sons as well as daughters, without special permission from the lord of the castle; he authorised the visits of mr browning, the poet, being fondly assured that mr browning's intentions were not those of a burglar, or--worse--an amorous knight-errant. if any daughter of his conceived the possibility of transferring her prime love and loyalty from himself to another, she was even as aholah and aholibah who doted upon the assyrians, captains, and rulers clothed most gorgeously, all of them desirable young men. "if a prince of eldorado" said elizabeth barrett to her sister arabel, "should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good behaviour from the nearest independent chapel in the other--" "why, even then," interrupted arabel, "it would not _do_" one admirable trait, however, mr moulton barrett did possess--he was nearly always away from home till six o'clock. the design that miss barrett should winter abroad was still under consideration, but the place now fixed upon was pisa. suddenly, in mid-september, she finds herself obliged to announce that "it is all over with pisa." her father had vetoed the undutiful project, and had ceased to pay her his evening visits; only in his separate and private orisons were all her sins remembered. to admit the fact that he did not love her enough to give her a chance of recovery was bitter, yet it could not be denied. her life was now a thing of value to herself, for it was precious to another. she beat against the bars of her cage; planned a rebellious flight; made inquiries respecting ships and berths; but she could not travel alone; and she would not subject either of her sisters to the heavy displeasure of the ruler of the house. robert browning held strong opinions on the duty of resisting evil, and if evil assume the guise of parental authority it is none the _less_--he believed--to be resisted. to submit to the will of another is often easy; to act on one's own best judgment is hard; our faculties were given us to put to use; to be passively obedient is really to evade probation--so with almost excessive emphasis browning set forth a cardinal article of his creed; but elizabeth barrett was not, like him, "ever a fighter," and, after all, london in was not bleak and grey as it had been a year previously--"for reasons," to adopt a reiterated word of the correspondence, "for reasons." on two later occasions browning sang the same battle-hymn against the enemies of god and with a little too much vehemence--not to say truculence--as is the way with earnest believers. his gentler correspondent could not tolerate the thought of duelling, and she disapproved of punishment by death. browning argues that for one who values the good opinion of society--not for himself--that good opinion is a possession which may, like other possessions, be defended at the risk of a man's life, and as for capital punishment, is not evil to be suppressed at any price? is not a miscreant to be expelled out of god's world? the difference of opinion was the first that had arisen between the friends, and browning's words carried with them a certain sense of pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. happily the theoretical fire-eater had faith superior to his own arguments;--faith in a woman's insight as finer than his own;--and he is let off with a gratified rebuke for preternatural submissiveness and for arraying her in pontifical garments of authority which hang loose upon so small a figure. the other application of his doctrine of resisting evil was even more trying to her feelings and the preacher was instant certainly out of season. not the least important personage in the wimpole street house was miss barrett's devoted companion flush. loyal and loving to his mistress flushie always was; yet to his lot some canine errors fell; he eyed a visitor's umbrella with suspicion; he resented perhaps the presence of a rival; he did not behave nicely to a poet who had not written verses in his honour; for which he was duly rebuked by his mistress--the punishment was not capital--and was propitiated with bags of cakes by the intruder. when the day for their flight drew near miss barrett proposed somewhat timidly that her maid wilson should accompany her to italy, but she was gratefully confident that flush could not be left behind. just at this anxious moment a dreadful thing befell; a gang of dog-stealers, presided over by the arch-fiend taylor, bore flushie away into the horror of some obscure and vulgar london alley. he was a difficult dog to capture and his ransom must be in proportion to his resistance. there was a terrible tradition of a lady who had haggled about the sum demanded and had received her dog's head in a parcel. miss barrett was eager to part with her six guineas and rescue her faithful companion from misery. was this an occasion for preaching from ethical heights the sin of making a composition with evil-doers? yet browning, still "a fighter" and armed with desperate logic, must needs declaim vehemently against the iniquity of such a bargain. it is something to rejoice at that he was dexterously worsted in argument, being compelled to admit that if italian banditti were to carry off his "ba," he would pay down every farthing he might have in the world to recover her, and this before he entered on that chase of fifty years which was not to terminate until he had shot down with his own hand the receiver of the infamous bribe. the journey of miss barrett to pisa having been for the present abandoned, friendship, now acknowledged to be more than friendship, resumed its accustomed ways. visits, it was agreed, were not to be too frequent--three in each fortnight might prudently be ventured; but wednesday might have to be exchanged for thursday or saturday for monday, if on the first elected day miss mitford--dear and generous friend--threatened to come with her talk, talk, talk, or mrs jameson with her drawings and art-criticism, or some unknown lion-huntress who had thrown her toils, or kindly mr kenyon, who knew of browning's visits, and who when he called would peer through his all-scrutinising spectacles with an air of excessive penetration or too extreme unconsciousness. and there were times--later on--when an avalanche of aunts and uncles would precipitate itself on wimpole street--perspicacious aunts and amiable uncles who were wished as far off as seringapatam, and who wrung from an impatient niece--to whom indeed they were dear--the cry "the barbarians are upon us." miss barrett's sisters, the gentle henrietta, who preferred a waltz to the best sermon of an independent minister, and the more serious arabel, who preferred the sermon of an independent minister to the best waltz, were informed of the actual state of affairs. they were trustworthy and sympathetic; henrietta had special reasons of her own for sympathy; captain surtees cook, who afterwards became her husband, might be discussing affairs with her in the drawing-room at the same time that mr browning the poet--"the man of the pomegranates" as he was named by mr barrett--held converse on literature with elizabeth in the upper chamber. the household was honeycombed with treasons. for the humours of superficial situations and passing incidents miss barrett had a lively sense, and she found some relief in playing with them; but with a nature essentially truthful like hers the necessity of concealment was a cause of distress. the position was no less painful to browning, and in the end it became intolerable. yet while there were obstructions and winding ways in the shallows, in the depths were flawless truth and inviolable love. what sentimental persons fancy and grow effusive over was here the simplest and yet always a miraculous reality--"he of the heavens and earth brought us together so wonderfully, holding two souls in his hand."[ ] in the most illuminating words of each correspondent no merely private, or peculiar feeling is expressed; it is the common wave of human passion, the common love of man and woman, that here leaps from the depths to the height, and over which the iris of beauty ever and anon appears with--it is true--an unusual intensity. and so in reading the letters we have no sense of prying into secrets; there are no secrets to be discovered; what is most intimate is most common; only here what is most common rises up to its highest point of attainment. "i never thought of being happy through you or by you or in you even, your good was all my idea of good, and _is_" "let me be too near to be seen.... once i used to be more uneasy, and to think that i ought to _make_ you see me. but love is better than sight." "i love your love too much. and _that_ is the worst fault, my beloved, i can ever find in my love of _you_." these are sentences that tell of what can be no private possession, being as liberal and free as our light and air. and if the shadow of a cloud appears--appears and passes away--it is a shadow that has floated over many other hearts beside that of the writer: "how dreadfully natural it would be to me, seem to me, if you _did_ leave off loving me! how it would be like the sun's setting ... and no more wonder. only, more darkness." the old exchange of tokens, the old symbolisms--a lock of hair, a ring, a picture, a child's penholder--are good enough for these lovers, as they had been for others before them. what is diffused through many of the letters is gathered up and is delivered from the alloy of superficial circumstance in the "sonnets from the portuguese." in reading which we are in the presence of womanhood--womanhood delivered from death by love and from darkness by; light--as much as in that of an individual woman. and the disclosure in poems and in letters being without reserve affects us as no disclosure, but simply as an adequate expression of the truth universal. one obstacle to the prospective marriage was steadily diminishing in magnitude; miss barrett, with a new joy in life, new hopes, new interests, gained in health and strength from month to month. the winter of - was unusually mild. in january one day she walked--walked, and was not carried--downstairs to the drawing-room. spring came early that year; in the first week of february lilacs and hawthorn were in bud, elders in leaf, thrushes and white-throats in full song. in april miss barrett gave pledges of her confidence in the future by buying a bonnet; a little like a quaker's, it seemed to her, but the learned pronounced it fashionable. early in may, that bonnet, with its owner and arabel and flush, appeared in regent's park, while sunshine was filtering through the leaves. the invalid left her carriage, set foot upon the green grass, reached up and plucked a little laburnum blossom ("for reasons"), saw the "strange people moving about like phantoms of life," and felt that she alone and the idea of one who was absent were real--"and flush," she adds with a touch of remorse, "and flush a little too." many drives and walks followed; at the end of may she feloniously gathered some pansies, the flowers of paracelsus, and this notwithstanding the protest of arabel, in the botanical gardens, and felt the unspeakable beauty of the common grass. later in the year wild roses were found at hampstead; and on a memorable day the invalid--almost perfect in health--was guided by kind and learned mrs jameson through the pictures and statues of the poet rogers's collection. on yet another occasion it was mr kenyon who drove her to see the strange new sight of the great western train coming in; the spectators procured chairs, but the rush of people and the earth-thunder of the engine almost overcame miss barrett's nerves, which on a later trial shrank also from the more harmonious thunder of the organ of the abbey. sundays came when she enjoyed the privilege of sitting if not in a pew at least in the secluded vestry of a chapel, and joining unseen in those simple forms of prayer and praise which she valued most. altogether something like a miracle in the healing of the sick had been effected. money difficulty there was none. browning, it is true, was not in a position to undertake the expenses of even such a simple household economy as they both desired. he was prepared to seek for any honourable service--diplomatic or other--if that were necessary. but miss barrett was resolved against task-work which might divert him from his proper vocation as a poet. and, thanks to the affection of an uncle, she had means--some £ a year, capable of considerable increase by re-investment of the principal--which were enough for two persons who could be content with plain living in italy. browning still urged that he should be the bread-winner; he implored that her money should be made over to her own family, so that no prejudice against his action could be founded on any mercenary feeling; but she remained firm, and would consent only to its transference to her two sisters in the event of his death. and so the matter rested and was dismissed from the thoughts of both the friends. having the great patience of love, browning would not put the least pressure upon miss barrett as to the date of their marriage; if waiting long was for her good, then he would wait. but matters seemed tending towards the desired end. in january he begged her to "begin thinking"; before that month had closed it was agreed that they should look forward to the late summer or early autumn as the time of their departure to italy. not until march would miss barrett permit browning to fetter his free will by any engagement; then, to satisfy his urgent desire, she declared that she was willing to chain him, rivet him--"do you feel how the little fine chain twists round and round you? do you hear the stroke of the riveting?" but the links were of a kind to be loosed if need be at a moment's notice. june came, and with it a proposal from a well-intentioned friend, miss bayley, to accompany her to italy, if, by and by, such a change of abode seemed likely to benefit her health. miss barrett was prepared to accept the offer if it seemed right to browning, or was ready, if he thought it expedient, to wait for another year. his voice was given, with such decision as was possible, in favour of their adhering to the plan formed for the end of summer; they both felt the present position hazardous and tormenting; to wear the mask for another year would suffocate them; they were "standing on hot scythes." accordingly during the summer weeks there is much poring over guide-books to italy; much weighing of the merits of this place of residence and of that. shall it be sorrento? shall it be la cava? or pisa? or ravenna? or, for the matter of that, would not seven dials be as happy a choice as any, if only they could live and work side by side? there is much balancing of the comparative ease and the comparative cost of routes, the final decision being in favour of reaching italy by way of france. and as the time draws nearer there is much searching of time-tables, in the art of mastering which robert browning seems hardly to have been an expert. may mr kenyon be told? or is it not kinder and wiser to spare him the responsibility of knowing? mrs jameson, who had made a friendly proposal similar to that of miss bayley,--may she be half-told? or shall she be invited to join the travellers on their way? what books shall be brought? what baggage? and how may a box and a carpet bag be conveyed out of wimpole street with least observation? it was deeply repugnant to miss barrett's feelings to practise reserve on such a matter as this with her father. her happier companion had informed his father and mother of their plans, and had obtained from the elder mr browning a sum of money, asked for as a loan rather than a gift, sufficient to cover the immediate expenses of the journey. mr barrett was entitled to all respect, and as for affection he received from his daughter enough to make the appearance of disloyalty to him carry a real pang to her heart. but she believed that she had virtually no choice; her nerves were not of iron; the roaring of the great western express she might face but not an angry father. a loud voice, and a violent "scene," such as she had witnessed, until she fainted, when henrietta was the culprit, would have put an end to the italian project through mere physical collapse and ruin. far better therefore to withdraw quietly from the house, and trust to the effect of a subsequent pleading in all earnestness for reconciliation. [illustration: yours very truly, robert browning. _from an engraving by_ j.g. armytage.] as summer passed into early autumn the sense of dangers and difficulties accumulating grew acute. "the ground," wrote browning, "is crumbling from beneath our feet with its chances and opportunities." in one of the early days of august a thunder-storm with torrents of rain detained him for longer than usual at wimpole street; the lightning was the lesser terror of the day, for in the evening entered mr barrett to his daughter with disagreeable questioning, and presently came the words--accompanied by a gaze of stern displeasure--"it appears that _that man_ has spent the whole day with you." the louring cloud passed, but it was felt that visits to be prudent must be rare; for the first time a week went by without a meeting. early in september george barrett, a kindly brother distinguished by his constant air of dignity and importance, was commissioned to hire a country house for the family at dover or reigate or tunbridge, while paperers and painters were to busy themselves at wimpole street. the moment for immediate action had come; else all chance of italy might be lost for the year . "we must be married directly," wrote browning on the morning when this intelligence arrived. next day a marriage license was procured. on the following morning, saturday, september th, accompanied by her maid wilson, miss barrett, after a sleepless night, left her father's house with feet that trembled; she procured a fly, fortified her shaken nerves with a dose of sal volatile at a chemist's shop, and drove to marylebone church, where the marriage service was celebrated in the presence of two witnesses. as she stood and knelt her central feeling was one of measureless trust, a deep rest upon assured foundations; other women who had stood there supported by their nearest kinsfolk--parents or sisters--had one happiness she did not know; she needed it less because she was happier than they.[ ] then husband and wife parted. mrs browning drove to the house of her blind friend, mr boyd, who had been made aware of the engagement. on his sitting-room sofa she rested and sipped his cyprus wine; by and by arrived her sisters with grave faces; the carriage was driven to hampstead heath for the soothing happiness of the autumnal air and sunshine; after which the three sisters returned to their father's house; the wedding-ring was regretfully taken off; and the prayer arose in mrs browning's heart that if sorrow or injury should ever follow upon what had happened that day for either of the two, it might all fall upon her. browning did not again visit at wimpole street; it was enough to know that his wife was well, and kept all these things gladly, tremblingly, in her heart. for himself he felt that come what might his life had "borne flower and fruit."[ ] on the monday week which succeeded the marriage the barrett family were to move to the country house that had been taken at little bookham. on saturday afternoon, a week having gone by since the wedding, mrs browning and wilson, left what had been her home. flush was warned to make no demonstration, and he behaved with admirable discretion. it was "dreadful" to cause pain to her father by a voluntary act; but another feeling sustained her:--"you _only_! as if one said _god only_. and we shall have _him_ beside, i pray of him." at hodgson's, the stationer and bookseller's, they found browning, and a little later husband and wife, with the brave wilson and the discreet flush, were speeding from vauxhall to southampton, in good time to catch the boat for havre. a north wind blew them vehemently from the english coast. in the newspaper announcements of the wedding the date was to be omitted, and browning rejected the suggestion that on this occasion, and with reference to the great event of his life, he should be defined to the public as "the author of _paracelsus_." footnotes: [footnote : _letters of e.b.b._, i. .] [footnote : see _letters of r.b. and e.b.b_., i. .] [footnote : e.b.b. to r.b., march , .] [footnote : e.b.b. to r.b., sept. , .] [footnote : r.b. to e.b.b., sept. , .] chapter vi early years in italy the letters from which this story has been drawn have from first to last one burden; in them deep answers to deep; they happily are of a nature to escape far from the pedantries of literary criticism. it cannot be maintained that browning quite equals his correspondent in the discovery of rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings; or that his felicity in giving them expression is as frequent as hers. even on matters of literature his comments are less original than hers, less penetrating, less illuminating. her wit is the swifter and keener. when browning writes to afford her amusement, he sometimes appears to us, who are not greatly amused, a little awkward and laborious. she flashes forth a metaphor which embodies some mystery of feeling in an image entirely vital; he, with a habit of mind of which he was conscious and which often influences his poetry, fastens intensely on a single point and proceeds to muffle this in circumstance, assured that it will be all the more vividly apparent when the right instant arrives and requires this; but meanwhile some staying-power is demanded from the reader. neither correspondent has the art of etching a person or a scene in a few decisive lines; the gift of carlyle, the gift of carlyle's brilliant wife is not theirs, perhaps because acid is needed to bite an etcher's plate. and, indeed, many of the minor notabilities of , whose names appear in these letters, might hardly have repaid an etcher's intensity of selective vision. among the groups of spirits who presented themselves to dante there were some wise enough not to expect that their names should be remembered on earth; such shades may stand in a background. it is, however, strange that browning who created so many living men and women should in his letters have struck out no swift indelible piece of portraiture; even here his is the inferior touch. and yet throughout the whole correspondence we cannot but be aware that his is the more massive and the more complex nature; his intellect has hardier thews; his passion has an energy which corresponds with its mass; his will sustains his passion and projects it forward. and towards miss barrett his strength is seen as gentleness, his energy as an inexhaustible patience of hope. when browning and his wife reached paris, mrs browning was worn out by the excitement and fatigue. by a happy accident mrs jameson and her niece were at hand, and when the first surprise, with kisses to both fugitives, was over, she persuaded them to rest for a week where they were, promising, if they consented, to be their companion and aider until they arrived at pisa. their "imprudence," in her eyes, was "the height of prudence"; "wild poets or not" they were "wise people." the week at paris was given up to quietude; once they visited the louvre, but the hours passed for the most part indoors; it all seemed strange and visionary--"whether in the body or out of the body," wrote mrs browning, "i cannot tell scarcely." from paris and orleans they proceeded southwards in weather, which, notwithstanding some rains, was delightful. from avignon they went on pilgrimage to petrarch's vaucluse; browning bore his wife to a rock in mid stream and seated her there, while flush scurried after in alarm for his mistress. in the passage from marseilles to genoa, mrs browning was able to sit on deck; the change of air, although gained at the expense of some weariness, had done her a world of good. early in october the journeying closed at pisa. rooms were taken for six months in the great collegio ferdinando, close to the duomo and the leaning tower, rooms not quite the warmest in aspect. mrs jameson pronounced the invalid not improved but transformed. the repose of the city, asleep, as dickens described it, in the sun and the secluded life--a perpetual _tête-à-tête_, but one so happy--suited both the wedded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain, went by in "reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had twenty people to laugh with us, or rather _hadn't_." their sole acquaintance was an italian professor of the university; for three months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world was opened each evening by the arrival of the siècle. the lizards were silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes. they wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains seemed not far off. at the lanfranchi palace they thought of byron, to see a curl of whose hair or a glove from whose hand, browning declares (so foolish was he and ignorant) he would have gone farther than to see all wordsworth, coleridge and southey condensed in rosicrucian fashion into a vial. in the campo santo they listened to a musical mass for the dead. in the duomo they heard the friar preach. and early in the morning their dreams were scattered by the harmonious clangour of the church bells. "i never was happy before in my life," wrote mrs browning. her husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties. at two o'clock came a light dinner--perhaps thrushes and chianti--from the _trattoria_; at six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed, roast chestnuts and grapes. debts there were none to vex the spirits of these prudent children of genius. if a poet could not pay his butcher's and his baker's bills, browning's sympathies were all with the baker and the butcher. "he would not sleep," wrote his wife, "if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week "; and elsewhere: "being descended from the blood of all the puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days." perhaps some of this horror arose from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the more joyous mountings of the mind. one grief and only one was still present; mr barrett remained inexorable; his daughter hoped that with time and patience his arms would open to her again. it was a hope never to be fulfilled. in the cordial comradeship of browning's sister, sarianna, a new correspondent, there was a measure of compensation. already browning had in view the collected edition of his poetical works which did not appear until . the poems were to be made so lucid, "that everyone who understood them hitherto" was to "lose that mark of distinction." _paracelsus_ and _pippa_ were to be revised with special care. the sales reported by moxon were considered satisfactory; but of course the profits as yet were those of his wife's poems. "she is," he wrote to his publisher, "there as in all else, as high above me as i would have her." it was at pisa that the highest evidence of his wife's powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband. in a letter of december --more than a year since--she had confessed that she was idle; and yet "silent" was a better word she thought than "idle." her apology was that the apostle paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things. at the close of a letter written on july , , she wrote: "you shall see some day at pisa what i will not show you now. does not solomon say that 'there is a time to read what is written?' if he doesn't, he ought." the time to read had now come. "one day, early in ," as mr gosse records what was told to him by browning, "their breakfast being over, mrs browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. he was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant was gone. it was mrs browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. she told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room." the papers were a transcript of those ardent poems which we know as "sonnets from the portuguese." some copies were printed at reading in for private circulation with the title "sonnets by e.b.b." the later title under which they appeared among mrs browning's poems in the edition of was of browning's suggestion. his wife's proposal to name them "sonnets from the bosnian" was dismissed with words which allude to a poem of hers, "catarina to camoens," that had long been specially dear to him: "bosnian, no! that means nothing. from the portuguese: they are catarina's sonnets!" pisa with all its charm lacked movement and animation. it was decided to visit florence in april, and there enjoy for some days the society of mrs jameson before she left italy. the coupé of the diligence was secured, and on april th mrs jameson's "wild poets but wise people" arrived at florence. an excellent apartment was found in the via delle belle donne near the piazza santa maria novella, and for browning's special delight a grand piano was hired. when mrs browning had sufficiently recovered strength to view the city and its surroundings her pleasure was great: "at pisa we say, 'how beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe." they had hoped for summer wanderings in northern italy; but florence held them throughout the year except for a few days during which they attempted in vain to find a shelter from the heat among the pines of vallombrosa. provided with a letter of recommendation to the abbot they set forth from their rooms at early morning by vettura and from pelago onwards, while browning rode, mrs browning and wilson in basket sledges were slowly drawn towards the monastery by white bullocks. a new abbot, a little holy man with a red face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils "a petticoat stank." yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the house of strangers to five; during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages from the "life of san gualberto" were vouchsafed to heretics of both sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke comfortable words. "rolling or sliding down the precipitous path" they returned to florence in a morning glory, very merry, says mrs browning, for disappointed people. shelter from the glare of august being desirable, a suite of comparatively cool rooms in the palazzo guidi were taken; they were furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace--"a sort of balcony terrace which ... swims over with moonlight in the evenings." from casa guidi windows--and before long mrs browning was occupied with the first part of her poem--something of the life of italy at a moment of peculiar interest could be observed. europe in the years and was like a sea broken by wave after wave of revolutionary passion. browning and his wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments; mrs browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty" for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings. browning, although in this year he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth of individual character. he had faith in a forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of state. he valued liberty chiefly because each man here on earth is in process of being tested, in process of being formed, and liberty is the condition of a man's true probation and development. late in life he was asked to give his answer to the question: "why am i a liberal?" and he gave it succinctly in a sonnet which he did not reprint in any edition of his works, although it received otherwise a wide circulation. it may be cited here as a fragment of biography: "why?" because all i haply can and do, all that i am now, all i hope to be,-- whence comes it save from fortune setting free body and soul the purpose to pursue, god traced for both? if fetters, not a few, of prejudice, convention, fall from me, these shall i bid men--each in his degree also god-guided--bear, and gladly too? but little do or can the best of us: that little is achieved through liberty. who then dares hold--emancipated thus-- his fellow shall continue bound? not i who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss a brother's right to freedom. that is "why."[ ] this is an excellent reason for the faith that was in browning; he holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by that word he understands not only political freedom but also emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention. but browning in his verse, setting aside the early _strafford_, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of byron or shelley, in honour of the abstraction "liberty." nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character. things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind--"thiers is a rascal; i make a point of not reading one word said by m. thiers"; "proudhon is a madman; who cares for proudhon?" "the president's an ass; _he_ is not worth thinking of."[ ] this may be admirable economy of intellectual force; but it is not the way to understand the course of public events; it does not indicate a political or a historical sense. and, indeed, his writings do not show that browning possessed a political or a historical sense in any high degree, save as a representative person may be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation. when mrs trollope called at casa guidi, browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of victor hugo, and that was enough. might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice? "blessed be the inconsistency of men!" exclaimed mrs browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in her an agreeable woman. on the anniversary of their wedding day browning and his wife saw from their window a brilliant procession of grateful and enthusiastic florentines stream into the _piazza_. pitti with banners and _vivas_ for the space of three hours and a half it was the time when the grand duke was a patriot and pio nono was a liberal. the new helmets and epaulettes of the civic guard proclaimed the glories of genuine freedom. the pleasure of the populace was like that of children, and perhaps it had some serious feeling behind it. the incomparable grand duke had granted a liberal constitution, and was led back from the opera to the pitti by the torchlights of a cheering crowd--"through the dark night a flock of stars seemed sweeping up the piazza." a few months later, and the word of mrs browning is "ah, poor italy"; the people are attractive, delightful, but they want conscience and self reverence.[ ] browning and she painfully felt that they grew cooler and cooler on the subject of italian patriotism. a revolution had been promised, but a shower of rain fell and the revolution was postponed. now it was the grand duke _out_, and the bells rang, and a tree of liberty was planted close to the door of casa guidi; six weeks later it was the grand duke _in_, and the same bells rang, and the tree of liberty was pulled down. the pope is well-meaning but weak; and before long honorific epithets have to be denied him--he is merely a pope; his prestige and power over souls is lost. the liberal grand duke is transformed into a duke decorated with austrian titles. as for france, mrs browning had long since learnt from the books she read with so much delight to feel a debt to the country of balzac and george sand. she thought that the unrest and the eager hopes of the french revolution, notwithstanding its errors, indicated at least the conception of a higher ideal than any known to the english people. browning did not possess an equal confidence in france; he did not accept her view that the french occupation of rome was capable of justification; nor did he enter into her growing hero-worship--as yet far from its full development--of louis napoleon. her admiration for balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of wordsworth. with french communism or socialism neither husband nor wife, however republican in their faith, had sympathy; they held that its tendency is to diminish the influence of the individual, and that in the end the progress of the mass is dependent on the starting forth from the mass and the striding forward of individual minds. they believed as firmly as did edmund burke in the importance of what burke styles a natural aristocracy. for four years--from to --browning never crossed the confines of italy. no duties summoned him away, and he was happy in his home. "we are as happy," he wrote in december , "as two owls in a hole, two toads under a tree-stump; or any other queer two poking creatures that we let live after the fashion of their black hearts, only ba is fat and rosy; yes indeed." in spring they drove day by day through the cascine, passing on the way the carven window of the _statue and the bust_, and "the stone called dante's," whereupon he used to bring his quiet chair out, turned to brunelleschi's church.[ ] and after tea there was the bridge of trinita from which to watch the sunsets turning the arno to pure gold while the moon and the evening-star hung aloft. it was a life of retirement and of quiet work. mrs browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out--"not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of alfieri's," but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, "we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass." the "writing" included the revision and preparation for the press of browning's _poems_, in two volumes, which chapman & hall, more liberal than moxon, had undertaken to publish at their own risk, and which appeared in . some care and thought were also given by browning to the alterations of text made in the edition of his wife's poems of the following year; and for a time his own _christmas eve and easter day_ was an absorbing occupation. as to the "reading," the chief disadvantage of florence towards the middle of the last century was the difficulty of seeing new books of interest, whether french or english. yet _vanity fair_ and _the princess, jane eyre_ and _modern painters_ somehow found their way to casa guidi.[ ] casa guidi proper, the casa guidi which held the books and pictures and furniture and graceful knick-knacks chosen by its occupants, who were lovers of beauty, dates only from . previously they had been satisfied with a furnished apartment. not long before the unfurnished rooms were hired, a mistake in choosing rooms which suffered from the absence of sunshine and warmth gave browning an opportunity of displaying what to his wife's eyes appeared to be unexampled magnanimity. the six months' rent was promptly paid, and chambers on the pitti "yellow with sunshine from morning to evening" were secured. "any other man, a little lower than the angels," his wife assured miss mitford, "would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing, but as to _his_ being angry with _me_ for any cause, except not eating enough dinner, the sun would turn the wrong way first." it seemed an excellent piece of economy to take the spacious suite of unfurnished rooms in the via maggio, now distinguished by the inscription known to all visitors to florence, which were to be had for twenty-five guineas a year, and which, when furnished, might be let during any prolonged absence for a considerable sum. the temptation of a ground-floor in the frescobaldi palace, and a garden bright with camellias, to which browning for a time inclined, was rejected. at casa guidi the double terrace where orange-trees and camellias also might find a place made amends for the garden with its threatening cloud of mosquitoes, "worse than austrians"; every need of space and height, of warmth and coolness seemed to be met; and it only remained to expend the welcome proceeds of the sale of books in the recreation of gathering together "rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals' beds and the rest." before long browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like kirkup, would even hazard the name of cimabue or ghirlandaio, or if not that of giotto, then the safer adjective giottesque. although living the life of retirement which his wife's uncertain state of health required, browning gradually obtained the acquaintance of several interesting persons, of whom kirkup, who has just been mentioned, was one. "as to italian society," wrote mrs browning, "one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible." but the name of elizabeth barrett, if not yet that of robert browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated englishmen and americans who had made florence their home. among the earliest of these acquaintances were the american sculptor powers, swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, "with eyes like a wild indian's, so black and full of light"), and hillard, the american lawyer, who, in his _six months in italy_, described browning's conversation as "like the poetry of chaucer," meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, "or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent." "it seems impossible," hillard goes on, "to think that he can ever grow old." and of mrs browning: "i have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. she is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." a third american friend was one who could bring tidings of emerson and hawthorne--margaret fuller of "the dial," now countess d'ossoli, "far better than her writings," says mrs browning, "... not only exalted but _exaltée_ in her opinions, yet calm in manner." her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to america deeply affected mrs browning. "was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. the first person seen on italian soil when browning and his wife disembarked at leghorn was the brilliant and erratic irish priest, "father prout" of _fraser's magazine_, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when browning was ill in florence, and chided mrs browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. charles lever "with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners"--animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect--called on them at the baths of lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship. and little miss boyle, one of the family of the earls of cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet. these, with the hoppners, known to shelley and byron, a french sculptress of royalist sympathies, mlle. de fauveau, much admired by browning, and one of the grandsons of goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain english folk at florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring. in march joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of browning and his wife. on the ninth of that month a son was born at casa guidi, who six weeks later was described by his mother as "a lovely, fat, strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest." he was baptised, with the simple lutheran rites, robert wiedemann barrett--the "wiedemann" in remembrance of the maiden name of browning's mother. from the first, browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of passion.[ ] mrs browning's letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy. and the boy's father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of casa guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart. when little wiedemann could frame imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into "penini," which abbreviated to "pen" became serviceable for domesticities. it was a fantastic derivation of nathaniel hawthorne which connected penini with the colossal statue in florence bearing the name of "apeninno." flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause. but the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow. a few days after the birth of his son came tidings of the death of browning's mother. he had loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the happiness of his wife's safety and his son's birth was terrible; it almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the new gladness of the time. in this conflict of emotions his spirits and to some extent his health gave way. he could not think of returning to his father's home without extreme pain--"it would break his heart," he said, "to see his mother's roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves." he longed that his father and sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to florence; but this was not to be. as for england, it could not be thought of as much on his wife's account as his own. her father held no communication with her; supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily estranged. her sister henrietta had left her former home; having "insulted" her father by asking his consent to her marriage with captain surtees cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter--married to a person of moderate means and odiously "tractarian views"--was never again to be mentioned in mr barrett's presence. england had become for mrs browning a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she did not feel herself as yet able to encounter. the love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose. in , beguiled by the guide-book, they visited fano to find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." their reward at fano was that picture by guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which browning has translated into song: we were at fano, and three times we went to sit and see him in his chapel there, and drink his beauty to our soul's content --my angel with me too. ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically true, followed fano, among whose brown rocks, "elbowing out the purple tides," and brown houses--"an exfoliation of the rock"--they lived for a week on fish and cold water. the tour included rimini and ravenna, with a return to florence by forli and a passage through the apennines. next year-- --when pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in browning's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was mrs browning's part to compel him, for the baby's sake and hers, to seek his own good. they visited spezzia and glanced at the house of shelley at lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in "a sort of eagle's nest" at the highest habitable point of the baths of lucca. here the baby's great cheeks grew rosier; browning gained in spirits; and his wife was able "to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests." when they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness. on one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback--"such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by." it was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at wimpole street. setting aside his own happiness, browning could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied. the weeks at siena of the year were not quite so prosperous. during that summer mrs browning had been seriously ill. when sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain. at first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city. for a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his "singing voice" was heard in the house and garden. mrs browning in the fresh yet warm september air regained her strength. before returning to florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by sodoma. even little wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. "it was as well," said browning, "to have the eyeteeth and the puseyistical crisis over together." this comment, although no more than a passing word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of browning's feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religious movement in england which was altering the face of the established church. "puseyism" was for them a kind of child's play which unfortunately had religion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger. both of them, though one was a writer for the stage and the other could read _madame bovary_ without flinching and approved the morals of _la dame aux camélias_, had their roots in english puritanism.[ ] and now the time had come when browning was to embody some of his puritan thoughts and feelings relating to religion in a highly original poem. footnotes: [footnote : "why am i a liberal?" edited by andrew reid. london, .] [footnote : letters of e.b.b., i. .] [footnote : to miss mitford, august , .] [footnote : casa guidi windows, i.] [footnote : "jane eyre" was lent to e.b.b. by mrs story.] [footnote : _to miss mitford, feb. , ._] [footnote : in january , pen was reading an italian translation of _monte cristo_, and announced, to his father's and mother's amusement, that after dumas he would proceed to "papa's favourite book, _madame bovary_".] chapter vii christmas eve and easter day _christmas eve and easter day_ was published by chapman & hall in the year . it was reported to the author that within the first fortnight two hundred copies had been sold, with which evidence of moderate popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained and subsequently the book became, like _sordello_, a "remainder." as early as , in the opening days of the correspondence with miss barrett, when she had called upon her friend to speak as poet in his own person and to speak out, he assured her that whereas hitherto he had only made men and women utter themselves on his behalf and had given the truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, now he would try to declare directly that which was in him. in place of his men and women he would have her to be a companion in his work, and yet, he adds, "i don't think i shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about popes and imaginative religions that i must say." we can only conjecture as to whether the theme of the poem of was already in browning's mind. his wife's influence certainly was not unlikely to incline him towards the choice of a subject which had some immediate relation to contemporary thought. she knew that poetry to be of permanent value must do more than reflect a passing fashion; that in a certain sense it must in its essence be out of time and space, expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity. yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the artist. and even in the design of such a poem as her own _aurora leigh_ was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of "novel-poem, running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as i conceive of it out plainly." browning's poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of theological professors. the spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate--these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in _easter day_; the spiritual life corporate in _christmas eve._ browning, with the blood of all the puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the exiles at geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth century and the evangelical revival of times less remote. looking around him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable movements--one embodying, or professing to embody, the catholic as opposed to the puritan conception of religion, the other a free critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional dogma of christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical and even in part its religious influence. the facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the same epoch produced in england the sermons of spurgeon, the _apologia pro vita sua_ of newman, and the _literature and dogma_ of matthew arnold. to discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the argumentative genius of dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise. but three representative scenes might be painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way of commentary. such was the design of the poet of _christmas eve_. to topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. but the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed. it was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of shakespeare or of cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature. but it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. one who esteemed so highly the work of balzac and of flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith. the picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of "mount zion" and of the pious sheep--duly indignant at the interloper in their midst--who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of cervantes or of shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of dickens, and it is touched, in the manner of dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity. the night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the moon, the vast double rainbow, and he whose sweepy garment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie. is the vision of the face of christ an illusion? the whole face turned upon me full, and i spread myself beneath it, as when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it in the cleansing sun, his wool,-- steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness some defiled, discoloured web-- so lay i saturate, with brightness. is this a phantom or a dream? well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the mighty report of her umbrella, "wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones." and the fat woman of mount zion chapel, with love lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the lord. thus the poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added. the central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is christ; and the christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very god and very man, the christ of nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. literary criticism which would interpret browning's meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark. love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love. desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one--"love," and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshippers. browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from mount zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of mount zion sit on "divinely flustered" under the pig-of-lead-like pressure of the preaching man's immense stupidity. the pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the holy scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense. nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness--how has a gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect? matthew arnold, had he visited mount zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in english dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. and matthew arnold would have been right. these are the precise subjects of browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. but browning adds that in mount zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is christ. of english nonconformity in its humblest forms browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of roman catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in st. peter's at rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling. for a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under "rome's gross yoke," are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants peevish as ever to be suckled, lulled with the same old baby-prattle with intermixture of the rattle. and this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." such a short and easy method of dealing with roman catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as browning without being as crude as he in misconception. he does not seriously consider the catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. it is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the divine as an obstruction or a veil: my heart does best to receive in meekness that mode of worship, as most to his mind, where earthly aids being left behind, his all in all appears serene with the thinnest human veil between, letting the mystic lamps, the seven, the many motions of his spirit, pass as they list to earth from heaven. this was the creed of milton and of bunyan; and yet with both milton and bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit. from the lecture-room of göttingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the roman basilica. yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of the myth of christ. in the professor's lecture-room browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love. he argues that if the "myth" of christ be dissolved, the authority of christ as a teacher disappears; christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that he made personal claims which cannot be sustained. and whatever may be christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which his life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of god manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. at every point the criticism of browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of matthew arnold. the one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm. the other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration--and an alteration for the worse--has been made in the religious consciousness of christendom. and undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of christianity is far greater than arnold represented it to be. but browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of god. in that revelation, whether the son of god was human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul. that such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history. browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the göttingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his professor's lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion. but the process and the conclusion are alike unjust. having traversed the various forms of christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in _christmas eve_ declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these. has not christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore god's word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? why, then, over-strenuously take a side? why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to browning's feelings. the hem of christ's robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem. one best way of worship there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found. it may be god's part--we trust it is--to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last. as for us, we must seek after him and find him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest passion. here browning speaks from his central feeling. only, we may ask, what if one's truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? and is not the world spacious enough to include a montaigne as well as a pascal or a browning? assuredly the world without its montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men. mrs browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of _easter day_, the second part of his volume of ; his reply was that it stated "one side of the question." "don't think," mrs browning says, "that he has taken to the cilix--indeed he has not--but it is his way to _see_ things as passionately as other people _feel_ them." _easter day_ has nothing to say of religious life in churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worship. for the writer of this poem only three things exist--god, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul. browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin. two difficulties in the christian life in particular he chooses to consider--first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world. that we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy--that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? it was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill. therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost. as to the initial difficulty of faith, browning with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of christianity--as they are styled--external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. but in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. the mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper "that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun." a grasshopper's leap sunwards--that is what we signify by this word "faith." but the difficulties of the christian life only shift their place when faith by whatever means has been won. we are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed? "ascetic" mrs browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word. to renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses: "renounce the world!"--ah, were it done by merely cutting one by one your limbs off, with your wise head last, how easy were it!--how soon past, if once in the believing mood. the harder and the higher renunciation is this--to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them. such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. a certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. and if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency? in the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth. and what is the meaning of this mortal life--this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible--if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come? to forget that browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists. but the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of michael angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty. and armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower. browning's doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best--as in _rabbi ben ezra_ or _abt vogler_--the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. both are present in _easter day_, and we must watch the movement of the two. in a passage already quoted from _christmas eve_ the face of christ is nobly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. here the poet's imagination is as intense in its presentation of christ the doomsman: he stood there. like the smoke pillared o'er sodom, when day broke-- i saw him. one magnific pall mantled in massive fold and fall his head, and coiled in snaky swathes about his feet; night's black, that bathes all else, broke, grizzled with despair, against the soul of blackness there. a gesture told the mood within-- that wrapped right hand which based the chin,-- that intense meditation fixed on his procedure,--pity mixed with the fulfilment of decree. motionless thus, he spoke to me, who fell before his feet, a mass, no man now. the picture of the final conflagration of the judgment day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,--a picture somewhat too much in the manner of martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. the glow of milton's hell is intenser, and milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. the real awfulness of browning's judgment day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. the speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. the sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will--let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his. to his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content. the plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. the glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. the joy of knowledge, with all those grasps of guess which pull the more into the less, is lost. and as to earth's best possession--love--had he ever made a discovery through human love of that which it forthshadows--the love that is perfect and divine? earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the god rephan of which we read in one of browning's latest poems; in the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the judge's feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted him: then did the form expand, expand-- knew him through the dread disguise as the whole god within his eyes embraced me. the doomsman has in a moment become the saviour. in all this, if browning has the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision. his art is sensuous and passionate; his argument is transformed into a series of imaginative experiences. mrs. browning's illness during the summer and early autumn of left her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her marriage. but by the spring of the following year she had recovered strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include rome, north italy, switzerland, the rhine, brussels, paris and london. almost at the moment of starting for rome at the end of april, the plans were altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means must be economised; rome might be postponed for a future visit; and venice would make amends for the present sacrifice. and venice in may and early june did indeed for a time make amends. "i have been between heaven and earth," mrs. browning wrote, "since our arrival at venice." the rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known. when evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for "two shillings and eightpence english," or sit under the moon in the piazza of st mark sipping coffee and reading the french papers. but as the month went by, browning lost appetite and lost sleep. the "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere" which suited mrs. browning made him, after the first excitement of delight, grow nervous and dispirited. they hastened away to padua, drove to arqua, "for petrarch's sake," passed through brescia in a flood of white moonlight, and having reached milan climbed--the invalid of wimpole street and her husband--to the topmost point of the cathedral. from the italian lakes they crossed by the st gothard to switzerland, and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in twenty-four hours without stopping from strasburg to paris. in paris they loitered for three weeks. mrs. browning during the short visit which followed her marriage had hardly seen the city. bright shop-windows, before which little wiedemann would scream with pleasure, restaurants and dinners _à la carte_, full-foliaged trees and gardens in the heart of the town were a not unwelcome exchange for italian church-interiors and altar-pieces. even "disreputable prints and fascinating hats and caps" were appreciated as proper to the genius of the place, and the writer of _casa guidi windows_ had the happiness of seeing her hero, m. le president, "in a cocked hat, and with a train of cavalry, passing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional yell from the red." by a happy chance they lighted in paris upon tennyson, now poet-laureate, whom mrs. browning had hitherto known only through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they should make use of his house and servants during their stay in england, an offer which was not refused, though there was no intention of actually taking advantage of the kindness. as for england, the thought of it, with her father's heart and her father's door closed against her, was bitter as wormwood to mrs. browning. "it's only robert," she wrote, "who is a patriot now, of us two." english soil as they stepped ashore was a puddle, and english air a fog. london lodgings were taken at devonshire street, and, although mrs. browning suffered from the climate, they were soon dizzied and dazzled by the whirl of pleasant hospitalities. an evening with carlyle ("one of the greatest sights in england"), a dinner given by forster at thames ditton, "in sight of the swans," a breakfast with rogers, daily visits of barry cornwall, cordial companionship of mrs. jameson, a performance by the literary guild actors, a reading of _hamlet_ by fanny kemble--with these distractions and such as these the two months flew quickly. it was in some ways a relief when pen's faithful maid wilson went for a fortnight to see her kinsfolk, and mrs. browning had to take her place and substitute for social racketing domestic cares. the one central sorrow remained and in some respects was intensified. she had written to her father, and browning himself wrote--"a manly, true, straight-forward letter," she informs a friend, "... everywhere generous and conciliating." a violent and unsparing reply was made, and with it came all the letters that his undutiful daughter had written to mr. barrett; not one had been read or opened. he returned them now, because he had not previously known how he could be relieved of the obnoxious documents. "god takes it all into his own hands," wrote mrs. browning, "and i wait." something, however, was gained; her brothers were reconciled; arabella barrett was constant in kindness; and henrietta journeyed from taunton to london to enjoy a week in her company. it was at devonshire street that bayard taylor, the distinguished american poet and critic, made the acquaintance of the brownings, and the record of his visit gives a picture of browning at the age of thirty-nine, so clearly and firmly drawn that it ought not to be omitted here: "in a small drawing-room on the first floor i met browning, who received me with great cordiality. in his lively, cheerful manner, quick voice, and perfect self-possession, he made the impression of an american rather than an englishman. he was then, i should judge, about thirty-seven years of age, but his dark hair was already streaked with gray about the temples. his complexion was fair, with perhaps the faintest olive tinge, eyes large, clear, and gray, nose strong and well cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not prominent. his forehead broadened rapidly upwards from the outer angle of the eyes, slightly retreating. the strong individuality which marks his poetry was expressed not only in his face and head, but in his whole demeanour. he was about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but slender at the waist, and his movements expressed a combination of vigour and elasticity." mrs browning with her slight figure, pale face, shaded by chestnut curls, and grave eyes of bluish gray, is also described; and presently entered to the american visitor pen, a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, who babbled his little sentences in italian. when, towards the close of september, browning and his wife left london for paris, carlyle by his own request was their companion on the journey. mrs browning feared that his irritable nerves would suffer from the vivacities of little pen, but it was not so; he accepted with good humour the fact that the small boy had not yet learned, like his own teufelsdröckh, the eternal no: "why, sir," exclaimed carlyle, "you have as many aspirations as napoleon!"[ ] at dieppe, browning, as carlyle records, "did everything, fought for us, and we--that is, the woman, the child and i--had only to wait and be silent." at paris in the midst of "a crowding, jangling, vociferous tumult, the brave browning fought for us, leaving me to sit beside the woman." an apartment was found on the sunny side of the avenue des champs-elysées, "pretty, cheerful, carpeted rooms," far brighter and better than those of devonshire street, and when, to browning's amusement, his wife had moved every chair and table into the new and absolutely right position, they could rest and be thankful. carlyle spent several evenings with them, and repaid the assistance which he received in various difficulties from browning's command of the language, by picturesque conversations in his native speech: "you come to understand perfectly," wrote mrs browning, "when you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." a little later browning's father and sister spent some weeks in paris. here, at all events, were perfect relations between the members of a family group; the daughter here was her father's comrade with something even of a maternal instinct; and the grandfather discovered to his great satisfaction that his own talent for drawing had descended to his grandchild. the time was one when the surface of life in paris showed an unruffled aspect; but under the surface were heavings of inward agitation. on the morning of december nd the great stroke against the republic was delivered; the _coup d'état_ was an accomplished fact. later in the day louis napoleon rode under the windows of the apartment in the avenue des champs-elysées, from the carrousel to the arc de l'Étoile. to mrs browning it seemed the grandest of spectacles--"he rode there in the name of the people after all." she and her husband had witnessed revolutions in florence, and political upheavals did not seem so very formidable. on the thursday of bloodshed in the streets--december th--pen was taken out for his usual walk, though not without certain precautions; as the day advanced the excitement grew tense, and when night fell the distant firing on the boulevards kept mrs. browning from her bed till one o'clock. on saturday they took a carriage and drove to see the field of action; the crowds moved to and fro, discussing the situation, but of real disturbance there was none; next day the theatres had their customary spectators and the champs-elysées its promenaders. for the dishonoured "liberté, egalité, fraternité," as mrs. browning heard it suggested, might now be inscribed "infanterie, cavallerie, artillerie." such may have been her husband's opinion, but such was not hers. her faith in the president had been now and again shaken; her faith in the emperor became as time went on an enthusiasm of hero-worship. the display of force on december nd impressed her imagination; there was a dramatic completeness in the whole performance; napoleon represented the people; a democrat, she thought, should be logical and thorough; the vote of the millions entirely justified their chief. browning viewed affairs more critically, more sceptically. "robert and i," writes his wife jestingly, "have had some domestic _émeutes_, because he hates some imperial names." he detested all buonapartes, he would say, past, present, and to come,--an outbreak explained by mrs browning to her satisfaction, as being only his self-willed way of dismissing a subject with which he refused to occupy his thoughts, a mere escapade of feeling and known to him as such. when all the logic and good sense were on the woman's side, how could she be disturbed by such masculine infirmities? though only a very little lower than the angels, he was after all that humorous being--a man. footnotes: [footnote : "mrs orr's life and letters of r.b.," .] chapter viii to it was during the month of the _coup d'état_ that browning went back in thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as shelley's by moxon in . the essay is interesting as browning's only considerable piece of prose, and also as an utterance made not through the mask of any _dramatis persona_, but openly and directly from his own lips. though not without value as a contribution to the study of shelley's genius, it is perhaps chiefly of importance as an exposition of some of browning's own views concerning his art. he distinguishes between two kinds or types of poet: the poet who like shakespeare is primarily the "fashioner" of things independent of his own personality, artistic creations which embody some fact or reality, leaving it to others to interpret, as best they are able, its significance; and secondly the poet who is rather a "seer" than a fashioner, who attempts to exhibit in imaginative form his own conceptions of absolute truth, conceptions far from entire adequacy, yet struggling towards completeness; the poet who would shadow forth, as he himself apprehends them, _ideas_, to use the word of plato, "seeds of creation lying burningly on the divine hand"--which ideas he discovers not so often in the external world as in his own soul, this being for him "the nearest reflex of the absolute mind." what a poet of this second kind produces, as browning finely states it, will be less a work than an effluence. he is attracted among external phenomena chiefly by those which summon forth his inner light and power, "he selects that silence of the earth and sea in which he can best hear the beating of his individual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience of man around him, which serve only to distract and suppress the working of his brain." to this latter class of poets, although in _the cenci_ and _julian and maddalo_ he is eminent as a "fashioner," shelley conspicuously belongs. mankind cannot wisely dispense with the services of either type of poet; at one time it chiefly needs to have that which is already known interpreted into its highest meanings; and at another, when the virtue of these interpretations has been appropriated and exhausted, it needs a fresh study and exploration of the facts of life and nature--for "the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." the truest and highest point of view from which to regard the poetry of shelley is that which shows it as a "sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal." for browning the poet of _prometheus unbound_ was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of matthew arnold's fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. a great moral purpose looked forth from shelley's work, as it does, browning would add, from all lofty works of art. and it may be remarked that the criticism of browning's own writings which considers not only their artistic methods and artistic success or failure, but also their ethical and spiritual purport, is entirely in accord with his thoughts in this essay. far from regarding shelley as unpractical, he notes--and with perfect justice--"the peculiar practicalness" of shelley's mind, which in his earlier years acted injuriously upon both his conduct and his art. his power to perceive the defects of society was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive remedies; but his crudeness in theorising and his inexperience in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors. gradually he left behind him "this low practical dexterity"; gradually he learnt that "the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle." browning urges that shelley, before the close, had passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith. "i shall say what i think," he adds--"had shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the christians.... the preliminary step to following christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead." perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is to be classed with the surmise of cardinal wiseman (if father prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of _men and women_ in _the rambler_) that browning himself would one day be found in the ranks of converts to catholicism. in each case a wish was father to the thought; browning recognised the fact that shelley assigned a place to love, side by side with power, among the forces which determine the life and development of humanity, and with browning himself "power" was a synonym for the divine will, and "love" was often an equivalent for god manifest in jesus christ. one or two other passages of the essay may be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer's modes of thought and feeling: "everywhere is apparent shelley's belief in the existence of good, to which evil is an accident"--it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than shelley's, who is applauding optimism. "shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere." was browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared in explosions of indignant wrath? the principle, again, by which he determined an artist's rank is in harmony with browning's general feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements than by the possibilities that lie unfolded within them, and the ends to which they aspire, even though such ends be unattained: "in the hierarchy of creative minds, it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the rarer endowment though only in the germ." and, last, of the tardy recognition of shelley's genius as a poet, browning wrote in words which though, as he himself says, he had always good praisers, no doubt express a thought that helped to sustain him against the indifference of the public to his poetry: "the misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other departments of the great human effort. the 'e pur si muove' of the astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so like despair." the volume in which browning's essay appeared was withdrawn from circulation on the discovery of the fraudulent nature of its contents. he had himself no opportunity of inspecting the forged manuscripts, and no question of authenticity was raised until several copies of the book had passed into circulation.[ ] during the nine months spent in paris, from september to june , browning enlarged the circle of his friends and made some new and interesting acquaintances. chief among friendships was that with joseph milsand of dijon, whose name is connected with _sordello_ in the edition of browning's "poetical works" of the year . under the title "la poésie anglaise depuis byron," two articles by milsand were contributed to the "revue des deux mondes," the first on tennyson, the second (published th august ) a little before the poet's arrival in paris, on robert browning. "of all the poets known to me," wrote his french critic, "he is the most capable of summing up the conceptions of the religion, the ethics, and the theoretic knowledge of our period in forms which embody the beauty proper to such abstractions." such criticism by a thoughtful student of our literature could not but prepare the way pleasantly for personal acquaintance. milsand, we are told by his friend th. bentzon (mme. blanc), having hesitated as to the propriety of printing a passage in an article as yet unpublished, in which he had spoken of the great sorrow of mrs browning's early life--the death of her brother, went straight to browning, who was then in paris, and declared that he was ready to cancel what he had written if it would cause her pain. "only a frenchman," exclaimed browning, grasping both hands of his visitor, "would have done this." so began a friendship of an intimate and most helpful kind, which closed only with milsand's death in . to his memory is dedicated the volume published soon after his death, _parleyings with certain people of importance_. "i never knew or shall know his like among men," wrote browning; and again: "no words can express the love i have for him." and in _red cotton nightcap country_ it is milsand who is characterised in the lines: he knows more and loves better than the world that never heard his name and never may, ... what hinders that my heart relieve itself, o friend! who makest warm my wintry world, and wise my heaven, if there we consort too. in the correction of browning's proof-sheets, and especially in regulating the punctuation of his poems, milsand's friendly services were of high value. in when browning happened to be at dijon, and had reason to believe, though in fact erroneously, that his friend was absent in paris, he went twice "in a passion of friendship," as his wife tells a correspondent, to stand before maison milsand, and muse, and bless the threshold.[ ] browning desired much to know victor hugo, but his wish was never gratified. after december nd paris could not contain a spirit so fiery as hugo's was in hostility to the new régime and its chief representative. balzac, whom it would have been a happiness even to look at, was dead. lamartine promised a visit, but for a time his coming was delayed. by a mischance alfred de musset failed to appear when browning, expecting to meet him, was the guest of m. buloz. but béranger was to be seen "in his white hat wandering along the asphalte." the blind historian thierry begged browning and his wife to call upon him. at the house of ary scheffer, the painter, they heard mme. viardot sing; and receptions given by lady elgin and mme. mohl were means of introduction to much that was interesting in the social life of paris. at the theatre they saw with the deepest excitement "la dame aux camélias," which was running its hundred nights. caricatures in the streets exhibited the occupants of the pit protected by umbrellas from the rain of tears that fell from the boxes. tears, indeed, ran down browning's cheeks, though he had believed himself hardened against theatrical pathos. mrs browning cried herself ill, and pronounced the play painful but profoundly moral. mrs browning's admiration of the writings of george sand was so great that it would have been a sore disappointment to her if george sand were to prove inaccessible. a letter of introduction to her had been obtained from mazzini. "ah, i am so vexed about george sand," mrs browning wrote on christmas eve; "she came, she has gone, and we haven't met." in february she again was known to be for a few days in paris; browning was not eager to push through difficulties on the chance of obtaining an interview, but his wife was all impatience: "' no,' said i, 'you _shan't_ be proud, and i _won't_ be proud, and we _will_ see her. i won't die, if i can help it, without seeing george sand.'" a gracious reply and an appointment came in response to their joint-petition which accompanied mazzini's letter. on the appointed sunday browning and mrs browning--she wearing a respirator and smothered in furs--drove to render their thanks and homage to the most illustrious of frenchwomen. mrs browning with beating heart stooped and kissed her hand. they found in george sand's face no sweetness, but great moral and intellectual capacities; in manners and conversation she was absolutely simple. young men formed the company, to whom she addressed counsel and command with the utmost freedom and a conscious authority. through all her speech a certain undercurrent of scorn, a half-veiled touch of disdain, was perceptible. at their parting she invited the english visitors to come again, kissed mrs browning on the lips, and received browning's kiss upon her hand. the second call upon her was less agreeable. she sat warming her feet in a circle of eight or nine ill-bred men, representatives of "the ragged red diluted with the lower theatrical." if any other mistress of a house had behaved so unceremoniously, browning declared that he would have walked out of the room; and mrs browning left with the impression--"she does not care for me." they had exerted themselves to please her, but felt that it was in vain; "we couldn't penetrate, couldn't really _touch_ her." once browning met her near the tuileries and walked the length of the gardens with her arm upon his. if nothing further was to come of it, at least they had seen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have discredited their travel. only to mrs browning's mortification the spectacle wanted one detail indispensable to its completeness--the characteristic cigarette was absent: "ah, but i didn't see her smoke." life leaves us always something to desire. before the close of june they were again in london, and found comfortable rooms at welbeck street. when the turmoil of the first days had subsided, they visited "kenyon the magnificent"--so named by browning--at wimbledon, at whose table landor, abounding in life and passionate energy as in earlier days, was loud in his applause of the genius of louis napoleon. mazzini, his "intense eyes full of melancholy illusions," called at their lodgings in company with mrs carlyle, who seemed to mrs browning not only remarkable for her play of ideas but attaching through her feelings and her character.[ ] florence nightingale was also a welcome visitor, and her visit was followed by a gift of flowers. invitations from country houses came in sheaves, and the thought of green fields is seductive in a london month of july; but to remain in london was to be faithful to penini--and to the much-travelled flush. once the whole household, with flush included, breathed rural air for two days with friends at farnham, and browning had there the pleasure of meeting charles kingsley, whose christian socialism seemed wild and unpractical enough, but as for the man himself, brave, bold, original, full of a genial kindliness, mrs browning assures a correspondent that he could not be other than "good and noble let him say or dream what he will." it is stated by mr w.m. rossetti that browning first became acquainted with his brother dante gabriel in the course of this summer. coventry patmore gave him the manuscript of his unpublished poems of to read. and ruskin was now added to the number of his personal acquaintances. "we went to denmark hill yesterday, by agreement," wrote mrs browning in september, "to see the turners--which, by the way, are divine. i like mr ruskin much, and so does robert. very gentle, yet earnest--refined and truthful." at lord stanhope's they were introduced to the latest toy of fashionable occultism, the crystal ball, in which the seer beheld oremus, the spirit of the sun; the supernatural was qualified for the faithful with luncheon and lobster salad; "i love the marvellous," mrs browning frankly declares. and of terrestrial wonders, with heaven lying about them, and also india muslin and brussels lace, two were seen in the babies of monckton milnes and alfred tennyson. pen, because he was "troppo grande," declined to kiss the first of these new-christened wonders, but pen's father, who went alone to the baptism of hallam tennyson, distinguished himself by nursing for some ten minutes and with accomplished dexterity, the future governor-general of australia. yet with all these distractions, perhaps in part because of them, the visit to england was not one of browning's happiest times. the autumn weather confined mrs browning to her rooms. he was anxious, vexed, and worn.[ ] it was a happiness when welbeck street was left behind, and they were on the way by paris to their resting-place at casa guidi. from a balcony overlooking one of the paris boulevards they witnessed, in a blaze of autumnal sunshine, which glorified much military and civic pomp, the reception of the new emperor. mrs browning's handkerchief waved frantically while she prayed that god might bless the people in this the chosen representative of a democracy. what were browning's thoughts on that memorable saturday is not recorded, but we may be sure that they were less enthusiastic. yet he enjoyed the stir and animation of paris, and after the palpitating life of the boulevards found florence dull and dead--no change, no variety. the journey by the mont cenis route had not been without its trying incidents. at genoa, during several days he was deeply depressed by the illness of his wife, who lay on the sofa and seemed to waste away. but casa guidi was reached at last, where it was more like summer than november; the pleasant nest had its own peculiar welcome for wanderers; again they enjoyed the sunsets over the arno, and mrs browning was able to report herself free from cough and feeling very well and very happy: "you can't think how we have caught up our ancient traditions just where we left them, and relapsed into our former soundless, stirless, hermit life. robert has not passed an evening from home since we came--just as if we had never known paris."[ ] the political condition of italy was, indeed, a grief to both husband and wife. it was a state of utter prostration--on all sides "the unanimity of despair." the grand duke, the emancipator, had acquired a respect and affection for the bayonets of austria. the pope was "wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free-thought and action." browning groaned "how long, o lord, how long?" his home-thoughts of england in contrast with italy were those of patriotism and pride. his wife was more detached, more critical towards her native land. the best symptom for italian freedom was that if italy had not energy to act, she yet had energy to hate. to be happy now they both must turn to imaginative work, and gain all the gains possible from private friendships. browning was already occupied with the poems included afterwards in the volumes of _men and women_. mrs browning was already engaged upon _aurora leigh_. "we neither of us show our work to one another," she wrote, "till it is finished. an artist must, i fancy, either find or _make_ a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at all." but as her husband's poems, one by one, were completed, she saw them, and they seemed to her as fine as anything he had done. away in england _colombe's birthday_ was given on the stage, with helen faucit in the leading part. it was at least an indication that the public had not forgotten that browning was a poet. here in florence, although the hermit life was happy, new friends--the gift of england--added to its happiness. frederick tennyson, the laureate's brother, and himself a true poet in his degree, "a dreamy, shy, speculative man," simple withal and truthful, had married an italian wife and was settled for a time in florence. to him browning became attached with genuine affection. mrs browning was a student of the writings of swedenborg, and she tells much of her new friend in a single swedenborgian word--"selfhood, the _proprium_, is not in him." frederick tennyson, though left in a state of bewilderment by browning's poetry, found the writer of the poetry "a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness."[ ] another intimate who charmed them much was one of the attachés of the english embassy, and a poet of unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate and excitable, full of sensibility, "full of all sorts of goodness and nobleness," but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, "visionary enough," writes mrs browning, "to suit me," interested moreover in spiritualism, which suited her well, "never," she unwisely prophesied, "to be a great diplomatist." it was hardly, mr kenyon, the editor of her letters, observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of lord lytton, the future ambassador at paris and viceroy of india.[ ] early in mrs browning became much interested in the reports which reached her--many of these from america--of the "rapping spirits," who in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go. "you know i am rather a visionary," she wrote to miss mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out." her swedenborgian studies had prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being wholly estranged from the other. a clever person who loves the marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are the most natural things in the world. should we not credit human testimony? should we not evict prejudice from our understandings? should we not investigate alleged facts? should we not keep an open mind? we cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence. browning himself with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent. he did not actively enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an artist and a thinker; and he made poems, and amused himself with drawing, modelling in clay, and the study of music. mrs browning squandered her enthusiasms with less discretion. a good dose of stupidity or an indignant energy of common-sense, impatient of the nonsense of the thing, may be the salvation of the average man. it is often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their folly. a fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts of judgment amassed into a convenient working result; a single act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom. scientific discovery is not advanced by a multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly. whether the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, mrs browning, gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and certain loss. before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer, as she describes it, on testimony. the fact of communication with the invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had been communicated. the spirits themselves "seem abundantly foolish, one must admit." yet it was clear to her that mankind was being prepared for some great development of truth. she would keep her eyes wide open to facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation. by-and-by she felt the dumb wood of the table panting and shivering with human emotion. the dogmatism of faraday in an inadequate theory was simply unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny. the american medium home, she learnt from her friends, was "turning the world upside down in london with this spiritual influx." two months later, in july , mrs browning and her husband were themselves in london, and witnessed home's performances during a séance at ealing. miss de gaudrion (afterwards mrs merrifield), who was present on that occasion, and who was convinced that the "manifestations" were a fraud, wrote to mrs browning for an expression of her opinion. the reply, as might be expected, declared the writer's belief in the genuine character of the phenomena; such manifestations, she admitted, in the undeveloped state of the subject were "apt to be low"; but they were, she was assured, "the beginning of access from a spiritual world, of which we shall presently learn more perhaps." a letter volunteered by browning accompanied that of his wife. he had, he said, to overcome a real repugnance in recalling the subject; he could hardly understand how another opinion was possible than that "the whole display of 'hands,' 'spirit utterances,' etc., was a cheat and imposture." it was all "melancholy stuff," which a grain of worldly wisdom would dispose of in a minute. "mr browning," the letter goes on, "has, however, abundant experience that the best and rarest of natures may begin by the proper mistrust of the more ordinary results of reasoning when employed in such investigations as these, go on to an abnegation of the regular tests of truth and rationality in favour of these particular experiments, and end in a voluntary prostration of the whole intelligence before what is assumed to transcend all intelligence. once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross--absurdities are referred to 'low spirits,' falsehoods to 'personating spirits'--and the one terribly apparent spirit, the father of lies, has it all his own way." these interesting letters were communicated to _the times_ by mr merrifield (_literary supplement_, nov. , ), and they called forth a short additional letter from mr r. barrett browning, the "penini" of earlier days. he mentions that his father had himself on one occasion detected home in a vulgar fraud; that home had called at the house of the brownings, and was turned out of it. mr browning adds: "what, however, i am more desirous of stating is that towards the end of her life my mother's views on 'spiritual manifestations' were much modified. this change was brought about, in great measure, by the discovery that she had been duped by a friend in whom she had blind faith. the pain of the disillusion was great, but her eyes were opened and she saw clearly."[ ] it must be added, that letters written by mrs browning six months before her death give no indication of this change of feeling, but she admits that "sublime communications" from the other world are "decidedly absent," and that while no truth can be dangerous, unsettled minds may lose their balance, and may do wisely to avoid altogether the subject of spiritualism. browning's hostility arose primarily from his conviction that the so-called "manifestations" were, as he says, a cheat and imposture. he had grasped home's leg under the table while at work in producing "phenomena." he had visited his friend, seymour kirkup, had found the old man assisting at the trance of a peasant girl named mariana; and when kirkup withdrew for a moment, the entranced mariana relieved herself from the fatigue of her posturing, at the same time inviting browning with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which she profited in admiration and in pelf. browning, who would have waged immitigable war against the london dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. but his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium. the vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. and his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he regarded as verminous impostors. yet he recognised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather his misfortune than his crime. it was a considerable time after his wife's death that browning's study of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, "mr sludge the medium," appeared in the _dramatis personae_ of ; the date of its composition is rome, - ; but the observations which that study sums up were accumulated during earlier years, and if mr sludge is not a portrait of home, that eminent member of the tribe of sludge no doubt supplied suggestions for the poet's character-study. browning evidently wrote the poem with a peculiar zest; its intellectual energy never flags; its imaginative grip never slackens. if the bishop, who orders his tomb at st praxed's, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void of one phase of the italian renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does mr sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions. unhappily the later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of inordinate length. browning, somewhat in the manner of ben jonson when he wrote _the alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs. the writer's zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a demonstration. "mr sludge the medium" is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a dramatic scene in the history of a soul; and browning, with his democratic feeling in things of the mind, held that every soul however mean is worth understanding. if the poem is a satire, it is so only in a way that is inevitable. browning's desire is to be absolutely just, but sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire. he takes an impostor at the moment of extreme disadvantage; the "medium" is caught in the very act of cheating; he will make a clean breast of it; and his confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication. the most contemptible of creatures, in desperate straits, makes excellent play with targe and dagger; the poetry of the piece is to be found in the lithe attitudes, absolutely the best possible under the circumstances, by which he maintains both defence and attack. half of the long _apologia_ is a criticism not of those who feast fools in their folly, but of the fools who require a caterer for the feast; it is a study of the methods by which dupes solicit and educate a knave. the other half is sludge's plea that, knave though he be, he is not wholly knave; and browning, while absolutely rejecting the doctrine of so called spiritualism, is prepared to admit that in the composition of a sludge there enters a certain portion of truth, low in degree, perverted in kind, inoperative to the ends of truth, yet a fragment of that without which life itself were impossible even for the meanest organism in the shape of man. cowardly, cunning, insolent, greedy, effeminately sensual, playing upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality, playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged. who made him what he is? who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation? who helped him through his blunders with ingenious excuses--"the manifestations are at first so weak"; or "sludge is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena"; or "a doubter is in the company, and the spirits have grown confused in their communications"? who proceeded to exhibit him as a lawful prize and possession, staking their vanity on the success of his imposture? who awakened in him the artist's joy in rare invention? who urged him forward from modest to magnificent lies? who fed and flattered him? what ladies bestowed their soft caresses on sludge? and now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the vagrant lived in freedom and in truth? it's too bad, i say, ruining a soul so! and in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived cheating is so "cruel easy." the difficulty is rather that the cheating, even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is. the medium has confessed! yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium nature; none the less he has the medium's gift of acting as a conductor between the visible and the invisible worlds. has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural means? and sludge chuckles "could not?"--could not be known by him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was throwing thus his sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue, soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible, and when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick, their juice enriched his palate. "could not sludge!" haunters of the séance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty. is it his part, sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased him? gratitude to these? the gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute to the greenhorn and the bully. the truculence of sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of robert browning, "shaking his mane," as dante rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists, "with occasional foamings at the mouth."[ ] where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the putrefaction of sludge's nature? liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." the spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, god is present. sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve: i guess what's going on outside the veil, just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time in the islands where his kind are, so must fall to capering by himself some shiny night as if your back yard were a plot of spice. he cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to. or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ of truth? is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth? at the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence? this world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights itself! how intelligible it all grows! and is the faculty of imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit--put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian--is this a power which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play? browning's design is to exhibit even in this sludge the rudiments--coarse, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for moral good--of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present--to take a lofty exemplar--in his pope of _the ring and the book_. it is not through spiritualism so-called that sludge has received his little grain of truth; that has only darkened the glimmer of true light which was in him. yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original structure. the epilogue--sludge's outbreak against his corrupter and tormentor--stands as evidence of the fact that no purifying, no cleansing, no really illuminating power remains in what is now only a putrescent luminosity within him. his rage is natural and dramatically true; a noble rage would be to his honour. this is a base and poisonous passion with no virtue in it, and the passion, flaring for a moment, sinks idly into as base a fingering of sludge's disgraceful gains. [illustration: the via bocca di leone, rome, in which the brownings stayed. _from a photograph._] the summer and early autumn of were spent by browning and his wife, as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the baths of lucca. their house among the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up their garden. the green rushing river--"a flashing scimitar that cuts through the mountain"--the chestnut woods, the sheep-walks, "the villages on the peaks of the mountains like wild eagles," renewed their former delights. on the longer excursions browning slackened his footsteps to keep pace with his wife's donkey; basins of strawberries and cream refreshed the wanderers after their exertion. "oh those jagged mountains," exclaims mrs browning, "rolled together like pre-adamite beasts, and setting their teeth against the sky.... you may as well guess at a lion by a lady's lap-dog as at nature by what you see in england. all honour to england, lanes and meadowland, notwithstanding. to the great trees above all." the sculptor story and his family, whose acquaintance they had made in florence before casa guidi had become their home, were their neighbours at the baths, and robert lytton was for a time their guest. browning worked at his _men and women_, of which his wife was able to report in the autumn that it was in an advanced state. _in a balcony_ was the most important achievement of the summer. "the scene of the declaration in _by the fireside_" mrs orr informs us, "was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which browning walked or rode." only a few weeks were given to florence. in perfect autumnal weather the occupants of casa guidi started for rome. the delightful journey occupied eight days, and on the way the church of assisi was seen, and the falls of terni--"that passion of the waters,"--so mrs browning describes it, "which makes the human heart seem so still." they entered rome in a radiant mood.--"robert and penini singing." an apartment had been taken for them by their friends the storys in the via bocca di leone, and all was bright, warm, and full of comfort. next morning a shadow fell upon their happiness--the storys' little boy was seized with convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[ ] a second child--a girl--was taken ill in the brownings' house, and could not be moved from where she lay in a room below their apartment. mrs browning was in a panic for her own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health. rome, for a time, was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her as she had expected: "it's a palimpsest rome," she writes, "a watering-place written over the antique." the chief gains of these roman months were those of friendship and pleasant acquaintances added to those already given by italy. in rooms under those occupied by the brownings was page the american artist, who painted in colours then regarded as "venetian," now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift for mrs browning, the portrait of robert browning exhibited in the royal academy of . browning himself wrote to story with enthusiasm of page's work. "i am much disappointed in it," wrote dante rossetti to allingham, "and shall advise its non-exhibition." a second portrait painted at this time--that by fisher--is familiar to us through a reproduction in the second volume of _the letters of mrs browning_. a rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered rome had deplorably altered browning's appearance. in what his wife calls a fit of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour, and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with clean-shaven cheeks and chin. "i cried when i saw him," she tells his sister, "i was so horror-struck." to mark the sin, his beard, when once again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but mrs browning cherished the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave "a character of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy." to complete this history, it may be added that in the moustache of his later portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with decision as picturesque.[ ] under all disadvantages of appearance browning made his way triumphantly in the english and american society of rome. the studios were open to him. in gibson's he saw the tinted venus--"rather a grisette than a goddess," pronounced mrs browning. harriet hosmer, the young american sculptress, working with true independence, high aims and right woman's manliness, was both admired and loved. thackeray, with his daughters, called at the apartment in the bocca di leone, bringing small-talk in "handfuls of glittering dust swept out of salons." lockhart, snow-white in aspect, snow-cold in manner, gave browning emphatic commendation, though of a negative kind--"he isn't at all," declared lockhart, "like a damned literary man." but of many interesting acquaintances perhaps the most highly valued were fanny kemble and her sister adelaide sartoris--fanny kemble magnificent, "with her black hair and radiant smile," her sympathetic voice, "her eyes and eyelids full of utterance"--a very noble creature indeed; mrs sartoris, genial and generous, more tolerant than fanny of mrs browning's wayward enthusiasms, eloquent in talk and passionate in song. "the kembles," writes mrs browning, "were our gain in rome." towards the end of may farewells were said, and the brownings returned from rome, to florence by vettura. they had hoped to visit england, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among the mountains from the summer heat. but needful coin on which they had reckoned did not arrive; and they resolved in prudence to sit still at florence and eat their bread and macaroni as poor sensible folk should do. and florence looked more beautiful than ever after rome; the nightingales sang around the olive-trees and vineyards, not only by starlight and fire-fly-light but in the daytime. "i love the very stones of florence," exclaims mrs browning. her friend miss mitford, now in england, and sadly failing in health, hinted at a loan of money; but the answer was a prompt, "oh no! my husband has a family likeness to lucifer in being proud." there followed a tranquil and a happy time, and both _men and women_ and _aurora leigh_ maintained in the writers a deep inward excitement of the kind that leaves an enduring result. a little joint publication; _two poems by e.b.b. and r.b_., containing _a plea for the ragged schools of london_ and _the twins_, was sold at miss arabella barrett's ragged school bazaar in . it is now a waif of literature which collectors prize. there is special significance in the _date_ and _dabitur_, the twins of browning's poem, when we bear in mind the occasion with which it was originally connected. in the early weeks of mrs browning was seriously ill; through feverish nights of coughing, she had in her husband a devoted nurse. his sleepless hours were troubled not only by anxiety on her account but by a passionate interest in the heroisms and miseries, of his fellow countrymen during the crimean winter: "when he is mild _he_ wishes the ministry to be torn to pieces in the streets, limb from limb." gradually his wife regained health, but she had not long recovered when tidings of the death of miss mitford came to sadden her. not until april did she feel once more a leap into life. browning was now actively at work in anticipation of printing his new volumes during the approaching visit to england. "he is four hours a day," his wife tells a correspondent, "engaged in dictating to a friend of ours who transcribes for him." and a little later she reports that they will take to england between them some sixteen thousand lines of verse, "eight on one side, eight on the other," her husband's total being already completed, her own still short of the sum by a thousand lines. allowance, as she pleads, had to be made for time spent in seeing that "penini's little trousers are creditably frilled and tucked." on the whole, notwithstanding illness and wrath directed against english ministerial blunders, this year of life in florence had been rich in happiness--a "still dream-life, where if one is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the walls and the pre-giotto pictures ... surround us, ready to quiet us again."[ ] london lodgings did not look inviting from the distance of italy; but the summons north was a summons to work, and could not be set aside. the midsummer of found browning and his wife in dorset street, london, and browning's sister was with them. the faithful wilson, mrs browning's maid, had married a florentine, ferdinando romagnoli, and the husband also was now in their service. the weeks until mid-october were occupied with social pleasures and close proof-reading of the sheets of _men and women_[ ] browning took his young friend the artist leighton to visit ruskin, and was graciously received. carlyle was, as formerly, "in great force, particularly in the damnatory clauses." but the weather was drooping, the skies misty, the air oppressive, and mrs browning, apart from these, had special causes of depression. her married sister henrietta was away in taunton, and the cost of travel prevented the sisters from meeting. arabella barrett--"my one light in london" is mrs browning's word--was too soon obliged to depart to eastbourne. and the barrett household was disturbed by the undutifulness of a son who had been guilty of the unpardonable crime of marriage, and in consequence was now exiled from wimpole street. in body and soul mrs browning felt strong yearnings for the calm of casa guidi. the year was a fortunate year for english poetry. _men and women_ was published in the autumn; the beautiful epilogue, addressed to e.b.b., "there they are, my fifty men and women," was written in dorset street. tennyson's _maud_ had preceded browning's volumes by some months. it bewildered the critics, but his brother poet did justice to tennyson's passionate sequence of dramatic lyrics. and though london in mid-autumn had emptied itself tennyson happened for a few days to be in town. two evenings he gave to the brownings, "dined with us," writes mrs browning, "smoked with us, opened his heart to us (and the second bottle of port), and ended by reading _maud_ through from end to end, and going away at half-past two in the morning." his delightful frankness and simplicity charmed his hostess. "think of his stopping in _maud_," she goes on, "every now and then--'there's a wonderful touch! that's very tender! how beautiful that is!' yes and it _was_ wonderful, tender, beautiful, and he read exquisitely in a voice like an organ, rather music than speech." one of the few persons who were invited to meet tennyson on this occasion, mr w.m. rossetti, is still living, and his record of that memorable evening ought not to be omitted. "the audience was a small one, the privilege accorded to each individual all the higher: mr and mrs browning, miss browning, my brother, and myself, and i think there was one more--either madox brown or else [holman] hunt or woolner ... tennyson, seated on a sofa in a characteristic attitude, and holding the volume near his eyes ... read _maud_ right through. my brother made two pen-and-ink sketches of him, and gave one of them to browning. so far as i remember, the poet-laureate neither saw what dante was doing, nor knew of it afterwards. his deep grand voice, with slightly chaunting intonation, was a noble vehicle for the perusal of mighty verse. on it rolled, sonorous and emotional. dante rossetti, according to mr hall caine, spoke of the incident in these terms: 'i once heard tennyson read _maud_; and, whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks.' ... after tennyson and _maud_ came browning and _fra lippo lippi_--read with as much sprightly variation as there was in tennyson of sustained continuity. truly a night of the gods, not to be remembered without pride and pang."[ ] a quotation from a letter of dante rossetti to allingham gives praise to mrs browning of a kind which resembles lockhart's commendation of her husband: "what a delightful unliterary person mrs browning is to meet! during two evenings when tennyson was at their house in london, mrs browning left tennyson with her husband and william and me (who were the fortunate remnant of the male party) to discuss the universe, and gave all her attention to some certainly not very exciting ladies in the next room."[ ] without detracting from mrs browning's "unliterary" merits, one may conjecture that the ladies who proved unexciting to rossetti were arabella barrett and sarianna browning. footnotes: [footnote : browning's essay on shelley was reprinted by dr furnivall in "the browning society's papers," - , part i.] [footnote : letters of e.b.b. ii. . on milsand, the article "a french friend of browning," by th. bentzon, is valuable and interesting.] [footnote : mrs orr says that browning always thought mrs carlyle "a hard and unlovable woman"; she adds, "i believe little liking was lost between them." mrs ritchie, in her "records of tennyson, ruskin, and browning" (pp. , ), tells with spirit the story of browning and mrs carlyle's kettle, which, on being told to "put it down," in an absent mood he planted upon her new carpet. "ye should have been more explicit," said carlyle to his wife.] [footnote : see letters of e.b.b. ii. .] [footnote : letters of e.b.b. ii. .] [footnote : letter of f. tennyson, in memoir of alfred tennyson, by his son, chapter xviii.] [footnote : mr kenyon's note, vol. ii. of letters of e.b.b.] [footnote : _times lit. supplement_, dec. , .] [footnote : miss cobbe's testimony is similar, and lehmann says that at home's name browning would grow pale with passion.] [footnote : see "story and his friends," by henry james, , vol. i. pp. , .] [footnote : letters of e.b.b., ii. .] [footnote : e.b.b. to ruskin, _letters_, ii. .] [footnote : which, however, did not prevent certain errors noted in a letter of browning to dante rossetti.] [footnote : dante gabriel rossetti. his "family letters," i. , .] [footnote : letters of d.g. rossetti to william allingham, . see mrs browning's letter to mrs tennyson in memoir of tennyson by his son, i vol. edition, p. .] [illustration: portrait of filippo lippi. _by himself. a detail from the fresco in the cathedral at praia from a photograph by_ alinari.] chapter ix men and women rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about _men and women_ in a word when he calls the poems "my elixir of life." to ruskin these, with other pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a rebellious mood, a mass of conundrums. "he compelled me," rossetti adds, "to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night; the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to browning, in which i trust he told him he was the greatest man since shakespeare." the poems of the two new volumes were the gradual growth of a considerable number of years; since their author had published no group of short poems, and now, at the age of forty-three, he had attained the fulness of intellectual and imaginative power, varied experience of life and the artistic culture of italy. the _dramatis personae_ of exhibits no decline from the high level reached in the volumes of ; but is there any later volume of miscellaneous poetry by browning which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the collections of and ? there is no need now to "lay siege" to the poems of _men and women_; they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the truth is that they are by no means nut-shells into which mottoes meant for the construing of the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich in colour and perfume, a feast for the imagination, the passions, the spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the heart of these. if a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them--and that it should do so means that the poet's total mind has been taken up into his art--browning conveys his doctrine not as such but as an enthusiasm of living; his generalized truth saturates a medium of passion and of beauty. in the prologue to _fifine at the fair_ he compares the joy of poetry to a swimmer's joy in the sea: the vigour that such disport in sun and sea communicates is the vigour of joyous play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the constituents of sea-water by a chemical analysis; but the analysis will not convey to us the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine. one of the blank-verse pieces of _men and women_ rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth "stark-naked thought" in poetry. why take the harp to his breast "only to speak dry words across the strings"? better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot alpine horn of prose. boys may desire the interpretation into bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, and the strength which comes through delight. better than the meaning of a rose is the rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfume. and so the poet for men will resemble that old mage john of halberstadt: he with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side, * * * * * buries us with a glory, young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. browning in _men and women_ is in truth a john of halberstadt; he enriches life with colour, warmth, music, romance, not dissociated from thought and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed by these. not a single poem is "stark-naked thought"; not a single poem is addressed solely to the intellect; even _bishop blougram_ is rather a presentation of character than a train of argument or a chain of ideas. in few of these poems does browning speak in his own person; the verses addressed to his wife, which present her with "his fifty men and women" and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines, _memorabilia_, addressed to one who had seen shelley, and _old pictures in florence_, are perhaps the only exceptions to the dramatic character of the contents of the two volumes. yet through them all browning's mind is clearly discernible; and even his central convictions, his working creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them. to attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his _dramatis personae_ would of course be the crudest of mistakes. but when an idea persists through many poems written at various times and seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of circumstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an intimate possession of the writer's mind. such an idea is not a mere playmate but rather a confidant. when, again, after a tangle of casuistic reasoning or an embroilment of contending feelings, some idea suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth from falsehood and darkness from light, we may be assured that it has more than a dramatic value. and, once more, if again and again the same idea shows its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has embraced it as a truth of the emotions. because browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and women. they served to give his ideas a concrete body. by sympathy and by intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence. if the poet loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy with humanity! thus new combinations of thought and feeling are effected. thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations. truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth testing under various conditions and circumstances. the truth or falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself that can be said. let truth and falsehood grapple. let us hear the counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill. a luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a blougram; and blougram has things to tell us which luther never knew. but precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice we would do to others we must also render to ourselves. a wide survey may be made from a fixed centre. "universal sympathies," miss barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent. a church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ... _as_ different as a willow tree from a church tower."[ ] the fifty poems of _men and women_, with a few exceptions, fall into three principal groups--those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts--painting, poetry, music--and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, _a grammarian's funeral_; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of religions. two poems may be called descriptive; both are italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, _up at a villa--down in the city_, is made up of humorous observations of italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an italian person of quality; the other, "_de gustibus_--," which contrasts the happy quietudes of english landscape with the passionate landscape of the south, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. _the patriot_ is again italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which browning had witnessed in florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold. his year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year's misdeeds, his life is a failure; but browning characteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles' gate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon god, the paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day. the most remarkable of these poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, _childe roland to the dark tower came_. it is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a romantic motive. the external suggestions for the poem were no more than the words from _king lear_ which form the title, a tower seen in the carrara mountains, a painting seen in paris, and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of casa guidi.[ ] in his own mind browning may have put the question: of all the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest? not to combat with dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions in a rapture of battle. not these, but to cling to a purpose amid all that depresses the senses at a time when the heart within us is also failing; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul. childe roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature--a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness. and yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the dark tower and blows the blast upon his horn. browning was wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is enough; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking from the nightmare, and at that point the long-enduring quester may be left. we are defrauded of nothing by the abrupt conclusion. in the poems which treat of the love of man and woman browning regards the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life, and also as affording one of its chief tests. when we have formed these into a group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two divisions--poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat. certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous passion. browning does not belabour with heavy invective the _pretty woman_ of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown away. the chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this--the man at his most blissful moment cries "what treasures i have obtained!" the woman cries "what treasures have i to surrender and bestow?" hence the singleness and finality in the election of passion made by a woman as compared with a man's acquisitiveness of delight. the unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through the lines of _in a year_, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart: dear, the pang is brief, do thy part, have thy pleasure! how perplexed grows belief! well, this cold clay clod was man's heart: crumble it and what comes next? is it god? and with no chilling of love on the man's part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, _any wife to any husband_; noble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man. but elsewhere browning does justice to the pure chivalry of a man's devotion. caponsacchi's joy is the joy of a saviour who himself is saved; the great event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and ultimate; his soul is delivered from careless egoism once and for ever; the grace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace, and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance. even here in _men and women_ two contrasted poems assure us that, while the passion of a man may be no more than _love in a life_, it may also be an unweariable _life in a love_. of the poems of attainment one--_respectability_--has the spirit of youth and gaiety in it. here love makes its gallant bid for freedom, fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at defiance: the world's good word!--the institute! guizot receives montalembert! eh? down the court three lampions flare: set forward your best foot! but, after all, this love may be no more than an adventure of the boulevard and the attic in the manner of béranger's gay bohemianism. the distance is wide between such élan of youthful passion and the fidelity which is inevitable, and on which age has set its seal, in that poem of perfect attainment, _by the fireside_. this is the love which completes the individual life and at the same time incorporates it with the life of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which, owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for futurity. browning's personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact. the poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various degrees and kinds of failure. it is not death which can bring the sense of failure to love. in _evelyn hope_ all the passion has been on the man's side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud. but death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of which the speaker's passion, breaking through time, is the assurance, an attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely explain the meaning of things that are now obscure. perhaps the saddest and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark and yet just misses it. this is the subject of a poem equally admirable in its descriptive and its emotional passages, _two in the campagna_. the line "one near one is too far," might serve as its motto. satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached. two hearts touch and never can unite. one drop of the salt estranging sea is as unplumbed as the whole ocean. and the only possible end is infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.[ ] compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success. there is something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed. such is the mood which is presented in _one way of love_; the foiled lover has at least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success: she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! lose who may--i still can say those who win heaven, blest are they! so, too, in _the last ride together_, the lover is defeated but he is not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of defeat. who in this our life--he reflects--statesman or soldier, sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal? he has been granted the grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his best possession. with these generous rejections and magnanimous acceptances of failure stands in contrast _a serenade at the villa_, where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or, worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love, and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain, bitter and unredeemed. in these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will. but what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays, consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the passion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love has waned, and the passion dies in a twilight hour through mere inanition? such a failure as this seems to browning to mean the perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one. he takes in _the statue and the bust_ a case where the fulfilment of passion would have been a crime. the lady is a bride of the riccardi; to win her, now a wedded wife, would be to violate the law of god and man. nevertheless it is her face which has "filled the empty sheath of a man" with a blade for a knight's adventure--the duke grew straightway brave and wise. and then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the duke's flood of passion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy flats of life: so weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam the glory dropped from their youth and love, and both perceived they had dreamed a dream. their end was a crime, but browning's contention is that a crime may serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the duke and the lady had alike failed through mere languor of soul: and the sin i impute to each frustrate ghost is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, though the end in sight was a vice, i say. had tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and self-control. the reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems. winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of passion, the energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in _a lovers' quarrel_ with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of camaraderie between the lover and his mistress. the mass and intensity of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the pampas, with its leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, "black neck and eyeballs keen" appearing through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight. there is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, _a womans last word_: in a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is--the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender. the poem of union, _love among the ruins_, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes. the lover keeps at arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while; here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life; here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its shames. his eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of burns, as a jet of unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion; and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service. in like manner _by the fireside, a serenade at the villa_, and _two in the campagna_, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice. of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are the least valuable. _transcendentalism_ sets forth the old doctrine that poetry must be sensuous and passionate, leaving it to philosophy to deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. _how it strikes a contemporary_ shows by a humorous example how a poet's character and private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom he moves. _popularity_ maintains that the poet who is in the highest sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge and the praise; one day god's hand, which holds him, will open and let out all the beauty. the thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. two poems, and each of them a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. one, _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, is a singularly successful _tour de force_, if it is no more. poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in dealing with the fugue of his imaginary german composer, browning finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration. the poem of italian music, _a toccata of galuppi's_, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece. it is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; venice of the eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory passions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver. browning's artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the life of eighteenth-century venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a coffin-lid. shelley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of italy. there are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts that appeal to the mind through the eye in browning's poetry; and his sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as michael angelo's, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the classical work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[ ] the sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold authority upon the imagination. but the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to _protus_, one of the few flawless poems of browning. his mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of _sordello_. the poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and browning's imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in quest of tenderness or pity. "i spent some most delightful time," rossetti wrote to allingham shortly after the publication of _men and women_, "with browning at paris, both in the evenings and at the louvre, where (and throughout conversation) i found his knowledge of early italian art beyond that of any one i ever met--_encyclopedically_ beyond that of ruskin himself." the poem _old pictures at florence_, which rossetti calls "a jolly thing," and which is that and much more, is full of browning's learned enthusiasm for the early italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction which their adventures after new beauty and passion had for him as compared with the faultless achievements of classical sculpture. greek art, according to browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit. early christian art, even by faultily presenting spiritual ideals, not to be attained on earth but to be pursued through an immortal life, taught men to aspire. the aim of these painters was not to exhibit strength or grace, joy or grief, rage or love in their complete earthly attainment, but rather to make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, new fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: to bring the invisible full into play! let the visible go to the dogs--what matters? [illustration: andrea del sarto. _from a print after the portrait by himself in the uffizi gallery, florence_.] the prophecy with which the poem concludes, of a great revival of italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century that has elapsed since it was uttered. browning's doctrine that aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than the attainment of what is lower is a leading motive in the admirable dramatic monologue placed in the lips of andrea del sarto, the faultless painter. his craftsmanship is unerring; whatever he imagines he can achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and irretrievable: ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? all is silver-grey placid and perfect with my art: the worse! he could set right the arm which is wrongly put in rafael's work that fronts him; but "all the play, the insight and the stretch" of rafael are lacking in his own faultless lines. he looks back regretfully to his kingly days at fontainebleau with the royal francis, when what seemed a veritable fire was in his heart. and he tries to find an excuse for his failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful lucrezia--for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the higher love--lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her away. all might be so much better otherwise! yet otherwise he cannot choose that it should be; his art must remain what it is--not golden but silver-grey; and his lucrezia may attend to the cousin's whistle if only she retains the charm, not to be evaded, of her beauty.[ ] browning does not mean that art in its passionate pursuit of the highest ends should be indifferent to the means, or that things spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous embodiment as they are capable of receiving from the painter's brush or the poet's pen. were art a mere symbol or suggestion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise might claim to be art as admirable as any. what is the eye for, if not to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashion things as nature made them? it is through body that we reach after the soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the invisible which is expressed in and through these. such is the pleading of fra lippo lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that poem in which the dramatic monologue of browning attains its perfection of life and energy. fra lippo is intoxicated by the mere forms and colours of things, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean well: the beauty and the wonder and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, changes, surprises--and god made it all! these are the gospel to preach which he girds loin and lights the lamp, though he may perforce indulge a patron in shallower pieties of the conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with him, for now and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down florence streets--"zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all i'm made of!" fra lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragment of reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine significance.[ ] the same doctrine which is applied to art in _old pictures in florence_, that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the pursuit of knowledge in _a grammarian's funeral_. the time is "shortly after the revival of learning in europe"; the place-- a tall mountain, citied to the top, crowded with culture!-- is imagined to suit the idea of the poem. the dead scholar, borne to the summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed by the aspiration of paracelsus--to know; and, unlike paracelsus, he had never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy. he has been the saint and the martyr of renaissance philology. for the genius of such a writer as the author of _hudibras_, with his positive intellect and dense common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant. browning, through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to an eminence of honour and splendid fame. to a scholar greek particles may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what? upon the dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already attained; he only desperately follows after: that low man seeks a little thing to do, sees it and does it: this high man, with a great thing to pursue, dies ere he knows it. but again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon god; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar. two of the poems of _men and women_ are pages tragic-grotesque and pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion. in _the heretic s tragedy_ john, master of the temple, burns alive in paris square for his sins against the faith and holy church; the glow of the blazing larch and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of sulphur offends his nostrils. and the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the lord's house. yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we are made to feel that when john the apostate, bound in the flames and gagged, prays to jesus christ to save him, that prayer may have been answered. this passage from the story of the age of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic. _holy cross day_, a second fragment from history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from the ridiculous to the sublime. the picture of the close-packed jews tumbling or sidling churchwards to hear the christian sermon (for he saith "compel them to come in") and to partake of heavenly grace has in it something of rembrandt united with something of callot. such a crew of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous. but while they are cared for in the merciful bowels of the church, and groan out the expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts burn in them with the memory of jacob's house and of jerusalem. christ at least was of their kindred, and if they wronged him in past time, they will not wrong him now by naming these who outrage and insult them after his name. the historical distortions of the religion of christ do not, however, disturb the faith of browning in the christian revelation of divine love. in _cleon_ he exhibits the failure of paganism, even in its forms of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requirements of the human spirit. all that regal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to protus in his tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession of cleon; and a profound discouragement has settled down upon the soul of each. the race progresses from point to point; self-consciousness is deepened and quickened as generation succeeds generation; the sympathies of the individual are multiplied and extended. but he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow; most progress is most failure; the soul climbs the heights only to perish there. every day the sense of joy grows more acute; every day the soul grows more enlarged; and every day the power to put our best attainments to use diminishes. "and how dieth the wise man? as the fool. therefore i hated life; yea, i hated all my labour that i had taken under the sun." the poem is, indeed, an ecclesiastes of pagan religion. the assurance of extinction is the worm which gnaws at the heart of the rose: it is so horrible i dare at times imagine to my need some future state revealed to us by zeus, unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy. but this is no better than a dream; zeus could not but have revealed it, were it possible. browning does not bring his cleon, as pater brings his marius, into the christian catacombs, where the image of the shepherd bearing his lamb might interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house of cecilia where marius sees a new joy illuminating every face. cleon has heard of paulus and of christus, but who can suppose that a mere barbarian jew hath access to a secret shut from us? the doctrine of christ, preached on the island by certain slaves, is reported by an intelligent listener to be one which no sane man can accept. and cleon will not squander the time that might be well employed in studying the proportions of a man or in combining the moods of music--the later hours of a philosopher and a poet--on the futile creed of slaves. immortality and divine love--these were the great words pronounced by paul and by christ. _cleon_ is the despairing cry of pagan culture for the life beyond the grave which would attune to harmony the dissonances of earth, and render intelligible its mournful obscurities. _saul_, in the completed form of , and _an epistle of karshish_ are, the one a prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of god in the life and death of his son. the culminating moment in the effort of david by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the king, the moment towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own nature love as god's ultimate gift, and assured that in this, as in other gifts, the creature cannot surpass the creator, he breaks forth into a prophecy of god's love made perfect in weakness: o saul, it shall be a face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the christ stand! what follows in the poem is only the awe, the solemnity of this discovery which has come not through any processes of reasoning but by a passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice in david's own heart; only this awe, and the seeming extension of his throbbing emotion and pent knowledge over the face of external nature, until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their wonted ways. the case of lazarus as studied by karshish the arabian physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of david, but in a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance. the unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy, is not to be resisted; karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of judea's gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the tombs. but the face of lazarus, patient or joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of some secret which gives new meanings to all things, the perfect logic of his irrationality, his unexampled gentleness and love--these are memories which the keen-sighted arabian physician is unable to put by, so curious, so attaching a potency lies in the person of this man who holds that he was dead and rose again, karshish has a certain sense of shame that he, a man learned in all the wisdom of his day, should be so deeply moved. and yet how the thought of the secret possessed by this judean maniac--it is the secret of jesus--fills and expands the soul! the very god! think, abib: dost thou think? so, the all-great were the all-loving too-- so through the thunder comes a human voice saying "o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee!" science has at least something to consider in a thought so strangely potent. a nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his christian faith is the paradoxical subject of _bishop blougram's apology_, and it is one which admirably suited that side of browning's genius which leaned towards intellectual casuistry. but the poem is not only skilful casuistry--and casuistry, let it be remembered, is not properly the art of defending falsehood but of determining truth,--it is also a character-study chosen from the age of doubt; a dramatic monologue with an appropriate _mise en scène_; a display of fence and thrust which as a piece of art and wit rewards an intelligent spectator. that cardinal wiseman sat for the bishop's portrait is a matter of little consequence; the merit of the study is independent of any connection with an individual; it answers delightfully the cynical--yet not wholly cynical--question: how, for our gain in both worlds, can we best economise our scepticism and make a little belief go far?[ ] the nineteenth century is not precisely the age of the martyrs, or, if we are to find them, we must in general turn to politics and to science; bishop blougram does not pique himself on a genius for martyrdom; if he fights with beasts, it is on this occasion with a very small one, a lynx of the literary tribe, and in the arena of his own dining-room over the after-dinner wine. he is pre-eminently a man of his time, when the cross and its doctrine can be comfortably borne; both he and his table-companion, honoured for this one occasion only with the episcopal invitation, appreciate the good things of this world, but the bishop has a vast advantage over the maker of "lively lightsome articles" for the reviews, and he uses his advantage, it must be confessed, to the full. we are in company with no petty man while we read the poem and hear the great bishop roll out, with easy affluence, his long crumpled mind. he is delightfully frank and delightfully subtle; concealing himself by self-disclosure; opulent in ideas; shifting the pea of truth dexterously under the three gilded thimbles; blandly condescending and amiably contemptuous; a little feline, for he allows his adversary a moment's freedom to escape and then pounces upon him with the soft-furred claws; assured of his superiority in the game, yet using only half his mind; fencing with one arm pinioned; chess-playing with a rook and pawn given to his antagonist; or shall we say chess-playing blindfold and seeing every piece upon the board? is _bishop blougram's apology_ a poem at all? some literary critics may ask. and the answer is that through it we make acquaintance with one of browning's most genial inventions--the great bishop himself, and that if gigadibs were not present we could never have seen him at the particular angle at which he presents himself in his condescending play with truths and half-truths and quarter-truths, adapted to a smaller mind than his own. the sixteenth century gave us a montaigne, and the seventeenth century a pascal. why should not the nineteenth century of mundane comforts, of doubt troubled by faith, and faith troubled by doubt, produce a new type--serious yet humorous--in an episcopal pascal-montaigne? browning's moral sympathies, we may rest assured, do not go with one who like blougram finds satisfaction in things realised on earth; one who declines--at least as he represents himself for the purposes of argument--to press forward to things which he cannot attain but might nobly follow after. but browning's intellectual interest is great in seeing all that a blougram can say for himself; and as a destructive piece of criticism directed against the position of a gigadibs what he says may really be effective. the bishop frankly admits that the unqualified believer, the enthusiast, is more fortunate than he; he, sylvester blougram, is what he is, and all that he can do is to make the most of the nature allotted to him. that there has been a divine revelation he cannot absolutely believe; but neither can he absolutely disbelieve. unbelief is sterile; belief is fruitful, certainly for this world, probably for the next, and he elects to believe. having chosen to believe, he cannot be too pronounced and decisive in his faith; he will never attempt to eliminate certain articles of the _credenda_, and so "decrassify" his faith, for to this process, if once begun, there is no end; having donned his uniform, he will wear it, laces and spangles and all. true, he has at times his chill fits of doubt; but is not this the probation of faith? does not a life evince the ultimate reality that is within us? are not acts the evidence of a final choice, of a deepest conviction? and has he not given his vote for the christian religion? with me faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe. when the time arrives for a beatific vision blougram will be ready to adapt himself to the new state of things. is not the best pledge of his capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this--that being in the world he is worldly? we must not lose the training of each successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way into the next. so rolls on the argument to its triumphant conclusion-- fool or knave? why needs a bishop be a fool or knave when there's a thousand diamond weights between? only at the last, were it not that we know that there is a firmer ground for blougram than this on which he takes his stand in after-dinner controversy, we might be inclined to close the subject by adapting to its uses the title of a pamphlet connected with the kingsley and newman debate--"but was not mr gigadibs right after all?" worsted in sword-play he certainly was; but the soul may have its say, and the soul, armed with its instincts of truth, is a formidable challenger. footnotes: [footnote : letters of r.b. and e.b.b., i. .] [footnote : mrs orr's handbook to browning's works, , note. for the horse, see stanzas xiii. xiv. of the poem.] [footnote : this poem is sometimes expounded as a sigh for the infinite, which no human love can satisfy. but the simpler conception of it as expressing a love almost but not altogether complete seems the truer.] [footnote : browning's delight a few years later in modelling in clay was great.] [footnote : mrs andrew crosse, in her article, "john kenyon and his friends" (_temple bar magazine_, april ), writes: "when the brownings were living in florence, kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the pitti of andrea del sarto and his wife. mr browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of andrea del sarto--and sent it to kenyon!"] [footnote : the writer of this volume many years ago pointed out to browning his transposition of the chronological places of fra lippo lippi and masaccio ("hulking tom") in the history of italian art. browning vigorously maintained that he was in the right; but recent students do not support his contention. at the same time an error in _transcendentalism_, where browning spoke of "swedish boehme," was indicated. he acknowledged the error and altered the text to "german boehme."] [footnote : browning maintained to gavan duffy that his treatment of the cardinal was generous.] chapter x close of mrs browning's life when _men and women_ was published in the autumn of the brownings were again in paris. an impulsive friend had taken an apartment for them in the rue de grenelle, facing east, and in all that concerned comfort splendidly mendacious. after some weeks of misery and illness mrs browning was conveyed to less glittering but more hospitable rooms in the rue du colisée by a desperate husband--"that darling robert carried me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and respirator in woollen shawls. no, he wouldn't set me down even to walk up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down in a struggling bundle."[ ] happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. mrs browning worked _aurora leigh_ in "a sort of _furia_," and browning set himself to the task--a fruitless one as it proved--of rehandling and revising _sordello_: "i lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might,--instead of what the few must--like: but after all i imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as i find it"--proud but warrantable words. some of his leisure was given to vigorous and not unsuccessful efforts in drawing. at the theatre he saw ristori as medea and admired her, but with qualifications. at monckton milnes's dinner-table he met mignet and cavour, and george sand crowned with an ivy-wreath and "looking like herself." mrs browning records with pleasure that her husband's hostility to the french government had waned; at least he admitted that he was sick of the opposition. in may tidings from london of the illness of kenyon caused him serious anxiety; he would gladly have hastened to attend upon so true and dear a friend, but this kenyon would not permit. a month later he and mrs browning were in occupation of kenyon's house in devonshire place, which he had lent to them for the summer, but the invalid had sought for restoration of his health in the isle of wight. on the day that mr barrett heard of his daughter's arrival he ordered his family away from london. mrs browning once more wrote to him, but the letter received no answer. "mama," said little pen earnestly, "if you've been very, very naughty i advise you to go into the room and say,'_papa, i'll be dood_.'" but the situation, as mrs browning sadly confesses, was hopeless. some companionship with her sister arabel and her brothers was gained by a swift departure from london in august for ventnor whither the wimpole street household, leaving its master behind, had been banished, and there "a happy sorrowful two weeks" were spent. at cowes a grief awaited browning and his wife, for they found kenyon kind as ever but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits. a short visit to mrs browning's married sister at taunton closed the summer and autumn in england. before the end of october they were on their way to florence. "the brownings are long gone back now," wrote dante rossetti in december, "and with them one of my delights--an evening resort where i never felt unhappy. how large a part of the real world, i wonder, are those two small people?--taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn." the great event of the autumn for the brownings and for the lovers of english poetry was the publication of _aurora leigh_. its popularity was instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there was no time to alter even a comma. "that golden-hearted robert," writes mrs browning, "is in ecstasies about it--far more than if it all related to a book of his own." the volume was dedicated to john kenyon; but before the year was at an end kenyon was dead. since the birth of their son he had enlarged the somewhat slender incomings of his friends by the annual gift of one hundred pounds, "in order," says the editor of mrs browning's letters, "that they might be more free to follow their art for its own sake only." by his will he placed them for the future above all possibility of straitened means. to browning he left , _l_., to mrs browning , _l_. "these," adds mr f.g. kenyon, "were the largest legacies in a very generous will--the fitting end to a life passed in acts of generosity and kindness to those in need." the gain to the brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss. "christmas came," says mrs browning, "like a cloud." for the length of three winter months she did not stir out of doors. then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time and universal madness in florence, with streets "one gigantic pantomime." penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be refused; and penini's father and mother were for once drawn into the vortex of italian gaiety. when at the great opera ball a little figure in mask and domino was struck on the shoulder with the salutation "bella mascherina!" it was mrs browning who received the stroke, with her husband, also in domino, by her side. the absence of real coarseness in the midst of so much seeming license, and the perfect social equality gave her a gratifying impression of her florentines. in april it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the cascine and to bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, miss isa blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed. an american authoress of wider fame since her book of than even the authoress of _aurora leigh_, mrs beecher stowe, was in florence, and somewhat to their surprise she charmed both browning and his wife by her simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner--"never," says mrs browning, "did lioness roar more softly." all pointed to renewed happiness; but before april was over pain of a kind that had a peculiar sting left mrs browning for a time incapable of any other feeling. her father was dead, and no word of affection had been uttered at the last; if there was water in the rock it never welled forth. the kindly meant effort of a relative to reopen friendly communications between mr barrett and his daughters, not many months previously, had for its only result the declaration that they had disgraced the family.[ ] at first mrs browning was crushed and could shed no tear; she remained for many days in a state of miserable prostration; it was two months before she could write a letter to anyone outside the circle of her nearest kinsfolk. once more the july heat in florence--"a composition of gehenna and paradise"--drove the brownings to the baths of lucca. miss blagden followed them, and also young lytton came, ailing, it was thought, from exposure to the sun. his indisposition soon grew serious and declared itself as a gastric fever. for eight nights isa blagden sat by his bedside as nurse; for eight other nights browning took her place. his own health remained vigorous. each morning he bathed in a rapid mountain stream; each evening and morning he rode a mountain pony; and in due time he had the happiness of seeing the patient, although still weak and hollow cheeked, convalescent and beginning to think of "poems and apple puddings," as mrs browning declares, "in a manner other than celestial." it had been a summer, she said in september, full of blots, vexations, anxieties. three days after these words were written a new and grave anxiety troubled her and her husband, for their son, who had been looking like a rose--"like a rose possessed by a fairy" is his mother's description--was attacked in the same way as lytton. "don't be unhappy for _me_" said pen; "think it's a poor little boy in the street, and be just only a little sorry, and not unhappy at all." within less than a fortnight he was well enough to have "agonising visions of beefsteak pies and buttered toast seen in _mirage_"; but his mother mourned for the rosy cheeks and round fat little shoulders, and confessed that she herself was worn out in body and soul. the winter at florence was the coldest for many years; the edges of the arno were frozen; and in the spring of mrs browning felt that her powers of resistance, weakened by a year of troubles and anxieties, had fallen low. browning himself was in vigorous health. when he called in june on hawthorne he looked younger and even handsomer than he had looked two years previously, and his gray hairs seemed fewer. "he talked," hawthorne goes on, "a wonderful quantity in a little time." that evening the hawthornes spent at casa guidi. mrs browning is described by the american novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination--no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable perfection." browning himself was "very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person--logical and common-sensible, as, i presume, poets generally are in their daily talk." "his conversation," says hawthorne, speaking of a visit to miss blagden at bellosguardo, "has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it.... his nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child." when summer came it was decided to join browning's father and sister in paris, and accompany them to some french seaside resort, where mrs browning could have the benefit of a course of warm salt-water baths. to her the sea was a terror, but railway-travelling was repose, and browning suggested on the way from marseilles to paris that they might "ride, ride together, for ever ride" during the remainder of their lives in a first-class carriage with for-ever renewed supplies of french novels and _galignanis_. they reached paris on the elder mr browning's birthday, and found him radiant at the meeting with his son and grandson, looking, indeed, ten years younger than when they had last seen his face. paris, mrs browning declares, was her "weakness," italy her "passion"; florence itself was her "chimney-corner," where she "could sulk and be happy." the life of the brilliant city, which "murmurs so of the fountain of intellectual youth for ever and ever," quickened her heart-beats; its new architectural splendours told of the magnificence in design and in its accomplishment of her hero the emperor. and here she and her husband met their helpful friend of former days, father prout, and they were both grieved and cheered by the sight of lady elgin, a paralytic, in her garden-chair, not able to articulate a word, but bright and gracious as ever, "the eloquent soul full and radiant, alive to both worlds." the happiness in presence of such a victory of the spirit was greater than the pain. having failed to find agreeable quarters at etretat, where browning in a "fine phrenzy" had hired a wholly unsuitable house with a potato-patch for view, and escaped from his bad bargain, a loser of some francs, at his wife's entreaty, they settled for a short time at havre--"detestable place," mrs browning calls it--in a house close to the sea and surrounded by a garden. on a bench by the shore mrs browning could sit and win back a little strength in the bright august air. the stay at havre, depressing to browning's spirits, was for some eight weeks. in october they were again in paris, where mrs browning's sister, arabel, was their companion. the year was far advanced and a visit to england was not in contemplation. towards the middle of the month they were once more in motion, journeying by slow stages to florence. a day was spent at chambéry "for the sake of les charmettes and rousseau." when casa guidi was at length reached, it was only a halting-place on the way to rome. winter had suddenly rushed in and buried all italy in snow; but when they started for rome in a carriage kindly lent by their american friends, the eckleys, it was again like summer. the adventures of the way were chiefly of a negative kind--occasioned by precipices over which they were not thrown, and banditti who never came in sight; but in a quarrel between oxen-drivers, one of whom attacked the other with a knife, browning with characteristic energy dashed between them to the terror of the rest of the party; his garments were the only serious sufferers from his zeal as mediator. the apartment engaged at rome was that of the earlier visit of - , in the via bocca di leone, "rooms swimming all day in sunshine." on christmas morning mrs browning was able to accompany her husband to st peter's to hear the silver trumpets. but january froze the fountains, and the north wind blew with force. mrs browning had just completed a careful revision _of aurora leigh_, and now she could rest, enjoy the sunshine streaming through their six windows, or give herself up to the excitement of italian politics as seen through the newspapers in the opening of a most eventful year. "robert and i," she wrote on the eve of the declaration of war between austria and victor emmanuel, "have been of one mind lately on these things, which comforts me much." she had also the satisfaction of health enjoyed at least by proxy, for her husband had never been more full of vigour and the spirit of enjoyment. in the freezing days of january he was out of his bed at six o'clock, and away for a brisk morning walk with mr eckley. the loaf at breakfast diminished "by gargantuan slices." into the social life of rome he threw himself with ardour. for a fortnight immediately after christmas he was out every night, sometimes with double and treble engagements. "dissipations," says mrs browning, "decidedly agree with robert, there's no denying that, though he's horribly hypocritical, and 'prefers an evening with me at home.'" he gathered various coloured fragments of life from the outer world and brought them home to brighten her hours of imprisonment. when they returned to florence in may the grand duke had withdrawn, the city was occupied by french troops, and there was unusual animation in the streets. browning shared to some extent in his wife's alienation from the policy of england, and believed, but with less than her enthusiastic confidence, in the good intentions towards italy of the french emperor. he subscribed his ten scudi a month to the italian war-fund, and rewarded pen for diligence in his lessons with half a paul a day, which the boy might give as his own contribution to the cause of italian independence. the french and the italian tricolour flags, displayed by pen, adorned the terrace. in june the sun beat upon florence with unusual fierceness, but it was a month of battles, and with bulletins of the war arriving twice a day they could not bear to remove to any quiet retreat at a distance from the centre. it was not curiosity that detained them but the passion for italy, the joy in generous effort and great deeds. in the rebound, as mrs browning expresses it, from high-strung hopes and fears for italy they found themselves drawn to the theatre, where salvini gave his wonderful impersonation of othello and his hamlet, "very great in both, robert thought," so commented mrs browning, "as well as i."[ ] the strain of excitement was indeed excessive for mrs browning's failing physical strength; there was in it something almost febrile. yet the fact is noteworthy that the romantic figures secured much less of her interest than the men of prudent statesmanship. she esteemed cavour highly; she wholly distrusted mazzini. she justified louis napoleon in concessions which she regarded as an unavoidable part of diplomacy directed to ends which could not be immediately attained. garibaldi was a "hero," but somewhat alarming in his heroisms--a "grand child," "not a man of much brain." after the victories of magenta and solferino came what seemed to many the great betrayal of villafranca. for a day the busts and portraits of the french emperor suddenly disappeared from the shop-windows of florence, and even mrs browning would not let her boy wear his napoleon medal. but the busts returned to their places, and mrs browning's faith in napoleon sprang up anew; it was not he who was the criminal; the selfish powers of europe had "forced his hand" and "truncated his great intentions." she rejoiced in the magnificent spectacle of dignity and calm presented by the people of italy. and yet her fall from the clouds to earth on the announcement of peace with austria was a shattering experience. sleep left her, or if she slept her dreams were affected by "inscrutable articles of peace and endless provisional governments." night after night her husband watched beside her, and in the day he not only gave his boy the accustomed two hours' lesson on the piano, but replaced the boy's mother as teacher of those miscellaneous lessons, which had been her educational province. "robert has been perfect to me," expressed mrs browning's feelings in a word. another anxiety gave browning an opportunity which he turned to account in a way that renders honour and gratitude his due from all lovers of english letters. at a great old age landor, who resided with his family at fiesole, still retained his violent and intractable temper; in his home there was much to excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong. three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back. when for a fourth time--like a feeble yet majestic lear--one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to casa guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.[ ] browning had often said, as his wife tells her sister-in-law, that he owed more as a writer to landor than to any other contemporary.[ ] he resolved to set things right, if possible; and if not, to make the best of a case that could not be entirely amended. a visit to the villa assured him that reconciliation was out of the question. he provided for landor's immediate wants; communicated with landor's brothers in england, who were prompt in arranging for a regular allowance to be administered by browning; became the old man's guide and guardian; soothed his wounded spirit, although, according to mrs browning, not often happy when he attempted compliments, with generous words and ready quotations from landor's own writings; and finally settled him in florence under the care of mrs browning's faithful maid wilson, who watched over him during the remainder of his life.[ ] to his incredulous wife browning spoke of landor's sweetness and gentleness, nor was he wrong in ascribing these qualities to the old lion. she admitted that he had generous impulses, but feared that her husband would before long become, like other friends of landor, the object of some enraged suspicion. "nothing coheres in him," she writes, "either in his opinions, or, i fear, affections." but landor, whose courtesy and refinement she acknowledges, had also a heart that was capable of loyal love and gratitude. after the first burst of rage against the fiesole household had spent itself, he beguiled the time in perpetuating his indignations in an innocent and classical form--that of latin alcaics directed against one private and one public foe--his wife and the emperor louis napoleon.[ ] lander's affairs threatened to detain the brownings in florence longer than they desired, now that peace had come and it was not indispensable to run out of doors twice a day in order to inspect the bulletins. but after three weeks of very exhausting illness, mrs browning needed change of air. as soon as her strength allowed, she was lifted into a carriage and they journeyed, as in the year , to the neighbourhood of siena. she reached the villa which had been engaged by story's aid, with the sense of "a peculiar frailty of being." though confined to the house, the fresher air by day and the night winds gradually revived her strength and spirits. the silence and repose were "heavenly things" to her: the "pretty dimpled ground covered by low vineyards" rested her eyes and her mind; and for excitements, instead of reports of battle-fields there were slow-fading scarlet sunsets over purple hills. a kind prussian physician, gresonowsky, who had attended mrs browning in florence, and who entered sympathetically into her political feelings, followed her uninvited to siena and gave her the benefit of his care, declining all recompense. the good friends from america, the storys, were not far off, and landor, after a visit to story, was placed in occupation of rooms not a stone's-cast from their villa. with pen it was a time of rejoicing, for his father had bought the boy a sardinian pony of the colour of his curls, and he was to be seen galloping through the lanes "like puck," to use browning's comparison, on a dragon-fly's back.[ ] the gipsy instinct, the desire of wandering, had greatly declined with both husband and wife since the earlier days in italy. yet when they returned to casa guidi it was only for six weeks. even at the close of the visit to siena mrs browning had recovered but a slender modicum of strength; she did not dare to enter the cathedral, for there were steps to climb. at florence she felt her old vitality return and her spirits rose. but the climate of rome was considered by dr gresonowsky more suitable for winter, and towards the close of november they took their departure, flying from the florentine tramontana. the carriage was furnished with novels of balzac, and pen's pony was of the party. the rooms taken in the via del tritone were bright and sunny; but a rash visit to the jeweller castellani, to see and touch the swords presented by roman citizens to napoleon iii. and victor emmanuel, threw back mrs browning into all her former troubles of a delicate chest and left her "as weak as a rag." tidings of the death of lady elgin seemed to tell only of a peaceful release from a period of imprisonment in the body, but the loss of mrs jameson was a painful blow. rome at a time of grave political apprehensions was almost empty of foreigners; but among the few americans who had courage to stay were the sculptor gibson and theodore parker--now near the close of his life--whose _tête-à-têtes_ were eloquent of beliefs and disbeliefs. as the spring advanced the authoress of "the mill on the floss" was reported to be now and again visible in rome, "with her elective affinity," as mrs browning puts it, "on the corso walking, or in the vatican musing. always together." a grand-daughter of lord byron--"very quiet and very intense"--was among the visitors at the via del tritone, and lady marion alford, "very eager about literature and art and robert," for all which eagernesses mrs browning felt bound to care for her. the artists burne-jones and prinsep had made browning's acquaintance at siena; prinsep now introduced him to some of the by-ways of popular life in rome. together they witnessed the rivalry of two improvisatori poetic gamecocks, whose efforts were stimulated by the announcement that a great poet from england was present; together they listened to the forbidden hymn to garibaldi played in gigi's _osteria_, witnessed the dignified blindness of the papal gendarmes to the offence, while gigi liberally plied them with drink; and together, to relieve the host of all fear of more revolutionary airs, they took carriages with their musicians and drove to see the coliseum by moonlight.[ ] the project of a joint volume of poems on the italian question by browning and his wife, which had made considerable progress towards realisation, had been dropped after villafranca, when browning destroyed his poem; but mrs browning had advanced alone and was now revising proofs of her slender contribution to the poetry of politics, _poems before congress._ she wrote them, she says, simply to deliver her soul--"to get the relief to my conscience and heart, which comes from a pent-up word spoken or a tear shed." she can hardly have anticipated that they would be popular in england; but she was not prepared for one poem which denounced american slavery being misinterpreted into a curse pronounced upon england. "robert was _furious_" against the offending review, she says; "i never saw him so enraged about a criticism;" but by-and-by he "didn't care a straw." his wife, on the other hand, was more deeply pained by the blindness and deafness of the british public towards her husband's genius; nobody "except a small knot of pre-rafaelite men" did him justice; his publisher's returns were a proof of this not to be gainsaid--not one copy of his poems had for six months been sold, while in america he was already a power. for the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation. when savoy was surrendered to france mrs browning suffered some pain lest her emperor's generosity might seem compromised. browning admitted that the liberation of italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future prince hohenstiel-schwangau, "but he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity." during the winter he wrote much. "robert deserves no reproaches," his wife tells her friend miss haworth in may, "for he has been writing a good deal this winter--working at a long poem, which i have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which i have seen, and may declare worthy of him." mr f.g. kenyon conjectures that the long poem is not unlikely to have been _mr sludge the medium_, for home's performances, as he says, were at this time rampant.[ ] as hitherto, both husband and wife showed their poems each to the other only when the poems were complete; thus like a pair of hardy friends they maintained their independence. even when they read, there was no reading aloud; mrs browning was indefatigable in her passion for books; her husband, with muscular energy impatient for action, found it impossible to read for long at a single sitting. on june th they left rome, travelling by vettura through orvieto and chiusi to their home in florence.[ ] the journey fatigued mrs browning, but on arriving they had the happiness of finding landor well; he looked not less than magnificent, displaying "the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard ... all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty." wilson had the old man under happy control; only once had he thrown his dinner out of the window; that he should be at odds with all the world was inevitable, and that all the world should be in the wrong was exhilarating and restorative. the plans for the summer were identical with those of the preceding year; the same "great lonely villa" near siena was occupied again; the same "deep soothing silence" lapped to rest mrs browning's spirits; landor, her "adopted son"--a son of eighty-six years old--was hard by as he had been last summer. the neighbourhood of miss blagden was this year an added pleasure. "the little eager lady," as henry james describes her, "with gentle, gay black eyes," had seen much, read much, written already a little (with more to follow), but better than all else were her generous heart and her helpful hand. the season was one of unusual coolness for italy. pen's pony, as before, flashed through the lanes and along the roads. browning had returned from rome in robust health, and looking stouter in person than six months previously. now, while a tenant of the villa alberti, he spent his energies in long rides, sometimes rides of three or four continuous hours. on returning from such careers on horseback little inclination, although he had his solitary room in which to work, remained for the pursuit of poetry. the departure for rome was early--about september; in the via felice rooms were found. a new and great sorrow had fallen upon mrs browning--her sister henrietta, mrs surtees cook, was dead, leaving behind her three young children. mrs browning could not shed tears nor speak of her grief: she felt tired and beaten by the pain; and tried to persuade herself that for one who believed the invisible world to be so near, such pain was but a weakness. her husband was able to do little, but he shared in his degree in the sense of loss, and protected her from the intrusion of untimely visitors. sir john bowring was admitted because he presented a letter of introduction and had intimate relations with the french emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in england, with its cry of "riflemen, form!" was grateful to mrs browning's political feelings. french troops were now in rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but pen had fraternised with the officers on the pincio, had learnedly discussed chopin and stephen heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the holy father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma--an invitation which they were too discreet to accept. mrs browning's excitement about public affairs had somewhat abated; yet she watched with deep interest the earlier stages of the great struggle in america; and she did not falter in her hopes for italy; by intrigues and smuggling the newspapers which she wished to see were obtained through the courteous french generals. but her spirits were languid; "i gather myself up by fits and starts," she confesses, "and then fall back." apart from his anxieties for his wife's health and the unfailing pleasure in his boy, whom a french or italian abbé now instructed, browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest. he had long been an accomplished musician; in paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor story. his previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment. he ceased even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says mrs browning smilingly, "poor lost soul." the union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved. his wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation. of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible. and some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience--"beating his dear head," as mrs browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some saurian monster." now he was well and even exultant--"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." of advancing years--browning was now nearly forty-nine--the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time. "the women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. on the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. afterwards, in his days of sorrow in london, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in story's studio, where the songs of the birds, and the bleat of a goat coming through the little door to the left, were heard.[ ] while hoping and planning for the future, his wife was not unaware of her own decline. "for the first time," she writes about december, "i have had pain in looking into penini's face lately--which you will understand." and a little earlier: "i wish to live just as long as, and no longer than to grow in the soul." the winter was mild, though snow had fallen once; a spell of colder weather was reserved for the month of may. they thought of meeting browning's father and sister in some picturesque part of the forest of fontainebleau, or, if that should prove unsuitable, perhaps at trouville. mrs browning, who had formerly enjoyed the stir of life in paris, now shrank from its noise and bustle. her wish would be to creep into a cave for the whole year. at eight o'clock each evening she left her sitting-room and sofa, and was in bed. yet she trusted that when she could venture again into the open air she would be more capable of enduring the friction of the world. in may she felt stronger, and saw visitors, among whom was hans andersen, "very earnest, very simple, very childlike."[ ] a little later she was cast down by the death of cavour--"that great soul which meditated and made italy"; she could hardly trust herself to utter his name. it was evident to browning that the journey to france could not be undertaken without serious risk. they had reached casa guidi, and there for the present she must take her rest. the end came swiftly, gently. a bronchial attack, attended with no more than the usual discomfort, found her with diminished power of resistance. browning had forebodings of evil, though there seemed to be no special cause to warrant his apprehension. on the last evening--june , --she herself had no anticipation of what was at hand, and talked of their summer plans. when she slept, her slumber was heavy and disturbed. at four in the morning her husband was alarmed and sent to summon the doctor; but she assured him that his fears were exaggerated. then inestimable words were spoken which lived forever in his heart. and so "smilingly, happily, with a face like a girl's," resting her head upon her husband's cheek, she passed away.[ ] footnotes: [footnote : letters of e.b.b. (to mrs jameson), ii. .] [footnote : f.g. kenyon. _letters of e.b.b._, ii. .] [footnote : "browning was intimately acquainted," writes miss anna swanwick, "with salvini." what especially lived in browning's memory as transcending everything else he had witnessed on the stage was salvini's impersonation of the blind oedipus, and in particular one incident: a hand is laid on the blind man's shoulder, which he supposes the hand of one of his sons; he discovers it to be the hand of antigone; the sudden transition from a look of fiery hate to one of ineffable tenderness was unsurpassable in its mastery of dramatic expression. (condensed from "anna swanwick, a memoir and recollections," , pp. , .)] [footnote : story says that landor "was turned out of doors by his wife and children." he had conveyed the villa to his wife. it is story who compares landor to king lear. "conversations in a studio," p. .] [footnote : letters of e.b.b., ii. .] [footnote : when browning at rome was invited to dine with the prince of wales (march ) by the desire of queen victoria, mrs browning told him to "eschew compliments," of his infelicity in uttering which she gives amusing examples. _letters of e.b.b_., ii. , .] [footnote : on browning's action in the affairs of landor see forster's _life of landor_, and the letters of browning in vol. ii. of henry james's _life of story_ (pp. - ).] [footnote : see, for this residence at siena, an interesting letter of story to c. eliot norton in henry james's _w.w. story_, vol. ii. pp. , .] [footnote : condensed from information given by prinsep to mrs orr, _life and letters of r.b._, pp. - .] [footnote : _letters of e.b.b._, ii. , note. mr kenyon suggests _a death in the desert_ as at least possibly meant. _the ring and the book_ "certainly had not yet been begun."] [footnote : halting at siena, whence browning wrote an account of the journey to story: henry james's _w.w. story_, ii. pp. - .] [footnote : h. james's _w.w. story_, vol. ii. pp. , .] [footnote : henry james tells of a children's party at the palazzo barberini, rome, of several years earlier, when hans andersen read "the ugly duckling," and browning, "the pied piper"; which led to "a grand march through the spacious barberini apartment, with story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes." _w.w. story_, vol. i.p. .] [footnote : the circumstances of mrs browning's death are described as above, but with somewhat fuller detail, in a letter of browning to miss haworth, july , , first printed by mrs orr. many details of interest will be found in a long letter of story, henry james's _w.w. story_, vol. ii. pp. - : "she talked with him and jested and gave expression to her love in the tenderest words; then, feeling sleepy, and he supporting her in his arms, she fell into a doze. in a few minutes, suddenly, her head dropped forward. he thought she had fainted, but she had gone for ever." a painful account of the funeral service, "blundered through by a fat english parson," is given by story.] chapter xi london: dramatis personae the grief of the desolate man was an uncontrollable passion; his heart was strong and all its strength entered into its sorrow. miss blagden, "perfect in all kindness," took motherly possession of the boy, and persuaded his father to accompany penini to her villa at bellosguardo. when all that was needful at casa guidi had been done, browning's first thought was to abandon italy for many a year, and hasten to london, there to have speech for a day or two at least with mrs browning's sister arabel. "the cycle is complete," he said, looking round the sitting-room of casa guidi. "i want my new life," he wrote, "to resemble the last fifteen years as little as possible." yet while he stayed in the accustomed rooms he held himself together; "when i was moved," he says, "i began to go to pieces."[ ] yet something remained to sustain him. to one who has habitually given as well as received much not the least of the pangs of separation arises from the incapacity to render any further direct service. it fortified browning's heart to know that much could be done, and in ways which his wife would have approved and desired, for her child. and as he himself had been also her care, it was his business now to see that his life fulfilled itself aright. yet he breaks out in july: "no more 'house-keeping' for me, even with my family. i shall grow still, i hope--but my root is taken, and remains." from the outward paraphernalia of death browning, as mrs orr notices, shrank with aversion; it was partly the instinct by which a man seeks to preserve what is most sacred and most strong in his own feelings from the poor materialisms and the poor sentimentalisms of the grave; partly a belief that any advance of the heart towards what has been lost may be rather hindered than helped by the external circumstance surrounding the forsaken body. browning took measures that his wife's grave should be duly cared for, given more than common distinction; but florence became a place from which even for his own sake and the sake of her whose spirit lived within him he must henceforth keep aloof. the first immediate claim upon browning was that of duty to his father. on august st he left florence for paris, accompanied by isa blagden, who still watched over him and the boy. two months were spent with his sister and the old man, still hale and strong of heart, at a place "singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's content"--so browning describes it--st enogat, near st malo. the solitary sea, the sands, the rocks, the green country gave him at least a breathing-space. then he proceeded to london, not without an outbreak of his characteristic energy in over-coming the difficulties--which involved two hours of "weary battling"--of securing a horse-box for pen's pony. at amiens tennyson, with his wife and children, was on the platform. browning pulled his hat over his face and was unrecognised.[ ] in "grim london," as he had called it, though with a quick remorse at recollection of the kindness awaiting him, he had the comfort of daily intercourse with miss arabel barrett. it was decided that an english education, but not that of a public school, would be best for the boy; the critical time for taking "the english stamp" must not be lost; his father's instruction, aided by that of a tutor, would suffice to prepare him for the university, and he would have the advantage of the motherly care of his mother's favourite sister. browning distrusted, he says to story, "ambiguous natures and nationalities." thus he bound himself to england and to london, while at times he sighed for the beauty of italian hills and skies. he shrank from society, although before long old friends, and especially procter, infirm and deaf, were not neglected. he found, or made, business for himself; had "never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it." the discomfort of london lodgings was before long exchanged for the more congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in warwick crescent, which he occupied until , two years before his death. the furniture and tapestries of casa guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose. "it was london," writes mrs ritchie, referring to her visits of a later date, "but london touched by some indefinite romance; the canal used to look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the crescent.... the house was an ordinary london house, but the carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs. in the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which i am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and fluttering." in an owl--for browning still indulged a fantasy of his own in the choice of pets--was "the light of our house," as a letter describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways." the bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one said "poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a sympathetic air of depression.[ ] miss barrett lived hard by, in delamere terrace. with her on sundays browning listened at bedford chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, thomas jones, to some of which when published in , he prefixed an introduction. "the welsh poet-preacher" was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural gift of eloquence, which, with his "liberal humanity," drew browning to become a hearer of his discourses. he made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. mrs browning had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion. an invitation to accept the editorship of the _cornhill magazine_, on thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation declined. he was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. in he issued with a dedication "to grateful florence" her _last poems_; in , her _greek christian poets_; in he prepared a volume of selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. the efforts of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend miss blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the "paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" god knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath. such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were characteristic of browning, and were sometimes followed by regret for his own distemperature. in a gratifying task was laid on him--that of superintending the three volume edition of his poetical works which was published in the following year. at the same time his old friend forster, with help from procter, was engaged in preparing the first--and the best--of the several selections from browning's poems; it was at once an indication of the growing interest in his writings and an effective means towards extending their influence. he set himself steadily to work out what was in him; he waited no longer upon his casual moods, but girded his loins and kept his lamp constantly lit. his genius, such as it was--this was the field given him to till, and he must see that it bore fruit. "i certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before i die"--so he wrote in . there were gains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses. a man of so active a mind by planting himself before a subject could always find something to say; but it might happen that such sheer brain-work was carried on by plying other faculties than those which give its highest value to poetry.[ ] in the late summer and early autumn of browning, in company with his son, was among the pyrenees at "green pleasant little cambo, and then at biarritz crammed," he says, "with gay people of whom i know nothing but their outsides." the sea and sands were more to his liking than the gay people.[ ] he had with him one book and no other--a euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the greek drama bears witness. at present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the roman murder story"--the story of pompilia and guido and caponsacchi--he describes as being pretty well in his head. it needed a long process of evolution before the murder story could uncoil its sinuous lengths in a series of volumes. the visit to ste-marie "a wild little place in brittany" near pornic, in the summer of --a visit to be repeated in the two summers immediately succeeding--is directly connected with two of the poems of _dramatis personae_. the story of _gold hair_ and the landscape details of _james lee's wife_ are alike derived from pornic. the solitude of the little breton hamlet soothed browning's spirit. the "good, stupid and dirty" people of the village were seldom visible except on sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the coast; fruit and milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and these were browning's diet. "i feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as i sit here at the window.... such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!" but the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought back the old siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. the mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs miss blagden (aug. , ) that having yesterday written a poem of lines, he means to keep writing whether he likes it or not.[ ] "with the spring of ," writes mr gosse, "a great change came over browning's habits. he had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him. he told the present writer [mr gosse] long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him." "accordingly," goes on mr gosse, "he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in london. this, however, was a slow process." mrs ritchie refers to spoken words of browning which declared that it was "a mere chance whether he should live in the london house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more." it was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth grown man," in his own "daniel bartoli," who in his desolation, after the death of his lady, trembled on the verge of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge he tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse, but took again, for better or for worse, the old way of the world, and, much the same man o' the outside, fairly played life's game. probably browning had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. and as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the victor: strength may conclude in archelaos' court, and yet esteem the silken company so much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown, for aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve. strength amid crowds as late in solitude may lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[ ] one cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate contemplation, such as was wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive london seasons. and perhaps it is not certain that the genius of browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception room. but the truth is, as mrs browning had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. if he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his mind. the pleasures of society both fatigued and rested browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force. in _dramatis personae_ was published. it might be described as virtually a third volume of _men and women_. and yet a certain change of tone is discernible. italy is no longer the background of the human figures. there is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold "joys of living." if higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul. in the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of _a death in the desert_, which had hardly been reached before. yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of ; except in one instance, where tennyson's method in _maud_, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of _men and women_, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of _dramatis personae._ a slight metrical complication--the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of _dîs aliter visum_ and in the third line of the quatrains of _may and death_--may be noted as indicating browning's love of new metrical experiments. in the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, "a mass of brass," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule. _mr sludge, "the medium_" the longest piece in the volume, has been already noticed. the story of the poor girl of pornic, as browning in a letter calls her, attracted him partly because it presented a psychological curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in words,--gold in contrast with that pallid face--as much as his friend rossetti might have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes of his brush: hair such a wonder of flix and floss, freshness and fragrance--floods of it too! gold, did i say? nay, gold's mere dross. the story, which might gratify a cynical observer of human nature, is treated by browning without a touch of cynicism, except that ascribed to the priest--good easy man--who has lost a soul and gained an altar. a saint _manqué_, whose legend is gruesome enough, but more pathetic than gruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the christian faith, and a type of the mystery of moral evil; but the psychological contrasts of the ambiguous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual contrast of that face, like a silver wedge 'mid the yellow wealth, are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in exposition of his tale. had the form of the poem been browning's favourite dramatic monologue, we can imagine that an ingenious apologia, convincing at least to half-pornic, could have been offered for the perversity of the dying girl's rifting every golden tress with gold. no poem in the volume of _dramatis personae_ is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled _a face_, lines of which emily patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty. that "little head of hers" is transferred to browning's panel in the manner of an early tuscan piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its imaginative transference to art. as _master hugues_ of the earlier collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so _abt vogler_ interprets music on the other side--that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element--real though slight--is subordinate. in the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by browning's verse. they climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has found rest in god; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude; and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and comforted. the poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet. the _toccata of galuppi_ left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence. the extemporising of _abt vogler_ fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. faith, victor over loss, in _abt vogler_, is victor over temporal decay in _rabbi ben ezra_. the poem is the song of triumph of devout old age. neither the shrunken sadness of matthew arnold's poem on old age, nor the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an admirable poem by emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some stress and strain may be felt in browning's effort to maintain his position. it is no "vale of years" of which _rabbi ben ezra_ tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience--knowledge which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on achievements but failures. possessed of such knowledge, tried in the probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and solemn vision, confident of being qualified at last to start forth upon that "adventure brave and new" to which death is a summons, and assured through experience that the power which gives our life its law is equalled by a superintending love. ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline, are here represented as the characteristics of extreme old age. an enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiasm of rest in knowledge, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to god and the divine purpose make up the poem. at no time did browning write verse which soars with a more steadfast and impassioned libration of wing. death in _rabbi ben ezra_ is death as a friend. in the lines entitled _prospice_ it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character. no lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the transcendent joy is human love recovered, which being once recovered, let whatever god may please succeed. the verses are a confession which gives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable in many of browning's later poems. he could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. the hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. in contrast with the ardent ideality of _rabbi ben ezra_ may be set the uncompromising realism of _apparent failure_, with its poetry of the paris morgue. the lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and worst, blinking no hideous fact. yet, even so, the reverence for humanity-- poor men, god made, and all for that!-- is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that after last returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched, that what began best, can't end worst. the optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the poem, with its suggestive title, is not argumentative. the sense of "the pity of it" in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of god, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or god must at the last intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in paris yesterday. and the word "nature" here would be rejected by browning as less than the truth. in under somewhat altered conditions, and from a ground somewhat shifted, browning in _a death in the desert_ and the _epilogue_ to "dramatis personae" continued his apology for the christian faith. the apologetics are, however, in the first instance poems, and they remain poems at the last. the imaginary scene of the death of the evangelist john is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain noble bareness; in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the little group of witnesses to whom he utters his legacy of words; at the cave's edge is the bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of assurance: outside was all noon and the burning blue. the slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings is as true as if it were studied from a death-bed; his sudden awakening at the words "i am the resurrection and the life" arrives not as a dramatic surprise but as the simplest surprise of nature--light breaking forth before sunset. the chief speaker of the poem is chosen because the argument is one concerning faith that comes through love, and st john was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets. the dialectic proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of simplicity. the verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables; a pondering, dwelling verse; and great single lines arise so naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be of one texture with the whole: this, for example,-- we would not lose the last of what might happen on his face; and this:-- when there was mid sea and the mighty things; and this:-- lie bare to the universal prick of light; and these:-- the bactrian was but a wild childish man, and could not write nor speak, but only loved. such lines, however, are made to be read _in situ_. the faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century, and is not the same. the story and the teaching of christ had alike one end--to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of divine love, and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. where love is, there is christ. our conceptions of god are relative to our own understanding; but god as power, god as a communicating intelligence, god as love--father, son and spirit--is the utmost that we can conceive of things above us. let us now put that knowledge--imperfect though it may be--to use. power, intelligence, love--these surround us everywhere; they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. the historical story of christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger assurance of faith. we are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of the empty sepulchre; christ is arisen. why revert to discuss miracles? the work of miracles--whatever they may have been--was long ago accomplished. the knowledge of the divine love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such for us is the christian faith, such is the work of christ accomplishing itself in humanity at the present time. and the christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger and more enduring belief. the acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak. this, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying testimony of browning's st john. it is thrown into lyrical form as his own testimony in the _epilogue_ to the volume of . the voices of singers, the sound of the trumpets of the jewish dedication day, when the glory of the lord in his cloud filled his house, have fallen silent. we are told by some that the divine face, known to early christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative: oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals. browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care: why, where's the need of temple, when the walls o' the world are that? what use of swells and falls from levites' choir, priests' cries, and trumpet calls? that one face, far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows.[ ] in the great poem of - , _the ring and the book_, one speaker, the venerable pope, like st john of _a death in the desert_, has almost reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying evangelist: lies bare to the universal prick of light. he, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses browning's own highest thought. and the pope's exposition of the christianity of our modern age is identical with that of john. man's mind is but "a convex glass" in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of god, "our known unknown." the pope has heard the christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible. god's power--that is clearly discernible in the universe; his intelligence--that is no less evidently present. what of love? the dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love. the surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of god to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's highest moral qualities. the acknowledgment of god in christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the pope, as for st john, solves all questions in the earth and out of it. but whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact, or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass a spectrum into mind, the narrow eye-- the same and not the same, else unconceived-- the pope dare not affirm. nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the christian tale--historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth--remains: so my heart be struck, what care i,--by god's gloved hand or the bare? by some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth. let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses.[ ] if the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in _dramatis personae_, the example given is of capital importance in this province of browning's art. the devil of notre dame, looking down on paris, is more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of gothic fantasy than caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin, while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his creator. the grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous bridgewater treatise is governed by a certain logic. the poem, indeed, is essentially a fragment of browning's own christian apologetics; it stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon the heads of assailants. the poet's intention is not at all to give us a chapter in the origins of religion; nor is caliban a representative of primitive man. a frequently recurring idea with browning is that expressed by pope innocent in the passage already cited; the external world proves the power of god; it proves his intelligence: but the proof of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of man. are you dissatisfied with such a proof? well, then, see what a god we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! if this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the part of our maker; his providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness and our misery. why were we brought into being? to amuse his solitary and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged manifestations of his power. why is one man selected for extreme agony from which a score of his fellows escape? because god setebos resembles caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him unhurt and stones the twenty-first, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. if any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of setebos, that law is surely very far away; it is "the quiet" of caliban's theology which takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving stars. except the short piece named _may and death_, which like rossetti's poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of association that make some trival object the special remembrancer of sorrow, the remaining poems of _dramatis personae_, as originally published, are all poems of love. _a likeness_, skilfully contrived in the indirect directness of its acknowledgment of love, its jealous privacy of passion, and its irresistible delight in the homage rendered by one who is not a lover, is no exception. not one of these poems tells of the full assurance and abiding happiness of lovers. but the warmth and sweetness of early passion are alive under the most disastrous circumstances in _confessions_. the apothecary with his bottles provides a chart of the scene of the boy-and-girl adventures; the professional gravities of the parson put an edge on the memory of the dear indiscretions; "summer's distillation," to borrow a word from shakespeare, makes faint the odour of the bottle labelled "ether"; the mummy wheat from the coffin of old desire sprouts up and waves its green pennons. _youth and art_ may be placed beside the earlier _respectability_ as two pages out of the history of the encounters of prudence and passion; youth and maiden alike, boy-sculptor and girl-singer, prefer the prudence of worldly success to the infinite prudence of love; and they have their reward--that success in life which is failure. like the tedious brief scene of young pyramus and thisbe, this is a poem of "very tragical mirth." and no less tragically mirthful is _dîs aliter visum_, a variation on the same or a kindred theme, where our young bohemian sculptor is replaced by the elderly poet, bent, wigged, and lamed, but sure of the fortieth chair in the academy, and the lone she-sparrow of the house-top by a young beauty, who adds to her other attractions a vague, uninstructed yearning for culture and entirely substantial possessions in the three-per-cents. but the moral is the same--the folly of being overwise, the wisdom of acting upon the best promptings of the heart. in _too late_ browning attempts to render a mood of passionate despair;--love and the hopes of love are defeated by a woman's sentence of rejection, her marriage, and, last, her death; it reads, more than any other poem of the writer, like a leaf torn out of "wuthering heights." there is a fixity of grief which is more appalling than this whirlblast; the souls that are wedged in ice occupy a lower circle in the region of sorrow than those which are driven before the gale. _the worst of it_--another poem of the failures of love--reverses the conventional attitude of the wronged husband; he ought, according to all recognised authorities of drama and novel, rage against his faithless wife, and commiserate his virtuous self; here he endeavours, though vainly, to transfer every stain and shame to himself from her; his anguish is all on her behalf, or if on his own chiefly because he cannot restore her purity or save her from her wrong done against herself. it is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity. browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination. for once in _james lee's wife_ (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity _james lee_), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success. the season of the year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord with those of the decline of hope in the wife's heart for any return of her love. her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only petrifies? it should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic poems into imaginary biography to find that browning, who had known so perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers. looking a little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known. but in all these poems he thinks of love as a supreme possession in itself and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit. footnotes: [footnote : letter to story in henry james's "w.w. story," vol. ii. p. and p. .] [footnote : h. james's "w.w. story," vol. ii. p. .] [footnote : "rossetti papers," p. .] [footnote : in browning gave time and pains to revising his friend story's _roba di roma_.] [footnote : in browning again "braved the awful biarritz" and stayed at cambo. on this occasion he visted fontarabia. an interesting letter from cambo, undated as to time, is printed in henry james's "w.w. story," vol. ii. pp. - . the year-- --may be ascertained by comparing it with a letter addressed to f.t. palgrave, given in palgrave's life, the date of this letter being oct. , . browning in the letter to story speaks of "the last two years in the dear rough ste.-marie."] [footnote : was the poem _gold hair_? if three stanzas were added to the first draft before the poem appeared in _the atlantic monthly_ the number of lines would have been . stanzas , and were added in the _dramatis personae_ version.] [footnote : _aristophanes' apology_ (spoken of euripides).] [footnote : compare with _epilogue: third speaker_ the lines from _a death in the desert_: then stand before that fact, that life and death, stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, as though a star should open out, all sides, grow the world on you, as it is my world. [footnote : statements by mrs orr with respect to browning's relations to christianity will be found on p. and p. of her life of browning. she regarded "la saisiaz" as conclusive proof of his "heterodox attitude." robert buchanan, in the epistle dedicatory to "the outcast," alleges that he questioned browning as to whether he were a christian, and that browning "thundered no!" the statement embodied in my text above is substantially not mine but browning's own. see on _ferishtah's fancies_ in chapter xvi.] chapter xii the ring and the book the publication of _dramatis personae_ marks an advance in browning's growing popularity; a second edition, in which some improvements were effected, was called for in , the year of its first publication. "all my new cultivators," browning wrote, "are young men"; many of them belonged to oxford and cambridge. but he was resolved to consult his own taste, to take his own way, and let popularity delay or hasten as it would--"pleasing myself," he says, "or aiming at doing so, and thereby, i hope, pleasing god." his life had ordered itself as seemed best to him--a life in london during the months in which the tide flows and sparkles; then summer and autumn quietude in some retreat upon the french coast. the years passed in such a uniformity of work and rest, with enjoyment accompanying each of these, that they may almost be grasped in bundles. in , the holiday was again at sainte-marie, and the weather was golden; but he noticed with regret that the old church at pornic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried, was disappearing to give space in front of a new and smart erection of brick and stucco. his florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he lamented the change. every detail of the italian days lived in his memory; the violets and ground ivy on a certain old wall; the fig tree behind the siena villa, under which his wife would sit and read, and "poor old landor's oak." "i never hear of any one going to florence," he wrote in , "but my heart is twitched." he would like to "glide for a long summer-day through the streets and between the old stone-walls--unseen come and unheard go." but he must guard himself against being overwhelmed by recollection: "oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny sunday afternoon, with my face turned to florence--'ten minutes to the gate, ten minutes _home_!' i think i should fairly end it all on the spot."[ ] other changes sadder than the loss of old norman pillars and ornaments, or new barbarous structures, run up beside poggio, were happening. in may browning's father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in june miss browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in paris twenty-four hours before the end. the elder browning had almost completed his eighty-fifth year. to the last he retained what his son described as "his own strange sweetness of soul." it was the close of a useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep affection. the occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense of loss was great. miss browning, whose devotion during many years first to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became her brother's constant companion. they rested for the summer at le croisic, a little town in brittany, in a delightfully spacious old house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushing waves browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers. their enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and to the same place, which browning has described in his _two poets of croisic_-- croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts spitefully north, they returned in the following summer. during this second visit (september ) that most spirited ballad of french heroism, _hervé riel_, was written, though its publication belongs to four years later.[ ] in june came grief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from outward communication with a portion of what was most precious in his past life. arabel barrett, his wife's only surviving sister, who had supported him in his greatest sorrow, died in browning's arms. "for many years," we are told by mr gosse, "he was careful never to pass her house in delamere terrace." although not prone to superstition, he had noted in july a dream of miss barrett in which she imagined herself asking her dead sister elizabeth, "when shall i be with you?" and received the answer, "dearest, in five years." "only a coincidence," he adds in a letter to miss blagden, "but noticeable." that summer, after wanderings in france, browning and his sister settled at audierne, on the extreme westerly point of brittany, "a delightful, quite unspoiled little fishing town," with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind. it was in every way an eventful year. in the autumn his new publishers, smith, elder & co., produced the six-volume edition of his poetical works, on the title-page of which the author describes himself as "robert browning, m.a., honorary fellow of balliol college, oxford." the distinction, partly due to jowett's influence, had been conferred a year previously. in , browning, who desired that his son should be educated at oxford, first became acquainted with jowett. acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship, which was not the less genuine or cordial because jowett had but a qualified esteem for browning's poems. "ought one to admire one's friend's poetry?" was a difficult question of casuistry which the master of balliol at one time proposed. much of browning's work appeared to him to be "extravagant, perverse, topsy-turvy"; "there is no rest in him," jowett wrote with special reference to the poems "christmas eve" and "easter day," which he regarded as browning's noblest work. but for the man his admiration was deep-based and substantial. after browning's first visit to him in june , jowett wrote that though getting too old to make, as he supposed, new friends, he had--he believed--made one. "it is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of mr browning's open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge. i had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man. his great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. of personal objects he seems to have none except the education of his son."[ ] browning's visits to oxford and cambridge did not cease when he dropped away from the round of visiting at country houses. he writes with frank enjoyment of the almost interminable banquet given at balliol in the lent term, , on the occasion of the opening of the new hall. oxford conferred upon him her d.c.l. in , on which occasion a happy undergraduate jester sent fluttering towards the new doctor's head an appropriate allusion in the form of a red cotton night-cap. the cambridge ll.d. was conferred in . in he was elected a life governor of the university of london. in he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the lord rectorship of the university of st andrews, as successor to john stuart mill, an honour which he declined.[ ] the great event of this year in the history of his authorship was the publication in november and december of the first two volumes of _the ring and the book_. the two remaining volumes followed in january and february . [illustration: piazza di san lorenzo, florence, where "the book" was found by browning. _from a photograph by_ alinari.] in june browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the piazza san lorenzo, florence, upon the "square old yellow book," part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the franceschini murder case was developed. the price was a lira, "eightpence english just." as he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of casa guidi[ ]. that night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of casa guidi, while from felice church opposite came the clear voice of the cloistered ones, chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights, he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his imagination: i fused my live soul and that inert stuff, before attempting smithcraft. according to mr rudolf lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the incident, browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted: "'when i had read the book,' so browning told me, 'my plan was at once settled. i went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it. those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided, and i adhered to that arrangement to the last.'"[ ] when in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none. smithcraft did not soon begin. he offered the story, "for prose treatment" to miss ogle, so we are informed by mrs orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of statement, offered it "for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries." we have seen that in a letter of from biarritz, browning speaks of the roman murder case as being the subject of a new poem already clearly conceived though unwritten. in the last section of _the ring and the book_, he refers to having been in close converse with his old quarto of the piazza san lorenzo during four years: how will it be, my four-years' intimate, when thou and i part company anon? the publication of _dramatis personae_ in doubtless enabled browning to give undivided attention to his vast design. in october of that year he advanced to actual definition of his scheme. when staying in the south of france he visited the mountain gorge which is connected with the adventure of the roland of romance, and there he planned the whole poem precisely as it was carried out. "he says," mr w.m. rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with browning ( march ), "he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan--some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time--often stores up a subject long before he writes it. he has written his forthcoming work all consecutively--not some of the later parts before the earlier."[ ] when carlyle met browning after the appearance of _the ring and the book_, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous than browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity: "it is a wonderful book," declared carlyle, "one of the most wonderful poems ever written. i re-read it all through--all made out of an old bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting."[ ] a like remark might have been made respecting the book which, in its method and its range of all english books most resembles browning's poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by browning's tale of guido and pompilia. richardson's _clarissa_ consists of eight volumes made out of an old bailey story, or what might have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion. but then we should never have known two of the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, clarissa and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader. out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure. it is of little profit to discuss the question whether richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand. no one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical polonius--"this is too long." but neither _clarissa_ nor _the ring and the book_ is one of the hundred merry tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert confidently that this was possible. it has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once. nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons--for the pompilia of guido and the pompilia of caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest. in the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves--not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguishing the several values of human testimony. we become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again. gossipry on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior foolishness of wisdom. the advocacy which consists of professional self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one--that which commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of rhetoric. the criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his fragment of truth--"what shall a man give for his life?" he has enough truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks, to set up false signal fires upon the rocks. and then are heard three successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to our mind the words, "but there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the almighty giveth them understanding." first the voice of the pure passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except the deliverance of a message--and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it please, ironical. it is as if elihu the son of barachel stood up and his wrath were kindled: "behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. i will speak that i may be refreshed." and yet we dare not say that caponsacchi's truth is the whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the light of common day. next, a voice from one who is human indeed "to the red-ripe of the heart," but who is already withdrawn from all the turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which comes from god, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,--uttering its fragment of the truth. last, the voice of old age, and authority and matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompassed by much doubt and weariness and human infirmity, a solemn, pondering voice, which, with god somewhere in the clear-obscure, goes sounding on a dim and perilous way, until in a moment this voice of the anxious explorer for truth changes to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the armed doomsman of righteousness. truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that, browning would say, is the concern of god. and so, at the close, we are directed to take to heart the lesson that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation words and wind. but there are degrees of approximation to truth and of remoteness from it. truth as apprehended by pure passion, truth as apprehended by simplicity of soul ("and a little child shall lead them"), truth as apprehended by spiritual experience--such respectively make up the substance of the monologues of caponsacchi, of pompilia, and of the pope. for the valuation, however, of this loftier testimony we require a sense of the level ground, even if it be the fen-country. a perception of the heights must be given by exhibiting the plain. if we were carried up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that we had not become inhabitants of some cloudcuckootown? and the plain is where we ordinarily live and move; it has its rights, and is worth understanding for its own sake. therefore we shall mix our mind with that of "half-rome" and "the other half-rome" before we climb any mounts of transfiguration or enter any city set upon a hill. the "man in the street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the _salon_ may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of pompilia, the profound searchings of spirit that proceed all through the droop of that sombre february day in the closet of the pope. and, then, at the most tragic moment and when pathos is most poignant, life goes on, and the world is wide, and laughter is not banished from earth. therefore dominus hyacinthus de archangelis, procurator of the poor, shall make his ingenious notes for the defence of count guido, and cite his precedents and quote his authorities, and darken counsel with words, all to be by and by ecclesiasticized and regularized and latinized and ciceroized, while more than half the good man's mind is occupied with thought of the imminent "lovesome frolic feast" on his boy cinone's birth-night, which shall bring with it lamb's fry and liver, stung out of its monotony of richness by parsley-sprigs and fennel. yes, and we shall hear also the other side--how, in a florilegium of latin, selected to honour aright the graces and the muses and the majesty of law, johannes-baptista bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce. the secondary personages in richardson's "clarissa" grow somewhat faint in our memories; but the figures of his heroine and of lovelace remain not only uneffaceable but undimmed by time. four of the _dramatis personae_ of browning's poem in like manner possess an enduring life, which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves almost forgotten. count guide franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like shakespeare's iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the count cenci of shelley. he has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror. he is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence. sin may have its strangeness in beauty; but guido does not gleam with the romance of sin. if browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at arezzo into which the white pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens--the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with guido himself as the main monster. yet the count, short of stature, "hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard" is not a monster but a man; possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a skilful defence. browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist webster as wanting in romance. but like some of webster's saturnine, fantastic assistants or tools in crime, guido has failed in everything, is no longer young, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is half-poisoned by its acrid juices. he is godless in an age of godless living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays the licentious imagination of an age of license. he plays a poor part in the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging desperately to the world and to life. a disinterested loyalty to the powers of evil might display a certain gallantry of its own, but, though guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in it--there is always a valid reason, a sordid motive for his rage. and in truth he has grounds of complaint, which a wave of generous passion would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of his life, might well make a bad man mad. his wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion. he is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage. he is pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of arezzo. a gallant of the troop of satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge; but guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold. when he makes his final pleading for life in the cell of the new prison by castle angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of his death. his effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself. when all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon god, who has made him what he is. it was a fine audacity of browning in imagining the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted brotherhood of death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, "christ,--maria,--god," one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:-- "pompilia, will you let them murder me?" pompilia is conceived by browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and championship of the right. her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire. when the pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose. others may yield to the eye of god a "timid leaf" and an "uncertain bud," while--see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed that sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze, spreads itself, one wide glory of desire to incorporate the whole great sun it loves from the inch-height whence it looks and longs. my flower, my rose, i gather for the breast of god. as she lies on her pallet, dying "in the good house that helps the poor to die," she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away-- looks old, fantastic and impossible: i touch a fairy thing that fades and fades. two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her--the babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a defender, and the friend who has saved her soul. even motherhood itself is not the deepest thing in pompilia's nature. the little gaetano, whom she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was like, who may some day have some hard thought of her. he too withdraws into the dream of earth. she can never lose him, and yet lose him she surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to god, without a further care," so to be safe. but one experience of pompilia's life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity. having laid her babe away with god, she must not even "think of him again, for gratitude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven--god's servant, man's friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips of arezzo and of rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest, caponsacchi. if any point in the whole long poem, _the ring and the book_, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of caponsacchi and pompilia. the truth of it, as conceived by browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art. it is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof. happily the human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. but the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. but, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man. its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude. if a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important fragment towards an interpretation of human life. and this browning has assuredly done. the sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation--these are rendered by browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience?[ ] if the senses co-operate--as perhaps they do--in such mysteries, they are senses in a state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit--"whether in the body or out of the body i cannot tell." when caponsacchi bears the body of pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host. from the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre, a lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad, he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--"i am yours "--is an eternity of speech, to match the immeasurable depth o' the soul that then broke silence. to abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to god. for him the mere revelation of pompilia would suffice. his inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the judges: "you know this is not love, sirs--it is faith." there is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life. it is that of which milton speaks in the lines: till old experience do attain to something of prophetic strain. this is the faith of browning's pope innocent, who up to extreme old age has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the godward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an instrument of the divine righteousness. and yet he is entirely human, god's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents, scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad-- simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute, with prudence, probity and--what beside from the other world he feels impress at times; a "grey ultimate decrepitude," yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil. _the ring and the book_ is a great receptacle into which browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers--his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate. could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of browning's mind. but we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best. never was browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in caponsacchi's account of the flight to rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm. never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of pompilia. never were the gropings of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the pope. the whole poem which he compares to a ring was the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed during the years of smithcraft "in memoriam"; in memory and also with a hope. the british public, whom browning addresses at the close of his poem, and who "liked him not" during so many years, now when he was not far from sixty went over to his side. _the ring and the book_ almost immediately passed into a second edition. the decade from onwards is called by mrs orr the fullest period in browning's life. his social occupations and entertainments both in london and for a time as a visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had energy for work as well as for play. during these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared. none of them are london poems, and italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of --_pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other poems_. the other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient greece, suggested by browning's studies in classical drama; secondly those, which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer wanderings in france and switzerland. the dream-scene of prince hohenstiel-schwangau is leicester square; but this also is one of the poems of france. _the inn album_ alone is english in its characters and their surroundings. such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed. it brings into prominence, however, the fact that browning, while resolved to work out what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions. he had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic. he had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest. it cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around and about his subjects. _the ring and the book_ had given him practice, extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue. now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it forward. imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being found, the speaker has to play against himself. in the story of the roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more salient. the poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation. the characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit's breathing. browning's genius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart. he employed his brain to twist and tangle a gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit. in the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening or resisting medium. in _the ring and the book_, and in a far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth. and yet it is never actually so. rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist. the masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of browning's intellectual casuistry--a hohenstiel-schwangau, an aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a balaustion, the lady of sorrows in _the inn album_, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation--the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint--or a dictate of pure human passion. eminent moments in life had an extraordinary interest for browning--moments when life, caught up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth through some noble ardour of the heart. therefore it did not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a shining moment is at last to spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness. browning's readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth.[ ] footnotes: [footnote : letter to miss blagden, feb. , , given by mrs orr, p. .] [footnote : vivid descriptions of le croisic at an earlier date may be found in one of balzac's short stories.] [footnote : _life of jowett_ by evelyn abbott and lewis campbell, i. , .] [footnote : a repeated invitation in was also declined. in browning was nominated by the independent club to the office of lord rector of glasgow university.] [footnote : such a book would naturally attract browning, who, like his father, had an interest in celebrated criminal cases. in his _memories_ (p. ), kegan paul records his surprise at a dinner-party where the conversation turned on murder, to find browning acquainted "to the minutest detail" with every _cause célèbre_ of that kind within living memory.] [footnote : _an artist's reminiscences_, by r. lehmann ( ), p. .] [footnote : rossetti papers, p. .] [footnote : so the story was told by dante rossetti, as recorded by mrs gilchrist; she says that she believed the story was told of himself by carlyle.] [footnote : the passage specially referred to is in caponsacchi's monologue, ii. - , beginning with "thought? nay, sirs, what shall follow was not thought."] [footnote : i have used here some passages already printed in my _studies in literature_.] chapter xiii poems on classical subjects during these years, - , browning's outward life maintained its accustomed ways. in the summer of he wandered with his son and his sister, in company with his friends of italian days, the storys, in scotland, and at lock luichart lodge visited lady ashburton.[ ] three summers, those of , and were spent at saint-aubin, a wild "un-murrayed" village on the coast of normandy, where milsand occupied a little cottage hard by. at night the light-house of havre shot forth its beam, and it was with "a thrill" that browning saw far off the spot where he had once sojourned with his wife.[ ] "i don't think we were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as here," he wrote in august . every morning, as mme. blanc (th. bentzon) tells us, he might be seen "walking along the sands with the small greek copy of homer which was his constant companion. on sunday he went with the milsands ... to a service held in the chapel of the chateau blagny, at lion-sur-mer, for the few protestants of that region. they were generally accompanied by a young huguenot peasant, their neighbour, and browning with the courtesy he showed to every woman, used to take a little bag from the hands of the strong norman girl, notwithstanding her entreaties." the visit of was saddened by the knowledge of what france was suffering during the progress of the war. he lingered as long as possible for the sake of comradeship with milsand, around whose shoulder browning's arm would often lie as they walked together on the beach.[ ] but communication with england became daily more and more difficult. milsand insisted that his friend should instantly return. it is said by mme. blanc that browning was actually suspected by the peasants of a neighbouring village of being a prussian spy. not without difficulty he and his sister reached honfleur, where an english cattle-boat was found preparing to start at midnight for southampton. two years later miss thackeray was also on the coast of normandy and at no great distance. "it was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty." some slight misunderstanding on browning's part, the fruit of mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his old friend was cleared away by the good offices of milsand. while miss thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun, browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. a meeting of both with the milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a village on the outer edges of luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the sun had fallen that evening they were in browning's house upon the cliff at saint-aubin. "the sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table. mr browning told us it was the only book he had with him. the bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but i remember a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. i heard mr browning declare they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[ ] perhaps browning's "only book" of contained the dramas of Æschylus, for at fontainebleau where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special subject of his study. it was at saint-aubin in that he found the materials for his poem of the following year, and to miss thackeray's drowsy name for the district, symbolic of the place and people too, _white cotton night-cap country_, the suggestion of browning's title _red cotton night-cap country_ is due. to her the poem is dedicated. browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in france during the prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the spring of . he had for long been averse to the publication of his poems in magazines and reviews. in he had gratified his american admirers by allowing _gold hair_ and _prospice_ to appear in the _atlantic monthly_ previous to their inclusion in _dramatis persona._ a fine sonnet written in , suggested by the tower erected at clandeboye by lord dufferin in memory of his mother, helen, countess of gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet, "helen's tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet was published at the close of in the _pall mall gazette_, but was not given a place by browning in the collected editions of his poetical works. in general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine, surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse as his. in february , however, he offered to his friend and, publisher mr smith the ballad of _hervé riel_ for use in the _cornhill magazine_ of march, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares and call the verses good. his purpose was to send something to the distressed people of paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally fixed by mr smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded--the gift of the english poet and his breton hero. the facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at st malo; the reports of the french admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the poem. on one point browning erred; it was not a day's holiday to be spent with his wife "la belle aurore" which the breton sailor petitioned for as the reward of his service, but a "congé absolu," the holiday of a life-time. in acknowledging his error to dr furnivall, and adding an explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word, "truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."[ ] for the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern french coast, with which browning's ballad of the croisickese pilot is associated, were, says mrs orr, becoming exhausted. yet some rest and refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a london season with its various claims were essential to his well-being. his passion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers was attested by halle. in his sonnet of , inscribed in the album to mr arthur chappell, _the founder of the feast_, a poem not included in any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight: sense has received the utmost nature grants, my cup was filled with rapture to the brim, when, night by night--ah, memory, how it haunts!-- music was poured by perfect ministrants, by halle, schumann, piatti, joachim. long since in florence he had become acquainted with miss egerton-smith, who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public performances in london. she was wealthy, and with too little confidence in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great world. in browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief--miss blagden. her place in his memory remained her own. miss egerton-smith might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of manner. browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve. and as he knew her, so he wrote of her in the opening of his _la saisiaz_: you supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: may be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. but more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand --maybe throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,-- treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue. disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice, prove i knew an alpine rose which all beside named edelweiss? miss egerton-smith was the companion and house-mate of browning and his sister in their various summer wanderings from to . in the first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea at the village of mers near tréport. browning at this time was much absorbed by his _aristophanes' apology_. "here," writes mrs orr, "with uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, mr browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." the following summers were spent at villers in normandy ( ), at the isle of arran ( ), and in the upland country of the salève, near geneva. during the visit to the salève district, where browning and his sister with miss egerton-smith occupied a chalet named la saisiaz, he was, mrs orr tells us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment." yet the place seemed lovely to him in its solitude and its beauty; the prospect of geneva, with lake and plain extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was repose to his sense of sight. he bathed twice each day in the mountain stream--"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." he read and rested; and wrote but little or not at all. suddenly the repose of la saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy discontent was at an end. while preparing to join her friend on a long-intended mountain climb miss egerton-smith, with no forewarning, died. the shock was for a time overwhelming. when browning returned to london the poem _la saisiaz_, the record of his inquisition into the mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was written. it was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear. the grouping of the works produced by browning from the date of the publication of _the ring and the book_ ( ) to the publication of _la saisias_ ( ), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested them, has only an external and historical interest. the studies in the greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at intervals over the whole decade. _balaustion's adventure_ was published in , _aristophanes' apology_ in , the translation of _the agamemnon of Æschylus_ in . two of the volumes of this period, _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ ( ) and _fifine at the fair_ ( ) are casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side in the chronological order. the first of the pair is concerned with public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question, the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.[ ] two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; _red cotton night-cap country_ ( ) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; _the inn album_ ( ) is a tragedy of the passion of love. the volume of , _pacchiarotto with other poems_, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. finally in _la saisiaz_ browning, writing in his own person, records the experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death. but it was part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he did not refrain from including a second piece, _the two poets of croisic_, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than common joy. _balaustion's adventure_, dedicated to the countess cowper by whom the transcript from euripides was suggested, or, as browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of may-month amusements" in the spring of . it was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of euripides' play that setting which has for its source a passage at the close of plutarch's life of nicias. the favours bestowed by the syracusans upon athenian slaves and fugitives who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of euripides is not to be marvelled at, says plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a ship of the city of caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates, thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could sing any of euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were straight suffered to enter, and come in."[ ] from this root blossomed browning's romance of the rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was more highly honoured abroad than in his own athens. perhaps browning felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of euripides. of all its author's dramas the alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are the suppliants to syracuse. in accepting the task imposed upon him browning must have felt that no other play of euripides could so entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet by mrs browning in the lines which he prefixed to _balaustions adventure_: our euripides the human, with his droppings of warm tears. "if the alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of euripides," wrote paul de saint-victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his heart."[ ] balaustion herself, not a rose of "the rosy isle" but its wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall find food, drink, odour all at once," is hellenic in her bright and swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all noble things of the mind, the grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. the atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea. balaustion tells her tale to the four greek girls, her companions, amid the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the rippling stream, outsmoothing galingale and watermint, its mat-floor, and in presence of the little temple baccheion, with its sanctities of religion and of art. by a happy and original device the transcript of the alkestis is much more than a translation; it is a translation rendered into dramatic action--for we see and hear the performers and they are no longer masked--and this is accompanied with a commentary or an interpretation. never was a more graceful apology for the function of the critic put forward than that of balaustion: 'tis the poet speaks: but if i, too, should try and speak at times, leading your love to where my love, perchance, climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew-- why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake! browning has not often played the part of a critic, and the interpretation of a poet's work by a poet has the double value of throwing light upon the mind of the original writer and the mind of his commentator. the life of mortals and the life of the immortal gods are brought into a beautiful relation throughout the play. it is pre-eminently human in its grief and in its joy; yet at every point the divine care, the divine help surrounds and supports the children of earth, with their transitory tears and smiles. apollo has been a herdsman in the service of admetos; herakles, most human of demigods, is the king's friend and guest. the interest of the play for browning lay especially in three things--the pure self-sacrifice of the heroine, devotion embodied in one supreme deed; and no one can heighten the effect with which euripides has rendered this; secondly, the joyous, beneficent strength of herakles, and this browning has felt in a peculiar degree, and by his commentary has placed it in higher relief; and thirdly, the purification and elevation through suffering of the character of admetos; here it would be rash to assert that browning has not divined the intention of euripides, but certainly he has added something of his own. it has been maintained that browning's interpretation of the spiritual significance of the drama is a beautiful perversion of the purpose of the greek poet; that admetos needs no purification; that in accepting his wife's offer to be his substitute in dying, the king was no craven but a king who recognised duty to the state as his highest duty. the general feeling of readers of the play does not fall in with this ingenious plea. browning, as appears from his imagined recast of the theme, which follows the transcript, had considered and rejected it. if admetos is to be in some degree justified, it can only be by bearing in mind that the fact by which he shall himself escape from death is of apollo's institution, and that obedience to the purpose of apollo rendered self-preservation a kind of virtue. but admetos makes no such defence of his action when replying to the reproaches of his father, and he anticipates that the verdict of the world will be against him. browning undoubtedly presses the case against admetos far more strongly than does euripides, who seems to hold that a man weak in one respect, weak when brought to face the test of death, may yet be strong in the heroic mastery of grief which is imposed upon him by the duties of hospitality. readers of the winter's tale have sometimes wondered whether there could be much rapture of joy in the heart of the silent hermione when she received back her unworthy husband. if admetos remained at the close of the play what he is understood by browning to have been at its opening, reunion with a self-lover so base could hardly have flushed with gladness the spirit of alkestis just escaped from the shades.[ ] but alkestis, who had proved her own loyalty by deeds, values deeds more than words. when dying she had put her love into an act, and had refrained from mere words of wifely tenderness; death put an end to her services to her husband; she felt towards him as any wife, if browning's earlier poem be true, may feel to any husband; but still she could render a service to her children, and she exacts from admetos the promise that he will never place a stepmother over them. his allegiance to this vow is an act, and it shall be for alkestis the test of his entire loyalty. and the good herakles, who enjoys a glorious jest amazingly, and who by that jest can benevolently retort upon admetos for his concealment of alkestis' death--for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her living, and yet believe her dead--herakles contrives to put admetos to that precise test which is alone sufficient to assure alkestis of his fidelity. words are words; but here is a deed, and admetos not only adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate it is impossible. she may well accept him as at length proved to be her very own. browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. he must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. when his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. in greeting herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god. he renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring. in dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old pheres the critic is hard set; but balaustion, speaking as interpreter for browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. but it is true that one who has much to give, like alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. for browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with pheres has an educational value for admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self. when the body of alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before--"he stared at the impossible mad life"; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death: he was beginning to be like his wife. and those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man. instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words, when i betray her, though she is no more, may i die. the regeneration of admetos is accomplished. how much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript. if the character of admetos is somewhat lowered by browning beneath the conception of the greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of herakles is certainly heightened. we shall not say that balaustion is the speaker and that herakles is somewhat of a woman's hero. browning himself fully enters into balaustion's enthusiasm. and the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. the great voice that goes before him is itself a _sursum corda!_--a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. and the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of herakles: out of this face emerge banners and horses--o superb! i see what is coming; i see the high pioneer-caps--i see the slaves of runners clearing the way, i hear victorious drums. this face is a life-boat. for walt whitman too had seen brother jonathan herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer herakles to many about to die. the speeches of the demigod in browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. the glorious gargantuan creature, in the best sense rabelaisian, is uplifted by browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a christian saint of luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent paynim giant: gladness be with thee, helper of our world! i think this is the authentic sign and sea! of godship, that it ever waxes glad, and more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts into a rage to suffer for mankind, and recommence at sorrow. something of the herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of browning. his breton sailor, hervé riel, has more than a touch of the heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. his ivàn ivànovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the heraclean joy in righteousness. and in the last of browning's poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a herakles-browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him. the new admetos, new alkestis, imagined by balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in pompilia's dream of heaven, "know themselves into one." for them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for herakles in this treatment of the story. it expresses browning's highest conception of the union of soul with soul: therewith her whole soul entered into his, he looked the look back, and alkestis died-- died only to be rejected by hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband's heart and will. yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. and, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,--"such is the envy gods still bear mankind." and in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, herakles may find great deeds to do. balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of euripides is the hero. _aristophanes' apology_ is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the "herakles" which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into english verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the "alkestis." perhaps not a little of the self-defence of aristophanes and his statement of the case against euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great greek maker of comedy. balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings. athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the power of sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for balaustion and her euthukles. the bark that bears them is bounding rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man's wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." it seems as if the spirit which might have saved athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of aristophanes. but aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth. nothing that browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of balaustion with aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of euripides reached athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture. the revellers scatter before the presence of balaustion, and she and the great traducer of euripides stand face to face. nowhere else has browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse: such domineering deity hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine for his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path which, purpling, recognised the conqueror. it is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. but in truth aristophanes is half on the side of balaustion and of euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of balaustion's regard perceives and recognises his higher self. suddenly the tuphon, "madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport," is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in browning is here young once more): all at once, large-looming from his wave, out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge, a sea-worn face, sad as mortality, divine with yearning after fellowship. he rose but breast-high. so much god she saw; so much she sees now, and does reverence. but in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash, frisk of fin"; the majestic aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers. no passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. but the entry of sophocles--"an old pale-swathed majesty,"--at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which _in situ_ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose: then the grey brow sank low, and sophokles re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed 'twixt rows as mute. the critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of aristophanes can be read elsewhere. it is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man's infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. it is aristophanes who thus vindicates euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. but he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. for him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned. he should have known--he did in fact know--that the art which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which makes wise, not grave,--and glad, not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears. instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off kassiterides--the tin isle which has stratford at its heart--to accomplish the task on which aristophanes would not adventure. one way a brilliant success was certain for aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith. it is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of euripides that he struggles. when towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side. browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of "thamuris marching," moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit. but reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of athens, when the athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer. the translation of _agamemnon_, the preface to which is dated "october st, ," was undertaken at the request or command of carlyle. the argument of the preface fails to justify browning's method. a translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. but that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming it rends to tatters. a translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill judgment--a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib. mrs orr, who tells us that browning refused to regard even the first of greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the _agamemnon_ was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf. such a supposition does not agree well with browning's own preface; but if he had desired to prove that the _agamemnon_ can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful. from first to last in the genius of browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity. footnotes: [footnote : was this a "baffled visit," as described by mr henry james in his "life of story" (ii. ), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?] [footnote : letter quoted by mrs orr, p. .] [footnote : the attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in mme. blanc's article "a french friend of browning."] [footnote : "records of tennyson, ruskin and browning," by annie ritchie, pp. , .] [footnote : "a bibliography of the writings of robert browning," by t.j. wise, pp. , .] [footnote : _aristophanes' apology_ is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.] [footnote : north's "plutarch," , p. .] [footnote : "les deux masques," ii. .] [footnote : a comment of paul de saint-victor on the silence of the recovered alkestis deserves to be quoted: "hercule apprend à admète qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiée de sa consécration aux divinités infernales. j'aime mieux voir dans cette réserve un scrupule religieux du poète laissant à la morte sa dignité d'ombre. alceste a été nitiée aux profonds mystères de la mort; elle a vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses lèvres serait une divulgation sacrilège. ce silence mystérieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde éternel."] chapter xiv problem and narrative poems _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, which appeared in december , four months after the publication of _balaustions adventure_, was written by browning during a visit to friends in scotland. his interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet. he professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. he had rejoiced in the enfranchisement of italy. during the american civil war he was strongly on the side of the north, as letters to story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. he was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered. he was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate parliament for ireland as were his friends carlyle and tennyson and matthew arnold. after the introduction of the home rule bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[ ] and whose talents he admired. yet for a certain kind of opportunism--that which conserves rather than destroys--browning thought that much might fairly be said. to say this with a special reference to the fallen emperor of france he wrote his _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_. browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "saviour of society," who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. he naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. but there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and browning on the whole preferred a veritable _civitas hominum_, however remote from the ideal, to a sham _civitas dei_ or a real cloudcuckootown. "it is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity." these words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever browning's was, might stand as a motto for the poem. but the pregnant sentence of bacon which follows these words should be added--"all this is true if time stood still." browning's pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the french empire. he did not, like his wife, think of the emperor as if he were a paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service--though not the highest--to france and to the world. "my opinion of the solid good rendered years ago," he wrote in september to story, "is unchanged. the subsequent deference to the clerical party in france and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good." and to miss blagden after the publication of his poem: "i thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. i think him very weak in the last miserable year." it seemed to browning a case in which a veritable _apologia_ was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this _apologia_ in the mouth of the emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required. the misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the "saviour of society" with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. he was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab. this may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. browning's intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped. the music that he makes here is the music of master hugues of saxe-gotha: so your fugue broadens and thickens, greatens and deepens and lengthens, till one exclaims--"but where's music, the dickens!" the mysterious sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary leicester square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination. the interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight. we return to _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book. there is a spirit of conservation, like that of edmund burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism. browning's prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm. something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility. he has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world. the divine ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him. but he will do the work of a mere man in a man's strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with god. so long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. the idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble mass of his people--"men that have wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere" throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere "shine and shade" on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life. all this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that browning, who had rejoiced with herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful. nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the prudent casuist. the splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of edmund burke.[ ] the record of the prince's early and irresponsible aspirations for a free italy-- ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine for ever!-- with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of mrs browning.[ ] and the characterisation of the genius of the french nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:-- the people here, earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride above her pride i' the race all flame and air and aspiration to the boundless great, the incommensurably beautiful-- whose very faulterings groundward come of flight urged by a pinion all too passionate for heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave doers, exalt in science, rapturous in art, the--more than all--magnetic race to fascinate their fellows, mould mankind. it is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "o star of france!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of france, by the american poet of democracy. to these memorable fragments from _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ one other may be added--that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world--"the new power slays the old, but handsomely." in _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ there is nothing enigmatical. "it is just what i imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so browning wrote to miss blagden soon after the publication of the volume. many persons, however, have supposed that in _fifine at the fair_ ( ) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. when she comes to speak of this work browning's biographer mrs orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing cynicism." the origin of the poem was twofold. the external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to pornic, browning had seen the original of his fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. the internal suggestion, as mrs orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. the world, in fact, seemed to be playing with browning the part of a fifine. if this were so, it would be characteristic of browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. but this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. the discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. it should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. as he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues. an actual elvire and an actual fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. the question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of _fifine at the fair_ as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of berkeley's _siris_. the poem is in fact browning's _siris_--a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation. but before all else _fifine at the fair_ is a poem. of all the longer poems which followed _the ring and the book_ it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. to point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. the joy in freedom--freedom accepting some hidden law--of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties--helen, cleopatra, the saint of pornic church--the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at saint-marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears orion, the venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the druidic stones gleaming--all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own. it is strange that any reader should have supposed either the prologue or the epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. both shadow forth the personal feelings of browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. but the last word of the epilogue--"love is all and death is nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. these poems have surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. browning's idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of dr furnivall, "was to show merely how a don juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." no more unhappy misnomer than this "don juan" could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. if we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. now it is certain that as browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. but the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions--illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. theologies, philosophies, scientific theories--these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. but the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. while in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which browning upheld. the speaker in _fifine at the fair_ is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. and he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. when he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its fifines the false which lead us onward to elvire the true, he expresses an idea which browning has repeatedly expressed in _ferishtah's fancies_ and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. and if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by elvire supplemented by fifine than by elvire alone. the sophistry of the speaker in browning's poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. the poet desires, as butler in his "analogy" desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge--imagination aiding his intellect--is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon browning's own lines, and he becomes a witness to browning's own conclusions. saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. for him, as for browning, "god and the soul stand sure." he sees, as browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions--religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments--to the divine. the pornic fair has become the venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. the speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. and yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent--which is the divine--can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached points: his problem posed aright was--"from a given point evolve the infinite!" not--"spend thyself in space, endeavouring to joint together, and so make infinite, point and point: fix into one elvire a fair-ful of fifines!" if he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: "out of thine own mouth will i judge thee, thou wicked servant." he will undoubtedly--let this be frankly acknowledged--grow in a certain kind of knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that comes through love. the poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in entire accord with browning's own deepest convictions and highest feelings.[ ] although in his later writings browning rendered ever more and more homage to the illuminating power of the affections, his methods unfortunately became, as has been said, more and more scientific, or--shall we say?--pseudo-scientific. art jealously selects its subjects, those which possess in a high degree spiritual or material beauty, or that more complete beauty which unites the two. science accepts any subject which promises to yield its appropriate truth. browning, probing after psychological truth, became too indifferent to the truth of beauty. or shall we say that his vision of beauty became enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins and nerves? to say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. his own defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which occur near the close of _red cotton night-cap country_: love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself. and he would have pleaded that art, which he styles the love of loving, rage of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things for truth's sake, whole and sole, may "crush itself" for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. but the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. to browning such a repulsive story as that of _red cotton night-cap country_ served now as well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its grandeur or its grace. here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption--sensuality and superstition, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration with aid of the scalpel? the incidents of the poem were historical and were recent. antoine mellerio, the sometime jeweller of paris, had flung himself from his belvedere in ; the suit, which raised the question of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in ; the scene of his death was close to browning's place of summer sojourn, saint-aubin. the subject lay close to browning's hand. it was an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of realistic. it was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. but the botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a lily or a rose. browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because it was, he thought, a story with a moral. he did not merely wish to examine as a spiritual chemist the action of castilian blood upon a french brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism--the scepticism induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he did not merely wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against itself. his purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight. granted the conditions, it was, browning maintains, an act of entire sanity on the part of his sorry hero, monsieur léonce miranda, to fling himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to our blessed lady, the bespangled and bejewelled ravissante, to bear him in safety through the air. but the conditions were deplorable; and those who declined to assist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are responsible for léonce miranda's bloody night-cap. the moral is just, and the story bears it well. yet browning's own conviction that man's highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. an iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. if our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own? the answer is twofold. first browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led léonce miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the virgin. secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity. therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic: quick conclude removal, time effects so tardily, of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared, let partial-ruin stand while ruin may, and serve world's use, since use is manifold. the tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some father secchi to "tick venus off in transit"; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin, to damage him aloft, brain us below, when new vibrations bury both in brick. for which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer. it is the word of browning the moralist. the study of the double-minded hero belongs to browning the psychologist. the admirable portrait of clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the church, is the chief gift received through this poem from browning the artist. she is a very admirable specimen of her kind--the _mamestra brassicae_ species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, clara is seen at the last, under the protection of holy church, still quietly devouring her miranda leaf--such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus. the second narrative poem of this period, _the inn album_ ( ), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work. it is as concentrated as _red cotton night-cap country_ is diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic concentration. a recast of _the inn album_ might indeed have appeared as a drama on the elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "a yorkshire tragedy"; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe. the incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of english nineteenth century society.[ ] browning's tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." he was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. the story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a tragedy of the soul. the _dramatis personae_, as refashioned from the crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would naturally call forth what was characteristic in browning's genius. a martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,--these are the central figures. the girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion. and a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the english qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here: the wooded watered country, hill and dale and steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, a-sparkle with may morning, diamond drift o' the sun-touched dew. we must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery. after all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent address:--"hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!" and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony. in this poem browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and simply dividing the evil from the good. we are not embarrassed by the mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised sympathies of the writer. we are no more in doubt where wrong and where justice lie than if count gismond were confronting count gauthier. the avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young english snob, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a "clumsy giant handsome creature," who for a year has tried to acquire under an accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of strength; "for ability, all's in the rough yet." of his education the best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love. and now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of occupation for his big, idle boy's heart; he wants something to do, someone also to serve. browning wishes to show the passion of righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human nature. the huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage and there and then makes an end of it. his big red hands are as much the instruments of divine justice as is the axe of ivàn ivànovitch. the traitor of the poem is "refinement every inch from brow to boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that browning's villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of the stage. he has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily affect. there is here and elsewhere in browning's later poetry somewhat too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world's acquaintance with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it quite good manners. the vulgarity of the man in the street may have a redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of _naïveté_, in it; the vulgarity of the man in the club, "refinement every inch" is beyond redemption. the exhibition of browning's traitor as having slipped lower and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes, are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to discover and interpret aright. the melodramatic is often the truth falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become tragic. there is much in shakespeare's plays which if treated by an inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. browning escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite forget its neighbourhood. when the traitor of this poem is withdrawn--as was guido-- into that sad obscure sequestered state where god unmakes but to remake the soul he else made first in vain, there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment--though too late--a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in their starkness and cruelty. the lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow oppressed by sweeps of hair darker and darker as they coil and swathe the crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black, her passion, her despair, her recovery through chilling to ice the heart within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his last fraud, and her self-sought death--the lady is dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. far more than pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. and yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at work: did you love me once? then take love's last and best return! i think womanliness means only motherhood; all love begins and ends there,--roams enough, but, having run the circle, rests at home. her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes. the _pacchiarotto_ volume of was the first collection of miscellaneous poetry put forth by browning since the appearance, twelve years previously, of _dramatis personae_[ ] there is, of course, throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of _pacchiarotto_, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine, and which invigorates while it--not always agreeably--bobs our head, and dashes down our throat. but vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery. the speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running comment by browning upon himself and his own work, together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics. there is a little too much in all this of the robustious herakles sending his great voice before him. an author ought to be aware of the fact that no pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he repel. in the _epilogue_ the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible. sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask. the experience of browning's readers contradicted the assertion. some who drank the good wines of and of in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year. the poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, "timed by raps of the knuckle," how the painter pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed siena, with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for himself. he learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous--not indolent--_laissez-faire_, playing, as energetically as a human being can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and "things rarely go smooth at rehearsal." browning's joy in difficult rhyming as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible. at a dinner given by sir leslie stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for "ecclefechan" and "craigenputtock." but in rhyming ingenuity browning is inferior to the author of "hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of "don juan." browning's good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense. in like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of browning's retort upon his critics: "you are chimney-sweeps," he sings out in his great voice, "listen! i have invented several insulting nicknames for you. decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces." this may appear to some persons to be genial and clever. it certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of pope's poisoned rapier. perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous. the browning who masks as shakespeare in _at the mermaid_ disclaims the ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the byronic _welt-schmerz_, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life. elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. such is the drift of the verses entitled _house_; a peep through the window is permitted, but "please you, no foot over threshold of mine." this was not shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was with the openness and with the taciturnity of nature. he did not stand in the window of his "house" declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at home and not at home. in the poem _shop_ browning continues his assurances that he is no eglamor to whom verse is "a temple-worship vague and vast." verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and jewel-selling is the goldsmith's--but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?--how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till. these poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them. but the volume of contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion. the two love-lyrics _natural magic_ and _magical nature_ have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability. _bifurcation_ is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better. which of the two was sinner? which was saint? to be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. in _st martin's summer_ the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. _fears and scruples_ is a confession of the trials of theistic faith in a world from which god seems to be an absentee. what had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries; what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the natural law of heredity. yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it would have borne fruit: all my days i'll go the softlier, sadlier for that dream's sake! how forget the thrill through and through me as i thought "the gladlier lives my friend because i love him still?" and the friend will value love all the more which persists through the obstacles of partial ignorance.[ ] the blank verse monologue _a forgiveness_, browning's "spanish tragedy," is a romance of passion, subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. out of its darkness gleams especially one resplendent passage--the description of those weapons of eastern workmanship-- horror coquetting with voluptuousness-- one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is voluptuous. the grim-grotesque incident from the history of the jews in italy related in _filippo baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos of _holy cross day_, to which it is in every respect inferior. the jew of the centuries of christian persecution is for browning's imagination a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. _cenciaja_, a note in verse connected with shelley's _cenci_, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the pope, inclining to pardon beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into verse. to recover our loyalty to browning as a poet, which this volume sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve _numpholeptos_ for the close. the pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow, silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. the subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. is the nymph an abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood? is she an embodiment of the ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? soft and sweet as she appears, she is _la belle dame sans merci_, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of keats's poem. footnotes: [footnote : see morley's "life of gladstone," vol. iii. p. .] [footnote : pages , of the first edition.] [footnote : pages - .] [footnote : it may here be noted that dante rossetti in a morbid mood supposed that certain passages of _fifine_ were directed against himself; and so ceased his friendship with browning.] [footnote : fanny kemble also derived from the story of lord de ros the subject of her "english tragedy."] [footnote : some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which i wrote on its appearance for _the academy_.] [footnote : see browning's letter to mr kingsland in "robert browning" by w. g. kingsland ( ), pp. , .] chapter xv solitude and society the volume which consists of _la saisiaz_ and _the two poets of croisic_ ( ) brings the work of this decade to a close.[ ] _la saisiaz_, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of salève after the death of miss egerton-smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. in reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. it serves browning's purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within them. does she still exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little enclosure at collonge? the poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with himself--a debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. in conducting that debate on immortality, browning is neither christian nor anti-christian. the christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge. it may be that any result he arrives at is a result for himself alone. but why conduct an argument in verse? is not prose a fitter medium for such a discussion? the answer is that the poem is more than an argument; it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. the frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. the poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and sunset for associates, jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, salève in its evening rose-bloom, mont-blanc which strikes greatness small; or at night he is beneath the luminous worlds which one by one came lamping--chiefly that prepotency of mars. while he climbs towards the summit he is aware of "earth's most exquisite disclosures, heaven's own god in evidence"; he stands face to face with nature--"rather with infinitude." all through his mountain ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he returns--there is her grave. the idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an education and a test, is so central with browning, so largely influences all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion. he puts the naked question to himself--what does death mean? is it total extinction? is it a passage into life?--without any vagueness, without any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer if only it be the truth. whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods. the debate, of which his poem is a report, falls into two parts: first, a statement of facts; secondly, a series of conjectures--conjectures and no more--rising from the basis of facts that are ascertained. to put the question, "shall i survive death?" is to assume that i exist and that something other than myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die. the nature of this power outside myself i do not know; we may for convenience call it "god." beyond these two facts--myself and a power environing me--nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on the matter in dispute. i am like a floating rush borne onward by a stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are facts that cannot be questioned. knowing that i exist--browning goes on--i know what for me is pain and what is pleasure. and, however it may be with others, for my own part i can pronounce upon the relation of joy to sorrow in this my life on earth:-- i must say--or choke in silence----"howsoever came my fate, sorrow did and joy did nowise--life well weighed--preponderate." if this failure be ordained by necessity, i shall bear it as best i can; but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. what i find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds. browning tacitly rejects the idea that the world is the work of some blind, force; and undoubtedly our reason, which endeavours to reduce all things in nature to rational conceptions, demands that we should conceive the world as rational rather than as some wild work of chance. upon one hypothesis, and upon one alone, can the life of man upon this globe appear the result of intelligence: i have lived then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught this--there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, if (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!) if you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, and life, time,--with all their chances, changes,--just probation--space, mine for me. grant this hypothesis, and all changes from irrational to rational, from evil to good, from pain to a strenuous joy:-- only grant a second life, i acquiesce in this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts gain about to be. thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when it is confronted by falsehood; while for love--oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed by the death-pang to the birth-throe--learning what is love indeed? yet at best this idea of a future life remains a conjecture, an hypothesis, a hope, which gives a key to the mysteries of our troubled earthly state. browning proceeds to argue that such a hope is all that we can expect or ought to desire. the absolute assurance of a future life and of rewards and punishments consequent on our deeds in the present world would defeat the very end for which, according to the hypothesis, we are placed here; it would be fatal to the purpose of our present life considered as a state of probation. what such a state of probation requires is precisely what we have--hope; no less than this and no more. does our heaven overcloud because we lack certainty? no: hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom, compelled by a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld, i behold in life, so--hope! such is the conclusion with browning of the whole matter. it is in entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help derived from his poems: "all the help i can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that i see ever _more_ reason to hold by the same hope--and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary.... god bless you, sustain you, and receive you." to dr moncure conway, who had lost a son, browning wrote: "if i, who cannot, would restore your son, he who can, will." and mr rudolph lehmann records his words in conversation: "i have doubted and denied it [a future life], and i fear have even printed my doubts; but now i am as deeply convinced that there is something after death. if you ask me what, i no more know it than my dog knows who and what i am. he knows that i am there and that is enough for him."[ ] browning's confession in _la saisias_ that the sorrow of his life outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of manner. such estimates as this are little to be trusted. one great shock of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory. we cannot tell. but that browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of note. in _the two poets of croisic_, which was written in london immediately after _la saisiaz_, and which, though of little intrinsic importance, shows that browning was capable of a certain grace in verse that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a poet's greatness: yoke hatred, crime, remorse, despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, let, through the tumult, break the poet's face radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race. this is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life. sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong. sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best. shadows and brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity worked from a dynamo of the will. it is pleasanter to encounter a breeze that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous and sustained gale even of a tonic quality. browning's unfailing cheer and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous, in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and beautiful nature. when _la saisiaz_ appeared browning was sixty-six years old. he lived for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single work of prolonged and sustained effort--which perhaps was well. his physical vigour continued for long unabated. he still enjoyed the various pleasures and excitements of the london season; but it is noted by mrs orr that after the death of miss egerton-smith he "almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him." his daily habits were of the utmost regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week. he was averse, says mrs orr, "to every hought of change," and chose rather to adapt himself to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them; "what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing." a few days after browning's death a journalist obtained from a photographer, mr grove, who had formerly been for seven years in browning's service, the particulars as to how an ordinary day during the london season went by at warwick crescent. browning rose without fail at seven, enjoyed a plate of whatever fruit--strawberries, grapes, oranges--were in season; read, generally some piece of foreign literature, for an hour in his bedroom; then bathed; breakfasted--a light meal of twenty minutes; sat by the fire and read his _times_ and _daily news_ till ten; from ten to one wrote in his study or meditated with head resting on his hand. to write a letter was the reverse of a pleasure to him, yet he was diligent in replying to a multitude of correspondents. his lunch, at one, was of the lightest kind, usually no more than a pudding. visits, private views of picture exhibitions and the like followed until half-past five. at seven he dined, preferring carlowitz or claret to other wines, and drinking little of any. but on many days the dinner was not at home; once during three successive weeks he dined out without the omission of a day. he returned home seldom at a later hour than half-past twelve; and at seven next morning the round began again. during his elder years, says mr grove, he took little interest in politics. he was not often a church-goer, but discussed religious matters earnestly with his clerical friends. he loved not only animals but flowers, and when once a virginia creeper entered the study window at warwick crescent, it was not expelled but trained inside the room. to his servants he was a considerate friend rather than a master. so far mr grove as reported in the _pall mall gazette_ (dec , ). many persons have attempted to describe browning as he appeared in society; there is a consensus of opinion as to the energy and cordiality of his way of social converse; but it is singular that, though some records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record that possesses permanent value. perhaps the best word that can be quoted is that remembered by sir james paget--browning's recommendation of bach's "crucifixus--et sepultus--et resurrexit" as a cure for want of belief. he did not fling such pointed shafts as those of johnson which still hang and almost quiver where they struck. his energy did not gather itself up into sentences but flowed--and sometimes foamed--in a tide. cordial as he was, he could be also vehemently intolerant, and sometimes perhaps where his acquaintance with the subject of his discourse was not sufficient to warrant a decided opinion.[ ] he appeared, says his biographer, "more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life"; with no moral selfishness he was, adds mrs orr, intellectually self-centred; and unquestionably the statement is correct. he could suffer fools, but not always gladly. speaking of earlier days in italy, t.a. trollope observes that, while he was never rough or discourteous even to the most exasperating fool, "the men used to be rather afraid of browning." his cordiality was not insincere; but it belonged to his outer, not his inner self. with the exception of milsand, he appears to have admitted no man to his heart, though he gave a portion of his intellect to many. his friends, in the more intimate sense of the word, were women, towards whom his feeling was that of comradeship and fraternal affection without over-much condescension or any specially chivalric sentiment. when early in their acquaintance miss barrett promised browning that he would find her "an honest man on the whole," she understood her correspondent, who valued a good comrade of the other sex, and had at the same time a vivid sense of the fact that such a comrade was not so unfortunate as to be really a man. let witnesses be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. mr w.j. stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his intercourse with browning, by the mental health and robustness of a nature sound to the core; "an almost unlimited intellectual vitality, and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armour, but with no aggressiveness."[ ] a writer in the first volume of _the new review_, described browning as a talker in general society so faithfully that it is impossible to improve on what he has said: "it may safely be alleged," he writes, "that no one meeting mr browning for the first time, and unfurnished with a clue, would guess his vocation. he might be a diplomatist, a statesman, a discoverer, or a man of science. but, whatever were his calling, we should feel that it must be essentially practical.... his conversation corresponds to his appearance. it abounds in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. yet all the time it is entirely free from mystery, vagueness, or technical jargon. it is the crisp, emphatic and powerful discourse of a man of the world, who is incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. mr browning is the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers. like the monsignore in _lothair_ he can 'sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee,' and when he deals in criticism the edge of his sword is mercilessly whetted against pretension and vanity. the inflection of his voice, the flash of his eye, the pose of his head, the action of his hand, all lend their special emphasis to the condemnation." the mental quality which most impressed mr w.m. rossetti in his communications with browning was, he says, "celerity "--"whatever he had to consider or speak about, he disposed of in the most forthright style." his method was of the greatest directness; "every touch told, every nail was hit on the head." he was not a sustained, continuous speaker, nor exactly a brilliant one; "but he said something pleasant and pointed on whatever turned up; ... one felt his mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his facility, accessibility, and _bonhomie_, softened but did not by any means disguise the sense of his power."[ ] browning's discourse with a single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, mr gosse declares, "a very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him." then "his talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. his voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody.... in his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture the visitor in a low arm-chair's "sofa-lap of leather", and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."[ ] mr henry james in his "life of story"[ ] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. he brings us back, however, to browning as seen in society. he speaks of the italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be "built out," though this was not really the case, by the brilliant london period. it was, he says, as if browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments. the man of the world "walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections, did his duty." the poet--an inscrutable personage--"sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of _that_ sphere to look for suitable company." "the poet and the 'member of society' were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been.... the wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it. it contained an invisible door, through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden key--carrying about the same with him even in the pocket of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none." tennyson, said an acquaintance of miss anna swanwick, "hides himself behind his laurels, browning behind the man of the world." she declares that her experience was more fortunate; that she seldom heard browning speak without feeling that she was listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to her of his wife[ ]. but many witnesses confirm the impression which is so happily put into words by mr henry james. the "member of society" protected the privacy of the poet. the questions remain whether the poet did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous forces which might be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of society; whether while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain deterioration. the doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the intellect is more and more preached in browning's poetry; but the doctrine itself is an act of the intellect. the poet need not perhaps insist on the doctrine if he creates--as browning did in earlier years--beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher, to our love. in the autumn of , after seventeen years of absence from italy, browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life venice and the venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose. for a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the splügen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says mrs orr, his poem of russia, _ivàn ivànovitch_. when a boy he had read in bunyan's "life and death of mr badman" the story of "old tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of english life, _ned bratts_. it was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "there comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years. a month since i wrote a poem of some two hundred lines ['donald'] about a story i heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things."[ ] before the close of september the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at asolo, which browning had not seen since his first italian journey more than forty years previously. "such things," he writes, "have begun and ended with me in the interval!" changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. the place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. "look! look there is asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" and always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.[ ] from the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. he wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue. a fortnight at venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." everything in venice, says mrs bronson, charmed him: "he found grace and beauty in the _popolo_ whom he paints so well in the goldoni sonnet. the poorest street children were pretty in his eyes. he would admire a carpenter or a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'see the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. you might fancy that man in the crimson robe of a senator as you see them in tintoret's canvas.'" but these are reminiscences of later days. it was in that browning made the acquaintance of his american friend mrs arthur bronson, whose kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to asolo and to venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of his last volume, and who, not long before her death in , published interesting articles on "browning in asolo" and "browning in venice" in _the century magazine_. the only years in which he did not revisit venice were , and , and in each of these years his absence was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. in the floods were out, and he proceeded no farther than verona. could he have overcome the obstacles and reached venice, he feared that he might have been incapable of enjoying it. for the first time in his life he was lamed by what he took for an attack of rheumatism, "caught," he says, "just before leaving st pierre de chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence in sitting with a window open at my back--reading the iliad, all my excuse!--while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and bitterness every where."[ ] in his sister's illness at first forbade travel to so considerable a distance. the two companions were received by another american friend, mrs bloomfield moore, at the villa berry, st moritz, and when she was summoned across the atlantic, at her request they continued to occupy her villa. the season was past; the place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. "we have walked every day," browning wrote at the end of september, "morning and evening--afternoon i should say--two or three hours each excursion, the delicious mountain air surpassing any i was ever privileged to breathe. my sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: i was hardly in want of such doctoring."[ ] two years later miss browning was ailing again, and they did not venture farther than wales. at the hand hotel, llangollen, they were at no great distance from brintysilio, the summer residence of their friends sir theodore and lady martin--in earlier days the lady carlisle and colombe of browning's plays.[ ] mrs orr notices that browning, liberal as he declared himself, was now very favourably impressed by the services to society of the english country gentleman. "talk of abolishing that class of men!" he exclaimed, "they are the salt of the earth!" she adds, as worthy of remark, that he attended regularly the afternoon sunday service in the parish church at llantysilio, where now a tablet of lady martin's placing marks the spot. churchgoing was not his practice in london; "but i do not think," says mrs orr, "he ever failed in it at the universities or in the country." at venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the services of a waldensian chapel, where "a certain eloquent pastor," as mrs bronson describes him, was the preacher. a year before his death browning in a letter to lady martin recalls the happy season in the vale of llangollen--"delightful weeks--each tipped with a sweet starry sunday at the little church leading to the house beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably." [illustration: the palazzo giustiniani, venice. _from a drawing by_ miss n. erichsen.] before passing on to venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of london, in some place not too much haunted by the english tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. in and it was st pierre de chartreuse, from which he visited the grande chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in and it was gressoney st jean in the val d'aosta--the "delightful gressoney" of the prologue to _ferishtah's fancies_, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit" sufficed "for gormandizing"; in it was the yet more beautiful primiero, near feltre. in the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at st moritz. these were seasons of abounding life. st pierre was only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.[ ] from gressoney in september he wrote: "we are all but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight's lodging. we take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country i know. yesterday the three hours passed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."[ ] all things pleased him; an august snowstorm at st moritz was made amends for by "the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white"; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in the iliad, the only book that accompanied him from england: "the days glide away uneventfully, _nearly_, and i breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. i have no few acquaintances here--nay, some old friends--but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."[ ] and from primiero in , when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold," with at times a silver change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to browning's great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[ ] as each successive volume that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of abode the last always was the loveliest. at venice for a time the quiet albergo dell' universo suited browning and his sister well, but when mrs bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the palazzo giustiniani recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the _palazzo_ has historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased browning's imagination. it was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the public gardens with his sister. he had many friends--mrs bronson is our informant--whose wants or wishes he bore in mind--the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. at noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which italian dishes were preferred. browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's hat with the spoils of birds-- clothed with murder of his best of harmless beings. he praised god--for pleasure as he teaches us is praise--by heartily enjoying ortolans, "a dozen luscious lumps" provided by the cook of the giustiniani-recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was fed with murder of his best of harmless beings, and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious "mouthfuls for cardinals."[ ] as if the pleasure of the eye in beauty gained at a bird's expense were more criminal than the gusto of the tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a dozen other birds! at three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often directed to the lido. "i walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on lido," browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as shelley did in those old days."[ ] and to another friend: "you don't know how absolutely well i am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved lido. go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea wind."[ ] at one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa on the lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. sunsets, however, and sunrises never faded from browning's brain. "i will not praise a cloud however bright," says wordsworth, although no one has praised them more ardently than he. from pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when his life drew towards its close, browning lavished his praise upon the scenery of the sky. a passage quoted by mrs orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when _pippa passes_ becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: "every morning at six i see the sun rise.... my bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of s. giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins." the sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, mrs bronson tells us, a special delight to browning. on a day of gales "he would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a sure sign of heavy storms in the adriatic." to him, as he declared, they were even more interesting than the doves of st mark. sometimes his walks, guided by mrs bronson's daughter, "the best cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to be discovery, of some neglected stone of venice. occasionally he examined curiously the monuments of the churches. his american friend tells at length the story of a search in the church of san niccolò for the tomb of the chieftain salinguerra of browning's own _sordello_. at times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry. his rule "never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it" must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in june from warwick crescent to de vere gardens many treasures acquired in italy were, mrs orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving. and the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: "like a child with a new toy," says mrs bronson, "he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits." thus, or with his son's assistance, came to de vere gardens brass lamps that had hung in venetian chapels, the silver jewish "sabbath lamp," and the "four little heads"--the seasons--after which, browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[ ] returning from his walks on the lido or wanderings through the little _calli_, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o'clock tea. at dinner he was in his toilet what mr henry james calls the "member of society," never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. good sense was his habit if not his foible. and why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining miss browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as mrs bronson describes her, wearing "beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty french cap and quaint antique jewels"? if other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed. the venetian comedies of gallina especially pleased browning; he went to his spacious box at the goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. in his _toccata of galuppi_ he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. when in the committee of the goldoni monument asked browning to contribute a poem to their album he immediately complied with the request. it was "scribbled off," according to mrs orr, while professor molmenti's messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says mrs bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he put pen to paper." it catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of goldoni's sunniest plays: there throng the people: how they come and go, lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb--see-- on piazza, calle, under portico and over bridge! dear king of comedy, be honoured! thou that didst love venice so, venice, and we who love her, all love thee! the brightness and lightness of southern life soothed browning's northern strenuousness of mood. he would enumerate of a morning the crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public press--a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered autolycus of the canals![ ] yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. he could not be happy without his london daily paper; mrs orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the british expedition for the relief of general gordon. in browning's son for the first time since his childhood was in italy. with venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated." for his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, browning entered into treaty with the owner, an austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the manzoni palazzo on the grand canal. he considered it the most beautiful house in venice. ruskin had described it in the "stones of venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of byzantine renaissance." it wholly captured the imagination of browning. he not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich façade with its medallions in coloured marble. the dream was never realised. the vendor, marchese montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. to his great mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. it was not until his son in , the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the palazzo rezzonico--"a stately temple of the rococo" is mr henry james's best word for it--that browning ceased to think with regret of the lost manzoni. at no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of his life in england. when in full expectation of becoming the owner of the palazzo manzoni he wrote to dr furnivall: "don't think i mean to give up london till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and innumerable delights grow a burden.... pen will have sunshine and beauty about him, and every help to profit by these, while i and my sister have secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome." footnotes: [footnote : some parts of what follows on _la saisiaz_ have already appeared in print in a forgotten article of mine on that poem.] [footnote : "an artist's reminiscences," by r. lehmann ( ), p. .] [footnote : thus he declaimed to robert buchanan against walt whitman's writings, with which, according to buchanan, he had little acquaintance.] [footnote : "autobiography of a journalist," ii. .] [footnote : from the first of three valuable articles by mr rossetti in _the magazine of art_ ( ) on "portraits of robert browning."] [footnote : robert browning, "personalia," by edmund gosse, pp. , .] [footnote : vol. ii. pp. , .] [footnote : anna swanwick, "a memoir by mary l. bruce," pp. , . to dr furnivall he often spoke of mrs browning.] [footnote : from mrs bronson's article in _the century magazine_, "browning in venice."] [footnote : related more fully in mrs bronson's article "browning in asolo" in _the century magazine_.] [footnote : mrs bronson's "browning in venice" in _the century magazine_.] [footnote : to dr furnivall, sept. , .] [footnote : some notices of browning in wales occur in sir t. martin's "life of lady martin."] [footnote : letter to dr furnivall, august , .] [footnote : to dr furnivall, sept. , .] [footnote : to dr furnivall, august , .] [footnote : see for fuller details the letter in mrs orr's _life of browning_, pp. , .] [footnote : so described by mrs bronson.] [footnote : to dr furnivall, oct. , .] [footnote : quoted by mrs bronson.] [footnote : mrs orr, "life of browning," p. .] [footnote : mrs bronson records this.] chapter xvi poet and teacher in old age during the last decade of his life browning's influence as a literary power was assured. the publication indeed of _the ring and the book_ in did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon authority. he noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ were sold in five days, and says of _balaustion's adventure_ " in five months is a good sale for the likes of me." the later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of selections made these easily accessible. that published by moxon in , and dedicated in words of admiration and friendship to tennyson, by no means equalled in value the earlier selections made by john forster. the volume of --dedicated also to tennyson--which has been frequently reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the poems chosen is far from clear--"by simply stringing together certain pieces"; browning wrote, "on the thread of an imaginary personality, i present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because i account them the most noteworthy portion of my work." we can perceive that some poems of love are brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly observed, and the "imaginary personality"--the thread--seems to be imaginary in the fullest sense of the word. yet it is of interest to observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at least designed. a second series of selections followed in . browning was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet. "tennyson and i seem now to be regarded as the two kings of brentford," he said laughingly in .[ ] the later-enthroned king was soon to have an interesting court. in the browning society, founded by dr furnivall--initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student of our literature--and miss e.h. hickey, herself a poet, began its course. at first, according to mrs orr, browning "treated the project as a joke," but when once he understood it to be serious, "he did not oppose it." he felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work: "as wilkes was no wilkeite," he wrote to edmund yates, "i am quite other than a browningite." with a little nervousness as to the discretion which the society might or might not show, he felt grateful for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name. he was always ready to furnish dr furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation. his old admirers had made him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession. a propaganda of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic--not even an heresiarch--of literature. other honours accompanied his old age. in he received the ll.d. of the university of edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the lord rectorship of the university of st andrews. next year he accepted the honorary presidency of the five associated societies of edinburgh. in he was appointed foreign correspondent to the royal academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of lord houghton. though so vigorous in talk, browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as to put him to this test. during many years he was president of the new shakspere society. his veneration for shakespeare is expressed in a sonnet entitled _the names_, written for the book of the show held in the albert hall, may , on behalf of the fulham road hospital for women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was superintending during the last two years of his life. browning was not wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the shakespearian drama to bacon; he agreed with spedding that whatever else might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the "essays" could not have been the author of the plays. on another question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion--he could see nothing of shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of _titus andronicus_. in appeared _dramatic idyls_ and in the following year _dramatic idyls, second series_. they differed in two respects from the volumes of miscellaneous poetry which browning had previously published. hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups--poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion. unless we regard _ned bratts_ as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the _dramatic idyls_. secondly, the short story in verse for the first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we understand by the word "realistic." the outward body of the story is in several instances more built up by cumulative details than formerly, which gives it an air of solidity or massiveness, and is less expressed through a swift selection of things essential. and this may lead a reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external incidents than is actually the case. in truth, though the "corporal rind" of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist. the narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake. there is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to which we are led up by all that precedes it. if the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. the narrative is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has its crisis. a question sometimes arises as to whether the central motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their centre, in the case, for example, of _doctor_----, the thesis is that a bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where the devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed's-head of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the imminent death. the question, "will the jest sustain a poem of such length?" is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might also say of an ingoldsby legend; but even a good-natured reader will hardly return to _doctor_ ---- with pleasure. chaucer with as thin a jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the entire piece. with browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be capable of laughter. in like manner few persons except the browning enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of _pietro of abano_ compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. we make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." the cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach pietro's final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical. the two series of _dramatic idyls_ included some conspicuous successes. the classical poems _pheidippides_, _echetlos_, _pan and luna_, idyls heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them again and again. browning's sympathy with gallantry in action, with self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in the first of these poems. the runner of athens is a more graceful brother of the breton sailor who saved a fleet for france; but the vision of majestical pan in "the cool of a cleft" exalts our human heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the "belle aurore." victory and then domestic love is the human interpretation of pan's oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death: he flung down his shield, ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the fennel-field and athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through, till in he broke: "rejoice, we conquer!" like wine through clay, joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss! the companion poem of marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. the unknown champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed--"the great deed ne'er grows small." browning's development of the vergilian myth--"si credere dignum est"--of pan and luna astonishes by its vehement sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the transaction of a significant dream or legend. in contrast with these classical pieces, _halbert and hob_ reads like a fragment from some scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts. yet father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage against paternity is the touch of the finger of god upon human hearts; and though old halbert sits dead, with an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face, and young hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a mindless docility, they are, like browning's men of the paris morgue, only "apparent failures"; there was in them that spark of divine illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make browning's faith or hope falter. it is the absence of human virtue which appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be salted? this it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in _ivàn ivànovitch_ has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood. for her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. ivàn acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of nature or of god, and the old village pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. the objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the heraklean task of purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of confinement at the pleasure of the czar in a criminal lunatic asylum is highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves. but perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered building a toy kremlin for his five children. we can take for granted that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day's work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with limelight effects on the kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain is rung down.[ ] [illustration: specimen of browning's handwriting. _from a letter to d.s. curtis, esq._] _martin relph_ is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as white as snow, standing, on a bright may day, in monumental grief, and exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity. one instant's failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices. only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence. _ned bratts_ may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece. it is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. the humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of rowlandson than that of hogarth. the bedford court house on the sweltering midsummer day, the puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the judges at high jinks upon the bench--to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter black ned, the stout publican, and big tab, his slut of a wife,--these are drawn after the broad british style of humorous illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. here at least is downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven home by the spirit of god and the terror of hell-fire. black ned and the slut tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the company of the blessed who move singing in solemn troops and sweet societies; but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so much as to be hanged, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as "christmas" was, to quit the city of destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues. thanks to the grace of god and john bunyan's book, husband and wife triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." a wise economy of spiritual force!--for while their effectual calling cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting converts, had they lingered on the pilgrims' way, as ned is painfully aware, might have been less of a certainty. browning's method as a story-teller may be studied with special advantage in _clive_. the circumstances under which the tale is related have to be caught at by the reader, which quickens his attention and keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself difficult, but to employ it with success is an achievement requiring skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the speaker, who is by no means a clive, has to betray something of his own character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a crisis; and that this should involve a paradox--clive's fear, in the present instance, being not that the antagonist's pistol, presented at his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be remorsefully or contemptuously flung away--gives the poet an opportunity for some subtle or some passionate casuistry. the effect of the whole is that of a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the story serves as a conductor. it is not a simple but a highly complex species of narrative. in _muléykeh_, one of the most delightful of browning's later poems, uniting, as it does, the poetry of the rapture of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion, the narrative leads up to a supreme moment, and this resolves itself through a paradox of the heart. shall hóseyn recover his stolen pearl of a steed, but recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with her glory untarnished? it is he himself who betrays himself to loss and grief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is more than possession; and thus as clive's fear was courage, as ivan's violation of law was obedience to law, so hóseyn's loss is hóseyn's gain. in each case browning's casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet. we can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart. a mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing familiar to browning in these his elder years. he had sought for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance. he was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could. he was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth. in the _pisgah sights_ of the _pacchiarotto_ volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death. but old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life. and because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased. he could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument. he could recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of the things that have been. some of an old man's jests may be found in _jocoseria_, some of an old man's imaginative passion in _asolando_, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in _ferishtah's fancies_ may be seen an old man's spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of matthew arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion. but the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. from the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of attempting to "thrust in earth eternity's concerns." in his earlier years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in _paracelsus_, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy with such glorious transgressors. he had valued more than any positive acquisitions of knowledge those "grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less." now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties--certainties even if illusions--of the general heart of man. these are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we may climb to higher things. and the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives. in autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the indian summer. in _jocoseria_, which appeared in browning's seventy-first year ( ), he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human infirmities from the heights of experience. the prop of israel, the much-enlightened master, "eximious jochanan ben sabbathai," when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man. and solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the queen of sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one small kiss from a fool. lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. these are harmless jests at the ironies of life. browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to _la saisiaz_ and the graceful epilogue to _the two poets of croisic_, and continued in the songs of _ferishtah's fancies_ and _asolando_--not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. his strength in this volume of is put into that protest of human righteousness against immoral conceptions of the deity uttered by ixion from his wheel of torture. rather than obey an immoral supreme power, as john stuart mill put it, "to hell i will go"--and such is the cry of browning's victim of zeus. he is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past zeus to the potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a caliban blindly felt when he discovered a quiet above the bitter god setebos; but the quiet of caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which ixion demands in his transcendent "potency." into this poem went the energy of browning's heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into _jochanan hakkadosh_, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length. the saint and sage of israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence. lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction. twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination--still all is vanity and vexation of spirit. only at the last, when by some unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear. instead of trying to solve the riddle he accepts it. he sees from his pisgah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring. the ultimate faith of jochanan the saint had been already expressed by browning: over the ball of it, peering and prying, how i see all of it, life there, outlying! roughness and smoothness, shine and defilement, grace and uncouthness: one reconcilement. but even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it. the spirit of the saint of israel is also the spirit of that wise dervish of browning's invention ( ), the persian ferishtah. the volume is frankly didactic, and browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. in reading _ferishtah's fancies_ we might suppose that we were in the interpreter's house, and that the interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens. the discourses of the dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. in persian poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or god, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman. throughout the series of poems it is not a persian dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the dervish born in camberwell in the year --ferishtah-browning. the doctrine set forth is the doctrine of browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet. the illustrations and imagery are often oriental; the ideas are those of a western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. the parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies: i starve in soul: so may mankind: and since men congregate in towns, not woods--to ispahan forthwith! such is the lesson of energetic charity. and the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the shah's prime minister--words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted job--"shall we receive good at the hand of god and shall we not receive evil?"[ ] or rather--shall not our hearts even in the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the good which we have received? browning proceeds, under a transparent veil of oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of christ. do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief? the more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of the potency of genuine conviction. and, after all, intellectual assent is of little importance compared with that love for the divine which may co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. _the family_ sets forth, through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views of things transcendent. why pray to god at all? why not rather accept his will and his providential disposition of our lives as absolutely wise, and right? that, browning replies, may be the way of the angels. we are men, and it is god's will that we should feel and think as men: be man and nothing more-- man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears, and craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes, and bids god help him, till death touch his eyes and show god granted most, denying all. the same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in _the sun_ to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only one who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. let us not strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. perhaps they are wholly remote from the unknown reality. they are none the less the conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the preacher very correctly expressed it, "the integrity of our anthropomorphism." the "magnified non-natural man," and "the three lord shaftesburys" of matthew arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of browning. his early christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a humanitarian theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. this theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of christ. the crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards a "stream of tendency." the presence of evil in a world created and governed by one all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in _mirhab shah_ as a necessity of our education. how shall love be called forth unless there be the possibility of self-sacrifice? how shall our human sympathy be perfected unless there be pain? what room is there for thanks to god or love of man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may be found in the star rephan? but let us not call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain. god may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. this justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. such a theological horror browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of _a camel-driver_; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards, thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there. and god has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel's brain and of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend. the poem which follows is directed against asceticism. self-sacrifice for the sake of our fellows is indeed "joy beyond joy." as to the rest--the question is not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do our day's work for the master. if we would supply joy to our fellows, it is needful that we should first know joy ourselves-- therefore, desire joy and thank god for it! browning's argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses. a feast of the senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense. and this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off of a hand. joy for browning means praise and gratitude; and in recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind ourselves too high. let us praise god for the little things that are so considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires. the morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our moment for a _te deum_, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of cherries. the glorious lamp in the shah's pavilion lightens other eyes than mine; but to think that the shah's goodness has provided slippers for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that i most affect! nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of earthly regards, "mere man's motives--" alas, friend, what was free from this alloy,-- some smatch thereof,--in best and purest love preferred thy earthly father? dust thou art, dust shall be to the end. our little human pleasures--do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of god? that is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride. god gives each of us his little plot, within which each of us is master. the question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we need not report to the lord of the soil the history of our manures; let us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to his granary in autumn. nay, do not i also tickle the palate of my ass with a thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work? in _a pillar at sebzevah_, ferishtah-browning confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love--what? "husked lupines, and belike the feeder's self." the dervish declares without shrinking the faith that is in him:-- "friend," quoth ferishtah, "all i seem to know is--i know nothing save that love i can boundlessly, endlessly." [illustration] if there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth. as for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must mistrust it, not as a road to gain:-- knowledge means ever-renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach, but love is victory, the prize itself. grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? the curse of life is this--that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. in truth the drop of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is only a mirage. browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of course, no pyrrhonist. he profoundly distrusts the capacity of the intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. in reality browning's attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to style itself "pragmatism" than it approaches pyrrhonism; but philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is condemnatory of their methods. in his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the affections as superior to the intellect, browning as a teacher has something in common with comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien to his nature as the creed of positivism. the last of ferishtah's discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to pain in the average life of man, or rather--for browning is nothing if he is not individualistic--in the life of each man as an individual. the conclusion arrived at is that no "bean-stripe"--each bean, white or black, standing for a day--is wholly black, and that the more extended is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the "bean-stripe" of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness and of light. before the poem closes, browning turns aside to consider the positivist position. why give our thanks and praise for all the good things of life to god, whose existence is an inference of the heart derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some being like ourselves? are not these good things the gifts of the race, of humanity, and its worthies who have preceded us and who at the present moment constitute our environment of loving help? ferishtah's reply, which is far from conclusive, must be regarded as no discussion of the subject but the utterance of an isolated thought. praise rendered to humanity and the heroes of the race simply reverts to the giver of the praise; his own perceptions of what is praiseworthy alone render praise possible; he must first of all thank and praise the giver of such perceptions--god. it is strange that browning should fail to recognise the fact that the positivist would immediately trace the power of moral perception to the energies of humanity in its upward progress from primitive savagery to our present state of imperfect development. it has been necessary to transcribe in a reduced form the teaching of ferishtah, for this is the clearest record left by browning of his own beliefs on the most important of all subjects, this is an essential part of his criticism of life, and at the same time it is little less than a passage of autobiography. the poems are admirable in their vigour, their humour, their seriousness, their felicity of imagery. yet the wisdom of _ferishtah's fancies_ is an old man's wisdom; we perceive in it the inner life, as baxter puts it, in speaking of changes wrought by his elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the root. but when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that browning touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he is always young. here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty. what if all his happy faith in the purpose of life, and the divine presence through all its course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had once been his and was still above and around him? such a doubt contained its own refutation: only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms all the late enchantment! what if all be error-- if the halo irised round my head were, love, thine arms? all the more, if this were so, must the speaker's heart turn godwards in gratitude. the whole design of the volume with its theological parables and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the passion of love between man and woman. footnotes: [footnote : mr gosse: "dictionary of national biography," supplement, i. .] [footnote : of the mother in this poem, a writer in the "browning society's papers," miss e.d. west, said justly: "there is discernible in her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial process.... her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost."] [footnote : the story of the melon-seller was related by a correspondent of _the times_ in , and is told by browning in a letter to miss barrett of aug. of that year. thus subjects of verse rose up in his memory after many years.] chapter xvii closing works and days _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_, published in , browning's last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour. it suffers, however, from the fact that several of the "parleyings" are discussions--emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual--of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the "people of importance" are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out browning's own voice. when certain aspects or principles of art are considered in _fra lippo lippi_, before us stands brother lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse. there is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of "the fable of the bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of charles avison the newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either avison or mandeville. this objection does not apply to all the poems. the parleying _with daniel bartoli_ is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. we are interested in francis furini, "good priest, good man, good painter," before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution. and in the case of christopher smart, the question why once and only once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. the volume, however, as a whole, while browning's energy never flags, has a larger proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms "mere grey argument"; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden outbursts of imagination and passion, as if these repressed for a time had carried away the dykes and dams, and went on their career in full flood. the description of the glory of sunrise in _bernard de mandeville_, the description of the chapel in _christopher smart_, the praise of a woman's beauty in _francis furini_, the amazing succession of mythological _tours de force_ in _gerard de lairesse_, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of march, in the opening of _charles avison_--these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound--"dance, yellows and whites and reds"--which closes _gerard de lairesse_. wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet the starved grass and daisies are more to him than these: daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows on the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: dance you, reds and whites and yellows! of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the _parleyings_ show no symptom. but the vigour of browning's will did a certain wrong to his other powers. he did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. he made it his task to work out all that was in him. and what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. we may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. the speed and excitement kindled by one's own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. it would have been a gain if browning's indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze. philosophy, love, poetry, politics, painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), painting again (the modern _versus_ the mythological in art), music, and, if we add the epilogue, the invention of printing--these are the successive themes of browning's _parleyings_, and they are important and interesting themes. unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a _danse macabre_. the spirit of acquiescence--strenuous not indolent acquiescence--with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? well, did not prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us? little? in little, light, warmth, life are blessed-- which, in the large, who sees to bless? or again--it is christopher smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his "song to david," and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. and why? because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take--to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction--the fruit of enjoyment--to come later. true learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,--a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. and once more--does francis furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription: only by looking low, ere looking high, comes penetration of the mystery. so also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth. meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good. thus at every point browning accepts here, as in _ferishtah's fancies_, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future. on the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit. do not, in the manner of bubb doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. there is a newer and a better trick than that. assume the supernatural; have a "mission "; have a "message"; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose. play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape. was browning's irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? however this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. browning's liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect. _asolando_, the last volume of a long array, was published in london on the last day of browning's life. as he lay dying in venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. it is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author's best years of early and mid manhood. _asolando_ is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the indian summer of his genius. the prologue is a confession, like that of wordsworth's great ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth. when first he set eyes on asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of italian landscape seemed that of terror with beauty, like the bush burning yet unconsumed now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct--"the bush is bare." browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent god than towards his creatures. but in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no fancy; the loss of what browning calls the "soul's iris-bow" is the loss of a substantial, a divine possession. the _epilogue_ has in it a certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through the energy we are conscious of the strain. the speaker pitches his voice high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. the _reverie_, a speculation on the time when power will show itself fully and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual garrulity which had grown on browning during the years when unhappily for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage. an old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for him; he repeats them again and again, for they constitute the best gift he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier inspiration. in the _reverie_, while accepting our limitations of knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast unknown, browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. and among the laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration: life is--to wake not sleep, rise and not rest, but press from earth's level where blindly creep things perfected, more or less, to the heaven's height, far and steep, where amid what strifes and storms may wait the adventurous quest, power is love. the voice of the poet of _paracelsus_ and of _rabbi ben ezra_ is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. and therefore he welcomes earth in his _rephan_, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. it is better, as _development_, with its recollections of browning's childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in troy siege, and the combats of hector and achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over wolfs prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. by and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain. the general impression left by _asolando_ is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. the series of _bad dreams_ is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. _dubiety_ is a poem of the indian summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. the love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled _speculative_, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. _white witchcraft_ does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. the infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn told of in a poem of is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable _inapprehensiveness_. the speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble rôle in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:-- "no, the book which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she, "was not by ruskin." i said "vernon lee." and in the uttered "vernon lee" lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic. there are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of _ponte dell' angelo_, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when browning is in his mood of mirth. there are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill. in _beatrice signorini_ the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart. cynicism grows genial in the jest of _the pope and the net_. in _muckle-mouth meg_, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman's art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy. _the bean-feast_ presents us with the latest transformation of the herakles ideal, where a good christian herakles, pope sixtus of rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses. and in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of rome, the too fortunate emperor augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of fate by turning beggar once a year. a shivering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant's "sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows' ridge": "he's god!" shouts lucius varus rufus: "man and worms'-meat any moment!" mutters low some power, admonishing the mortal-born. there were nobler sides of paganism than this with which browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy. and yet the religion even of marcus aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful pope who feasted upon beans.[ ] in the winter which followed his change of abode from warwick crescent to the more commodious house in de vere gardens, the winter of - , browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. in august he started ill for his italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. but the rest among the mountains at primiero restored him. at venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. and when he returned to london in february the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. in the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to balliol college, oxford. the opening week of june found him at cambridge. mr gosse has told how on the first sunday of that month browning and he sat together "in a sequestered part of the beautiful fellows' garden of trinity," under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. he shrank that summer, says mrs orr, from the fatigue of a journey to italy and thought of scotland as a place of rest. but unfavourable weather in early august forbade the execution of the plan. an invitation from mrs bronson to her house at asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son's wife in the palazzo rezzonico, venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with miss browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue. to the early days of july, shortly before his departure for italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of browning's character. on the th of that month he dined with the shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, "take the imperial eye"; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial. "i said to myself," he wrote to his young friend the painter lehmann's daughter, addressed in the letter as "my beloved alma"--"i said to myself 'here do i present my poetry to a personage for whom i do not care three straws; why should i not venture to do as much for a young lady i love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?' so i was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my alma, your affectionate friend, robert browning." a gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth! but the work of two days later, july th, was not gracious. the lines "to edward fitzgerald," printed in _the athenaeum_, were dated on that day. it is stated by mrs orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself. fitzgerald's reference to mrs browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. the expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. he had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead. browning's act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control. the lines sprang far more from love than from hate. "i felt as if she had died yesterday," he said. we cannot regret that browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment. in asolo, beside "the gate," mrs bronson had found and partly made what mr henry james describes as "one of the quaintest possible little places of _villegiatura_"--la mura, the house, "resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall. no sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of italy." browning's last visit to asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment. "he seemed possessed," writes mrs orr, "by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life." the thought that he was in asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him. he would stand delighted on the loggia of la mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own "sordello." nor was the later story forgotten of queen caterina cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks asolo, and whose secretary, cardinal bembo, wrote _gli asolani_, from which came the suggestion for the title of browning's forthcoming volume. at times, as mrs bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the euganean hills. "i was right," said he, "to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was i not?" the procedure of the day at asolo was almost as regular as that of a london day. the morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, english newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in mrs branson's carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre--these constituted an almost unvarying and happy routine. on his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would "whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them."[ ] sometimes a longer drive (and that to bassano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn. "if we were ever late in returning to asolo," mrs bronson writes, "he would say 'tell vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.' ... often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm. heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight." when in the evenings browning read aloud he did not, like tennyson, as described by mr rossetti, allow his voice to "sway onward with a long-drawn chaunt" which gave "noble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses." his delivery was full and distinctive, but it "took much less account than tennyson's of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition--its touches of character, the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. in those qualities of elocution in which tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, browning was contentedly weak; and _vice versâ_."[ ] sometimes, like another great poet, pope, he was deeply affected by the passion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not control his feelings. mrs orr mentions that in reading aloud his translation of the _herakles_, he, like pope in reading a passage of his _iliad_, was moved to tears. dr furnivall tells of the mounting excitement with which he once delivered in the writer's hearing his _ixion_. when at la mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of , old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, browning would propose to read aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. "no r.b. to-night," he would say; "then with a smile, 'let us have some real poetry'"; and the volume would be one by shelley or keats, or coleridge or tennyson. it was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of having no shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of his "toughest poems"; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis and pauses, became "as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire." in his talk at asolo "he seemed purposely to avoid deep and serious topics. if such were broached in his presence he dismissed them with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel." a project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the municipal authorities a small piece of ground, divided from la mura by a ravine clothed with olive and other trees, "on which stood an unfinished building"--the words are mrs bronson's--"commanding the finest view in asolo." he desired much to have a summer or autumn abode to which he might turn with the assurance of rest in what most pleased and suited him. in imagination, with his characteristic eagerness, he had already altered and added to the existing structure, and decided on the size and aspect of the loggia which was to out-rival that of la mura. "'it shall have a tower,' he said, 'whence i can see venice at every hour of the day, and i shall call it "pippa's tower".... we will throw a rustic bridge across the streamlet in the ravine.'" and then, in a graver mood: "it may not be for me to enjoy it long--who can say? but it will be useful for pen and his family.... but i am good for ten years yet." and when his son visited asolo and approved of the project of pippa's tower, browning's happiness in his dream was complete. it was on the night of his death that the authorities of asolo decided that the purchase might be carried into effect. [illustration: the palazzo rezzonico, venice. _from a drawing by_ miss katherine kimball.] for a time during this last visit to asolo browning suffered some inconvenience from shortness of breath in climbing hills, but the discomfort passed away. he looked forward to an early return to england, spoke with pleasant anticipation of the soft-pedal piano which his kind friend mrs bronson desired to procure at boston and place in his study in de vere gardens, and he dreamed of future poetical achievements. "shall i whisper to you my ambition and my hope?" he asked his hostess. "it is to write a tragedy better than anything i have done yet. i think of it constantly." with the end of october the happy days at asolo were at an end. on the first of november he was in venice, "magnificently lodged," he says, "in this vast palazzo, which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements." at asolo he had parted from his american friend story with the words, "more than forty years of friendship and never a break." in venice he met an american friend of more recent years, professor corson, who describes him as stepping briskly, with a look that went everywhere, and as cheerfully anticipating many more years of productive work.[ ] yet in truth the end was near. dining with mr and mrs curtis, where he read aloud some poems of his forthcoming volume, he met a london physician, dr bird. next evening dr bird again dined with browning, who expressed confident satisfaction as to his state of health, and held out his wrist that his words might be confirmed by the regularity and vigour of his pulse. the physician became at once aware that browning's confidence was far from receiving the warrant in which he believed. still he maintained his customary two hours' walk each day. towards the close of november, on a day of fog, he returned from the lido with symptoms of a bronchial cold. he dealt with the trouble as he was accustomed, and did not take to his bed. though feeling scarcely fit to travel he planned his departure for england after the lapse of four or five days. on december st, an italian physician was summoned, and immediately perceived the gravity of the case. within a few days the bronchial trouble was subdued, but failure of the heart was apparent. some hours before the end he said to one of his nurses, "i feel much worse. i know now that i must die." the ebbing away of life was painless. as the clocks of venice were striking ten on the night of thursday, december , , browning died.[ ] he had never concerned himself much about his place of burial. a lifeless body seemed to him only an old vesture that had been cast aside. "he had said to his sister in the foregoing summer," mrs orr tells us, "that he wished to be buried wherever he might die; if in england, with his mother; if in france, with his father; if in italy, with his wife." the english cemetery in florence had, however, been closed. the choice seemed to lie between venice, which was the desire of the city, or, if the difficulties could be overcome by the intervention of lord dufferin, the old florentine cemetery. the matter was decided otherwise; a grave in westminster abbey was proposed by dean bradley, and the proposal was accepted.[ ] a private service took place in the _palazzo rezzonico_; the coffin, in compliance with the civic requirements, was conveyed with public honours to the chapel on the island of san michele; and from thence to the house in de vere gardens. on the last day of the year , in presence of a great and reverent crowd, with solemn music arranged for the words of mrs browning's poem, "he giveth his beloved sleep," the body of browning was laid in its resting-place in poets' corner. to attempt at the present time to determine the place of browning in the history of english poetry is perhaps premature. yet the record of "how it strikes a contemporary" may itself have a certain historical interest. when estimates of this kind have been revised by time even their errors are sometimes instructive, or, if not instructive, are amusing. it is probable that tennyson will remain as the chief representative in poetry of the victorian period. browning, who was slower in securing an audience, may be found to possess a more independent individuality. yet in truth no great writer is independent of the influences of his age. browning as a poet had his origins in the romantic school of english poetry; but he came at a time when the romance of external action and adventure had exhausted itself, and when it became necessary to carry romance into the inner world where the adventures are those of the soul. on the ethical and religious side he sprang from english puritanism. each of these influences was modified by his own genius and by the circumstances of its development. his keen observation of facts and passionate inquisition of human character drew him in the direction of what is termed realism. this combination of realism with romance is even more strikingly seen in an elder contemporary on whose work browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist balzac. his puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect. he has the strenuous moral force of puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word--the hardy discipline of an athlete. opinions count for less than the form and the habitual attitudes of a soul. these with browning were always essentially christian. he regarded our life on earth as a state of probation and of preparation; sometimes as a battle-field in which our test lies in the choice of the worse or the better side and the energy of devotion to the cause; sometimes as a school of education, in the processes of which the emotions play a larger part than the intellect. the degrees in that school are not to be taken on earth. and on the battle-field the final issue is not to be determined here, so that what appears as defeat may contain within it an assured promise of ultimate victory. the attitudes of the spirit which were most habitual with him were two--the attitude of aspiration and the attitude of submission. these he brought into harmony with each other by his conception of human life as a period of training for a higher life; we must make the most vigorous and joyous use of our schooling, and yet we must press towards what lies beyond it. from the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. under the inspiration of the revolutionary movement passion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth century ideal of balance and moderation. with the transcendental reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of god to the universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and unmeasured aspirations. in his poetic method each writer followed the leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and standards; the individualism of the revolutionary epoch asserted itself to the full. these several influences helped to determine the character of browning's poetry. but meeting in him the ethical and religious tendencies of english puritanism they acquired new significances and assumed new forms. the cry of desire could not turn, as it did with byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with shelley, in the air or the ether. it must be controlled by the will and turned to some spiritual uses. the transcendental feeling which wordsworth most often attained through an impassioned contemplation of external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its sources or abettors all the higher passions of humanity. the revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his methods browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular. as for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, browning rejected it, in the old temper of english puritanism, on the side of religion; but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly entered. the scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. yet he gives definite expression in _paracelsus_ to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. "all that seems proved in darwin's scheme," he wrote to dr furnivall in , "was a conception familiar to me from the beginning." the positive influences of the scientific age in which he lived upon browning's work were chiefly these--first it tended to intellectualise his instincts, compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the passions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena of the world of mind. being a complete and a sane human creature, browning could not rest content with the vicious asceticism of the intellect which calls itself scientific because it refuses to recognise any facts that are not material and tangible. science itself, in the true sense of the word, exists and progresses by ventures of imaginative faith. and in all matters which involve good and evil, hopes and fears, in all matters which determine the conduct of life, no rational person excludes from his view the postulates of our moral nature or should exclude the final option of the will. the person whose beliefs are determined by material facts alone and by the understanding unallied with our other powers is the irrational and unscientific person. being a complete and sane human creature, browning was assured that the visible order of things is part of a larger order, the existence of which alone makes human life intelligible to the reason. the understanding being incapable of arriving unaided at a decision between rival theories of life, and neutrality between these being irrational and illegitimate, he rightly determined the balance with the weight of emotion, and rightly acted upon that decision with all the energy of his will. his chief intellectual error was not that he undervalued the results of the intellect, but that he imagined the existence as a part of sane human nature, of a wholly irrational intellect which in affairs of religious belief and conduct is indifferent to the promptings of the emotions and the moral nature. browning's optimism has been erroneously ascribed to his temperament. he declared that in his personal experience the pain of life outweighed its pleasure. he remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure. his optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. if any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. that whole of which our life on earth forms a part could not be conceived by browning as rational without also being conceived as good. all the parts of browning's nature were vigorous, and they worked harmoniously together. his senses were keen and alert; his understanding was both penetrating and comprehensive; his passions had sudden explosive force and also steadfastness and persistency; his will supported his other powers and perhaps it had too large a share in his later creative work. his feeling for external nature was twofold; he enjoyed colour and form--but especially colour--as a feast for the eye, and returned thanks for his meal as the pope of his poem did for the bean-feast. this was far removed from that passionate spiritual contemplation of nature of the wordsworthian mood. but now and again for browning external nature was, not indeed suffused as for wordsworth, but pierced and shot through with spiritual fire. his chief interest, however, was in man. the study of passions in their directness and of the intellect in its tortuous ways were at various times almost equally attractive to him. the emotions which he chiefly cared to interpret were those connected with religion, with art, and with the relations of the sexes. in his presentation of character browning was far from exhibiting either the universality or the disinterestedness of shakespeare. his sympathy with action was defective. the affections arising from hereditary or traditional relations are but slenderly represented in his poetry; the passions which elect their own objects are largely represented. those graceful gaieties arising from a long-established form of society, which constitute so large a part of shakespeare's comedies, are almost wholly absent from his work. his humour was robust but seldom fine or delicate. in an age of intellectual and spiritual conflict and trouble, his art was often deflected from the highest ends by his concern on behalf of ideas. he could not rest satisfied, it has been observed, with contemplating the children of his imagination, nor find the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of having given them existence.[ ] it seems often as if his purpose in creating them was to make them serve as questioners, objectors, and answerers in the great debate of conflicting thoughts which proceeds throughout his poems. his object in transferring his own consciousness into the consciousness of some imagined personage seems often to be that of gaining a new stand-point from which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning which he could not wholly satisfy himself from any single point of view. he cannot be content to leave his men and women, in shakespeare's disinterested manner, to look in various directions according to whatever chanced to suit best the temper and disposition he had imagined for them. they are placed by him with their eyes turned in very much the same direction, gazing towards the same problems, the same ideas. and somehow browning himself seems to be in company with them all the time, learning their different reports of the various aspects which those problems or ideas present to each of them, and choosing between the different reports in order to give credence to that which seems true. the study of no individual character would seem to him of capital value unless that character contained something which should help to throw light upon matters common to all humanity, upon the inquiries either as to what it is, or as to what are its relations to the things outside humanity. this is not quite the highest form of dramatic poetry. there is in it perhaps something of the error of seeking too quick returns of profit, and of drawing "a circle premature," to use browning's own words, "heedless of far gain." the contents of characters so conceived can be exhausted, whereas when characters are presented with entire disinterestedness they may seem to yield us less at first, but they are inexhaustible. the fault--if it be one--lay partly in browning's epoch, partly in the nature of his genius. such a method of deflected dramatic characterisation as his is less appropriate to regular drama than to the monologue; and accordingly the monologue, reflective or lyrical, became the most characteristic instrument of his art. there is little of repose in browning's poetry. he feared lethargy of heart, the supine mood, more than he feared excess of passion. once or twice he utters a sigh for rest, but it is for rest after strife or labour. broad spaces of repose, of emotional tranquillity are rare, if not entirely wanting, in his poetry. it is not a high table-land, but a range, or range upon range, of sierras. in single poems there is often a point or moment in which passion suddenly reaches its culmination. he flashes light upon the retina; he does not spread truth abroad like a mantle but plunges it downwards through the mists of earth like a searching sword-blade. and therefore he does not always distribute the poetic value of what he writes equally; one vivid moment justifies all that is preparatory to that great moment. his utterance, which is always vigorous, becomes intensely luminous at the needful points and then relapses, to its well-maintained vigour, a vigour not always accompanied by the highest poetical qualities. the music of his verse is entirely original, and so various are its kinds, so complex often are its effects that it cannot be briefly characterised. its attack upon the ear is often by surprises, which, corresponding to the sudden turns of thought and leaps of feeling, justify themselves as right and delightful. yet he sometimes embarrasses his verse with an excess of suspensions and resolutions. browning made many metrical experiments, some of which were unfortunate: but his failures are rather to be ascribed to temporary lapses into a misdirected ingenuity than to the absence of metrical feeling. his chief influence, other than what is purely artistic, upon a reader is towards establishing a connection between the known order of things in which we live and move and that larger order of which it is a part. he plays upon the will, summoning it from lethargy to activity. he spiritualises the passions by showing that they tend through what is human towards what is divine. he assigns to the intellect a sufficient field for exercise, but attaches more value to its efforts than to its attainments. his faith in an unseen order of things creates a hope which persists through the apparent failures of earth. in a true sense he may be named the successor of wordsworth, not indeed as an artist but as a teacher. substantially the creed maintained by each was the same creed, and they were both more emphatic proclaimers of it than any other contemporary poets. but their ways of holding and of maintaining that creed were far apart. wordsworth enunciated his doctrines as if he had never met with, and never expected to meet with, any gainsaying of them. he discoursed as a philosopher might to a school of disciples gathered together to be taught by his wisdom, not to dispute it. he feared chiefly not a counter creed but the materialising effects of the industrial movement of his own day. expecting no contradiction, wordsworth did not care to quit his own standpoint in order that he might see how things appear from the opposing side. he did not argue but let his utterance fall into a half soliloquy spoken in presence of an audience but not always directly addressed to them. browning's manner of speech was very unlike this. he seems to address it often to unsympathetic hearers of whose presence and gainsaying attitude he could not lose sight. the beliefs for which he pleaded were not in his day, as they had been in wordsworth's, part of a progressive wave of thought. he occupied the disadvantageous position of a conservative thinker. the later poet of spiritual beliefs had to make his way not with, but against, a great incoming tide of contemporary speculation. probably on this account browning's influence as a teacher will extend over a far shorter space of time than that of wordsworth. for wordsworth is self-contained, and is complete without reference to the ideas which oppose his own. his work suffices for its own explanation, and will always commend itself to certain readers either as the system of a philosophic thinker or as the dream of a poet. browning's thought where it is most significant is often more or less enigmatical if taken by itself: its energetic gestures, unless we see what they are directed against, seem aimless beating the air. his thought, as far as it is polemical, will probably cease to interest future readers. new methods of attack will call forth new methods of defence. time will make its discreet selection from his writings. and the portion which seems most likely to survive is that which presents in true forms of art the permanent passions of humanity and characters of enduring interest. footnotes: [footnote : mrs orr gives the dates of composition of several of the _asolando_ poems. _rosny_, _beatrice signorini_ and _flute-music_ were written in the winter of - . two or three of the _bad dreams_ are, with less confidence, assigned to the same date. the _ponte dell' angelo_ "was imagined during the next autumn in venice" (see mrs bronson's article "browning in venice"). "_white witchcraft_ had been suggested in the same summer ( ) by a letter from a friend in the channel islands which spoke of the number of toads to be seen there." _the cardinal and the dog_, written with the _pied piper_ for macready's son, is a poem of early date. mrs bronson in her article "browning in asolo" (_century magazine_, april ) relates the origin at asolo of _the lady and the painter_.] [footnote : mrs orr, _life_, p. .] [footnote : w.m. rossetti, portraits of browning, i., _magazine of art_, , p. . mr rossetti's words refer to an earlier period.] [footnote : "the nation," vol. ., where reminiscences by moncure conway may also be found.] [footnote : "my father died without pain or suffering other than that of weakness or weariness"--so mr r. barrett browning wrote to mrs bloomfield-moore. "his death was what death ought to be, but rarely is--so said the doctor." (quoted in an article on browning by mrs bloomfield-moore in lippincott's magazine--jan.--june , p. .)] [footnote : a grave in the abbey was at the same time offered for the body of browning's wife; the removal of her body from florence would have been against both the wishes of browning and of the people of florence. it was therefore declined by mr r. barrett browning. see his letter in mrs bloomfield-moore's article in lippincott's magazine, vol. xiv.] [footnote : e.d. west in the first of two papers, "browning as a preacher," in _the dark blue magazine_. browning esteemed these papers highly and in what follows i appropriate, with some modifications, a passage from the first of them. the writer has consented to the use here made of the passage, and has contributed a passage towards the close.] index [_the names of robert browning, the subject of this volume, and of elizabeth barrett browning are not included in the index_.] _abt vogler_ adams, sarah flower aeschylus (see _agamemnon_) _agamemnon_ alford, lady m. ancona andersen, hans _andrea del sarto_ _any wife to any husband_ _apparent failure_ _aristophanes' apology_ arnold, matthew arnould, joseph arran, isle of _artemis prologuizes_ asceticism ashburton, lady _asolando_ asolo _at the mermaid_ audierne _aurora leigh_ b bach bacon, francis _bad dreams_ _balaustion's adventure_ balzac, h. de barrett, arabella barrett, edward m. barrett, henrietta (mrs surtees cook) bayley, miss _bean feast_ _beatrice signorini_ _bells and pomegranates_ benckhausen, mr _bernard de mandeville_ biarritz _bifurcation_ bird, dr _bishop blougram_ _bishop orders his tomb_ blagden, isa blanc, mme. _blot in the 'scutcheon_ bottinius bowring, sir j. boyd, h.s. boyle, miss bradley, dean bridell-fox, mrs bronson, mrs a. browning, robert (grandfather) browning, robert (father) browning, robert, w.b. (son) browning, sarah anna (mother) browning, sarah anna, or sarianna (sister) buchanan, robert burne-jones, e. _by the fireside_ c _caliban upon setebos_ cambo cambridge caponsacchi carlyle, mrs carlyle, thomas casa guidi _cavalier tunes_ cavour _cenciaja_ chapman & hall chappell, arthur _charles avison_ _childe roland_ _christmas eve and easter day_ _christopher smart_ "clarissa" clayton, rev. mr _cleon_ _clive_ cobbe, miss f.p. _colombe's birthday_ conway, dr m. cook, captain surtees cook, mrs surtees, _see_ barrett, henrietta cornhill magazine _count gismond_ coup d'état _cristine_ croisic crosse, mrs andrew curtis, mr and mrs d _daniel bartoli_ dante davidson, captain _death in the desert_ _de gustibus_ _development_ de vere gardens dickens, charles _dîs aliter visum_ _doctor_ ---- domett, alfred dominus hyacinthus _donald_ _dramatic idyls_ (first and second series) _dramatic lyrics_ _dramatic romances and lyrics_ _dramatis personae_ _dubiety_ dufferin, lord duffy, c. gavan_ e _easter day_, see _christmas eve and easter day echetlos_ eckley, mr egerton-smith, miss elgin, lady eliot, george _englishman in italy_ _epilogue_ (to "asolando") _epilogue_ (to "dramatis personae") _epilogue_ (to "pacchiarotto" volume) _epilogue_ (to "two poets of croisic") _epistle to karshish_ etretat _evelyn hope_ f _face, a_ fano faraday faucit, helen _fears and scruples_ _ferishtah's fancies_ _fifine at the fair_ _filippo baldinucci_ fisher, w. fitzgerald, edward flaubert, g. _flight of the duchess_ flower, eliza flower, sarah flush _forgiveness_ forster, john _founder of the feast_ fox, caroline fox, w.j. _fra lippo lippi_ _francis farini_ fuller, margaret (see ossoli, countess d') furnivall, f.j. g gagarin, prince _garden fancy_ _gerard de lairesse_ gibson, j. gladstone, w.e. _glove_ _gold hair_ goldoni gosse, e. _grammarian's funeral_ _greek christian poets_ gresonowsky, dr gressoney grove, mr _guardian angel_ guido franceschini h _halbert and hob_ hatcham havre hawthorne, n. "helen's tower" herakles _heretic's tragedy_ _hervé riel_ hickey, miss e.h. hillard, g.s. _hippolytus and aricia_ _holy cross day_ home, d.d. hosmer, harriet _house_ _how it strikes a contemporary_ _how they brought the good news_ hugo, victor hunt, leigh i _imperante augusta natus est_ _in a balcony_ _in a gondola_ _inapprehensiveness_ _in a year_ _inn album_ _ion_ _italian in england_ _ivàn ivànovitch_ _ixion_ j james, henry _james lee's wife_ jameson, anna _jochanan hakkadosh_, _jocoseria_ _johannes agricola_ jones, thomas jowett, benjamin k kean, charles kemble, fanny kenyon, f.g. kenyon, john kingsley, charles _king victor and king charles_ kirkup, seymour l "la dame aux camélias" lamartine la mura landor, w.s. _la saisiaz_ _last poems_ _last ride_ lehmann, r. leighton, f. lever, charles lido _life in a love_ _likeness_ llangollen, vale of lockhart, j.g. long, professor _lost leader_ lounsbury, professor _love among the ruins_ _love in a life_ _lover s quarrel_ lucca, baths of _luria_ lytton, robert m maclise, daniel macready, w.c. "madame bovary" _magical nature_ _mansoor the hierophant_ marston, westland martin, lady (_see_ also faucit, helen) martin, sir t. _martin relph_ _master hugues_ "maud" (tennyson's) _may and death_ mazzini mellerio, a. _memorabilia_ _men and women_ merrifield, mr and mrs mers mignet milsand, joseph mill, j.s. milnes, monckton milton mitford, miss monclar, a. de ripert monodrama montecuccoli, marchese moore, mrs bloomfield moxon, e. _mr sludge the medium_ _muléykeh_ musset, a. de _my last duchess_ n _names_ napoleon, louis _narses_ _natural magic_ _ned bratts_ nightingale, florence "nobly, nobly cape st vincent" _numpholeptos_ o ogle, miss _old pictures in florence_ _one way of love_ _only a player-girl_ orr, mrs ossian, macpherson's ossoli, countess d' p _pacchiarotto_ page, mr paget, sir james palazzo giustiniani recanati palazzo manzoni palazzo rezzonico palgrave, f.t. _paracelsus_ paris parker, theodore _parleyings with certain people_ patmore, emily _patriot_ _pauline_ _pheidippides_ phelps _pictor ignotus_ _pied piper_ _pietro of abano_ pio nono _pippa passes_ pippa's tower _pisgah sights_ pisa plutarch _poems before congress_ pompilia pope (in "ring and book") _pope and the net_ _popularity_ pornic _porphyria's lover_ portraits powers, h. _pretty woman_ primiero _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ prinsep, v. procter ("barry cornwall") _prologue_ (to "la saisiaz") _prospice_ _protus_ prout, father "puseyism" r _rabbi ben ezra_ ready, rev. t. _red cotton night-cap country_ _rephan_ _respectability_ _return of the druses_ _reverie_ rhyming _ring and the book_ ristori ritchie, mrs a. thackeray rome rossetti, d.g. rossetti, w.m. _rudel_ ruskin, john s saint-aubin saint-enogat _st martin's summer_ st moritz st pierre de chartreuse sainte-marie saint-victor, paul de salève salvini sand, george sartoris, adelaide _saul_ _selections_ (from browning) _serenade at the villa_ shah, the shakespeare sharp, william shelley, p.b. _shop_ siena silverthorne, james smith, mr society, the browning _soliloquy in a spanish cloister_ _solomon and balkis_ _sonnets from the portuguese_ _sordello_ _soul's tragedy_ _speculative_ spiritualism stanhope, lord _statue and the bust_ stead, mr f.h. stephen, sir l. sterling, john stillmann, w.j. story, w.w. stowe, harriet b. _strafford_ swanwick swedenborg t talfourd taylor, bayard tennyson, alfred tennyson, frederick tennyson, hallam thackeray, miss, _see_ ritchie, mrs thackeray, w.m. _the worst of it_ _toccata of galuppi's_ _too late_ _transcendentalism_ trelawny, e.j. trollope, mrs trollope, t.a. _twins_ _two in the campagna_ _two poems by e.b.b. and r. b_. _two poets of croisic_ u _up at a villa_ v vallombrosa venice, , , , , , - villers w _waring_ warwick crescent white, rev. e. _white witchcraft_ whitman, walt _why am i a liberal_? wiedemann, william wilson (mrs browning's maid) wise, t.j. wiseman, cardinal _woman's last word_ wordsworth, w. y yates, edmund "york" (a horse) york street chapels _youth and art_ browning as a philosophical and religious teacher by henry jones professor of philosophy in the university of glasgow [illustration: robert browning.] this book is dedicated to my dear friends miss harriet macarthur and miss jane macarthur. preface the purpose of this book is to deal with browning, not simply as a poet, but rather as the exponent of a system of ideas on moral and religious subjects, which may fairly be called a philosophy. i am conscious that it is a wrong to a poet to neglect, or even to subordinate, the artistic aspect of his work. at least, it would be a wrong, if our final judgment on his poetry were to be determined on such a method. but there is a place for everything; and, even in the case of a great poet, there is sometimes an advantage in attempting to estimate the value of what he has said, apart from the form in which he has said it. and of all modern poets, browning is the one who most obviously invites and justifies such a method of treatment. for, in the first place, he is clearly one of that class of poets who are also prophets. he was never merely "the idle singer of an empty day," but one for whom poetic enthusiasm was intimately bound up with religious faith, and who spoke "in numbers," not merely "because the numbers came," but because they were for him the necessary vehicle of an inspiring thought. if it is the business of philosophy to analyze and interpret all the great intellectual forces that mould the thought of an age, it cannot neglect the works of one who has exercised, and is exercising so powerful an influence on the moral and religious life of the present generation. in the second place, as will be seen in the sequel, browning has himself led the way towards such a philosophical interpretation of his work. for, even in his earlier poems, he not seldom crossed the line that divides the poet from the philosopher, and all but broke through the strict limits of art in the effort to express--and we might even say to preach--his own idealistic faith. in his later works he did this almost without any disguise, raising philosophical problems, and discussing all the _pros_ and _cons_ of their solution, with no little subtlety and dialectical skill. in some of these poems we might even seem to be receiving a philosophical lesson, in place of a poetic inspiration, if it were not for those powerful imaginative utterances, those winged words, which browning has always in reserve, to close the ranks of his argument. if the question is stated in a prosaic form, the final answer, as in the ancient oracle, is in the poetic language of the gods. from this point of view i have endeavoured to give a connected account of browning's ideas, especially of his ideas on religion and morality, and to estimate their value. in order to do so, it was necessary to discuss the philosophical validity of the principles on which his doctrine is more or less consciously based. the more immediately philosophical chapters are the second, seventh, and ninth; but they will not be found unintelligible by those who have reflected on the difficulties of the moral and religious life, even although they may be unacquainted with the methods and language of the schools. i have received much valuable help in preparing this work for the press from my colleague, professor g.b. mathews, and still more from professor edward caird. i owe them both a deep debt of gratitude. henry jones. . contents. chapter i. introduction chapter ii. on the need of a philosophy of life chapter iii. browning's place in english poetry chapter iv. browning's optimism chapter v. optimism and ethics: their contradiction chapter vi. browning's treatment of the principle of love chapter vii. browning's idealism, and its philosophical justification chapter viii. browning's solution of the problem of evil chapter ix. a criticism of browning's view of the failure of knowledge chapter x. the heart and the head.--love and reason chapter xi. conclusion robert browning. chapter i. introduction. "grau, theurer freund, ist alle theorie, und grün des lebens goldner baum." (_faust_.) there is a saying of hegel's, frequently quoted, that "a great man condemns the world to the task of explaining him." the condemnation is a double one, and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself, who has to submit to explanation; and, probably, the last refinement of this species of cruelty is to expound a poet. i therefore begin with an apology in both senses of the term. i acknowledge that no commentator on art has a right to be heard, if he is not aware of the subordinate and temporary nature of his office. at the very best he is only a guide to the beautiful object, and he must fall back in silence so soon as he has led his company into its presence. he may perhaps suggest "the line of vision," or fix the point of view, from which we can best hope to do justice to the artist's work, by appropriating his intention and comprehending his idea; but if he seeks to serve the ends of art, he will not attempt to do anything more. in order to do even this successfully, it is essential that every judgment passed should be exclusively ruled by the principles which govern art. "fine art is not real art till it is free"; that is, till its value is recognized as lying wholly within itself. and it is not, unfortunately, altogether unnecessary to insist that, so far from enhancing the value of an artist's work, we only degrade it into mere means, subordinate it to uses alien, and therefore antagonistic to its perfection, if we try to show that it gives pleasure, or refinement, or moral culture. there is no doubt that great poetry has all these uses, but the reader can enjoy them only on condition of forgetting them; for they are effects that follow the sense of its beauty. art, morality, religion, is each supreme in its own sphere; the beautiful is not more beautiful because it is also moral, nor is a painting great because its subject is religious. it is true that their spheres overlap, and art is never at its best except when it is a beautiful representation of the good; nevertheless the points of view of the artist and of the ethical teacher are quite different, and consequently also the elements within which they work and the truth they reveal. in attempting, therefore, to discover robert browning's philosophy of life, i do not pretend that my treatment of him is adequate. browning is, first of all, a poet; it is only as a poet that he can be finally judged; and the greatness of a poet is to be measured by the extent to which his writings are a revelation of what is beautiful. i undertake a different and a humbler task, conscious of its limitations, and aware that i can hardly avoid doing some violence to the artist. what i shall seek in the poet's writings is not beauty, but truth; and although truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth, still the poetic and philosophic interpretation of life are not to be confused. philosophy must separate the matter from the form. its synthesis comes through analysis, and analysis is destructive of beauty, as it is of all life. art, therefore, resists the violence of the critical methods of philosophy, and the feud between them, of which plato speaks, will last through all time. the beauty of form and the music of speech which criticism destroys, and to which philosophy is, at the best, indifferent, are essential to poetry. when we leave them out of account we miss the ultimate secret of poetry, for they cling to the meaning and penetrate it with their charm. thought and its expression are inseparable in poetry, as they never are in philosophy; hence, in the former, the loss of the expression is the loss of truth. the pure idea that dwells in a poem is suffused in the poetic utterance, as sunshine breaks into beauty in the mist, as life beats and blushes in the flesh, or as an impassioned thought breathes in a thinker's face. but, although art and philosophy are supreme, each in its own realm, and neither can be subordinated to the uses of the other, they may help each other. they are independent, but not rival powers of the world of mind. not only is the interchange of truth possible between them; but each may show and give to the other all its treasures, and be none the poorer itself. "it is in works of art that some nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts." job and isaiah, Æschylus and sophocles, shakespeare and goethe, were first of all poets. mankind is indebted to them in the first place for revealing beauty; but it also owes to them much insight into the facts and principles of the moral world. it would be an unutterable loss to the ethical thinker and the philosopher, if this region were closed against them, so that they could no longer seek in the poets the inspiration and light that lead to goodness and truth. in our own day, almost above all others, we need the poets for these ethical and religious purposes. for the utterances of the dogmatic teacher of religion have been divested of much of their ancient authority; and the moral philosopher is often regarded either as a vendor of commonplaces or as the votary of a discredited science, whose primary principles are matter of doubt and debate. there are not a few educated englishmen who find in the poets, and in the poets alone, the expression of their deepest convictions concerning the profoundest interests of life. they read the poets for fresh inspiration, partly, no doubt, because the passion and rapture of poetry lull criticism and soothe the questioning spirit into acquiescence. but there are further reasons; for the poets of england are greater than its moral philosophers; and it is of the nature of the poetic art that, while eschewing system, it presents the strife between right and wrong in concrete character, and therefore with a fulness and truth impossible to the abstract thought of science. "a poet never dreams: we prose folk do: we miss the proper duct for thoughts on things unseen."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, lxxxviii.] it is true that philosophy endeavours to correct this fragmentariness by starting from the unity of the whole. but it can never quite get rid of an element of abstraction and reach down to the concrete individual. the making of character is so complex a process that the poetic representation of it, with its subtle suggestiveness, is always more complete and realistic than any possible philosophic analysis. science can deal only with aspects and abstractions, and its method becomes more and more inadequate as its matter grows more concrete, unless it proceeds from the unity in which all the aspects are held together. in the case of life, and still more so in that of human conduct, the whole must precede the part, and the moral science must, therefore, more than any other, partake of the nature of poetry; for it must start from living spirit, go from the heart outwards, in order to detect the meaning of the actions of man. on this account, poetry is peculiarly helpful to the ethical investigator, because it always treats the particular thing as a microcosm. it is the great corrective of the onesidedness of science with its harsh method of analysis and distinction. it is a witness to the unity of man and the world. every object which art touches into beauty, becomes in the very act a whole. the thing that is beautiful is always complete, the embodiment of something absolutely valuable, the product and the source of love; and the beloved object is all the world for the lover--beyond all praise, because it is above all comparison. "then why not witness, calmly gazing, if earth holds aught--speak truth--above her? above this tress, and this, i touch but cannot praise, i love so much!"[a] [footnote a: _song_ (dramatic lyrics).] this characteristic of the work of art brings with it an important practical consequence, because being complete, it appeals to the whole man. "poetry," it has been well said, is "the idealized and monumental utterance of the deepest feelings." and poetic feelings, it must not be forgotten, _are_ deepest; that is, they are the afterglow of the fullest activity of a complete soul, and not shallow titillations, or surface pleasures, such as the palate knows. led by poetry, the intellect so sees truth that it glows with it, and the will is stirred to deeds of heroism. for there is hardly any fact so mean, but that when intensified by emotion, it grows poetic; as there is hardly any man so unimaginative, but that when struck with a great sorrow, or moved by a great passion, he is endowed for a moment with the poet's speech. a poetic fact, one may almost say, is just any fact at its best. art, it is true, looks at its object through a medium, but it always seems its inmost meaning. in lear, othello, hamlet, in falstaff and touchstone, there is a revelation of the inner truth of human life beyond the power of moral science to bestow. we do well to seek philosophy in the poets, for though they teach only by hints and parables, they nevertheless reflect the concrete truth of life, as it is half revealed and half concealed in facts. on the other hand, the reflective process of philosophy may help poetry; for, as we shall show, there is a near kinship between them. even the critical analyst, while severing element from element, may help art and serve the poet's ends, provided he does not in his analysis of parts forget the whole. his function, though humble and merely preliminary to full poetic enjoyment, is not unimportant. to appreciate the grandeur of the unity of the work of art, there must be knowledge of the parts combined. it is quite true that the guide in the gallery is prone to be too talkative, and there are many who can afford to turn the commentator out of doors, especially if he moralizes. but, after all, man is not pure sensibility, any more than he is pure reason. and the aesthete will not lose if he occasionally allows those whom he may think less sensitive than himself to the charm of rhythmic phrase, to direct sober attention to the principles which lie embedded in all great poetry. at the worst, to seek for truth in poetry is a protest against the constant tendency to read it for the sake of the emotions which it stirs, the tendency to make it a refined amusement and nothing more. that is a deeper wrong to art than any which the theoretical moralist can inflict. of the two, it is better to read poetry for ethical doctrines than for fine sensations; for poetry purifies the passions only when it lifts the reader into the sphere of truths that are universal. the task of interpreting a poet may be undertaken in different ways. one of these, with which we have been made familiar by critics of shakespeare and of browning himself, is to analyze each poem by itself and regard it as the artistic embodiment of some central idea; the other is to attempt, without dealing separately with each poem, to reach the poet's own point of view, and to reveal the sovereign truths which rule his mind. it is this latter way that i shall try to follow. such dominant or even despotic thoughts it is possible to discover in all our great poets, except perhaps shakespeare, whose universality baffles every classifier. as a rule, the english poets have been caught up, and inspired, by the exceeding grandeur of some single idea, in whose service they spend themselves with that prodigal thrift which finds life in giving it. such an idea gives them a fresh way of looking at the world, so that the world grows young again with their new interpretation. in the highest instances, poets may become makers of epochs; they reform as well as reveal; for ideas are never dead things, "but grow in the hand that grasps them." in them lies the energy of a nation's life, and we comprehend that life only when we make clear to ourselves the thoughts which inspire it. it is thus true, in the deepest sense, that those who make the songs of a people make its history. in all true poets there are hints for a larger philosophy of life. but, in order to discover it, we must know the truths which dominate them, and break into music in their poems. whether it is always possible, and whether it is at any time fair to a poet to define the idea which inspires him, i shall not inquire at present. no doubt, the interpretation of a poet from first principles carries us beyond the limits of art; and by insisting on the unity of his work, more may be attributed to him, or demanded from him, than he properly owns. to make such a demand is to require that poetry should be philosophy as well, which, owing to its method of intuition, it can never be. nevertheless, among english poets there is no one who lends himself so easily, or so justly, to this way of treatment as browning. much of his poetry trembles on the verge of the abyss which is supposed to separate art from philosophy; and, as i shall try to show, there was in the poet a growing tendency to turn the power of dialectic on the pre-suppositions of his art. yet, even browning puts great difficulties in the way of a critic, who seeks to draw a philosophy of life from his poems. it is not by any means an easy task to lift the truths he utters under the stress of poetic emotion into the region of placid contemplation, or to connect them into a system, by means of the principle from which he makes his departure. the first of these difficulties arises from the extent and variety of his work. he was prodigal of poetic ideas, and wrote for fifty years on nature, art, and man, like a magnificent spendthrift of spiritual treasures. so great a store of knowledge lay at his hand, so real and informed with sympathy, that we can scarcely find any great literature which he has not ransacked, any phase of life which is not represented in his poems. all kinds of men and women, in every station in life, and at every stage of evil and goodness, crowd his pages. there are few forms of human character he has not studied, and each individual he has so caught at the supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress of circumstance, that the inmost working of his nature is revealed. the wealth is bewildering, and it is hard to follow the central thought, "the imperial chord, which steadily underlies the accidental mists of music springing thence."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_.] a second and still graver difficulty lies in the fact that his poetry, as he repeatedly insisted, is "always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."[b] in his earlier works, especially, browning is creative rather than reflective, a maker rather than a seer; and his creations stand aloof from him, working out their fate in an outer world. we often lose the poet in the imaginative characters, into whom he penetrates with his keen artistic intuition, and within whom he lies as a necessity revealing itself in their actions and words. it is not easy anywhere to separate the elements, so that we can say with certainty, "here i catch the poet, there lies his material." the identification of the work and worker is too intimate, and the realization of the imaginary personage is too complete. [footnote b: pref. to _pauline_, .] in regard to the dramatic interpretation of his poetry, browning has manifested a peculiar sensitiveness. in his preface to _pauline_ and in several of his poems--notably _the mermaid_, the _house_, and the _shop_--he explicitly cuts himself free from his work. he knew that direct self-revealment on the part of the poet violates the spirit of the drama. "with this same key shakespeare unlocked his heart," said wordsworth; "did shakespeare?" characteristically answers browning, "if so, the less shakespeare he!" and of himself he asks: "which of you did i enable once to slip inside my breast, there to catalogue and label what i like least, what love best, hope and fear, believe and doubt of, seek and shun, respect--deride? who has right to make a rout of rarities he found inside?"[a] [footnote a: _at the mermaid_.] he repudiates all kinship with byron and his subjective ways, and refuses to be made king by the hands which anointed him. "he will not give his woes an airing, and has no plague that claims respect." both as man and poet, in virtue of the native, sunny, outer-air healthiness of his character, every kind of subjectivity is repulsive to him. he hands to his readers "his work, his scroll, theirs to take or leave: his soul he proffers not." for him "shop was shop only"; and though he dealt in gems, and throws "you choice of jewels, every one, good, better, best, star, moon, and sun,"[a] [footnote a: _shop_.] he still _lived_ elsewhere, and had "stray thoughts and fancies fugitive" not meant for the open market. the poems in which browning has spoken without the disguise of another character are very few. there are hardly more than two or three of much importance which can be considered as directly reflecting his own ideas, namely, _christmas eve_ and _easter day, la saisiaz_, and _one word more_--unless, spite of the poet's warning, we add _pauline_. but, although the dramatic element in browning's poetry renders it difficult to construct his character from his works, while this is comparatively easy in the case of wordsworth or byron; and although it throws a shade of uncertainty on every conclusion we might draw as to any specific doctrine held by him, still browning lives in a certain atmosphere, and looks at his characters through a medium, whose subtle influence makes all his work indisputably _his_. the light he throws on his men and women is not the unobtrusive light of day, which reveals objects, but not itself. though a true dramatist, he is not objective like shakespeare and scott, whose characters seem never to have had an author. the reader feels, rather, that browning himself attends him through all the sights and wonders of the world of man; he never escapes the sense of the presence of the poet's powerful personality, or of the great convictions on which he has based his life. browning has, at bottom, only one way of looking at the world, and one way of treating his objects; one point of view, and one artistic method. nay, further, he has one supreme interest, which he pursues everywhere with a constancy shown by hardly any other poet; and, in consequence, his works have a unity and a certain originality, which make them in many ways a unique contribution to english literature. this characteristic, which no critic has missed, and which generally goes by the name of "the metaphysical element" in his poetry, makes it the more imperative to form a clear view of his ruling conceptions. no poet, least of all a dramatic poet, goes about seeking concrete vehicles for ready-made ideas, or attempts to dress a philosophy in metaphors; and browning, as an artist, is interested first of all in the object which he renders beautiful for its own sole sake, and not in any abstract idea it illustrates. still, it is true in a peculiar sense in his case, that the eye of the poet brings with it what it sees. he is, as a rule, conscious of no theory, and does not construct a poem for its explication; he rather strikes his ideas out of his material, as the sculptor reveals the breathing life in the stone. nevertheless, it may be shown that a theory rules him from behind, and that profound convictions arise in the heart and rush along the blood at the moment of creation, using his soul as an instrument of expression to his age and people. of no english poet, except shakespeare, can we say with approximate truth that he is the poet of all times. the subjective breath of their own epoch dims the mirror which they hold up to nature. missing by their limitation the highest universality, they can only be understood in their setting. it adds but little to our knowledge of shakespeare's work to regard him as the great elizabethan; there is nothing temporary in his dramas, except petty incidents and external trappings--so truly did he dwell amidst the elements constituting man in every age and clime. but this cannot be said of any other poet, not even of chaucer or spenser, far less of milton, or pope or wordsworth. in their case, the artistic form and the material, the idea and its expression, the beauty and the truth, are to some extent separable. we can distinguish in milton between the puritanic theology which is perishable, and the art whose beauty can never pass away. the former fixes his kinship with his own age, gives him a definite place in the evolution of english life; the latter is independent of time, a thing which has supreme worth in itself. nor can it be doubted that the same holds good of browning. he also is ruled by the ideas of his own age. it may not be altogether possible for us, "who are partners of his motion and mixed up with his career," to allow for the influence of these ideas, and to distinguish between that which is evanescent and that which is permanent in his work; still i must try to do so; for it is the condition of comprehending him, and of appropriating the truth and beauty he came to reveal. and if his nearness to ourselves makes this more difficult, it also makes it more imperative. for there is no doubt that, with carlyle, he is the interpreter of our time, reflecting its confused strength and chaotic wealth. he is the high priest of our age, standing at the altar for us, and giving utterance to our needs and aspirations, our fears and faith. by understanding him, we shall, to some degree, understand ourselves and the power which is silently moulding us to its purposes. it is because i thus regard browning as not merely a poet but a prophet, that i think i am entitled to seek in him, as in isaiah or aeschylus, a solution, or a help to the solution, of the problems that press upon us when we reflect upon man, his place in the world and his destiny. he has given us indirectly, and as a poet gives, a philosophy of life; he has interpreted the world anew in the light of a dominant idea; and it will be no little gain if we can make clear to ourselves those constitutive principles on which his view of the world rests. chapter ii. on the need of a philosophy of life. "art,--which i may style the love of loving, rage of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things for truth's sake, whole and sole, not any good, truth brings the knower, seer, feeler, beside,--instinctive art must fumble for the whole, once fixing on a part however poor, surpass the fragment, and aspire to reconstruct thereby the ultimate entire."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, xliv.] no english poet has spoken more impressively than browning on the weightier matters of morality and religion, or sought with more earnestness to meet the difficulties which arise when we try to penetrate to their ultimate principles. his way of poetry is, i think, fundamentally different from that of any other of our great writers. he often seems to be roused into speech, rather by the intensity of his spiritual convictions than by the subtle incitements of poetic sensibility. his convictions caught fire, and truth became beauty for him; not beauty, truth, as with keats or shelley. he is swayed by ideas, rather than by sublime moods. beneath the endless variety of his poems, there are permanent principles, or "colligating conceptions," as science calls them; and although these are expressed by the way of emotion, they are held by him with all the resources of his reason. his work, though intuitive and perceptive as to form, "gaining god by first leap" as all true art must do, leaves the impression, when regarded as a whole, of an articulated system. it is a view of man's life and destiny that can be maintained, not only during the impassioned moods of poetry, but in the very presence of criticism and doubt. his faith, like pompilia's, is held fast "despite the plucking fiend." he has given to us something more than intuitive glimpses into, the mysteries of man's character. throughout his life he held up the steady light of an optimistic conception of the world, and by its means injected new vigour into english ethical thought. in his case, therefore, it is not an immaterial question, but one almost forced upon us, whether we are to take his ethical doctrine and inspiring optimism as valid truths, or to regard them merely as subjective opinions held by a religious poet. are they creations of a powerful imagination, and nothing more? do they give to the hopes and aspirations that rise so irrepressibly in the heart of man anything better than an appearance of validity, which will prove illusory the moment the cold light of critical inquiry is turned upon them? it is to this unity of his work that i would attribute, in the main, the impressiveness of his deliverances on morality and religion. and this unity justifies us, i think, in applying to browning's view of life methods of criticism that would be out of place with any other english poet. it is one of his unique characteristics, as already hinted, that he has endeavoured to give us a complete and reasoned view of the ethical nature of man, and of his relation to the world--has sought, in fact, to establish a philosophy of life. in his case, not without injustice, it is true, but with less injustice than in the case of any other poet, we may disregard, _for our purposes_, the artistic method of his thought, and lay stress on its content only. he has a right to a place amongst philosophers, as plato has to a place amongst poets. there is such deliberate earnestness and systematic consistency in his teaching, that hegel can scarcely be said to have maintained that "the rational is the real" with greater intellectual tenacity, than browning held to his view of life. he sought, in fact, to establish an idealism; and that idealism, like kant's and fichte's, has its last basis in the moral consciousness. but, even if it be considered that it is not altogether just to apply these critical tests to the poet's teaching, and to make him pay the penalty for assuming a place amongst philosophers, it is certain that what he says of man's spiritual life cannot be rightly valued, till it is regarded in the light of his guiding principles. we shall miss much of what is best in him, even as a poet, if, for instance, we regard his treatment of love merely as the expression of elevated passion, or his optimism as based upon mere hope. love was to him rather an indwelling element in the world, present, like power, in everything. "from the first, power was--i knew. life has made clear to me that, strive but for closer view, love were as plain to see."[a] [footnote: a _reverie--asolando_.] love yielded to him, as reason did to hegel, a fundamental exposition of the nature of things. or, to express the same thing in another way, it was a deliberate hypothesis, which he sought to apply to facts and to test by their means, almost in the same manner as that in which natural science applies and tests its principles. that browning's ethical and religious ideas were for him something different from, and perhaps more than, mere poetic sentiments, will, i believe, be scarcely denied. that he held a deliberate theory, and held it with greater and greater difficulty as he became older, and as his dialectical tendencies grew and threatened to wreck his artistic freedom, is evident to any one who regards his work as a whole. but it will not be admitted so readily that anything other than harm can issue from an attempt to deal with him as if he were a philosopher. even if it be allowed that he held and expressed a definite theory, will it retain any value if we take it out of the region of poetry and impassioned religious faith, into the frigid zone of philosophical inquiry? could any one maintain, apart from the intoxication of religious and poetic sentiment, that the essence of existence is love? as long as we remain within the realm of imagination, it may be argued, we may find in our poet's great sayings both solacement and strength, both rest and an impulse towards higher moral endeavour; but if we seek to treat them as theories of facts, and turn upon them the light of the understanding, will they not inevitably prove to be hallucinations? poetry, we think, has its own proper place and function. it is an invaluable anodyne to the cark and care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping the critical intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious faith. but reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion--a world which to them is always beautiful and good with god's presence--becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing forms of energy. there is, at the present time, a widespread belief that we had better keep poetry and religion beyond the reach of critical investigation, if we set any store by them. faith and reason are thought to be finally divorced. it is an article of the common creed that every attempt which the world has made to bring them together has resulted in denial, or at the best in doubt, regarding all supersensuous facts. the one condition of leading a full life, of maintaining a living relation between ourselves and both the spiritual and material elements of our existence, is to make our lives an alternating rhythm of the head and heart, to distinguish with absolute clearness between the realm of reason and that of faith. now, such an assumption would be fatal to any attempt like the present, to find truth in poetry; and i must, therefore, try to meet it before entering upon a statement and criticism of browning's view of life. i cannot admit that the difficulties of placing the facts of man's spiritual life on a rational basis are so great as to justify the assertion that there is no such basis, or that it is not discoverable by man. surely, it is unreasonable to make intellectual death the condition of spiritual life. if such a condition were imposed on man, it must inevitably defeat its own purpose; for man cannot possibly continue to live a divided life, and persist in believing that for which his reason knows no defence. we must, in the long run, either rationalize our faith in morality and religion, or abandon them as illusions. and we should at least hesitate to deny that reason--in spite of its apparent failure in the past to justify our faith in the principles of spiritual life--may yet, as it becomes aware of its own nature and the might which dwells in it, find beauty and goodness, nay, god himself, in the world. we should at least hesitate to condemn man to choose between irreflective ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle. poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have something to tell the world that science, which is often ignorant of its own limits, cannot teach. the failure of philosophy in the past, even if it were as complete as is believed by persons ignorant of its history, is no argument against its success in the future. such persons have never known that the world of thought like that of action makes a stepping stone of its dead self. he who presumes to decide what passes the power of man's thought, or to prescribe absolute limits to human knowledge, is rash, to say the least; and he has neither caught the most important of the lessons of modern science, nor been lifted to the level of its inspiration. for science has done one thing greater than to unlock the secrets of nature. it has revealed something of the might of reason, and given new grounds for the faith, which in all ages has inspired the effort to know,--the faith that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by the thought of man. can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that man, and he alone, must remain an enigma? or does he not rather bear within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not _his_ thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? the success of science, in reducing to law the most varied and apparently unconnected facts, should dispel any suspicion which attaches to the attempt to gather these laws under still wider ones, and to interpret the world in the light of the highest principles. and this is precisely what poetry and religion and philosophy do, each in its own way. they carry the work of the sciences into wider regions, and that, as i shall try to show, by methods which, in spite of many external differences, are fundamentally at one with those which the sciences employ. there is only one way of giving the quietus to the metaphysics of poets and philosophers, and of showing the futility of a philosophy of life, or of any scientific explanation of religion and morals. it is to show that there is some radical absurdity in the very attempt. till this is done, the human mind will not give up problems of weighty import, however hard it may be to solve them. the world refused to believe socrates when he pronounced a science of nature impossible, and centuries of failure did not break man's courage. science, it is true, has given up some problems as insoluble; it will not now try to construct a perpetually moving machine, or to square the circle. but it has given them up, not because they are difficult, but because they are unreasonable tasks. the problems have a surd or irrational element in them; and to solve them would be to bring reason into collision with itself. now, whatever may be the difficulties of establishing a theory of life, or a philosophy, it has never been shown to be an unreasonable task to attempt it. one might, on the contrary, expect, _prima facie_, that in a world progressively proved to be intelligible to man, man himself would be no exception. it is impossible that the "light in him should be darkness," or that the thought which reveals the order of the world should be itself chaotic. the need for philosophy is just the ultimate form of the need for knowledge; and the truths which philosophy brings to light are implied in every rational explanation of things. the only choice we can have is between a conscious metaphysics and an unconscious one, between hypotheses which we have examined and whose limitations we know, and hypotheses which rule us from behind, as pure prejudices do. it is because of this that the empiric is so dogmatic, and the ignorant man so certain of the truth of his opinion. they do not know their postulates, nor are they aware that there is no interpretation of an object which does not finally point to a theory of being. we understand no joint or ligament, except in relation to the whole organism, and no fact, or event, except by finding a place for it in the context of our experience. the history of the pebble can be given, only in the light of the story of the earth, as it is told by the whole of geology. we must begin very far back, and bring our widest principles to bear upon the particular thing, if we wish really to know what it is. it is a law that explains, and laws are always universal. all our knowledge, even the most broken and inconsistent, streams from some fundamental conception, in virtue of which all the variety of objects constitute one world, one orderly kosmos, even to the meanest mind. it is true that the central thought, be it rich or poor, must, like the sun's light, be broken against particular facts. but there is no need of forgetting the real source of knowledge, or of deeming that its progress is a synthesis without law, or an addition of fact to fact without any guiding principles. now, it is the characteristic of poetry and philosophy that they keep alive our consciousness of these primary, uniting principles. they always dwell in the presence of the idea which makes their object _one_. to them the world is always, and necessarily, a harmonious whole, as it is also to the religious spirit. it is because of this that the universe is a thing of beauty for the poet, a revelation of god's goodness to the devout soul, and a manifestation of absolute reason to the philosopher. art, religion, and philosophy fail or flourish together. the age of prose and scepticism appears when the sense of the presence of the whole in the particular facts of the world and of life has been dulled. and there is a necessity in this; for if the conception of the world as a whole is held to be impossible, if philosophy is a futility, then poetry will be a vain sentiment and religion a delusion. nor will the failure of thought, when once demonstrated in these upper regions, be confined to them. on the contrary, it will spread downwards to science and ordinary knowledge, as mountain mists blot out the valleys. for every synthesis of fact to fact, every attempt to know, however humble and limited, is inspired by a secret faith in the unity of the world. each of the sciences works within its own region, and colligates its details in the light of its own hypothesis; and all the sciences taken together presuppose the presence in the world of a principle that binds it into an orderly totality. scientific explorers know that they are all working towards the same centre. and, ever and anon, as the isolated thinker presses home his own hypothesis, he finds his thought beating on the limits of his science, and suggesting some wider hypothesis. the walls that separate the sciences are wearing thin, and at times light penetrates from one to the other. so that to their votaries, at least, the faith is progressively justified, that there is a meeting point for the sciences, a central truth in which the dispersed rays will again be gathered together. in fact, all the sciences are working together under the guidance of a principle common to them all, although it may not be consciously known and no attempt is made to define it. in science, as in philosophy and art and religion, there is a principle of unity, which, though latent, is really prior to all explanation of particular matters of fact. in truth, man has only one way of knowing. there is no fundamental difference between scientific and philosophic procedure. we always light up facts by means of general laws. the fall of the stone was a perfect enigma, a universally unintelligible bit of experience, till the majestic imagination of newton conceived the idea of universal gravitation. wherever mind successfully invades the realm of chaos, poetry, the sense of the whole, comes first. there is the intuitive flash, the penetrative glimpse, got no one knows exactly whence--though we do know that it comes neither from the dead facts nor from the vacant region of _a priori_ thought, but somehow from the interaction of both these elements of knowledge. after the intuitive flash comes the slow labour of proof, the application of the principle to details. and that application transforms both the principle and the details, so that the former is enriched with content and the latter are made intelligible--a veritable conquest and valid possession for mankind. and in this labour of proof, science and philosophy alike take their share. philosophy may be said to come midway between poetry and science, and to partake of the nature of both. on the one side it deals, like poetry, with ideals of knowledge, and announces truths which it does not completely verify; on the other, it leaves to science the task of articulating its principles in facts, though it begins the articulation itself. it reveals subsidiary principles, and is, at the same time, a witness for the unity of the categories of science. we may say, if we wish, that its principles are mere hypotheses. but so are the ideas which underlie the most practical of the sciences; so is every forecast of genius by virtue of which knowledge is extended; so is every principle of knowledge not completely worked out. to say that philosophy is hypothetical implies no charge, other than that which can be levelled, in the same sense, against the most solid body of scientific knowledge in the world. the fruitful question in each case alike is, how far, if at all, does the hypothesis enable us to understand particular facts. the more careful of our scientific thinkers are well aware of the limits under which they work and of the hypothetical character of their results. "i take euclidean space, and the existence of material particles and elemental energy for granted," says the physicist; "deny them, and i am helpless; grant them, and i shall establish quantitative relations between the different forms of this elemental energy, and make it tractable and tame to man's uses. all i teach depends upon my hypothesis. in it is the secret of all the power i wield. i do not pretend to say what this elemental energy is. i make no declaration regarding the actual nature of things; and all questions as to the ultimate origin or final destination of the world are beyond the scope of my inquiry. i am ruled by my hypothesis; i regard phenomena _from my point of view_; and my right to do so i substantiate by the practical and theoretical results which follow." the language of geology, chemistry, zoology, and even mathematics is the same. they all start from a hypothesis; they are all based on an imaginative conception, and in this sense their votaries are poets, who see the unity of being throb in the particular fact. now, so far as the particular sciences are concerned, i presume that no one will deny the supreme power of these colligating ideas. the sciences do not grow by a process of empiricism, which rambles tentatively and blindly from fact to fact, unguided of any hypothesis. but if they do not, if, on the contrary, each science is ruled by its own hypothesis, and uses that hypothesis to bind its facts together, then the question arises, are there no wider colligating principles amongst these hypotheses themselves? are the sciences independent of each other, or is their independence only surface appearance? this is the question which philosophy asks, and the sciences themselves by their progress suggest a positive answer to it. the knowledge of the world which the sciences are building is not a chaotic structure. by their apparently independent efforts, the outer kosmos is gradually reproduced in the mind of man, and the temple of truth is silently rising. we may not as yet be able to connect wing with wing, or to declare definitely the law of the whole. the logical order of the hypotheses of the various sciences, the true connection of these categories of constructive thought, may yet be uncertain. but, still, there _is_ such an order and connection: the whole building has its plan, which becomes more and more intelligible as it approaches to its completion. beneath all the differences, there are fundamental principles which give to human thought a definite unity of movement and direction. there are architectonic conceptions which are guiding, not only the different sciences, but all the modes of thought of an age. there are intellectual media, "working hypotheses," by means of which successive centuries observe all that they see; and these far-reaching constructive principles divide the history of mankind into distinct stages. in a word, there are dynasties of great ideas, such as the idea of development in our own day; and these successively ascend the throne of mind, and hold a sway over human thought which is well-nigh absolute. now, if this is so, is it certain that all _knowledge_ of these ruling conceptions is impossible? in other words, is the attempt to construct a philosophy absurd? to say that it is, to deny the possibility of catching any glimpse of those regulative ideas, which determine the main tendencies of human thought, is to place the supreme directorate of the human intelligence in the hands of a necessity which, _for us_, is blind. for, an order that is hidden is equivalent to chance, so far as knowledge is concerned; and if we believe it to exist, we do so in the face of the fact that all we see, and all we _can_ see, is the opposite of order, namely lawlessness. human knowledge, on this view, would be subjected to law in its details and compartments, but to disorder as a whole. thinking men would be organized into regiments; but the regiments would not constitute an army, nor would there be any unity of movement in the attack on the realm of ignorance. but, such is not the conclusion to which the study of human history leads, especially when we observe its movements on a large scale. on the contrary, it is found that history falls into great epochs, each of which has its own peculiar characteristics. ages, as well as nations and individuals, have features of their own, special and definite modes of thinking and acting. the movement of thought in each age has its own direction, which is determined by some characteristic and fundamental idea, that fulfils for it the part of a working hypothesis in a particular science. it is the prerogative of the greatest leaders of thought in an age to catch a glimpse of this ruling idea when it first makes its appearance; and it is their function, not only to discover it, but also to reveal it to others. and, in this way, they are at once the exponents of their time, and its prophets. they reveal that which is already a latent but active power--"a tendency"; but they reveal it to a generation which will see the truth for itself, only after the potency which lies in it has manifested itself in national institutions and habits of thought and action. _after_ the prophets have left us, we believe what they have said; as long as they are with us, they are voices crying in the wilderness. now, these great ideas, these harmonies of the world of mind, first strike upon the ear of the poet. they seem to break into the consciousness of man by the way of emotion. they possess the seer; he is divinely mad, and he utters words whose meaning passes his own calmer comprehension. what we find in goethe, we find also in a manner in browning: an insight which is also foresight, a dim and partial consciousness of the truth about to be, sending its light before it, and anticipating all systematic reflection. it is an insight which appears to be independent of all method; but it is in nature, though not in sweep and expanse, akin to the intuitive leap by which the scientific explorer lights upon his new hypothesis. we can find no other law for it, than that sensitiveness to the beauty and truth hidden in facts, which much reflection on them generates for genius. for these great minds the "muddy vesture" is worn thin by thought, and they hear the immortal music. the poet soon passes his glowing torch into the hands of the philosopher. after aeschylus and sophocles, come plato and aristotle. the intuitive flash grows into a fixed light, which rules the day. the great idea, when reflected upon, becomes a system. when the light of such an idea is steadily held on human affairs, it breaks into endless forms of beauty and truth. the content of the idea is gradually evolved; hypotheses spring out of it, which are accepted as principles, rule the mind of an age, and give it its work and its character. in this way, hobbes and locke laid down, or at least defined, the boundaries within which moved the thought of the eighteenth century; and no one acquainted with the poetic and philosophic thought of germany, from lessing to goethe and from kant to hegel, can fail to find therein the source and spring of the constitutive principles of our own intellectual, social, political, and religious life. the virtues and the vices of the aristocracy of the world of mind penetrate downwards. the works of the poets and philosophers, so far from being filled with impracticable dreams, are repositories of great suggestions which the world adopts for its guidance. the poets and philosophers lay no railroads and invent no telephones; but they, nevertheless, bring about that attitude towards nature, man and god, and generate those moods of the general mind, from which issue, not only the scientific, but also the social, political and religious forces of the age. it is mainly on this account that i cannot treat the supreme utterances of browning lightly, or think it an idle task to try to connect them into a philosophy of life. in his optimism of love, in his supreme confidence in man's destiny and sense of the infinite height of the moral horizon of humanity, in his courageous faith in the good, and his profound conviction of the evanescence of evil, there lies a vital energy whose inspiring power we are yet destined to feel. until a spirit kindred to his own arises, able to push the battle further into the same region, much of the practical task of the age that is coming will consist in living out in detail the ideas to which he has given expression. i contend, then, not merely for a larger charity, but for a truer view of the facts of history than is evinced by those who set aside the poets and philosophers as mere dreamers, and conceive that the sciences alone occupy the region of valid thought in all its extent. there is a universal brotherhood of which all who think are members. not only do they all contribute to man's victory over his environment and himself, but they contribute in a manner which is substantially the same. there are many points of superficial distinction between the processes of philosophy and science, and between both and the method of poetry; but the inner movement, if one may so express it, is identical in all. it is time to have done with the notion that philosophers occupy a transcendent region beyond experience, or spin spiritual cocoons by _a priori_ methods, and with the view that scientific men are mere empirics, building their structures from below by an _a posteriori_ way of thought, without the help of any ruling conceptions. all alike endeavour to interpret experience, but none of them get their principles from it. "but, friends, truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe." there is room and need for the higher synthesis of philosophy and poetry, as well as for the more palpable and, at the same time, more narrow colligating conceptions of the systematic sciences. the quantitative relations between material objects, which are investigated by mathematics and physics, do not exhaust the realm of the knowable, so as to leave no place for the poet's, or the philosopher's view of the world. the scientific investigator who, like mr. tyndall, so far forgets the limitations of his province as to use his natural data as premises for religious or irreligious conclusions, is as illogical as the popular preacher, who attacks scientific conclusions because they are not consistent with his theological presuppositions. looking only at their primary aspects, we cannot say that religious presuppositions and the scientific interpretation of facts are either consistent or inconsistent: they are simply different. their harmony or discord can come only when the higher principles of philosophy have been fully developed, and when the departmental ideas of the various sciences are organized into a view of the world as a whole. and this is a task which has not as yet been accomplished. the forces from above and below have not met. when they do meet, they will assuredly find that they are friends, and not foes. for philosophy can articulate its supreme conception only by interaction with the sciences; and, on the other hand, the progress of science, and the effectiveness of its division of labour, are ultimately conditioned by its sensitiveness to the hints, given by poets and philosophers, of those wider principles in virtue of which the world is conceived as a unity. there are many, indeed, who cannot see the wood for the trees, as there are others who cannot see the trees for the wood. carlyle cared nothing though science were able to turn a sunbeam on its axis; ruskin sees little in the advance of invention except more slag-hills. and scientific men have not been slow to return with interest the scorn of the moralists. but a more comprehensive view of the movement of human knowledge will show that none labour in vain. for its movement is that of a thing which _grows_! and in growth there is always movement towards both unity and difference. science, in pursuing truth into greater and greater detail, is constrained by its growing consciousness of the unlimited wealth of its material, to divide and isolate its interests more and more; and thus, at the same time, the need for the poets and philosophers is growing deeper, their task is becoming more difficult of achievement, and a greater triumph in so far as it is achieved. both science and philosophy are working towards a more concrete view of the world as an articulated whole. if we cannot quite say with browning that "poets never dream," we may yet admit with gratitude that their dreams are an inspiration. "sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."[a] [footnote a: _abt vogler_.] and side by side with the poetry that grasps the truth in immediate intuition, there is also the uniting activity of philosophy, which, catching up its hints, carries "back our scattered knowledge of the facts and laws of nature to the principle upon which they rest; and, on the other hand, develops that principle so as to fill all the details of knowledge with a significance which they cannot have in themselves, but only as seen _sub specie aeternitatis_."[b] [footnote b: _the problem of philosophy at the present time_, by professor caird.] so far we have spoken of the function of philosophy in the interpretation of the phenomena of the outer world. it bears witness to the unity of knowledge, and strives by the constructive criticism of the categories of science to render that unity explicit. its function is, no doubt, valid and important, for it is evident that man cannot rest content with fragmentary knowledge. but still, it might be objected that it is premature at present to endeavour to formulate that unity. physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences, while they necessarily presuppose the unity of knowledge, and attempt in their own way and in their own sphere to discover it, are making very satisfactory headway without raising any of the desperate questions of metaphysics as to its ultimate nature. for them it is not likely to matter for a long time to come whether optimism or pessimism, materialism or idealism, or none of them, be true. in any case the principles they establish are valid. physical relations always remain true; "ginger will be hot i' the mouth, and there will be more cakes and ale." it is only when the sciences break down beneath the weight of knowledge and prove themselves inadequate, that it becomes necessary or advantageous to seek for more comprehensive principles. at present is it not better to persevere in the way of science, than to be seduced from it by the desire to solve ultimate problems, which, however reasonable and pressing, seem to be beyond our power to answer? such reasonings are not convincing; still, so far as natural science is concerned, they seem to indicate that there might be no great harm in ignoring, for a time, its dependence on the wider aspects of human thought. there is no department of nature so limited, but that it may more than satisfy the largest ambition of the individual for knowledge. but this attitude of indifference to ultimate questions is liable at any moment to be disturbed. "just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, a chorus-ending from euripides,-- and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears as old and new at once as nature's self, to rap and knock and enter in our soul, take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- the grand perhaps! we look on helplessly. there the old misgivings, crooked questions are."[a] [footnote a: _bishop blougram's apology._] amongst the facts of our experience which cry most loudly for some kind of solution, are those of our own inner life. we are in pressing need of a "working hypothesis" wherewith to understand ourselves, as well as of a theory which will explain the revolution of the planets, or the structure of an oyster. and this self of ours intrudes everywhere. it is only by resolutely shutting our eyes, that we can forget the part it plays even in the outer world of natural science. so active is it in the constitution of things, so dependent is their nature on the nature of our knowing faculties, that scientific men themselves admit that their surest results are only hypothetical. their truth depends on laws of thought which natural science does not investigate. but quite apart from this doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which is generally first acknowledged and then ignored, every man, the worst and the best alike, is constrained to take some _practical_ attitude towards his fellows. man is never alone with nature, and the connections with his fellows which sustain his intelligent life, are liable to bring him into trouble, if they are not to some degree understood. "there's power in me," said bishop blougram, "and will to dominate which i must exercise, they hurt me else." the impulse to know is only a phase of the more general impulse to act and to be. the specialist's devotion to his science is his answer to a demand, springing from his practical need, that he realize himself through action. he does not construct his edifice of knowledge, as the bird is supposed to build its nest, without any consciousness of an end to be attained thereby. even if, like lessing, he values the pursuit of truth for its own sake, still what stings him into effort is the sense that in truth only can he find the means of satisfying and realizing himself. beneath all man's activities, as their very spring and source, there lies some dim conception of an end to be attained. this is his moral consciousness, which no neglect will utterly suppress. all human effort, the effort to know like every other, conceals within it a reference to some good, conceived at the time as supreme and complete; and this, in turn, contains a theory both of man's self and of the universe on which he must impress his image. every man must have his philosophy of life, simply because he must act; though, in many cases, that philosophy may be latent and unconscious, or, at least, not a definite object of reflection. the most elementary question directed at his moral consciousness will at once elicit the universal element. we cannot ask whether an action be right or wrong without awakening all the echoes of metaphysics. as there is no object on the earth's surface whose equilibrium is not fixed by its relation to the earth's centre, so the most elementary moral judgment, the simplest choice, the most irrational vagaries of a will calling itself free and revelling in its supposed lawlessness, are dominated by the conception of a universal good. everything that a man does is an attempt to articulate his view of this good, with a particular content. hence, man as a moral agent is always the centre of his own horizon, and stands right beneath the zenith. little as he may be aware of it, his relation between himself and his supreme good is direct. and he orders his whole world from his point of view, just as he regards east and west as meeting at the spot on which he stands. whether he will or not, he cannot but regard the universe of men and objects as the instrument of his purposes. he extracts all its interest and meaning from himself. his own shadow falls upon it all. if he is selfish, that is, if he interprets the self that is in him as vulturous, then the whole outer world and his fellow-men fall for him into the category of carrion, or not-carrion. if he knows himself as spirit, as the energy of love or reason, if the prime necessity he recognizes within himself is the necessity to be good, then the universe becomes for him an instrument wherewith moral character is evolved. in all cases alike, his life-work is an effort to rob the world of its alien character, and to translate it into terms of himself. we are in the habit of fixing a chasm between a man's deeds and his metaphysical, moral, and religious creed; and even of thinking that he can get on "in a sufficiently prosperous manner," without any such creed. can we not digest without a theory of peptics, or do justice without constructing an ideal state? the truest answer, though it is an answer easily misunderstood, is that we cannot. in the sphere of morality, at least, action, depends on knowledge: socrates was right in saying that virtuous conduct ignorant of its end is accidental. man's action, so far as it is good or evil, is shot through and through with his intelligence. and once we clearly distinguish between belief and profession, between the motives which really impel our actions and the psychological account of them with which we may deceive ourselves and others, we shall be obliged to confess that we always act our creed. a man's conduct, just because he is man, is generated by his view of himself and his world. he who cheats his neighbour believes in tortuosity, and, as carlyle says, has the supreme quack for his god. no one ever acted without some dim, though perhaps foolish enough, half-belief that the world was at his back; whether he plots good or evil he always has god as an accomplice. and this is why character cannot be really bettered by any peddling process. moralists and preachers are right in insisting on the need of a new life, that is, of a new principle, as the basis of any real improvement; and such a principle necessarily carries in it a new attitude towards men, and a new interpretation of the moral agent himself and of his world. thus, wherever we touch the practical life of man, we are at once referred to a metaphysic. his creed is the heart of his character, and it beats as a pulse in every action. hence, when we deal with moral life, we _must_ start from the centre. in our intellectual life, it is not obviously unreasonable to suppose that there is no need of endeavouring to reach upward to a constructive idea, which makes the universe one, but when we act, such self-deception is not possible. as a moral agent, and a moral agent man always is, he not only may, but must have his working hypothesis, and that hypothesis must be all-inclusive. as there are natural laws which connect man's physical movements with the whole system of nature, so there are spiritual relations which connect him with the whole spiritual universe; and spiritual relations are always direct. now it follows from this, that, whenever we consider man as a moral agent, that is, as an agent who converts ideas into actual things, the need of a philosophy becomes evident. instead of condemning ideal interpretations of the universe as useless dreams, the foolish products of an ambition of thought which refuses to respect the limits of the human intellect, we shall understand that philosophers and poets are really striving with greater clearness of vision, and in a more sustained manner, to perform the task which all men are obliged to perform in some way or other. man subsists as a natural being only on condition of comprehending, to some degree, the conditions of his natural life, and the laws of his natural environment. from earliest youth upwards, he is learning that fire will burn and water drown, and that he can play with the elements with safety only within the sphere lit up by his intelligence. nature will not pardon the blunders of ignorance, nor tamely submit to every hasty construction. and this truth is still more obvious in relation to man's moral life. here, too, and in a pre-eminent degree, conduct waits on intelligence. deep will only answer unto deep; and great characters only come with much meditation on the things that are highest. and, on the other hand, the misconstruction of life's meaning flings man back upon himself, and makes his action nugatory. byronism was driven "howling home again," says the poet. the universe will not be interpreted in terms of sense, nor be treated as carrion, as carlyle said. there is no rest in the "everlasting no," because it is a wrong view of man and of the world. or rather, the negative is not everlasting; and man is driven onwards by despair, through the "centre of indifference," till he finds a "universal yea"--a true view of his relation to the universe. there is given to men the largest choice to do or to let alone, at every step in life. but there is one necessity which they cannot escape, because they carry it within them. they absolutely must try to make the world their home, find some kind of reconciling idea between themselves and the forces amidst which they move, have some kind of working hypothesis of life. nor is it possible to admit that they will find rest till they discover a true hypothesis. if they do not seek it by reflection--if, in their ardour to penetrate into the secrets of nature, they forget themselves; if they allow the supreme facts of their moral life to remain in the confusion of tradition, and seek to compromise the demands of their spirit by sacrificing to the idols of their childhood's faith; if they fortify themselves in the indifference of agnosticism,--they must reap the harvest of their irreflection. ignorance is not harmless in matters of character any more than in the concerns of our outer life. there are in national and in individual history seasons of despair, and that despair, when it is deepest, is ever found to be the shadow of moral failure--the result of going out into action with a false view of the purpose of human life, and a wrong conception of man's destiny. at such times, the people have not understood themselves or their environment, and, in consequence, they come into collision with their own welfare. there is no experiment so dangerous to an age or people, as that of relegating to the common ignorance of unreasoning faith the deep concerns of moral conduct; and there is no attitude more pitiable than that which leads it to turn a deaf ear and the lip of contempt towards those philosophers who carry the spirit of scientific inquiry into these higher regions, and endeavour to establish for mankind, by the irrefragable processes of reason, those principles on which rest all the great elements of man's destiny. we cannot act without a theory of life; and to whom shall we look for such a theory, except to those who, undaunted by the difficulties of the task, ask once more, and strive to answer, those problems which man cannot entirely escape, as long as he continues to think and act? chapter iii. browning's place in english poetry. "but there's a great contrast between him and me. he seems very content with life, and takes much satisfaction in the world. it's a very strange and curious spectacle to behold a man in these days so confidently cheerful." (_carlyle_.) it has been said of carlyle, who may for many reasons be considered as our poet's twin figure, that he laid the foundations of his world of thought in _sartor resartus_, and never enlarged them. his _orientirung_ was over before he was forty years old--as is, indeed, the case with most men. after that period there was no fundamental change in his view of the world; nothing which can be called a new idea disturbed his outline sketch of the universe. he lived afterwards only to fill it in, showing with ever greater detail the relations of man to man in history, and emphasizing with greater grimness the war of good and evil in human action. there is evidence, it is true, that the formulae from which he more or less consciously set forth, ultimately proved too narrow for him, and we find him beating himself in vain against their limitations; still, on the whole, carlyle speculated within the range and influence of principles adopted early in life, and never abandoned for higher or richer ideas, or substantially changed. in these respects, there is considerable resemblance between carlyle and browning. browning, indeed, fixed his point of view and chose his battleground still earlier; and he held it resolutely to his life's close. in his _pauline_ and in his epilogue to _asolando_ we catch the triumphant tone of a single idea, which, during all the long interval, had never sunk into silence. like "the wise thrush, he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!"[a] [footnote a: _home thoughts from abroad_.] moreover, these two poets, if i may be permitted to call carlyle a poet, taught the same truth. they were both witnesses to the presence of god in the spirit of man, and looked at this life in the light of another and a higher; or rather, they penetrated through the husk of time and saw that eternity is even here, a tranquil element underlying the noisy antagonisms of man's earthly life. both of them, like plato's philosopher, made their home in the sunlight of ideal truth: they were not denizens of the cave taking the things of sense for those of thought, shadows for realities, echoes for the voices of men. but, while carlyle fought his way into this region, browning found himself in it from the first; while carlyle bought his freedom with a great sum, the poet "was free born." carlyle saw the old world faith break up around him, and its fragments never ceased to embarrass his path. he was _at_ the point of transition, present at the collision of the old and new, and in the midst of the confusion. he, more than any other english writer, was the instrument of the change from the deism of the eighteenth century and the despair which followed it, into the larger faith of our own. but, for browning, there was a new heaven and a new earth, and old things had passed away. this notable contrast between the two men, arising at once from their disposition and their moral environment, had far-reaching effects on their lives and their writings. but their affinity was deeper than the difference, for they are essentially heirs and exponents of the same movement in english thought. the main characteristic of that movement is that it is both moral and religious, a devotion to god and the active service of man, a recognition at once of the rights of nature and of spirit. it does not, on the one hand, raise the individual as a natural being to the throne of the universe, and make all forces social, political, and spiritual stoop to his rights; nor does it, on the other hand, deny these rights, or make the individual a mere instrument of society. it at least attempts to reconcile the fundamental facts of human nature, without compromising any of them. it cannot be called either individualistic or socialistic; but it strives to be both at once, so that both man and society mean more to this age than they ever did before. the narrow formulae that cramped the thought of the period which preceded ours have been broken through. no one can pass from the hedonists and individualists to carlyle and browning without feeling that these two men are representatives of new forces in politics, in religion, and in literature,--forces which will undoubtedly effect momentous changes before they are caught again and fixed in creeds. that a new epoch in english thought was veritably opened by them is indicated by the surprise and bewilderment they occasioned at their first appearance. carlyle had emerson to break his loneliness and browning had rossetti; but, to most other men at that day, _sartor_ and _pauline_ were all but unintelligible. the general english reader could make little of the strange figures that had broken into the realm of literature; and the value and significance of their work, as well as its originality, will be recognized better by ourselves if we take a hurried glance at the times which lay behind them. its main worth will be found to lie in the fact that they strove to bring together again certain fundamental elements, on which the moral life of man must always rest, and which had fallen asunder in the ages which preceded their own. the whole-hearted, instinctive life of the elizabethan age was narrowed and deepened into the severe one-sidedness of puritanism, which cast on the bright earth the sombre shadow of a life to come. england was given up for a time to a magnificent half-truth. it did not "wait the slow and sober uprise all around o' the building," but "ran up right to roof a sudden marvel, piece of perfectness."[a] [footnote a:_prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] after puritanism came charles the second and the rights of the flesh, which rights were gradually clarified, till they contradicted themselves in the benevolent self-seeking of altruistic hedonism. david hume led the world out of the shadow of eternity, and showed that it was only an object of the five senses; or of six, if we add that of "hunger." the divine element was explained away, and the proper study of mankind was, not man, as that age thought, but man reduced to his beggarly elements--a being animated solely by the sensuous springs of pleasure and pain, which should properly, as carlyle thought, go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral. all things were reduced to what they seemed, robbed of their suggestiveness, changed into definite, sharp-edged, mutually exclusive particulars. the world was an aggregate of isolated facts, or, at the best, a mechanism into which particulars were fitted by force; and society was a gathering of mere individuals, repelling each other by their needs and greed, with a ring of natural necessity to bind them together. it was a fit time for political economy to supplant ethics. there was nowhere an ideal which could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to find a higher life. and, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way to naturalism and poetry to prose. after this age of prose came our own day. the new light first flushed the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of germany: kant and lessing, fichte and schiller, goethe and hegel. they brought about the copernican change. for them this world of the five senses, of space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to a system which was spiritual; and man found his meaning in his connection with society, the life of which stretched endlessly far back into the past and forward into the future. psychology gave way to metaphysics. the universal element in the thought of man was revealed. instead of mechanism there was life. a new spirit of poetry and philosophy brought god back into the world, revealed his incarnation in the mind of man, and changed nature into a pellucid garment within which throbbed the love divine. the antagonism of hard alternatives was at an end; the universe was spirit-woven and every smallest object was "filled full of magical music, as they freight a star with light." there were no longer two worlds, but one; for "the other" world penetrated this, and was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were reconciled. these thinkers made room for man, as against the puritans, and for god, as against their successors. instead of the hopeless struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which religion gives: "psyche drinks its stream and forgets her sorrows." now, this is just the soil where art blooms. for what is beauty but the harmony of thought and sense, a universal meaning caught and tamed in the particular? to the poet each little flower that blooms has endless worth, and is regarded as perfect and complete; for he sees that the spirit of the whole dwells in it. it whispers to him the mystery of the infinite; it is a pulse in which beats the universal heart. the true poet finds god everywhere; for the ideal is actual wherever beauty dwells. and there is the closest affinity between art and religion, as its history proves, from job and isaiah, homer and aeschylus, to our own poet; for both art and religion lift us, each in its own way, above one-sidedness and limitation, to the region of the universal. the one draws god to man, brings perfection _here_, and reaches its highest form in the joyous life of greece, where the natural world was clothed with almost supernatural beauty; the other lifts man to god, and finds this life good because it reflects and suggests the greater life that is to be. both poetry and religion are a reconciliation and a satisfaction; both lift man above the contradictions of limited existence, and place him in the region of peace--where, "with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, he sees into the life of things."[a] [footnote a: _tintern abbey._] in this sense, it will be always true of the poet, as it is of the religious man, that "the world, the beauty and the wonder and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, changes, surprises,"[a] [footnote a: _fra lippo lippi_.] lead him back to god, who made it all. he is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world. it is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the age of deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic grandeur. unless we regard burke as the herald of the new era, we may say that england first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the poems of shelley and wordsworth. "the one remains, the many change and pass; heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly; life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity, until death tramples it to fragments."[b] [footnote b: _adonais_.] "and i have felt," says wordsworth, "a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man: a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things."[c] [footnote c: _tintern abbey_.] such notes as these could not be struck by pope, nor be understood by the age of prose. still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of browning. whether he be a greater poet than these or not,--a question whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and reflects by his own facet the universal truth--his poetry contains in it larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher discords of his more stubborn material. even where their spheres touch, browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner. to shelley, perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets, "that light whose smile kindles the universe, that beauty in which all things work and move," was an impassioned sentiment, a glorious intoxication; to browning it was a conviction, reasoned and willed, possessing the whole man, and held in the sober moments when the heart is silent. "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" was lightened for wordsworth, only when he was far from the haunts of men, and free from the "dreary intercourse of daily life"; but browning weaved his song of hope right amidst the wail and woe of man's sin and wretchedness. for wordsworth "sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the heart, passed into his purer mind with tranquil restoration," and issued "in a serene and blessed mood"; but browning's poetry is not merely the poetry of the emotions however sublimated. he starts with the hard repellent fact, crushes by sheer force of thought its stubborn rind, presses into it, and brings forth the truth at its heart. the greatness of browning's poetry is in its perceptive grip: and in nothing is he more original than in the manner in which he takes up his task, and assumes his artistic function. in his postponement of feeling to thought we recognize a new poetic method, the significance of which we cannot estimate as yet. but, although we may fail to apprehend the meaning of the new method he employs, we cannot fail to perceive the fact, which is not less striking, that the region from which he quarries his material is new. and yet he does not break away abruptly from his predecessors. his kinship with them, in that he recognizes the presence of god in nature, is everywhere evident. we quote one passage, scarcely to be surpassed by any of our poets, as indicative of his power of dealing with the supernaturalism of nature. "the centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, and the earth changes like a human face; the molten ore burst up among the rocks, winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright in hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask-- god joys therein. the wroth sea's waves are edged with foam, white as the bitter lip of hate, when, in the solitary waste, strange groups of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like, staring together with their eyes on flame-- god tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: but spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes over its breast to waken it, rare verdure buds tenderly upon rough banks, between the withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, like a smile striving with a wrinkled face. * * * * * "above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark soars up and up, shivering for very joy; afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls flit where the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets; savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain--and god renews his ancient rapture. thus he dwells in all, from life's minute beginnings, up at last to man--the consummation of this scheme of being, the completion of this sphere of life."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus._] such passages as these contain neither the rapt, reflective calm of wordsworth's solemn tones, nor the ethereal intoxication of shelley's spirit-music; but there is in them the same consciousness of the infinite meaning of natural facts. and beyond this, there is also, in the closing lines, a hint of a new region for art. shelley and wordsworth were the poets of nature, as all truly say; browning was the poet of the human soul. for shelley, the beauty in which all things work and move was well-nigh "quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of man"; and wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o'er man's mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him. from the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed sadness. it was a foolish and furious strife with unknown powers fought in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that god dwelt amidst the chaos. but browning found "harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." he found nature crowned in man, though man was mean and miserable. at the heart of the most wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch of god. shelley turned away from man; wordsworth paid him rare visits, like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with looking at him from afar; browning dwelt with him. he was a comrade in the fight, and ever in the van of man's endeavour bidding him be of good cheer. he was a witness for god in the midmost dark, where meet in deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong. for god is present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the world of will and thought. beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but "has its way with man, not he with it." now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to penetrate with hope; and browning was the first of modern poets to "stoop into the vast and unexplored abyss, strenuously beating the silent boundless regions of the sky." it is also a new world for religion and morality; and to understand it demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life. to show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as already hinted, to connect the poet's work, not merely with that of his english predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive movement of the thought of germany since the time of kant. it would be necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of his race. it proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and inspired him with the conviction of its boundless progress. it is not that the significance of the individual or the meaning of his endeavour is lost. under this new view, man has still to fight for his own hand, and it is still recognized that spirit is always burdened with its own fate and cannot share its responsibility. morality does not give way to religion or pass into it, and there is a sense in which the individual is always alone in the sphere of duty. but from this new point of view the individual is re-explained for us, and we begin to understand that he is the focus of a light which is universal, "one more incarnation of the mind of god." his moral task is no longer to seek his own in the old sense, but to elevate humanity; for it is only by taking this circuit that he can come to his own. such a task as this is a sufficiently great one to occupy all time; but it is to humanity in him that the task belongs, and it will therefore be achieved. this is no new one-sidedness. it does not mean, to those who comprehend it, the supplanting of the individual thought by the collective thought, or the substitution of humanity for man. the universal is _in_ the particular, the fact _is_ the law. there is no collision between the whole and the part, for the whole lives in the part. as each individual plant has its own life and beauty and worth, although the universe has conspired to bring it into being; so also, and in a far higher degree, man has his own duty and his own dignity, although he is but the embodiment of forces, natural and spiritual, which have come from the endless past. like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; _but the sentence is meaningless without him_. "rays from all round converge in him," and he has no power except that which has been lent to him; but all the same, nay, all the more, he must "think as if man never thought before! act as if all creation hung attent on the acting of such faculty as his."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] his responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the race has stored for him. the great man speaks the thought of his people, and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their dumb yearnings. and even the mean and insignificant man is what he is, in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer vehicle for that humanity. thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the individual," in the old sense of a being _opposed_ to society and _opposed_ to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real. and, on the other hand, society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is potentially in every part--an organism _of_ organisms. the influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which concerns itself with man is not to be measured. it is already fast changing all the practical sciences of man--economics, politics, ethics and religion. the material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation. but human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new significance. the idea of duty has received an expansion almost illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and dignity--for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance of being good? when we contrast this view of the life of man as the life of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality also has at last, in bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into the open ocean. and after all, the greatest achievement of our age may be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has made possible the science of man. we have, at length, reached a point of view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. law, order, continuity, in human action--the essential pre-conditions of a moral science--were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. it left to ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in his nature. naturalism did the first. intuitionism, the second. the former made human action the _re_action of a natural agent on the incitement of natural forces. it made man a mere object, a _thing_ capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an external origin, just like any other object. the latter theory cut man free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in stultifying both law and morality. but this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free. it relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in each of them. it elevates the individual above the distinctions of time; it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life of the future. on this view, the individual and the race are possible only through each other. this fundamental change in our way of looking at the life of man is bound to abolish the ancient landmarks and bring confusion for a time. out of the new conception, _i.e.,_ out of the idea of evolution, has sprung the tumult as well as the strength of our time. the present age is moved with thoughts beyond the reach of its powers: great aspirations for the well-being of the people and high ideals of social welfare flash across its mind, to be followed again by thicker darkness. there is hardly any limit to its despair or hope. it has a far larger faith in the destiny of man than any of its predecessors, and yet it is _sure_ of hardly anything--except that the ancient rules of human life are false. individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise. we know that the old methods are no longer of use. we cannot now cut ourselves free of the fate of others. the confused cries for help that are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren; and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the problem of their welfare is also ours. we grapple with social questions at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the solution of these enigmas. legislators and economists, teachers of religion and socialists, are all alike social reformers. philanthropy has taken a deeper meaning; and all sects bear its banner. but their forces are beaten back by the social wretchedness, for they have not found the sovereign remedy of a great idea; and the result is in many ways sad enough. our social remedies often work mischief; for we degrade those whom we would elevate, and in our charity forget justice. we insist on the rights of the people and the duties of the privileged classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour, and goodness to those whom we condemn. the task that lies before us is plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. but we fail to grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend to sunder them. we know that the public good will not be obtained by separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. we must find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the simple constitution of a wooden doll. society is not put together mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if he is to be helped, he must rather share its life, be the heir of the wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its onward movement. between this new social ideal and our attainment, between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair of bridging over. the characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the pages of carlyle, with whose thoughts those of browning are immediately connected. it was carlyle who first effectively revealed to england the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst much smoke and din, showed his english readers something of the greatness of the moral world. he gave us a philosophy of clothes, penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes of man's activity. he showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual, that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that national welfare rests on character. after reading him, it is impossible for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "am i my brother's keeper?" he not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses whom-so it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing. i say, there is not a red indian, hunting by lake winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? it is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe." carlyle dealt the deathblow to the "laissez-faire" theory rampant in his day, and made each individual responsible for the race. he has demonstrated that the sphere of duty does not terminate with ourselves and our next-door neighbours. there will be no pure air for the correctest levite to breathe, till the laws of sanitation have been applied to the moral slums. "ye are my brethren," said he, and he adds, as if conscious of his too denunciatory way of dealing with them, "hence my rage and sorrow." but his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair for him. he saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the world was there to help him bear it, and that "one with god is a majority." he taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on striving to save all. but he neglected the complement of this truth, and forgot the greatness of the beings on whom so great a duty could be laid. he therefore dignifies humanity only to degrade it again. the "twenty millions" each must try to save "are mostly fools." but how fools, when they can have such a task? is it not true, on the contrary, that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that "man can because he ought" and ought only because he can? the evils an individual cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows. the good are not lone workers of god's purposes, and there is no need of despair. carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission, and too forgetful of that of others. "i have been very jealous for the lord god of hosts; because the children of israel have forgotten thy covenant, thrown down thine alters, and slain thy prophets, and i, even i only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." he needed, beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of brotherhood with humbler workers. "yet i have left me seven thousand in israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him." it would have helped him had he remembered, that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers for the din he made himself. it would have changed his despair into joy, and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas, there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of goodness. it is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for good which is planted within it. but carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and destiny. he knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. that morality is the essence of things, that wrong _must_ prove its weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers. but carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity, and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of sin. he never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it on to death. he saw the necessity which rules history, but not the beneficent character of that necessity. the same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest revelation to his age. he felt its categorical authority and its binding force. but the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens, in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. his only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is "unprofitable servant." in this he has much of the combined strength and weakness of the old scottish calvinism. "he stands between the individual and the infinite without hope or guide. he has a constant disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with god," said mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "from his lips, at times so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the breton mariner--'my god protect me! my bark is so small, and thy ocean so vast.'" his reconciliation of god and man was incomplete: god seemed to him to have manifested himself _to_ man but not _in_ man. he did not see that "the eternity which is before and behind us is also within us." but the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. the extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. and, if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of a better future. the hard problems set for us by our social environment are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye sees only what the heart prompts. the very statement of the difficulty contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the promise of its own fulfilment. it is ignorance which is ruinous, as when the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a comfort, denied to carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to our social duties. he has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of bewildered helplessness. but this very sense contains the germ of hope, and england is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs. carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking a step into it. he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there, and was denied the view from pisgah. now, this view was given to robert browning, and he broke out into a song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in the coming time. that his solution of the evils of life is not final, may at once be admitted. there are elements in the problem of which he has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the poet has to say. even the poet himself grows, at least in some directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he grows older. his faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude. still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of luther. chapter iv. browning's optimism. "gladness be with thee, helper of the world! i think this is the authentic sign and seal of godship, that it ever waxes glad, and more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts into a rage to suffer for mankind, and recommence at sorrow."[a] [footnote a: _balaustion's adventure_.] i have tried to show that one of the distinctive features of the present era is the stress it lays on the worth of the moral life of man, and the new significance it has given to that life by its view of the continuity of history. this view finds expression, on its social and ethical side, in the pages of carlyle and browning: both of whom are interested exclusively, one may almost say, in the evolution of human character; and both of whom, too, regard that evolution as the realization by man of the purposes, greater than man's, which rule in the world. and, although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in the finite. the meaning of the universe is moral, its last might is rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the inmost principle of his life. this, fully grasped, will bring the finite and the infinite, morality and religion, together, and reconcile them. but the reconciliation which carlyle sought to effect was incomplete on every side--even within the sphere of duty, with which alone, as moralist, he specially concerned himself. the moral law was imposed upon man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed; for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a hopeless battle against endless evil. god was everywhere around man, and the universe was just the expression of his will--a will inexorably bent on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but god was not _within_ man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. an infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him break out into a cry of despair. browning, however, not only sought to bring about the reconciliation, but succeeded, in so far as that is possible _in terms of mere feeling_. his poetry contains suggestions that the moral will without is also a force within man; that the power which makes for righteousness in the world has penetrated into, or rather manifests itself _as_, man. intelligence and will, the reason which apprehends the nature of things, and the original impulse of self-conscious life which issues in action, are god's power in man; so that god is realizing himself in the deeds of man, and human history is just his return to himself. outer law and inner motive are, for the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative, or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man's foolishness and sin, a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very nature of man's reason and will. if man could only understand himself he would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a law which is one with his own essential being. a beneficent power has loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of failure and victory are not even; for man's nature is itself a divine endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness. in the language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the spiritual incarnation of god; it is god's goodness as love, effecting itself in human action. hence carlyle's cry of despair is turned by browning into a song of victory. while the former regards the struggle between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives joyous vigour to every stroke. browning lifted morality into an optimism, and translated its battle into song. this was the distinctive mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration. in order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his faith in the good. merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed depends upon its content--upon its fidelity to the facts of human life, the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the intensity of its realism. there is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and deliberate action of man. there is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature. final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact. the one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a condemnatory judgment upon them. the belief that a harmonious relation between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible, underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. a moral order--that is, an order of rational ends--is postulated in all human actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,--just as truly as we move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. a true ethics, like a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start _ab initio_. we live in the copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to whose laws he finds his welfare. and this is simply the assertion of an optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world. but, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. we are only on the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. and, until this is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. the revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of nature and man and god is still further in the future, and will be the last triumph of philosophy. during all the interval the world will be a scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory. and in this state of things even _their_ assurance often falters. faith lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary exhibits, "through europe to the aetolian shore, the pageant of his bleeding heart." the optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a desire, a "grand perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. if, in the form of a religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often, it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance, which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated reason. nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a general hypothesis, a mere leap to god which spurns the intermediate steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality. such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts, was emerson's. caroline fox tells a story of him and carlyle which reveals this very pointedly. it seems that carlyle once led the serene philosopher through the abominations of the streets of london at midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "do you believe in the devil _now_?" emerson replied that the more he saw of the english people the greater and better he thought them. this little incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. where the one saw, the other was blind. to the one there was the misery and the universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken. carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." emerson was sir galahad, blind to all but the holy grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. but his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. his victory was not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. and, in consequence, emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils. but browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness. it is a conviction which has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. its power will be felt and its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the contradictions of human life and known their depths. no lover of browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and heart. "when british literature," said carlyle of scott and cobbett, "lay all puking and sprawling in wertherism, byronism and other sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." and he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and embellishing all things." but he finds it easy to account for the health of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. such healthiness we find in browning, although he wrote with carlyle at his side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist. and yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous meaning which the poet found in the world. his optimism was not a constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish." there are, indeed, certain rash and foolish persons who pretend to trace browning's optimism to his mixed descent; but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres, who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological antecedents. they cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor, even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that "the wind bloweth where it listeth." no doubt the poet's optimism indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. he had the invaluable endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root of our misery in all its forms. he had little respect for the _welt-schmerz,_ and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding heart. "sinning, sorrowing, despairing, body-ruined, spirit-wrecked-- should i give my woes an airing,-- where's one plague that claims respect? "have you found your life distasteful? my life did, and does, smack sweet. was your youth of pleasure wasteful? mine i saved and hold complete. do your joys with age diminish? when mine fail me i'll complain. must in death your daylight finish? my sun sets to rise again. * * * * * "i find earth not grey but rosy, heaven not grim but fair of hue. do i stoop? i pluck a posy. do i stand and stare? all's blue."[a] [footnote a: _at the mermaid_.] browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance, and valued most highly "his life-rent of god's universe with the tasks it offered and the tools to do them with." but his optimism sent its roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of god's goodness. optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress of criticism and doubt. browning's optimism is a great element in english literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks that come from both these quarters. his joyousness is the reflection _in feeling_ of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was able to call forth. in fact, its value lies, above all, in this,--that it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which byron and carlyle had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man. the need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings. natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world. the fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt. optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of an unresolved contradiction. both are a judgment passed upon the world, from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands, arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself. now, as i have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants and claims. the spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "man was born free," cried rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which can set themselves against him." and rousseau's countrymen believed him. there was not a _sans-culotte_ amongst them all but held his head high, being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. they flung themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it. "expend eternity upon its shows, flung them as freely as one rose out of a summer's opulence."[a] [footnote a:_easter day_.] but the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the resources of the natural world. the infinite hunger of a soul cannot be satisfied with the things of sense. the natural world is too limited even for carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that byron should find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to much-admiring mankind. now, both carlyle and browning apprehended the cause of the discontent, and both endured the byronic utterance of it with considerable impatience. "art thou nothing other than a vulture, then," asks the former, "that fliest through the universe seeking after somewhat _to eat,_ and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? close thy byron, open thy goethe." "huntsman common sense came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense quiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue, and rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too, its touch of god's own flame, which he may so expand 'who measured the waters i' the hollow of his hand' that ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect of all-triumphant fire, matter with intellect once fairly matched."[a] [footnote a:_fifine at the fair_, lxvii.] but carlyle was always more able to detect the disease than to suggest the remedy. he had, indeed, "a glimpse of it." "there is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness." but the glimpse was misleading, for it penetrated no further than the first negative step. the "everlasting yea" was, after all, only a deeper "no!" only _entsagung_, renunciation: "the fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator." blessed alone is he that expecteth nothing. the holy of holies, where man hears whispered the mystery of life, is "the sanctuary of sorrow." "what act of legislature was there that _thou_ shouldst be happy? a little while ago thou hadst no right to _be_ at all. what if thou wert born and predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy? nay, is not 'life itself a disease, knowledge the symptom of derangement'? have not the poets sung 'hymns to the night' as if night were nobler than day; as if day were but a small motley-coloured veil spread transiently over the infinite bosom of night, and did but deform and hide from us its pure transparent eternal deeps." "we, the whole species of mankind, and our whole existence and history, are but a floating speck in the illimitable ocean of the all ... borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides, and grand ocean currents, of which what faintest chance is there that we should ever exhaust the significance, ascertain the goings and comings? a region of doubt, therefore, hovers for ever in the back-ground.... only on a canvas of darkness, such is man's way of being, could the many-coloured picture of our life paint itself and shine." in such passages as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in anything which byron could experience or express. scepticism is directed by carlyle, not against the natural elements of life--the mere sensuous outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself. self-consciousness, or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man, instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good. the discovery that man is spirit and no vulture, which was due to carlyle himself more than to any other english writer of his age, seemed, after all, to be a great calamity; for it led to the renunciation of happiness, and filled man with yearnings after a better than happiness, but left him nothing wherewith they might be satisfied, except "the duty next to hand." and the duty next to hand, as interpreted by carlyle, is a means of suppressing by action, not idle speech only, but thought itself. but, if this be true, the highest in man is set against itself. and what kind of action remains possible to a "speck on the illimitable ocean, borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides"? "here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign, and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be done." but there is one element of still deeper gloom in this blind fighting; it is fought for a foreign cause. it is god's cause and not ours, or ours only in so far as it has been despotically imposed upon us; and it is hard to discover from carlyle what interest we can have in the victory. duty is to him a menace--like the duty of a slave, were that possible. it lacks the element which alone can make it imperative to a free being, namely, that it be recognized as _his_ good, and that the outer law become his inner motive. the moral law is rarely looked at by carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and with god. and consequently, he can draw little strength from religion; for it is only love that can cast out fear. to sum up all in a word, carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into the inmost recesses of man's being. thought was disease; morality was blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship. man's nature was discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its wants. it was an endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy--not the infinite, because it is too great, not the finite, because it is too little; not god, because he is too far above man, not nature, because it is too far beneath him. we are unable to satisfy ourselves with the things of sense, and are also "shut out of the heaven of spirit." what have been called, "the three great terms of thought"--the world, self, and god--have fallen asunder in his teaching. it is the difficulty of reconciling these which brings despair, while optimism is evidently the consciousness of their harmony. now, these evils which reflection has revealed, and which are so much deeper than those of mere sensuous disappointment, can only be removed by deeper reflection. the harmony of the world of man's experience, which has been broken by "the comprehensive curse of sceptical despair," can, as goethe teaches us, be restored only by thought-- "in thine own soul, build it up again." the complete refutation of carlyle's pessimistic view can only come, by reinterpreting each of the contradicting terms in the light of a higher conception. we must have a deeper grasp and a new view of the self, the world, and god. and such a view can be given adequately only by philosophy. reason alone can justify the faith that has been disturbed by reflection, and re-establish its authority. how, then, it may be asked, can a poet be expected to turn back the forces of a scepticism, which have been thus armed with the weapons of dialectic? can anything avail in this region except explicit demonstration? a poet never demonstrates, but perceives; art is not a process, but a result; truth for it is immediate, and it neither admits nor demands any logical connection of ideas. the standard-bearers and the trumpeters may be necessary to kindle the courage of the army and to lead it on to victory, but the fight must be won by the thrust of sword and pike. man needs more than the intuitions of the great poets, if he is to maintain solid possession of the truth. now, i am prepared to admit the force of this objection, and i shall endeavour in the sequel to prove that, in order to establish optimism, more is needed than browning can give, even when interpreted in the most sympathetic way. his doctrine is offered in terms of art, and it cannot have any demonstrative force without violating the limits of art. in some of his poems, however,--for instance, in _la saisiaz, ferishtatis fancies_ and the _parleyings_, browning sought to advance definite proofs of the theories which he held. he appears before us at times armed _cap-à-pie,_ like a philosopher. still, it is not when he argues that browning proves: it is when he sees, as a poet sees. it is not by means of logical demonstrations that he helps us to meet the despair of carlyle, or contributes to the establishment of a better faith. browning's proofs are least convincing when he was most aware of his philosophical presuppositions; and a philosophical critic could well afford to agree with the critic of art, in relegating the demonstrating portions of his poems to the chaotic limbo lying between philosophy and poetry. when, however, he forgets his philosophy, and speaks as poet and religious man, when he is dominated by that sovereign thought which gave unity to his life-work, and which, therefore, seemed to lie deeper in him than the necessities of his art and to determine his poetic function, his utterances have a far higher significance. for he so lifts the artistic object into the region of pure thought, and makes sense and reason so to interpenetrate, that the old metaphors of "the noble lie" and "the truth beneath the veil" seem no longer to help. he seems to show us the truth so vividly and simply, that we are less willing to make art and philosophy mutually exclusive, although their methods differ. like some of the greatest philosophers, and notably plato and hegel, he constrains us to doubt, whether the distinction penetrates low beneath the surface; for philosophy, too, when at its best, is a thinking of things together. in their light we begin to ask, whether it is not possible that the interpretation of the world in terms of spirit, which is the common feature of both hegel's philosophy and browning's poetry, does not necessarily bring with it a settlement of the ancient feud between these two modes of thought. but, in any case, browning's utterances, especially those which he makes when he is most poet and least philosopher, have something of the convincing impressiveness of a reasoned system of optimism. and this comes, as already suggested, from his loyalty to a single idea, which gives unity to all his work. that idea we may, in the end, be obliged to treat not only as a hypothesis--for all principles of reconciliation, even those of the sciences, as long as knowledge is incomplete, must be regarded as hypotheses--but also as a hypothesis which he had no right to assume. it may be that in the end we shall be obliged to say of him, as of so many others-- "see the sage, with the hunger for the truth, and see his system that's all true, except the one weak place, that's stanchioned by a lie!"[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] it may be that the religious form, through which he generally reaches his convictions, is not freed from a dogmatic element, which so penetrates his thought as to vitiate it as a philosophy. nevertheless, it answered for the poet all the uses of a philosophy, and it may do the same for many who are distrustful of the systems of the schools, and who are "neither able to find a faith nor to do without one." it contains far-reaching hints of a reconciliation of the elements of discord in our lives, and a suggestion of a way in which it may be demonstrated, that an optimistic theory is truer to facts than any scepticism or agnosticism, with the despair that they necessarily bring. for browning not only advanced a principle, whereby, as he conceived, man might again be reconciled to the world and god, and all things be viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also sought to apply his principle to the facts of life. he illustrates his fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific investigator. his optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore inconvenient difficulties. it is not an attempt to justify the whole by neglecting details, or to make wrong seem right by reference to a far-off result, in which the steps of the process are forgotten. he stakes the value of his view of life on its power to meet _all_ facts; one fact, ultimately irreconcilable with his hypothesis, will, he knows, destroy it. "all the same, of absolute and irretrievable black,--black's soul of black beyond white's power to disintensify,-- of that i saw no sample: such may wreck my life and ruin my philosophy tomorrow, doubtless."[a] [footnote a: _a bean stripe_--_ferishtah's fancies_.] he knew that, to justify god, he had to justify _all_ his ways to man; that if the good rules at all, it rules absolutely; and that a single exception would confute his optimism. "so, gazing up, in my youth, at love as seen through power, ever above all modes which make it manifest, my soul brought all to a single test-- that he, the eternal first and last, who, in his power, had so surpassed all man conceives of what is might,-- whose wisdom, too, showed infinite, --would prove as infinitely good; would never, (my soul understood,) with power to work all love desires, bestow e'en less than man requires."[b] [footnote b: _christmas eve_.] "no: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it, has ever been seen the sole good of life in it, the love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it, shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it. and i shall behold thee, face to face, o god, and in thy light retrace how in all i loved here, still wast thou!"[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] we can scarcely miss the emphasis of the poet's own conviction in these passages, or in the assertion that,-- "the acknowledgment of god in christ accepted by thy reason, solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it, and has so far advanced thee to be wise."[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] consequently, there is a defiant and aggressive element in his attitude. strengthened with an unfaltering faith in the supreme good, this knight of the holy spirit goes forth over all the world seeking out wrongs. "he has," said dr. westcott, "dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has brought back for us from this universal survey a conviction of hope." i believe, further, that it was in order to justify this conviction that he set out on his quest. his interest in vice--in malice, cruelty, ignorance, brutishness, meanness, the irrational perversity of a corrupt disposition, and the subtleties of philosophic and aesthetic falsehood--was no morbid curiosity. browning was no "painter of dirt"; no artist can portray filth for filth's sake, and remain an artist. he crowds his pages with criminals, because he sees deeper than their crimes. he describes evil without "palliation or reserve," and allows it to put forth all its might, in order that he may, in the end, show it to be subjected to god's purposes. he confronts evil in order to force it to give up the good, which is all the reality that is in it. he conceives it as his mission to prove that evil is "stuff for transmuting," and that there is nought in the world. "but, touched aright, prompt yields each particle its tongue of elemental flame--no matter whence flame sprung, from gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness." all we want is-- "the power to make them burn, express what lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind, howe'er the chance."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_.] he had pompilia's faith. "and still, as the day wore, the trouble grew, whereby i guessed there would be born a star." he goes forth in the might of his faith in the power of good, as if he wished once for all to try the resources of evil at their uttermost, and pass upon it a complete and final condemnation. with this view, he seeks evil in its own haunts. he creates guido, the subtlest and most powerful compound of vice in our literature--except iago, perhaps--merely in order that we may see evil at its worst; and he places him in an environment suited to his nature, as if he was carrying out an _experimentum crucis_. the "midmost blotch of black discernible in the group of clustered crimes huddling together in the cave they call their palace."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] beside him are his brothers, each with his own "tint of hell"; his mistress, on whose face even pompilia saw the glow of the nether pit "flash and fade"; and his mother-- "the gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke, the hag that gave these three abortions birth, unmotherly mother and unwomanly woman, that near turns motherhood to shame, womanliness to loathing"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] such "denizens o' the cave now cluster round pompilia and heat the furnace sevenfold." while she "sent prayer like incense up to god the strong, god the beneficent, god ever mindful in all strife and strait, who, for our own good, makes the need extreme, till at the last he puts forth might and saves."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book_--_pompilia_, - .] in these lines we feel the poet's purpose, constant throughout the whole poem. we know all the while that with him at our side we can travel safely through the depths of the inferno--for the flames bend back from him; and it is only what we expect as the result of it all, that there should come "a bolt from heaven to cleave roof and clear place, . . . . then flood and purify the scene with outside day-- which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark, ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam to the despair of hell."[c] [footnote c: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] the superabundant strength of browning's conviction in the supremacy of the good, which led him in _the ring and the book_ to depict criminals at their worst, forced him later on in his life to exhibit evil in another form. the real meaning and value of such poems as _fifine at the fair, prince hohenstiel-schwangau, red cotton nightcap country, ferishtah's francies_, and others, can only be determined by a careful and complete analysis of each of them. but they have one characteristic so prominent, and so new in poetry, that the most careless reader cannot fail to detect it. action and dramatic treatment give place to a discussion which is metaphysical; instead of the conflict of motives within a character, the stress and strain of passion and will in collision with circumstances, there is reflection on action after it has passed, and the conflict of subtle arguments on the ethical value of motives and ways of conduct, which the ordinary moral consciousness condemns without hesitation. all agree that these poems represent a new departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of the poetic art. to such critics, this later period seems the period of his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies, which had already appeared in _bishop blougram's apology, mr. sludge the medium_, and other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride of strength, has grown wanton. _fifine at the fair is_ said to be "a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love." its hero, who is "a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. the poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_ is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that betrays every cause to the individual's meanest welfare. the object of the poet is "by no means to prove black white, or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less self-delusion reconcile itself to itself." i am not able to accept this as a complete explanation of the intention of the poet, except with reference to _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._ the _prince_ is a psychological study, like _mr. sludge the medium,_ and _bishop blougram_. no doubt he had the interest of a dramatist in the hero of _fifine at the fair_ and in the hero of _red cotton nightcap country;_ but, in these poems, his dramatic interest is itself determined by an ethical purpose, which is equally profound. his meeting with the gipsy at pornic, and the spectacle of her unscrupulous audacity in vice, not only "sent his fancy roaming," but opened out before him the fundamental problems of life. what i would find, therefore, in _fifine at the fair_ is not the casuistic defence of an artistic and speculative libertine, but an earnest attempt on the part of the poet to prove, "that, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures, and sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,-- all by demonstrating the value of fifine."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, xxviii.] within his scheme of the universal good he seeks to find a place even for this gipsy creature, who traffics "in just what we most pique us that we keep." having, in the _ring and the book_, challenged evil at its worst as it manifests itself practically in concrete characters and external action, and having wrung from it the victory of the good, in _fifine_ and in his other later poems he meets it again in the region of dialectic. in this sphere of metaphysical ethics, evil has assumed a more dangerous form, especially for an artist. his optimistic faith has driven the poet into a realm into which poetry never ventured before. his battle is now, not with flesh and blood, but with the subtler powers of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the poet's faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the worst evil by what is highest of all. having indicated in outward fact "the need," as well as the "transiency of sin and death," he seeks here to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of religion into a defence of the worst wickedness. no doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist, who is apt to find in _fifine_ nothing but a casuistical and shameless justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself. we are made to "discover," for instance, that "there was just enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust, could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift the weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift of nature, and explain the glories by the shames mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, cviii.] we are told that-- "force, guile were arms which earned my praise, not blame at all." confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that, rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the sophistries of a philosophical don juan, powerful enough, under the stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong. but, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of _rabbi ben ezra, christmas eve_, and _a death in the desert_, with which we not only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith that "god's in his heaven,-- all's right with the world." the poet had far too much speculative acumen to be ignorant of this, and too much boldness and strength of conviction in the might of the good, to refuse to confront the issues that sprang from it. in his later poems, as in his earlier ones, he is endeavouring to justify the ways of god to man; and the difficulties which surround him are not those of a casuist, but the stubborn questionings of a spirit, whose religious faith is thoroughly earnest and fearless. to a spirit so loyal to the truth, and so bold to follow its leading, the suppression of such problems is impossible; and, consequently, it was inevitable that he should use the whole strength of his dialectic to try those fundamental principles, on which the moral life of man is based. and it is this, i believe, which we find in _fifine_, as in _ferishtah's fancies_ and the _parleyings_; not an exhibition of the argumentative subtlety of a mind whose strength has become lawless, and which spends itself in intellectual gymnastics, that have no place within the realm of either the beautiful or the true. chapter v. optimism and ethics: their contradiction. "our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven. the fated sky gives us free scope; only doth backward pull our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull. * * * * * "but most it is presumption in us, when the help of heaven we count the act of men."[a] [footnote a: _all's well that ends well_.] i have tried to show that one of the ruling conceptions of browning's view of life is that the good is absolute, and that it reveals itself in all the events of human life. by means of this conception, he endeavoured to bring together the elements which had fallen asunder in the sensational and moral pessimism of byron and carlyle. in other words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to reconcile man with the world and with god, and thereby with himself. and the governing motive, whether the conscious motive or not, of browning's poetry, the secret impulse which led him to dramatise the conflicts and antagonisms of human life, was the necessity of finding in them evidence of the presence of this absolute good. browning's optimism was deep and comprehensive enough to reject all compromise. his faith in the good seemed to rise with the demands that were made upon it by the misery and wickedness of man, and the apparently purposeless waste of life and its resources. there was in it a deliberate earnestness which led him to grapple, not only with the concrete difficulties of individual life, but with those also that spring from reflection and theory. the test of a philosophic optimism, as of any optimism which is more than a pious sentiment, must finally lie in its power to reveal the presence of the good in actual individual evils. but there are difficulties still nearer than those presented by concrete facts, difficulties arising out of the very suggestion that evil is a form of good. such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts. now, browning's creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a god-intoxicated man. it was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things. it is, therefore, justly open to the same kind of criticism as that to which a philosophic doctrine is exposed. the poet deprived himself of the refuge, legitimate enough to the intuitive method of art, when, in his later works, he not only offered a dramatic solution of the problem of life, but definitely attempted to meet the difficulties of speculative ethics. in this chapter i shall point out some of these difficulties, and then proceed to show how the poet proposed to solve them. a thorough-going optimism, in that it subdues all things to the idea of the supreme good, and denies to evil the right even to dispute the absoluteness of its sway, naturally seems to imply a pantheistic theory of the world. and browning's insistence on the presence of the highest in all things may easily be regarded as a mere revival of the oldest and crudest attempts at finding their unity in god. for if _all_, as he says, is for the best, there seems to be no room left for the differences apparent in the world, and the variety which gives it beauty and worth. particular existences would seem to be illusory and evanescent phenomena, the creations of human imagination, itself a delusive appearance. the infinite, on this view, stands over against the finite, and it overpowers and consumes it; and the optimism, implied in the phrase that "god is all," turns at once into a pessimism. for, as soon as we inquire into the meaning of this "all," we find that it is only a negation of everything we can know or be. such a pantheism as this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all things upwards to a manifestation of the divine, it really levels all downwards to the level of mere unqualified being, a stagnant and empty unknowable. it leaves only a choice between akosmism and atheism, and, at the same time, it makes each of the alternatives impossible. for, in explaining the world it abolishes it, and in abolishing the world it empties itself of all signification; so that the godhood which it attempts to establish throughout the whole realm of being, is found to mean nothing. "it is the night, in which all cows are black." the optimistic creed, which the poet strove to teach, must, therefore, not only establish the immanence of god, but show in some way how such immanence is consistent with the existence of particular things. his doctrine that there is no failure, or folly, or wickedness, or misery, but conceals within it, at its heart, a divine element; that there is no incident in human history which is not a pulsation of the life of the highest, and which has not its place in a scheme of universal good, must leave room for the moral life of man, and all the risks which morality brings with it. otherwise, optimism is impossible. for a god who, in filling the universe with his presence, encroaches on the freedom and extinguishes the independence of man, precludes the possibility of all that is best for man--namely, moral achievement. life, deprived of its moral purpose, is worthless to the poet, and so, in consequence, is all that exists in order to maintain that life. optimism and ethics seem thus to come into immediate collision. the former, finding the presence of god in all things, seems to leave no room for man; and the latter seems to set man to work out his own destiny in solitude, and to give him supreme and absolute authority over his own life; so that any character which he forms, be it good or bad, is entirely the product of his own activity. so far as his life is culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. there may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity. he is part of a whole, and has his place fixed, and his function predetermined, by a power which is greater than his own. but, if we are to call him good or evil, if he is to aspire and repent and strive, in a word, if he is to have any _moral_ character, he cannot be merely a part of a system; there must be something within him which is superior to circumstances, and which makes him master of his own fate. his natural history may begin with the grey dawn of primal being, but his moral history begins with himself, from the time when he first reacted upon the world in which he is placed, and transformed his natural relations into will and character. for who can be responsible for what he did not will? what could a moral imperative mean, what could an "ought" signify, to a being who was only a temporary embodiment of forces, who are prior to, and independent of himself? it would seem, therefore, as if morality were irreconcilable with optimism. the moral life of man cannot be the manifestation of a divine benevolence whose purpose is necessary; it is a trust laid upon himself, which he may either violate or keep. it surpasses divine goodness, "tho' matched with equal power" to _make_ man good, as it has made the flowers beautiful. from this point of view, spiritual attainment, whether intellectual or moral, is man's own, a spontaneous product. just as god is conceived as all in all in the universe, so man is all in all within the sphere of duty; for the kingdom of heaven is within. in both cases alike, there is absolute exclusion of external interference. for this reason, it has often seemed both to philosophers and theologians, as if the world were too confined to hold within it both god and man. in the east, the consciousness of the infinite seemed at times to leave no room for the finite; and in the west, where the consciousness of the finite and interest therein is strongest, and man strives and aspires, a deism arose which set god at a distance, and allowed him to interfere in the fate of man only by a benevolent miracle. nor is this collision of pantheism and freedom, nay of religion and morality, confined to the theoretical region. this difficulty is not merely the punishment of an over-bold and over-ambitious philosophy, which pries too curiously into the mystery of being. it lies at the very threshold of all reflection on the facts of the moral life. even children feel the mystery of god's permitting sin, and embarrass their helpless parents with the contradiction between absolute benevolence and the miseries and cruelties of life. "a vain interminable controversy," says teufels-dröckh, "which arises in every soul since the beginning of the world: and in every soul, that would pass from idle suffering into actual endeavouring, must be put an end to. the most, in our own time, have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough suppression of this controversy: to a few solution of it is indispensable." solution, and not suppression, is what browning sought; he did, in fact, propound a solution, which, whether finally satisfactory or not, at least carries us beyond the easy compromises of ordinary religious and ethical teaching. he does not deny the universality of god's beneficence or power, and divide the realm of being between him and the adversary: nor, on the other hand, does he limit man's freedom, and stultify ethics by extracting the sting of reality from sin. to limit god, he knew, was to deny him; and, whatever the difficulties he felt in regarding the absolute spirit as realising itself in man, he could not be content to reduce man into a temporary phantom, an evanescent embodiment of "spiritual" or natural forces, that take a fleeting form in him as they pursue their onward way. browning held with equal tenacity to the idea of a universal benevolent order, and to the idea of the moral freedom of man within it. he was driven in opposite directions by two beliefs, both of which he knew to be essential to the life of man as spirit, and both of which he illustrates throughout his poems with an endless variety of poetic expression. he endeavoured to find god in man and still to leave man free. his optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. the vigour of his ethical doctrine is as pre-eminent, as the fulness of his conviction of the absolute sway of the good. side by side with his doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man's moral warfare, and of the surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul. so powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought else in the world of any deep concern. "my stress lay," he said in his preface to _sordello_ ( ), "on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. i, at least, always thought so--you, with many known and unknown to me, think so--others may one day think so." and this development of a soul is not at any time regarded by the poet as a peaceful process, like the growth of a plant or animal. although he thinks of the life of man as the gradual realization of a divine purpose within him, he does not suppose it to take place in obedience to a tranquil necessity. man advances morally by fighting his way inch by inch, and he gains nothing except through conflict. he does not become good as the plant grows into maturity. "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." "no, when the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something. god stoops o'er his head, satan looks up between his feet,--both tug-- he's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul awakes and grows. prolong that battle through this life! never leave growing till the life to come."[a] [footnote a: _bishop blougram_.] man is no idle spectator of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; browning never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his age or race. and although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each. the struggle is always personal, individual like the duels of the homeric heroes. it is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to browning. it is not a mere equilibrium of qualities--the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. his code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and throw himself upon life with the whole energy of his being. it is better even to seek evil with one's whole mind, than to be lukewarm in goodness. whether you seek good or evil, and play for the counter or the coin, stake it boldly! "let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will! "the counter our lovers staked was lost as surely as if it were lawful coin: and the sin i impute to each frustrate ghost "is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin though the end in sight was a vice, i say. you, of the virtue (we issue join) how strive you?--'_de te fabula!_'"[a] [footnote a: _the statue and the bust_.] indifference and spiritual lassitude are, to the poet, the worst of sins. "go!" says the pope to pompilia's pseudo-parents, "never again elude the choice of tints! white shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] in all the greater characters of _the ring and the book_, this intensity of vigour in good and evil flashes out upon us. even pompilia, the most gentle of all his creations, at the first prompting of the instinct of motherhood, rises to the law demanding resistance, and casts off the old passivity. "dutiful to the foolish parents first, submissive next to the bad husband,--nay, tolerant of those meaner miserable that did his hests, eked out the dole of pain ";[c] [footnote c: _ibid_., - .] she is found "sublime in new impatience with the foe." "i did for once see right, do right, give tongue the adequate protest: for a worm must turn if it would have its wrong observed by god. i did spring up, attempt to thrust aside that ice-block 'twixt the sun and me, lay low the neutralizer of all good and truth."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--pompilia_, - .] "yet, shame thus rank and patent, i struck, bare, at foe from head to foot in magic mail, and off it withered, cobweb armoury against the lightning! 'twas truth singed the lies and saved me."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_., - .] beneath the mature wisdom of the pope, amidst the ashes of old age, there sleeps the same fire. he is as truly a warrior priest as caponsacchi himself, and his matured experience only muffles his vigour. wearied with his life-long labour, we see him gather himself together "in god's name," to do his will on earth once more with concentrated might. "i smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, ending, so far as man may, this offence."[c] [footnote c: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] nor, spite of doubts, the promptings of mercy, the friends plucking his sleeve to stay his arm, does he fear "to handle a lie roughly"; or shrink from sending the criminal to his account, though it be but one day before he himself is called before the judgment seat. the same energy, the same spirit of bold conflict, animates guido's adoption of evil for his good. at all but the last moment of his life of monstrous crime, just before he hears the echo of the feet of the priests, who descend the stair to lead him to his death, "he repeats his evil deed in will." "nor is it in me to unhate my hates,-- i use up my last strength to strike once more old pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face, to trample underfoot the whine and wile of beast violante,--and i grow one gorge to loathingly reject pompilia's pale poison my hasty hunger took for food."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_guido_, - .] if there be any concrete form of evil with which the poet's optimism is not able to cope, any irretrievable black "beyond white's power to disintensify," it is the refusal to take a definite stand and resolute for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness. the cool self-love of the old english moralists, which "reduced the game of life to principles," and weighed good and evil in the scales of prudence, is to our poet the deepest damnation. "saint eldobert--i much approve his mode; with sinner vertgalant i sympathize; but histrionic sganarelle, who prompts while pulling back, refuses yet concedes,-- * * * * * "surely, one should bid pack that mountebank!" in him, even "thickheads ought to recognize the devil, that old stager, at his trick of general utility, who leads downward, perhaps, but fiddles all the way!"[a] [footnote a: _red cotton nightcap country._] for the bold sinner, who chooses and sustains his part to the end, the poet has hope. indeed, the resolute choice is itself the beginning of hope; for, let a man only give _himself_ to anything, wreak _himself_ on the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of passion and "range from helen to elvire, frenetic to be free," let him rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he has set himself. if there be sufficient strength in a man to vent himself in action, and "try conclusions with the world," he will then learn that it has another destiny than to be the instrument of evil. self-assertion taken by itself is good; indeed, it is the very law of every life, human and other. "each lie redounded to the praise of man, was victory man's nature had both right to get and might to gain."[b] [footnote b: _fifine at the fair_, cxxviii.] but it leads to the revelation of a higher law than that of selfishness. the very assertion of the self which leads into evil, ultimately leaves the self assertion futile. there is the disappointment of utter failure; the sinner is thrown back upon himself empty-handed. he finds himself subjected, even when sinning, "to the reign of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit to have its way with man, not man his way with it."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, cxxviii.] "poor pabulum for pride when the first love is found last also! and, so far from realizing gain, each step aside just proves divergency in vain. the wanderer brings home no profit from his quest beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best could life begin anew."[b] [footnote b:_ibid_. cxxix.] the impossibility of living a divided life, of enjoying at once the sweets of the flesh on the "turf," and the security of the "towers," is the text of _red cotton nightcap country_. the sordid hero of the poem is gradually driven to choose between the alternatives. the best of his luck, the poet thinks, was the "rough but wholesome shock, an accident which comes to kill or cure, a jerk which mends a dislocated joint!"[c] [footnote c: _red cotton nightcap country_.] the continuance of disguise and subterfuge, and the retention of "the first falsehood," are ultimately made impossible to léonce miranda: "thus by a rude in seeming--rightlier judged beneficent surprise, publicity stopped further fear and trembling, and what tale cowardice thinks a covert: one bold splash into the mid-shame, and the shiver ends, though cramp and drowning may begin perhaps."[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] in the same spirit he finds miranda's suicidal leap the best deed possible for _him_. "'mad!' 'no! sane, i say. such being the conditions of his life, such end of life was not irrational. hold a belief, you only half-believe, with all-momentous issues either way,-- and i advise you imitate this leap, put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once!'"[a] [footnote a: _red cotton nightcap country_.] thus it is the decisive deed that gains the poet's approval. he finds the universe a great plot against a pied morality. even guido claims some kind of regard from him, since "hate," as pompilia said, "was the truth of him." in that very hate we find, beneath his endless subterfuges, something real, at last. and since, through his hate, he is frankly measuring his powers against the good at work in the world, there cannot remain any doubt of the issue. to bring the rival forces face to face is just what is wanted. "i felt quite sure that god had set himself to satan; who would spend a minute's mistrust on the end?"[b] [footnote b:_count gismond_.] it is the same respect for strenuous action and dislike of compromise, that inspired the pathetic lines in which he condemns the lost leader, who broke "from the van and the free-men, and sunk to the rear and the slaves." for the good pursues its work without him. "we shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence; songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre; deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence, still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: _blot out his name_, then, record one lost soul more, one task more declined, one more footpath untrod, one more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels, one wrong more to man, one more insult to god!"[a] [footnote a: _the list leader_.] everywhere browning's ethical teaching has this characteristic feature of vigorous decisiveness. as dr. westcott has said, "no room is left for indifference or neutrality. there is no surrender to an idle optimism. a part must be taken and maintained. the spirit in which luther said '_pecca fortiter_' finds in him powerful expression." browning is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood. his words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man's struggle, wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for the good in the throng and crush of life. we catch the tones of this heart-strengthening music in the earliest poems he sung: nor did his courage fail, or vigour wane, as the shades of night gathered round him. in the latest of all his poems, he still speaks of "one who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." "no, at noon-day in the bustle of man's work-time greet the unseen with a cheer! bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'strive and thrive'! cry 'speed!--fight on, fare ever there as here.'"[a] [footnote a: epilogue to _asolande_.] these are fit words to close such a life. his last act is a kind of re-enlistment in the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on a new war under new conditions and in lands unknown, by a heroic man who is sure of himself and sure of his cause. but now comes the great difficulty. how can the poet combine such earnestness in the moral struggle with so deep a conviction of the ultimate nothingness of evil, and of the complete victory of the good? again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be absolutely necessary and inevitable. his belief in god, his trust in his love and might, will brook no limit anywhere. his conviction is that the power of the good subjects evil itself to its authority. "my own hope is, a sun will pierce the thickest cloud earth ever stretched; that, after last, returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched; that what began best, can't end worst. nor what god blessed once, prove accurst."[b] [footnote b: _apparent failure_.] it is the poet himself and not merely the sophistic aesthete of _fifine_ that speaks:-- "partake my confidence! no creature's made so mean but that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate, its supreme worth: fulfils, by ordinance of fate, its momentary task, gets glory all its own, tastes triumph in the world, pre-eminent, alone." * * * * * "as firm is my belief, quick sense perceives the same self-vindicating flash illustrate every man and woman of our mass, and prove, throughout the plan, no detail but, in place allotted it, was prime and perfect."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, xxix.] but if so,--if helen, fifine, guido, find themselves within the plan, fulfilling, after all, the task allotted to them in the universal scheme, how can we condemn them? must we not plainly either modify our optimism and keep our faith in god within bounds, or, on the other hand, make every failure "apparent" only, sin a phantom, and the distinction between right and wrong a helpful illusion that stings man to effort--but an illusion all the same? "what but the weakness in a faith supplies the incentive to humanity, no strength absolute, irresistible comforts. how can man love but what he yearns to help?"[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] where is the need, nay, the possibility, of self-sacrifice, except where there is misery? how can good, the good which is highest, find itself, and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it, except as resisting evil? are not good and evil relative? is not every criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of himself and the world? why cannot he, then, take his stand on his right to move towards the good by any path that best pleases himself: since move he must. it is easy for the religious conscience to admit with pippa that "all service ranks the same with god-- with god, whose puppets, best and worst, are we: there is no last or first."[a] [footnote a: _pippa passes_.] but, if so, why do we admire her sweet pre-eminence in moral beauty, and in what is she really better than ottima? the doctrine that "god's in his heaven-- all's right with the world!"[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world: it is of the very essence of religion. but what of its moral consequences? religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant reconciliation of all contradictions. it is optimism, the justification of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness. but morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. the absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher. but the moral ideal, when reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future. so that morality is the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization of a good that can never be complete. it would thus seem to be irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of change, or hint of limit or imperfection. how, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and universal supremacy of god, and morality, which postulates the absolute supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is called right or wrong? this difficulty, in one or other of its forms, is, perhaps, the most pressing in modern philosophy. it is the problem of the possibility of rising above the "either, or" of discrepant conceptions, to a position which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea. it is at bottom the question, whether we can have a philosophy at all; or whether we must fall back once more into compromise, and the scepticism and despair which it always brings with it. it is just because browning does not compromise between the contending truths that he is instructive. the value of his solution of the problem corresponds accurately to the degree in which he holds both the absoluteness of god's presence in history, and the complete independence of the moral consciousness. he refused to degrade either god or man. in the name of religion, he refuses to say that "a purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal structures of mankind"--_only_ "on the whole "; and in the name of morality, he refuses to "assert the perfection of the actual world" as it is, and by implication to stultify all human endeavour. he knew the vice of compromising, and strove to hold both the truths in their fulness. that he did not compromise god's love or power, and make it dominant merely "on the whole," leaving within his realm, which is universal, a limbo for the "lost," is evident to the most casual reader. "this doctrine, which one healthy view of things, one sane sight of the general ordinance-- nature,--and its particular object,--man,-- which one mere eyecast at the character of who made these and gave man sense to boot, had dissipated once and evermore,-- this doctrine i have dosed our flock withal. why? because none believed it."[a] [footnote a: _the inn album_.] "o'er-punished wrong grows right," browning says. hell is, for him, the consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested growth; and even that, in turn, is the beginning of a better life. "however near i stand in his regard, so much the nearer had i stood by steps offered the feet which rashly spurned their help. that i call hell; why further punishment?"[b] [footnote b: _a camel-driver._] another ordinary view, according to which evil is self-destructive, and ends with the annihilation of its servant, he does not so decisively reject. at least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic power, which he puts into the mouth of caponsacchi, he describes guido as gradually lapsing towards the chaos, which is lower then created existence. he observes him "not to die so much as slide out of life, pushed by the general horror and common hate low, lower,--left o' the very ledge of things, i seem to see him catch convulsively, one by one at all honest forms of life, at reason, order, decency and use, to cramp him and get foothold by at least; and still they disengage them from _his_ clutch. * * * * * "and thus i see him slowly and surely edged off all the table-land whence life upsprings aspiring to be immortality." there he loses him in the loneliness, silence and dusk-- "at the horizontal line, creation's verge. from what just is to absolute nothingness."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--giuseppe caponsacchi_, - .] but the matchless moral insight of the pope leads to a different conclusion, and the poet again retrieves his faith. the pope puts his first trust "in the suddenness of guido's fate," and hopes that the truth may "be flashed out by the blow of death, and guido see one instant and be saved." nor is his trust vain. "the end comes," said dr. westcott. "the ministers of death claim him. in his agony he summons every helper whom he has known or heard of-- "'abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god--' "and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom: "'pompilia! will you let them murder me?' "in this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has begun to feel it. the cry, like the intercession of the rich man in hades, is a promise of a far-off deliverance." but even beyond this hope, which is the last for most men, the pope had still another. "else i avert my face, nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state where god unmakes but to remake the soul he else made first in vain: _which must not be_."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] this phrase, "which must not be," seems to me to carry in it the irrefragable conviction of the poet himself. the same faith in the future appears in the words in which pompilia addresses her priest. "o lover of my life, o soldier-saint, no work begun shall ever pause for death! love will be helpful to me more and more i' the coming course, the new path i must tread, my weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!"[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the seek--pompilia_, - .] for the poet, the death of man brings no change in the purpose of god; nor does it, or aught else, fix a limit to his power, or stultify by failure the end implied in all god's work, nature no less than man himself--to wit, that every soul shall learn the lesson of goodness, and reflect the devine life in desire, intelligence, and will. equally emphatic, on some sides at least, is browning's rejection of those compromises, with which the one-sided religious consciousness threatens the existence of the moral life. at times, indeed, he seems to teach, as man's best and highest, a passive acquiescence in the divine benevolence; and he uses the dangerous metaphor of the clay and potter's wheel. _rabbi ben ezra_ bids us feel "why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay"; and his prayer is, "so, take and use thy work: amend what flaws may lurk, what strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! my times be in thy hand! perfect the cup as planned! let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"[a] [footnote a: _rabbi ben ezra_.] but this attitude of quiescent trust, which is so characteristic of religion, is known by the poet to be only a phase of man's best life. it is a temporary resting-place for the pilgrim: "the country of beulah, whose air is very sweet and pleasant, where he may solace himself for a season." but, "the way lies directly through it," and the pilgrim, "being a little strengthened and better able to bear his sickness," has to go forward on his journey. browning's characteristic doctrine on this matter is not acquiescence and resignation. "leave god the way" has, in his view, its counterpart and condition--"have you the will!" "for a worm must turn if it would have its wrong observed by god."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book--pompilia,_ - .] the root of browning's joy is in the need of progress towards an infinitely high goal. he rejoices "that man is hurled from change to change unceasingly, his soul's wings never furled." the bliss of endeavour, the infinite worth of the consciousness of failure, with its evidence of coming triumph, "the spark which disturbs our clod," these are the essence of his optimistic interpretation of human life, and also of his robust ethical doctrine. "then, welcome each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough, each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! be our joys three-parts pain! strive, and hold cheap the strain; learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[a] [footnote a: _rabbi ben ezra._] and he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life and man's best, and therefore god's best in man. the struggle upward from the brute, may, indeed end with death. but this only means that man "has learned the uses of the flesh," and there are in him other potencies to evolve: "other heights in other lives, god willing." death is the summing up of this life's meaning, stored strength for new adventure. "the future i may face now i have proved the past;" and, in view of it, browning is "fearless and unperplexed when i wage battle next, what weapons to select, what armour to indue." he is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one. there is no limiting here of man's possibility, or confining of man's endeavour after goodness. "strive and thrive! cry 'speed,' fight on, fare ever there as here," are the last words which came from his pen. now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry, cannot help in philosophy. they do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. if the problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the present world. this objection is valid, so far as it goes. but browning's treatment is valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to limit or compromise the conflicting truths. he, by implication, rejects the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth. he refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to put man in the place of god," by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man's struggle, and god's achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives. as i shall show in the sequel, movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the poet the very nature of man. and to speak about either god or man (or even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has no meaning to him. we are not first moral and then religious, first struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. god is with us in the battle, and the victory is in every blow. but there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling morality and religion, or the presence of both god and man in human action. morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. and the higher a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done. "say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold i say unto you, 'lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.'" it looks like blasphemy against morality to say "that god lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time." morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language seems to be, "god is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come." nor does it rest with condemning the world. it also finds flaws in its own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "to mock ourselves in all that's best of us." the beginning of the spiritual life seems just to consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness ever grows deeper. this is well illustrated in browning's account of caponsacchi; from the time when pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him-- "thinking how my life had shaken under me--broken short indeed and showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be-- and into what abysm the soul may slip"--[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_giuseppe caponsacchi_, - .] up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to express his despair. "to have to do with nothing but the true, the good, the eternal--and these, not alone in the main current of the general life, but small experiences of every day, concerns of the particular hearth and home: to learn not only by a comet's rush but a rose's birth--not by the grandeur, god, but the comfort, christ. _all this_ how _far away_ mere delectation, meet for a minute's dream!"[b] [footnote b: _ibid._ - .] so illimitably beyond his strength is such a life, that he finds himself like the drudging student who "trims his lamp, opens his plutarch, puts him in the place of roman, grecian; draws the patched gown close, dreams, 'thus should i fight, save or rule the world!'-- then smilingly, contentedly, awakes to the old solitary nothingness."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_giuseppe caponsacchi_, - .] the moral world with its illimitable horizon had opened out around him, the voice of the new commandment bidding him "be perfect as his father in heaven is perfect" had destroyed his peace, and made imperative a well nigh hopeless struggle; and, as he compares himself at his best with the new ideal, he breaks out into the cry, "o great, just, good god! miserable me!" this humility and contrition, this discontent verging on hopelessness, constituted, as we have seen, the characteristic attitude of carlyle; and it represents a true and, in fact, an indispensable element of man's moral life. but this self-condemnation in the face of the moral law is nothing more than an element, and must not be taken either for the whole truth or for the most fundamental one. it is because it is taken as fundamental and final that the discrepancy between morality and religion is held to be absolute, and the consciousness of evil is turned against faith in the good. it is an abstract way of thinking that makes us deduce, from the transcendent height of the moral ideal, the impossibility of attaining goodness, and the failure of god's purpose in man. and this is what carlyle did. he stopped short at the consciousness of imperfection, and he made no attempt to account for it. he took it as a complete fact, and therefore drew a sharp line of distinction between the human and the divine. and, so far, he was right; for, if we look no further than this negative side, it is emphatically absurd to identify man, be he "philosopher" or not, with the absolute. "why callest thou me good? there is none good save one, that is god." the "ought" _must_ stand above _all_ human attainment, and declare that "whatever is, is wrong." but whence comes the ought itself, the ideal which condemns us? is it not also immanent in the fact it condemns? "who is not acute enough," asks hegel, "to see a great deal in his surroundings which is really far from being what it ought to be?" and who also, we may add, has not enough of the generalizing faculty, often mistaken for a philosophical one, to extend this condemnation over the whole of "this best of all possible worlds"? but what is this "ought-to-be," which has such potency in it that all things confronted with it lose their worth? the first answer is, that it is an idea which men, and particularly good men, carry with them. but a little consideration will show that it cannot be a mere idea. it must be something more valid than a capricious product of the individual imagination. for we cannot wisely condemn things because they do not happen to answer to any casual conception which we may choose to elevate into a criterion. a criterion must have objective validity. it must be an idea _of_ something and not an empty notion; and that something must, at the worst, be possible. nay, when we consider all that is involved in it, it becomes obvious that a true ideal--an ideal which is a valid criterion--must be not only possible but real, and, indeed, more real than that which is condemned by reference to it. absolute pessimism has in it the same contradiction as absolute scepticism has,--in fact, it is only its practical counterpart; for both scepticism and pessimism involve the assumption that it is possible to reach a position outside the realm of being, from which it may be condemned as a whole. but the rift between actual and ideal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on the actuality of the imperfect and treats the perfect as if it were as good as nothing, which it cannot be. in other words, this way of regarding human life isolates the passing phenomenon, and does not look to that which reveals itself in it and causes it to pass away. confining ourselves, however, for the present, to the ideal in morality, we can easily see that, in that sphere at least, the actual and ideal change places; and that the latter contrasts with the former as the real with the phenomenal. for, in the first place, the moral ideal is something more than a mere idea not yet realized. it is more even than a _true_ idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal. a mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle. such a principle is an ideal, as well as an idea. it is an idea which has causative potency in it. it supplies motives, it is an incentive to action, and, though in one sense a thing of the future, it is also the actual spring and source of present activity. in so far as the agent acts, as kant put it, not according to laws, but according to an _idea_ of law (and a responsible agent always acts in this manner), the ideal is as truly actualized in him as the physical law is actualized in the physical fact, or the vegetable life in the plant. in fact, the ideal of a moral being is his life. all his actions are its manifestations. and, just as the physical fact is not seen as it really is, nor its reality proved, till science has penetrated through the husk of the sensuous phenomenon, and grasped it in thought as an instance of a law; so an individual's actions are not understood, and can have no moral meaning whatsoever, except in the light of the purpose which gave them being. we know the man only when we know his creed. his reality is what he believes in; that is, it is his ideal. it is the consciousness that the ideal is the real which explains the fact of contrition. to become morally awakened is to become conscious of the vanity and nothingness of the past life, as confronted with the new ideal implied in it. the past life is something to be cast aside as false show, just because the self that experienced it was not realized in it. it is for this reason that the moral agent sets himself against it, and desires to annihilate all its claims upon him by undergoing its punishment, and drinking to the dregs its cup of bitterness. thus his true life lies in the realization of his ideal, and his advance towards it is his coming to himself. only in attaining to it does he attain reality, and the only realization possible for him in the present is just the consciousness of the potency of the ideal. to him to live is to realize his ideal. it is a power that irks, till it finds expression in moral habits that accord with its nature, _i.e._, till the spirit has, out of its environment, created a body adequate to itself. the condemnation of self which characterizes all moral life and is the condition of moral progress, must not, therefore, be regarded as a complete truth. for the very condemnation implies the actual presence of something better. both of the terms--both the criterion and the fact which is condemned by it--fall within the same individual life. man cannot, therefore, without injustice, condemn himself in all that he is; for the condemnation is itself a witness to the activity of that good of which he despairs. hence, the threatening majesty of the moral imperative is nothing but the shadow of man's own dignity; and moral contrition, and even the complete despair of the pessimistic theory, when rightly understood, are recognized as unwilling witnesses to the authority and the actuality of the highest good. and, on the other hand, the highest good cannot be regarded as a mere phantom, without nullifying all our condemnation of the self and the world. the legitimate deduction from the height of man's moral ideal is thus found to be, not, as carlyle thought, the weakness and worthlessness of human nature, but its promise and native dignity: and in a healthy moral consciousness it produces, not despair, but faith and joy. for, as has been already suggested in a previous chapter, the authority of the moral law over man is rooted in man's endowment. its imperative is nothing but the voice of the future self, bidding the present self aspire, while its reproof is only the expression of a moral aspiration which has misunderstood itself. contrition is not a bad moral state which should bring despair, but a good state, full of promise of one that is still better. it is, in fact, just the first step which the ideal takes in its process of self-realization: "the sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!" the moral ideal thus, like every other ideal, even that which we regard as present in natural life, contains a certain guarantee of its own fulfilment. it is essentially an active thing, an energy, a movement upwards. it may, indeed, be urged that the guarantee is imperfect. ideals tend to self-realization, but the tendency may remain unfulfilled. men have some ideals which they never reach, and others which, at first sight at least, it were better for them not to reach. the goal may never be attained, or it may prove "a ruin like the rest." and, as long as man is moral, the ideal is not, and cannot be, fully reached, morality necessarily implies a rift within human nature, a contradiction between what is and what ought to be; although neither the rift nor the contradiction is absolute. there might seem for this reason to be no way of bringing optimism and ethics together, of reconciling what is and what ought to be. my answer to these difficulties must at this stage be very brief and incomplete. that the moral good, if attained, should itself prove vain is a plain self-contradiction. for moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good. the question. "why should i be moral," has no answer, because it is self-contradictory. the moral ideal contains its justification in itself, and requires to lean on nothing else. but it is not easy to prove that it is attainable. in one sense it is not attainable, at least under the conditions of human life which fall within our experience, from which alone we have a right to speak. for, as i shall strive to show in a succeeding chapter, the essence of man's life as spiritual, that is as intelligent and moral, is its self-realizing activity. intellectual and moral life is progress, although it is the progress of an ideal which is real and complete, the return of the infinite to itself through the finite. the cessation of the progress of the ideal in man, whereby man interprets the world in terms of himself and makes it the instrument of his purposes, is intellectual and moral death. from one point of view, therefore, this spiritual life, or moral and intellectual activity, is inspired at every step by the consciousness of a "beyond" not possessed, of an unsolved contradiction between the self and the not-self, of a good that ought to be and is not. the last word, or rather the last word _but one_, regarding man is "failure." but failure is the last word but one, as the poet well knew. "what's come to perfection perishes," he tells us. from this point of view the fact that perfection is not reached, merely means that the process is not ended. "it seethes with the morrow for us and more." the recognition of failure implies more effort and higher progress, and contains a suggestion of an absolute good, and even a proof of its active presence. "the beyond," for knowledge and morality, is the land of promise. and the promise is not a false one; for the "land" is possessed. the recognition of the fact to be known, the statement of the problem, is the first step in its solution; and the consciousness of the moral ideal not attained is the first step in its self-actualizing progress. had man not come so far, he would not have known the further difficulty, or recognized the higher good. to say that the moral ideal is never attained, is thus only a half-truth. we must add to it the fact that it is always being attained; nay, that it is always present as an active reality, attaining itself, evolving its own content. or, to return to the previous metaphor, the land of promise is possessed, although the possession always reveals a still better beyond, which is again a land of promise. while, therefore, it must always remain true that knowledge does not reach absolute reality, nor morality absolute goodness, this cannot be used as an argument against optimism, except on the presupposition that mental and moral activity are a disease. and this is a contradiction in terms. if the ideal is in itself good, the process whereby it is attained is good; if the process in itself is evil, the ideal it seeks is evil, and therefore the condemnation of the actual by reference to it is absurd. and, on the other hand, to postulate as best the identity of ideal and actual, so that no process is necessary, is to assume a point of view where both optimism and pessimism are meaningless, for there is no criterion. as aristotle teaches us, we have no right either to praise or to blame the highest. a process, such as morality is, which is not the self-manifestation of an actual idea, and an ideal which does not reveal its potencies in its passing forms, are both fictions of one-sided thought. the process is not the ideal, but its manifestation; and the ideal is not the process, but the principle which is its source and guide. but if the process cannot be thus immediately identified with the ideal, or "man take the place of god," or "human self-consciousness be confused with the absolute self-consciousness," far less can they be separated. the infinitely high ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, implied in the christian command, "be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect," is an ideal, just because the unity of what is and what ought to be is deeper than their difference. the recognition of the limit of our knowledge, or the imperfection of our moral character, is a direct witness to the fact that there is more to be known and a better to be achieved. the negative implies the affirmative, and is its effect. man's confession of the limitation of his knowledge is made on the supposition that the universe of facts, in all its infinitely rich complexity, is meant to be known; and his confession of moral imperfection is made by reference to a good which is absolute, and which yet may be and ought to be his. the good in morality is necessarily supreme and perfect. a good that is "merely human," "relative to man's nature," in the sense of not being true goodness, is a phantom of confused thinking. morality demands "_the_ good," and not a simulacrum or make-shift. the distinction between right and wrong, and with it all moral aspiration, contrition, and repentance, would otherwise become meaningless. what can a seeming good avail to a moral agent? there is no better or worse among merely apparent excellencies, and of phantoms it matters not which is chosen. and, in a similar way, the distinction between true and false in knowledge, and the common condemnation of human knowledge as merely of phenomena, implies the absolute unity of thought and being, and the knowledge of that unity as a fact. there is no true or false amongst merely apparent facts. but, if the ideal of man as a spiritual being is conceived as perfect, then it follows not only that its attainment is possible, but that it is necessary. the guarantee of its own fulfilment which an ideal carries with it as an ideal, that is, as a potency in process of fulfilment, becomes complete when that ideal is absolute. "if god be for us, who can be against us?" the absolute good, in the language of emerson, is "too good not to be true." if such an ideal be latent in the nature of man, it brings the order of the universe over to his side. for it implies a kinship between him, as a spiritual being, and the whole of existence. the stars in their courses fight for him. in other words, the moral ideal means nothing, if it does not imply a law which is universal. it is a law which exists already, whether man recognizes it or not; it is the might in things, a law of which "no jot or tittle can in any wise pass away." the individual does not institute the moral law; he finds it to be written both within and without him. his part is to recognize, not to create it; to make it valid in his own life and so to identify himself with it, that his service of it may be perfect freedom. we thus conclude that morality, and even the self-condemnation, contrition, and consciousness of failure which it brings with it as phases of its growth, are witnesses of the presence, and the actual product of an absolute good in man. morality, in other words, rests upon, and is the self-evolution of the religious principle in man. a similar line of proof would show that religion implies morality. an absolute good is not conceivable, except in relation to the process whereby it manifests itself. in the language of theology, we may say that god must create and redeem the world in order to be god; or that creation and redemption,--the outflow of the universe from god as its source, and its return to him through the salvation of mankind,--reveal to us the nature of god. apart from this outgoing of the infinite to the finite and its return to itself through it, the name god would be an empty word, signifying a something unintelligible dwelling in the void beyond the realm of being. but religion, as we have seen, is the recognition not of an unknown but of the absolute good as real; the joyous consciousness of the presence of god in all things. and morality, in that it is the realization of an ideal which is perfect, is the process whereby the absolute good actualizes itself in man. it is true that the ideal cannot be identified with the process; for it is the principle of the process, and therefore more than it. man does not reach "the last term of development," for there is no last term to a being whose essence is progressive activity. he does not therefore take the place of god, and his self-consciousness is never the absolute self-consciousness. but still, in so far as his life is a progress towards the true and good, it is the process of truth and goodness within him. it is the activity of the ideal. it is god lifting man up to himself, or, in the language of philosophy, "returning to himself in history." and yet it is at the same time man's effort after goodness. man is not a mere "vessel of divine grace," or a passive recipient of the highest bounty. all man's goodness is necessarily man's achievement. and the realization by the ideal of itself is man's achievement of it. for it is his ideal. the law without is also the law within. it is the law within because it is recognized as the law without. thus, the moral consciousness passes into the religious consciousness. the performance of duty is the willing service of the absolute good; and, as such, it involves also the recognition of a purpose that cannot fail. it is both activity and faith, both a struggle and a consciousness of victory, both morality and religion. we cannot, therefore, treat these as alternative phases of man's life. there is not first the pain of the moral struggle, and then the joy and rest of religion. the meat and drink is "to do the will of him that sent me, to finish his work." heaven is the service of the good. "there is nothing in the world or out of it that can be called unconditionally good, except the good will." the process of willing--the moral activity--is its own reward; "the only jewel that shines in its own light." it may seem to some to be presumptuous thus to identify the divine and the human; but to separate them makes both morality and religion impossible. it robs morality of its ideal, and makes god a mere name for the "unknown." those who think that this identification degrades the divine, misapprehend the nature of spirit; and forget that it is of its essence to communicate itself. and goodness and truth do not become less when shared; they grow greater. spiritual possessions imply community wherein there is no exclusion; and to the christian the glory of god is his communication of himself. hence the so-called religious humility, which makes god different in nature from his work, really degrades the object of its worship. it puts mere power above the gifts of spirit, and it indicates that the worshipper has not been emancipated from the slavishness, which makes a fetish of its god. such a religion is not free, and the development of man destroys it. "i never realized god's birth before-- how he grew likest god in being born."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--pompilia_, - .] the intense love of the young mother drew the divine and the human together, and set at nought the contrast which prose ever draws between them. this thought of the unity of god and man is one which has frequent utterance from the poet when his religious spirit is most deeply moved; for it is the characteristic of religious feeling that it abolishes all sense of separation. it removes all the limitations of finitude and lifts man into rapturous unity with the god he adores; and it gives such completeness to his life that it seems to him to be a joyous pulse of the life that is absolute. the feeling of unity may be an illusion. this we cannot discuss here; but, in any case, it is a feeling essential to religion. and the philosophy which seeks to lift this feeling into clear consciousness and to account for its existence, cannot but recognize that it implies and presupposes the essential affinity of the divine nature with the nature of man. thus, both from the side of morality and from that of religion, we are brought to recognize the unity of god with man as a spiritual being. the moral ideal is man's idea of perfection, that is, his idea of god. while theology and philosophy are often occupied with the vain task of bridging a chasm between the finite and the infinite, which they assume to be separated, the supreme facts of the life of man as a spirit spring from their unity. in other words, morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. the good that man effects is, at the same time, the working of god within him. the activity that man is, "tending up, holds, is upheld by, god, and ends the man upward in that dread point of intercourse nor needs a place, for it returns to him."[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] "god, perchance, grants each new man, by some as new a mode, inter-communication with himself wreaking on finiteness infinitude."[b] [footnote b: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] and while man's moral endeavour is thus recognized as the activity of god within him, it is also implied that the divine being can be known only as revealed, and incarnated, if one may so say, in a perfect human character. it was a permanent conviction of browning, that "the acknowledgment of god in christ accepted by thy reason, solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it." so far from regarding the power in the world which makes for righteousness, as "not-ourselves," as matthew arnold did in his haste, that power is known to be the man's true self and more, and morality is the gradual process whereby its content is evolved. and man's state of perfection, which is symbolized for the intelligent by the term heaven, is, for browning, "the equalizing, ever and anon, in momentary rapture, great with small, omniscience with intelligency, god with man--the thunder glow from pole to pole abolishing, a blissful moment-space, great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire-- as sure to ebb as sure again to flow when the new receptivity deserves the new completion."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_.] thus, therefore, does the poet wed the divine strength with human weakness; and the principle of unity, thus conceived, gives him at once his moral strenuousness and that ever present foretaste of victory, which we may call his religious optimism. whether this principle receives adequate expression from the poet, we shall inquire in the next chapter. for on this depends its worth as a solution of the enigma of man's moral life. chapter vi. browning's treatment of the principle of love. "god! thou art love! i build my faith on that!"[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_] it may be well before going further to gather together the results so far reached. browning was aware of the conflict of the religious and moral consciousness, but he did not hesitate to give to each of them its most uncompromising utterance. and it is on this account that he is instructive; for, whatever may be the value of compromise in practical affairs, there is no doubt that it has never done anything to advance human thought. his religion is an optimistic faith, a peaceful consciousness of the presence of the highest in man, and therefore in all other things. yet he does not hesitate to represent the moral life as a struggle with evil, and a movement through error towards a highest good which is never finally realized. he sees that the contradiction is not an absolute one, but that a good man is always both moral and religious, and, in every good act he does, transcends their difference. he knew that the ideal apart from the process is nothing, and that "a god beyond the stars" is simply the unknowable. but he knew, too, that the ideal is not _merely_ the process, but also that which starts the process, guides it, and comes to itself through it. god, emptied of human elements, is a mere name; but, at the same time, the process of human evolution does not exhaust the idea of god. the process by itself, _i.e._, mere morality, is a conception of a fragment, a fiction of abstract thought; it is a movement which has no beginning or end; and in it neither the head nor the heart of man could find contentment. he is driven by ethics into philosophy, and by morality into religion. it was in this way that browning found himself compelled to trace back the moral process to its origin, and to identify the moral law with the nature of god. it is this that gives value to his view of moral progress, as reaching beyond death to a higher stage of being, for which man's attainments in this life are only preliminary. "what's time? leave now for dogs and apes, man has forever."[a] [footnote a: _grammarian's funeral_.] there are other "adventures brave and new" for man, "more lives yet," other ways of warfare, other depths of goodness and heights of love. the poet lifts the moral ideal into infinitude, and removes all limits to the possibility and necessity of being good. nay, the process itself is good. moral activity is its own bountiful reward; for moral progress, which means struggle, is the best thing in the world or out of it. to end such a process, to stop that activity, were therefore evil. but it cannot end, for it is the self-manifestation of the divine life. there is plenty of way to make, for the ideal is absolute goodness. the process cannot exhaust the absolute, and it is impossible that man should be god. and yet this process is the process of the absolute, the working of the ideal, the presence of the highest in man as a living power realizing itself in his acts and in his thoughts. and the absolute cannot fail; not in man, for the process is the evolution of his essential nature; and not in the world, for that is but the necessary instrument of the evolution. by lifting the moral ideal of man to infinitude, the poet has identified it with the nature of god, and made it the absolute law of things. now, this idea of the identity of the human and the divine is a perfectly familiar christian idea. "thence shall i, approved a man, for aye removed from the developed brute; a god though in the germ."[a] [footnote a: _rabbi ben ezra._] this idea is involved in the ordinary expressions of religious thought. but, nevertheless, both theology and philosophy shrink from giving to it a clear and unembarrassed utterance. instead of rising to the sublime boldness of the nazarene teacher, they set up prudential differences between god and man--differences not of degree only but of nature; and, in consequence, god is reduced into an unknowable absolute, and man is made incapable not only of moral, but also of intellectual life. the poet himself has proved craven-hearted in this, as we shall see. he, too, sets up insurmountable barriers between the divine and the human, and thereby weakens both his religious and his moral convictions. his moral inspiration is greatest just where his religious enthusiasm is most intense. in _rabbi ben ezra, the death in the desert_, and _the ring and the book_, there prevails a constant sense of the community of god and man within the realm of goodness; and the world itself, "with its dread machinery of sin and sorrow," is made to join the great conspiracy, whose purpose is at once the evolution of man's character, and the realization of the will of god. "so, the all-great, were the all-loving too-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying, 'o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee.'"[a] [footnote a: _an epistle from karshish_.] but, if we follow browning's thoughts in his later and more reflective poems, such as _ferishtah's_ _fancies_ for instance, it will not be possible to hold that the poet altogether realized the importance for both morality and religion alike, of the idea of the actual immanence of god in man. in these poems he seems to have abandoned it in favour of the hypotheses of a more timid philosophy. but, if his religious faith had not been embarrassed by certain dogmatic presuppositions of which he could not free himself, he might have met more successfully some of the difficulties which later reflection revealed to him, and might have been able to set a true value on that "philosophy," which betrayed his faith while appearing to support it. but, before trying to criticize the principle by means of which browning sought to reconcile the moral and religious elements of human life, it may be well to give it a more explicit and careful statement. what, then, is that principle of unity between the divine and the human? how can we interpret the life of man as god's life in man, so that man, in attaining the moral ideal proper to his own nature, is at the same time fulfilling ends which may justly be called divine? the poet, in early life and in late life alike, has one answer to this question--an answer given with the confidence of complete conviction. the meeting-point of god and man is love. love, in other words, is, for the poet, the supreme principle both of morality and religion. love, once for all, solves that contradiction between them which, both in theory and in practice, has embarrassed the world for so many ages. love is the sublimest conception attainable by man; a life inspired by it is the most perfect form of goodness he can conceive; therefore, love is, at the same moment, man's moral ideal, and the very essence of godhood. a life actuated by love is divine, whatever other limitations it may have. such is the perfection and glory of this emotion, when it has been translated into a self-conscious motive, and become the energy of an intelligent will, that it lifts him who owns it to the sublimest height of being. "for the loving worm within its clod, were diviner than a loveless god amid his worlds, i will dare to say."[a] [footnote a: _christmas eve_.] so excellent is this emotion that, if man, who has this power to love, did not find the same power in god, then man would excel him, and the creature and creator change parts. "do i find love so full in my nature, god's ultimate gift, that i doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift? here, the creature surpass the creator,--the end what began?"[b] [footnote b: _saul_.] not so, says david, and with him no doubt the poet himself. god is himself the source and fulness of love. "tis thou, god, that givest, 'tis i who receive: in the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. all's one gift." * * * * * "would i suffer for him that i love? so would'st thou,--so wilt thou! so shall crown thee, the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown-- and thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down one spot for the creature to stand in!"[a] [footnote a: _saul_.] and this same love not only constitutes the nature of god and the moral ideal of man, but it is also the purpose and essence of all created being, both animate and inanimate. "this world's no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely and means good."[b] [footnote b: _fra lippo lippi_.] "o world, as god has made it! all is beauty: and knowing this is love, and love is duty, what further may be sought for or declared?" in this world then "all's love, yet all's law." god permits nothing to break through its universal sway, even the very wickedness and misery of life are brought into the scheme of good, and, when rightly understood, reveal themselves as its means. "i can believe this dread machinery of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, devised--all pain, at most expenditure of pain by who devised pain--to evolve, by new machinery in counterpart, the moral qualities of man--how else?-- to make him love in turn and be beloved, creative and self-sacrificing too, and thus eventually godlike."[c] [footnote c: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] the poet thus brings the natural world, the history of man, and the nature of god, within the limits of the same conception. the idea of love solves for browning all the enigmas of human life and thought. "the thing that seems mere misery, under human schemes, becomes, regarded by the light of love, as very near, or quite as good a gift as joy before."[a] [footnote a: _easter day_.] taking browning's work as a whole, it is scarcely possible to deny that this is at once the supreme motive of his art, and the principle on which his moral and religious doctrine rests. he is always strong and convincing when he is dealing with this theme. it was evidently his own deepest conviction, and it gave him the courage to face the evils of the world, and the power as an artist to "contrive his music from its moans." it plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that reason fills for hegel, or the blind will for schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle. love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to "the immortal course"; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven. all life is but treading the "love-way," and no wanderer can finally lose it. "the way-faring men, though fools, shall not err therein." since love has such an important place in browning's theory of life, it is necessary to see what he means by it. for love has had for different individuals, ages and nations, a very different significance; and almost every great poet has given it a different interpretation. and this is not unnatural. for love is a passion which, beginning with youth and the hey-day of the blood, expands with the expanding life, and takes new forms of beauty and goodness at every stage. and this is equally true, whether we speak of the individual or of the human race. love is no accident in man's history, nor a passing emotion. it is rather a constitutive element of man's nature, fundamental and necessary as his intelligence. and, like everything native and constitutive, it is obedient to the law of evolution, which is the law of man's being; and it passes, therefore, through ever varying forms. to it--if we may for the moment make a distinction between the theoretical and practical life, or between ideas and their causative potency--must be attributed the constructive power which has built the world of morality, with its intangible but most real relations which bind man to man and age to age. it is the author of the organic institutions which, standing between the individual and the rudeness of nature, awaken in him the need, and give him the desire and the faculty, of attaining higher things than physical satisfaction. man is meant to act as well as to think, to be virtuous as well as to have knowledge. it is possible that reverence for the intellect may have led men, at times, to attribute the evolution of the race too exclusively to the theoretic consciousness, forgetting that, along with reason, there co-operates a twin power in all that is wisest and best in us, and that a heart which can love, is as essential a pre-condition of all worthy attainment, as an intellect which can see. love and reason[a] are equally primal powers in man, and they reflect might into each other: for love increases knowledge, and knowledge love. it is their combined power that gives interest and meaning to the facts of life, and transmutes them into a moral and intellectual order. they, together, are lifting man out of the isolation and chaos of subjectivity into membership in a spiritual kingdom, where collision and exclusion are impossible, and all are at once kings and subjects. [footnote a: it would be more correct to say the reason that is loving or the love that is rational; for, though there is distinction, there is no dualism.] and, just as reason is present as a transmuting power in the sensational life of the infancy of the individual and race, so is love present amidst the confused and chaotic activity of the life that knows no law other than its own changing emotions. both make for order, and both grow with it. both love and reason have travelled a long way in the history of man. the patriot's passion for his country, the enthusiasm of pity and helpfulness towards all suffering which marks the man of god, are as far removed from the physical attraction of sex for sex, and the mere liking of the eye and ear, as is the intellectual power of the sage from the vulpine cunning of the savage. "for," as emerson well said, "it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the world and all nature with its generous flames." both love and reason alike pass through stage after stage, always away from the particularity of selfishness and ignorance, into larger and larger cycles of common truth and goodness, towards the full realization of knowledge and benevolence, which is the inheritance of emancipated man. in this transition, the sensuous play of feeling within man, and the sensitive responses to external stimuli, are made more and more organic to ends which are universal, that is, to spiritual ends. love, which in its earliest form, seems to be the natural yearning of brute for brute, appearing and disappearing at the suggestion of physical needs, passes into an idealized sentiment, into an emotion of the soul, into a principle of moral activity which manifests itself in a permanent outflow of helpful deeds for man. it represents, when thus sublimated, one side at least of the expansion of the self, which culminates when the world beats in the pulse of the individual, and the joys and sorrows, the defeats and victories of mankind are felt by him as his own. it is no longer dependent merely on the incitement of youth, grace, beauty, whether of body or character; it transcends all limitations of sex and age, and finds objects on which it can spend itself in all that god has made, even in that which has violated its own law of life and become mean and pitiful. it becomes a love of fallen humanity, and an ardour to save it by becoming the conscious and permanent motive of all men. the history of this evolution of love has been written by the poets. every phase through which this ever-deepening emotion has passed, every form which this primary power has taken in its growth, has received from them its own proper expression. they have made even the grosser instincts lyric with beauty; and, ascending with their theme, they have sung the pure passion of soul for soul, its charm and its strength, its idealism and heroism, up to the point at which, in browning, it transcends the limits of finite existence, sheds all its earthly vesture, and becomes a spiritual principle of religious aspiration and self-surrender to god. browning nowhere shows his native strength more clearly than in his treatment of love. he has touched this world-old theme--which almost every poet has handled, and handled in his highest manner--with that freshness and insight, which is possible only to the inborn originality of genius. other poets have, in some ways, given to love a more exquisite utterance, and rendered its sweetness, and tenderness, and charm with a lighter grace. it may even be admitted that there are poets whose verses have echoed more faithfully the fervour and intoxication of passion, and who have shown greater power of interpreting it in the light of a mystic idealism. but, in one thing, browning stands alone. he has given to love a moral significance, a place and power amongst those substantial elements on which rest the dignity of man's being and the greatness of his destiny, in a way which is, i believe, without example in any other poet. and he has done this by means of that moral and religious earnestness, which pervades all his poetry. the one object of supreme interest to him is the development of the soul, and his penetrative insight revealed to him the power to love as the paramount fact in that development. to love, he repeatedly tells us, is the sole and supreme object of man's life; it is the one lesson which he has to learn on earth; and, love once learnt, in what way matters little, "it leaves completion in the soul." love we dare not, and, indeed, cannot absolutely miss. no man can be absolutely selfish and be man. "beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade the whole o' the grey, and, free again, be fire; of worth the same, howe'er produced, for, great or little, flame is flame."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, xliii.] love, once evoked, once admitted into the soul, "adds worth to worth, as wine enriches blood, and straightway sends it forth, conquering and to conquer, through all eternity, that's battle without end."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_. liv.] this view of the significance of love grew on browning as his knowledge of man's nature and destiny became fuller and deeper, while, at the same time, his trust in the intellect became less. even in _paracelsus_ he reveals love, not as a sentiment or intoxicating passion, as one might expect from a youthful poet, but as one of the great fundamental "faculties" of man. love, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened, often-chequered trust," though it be, still makes man "the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false." in that poem, love is definitely lifted by the poet to the level of knowledge. intellectual gain, apart from love, is folly and futility, worthless for the individual and worthless to the race. "mind is nothing but disease," paracelsus cries in the bitterness of his disappointment, "and natural health is ignorance"; and he asks of the mad poet who "loved too rashly," "are we not halves of one dissevered world, whom this strange chance unites once more? part? never! till thou the lover, know; and i, the knower, love--until both are saved."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] and, at the end of the poem, paracelsus, coming to an understanding with himself as to the gain and loss of life, proclaims with his last strength the truth he had missed throughout his great career, namely, the supreme worth of love. "i saw aprile--my aprile there! and as the poor melodious wretch disburthened his heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear, i learned my own deep error; love's undoing taught me the worth of love in man's estate, and what proportion love should hold with power in his right constitution; love preceding power, and with much power, always much more love; love still too straitened in his present means, and earnest for new power to set love free." as long as he hated men, or, in his passionate pursuit of truth, was indifferent to their concerns, it was not strange that he saw no good in men and failed to help them. knowledge without love is not _true_ knowledge, but folly and weakness. but, great as is the place given to love in _paracelsus_, it is far less than that given to it in the poet's later works. in _ferishtah's fancies_ and _la saisiaz_ it is no longer rivalled by knowledge; nor even in _easter day_, where the voice beside the poet proclaiming that "life is done, time ends, eternity's begun," gives a final pronouncement upon the purposes of the life of man. the world of sense--of beauty and art, of knowledge and truth, are given to man, but none of them satisfy his spirit; they merely sting with hunger for something better. "deficiency gapes every side," till love is known as the essence and worth of all things. "is this thy final choice? love is the best? 'tis somewhat late! and all thou dost enumerate of power and beauty in the world, the righteousness of love was curled inextricably round about. love lay within it and without, to clasp thee,--but in vain! thy soul still shrunk from him who made the whole, still set deliberate aside his love!--now take love! well betide thy tardy conscience!"[a] [footnote a: _easter day._] in his later reflective poems, in which he deals with the problems of life in the spirit of a metaphysician, seeking a definite answer to the questions of the intelligence, he declares the reason for his preference of love to knowledge. in _la saisiaz_ he states that man's love is god's too, a spark from his central fire; but man's knowledge is man's only. knowledge is finite, limited and tinged with sense. the truth we reach at best is only truth _for us_, relative, distorted. we are for ever kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with semblances. the poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid for any other man. david hume could scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor berkeley more surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments. in fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to spirit. out of his experience, browning says, "there crowds conjecture manifold. but, as knowledge, this comes only,--things may be as i behold or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are; i myself am what i know not--ignorance which proves no bar to the knowledge that i am, and, since i am, can recognize what to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] thought itself, for aught he knows, may be afflicted with a kind of colour-blindness; and he knows no appeal when one affirms "green as grass," and another contradicts him with "red as grass." under such circumstances, it is not strange that browning should decline to speak except for himself, and that he will "nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong or weak," or that he will far less presume to pronounce for god, and pretend that the truth finds utterance from lips of clay-- "pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach." "have i knowledge? confounded it shrivels at wisdom laid bare! have i forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the infinite care! * * * * * "and thus looking within and around me, i ever renew (with that stoop of the soul, which in bending upraises it too) the submission of man's nothing-perfect to god's all-complete, as by each new obeisance in spirit, i climb to his feet."[b] [footnote b: _saul_, iii.] but david finds in himself one faculty so supreme in worth that he keeps it in abeyance-- "lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, i worst e'en the giver in one gift.--behold, i could love if i durst! but i sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake god's own speed in the one way of love: i abstain for love's sake."[a] [footnote a: _saul_, iii.] this faculty of love, so far from being tainted with finitude, like knowledge; so far from being mere man's, or a temporary and deceptive power given to man for temporary uses, by a creator who has another ineffably higher way of loving, as he has of truth, is itself divine. in contrast with the activity of love, omnipotence itself dwindles into insignificance, and creation sinks into a puny exercise of power. love, in a word, is the highest good; and, as such, it has all its worth in itself, and gives to all other things what worth they have. god himself gains the "ineffable crown" by showing love and saving the weak. it is the power divine, the central energy of god's being. browning never forgets this moral or religious quality of love. so pure is this emotion to the poet, "so perfect in whiteness, that it will not take pollution; but, ermine-like, is armed from dishonour by its own soft snow." in the corruptest hearts, amidst the worst sensuality, love is still a power divine, making for all goodness. even when it is kindled into flame by an illicit touch, and wars against the life of the family, which is its own product, its worth is supreme. he who has learned to love in any way, has "caught god's secret." how he has caught it, whom he loves, whether or not he is loved in return, all these things matter little. the paramount question on which hangs man's fate is, has he learned to love another, any other, fifine or elvire. "she has lost me," said the unloved lover; "i have gained her. her soul's mine." the supreme worth of love, the mere emotion itself, however called into activity, secures it against all taint. no one who understands browning in the least, can accuse him of touching with a rash hand the sanctity of the family; rather he places it on the basis of its own principle, and thereby makes for it the strongest defence. such love as he speaks of, however irregular its manifestation or sensuous its setting, can never be confounded with lust--"hell's own blue tint." it is further removed from lust even than asceticism. it has not even a negative attitude towards the flesh; but finds the flesh to be "stuff for transmuting," and reduces it to the uses of the spirit. the love which is sung by browning is more pure and free, and is set in a higher altitude than anything that can be reached by the way of negation. it is a consecration of the undivided self, so that "soul helps not flesh more, than flesh helps soul." it is not only a spiritual and divine emotion, but it also "shows a heart within blood-tinctured with a veined humanity." "be a god and hold me with a charm! be a man and hold me with thine arm! "teach me, only teach, love! as i ought i will speak thy speech, love! think thy thought-- "meet, if thou require it, both demands, laying flesh and spirit in thy hands."[a] [footnote a: _a woman's last word_.] true love is always an infinite giving, which holds nothing back. it is a spendthrift, magnificent in its recklessness, squandering the very essence of the self upon its object, and by doing so, in the end enriching the self beyond all counting. for in loving, the individual becomes re-impersonated in another; the distinction of me and thee is swept away, and there pulses in two individuals one warm life. "if two lives join, there is oft a scar they are one and one with a shadowy third; one near one is too far. "a moment after, and hands unseen were hanging the night around us fast; but we knew that a bar was broken between life and life: we were mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen."[b] [footnote b: _by the fireside_.] the throwing down of the limits that wall a man within himself, the mingling of his own deepest interests with those of others, always marks love; be it love of man for maid, parent for child, or patriot for his country. it opens an outlet into the pure air of the world of objects, and enables man to escape from the stuffed and poisonous atmosphere of his narrow self. it is a streaming outwards of the inmost treasures of the spirit, a consecration of its best activities to the welfare of others. and when this is known to be the native quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place. "prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of _turf and towers_, in slime. lust, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled love, is its worst perversion. love spends itself for another, and seeks satisfaction only in another's good. but last uses up others for its own worst purposes, wastes its object, and turns the current of life back inwards, into the slush and filth of selfish pleasure. the distinction between love and its perversion, which is impossible in the naive life of an animal, ought to be clear enough to all, and probably is. nor should the sexual impulse in human beings be confused with fleshly desire, and treated as if it were merely natural, "the mere lust of life" common to all living things,--"that strive," as spinoza put it, "to persevere in existing." for there is no purely natural impulse in man; all that he is, is transfused with spirit, whether he will or no. he cannot act as a mere animal, because he cannot leave his rational nature behind him. he cannot desire as an innocent brute desires: his desire is always love or lust. we have as little right to say that the wisdom of the sage is _nothing but_ the purblind savagery of a terra del fuegian, as we have to assert that love is _nothing but_ a sexual impulse. that impulse rather, when its potency is set free, will show itself, at first confusedly, but with more and more clearness as it expands, to be the yearning of soul for soul. it puts us "in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom." the height to which this passion lifts man, is just what makes possible the fall into a sensuality and excess of brutishness, in comparison with which animal life is a paradise of innocence. if this is clearly recognized, many of the idle questions of casuistry that are sometimes raised regarding sexual love and marriage will cease to trouble. for these questions generally presuppose the lowest possible view of this passion. browning shows us how to follow with serene security the pure light of the emotion of love, amidst all the confused lawlessness of lustful passion, and through all the intricacies of human character. love, he thinks, is never illicit, never unwise, except when it is disloyal to itself; it never ruins, but always strives to enrich its object. bacon quotes with approval a saying "that it is impossible to love, and to be wise." browning asserts that it is impossible to love and _not_ be wise. it is a power that, according to the christian idea which the poet adopts, has infinite goodness for its source, and that, even in its meanest expression, is always feeling its way back to its origin, flowing again into the ocean whence it came. so sparklingly pure is this passion that it could exorcise the evil and turn old to new, even in the case of léonce miranda. at least browning, in this poem, strives to show that, being true love, though the love of an unclean man for an unclean woman, it was a power at war with the sordid elements of that sordid life. love has always the same potency, flame is always flame, "no matter whence flame sprung, from gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, lv.] "let her but love you, all else you disregard! what else can be? you know how love is incompatible with falsehood--purifies, assimilates all other passions to itself."[b] [footnote b: _colombe's birthday._] "ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world and say, love can go unrequited here! you will have blessed him to his whole life's end-- low passions hindered, baser cares kept back, all goodness cherished where you dwelt--and dwell."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] but, while love is always a power lifting a man upwards to the level of its own origin from whatever depths of degradation, its greatest potency can reveal itself only in characters intrinsically pure, such as pompilia and caponsacchi. like mercy and every other spiritual gift, it is mightiest in the mighty. in the good and great of the earth love is veritably seen to be god's own energy; "who never is dishonoured in the spark he gave us from his fire of fires, and bade remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid while that burns on, though all the rest grow dark."[a] [footnote a: _any wife to any husband_, iii.] it were almost an endless task to recount the ways in which browning exhibits the moralizing power of love: how it is for him the quintessence of all goodness; the motive, and inspiring cause, of every act in the world that is completely right; and how, on that account, it is the actual working in the man of the ideal of all perfection. this doctrine of love is, in my opinion, the richest vein of pure ore in browning's poetry. but it remains to follow briefly our poet's treatment of love in another direction--as a principle present, not only in god as creative and redeeming power, and in man as the highest motive and energy of the moral life, but also in the outer world, in the "material" universe. in the view of the poet, the whole creation is nothing but love incarnate, a pulsation from the divine heart. love is the source of all law and of all beauty. "day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night speaketh knowledge. there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard." and our poet speaks as if he had caught the meaning of the language, and believes that all things speak of love--the love of god. "i think," says the heroine of the _inn album_, "womanliness means only motherhood; all love begins and ends there,--roams enough, but, having run the circle, rests at home."[a] [footnote a: _the inn album_.] and browning detects something of this motherhood everywhere. he finds it as "some cause such as is put into a tree, which turns away from the north wind with what nest it holds."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book_--_canon caponsacchi_, - .] the pope--who, if any one, speaks for browning--declares that "brute and bird, reptile and the fly, ay and, i nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant and flower o' the field, are all in a common pact to worthily defend the trust of trusts, life from the ever living."[c] [footnote c: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] "because of motherhood," said the minor pope in _ivàn ivànovitch_, "each male yields to his partner place, sinks proudly in the scale: his strength owned weakness, wit--folly, and courage--fear, beside the female proved males's mistress--only here the fox-dam, hunger-pined, will slay the felon sire who dares assault her whelp." the betrayal of the mother's trust is the "unexampled sin," which scares the world and shames god. "i hold that, failing human sense, the very earth had oped, sky fallen, to efface humanity's new wrong, motherhood's first disgrace."[a] [footnote a: _ivàn ivànovitch_.] this instinct of love, which binds brute-parent to brute-offspring, is a kind of spiritual law in the natural world: it, like all law, guarantees the continuity and unity of the world, and it is scarcely akin to merely physical attraction. no doubt its basis is physical; it has an organism of flesh and blood for its vehicle and instrument: but mathematical physics cannot explain it, nor can it be detected by chemical tests. rather, with the poet, we are to regard brute affection as a kind of rude outline of human love; as a law in nature, which, when understood by man and adopted as his rule of conduct, becomes the essence and potency of his moral life. thus browning regards love as an omnipresent good. there is nothing, he tells us in _fifine_, which cannot reflect it; even moral putridity becomes phosphorescent, "and sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures." "there is no good of life but love--but love! what else looks good, is some shade flung from love, love gilds it, gives it worth."[b] [footnote b: _in a balcony_.] there is no fact which, if seen to the heart, will not prove itself to have love for its purpose, and, therefore, for its substance. and it is on this account that everything finds its place in a kosmos and that there is "no detail but, in place allotted it, was prime and perfect."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_. xxxi.] every event in the history of the world and of man is explicable, as the bursting into new form of this elemental, all-pervading power. the permanence in change of nature, the unity in variety, the strength which clothes itself in beauty, are all manifestations of love. nature is not merely natural; matter and life's minute beginnings, are more than they seem. paracelsus said that he knew and felt "what god is, what we are, what life is--how god tastes an infinite joy in finite ways--one everlasting bliss, from whom all being emanates, all power proceeds: in whom is life for evermore, yet whom existence in its lowest form includes."[b] [footnote b: _paracelsus_.] the scheme of love does not begin with man, he is rather its consummation. "whose attributes had here and there been scattered o'er the visible world before, asking to be combined, dim fragments meant to be united in some wondrous whole, imperfect qualities throughout creation, suggesting some one creature yet to make, some point where all those scattered rays should meet convergent in the faculties of man. * * * * * "hints and previsions of which faculties, are strewn confusedly everywhere about the inferior natures, and all lead up higher, all shape out divinely the superior race, the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, and man appears at last."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] power, knowledge, love, all these are found in the world, in which "all tended to mankind, and, man produced, all has its end thus far: but, in completed man begins anew a tendency to god."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] for man, being intelligent, flings back his light on all that went before, "illustrates all the inferior grades, explains each back step in the circle."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_. .] he gives voice to the mute significance of nature, and lets in the light on its blind groping. "man, once descried, imprints for ever his presence on all lifeless things." and how is this interpretation achieved? by penetrating behind force, power, mechanism, and even intelligence, thinks the poet, to a purpose which is benevolent, a reason which is all embracing and rooted in love. the magnificent failure of paracelsus came from missing this last step. his transcendent hunger for knowledge was not satisfied, not because human knowledge is essentially an illusion or mind disease, but because his knowledge did not reach the final truth of things, which is love. for love alone makes the heart wise, to know the secret of all being. this is the ultimate hypothesis in the light of which alone man can catch a glimpse of the general direction and intent of the universal movement in the world and man. dying, paracelsus, taught by aprile, caught a glimpse of this elemental "love-force," in which alone lies the clue to every problem, and the promise of the final satisfaction of the human spirit. failing in this knowledge, man may know many things, but nothing truly; for all such knowledge stays with outward shows. it is love alone that puts man in the right relation to his fellows and to the world, and removes the distortion which fills life with sorrow, and makes it "only a scene of degradation, ugliness and tears, the record of disgraces best forgotten, a sullen page in human chronicles fit to erase."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] but in the light of love, man "sees a good in evil, and a hope in ill success," and recognizes that mankind are "all with a touch of nobleness, despite their error, upward tending all though weak; like plants in mines which never saw the sun, but dream of him, and guess where he may be, and do their best to climb and get to him."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] "all this i knew not," adds paracelsus, "and i failed. let men take the lesson and press this lamp of love, 'god's lamp, close to their breasts'; its splendour, soon or late, will pierce the gloom," and show that the universe is a transparent manifestation of his beneficence. chapter vii. browning's idealism, and its philosophical justification. "master, explain this incongruity! when i dared question, 'it is beautiful, but is it true?' thy answer was, 'in truth lives beauty.'"[a] [footnote a: _shah abbas_.] we have now seen how browning sought to explain all things as manifestations of the principle of love; how he endeavoured to bring all the variety of finite existence, and even the deep discrepancies of good and evil, under the sway of one idea. i have already tried to show that all human thought is occupied with the same task: science, art, philosophy, and even the most ordinary common-sense, are all, in their different ways, seeking for constant laws amongst changing facts. nay, we may even go so far as to say that all the activity of man, the practical as well as the theoretical, is an attempt to establish a _modus vivendi_ between his environment and himself. and such an attempt rests on the assumption that there is some ground common to both of the struggling powers within and without, some principle that manifests itself both in man and in nature. so that all men are philosophers to the extent of postulating a unity, which is deeper than all differences; and all are alike trying to discover, in however limited or ignorant a way, what that unity is. if this fact were more constantly kept in view, the effort of philosophers to bring the ultimate colligating principles of thought into clear consciousness would not, at the outset at least, be regarded with so much suspicion. for the philosopher differs from the practical man of the world, not so much in the nature of the task which he is trying to accomplish, as in the distinct and conscious purpose with which he enters upon it. now, i think that those, who, like browning, offer an explicitly optimistic idea of the relation between man and the world, have a special right to a respectful hearing; for it can scarcely be denied that their optimistic explanation is invaluable, _if it is true_-- "so might we safely mock at what unnerves faith now, be spared the sapping fear's increase that haply evil's strife with good shall cease never on earth."[a] [footnote a: _bernard de mandeville_.] despair is a great clog to good work for the world, and pessimists, as a rule, have shown much more readiness than optimists to let evil have its unimpeded way. having found, like schopenhauer, that "life is an awkward business," they "determine to spend life in reflecting on it," or at least in moaning about it. the world's helpers have been men of another mould; and the contrast between fichte and schopenhauer is suggestive of a general truth:--"fichte, in the bright triumphant flight of his idealism, supported by faith in a moral order of the world which works for righteousness, turning his back on the darker ethics of self-torture and mortification, and rushing into the political and social fray, proclaiming the duties of patriotism, idealizing the soldier, calling to and exercising an active philanthrophy, living with his nation, and continually urging it upwards to higher levels of self-realization--schopenhauer recurring to the idea of asceticism, preaching the blessedness of the quiescence of all will, disparaging efforts to save the nation or elevate the masses, and holding that each has enough to do in raising his own self from its dull engrossment in lower things to an absorption in that pure, passionless being which lies far beyond all, even the so-called highest, pursuits of practical life."[a] [footnote a: _schopenhauer_, by prof. wallace.] a pessimism, which is nothing more than flippant fault-finding, frequently gains a cheap reputation for wisdom; and, on the other hand, an optimism, which is really the result of much reflection and experience, may be regarded as the product of a superficial spirit that has never known the deeper evils of life. but, if pessimism be true, it differs from other truths by its uselessness; for, even if it saves man from the bitterness of petty disappointments, it does so only by making the misery universal. there is no need to specify, when "_all_ is vanity." the drowning man does not feel the discomfort of being wet. but yet, if we reflect on the problem of evil, we shall find that there is no neutral ground, and shall ultimately be driven to choose between pessimism and its opposite. nor, on the other hand, is the suppression of the problem of evil possible, except at a great cost. it presents itself anew in the mind of every thinking man; and some kind of solution of it, or at least some definite way of meeting its difficulty, is involved in the attitude which every man assumes towards life and its tasks. it is not impossible that there may be as much to be said for browning's joy in life and his love of it, as there is for his predecessor's rage and sorrow. browning certainly thought that there was; and he held his view consistently to the end. we cannot, therefore, do justice to the poet without dealing critically with the principle on which he has based his faith, and observing how far it is applicable to the facts of human life. as i have previously said, he strives hard to come into fair contact with the misery of man in all its sadness; and, after doing so, he claims, not as a matter of poetic sentiment, but as a matter of strict truth, that good is the heart and reality of it all. it is true that he cannot demonstrate the truth of his principle by reference to all the facts, any more than the scientific man can justify his hypothesis in every detail; but he holds it as a faith which reason can justify and experience establish, although not in every isolated phenomenon. the good may, he holds, be seen actually at work in the world, and its process will be more fully known, as human life advances towards its goal. "though master keep aloof, signs of his presence multiply from roof to basement of the building."[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] thus browning bases his view upon experience, and finds firm footing for his faith in the present; although he acknowledges that the "profound of ignorance surges round his rockspit of self-knowledge." "enough that now, here where i stand, this moment's me and mine, shows me what is, permits me to divine what shall be."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] "since we know love we know enough"; for in love, he confidently thinks we have the key to all the mystery of being. now, what is to be made of an optimism of this kind, which is based upon love and which professes to start from experience, or to be legitimately and rationally derived from it? if such a view be taken seriously, as i propose doing, we must be prepared to meet at the outset with some very grave difficulties. the first of these is that it is an interpretation of facts by a human emotion. to say that love blushes in the rose, or breaks into beauty in the clouds, that it shows its strength in the storm, and sets the stars in the sky, and that it is in all things the source of order and law, may imply a principle of supreme worth both to poetry and religion; but when we are asked to take it as a metaphysical explanation of facts, we are prone, like the judges of caponsacchi, not to "levity, or to anything indecorous"-- "only--i think i apprehend the mood: there was the blameless shrug, permissible smirk, the pen's pretence at play with the pursed mouth, the titter stifled in the hollow palm which rubbed the eye-brow and caressed the nose, when i first told my tale; they meant, you know-- 'the sly one, all this we are bound believe! well, he can say no other than what he says.'"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--canon caponsacchi_, - .] we are sufficiently willing to let the doctrine be held as a pious opinion. the faith that "all's love yet all's law," like many another illusion, if not hugged too closely, may comfort man's nakedness. but if we are asked to substitute this view for that which the sciences suggest,--if we are asked to put "love" in the place of physical energy, and, by assuming it as a principle, to regard as unreal all the infinite misery of humanity and the degradation of intellect and character from which it arises, common-sense seems at once to take the side of the doleful sage of chelsea. when the optimist postulates that the state of the world, were it rightly understood, is completely satisfactory, reason seems to be brought to a stand; and if poetry and religion involve such a postulate, they are taken to be ministering to the emotions at the expense of the intellect. browning, however, was not a mere sentimentalist who could satisfy his heart without answering the questions of his intellect. nor is his view without support--at least, as regards the substance of it. the presence of an idealistic element in things is recognized even by ordinary thought; and no man's world is so poor that it would not be poorer still for him, if it were reduced by the abstract sciences of nature into a mere manifestation of physical force. such a world richter compares to an empty eye-socket. the great result of speculation since the time of kant is to teach us to recognize that objects are essentially related to mind, and that the principles which rule our thought enter, so to speak, into the constitution of the things we know. a very slight acquaintance with the history even of psychology, especially in modern times, shows that facts are more and more retracted into thought. this science, which began with a sufficiently common-sense view, not only of the reality and solidity of the things of the outer world, but of their opposition to, or independence of thought, is now thinning that world down into a mere shadow--a something which excites sensation. it shows that external things as we know them, and we are not concerned in any others, are, to a very great extent, the product of our thinking activities. no one will now subscribe to the lockian or humean view, of images impressed by objects on mind: the object which "impresses" has first to be made by mind, out of the results of nervous excitation. in a word, modern psychology as well as modern metaphysics, is demonstrating more and more fully the dependence of the world, as it is known, on the nature and activity of man's mind. every explanation of the world is found to be, in this sense, idealistic; and in this respect, there is no difference whatsoever between the interpretation given by science and that of poetry, or religion, or philosophy. if we say that a thing is a "substance," or has "a cause"; if, with the physicist, we assert the principle of the transmutation of energy, or make use of the idea of evolution with the biologist or geologist; nay, if we speak of time and space with the mathematician, we use principles of unity derived from self-consciousness, and interpret nature in terms of ourselves, just as truly as the poet or philosopher, who makes love, or reason, the constitutive element in things. if the practical man of the world charges the poet and philosopher with living amidst phantoms, he can be answered with a "_tu quoque_." "how easy," said emerson, "it is to show the materialist that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe proving dim and impalpable before his sense." "sense," which seems to show directly that the world is a solid reality, not dependent in any way on thought, is found not to be reliable. all science is nothing but an appeal to thought from ordinary sensuous opinion. it is an attempt to find the reality of things by thinking about them; and this reality, when it is found, turns out to be a law. but laws are ideas; though, if they are true ideas, they represent not merely thoughts in the mind, but also real principles, which manifest themselves in the objects of the outer world, as well as in the thinker's mind. it is not possible in such a work as this, to give a carefully reasoned proof of this view of the relation of thought and things, or to repeat the argument of kant. i must be content with merely referring to it, as showing that the principles in virtue of which we think, are the principles in virtue of which objects as we know them exist; and we cannot be concerned with any other objects. the laws which scientific investigation discovers are not only ideas that can be written in books, but also principles which explain the nature of things. in other words, the hypotheses of the natural sciences, or their categories, are points of view in the light of which the external world can be regarded as governed by uniform laws. and these constructive principles, which lift the otherwise disconnected world into an intelligible system, are revelations of the nature of intelligence, and only on that account principles for explaining the world. "to know, rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] in this sense, it may be said that all knowledge is anthropomorphic; and in this respect there is no difference between the physics, which speaks of energy as the essence of things, and the poetry, which speaks of love as the ultimate principle of reality. between such scientific and idealistic explanations there is not even the difference that the one begins without and the other within, or that the one is objective and the other subjective. the true distinction is that the principles upon which the latter proceed are less abstract than those of science. "reason" and "love" are higher principles for the explanation of the nature of things than "substance" or "cause"; but both are forms of the unity of thought. and if the latter seem to have nothing to do with the self, it is only because they are inadequate to express its full character. on the other hand, the higher categories, or ideas of reason, seem to be merely anthropomorphic, and, therefore, ill-suited to explain nature, because the relation of nature to intelligence is habitually neglected by ordinary thought, which has not pressed its problems far enough to know that such higher categories can alone satisfy the demand for truth. but natural science is gradually driven from the lower to the higher categories, or, in other words, it is learning to take a more and more idealistic view of nature. it is moving very slowly, because it is a long labour to exhaust the uses of an instrument of thought; and it is only at great intervals in the history of the human intellect, that we find the need of a change of categories. but, as already hinted, there is no doubt that science is becoming increasingly aware of the conditions, under which alone its results may be held as valid. at first, it drove "mind" out of the realm of nature, and offered to explain both it and man in physical and mathematical terms. but, in our day, the man of science has become too cautious to make such rash extensions of the principles he uses. he is more inclined to limit himself to his special field, and he refuses to make any declaration as to the ultimate nature of things. he holds himself apart from materialism, as he does from idealism. i think i may even go further, and say that the fatal flaw of materialism has been finally detected, and that the essential relativity of all objects to thought is all but universally acknowledged. the common notion that science gives a complete view of truth, to which we may appeal as refuting idealism, is untenable. science itself will not support the appeal, but will direct the appellant to another court. perhaps, rather, it would be truer to say that its attitude is one of doubt whether or not any court, philosophical or other, can give any valid decision on the matter. confining themselves to the region of material phenomena, scientific men generally leave to common ignorance, or to moral and theological tradition, all the interests and activities of man, other than those which are physical or physiological. and some of them are even aware, that if they could find the physical equation of man, or, through their knowledge of physiology, actually produce in man the sensations, thoughts, and notions now ascribed to the intelligent life within him, the question of the spiritual or material nature of man and the world, would remain precisely where it was. the explanation would still begin with mind and end there. the principles of the materialistic explanation of the world would still be derived from intelligence; mind would still underlie all it explained, and completed science would still be, in this sense, anthropomorphic. the charge of anthropomorphism thus falls to the ground, because it would prove too much. it is a weapon which cuts the hand that wields it. and, as directed against idealism, it only shows that he who uses it has inadequate notions both of the nature of the self and of the world, and is not aware that each gets meaning, only as an exponent of the other. on the whole, we may say that it is not men of science who now assail philosophy, because it gives an idealistic explanation of the world, so much as unsystematic dabblers in matters of thought. the best men of science, rather, show a tendency to acquiesce in a kind of dualism of matter and spirit, and to leave morality and religion, art and philosophy to pursue their own ends undisturbed. mr. huxley, for instance, and some others, offer two philosophical solutions, one proceeding from the material world and the other from the sensations and other "facts of consciousness." they say that we may either explain man as a natural phenomenon, or the world as a mental one. but it is a little difficult not to ask which of these explanations is true. both of them cannot well be, seeing that they are different. and neither of them can be adopted without very serious consequences. it would require considerable hardihood to suggest that natural science should be swept away in favour of psychology, which would be done if the one view held by mr. huxley were true. and, in my opinion, it requires quite as much hardihood to suggest the adoption of a theory that makes morality and religion illusory, which would be done were the other view valid. as a matter of fact, however, such an attitude can scarcely be held by any one who is interested _both_ in the success of natural science and in the spiritual development of mankind. we are constrained rather to say that, if these rival lines of thought lead us to deny either the outer world of things, or the world of thought and morality, then they must both be wrong. they are not "explanations" but false theories, if they lead to such conclusions as these. and, instead of holding them up to the world as the final triumph of human thought, we should sweep them into the dust-bin, and seek for some better explanation from a new point of view. and, indeed, a better explanation is sought, and sought not only by idealists, but by scientific men themselves,--did they only comprehend their own main tendency and method. the impulse towards unity, which is the very essence of thought, if it is baulked in one direction by a hopeless dualism, just breaks out in another. subjective idealism, that is, the theory that things are nothing but phenomena of the individual's consciousness, that the world is really all inside the philosopher, is now known by most people to end in self-contradiction; and materialism is also known to begin with it. and there are not many people sanguine enough to believe with mr. huxley and mr. herbert spencer, that, if we add two self-contradictory theories together, or hold them alternately, we shall find the truth. modern science, that is, the science which does not philosophize, and modern philosophy are with tolerable unanimity denying this absolute dualism. they do not know of any thought that is not of things, or of any things that are not for thought. it is necessarily assumed that, in some way or other, the gap between things and thought is got over by knowledge. how the connection is brought about may not be known; but, that there is the connection between real things and true thoughts, no one can well deny. it is an ill-starred perversity which leads men to deny such a connection, merely because they have not found out how it is established. a new category of thought has taken possession of the thought of our time--a category which is fatal to dualism. the idea of development is breaking down the division between mind and matter, as it is breaking down all other absolute divisions. geology, astronomy, and physics at one extreme, biology, psychology, and philosophy at the other, combine in asserting the idea of the universe as a unity which is always evolving its content, and bringing its secret potencies to the light. it is true that these sciences have not linked hands as yet. we cannot get from chemistry to biology without a leap, or from physiology to psychology without another. but no one will postulate a rift right through being. the whole tendency of modern science implies the opposite of such a conception. history is striving to trace continuity between the civilized man and the savage. psychology is making towards a junction with physiology and general biology, biology with chemistry, and chemistry with physics. that there is an unbroken continuity in existence is becoming a postulate of modern science, almost as truly as the "universality of law" or "the uniformity of nature." nor is the postulate held less firmly because the evidence for the continuity of nature is not yet complete. chemistry has not yet quite lapsed into physics; biology at present shows no sign of giving up its characteristic conception of life, and the former science is as yet quite unable to deal with that peculiar phenomenon. the facts of consciousness have not been resolved into nervous action, and, so far, mind has not been shown to be a secretion of brain. nevertheless, all these sciences are beating against the limits which separate them, and new suggestions of connection between natural life and its inorganic environment are continually discovered. the sciences are boring towards each other, and the dividing strata are wearing thin; so that it seems reasonable to expect that, with the growth of knowledge, an unbroken way upwards may be discovered, from the lowest and simplest stages of existence to the highest and most complex forms of self-conscious life. now, to those persons who are primarily interested in the ethical and religious phenomena of man's life, the idea of abolishing the chasm between spirit and nature is viewed with no little apprehension. it is supposed that if evolution were established as a universal law, and the unity of being were proved, the mental and moral life of man would be degraded into a complex manifestation of mere physical force. and we even find religious men rejoicing at the failure of science to bridge the gap between the inorganic and the organic, and between natural and self-conscious life; as if the validity of religion depended upon the maintenance of their separating boundaries. but no religion that is free from superstitious elements has anything to gain from the failure of knowledge to relate things to each other. it is difficult to see how breaks in the continuity of being can be established, when every living plant confutes the absolute difference between the organic and inorganic, and, by the very fact of living, turns the latter into the former; and it is difficult to deny the continuity of "mind and matter," when every human being is relating himself to the outer world in all his thoughts and actions. and religion is the very last form of thought which could profit from such a proof of absolute distinctions, were it possible. in fact, as we have seen, religion, in so far as it demands a perfect and absolute being as the object of worship, is vitally concerned in maintaining the unity of the world. it must assume that matter, in its degree, reveals the same principle which, in a higher form, manifests itself in spirit. but closer investigation will show that the real ground for such apprehension does not lie in the continuity of existence, which evolution implies; for religion itself postulates the same thing. the apprehension springs, rather, from the idea that the continuity asserted by evolution, is obtained by resolving the higher forms of existence into the lower. it is believed that, if the application of development to facts were successfully carried out, the organic would be shown to be nothing but complex inorganic forces, mental life nothing but a physiological process, and religion, morality, and art, nothing but products of the highly complex motion of highly complex aggregates of physical atoms. it seems to me quite natural that science should be regarded as tending towards such a materialistic conclusion. this is the view which many scientific investigators have themselves taken of their work; and some of their philosophical exponents, notably mr. herbert spencer, have, with more or less inconsistency, interpreted the idea of evolution in this manner. but, it may be well to bear in mind that science is generally far more successful in employing its constructive ideas, than it is in rendering an account of them. in fact, it is not its business to examine its categories: that task properly belongs to philosophy, and it is not a superfluous one. but, so long as the employment of the categories in the special province of a particular science yields valid results, scientific explorers and those who attach, and rightly attach, so much value to their discoveries, are very unwilling to believe that these categories are not valid universally. the warning voice of philosophy is not heeded, when it charges natural science with applying its conceptions to materials to which they are inadequate; and its examination of the categories of thought is regarded as an innocent, but also a useless, activity. for, it is argued, what good can arise from the analysis of our working ideas? the world looked for causes, and found them, when it was very young; but, up to the time of david hume, no one had shown what causality meant, and the explanation which he offered is now rejected by modern science, as definitely as it is rejected by philosophy. meantime, while philosophy is still engaged in exposing the fallacies of the theory of association as held by hume, science has gone beyond this category altogether; it is now establishing a theory of the conservation of energy, which supplants the law of causality by tracing it into a deeper law of nature. there is some force in this argument, but it cuts both ways. for, even if it be admitted that the category was successfully applied in the past, it is also admitted that it was applied without being understood; and it cannot now be questioned that the philosophers were right in rejecting it as the final explanation of the relation of objects to each other, and in pointing to other and higher connecting ideas. and this consideration should go some way towards convincing evolutionists that, though they may be able successfully to apply the idea of development to particular facts, this does not guarantee the soundness of their view of it as an instrument of thought, or of the nature of the final results which it is destined to achieve. hence, without any disparagement to the new extension which science has received by the use of this new idea, it may be maintained that the ordinary view of its tendency and mission is erroneous. "the prevailing method of explaining the world," says professor caird, "may be described as an attempt to level 'downwards.' the doctrine of development, interpreted as that idea usually is interpreted, supports this view, as making it necessary to trace back higher and more complex to lower or simpler forms of being; for the most obvious way of accomplishing this task is to show analytically that there is really nothing more in the former than in the latter."[a] "divorced from matter," asks professor tyndall, "where is life to be found? whatever our _faith_ may say our _knowledge_ shows them to be indissolubly joined. every meal we eat, and every cup we drink, illustrates the mysterious _control of mind by matter_. trace the line of life backwards and see it approaching more and more to what we call the _purely physical condition_."[b] and then, rising to the height of his subject, or even above it, he proclaims, "by an intellectual necessity i cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life."[c] a little further on, speaking in the name of science, and on behalf of his scientific fellow-workers (with what right is a little doubtful), he adds--"we claim, and we shall wrest, from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. all schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science, must, _in so far as they do this,_ submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it." but if science is to control the knowable world, he generously leaves the remainder for religion. he will not deprive it of a faith in "a power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man. as little in our days as in the days of job can a man by searching find this power out." and, now that he has left this empty sphere of the unknown to religion, he feels justified in adding, "there is, you will observe, no very rank materialism here." [footnote a: _the critical philosophy of kant_, vol. i. p. ] [footnote b: _address to the british association_, , p. .] [footnote c: _belfast address_, .] "yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way, with the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway."[a] [footnote a: clerk maxwell: "_notes of the president's address,_" british association, .] now these declarations of mr. tyndall are, to say the least, somewhat ambiguous and shadowy. yet, when he informs us that eating and drinking "illustrate the control of mind by matter," and "that the line of life traced backwards leads towards a purely physical condition," it is a little difficult to avoid the conclusion that he regards science as destined. "to tread the world into a paste, and thereof make a smooth uniform mound, whereon to plant its flag."[b] [footnote b: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] for the conclusion of the whole argument seems to be, that all _we know as facts_ are mere forms of matter; although the stubborn refusal of consciousness to be resolved into natural force, and its power of constructing for itself a world of symbols, gives science no little trouble, and forces it to acknowledge complete ignorance of the nature of the power from which all comes. "so roll things to the level which you love, that you could stand at ease there and survey the universal nothing undisgraced by pert obtrusion of some old church-spire i' the distance! "[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_.] some writers on ethics and religion have adopted the same view of the goal of the idea of evolution. in consistency with this supposed tendency of science, to resolve all things into their simplest, and earliest forms, religion has been traced back to the superstition and ghost-worship of savages; and then it has been contended that it is, in essence, nothing more than superstition and ghost-worship. and, in like manner, morality, with its categorical imperative of duty, has been traced back, without a break, to the ignorant fear of the vengeance of a savage chief. a similar process in the same direction reduces the love divine, of which our poet speaks, into brute lust; somewhat sublimated, it is true, in its highest forms, but not fundamentally changed. "philosophers deduce you chastity or shame, from just the fact that at the first whoso embraced a woman in the field, threw club down and forewent his brains beside; so, stood a ready victim in the reach of any brother-savage, club in hand. hence saw the use of going out of sight in wood or cave to prosecute his loves."[b] [footnote b: _bishop blouhram's apology_.] and when the sacred things of life are treated in this manner--when moral conduct is showed to be evolved by a continuous process from "conduct in general," the conduct of an "infusorium or a cephalopod," or even of wind-mills or water-wheels, it is not surprising if the authority of the moral law seems to be undermined, and that "devout souls" are apprehensive of the results of science. "does law so analyzed coerce you much?" asks browning. the derivation of spiritual from natural laws thus appears to be fatal to the former; and religious teachers naturally think that it is necessary for their cause to snap the links of the chain of evolution, and, like professor drummond, to establish absolute gaps, not only between the inorganic and the organic worlds, but also between the self-conscious life of man and the mysterious, spiritual life of christ, or god. but it seems to me that, in their antagonism to evolution, religious teachers are showing the same incapacity to distinguish between their friends and their foes, which they previously manifested in their acceptance of the kantian doctrine of "things in themselves,"--a doctrine which placed god and the soul beyond the power of speculative reason either to prove or disprove. it is, however, already recognized that the attempt of mansel and hamilton to degrade human reason for the behoof of faith was really a veiled agnosticism; and a little reflection must show that the idea of evolution, truly interpreted, in no wise threatens the degradation of man, or the overthrow of his spiritual interests. on the contrary, this idea is, in all the history of thought, the first constructive hypothesis which is adequate to the uses of ethics and religion. by means of it, we may hope to solve many of the problems arising from the nature of knowledge and moral conduct, which the lower category of cause turned into pure enigmas. it seems, indeed, to contain the promise of establishing the science of man, as intelligent, on a firm basis; on which we may raise a superstructure, comparable in strength and superior in worth, to that of the science of nature. and, even if the moral science must, like philosophy, always return to the beginning--must, that is, from the necessity of its nature, and not from any complete failure--it will still begin again at a higher level now that the idea of evolution is in the field. it now remains to show in what way the idea of evolution leaves room for religion and morality; or, in other words, to show how, so far from degrading man to the level of the brute condition, and running life down into "purely physical conditions," it contains the promise of establishing that idealistic view of the world, which is maintained by art and religion. in order to show this, it is necessary that the idea of evolution should be used fearlessly, and applied to all facts that can in any way come under it. it must, in other words, be used as a category of thought, whose application is universal; so that, if it is valid at all as a theory, it is valid of all finite things. for the question we are dealing with is not the truth of the hypothesis of a particular science, but the truth of a hypothesis as to the relation of all objects in the world, including man himself. we must not be deterred from this universal application by the fact that we cannot, as yet, prove its truth in every detail. no scientific hypothesis ever has exhausted its details. i consider, therefore, that mr. tyndall had a complete right to "cross the boundary of the experimental evidence by an intellectual necessity"; for the necessity comes from the assumption of a possible explanation by the aid of the hypothesis. it is no argument against such a procedure to insist that, as yet, there is no proof of the absolute continuity of matter and physical life, or that the dead begets the living. the hypothesis is not disproved by the absence of evidence; it is only not proved. the connection may be there, although we have not, as yet, been able to find it. in the face of such difficulties as these, the scientific investigator has always a right to claim more time; and his attitude is impregnable as long as he remembers, as mr. tyndall did on the whole, that his hypothesis is a hypothesis. but mr. tyndall has himself given up this right. he, like mr. huxley, has placed the phenomena of self-consciousness outside of the developing process, and confined the sphere in which evolution is applicable, to natural objects. between objects and the subject, even when both subject and object are man himself, there lies "an impassable gulf." even to try "to comprehend the connection between thought and thing is absurd, like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his own waist-band." our states of self-consciousness are symbols only--symbols of an outside entity, whose real nature we can never know. we know only these states; we only _infer_ "that anything answering to our impressions exists outside of ourselves." and it is impossible to justify even that inference; for, if we can only know states of consciousness, we cannot say that they are symbols of anything, or that there is anything to be symbolized. the external world, on this theory, ceases to exist even as an unknown entity. in triumphantly pointing out that, in virtue of this psychological view, "there is, you will observe, no very rank materialism here," mr. tyndall forgets that he has destroyed the basis of all natural science, and reduced evolution into a law of "an outside entity," of which we can never know anything, and any inference regarding which violates every law of thought. it seems to me quite plain that either this psychological theory, which mr. tyndall has mistaken for a philosophy, is invalid; or else it is useless to endeavour to propound any view regarding a "nature which is the phantom of the individual's mind." i prefer the science of mr. tyndall (and of mr. huxley, too) to his philosophy; and he would have escaped materialism more effectively, if he had remained faithful to his theory of evolution. it is a disloyalty, not only to science, but to thought, to cast away our categories when they seem to imply inconvenient consequences. they must be valid universally, if they are valid at all. mr. tyndall contends that nature makes man, and he finds evidence in the fact that we eat and drink, "of the control of mind by matter." now, it seems to me, that _if_ nature makes man, then nature makes man's thoughts also. his sensations, feelings, ideas, notions, being those of a naturally-evolved agent, are revelations of the potency of the primal matter, just as truly as are the buds, flowers, and fruits of a tree. no doubt, we cannot as yet "comprehend the connection" between nervous action and sensation, any more than we can comprehend the connection between inorganic and organic existence. but, if the absence of "experimental evidence" does not disprove the hypothesis in the one case, it can not disprove it in the other. there are two crucial points in which the theory has not been established. but, in both cases alike, there is the same kind of evidence that the connection exists; although in neither case can we, as yet, discover what it is. plants live by changing inorganic elements into organic structure; and man is intelligent only in so far as he crosses over the boundary between subject and object, and knows the world without him. there is no "impassable gulf separating the subject and object"; if there were we could not know anything of either. there are not two worlds--the one of thoughts, the other of things--which are absolutely exclusive of each other, but one universe in which thought and reality meet. mr. tyndall thinks that it is an inference (and an inference over an impassable gulf!) that anything answering to our impressions exists outside ourselves. "the question of the external world is the great battleground of metaphysics," he quotes approvingly from mr. j.s. mill. but the question of the external world is not whether that world exists; it is, how are we to account for our knowledge that it does exist. the inference is not from thoughts to things, nor from things to thoughts, but from a partially known world to a systematic theory of that world. philosophy is not engaged on the foolish enterprise of trying to discover whether the world exists, or whether we know that it exists; its problem is how to account for our knowledge. it asks what must the nature of things be, seeing that they are known; and what is the nature of thought, seeing that it knows facts? there is no hope whatsoever for ethics, or religion, or philosophy--no hope even for science--in a theory which would apply evolution all the way up from inorganic matter to life, but which would postulate an absolute break at consciousness. the connection between thought and things is there to begin with, whether we can account for it or not; if it were not, then natural science would be impossible. it would be palpably irrational even to try to find out the nature of things by thinking. the only science would be psychology, and even that would be the science of "symbols of an unknown entity." what symbols of an unknown can signify, or how an unknown can produce symbols of itself across an impassable gulf--mr. spencer, mr. huxley, and mr. tyndall have yet to inform us. it is the more necessary to insist on this, because the division between thought and matter, which is admitted by these writers, is often grasped at by their opponents, as a means of warding off the results which they draw from the theory of evolution. when science breaks its sword, religion assails it, with the fragment. it is not at once evident that if this chasm were shown to exist, knowledge would be a chimera; for there would be no outer world at all, not even a phenomenal one, to supply an object for it. we _must_ postulate the ultimate unity of all beings with each other and with the mind that knows them, just because we are intellectual and moral beings; and to destroy this unity is to "kill reason itself, as it were, in the eye," as milton said. now, evolution not only postulates unity, or the unbroken continuity of all existence, but it also negates all differences, except those which are expressions of that unity. it is not the mere assertion of a substratum under qualities; but it implies that the substratum penetrates into the qualities, and manifests itself in them. that which develops--be it plant, child, or biological kingdom--is, at every stage from lowest to highest, a concrete unity of all its differences; and in the whole history of its process its actual content is always the same. the environment of the plant evokes that content, but it adds nothing to it. no addition of anything absolutely new, no external aggregation, no insertion of anything alien into a growing thing, is possible. what it is now, it was in the beginning; and what it will be, it is now. granting the hypothesis of evolution, there can be no quarrel with the view that the crude beginnings of things, matter in its most nebulous state, contains potentially all the rich variety of both natural and spiritual life. but this continuity of all existence may be interpreted in two very different ways. it may lead us either to radically change our notions of mind and its activities, or "to radically change our notions of matter." we may take as the principle of explanation, either the beginning, or the end of the process of development. we may say of the simple and crass, "there is all that your rich universe really means"; or we may say of the spiritual activities of man, "this is what your crude beginning really was." we may explain the complex by the simple, or the simple by the complex. we may analyze the highest back into the lowest, or we may follow the lowest, by a process of synthesis, up to the highest. and one of the most important of all questions for morality and religion is the question, which of these two methods is valid. if out of crass matter is evolved all animal and spiritual life, does that prove life to be nothing but matter; or does it not rather show that what we, in our ignorance, took to be mere matter was really something much greater? if "crass matter" contains all this promise and potency, by what right do we still call it "crass"? it is manifestly impossible to treat the potencies, assumed to lie in a thing that grows, as if they were of no significance; first, to assert that such potencies exist, in saying that the object develops; and then, to neglect them, and to regard the effect as constituted merely of its simplest elements. either these potencies are not in the object, or else the object has in it, and is, at the first, more than it appears to be. either the object does not grow, or the lowest stage of its being is no explanation of its true nature. if we wish to know what the forms of natural life mean, we look in vain to their primary state. we must watch the evolution and revelation of the secret hid in natural life, as it moves through the ascending cycles of the biological kingdom. the idea of evolution, when it is not muddled, is synthetic--not analytic; it explains the simplest in the light of the complex, the beginning in the light of the end, and not _vice versa_. in a word, it follows the ways of nature, the footsteps of fact, instead of inventing a wilful backward path of its own. and nature explains by gradually expanding. if we hearken to nature, and not to the voice of illusory preconceptions, we shall hear her proclaim at the last stage, "here is the meaning of the seedling. now it is clear what it really was; for the power which lay dormant has pushed itself into light, through bud and flower and leaf and fruit." the reality of a growing thing is its highest form of being. the last explains the first, but not the first the last. the first is abstract, incomplete, not yet actual, but mere potency; and we could never know even the potency, except in the light of its own actualization. from this correction of the abstract view of development momentous consequences follow. if the universe is, as science pronounces, an organic totality, which is ever converting its promise and potency into actuality, then we must add that the ultimate interpretation even of the lowest existence in the world cannot be given except on principles which are adequate to explain the highest. we must "level up and not level down": we must not only deny that matter can explain spirit, but we must say that even matter itself cannot be fully understood, except as an element in a spiritual world."[a] [footnote a: professor caird, _the critical philosophy of kant_, p. .] that the idea of evolution, even when applied in this consistent way, has difficulties of its own, it is scarcely necessary to say. but there is nothing in it which imperils the ethical and religious interests of humanity, or tends to reduce man into a natural phenomenon. instead of degrading man, it lifts nature into a manifestation of spirit. if it were established, if every link of the endless chain were discovered and the continuity of existence were irrefragably proved, science would not overthrow idealism, but it would rather vindicate it. it would justify _in detail_ the attempt of poetry and religion and philosophy, to interpret all being as the "transparent vesture" of reason, or love, or whatever other power in the world is regarded as highest. i have now arrived at the conclusion that was sought. i have tried to show, not only that the attempt to interpret nature in terms of man is not a superstitious anthropomorphism, but that such an interpretation is implied in all rational thought. in other words, self-consciousness is the key to all the problems of nature. science, in its progress, is gradually substituting one category for the other, and every one of these categories is at once a law of thought and a law of things as known. each category, successively adopted, lifts nature more to the level of man; and the last category of modern thought, namely, development, constrains us so to modify our views of nature, as to regard it as finally explicable only in the terms of spirit. thus, the movement of science is towards idealism. instead of lowering man, it elevates nature into a potency of that which is highest and best in man. it represents the life of man, in the language of philosophy, as the return of the highest to itself; or in the language of our poet, and of religion, as a manifestation of infinite love. the explanation of nature from the principle of love, if it errs, errs "because it is not anthropomorphic enough," not because it is too anthropomorphic; it is not too high and concrete a principle, but too low and abstract. it now remains to show that the poet, in employing the idea of evolution, was aware of its upward direction. i have already quoted a few passages which indicate that he had detected the false use of it. i shall now quote a few others in which he shows a consciousness of its true meaning: "'will you have why and wherefore, and the fact made plain as pike-staff?' modern science asks. 'that mass man sprung from was a jelly-lump once on a time; he kept an after course through fish and insect, reptile, bird and beast, till he attained to be an ape at last, or last but one. and if this doctrine shock in aught the natural pride.'"[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] "not at all," the poet interrupts the man of science: "friend, banish fear!" "i like the thought he should have lodged me once i' the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement, the mansion and the palace; made me learn the feel o' the first, before i found myself loftier i' the last."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] this way upward from the lowest stage through every other to the highest, that is, the way of development, so far from lowering us to the brute level, is the only way for us to attain to the true highest, namely, the all-complete. "but grant me time, give me the management and manufacture of a model me, me fifty-fold, a prince without a flaw,-- why, there's no social grade, the sordidest, my embryo potentate should brink and scape. king, all the better he was cobbler once, he should know, sitting on the throne, how tastes life to who sweeps the doorway."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] but then, unfortunately, we have no time to make our kings in this way, "you cut probation short, and, being half-instructed, on the stage you shuffle through your part as best you can."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] god, however, "takes time." he makes man pass his apprenticeship in all the forms of being. nor does the poet "refuse to follow farther yet i' the backwardness, repine if tree and flower, mountain or streamlet were my dwelling-place before i gained enlargement, grew mollusc."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] it is, indeed, only on the supposition of having been thus evolved from inanimate being that he is able to account "for many a thrill of kinship, i confess to, with the powers called nature: animate, inanimate, in parts or in the whole, there's something there man-like that somehow meets the man in me."[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] these passages make it clear that the poet recognized that the idea of development "levels up," and that he makes an intelligent, and not a perverted and abstract use of this instrument of thought. he sees each higher stage carrying within it the lower, the present storing up the past; he recognizes that the process is a self-enriching one. he knows it to be no degradation of the higher that it has been in the lower; for he distinguishes between that life, which is continuous amidst the fleeting forms, and the temporary tenements, which it makes use of during the process of ascending. "from first to last of lodging, i was i, and not at all the place that harboured me."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] when nature is thus looked upon from the point of view of its final attainment, in the light of the self-consciousness into which it ultimately breaks, a new dignity is added to every preceding phase. the lowest ceases to be lowest, except in the sense that its promise is not fulfilled and its potency not actualized; for, throughout the whole process, the activity streams from the highest. it is that which is about to be which guides the growing thing and gives it unity. the final cause is the efficient cause; the distant purpose is the ever-present energy; the last is always first. nor does the poet shrink from calling this highest, this last which is also first, by its highest name,--god. "he dwells in all, from, life's minute beginnings, up at last to man--the consummation of this scheme of being, the completion of this sphere of life."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] "all tended to mankind," he said, after reviewing the whole process of nature in _paracelsus_, "and, man produced, all has its end thus far: but in completed man begins anew a tendency to god."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] there is nowhere a break in the continuity. god is at the beginning, his rapturous presence is seen in all the processes of nature, his power and knowledge and love work in the mind of man, and all history is his revelation of himself. the gap which yawns for ordinary thought between animate and inanimate, between nature and spirit, between man and god, does not baffle the poet. at the stage of human life, which is "the grand result" of nature's blind process, "a supplementary reflux of light, illustrates all the inferior grades, explains each back step in the circle."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] nature is retracted into thought, built again in mind. "man, once descried, imprints for ever his presence on all lifeless things."[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] the self-consciousness of man is the point where "all the scattered rays meet"; and "the dim fragments," the otherwise meaningless manifold, the dispersed activities of nature, are lifted into a kosmos by the activity of intelligence. in its light, the forces of nature are found to be, not blind nor purposeless, but "hints and previsions" "strewn confusedly everywhere about the inferior natures, and all lead up higher, all shape out dimly the superior race, the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, and man appears at last."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] in this way, and in strict accordance with the principle of evolution, the poet turns back at each higher stage to re-illumine in a broader light what went before,--just as we know the seedling after it is grown; just as, with every advance in life, we interpret the past anew, and turn the mixed ore of action into pure metal by the reflection which draws the false from the true. "youth ended, i shall try my gain or loss thereby; leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: and i shall weigh the same, give life its praise or blame: young, all lay in dispute; i shall know, being old."[b] [footnote b: _rabbi ben ezra_.] as youth attains its meaning in age, so does the unconscious process of nature come to its meaning in man and old age, "still within this life though lifted o'er its strife," is able to "discern, compare, pronounce at last, this rage was right i' the main, that acquiescence vain";[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] so man is able to penetrate beneath the apparently chaotic play of phenomena, and find in them law, and beauty, and goodness. the laws which he finds by thought are not his inventions, but his discoveries. the harmonies are in the organ, if the artist only knows how to elicit them. nay, the connection is still more intimate. it is in the thought of man that silent nature finds its voice; it blooms into "meaning," significance, thought, in him, as the plant shows its beauty in the flower. nature is making towards humanity, and in humanity it finds _itself_. "striving to be man, the worm mounts through all the spires of form."[a] [footnote a: _emerson_.] the geologist, physicist, chemist, by discovering the laws of nature, do not bind unconnected phenomena; but they refute the hasty conclusion of sensuous thought, that the phenomena ever were unconnected. men of science do not introduce order into chance and chaos, but show that there never was chance or chaos. the poet does not make the world beautiful, but finds the beauty that is dwelling there. without him, indeed, the beauty would not be, any more than the life of the tree is beautiful until it has evolved its potencies into the outward form. nevertheless, he is the expression of what was before, and the beauty was there in potency, awaiting its expression. "only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture," said emerson. "the winds are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, a querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh, never a senseless gust now man is born. the herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, a secret they assemble to discuss when the sun drops behind their trunks. * * * * * "the morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops with evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, voluptuous transport ripens with the corn beneath a warm moon like a happy face."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] such is the transmuting power of imagination, that there is "nothing but doth suffer change into something rich and strange"; and yet the imagination, when loyal to itself, only sees more deeply into the truth of things, and gets a closer and fuller hold of facts. but, although the human mind thus heals the breach between nature and spirit, and discovers the latter in the former, still it is not in this way that browning finally establishes his idealism. for him, the principle working in all things is not reason, but love. it is from love that all being first flowed; into it all returns through man; and in all "the wide compass which is fetched," through the infinite variety of forms of being, love is the permanent element and the true essence. nature is on its way back to god, gathering treasure as it goes. the static view is not true to facts; it is development that for the poet explains the nature of things; and development is the evolution of love. love is for browning the highest, richest conception man can form. it is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. and the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. the universe is homeward bound. now, whether love is the highest principle or not, i shall not inquire at present. my task in this chapter has been to try to show that the idea of evolution drives us onward towards some highest conception, and then uses that conception as a principle to explain all things. if man is veritably higher as a physical organism than the bird or reptile, then biology, if it proceeds according to the principles of evolution, _must_ seek the meaning of the latter in the former, and make the whole kingdom of life a process towards man. "man is no upstart in the creation. his limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather the finish--of the rudimental forms that have already been sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud." and the same way of thought applies to man as a spiritual agent. if spirit be higher than matter, and if love be spirit at its best, then the principle of evolution leaves no option to the scientific thinker, but to regard all things as potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world as manifestations of love. evolution necessarily combines all the objects to which it is applied into a unity. it knits all the infinite forms of natural life into an organism of organisms, so that it is a universal life which really lives in all animate beings. "each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher. there is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force." in its still wider application by poetry and philosophy, the idea of evolution gathers all being into one self-centred totality, and makes all finite existence a movement within, and a movement of, that final perfection which, although last in order of time, is first in order of potency,--the _prius_ of all things, the active energy _in_ all things, and the _reality_ of all things. it is the doctrine of the immanence of god; and it reveals "the effort of god, of the supreme intellect, in the extreme frontier of his universe." in pronouncing, as browning frequently does, that "after last comes first" and "what god once blessed cannot prove accursed"; in the boldness of the faith whereby he makes all the inferior grades of being into embodiments of the supreme good; in resolving the evils of human life, the sorrow, strife, and sin of man into means of man's promotion, he is only applying, in a thorough manner, the principle on which all modern speculation rests. his conclusions may shock common-sense; and they may seem to stultify not only our observation of facts, but the testimony of our moral consciousness. but i do not know of any principle of speculation which, when elevated into a universal principle of thought, will not do the same; and this is why the greatest poets and philosophers seem to be touched with a divine madness. still, if this be madness, there is a method in it. we cannot escape from its logic, except by denying the idea of evolution--the hypothesis by means of which modern thought aims, and in the main successfully aims, at reducing the variety of existence, and the chaos of ordinary experience, into an order-ruled world and a kosmos of articulated knowledge. the new idea of evolution differs from that of universal causation, to which even the ignorance of our own day has learnt to submit, in this mainly--it does not leave things on the level on which it finds them. both cause and evolution assert the unity of being, which, indeed, every one must assume--even sceptics and pessimists; but development represents that unity as self-enriching; so that its true nature is revealed, only in the highest form of existence which man can conceive. the attempt of poets and philosophers to establish a universal synthesis by means of evolution, differs from the work which is done by men of science, only in the extent of its range and the breadth of its results. it is not "idealism," but the scepticism which, in our day, conceals its real nature under the name of dualism or agnosticism, that is at war with the inner spirit of science. "not only," we may say of browning as it was said of emerson by professor tyndall, "is his religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science; but all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. by him scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world." and this he does without any distortion of the truth. for natural science, to one who understands its main tendency, does not militate against philosophy, art, and religion; nor threaten to overturn a metaphysic whose principle is truth, or beauty, or goodness. rather, it is gradually eliminating the discord of fragmentary existence, and making the harmony of the world more and more audible to mankind. it is progressively proving that the unity, of which we are all obscurely conscious from the first, actually holds in the whole region of its survey. the idea of evolution is reconciling science with art and religion, in an idealistic conception of the universe. chapter viii. browning's solution of the problem of evil. "let him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge of nature, train his moral sense, let him act and conceive in accordance with the noble essence of his soul; and, as if of herself, nature will become open to him. moral action is that great and only experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves."[a] [footnote a: _novalis_.] in the last chapter, i tried to set forth some considerations that justify the attempt to interpret the world by a spiritual principle. the conception of development, which modern science and philosophy assume as a starting-point for their investigation, was shown to imply that the lowest forms of existence can be explained, only as stages in the self-realization of that which is highest. this idea "levels upwards," and points to self-consciousness as the ultimate truth of all things. in other words, it involves that all interpretation of the world is anthropomorphic, in the sense that what constitutes thought constitutes things, and, therefore, that the key to nature is man. in propounding this theory of love, and establishing an idealism, browning is in agreement with the latest achievement of modern thought. for, if the principle of evolution be granted, love is a far more adequate hypothesis for the explanation of the nature of things, than any purely physical principle. nay, science itself, in so far as it presupposes evolution, tends towards an idealism of this type. whether love be the best expression for that highest principle, which is conceived as the truth of being, and whether browning's treatment of it is consistent and valid, i do not as yet inquire. before attempting that task, it must be seen to what extent, and in what way, he applies the hypothesis of universal love to the particular facts of life. for the present, i take it as admitted that the hypothesis is legitimate, as an hypothesis; it remains to ask, with what success, if any, we may hope, by its means, to solve the contradictions of life, and to gather its conflicting phenomena into the unity of an intelligible system. this task cannot be accomplished within our limits, except in a very partial manner. i can attempt to meet only a few of the more evident and pressing difficulties that present themselves, and i can do that only in a very general way. the first of these difficulties, or, rather, the main difficulty from which all others spring, is that the hypothesis of universal love is incompatible with the existence of any kind of evil, whether natural or moral. of this, browning was well aware. he knew that he had brought upon himself the hard task of showing that pain, weakness, ignorance, failure, doubt, death, misery, and vice, in all their complex forms, can find their legitimate place in a scheme of love. and there is nothing more admirable in his attitude, or more inspiring in his teaching, than the manly frankness with which he endeavours to confront the manifold miseries of human life, and to constrain them to yield, as their ultimate meaning and reality, some spark of good. but, as we have seen, there is a portion of this task in the discharge of which browning is drawn beyond the strict limits of art. neither the magnificent boldness of his religious faith, nor the penetration of his artistic insight, although they enabled him to deal successfully with the worst samples of human evil, as in _the ring and the book_, could dissipate the gloom which reflection gathers around the general problem. art cannot answer the questions of philosophy. the difficulties that critical reason raises reason alone can lay. nevertheless, the poet was forced by his reflective impulse, to meet that problem in the form in which it presents itself in the region of metaphysics. he was conscious of the presuppositions within which his art worked, and he sought to justify them. into this region we must now follow him, so as to examine his theory of life, not merely as it is implied in the concrete creations of his art, but as it is expressed in those later poems, in which he attempts to deal directly with the speculative difficulties that crowd around the conception of evil. to the critic of a philosophy, there is hardly more than one task of supreme importance. it is that of determining the precise point from which the theory he examines takes its departure; for, when the central conception is clearly grasped, it will be generally found that it rules all the rest. the superstructure of philosophic edifices is usually put together in a sufficiently solid manner--it is the foundation that gives way. hence hegel, who, whatever may be thought of his own theory, was certainly the most profound critic of philosophy since aristotle, generally concentrates his attack on the preliminary hypothesis. he brings down the erroneous system by removing its foundation-stone. his criticism of spinoza, kant, fichte, and schelling may almost be said to be gathered into a single sentence. browning has made no secret of his central conception. it is the idea of an immanent or "immundate" love. and that love, we have shown, is conceived by him as the supreme moral motive, the ultimate essence and end of all self-conscious activity, the veritable nature of both man and god. "denn das leben ist die liebe, und des lebens leben geist." his philosophy of human life rests on the idea that it is the realization of a moral purpose, which is a loving purpose. to him there is no supreme good, except good character; and the foundation of that character by man and in man is the ultimate purpose, and, therefore, the true meaning of all existence. "i search but cannot see what purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own for ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known the gain of every life. death reads the title clear-- what each soul for itself conquered from out things here: since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, i assert."[a] [footnote a: _fifine at the fair_, lv.] in this passage, browning gives expression to an idea which continually reappears in his pages--that human life, in its essence, is movement to moral goodness through opposition. his fundamental conception of the human spirit is that it is a process, and not a fixed fact. "man," he says, "was made to grow not stop." "getting increase of knowledge, since he learns because he lives, which is to be a man, set to instruct himself by his past self."[b] [footnote b: _a death in the desert_.] "by such confession straight he falls into man's place, a thing nor god nor beast, made to know that he can know and not more: lower than god who knows all and can all, higher than beasts which know and can so far as each beast's limit, perfect to an end, nor conscious that they know, nor craving more; while man knows partly but conceives beside, creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, and in this striving, this converting air into a solid he may grasp and use, finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, not god's and not the beasts': god is, they are, man partly is and wholly hopes to be."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] it were easy to multiply passages which show that his ultimate deliverance regarding man is, not that he is, nor that he is not, but that he is ever becoming. man is ever at the point of contradiction between the actual and ideal, and moving from the latter to the former. strife constitutes him. he is a war of elements; "hurled from change to change unceasingly." but rest is death; for it is the cessation of the spiritual activity, whose essence is acquirement, not mere possession, whether in knowledge or in goodness. "man must pass from old to new, from vain to real, from mistake to fact, from what once seemed good, to what now proves best."[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] were the movement to stop, and the contradiction between the actual and ideal reconciled, man would leave man's estate, and pass under "angel's law." "indulging every instinct of the soul there, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] but as long as he is man, he has "somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become." in _paracelsus_, _fifine at the fair_, _red cotton nightcap country_, and many of his other poems, browning deals with the problem of human life from the point of view of development. and it is this point of view, consistently held, which enables him to throw a new light on the whole subject of ethics. for, if man be veritably a being in process of evolution, if he be a permanent that always changes from earliest childhood to old age, if he be a living thing, a potency in process of actualization, then no fixed distinctions made with reference to him can be true. if, for instance, it be asked whether man is rational or irrational, free or bound, good or evil, god or brute, the true answer, if he is veritably a being moving from ignorance to knowledge, from wickedness to virtue, from bondage to freedom, is, that he is at once neither of these alternatives and both. all hard terms of division, when applied to a subject which grows, are untrue. if the life of man is a self-enriching process, if he is _becoming_ good, and rational, and free, then at no point in the movement is it possible to pass fixed and definite judgments upon him. he must be estimated by his direction and momentum, by the whence and whither of his life. there is a sense in which man is from the first and always good, rational and free; for it is only by the exercise of reason and freedom that he exists as man. but there is also a sense in which he is none of these; for he is at the first only a potency not yet actualized. he is not rational, but becoming rational; not good, but becoming good; not free, but aspiring towards freedom. it is his prayer that "in his light, he may see light truly, and in his service find perfect freedom." in this frank assumption of the point of view of development. browning suggests the question whether the endless debate regarding freedom, and necessity, and other moral terms, may not spring from the fact, that both of the opposing schools of ethics are fundamentally unfaithful to the subject of their inquiry. they are treating a developing reality from an abstract point of view, and taking for granted,--what cannot be true of man, if he grows in intellectual power and moral goodness--that he is _either_ good or evil, _either_ rational or irrational, _either_ free or bond, at every moment in the process. they are treating man from a static, instead of from a kinetic point of view, and forgetting that it is his business to acquire the moral and intellectual freedom, which he has potentially from the first-- "some fitter way express heart's satisfaction that the past indeed is past, gives way before life's best and last, the all-including future!"[a] [footnote a: _gerard de lairesse_.] but, whether or not the new point of view renders some of the old disputations of ethics meaningless, it is certain that browning viewed moral life as a growth through conflict. "what were life did soul stand still therein, forego her strife through the ambiguous present to the goal of some all-reconciling future?"[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] to become, to develop, to actualize by reaction against the natural and moral environment, is the meaning both of the self and of the world it works upon. "we are here to learn the good of peace through strife, of love through hate, and reach knowledge by ignorance." now, since the conception of development is a self-contradictory one, or, in other words, since it necessarily implies the conflict of the ideal and actual in all life, and in every instant of its history, it remains for us to determine more fully what are the warring elements in human nature. what is the nature of this life of man, which, like all life, is self-evolving; and by conflict with what does the evolution take place? what is the ideal which condemns the actual, and yet realizes itself by means of it; and what is the actual which wars against the ideal, and yet contains it in potency, and reaches towards it? that human life is conceived by browning as a moral life, and not a more refined and complex form of the natural life of plants and animals--a view which finds its exponents in herbert spencer, and other so-called evolutionists--it is scarcely necessary to assert. it is a life which determines itself, and determines itself according to an idea of goodness. that idea, moreover, because it is a _moral ideal_, must be regarded as the conception of perfect and absolute goodness. through the moral end, man is ideally identified with god, who, indeed, is necessarily conceived as man's moral ideal regarded as already and eternally real. "god" and the "moral ideal" are, in truth, expressions of the same idea; they convey the conception of perfect goodness from different standpoints. and perfect goodness is, to browning, limitless love. pleasure, wisdom, power, and even the beauty which art discovers and reveals, together with every other inner quality and outer state of being, have only relative worth. "there is nothing either in the world or out of it which is unconditionally good, except a good will," said kant; and a good will, according to browning, is a will that wills lovingly. from love all other goodness is derived. there is earnest meaning, and not mere sentiment, in the poet's assertion that "there is no good of life but love--but love! what else looks good, is some shade flung from love. love gilds it, gives it worth. be warned by me, never you cheat yourself one instant! love, give love, ask only love, and leave the rest!"[a] [footnote a: _in a balcony_.] "let man's life be true," he adds, "and love's the truth of mine." to attain this truth, that is, to constitute love into the inmost law of his being, and permanent source of all his activities, is the task of man. and browning defines that love as "yearning to dispense, each one its own amount of gain thro' its own mode of practising with life." there is no need of illustrating further the doctrine, so evident in browning, that "love" is the ideal which in man's life makes through conflict for its own fulfilment. from what has been already said, it is abundantly plain that love is to him a divine element, which is at war with all that is lower in man and around him, and which by reaction against circumstance converts its own mere promise into fruition and fact. through love man's nature reaches down to the permanent essence, amid the fleeting phenomena of the world, and is at one with what is first and last. as loving he ranks with god. no words are too strong to represent the intimacy of the relation. for, however limited in range and tainted with alien qualities human love may be, it is still "a pin-point rock of his boundless continent." it is not a semblance of the divine nature, an analogon, or verisimilitude, but the love of god himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the divine. the godhood in him constitutes him, so that he cannot become himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming perfect as god is perfect. but the emphasis thus laid on the divine worth and dignity of human love is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and finitude of every other human attribute. having elevated the ideal, he degrades the actual. knowledge and the intellectual energy which produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: every power and every gift, physical and spiritual, other than love, has in it the fatal flaw of being merely human. all these are so tainted with creatureship, so limited and conditioned, that it is hardly too much to say that they are, at their best, deceptive endowments. thus, the life of man regarded as a whole is, in its last essence, a combination of utterly disparate elements. the distinction of the old moralists between divinity and dust; the absolute dualism of the old ascetics between flesh and spirit, sense and reason, find their accurate parallel in browning's teachings. but he is himself no ascetic, and the line of distinction he draws does not, like theirs, pass between the flesh and the spirit. it rather cleaves man's spiritual nature into two portions, which are absolutely different from each other. a chasm divides the head from the heart, the intellect from the emotions, the moral and practical from the perceptive and reflective faculties. and it is this absolute cleavage that gives to browning's teaching, both on ethics and religion, one of its most peculiar characteristics. by keeping it constantly in sight, we may hope to render intelligible to ourselves the solution he offers of the problem of evil, and of other fundamental difficulties of the life of man. for, while browning's optimism has its original source in his conception of the unity of god and man, through the godlike quality of love--even "the poorest love that was ever offered"--he finds himself unable to maintain it, except at the expense of degrading man's knowledge. thus, his optimism and faith in god is finally based upon ignorance. if, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a spinozist, on god's communication of his own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. while "love gains god at first leap," "knowledge means ever-renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach."[a] [footnote a: _a pillar at sebzevar_.] a radical flaw runs through our knowing faculty. human knowledge is not only incomplete--no one can be so foolish as to deny that--but it is, as regarded by browning, essentially inadequate to the nature of fact, and we must "distrust it, even when it seems demonstrable." no professed agnostic can condemn the human intellect more utterly than he does. he pushes the limitedness of human knowledge into a disqualification of it to reach truth at all; and makes the conditions according to which we know, or seem to know, into a deceiving necessity, which makes us know wrongly. "to know of, think about,-- is all man's sum of faculty effects when exercised on earth's least atom, son! what was, what is, what may such atom be? no answer!"[b] [footnote b: _a bean-stripe_.] thought plays around facts, but never reaches them. mind intervenes between itself and its objects, and throws its own shadow upon them; nor can it penetrate through that shadow, but deals with it as if it were reality, though it knows all the time that it is not. this theory of knowledge, or rather of nescience or no-knowledge, he gives in _la saisiaz_, _ferishtah's fancies, the parleyings_, and _asolando_--in all his later and more reflective poems, in fact. it must, i think, be held to be his deliberate and final view--and all the more so, because, by a peculiar process, he gets from it his defence of his ethical and religious faith. in the first of these poems, browning, while discussing the problem of immortality in a purely speculative spirit, and without stipulating, "provided answer suits my hopes, not fears," gives a tolerably full account of that which must be regarded as the principles of his theory of knowledge. its importance to his ethical doctrine justifies a somewhat exhaustive examination of it. he finds himself to be "a midway point, between a cause before and an effect behind--both blanks." within that narrow space, of the self hemmed in by two unknowns, all experience is crammed. out of that experience crowds all that he knows, and all that he misknows. there issues from experience-- "conjecture manifold, but, as knowledge, this comes only--things may be as i behold, or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are; i myself am what i know not--ignorance which proves no bar to the knowledge that i am, and, since i am, can recognize what to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise. if my fellows are or are not, what may please them and what pain,-- mere surmise: my own experience--that is knowledge once again."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] experience, then, within which he (and every one else) acknowledges that all his knowledge is confined, yields him as certain facts--the consciousness that he is, but not what he is: the consciousness that he is pleased or pained by things about him, whose real nature is entirely hidden from him: and, as he tells us just before, the assurance that god is the thing the self perceives outside itself, "a force actual e'er its own beginning, operative thro' its course, unaffected by its end."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] but, even this knowledge, limited as it is to the bare existence of unknown entities, has the further defect of being merely subjective. the "experience" from which he draws his conclusions, is his own in an exclusive sense. his "thinking thing" has, apparently, no elements in common with the "thinking things" of other selves. he ignores the fact that there may be general laws of thought, according to which his mind must act in order to be a mind. intelligence seems to have no nature, and may be anything. all questions regarding "those apparent other mortals" are consequently unanswerable to the poet. "knowledge stands on my experience"; and this "my" is totally unrelated to all other mes. "all outside its narrow hem, free surmise may sport and welcome! pleasures, pains affect mankind just as they affect myself? why, here's my neighbour colour-blind, eyes like mine to all appearance: 'green as grass' do i affirm? 'red as grass' he contradicts me: which employs the proper term?"[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] if there were only they two on earth as tenants, there would be no way of deciding between them; for, according to his argument, the truth is apparently decided by majority of opinions. each individual, equipped with his own particular kind of senses and reason, gets his own particular experience, and draws his own particular conclusions from it. if it be asked whether these conclusions are true or not, the only answer is that the question is absurd; for, under such conditions, there cannot be either truth or error. every one's opinion is its own criterion. each man is the measure of all things; "his own world for every mortal," as the poet puts it. "to each mortal peradventure earth becomes a new machine, pain and pleasure no more tally in our sense than red and green."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] the first result of this subjective view of knowledge is clearly enough seen by the poet. he is well aware that his convictions regarding the high matters of human destiny are valid only for himself. "only for myself i speak, nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong and weak."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] experience, as he interprets it, that is, present consciousness, "this moment's me and mine," is too narrow a basis for any universal or objective conclusion. so far as his own inner experience of pain and pleasure goes, "all--for myself--seems ordered wise and well inside it,--what reigns outside, who can tell?"[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] but as to the actual world, he can have no opinion, nor, from the good and evil that apparently play around him, can he deduce either "praise or blame of its contriver, shown a niggard or profuse in each good or evil issue."[b] [footnote b: _la saisiaz_.] the moral government of the world is a subject, regarding which we are doomed to absolute ignorance. a theory that it is ruled by the "prince of the power of the air" has just as much, and just as little, validity as the more ordinary view held by religious people. who needs be told "the space which yields thee knowledge--do its bounds embrace well-willing and wise-working, each at height? enough: beyond thee lies the infinite-- back to thy circumscription!"[c] [footnote c: _francis furini_.] and our ignorance of god, and the world, and ourselves is matched by a similar ignorance regarding moral matters. "ignorance overwraps his moral sense, winds him about, relaxing, as it wraps, so much and no more than lets through perhaps the murmured knowledge--' ignorance exists.'"[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] we cannot be certain even of the distinction and conflict of good and evil in the world. they, too, and the apparent choice between them to which man is continually constrained, may be mere illusions--phenomena of the individual consciousness. what remains, then? nothing but to "wait." "take the joys and bear the sorrows--neither with extreme concern! living here means nescience simply: 'tis next life that helps to learn."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] it is hardly necessary to enter upon any detailed criticism of such a theory of knowledge as this, which is proffered by the poet. it is well known by all those who are in some degree acquainted with the history of philosophy--and it will be easily seen by all who have any critical acumen--that it leads directly into absolute scepticism. and absolute scepticism is easily shown to be self-contradictory. for a theory of nescience, in condemning all knowledge and the faculty of knowledge, condemns itself. if nothing is true, or if nothing is known, then this theory itself is not true, or its truth cannot be known. and if this theory is true, then nothing is true; for this theory, like all others, is the product of a defective intelligence. in whatsoever way the matter is put, there is left no standing-ground for the human critic who condemns human thought. and he cannot well pretend to a footing in a sphere above man's, or below it. there is thus one presupposition which every one must make, if he is to propound any doctrine whatsoever, even if that doctrine be that no doctrine can be valid; it is the presupposition that knowledge is possible, and that truth can be known. and this presupposition fills, for modern philosophy, the place of the _cogito ergo sum_ of descartes. it is the starting-point and criterion of all knowledge. it is, at first sight, a somewhat difficult task to account for the fact, that so keen an intellect as the poet's did not perceive the conclusion to which his theory of knowledge so directly and necessarily leads. it is probable, however, that he never critically examined it, but simply accepted it as equivalent to the common doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which, in some form or other, all the schools of philosophy adopt. but the main reason will be found to lie in the fact that knowledge was not, to browning, its own criterion or end. the primary fact of his philosophy is that human life is a moral process. his interest in the evolution of character was his deepest interest, as he informs us; he was an ethical teacher rather than a metaphysician. he is ever willing to asperse man's intelligence. but that man is a moral agent he will in no wise doubt. this is his "solid standing-place amid the wash and welter, whence all doubts are bid back to the ledge they break against in foam."[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] his practical maxim was "wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust as wholly love allied to ignorance! there lies thy truth and safety."[b] [footnote b: _a pillar of sebzevar_.] all phenomena must, in some way or other, be reconciled by the poet with the fundamental and indubitable fact of the progressive moral life of man. for the fundamental presupposition which a man makes, is necessarily his criterion of knowledge, and it determines the truth or illusoriness of all other opinions whatsoever. now, browning held, not only that no certain knowledge is attainable by man, but also that such certainty is incompatible with moral life. absolute knowledge would, he contends, lift man above the need and the possibility of making the moral choice, which is our supreme business on earth. man can be good or evil, only on condition of being in absolute uncertainty regarding the true meaning of the facts of nature and the phenomena of life. this somewhat strange doctrine finds the most explicit and full expression in _la saisiaz_. "fancy," amongst the concessions it demands from "reason," claims that man should know--not merely surmise or fear--that every action done in this life awaits its proper and necessary meed in the next. "i also will that man become aware life has worth incalculable, every moment that he spends so much gain or loss for that next life which on this life depends."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] but reason refuses the concession, upon the ground that such sure knowledge would be destructive of the very distinction between right and wrong, which the demand implies. the "promulgation of this decree," by fancy, "makes both good and evil to cease." prior to it "earth was man's probation-place"; but under this decree man is no longer free; for certain knowledge makes action necessary. "once lay down the law, with nature's simple 'such effects succeed causes such, and heaven or hell depends upon man's earthly deed just as surely as depends the straight or else the crooked line on his making point meet point or with or else without incline,' thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_, .] if we presuppose that "man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane" (and we must stipulate sanity, if his actions are to be morally judged at all)--then a law which binds punishment and reward to action in a necessary manner, and is known so to bind them, would "obtain prompt and absolute obedience." there are some "edicts, now styled god's own nature's," "which to hear means to obey." all the laws relating to the preservation of life are of this character. and, if the law--"would'st thou live again, be just"--were in all ways as stringent as the other law-- "would'st thou live now, regularly draw thy breath! for, suspend the operation, straight law's breach results in death"--[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] then no one would disobey it, nor could. "it is the liberty of doing evil that gives the doing good a grace." and that liberty would be taken away by complete assurance, that effects follow actions in the moral world with the necessity seen in the natural sphere. since, therefore, man is made to grow, and earth is the place wherein he is to pass probation and prove his powers, there must remain a certain doubt as to the issues of his actions; conviction must not be so strong as to carry with it man's whole nature. "the best i both see and praise, the worst i follow," is the adage rife in man's mouth regarding his moral conduct. but, spite of his seeing and praising, "he disbelieves in the heart of him that edict which for truth his head receives."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] he has a dim consciousness of ways whereby he may elude the consequences of his wickedness, and of the possibility of making amends to law. "and now, auld cloots, i ken ye're thinkin', a certain bardie's rantin', drinkin', some luckless hour will send him linkin' to your black pit; but, faith, he'll turn a corner jinkin', and cheat you yet." the more orthodox and less generous individual is prone to agree, as regards himself, with burns; but, he sees, most probably, that such an escape is impossible to others. he has secret solacement in a latent belief that he himself is an exception. there will be a special method of dealing with him. he is a "chosen sample"; and "god will think twice before he damns a man of his quality." it is just because there is such doubt as to the universality and necessity of the law which connects actions and consequences in the moral sphere, that man's deeds have an ethical character; while, to disperse doubt and ignorance by the assurance of complete knowledge, would take the good from goodness and the ill from evil. in this ingenious manner, the poet turns the imperfect intellect and delusive knowledge of man to a moral use. ordinarily, the intellectual impotence of man is regarded as carrying with it moral incapacity as well, and the delusiveness of knowledge is one of the strongest arguments for pessimism. to persons pledged to the support of no theory, and to those who have the _naïveté_, so hard to maintain side by side with strong doctrinal convictions, it seems amongst the worst of evils that man should be endowed with fallacious faculties, and cursed with a futile desire for true knowledge which is so strong, that it cannot be quenched even in those who believe that truth can never be attained. it is the very best men of the world who cry "oh, this false for real, this emptiness which feigns solidity,-- ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black,-- when shall we rest upon the thing itself, not on its semblance? soul--too weak, forsooth, to cope with fact--wants fiction everywhere! mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost!"[a] [footnote a: _a bean-stripe_.] the poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing. yet, it is this very failure of knowledge--a failure which, be it remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our "relative intelligences,"--which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic faith. so high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to browning, that no sacrifice is too great to secure it. and, indeed, if it were once clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt, ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully justified--provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is attained. and, to browning, ignorance was one of the conditions. and consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is only "silence implying sound"; and the vain cry for truth, arising from the heart of the earth's best men, is only a discord moving towards resolution into a more rapturous harmony. i do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life. i return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now possible to answer. that question was: how does browning reconcile his hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing in the world? his answer is quite explicit. the poet solves the problem by casting doubt upon the facts which threaten his hypothesis. he reduces them into phenomena, in the sense of phantoms begotten by the human intellect upon unknown and unknowable realities. "thus much at least is clearly understood-- of power does man possess no particle: of knowledge--just so much as shows that still it ends in ignorance on every side."[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] he is aware of the phenomena of his own consciousness, "my soul, and my soul's home, this body "; but he knows not whether "things outside are fact or feigning." and he heeds little, for in either case they "teach what good is and what evil,--just the same, be feigning or be fact the teacher."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] it is the mixture, or rather the apparent mixture, of shade and light in life, the conflict of seeming good with seeming evil in the world, that constitutes the world a probation-place. it is a kind of moral gymnasium, crowded with phantoms, wherein by exercise man makes moral muscle. and the vigour of the athlete's struggle is not in the least abated by the consciousness that all he deals with are phantoms. "i have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught this--there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, if--(to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)-- if you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, and life, time--with all their chances, changes,--just probation-space, mine, for me."[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] and the world would not be such a probation-space did we once penetrate into its inmost secret, and know its phenomena as veritably either good or evil. there is the need of playing something perilously like a trick on the human intellect if man is to strive and grow. "here and there a touch taught me, betimes, the artifice of things-- that all about, external to myself, was meant to be suspected,--not revealed demonstrably a cheat--but half seen through."[b] [footnote b: _a bean-stripe._] to know objects as they veritably are, might reveal all things as locked together in a scheme of universal good, so that "white would rule unchecked along the line." but this would be the greatest of disasters; for, as moral agents, we cannot do without "the constant shade cast on life's shine,--the tremor that intrudes when firmest seems my faith in white."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] the intellectual insight that would penetrate through the vari-colour of events into the actual presence of the incandescent white of love, which glows, as hope tells us, in all things, would stultify itself, and lose its knowledge even of the good. "think! could i see plain, be somehow certified all was illusion--evil far and wide was good disguised,--why, out with one huge wipe goes knowledge from me. type needs antitype: as night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good needs evil: how were pity understood unless by pain? "[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only through its contrary. "for me (patience, beseech you!) knowledge can but be of good by knowledge of good's opposite-- evil."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] the extinction of one of the terms would be the extinction of the other. and, in a similar manner, clear knowledge that evil is illusion and that all things have their place in an infinite divine order would paralyze all moral effort, as well as stultify itself. "make evident that pain permissibly masks pleasure--you abstain from out-stretch of the finger-tip that saves a drowning fly."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] certainty on either side, either that evil is evil for evermore, irredeemable and absolute, a drench of utter dark not illuminable by white; or that it is but mere show and semblance, which the good takes upon itself, would alike be ruinous to man. for both alternatives would render all striving folly. the right attitude for man is that of ignorance, complete uncertainty, the equipoise of conflicting alternatives. he must take his stand on the contradiction. hope he may have that all things work together for good. it is right that he should nourish the faith that the antagonism of evil with good in the world is only an illusion; but that faith must stop short of the complete conviction that knowledge would bring. when, therefore, the hypothesis of universal love is confronted with the evils of life, and we ask how it can be maintained in the face of the manifold miseries everywhere apparent, the poet answers, "you do not know, and cannot know, whether they are evils or not. your knowledge remains at the surface of things. you cannot fit them into their true place, or pronounce upon their true purpose and character; for you see only a small arc of the complete circle of being. wait till you see more, and, in the meantime, hope!" "why faith--but to lift the load, to leaven the lump, where lies mind prostrate through knowledge owed to the loveless power it tries to withstand, how vain!"[a] [footnote a: _reverie_--_asolando_.] and, if we reply in turn, that this necessary ignorance leaves as little room for his scheme of love as it does for its opposite, he again answers: "not so! i appeal from the intellect, which is detected as incompetent, to the higher court of the moral consciousness. and there i find the ignorance to be justified: for it is the instrument of a higher purpose, a means whereby what is best is gained, namely, _love_." "my curls were crowned in youth with knowledge,--off, alas, crown slipped next moment, pushed by better knowledge still which nowise proved more constant; gain, to-day, was toppling loss to-morrow, lay at last --knowledge, the golden?--lacquered ignorance! as gain--mistrust it! not as means to gain: lacquer we learn by: ... the prize is in the process: knowledge means ever-renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach, but love is victory, the prize itself: love--trust to! be rewarded for the trust in trust's mere act."[a] [footnote a: _a pillar at sebzevar_.] now, in order to complete our examination of this theory, we must follow the poet in his attempt to escape from the testimony of the intellect to that of the heart. in order to make the most of the latter, we find that browning, especially in his last work, tends to withdraw his accusation of utter incompetence on the part of the intellect. he only tends to do so, it is true. he is tolerably consistent in asserting that we know our own emotions and the phenomena of our own consciousness; but he is not consistent in his account of our knowledge, or ignorance, of external things. on the whole, he asserts that we know nothing of them. but in _asolando_ he seems to imply that the evidence of a loveless power in the world, permitting evil, is irresistible.[a] to say the least, the testimony of the intellect, such as it is, is more clear and convincing with regard to evil than it is with regard to good. within the sphere of phenomena, to which the intellect is confined, there seems to be, instead of a benevolent purpose, a world ruled by a power indifferent to the triumph of evil over good, and either "loveless" or unintelligent. [footnote a: _see passage just quoted._] "life, from birth to death, means--either looking back on harm escaped, or looking forward to that harm's return with tenfold power of harming."[b] [footnote b: _a bean-stripe._] and it is not possible for man to contravene this evidence of faults and omissions: for, in doing so, he would remove the facts in reaction against which his moral nature becomes active. what proof is there, then, that the universal love is no mere dream? none! from the side of the intellect, answers the poet. man, who has the will to remove the ills of life, "stop change, avert decay, fix life fast, banish death,"[c] [footnote c: _reverie_--_asolando_.] has not the power to effect his will; while the power, whose limitlessness he recognizes everywhere around him, merely maintains the world in its remorseless course, and puts forth no helping hand when good is prone and evil triumphant. "god does nothing." "'no sign,'--groaned he,-- no stirring of god's finger to denote he wills that right should have supremacy on earth, not wrong! how helpful could we quote but one poor instance when he interposed promptly and surely and beyond mistake between oppression and its victim, closed accounts with sin for once, and bade us wake from our long dream that justice bears no sword, or else forgets whereto its sharpness serves.'"[a] [footnote a: _bernard de mandeville._] but he tells us in his later poems, that there is no answer vouchsafed to man's cry to the power, that it should reveal "what heals all harm, nay, hinders the harm at first, saves earth."[b] [footnote b: _reverie--asolando._] and yet, so far as man can see, there were no bar to the remedy, if "god's all-mercy" did really "mate his all-potency." "how easy it seems,--to sense like man's--if somehow met power with its match--immense love, limitless, unbeset by hindrance on every side!"[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] but that love nowhere makes itself evident. "power," we recognize, "finds nought too hard, fulfilling itself all ways, unchecked, unchanged; while barred, baffled, what good began ends evil on every side."[a] [footnote a: _reverie--asolando_.] thus, the conclusion to which knowledge inevitably leads us is that mere power rules. "no more than the passive clay disputes the potter's act, could the whelmed mind disobey knowledge, the cataract."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] but if the intellect is thus overwhelmed, so as to be almost passive to the pessimistic conclusion borne in upon it by "resistless fact," the heart of man is made of another mould. it revolts against the conclusion of the intellect, and climbs "through turbidity all between, from the known to the unknown here, heaven's 'shall be,' from earth's 'has been.'"[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] it grasps a fact beyond the reach of knowledge, namely, the possibility, or even the certainty, that "power is love." at present there is no substantiating by knowledge the testimony of the heart; and man has no better anchorage for his optimism than faith. but the closer view will come, when even our life on earth will be seen to have within it the working of love, no less manifest than that of power. "when see? when there dawns a day, if not on the homely earth, then, yonder, worlds away, where the strange and new have birth, and power comes full in play."[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] now, what is this evidence of the heart, which is sufficiently cogent and valid to counterpoise that of the mind; and which gives to "faith," or "hope," a firm foothold in the very face of the opposing "resistless" testimony of knowledge? within our experience, to which the poet knows we are entirely confined, there is a fact, the significance of which we have not as yet examined. for, plain and irresistible as is the evidence of evil, so plain and constant is man's recognition of it as evil, and his desire to annul it. if man's mind is made to acknowledge evil, his moral nature is made so as to revolt against it. "man's heart is _made_ to judge pain deserved nowhere by the common flesh our birth-right--bad and good deserve alike no pain, to human apprehension."[a] [footnote a: _mihrab shah_--_ferishtah's fancies_.] owing to the limitation of our intelligence, we cannot deny but that "in the eye of god pain may have purpose and be justified." but whether it has its purpose for the supreme intelligence or not, "man's sense avails to only see, in pain, a hateful chance no man but would avert or, failing, needs must pity."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] man must condemn evil, he cannot acquiesce in its permanence, but is, spite of his consciousness of ignorance and powerlessness, roused into constant revolt against it. "true, he makes nothing, understands no whit: had the initiator-spasm seen fit thus doubly to endow him, none the worse and much the better were the universe. what does man see or feel or apprehend here, there, and everywhere, but faults to mend, omissions to supply,--one wide disease of things that are, which man at once would ease had will but power and knowledge?"[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] but the moral worth of man does not suffer the least detraction from his inability to effect his benevolent purpose. "things must take will for deed," as browning tells us. david is not at all distressed by the consciousness of his weakness. "why is it i dare think but lightly of such impuissance? what stops my despair? this;--'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do."[b] [footnote b: _saul_.] the fact that "his wishes fall through," that he cannot, although willing, help saul, "grow poor to enrich him, fill up his life by starving his own," does not prevent him from regarding his "service as perfect." the will was there, although it lacked power to effect itself. the moral worth of an action is complete, if it is willed; and it is nowise affected by its outer consequences, as both browning and kant teach. the loving will, the inner act of loving, though it can bear no outward fruit, being debarred by outward impediment, is still a complete and highest good. "but love is victory, the prize itself: love--trust to! be rewarded for the trust in trust's mere act. in love success is sure, attainment--no delusion, whatso'er the prize be: apprehended as a prize, a prize it is."[a] [footnote a: _a pillar at sebzevar_.] whatever the evil in the world and the impotence of man, his duty and his dignity in willing to perform it, are ever the same. though god neglect the world "man's part is plain--to send love forth,--astray, perhaps: no matter, he has done his part."[b] [footnote b: _the sun_.] now, this fact of inner experience, which the poet thinks incontrovertible--the fact that man, every man, necessarily regards evil, whether natural or moral, as something to be annulled, were it only possible--is an immediate proof of the indwelling of that which is highest in man. on this basis, browning is able to re-establish the optimism which, from the side of knowledge, he had utterly abandoned. the very fact that the world is condemned by man is proof that there dwells in man something better than the world, whose evidence the pessimist himself cannot escape. all is not wrong, as long as wrong _seems_ wrong. the pessimist, in condemning the world, must except himself. in his very charge against god of having made man in his anger, there lies a contradiction; for he himself fronts and defies the outrage. there is no depth of despair which this good cannot illumine with joyous light, for the despair is itself the reflex of the good. "were earth and all it holds illusions mere, only a machine for teaching love and hate, and hope and fear, "if this life's conception new life fail to realize-- though earth burst and proved a bubble glassing hues of hell, one huge reflex of the devil's doings--god's work by no subterfuge,"[a] [footnote a: _la saisiaz_.] still, good is good, and love is its own exceeding great reward. alone, in a world abandoned to chaos and infinite night, man is still not without god, if he loves. in virtue of his love, he himself would be crowned as god, as the poet often argues, were there no higher love elsewhere. "if he believes might can exist with neither will nor love, in god's case--what he names now nature's law-- while in himself he recognizes love no less than might and will,"[b] [footnote b: _death in the desert_.] man takes, and rightly takes, the title of being "first, last, and best of things." "since if man prove the sole existent thing where these combine, whatever their degree, however weak the might or will or love, so they be found there, put in evidence-- he is as surely higher in the scale than any might with neither love nor will, as life, apparent in the poorest midge, is marvellous beyond dead atlas' self, given to the nobler midge for resting-place! thus, man proves best and highest--god, in fine."[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] to any one capable of spiritually discerning things, there can be no difficulty in regarding goodness, however limited and mated with weakness, as infinitely above all natural power. divinity will be known to consist, not in any senseless might, however majestic and miraculous, but in moral or spiritual perfection. if god were indifferent to the evil of the world, acquiesced in it without reason, and let it ripen into all manner of wretchedness, then man, in condemning the world, though without power to remove the least of its miseries, would be higher than god. but we have still to account for the possibility of man's assuming an attitude implied in the consciousness that, while he is without power, god is without pity, and in the despair which springs from his hate of evil. how comes it that human nature rises above its origin, and is able--nay, obliged--to condemn the evil which god permits? is man finite in power, a mere implement of a mocking will so far as knowledge goes, the plaything of remorseless forces, and yet author and first source of something in himself which invests him with a dignity that god himself cannot share? is the moral consciousness which, by its very nature, must bear witness against the power, although it cannot arrest its pitiless course, or remove the least evil, "man's own work, his birth of heart and brain, his native grace, no alien gift at all?" we are thus caught between the horns of a final dilemma. either the pity and love, which make man revolt against all suffering, are man's own creation; or else god, who made man's heart to love, has given to man something higher than he owns himself. but both of these alternatives are impossible. "here's the touch that breaks the bubble." the first alternative is impossible, because man is by definition powerless, a mere link in the endless chain of causes, incapable of changing the least part of the scheme of things which he condemns, and therefore much more unable to initiate, or to bring into a loveless world abandoned to blind power, the noble might of love. "will of man create? no more than this my hand, which strewed the beans produced them also from its finger-tips."[a] [footnote a: _a bean-stripe_.] all that man is and has is a mere loan; his love no less than his finite intellect and limited power, has had its origin elsewhere. "back goes creation to its source, source prime and ultimate, the single and the sole."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] the argument ends by bringing us back "to the starting-point,-- man's impotency, god's omnipotence, these stop my answer."[a] [footnote a: _a bean-stripe_.] i shall not pause at present to examine the value of this new form of the old argument, "_ex contingentia mundi_." but i may point out in passing, that the reference of human love to a divine creative source is accomplished by means of the idea of cause, one of the categories of the thought which browning has aspersed. and it is a little difficult to show why, if we are constrained to doubt our thought, when by the aid of causality it establishes a connection between finite and finite, we should regard it as worthy of trust when it connects the finite and the infinite. in fact, it is all too evident that the poet assumes or denies the possibility of knowledge, according as it helps or hinders his ethical doctrine. but, if we grant the ascent from the finite to the infinite and regard man's love as a divine gift--which it may well be although the poet's argument is invalid--then a new light is thrown upon the being who gave man this power to love. the "necessity," "the mere power," which alone could be discerned by observation of the irresistible movement of the world's events, acquires a new character. prior to this discovery of love in man as the work of god-- "head praises, but heart refrains from loving's acknowledgment. whole losses outweigh half-gains: earth's good is with evil blent: good struggles but evil reigns."[a] [footnote a: _reverie_--_asolando_.] but love in man is a suggestion of a love without; a proof, in fact, that god is love, for man's love is god's love in man. the source of the pity that man shows, and of the apparent evils in the world which excite it, is the same. the power which called man into being, itself rises up in man against the wrongs in the world. the voice of the moral consciousness, approving the good, condemning evil, and striving to annul it, is the voice of god, and has, therefore, supreme authority. we do wrong, therefore, in thinking that it is the weakness of man which is matched against the might of evil in the world, and that we are fighting a losing battle. it is an incomplete, abstract, untrue view of the facts of life which puts god as irresistible power in the outer world, and forgets that the same irresistible power works, under the higher form of love, in the human heart. "is not god now i' the world his power first made? is not his love at issue still with sin, visibly when a wrong is done on earth? love, wrong, and pain, what see i else around?"[b] [footnote b: _a death in the desert_.] in this way, therefore, the poet argues back from the moral consciousness of man to the goodness of god. and he finds the ultimate proof of this goodness in the very pessimism and scepticism and despair, that come with the view of the apparently infinite waste in the world and the endless miseries of humanity. the source of this despair, namely, the recognition of evil and wrong, is just the godhood in man. there is no way of accounting for the fact that "man hates what is and loves what should be," except by "blending the quality of man with the quality of god." and "the quality of god" is the fundamental fact in man's history. love is the last reality the poet always reaches. beneath the pessimism is love: without love of the good there were no recognition of evil, no condemnation of it, and no despair. but the difficulty still remains as to the permission of evil, even though it should prove in the end to be merely apparent. "wherefore should any evil hap to man-- from ache of flesh to agony of soul-- since god's all-mercy mates all-potency? nay, why permits he evil to himself-- man's sin, accounted such? suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant-- man pure of evil in thought, word, and deed-- were it not well? then, wherefore otherwise?"[a] [footnote a: _mihrab shah_.] the poet finds an answer to this difficulty in the very nature of moral goodness, which, as we have seen, he regards as a progressive realization of an infinitely high ideal. the demand for a world purged of all pain and sin is really, he teaches us, a demand for a sphere where "time brings no hope, no fear: as to-day, shall be to-morrow: advance or retreat need we at our stand-still through eternity?"[a] [footnote a: _rephan_--_asolando_.] what were there to "bless or curse, in such a uniform universe," "where weak and strong, the wise and the foolish, right and wrong, are merged alike in a neutral best."[b] [footnote b: _ibid_.] there is a better way of life, thinks browning, than such a state of stagnation. "why should i speak? you divine the test. when the trouble grew in my pregnant breast a voice said, so would'st thou strive, not rest, "burn and not smoulder, win by worth, not rest content with a wealth that's dearth, thou art past rephan, thy place be earth."[c] [footnote c: _ibid_.] the discontent of man, the consciousness of sin, evil, pain, is a symbol of promotion. the peace of the state of nature has been broken for him; and, although the first consequence be "brow-furrowed old age, youth's hollow cheek,-- diseased in the body, sick in soul, pinched poverty, satiate wealth,--your whole array of despairs,"[d] [footnote d: _ibid_.] still, without them, the best is impossible. they are the conditions of the moral life, which is essentially progressive. they are the consequences of the fact that man has been "startled up" "by an infinite discovered above and below me--height and depth alike to attract my flight, "repel my descent: by hate taught love. oh, gain were indeed to see above supremacy ever--to move, remove, "not reach--aspire yet never attain to the object aimed at."[a] [footnote a: _rephan_--_asolando_.] he who places rest above effort, rephan above the earth, places a natural good above a moral good, stagnation above progress. the demand for the absolute extinction of evil betrays ignorance of the nature of the highest good. for right and wrong are relative. "type need antitype." the fact that goodness is best, and that goodness is not a stagnant state but a progress, a gradual realization, though never complete, of an infinite ideal, of the perfection of god by a finite being, necessarily implies the consciousness of sin and evil. as a moral agent man must set what should be above what is. if he is to aspire and attain, the actual present must seem to him inadequate, imperfect, wrong, a state to be abolished in favour of a better. and therefore it follows that "though wrong were right could we but know--still wrong must needs seem wrong to do right's service, prove men weak or strong, choosers of evil or good."[b] [footnote b: _francis furini_.] the apparent existence of evil is the condition of goodness. and yet it must only be apparent. for if evil be regarded as veritably evil, it must remain so for all that man can do; he cannot annihilate any fact nor change its nature, and all effort would, therefore, be futile. and, on the other hand, if evil were known as unreal, then there were no need of moral effort, no quarrel with the present and therefore no aspiration, and no achievement. that which is man's highest and best,--namely, a moral life which is a progress--would thus be impossible, and his existence would be bereft of all meaning and purpose. and if the highest is impossible then all is wrong, "the goal being a ruin, so is all the rest." the hypothesis of the moral life as progressive is essential to browning. but if this hypothesis be granted, then all difficulties disappear. the conception of the endless acquirement of goodness at once postulates the consciousness of evil, and the consciousness of it as existing in order to be overcome. hence the consciousness of it as illusion comes nearest to the truth. and such a conception is essentially implied by the idea of morality. to speculative reason, however, it is impossible, as the poet believes, that evil should thus be at the same time regarded as both real and unreal. knowledge leads to despair on every side; for, whether it takes the evil in the world as seeming or actual, it stultifies effort, and proves that moral progress, which is best of all things, is impossible. but the moral consciousness derives its vitality from this contradiction. it is the meeting-point and conflict of actual and ideal; and its testimony is indisputable, however inconsistent it may be with that of knowledge. acknowledging absolute ignorance of the outer world, the poet has still a retreat within himself, safe from all doubt. he has in his own inner experience irrefragable proof "how things outside, fact or feigning, teach what good is and what evil--just the same, be feigning or be fact the teacher."[a] [footnote a: _francis furini_.] the consciousness of being taught goodness by interaction with the outside unknown is sufficient; it is "a point of vantage" whence he will not be moved by any contradictions that the intellect may conjure up against it. and this process of learning goodness, this gradual realization by man of an ideal infinitely high and absolute in worth, throws back a light which illumines all the pain and strife and despair, and shows them all to be steps in the endless "love-way." the consciousness of evil is thus at once the effect and the condition of goodness. the unrealized, though ever-realizing good, which brings despair, is the best fact in man's history; and it should rightly bring, not despair, but endless joy. chapter ix. a criticism of browning's view of the failure of knowledge. "der mensch, da er geist ist, darf und soll sich selbst des höchsten würdig achten, von der grösse und macht seines geistes kann er nicht gross genug denken; und mit diesem glauben wird nichts so spröde und hart seyn, das sich ihm nicht eröffnete. das zuerst verborgene und verschlossene wesen des universums hat keine kraft, die dem muthe des erkennens widerstand leisten könnte: es muss sich vor ihm aufthun, und seinen reichthum und seine tiefen ihm vor augen legen und zum genusse geben."[a] [footnote a: _hegel's inaugural address at heidelberg_.] before entering upon a criticism of browning's theory, as represented in the last chapter, it may be well to give a brief summary of it. the most interesting feature of browning's proof of his optimistic faith is his appeal from the intelligence to the moral consciousness. to show theoretically that evil is merely phenomenal is, in his view, both impossible and undesirable. it is impossible, because the human intellect is incapable of knowing anything as it really is, or of pronouncing upon the ultimate nature of any phenomenon. it is undesirable, because a theoretical proof of the evanescence of evil would itself give rise to the greatest of all evils. the best thing in the world is moral character. man exists in order to grow better, and the world exists in order to help him. but moral growth is possible only through conflict against evil, or what seems to be evil; hence, to disprove the existence of evil would be to take away the possibility of learning goodness, to stultify all human effort, and to deprive the world of its meaning. but, if an optimistic doctrine cannot be reached by way of speculative thought, if the intellect of man cannot see the good in things evil, his moral consciousness guarantees that all is for the best, and that "the good is all in all." for, in distinguishing between good and evil, the moral consciousness sets up an ideal over against the actual. it conceives of a scheme of goodness which is not realized in the world, and it condemns the world as it is. man, as moral being, is so constituted that he cannot but regard the evil in the world as something to be annulled. if he had only the power, there would be no pain, no sorrow, no weakness, no failure, no death. is man, then, better than the power which made the world and let woe gain entrance into it? no! answers the poet; for man himself is part of that world and the product of that power. the power that made the world also made the moral consciousness which condemns the world; if it is the source of the evil in the world, it is also the source of that love in man, which, by self-expenditure, seeks to remedy it. if the external world is merely an expression of a remorseless power, whence comes the love which is the principle of the moral life in man? the same power brings the antidote as well as the bane. and, further, the bane exists for the sake of the antidote, the wrong for the sake of the remedy. the evil in the world is means to a higher good, and the only means possible; for it calls into activity the divine element in man, and thereby contributes to its realization in his character. it gives the necessary opportunity for the exercise of love. hence, evil cannot be regarded as ultimately real. it is real only as a stage in growth, as means to an end; and the means necessarily perishes, or is absorbed in, the attainment of the end. it has no significance except by reference to that end. from this point of view, evil is the resistance which makes progress possible, the negative which gives meaning to the positive, the darkness that makes day beautiful. this must not, however, be taken to mean that evil is nothing. it is resistance; it is negative; it does oppose the good; although its opposition is finally overcome. if it did not, if evil were unreal, there would be no possibility of calling forth the moral potency of man, and the moral life would be a figment. but these two conditions of the moral life--on the one hand, that the evil of the world must be capable of being overcome and is there for the purpose of being overcome, and that it is unreal except as a means to the good; and, on the other hand, that evil must be actually opposed to the good, if the good is to have any meaning,--cannot, browning thinks, be reconciled with each other. it is manifest that the intellect of man cannot, at the same time, regard evil as both real and unreal. it must assert the one and deny the other; or else we must regard its testimony as altogether untrustworthy. but the first alternative is destructive of the moral consciousness. moral life is alike impossible whether we deny or assert the real existence of evil. the latter alternative stultifies knowledge, and leaves all the deeper concerns of life--the existence of good and evil, the reality of the distinction between them, the existence of god, the moral governance of the world, the destiny of man--in a state of absolute uncertainty. we must reject the testimony either of the heart or of the head. browning, as we have seen, unhesitatingly adopts the latter alternative. he remains loyal to the deliverances of his moral consciousness and accepts as equally valid, beliefs which the intellect finds to be self-contradictory: holding that knowledge on such matters is impossible. and he rejects this knowledge, not only because our thoughts are self-contradictory in themselves, but because the failure of a speculative solution of these problems is necessary to morality. clear, convincing, demonstrative knowledge would destroy morality; and the fact that the power to attain such knowledge has been withheld from us is to be regarded rather as an indication of the beneficence of god, who has not held even ignorance to be too great a price for man to pay for goodness. knowledge is not the fit atmosphere for morality. it is faith and not reason, hope and trust but not certainty, that lend vigour to the good life. we may believe, and rejoice in the belief, that the absolute good is fulfilling itself in all things, and that even the miseries of life are really its refracted rays--the light that gains in splendour by being broken. but we must not, and, indeed, cannot ascend from faith to knowledge. the heart may trust, and must trust, if it faithfully listens to its own natural voice; but reason must not demonstrate. ignorance on the side of intellect, faith on the side of the emotions; distrust of knowledge, absolute confidence in love; such is the condition of man's highest welfare: it is only thus that the purpose of his life, and of the world which is his instrument, can be achieved. no final estimate of the value of this theory of morals and religion can be made, without examining its philosophical presuppositions. nor is such an examination in any way unfair; for it is obvious that browning explicitly offers us a philosophical doctrine. he appeals to argument and not to artistic intuition; he offers a definite theory to which he claims attention, not on account of any poetic beauty that may lie within it, but on the ground that it is a true exposition of the moral nature of man. kant's _metaphysic of ethics_ is not more metaphysical in intention than the poet's later utterances on the problems of morality. in _la saisiaz_, in _ferishtah's fancies_, in the _parleyings_, and, though less explicitly, in _asolando_, _fifine at the fair_, and _red cotton nightcap country_, browning definitely states, and endeavours to demonstrate a theory of knowledge, a theory of the relation of knowledge to morality, and a theory of the nature of evil; and he discusses the arguments for the immortality of the soul. in these poems his artistic instinct avails him, not as in his earlier ones, for the discovery of truth by way of intuition, but for the adornment of doctrines already derived from a metaphysical repository. his art is no longer free, no longer its own end, but coerced into an alien service. it has become illustrative and argumentative, and in being made to subserve speculative purposes, it has ceased to be creative. browning has appealed to philosophy, and philosophy must try his cause. such, then, is browning's theory; and i need make no further apology for discussing at some length the validity of the division which it involves between the intellectual and the moral life of man. is it possible to combine the weakness of man's intelligence with the strength of his moral and religious life, and to find in the former the condition of the latter? does human knowledge fail, as the poet considers it to fail? is the intelligence of man absolutely incapable of arriving at knowledge of things as they are? if it does, if man cannot know the truth, can he attain goodness? these are the questions that must now be answered. it is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its own activity: the ancient philosophical "scepticism" has been revived and strengthened. side by side with the sense of the triumphant progress of natural science, there is a conviction, shared even by scientific investigators themselves, as well as by religious teachers and by many students of philosophy, that our knowledge has only limited and relative value, and that it always stops short of the true nature of things. the reason of this general conviction lies in the fact that thought has become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them. this relativity of things to thought has, not unnaturally, suggested the idea that the objects of our knowledge are different from objects as they are. "that the real nature of things is very different from what we make of them, that thought and thing are divorced, that there is a fundamental antithesis between them," is, as hegel said, "the hinge on which modern philosophy turns." educated opinion in our day has lost its naive trust in itself. "the natural belief of man, it is true, ever gives the lie" to the doctrine that we do not know things. "in common life," adds hegel, "we reflect without particularly noting that this is the process of arriving at the truth, and we think without hesitation and in the firm belief that thought coincides with things."[a] but, as soon as attention is directed to the process of thinking, and to the way in which the process affects our consciousness of the object, it is at once concluded that thought will never reach reality, that things are not given to us as they are, but distorted by the medium of sense and our intelligence, through which they pass. the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge is thus very generally regarded as equivalent to the doctrine that there is no true knowledge whatsoever. we know only phenomena, or appearances; and it is these, and not veritable facts, that we systematize into sciences. "we can arrange the appearances--the shadows of our cave--and that, for the practical purposes of the cave, is all that we require."[b] not even "earth's least atom" can ever be known to us as it really is; it is for us, at the best, [footnote a: wallace's _translation of hegel's logic_, p. .] [footnote b: caird's _comte_.] "an atom with some certain properties known about, thought of as occasion needs."[c] [footnote c: _a bean-stripe_.] in this general distrust of knowledge, however, there are, as might be expected, many different degrees. its origin in modern times was, no doubt, the doctrine of kant. "this divorce of thing and thought," says hegel, "is mainly the work of the critical philosophy and runs counter to the conviction of all previous ages." and the completeness of the divorce corresponds, with tolerable accuracy, to the degree in which the critical philosophy has been understood; for kant's writings, like those of all great thinkers, are capable of many interpretations, varying in depth with the intelligence of the interpreters. the most common and general form of this view of the limitation of the human intelligence is that which places the objects of religious faith beyond the reach of human knowledge. we find traces of it in much of the popular theology of our day. the great facts of religion are often spoken of as lying in an extra-natural sphere, beyond experience, into which men cannot enter by the native right of reason. it is asserted that the finite cannot know the infinite, that the nature of god is unknowable--except by means of a supernatural interference, which gives to men a new power of spiritual discernment, and "reveals" to them things which are "above reason," although not contrary to it. the theologian often shields certain of his doctrines from criticism, on the ground, as he contends, that there are facts which we must believe, but which it would be presumptuous for us to pretend to understand or to demonstrate. they are the proper objects of "faith." but this view of the weakness of the intelligence when applied to supersensuous facts, is held along with an undisturbed conviction of the validity of our knowledge of ordinary objects. it is believed, in a word, that there are two kinds of realities,--natural and supernatural; and that the former is knowable and the latter not. it requires, however, no great degree of intellectual acumen to discover that this denial of the validity of our knowledge of these matters involves its denial in all its applications. the ordinary knowledge of natural objects, which we begin by regarding as valid, or, rather, whose validity is taken for granted without being questioned, depends upon our ideas of these supersensible objects. in other words, those fundamental difficulties which pious opinion discovers in the region of theology, and which, as is thought, fling the human intellect back upon itself into a consciousness of frailty and finitude, are found to lurk beneath our ordinary knowledge. whenever, for instance, we endeavour to know any object, we find that we are led back along the line of its conditions to that which unconditionally determines it. for we cannot find the reason for a particular object in a particular object. we are driven back endlessly from one to another along the chain of causes; and we can neither discover the first link nor do without it. the first link must be a cause of itself, and experience yields none such. such a cause would be the unconditioned, and the unconditioned we cannot know. the final result of thinking is thus to lead us to an unknown; and, in consequence, all our seeming knowledge is seen to have no intelligible basis, and, therefore, to be merely hypothetical. if we cannot know god, we cannot know anything. this view is held by the positivists, and the most popular english exponent of it is, perhaps, mr. herbert spencer. its characteristic is its repudition of both theology and metaphysics as pseudo-sciences, and its high esteem for science. that esteem is not disturbed by the confession that "noumenal causes,"--that is, the actual reality of things,--are unknown; for we can still lay claim to valid knowledge of the laws of phenomena. having acknowledged that natural things as known are merely phenomena, positivism treats them in all respects as if they were realities; and it rejoices in the triumphant progress of the natural sciences as if it were a veritable growth of knowledge. it does not take to heart the phenomenal nature of known objects. but, having paid its formal compliments to the doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge, it neglects it altogether. those who understand kant better carry his scepticism further, and they complete the divorce between man's knowledge and reality. the process of knowing, they hold, instead of leading us towards facts, as it was so long supposed to do, takes us away from them: _i.e._, if either "towards" or "away from" can have any meaning when applied to two realms which are absolutely severed from one another. knowledge is always concerned with the relations between things; with their likeness, or unlikeness, their laws, or connections; but these are universals, and things are individuals. science knows the laws of things, but not the things; it reveals how one object affects another, how it is connected with it; but what are the things themselves, which are connected, it does not know. the laws are mere forms of thought, "bloodless categories," and not facts. they may somehow be regarded as explaining facts, but they must not be identified with the facts. knowledge is the sphere of man's thoughts, and is made up of ideas; real things are in another sphere, which man's thoughts cannot reach. we must distinguish more clearly than has hitherto been done, between logic as the science of knowledge, and metaphysics as a science which pretends to reveal the real nature of things. in a word, we can know thoughts or universals, but not things or particular existences. "when existence is in question it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a composite of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of its being." each object keeps its own real being to itself. its inmost secret, its reality, is something that cannot appear in knowledge. we can only know its manifestations; but these manifestations are not its reality, nor connected with it. these belong to the sphere of knowledge, they are parts in a system of abstract thoughts; they do not exist in that system, or no-system, of individual realities, each of which, in its veritable being, is itself only, and connected with nought beside. now, this view of the absolute impossibility of knowing any reality, on account of the fundamental difference between things and our thoughts about things, contains a better promise of a true view both of reality and of knowledge, than any of the previously mentioned half-hearted theories. it forces us explicitly either to regard every effort to know as futile, or else to regard it as futile _on this theory of it_. in other words, we must either give up knowledge or else give up the account of knowledge advanced by these philosophers. hitherto, however, every philosophy that has set itself against the possibility of the knowledge of reality has had to give way. it has failed to shake the faith of mankind in its own intellectual endowment, or to arrest, even for a moment, the attempt by thinking to know things as they are. the view held by berkeley, that knowledge is merely subjective, because the essence of things consists in their being perceived by the individual, and that they are nothing but his ideas, was refuted by kant, when he showed that the very illusion of seeming knowledge was impossible on that theory. and this later view, which represents knowledge as merely subjective, on the ground that it is the product of the activity of the thought of mankind, working according to universal laws, is capable of being refuted in the same manner. the only difference between the berkeleian and this modern speculative theory is that, on the former view, each individual constructed his own subjective entities or illusions; while, on the latter, all men, by reason of the universality of the laws of thought governing their minds, create the same illusion, the same subjective scheme of ideas. instead of each having his own private unreality, as the product of his perceiving activity, they have all the same, or at least a similar, phantom-world of ideas, as the result of their thinking. but, in both cases alike, the reality of the world without is out of reach, and knowledge is a purely subjective apprehension of a world within. thoughts are quite different from things, and no effort of human reason can reveal any community between them. now, there are certain difficulties which, so far as i know, those who hold this view have scarcely attempted to meet. the first of these lies in the obvious fact, that all men at all times consider that this very process of thinking, which the theory condemns as futile, is the only way we have of finding out what the reality of things is. why do we reflect and think, except in order to pass beyond the illusions of sensuous appearances to the knowledge of things as they are? nay, why do these philosophers themselves reflect, when reflection, instead of leading to truth, which is knowledge of reality, leads only to ideas, which, being universal, cannot represent the realities that are said to be "individual." the second is, that the knowledge of "the laws" of things gives to us practical command over them; although, according to this view, laws are not things, nor any part of the reality of things, nor even true representations of things. our authority over things seems to grow _pari passu_ with our knowledge. the natural sciences seem to prove by their practical efficiency, that they are not building up a world of apparitions, like the real world; but gradually getting inside nature, learning more and more to wield her powers, and to make them the instruments of the purposes of man, and the means of his welfare. to common-sense,--which frequently "divines" truths that it cannot prove, and, like ballast in a ship, has often given steadiness to human progress although it is only a dead weight,--the assertion that man knows nothing is as incredible as that he knows all things. if it is replied, that the "things" which we seem to dominate by the means of knowledge are themselves only phenomena, the question arises, what then are the real things to which they are opposed? what right has any philosophy to say that there is any reality which no one can in any sense know? the knowledge that such reality is, is surely a relation between that reality and consciousness, and, if so, the assertion of an unknowable reality is self-contradictory. for the conception of it is the conception of something that is, and at the same time is not, out of relation to consciousness. to say what kind of thing reality is, is a still more remarkable feat, if reality is unknowable. reality, being beyond knowledge, why is it called particular or individual, rather than universal? how is it known that the true being of things is different from ideas? surely both of the terms must be regarded as known to some extent, if they are called like or unlike, contrasted or compared, opposed or identified. but, lastly, this theory has to account for the fact that it constitutes what is not only unreal, but impossible, into the criterion of what is actual. if knowledge of reality is altogether different from human knowledge, how does it come to be its criterion? that knowledge is inadequate or imperfect can be known, only by contrasting it with its own proper ideal, whatever that may be. a criticism by reference to a foreign or irrelevant criterion, or the condemnation of a theory as imperfect because it does not realize an impossible end, is unreasonable. all true criticism of an object implies a reference to a more perfect state of itself. we must, then, regard the knowledge of objects as they are, which is opposed to human knowledge, as, only a completer and fuller form of that knowledge; or else we must cease to contrast it with our human knowledge, as valid with invalid, true with phenomenal. either knowledge of reality is complete knowledge, or else it is a chimera. and, in either case, the sharp distinction between the real and the phenomenal vanishes; and what remains, is not a reality outside of consciousness, or different from ideas, but a reality related to consciousness, or, in other words, a knowable reality. "the distinction of objects into phenomena and noumena, _i.e._, into things that for us exist, and things that for us do not exist, is an irish bull in philosophy," said heine. to speak of reality as unknowable, or to speak of anything as unknowable, is to utter a direct self-contradiction; it is to negate in the predicate what is asserted in the subject. it is a still more strange perversion to erect this knowable emptiness into a criterion of knowledge, and to call the latter phenomenal by reference to it. these difficulties are so fundamental and so obvious, that the theory of the phenomenal nature of human knowledge, which, being interpreted, means that we know nothing, could scarcely maintain its hold, were it not confused with another fact of human experience, that is apparently inconsistent with the doctrine that man can know the truth. side by side with the faith of ordinary consciousness, that in order to know anything we must think, or, in other words, that knowledge shows us what things really are, there is a conviction, strengthened by constant experience, that we never know things fully. every investigation into the nature of an object soon brings us to an enigma, a something more we do not know. failing to know this something more, we generally consider that we have fallen short of reaching the reality of the object. we recognize, as it has been expressed, that we have been brought to a stand, and we therefore conclude that we are also brought to the end. we arrive at what we do not know, and we pronounce that unknown to be unknowable; that is, we regard it as something different in nature from what we do know. so far as i can see, the attitude of ordinary thought in regard to this matter might be fairly represented by saying, that it always begins by considering objects as capable of being known in their reality, or as they are, and that experience always proves the attempt to know them as they are to be a failure. the effort is continued although failure is the result, and even although that failure be exaggerated and universalized into that despair of knowledge which we have described. we are thus confronted with what seems to be a contradiction; a trust and distrust in knowledge. it can only be solved by doing full justice to both of the conflicting elements; and then, if possible, by showing that they are elements, and not the complete, concrete fact, except when held together. from one point of view, it is undeniable that in every object of perception, we come upon problems that we cannot solve. science at its best, and even when dealing with the simplest of things, is forced to stop short of its final secret. even when it has discovered its law, there is still apparently something over and above which science cannot grasp, and which seems to give to the object its reality. all the natural sciences concentrated on a bit of iron ore fail to exhaust the truth in it: there is always a "beyond" in it, something still more fundamental which is not yet understood. and that something beyond, that inner essence, that point in which the laws meet and which the sciences fail to lift into knowledge, is regarded as just the reality of the thing. thus the reality is supposed, at the close of every investigation, to lie outside of knowledge; and conversely, all that we do know, seeing that it lacks this last element, seems to be only apparent knowledge, or knowledge of phenomena. in this way the process of knowing seems always to stop short at the critical moment, when the truth is just about to be reached. and those who dwell on this aspect alone are apt to conclude that man's intellect is touched with a kind of impotence, which makes it useless when it gets near the reality. it is like a weapon that snaps at the hilt just when the battle is hottest. for we seem to be able to know everything but the reality, and yet apart from the real essence all knowledge seems to be merely apparent. physical science penetrates through the outer appearances of things to their laws, analyzes them into forms of energy, calculates their action and predicts their effects with certainty. its practical power over the forces of nature is so great that it seems to have got inside her secrets. and yet science will itself acknowledge that in every simplest object there is an unknown. its triumphant course of explaining seems to be always arrested at the threshold of reality. it has no theory, scarcely an hypothesis, of the actual nature of things, or of what that is in each object, which constitutes it a real existence. natural science, with a scarcely concealed sneer, hands over to the metaphysician all questions as to the real being of things; and itself makes the more modest pretension of showing how things behave, not what they are; what effects follow the original noumenal causes, but not the veritable nature of these causes. nor can the metaphysician, in his turn, do more than suggest a hypothesis as to the nature of the ultimate reality in things. he cannot detect or demonstrate it in any particular fact. in a word, every minutest object in the world baffles the combined powers of all forms of human thought, and holds back its essence or true being from them. and as long as this true being, or reality is not known, the knowledge which we seem to have cannot be held as ultimately true, but is demonstrably a makeshift. having made this confession, there seems to be no alternative but to postulate an utter discrepancy between human thought and real existence, or between human knowledge and truth, which is the correspondence of thing and thought. for, at no point is knowledge found to be in touch with real being; it is everywhere demonstrably conditioned and relative, and inadequate to express the true reality of its objects. what remains, then, except to regard human knowledge as completely untrustworthy, as merely of phenomena? if we cannot know _any_ reality, does not knowledge completely fail? now, in dealing with the moral life of man, we saw that the method of hard alternatives is invalid. the moral life, being progressive, was shown to be the meeting--point of the ideal and the actual; and the ideal of perfect goodness was regarded as manifesting itself in actions which, nevertheless, were never adequate to express it. the good when achieved was ever condemned as unworthy, and the ideal when attained ever pressed for more adequate expression in a better character. the ideal was present as potency, as realizing itself, but it was never completely realized. the absolute good was never reached in the best action, and never completely missed in the worst. the same conflict of real and unreal was shown to be essential to every natural life. as long as anything grows it neither completely attains, nor completely falls away from its ideal. the growing acorn is not an oak tree, and yet it is not a mere acorn. the child is not the man; and yet the man is in the child, and only needs to be evolved by interaction with circumstances. the process of growth is one wherein the ideal is always present, as a reconstructive power gradually changing its whole vehicle, or organism, into a more perfect expression of itself. the ideal is reached in the end, just because it is present in the beginning; and there is no end as long as growth continues. now, it is evident that knowledge, whether it be that of the individual man or of the human race, is a thing that grows. the process by means of which natural science makes progress, or by which the consciousness of the child expands and deepens into the consciousness of the man, is best made intelligible from the point of view of evolution. it is like an organic process, in which each new acquirement finds its place in an old order, each new fact is brought under the permanent principles of experience, and absorbed into an intellectual life, which itself, in turn, grows richer and fuller with every new acquisition. no knowledge worthy of the name is an aggregation of facts. wisdom comes by growth. hence, the assertion that knowledge never attains reality, does not imply that it always misses it. in morals we do not say that a man is entirely evil, although he never, even in his best actions, attains the true good. and if the process of knowing is one that presses onward towards an ideal, that ideal is never completely missed even in the poorest knowledge. if it grows, the method of fixed alternatives must be inapplicable to it. the ideal, whatever it may be, must be considered as active in the present, guiding the whole movement, and gradually manifesting itself in each of the passing forms, which are used up as the raw material of new acquirement; and yet no passing form completely expresses the ideal. nor is it difficult to say what that ideal of knowledge is, although we cannot define it in any adequate manner. we know that the end of morality is the _summum bonum_, although we cannot, as long as we are progressive, define its whole content, or find it fully realized in any action. every failure brings new truth, every higher grade of moral character reveals some new height of goodness to be scaled; the moral ideal acquires definiteness and content as humanity moves upwards. and yet the ideal is not entirely unknown even at the first; even to the most ignorant, it presents itself as a criterion which enables him to distinguish between right and wrong, evil and goodness, and which guides his practical life. the same truth holds with regard to knowledge. its growth receives its impulse from, and is directed and determined by, what is conceived as the real world of facts. this truth, namely, that the ideal knowledge is knowledge of reality, the most subjective philosopher cannot but acknowledge. it is implied in his condemnation of knowledge as merely phenomenal, that there is possible a knowledge of real being. that thought and reality can be brought together, or rather, that they are always together, is presupposed in all knowledge and in all experience. the effort to know is the effort to _explain_ the relation of thought and reality, not to create it. the ideal of perfect knowledge is present from the first; it generates the effort, directs it, distinguishes between truth and error. and that which man ever aims at, whether in the ordinary activities of daily thought, or through the patient labour of scientific investigation, or in the reflective self-torture of philosophic thought, is to know the world as it is. no failure damps the ardour of this endeavour. relativists, phenomenalists, agnostics, sceptics, kantians or neo-kantians--all the crowd of thinkers who cry down the human intellect, and draw a charmed circle around reality so as to make it unapproachable to the mind of man--ply this useless labour. they are seeking to penetrate beneath the shows of sense and the outer husk of phenomena to the truth, which is the meeting-point of knowledge and reality; they are endeavouring to translate into an intellectual possession the powers that play within and around them; or, in other words, to make these powers express themselves in their thoughts, and supply the content of their spiritual life. the irony, latent in their endeavour, gives them no pause; they are in some way content to pursue what they call phantoms, and to try to satisfy their thirst with the waters of a mirage. this comes from the presence of the ideal within them, that is, of the implicit unity of reality and thought, which seeks for explicit and complete manifestation in knowledge. the reality is present in them as thinking activity, working towards complete revelation of itself by means of knowledge. and its presence is real, although the process is never complete. in knowledge, as in morals, it is necessary to remember both of the truths implied in the pursuit of an ideal--that a growing thing not only always fails to attain, but also always succeeds. the distinction between truth and error in knowledge is present at every stage in the effort to attain truth, as the distinction between right and wrong is present in every phase of the moral life. it is the source of the intellectual effort. but that distinction cannot be drawn except by reference to a criterion of truth, which condemns our actual knowledge; as it is the absolute good, which condemns the present character. the ideal may be indefinite, and its content confused and poor; but it is always sufficient for its purpose, always better than the actual achievement. and, in this sense, reality, the truth, the veritable being of things, is always reached by the poorest knowledge. as there is no starved and distorted sapling which is not the embodiment of the principle of natural life, so the meanest character is the product of an ideal of goodness, and the most confused opinion of ignorant mankind is an expression of the reality of things. without it there would not be even the semblance of knowledge, not even error and untruth. those who, like browning, make a division between man's thought and real things, and regard the sphere of knowledge as touching at no point the sphere of actual existence, are attributing to the bare human intellect much more power than it has. they regard mind as creating its phenomenal knowledge, or the apparent world. for, having separated mind from reality, it is evident that they cannot avail themselves of any doctrine of sensations or impressions as a medium between them, or postulate any other form of connection or means of communication. connection of any kind must, in the end, imply some community of nature, and must put the unity of thought and being--here denied--beneath their difference. hence, the world of phenomena which we know, and which as known, does not seem to consist of realities, must be the product of the unaided human mind. the intellect, isolated from all real being, has manufactured the apparent universe, in all its endless wealth. it is a creative intellect, although it can only create illusions. it evolves all its products from itself. but thought, set to revolve upon its own axis in an empty region, can produce nothing, not even illusions. and, indeed, those who deny that it is possible for thought and reality to meet in a unity, have, notwithstanding, to bring over "something" to the aid of thought. there must be some effluence from the world of reality, some manifestations of the thing (though they are not the reality of the thing, nor any part of the reality, nor connected with the reality!) to assist the mind and supply it with data. the "phenomenal world" is a hybrid, generated by thought and "something"--which yet is not reality; for the real world is a world of things in themselves, altogether beyond thought. by bringing in these data, it is virtually admitted that the human mind reaches down into itself in vain for a world, even for a phenomenal one. thought apart from things is quite empty, just as things apart from thought are blind. such thought and such reality are mere abstractions, hypostasized by false metaphysics; they are elements of truth rent asunder, and destroyed in the rending. the dependence of the intelligence of man upon reality is direct and complete. the foolishest dream, that ever played out its panorama beneath a night-cap, came through the gates of the senses from the actual world. man is limited to his material in all that he knows, just as he is ruled by the laws of thought. he cannot go one step beyond it. to transcend "experience" is impossible. we have no wings to sustain us in an empty region, and no need of any. it is as impossible for man to create new ideas, as it is for him to create new atoms. our thought is essentially connected with reality. there is no _mauvais pas_ from thought to things. we do not need to leap out of ourselves in order to get into the world. we are in it from the first, both as physical and moral agents, and as thinking beings. our thoughts are expressions of the real nature of things, so far as they go. they may be and are imperfect; they may be and are confused and inadequate, and express only the superficial aspects and not "the inmost fibres"; still, they are what they are, in virtue of "the reality," which finds itself interpreted in them. severed from that reality, they would be nothing. thus, the distinction between thought and reality is a distinction within a deeper unity. and that unity must not be regarded as something additional to both, or as a third something. it _is_ their unity. it is both reality and thought: it is existing thought, or reality knowing itself and existing through its knowledge of self; it is self-consciousness. the distinguished elements have no existence or meaning except in their unity. like the actual and ideal, they have significance and being, only in their reference to each other. there is one more difficulty connected with this matter which i must touch upon, although the discussion may already be regarded as prolix. it is acknowledged by every one that the knowledge of the individual, and his apparent world of realities, grow _pari passu_. beyond his sphere of knowledge there is no reality _for him_, not even apparent reality. but, on the other hand, the real world of existing things exists all the same whether he knows it or not. it did not begin to be with any knowledge he may have of it, it does not cease to be with his extinction, and it is not in any way affected by his valid, or invalid, reconstruction of it in thought. the world which depends on his thought is his world, and not the world of really existing things. and this is true alike of every individual. the world is independent of all human minds. it existed before them, and will, very possibly, exist after them. can we not, therefore, conclude that the real world is independent of thought, and that it exists without relation to it? a short reference to the moral consciousness may suggest the answer to this difficulty. in morality (as also is the case in knowledge) the moral ideal, or the objective law of goodness, grows in richness and fulness of content with the individual who apprehends it. _his_ moral world is the counterpart of _his_ moral growth as a character. goodness _for him_ directly depends upon his recognition of it. animals, presumably, have no moral ideal, because they have not the power to constitute it. in morals, as in knowledge, the mind of man constructs its own world. and yet, in both alike, the world of truth or of goodness exists all the same whether the individual knows it or not. he does not call the moral law into being, but finds it without, and then realizes it in his own life. the moral law does not vanish and reappear with its recognition by mankind. it is not subject to the chances and changes of its life, but a good in itself that is eternal. is it therefore independent of all intelligence? can goodness be anything but the law of a self-conscious being? is it the quality or motive or ideal of a mere thing? manifestly not. its relation to self-consciousness is essential. with the extinction of self-consciousness all moral goodness is extinguished. the same holds true of reality. the question of the reality or unreality of things cannot arise except in an intelligence. animals have neither illusions nor truths--unless they are self-conscious. the reality, which man sets over against his own inadequate knowledge, is posited by him; and it has no meaning whatsoever except in this contrast. and to endeavour to conceive a reality which no one knows, is to assert a relative term without its correlative, which is absurd; it is to posit an ideal which is opposed to nothing actual. in this view, so commonly held in our day, that knowledge is subjective and reality unknowable, we have another example of the falseness and inconsistency of abstract thinking. if this error be committed, there is no fundamental gain in saying with kant, that things are relative to the thought of all, instead of asserting, with berkeley or browning, that they are relative to the thought of each. the final result is the same. things as known, are reduced into mere creations of thought; things as they are, are regarded as not thoughts, and as partaking in no way of the nature of thought. and yet "reality" is virtually assumed to be given at the beginning of knowledge; for the sensations are supposed to be emanations from it, or roused in consciousness by it. these sensations, it is said, man does not make, but receives, and receives from the concealed reality. they flow from it, and are the manifestations of its activity. then, in the next moment, reality is regarded as not given in any way, but as something to be discovered by the effort of thought; for we always strive to know things, and not phantoms. lastly, the knowledge thus acquired being regarded as imperfect, and experience showing to us continually that every object has more in it than we know, the reality is pronounced to be unknowable, and all knowledge is regarded as failure, as acquaintance with mere phantoms. thus, in thought, as in morality, the ideal is present at the beginning, it is an effort after explicit realization, and its process is never complete. now, all these aspects of the ideal of knowledge, that is, of reality, are held by the unsophisticated intelligence of man; and abstract philosophy is not capable of finally getting rid of any one of them. it, too, holds them _alternately_. its denial of the possibility of knowing reality is refuted by its own starting-point; for it begins with a given something, regarded as real, and its very effort to know is an attempt to know that reality by thinking. but it forgets these facts, when it is discovered that knowledge at the best is incomplete. it is thus tossed from assertion to denial, and from denial to assertion; from one abstract or one-sided view of reality, to the other. when these different aspects of truth are grasped together from the point of view of evolution, there seems to be a way of escaping the difficulties to which they give rise. for the ideal must be present at the beginning, and cannot be present in its fulness till the process is complete. what is here required is to lift our theory of man's knowledge to the level of our theory of his moral life, and to treat it frankly as the process whereby reality manifests itself in the mind of man. in that way, we shall avoid the absurdities of both of the abstract schools of philosophy, to both of which alike the native intelligence of man gives the lie. we shall say neither that man knows nothing, nor that he knows all; we shall regard his knowledge, neither as purely phenomenal and out of all contact with reality, nor as an actual identification with the real being of things in all their complex variety. for, in morality, we do not say either that the individual is absolutely evil, because his actions never realize the supreme ideal of goodness; nor, that he is at the last term of development, and "taking the place of god," because he lives as "ever in his great taskmaster's eye." just as every moral action, however good, leaves something still to be desiderated, something that may become a stepping-stone for new movement towards the ideal which it has failed to actualize; so all our knowledge of an object leaves something over that we have not apprehended, which is truer and more real than anything we know, and which in all future effort we strive to master. and, just as the very effort, to be good derives its impulse and direction from the ideal of goodness which is present, and striving for realization; so the effort to know derives its impulse and direction from the reality which is present, and striving for complete realization in the thought of man. we know reality confusedly from the first; and it is because we have attained so much knowledge, that we strive for greater clearness and fulness. it is by planting his foot on the world that man travels. it is by opposing his power to the given reality that his knowledge grows. when once we recognize that reality is the ideal of knowledge, we are able to acknowledge all the truth that is in the doctrine of the phenomenalists, without falling into their errors and contradictions. we may go as far as the poet in confessing intellectual impotence, and roundly call the knowledge of man "lacquered ignorance." "earth's least atom" does veritably remain an enigma. man is actually flung back into his circumscribed sphere by every fact; and he will continue to be so flung to the end of time. he will never know reality, nor be able to hold up in his hand the very heart of the simplest thing in the world. for the world is an organic totality, and its simplest thing will not be seen, through and through, till everything is known, till every fact and event is related to every other under principles which are universal: just as goodness cannot be fully achieved in any act, till the agent is in all ways lifted to the level of absolute goodness. physics cannot reveal the forces which keep a stone in its place on the earth, till it has traced the forces that maintain the starry systems in their course. no fact can be thoroughly known, _i.e._, known in its reality, till the light of the universe has been focussed upon it: and, on the other hand, to know any subject through and through would be to explain all being. the highest law and the essence of the simple fact, the universal and the particular, can only be known together, in and through one another. "reality" in "the least atom" will be known, only when knowledge has completed its work, and the universe has become a transparent sphere, penetrated in every direction by the shafts of intelligence. but this is only half the truth. if knowledge is never complete, it is always _completing_; if reality is never known, it is ever _being known_; if the ideal is never actual, it is always _being actualized_. the complete failure of knowledge is as impossible as its complete success. it is at no time severed from reality; it is never its mere adumbration, nor are its contents mere phenomena. on the contrary, it is reality partially revealed, the ideal incompletely actualized. our very errors are the working of reality within us, and apart from it they would be impossible. the process towards truth by man is the process of truth _in_ man; the movement of knowledge towards reality is the movement of reality into knowledge. a purely subjective consciousness which knows, such as the poet tried to describe, is a self-contradiction: it would be a consciousness at once related, and not related, to the actual world. but man has no need to relate himself to the world. he is already related, and his task is to understand that relation, or, in other words, to make both its terms intelligible. man has no need to go out from himself to facts; his relation to facts is prior to his distinction from them. the truth is that he cannot entirely lift himself away from them, nor suspend his thoughts in the void. in his inmost being he is creation's voice, and in his knowledge he confusedly murmurs its deep thoughts. browning was aware of this truth in its application to man's moral nature. in speaking of the principle of love, he was not tempted to apply fixed alternatives. on the contrary, he detected in the "poorest love that was ever offered" the veritable presence of that which is perfect and complete, though never completely actualized. his interest in the moral development of man, and his penetrative moral insight, acting upon, and guided by the truths of the christian religion, warned him, on this side, against the absolute separation of the ideal and actual, the divine and human. human love, however poor in quality and limited in range, was to him god's love in man. it was a wave breaking in the individual of that first love, which is ever flowing back through the life of humanity to its primal source. to him all moral endeavour is the process of this primal love; and every man, as he consciously identifies himself with it, may use the language of scripture, and say, "it is not i that live, but christ lives in me." but, on the side of knowledge, he was neither so deeply interested, nor had he so good a guide to lean upon. ignorant, according to all appearances, of the philosophy which has made the christian maxim, "die to live,"--which primarily is only a principle of morality--the basis of its theory of knowledge, he exaggerated the failure of science to reach the whole truth as to any particular object, into a qualitative discrepancy between knowledge and truth. because knowledge is never complete, it is always mere lacquered ignorance; and man's apparent intellectual victories are only conquests in a land of unrealities, or mere phenomena. he occupies in regard to knowledge, a position strictly analogous to that of carlyle, in regard to morality; his intellectual pessimism is the counterpart of the moral pessimism of his predecessor, and it springs from the same error. he forgot that the ideal without is also the power within, which makes for its own manifestation in the mind of man. he opposed the intellect to the world, as carlyle opposed the weakness of man to the law of duty; and he neglected the fact that the world was there for him, only because he knew it, just as carlyle neglected the fact that the duty was without, only because it was recognized within. he strained the difference between the ideal and actual into an absolute distinction; and, as carlyle condemned man to strive for a goodness which he could never achieve, so browning condemns him to pursue a truth which he can never attain. in both, the failure is regarded as absolute. "there is no good in us," has for its counterpart "there is no truth in us." both the moralist and the poet dwell on the _negative_ relation of the ideal and actual, and forget that the negative has no meaning, except as the expression of a deeper affirmative. carlyle had to learn that we know our moral imperfection, only because we are conscious of a better within us; and browning had to learn that we are aware of our ignorance, only because we have the consciousness of fuller truth with which we contrast our knowledge. browning, indeed, knew that the consciousness of evil was itself evidence of the presence of good, that perfection means death, and progress is life, on the side of morals; but he has missed the corresponding truth on the side of knowledge. if he acknowledges that the highest revealed itself to man, on the practical side, as love; he does not see that it has also manifested itself to man, on the theoretical side, as reason. the self-communication of the infinite is incomplete love is a quality of god, intelligence a quality of man; hence, on one side, there is no limit to achievement, but on the other there is impotence. human nature is absolutely divided against itself; and the division, as we have already seen, is not between flesh and spirit, but between a love which is god's own and perfect, and an intelligence which is merely man's and altogether weak and deceptive. this is what makes browning think it impossible to re-establish faith in god, except by turning his back on knowledge; but whether it is possible for him to appeal to the moral consciousness, we shall inquire in the next chapter. chapter x. the heart and the head.--love and reason. "and though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter."[a] [footnote a: milton's _areopagitica_.] it has been shown that browning appeals, in defence of his optimistic faith, from the intellect to the heart. his theory rests on three main assumptions:--namely ( ) that knowledge of the true nature of things is impossible to man, and that, therefore, it is necessary to find other and better evidence than the intellect can give for the victory of good over evil; ( ) that the failure of knowledge is a necessary condition of the moral life, inasmuch as certain knowledge would render all moral effort either futile or needless; ( ) that after the failure of knowledge there still remains possible a faith of the heart, which can furnish a sufficient objective basis to morality and religion. the first of these assumptions i endeavoured to deal with in the last chapter. i now turn to the remaining two. demonstrative, or certain, or absolute knowledge of the actual nature of things would, browning asserts, destroy the very possibility of a moral life.[a] for such knowledge would show either that evil is evil, or that evil is good; and, in both cases alike, the benevolent activity of love would be futile. in the first case, it would be thwarted and arrested by despair; for, if evil be evil, it must remain evil for aught that man can do. man cannot effect a change in the nature of things, nor create a good in a world dominated by evil. in the second case, the saving effect of moral love would be unnecessary; for, if evil be only seeming, then all things are perfect and complete, and there is no need of interference. it is necessary, therefore, that man should be in a permanent state of doubt as to the real existence of evil; and, whether evil does exist or not, it must seem, and only seem to exist to man, in order that he may devote himself to the service of good.[b] [footnote a: see chapter viii., p. .] [footnote b: _ibid_.] now, if this view of the poet be taken in the strict sense in which he uses it in this argument, it admits of a very easy refutation. it takes us beyond the bounds of all possible human experience, into an imaginary region, as to which all assertions are equally valueless. it is impossible to conceive how the conduct of a being who is moral would be affected by absolute knowledge; or, indeed, to conceive the existence of such a being. for morality, as the poet insists, is a process in which an ideal is gradually realized through conflict with the actual--an actual which it both produces and transmutes at every stage of the progress. but complete knowledge would be above all process. hence we would have, on browning's hypothesis, to conceive of a being in whom perfect knowledge was combined with an undeveloped will. a being so constituted would be an agglomerate of utterly disparate elements, the interaction of which in a single character it would be impossible to make intelligible. but, setting aside this point, there is a curious flaw in browning's argument, which indicates that he had not distinguished between two forms of optimism which are essentially different from each other,--namely, the pantheistic and the christian. to know that evil is only apparent, that pain is only pleasure's mask, that all forms of wickedness and misery are only illusions of an incomplete intelligence, would, he argues, arrest all moral action and stultify love. for love--which necessarily implies need in its object--is the principle of all right action. in this he argues justly, for the moral life is essentially a conflict and progress; and, in a world in which "white ruled unchecked along the line," there would be neither the need of conflict nor the possibility of progress. and, on the other hand, if the good were merely a phantom, and evil the reality, the same destruction of moral activity would follow. "white may not triumph," in this absolute manner, nor may we "clean abolish, once and evermore, white's faintest trace." there must be "the constant shade cast on life's shine." all this is true; but the admission of it in no way militates against the conception of absolutely valid knowledge; nor is it any proof that we need live in the twilight of perpetual doubt, in order to be moral. for the knowledge, of which browning speaks, would be knowledge of a state of things in which morality would be really impossible; that is, it would be knowledge of a world in which all was evil or all was good. on the other hand, valid knowledge of a world in which good and evil are in conflict, and in which the former is realized through victory over the latter, would not destroy morality. what is inconsistent with the moral life is the conception of a world where there is no movement from evil to good, no evolution of character, but merely the stand-still life of "rephan." but absolutely certain knowledge that the good is at issue with sin in the world, that there is no way of attaining goodness except through conflict with evil, and that moral life, as the poet so frequently insists, is a process which converts all actual attainment into a dead self, from which we can rise to higher things--a self, therefore, which is relatively evil--would, and does, inspire morality. it is the deification of evil not negated or overcome, of evil as it is in itself and apart from all process, which destroys morality. and the same is equally true of a pantheistic optimism, which asserts that all things _are_ good. but it is not true of a christian optimism, which asserts that all things are _working together for_ good. for such optimism implies that the process of negating or overcoming evil is essential to the attainment of goodness; it does not imply that evil, as evil, is ever good. evil is unreal, only in the sense that it cannot withstand the power which is set against it. it is not _mere_ semblance, a mere negation or absence of being; it is opposed to the good, and its opposition can be overcome, only by the moral effort which it calls forth. an optimistic faith of this kind can find room for morality; and, indeed, it furnishes it with the religious basis it needs. browning, however, has confused these two forms of optimism; and, therefore, he has been driven to condemn knowledge, because he knew no alternative but that of either making evil eternally real, or making it absolutely unreal. a third alternative, however, is supplied by the conception of moral evolution. knowledge of the conditions on which good can be attained--a knowledge that amounts to conviction--is the spring of all moral effort; whereas an attitude of permanent doubt as to the distinction between good and evil would paralyse it. such a doubt must be solved before man can act at all, or choose one end rather than another. all action implies belief, and the ardour and vigour of moral action can only come from a belief which is whole-hearted. the further assertion, which the poet makes in _la saisiaz_, and repeats elsewhere, that sure knowledge of the consequences that follow good and evil actions would necessarily lead to the choice of good and the avoidance of evil, and destroy morality by destroying liberty of choice, raises the whole question of the relation of knowledge and conduct, and cannot be adequately discussed here. it may be said, however, that it rests upon a confusion between two forms of necessity: namely, natural and spiritual necessity. in asserting that knowledge of the consequences of evil would determine human action in a necessary way, the poet virtually treats man as if he were a natural being. but the assumption that man is responsible and liable to punishment, involves that he is capable of withstanding all such determination. and knowledge does not and cannot lead to such necessary determination. reason brings freedom; for reason constitutes the ends of action. it is the constant desire of the good to attain to such a convincing knowledge of the worth and dignity of the moral law that they shall be able to make themselves its devoted instruments. their desire is that "the good" shall supplant in them all motives that conflict against it, and be the inner principle, or necessity, of all their actions. such complete devotion to the good is expressed, for instance, in the words of the hebrew psalmist: "thy testimonies have i taken as an heritage for ever; for they are the rejoicing of my heart. i have inclined mine heart to perform thy statutes alway, even unto the end. i hate vain thoughts, but thy law do i love." "nevertheless i live," said the christian apostle, "yet not i, but christ liveth in me; and the life which i now live in the flesh i live by the faith of the son of god." in these words there is expressed that highest form of the moral life, in which the individual is so identified in desire with his ideal, that he lives only to actualize it in his character. the natural self is represented as dead, and the victory of the new principle is viewed as complete. this full obedience to the ideal is the service of a necessity; but the necessity is within, and the service is, therefore, perfect freedom. the authority of the law is absolute, but the law is self-imposed. the whole man is convinced of its goodness. he has acquired something even fuller than a mere intellectual demonstration of it; for his knowledge has ripened into wisdom, possessed his sympathies, and become a disposition of his heart. and the fulness and certainty of his knowledge, so far from rendering morality impossible, is its very perfection. to bring about such a knowledge of the good of goodness and the evil of evil, as will engender love of the former and hatred of the latter, is the aim of all moral education. thus, the history of human life, in so far as it is progressive, may be concentrated in the saying that it is the ascent from the power of a necessity which is natural, to the power of a necessity which is moral. and this latter necessity can come only through fuller and more convincing knowledge of the law that rules the world, and is also the inner principle of man's nature. there remains now the third element in browning's view,--namely, that the faith in the good, implied in morality and religion, can be firmly established, after knowledge has turned out deceptive, upon the individual's consciousness of the power of love within himself. in other words, i must now try to estimate the value of browning's appeal from the intellect to the heart. before doing so, however, it may be well to repeat once more that browning's condemnation of knowledge, in his philosophical poems, is not partial or hesitating. on the contrary, he confines it definitely to the individual's consciousness of his own inner states. "myself i solely recognize. they, too, may recognize themselves, not me, for aught i know or care."[a] [footnote a: _a bean-stripe_. see also _la saisiaz_.] nor does browning endeavour to correct this limited testimony of the intellect as to its own states, by bringing in the miraculous aid of revelation, or by postulating an unerring moral faculty. he does not assume an intuitive power of knowing right from wrong; but he maintains that ignorance enwraps man's moral sense.[b] [footnote b: see chapter viii.] and, not only are we unable to know the rule of right and wrong in details, but we cannot know whether there _is_ right or wrong. at times the poet seems inclined to say that evil is a phenomenon conjured up by the frail intelligence of man. "man's fancy makes the fault! man, with the narrow mind, must cram inside his finite god's infinitude,--earth's vault he bids comprise the heavenly far and wide, since man may claim a right to understand what passes understanding."[a] [footnote a: _bernard de mandeville_.] god's ways are past finding out. nay, god himself is unknown. at times, indeed, the power to love within man seems to the poet to be a clue to the nature of the power without, and god is all but revealed in this surpassing emotion of the human heart. but, when philosophizing, he withdraws even this amount of knowledge. he is "assured that, whatsoe'er the quality of love's cause, save that love was caused thereby, this--nigh upon revealment as it seemed a minute since--defies thy longing looks, withdrawn into the unknowable once more."[b] [footnote b: _a pillar at sebzevar_.] thus--to sum up browning's view of knowledge--we are ignorant of the world; we do not know even whether it is good, or evil, or only their semblance, that is presented to us in human life; and we know nothing of god, except that he is the cause of love in man. what greater depth of agnosticism is possible? when the doctrine is put in this bald form, the moral and religious consciousness of man, on behalf of which the theory was invented, revolts against it. nevertheless, the distinction made by browning between the intellectual and emotional elements of human life is very common in religious thought. it is not often, indeed, that either the worth of love, or the weakness of knowledge receives such emphatic expression as that which is given to them by the poet; but the same general idea of their relation is often expressed, and still more often implied. browning differs from our ordinary teachers mainly in the boldness of his affirmatives and negatives. they, too, regard the intellect as merely human, and the emotion of love as divine. they, too, shrink from identifying the reason of man with the reason of god; even though they may recognize that morality and religion must postulate some kind of unity between god and man. they, too, conceive that human knowledge differs _in nature_ from that of god, while they maintain that human goodness is the same in nature with that of god, though different in degree and fulness. there are two _kinds_ of knowledge, but there is only one kind of justice, or mercy, or loving-kindness. man must be content with a semblance of a knowledge of truth; but a semblance of goodness, would be intolerable. god really reveals himself to man in morality and religion, and he communicates to man nothing less than "the divine love." but there is no such close connection on the side of reason. the religious life of man is a divine principle, the indwelling of god in him; but there is a final and fatal defect in man's knowledge. the divine love's manifestation of itself is ever incomplete, it is true, even in the best of men; but there is no defect in its nature. as a consequence of this doctrine, few religious opinions are more common at the present day, than that it is necessary to appeal, on all the high concerns of man's moral and religious life, from the intellect to the heart. where we cannot know, we may still feel; and the religious man may have, in his own feeling of the divine, a more intimate conviction of the reality of that in which he trusts, than could be produced by any intellectual process. "enough to say, 'i feel love's sure effect, and, being loved, must love the love its cause behind,--i can and do.'"[a] [footnote a: _a piller at sebzevar_.] reason, in trying to scale the heights of truth, falls-back, impotent and broken, into doubt and despair; not by that way can we come to that which is best and highest. "i found him not in world or sun, or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; nor thro' the questions men may try, the petty cobwebs we have spun."[b] [footnote b: _in memoriam_.] but there is another way to find god and to conquer doubt. "if e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, i heard a voice 'believe no more,' and heard an ever-breaking-shore that tumbled in the godless deep; "a warmth within the breast would melt the freezing reason's colder part, and like a man in wrath the heart stood up and answer'd 'i have felt.'"[a] [footnote a: _in memoriam_.] what, then, i have now to ask, is the meaning and value of this appeal to emotion? can love, or emotion in any of its forms, reveal truths to man which his intellect cannot discover? if so, how? if not, how shall we account for the general conviction of good men that it can? we have, in a word, either to justify the appeal to the heart, by explaining how the heart may utter truths that are hidden from reason; or else to account for the illusion, by which religious emotion seems to reveal such truths. the first requirement is shown to be unreasonable by the very terms in which it is made. the intuitive insight of faith, the immediate conviction of the heart, cannot render, and must not try to render, any account of itself. proof is a process; but there is no process in this direct conviction of truth. its assertion is just the denial of process; it is a repudiation of all connections; in such a faith of feeling there are no cob-web lines relating fact to fact, which doubt could break. feeling is the immediate unity of the subject and object. i am pained, because i cannot rid myself of an element which is already within me; i am lifted into the emotion of pleasure, or happiness, or bliss, by the consciousness that i am already at one with an object that fulfils my longings and satisfies my needs. hence, there seems to be ground for saying that, in this instance, the witness cannot lie; for it cannot go before the fact, as it is itself the effect of the fact. if the emotion is pleasurable it is the consciousness of the unity within; if it is painful, of the disunity. in feeling, i am absolutely with myself; and there seems, therefore, to be no need of attempting to justify, by means of reason, a faith in god which manifests itself in emotion. the emotion itself is its own sufficient witness, a direct result of the intimate union of man with the object of devotion. nay, we may go further, and say that the demand is an unjust one, which betrays ignorance of the true nature of moral intuition and religious feeling. i am not concerned to deny the truth that lies in the view here stated; and no advocate of the dignity of human reason, or of the worth of human knowledge, is called upon to deny it. there is a sense in which the conviction of "faith" or "feeling" is more intimate and strong than any process of proof. but this does not in any wise justify the contention of those who maintain that we can feel what we do not in any sense know, or that the heart can testify to that of which the intellect is absolutely silent. "so let us say--not 'since we know, we love,' but rather, 'since we love, we know enough.'"[a] [footnote a: _a pillar at sebzevar_.] in these two lines there are combined the truth i would acknowledge, and the error i would confute. love is, in one way, sufficient knowledge; or, rather, it is the direct testimony of that completest knowledge, in which subject and object interpenetrate. for, where love is, all foreign elements have been eliminated. there is not "one and one with a shadowy third"; but the object is brought within the self as constituting part of its very life. this is involved in all the great forms of human thought--in science and art, no less than in morality and religion. it is the truth that we love, and only that, which is altogether ours. by means of love the poet is "made one with nature. there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird "; and it is because he is made one with her that he is able to reveal her inmost secrets. "man," said fichte, "can will nothing but what he loves; his love is the sole and at the same time the infallible spring of his volition, and of all his life's striving and movement." it is only when we have identified ourselves with an ideal, and made its realization our own interest, that we strive to attain it. love is revelation in knowledge, inspiration in art, motive in morality, and the fulness of religious joy. but, although in this sense love is greater than knowledge, it is a grave error to separate it from knowledge. in the life of man at least, the separation of the emotional and intellectual elements extinguishes both. we cannot know that in which we have no interest. the very effort to comprehend an object rests on interest, or the feeling of ourselves in it; so that knowledge, as well as morality, may be said to begin in love. we cannot know except we love; but, on the other hand, we cannot love that which we do not in some degree know. wherever the frontiers of knowledge may be it is certain that there is nothing beyond them which can either arouse feeling, or be a steadying centre for it. emotion is like a climbing plant. it clings to the tree of knowledge, adding beauty to its strength. but, without knowledge, it is impossible for man. there is no feeling which is not also incipient knowledge; for feeling is only the subjective side of knowledge--that face of the known fact which is turned inwards. if, therefore, the poet's agnosticism were taken literally, and, in his philosophical poems he obviously means it to be taken literally, it would lead to a denial of the very principles of religion and morality, which it was meant to support. his appeal to love would then, strictly speaking, be an appeal to the love of nothing known, or knowable; and such love is impossible. for love, if it is to be distinguished from the organic, impulse of beast towards beast, must have an object. a mere instinctive activity of benevolence in man, by means of which he lightened the sorrows of his brethren, if not informed with knowledge, would have no more moral worth than the grateful warmth of the sun. such love as this there may be in the animal creation. if the bird is not rational, we may say that it builds its nest and lines it for its brood, pines for its partner and loves it, at the bidding of the returning spring, in much the same way as the meadows burst into flower. without knowledge, the whole process is merely a natural one; or, if it be more, it is so only in so far as the life of emotion can be regarded as a foretaste of the life of thought. but such a natural process is not possible to man. every activity in him is relative to his self-consciousness, and takes a new character from that relation. his love at the best and worst is the love of something that he knows, and in which he seeks to find himself made rich with new sufficiency. thus love can not "ally" itself with ignorance. it is, indeed, an impulse pressing for the closer communion of the lover with the object of his love. "like two meteors of expanding flame, those spheres instinct with it become the same, touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still burning, yet ever inconsumable; in one another's substance finding food."[a] [footnote a: shelley's _epipsychidion_.] but, for a being such as browning describes, who is shut up within the blind walls of his own self, the self-transcending impulse of love would be impossible. if man's inner consciousness is to be conceived as a dark room shutting out the world, upon whose shadowy phenomena the candle of introspection throws a dim and uncertain light, then he can have no interest outside of himself; nor can he ever take that first step in goodness, which carries him beyond his narrow individuality to seek and find a larger self in others. morality, even in its lowest form, implies knowledge, and knowledge of something better than "those _apparent_ other mortals." with the first dawn of the moral life comes the consciousness of an ideal, which is not actual; and such a break with the natural is not possible except to him who has known a better and desired it. the ethical endeavour of man is the attempt to convert ideas into actuality; and all his activity as moral agent takes place within the sphere that is illumined by the light of knowledge. if knowledge breaks down, there is no law of action which he can obey. the moral law that must be apprehended, and whose authority must be recognized by man, either sinks out of being or becomes an illusive phantom, if man is doomed to ignorance or false knowledge. to extinguish truth is to extinguish goodness. in like manner, religion, which the poet would fain defend for man by means of agnosticism, becomes impossible, if knowledge be denied. religion is not blind emotion; nor can mere feeling, however ecstatic, ascend to god. animals feel, but they are not, and cannot be, religious--unless they can know. the love of god implies knowledge. "i know him whom i have believed" is the language of religion. for what is religion but a conscious identification of the self with one who is known to fulfil its needs and satisfy its aspirations? agnosticism is thus directly destructive of it. we cannot, indeed, prove god as the conclusion of a syllogism, for he is the primary hypothesis of all proof. but, nevertheless, we cannot reach him without knowledge. emotion reveals no object, but is consequent upon the revelation of it; feeling yields no truth, but is the witness of the worth of a truth for the individual. if man were shut up to mere feeling, even the awe of the devout agnostic would be impossible. for the unknowable cannot generate any emotion. it appears to do so, only because the unknowable of the agnostic is not altogether unknown to him; but is a vast, abysmal "something," that has occupied with its shadowy presence the field of his imagination. it is paganism stricken with the plague, and philosophy afflicted with blindness, that build altars to an unknown god. the highest and the strongest faith, the deepest trust and the most loving, come with the fullest knowledge. indeed, the distinction between the awe of the agnostic, which is the lowest form of religion, and that highest form in which perfect love casteth out fear, springs from the fuller knowledge of the nature of the object of warship, which the latter implies. thus, religion and morality grow with the growth of knowledge; and neither has a worse enemy than ignorance. the human spirit cannot grow in a one-sided manner. devotion to great moral ends is possible, only through the deepening and widening of man's knowledge of the nature of the world. those who know god best, render unto him the purest service. so evident is this, that it seems at first sight to be difficult to account for that antagonism to the intellect and distrust of its deliverances, which are so emphatically expressed in the writings of browning, and which are marked characteristics of the ordinary religious opinion of our day. on closer examination, however, we shall discover that it is not pure emotion, or mere feeling, whose authority is set above that of reason, but rather the emotion which is the result of knowledge. the appeal of the religious man from the doubts and difficulties, which reason levels against "the faith," is really an appeal to the character that lies behind the emotion. the conviction of the heart, that refuses to yield to the arguments of the understanding, is not _mere_ feeling; but, rather, the complex experience of the past life, that manifests itself in feeling. when an individual, clinging to his moral or religious faith, says, "i have felt it," he opposes to the doubt, not his feeling as such, but his personality in all the wealth of its experience. the appeal to the heart is the appeal to the unproved, but not, therefore, unauthorized, testimony of the best men at their best moments, when their vision of truth is clearest. no one pretends that "the loud and empty voice of untrained passion and prejudice" has any authority in matters of moral and religious faith; though, in such cases, "feeling" may lack neither depth nor intensity. if the "feelings" of the good man were dissociated from his character, and stripped bare of all the significance they obtain therefrom, their worthlessness would become apparent. the profound error of condemning knowledge in order to honour feeling, is hidden only by the fact that the feeling is already informed and inspired with knowledge. religious agnosticism, like all other forms of the theory of nescience, derives its plausibility from the adventitious help it purloins from the knowledge which it condemns. that it is to such feeling that browning really appeals against knowledge becomes abundantly evident, when we bear in mind that he always calls it "love." for love in man is never ignorant. it knows its object, and is a conscious identification of the self with it. and to browning, the object of love, when love is at its best--of that love by means of which he refutes intellectual pessimism--is mankind. the revolt of the heart against all evil is a desire for the good of all men. in other words, his refuge against the assailing doubts which spring from the intellect, is in the moral consciousness. but that consciousness is no mere emotion; it is a consciousness which knows the highest good, and moves in sympathy with it. it is our maturest wisdom; for it is the manifestation of the presence and activity of the ideal, the fullest knowledge and the surest. compared with this, the emotion linked to ignorance, of which the poet speaks in his philosophic theory, is a very poor thing. it is poorer than the lowest human love. now, if this higher interpretation of the term "heart" be accepted, it is easily seen why its authority should seem higher than that of reason; and particularly, if it be remembered that, while the heart is thus widened to take in all direct consciousness of the ideal, "the reason" is reduced to the power of reflection, or mental analysis. "the heart," in this sense, is the intensest unity of the complex experiences of a whole life, while "the reason" is taken merely as a faculty which invents arguments, and provides grounds and evidences; it is what is called, in the language of german philosophy, the "understanding." now, in this sense, the understanding has, at best, only a borrowed authority. it is the faculty of rules rather than of principles. it is ever dogmatic, assertive, repellent, hard; and it always advances its forces in single line. its logic never convinced any one of truth or error, unless, beneath the arguments which it advanced, there lay some deeper principle of concord. thus, the opposition between "faith and reason," rightly interpreted, is that between a concrete experience, instinct with life and conviction, and a mechanical arrangement of abstract arguments. the quarrel of the heart is not with reason, but with reasons. "evidences of christianity?" said coleridge; "i am weary of the word." it is this weariness of evidence, of the endless arguments _pro_ and _con_, which has caused so many to distrust reason and knowledge, and which has sometimes driven believers to the dangerous expedient of making their faith dogmatic and absolute. nor have the opponents of "the faith" been slow to seize the opportunity thus offered them. "from the moment that a religion solicits the aid of philosophy, its ruin is inevitable," said heine. "in the attempt at defence, it prates itself into destruction. religion, like every absolutism, must not seek to justify itself. prometheus is bound to the rock by a silent force. yea, aeschylus permits not personified power to utter a single word. it must remain mute. the moment that a religion ventures to print a catechism supported by arguments, the moment that a political absolutism publishes an official newspaper, both are near their end. but therein consists our triumph: we have brought our adversaries to speech, and they must reckon with us."[a] but, we may answer, religion is _not_ an absolutism; and, therefore, it is _not_ near its end when it ventures to justify itself. on the contrary, no spiritual power, be it moral or religious, can maintain its authority, if it assumes a despotic attitude; for the human spirit inevitably moves towards freedom, and that movement is the deepest necessity of its nature, which it cannot escape. "religion, on the ground of its sanctity, and law, on the ground of its majesty, often resist the sifting of their claims. but in so doing, they inevitably awake a not unjust suspicion that their claims are ill-founded. they can command the unfeigned homage of man, only when they have shown themselves able to stand the test of free inquiry." [footnote a: _religion and philosophy in germany_.] and if it is an error to suppose, with browning, that the primary truths of the moral and religious consciousness belong to a region which is higher than knowledge, and can, from that side, be neither assailed nor defended; it is also an error to suppose that reason is essentially antagonistic to them. the facts of morality and religion are precisely the richest facts of knowledge; and that faith is the most secure which is most completely illumined by reason. religion at its best is not a dogmatic despotism, nor is reason a merely critical and destructive faculty. if reason is loyal to the truth of religion on which it is exercised, it will reach beneath all the conflict and clamour of disputation, to the principle of unity, on which, as we have seen, both reason and religion rest. the "faith" to which religious spirits appeal against all the attacks of doubt, "the love" of browning, is really implicit reason; it is "abbreviated" or concentrated knowledge; it is the manifold experiences of life focussed into an intense unity. and, on the other hand, the "reason" which they condemn is what carlyle calls the logic-chopping faculty. in taking the side of faith when troubled with difficulties which they cannot lay, they are really defending the cause of reason against that of the understanding. for it is quite true that the understanding, that is, the reason as reflective or critical, can never bring about either a moral or religious life. it cannot create a religion, any more than physiology can produce men. the reflection which brings doubt is always secondary; it can only exercise itself on a given material. as hegel frequently pointed out, it is not the function of moral philosophy to create or to institute a morality or religion, but to understand them. the facts must first be given; they must be actual experiences of the human spirit. moral philosophy and theology differ from the moral or religious life, in the same way as geology differs from the earth, or astronomy from the heavenly bodies. the latter are facts; the former are theories about the facts. religion is an attitude of the human spirit towards the highest; morality is the realization of character; and these are not to be confused with their reflective interpretations. much of the difficulty in these matters comes from the lack of a clear distinction between _beliefs_ and _creeds_. further, not only are the utterances of the heart prior to the deliverances of the intellect in this sense, but it may also be admitted that the latter can never do full justice to the contents of the former. so rich is character in content and so complex is spiritual life, that we can never, by means of reflection, lift into clear consciousness all the elements that enter into it. into the organism of our experience, which is our faith, there is continually absorbed the subtle influences of our complex natural and social environment. we grow by means of them, as the plant grows by feeding on the soil and the sunshine and dew. it is as impossible for us to set forth, one by one, the truths and errors which we have thus worked into our mental and moral life, as it is to keep a reckoning of the physical atoms with which the natural life builds up the body. hence, every attempt to justify these truths seems inadequate; and the defence which the understanding sets up for the faith, always seems partial and cold. who ever fully expressed his deepest convictions? the consciousness of the dignity of the moral law affected kant like the view of the starry firmament, and generated a feeling of the sublime which words could not express; and the religious ecstasy of the saints cannot be confined within the channels of speech, but floods the soul with overmastering power, possessing all its faculties. in this respect, it will always remain true that the greatest facts of human experience reach beyond all knowledge. nay, we may add further, that in this respect the simplest of these facts passes all understanding. still, as we have already seen, it is reason that constitutes them; that which is presented to reason for explanation, in knowledge and morality and religion, is itself the product of reason. reason is the power which, by interaction with our environment, has generated the whole of our experience. and, just as natural science interprets the phenomena given to it by ordinary opinion, _i.e._, interprets and purifies a lower form of knowledge by converting it into a higher; so the task of reason when it is exercised upon morality and religion, is simply to evolve, and amplify the meaning of its own products. the movement from morality and religion to moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, is thus a movement from reason to reason, from the implicit to the explicit, from the germ to the developed fulness of life and structure. in this matter, as in all others wherein the human spirit is concerned, that which is first by nature is last in genesis--[greek: nika d' ho prôtos kai teleutaios dramôn.] the whole history of the moral and religious experience of mankind is comprised in the statement, that the implicit reason which we call "faith" is ever developing towards full consciousness of itself; and that, at its first beginning, and throughout the whole ascending process of this development, the highest is present in it as a self-manifesting power. but this process from the almost instinctive intuitions of the heart towards the morality and religion of freedom, being a process of evolution, necessarily involves conflict. there are men, it is true, the unity of whose moral and religious faith is never completely broken by doubt; just as there are men who are not forced by the contradictions in the first interpretation of the world by ordinary experience to attempt to re-interpret it by means of science and philosophy. throughout their lives they may say like pompilia-- "i know the right place by foot's feel, i took it and tread firm there; wherefore change?"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] jean paul richter said that he knew another way of being happy, beside that of soaring away so far above the clouds of life, that its miseries looked small, and the whole external world shrunk into a little child's garden. it was, "simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and rain-screen." there is a similar way of being good, with a goodness which, though limited, is pure and perfect in nature. nay, we may even admit that such lives are frequently the most complete and beautiful, just as the fairest flowers grow, not on the tallest trees, but on the fragile plants at their foot. nevertheless, even in the case of those persons who have never broken from the traditional faith of the past, or felt it to be inadequate, that faith has been silently reconstructed in a new synthesis of knowledge. spiritual life cannot come by inheritance; but every individual must acquire a faith for himself, and turn his spiritual environment into personal experience. "a man may be a heretic in the truth," said milton, "and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." it is truth to another but tradition to him; it is a creed and not a conviction. browning fully recognizes the need of this conflict-- "is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible?"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] asks the pope. the stream of truth when it ceases to flow onward, becomes a malarious swamp. movement is the law of life; and knowledge of the principles of morality and religion, as of all other principles, must, in order to grow, be felt from time to time as inadequate and untrue. there are men and ages whose mission is-- "to shake this torpor of assurance from our creed, re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring that formidable danger back, we drove long ago to the distance and the dark."[b] [footnote b: _ibid._, - .] such a spirit of criticism seems to many to exercise a merely destructive power, and those who have not felt the inadequacy of the inherited faith defend themselves against it, as the enemy of their lives. but no logic, or assailing doubt, could have power against the testimony of "the heart," unless it was rooted in deeper and truer principles than those which it attacked. nothing can overpower truth except a larger truth; and, in such a conflict, the truth in the old view will ultimately take the side of the new, and find its subordinate position within it. it has happened, not infrequently, as in the case of the encyclopædists, that the explicit truths of reason were more abstract, that is, less true, than the implicit "faith" which they assailed. the central truths of religion have often proved themselves to possess some stubborn, though semi-articulate power, which could ultimately overcome or subordinate the more partial and explicit truths of abstract science. it is this that gives plausibility to the idea, that the testimony of the heart is more reliable than that of the intellect. but, in this case also, it was really reason that triumphed. it was the truth which proved itself to be immortal, and not any mere emotion. the insurrection of the intellect against the heart is quelled, only when the untruth, or abstract character, of the principle of the assailants has been made manifest, and when the old faith has yielded up its unjust gains, and proved its vitality and strength by absorbing the truth that gave vigour to the attack. just as in morality it is the ideal, or the unity of the whole moral life, that breaks up into differences, so also here it is the implicit faith which, as it grows, breaks forth into doubts. in both cases alike, the negative movement which induces despair, is only a phase of a positive process--the process of reason towards a fuller, a more articulate and complex, realization of itself. hence it follows that the value and strength of a faith corresponds accurately to the doubts it has overcome. those who never went forth to battle cannot come home heroes. it is only when the earthquake has tried the towers, and destroyed the sense of security, that "man stands out again, pale, resolute, prepared to die,--that is, alive at last. as we broke up that old faith of the world, have we, next age, to break up this the new-- faith, in the thing, grown faith in the report-- whence need to bravely disbelieve report through increased faith i' the thing reports belie?"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] "well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrive by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion." it was, thus, i conclude, a deep speculative error into which browning fell, when, in order to substantiate his optimistic faith, he stigmatized human knowledge as merely apparent. knowledge does not fail, except in the sense in which morality also fails; it does not at any time attain to the ultimate truth, any more than the moral life is in any of its activities[b] a complete embodiment of the absolute good. it is not given to man, who is essentially progressive, to reach the ultimate term of development. for there is no ultimate term: life never stands still. but, for the same reason, there is no ultimate failure. the whole history of man is a history of growth. if, however, knowledge did fail, then morality too must fail; and the appeal which the poet makes from the intellect to the heart, would be an appeal to mere emotion. finally, even if we take a generous view of the poet's meaning, and put out of consideration the theory he expresses when he is deliberately philosophizing, there is still no appeal from the reason to an alien and higher authority. the appeal to "the heart" is, at best, only an appeal from the understanding to the reason, from a conscious logic to the more concrete fact constituted by reason, which reflection has failed to comprehend in its completeness; at its worst, it is an appeal from truth to prejudice, from belief to dogma. [footnote b: see chapter ix., p. .] and in both cases alike, the appeal is futile; for, whether "the heart be wiser than the head," or not, whether the faith which is assailed be richer or poorer, truer or more false, than the logic which is directed against it, an appeal to the heart cannot any longer restore the unity of the broken life. once reflection has set in, there is no way of turning away its destructive might, except by deeper reflection. the implicit faith of the heart must become the explicit faith of reason. "there is no final and satisfactory issue from such an endless internal debate and conflict, until the 'heart' has learnt to speak the language of the head--_i.e._, until the permanent principles, which underlay and gave strength to faith, have been brought into the light of distinct consciousness."[a] [footnote a: caird's _comte_.] i conclude, therefore, that the poet was right in saying that, in order to comprehend human character, "i needs must blend the quality of man with quality of god, and so assist mere human sight to understand my life."[a] [footnote a: _a bean-stripe_--_ferishtah's fancies_.] but it was a profound error, which contained in it the destruction of morality and religion, as well as of knowledge, to make "the quality of god" a love that excludes reason, and the quality of man an intellect incapable of knowing truth. such in-congruous elements could never be combined into the unity of a character. a love that was mere emotion could not yield a motive for morality, or a principle of religion. a philosophy of life which is based on agnosticism is an explicit self-contradiction, which can help no one. we must appeal from browning the philosopher to browning the poet. chapter xi. conclusion. "well, i can fancy how he did it all, pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, above and through his art--for it gives way; that arm is wrongly put--and there again-- a fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, its body, so to speak: its soul is right, he means right--that, a child may understand."[a] [footnote a: _andrea del sarto_.] i have tried to show that browning's theory of life, in so far as it is expressed in his philosophical poems, rests on agnosticism; and that such a theory is inconsistent with the moral and religious interests of man. the idea that truth is unattainable was represented by browning as a bulwark of the faith, but it proved on examination to be treacherous. his optimism was found to have no better foundation than personal conviction, which any one was free to deny, and which the poet could in no wise prove. the evidence of the heart, to which he appealed, was the evidence of an emotion severed from intelligence, and, therefore, without any content whatsoever. "the faith," which he professed, was not the faith that anticipates and invites proof, but a faith which is incapable of proof. in casting doubt upon the validity of knowledge, he degraded the whole spiritual nature of man; for a love that is ignorant of its object is a blind impulse, and a moral consciousness that does not know the law is an impossible phantom--a self-contradiction. but, although browning's explicitly philosophical theory of life fails, there appears in his earlier poems, where his poetical freedom was not yet trammelled, nor his moral enthusiasm restrained by the stubborn difficulties of reflective thought, a far truer and richer view. in this period of pure poetry, his conception of man was less abstract than in his later works, and his inspiration was more direct and full. the poet's dialectical ingenuity increased with the growth of his reflective tendencies; but his relation to the great principles of spiritual life seemed to become less intimate, and his expression of them more halting. what we find in his earlier works are vigorous ethical convictions, a glowing optimistic faith, achieving their fitting expression in impassioned poetry; what we find in his later works are arguments, which, however richly adorned with poetic metaphors, have lost the completeness and energy of life. his poetic fancies are like chaplets which crown the dead. lovers of the poet, who seek in his poems for inspiring expressions of their hope and faith, will always do well in turning from his militant metaphysics to his art. in his case, as in that of many others, spiritual experience was far richer than the theory which professed to explain it. the task of lifting his moral convictions into the clear light of conscious philosophy was beyond his power. the theory of the failure of knowledge, which he seems to have adopted far too easily from the current doctrine of the schools, was fundamentally inconsistent with his generous belief in the moral progress of man; and it maimed the expression of that belief. the result of his work as a philosopher is a confession of complete ignorance and the helpless asseveration of a purely dogmatic faith. the fundamental error of the poet's philosophy lies, i believe, in that severance of feeling and intelligence, love and reason, which finds expression in _la saisiaz_, _ferishtah's fancies_, _the parleyings_, and _asolando_. such an absolute division is not to be found in _christmas-eve and easter-day_, _rabbi ben ezra_, _a death in the desert_, or in _the ring and the book_; nor even in _fifine at the fair_. in these works we are not perplexed by the strange combination of a nature whose principle is love, and which is capable of infinite progress, with an intelligence whose best efforts end in ignorance. rather, the spirit of man is regarded as one, in all its manifestations; and, therefore, as progressive on all sides of its activity. the widening of his knowledge, which is brought about by increasing experience, is parallel with the deepening and purifying of his moral life. in all browning's works, indeed, with the possible exception of _paracelsus_, love is conceived as having a place and function of supreme importance in the development of the soul. its divine origin and destiny are never obscured; but knowledge is regarded as merely human, and, therefore, as falling short of the truth. in _easter-day_ it is definitely contrasted with love, and shown to be incapable of satisfying the deepest wants of man. it is, at the best, only a means to the higher purposes of moral activity, and, except in the _grammarian's funeral_, it is nowhere regarded as in itself a worthy end. "'tis one thing to know, and another to practise. and thence i conclude that the real god-function is to furnish a motive and injunction for practising what we know already."[a] [footnote a: _christmas-eve and easter-day_.] even here, there is implied that the motive comes otherwise than by knowledge; still, taking these earlier poems as a whole, we may say that in them knowledge is regarded as means to morality and not as in any sense contrasted with or destructive of it. man's motives are rational motives; the ends he seeks are ends conceived and even constituted by his intelligence, and not purposes blindly followed as by instinct and impulse. "why live, except for love--how love, unless they know?"[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] asks the pope. moral progress is not secured apart from, or in spite of knowledge. we are not exhorted to reject the verdict of the latter as illusive, in order to confide in a faith which not only fails to receive support from the defective intelligence, but maintains its own integrity only by repudiating the testimony of the reason. in the distinction between knowledge as means and love as end, it is easy, indeed, to detect a tendency to degrade the former into a mere temporary expedient, whereby moral ends may be served. the poet speaks of "such knowledge as is possible to man." the attitude he assumes towards it is apologetic, and betrays a keen consciousness of its limitation, and particularly of its utter inadequacy to represent the infinite. in the speech of the pope---which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as the poet's own maturest utterance on the great moral and religious questions raised by the tragedy of pompilia's death--we find this view vividly expressed:-- "o thou--as represented here to me in such conception as my soul allows,-- under thy measureless, my atom width!-- man's mind, what is it but a convex glass wherein are gathered all the scattered points picked out of the immensity of sky, to reunite there, be our heaven for earth, our known unknown, our god revealed to man?"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] god is "appreciable in his absolute immensity solely by himself," while, "by the little mind of man, he is reduced to littleness that suits man's faculty." in these words, and others that might be quoted, the poet shows that he is profoundly impressed with the distinction between human knowledge, and that knowledge which is adequate to the whole nature and extent of being. and in _christmas-eve_ he repudiates with a touch of scorn, the absolute idealism, which is supposed to identify altogether human reason with divine reason; and he commends the german critic for not making "the important stumble of adding, he, the sage and humble, was also one with the creator."[a] [footnote a: _christmas-eve_.] nowhere in browning, unless we except _paracelsus_, is there any sign of an inclination to treat man's knowledge in the same spirit as he deals with man's love--namely, as a direct emanation from the inmost nature of god, a divine element that completes and crowns man's life on earth. on the contrary, he shows a persistent tendency to treat love as a power higher in nature than reason, and to give to it a supreme place in the formation of character; and, as he grows older, that tendency grows in strength. the philosophical poems, in which love is made all in all, and knowledge is reduced to nescience follow by logical evolution from principles, the influence of which we can detect even in his earlier works. still, in the latter, these principles are only latent, and are far from holding undisputed sway. browning was, at first, restrained from exclusive devotion to abstract views, by the suggestions which the artistic spirit receives through its immediate contact with the facts of life. that contact it is very difficult for philosophy to maintain as it pursues its effort after universal truth. philosophy is obliged to analyze in order to define, and, in that process, it is apt to lose something of that completeness of representation, which belongs to art. for art is always engaged in presenting the universal in the form of a particular object of beauty. its product is a "known unknown," but the unknown is the unexhausted reality of a fact of intuition. nor can analysis ever exhaust it; theory can never catch up art, or explain all that is in it. on similar grounds, it may be shown that it is impossible for reason to lay bare all the elements that enter into its first complex product, which we call faith. in religion, as in art, man is aware of more than he knows; his articulate logic cannot do justice to all the truths of the "heart." "the supplementary reflux of light" of philosophy cannot "illustrate all the inferior grades" of knowledge. man will never completely understand himself. "i knew, i felt, (perception unexpressed, uncomprehended by our narrow thought, but somehow felt and known in every shift and change in the spirit,--nay, in every pore of the body, even,)--what god is, what we are, what life is--how god tastes an infinite joy in infinite ways--one everlasting bliss, from whom all being emanates, all power proceeds."[a] [footnote a: _paracelsus_.] i believe that it is possible, by the help of the intuitions of browning's highest artistic period, to bring together again the elements of his broken faith, and to find in them suggestions of a truer philosophy of life than anything which the poet himself achieved. perhaps, indeed, it is not easy, nor altogether fair, to press the passionate utterances of his religious rapture into the service of metaphysics, and to treat the unmeasured language of emotion as the expression of a definite doctrine. nevertheless, rather than set forth a new defence of the faith, which his agnosticism left exposed to the assaults of doubt and denial, it is better to make browning correct his own errors, and to appeal from the metaphysician to the poet, from the sobriety of the logical understanding to the inspiration of poetry. i have already indicated what seems to me to be the defective element in the poet's philosophy of life. his theory of knowledge is in need of revision; and what he asserts of human love, should be applied point by point to human reason. as man is ideally united with the absolute on the side of moral emotion (if the phrase may be pardoned), so he is ideally united with the absolute on the side of the intellect. as there is no difference of _nature_ between god's goodness and man's goodness, so there is no difference of nature between god's truth and man's truth. there are not two kinds of righteousness or mercy; there are not two kinds of truth. human nature is not "cut in two with a hatchet," as the poet implies that it is. there is in man a lower and a higher element, ever at war with each other; still he is not a mixture, or agglomerate, of the finite and the infinite. a love perfect in nature cannot be linked to an intelligence imperfect in nature; if it were, the love would be either a blind impulse or an erring one. both morality and religion demand the presence in man of a perfect ideal, which is at war with his imperfections; but an ideal is possible, only to a being endowed with a capacity for knowing the truth. in degrading human knowledge, the poet is disloyal to the fundamental principle of the christian faith which he professed--that god can and does manifest himself in man. on the other hand, we are not to take the unity of man with god, of man's moral ideal with the all-perfect, as implying, on the moral side, an absolute identification of the finite with the infinite; nor can we do so on the side of knowledge. man's moral life and rational activity in knowledge are the process of the highest. but man is neither first, nor last; he is not the original author of his love, any more than of his reason; he is not the divine principle of the whole to which he belongs, although he is potentially in harmony with it. both sides of his being are equally touched with imperfection--his love, no less than his reason. perfect love would imply perfect wisdom, as perfect wisdom, perfect love. but absolute terms are not applicable to man, who is ever _on the way_ to goodness and truth, progressively manifesting the power of the ideal that dwells in him, and whose very life is conflict and acquirement. "ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? all is silver-grey placid and perfect with my art: the worse."[a] [footnote a: _andrea del sarto_.] hardly any conception is more prominent in browning's writings than this, of endless progress towards an infinite ideal; although he occasionally manifests a desire to have done with effort. "when a soul has seen by the means of evil that good is best, and, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene,-- when our faith in the same has stood the test-- why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, the uses of labour are surely done, there remaineth a rest for the people of god, and i have had troubles enough, for one."[b] [footnote b: _old pictures in florence_.] it is the sense of endless onward movement, the outlook towards an immortal course, "the life after life in unlimited series," which is so inspiring in his early poetry. he conceives that we are here, on this lower earth, just to learn one form, the elementary lesson and alphabet of goodness, namely, "the uses of the flesh": in other lives, other achievements. the separation of the soul from its instrument has very little significance to the poet; for it does not arrest the course of moral development. "no work begun shall ever pause for death." the spirit pursues its lone way, on other "adventures brave and new," but ever towards a good which is complete. "delayed it may be for more lives yet, through worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn, much to forget ere the time be come for taking you."[a] [footnote a: _evelyn hope_.] still the time will come when the awakened need shall be satisfied; for the need was created in order to be satisfied. "wherefore did i contrive for thee that ear hungry for music, and direct thine eye to where i hold a seven-stringed instrument, unless i meant thee to beseech me play?"[b] [footnote b: _two camels_.] the movement onward is thus a movement in knowledge, as well as in every other form of good. the lover of evelyn hope, looking back in imagination on the course he has travelled on earth and after, exclaims-- "i have lived (i shall say) so much since then, given up myself so many times, gained me the gains of various men, ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes."[c] [footnote c: _evelyn hope_.] in these earlier poems, there is not, as in the later ones, a maimed, or one-sided, evolution--a progress towards perfect love on the side of the heart, and towards an illusive ideal on the side of the intellect. knowledge, too, has its value, and he who lived to settle "_hoti's_ business, properly based _oun_," and who "gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _de_," was, to the poet, "still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying. "here's the top-peak; the multitude below live, for they can, there: this man decided not to live but know-- bury this man there? here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go."[a] [footnote a: _a grammarian's funeral_.] no human effort goes to waste, no gift is delusive; but every gift and every effort has its proper place as a stage in the endless process. the soul bears in it _all_ its conquests. "there shall never be one lost good! what was, shall live as before; the evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; what was good, shall be good, with, for evil, _so_ much good more; on the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round."[b] [footnote b: _abt vogler_.] the "apparent failure" of knowledge, like every apparent failure, is "a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days." the doubts that knowledge brings, instead of implying a defective intelligence doomed to spend itself on phantom phenomena, sting to progress towards the truth. he bids us "learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe." "rather i prize the doubt low kinds exist without, finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark."[a] [footnote a: _rabbi ben ezra_.] similarly, defects in art, like defects in character, contain the promise of further achievement. "are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? in both, of such lower types are we precisely because of our wider nature; for time, their's--ours, for eternity. "to-day's brief passion limits their range; it seethes with the morrow for us and more. they are perfect--how else? they shall never change: we are faulty--why not? we have time in store."[b] [footnote b: _old pictures in florence_.] prior to the period when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a thing as _mere_ knowledge). "everywhere i see in the world the intellect of man, that sword, the energy his subtle spear, the knowledge which defends him like a shield-- everywhere; but they make not up, i think, the marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flower she holds up to the softened gaze of god."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] but yet she recognized with patient pain the loss she had sustained for want of knowledge. "the saints must bear with me, impute the fault to a soul i' the bud, so starved by ignorance, stinted of warmth, it will not blow this year nor recognize the orb which spring-flowers know."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book_--_pompilia_, - .] further on in the pope's soliloquy, the poet shows that, at that time, he fully recognized the risk of entrusting the spiritual interests of man to the enthusiasm of elevated feeling, or to the mere intuitions of a noble heart. such intuitions will sometimes guide a man happily, as in the case of caponsacchi: "since ourselves allow he has danced, in gaiety of heart, i' the main the right step through the maze we bade him foot."[c] [footnote c: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] but, on the other hand, such impulses, not instructed by knowledge of the truth, and made steadfast to the laws of the higher life by a reasoned conviction, lead man rightly only by accident. in such a career there is no guarantee of constancy; other impulses might lead to other ways of life. "but if his heart had prompted to break loose and mar the measure? why, we must submit, and thank the chance that brought him safe so far. will he repeat the prodigy? perhaps. can he teach others how to quit themselves, show why this step was right while that were wrong? how should he? 'ask your hearts as i asked mine, and get discreetly through the morrice too; if your hearts misdirect you,--quit the stage, and make amends,--be there amends to make.'"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] if the heart proved to caponsacchi a guide to all that is good and glorious, "the abate, second in the suite," puts in the testimony of another experience: "his heart answered to another tune." "i have my taste too, and tread no such step! you choose the glorious life, and may for me! i like the lowest of life's appetites,-- so you judge--but the very truth of joy to my own apprehension which decides."[b] [footnote b: _ibid._, - .] mere emotion is thus an insecure guide to conduct, for its authority can be equally cited in support of every course of life. no one can say to his neighbour, "thou art wrong." every impulse is right to the individual who has it, and so long as he has it. _de gustibus non disputandum_. without a universal criterion there is no praise or blame. "call me knave and you get yourself called fool! i live for greed, ambition, lust, revenge; attain these ends by force, guile: hypocrite, to-day, perchance to-morrow recognized the rational man, the type of common-sense."[c] [footnote c: _ibid._, - .] this poem which, both in its moral wisdom and artistic worth, marks the high tide of browning's poetic insight, while he is not as yet concerned with the defence of any theory or the discussion of any abstract question, contrasts strongly with the later poems, where knowledge is dissembling ignorance, faith is blind trust, and love is a mere impulse of the heart. having failed to meet the difficulties of reflection, the poet turned upon the intellect. knowledge becomes to him an offence, and to save his faith he plucked out his right eye and entered into the kingdom maimed. in _rabbi ben ezra_ the ascent into another life is triumphant, like that of a conqueror bearing with him the spoils of earth; but in the later poems he escapes with a bare belief, and the loss of all his rich possessions of knowledge, like a shipwrecked mariner whose goods have been thrown overboard. his philosophy was a treacherous ally to his faith. but there is another consideration which shows that the poet, as artist, recognized the need of giving to reason a larger function than seems to be possible according to the theory in his later works. in the early poems there is no hint of the doctrine that demonstrative knowledge of the good, and of the necessity of its law, would destroy freedom. on the contrary, there are suggestions which point to the opposite doctrine, according to which knowledge is the condition of freedom. while in his later poems the poet speaks of love as an impulse--either blind or bound to erring knowledge--and of the heart as made to love, in his earlier ones he seems to treat man as free to work out his own purposes, and act out his own ideals. browning here finds himself able to maintain the dependence of man upon god without destroying morality. he regards man's impulses not as blind instincts, but as falling _within_ his rational nature, and constituting the forms of its activity. he recognizes the distinction between a mere impulse, in the sense of a tendency to act, which is directed by a foreign power, and an impulse informed, that is, directed by reason. according to this view, it is reason which at once gives man the independence of foreign authority, which is implied in morality, and constitutes that affinity between man and god, which is implied by religion. no doubt, the impulse to know, like the impulse to love, was put into man: his whole nature is a gift, and he is therefore, in this sense, completely dependent upon god--"god's all, man's nought." but, on the other hand, it _is_ a rational nature which has been put into him, and not an irrational impulse. or, rather, the impulse that constitutes his life as man, is the self-evolving activity of reason. "who speaks of man, then, must not sever man's very elements from man."[a] [footnote a: _christmas-eve_.] however the rational nature of man has come to be, whether by emanation or creation, it necessarily brings freedom with it, and all its risks and possibilities. it is of the very essence of reason that it should find its law within itself. "god's all, man's nought: but also, god, whose pleasure brought man into being, stands away as it were a hand-breadth off, to give room for the newly-made to live, and look at him from a place apart, and use his gifts of brain and heart, given, indeed, but to keep for ever."[a] [footnote a: _christmas-eve_.] thus, while insisting on the absolute priority of god, and the original receptivity of man; while recognizing that love, reason, and every inner power and outer opportunity are lent to man, browning does not forget what these powers are. man can only act as man; he must obey his nature, as the stock or stone or plant obeys its nature. but to act as man is to act freely, and man's nature is not that of a stock or stone. he is rational, and cannot but be rational. hence he can neither be ruled, as dead matter is ruled, by natural law; nor live, like a bird, the life of innocent impulse or instinct. he is placed, from the very first, on "the table land whence life upsprings aspiring to be immortality." he is a spirit,--responsible because he is free, and free because he is rational. "man, therefore, stands on his own stock of love and power as a pin-point rock, and, looks to god who ordained divorce of the rock from his boundless continent."[b] [footnote b: _ibid._] the divorce is real, although ordained, but it is possible only in so far as man, by means of reason, constitutes his own ends of action. impulse cannot bring it about. it is reason that enables man to free himself from the despotic authority of outer law, to relate himself to an inner law, and by reconciling inner and outer to attain to goodness. thus reason is the source of all morality. and it also is the principle of religion, for it implies the highest and fullest manifestation of the absolute. although the first aspect of self-consciousness is its independence, which is, in turn, the first condition of morality, still this is only the first aspect. the rational being plants himself on his own individuality, stands aloof and alone in the rights of his freedom, _in order that_ he may set out from thence to take possession, by means of knowledge and action, of the world in which he is placed. reason is potentially absolute, capable of finding itself everywhere. so that in it man is "honour-clothed and glory-crowned." "this is the honour,--that no thing i know, feel or conceive, but i can make my own somehow, by use of hand, or head, or heart."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau._] man, by his knowledge, overcomes the resistance and hostility of the world without him, or rather, discovers that there is not hostility, but affinity between it and himself. "this is the glory,--that in all conceived, or felt or known, i recognize a mind not mine but like mine,--for the double joy,-- making all things for me and me for him."[a] [footnote a: _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_.] that which is finite is hemmed in by other things, as well as determined by them; but the infinite is all-inclusive. there exists for it no other thing to limit or determine it. there is nothing finally alien or foreign to reason. freedom and infinitude, self-determination and absoluteness, imply each other. in so far as man is free, he is lifted above the finite. it was god's plan to make man on his own image:-- "to create man and then leave him able, his own word saith, to grieve him, but able to glorify him too, as a mere machine could never do, that prayed or praised, all unaware of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, made perfect as a thing of course."[b] [footnote b: _christmas-eve_.] man must find his law within himself, be the source of his own activity, not passive or receptive, but outgoing and effective. "rejoice we are allied to that which doth provide and not partake, effect and not receive! a spark disturbs our clod; nearer we hold of god who gives, than of his tribes that take, i must believe."[c] [footnote c: _rabbi ben ezra_.] this near affinity between the divine and human is just what browning seems to repudiate in his later poems, when he speaks as if the absolute, in order to maintain its own supremacy over man, had to stint its gifts and endow him only with a defective reason. in the earlier period of the poet there is far less timidity. he then saw that the greater the gift, the greater the giver; that only spirit can reveal spirit; that "god is glorified in man," and that love is at its fullest only when it gives itself. in insisting on such identity of the human spirit with the divine, our poet does not at any time run the risk of forgetting that the identity is not absolute. absolute identity would be pantheism, which leaves god lonely and loveless, and extinguishes man, as well as his morality. "man is not god, but hath god's end to serve, a master to obey, a course to take, somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] man, at best, only moves _towards_ his ideal: god is conceived as the ever-existing ideal. god, in short, is the term which signifies for us the being who is eternally all in all, and who, therefore, is hidden from us who are only moving _towards_ perfection, in the excess of the brightness of his own glory. nevertheless, as browning recognizes, the grandeur of god's perfection is just his outflowing love. and that love is never complete in its manifestation, till it has given itself. man's life, as spirit, is thus one in nature with that of the absolute. but the unity is not complete, because man is only potentially perfect. he is the process _of_ the ideal; his life is the divine activity within him. still, it is also man's activity. for the process, being the process of spirit, is a _free_ process--one in which man himself energizes; so that, in doing god's will, he is doing his own highest will, and, in obeying the law of his own deepest nature, he is obeying god. the unity of divine and human within the spiritual life of man is a real unity, just because man is free; the identity manifests itself through the difference, and the difference is possible through the unity. thus, in the light of an ideal which is moral, and therefore perfect--an ideal gradually realizing itself in a process which is endless--the poet is able to maintain at once the community between man and god, which is necessary to religion, and their independence, which is necessary to morality. the conception of god as giving, which is the main doctrine of christianity, and of man as akin with god, is applied by him to the whole spiritual nature of man, and not merely to his emotion. the process of evolution is thus a process towards truth, as well as goodness; in fact, goodness and truth are known as inseparable. knowledge, too, is a divine endowment. "what gift of man is not from god descended?" what gift of god can be deceptive? "take all in a word: the truth in god's breast lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: though he is so bright and we so dim, we are made in his image to witness him."[a] [footnote a: _christmas-eve_.] the pope recognizes clearly the inadequacy of human knowledge; but he also recognizes that it has a divine source. "yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun; thither i sent the great looks which compel light from its fount: all that i do and am comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised, remembered or divined, as mere man may."[b] [footnote b: _the ring and the book_--_the pope_, - .] the last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge, which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier poems, the poet does not analyze human nature into a finite and infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive solvent of a dualistic agnosticism. he treats spirit as a unity, and refuses to set love and reason against each other. man's _life_, for the poet, and not merely man's love, begins with god, and returns back to god in the rapt recognition of god's perfect being by reason, and in the identification of man's purposes with his by means of will and love. "what is left for us, save, in growth of soul, to rise up, far past both, from the gift looking to the giver, and from the cistern to the river, and from the finite to infinity and from man's dust to god's divinity?"[c] [footnote c: _christmas-eve_.] it is this movement of the absolute in man, this aspiration towards the full knowledge and perfect goodness which can never be completely attained, that constitutes man. "man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect he could not, what he knows now, know at first: what he considers that he knows to-day, come but to-morrow, he will find mis-known; getting increase of knowledge, since he learns because he lives, which is to be a man, set to instruct himself by his past self: first, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. god's gift was that man shall conceive of truth and yearn to gain it, catching at mistake, as midway help till he reach fact indeed?"[a] [footnote a: _a death in the desert_.] "progress," the poet says, is "man's distinctive mark alone." the endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later days, bring despair to him. for the consciousness of failure is possible in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has come a fuller light. browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper positive. he does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he asserts the contrary. failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph's evidence in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil in any form, is therefore impossible. we deny "recognized truths, obedient to some truth unrecognized yet, but perceptible,-- correct the portrait by the living face, man's god, by god's god in the mind of man."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] thus the poet ever returns to the conception of god in the mind of man. god is the beginning and the end; and man is the self-conscious worker of god's will, the free process whereby the last which is first, returns to itself. the process, the growth, is man's life and being; and it falls within the ideal, which is eternal and all in all. the spiritual life of man, which is both intellectual and moral, is a dying into the eternal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for spirits necessarily commune. he dies to the temporal interests and narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle which is the life of god, who lives and loves in all things. "god is a being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that he _is_ all which the human spirit is capable of becoming."[b] [footnote b: green's _prolegomena to ethics_, p. .] from this point of view, and in so far as browning is loyal to the conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to maintain his faith in god, not in spite of knowledge, but through the very movement of knowledge within him. he is not obliged, as in his later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion. he needs no syllogistic process to arrive at god; for the very activity of his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is the activity of god within him. scepticism, is impossible, for the very act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the knowledge of the truth. "i put no such dreadful question to myself, within whose circle of experience burns the central truth, power, wisdom, goodness,--god: i must outlive a thing ere know it dead: when i outlive the faith there is a sun, when i lie, ashes to the very soul,-- someone, not i, must wail above the heap, 'he died in dark whence never morn arose.'"[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] and this view of god as immanent in man's experience also forecloses all possibility of failure. beneath the failure, the possibility of which is involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through contradiction to its own fulfilment. failure is necessary for man, because he grows: but, for the same reason, the failure is not final. thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to the existence of evil, or casting doubt on the distinction between right and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict between good and evil as real and earnest. he can look evil in the face, recognize its stubborn resistance to the good, and still regard the victory of the latter as sure and complete. he has not to reduce it into a phantom, or mere appearance, in order to give it a place within the divine order. he sees the night, but he also sees the day succeed it. man falls into sin, but he cannot rest in it. it is contradictory to his nature, he cannot content himself with it, and he is driven through it. mephistopheles promised more than he could perform, when he undertook to make faust declare himself satisfied. there is not within the kingdom of evil what will satisfy the spirit of man, whose last law is goodness, whose nature, however obscured, is god's gift of himself. "while i see day succeed the deepest night-- how can i speak but as i know?--my speech must be, throughout the darkness. it will end: 'the light that did burn, will burn!' clouds obscure-- but for which obscuration all were bright? too hastily concluded! sun--suffused, a cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,-- better the very clarity of heaven: the soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. what but the weakness in a faith supplies the incentive to humanity, no strength absolute, irresistible, comports? how can man love but what he yearns to help? and that which men think weakness within strength, but angels know for strength and stronger yet-- what were it else but the first things made new, but repetition of the miracle, the divine instance of self-sacrifice that never ends and aye begins for man? so, never i miss footing in the maze, no,--i have light nor fear the dark at all."[a] [footnote a: _the ring and the book--the pope_, - .] [illustration] proofreaders robert browning by g.k. chesterton contents chapter i browning in early life chapter ii early works chapter iii browning and his marriage chapter iv browning in italy chapter v browning in later life chapter vi browning as a literary artist chapter vii "the ring and the book" chapter viii the philosophy of browning index robert browning chapter i browning in early life on the subject of browning's work innumerable things have been said and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of facts, there is little or nothing to say. it was a lucid and public and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and publicity. and yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. his work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple. he was clever enough to understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand it. but he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly hidden from us. the subtle man is always immeasurably easier to understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. but a man like browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things growing at will, like forces of nature. there is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: "when that poem was written, two people knew what it meant--god and robert browning. and now god only knows what it means." this story gives, in all probability, an entirely false impression of browning's attitude towards his work. he was a keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and he had a memory like the british museum library. but the story does, in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of browning's attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. if a man had asked him what some particular allusion to a persian hero meant he could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked him which third cousin of charlemagne was alluded to in _sordello_, he could have given an account of the man and an account of his father and his grandfather. but if a man had asked him what he thought of himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he would have replied with perfect sincerity that god alone knew. this mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly in browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. the same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious. it may be difficult to discover the principles of the rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of the rosicrucians than the principles of the united states: nor has any secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. the way to be inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality of browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. the discussion of what some particular allusion in _sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go on still, but it has it in its nature to end. the life of robert browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. robert browning was born in camberwell on may th . his father and grandfather had been clerks in the bank of england, and his whole family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. this actual quality and character of the browning family shows some tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. it is the custom of all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant ages and even in distant lands; and browning, as it happens, has given them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main matter in hand. there is a tradition, for example, that men of his name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond a coincidence of surnames and the fact that browning used a seal with a coat-of-arms. thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about the condition of their ancestors in the middle ages. then, again, there is a theory that he was of jewish blood; a view which is perfectly conceivable, and which browning would have been the last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, there is exceedingly little evidence. the chief reason assigned by his contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, specially and profoundly interested in jewish matters. this suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other way. for while an englishman may be enthusiastic about england, or indignant against england, it never occurred to any living englishman to be interested in england. browning was, like every other intelligent aryan, interested in the jews; but if he was related to every people in which he was interested, he must have been of extraordinarily mixed extraction. thirdly, there is the yet more sensational theory that there was in robert browning a strain of the negro. the supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in reality to say, except that browning's grandmother was certainly a creole. it is said in support of the view that browning was singularly dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an italian. there does not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, except that if he looked like an italian, he must have looked exceedingly unlike a negro. there is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, be true, but they are still irrelevant. they are something that is in history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are misleading. we do not want to know about a man like browning, whether he had a right to a shield used in the wars of the roses, or whether the tenth grandfather of his creole grandmother had been white or black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a different thing. we wish to have about browning not so much the kind of information which would satisfy clarencieux king-at-arms, but the sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. we should not be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an irish king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three generations. this is the most practical duty of biography, and this is also the most difficult. it is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of henry ii. than to catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of all things--social tone. it will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we looked for it. but it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again. it is true, assuredly, that all the three races above named could be connected with browning's personality. if we believed, for instance, that he really came of a race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a german theory about the gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a crowd. again, if we had decided that he was a jew, we should point out how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we should be right, for he was so absorbed. or again, in the case even of the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure "when reds and blues were indeed red and blue," as he says in _the ring and the book_. we should be right; for there really was in browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid our cold english poets, seems scarcely european. all this is extremely fascinating; and it may be true. but, as has above been suggested, here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble temptation to see too much in everything. the biographer can easily see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. but is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any three other nationalities? if browning's ancestors had been frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he inherited that logical agility which marks him among english poets? if his grandfather had been a swede, should we not have said that the old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable travel? if his great-aunt had been a red indian, should we not have said that only in the ojibways and the blackfeet do we find the browning fantasticality combined with the browning stoicism? this over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret hero-worship which is the heart of biography. the lover of great men sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the storms and the falling stars. a certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of browning study, dr. furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been conducting into the condition of the browning family since the beginning of the world. for his last discovery, the descent of browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. but browning's descent from barons, or jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the main point touching his family. if the brownings were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like the great majority of english middle-class people. it is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest in one not very interesting type of rank and family. the truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. for since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. it is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of eastern or celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime. let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the browning family have every abstract possibility. but it is a far more cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of every house in the street where browning was born, he would have found similar legends in all of them. there is hardly a family in camberwell that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations back; and in all this the brownings are simply a typical camberwell family. the real truth about browning and men like him can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, kingsley's _water babies_, in which the pedigree of the professor is treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common sense of the book. "his mother was a dutch woman, and therefore she was born at curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and therefore know why), and his father was a pole, and therefore he was brought up at petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough an englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods." it may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear account of brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much more important, a clear account of his home. for the great central and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that browning was a thoroughly typical englishman of the middle class. he may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native. a phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an englishman of the middle class. neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an englishman of the middle class. he expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism of _fifine at the fair_ and the blasphemous theology of caliban; but he remained himself an englishman of the middle class. he pictured all the passions of the earth since the fall, from the devouring amorousness of _time's revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _instans tyrannus_; but he remained himself an englishman of the middle class. the moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. he met george sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible life. he met the spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocal positions and playing with fire. his intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. he piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest english house in camberwell. he abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. it is then of browning as a member of the middle class, that we can speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate forebears who present the real interest to us. his father, robert browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. every glimpse we have of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is really a thing difficult or impossible. in early life robert browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important commercial position in the west indies. he threw up the position however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent him in a bill for the cost of his education. about the same time that he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by joining a dissenting sect. he was, in short, a very typical example of the serious middle-class man of the wilberforce period, a man to whom duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. thus, while he was puritan at the core, not the ruthless puritan of the seventeenth, but the humanitarian puritan of the eighteenth century, he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. but the whole was absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. he lamented his son's early admiration for byron, and never ceased adjuring him to model himself upon pope. he was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral practice. robert browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy their fortunes in order to protest against it. the ideals of the men of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. but when we think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. they uprooted the enormous upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of man. they altered the whole face of europe with their deductive fancies. we have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. it scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. robert browning's mother was the daughter of william wiedermann, a german merchant settled in dundee, and married to a scotch wife. one of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of the german and scotch, browning got his metaphysical tendency; it is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical danger of making mountains out of molehills. what browning's mother unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. thomas carlyle called her "the type of a scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of scotland, one of the very few european countries where large sections of the aristocracy are puritans; thus a scottish gentlewoman combines two descriptions of dignity at the same time. little more is known of this lady except the fact that after her death browning could not bear to look at places where she had walked. browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. in very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. however this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by mr. ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. but the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the greek epics and mediæval chronicles. if we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in english literary history. but if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. in a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of troy. browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge--knowledge about the greek poets, knowledge about the provençal troubadours, knowledge about the jewish rabbis of the middle ages. but along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. he was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. in the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. he had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. he had no reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. his sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "married two wives this morning." the insane ingenuity of the biographer would be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _fifine at the fair_. a great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only sister sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her also he passed his last days. from his earliest babyhood he seems to have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. browning began to live in the life of his own age. as a young man he attended classes at university college; beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family. but the forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area. about the time of browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the brownings. in studying the careers of great men we tend constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their characters practically formed in a period long previous to their appearance in history. we think of milton, the restoration puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of shakespeare and the full summer of the elizabethan drama. we realise garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new kingdom of italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that napoleon was the master of europe. similarly, we think of browning as the great victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on mr. gladstone's home rule bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "mr. shelley's atheistic poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who mr. shelley was. browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the great revolution. the french revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. it may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive. the great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that eden. no one can do the least justice to the great jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. and just as for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful emancipation, so the dream began in the time of keats and shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society. a spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. the shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. he represented, in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which god was rebelling against satan. there began to arise about this time a race of young men like keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. they were a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. they climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated the victorian era, were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory; carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in dumfriesshire; keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon when browning was a boy in camberwell. on all sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. it was the age of inspired office-boys. browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of shelley and keats, in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed in a new world. it is important to remember this, because the real browning was a quite different person from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of browning societies and university extension lecturers. browning was first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and invisible, a priest of the higher passions. the misunderstanding that has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding which attaches to most other poets. the opponents of victor hugo called him a mere windbag; the opponents of shakespeare called him a buffoon. but the admirers of hugo and shakespeare at least knew better. now the admirers and opponents of browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. the only difference between the browningite and the anti-browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. the admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage browning; and all the time browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. the whole of the boyhood and youth of robert browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of shelley. we do not find in it any trace of the analytical browning who is believed in by learned ladies and gentlemen. how indeed would such sympathisers feel if informed that the first poems that browning wrote in a volume called _incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? they were indeed byronic in the extreme, and browning in his earlier appearances in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. macready, the actor, wrote of him: "he looks and speaks more like a young poet than any one i have ever seen." a picturesque tradition remains that thomas carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. browning at this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of physical charm. a friend who attended university college with him says: "he was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair falling over his shoulders." every tale that remains of him in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. he was fond, for example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "following the queen of the gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the spirit of escape and bohemianism, _the flight of the duchess_. such other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding across wimbledon common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting aloud passages from isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above norwood to look over london by night. it was when looking down from that suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of london that he was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _pippa passes_. at the end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of competition which, i imagine, has since become less common in camberwell. when browning as a boy was intoxicated with the poetry of shelley and keats, he hypnotised himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them. this last story is perhaps the most typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. with browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as the hunger for bread made a plough. the life he lived in those early days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth was so young. when he was full of years and fame, and delineating in great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern europe, a young man, thinking to please him, said, "there is no romance now except in italy." "well," said browning, "i should make an exception of camberwell." such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that there was in the nature of things between the generation of browning and the generation of his father. browning was bound in the nature of things to become at the outset byronic, and byronism was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an optimism about savage things. this great revolt on behalf of the elemental which keats and shelley represented was bound first of all to occur. robert browning junior had to be a part of it, and robert browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless couplets of pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that he cannot understand. the earliest works of browning bear witness, without exception, to this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _pauline_ appeared anonymously in . it exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and mr. johnson fox, an old friend of browning's father, who reviewed it for _tait's magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find anything more purely confessional. it is the typical confession of a boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else has committed them. it is wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. but the records of that particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and beautiful as _pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome reading. the chief interest of _pauline_, with all its beauties, lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that browning, of all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. but this is a morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual measles. no one of any degree of maturity in reading _pauline_ will be quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the story as he seems to be himself. it is the utterance of that bitter and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin. the boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. that browning, whose judgment on his own work was one of the best in the world, took this view of _pauline_ in after years is quite obvious. he displayed a very manly and unique capacity of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed of it. "this," he said of _pauline_, "is the only crab apple that remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." it would be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. although _pauline_ was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain circle, and browning began to form friendships in the literary world. he had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was ever destined to have, alfred domett, celebrated in "the guardian angel" and "waring," and his cousin silverthorne, whose death is spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the english language, browning's "may and death." these were men of his own age, and his manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid world of comradeship which. plato and walt whitman knew, with its endless days and its immortal nights. browning had a third friend destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to an older generation and a statelier school of manners and scholarship. mr. kenyon was a schoolfellow of browning's father, and occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible uncle. he was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for himself. elizabeth barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then old-fashioned. yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all directions. one friend in particular he made, the comte de ripert-monclar, a french royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies in the mediæval and renaissance schools of philosophy. it was the count who suggested that browning should write a poetical play on the subject of paracelsus. after reflection, indeed, the count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave no room for love. undismayed by this terrible deficiency, browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in appeared the first of his works which he himself regarded as representative--_paracelsus_. the poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. fifty-two years afterwards he wrote _parleyings with certain persons of importance in their day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours. the same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote _paracelsus_ and _sordello_. nowhere in browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist. he has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about socrates or cæsar or napoleon, or beethoven or mozart, or buddha or mahomet. when he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, king victor of sardinia. when he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called abt vogler and master hugues of saxe-gotha. when he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure jewish rabbi of the name of ben ezra. it is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from plato to darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. he selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the _à priori_ scientist of the middle ages and the renaissance. his supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. it is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. to the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. but for all that browning was right. any critic who understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. in the character of paracelsus, browning wished to paint the dangers and disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the intellect. he wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in the tradition of the middle ages, the most thoroughly and even painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. if he had chosen an ancient greek philosopher, it would have been open to the critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. if he had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. but the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval magician. it is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it uncivilised. we call the chinese barbarians, and they call us barbarians. the mediæval state, like china, was a foreign civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared for the things of the mind for their own sake. to complain of the researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. it is not only true that the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is quite equally true that they never tried. the eden of the middle ages was really a garden, where each of god's flowers--truth and beauty and reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. the eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden. it would have been hard, therefore, for browning to have chosen a better example for his study of intellectual egotism than paracelsus. modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of over-glorifying it. there is, however, another and even more important deduction to be made from the moral of _paracelsus_. the usual accusation against browning is that he was consumed with logic; that he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry and sentiment. to people who imagine browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one answer necessary or sufficient. it is the fact that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the age of twenty-three. _paracelsus_ was in all likelihood browning's introduction to the literary world. it was many years, and even many decades, before he had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his standard upon the publication of _paracelsus_. the celebrated john forster had taken up _paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. john stuart mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested himself in browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. among other early admirers were landor, leigh hunt, horne, serjeant talfourd, and monckton-milnes. one man of even greater literary stature seems to have come into browning's life about this time, a man for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got on perfectly with thomas carlyle. it is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of browning, that carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him. he would run over to paris for the mere privilege of dining with him. browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified carlyle in all companies. "i have just seen dear carlyle," he writes on one occasion; "catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter beginning." he sided with carlyle in the vexed question of the carlyle domestic relations, and his impression of mrs. carlyle was that she was "a hard unlovable woman." as, however, it is on record that he once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, put down mrs. carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural explanation. his partisanship in the carlyle affair, which was characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on the character of browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. browning was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled tennyson to say that he could not agree that the carlyles ought never to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would have been four miserable people instead of two. among the motley and brilliant crowd with which browning had now begun to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than that of macready the actor. this extraordinary person, a man living from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction towards browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a great play. browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as macready. he immediately began to plan out a great historical play, and selected for his subject "strafford." in browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a trace of his puritan and liberal upbringing. it is one of the very earliest of the really important works in english literature which are based on the parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time of charles i. it is true that the finest element in the play is the opposition between strafford and pym, an opposition so complete, so lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. the two men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the same time completely. this is a great thing of which even to attempt the description. it is easy to have the impartiality which can speak judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both parties. nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is in the play a definite trace of browning's puritan education and puritan historical outlook. for _strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of all literary works--a political play. the thing has been achieved once at least admirably in shakespeare's _julius cæsar_, and something like it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been done excellently in _l'aiglon_. but the difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face of the matter. in a political play the principal characters are not merely men. they are symbols, arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. it is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. to give even the faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. that is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos and dignity upon such persons as charles i. and mary queen of scots, the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their enormous crimes. it would be impossible to find a stronger example than the case of _strafford_. it is clear that no one could possibly tell the whole truth about the life and death of strafford, politically considered, in a play. strafford was one of the greatest men ever born in england, and he attempted to found a great english official despotism. that is to say, he attempted to found something which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been born a dog or an elephant. it would require enormous imagination to reconstruct the political ideals of strafford. now browning, as we all know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that strafford had any political ideals at all. that is to say, while crediting strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon his passionate personal attachment to the king. this is unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of the political play. that difficulty, in the case of any political problem, is, as has been said, great. it would be very hard, for example, to construct a play about mr. gladstone's home rule bill. it would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as that irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age of strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest commonwealths of the east and west. but we should scarcely be satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing mr. gladstone's action in the home rule question to an overwhelming personal affection for mr. healy. and in thus basing strafford's action upon personal and private reasons, browning certainly does some injustice to the political greatness, of strafford. to attribute mr. gladstone's conversion to home rule to an infatuation such as that suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the writer thought the home rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. similarly, browning's choice of a motive for strafford has very much the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public grounds for strafford's political ideal. now this is certainly not the case. the puritans in the great struggles of the reign of charles i. may have possessed more valuable ideals than the royalists, but it is a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. in browning's play pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, and strafford of private ties. but not only may an upholder of despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders of it like strafford he generally is. despotism indeed, and attempts at despotism, like that of strafford, are a kind of disease of public spirit. they represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. it is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. they are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. this belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not public-spirited. the sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little. therefore from age to age in history arise these great despotic dreamers, whether they be royalists or imperialists or even socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of going its own way. when a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an emperor. of these men strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man. but the whole question is interesting, because browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such palpable importance as _strafford_, could never keep politics altogether out of his dramatic work. _king victor and king charles_, which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic instinct much meaner than that of strafford. _colombe's birthday_, again, is political as well as romantic. politics in its historic aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in the world that is as intellectual as the _encyclopædia britannica_ and as rapid as the derby. one of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long controversies about browning (and their name is legion) is the question of whether browning's plays, such as _strafford_, were successes upon the stage. as they are never agreed about what constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their quarrels. but the general fact is very simple; such a play as _strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. on the other hand, it was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. above all, the definite success which attended the representation of _strafford_ from the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite enough to establish browning in a certain definite literary position. as a classical and established personality he did not come into his kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was near to entering upon the final rest. but as a detached and eccentric personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally apparent, mrs. bridell fox has left a very vivid little sketch. she describes how browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt politeness if he might play on the piano. this touch is very characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of browning's social manner. "he was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very handsome, and--may i hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion and the mould of form. but full of 'ambition,' eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." that is as good a portrait as we can have of the browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. but a man still above all things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising foppery which defies them. just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of european literature and offered to sing. chapter ii early works in _sordello_ was published. its reception by the great majority of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception that was neither praise nor blame. it was perhaps best expressed by carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read _sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether sordello was a man, or a city, or a book. better known, of course, is the story of tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem-- "who will, may hear sordello's story told," and the last line-- "who would, has heard sordello's story told," were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were lies. perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of sordello legends is that which is related of douglas jerrold. he was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began _sordello_. no sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book, and said, "my god! i'm an idiot. my health is restored, but my mind's gone. i can't understand two consecutive lines of an english poem." he then summoned his family and silently gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. these stories, whether accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception accorded to _sordello_, a reception which, as i have said, bears no resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. there had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _sordello_ enters into literary history the browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question very relevant to the fame and character of browning which is raised by _sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as hopelessly unintelligible. it really throws some light upon the reason of browning's obscurity. the ordinary theory of browning's obscurity is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. there are at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. in the first place, it must emphatically be said for browning that in all the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain. the evidence is entirely the other way. he was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a certain period upon his wife. from the records of his early dandyism, his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough that he was vain of his good looks. he was vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and he was, i fancy, decidedly vain of his prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. but everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. in the matter of conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative quality in his mere bodily presence. some people who did not like him found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. one lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day with your head up. another lady who did not know him, and therefore disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "who was that too-exuberant financier?" these are the diversities of feeling about him. but they all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. he talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority. when he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. we have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers. there is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration. we constantly hear the statement that browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true. _sordello_, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before _strafford_, and was therefore the third of his works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _pauline_, the second. he wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. it was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it. he was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. he was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious. a man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. what poet was ever vainer than byron? what poet was ever so magnificently lucid? but a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think that they are discoveries. he thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism. _sordello_ was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man. in the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author a mark of inward clarity. a man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one understands. no one ever found miss marie corelli obscure, because she believes only in words. but if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world. let us take an imaginary example. suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in the minds of others. and suppose that in pursuance of this general idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very silly one, he were to say that he believed in puritanism without its theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "you will not get the godless puritan into your white taverns," and no one in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest notion of what he could mean. so it would have been in any example, for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did not realise how far the world was from it. if it had been possible for a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as obvious the evolutionary theory of darwin, he might have written down some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the meaning of the allusion. the more fixed and solid and sensible the idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have appeared to the world. most of us indeed, if we ever say anything valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall paper. it is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the thinker that it becomes startling to the world. it is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground of browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about him. our whole view of browning is bound to be absolutely different, and i think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he was what the french call an intellectual. if we see browning with the eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. for his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers. indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. "wilkes was no wilkite," he said, "and i am very far from being a browningite." we shall, as i say, utterly misunderstand browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and abstruseness of his message. he took pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. but his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. he conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter. "i was ever," as he says, "a fighter." his faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. his virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. he had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with literary egotism. he was not vain of being an extraordinary man. he was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. the browning then who published _sordello_ we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other. if we compare, for example, the complexity of browning with the clarity of matthew arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that matthew arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and browning an intellectual democrat. the particular peculiarities of _sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. a very great part of the difficulty of _sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs--the period of the guelph and ghibelline struggles in mediæval italy. here, of course, browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed. his father was a student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about ecelo and taurello salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an english baby shows when it talks english to an italian organ grinder. beyond this the poem of _sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant advance in browning's mental development on that already represented by _pauline_ and _paracelsus_. _pauline, paracelsus_, and _sordello_ stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by mr. johnson fox, "confessional." all three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament finds in itself. browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. this kind of self-analysis is always misleading. for we do not see in ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbours see. we see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by nero or sir willoughby patterne. when studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside napoleon. so it was with browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. _sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into a jest. the most truly memorable thing about it was browning's saying in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "i blame no one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." this is indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only the letters and to lose the man. when next browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new voice. his visit to asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which a man like byron had lived and died. in _pippa passes_ appeared, and with it the real browning of the modern world. he had made the discovery which byron never made, but which almost every young man does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not robinson crusoe. _pippa passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by walt whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. the phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound. the love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. as a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. the love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. in our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. and this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world scattering goodness like a capricious god. it is desired that mankind should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a criminal; that he should be an anonymous saviour, an unrecorded christ. browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. he has written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies of others to mightier and better issues. then his almost faultless artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he dramatised as the work-girl, pippa, should be even unconscious of anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a lonely mirth. it was a bold and moving conception to show us these mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child. and it was an even more precise instinct which made browning make the errant benefactor a woman. a man's good work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is. there is one other point about _pippa passes_ which is worth a moment's attention. the great difficulty with regard to the understanding of browning is the fact that, to all appearance, scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary artist. his adversaries consider his literary vagaries a disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. browning is supposed to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of thought. but, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will take browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form very seriously. now _pippa passes_ is, among other things, eminently remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one figure. for this admirable literary departure browning, amid all the laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had credit. and just as we should, if we took browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary mistakes. there is one of them, a glaring one, in _pippa passes_; and, as far as i know, no critic has ever thought enough of browning as an artist to point it out. it is a gross falsification of the whole beauty of _pippa passes_ to make the monseigneur and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of pippa herself. the whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms. to make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of pippa. having done that, browning might just as well have made sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married. browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. but its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism which idolises browning as a metaphysician and neglects him as a poet. but a better test was coming. browning's poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in _dramatic lyrics_, published in . here he showed himself a picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. and the two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most commonly denied to browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. those who suppose browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. but when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and almost unexpectedly otherwise. let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _dramatic lyrics_. the first item consists of those splendid war chants called "cavalier tunes." i do not imagine that any one will maintain that there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. the second item is the fine poem "the lost leader," a poem which expresses in perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned indignation. it is the same, however far we carry the query. what theory does the next poem, "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often exciting to ride a good horse in belgium? what theory does the poem after that, "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr," express, except that it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in africa? then comes "nationality in drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "garden fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis that a book may be a bore. then comes "the soliloquy of the spanish cloister," from which the most ingenious "browning student" cannot extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in spain; and then "the laboratory," from which he could extract nothing except that people sometimes hate each other in france. this is a perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. and the first eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems that browning ever wrote. it may be repeated that either he wrote these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. it is permissible to say that the _dramatic lyrics_ represent the arrival of the real browning of literary history. it is true that he had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan--_paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the intellectual, _pippa passes_ with its beautiful deification of unconscious influence. but youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do. youth is universal, but not individual. the genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent prime minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating nursery rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. this was what happened to browning; like every one else, he had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. with him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. in _dramatic lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else--the dramatic lyric. the form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had found himself. the actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little difficult to describe. but its general characteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions. the best and most characteristic of the poems are love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love. the imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid survey of browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats. but in this new method he thoroughly expressed the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. if any one wished to prove that browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element than browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. there is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. thought and the intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be called for the sake of argument x, and ten widows' incomes called for the sake of argument y; they are content that a thousand awful and mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. but sentiment must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. and therefore browning's love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about window-panes and gloves and garden walls. it does not deal much with abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not speak much about love. it awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any millionaire to compute. he expresses the celestial time when a man does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. and therefore he is, first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic philosopher except whitman. the general accusation against browning in connection with his use of the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love. in that delightful poem "youth and art" we have the singing girl saying to her old lover-- "no harm! it was not my fault if you never turned your eye's tail up as i shook upon e _in alt_, or ran the chromatic scale up." this is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the great poems of the world. browning never forgets the little details which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow through the heart. take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is treated in "a lover's quarrel." "see, how she looks now, dressed in a sledging cap and vest! 'tis a huge fur cloak-- like a reindeer's yoke falls the lappet along the breast: sleeves for her arms to rest, or to hang, as my love likes best." that would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. so great a power have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that i question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. and if any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as browning did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, an old door. in appeared that marvellous drama _the return of the druses_, a work which contains more of browning's typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. we have in _the return of the druses_ his love of the corners of history, his interest in the religious mind of the east, with its almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be an oriental himself. but, above all, it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which browning was thenceforth to pursue. in _pauline_ and the poems that follow it, browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. in _pippa passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of humanity. in _the return of the druses_ he has for the first time the task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the task of giving an account of a human being. djabal, the great oriental impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. he is supremely important in the history of browning's mind, for he is the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth--djabal, fra lippo, bishop blougram, sludge, prince hohenstiel-schwangau, and the hero of _fifine at the fair_. with this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the defence of the indefensible. it may be noticed that browning was not in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might be high-minded. he was insatiable: he wished to go further and show in a character like djabal that an impostor might be generous and that a liar might be high-minded. in all his life, it must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult things. just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in their place. charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. he was a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue. the character of djabal in _the return of the druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. as we shall see, even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like djabal did not content his erratic hunger for goodness. he went further again, and realised the humanity of a mean impostor like sludge. but in all things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners cast out. browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to grow at this time. it must be remembered that he had every natural tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. he was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature an unsuccessful dramatist. he was, that is to say, a man who loved above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a clear and ringing conclusion to everything. but it so happened, unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite inaudible. we are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all feel that they should have been. he was, as it were, by nature a neglected dramatist. he was one of those who achieve the reputation, in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to reach the centre. _a blot on the 'scutcheon_ followed _the return of the druses_. in connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate the curious energetic simplicity of browning's character. macready, who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never occurred to browning to see what he meant. he pushed off the part upon phelps, and browning was contented; he resumed it, and browning was only discontented on behalf of phelps. the two had a quarrel; they were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely with the unfortunate condition of phelps. browning beat down his own hat over his eyes; macready flung browning's manuscript with a slap upon the floor. but all the time it never occurred to the poet that macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a desire for money. browning was in fact by his principles and his ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. that worldly ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. he was as it were a citizen of the new jerusalem who desired with perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of mayfair. there was in him a quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of vices. those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be said violently and with ease, might naturally call browning a snob. he was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for the right reasons. he admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. he bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting opposite. chapter iii browning and his marriage robert browning had his faults, and the general direction of those faults has been previously suggested. the chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. but any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one most striking and determining element in the question--browning's simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. he was one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. carlyle, tennyson, ruskin, matthew arnold, were alike in being children of a very strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other influences. browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without the least affectation, all the influences of his day. a very interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure in a university dinner. "praise," he says in effect, "was given very deservedly to matthew arnold and swinburne, and to that pride of oxford men, clough." the really striking thing about these three names is the fact that they are united in browning's praise in a way in which they are by no means united in each other's. matthew arnold, in one of his extant letters, calls swinburne "a young pseudo-shelley," who, according to arnold, thinks he can make greek plays good by making them modern. mr. swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised clough in a contemptuous rhyme:-- "there was a bad poet named clough, whom his friends all united to puff. but the public, though dull, has not quite such a skull as belongs to believers in clough." the same general fact will be found through the whole of browning's life and critical attitude. he adored shelley, and also carlyle who sneered at him. he delighted in mill, and also in ruskin who rebelled against mill. he excused napoleon iii. and landor who hurled interminable curses against napoleon. he admired all the cycle of great men who all contemned each other. to say that he had no streak of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to envy. but browning was really unique, in that he had a certain spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. he admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring leaf. he no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or greener than the leaf of spring. he was naturally magnanimous in the literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. in this spirit browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady poet, miss barrett. that impression was indeed amply justified. in a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very weakest tint, miss barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. when she erred it was through an elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a straining after violent metaphors. with her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days of elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and of brazen paradox and antithesis. we find this hot wit, as distinct from the cold wit of the school of pope, in the puns and buffooneries of shakespeare. we find it lingering in _hudibras_, and we do not find it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of elizabeth barrett in her poem on napoleon:-- "blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth, but glittered dew-like in the covenanted and high-rayed light. he was a despot--granted, but the [greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth said 'yea' i' the people's french! he magnified the image of the freedom he denied." her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the peacock fans of the vatican, which she describes as winking at the italian tricolor. she often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. elizabeth barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. her verse at its best was quite as strong as browning's own, and very nearly as clever. the difference between their natures was a difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light shades of the same colour. browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private life of this lady from his father's friend kenyon. the old man, who was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively short intercourse, had been appointed by miss barrett as her "fairy godfather." he spoke much about her to browning, and of browning to her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. and there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of miss barrett. she was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. her father, edward moulton barrett, had been a landowner in the west indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part in the same social system which stung browning's father into revolt and renunciation. the parts played by edward barrett, however, though little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. he was a man conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his conceptions prevail. he was an able man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity of phrase. he was rigidly upright and responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. but selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of all despots. his most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad ones. he had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. his daughters must be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten or caressed. during the early years of elizabeth barrett's life, the family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. she was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. in early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. she was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she was riding. the injury to her spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto been attached to it. her father moved to a melancholy house in wimpole street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. she was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to her bed. her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. she was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. the existence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. a man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet regard, as stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional and the two as normal. but the curse that lay on the barrett household was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a human being. the truth was that edward barrett was living emotionally and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his daughter's decline. he did not know this, but it was so. scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty of the sentimentalist. it is wonderful that elizabeth barrett was not made thoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable tenderness. in her estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer. it is evident that she practically believed herself to be dying. but she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of life. silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. she could still own with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, "tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. it is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. in after years, when browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that minute." there we have very graphically the spirit which tears open parcels. not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." she had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous sense. her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she breathed. she used her brains seriously; she was a good greek scholar, and read Æschylus and euripides unceasingly with her blind friend, mr. boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public questions. naturally she was not uninterested in robert browning, but it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her. he does appear to have felt an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. in he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination and found the door barred against him. in that phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of browning remained inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external appearance solidifying. miss barrett replied to his letters with charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else to do. she herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of her life if their relations had always remained a learned and delightful correspondence. but she must have known very little of robert browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy and bloodless tie. at all times of his life he was sufficiently fond of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond of them. the correspondence between the two poets had not long begun when browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on any one else. this seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and doubt. she alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her health and the season of the year and the east winds. "if my truest heart's wishes avail," replied browning obstinately, "you shall laugh at east winds yet as i do." then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. it is a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many profound questions. it is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. to the mind of the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. i am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. that spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a cavern, and the word gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper. whenever, therefore, a poet or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, i can imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. thus it was that dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in the streets of florence. thus it was that paul founded a civilisation by keeping an ethical diary. but the one essential which exists in all such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he chooses his words to that end. yet when a work contains expressions which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of sanctity does arise. it is not because there is anything in this world too sacred to tell. it is rather because there are a great many things in this world too sacred to parody. if browning could really convey to the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, i see no reason why he should not. but the objection to letters which begin "my dear ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. as far as any third person is concerned, browning might as well have been expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of the cherokees. objection to the publication of such passages as that, in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the brownings, but that they do not tell us about it. upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a selection among the letters, but not a selection which should exclude anything merely because it was ardent and noble. if browning or mrs. browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of each other, they would not have written and published "one word more" or "the sonnets from the portuguese." nay, they would not have been married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too sacred for the world to know. the ridiculous theory that men should have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning. but the words of a poem or the words of the english marriage service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. if the bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of aunt matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the browning letters. why the serious and universal portions of those letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and unmeaning it is difficult to understand. our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love. there is at least one peculiarity in the browning letters which tends to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any other collection of love letters which can be imagined. the ordinary sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make head or tail of three consecutive sentences. in this respect it is the most extraordinary correspondence in the world. there seem to be only two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence you need never in any case write any more. it would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the browning letters. he would probably come upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "i ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before i shot down your dogs.... but not being phoibos apollon, you are to know further that when i _did_ think i might go modestly on ... [greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles." what our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. the only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to wimpole street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of miss barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central idea of the browning correspondence that the most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots. she replies in a letter following the above: "but if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me. . . . can it be? or am i reading this 'attic contraction' quite the wrong way. you see i am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the fatal difference. and now will you understand that i should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the portfolio . . . however incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask impudently of them now? is that plain?" most probably she thought it was. with regard to browning himself this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate. browning's prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the world. those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its object. this fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of browning's intellectual conceit. a man would have to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation of his own plans. the fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. the words "tail foremost" express browning's style with something more than a conventional accuracy. the tail, the most insignificant part of an animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. an utterance of browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his head. he was in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling the least important thing first. if a man who belonged to an italian secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour of olives. his whole method was founded both in literature and life upon the principle of the "ex pede herculem," and at the beginning of his description of hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than the hero. it is, in short, natural enough that browning should have written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his publisher and his solicitor obscurely. in the case of mrs. browning it is somewhat more difficult to understand. for she at least had, beyond all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. but she was partly under the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of browning. whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort which can be pursued very much by the outside public. their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. they write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation. wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of browning, "so robert browning and miss barrett have gone off together. i hope they understand each other--nobody else would." it would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage. their common affection for kenyon was a great element in their lives and in their correspondence. "i have a convenient theory to account for mr. kenyon," writes browning mysteriously, "and his otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "for mr. kenyon's kindness," retorts elizabeth barrett, "no theory will account. i class it with mesmerism for that reason." there is something very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the world would never have heard but for them. browning's feeling for him was indeed especially strong and typical. "there," he said, pointing after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as 'kenyon the magnificent.'" there is something thoroughly worthy of browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy. he is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able. browning's desire to meet miss barrett was received on her side, as has been stated, with a variety of objections. the chief of these was the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be permitted to form his own opinion. "there is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me.--i never learned to talk as you do in london; although i can admire that brightness of carved speech in mr. kenyon and others. if my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. i have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and dark." the substance of browning's reply was to the effect, "i will call at two on tuesday." they met on may , . a short time afterwards he had fallen in love with her and made her an offer of marriage. to a person in the domestic atmosphere of the barretts, the incident would appear to have been paralysing. "i will tell you what i once said in jest ..." she writes, "if a prince of el dorado should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket of good behaviour from the nearest independent chapel in the other!--'why, even _then_,' said my sister arabel, 'it would not _do_.' and she was right; we all agreed that she was right." this may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state of mr. barrett's mind on one subject. it is illustrative of the very best and breeziest side of elizabeth barrett's character that she could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human mind. browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character to dismay and repel all those who surrounded elizabeth barrett. it was not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. the whole of her family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. almost alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous view of her condition, stood browning himself. "but you are better," he would say; "you look so and speak so." which of the two opinions was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like this has neither the right nor the need to enter. but this much may be stated as a mere question of fact. in the summer of elizabeth barrett was still living under the great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly. a year or two later, in italy, as mrs. browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars." it is perfectly incredible that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have lived this life for twenty-four hours. something must be allowed for the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. but such exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and mrs. browning lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than she had ever known before. in the light of modern knowledge it is not very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all diseases. it must be remembered that in little or nothing was known of spine complaints such as that from which elizabeth barrett suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least of all of hysterical phenomena. in our day she would have been ordered air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of which chilled the barretts with terror. in our day, in short, it would have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. those who surrounded miss barrett knew nothing of this, and browning knew nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they did. mrs. orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to his dying day. but devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, he was, and remained, right. he at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to the practical centre of the situation. he did not know anything about hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew that the atmosphere of mr. barrett's house was not a fit thing for any human being, alive, dying, or dead. his stand upon this matter has really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average man to the confounding of the experts. experts are undoubtedly right nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in military matters an oliver cromwell who will make every mistake known to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a robert browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and are entirely correct. but while browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, while edward barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to weigh at least three souls in the balance. upon further examination of miss barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was absolutely necessary that she should be taken to italy. this may, without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last great earthly opportunity of barrett's character. he had not originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things. he had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe. and as long as the great mass of authorities were on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable. his crisis came when the authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his permission to send his daughter abroad. it was his crisis, and he refused. he had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and somewhat detestable way of refusing. once when his daughter had asked a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." these were the weapons with which he ruled his people. for the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp. barrett was one of the oppressors who have discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the fine verse of swinburne:-- "the racks of the earth and the rods are weak as the foam on the sands; the heart is the prey for the gods, who crucify hearts, not hands." he, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. when browning heard that the italian journey was forbidden, he proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey together. many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active in the matter. kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary of mortals, had marched into the house and given arabella barrett, the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. mrs. jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately stepped in and offered to take elizabeth to italy herself, thus removing all questions of expense or arrangement. she would appear to have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and magnanimity. she called day after day seeking for a change of mind, and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. at length, when it became evident that the extraction of mr. barrett's consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in europe alone. she went to paris, and had not been there many days, when she received a formal call from robert browning and elizabeth barrett browning, who had been married for some days. her astonishment is rather a picturesque thing to think about. the manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, as every one knows, in the browning letters. browning had decided that an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary that it should be a secret marriage. to a man of his somewhat stormily candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. he had always had the courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect cheerfulness and lucidity. in thus disappearing surreptitiously with an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. it is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of browning's character, to read the accounts which he writes to elizabeth barrett of his attitude towards the approaching _coup de théâtre_. in one place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as a frustrating influence is kenyon. mr. barrett could only walk into the room and fly into a passion; and this browning could have received with perfect equanimity. "but," he says, "if kenyon knows of the matter, i shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with his arm on my shoulder) of how i am ruining your social position, destroying your health, etc., etc." this touch is very suggestive of the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people as well as major pendennis. kenyon had indeed long been perfectly aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. in a conversation with elizabeth barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything between her sister and a certain captain cooke. on receiving a surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the house. elizabeth barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some meredithian comedy. the manner in which browning bore himself in this acute and necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his credit than anything else in his career. he never came out so well in all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act of deception. having made up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of god, after the manner of the cockney decadent. he was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. we all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power of giving dispensations to themselves. we feel that men without meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and end by being thoroughly anti-social. one of the best and most striking things to notice about robert browning is the fact that he did this thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave it really exceptional. it did not in the least degree break the rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. it did not in the least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. at a supreme crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and died conventional. it would be hard to say whether he appears the more thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed it to affect him. elizabeth barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost monotonous assertion of browning that this elopement was the only possible course of action. before she finally agreed, however, she did something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs almost to a more primitive age. the sullen system of medical seclusion to which she had long been subjected has already been described. the most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. on the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. in this she drove into regent's park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at the leaves and the sky. she then entered the cab again, drove home, and agreed to the elopement. this was possibly the best poem that she ever produced. browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of prudence and knowledge of human nature. early one morning in september miss barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became mrs. robert browning in a church in marylebone, and returned home again as if nothing had happened. in this arrangement browning showed some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a poet the most practical of all men. the incident was, in the nature of things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising effect of familiar scenes and faces. one trifling incident is worth mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of browning. it has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. browning would have felt the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had held. during the brief and most trying period between his actual marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he would not call at the house in wimpole street, because he would have been obliged to ask if miss barrett was disengaged. he was acting a lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a maidservant. here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to describe or to justify. browning's respectability was an older and more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of other men. if we wish to understand him, we must always remember that in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt inclined to do it ourselves. at length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. mrs. browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just successfully prevented from barking. before the end of the day in all probability barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled with browning to italy. they never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. they do not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a reconciliation. elizabeth barrett had discovered at last that her father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, even a man to be blamed. she knew to all intents and purposes that she had grown up in the house of a madman. chapter iv browning in italy the married pair went to pisa in , and moved soon afterwards to florence. of the life of the brownings in italy there is much perhaps to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said in the way of actual narrative. each of them had passed through the one incident of existence. just as elizabeth barrett's life had before her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. a succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous intellectual gossip. how browning and his wife rode far into the country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque figures of italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how browning was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising italian bards; how he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of garibaldi's hymn brought the knocking of the austrian police; these are the things of which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. the only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death of browning's mother in . it is well known that browning loved italy; that it was his adopted country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name of it would be found written on his heart. but the particular character of this love of browning for italy needs to be understood. there are thousands of educated europeans who love italy, who live in it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they are all united in this, that they regard italy as a dead place. it is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. there are rich and cultivated persons, particularly americans, who seem to think that they keep italy, as they might keep an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. if he could not have loved italy as a nation, he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. in everything on earth, from the middle ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such length in "mr. sludge the medium," he is interested in the life in things. he was interested in the life in italian art and in the life in italian politics. perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this matter is in browning's interest in art. he was immeasurably fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for the study of painting and sculpture. but his interest in these studies was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the italian cities. thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless lines of magnificent pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their diaries. but the way in which they affected browning is described very suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. she describes herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as fast as he made them. this is browning's interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done. every one who knows his admirable poems on painting--"fra lippo lippi" and "andrea del sarto" and "pictor ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours. sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual reader. an extreme case may be found in that of a lady i once knew who had merely read the title of "pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper," and thought that pacchiarotto was the name of a dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment of his duty. these browning poems do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint. they are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. browning was interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. there is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop with them. personally he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist. but there are, when all is said and done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. and these were the things that browning knew. he was, in other words, what is called an amateur. the word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. a man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. browning was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur. he tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed. the story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures by roasting brown paper over a candle. in precisely the same spirit of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in music. in his old age, he shows traces of being so bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an italian town. indeed, his own _ring and the book_ is merely a sublime detective story. he was in a hundred things this type of man; he was precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, of the admirable figure in stevenson's story who said, "i can play the fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite." the love of browning for italian art, therefore, was anything but an antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. we see the same phenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence and individuality of the country itself. italy to browning and his wife was not by any means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those cultivated english men and women who live in italy and enjoy and admire and despise it. to them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of western history, the very europe of europe. and they lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--the making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that they are still in the morning of the earth. before their eyes, with every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of the unification of italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of cavour. they lived in a time when affairs of state had almost the air of works of art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets. browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental and english politics a very strong liberal. this fact is not a mere detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of the authorship of the "eikon basilike" or the authenticity of the tichborne claimant. liberalism was so inevitably involved in the poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative conservative would feel that browning was bound to be a liberal. his mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and energy and in the ultimate utility of error. he held the great central liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest convictions. the world was going right he felt, most probably in his way, but certainly in its own way. the sonnet which he wrote in later years, entitled "why i am a liberal," expresses admirably this philosophical root of his politics. it asks in effect how he, who had found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. a liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. browning was a liberal in this sense. and just as the great liberal movement which followed the french revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. it attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems attached to the life of a man. the grounds were indeed much the same; no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or must remain useless to the world. men remembered how often barbarous tribes or strange and alien scriptures had been called in to revive the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. and this sense of the personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all other nations, did not involve in the case of these old liberals international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. but in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a scotchman as carlyle in love with germany, and so thorough an englishman as browning in love with italy. and while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find it difficult to realise or describe. we have seen in our own time a great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old _régime_. but the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of europe which survived, and for a time conquered, the revolution. the case against the church in italy in the time of pio nono was not the case which a rationalist would urge against the church of the time of st. louis, but diametrically the opposite case. against the mediæval church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the devotional side of the soul. against the church of pio nono the main thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. the same was true of the monarchical systems of prussia and austria and russia at this time. their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers who rode after charles i. or louis xiii. it was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. that was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the napoleon legend--that while napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the pessimism of europe, and erased the word "impossible." one does not need to be a bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the first empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of prussia and austria driven into battle with a cane. browning, as we have said, was in italy at the time of the break-up of one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, austria's hold in the north of italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the holy alliance had established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief would last until the day of judgment, though it is difficult to imagine what the holy alliance thought would happen then. but almost of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. in an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act symbols and become legends while they are alive. garibaldi in his red shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a shot at him. mazzini poured out upon europe a new mysticism of humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate jesuit of the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or a criminal. cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and picturesque than war itself. these men had nothing to do with an age of the impossible. they have passed, their theories along with them, as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. gordon was a possible exception. they were the last of the heroes. when browning was first living in italy, a telegram which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of his known sympathy with the italian liberals. it is almost impossible for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a small thing like that will affect a man. it was not so much the obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital moment. it was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on something personal and essentially free. tyranny like this is not the worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. it interferes with men not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. it may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a city like a mediæval ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. unmeaning and muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the massacres of september. and that was the nightmare of vexatious triviality which was lying over all the cities of italy that were ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of europe. the history of the time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--struggles about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of a journey, or the opening of a letter. and there can be little doubt that browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the imperial and ducal and papal systems of italy, which sometimes passed the necessities of liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its spirit. the life which he and his wife lived in italy was extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions under which one at least of them had always lain. they met and took delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting people of their time--ruskin, cardinal manning, and lord lytton. browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by the bedside of a third. it has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever separated mr. and mrs. browning was upon the question of spiritualism. that statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if it means that they never differed; that mr. browning never thought an _act of parliament_ good when mrs. browning thought it bad; that mr. browning never thought bread stale when mrs. browning thought it new. such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between two strong and independent forces. they differed, in truth, about a great many things, for example, about napoleon iii. whom mrs. browning regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the deserts of sir galahad, and whom browning with his emphatic liberal principles could never pardon for the _coup d'État_. if they differed on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. mrs. orr, in her excellent _life of browning_, states that the difficulty arose from mrs. browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and browning's absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. another writer who met them at this time says, "browning cannot believe, and mrs. browning cannot help believing." this theory, that browning's aversion to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been repeated. but it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with browning's character. he was the last man in the world to be intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. he had friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the french legitimism of de ripert-monclar to the republicanism of landor. intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. it is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "caliban" and the morality of "time's revenges." it is true that at this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a superstition against believing in ghosts. but, intellectually speaking, browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for that time. the fact was in all probability that browning's aversion to the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. it arose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromising dislike of what is called bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility. any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that browning disliked need only do two things. first, he should read the _memoirs_ of david home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom browning came in contact. these _memoirs_ constitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that browning ever wrote. the ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative. but the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage in which home describes mrs. browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. it is in this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of browning. he did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. the second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should cast an eye, is the record of the visit which mrs. browning insisted on making while on their honeymoon in paris to the house of george sand. browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of george sand which he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of home. the society was "of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship george sand, _à genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva." when we find that a man did not object to any number of jacobites or atheists, but objected to the french bohemian poets and to the early occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a social tone. the truth was that browning had a great many admirably philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his responsibilities towards his wife. he enjoyed being a husband. this is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be found apart from it. but, like all good feelings, it has its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. david home, the medium, came to florence about . mrs. browning undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour at first, and browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length forbade, the enterprise. he did not do so however until he had attended one _séance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event occurred, which is described in home's _memoirs_ with a gravity even more absurd than the incident. towards the end of the proceedings a wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering for some time, to move towards mrs. browning, and at length to alight upon her head. as the wreath was floating in her direction, her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. one would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, genuine or otherwise. but mr. home gravely asserts that it was generally believed that browning had crossed the room in the hope that the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism. the idea of the very conventional and somewhat bored robert browning running about the room after a wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. browning could be fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if mr. home's wreath had alighted on his head. next day, according to home's account, he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. what actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the account in home's _memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced browning to a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. but there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was that browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. there can be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. he knew his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to the purposes of men like home as to exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. like many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a borderland; and it is impossible to say that if browning had not interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended in an asylum. the whole of this incident is very characteristic of browning; but the real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some extent missed. when some seven years afterwards he produced "mr. sludge the medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. as we shall see when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of it. but what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a dislike of home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in spiritualism. it might, of course, imply a very firm and serious belief in it. as a matter of fact it did not imply this in browning, but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted the reasonableness of such things. home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. it is surely curious to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose and nameless energies of the universe. browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all probability quite open and unbiassed. his was a peculiarly hospitable intellect. if any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of gnostics in alexandria, or of heretical talmudists at antwerp, he would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have adopted them. but greek gnostics and antwerp jews do not dance round a man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. it was simply the stirring in browning of certain primal masculine feelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deep that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, there is always pain. browning did not like spiritualism to be mentioned for many years. robert browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. there are many who think this element of conventionality altogether regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a convention of the unconventional. but this hatred of the conventional element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do not remember the meaning of words. convention means only a coming together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a convention. every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections shall not be raised. the most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection. against the most exact and everyday drama that ever came out of norway it is still possible for the realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of strangers. against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. and in precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be conventional. unless he is describing an emotion which others share with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. if a poet really had an original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his feelings. poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. if men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. if, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. if a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. poetry can only express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of original sin. it is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins. all artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in matters of conduct. it is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of civilisation. just as an agreement between the dramatist and the audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the gentleman. browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. he delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. being by birth an englishman, he took pleasure in being an englishman; being by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient scruples and its everlasting boundaries. he was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a liberal, an englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. this must always be remembered as a general characteristic of browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. he exhibited it pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and after the escape of himself and his wife to italy. he seems to have forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. he showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a responsibility which had its practical side. he came finally and entirely out of his dreams. since he had himself enough money to live on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head day and night. but when the problem of the elopement arose he threw himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every kind of scheme for solidifying his position. he wrote to monckton milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a post in the british museum. "i will work like a horse," he said, with that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes it, is more poetical than all his poems. all his language in this matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. he offered to read for the bar, and probably began doing so. but all this vigorous and very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by elizabeth barrett. she declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. probably she was right and browning wrong, but it was an error which every man would desire to have made. one of the qualities again which make browning most charming, is the fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "if he is vain of anything," writes mrs. browning, "it is of my restored health." later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, "and i have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in nature." when a lady in italy said, on an occasion when browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a christian to his wife," browning was elated to an almost infantile degree. but there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects. one picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the brownings' life in italy is walter savage landor. browning found him living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. he had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. like an old roman senator, or like a gentleman of the southern states of america, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a jacobin to those above. the only person who appears to have been able to manage him and bring out his more agreeable side was browning. it is, by the way, one of the many hints of a certain element in browning which can only be described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who could get on with no one else. carlyle, who could not get a bitter taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was fond of browning. landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond of browning. these are things which speak more for a man than many people will understand. it is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. but when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual. men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. this general truth about browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there. browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by seymour kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of very generous conduct. he was fully repaid in his own mind for his trouble by the mere presence and friendship of landor, for whose quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. it is somewhat amusing and characteristic that mrs. browning did not share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of mr. landor, and expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. she writes, "dear, darling robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. a most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very affectionate to robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. what do you really say to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in latin alcaics against his wife and louis napoleon." one event alone could really end this endless life of the italian arcadia. that event happened on june , . robert browning's wife died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a characteristic touch) by the death of cavour. she died alone in the room with browning, and of what passed then, though much has been said, little should be. he, closing the door of that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw browning upon earth again but only a splendid surface. chapter v browning in later life browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. the two most intimate of these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed away in his presence as elizabeth had done. the other letters, which number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his bereavement are addressed to miss haworth and isa blagden. he left florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near dinard. then he returned to london and took up his residence in warwick crescent. naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of the intellectual. browning was now famous, _bells and pomegranates, men and women, christmas eve_, and _dramatis personæ_ had successively glorified his italian period. but he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more famous things. he has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement. in a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness:-- "picture frames white through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry polished and rough, sundry amazing busts in baked earth, (broken, providence be praised!) a wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web when reds and blues were indeed red and blue, now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet (since carpets constitute a cruel cost). * * * * * vulgarised horace for the use of schools, 'the life, death, miracles of saint somebody, saint somebody else, his miracles, death, and life'-- with this, one glance at the lettered back of which, and 'stall,' cried i; a _lira_ made it mine." this sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _débris_, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "this," which browning bought for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old latin record of the criminal case of guido franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife pompilia in the year . and this again, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _the ring and the book_. browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife's lifetime in italy. but the more he studied it, the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his _magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. then came the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine. "i mean to keep writing," he said, "whether i like it or not." and thus finally he took up the scheme of the franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the world to an affair of two or three characters. of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to its curious and original form of narration, i shall speak subsequently. but there is one peculiarity about the story which has more direct bearing on browning's life, and it appears singular that few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. this peculiarity is the extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which constituted the crisis and centre of browning's own life. nothing, properly speaking, ever happened to browning after his wife's death; and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth about his own greatest trial and hesitation. he himself had in this sense the same difficulty as caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the reward, but even without the name of virtue. he had, like caponsacchi, preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and honourable. he knew better than any man that there is little danger of men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility seeking it too often or indulging it too much. the conscientiousness of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the conscientious law-breaker. browning had once, for what he seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and evasion. such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. if he finds that necessity twice, he may, i think, be looked at with the beginning of a suspicion. to browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who is worthy to live. as has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be justified by success. if browning had taken his wife to paris, and she had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "how should i have borne me, please?" before and after this event his life was as tranquil and casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. this great moral of browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besides _the ring and the book_, and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole. it is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "the statue and the bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised morality. it deals, as every one knows, with a duke ferdinand and an elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the riccardi. the lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it were, waiting for each other. the objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly answered by browning himself. his case against the dilatory couple is not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. his case is that they exhibited no virtue. crime was frustrated in them by cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. the same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "youth and art," where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. "each life unfulfilled, you see; it hangs still, patchy and scrappy: we have not sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." and this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal drama. it is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on. probably critics have been misled by the fact that browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. the enormous scope and seriousness of _the ring and the book_ occupied browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in the winter of . just before it was published smith and elder brought out a uniform edition of all browning's works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and somewhat belated culmination of browning's literary fame. the years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing of _the ring and the book_, had been years of an almost feverish activity in that and many other ways. his travels had been restless and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of him--the life of what is called society. a man of a shallower and more sentimental type would have professed to find the life of dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and especially to a poet in mourning. but if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honourable about browning, it is the entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. he had the one great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. the life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial. to the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. the young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. a great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even disapproval of, this social frivolity of browning's. not one of these literary people would have been shocked if browning's interest in humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the wild west or a low tavern in paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are not human at all. humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. humanitarians of a more vivid type, the bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the quartier latin. but humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. for them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human. shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in his own native town and talking to the townsmen. browning was invited to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend that they bored him. in a letter belonging to this period of his life he describes his first dinner at one of the oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. it may be indeed that browning had a kind of second youth in this long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do that. of browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. he was a middle-sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. the beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. his hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time must have been very well represented by mr. g.f. watts's fine portrait in the national portrait gallery. the portrait bears one of the many testimonies which exist to mr. watts's grasp of the essential of character, for it is the only one of the portraits of browning in which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain-worker. he looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too scholarly to live a completely healthy life. his manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual eminence. lockhart said briefly, "i like browning; he isn't at all like a damned literary man." he was, according to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. the first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like. browning was one of the latter class. his volubility in speech had the same origin as his voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong humility. he cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people down or have wished to do so. for this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and even weakness that he had. he wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full sense was one. he remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a puritan, and a little too much of what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. one of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. on the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. he was not indeed, as we shall see when we come to study "sludge the medium," exactly prejudiced against spiritualism. but he was beyond all question stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. whether the medium home was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to conjecture. but in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. and even if we think that the moral atmosphere of home is that of a man of dubious character, we can still feel that browning might have achieved his purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. some traces again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a subconscious hostility to the roman church, or at least a less full comprehension of the grandeur of the latin religious civilisation than might have been expected of a man of browning's great imaginative tolerance. Æstheticism, bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of grub street and the latin quarter, he hated with a consuming hatred. he was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose white garments of the lounger in southern europe, they were in their own way as precise as a dress suit. this extra carefulness in all things he defended against the cant of bohemianism as the right attitude for the poet. when some one excused coarseness or negligence on the ground of genius, he said, "that is an error: noblesse oblige." browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. it never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. it is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. we all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. it does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that whitman is an obscene ranter or that stevenson is a mere trifler with style. it is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition. prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. with browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. but almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. he stands pre-eminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like any other material, in its samples. he had no kinship with those new and strange universalists of the type of tolstoi who praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have lived under, and all the ties they have known. he thought the world good because he had found so many things that were good in it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. he did not, like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found so many things in it that were bad. as has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and dangerous that underlay all the good humour of browning. if one of these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the better pleased. but if some of the prejudices that were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far removed from the shrill disapproval of carlyle and ruskin. it can only be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or presentable savage. the indecent fury which danced upon the bones of edward fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any one who had known much of browning's character or even of his work. some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of mrs. browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a _life_ founded upon them. they ought to have understood that browning would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must have thought he was mad. "what i suffer with the paws of these black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. again he writes: "think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those of her family, worthy of notice. it shall not be done if i can stop the scamp's knavery along with his breath." whether browning actually resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him to silence, probably from stupefaction. the same peculiarity ought, as i have said, to have been apparent to any one who knew anything of browning's literary work. a great number of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more or less impossible to give examples. suffice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that poets like swinburne (who seldom uses a gross word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral license into victorian poetry. what the non-conformist conscience has been doing to have passed browning is something difficult to imagine. but the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. the poet seems to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only speak of them in pothouse words. it would be idle, and perhaps undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used by his caponsacchi about the people who could imagine pompilia impure and by his shakespeare in "at the mermaid," about the claim of the byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity. in both cases browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that the mud of chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of sterne. herein again browning is close to the average man; and to do the average man justice, there is a great deal more of this browningesque hatred of byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many people suppose. such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began to grow upon the consciousness of the english literary world about this time. for the first time friendship grew between him and the other great men of his time. tennyson, for whom he then and always felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and along with him gladstone and francis palgrave. there began to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is unread. he was made a fellow of balliol in , and the homage of the great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part. he was unanimously elected lord rector of glasgow university in . he declined, owing to his deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the university of st. andrews. he was much at the english universities, was a friend of dr. jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to a university. the great universities would not let him alone, to their great credit, and he became a d.c.l. of cambridge in , and a d.c.l. of oxford in . when he received these honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly on his head as he passed under the gallery. some indignant intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "you are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless drolleries of the young men. indeed, there used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'filius terrae' he was called, whose business it was to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal." in this there are other and deeper things characteristic of browning besides his learning and humour. in discussing anything, he must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. even in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. the young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the representatives of the "filius terrae." but the years during which browning was thus reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the years were passing over him. on june , , his father had died, a man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom browning owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability mainly owe browning. in one of his closest friends, arabella barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone with browning. browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a dream which arabella had of her, in which she prophesied their meeting in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of elizabeth and arabella. his friend milsand, to whom _sordello_ was dedicated, died in . "i never knew," said browning, "or ever shall know, his like among men." but though both fame and a growing isolation indicated that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual output. in he produced _balaustion's adventure_, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _balaustion's adventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an english version of the alcestis of euripides, is an illustration of one of browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic admiration. those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others; and _balaustion's adventure_ is a monument of this fiery self-forgetfulness. it is penetrated with the passionate desire to render euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the songs of pippa and the last agony of guido. browning never put himself into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an excellent translation. in the uncouth philosophy of caliban, in the tangled ethics of sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most feather-headed lyric, browning was never more thoroughly browning than in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. this revived excitement in greek matters; "his passionate love of the greek language" continued in him thenceforward till his death. he published more than one poem on the drama of hellas. _aristophanes' apology_ came out in , and _the agamemnon of Æschylus_, another paraphrase, in . all three poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the writer has the literature of athens literally at his fingers' ends. he is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their frivolity and their slang; he knows not only athenian wisdom, but athenian folly; not only the beauty of greece, but even its vulgarity. in fact, a page of _aristophanes' apology_ is like a page of aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's treatise, with its load of jokes. in also appeared _prince hohenstiel-schwangau: saviour of society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all browning's apologetic monologues. the figure is, of course, intended for napoleon iii., whose empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. the saying has been often quoted that louis napoleon deceived europe twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman. it might be added that europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of browning's to give the man a platform and let him speak for himself. it is the apologia of a political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation. mankind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. we have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name of compromise. browning had to defend, or rather to interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged the montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a _régime_. he did these hideous things not so much that he might be able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able to do nothing for twenty years; and browning's contention, and a very plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could do. there is something peculiarly characteristic of browning in thus selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most prosaic kind of villain. we scarcely ever find in browning a defence of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for parochial morals. he was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of the outcast. he took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. he went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the pharisee. how little this desire of browning's, to look for a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms on _hohenstiel-schwangau_, which, says browning, "the editor of the _edinburgh review_ calls my eulogium on the second empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of england. it is just what i imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself." in appeared _red-cotton night-cap country_, which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest of browning's poems, is certainly one of the most magnificently browningesque. the origin of the name of the poem is probably well known. he was travelling along the normandy coast, and discovered what he called "meek, hitherto un-murrayed bathing-places, best loved of sea-coast-nook-full normandy!" miss thackeray, who was of the party, delighted browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "white cotton night-cap country." it was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction. the notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that browning in his heart loved better than _paradise lost_. some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the french journals in the year , and which had taken place in the same district. it is worth noting that browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. from _the ring and the book_ to _red-cotton night-cap country_ a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories. the story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier. and in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in _the ring and the book_. it almost looks at first sight as if browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid. but this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake. it was written in something which, for want of a more exact word, we must call one of the bitter moods of browning; but the bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes more than they deserved. in this poem these principles of weakness and evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of romanism, and the more sensual side of the french temperament. we must never forget what a great deal of the puritan there remained in browning to the end. this outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. it says in effect, "you call this a country of sleep, i call it a country of death. you call it 'white cotton night-cap country'; i call it 'red cotton night-cap country.'" shortly before this, in , he had published _fifine at the fair_, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. but cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that browning ever wrote. cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability. _fifine at the fair_, like _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, is one of browning's apologetic soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. this casuist, like all browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical. it is difficult to understand what particular connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even in a sensual fool. after _fifine at the fair_ appeared the _inn album_, in , a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after the _inn album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote, _of pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_, in . it is impossible to call the work poetry, and it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. its chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal energy of words. not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children. it ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath. one can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. this is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages:-- "long after the last of your number has ceased my front-court to encumber while, treading down rose and ranunculus, you _tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! troop, all of you man or homunculus, quick march! for xanthippe, my housemaid, if once on your pates she a souse made with what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, first comes to her hand--things were more amiss! i would not for worlds be your place in-- recipient of slops from the basin! you, jack-in-the-green, leaf-and-twiggishness won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" you can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the brute-force of language. in spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequalled. nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "fears and scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- "hush, i pray you! what if this friend happen to be--god." it is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary quality, sensationalism. the volume entitled _pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity--"at the mermaid," "house," and "shop." in spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to come thicker and faster. two were published in --_la saisiaz_, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _the two poets of croisic_. those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humour. another collection followed in , the first series of _dramatic idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "pheidippides" and "ivàn ivànovitch." upon its heels, in , came the second series of _dramatic idylls_, including "muléykeh" and "clive," possibly the two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality. _jocoseria_ did not appear till . it contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in the lyric of "never the time and the place," which we may call the most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over seventy. in the next year appeared _ferishtah's fancies_, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic images. here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of browning--his sense of the symbolism of material trifles. enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. it is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises browning among all other poets. other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. but it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "a bean stripe; also apple eating." three more years passed, and the last book which browning published in his lifetime was _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives--daniel bartoli, francis furini, gerard de lairesse, and charles avison. this extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterise browning even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality. apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. all these later poems are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. they are thoroughly characteristic of their author. but nothing in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things in the world, to re-write and improve "pauline," the boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before. here was a man covered with glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive victories. it is such things as these which give to browning an interest of personality which is far beyond the more interest of genius. it was of such things that elizabeth barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius was the least important thing about him. during all these later years, browning's life had been a quiet and regular one. he always spent the winter in italy and the summer in london, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the same time. he had by this time become far more of a public figure than he had ever been previously, both in england and italy. in , dr. furnivall and miss e.h. hickey founded the famous "browning society." he became president of the new "shakespeare society" and of the "wordsworth society." in , on the death of lord houghton, he accepted the post of foreign correspondent to the royal academy. when he moved to de vere gardens in , it began to be evident that he was slowly breaking up. he still dined out constantly; he still attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity and embarrassment. in a letter to mr. george bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole literary career: "i myself found many forgotten fields which have proved the richest of pastures." but despite his continued energy, his health was gradually growing worse. he was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement prolonged through a lifetime. in these closing years he began to feel more constantly the necessity for rest. he and his sister went to live at a little hotel in llangollen, and spent hours together talking and drinking tea on the lawn. he himself writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, "another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry sunday at the little church." for the first time, and in the last two or three years, he was really growing old. on one point he maintained always a tranquil and unvarying decision. the pessimistic school of poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popularity. but browning would not for one instant take the scorn of them out of his voice. "death, death, it is this harping on death that i despise so much. in fiction, in poetry, french as well as english, and i am told in american also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us. but what fools who talk thus! why, _amico mio_, you know as well as i, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. never say of me that i am dead." on august , , he set out once more for italy, the last of his innumerable voyages. during his last italian period he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature. the family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and browning would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. the old man could be seen continually in the lanes round asolo, peering into hedges and whistling for the lizards. this serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below. browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished edward fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of elizabeth barrett browning. browning immediately wrote the "lines to edward fitzgerald," and set the whole literary world in an uproar. the lines were bitter and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to reply. and yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy. the mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its forgotten fire. and the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. all that the old man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "i felt as if she had died yesterday." towards december of he moved to venice, where he fell ill. he took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he maintained that the animals were more sagacious. he asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. gradually, however, the talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, robert browning died on december , . the body was taken on board ship by the venice municipal guard, and received by the royal italian marines. he was buried in the poets' corner of westminster abbey, the choir singing his wife's poem, "he giveth his beloved sleep." on the day that he died _asolando_ was published. chapter vi browning as a literary artist mr. william sharp, in his _life_ of browning, quotes the remarks of another critic to the following effect: "the poet's processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." this is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which browning is treated. for what is the state of affairs? a man publishes a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. the critics read them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a remarkable philosopher and logician. they then proceed to examine his philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not logical, but "transcendental and inept." in other words, browning is first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he is to be a logician. it is just as if a man were to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of rockeries and flower-beds. as we find, after this manner, that browning does not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to what he himself professed to be--a poet. and if we study this seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. it is a gross and complete slander upon browning to say that his processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. they are nothing of the sort; if they were, browning could not be a good poet. the critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as "transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are not transcendental, must be inept. do the people who call one of browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of what they say? one is tempted to think that they know a scientific analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. the one supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an artistic statement means something entirely different, according to the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. the remark, let us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. but if we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the matter is quite different. if the sentence came at the beginning of a short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. if it were the last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some peculiar irony or triumph. can any one read browning's great monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising from its arrangement. take such an example as "caliban upon setebos," a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the creator of all things. then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over caliban's island, and the profane speculator falls flat upon his face-- "lo! 'lieth flat and loveth setebos! 'maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, will let those quails fly, will not eat this month one little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had occurred at the beginning of "caliban upon setebos." it does not mean the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from this is the curious fact that browning is an artist, and that consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their precision and analysis." no criticism of browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate artist. he may have failed as an artist, though i do not think so; that is quite a different matter. but it is one thing to say that a man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does not like his art, at least the author did. the general sentiment expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. it would be far nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other english poet who ever lived. he was always weaving and modelling and inventing new forms. among all his two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many different metres as there are different poems. the great english poets who are supposed to have cared more for form than browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had new ideas. browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than he tried to make a new form to express it. wordsworth and shelley were really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. nevertheless, the "ode on the intimations of immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "prometheus unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional greek lyrical drama. but if we study browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms. it is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. _the ring and the book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in literary method--the method of telling the same story several times and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several different and equally interesting stories. _pippa passes_, to take another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated figure. the invention of these things is not merely like the writing of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or the gothic arch. the poet who makes them does not merely create himself--he creates other poets. it is so in a degree long past enumeration with regard to browning's smaller poems. such a pious and horrible lyric as "the heretic's tragedy," for instance, is absolutely original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, mocking echoes indeed-- "and dipt of his wings in paris square, they bring him now to lie burned alive. _[and wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_-- we bring john now to be burned alive." a hundred instances might, of course, be given. milton's "sonnet on his blindness," or keats's "ode on a grecian urn," are both thoroughly original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such odes. but can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural and literary type as "fears and scruples," as "the householder," as "house" or "shop," as "nationality in drinks," as "sibrandus schafnaburgensis," as "my star," as "a portrait," as any of "ferishtah's fancies," as any of the "bad dreams." the thing which ought to be said about browning by those who do not enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have studied the form, and think it a bad form. if more people said things of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in clarity and common honesty. browning put himself before the world as a good poet. let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and there will be an end of the matter. there are many styles in art which perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. for instance, it would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of gothic to say that one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the belgian churches with bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his opinion, ugly. but surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it had no form. a man's actual feelings about it might be better expressed by saying that it had too much. to say that browning was merely a thinker because you think "caliban upon setebos" ugly, is precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. the truth about browning is not that he was indifferent to technical beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. there is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and unmeaning criticism. the usual way of criticising an author, particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. the correct thing to say about maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that really boisterous will to live which may be found in _martin chuzzlewit_. the right thing to say about _cyrano de bergerac_ is that it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in norway. it cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon the whole greatly under-rated. they are blamed for not doing, not only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. if we can show that browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written _in memoriam_ if he had tried. browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. they believe that what is ordinarily called the grotesque style of browning was a kind of necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel and profound ideas. but this is an entire mistake. what is called ugliness was to browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. for reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical use of the grotesque, it did so happen that browning's grotesque style was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and metaphysical view. but the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque of the nature of art for art's sake. here, for example, is a short distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish german jugs in which it is to be presumed tokay had been served to him. this is the whole poem, and a very good poem too-- "up jumped tokay on our table, like a pigmy castle-warder, dwarfish to see, but stout and able, arms and accoutrements all in order; and fierce he looked north, then, wheeling south blew with his bugle a challenge to drouth, cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, twisted his thumb in his red moustache, jingled his huge brass spurs together, tightened his waist with its buda sash, and then, with an impudence nought could abash, shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder, for twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: and so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, and dexter-hand on his haunch abutting, went the little man, sir ausbruch, strutting!" i suppose there are browning students in existence who would think that this poem contained something pregnant about the temperance question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic movement in germany. but surely to most of us it is sufficiently apparent that browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these preposterous german jugs. now before studying the real character of this browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised about browning's work. it is this--that it is absolutely necessary to remember that browning had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of the badness of his artistic aim. browning's style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. on this point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets. it is very little realised that the vast majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad poetry. the unfortunate wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor poems of byron and shelley and tennyson. now it is only just to browning that his more uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but treated simply as his failures. it is really true that such a line as "irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" is a very ugly and a very bad line. but it is quite equally true that tennyson's "and that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," is a very ugly and a very bad line. but people do not say that this proves that tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and metaphysician. they say that it is a bad example of tennyson's form; they do not say that it is a good example of tennyson's indifference to form. upon the whole, browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like spenser and keats, who seem to have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. but almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations of themselves. every now and then in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an american book of parodies. swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet-- "from the lilies and languors of virtue to the raptures and roses of vice," wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of proving that the swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters. or again, mr. rudyard kipling when he wrote the line-- "or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of american humour. this tendency is, of course, the result of the self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personæ_ and act perpetually in character. browning sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great deal too like himself. "will i widen thee out till thou turnest from margaret minnikin mou' by god's grace, to muckle-mouth meg in good earnest." this sort of thing is not to be defended in browning any more than in swinburne. but, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in browning to a vital æsthetic deficiency. in the case of swinburne, we all feel that the question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the swinburnian to have written the hymn to proserpine. in the same way, the essential issue about browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with byron, wordsworth, shelley, tennyson, and swinburne, sometimes wrote bad poetry, but whether in any other style except browning's you could have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such incomparable lyrics as "the patriot" or "the laboratory." the answer must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole justification of browning as an artist. the question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his functions as an artist? we have already agreed that his artistic originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque. it becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental elements in life? one of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an æsthetic variety. thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "the scenery round such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." to disparage scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite white, or an italian sky as quite blue. flatness is a sublime quality in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in others. in the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly used in order to disparage such writers as browning which do not in fact disparage, but merely describe them. one of the most distinguished of browning's biographers and critics says of him, for example, "he has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in striving after strength." to say that browning never tried to be rugged is to say that edgar allan poe never tried to be gloomy, or that mr. w.s. gilbert never tried to be extravagant. the whole issue depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. some poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. when we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. when we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine although it is twisted. when we see a mountain, we do not say that it is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after strength. now, to say that browning's poems, artistically considered, are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of the eternal harmonies. as the children of nature, we are akin not only to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the monstrous tropical birds. and it is to be repeated as the essential of the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. for example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. in the old ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse-- "he is either himsell a devil frae hell, or else his mother a witch maun be; i wadna have ridden that wan water for a' the gowd in christentie," is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as "there's a bower of roses by bendemeer stream, and the nightingale sings in it all the night long," is in another way. browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular kind of staccato music. the absurd notion that he had no sense of melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no melody in verse which is not an imitation of swinburne. to give a satisfactory idea of browning's rhythmic originality would be impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. but the essential point has been suggested. "they were purple of raiment and golden, filled full of thee, fiery with wine, thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, in marvellous chambers of thine," is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. this, for instance, has also a tune in it-- "i--'next poet.' no, my hearties, i nor am, nor fain would be! choose your chiefs and pick your parties, not one soul revolt to me! * * * * * which of you did i enable once to slip inside my breast, there to catalogue and label what i like least, what love best, hope and fear, believe and doubt of, seek and shun, respect, deride, who has right to make a rout of rarities he found inside?" this quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by. this, then, roughly is the main fact to remember about browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which can only be conveyed by that method. it is perfectly true, for instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of tennyson, such as-- "thou art the highest, and most human too" and "we needs must love the highest when we see it" would really be made the worse for being translated into browning. it would probably become "high's human; man loves best, best visible," and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. but it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment of browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist in "master hugues of saxe-gotha"-- "hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! down it dips, gone like a rocket. what, you want, do you, to come unawares, sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, and find a poor devil has ended his cares at the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? do i carry the moon in my pocket?" --it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and ran-- "what must i deem then that thou dreamest to find disjected bones adrift upon the stair thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that i pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?" is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the preposterous and grotesque original? in fact, we may see how unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in tennyson himself. the humorous passages in _the princess_, though often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. if browning had written the passage which opens _the princess_, descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. he would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal human energy. energy and joy, the father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. we should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of which mr. henley writes-- "praise the generous gods for giving, in this world of sin and strife, with some little time for living, unto each the joy of life," the thought that every wise man has when looking at a bank holiday crowd at margate. to ask why browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great deal deeper than it is possible to go. but it is worth while to suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art generally and in his art in particular. there is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood. the whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, german jugs, chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of mr. aubrey beardsley and the puns of robert browning. but in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live in the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in westminster abbey. men who live in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of callot. and the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way. browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate tradition of nature. the verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy like the toadstool. energy which disregards the standard of classical art is in nature as it is in browning. the same sense of the uproarious force in things which makes browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea. here, for example, we have a random instance from "the englishman in italy" of the way in which browning, when he was most browning, regarded physical nature. "and pitch down his basket before us, all trembling alive with pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; you touch the strange lumps, and mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner of horns and of humps, which only the fisher looks grave at." nature might mean flowers to wordsworth and grass to walt whitman, but to browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea. and just as these strange things meant to browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. when, in one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled with god as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. "the name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, the simplest of creations, just a sac that's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives and feels, and could do neither, we conclude, if simplified still further one degree." (sludge.) these bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the everlasting. there is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but which is definitely valuable in browning's poetry, and indeed in all poetry. to present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. it is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque. but we should all agree that if st. paul's cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it. if we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in his presence. when the author of the book of job insists upon the huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of wonder provoked by the grotesque. "canst thou play with him as with a bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable passage. the notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is curiously in the spirit of the humour of browning. but when it is clearly understood that browning's love of the fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a chinese potter might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a fault. he certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only just fit into each other like a chinese puzzle. probably it was only one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in details. he was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. he prided himself on having written _the ring and the book_, and he also prided himself on knowing good wine when he tasted it. he prided himself on re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided himself on such rhymes as the following in _pacchiarotto_:-- "the wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, by piping advice in one key-- that his pipe should play a prelude to something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, something not harsh but docile, man-liquid, not man-fossil." this writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of joke, and most probably browning considered it so himself. it has nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from "holy cross day":-- "give your first groan--compunction's at work; and soft! from a jew you mount to a turk. lo, micah--the self-same beard on chin he was four times already converted in!" this is the serious use of the grotesque. through it passion and philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. but the rhyming frenzy of browning has no particular relation even to the poems in which it occurs. it is not a dance to any measure; it can only be called the horse-play of literature. it may be noted, for example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of assonance. "the pied piper of hamelin," a poem written for children, and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which it is physically impossible for any one to say:-- "and, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice, if we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!" this queer trait in browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect artist in the use of the grotesque. but everywhere when we go a little below the surface in browning we find that there was something in him perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and simplicity. his mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made exactly like the ordinary mind. it was like a piece of strong wood with a knot in it. the quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under discussion is indeed one of the many things in which browning was more of an elizabethan than a victorian. he was like the elizabethans in their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and almost a frivolity. but there was nothing in which he was so thoroughly elizabethan, and even shakespearian, as in this fact, that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so. many great writers have contrived to be tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any great writer since the time of rabelais and the time of the elizabethans. in many of the comic scenes of shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages. in the elizabethan dramatists and in browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real hilarity. people must be very happy to be so easily amused. in the case of what is called browning's obscurity, the question is somewhat more difficult to handle. many people have supposed browning to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was profound. he was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each other. browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was expressing was profound or superficial. suppose, for example, that a person well read in english poetry but unacquainted with browning's style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:-- "hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats. nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup. nokes outdares stokes in azure feats-- both gorge. who fished the murex up? what porridge had john keats?" the individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. but the point of the matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious fact of life. the whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of tyre. the poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, and points out that hobbs, nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural comment:-- "... who fished the murex up? what porridge had john keats?" so that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. he is both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in a particular manner. the manner is as natural to him as a man's physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. here comes in the fundamental difference between browning and such a writer as george meredith, with whom the philistine satirist would so often in the matter of complexity class him. the works of george meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. they deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of these. but the great part of browning's actual sentiments, and almost all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and popular and eternal sentiments. meredith is really a singer producing strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate rhythm of the song he sings. browning is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech. or rather, to speak more strictly, browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity. if browning and george meredith were each describing the same act, they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely different. suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man to whom he had given the lie, meredith's description would refer to something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could not describe. it might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the object of the assault. he might write, "wainwood's 'men vary in veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. he felt the doors of his brain burst, and wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." meredith, in other words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental experiences. but browning might simply be describing the material incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description would run:-- "what then? 'you lie' and doormat below stairs takes bump from back." this is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. browning is not like meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. he is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story. many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality. but here again browning's work requires a somewhat more cautious and sympathetic analysis. there is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end. it is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. one of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. there is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. there is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. but in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange and unclassified artistic merits of browning. he was always trying experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. far more often he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. but whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce hunt after poetic novelty. he never became a conservative. the last book he published in his life-time, _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than _paracelsus_. this is the true light in which to regard browning as an artist. he had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. an admirable example can be found in that splendid poem "childe roland to the dark tower came." it is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but browning is not content with this. he insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. that sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. "if there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents were jealous else. what made those holes and rents in the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk all hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." this is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. it is the song of the beauty of refuse; and browning was the first to sing it. oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat browning as a science instead of a poet, "what does the poem of 'childe roland' mean?" the only genuine answer to this is, "what does anything mean?" does the earth mean nothing? do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? if it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing. chapter vii _the ring and the book_ when we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _the ring and the book_, the studying of a single matter from nine different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice what these stand-points are; what figures browning has selected as voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. one of the ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of browning, mr. augustine birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates in _the ring and the book_ will scarcely be very interesting to the ordinary reader. however that may be, there can be little doubt that a great number of the readers of browning think them beside the mark and adventitious. but it is exceedingly dangerous to say that anything in browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. we are apt to go on thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central pillar of the structure. in the successive monologues of his poem, browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a fact gets itself presented to the world. in every question there are partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the wrong side. but over and above these, there does exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by entirely inappropriate arguments. they do not know the real good that can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for the bad one. they are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of juris doctor bottinius and dominus hyacinthus de archangelis. these two men brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own cause. the introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic strokes in _the ring and the book_. we can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. suppose that a poet of the type of browning lived some centuries hence and found in some _cause célèbre_ of our day, such as the parnell commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _the ring and the book_. the first monologue, which would be called "half-london," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and sensible unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the nationalist movement in ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. the "otherhalf-london" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible home ruler, who thought that in the main nationalism was one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and stagnant problem. the "tertium quid" would be some detached intellectual, committed neither to nationalism nor to unionism, possibly mr. bernard shaw, who would make a very entertaining browning monologue. then of course would come the speeches of the great actors in the drama, the icy anger of parnell, the shuffling apologies of pigott. but we should feel that the record was incomplete without another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion of such a question. bottinius and hyacinthus de archangelis, the two cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact that parnell was a socialist or an anarchist, or an atheist or a roman catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the theory that lord salisbury hated parnell or was in league with him, or had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the world of reality. these are the kind of little touches for which we must always be on the look-out in browning. even if a digression, or a simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, let us wait a little and give it a chance. he very seldom wrote anything that did not mean a great deal. it is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. he may have intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air. these are the sensations with which the true browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of browning's critics and biographers about _the ring and the book_. that criticism was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity." now this remark shows at once that the critic does not know what _the ring and the book_ means. we feel about it as we should feel about a man who said that the plot of _tristram shandy_ was not well constructed, or that the women in rossetti's pictures did not look useful and industrious. a man who has missed the fact that _tristram shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read _tristram shandy_ at all. the man who objects to the rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all. and any one who objects to browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. the essence of _the ring and the book_ is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things. the supreme difference that divides _the ring and the book_ from all the great poems of similar length and largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about affairs commonly called important, and _the ring and the book_ is about an affair commonly called contemptible. homer says, "i will show you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." the author of the book of job says, "i will show you the relations between man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of god out of a whirlwind." virgil says, "i will show you the relations of man to heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the founding of the most wonderful city in the world." dante says, "i will show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as i have heard, the roaring of the mills of god." milton says, "i will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the first twilight of time." browning says, "i will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty italian book of criminal trials from which i select one of the meanest and most completely forgotten." until we have realised this fundamental idea in _the ring and the book_ all criticism is misleading. in this browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. the characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is the apotheosis of the insignificant. whether it be the school of poetry which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. maeterlinck stricken still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out of a window at night; zola filling note-books with the medical significance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of his appetite; whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac; mr. george gissing lingering fondly over the third-class ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; george meredith seeing a soul's tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; mr. bernard shaw filling three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant. significance is to them a wild thing that may leap upon them from any hiding-place. they have all become terribly impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of small things. their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes. this tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was one man in english literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was robert browning. when browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the tennysonian poet. the tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession. sane as he was, this one feeling might have driven him to a condition not far from madness. any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with a story. there was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind. a human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came forward with equally aggressive clearness. it may be repeated, that if ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would have been through this turbulent democracy of things. if he looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _arabian nights_, to send up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow the earth, like the tree of knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a scamper along the road to the end of the world. any one who has read browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude which could not have been found in any more usual example. thus, for instance, _prince hohenstiel--schwangau_ explains the psychological meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to connect two separate blots that were already there. this queer example is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of man. i have no doubt whatever that browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea. it is therefore the very essence of browning's genius, and the very essence of _the ring and the book_, that it should be the enormous multiplication of a small theme. it is the extreme of idle criticism to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sordid story may contain. when once this is realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work. it explains, for example, browning's detailed and picturesque account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed latin. the more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. it explains again the strictness with which browning adhered to the facts of the forgotten intrigue. he was playing the game of seeing how much was really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. to have introduced large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _the ring and the book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness of life by taking as a text a poor story. it pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments--the great compliment which monarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almost at random. but this is only the first half of the claim of _the ring and the book_ to be the typical epic of modern times. the second half of that claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _the ring and the book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detective story. its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre of spiritual guilt. but it has exactly the same kind of exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it is. but the element which is important, and which now requires pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. in order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some little way in literary history. i do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics in sir francis palgrave's _golden treasury_. however that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner of looking at things. the first is goldsmith's almost too well known "when lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy? what art can wash her guilt away?" immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of note, the voice of burns:-- "ye banks and braes o' bonnie doon, how can ye bloom sae fair? how can ye chant, ye little birds, and i sae fu' of care? thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, that sings upon the bough, thou minds me of the happy days when my fause love was true." a man might read those two poems a great many times without happening to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. and the whole difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and burns's words are spoken in that situation. in the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change of which burns was in many ways the beginning, of which browning, in a manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old historic idea of what a poet was. the poet, the _vates_, was the supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the same word, either a spectator or a seer. he took a situation, such as the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he gave, as goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the outside. then, as in the case of _the golden treasury_, he has no sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the general rule. no one, for example, but a person who knew something of the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird." we find and could find no such touch in goldsmith. we have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the _vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. now browning, as he appears in _the ring and the book_, represents the attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that goldsmith states it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional experiences, such as that rendered by burns. browning, like goldsmith, seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. goldsmith stands apart from all the passions of the case, and browning includes them all. if browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case like that of the deserted lady by the banks of doon, he would not touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as burns sang it, but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. a lyric or a soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. we should be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. all these characters in the story, browning would realise from their own emotional point of view before he gave judgment. the poet in his ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men halters and haloes; browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he gives them voices. this is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. here then we have the second great respect in which _the ring and the book_ is the great epic of the age. it is the great epic of the age, because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view. no one ever lived who had not a little more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely to say for him. it is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and moral value of the characters. suppose, for example, that homer had written the _odyssey_ on the principle of _the ring and the book_, how disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from the point of view of antinous! without contradicting a single material fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were dealing with the same place and people. the calm face of penelope would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face changing in a dream. she would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. or, again, if we had the story of the fall of king arthur told from the stand-point of mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of high-placed paladins like lancelot and tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. it might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that ulysses was really right and arthur was really right, just as browning makes it ultimately appear that pompilia was really right. but any one can see the enormous difference in scope and difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical and disturbing as our imaginary defence of antinous and apologia of mordred. one of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and social, which is represented by _the ring and the book_. it is the step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and disadvantages, to let everybody talk. the poet of the old epic is the poet who had learnt to speak; browning in the new epic is the poet who has learnt to listen. this listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn. _the ring and the book_ is the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. it is the epic of free speech. free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. he takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. he considers the calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in relation to social phenomena. we forget that the earth is a star, and we forget that free speech is a paradox. it is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. it is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. the theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. it is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to poetry. he perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. he saw that the truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the custom of comic men to take themselves. and in this browning is beyond all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable in the aesthetes of , and the decadent of , has its ultimate source in browning's great conception that every one's point of view is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of view. he is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen goods. but browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a chasm in another equally important point. he held that it is necessary to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of it. but he held that there was a truth to discover. he held that justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a delusion. he held, in other words, the true browning doctrine, that in a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the nature of things wrong. browning's conception of the universe can hardly be better expressed than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went to visit an elephant. one of them seized its trunk, and asserted that an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. in the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. this, as i have said, is the whole theology and philosophy of browning. but he differs from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there all the time. the blind men formed mistaken theories because an elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. and browning firmly believed that the universe was a thing with a very curious shape indeed. no blind poet could even imagine an elephant without experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of god and not die. but there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. to the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. we are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and serpents without reason and without result. chapter viii the philosophy of browning the great fault of most of the appreciation of browning lies in the fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie in what is called "the message of browning," or "the teaching of browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of browning. now browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for parliament. he did not hesitate to express these opinions any more than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. for example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the intellectual basis of christianity. those opinions were very striking and very solid, as everything was which came out of browning's mind. his two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two comparatively parallel phrases. the first was what may be called the hope which lies in the imperfection of man. the characteristic poem of "old pictures in florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg and another eye. the poem suggests admirably that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be greater than the whole. and from this browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life. for nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." in other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. and browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. this then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of browning: the hope that lies in the imperfection of man. the second of the great browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. it can only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of god. that is to say, that browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. he held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have provoked the envy of the almighty. if man has self-sacrifice and god has none, then man has in the universe a secret and blasphemous superiority. and this tremendous story of a divine jealousy browning reads into the story of the crucifixion. if the creator had not been crucified he would not have been as great as thousands of wretched fanatics among his own creatures. it is needless to insist upon this point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be referred to "saul." but these are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of browning which i have ventured to characterise roughly as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of god. they are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. but about them in connection with browning there nevertheless remains something to be added. browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist. his theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. his theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies god's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good argument for optimism. but any one will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about browning who imagines that his optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. because he had a strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the incompleteness of man and the sacrifice of omnipotence. but these doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. it is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no one can be argued into happiness. browning's optimism was not founded on opinions which were the work of browning, but on life which was the work of god. one of browning's most celebrated biographers has said that something of browning's theology must be put down to his possession of a good digestion. the remark was, of course, like all remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of browning's faith. but if we examine the matter with somewhat greater care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that faith. nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his digestion. he is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all about it. nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. i cannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a good body--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the first flower of spring. but there is about digestion this peculiarity throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. we should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his boots if we meant that he had really no boots. but we do speak of a man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack of digestion. in the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's nerves. if any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous manner. and as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence itself in the eyes of browning and all the great optimists is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong. he held himself as free to draw his inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning or the gift of fellowship. but he held that such gifts were in life innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of things. browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or disillusioning experience. an old gentleman rebuking a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of experience. if he really wished to be a type of experience he would climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity of colour. he did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. he rather used it in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at revivalist meetings. in the salvation army a man's experiences mean his experiences of the mercy of god, and to browning the meaning was much the same. but the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with experiences of prayer and praise; browning's dealt pre-eminently with what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. and this quality of browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is also a very typical quality. browning's optimism is of that ultimate and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things. if a man had gone up to browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "do you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been. if he had been for the moment under the influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he would have said, "existence is justified by its manifest design, its manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "existence is justified by its completeness." if, on the other hand, he had been influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have said, "existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," or, in other words, "existence is justified by its incompleteness." but if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question "is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "crimson toadstools in hampshire." some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. to his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope was traced to disorder. but to browning himself hope was traced to something like red toadstools. his mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. with him the great concrete experiences which god made always come first; his own deductions and speculations about them always second. and in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. one of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual secret of browning's optimism is mr. santayana in his most interesting book _interpretations of poetry and religion_. he, in contradistinction to the vast mass of browning's admirers, had discovered what was the real root virtue of browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. he describes the poetry of browning most truly as the poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and indivisible emotions. "for the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal goal." whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. it might, perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few feelings and think very little about those they have. it is when we have grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that sleep in the depths of us. thus it is that the literature of our day has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become more primeval as the world grows older, until whitman writes huge and chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, and maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in the dark. thus, mr. santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the browning critics. he has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is that repels him in browning, and he has discovered the fault which none of browning's opponents have discovered. and in this he has discovered the merit which none of browning's admirers have discovered. whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, mr. santayana is perfectly right. the whole of browning's poetry does rest upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so does the whole of every one else's poetry. poetry deals entirely with those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate despots of existence. poetry presents things as they are to our emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any argument, however conclusive. if love is in truth a glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. if bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. and here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity. the practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of man. ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives. some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. but all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful. if poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness. and the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the tivoli. poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. now the supreme value of browning as an optimist lies in this that we have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with existence. if the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if possible a little more so. he is a great poet of human joy for precisely the reason of which mr. santayana complains: that his happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. he is something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. this happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own way. he does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in which most poets find felicity. he finds much of it in those matters in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. he is to a considerable extent the poet of towns. "do you care for nature much?" a friend of his asked him. "yes, a great deal," he said, "but for human beings a great deal more." nature, with its splendid and soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the essential worthiness of things. there are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. the speciality of browning is rather that he would have been quieted and exalted by the waggonette. to browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be found in the faces in the street. to him they were all the masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed indian god of nature. each one of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes. each one of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance. the sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses. he was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity. he did not love humanity but men. his sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic. it would have been to him like playing four hundred beautiful airs at once. the mixture would not combine all, it would lose all. browning believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of god. each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions. in the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man sir charles gavan duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting anecdote about browning, the point of which appears to have attracted very little attention. duffy was dining with browning and john forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own adherence to the roman catholic faith, when forster remarked, half jestingly, that he did not suppose that browning would like him any the better for that. browning would seem to have opened his eyes with some astonishment. he immediately asked why forster should suppose him hostile to the roman church. forster and duffy replied almost simultaneously, by referring to "bishop blougram's apology," which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on cardinal wiseman. "certainly," replied browning cheerfully, "i intended it for cardinal wiseman, but i don't consider it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it." this is the real truth which lies at the heart of what may be called the great sophistical monologues which browning wrote in later years. they are not satires or attacks upon their subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. they are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can be said for the persons with whom they deal. but very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own characters. the real defence, the defence which belongs to the day of judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. one of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted. we might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he disapproved. we might touch the life of many dissolute public men with pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the history of their sins. but we should throw the world into an uproar if we hinted that they had any. thus the decencies of civilisation do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him. browning, in such poems as "bishop blougram's apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel. this is one typical side of the real optimism of browning. and there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. there is little danger that men will desire to excuse their souls before god by presenting themselves before men as such snobs as bishop blougram, or such dastards as sludge the medium. there is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of god. it is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by such a generalisation as the above. browning's was a simple character, and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. probably in a great many cases, the original impulse which led browning to plan a soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first charcoal sketch of blougram was a caricature of a priest. browning, as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. but as he worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end would come the full revelation, and browning would stand up in the man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. however this may be, it is worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. when robert browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with the spiritualist home, it is generally and correctly stated that he gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied in "mr. sludge the medium." the statement so often made, particularly in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that browning himself is the original of the interlocutor and exposer of sludge, is of course merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has suffered more than browning despite his students and societies. the man to whom sludge addresses his confession is a mr. hiram h. horsfall, an american, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more than once suggested, something of a fool. nor is there the smallest reason to suppose that sludge considered as an individual bears any particular resemblance to home considered as an individual. but without doubt "mr. sludge the medium" is a general statement of the view of spiritualism at which browning had arrived from his acquaintance with home and home's circle. and about that view of spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. the poem, appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. the spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of his own wife. the sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of magic. which of these two parties was right about the question of attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary to discuss. for the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and none of the students of browning seem to have noticed, is that "mr. sludge the medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. it would be a great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it a justification of spiritualism. the whole essence of browning's method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of browning's method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "mr. sludge the medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. but so, when we have comprehended browning's spirit, the fact will be found to be. the general idea is that browning must have intended "sludge" for an attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. to regard this deduction as sound is to misunderstand browning at the very start of every poem that he ever wrote. there is nothing that the man loved more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a speciality of browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. in his poetry praise and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. now what, as a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of "sludge"? the climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. sludge the medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or palliation which will leave his moral character intact. he is therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his dupe, but to himself. he excuses himself for the earlier stages of the trickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth and fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. there are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the isthmus of panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the existence of north america. people of this kind quite consistently think sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. it may be remembered that they thought the same thing of newman. it is actually supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. this tendency to casuistry in browning's monologues has done much towards establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which has done him so much harm. but casuistry in this sense is not a cold and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. to know what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the remotest desert and the darkest incognito. this is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood raised in "sludge the medium." to say that it is sometimes difficult to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. to think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in the colours of the rainbow. it is really difficult to decide when we come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is permissible to create an illusion. a standing example, for instance, is the case of the fairy-tales. we think a father entirely pure and benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. we should consider that he lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. again, few people would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. the reason of this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play the violin. no one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. and when a man like sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny his right to be heard. we must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the sludge self-analysis. he begins, as we have said, by urging a general excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. so far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. sludge might indeed find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of how true were the tales told about conservatives in an exclusive circle of radicals, or the stories told about radicals in a circle of indignant conservatives. but after this general excuse, sludge goes on to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. he professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial slips of making plato write greek in naughts and crosses. "as i fear, sir, he sometimes used to do before i found the useful book that knows." it would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome personal conceit, than sludge the medium. he confesses not only fraud, but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even than fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. and then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. he says in effect: "now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that i have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that i have practised, now that i stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now i tell you with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that i believe that there is something in spiritualism. in the course of a thousand conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, i have discovered that there is really something in this matter that neither i nor any other man understands. i am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, but i am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. i have seen too much for that." this is the confession of faith of mr. sludge the medium. it would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and presented in a more impressive manner. sludge is a witness to his faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more impressively. they testified to their religion even after they had lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. sludge testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his honour. it may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is the pivot of the poem. the avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:-- "now for it, then! will you believe me, though? you've heard what i confess: i don't unsay a single word: i cheated when i could, rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work, wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match, and all the rest; believe that: believe this, by the same token, though it seem to set the crooked straight again, unsay the said, stick up what i've knocked down; i can't help that, it's truth! i somehow vomit truth to-day. this trade of mine--i don't know, can't be sure but there was something in it, tricks and all!" it is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack on spiritualism. to miss that climax is like missing the last sentence in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _othello_ into the middle of the play. either the whole poem of "sludge the medium" means nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that some real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. one curious theory which is common to most browning critics is that sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of mr. horsfall, he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. surely this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. a man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. for let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. a really accomplished impostor is the most wretched of geniuses; he is a napoleon on a desert island. a man might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. and in the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that part of himself which exists in every man--that part which does believe in, and value, and worship something. this he would fling in his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given before--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. but surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, like a villain in the worst parts of dickens. the moment the danger was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. a man in such a case would do exactly as sludge does. he would declare his own shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what he had done, say something like this:-- "r-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! cowardly scamp! i only wish i dared burn down the house and spoil your sniggering!" and so on, and so on. he would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in browning. but it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second outburst than in the first. whence came this extraordinary theory that a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? the truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and coarse speaking will seldom do it. when we have grasped this point about "sludge the medium," we have grasped the key to the whole series of browning's casuistical monologues--_bishop blaugram's apology, prince hohenstiel-schwangau, fra lippo lippi, fifine at the fair, aristophanes' apology_, and several of the monologues in _the ring and the book_. they are all, without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. "for blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to tell lies. if a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that we require to know. if any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of this general idea in browning's monologues, he may be recommended to notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. as a whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even brutal english. browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so fully and extravagantly indulged. this, like a great many other things for which browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly appropriate to the theme. a vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. but the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing. browning does not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in the english language into the mouths of such slaves as sludge and guido franceschini. take, for the sake of example, "bishop blougram's apology." the poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. it is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician grossness of a grand dinner-party _à deux_. it has many touches of an almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible name of gigadibs. the bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. we cannot establish ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. faith itself is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. then comes the passage:-- "just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, a chorus ending from euripides,-- and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears as old and new at once as nature's self, to rap and knock and enter in our soul, take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- the grand perhaps!" nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the mouth of pompilia, or rabbi ben ezra. it is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over the comfortable wine and the cigars. along with this tendency to poetry among browning's knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. these loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to god. it may seem strange at first sight that those who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the indulgence of divine perfection. thus sludge is certain that his life of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by god. thus bishop blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method that could unite him with god. thus prince hohenstiel-schwangau is certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of god. every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the absolute. to many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. but, in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less dangerous than its opposite. every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends of god. the evil wrought by this mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. the crimes of the devil who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes of the devil who thinks himself of no value. with browning's knaves we have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak poetry. we are talking to a peevish and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. and suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of god, uttering his everlasting soliloquy. index a _agamemnon of aeschylus, the_, . alliance, the holy, . "andrea del sarto," . _aristophanes' apology_, , . arnold, matthew, , , . _asolando_, . asolo (italy), , . "at the mermaid," . austria, , . b "bad dreams," . _balaustion's adventure_, - . barrett, arabella, , . barrett, edward moulton, _seq._, , , , , . beardsley, mr. aubrey, . _bells and pomegranates_, . "ben ezra," , . birrell, mr. augustine, . "bishop blougram," , . _bishop blougram's apology_, , , , . _blot on the 'scutcheon, a_, . boyd, mr., . browning, robert: birth and family history, ; theories as to his descent, - ; a typical englishman of the middle class, ; his immediate ancestors, _seq._; education, ; boyhood and youth, ; first poems, _incondita_, ; romantic spirit, ; publication of _pauline_, ; friendship with literary men, ; _paracelsus_, ; introduction to literary world, ; his earliest admirers, ; friendship with carlyle, ; _strafford_, ; _sordello_, ; _pippa passes_, ; _dramatic lyrics_, ; _the return of the druses_, ; _a blot on the 'scutcheon_, ; correspondence with elizabeth barrett, _seq._; their first meeting, ; marriage and elopement, , ; life in italy, _seq._; love of italy, , _seq._; sympathy with italian revolution, ; attitude towards spiritualism, _seq._, , - ; death of his wife, ; returns to england, ; _the ring and the book_, ; culmination of his literary fame, , ; life in society, ; elected fellow of balliol, ; honoured by the great universities, ; _balaustion's adventure_, - ; _aristophanes' apology_, ; _the agamemnon of aeschylus_, ; _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, ; _red-cotton night-cap country_, ; _fifine at the fair_, ; _the inn album_, ; _pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_, ; _la saisiaz_, ; _the two poets of croisic_, ; _dramatic idylls_, ; _jocoseria_, ; _ferishtah's fancies_, ; _parleyings with certain people of importance in their day_, ; accepts post of foreign correspondent to the royal academy, ; goes to llangollen with his sister, ; last journey to italy, ; death at venice, ; publication of _asolando_, ; his conversation, ; vanity, , ; faults and virtues, , ; his interest in art, _seq._; his varied accomplishments, - ; personality and presence, , , _seq._; his prejudices, - ; his occasional coarseness, ; politics, _seq._; browning as a father, ; as dramatist, ; as a literary artist, _seq._; his use of the grotesque, , , , _seq._; his failures, ; artistic originality, , , ; keen sense of melody and rhythm, _seq._; ingenuity in rhyming, ; his buffoonery, ; obscurity, _seq._; his conception of the universe, ; philosophy, _seq._; optimism, _seq._; his love poetry, ; his knaves, , - ; the key to his casuistical monologues, . _browning, life of_ (mrs. orr), . browning, robert (father of the poet), , . browning, mrs., _née_ wiedermann (mother), , . browning, anna (sister), , . browning, elizabeth barrett (wife), _seq._, - , , , , , , . browning society, . burns, robert, - . byron, , , , . byronism, , . c "caliban," , . "caliban upon setebos," , , . camberwell, , , . "caponsacchi," . carlyle, thomas, , , , , , , , . carlyle, mrs., . "cavalier tunes," . cavour, , , . charles i., , . chaucer, . "childe roland to the dark tower came," . _christmas eve_, . church in italy, the, . "clive," . clough, arthur hugh, . _colombe's birthday_, . corelli, miss marie, . cromwell, oliver, . d darwin, , . dickens, . "djabal," , . domett, alfred, . "dominus hyacinthus de archangelis," . _dramatic idylls_, . _dramatic lyrics_, - . _dramatis personæ_, . duffy, sir charles gavan, , . e _edinburgh review_, . "englishman in italy, the," . f "fears and scruples," , . "ferishtah's fancies," . _fifine at the fair_, , , , , . fitzgerald, edward, , . _flight of the duchess, the_, . florence, , . forster, john, . foster, john, , . fox, mr. johnson, . fox, mrs. bridell, . "fra lippo,", . _fra lippo lippi_, , . french revolution, . furnivall, dr., , . g "garden fancies," . garibaldi, , . gilbert, w.s., . gissing, mr. george, . gladstone, . _golden treasury_ (palgrave), . goldsmith, , . gordon, general, . "guido franceschini," , , . h henley, mr., . "heretic's tragedy, the," . hickey, miss e.h., . "holy cross day," . home, david (spiritualist), - , , , . home, david, _memoirs_ of, _seq._ horne, . houghton, lord, . "house," . "householder, the," . "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," . _hudibras_ (butler), . hugo, victor, . hunt, leigh, . i _incondita_, . _inn album, the_, . _instans tyrannus_, . italy, _seq._ italian revolution, _seq._ "ivàn ivànovitch," . j jameson, mrs., . jerrold, douglas, . _jocoseria_, . jowett, dr., . _julius cæsar_ (shakespeare), . "juris doctor bottinius," . k keats, , , , , . kenyon, mr., , , - , , . _king victor and king charles_, . kipling, rudyard, . kirkup, seymour, . l _l'aiglon_, . "laboratory, the," , . landor, , , , - . _la saisiaz_, . _letters, the browning_, . liberalism, . "lines to edward fitzgerald," . llangollen, . lockhart, . "lost leader, the," . "lover's quarrel, a," . "luigi," . lytton, lord (novelist), . m macready, , , . maeterlinck, , . manning, cardinal, . mary queen of scots, . "master hugues of saxe-gotha," . "may and death." . mazzini, . _men and women_, . meredith, george, , . mill, john stuart, , . milsand, . milton, . monckton-milnes, , . _mr. sludge the medium_, , , , - . "muléykeh," . "my star," . n "nationality in drinks," , . napoleon, , . napoleon iii., , , . "never the time and the place," . newman, cardinal, . norwood, . o "ode on the intimations of immortality" (wordsworth), . "ode on a grecian urn" (keats), . "old masters in florence," . "one word more," . orr, mrs., . p _pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper_, , , . _paracelsus_, , , , , , . "paracelsus," , . painting, poems on, . palgrave, francis, . paris, . _parleyings with certain persons of importance in their day_, , , . _pauline_, , , , , . "pheidippides," . phelps (actor), . "pictor ignotus," . "pied piper of hamelin, the," . "pippa," , . _pippa passes_, , , , , . pisa, . pius ix., church under, . plato, , . poe, edgar allan, . poetry, pessimistic school of, . "pompilia," . pope, , , . "portrait, a," . _prince hohenstiel-schwangau_, - . _princess, the_ (tennyson), . "prometheus unbound" (shelley), . prussia, , . puritans, . pym, , . r "rabbi ben ezra," . _red-cotton night-cap country_, - . _return of the druses, the_, - . revolution, the french, ; italian, . _ring and the book, the_, , , , , , - . ripert-monclar, comte de, , . roman church, , , . rossetti, . royalists, . ruskin, , , , , . russia, . s sand, george, , . santayana's, mr., _interpretations of poetry and religion_, - . "sebald," . shakespeare, , . shakespeare society, . sharp, mr. william, . shaw, mr. bernard, . shelley, , , , , , , , . "shop," . "sibrandus schafnaburgensis," . silverthorne (browning's cousin), . "sludge," , , , , . smith, elder (publishers), . "soliloquy of the spanish cloister, the," . "sonnets from the portuguese," . _sordello_, , , . speech, free, . spenser, . spiritualism, , , , . "statue and the bust, the," . sterne, . stevenson, robert louis, , . _straford_, _seq._, . "stafford," , , . swinburne, , , , . t _tait's magazine_, . talfourd, sergeant, . tennyson, , , , , , , , . thackeray, miss, . "through the metidja to abd-el-kadr," . _time's revenges_, , . tolstoi, . _tristram shandy_ (sterne), . _two poets of croisic, the_, . u university college, . "up jumped tokay" (poem quoted), . v venice, . victor of sardinia, king, . vogler, abt, . w _water babies_ (kingsley), . watts, mr. g.f., . whitman, walt, , , , , , . "why i am a liberal" (sonnet), . wiedermann, william, . wiseman, cardinal, . wimbledon common, . wordsworth, , , , . wordsworth society, . y "youth and art," , . z zola, . * * * * * english men of letters. new series. _crown vo. gilt tops. flat backs. s. net each._ george eliot. by sir leslie stephen, k.c.b. hazlitt. by augustine birrell, k.c. matthew arnold. by herbert w. paul. ruskin. by frederic harrison. tennyson. by sir alfred lyall. richardson. by austin dobson. browning. by g.k. chesterton. crabbe. by the rev. canon ainger. jane austen. by the rev. canon beeching. hobbes. by sir leslie stephen, k.c.b. adam smith. by francis w. hirst. sydney smith. by george w.e. russell. fanny burney. by austin dobson. jeremy taylor. by edmund gosse. andrew marvell. by augustine birrell, k.c. dante gabriel rossetti. by a.c. benson. maria edgeworth. by the hon. emily lawless. mrs. gaskell. by clement shorter. thomas moore. by stephen gwynn. re-issue of the original series _library edition. uniform with the above. s. net each._ addison. by w.j. courthope. bacon. by dean church. bentley. by sir richard jebb. bunyan. by j.a. froude. burke. by john morley. burns. by principal shairp. byron. by professor nichol. carlyle. by professor nichol. chaucer. by dr. a.w. ward. coleridge. by h.d. traill. cowper. by goldwin smith. defoe. by w. minto. dequincey. by prof. masson. dickens. by dr. a.w. ward. dryden. by prof. saintsbury. fielding. by austin dobson. gibbon. by j.c. morison. goldsmith. by w. black. gray. by edmund gosse. hawthorne. by henry james. hume. by prof. huxley, f.r.s. johnson. by sir leslie stephen, k.c.b. keats. by sidney colvin. lamb, charles. by canon ainger. landor. by sidney colvin. locke. by thomas fowler. macaulay. by j.c. morison. milton. by mark pattison. pope. by sir leslie stephen, k.c.b. scott. by r.h. hutton. shelley. by j.a. symonds. sheridan. by mrs. oliphant. sidney. by j.a. symonds. southey. by prof. dowden. spenser. by dean church. sterne. by h.d. traill. swift. by sir leslie stephen, k.c.b. thackeray. by anthony trollope. wordsworth. by f.w.h. myers. macmillan and co., ltd., london. * * * * * english men of action series. crown vo. cloth. with portraits. s. d. each. campbell (colin). by archibald forbes. clive. by sir charles wilson. cook (captain). by sir walter besant. dampier. by w. clark russell. drake. by julian corbett. dundonald. by the hon. j.w. fortescue. gordon (general). by sir w. butler. hastings (warren). by sir a. lyall. havelock (sir henry). by a. forbes. henry v. by the rev. a.j. church. lawrence (lord). by sir richard temple. livingstone. by thomas hughes. monk. by julian corbett. montrose. by mowbray morris. napier (sir charles). by colonel sir w. butler. nelson. by prof. j.k. laughton. peterborough. by w. stebbing. rodney. by david hannay. strafford. by h.d. traill. warwick, the king-maker by c.w. oman. wellington. by george hooper. wolfe. by a.g. bradley. * * * * * twelve englishmen statesmen. crown vo. s. d. each. * * * _a series of short biographies, not designed to be a complete roll of famous statesmen, but to present in historic order the lives and work of those leading actors in our affairs who by their direct influence have left an abiding mark on the policy, the institutions, and the position of great britain among states_. william the conqueror. by edward a. freeman, d.c.l., ll.d., late regius professor of modern history in the university of oxford. henry ii. by mrs. j.r. green. edward i. by t.f. tout, m.a., professor of history, the owens college, manchester. henry vii. by james gairdner. cardinal wolsey. by bishop creighton, d.d., late dixie professor of ecclesiastical history in the university of cambridge. elizabeth. by e.s. beesly, m.a., professor of modern history, university college, london. oliver cromwell. by frederic harrison. william iii. by h.d. traill. walpole. by john morley. chatham. by john morley. [_in preparation_ pitt. by lord rosebery. peel. by j.r. thursfield, m.a., late fellow of jesus college, oxford. proofreaders emerson and other essays by john jay chapman ams press new york _second printing _ reprinted from the edition of , new york first ams edition published manufactured in the united states of america library of congress catalog card number: - sen: - - contents emerson walt whitman a study of romeo michael angelo's sonnets the fourth canto of the inferno robert browning robert louis stevenson emerson i "leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. i wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. the worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. masses! the calamity is the masses. i do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. if government knew how, i should like to see it check, not multiply the population. when it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their conscience." this extract from the conduct of life gives fairly enough the leading thought of emerson's life. the unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can permanently excite it,--the character of a man. it is surprising to find this identity of content in all great deliverances. the only thing we really admire is personal liberty. those who fought for it and those who enjoyed it are our heroes. but the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny; the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one good custom may corrupt the world. and so the inspiration of one age becomes the damnation of the next. this crystallizing of life into death has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws of progress. emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democracy. he is the most recent example of elemental hero-worship. his opinions are absolutely unqualified except by his temperament. he expresses a form of belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any personal relations he has with the world. it is as if a man had been withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally, that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes of tyranny. dogma cannot be extracted from it. schools cannot be built on it. it either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and leaves nothing. emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he would hardly trust his words to print. he was assured there was no such thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. he therefore resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. and he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. if this be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding misconception. if it be true, he stands alone in the history of teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing behind him. the signs of those times which brought forth emerson are not wholly undecipherable. they are the same times which gave rise to every character of significance during the period before the war. emerson is indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. he is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest phenomena. it is convenient, in describing him, to use language which implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no theory of himself; he was a product. the years between and were the most pitiable through which this country has ever passed. the conscience of the north was pledged to the missouri compromise, and that compromise neither slumbered nor slept. in new england, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the colonies had survived the revolution and kept under its own waterlocks the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business self-interest was superimposed. the history of the conflicts which followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change. but it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the missouri compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in new england. it was conscience that made cowards of us all. the white-lipped generation of edward everett were victims, one might even say martyrs, to conscience. they suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up the springs of life. if it were not that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip into real life, i do not know what more awful subject for a poem could have been found than that of the new england judge enforcing the fugitive slave law. for lack of such a poem the heroism of these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. it was this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces afterward gave it. in the social fruits of these heavy conditions could be seen in the life of the people. free speech was lost. "i know no country," says tocqueville, who was here in , "in which there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in america." tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. he cannot disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged his whole philosophy and his book. the timidity of the americans of this era was a thing which intelligent foreigners could not understand. miss martineau wrote in her autobiography: "it was not till months afterwards that i was told that there were two reasons why i was not invited there [chelsea] as elsewhere. one reason was that i had avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that i was disappointed in an oration of mr. everett's; and another was that i had publicly condemned the institution of slavery. i hope the boston people have outgrown the childishness of sulking at opinions not in either case volunteered, but obtained by pressure. but really, the subservience to opinion at that time seemed a sort of mania." the mania was by no means confined to boston, but qualified this period of our history throughout the northern states. there was no literature. "if great writers have not at present existed in america, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in america," wrote tocqueville. there were no amusements, neither music nor sport nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. the whole life of the community was a life of the intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay the weight of intellectual tyranny. the pressure kept on increasing, and the suppressed forces kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show what gigantic power was needed to keep conservatism dominant, the merchant province put forward daniel webster. the worst period of panic seems to have preceded the anti-slavery agitations of , because these agitations soon demonstrated that the sky did not fall nor the earth yawn and swallow massachusetts because of mr. garrison's opinions, as most people had sincerely believed would be the case. some semblance of free speech was therefore gradually regained. let us remember the world upon which the young emerson's eyes opened. the south was a plantation. the north crooked the hinges of the knee where thrift might follow fawning. it was the era of martin chuzzlewit, a malicious caricature,--founded on fact. this time of humiliation, when there was no free speech, no literature, little manliness, no reality, no simplicity, no accomplishment, was the era of american brag. we flattered the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. we were over-sensitive, insolent, and cringing. as late as , g.p. putnam, a most sensible and modest man, published a book to show what the country had done in the field of culture. the book is a monument of the age. with all its good sense and good humor, it justifies foreign contempt because it is explanatory. underneath everything lay a feeling of unrest, an instinct,--"this country cannot permanently endure half slave and half free,"--which was the truth, but which could not be uttered. so long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects. they wear an iron crown and talk in whispers. such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and throughout new england, as throughout the whole north, the individual was crushed and maimed. the generous youths who came to manhood between and , while this deadly era was maturing, seem to have undergone a revulsion against the world almost before touching it; at least two of them suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school, and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. the activity of william lloyd garrison, the man of action, preceded by several years that of emerson, who is his prophet. both of them were parts of one revolution. one of emerson's articles of faith was that a man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds good for society at large. perhaps all truths, whether moral or economic, must be worked out in real life before they are discovered by the student, and it was therefore necessary that garrison should be evolved earlier than emerson. the silent years of early manhood, during which emerson passed through the divinity school and to his ministry, known by few, understood by none, least of all by himself, were years in which the revolting spirit of an archangel thought out his creed. he came forth perfect, with that serenity of which we have scarce another example in history,--that union of the man himself, his beliefs, and his vehicle of expression that makes men great because it makes them comprehensible. the philosophy into which he had already transmuted all his earlier theology at the time we first meet him consisted of a very simple drawing together of a few ideas, all of which had long been familiar to the world. it is the wonderful use he made of these ideas, the closeness with which they fitted his soul, the tact with which he took what he needed, like a bird building its nest, that make the originality, the man. the conclusion of berkeley, that the external world is known to us only through our impressions, and that therefore, for aught we know, the whole universe exists only in our own consciousness, cannot be disproved. it is so simple a conception that a child may understand it; and it has probably been passed before the attention of every thinking man since plato's time. the notion is in itself a mere philosophical catch or crux to which there is no answer. it may be true. the mystics made this doctrine useful. they were not content to doubt the independent existence of the external world. they imagined that this external world, the earth, the planets, the phenomena of nature, bore some relation to the emotions and destiny of the soul. the soul and the cosmos were somehow related, and related so intimately that the cosmos might be regarded as a sort of projection or diagram of the soul. plato was the first man who perceived that this idea could be made to provide the philosopher with a vehicle of expression more powerful than any other. if a man will once plant himself firmly on the proposition that _he is_ the universe, that every emotion or expression of his mind is correlated in some way to phenomena in the external world, and that he shall say how correlated, he is in a position where the power of speech is at a maximum. his figures of speech, his tropes, his witticisms, take rank with the law of gravity and the precession of the equinoxes. philosophical exaltation of the individual cannot go beyond this point. it is the climax. this is the school of thought to which emerson belonged. the sun and moon, the planets, are mere symbols. they signify whatever the poet chooses. the planets for the most part stay in conjunction just long enough to flash his thought through their symbolism, and no permanent relation is established between the soul and the zodiac. there is, however, one link of correlation between the external and internal worlds which emerson considered established, and in which he believed almost literally, namely, the moral law. this idea he drew from kant through coleridge and wordsworth, and it is so familiar to us all that it hardly needs stating. the fancy that the good, the true, the beautiful,--all things of which we instinctively approve,--are somehow connected together and are really one thing; that our appreciation of them is in its essence the recognition of a law; that this law, in fact all law and the very idea of law, is a mere subjective experience; and that hence any external sequence which we coördinate and name, like the law of gravity, is really intimately connected with our moral nature,--this fancy has probably some basis of truth. emerson adopted it as a corner-stone of his thought. such are the ideas at the basis of emerson's philosophy, and it is fair to speak of them in this place because they antedate everything else which we know of him. they had been for years in his mind before he spoke at all. it was in the armor of this invulnerable idealism and with weapons like shafts of light that he came forth to fight. in , at the age of thirty-three, emerson published the little pamphlet called nature, which was an attempt to state his creed. although still young, he was not without experience of life. he had been assistant minister to the rev. dr. ware from to , when he resigned his ministry on account of his views regarding the lord's supper. he had married and lost his first wife in the same interval. he had been abroad and had visited carlyle in . he had returned and settled in concord, and had taken up the profession of lecturing, upon which he in part supported himself ever after. it is unnecessary to review these early lectures. "large portions of them," says mr. cabot, his biographer, "appeared afterwards in the essays, especially those of the first series." suffice it that through them emerson had become so well known that although nature was published anonymously, he was recognized as the author. many people had heard of him at the time he resigned his charge, and the story went abroad that the young minister of the second church had gone mad. the lectures had not discredited the story, and nature seemed to corroborate it. such was the impression which the book made upon boston in . as we read it to-day, we are struck by its extraordinary beauty of language. it is a supersensuous, lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evidently by a man of genius. it reveals a nature compelling respect,--a shelley, and yet a sort of yankee shelley, who is mad only when the wind is nor'-nor'west; a mature nature which must have been nourished for years upon its own thoughts, to speak this new language so eloquently, to stand so calmly on its feet. the deliverance of his thought is so perfect that this work adapts itself to our mood and has the quality of poetry. this fluency emerson soon lost; it is the quality missing in his poetry. it is the efflorescence of youth. "in good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, i have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. i am glad to the brink of fear. in the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. in the woods is perpetual youth. within these plantations of god, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.... it is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect." perhaps these quotations from the pamphlet called nature are enough to show the clouds of speculation in which emerson had been walking. with what lightning they were charged was soon seen. in he was asked to deliver the phi beta kappa oration at cambridge. this was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. the mystic and eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to be a man exclusively interested in real life. this recluse, too tender for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has retired him to rural concord, pours out a vial of wrath. this cub puts forth the paw of a full-grown lion. emerson has left behind him nothing stronger than this address, the american scholar. it was the first application of his views to the events of his day, written and delivered in the heat of early manhood while his extraordinary powers were at their height. it moves with a logical progression of which he soon lost the habit. the subject of it, the scholar's relation to the world, was the passion of his life. the body of his belief is to be found in this address, and in any adequate account of him the whole address ought to be given. "thus far," he said, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. as such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.... the theory of books is noble. the scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. it came into him life; it went out from him truth.... yet hence arises a grave mischief. the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. the poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine, also. the writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant.... books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. what is the right use? what is the one end which all means go to effect? they are for nothing but to inspire.... the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. this every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. the soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. in this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.... genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. the literature of every nation bears me witness. the english dramatic poets have shakspearized now for two hundred years.... these being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. he, and he only, knows the world. the world of any moment is the merest appearance. some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. the odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom." dr. holmes called this speech of emerson's our "intellectual declaration of independence," and indeed it was. "the phi beta kappa speech," says mr. lowell, "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals,--a scene always to be treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. what crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" the authorities of the divinity school can hardly have been very careful readers of nature and the american scholar, or they would not have invited emerson, in , to deliver the address to the graduating class. this was emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs directly to society. a few lines out of the famous address are enough to show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence that he saw in the letters: "the prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of denderah and the astronomical monuments of the hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. they mark the height to which the waters once rose.... it is the office of a true teacher to show us that god is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. the true christianity--a faith like christ's in the infinitude of man--is lost. none believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. ah me! no man goeth alone. all men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the god who seeth in secret. they cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. they think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world." it is almost misleading to speak of the lofty utterances of these early addresses as attacks upon society, but their reception explains them. the element of absolute courage is the same in all natures. emerson himself was not unconscious of what function he was performing. the "storm in our wash-bowl" which followed this divinity school address, the letters of remonstrance from friends, the advertisements by the divinity school of "no complicity," must have been cheering to emerson. his unseen yet dominating ambition is shown throughout the address, and in this note in his diary of the following year:-- "_august_ . yesterday at the phi beta kappa anniversary. steady, steady. i am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar he shall have perfect freedom. the young people and the mature hint at odium and the aversion of forces to be presently encountered in society. i say no; i fear it not." the lectures and addresses which form the latter half of the first volume in the collected edition show the early emerson in the ripeness of his powers. these writings have a lyrical sweep and a beauty which the later works often lack. passages in them remind us of hamlet:-- "how silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without space to insert an atom;--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. it will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown.... the great pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars,--was but the representative of thee, o rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the city of god; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.... every star in heaven is discontent and insatiable. gravitation and chemistry cannot content them. ever they woo and court the eye of the beholder. every man who comes into the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his mind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate world than that they occupy.... so it is with all immaterial objects. these beautiful basilisks set their brute glorious eyes on the eye of every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass through his wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed." emerson is never far from his main thought:-- "the universe does not attract us till it is housed in an individual." "a man, a personal ascendency, is the only great phenomenon." "i cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity." on the other hand, he is never far from his great fear: "but truth is such a fly-away, such a sly-boots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light." "let him beware of proposing to himself any end.... i say to you plainly, there is no end so sacred or so large that if pursued for itself will not become carrion and an offence to the nostril." there can be nothing finer than emerson's knowledge of the world, his sympathy with young men and with the practical difficulties of applying his teachings. we can see in his early lectures before students and mechanics how much he had learned about the structure of society from his own short contact with the organized church. "each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity.... the fact that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprise you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts.... and further i will not dissemble my hope that each person whom i address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to go in honor and with benefit...." beneath all lay a greater matter,--emerson's grasp of the forms and conditions of progress, his reach of intellect, which could afford fair play to every one. his lecture on the conservative is not a puzzling _jeu d'esprit_, like bishop blougram's apology, but an honest attempt to set up the opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform so as to represent real life. hardly can such a brilliant statement of the case be found elsewhere in literature. it is not necessary to quote here the reformer's side of the question, for emerson's whole life was devoted to it. the conservatives' attitude he gives with such accuracy and such justice that the very bankers of state street seem to be speaking:-- "the order of things is as good as the character of the population permits. consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first animal life up to the present high culture of the best nations, has advanced thus far.... "the conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose if we were still in the garden of eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction, and this omission makes his whole doctrine false. the idealist retorts that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. the conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb tea. sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue." it is unnecessary to go, one by one, through the familiar essays and lectures which emerson published between and . they are in everybody's hands and in everybody's thoughts. in he wrote in his diary: "in all my lectures i have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. this the people accept readily enough, and even with commendation, as long as i call the lecture art or politics, or literature or the household; but the moment i call it religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." to the platform he returned, and left it only once or twice during the remainder of his life. his writings vary in coherence. in his early occasional pieces, like the phi beta kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. they were written for a purpose, and were perhaps struck off all at once. but he earned his living by lecturing, and a lecturer is always recasting his work and using it in different forms. a lecturer has no prejudice against repetition. it is noticeable that in some of emerson's important lectures the logical scheme is more perfect than in his essays. the truth seems to be that in the process of working up and perfecting his writings, in revising and filing his sentences, the logical scheme became more and more obliterated. another circumstance helped make his style fragmentary. he was by nature a man of inspirations and exalted moods. he was subject to ecstasies, during which his mind worked with phenomenal brilliancy. throughout his works and in his diary we find constant reference to these moods, and to his own inability to control or recover them. "but what we want is consecutiveness. 't is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. ah! could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of copernican worlds!" in order to take advantage of these periods of divination, he used to write down the thoughts that came to him at such times. from boyhood onward he kept journals and commonplace books, and in the course of his reading and meditation he collected innumerable notes and quotations which he indexed for ready use. in these mines he "quarried," as mr. cabot says, for his lectures and essays. when he needed a lecture he went to the repository, threw together what seemed to have a bearing on some subject, and gave it a title. if any other man should adopt this method of composition, the result would be incomprehensible chaos; because most men have many interests, many moods, many and conflicting ideas. but with emerson it was otherwise. there was only one thought which could set him aflame, and that was the thought of the unfathomed might of man. this thought was his religion, his politics, his ethics, his philosophy. one moment of inspiration was in him own brother to the next moment of inspiration, although they might be separated by six weeks. when he came to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted well, no matter in what order he placed them, because they were all part of the same idea. his works are all one single attack on the vice of the age, moral cowardice. he assails it not by railings and scorn, but by positive and stimulating suggestion. the imagination of the reader is touched by every device which can awake the admiration for heroism, the consciousness of moral courage. wit, quotation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhetoric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, are launched at the reader, till he feels little lambent flames beginning to kindle in him. he is perhaps unable to see the exact logical connection between two paragraphs of an essay, yet he feels they are germane. he takes up emerson tired and apathetic, but presently he feels himself growing heady and truculent, strengthened in his most inward vitality, surprised to find himself again master in his own house. the difference between emerson and the other moralists is that all these stimulating pictures and suggestions are not given by him in illustration of a general proposition. they have never been through the mill of generalization in his own mind. he himself could not have told you their logical bearing on one another. they have all the vividness of disconnected fragments of life, and yet they all throw light on one another, like the facets of a jewel. but whatever cause it was that led him to adopt his method of writing, it is certain that he succeeded in delivering himself of his thought with an initial velocity and carrying power such as few men ever attained. he has the force at his command of the thrower of the discus. his style is american, and beats with the pulse of the climate. he is the only writer we have had who writes as he speaks, who makes no literary parade, has no pretensions of any sort. he is the only writer we have had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to his temperament. it is impossible to name his style without naming his character: they are one thing. both in language and in elocution emerson was a practised and consummate artist, who knew how both to command his effects and to conceal his means. the casual, practical, disarming directness with which he writes puts any honest man at his mercy. what difference does it make whether a man who can talk like this is following an argument or not? you cannot always see emerson clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but you always know exactly on what spot he is standing. you judge it by the flight of the objects he throws over the wall,--a bootjack, an apple, a crown, a razor, a volume of verse. with one or other of these missiles, all delivered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty sure to hit you. these catchwords stick in the mind. people are not in general influenced by long books or discourses, but by odd fragments of observation which they overhear, sentences or head-lines which they read while turning over a book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. these are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man's most stubborn will. emerson called them the police of the universe. his works are a treasury of such things. they sparkle in the mine, or you may carry them off in your pocket. they get driven into your mind like nails, and on them catch and hang your own experiences, till what was once his thought has become your character. "god offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. take which you please; you can never have both." "discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will." "it is impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself." the orchestration with which emerson introduces and sustains these notes from the spheres is as remarkable as the winged things themselves. open his works at a hazard. you hear a man talking. "a garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of every month in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction. in an evil hour he pulled down his wall and added a field to his homestead. no land is bad, but land is worse. if a man own land, the land owns him. now let him leave home if he dare. every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he has done and all he means to do, stand in his way like duns, when he would go out of his gate." your attention is arrested by the reality of this gentleman in his garden, by the first-hand quality of his mind. it matters not on what subject he talks. while you are musing, still pleased and patronizing, he has picked up the bow of ulysses, bent it with the ease of ulysses, and sent a shaft clear through the twelve axes, nor missed one of them. but this, it seems, was mere byplay and marksmanship; for before you have done wondering, ulysses rises to his feet in anger, and pours flight after flight, arrow after arrow, from the great bow. the shafts sing and strike, the suitors fall in heaps. the brow of ulysses shines with unearthly splendor. the air is filled with lightning. after a little, without shock or transition, without apparent change of tone, mr. emerson is offering you a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you mind the last step at the garden end. if the man who can do these things be not an artist, then must we have a new vocabulary and rename the professions. there is, in all this effectiveness of emerson, no pose, no literary art; nothing that corresponds even remotely to the pretended modesty and ignorance with which socrates lays pitfalls for our admiration in plato's dialogues. it was the platform which determined emerson's style. he was not a writer, but a speaker. on the platform his manner of speech was a living part of his words. the pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the searching, the balancing, the turning forward and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of genius,--all this was emerson. he invented this style of speaking, and made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. lowell wrote, while still under the spell of the magician: "emerson's oration was more disjointed than usual, even with him. it began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. every possible criticism might have been made on it but one,--that it was not noble. there was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. he boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was _our_ fault, not his. it was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. all through it i felt something in me that cried, 'ha! ha!' to the sound of the trumpets." it is nothing for any man sitting in his chair to be overcome with the sense of the immediacy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the victory of good over evil, the value, now and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. such moments come to us all. but for a man to sit in his chair and write what shall call up these forces in the bosoms of others--that is desert, that is greatness. to do this was the gift of emerson. the whole earth is enriched by every moment of converse with him. the shows and shams of life become transparent, the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shutters of the spirit are opened, and provinces and realms of our own existence lie gleaming before us. it has been necessary to reduce the living soul of emerson to mere dead attributes like "moral courage" in order that we might talk about him at all. his effectiveness comes from his character; not from his philosophy, nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from any of the accidents of his education. he might never have heard of berkeley or plato. a slightly different education might have led him to throw his teaching into the form of historical essays or of stump speeches. he might, perhaps, have been bred a stonemason, and have done his work in the world by travelling with a panorama. but he would always have been emerson. his weight and his power would always have been the same. it is solely as character that he is important. he discovered nothing; he bears no relation whatever to the history of philosophy. we must regard him and deal with him simply as a man. strangely enough, the world has always insisted upon accepting him as a thinker: and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. as a thinker, emerson is difficult to classify. before you begin to assign him a place, you must clear the ground by a disquisition as to what is meant by "a thinker", and how emerson differs from other thinkers. as a man, emerson is as plain as ben franklin. people have accused him of inconsistency; they say that he teaches one thing one day, and another the next day. but from the point of view of emerson there is no such thing as inconsistency. every man is each day a new man. let him be to-day what he is to-day. it is immaterial and waste of time to consider what he once was or what he may be. his picturesque speech delights in fact and anecdote, and a public which is used to treatises and deduction cares always to be told the moral. it wants everything reduced to a generalization. all generalizations are partial truths, but we are used to them, and we ourselves mentally make the proper allowance. emerson's method is, not to give a generalization and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting statements and leave the balance of truth to be struck in our own minds on the facts. there is no inconsistency in this. it is a vivid and very legitimate method of procedure. but he is much more than a theorist: he is a practitioner. he does not merely state a theory of agitation: he proceeds to agitate. "do not," he says, "set the least value on what i do, or the least discredit on what i do not, as if i pretended to settle anything as false or true. i unsettle all things. no facts are to me sacred, none are profane. i simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back." he was not engaged in teaching many things, but one thing,--courage. sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great characters,--fox, milton, alcibiades; sometimes he inspires it by bidding us beware of imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hindrances and dangers to our development. there is no inconsistency here. emerson might logically have gone one step further and raised inconsistency into a jewel. for what is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a timid and conservative man, as to do something inconsistent and regrettable? it lends character to him at once. he breathes freer and is stronger for the experience. emerson is no cosmopolitan. he is a patriot. he is not like goethe, whose sympathies did not run on national lines. emerson has america in his mind's eye all the time. there is to be a new religion, and it is to come from america; a new and better type of man, and he is to be an american. he not only cared little or nothing for europe, but he cared not much for the world at large. his thought was for the future of this country. you cannot get into any chamber in his mind which is below this chamber of patriotism. he loves the valor of alexander and the grace of the oxford athlete; but he loves them not for themselves. he has a use for them. they are grist to his mill and powder to his gun. his admiration of them he subordinates to his main purpose,--they are his blackboard and diagrams. his patriotism is the backbone of his significance. he came to his countrymen at a time when they lacked, not thoughts, but manliness. the needs of his own particular public are always before him. "it is odd that our people should have, not water on the brain, but a little gas there. a shrewd foreigner said of the americans that 'whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.'" "i shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and vices which require this order of censors in the state.... the timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall i say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion." "our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual's judgment. dr. channing's piety and wisdom had such weight in boston that the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held." "let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity, the squalid contentment of the times." the politicians he scores constantly. "who that sees the meanness of our politics but congratulates washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud and forever safe." the following is his description of the social world of his day: "if any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. the sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers." it is the same wherever we open his books. he must spur on, feed up, bring forward the dormant character of his countrymen. when he goes to england, he sees in english life nothing except those elements which are deficient in american life. if you wish a catalogue of what america has not, read english traits. emerson's patriotism had the effect of expanding his philosophy. to-day we know the value of physique, for science has taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his day, and his philosophy affords no basis for it. emerson in this matter transcends his philosophy. when in england, he was fairly made drunk with the physical life he found there. he is like caspar hauser gazing for the first time on green fields. english traits is the ruddiest book he ever wrote. it is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical well-being, and ends with the dominant note of his belief: "by this general activity and by this sacredness of individuals, they [the english] have in seven hundred years evolved the principles of freedom. it is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of original right which make the stone tables of liberty." he had found in england free speech, personal courage, and reverence for the individual. no convulsion could shake emerson or make his view unsteady even for an instant. what no one else saw, he saw, and he saw nothing else. not a boy in the land welcomed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as did this shy village philosopher, then at the age of fifty-eight. he saw that war was the cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. it was not the cause of the slave that moved him; it was not the cause of the union for which he cared a farthing. it was something deeper than either of these things for which he had been battling all his life. it was the cause of character against convention. whatever else the war might bring, it was sure to bring in character, to leave behind it a file of heroes; if not heroes, then villains, but in any case strong men. on the th of april, , three days before fort sumter was bombarded, he had spoken with equanimity of "the downfall of our character-destroying civilization.... we find that civilization crowed too soon, that our triumphs were treacheries; we had opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the castle." "ah," he said, when the firing began, "sometimes gunpowder smells good." soon after the attack on sumter he said in a public address, "we have been very homeless for some years past, say since ; but now we have a country again.... the war was an eye-opener, and showed men of all parties and opinions the value of those primary forces that lie beneath all political action." and it was almost a personal pledge when he said at the harvard commemoration in , "we shall not again disparage america, now that we have seen what men it will bear." the place which emerson forever occupies as a great critic is defined by the same sharp outlines that mark his work, in whatever light and from whatever side we approach it. a critic in the modern sense he was not, for his point of view is fixed, and he reviews the world like a search-light placed on the top of a tall tower. he lived too early and at too great a distance from the forum of european thought to absorb the ideas of evolution and give place to them in his philosophy. evolution does not graft well upon the platonic idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred sciences sympathetic. nothing aroused emerson's indignation more than the attempts of the medical faculty and of phrenologists to classify, and therefore limit individuals. "the grossest ignorance does not disgust me like this ignorant knowingness." we miss in emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development, so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for instance, is found everywhere latent in browning's poetry. browning regards character as the result of experience and as an ever changing growth. to emerson, character is rather an entity complete and eternal from the beginning. he is probably the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint. there is a certain lack of the historic sense in all he has written. the ethical assumption that all men are exactly alike permeates his work. in his mind, socrates, marco polo, and general jackson stand surrounded by the same atmosphere, or rather stand as mere naked characters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. he is probably the last great writer who will fling about classic anecdotes as if they were club gossip. in the discussion of morals, this assumption does little harm. the stories and proverbs which illustrate the thought of the moralist generally concern only those simple relations of life which are common to all ages. there is charm in this familiar dealing with antiquity. the classics are thus domesticated and made real to us. what matter if Æsop appear a little too much like an american citizen, so long as his points tell? it is in emerson's treatment of the fine arts that we begin to notice his want of historic sense. art endeavors to express subtle and ever changing feelings by means of conventions which are as protean as the forms of a cloud; and the man who in speaking on the plastic arts makes the assumption that all men are alike will reveal before he has uttered three sentences that he does not know what art is, that he has never experienced any form of sensation from it. emerson lived in a time and clime where there was no plastic art, and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas about art by means of a highly complex process of reasoning. he dwelt constantly in a spiritual place which was the very focus of high moral fervor. this was his enthusiasm, this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned out the probable meaning of the fine arts. "this," thought emerson, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy of moral feeling, "this must be what apelles experienced, this fervor is the passion of bramante. i understand the parthenon." and so he projected his feelings about morality into the field of the plastic arts. he deals very freely and rather indiscriminately with the names of artists,--phidias, raphael, salvator rosa,--and he speaks always in such a way that it is impossible to connect what he says with any impression we have ever received from the works of those masters. in fact, emerson has never in his life felt the normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. these things, of which he does not know the meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical truths. the result is that his books are full of blind places, like the notes which will not strike on a sick piano. it is interesting to find that the one art of which emerson did have a direct understanding, the art of poetry, gave him some insight into the relation of the artist to his vehicle. in his essay on shakespeare there is a full recognition of the debt of shakespeare to his times. this essay is filled with the historic sense. we ought not to accuse emerson because he lacked appreciation of the fine arts, but rather admire the truly goethean spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of arts of which he had no understanding. this is the same spirit which led him to insist on the value of the eastern poets. perhaps there exist a few scholars who can tell us how far emerson understood or misunderstood saadi and firdusi and the koran. but we need not be disturbed for his learning. it is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. the east added nothing to emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. the whole of his mysticism is to be found in nature, written before he knew the sages of the orient, and it is not improbable that there is some real connection between his own mysticism and the mysticism of the eastern poets. emerson's criticism on men and books is like the test of a great chemist who seeks one or two elements. he burns a bit of the stuff in his incandescent light, shows the lines of it in his spectrum, and there an end. it was a thought of genius that led him to write representative men. the scheme of this book gave play to every illumination of his mind, and it pinned him down to the objective, to the field of vision under his microscope. the table of contents of representative men is the dial of his education. it is as follows: uses of great men; plato, or the philosopher; plato, new readings; swedenborg, or the mystic; montaigne, or the sceptic; shakespeare, or the poet; napoleon, or the man of the world; goethe, or the writer. the predominance of the writers over all other types of men is not cited to show emerson's interest in the writer, for we know his interest centred in the practical man,--even his ideal scholar is a practical man,--but to show the sources of his illustration. emerson's library was the old-fashioned gentleman's library. his mines of thought were the world's classics. this is one reason why he so quickly gained an international currency. his very subjects in representative men are of universal interest, and he is limited only by certain inevitable local conditions. representative men is thought by many persons to be his best book. it is certainly filled with the strokes of a master. there exists no more profound criticism than emerson's analysis of goethe and of napoleon, by both of whom he was at once fascinated and repelled. ii the attitude of emerson's mind toward reformers results so logically from his philosophy that it is easily understood. he saw in them people who sought something as a panacea or as an end in itself. to speak strictly and not irreverently, he had his own panacea,--the development of each individual; and he was impatient of any other. he did not believe in association. the very idea of it involved a surrender by the individual of some portion of his identity, and of course all the reformers worked through their associations. with their general aims he sympathized. "these reforms," he wrote, "are our contemporaries; they are ourselves, our own light and sight and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify." but with the methods of the reformers he had no sympathy: "he who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. the reforms whose fame now fills the land with temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end." again: "the young men who have been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods seem to have made this mistake: they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the reform of reforms must be accomplished without means." emerson did not at first discriminate between the movement of the abolitionists and the hundred and one other reform movements of the period; and in this lack of discrimination lies a point of extraordinary interest. the abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, had in fact got hold of the issue which was to control the fortunes of the republic for thirty years. the difference between them and the other reformers was this: that the abolitionists were men set in motion by the primary and unreasoning passion of pity. theory played small part in the movement. it grew by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty will arouse in the minds of sensitive people. it is not to be denied that the social conditions in boston in foreboded an outbreak in some form. if the abolition excitement had not drafted off the rising forces, there might have been a merry mount, an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of some sort. the abolition movement afforded the purest form of an indulgence in human feeling that was ever offered to men. it was intoxicating. it made the agitators perfectly happy. they sang at their work and bubbled over with exhilaration. they were the only people in the united states, at this time, who were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical activity. but emerson at first lacked the touchstone, whether of intellect or of heart, to see the difference between this particular movement and the other movements then in progress. indeed, in so far as he sees any difference between the abolitionists and the rest, it is that the abolitionists were more objectionable and distasteful to him. "those," he said, "who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits to mankind are narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and affect us as the insane do." and again: "by the side of these men [the idealists] the hot agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than others. of the two, i own i like the speculators the best. they have some piety which looks with faith to a fair future unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it." he was drawn into the abolition cause by having the truth brought home to him that these people were fighting for the moral law. he was slow in seeing this, because in their methods they represented everything he most condemned. as soon, however, as he was convinced, he was ready to lecture for them and to give them the weight of his approval. in he was already practically an abolitionist, and his feelings upon the matter deepened steadily in intensity ever after. the most interesting page of emerson's published journal is the following, written at some time previous to ; the exact date is not given. a like page, whether written or unwritten, may be read into the private annals of every man who lived before the war. emerson has, with unconscious mastery, photographed the half-spectre that stalked in the minds of all. he wrote: "i had occasion to say the other day to elizabeth hoar that i like best the strong and worthy persons, like her father, who support the social order without hesitation or misgiving. i like these; they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of any sort. but the professed philanthropists, it is strange and horrible to say, are an altogether odious set of people, whom one would shun as the worst of bores and canters. but my conscience, my unhappy conscience respects that hapless class who see the faults and stains of our social order, and who pray and strive incessantly to right the wrong; this annoying class of men and women, though they commonly find the work altogether beyond their faculty, and their results are, for the present, distressing. they are partial, and apt to magnify their own. yes, and the prostrate penitent, also,--he is not comprehensive, he is not philosophical in those tears and groans. yet i feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea and all that in them is, and the axis around which the universe revolves passes through his body where he stands." it was the defection of daniel webster that completed the conversion of emerson and turned him from an adherent into a propagandist of abolition. not pity for the slave, but indignation at the violation of the moral law by daniel webster, was at the bottom of emerson's anger. his abolitionism was secondary to his main mission, his main enthusiasm. it is for this reason that he stands on a plane of intellect where he might, under other circumstances, have met and defeated webster. after the th of march, , he recognized in webster the embodiment of all that he hated. in his attacks on webster, emerson trembles to his inmost fibre with antagonism. he is savage, destructive, personal, bent on death. this exhibition of emerson as a fighting animal is magnificent, and explains his life. there is no other instance of his ferocity. no other nature but webster's ever so moved him; but it was time to be moved, and webster was a man of his size. had these two great men of new england been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate the phi beta kappa address into politics, you have something stronger than webster,--something that recalls chatham; and emerson would have had this advantage,--that he was not afraid. as it was, he left his library and took the stump. mr. cabot has given us extracts from his speeches:-- "the tameness is indeed complete; all are involved in one hot haste of terror,--presidents of colleges and professors, saints and brokers, lawyers and manufacturers; not a liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on their passive obedience.... mr. webster, perhaps, is only following the laws of his blood and constitution. i suppose his pledges were not quite natural to him. he is a man who lives by his memory; a man of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. all the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward, and his finely developed understanding only works truly and with all its force when it stands for animal good; that is, for property. he looks at the union as an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence of it so far. what he finds already written he will defend. lucky that so much had got well written when he came, for he has no faith in the power of self-government. not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive his sanction. in massachusetts, in , he would, beyond all question, have been a refugee. he praises adams and jefferson, but it is a past adams and jefferson. a present adams or jefferson he would denounce.... but one thing appears certain to me: that the union is at an end as soon as an immoral law is enacted. he who writes a crime into the statute book digs under the foundations of the capitol.... the words of john randolph, wiser than he knew, have been ringing ominously in all echoes for thirty years: 'we do not govern the people of the north by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves.' ... they come down now like the cry of fate, in the moment when they are fulfilled." the exasperation of emerson did not subside, but went on increasing during the next four years, and on march , , he read his lecture on the fugitive slave law at the new york tabernacle: "i have lived all my life without suffering any inconvenience from american slavery. i never saw it; i never heard the whip; i never felt the check on my free speech and action, until the other day, when mr. webster, by his personal influence, brought the fugitive slave law on the country. i say mr. webster, for though the bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. it cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it, and made the law.... nobody doubts that daniel webster could make a good speech. nobody doubts that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the south. but this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. _how came he there_? ... but the question which history will ask is broader. in the final hour when he was forced by the peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a side,--did he take the part of great principles, the side of humanity and justice, or the side of abuse, and oppression and chaos? ... he did as immoral men usually do,--made very low bows to the christian church and went through all the sunday decorums, but when allusion was made to the question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at albany, 'some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the heaven--i do not know where.' and if the reporters say true, this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company." it was too late for emerson to shine as a political debater. on may , , longfellow wrote in his diary, "it is rather painful to see emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and hooted at by young law students." emerson records a similar experience at a later date: "if i were dumb, yet would i have gone and mowed and muttered or made signs. the mob roared whenever i attempted to speak, and after several beginnings i withdrew." there is nothing "painful" here: it is the sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage to circumstance. the thing to be noted is that this is the same man, in the same state of excitement about the same idea, who years before spoke out in the american scholar, in the essays, and in the lectures. what was it that had aroused in emerson such promethean antagonism in but those same forces which in came to their culmination and assumed visible shape in the person of daniel webster? the formal victory of webster drew emerson into the arena, and made a dramatic episode in his life. but his battle with those forces had begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw down the gauntlet to them in his phi beta kappa oration. emerson by his writings did more than any other man to rescue the youth of the next generation and fit them for the fierce times to follow. it will not be denied that he sent ten thousand sons to the war. in speaking of emerson's attitude toward the anti-slavery cause, it has been possible to dispense with any survey of that movement, because the movement was simple and specific and is well remembered. but when we come to analyze the relations he bore to some of the local agitations of his day, it becomes necessary to weave in with the matter a discussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded in the life of his times, and of which he himself was in a sense an outcome. in speaking of the transcendentalists, who were essentially the children of the puritans, we must begin with some study of the chief traits of puritanism. what parts the factors of climate, circumstance, and religion have respectively played in the development of the new england character no analysis can determine. we may trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed in the lines of the face. we may sometimes follow from generation to generation the course of a truth which at first sustained the spirit of man, till we see it petrify into a dogma which now kills the spirits of men. conscience may destroy the character. the tragedy of the new england judge enforcing the fugitive slave law was no new spectacle in new england. a dogmatic crucifixion of the natural instincts had been in progress there for two hundred years. emerson, who is more free from dogma than any other teacher that can be named, yet comes very near being dogmatic in his reiteration of the moral law. whatever volume of emerson we take up, the moral law holds the same place in his thoughts. it is the one statable revelation of truth which he is ready to stake his all upon. "the illusion that strikes me as the masterpiece in that ring of illusions which our life is, is the timidity with which we assert our moral sentiment. we are made of it, the world is built by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves by its side. nay, we presume strength of him or them who deny it. cities go against it, the college goes against it, the courts snatch any precedent at any vicious form of law to rule it out; legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it and vote it down." with this very beautiful and striking passage no one will quarrel, nor will any one misunderstand it. the following passage has the same sort of poetical truth. "things are saturated with the moral law. there is no escape from it. violets and grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and tides, every change, every cause in nature is nothing but a disguised missionary." ... but emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. "we affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent revelation. _they_ report the truth. _it_ is the truth." in this last extract we have emerson actually affirming that his dogma of the moral law is absolute truth. he thinks it not merely a form of truth, like the old theologies, but very distinguishable from all other forms in the past. curiously enough, his statement of the law grows dogmatic and incisive in proportion as he approaches the borderland between his law and the natural instincts: "the last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a manner it severs the man from all other men; makes known to him _that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being existed_; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all anew." here we have the dogma applied, and we see in it only a new form of old calvinism as cruel as calvinism, and not much different from its original. the italics are not emerson's, but are inserted to bring out an idea which is everywhere prevalent in his teaching. in this final form, the moral law, by insisting that sheer conscience can slake the thirst that rises in the soul, is convicted of falsehood; and this heartless falsehood is the same falsehood that has been put into the porridge of every puritan child for six generations. a grown man can digest doctrine and sleep at night. but a young person of high purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie as this half-truth and feeds on it as on the bread of life, will suffer. it will injure the action of his heart. truly the fathers have eaten sour grapes, therefore the children's teeth are set on edge. * * * * * to understand the civilization of cities, we must look at the rural population from which they draw their life. we have recently had our attention called to the last remnants of that village life so reverently gathered up by miss wilkins, and of which miss emily dickinson was the last authentic voice. the spirit of this age has examined with an almost pathological interest this rescued society. we must go to it if we would understand emerson, who is the blossoming of its culture. we must study it if we would arrive at any intelligent and general view of that miscellaneous crop of individuals who have been called the transcendentalists. between and there were already signs in new england that the nutritive and reproductive forces of society were not quite wholesome, not exactly well adjusted. self-repression was the religion which had been inherited. "distrust nature" was the motto written upon the front of the temple. what would have happened to that society if left to itself for another hundred years no man can guess. it was rescued by the two great regenerators of mankind, new land and war. the dispersion came, as emerson said of the barbarian conquests of rome, not a day too soon. it happened that the country at large stood in need of new england as much as new england stood in need of the country. this congested virtue, in order to be saved, must be scattered. this ferment, in order to be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven to leaven the whole lump. "as you know," says emerson in his eulogy on boston, "new england supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the south and west.... we are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. that is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and invites." for purposes of yeast, there was never such leaven as the puritan stock. how little the natural force of the race had really abated became apparent when it was placed under healthy conditions, given land to till, foes to fight, the chance to renew its youth like the eagle. but during this period the relief had not yet come. the terrible pressure of puritanism and conservatism in new england was causing a revolt not only of the abolitionists, but of another class of people of a type not so virile as they. the times have been smartly described by lowell in his essay on thoreau:-- "every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. bran had its prophets.... everybody had a mission (with a capital m) to attend to everybody else's business. no brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. communities were established where everything was to be common but common sense.... conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose." whatever may be said of the transcendentalists, it must not be forgotten that they represented an elevation of feeling, which through them qualified the next generation, and can be traced in the life of new england to-day. the strong intrinsic character lodged in these recusants was later made manifest; for many of them became the best citizens of the commonwealth,--statesmen, merchants, soldiers, men and women of affairs. they retained their idealism while becoming practical men. there is hardly an example of what we should have thought would be common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the flesh-pots. in their early life they resembled the abolitionists in their devotion to an idea; but with the transcendentalists self-culture and the aesthetic and sentimental education took the place of more public aims. they seem also to have been persons of greater social refinement than the abolitionists. the transcendentalists were sure of only one thing,--that society as constituted was all wrong. in this their main belief they were right. they were men and women whose fundamental need was activity, contact with real life, and the opportunity for social expansion; and they keenly felt the chill and fictitious character of the reigning conventionalities. the rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. there was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. people are apt to forget that such masks are never worn with ease. they result from the application of an inflexible will, and always inflict discomfort. the transcendentalists found themselves all but stifled in a society as artificial in its decorum as the court of france during the last years of louis xiv. emerson was in no way responsible for the movement, although he got the credit of having evoked it by his teaching. he was elder brother to it, and was generated by its parental forces; but even if emerson had never lived, the transcendentalists would have appeared. he was their victim rather than their cause. he was always tolerant of them and sometimes amused at them, and disposed to treat them lightly. it is impossible to analyze their case with more astuteness than he did in an editorial letter in the dial. the letter is cold, but is a masterpiece of good sense. he had, he says, received fifteen letters on the prospects of culture. "excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers, obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company.... they want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasonable word." after discussing one or two of their proposals,--one of which was that the tiresome "uncles and aunts" of the enthusiasts should be placed by themselves in one delightful village, the dough, as emerson says, be placed in one pan and the leaven in another,--he continues: "but it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims." young americans "are educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it. many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism ... which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large.... we should not know where to find in literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men pretend to.... the balance of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. superficialness is the real distemper.... it is certain that speculation is no succedaneum for life." he then turns to find the cure for these distempers in the farm lands of illinois, at that time already being fenced in "almost like new england itself," and closes with a suggestion that so long as there is a woodpile in the yard, and the "wrongs of the indian, of the negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated," relief might be found even nearer home. in his lecture on the transcendentalists he says: "... but their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world: they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. they do not even like to vote." a less sympathetic observer, harriet martineau, wrote of them: "while margaret fuller and her adult pupils sat 'gorgeously dressed,' talking about mars and venus, plato and goethe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go at a breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my complaint against the 'gorgeous' pedants was that they regarded their preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way." harriet martineau, whose whole work was practical, and who wrote her journal in and in the light of history, was hardly able to do justice to these unpractical but sincere spirits. emerson was divided from the transcendentalists by his common sense. his shrewd business intellect made short work of their schemes. each one of their social projects contained some covert economic weakness, which always turned out to lie in an attack upon the integrity of the individual, and which emerson of all men could be counted on to detect. he was divided from them also by the fact that he was a man of genius, who had sought out and fought out his means of expression. he was a great artist, and as such he was a complete being. no one could give to him nor take from him. his yearnings found fruition in expression. he was sure of his place and of his use in this world. but the transcendentalists were neither geniuses nor artists nor complete beings. nor had they found their places or uses as yet. they were men and women seeking light. they walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. the transcendentalists are not collectively important because their _sturm und drang_ was intellectual and bloodless. though emerson admonish and harriet martineau condemn, yet from the memorials that survive, one is more impressed with the sufferings than with the ludicrousness of these persons. there is something distressing about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries. they worry and contort and introspect. they rave and dream. they peep and theorize. they cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind comes from. margaret fuller analyzes emerson, and emerson margaret fuller. it is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. it is a nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are all unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside. it is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable. all that intelligence could do toward solving problems for his friends emerson did. but there are situations in life in which the intelligence is helpless, and in which something else, something perhaps possessed by a ploughboy, is more divine than plato. if it were not pathetic, there would be something cruel--indeed there is something cruel--in emerson's incapacity to deal with margaret fuller. he wrote to her on october , : "my dear margaret, i have your frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet i think i could wish it unwritten. i ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all persons my genius warns me away." the letter proceeds with unimpeachable emptiness and integrity in the same strain. in he writes in his diary: "strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation with margaret, whom i always admire, most revere when i nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom i freeze and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest." human sentiment was known to emerson mainly in the form of pain. his nature shunned it; he cast it off as quickly as possible. there is a word or two in the essay on love which seems to show that the inner and diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but not for long, been shot with blood: he recalls only the pain of it. his relations with margaret fuller seem never normal, though they lasted for years. this brilliant woman was in distress. she was asking for bread, and he was giving her a stone, and neither of them was conscious of what was passing. this is pitiful. it makes us clutch about us to catch hold, if we somehow may, of the hand of a man. there was manliness in horace greeley, under whom miss fuller worked on the new york tribune not many years afterward. she wrote: "mr. greeley i like,--nay, more, love. he is in his habit a plebeian, in his heart a nobleman. his abilities in his own way are great. he believes in mine to a surprising degree. we are true friends." this anæmic incompleteness of emerson's character can be traced to the philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy. there is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of transcendentalism, including emerson. that falsehood consists in the theory of the self-sufficiency of each individual, men and women alike. margaret fuller is a good example of the effect of this philosophy, because her history afterward showed that she was constituted like other human beings, was dependent upon human relationship, and was not only a very noble, but also a very womanly creature. her marriage, her italian life, and her tragic death light up with the splendor of reality the earlier and unhappy period of her life. this woman had been driven into her vagaries by the lack of something which she did not know existed, and which she sought blindly in metaphysics. harriet martineau writes of her: "it is the most grievous loss i have almost ever known in private history, the deferring of margaret fuller's married life so long. that noble last period of her life is happily on record as well as the earlier." the hardy englishwoman has here laid a kind human hand on the weakness of new england, and seems to be unconscious that she is making a revelation as to the whole transcendental movement. but the point is this: there was no one within reach of margaret fuller, in her early days, who knew what was her need. one offered her kant, one comte, one fourier, one swedenborg, one the moral law. you cannot feed the heart on these things. yet there is a bright side to this new england spirit, which seems, if we look only to the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and deficient. a bright and cheery courage appears in certain natures of which the sun has made conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss, so splendid is the outcome. the practical, dominant, insuppressible active temperaments who have a word for every emergency, and who carry the controlled force of ten men at their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit. emerson knew not tears, but he and the hundred other beaming and competent characters which new england has produced make us almost envy their state. they give us again the old stoics at their best. very closely connected with this subject--the crisp and cheery new england temperament--lies another which any discussion of emerson must bring up,--namely, asceticism. it is probable that in dealing with emerson's feelings about the plastic arts we have to do with what is really the inside, or metaphysical side, of the same phenomena which present themselves on the outside, or physical side, in the shape of asceticism. emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to us in almost every form in which history can record a man. it is in his philosophy, in his style, in his conduct, and in his appearance. it was, however, not in his voice. mr. cabot, with that reverence for which every one must feel personally grateful to him, has preserved a description of emerson by the new york journalist, n.p. willis: "it is a voice with shoulders in it, which he has not; with lungs in it far larger than his; with a walk which the public never see; with a fist in it which his own hand never gave him the model for; and with a gentleman in it which his parochial and 'bare-necessaries-of-life' sort of exterior gives no other betrayal of. we can imagine nothing in nature (which seems too to have a type for everything) like the want of correspondence between the emerson that goes in at the eye and the emerson that goes in at the ear. a heavy and vase-like blossom of a magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of aspen, would not seem more as if it could never have grown there than emerson's voice seems inspired and foreign to his visible and natural body." emerson's ever exquisite and wonderful good taste seems closely connected with this asceticism, and it is probable that his taste influenced his views and conduct to some small extent. the anti-slavery people were not always refined. they were constantly doing things which were tactically very effective, but were not calculated to attract the over-sensitive. garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism was good politics, but bad taste. wendell phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to deal in personalities of an exasperating kind. one sees a certain shrinking in emerson from the taste of the abolitionists. it was not merely their doctrines or their methods which offended him. he at one time refused to give wendell phillips his hand because of phillips's treatment of his friend, judge hoar. one hardly knows whether to be pleased at emerson for showing a human weakness, or annoyed at him for not being more of a man. the anecdote is valuable in both lights. it is like a tiny speck on the crystal of his character which shows us the exact location of the orb, and it is the best illustration of the feeling of the times which has come down to us. if by "asceticism" we mean an experiment in starving the senses, there is little harm in it. nature will soon reassert her dominion, and very likely our perceptions will be sharpened by the trial. but "natural asceticism" is a thing hardly to be distinguished from functional weakness. what is natural asceticism but a lack of vigor? does it not tend to close the avenues between the soul and the universe? "is it not so much death?" the accounts of emerson show him to have been a man in whom there was almost a hiatus between the senses and the most inward spirit of life. the lower register of sensations and emotions which domesticate a man into fellowship with common life was weak. genial familiarity was to him impossible; laughter was almost a pain. "it is not the sea and poverty and pursuit that separate us. here is alcott by my door,--yet is the union more profound? no! the sea, vocation, poverty, are seeming fences, but man is insular and cannot be touched. every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.... most of the persons whom i see in my own house i see across a gulf; i cannot go to them nor they come to me." this aloofness of emerson must be remembered only as blended with his benignity. "his friends were all that knew him," and, as dr. holmes said, "his smile was the well-remembered line of terence written out in living features." emerson's journals show the difficulty of his intercourse even with himself. he could not reach himself at will, nor could another reach him. the sensuous and ready contact with nature which more carnal people enjoy was unknown to him. he had eyes for the new england landscape, but for no other scenery. if there is one supreme sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of venice seen from the water. this sight greeted emerson at the age of thirty. the famous city, as he approached it by boat, "looked for some time like nothing but new york. it is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my thought a most disagreeable residence. you feel always in prison and solitary. it is as if you were always at sea. i soon had enough of it." emerson's contempt for travel and for the "rococo toy," italy, is too well known to need citation. it proceeds from the same deficiency of sensation. his eyes saw nothing; his ears heard nothing. he believed that men travelled for distraction and to kill time. the most vulgar plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from athens than this cultivated saint. everything in the world which must be felt with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him dead-letter. art was a name to him; music was a name to him; love was a name to him. his essay on love is a nice compilation of compliments and elegant phrases ending up with some icy morality. it seems very well fitted for a gift-book or an old-fashioned lady's annual. "the lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.... the soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. they appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. this repairs the wounded affection. meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the weakness of the other.... at last they discover that all which at first drew them together--those once sacred features, that magical play of charms--was deciduous, had a prospective end like the scaffolding by which the house was built, and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness.... thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex nor person nor partiality, but which seeks wisdom and virtue everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.... there are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. but in health the mind is presently seen again," etc. all this is not love, but the merest literary coquetry. love is different from this. lady burton, when a very young girl, and six years before her engagement, met burton at boulogne. they met in the street, but did not speak. a few days later they were formally introduced at a dance. of this she writes: "that was a night of nights. he waltzed with me once, and spoke to me several times. i kept the sash where he put his arm around me and my gloves, and never wore them again." a glance at what emerson says about marriage shows that he suspected that institution. he can hardly speak of it without some sort of caveat or precaution. "though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears, and glory,--though there be for heroes this _moral union_, yet they too are as far as ever from, an intellectual union, and the moral is for low and external purposes, like the corporation of a ship's company or of a fire club." in speaking of modern novels, he says: "there is no new element, no power, no furtherance. 'tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. great is the poverty of their inventions. _she was beautiful, and he fell in love_.... happy will that house be in which the relations are formed by character; after the highest and not after the lowest; the house in which character marries and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.... to each occurs soon after puberty, some event, or society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the chief fact in their history. in women it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable), and yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an unfolding life from such a youthful and generally inconsiderate period as the age of courtship and marriage.... women more than all are the element and kingdom of illusion. being fascinated they fascinate. they see through claude lorraines. and how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by which they live? too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage." we are all so concerned that a man who writes about love shall tell the truth that if he chance to start from premises which are false or mistaken, his conclusions will appear not merely false, but offensive. it makes no matter how exalted the personal character of the writer may be. neither sanctity nor intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they be intensified to the point of incandescence, can make up for a want of nature. this perpetual splitting up of love into two species, one of which is condemned, but admitted to be useful--is it not degrading? there is in emerson's theory of the relation between the sexes neither good sense, nor manly feeling, nor sound psychology. it is founded on none of these things. it is a pure piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he was bred to the priesthood. we are not to imagine that there was in this doctrine anything peculiar to emerson. but we are surprised to find the pessimism inherent in the doctrine overcome emerson, to whom pessimism is foreign. both doctrine and pessimism are a part of the puritanism of the times. they show a society in which the intellect had long been used to analyze the affections, in which the head had become dislocated from the body. to this disintegration of the simple passion of love may be traced the lack of maternal tenderness characteristic of the new england nature. the relation between the blood and the brain was not quite normal in this civilization, nor in emerson, who is its most remarkable representative. if we take two steps backward from the canvas of this mortal life and glance at it impartially, we shall see that these matters of love and marriage pass like a pivot through the lives of almost every individual, and are, sociologically speaking, the _primum mobile_ of the world. the books of any philosopher who slurs them or distorts them will hold up a false mirror to life. if an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an italian opera than he would by reading emerson's volumes. he would learn from the italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin. in a review of emerson's personal character and opinions, we are thus led to see that his philosophy, which finds no room for the emotions, is a faithful exponent of his own and of the new england temperament, which distrusts and dreads the emotions. regarded as a sole guide to life for a young person of strong conscience and undeveloped affections, his works might conceivably be even harmful because of their unexampled power of purely intellectual stimulation. * * * * * emerson's poetry has given rise to much heart-burning and disagreement. some people do not like it. they fail to find the fire in the ice. on the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of professed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of readers who find in emerson an element for which they search the rest of poesy in vain. it is the irony of fate that his admirers should be more than usually sensitive about his fame. this prophet who desired not to have followers, lest he too should become a cult and a convention, and whose main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly canonized and embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved. he is become a tradition and a sacred relic. you must speak of him under your breath, and you may not laugh near his shrine. emerson's passion for nature was not like the passion of keats or of burns, of coleridge or of robert browning; compared with these men he is cold. his temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands on the shelf of english poets like the icy fish which in caliban upon setebos is described as finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of an ocean not his own. but emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose verses carry a world of their own within them. they are overshadowed by the greatness of his prose, but they are authentic. he is the chief poet of that school of which emily dickinson is a minor poet. his poetry is a successful spiritual deliverance of great interest. his worship of the new england landscape amounts to a religion. his poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we are alone in the fields and with the trees,--not english fields nor french lanes, but new england meadows and uplands. there is no human creature in sight, not even emerson is there, but the wind and the flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmosphere, the breath of nature. there is a deep and true relation between the intellectual and almost dry brilliancy of emerson's feelings and the landscape itself. here is no defective english poet, no shelley without the charm, but an american poet, a new england poet with two hundred years of new england culture and new england landscape in him. people are forever speculating upon what will last, what posterity will approve, and some people believe that emerson's poetry will outlive his prose. the question is idle. the poems are alive now, and they may or may not survive the race whose spirit they embody; but one thing is plain: they have qualities which have preserved poetry in the past. they are utterly indigenous and sincere. they are short. they represent a civilization and a climate. his verse divides itself into several classes. we have the single lyrics, written somewhat in the style of the later seventeenth century. of these the humble bee is the most exquisite, and although its tone and imagery can be traced to various well-known and dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. the rhodora and terminus and perhaps a few others belong to that class of poetry which, like abou ben adhem, is poetry because it is the perfection of statement. the boston hymn, the concord ode, and the other occasional pieces fall in another class, and do not seem to be important. the first two lines of the ode, "o tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire." are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of some mythical greek, some simonides, some sappho, but the rest of the lines are commonplace. throughout his poems there are good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches of grace. he himself knew the quality of his poetry, and wrote of it, "all were sifted through and through, five lines lasted sound and true." he is never merely conventional, and his poetry, like his prose, is homespun and sound. but his ear was defective: his rhymes are crude, and his verse is often lame and unmusical, a fault which can be countervailed by nothing but force, and force he lacks. to say that his ear was defective is hardly strong enough. passages are not uncommon which hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed; as, for example:-- "thorough a thousand voices spoke the universal dame: 'who telleth one of my meanings is master of all i am.'" he himself has very well described the impression his verse is apt to make on a new reader when he says,-- "poetry must not freeze, but flow." the lovers of emerson's poems freely acknowledge all these defects, but find in them another element, very subtle and rare, very refined and elusive, if not altogether unique. this is the mystical element or strain which qualifies many of his poems, and to which some of them are wholly devoted. there has been so much discussion as to emerson's relation to the mystics that it is well here to turn aside for a moment and consider the matter by itself. the elusiveness of "mysticism" arises out of the fact that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. it is formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to be conveyed, by symbols. these symbols to a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will say nothing, but the presumption among those who are inclined towards the cult is that if these symbols convey anything at all, that thing is mysticism. the mystics are right. the familiar phrases, terms, and symbols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a glance at them shows that they do tend to express and evoke a somewhat definite psychic condition. there is a certain mood of mind experienced by most of us in which we feel the mystery of existence; in which our consciousness seems to become suddenly separated from our thoughts, and we find ourselves asking, "who am i? what are these thoughts?" the mood is very apt to overtake us while engaged in the commonest acts. in health it is always momentary, and seems to coincide with the instant of the transition and shift of our attention from one thing to another. it is probably connected with the transfer of energy from one set of faculties to another set, which occurs, for instance, on our waking from sleep, on our hearing a bell at night, on our observing any common object, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our mind is or has just been thoroughly preoccupied with something else. this displacement of the attention occurs in its most notable form when we walk from the study into the open fields. nature then attacks us on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissipates all focus of thought and dissolves our attention. if we happen to be mentally fatigued, and we take a walk in the country, a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, which nothing else on earth can give, accompanies this distraction of the mind from its problems. the reaction fills us with a sense of mystery and expansion. it brings us to the threshold of those spiritual experiences which are the obscure core and reality of our existence, ever alive within us, but generally veiled and sub-conscious. it brings us, as it were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry, and music. the condition is one of excitation and receptiveness, where art may speak and we shall understand. on the other hand, the condition shows a certain dethronement of the will and attention which may ally it to the hypnotic state. certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of nature by calling on us with a thousand voices at once. poetry deals often with vague or contradictory statements, with a jumble of images, a throng of impressions. but in true poetry the psychology of real life is closely followed. the mysticism is momentary. we are not kept suspended in a limbo, "trembling like a guilty thing surprised," but are ushered into another world of thought and feeling. on the other hand, a mere statement of inconceivable things is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of poetry, because such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters the attention, and does to a certain extent superinduce the "blank misgivings" of mysticism. it does this, however, _without_ going further and filling the mind with new life. if i bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and then say, "i am the slayer and the slain, i am the doubter and the doubt," i puzzle his mind, and may succeed in reawakening in him the sense he has often had come over him that we are ignorant of our own destinies and cannot grasp the meaning of life. if i do this, nothing can be a more legitimate opening for a poem, for it is an opening of the reader's mind. emerson, like many other highly organized persons, was acquainted with the mystic mood. it was not momentary with him. it haunted him, and he seems to have believed that the whole of poetry and religion was contained in the mood. and no one can gainsay that this mental condition is intimately connected with our highest feelings and leads directly into them. the fault with emerson is that he stops in the ante-chamber of poetry. he is content if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. his prologue and overture are excellent, but where is the argument? where is the substantial artistic content that shall feed our souls? the sphinx is a fair example of an emerson poem. the opening verses are musical, though they are handicapped by a reminiscence of the german way of writing. in the succeeding verses we are lapped into a charming reverie, and then at the end suddenly jolted by the question, "what is it all about?" in this poem we see expanded into four or five pages of verse an experience which in real life endures an eighth of a second, and when we come to the end of the mood we are at the end of the poem. there is no question that the power to throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a pass or two which shall give you his virgin attention is necessary to any artist. nobody has the knack of this more strongly than emerson in his prose writings. by a phrase or a common remark he creates an ideal atmosphere in which his thought has the directness of great poetry. but he cannot do it in verse. he seeks in his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose: follow a logical method. he seems to know too much what he is about, and to be content with doing too little. his mystical poems, from the point of view of such criticism as this, are all alike in that they all seek to do the same thing. nor does he always succeed. how does he sometimes fail in verse to say what he conveys with such everlasting happiness in prose! "i am owner of the sphere, of the seven stars and the solar year, of cæsar's hand and plato's brain, of lord christ's heart and shakespeare's strain." in these lines we have the same thought which appears a few pages later in prose: "all that shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself." he has failed in the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which was stronger in its simplicity; because in the verse he states an abstraction instead of giving an instance. the same failure follows him sometimes in prose when he is too conscious of his machinery. emerson knew that the sense of mystery accompanies the shift of an absorbed attention to some object which brings the mind back to the present. "there are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is more suggestive to the mind than the yosemite gorge or the vatican would be in another hour. in like mood, an old verse, or certain words, gleam with rare significance." at the close of his essay on history he is trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. he is speaking of the romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the romans. for this he has been quite properly laughed at by dr. holmes, because he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion. indeed, dr. holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that suggested by emerson; and dr. holmes is accurately happy in his jest, because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly mystical manner. there is throughout emerson's poetry, as throughout all of the new england poetry, too much thought, too much argument. some of his verse gives the reader a very curious and subtle impression that the lines are a translation. this is because he is closely following a thesis. indeed, the lines are a translation. they were thought first, and poetry afterwards. read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at once. read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the connection of ideas. the reason is that in the poetry the sequence is intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emotional. it is no mere epigram to say that his poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of prose writing, and his prose by the laws of poetry. the lines entitled days have a dramatic vigor, a mystery, and a music all their own:-- "daughters of time, the hypocritic days, muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, and marching single in an endless file, bring diadems and fagots in their hands. to each they offer gifts after his will, bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. i, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, forgot my morning wishes, hastily took a few herbs and apples, and the day turned and departed silent. i, too late, under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." the prose version of these lines, which in this case is inferior, is to be found in works and days: "he only is rich who owns the day.... they come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." that emerson had within him the soul of a poet no one will question, but his poems are expressed in prose forms. there are passages in his early addresses which can be matched in english only by bits from sir thomas browne or milton, or from the great poets. heine might have written the following parable into verse, but it could not have been finer. it comes from the very bottom of emerson's nature. it is his uttermost. infancy and manhood and old age, the first and the last of him, speak in it. "every god is there sitting in his sphere. the young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. on the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. he fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. the mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. what is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. and when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,--they alone with him alone." with the war closes the colonial period of our history, and with the end of the war begins our national life. before that time it was not possible for any man to speak for the nation, however much he might long to, for there was no nation; there were only discordant provinces held together by the exercise on the part of each of a strong and conscientious will. it is too much to expect that national character shall be expressed before it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish during a period when everybody is preoccupied with the fear of revolution. the provincial note which runs through all our literature down to the war resulted in one sense from our dependence upon europe. "all american manners, language, and writings," says emerson, "are derivative. we do not write from facts, but we wish to state the facts after the english manner. it is the tax we pay for the splendid inheritance of english literature." but in a deeper sense this very dependence upon europe was due to our disunion among ourselves. the equivocal and unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we were consigned by fate, and which made us perceive and resent the condescension of foreigners, was the logical outcome of our political situation. the literature of the northern states before the war, although full of talent, lacks body, lacks courage. it has not a full national tone. the south is not in it. new england's share in this literature is so large that small injustice will be done if we give her credit for all of it. she was the academy of the land, and her scholars were our authors. the country at large has sometimes been annoyed at the self-consciousness of new england, at the atmosphere of clique, of mutual admiration, of isolation, in which all her scholars, except emerson, have lived, and which notably enveloped the last little distinguished group of them. the circumstances which led to the isolation of lowell, holmes, longfellow, and the saturday club fraternity are instructive. the ravages of the war carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. the war did more than kill off a generation of scholars who would have succeeded these older scholars. it emptied the universities by calling all the survivors into the field of practical life; and after the war ensued a period during which all the learning of the land was lodged in the heads of these older worthies who had made their mark long before. a certain complacency which piqued the country at large was seen in these men. an ante-bellum colonial posing, inevitable in their own day, survived with them. when jared sparks put washington in the proper attitude for greatness by correcting his spelling, sparks was in cue with the times. it was thought that a great man must have his hat handed to him by his biographer, and be ushered on with decency toward posterity. in the lives and letters of some of our recent public men there has been a reminiscence of this posing, which we condemn as absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. provincial manners are always a little formal, and the pomposity of the colonial governor was never quite worked out of our literary men. let us not disparage the past. we are all grateful for the new england culture, and especially for the little group of men in cambridge and boston who did their best according to the light of their day. their purpose and taste did all that high ideals and good taste can do, and no more eminent literati have lived during this century. they gave the country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. they chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely sources. they lived stainless lives, and died in their professors' chairs honored by all men. for achievements of this sort we need hardly use as strong language as emerson does in describing contemporary literature: "it exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a new revelation." the mass and volume of literature must always be traditional, and the secondary writers of the world do nevertheless perform a function of infinite consequence in the spread of thought. a very large amount of first-hand thinking is not comprehensible to the average man until it has been distilled and is fifty years old. the men who welcome new learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next age. to their own times these secondary men often seem great because they are recognized and understood at once. we know the disadvantage under which these humanists of ours worked. the shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs over us still. the conservatism and timidity of our politics and of our literature to-day are due in part to that fearful pressure which for sixty years was never lifted from the souls of americans. that conservatism and timidity may be seen in all our past. they are in the rhetoric of webster and in the style of hawthorne. they killed poe. they created bryant. since the close of our most blessed war, we have been left to face the problems of democracy, unhampered by the terrible complications of sectional strife. it has happened, however, that some of the tendencies of our commercial civilization go toward strengthening and riveting upon us the very traits encouraged by provincial disunion. wendell phillips, with a cool grasp of understanding for which he is not generally given credit, states the case as follows:-- "the general judgment is that the freest possible government produces the freest possible men and women, the most individual, the least servile to the judgment of others. but a moment's reflection will show any man that this is an unreasonable expectation, and that, on the contrary, entire equality and freedom in political forms almost invariably tend to make the individual subside into the mass and lose his identity in the general whole. suppose we stood in england to-night. there is the nobility, and here is the church. there is the trading class, and here is the literary. a broad gulf separates the four; and provided a member of either can conciliate his own section, he can afford in a very large measure to despise the opinions of the other three. he has to some extent a refuge and a breakwater against the tyranny of what we call public opinion. but in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. there is no refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach; and the result is that if you take the old greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred, you will find not one single american who has not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, his social life, or his business, from the good opinion and the votes of those around him. and the consequence is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out his own convictions, as a nation, compared to other nations, we are a mass of cowards. more than all other people, we are afraid of each other." if we take a bird's-eye view of our history, we shall find that this constant element of democratic pressure has always been so strong a factor in moulding the character of our citizens, that there is less difference than we could wish to see between the types of citizenship produced before the war and after the war. charles pollen, that excellent and worthy german who came to this country while still a young man and who lived in the midst of the social and intellectual life of boston, felt the want of intellectual freedom in the people about him. if one were obliged to describe the america of to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a sentence from a letter of follen to harriet martineau written in , after the appearance of one of her books: "you have pointed out the two most striking national characteristics, 'deficiency of individual moral independence and extraordinary mutual respect and kindness.'" much of what emerson wrote about the united states in is true of the united states to-day. it would be hard to find a civilized people who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. it is easy to-day for the educated man who has read bryce and tocqueville to account for the mediocrity of american literature. the merit of emerson was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. he felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man about him was celebrating liberty and democracy, and every day was fourth of july. he taxes language to its limits in order to express his revolt. he says that no man should write except what he has discovered in the process of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every man will write well in proportion as he has contempt for the public. emerson seems really to have believed that if any man would only resolutely be himself, he would turn out to be as great as shakespeare. he will not have it that anything of value can be monopolized. his review of the world, whether under the title of manners, self-reliance, fate, experience, or what-not, leads him to the same thought. his conclusion is always the finding of eloquence, courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the humblest reader. he knows that we are full of genius and surrounded by genius, and that we have only to throw something off, not to acquire any new thing, in order to be bards, prophets, napoleons, and goethes. this belief is the secret of his stimulating power. it is this which gives his writings a radiance like that which shone from his personality. the deep truth shadowed forth by emerson when he said that "all the american geniuses lacked nerve and dagger" was illustrated by our best scholar. lowell had the soul of the yankee, but in his habits of writing he continued english tradition. his literary essays are full of charm. the commemoration ode is the high-water mark of the attempt to do the impossible. it is a fine thing, but it is imitative and secondary. it has paid the inheritance tax. twice, however, at a crisis of pressure, lowell assumed his real self under the guise of a pseudonym; and with his own hand he rescued a language, a type, a whole era of civilization from oblivion. here gleams the dagger and here is lowell revealed. his limitations as a poet, his too much wit, his too much morality, his mixture of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the very elements of power. the novelty of the biglow papers is as wonderful as their world-old naturalness. they take rank with greatness, and they were the strongest political tracts of their time. they imitate nothing; they are real. emerson himself was the only man of his times who consistently and utterly expressed himself, never measuring himself for a moment with the ideals of others, never troubling himself for a moment with what literature was or how literature should be created. the other men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, believed that literature was a very desirable article, a thing you could create if you were only smart enough. but emerson had no literary ambition. he cared nothing for belles-lettres. the consequence is that he stands above his age like a colossus. while he lived his figure could be seen from europe towering like atlas over the culture of the united states. great men are not always like wax which their age imprints. they are often the mere negation and opposite of their age. they give it the lie. they become by revolt the very essence of all the age is not, and that part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and breaks into utterance in one. through emerson spoke the fractional spirits of a multitude. he had not time, he had not energy left over to understand himself; he was a mouthpiece. if a soul be taken and crushed by democracy till it utter a cry, that cry will be emerson. the region of thought he lived in, the figures of speech he uses, are of an intellectual plane so high that the circumstances which produced them may be forgotten; they are indifferent. the constitution, slavery, the war itself, are seen as mere circumstances. they did not confuse him while he lived; they are not necessary to support his work now that it is finished. hence comes it that emerson is one of the world's voices. he was heard afar off. his foreign influence might deserve a chapter by itself. conservatism is not confined to this country. it is the very basis of all government. the bolts emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his perception, are not provincial. they were found to carry inspiration to england and germany. many of the important men of the last half-century owe him a debt. it is not yet possible to give any account of his influence abroad, because the memoirs which will show it are only beginning to be published. we shall have them in due time; for emerson was an outcome of the world's progress. his appearance marks the turning-point in the history of that enthusiasm for pure democracy which has tinged the political thought of the world for the past one hundred and fifty years. the youths of england and germany may have been surprised at hearing from america a piercing voice of protest against the very influences which were crushing them at home. they could not realize that the chief difference between europe and america is a difference in the rate of speed with which revolutions in thought are worked out. while the radicals of europe were revolting in against the abuses of a tyranny whose roots were in feudalism, emerson, the great radical of america, the arch-radical of the world, was revolting against the evils whose roots were in universal suffrage. by showing the identity in essence of all tyranny, and by bringing back the attention of political thinkers to its starting-point, the value of human character, he has advanced the political thought of the world by one step. he has pointed out for us in this country to what end our efforts must be bent. * * * * * walt whitman it would be an ill turn for an essay-writer to destroy walt whitman,--for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. he is the mare's nest of "american literature," and scarce a contributor to the saturday review but has at one time or another raised a flag over him. the history of these chronic discoveries of whitman as a poet, as a force, as a something or a somebody, would write up into the best possible monograph on the incompetency of the anglo-saxon in matters of criticism. english literature is the literature of genius, and the englishman is the great creator. his work outshines the genius of greece. his wealth outvalues the combined wealth of all modern europe. the english mind is the only unconscious mind the world has ever seen. and for this reason the english mind is incapable of criticism. there has never been an english critic of the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; and the critical work of england consists either of an academical bandying of a few old canons and shibboleths out of horace or aristotle, or else of the merest impressionism, and wordy struggle to convey the sentiment awakened by the thing studied. now, true criticism means an attempt to find out what something is, not for the purpose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for the purpose of illustrating something else, nor for any other ulterior purpose whatever. the so-called canons of criticism are of about as much service to a student of literature as the nicene creed and the lord's prayer are to the student of church history. they are a part of his subject, of course, but if he insists upon using them as a tape measure and a divining-rod he will produce a judgment of no possible value to any one, and interesting only as a record of a most complex state of mind. the educated gentlemen of england have surveyed literature with these time-honored old instruments, and hordes of them long ago rushed to america with their theodolites and their quadrants in their hands. they sized us up and they sized us down, and they never could find greatness in literature among us till walt whitman appeared and satisfied the astrologers. here was a comet, a man of the people, a new man, who spoke no known language, who was very uncouth and insulting, who proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and who corresponded to the english imagination with the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in america,--with mormonism and car factories, steamboat explosions, strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose form violated every one of their minor canons as america violated every one of their social ideas. then, too, whitman arose out of the war, as shakespeare arose out of the destruction of the armada, as the greek poets arose out of the repulse of the persians. it was impossible, it was unprecedented, that a national revulsion should not produce national poetry--and lo! here was whitman. it may safely be said that the discovery of whitman as a poet caused many a hard-thinking oxford man to sleep quietly at night. america was solved. the englishman travels, but he travels after his mind has been burnished by the university, and at an age when the best he can do in the line of thought is to make an intelligent manipulation of the few notions he leaves home with. he departs an educated gentleman, taking with him his portmanteau and his ideas. he returns a travelled gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and his portmanteau. he would as soon think of getting his coats from kansas as his thoughts from travel. and therefore every impression of america which the travelling englishman experienced confirmed his theory of whitman. even rudyard kipling, who does not in any sense fall under the above description, has enough anglo-saxon blood in him to see in this country only the fulfilment of the fantastic notions of his childhood. but imagine an oxford man who had eyes in his head, and who should come to this country, never having heard of whitman. he would see an industrious and narrow-minded population, commonplace and monotonous, so uniform that one man can hardly be distinguished from another, law-abiding, timid, and traditional; a community where the individual is suppressed by law, custom, and instinct, and in which, by consequence, there are few or no great men, even counting those men thrust by necessary operation of the laws of trade into commercial prominence, and who claim scientific rather than personal notice. the culture of this people, its architecture, letters, drama, etc., he would find were, of necessity, drawn from european models; and in its poetry, so far as poetry existed, he would recognize a somewhat feeble imitation of english poetry. the newspaper verses very fairly represent the average talent for poetry and average appreciation of it, and the newspaper verse of the united states is precisely what one would expect from a decorous and unimaginative population,--intelligent, conservative, and uninspired. above the newspaper versifiers float the minor poets, and above these soar the greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy are the same as those of the humblest acolyte,--intelligence, conservatism, conventional morality. above the atmosphere they live in, above the heads of all the american poets, and between them and the sky, float the constitution of the united states and the traditions and forms of english literature. this whole culture is secondary and tertiary, and it truly represents the respectable mediocrity from which it emanates. whittier and longfellow have been much read in their day,--read by mill-hands and clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and doctors and divines, by the reading classes of the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke for, whose yearnings and spiritual life they truly expressed. now, the oxford traveller would not have found whitman at all. he would never have met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a man like him. the traveller, as he opened his saturday review upon his return to london, and read the current essay on whitman, would have been faced by a problem fit to puzzle montesquieu, a problem to floor goethe. and yet whitman is representative. he is a real product, he has a real and most interesting place in the history of literature, and he speaks for a class and type of human nature whose interest is more than local, whose prevalence is admitted,--a type which is one of the products of the civilization of the century, perhaps of all centuries, and which has a positively planetary significance. there are, in every country, individuals who, after a sincere attempt to take a place in organized society, revolt from the drudgery of it, content themselves with the simplest satisfactions of the grossest need of nature, so far as subsistence is concerned, and rediscover the infinite pleasures of life in the open air. if the roadside, the sky, the distant town, the soft buffeting of the winds of heaven, are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, the freedom from all responsibility and accountability is nirvana to his moral nature. a man who has once tasted these two joys together, the joy of being in the open air and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed, has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined nature might well dread. life has no terrors for such a man. society has no hold on him. the trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as nothing compared with its satisfactions. the worm that never dies is dead in him. the great mystery of consciousness and of effort is quietly dissolved into the vacant happiness of sensation,--not base sensation, but the sensation of the dawn and the sunset, of the mart and the theatre, and the stars, the panorama of the universe. to the moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the sake of something else. he must explain or make use of them, or define his relation to them. he spends the whole agony of his existence in an endeavor to docket them and deal with them. hampered as he is by all that has been said and done before, he yet feels himself driven on to summarize, and wreak himself upon the impossible task of grasping this cosmos with his mind, of holding it in his hand, of subordinating it to his purpose. the tramp is freed from all this. by an act as simple as death, he has put off effort and lives in peace. it is no wonder that every country in europe shows myriads of these men, as it shows myriads of suicides annually. it is no wonder, though the sociologists have been late in noting it, that specimens of the type are strikingly identical in feature in every country of the globe. the habits, the physique, the tone of mind, even the sign-language and some of the catch-words, of tramps are the same everywhere. the men are not natally outcasts. they have always tried civilized life. their early training, at least their early attitude of mind towards life, has generally been respectable. that they should be criminally inclined goes without saying, because their minds have been freed from the sanctions which enforce law. but their general innocence is, under the circumstances, very remarkable, and distinguishes them from the criminal classes. when we see one of these men sitting on a gate, or sauntering down a city street, how often have we wondered how life appeared to him; what solace and what problems it presented. how often have we longed to know the history of such a soul, told, not by the police-blotter, but by the poet or novelist in the heart of the man! walt whitman has given utterance to the soul of the tramp. a man of genius has passed sincerely and normally through this entire experience, himself unconscious of what he was, and has left a record of it to enlighten and bewilder the literary world. in whitman's works the elemental parts of a man's mind and the fragments of imperfect education may be seen merging together, floating and sinking in a sea of insensate egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, disgusting, extraordinary. our inability to place the man intellectually, and find a type and reason for his intellectual state, comes from this: that the revolt he represents is not an intellectual revolt. ideas are not at the bottom of it. it is a revolt from drudgery. it is the revolt of laziness. there is no intellectual coherence in his talk, but merely pathological coherence. can the insulting jumble of ignorance and effrontery, of scientific phrase and french paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective, which he puts forward with the pretence that it represents thought, be regarded, from any possible point of view, as a philosophy, or a system, or a belief? is it individualism of any statable kind? do the thoughts and phrases which float about in it have a meaning which bears any relation to the meaning they bear in the language of thinkers? certainly not. does all the patriotic talk, the talk about the united states and its future, have any significance as patriotism? does it poetically represent the state of feeling of any class of american citizens towards their country? or would you find the nearest equivalent to this emotion in the breast of the educated tramp of france, or germany, or england? the speech of whitman is english, and his metaphors and catch-words are apparently american, but the emotional content is cosmic. he put off patriotism when he took to the road. the attraction exercised by his writings is due to their flashes of reality. of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. his tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. the world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of an insane self-consciousness in its presence. perhaps this egotism and posturing is the revenge of a stilled conscience, and we ought to read in it the inversion of the social instincts. perhaps all tramps are poseurs. but there is this to be said for whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an authentic creature. he did not sit in a study and throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not by his poses, that he has survived. the descriptions of nature, the visual observation of life, are first-hand and wonderful. it was no false light that led the oxonians to call some of his phrases homeric. the pundits were right in their curiosity over him; they went astray only in their attempt at classification. it is a pity that truth and beauty turn to cant on the second delivery, for it makes poetry, as a profession, impossible. the lyric poets have always spent most of their time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the very attempt disqualifies them. a poet who discovers his mission is already half done for; and even wordsworth, great genius though he was, succeeded in half drowning his talents in his parochial theories, in his own self-consciousness and self-conceit. walt whitman thought he had a mission. he was a professional poet. he had purposes and theories about poetry which he started out to enforce and illustrate. he is as didactic as wordsworth, and is thinking of himself the whole time. he belonged, moreover, to that class of professionals who are always particularly self-centred, autocratic, vain, and florid,--the class of quacks. there are, throughout society, men, and they are generally men of unusual natural powers, who, after gaining a little unassimilated education, launch out for themselves and set up as authorities on their own account. they are, perhaps, the successors of the old astrologers, in that what they seek to establish is some personal professorship or predominance. the old occultism and mystery was resorted to as the most obvious device for increasing the personal importance of the magician; and the chief difference to-day between a regular physician and a quack is, that the quack pretends to know it all. brigham young and joseph smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent establishment of supernatural and occult powers. the phrenologists, the venders of patent medicine, the christian scientists, the single-taxers, and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and pontifical appeal to human nature. it is this mystical power, this religious element, which floats them, sells the drugs, cures the sick, and packs the meetings. by temperament and education walt whitman was fitted to be a prophet of this kind. he became a quack poet, and hampered his talents by the imposition of a monstrous parade of rattletrap theories and professions. if he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he would have been ruined from the start. as it is, he has filled his work with grimace and vulgarity. he writes a few lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself and his mission. he has the bad taste bred in the bone of all missionaries and palmists, the sign-manual of a true quack. this bad taste is nothing more than the offensive intrusion of himself and his mission into the matter in hand. as for his real merits and his true mission, too much can hardly be said in his favor. the field of his experience was narrow, and not in the least intellectual. it was narrow because of his isolation from human life. a poet like browning, or heine, or alfred de musset deals constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the human heart. he explains life on its social side. he gives us some more or less coherent view of an infinitely complicated matter. he is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion. walt whitman has no interest in any of these things. he was fortunately so very ignorant and untrained that his mind was utterly incoherent and unintellectual. his mind seems to be submerged and to have become almost a part of his body. the utter lack of concentration which resulted from living his whole life in the open air has left him spontaneous and unaccountable. and the great value of his work is, that it represents the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of the mind and body in health. it is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than walt whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely. he is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. all that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being. a man who leaves his office and gets into a canoe on a canadian river, sure of ten days' release from the cares of business and housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as walt whitman has here and there thrown into his poetry. one might say that to have done this is the greatest accomplishment in literature. walt whitman, in some of his lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives us life in the throb. it is the throb of the whole physical system of a man who breathes the open air and feels the sky over him. "when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed" is a great lyric. here is a whole poem without a trace of self-consciousness. it is little more than a description of nature. the allusions to lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two--merest suggestions of the tragedy. but grief, overwhelming grief, is in every line of it, the grief which has been transmuted into this sensitiveness to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac's bloom, and the sunset. here is truth to life of the kind to be found in king lear or guy mannering, in Æschylus or burns. walt whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. had he had any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the poem. the recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do other than spoil. it is ungrateful to note whitman's limitations, his lack of human passion, the falseness of many of his notions about the american people. the man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. even his work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems and notes upon the period are picturesque. as to his talk about comrades and manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawny arms round each other's brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in whitman's poetry is false to life. it has a lyrical value, as representing whitman's personal feelings, but no one else in the country was ever found who felt or acted like this. in fact, in all that concerns the human relations walt whitman is as unreal as, let us say, william morris, and the american mechanic would probably prefer sigurd the volsung, and understand it better than whitman's poetry. this falseness to the sentiment of the american is interwoven with such wonderful descriptions of american sights and scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the foreigners should have accepted the gospel. on the whole, whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and throws no light on american civilization, is a delightful appearance, and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. this man committed every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was an outrage. he was neither chaste, nor industrious, nor religious. he patiently lived upon cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph. he did really live the life he liked to live, in defiance of all men, and this is a great desert, a most stirring merit. and he gave, in his writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,--a picture which the world had never seen before, and which it is probable the world will not soon cease to wonder at. * * * * * a study of romeo the plays of shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. they stand in a place outside of our deduction. their cosmos is greater than our philosophy. they are like the forces of nature and the operations of life in the vivid world about us. we may measure our intellectual growth by the new horizons we see opening within them. so long as they continue to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. at the moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning to petrify. our fresh interest in life has been arrested. there is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size up" shakespeare. we cannot help setting down as a coxcomb any man who has done it to his own satisfaction. he has pigeon-holed himself. he will not get lost. if you want him, you can lay your hand on him. he has written an autobiography. he has "sized up" himself. in writing about shakespeare, it is excusable to put off the armor of criticism, and speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive manner, lest by giving way to conviction, by encouraging ourselves into positive beliefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old before our time. perhaps some such apology is needed to introduce the observations on the character of romeo which are here thrown together, and the remarks about the play itself, the acting, and the text. it is believed by some scholars that in the second quarto edition of romeo and juliet, published in , shakespeare's revising hand can be seen, and that the differences between the first and second editions show the amendments, additions, and corrections with which shakespeare saw fit to embellish his work in preparing it for the press. if this were actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table before us, convinced that one of them was shakespeare's draft or acting copy, and the other shakespeare's finished work; and if, by comparing the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,--it would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this great personality, this intellect the most powerful that has ever illumined human life. no other literary inquiry could compare in interest with such a study as this; for the relation which shakespeare himself bore to the plays he created is one of the mysteries and blank places in history, a gap that staggers the mind and which imagination cannot overleap. the student who examines both texts will be apt to conclude that the second is by no means a revised edition of the first, but that (according to another theory) the first is a pirated edition of the play, stolen by the printer, and probably obtained by means of a reporter who took down the lines as they were spoken on the stage. the stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on the stage. the mistakes of the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) as seen in the first edition generally injure the play; and it was from this circumstance--the frequency of blotches in the first edition--that the idea gained currency that the second edition was an example of shakespeare's never-failing tact in bettering his own lines. perhaps, after all, it would little advance our understanding of the plays, or solve the essential puzzle,--that they actually had an author,--if we could follow every stroke of his revising pen. we should observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and true meaning, the secret of their life, would be as safe as it is at present, as securely lost in the midst of all this demonstration as the manuscripts themselves were in the destruction of the globe theatre. if we must then abandon the hope of seeing shakespeare in his workshop, we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the manner in which shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he fared at the hands of the early actors. romeo and juliet is an exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have been about the same in shakespeare's time as they are to-day. they are, in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself. as artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their early years. there is an anecdote of schumann which somewhat crudely illustrates this. it is said that in one of his early symphonies he introduced a passage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to take up the aria in triumph. at the rehearsal, when the moment came for the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. the composer had arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could not sound except with closed stops. the passage had to be rewritten. the young painter is frequently found struggling with subjects, with effects of light, which are almost impossible to render, and which perhaps an older man would not attempt. it is not surprising to find among the early works of shakespeare that some of the characters, however true to life,--nay, because true to life,--are almost impossible to be represented on the stage. certainly romeo presents us with a character of the kind. shakespeare's knowledge of human nature seems to have antedated his knowledge of the stage. in imagining the character of romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors. in conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a course of conduct as romeo's, shakespeare had in his mind the probabilities and facts in real life rather than the probabilities demanded by the stage. romeo must be a man almost wholly made up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric poet in the intensity of his sensations, a child in his helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. he lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with real life only to injure himself and others, and finally drives with the collected energy of his being into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of the world. this man must fall in love at first sight. he must marry clandestinely. he must be banished for having taken part in a street fight, and must return to slay himself upon the tomb of his beloved. shakespeare, with his passion for realism, devotes several scenes at the opening of the play to the explanation of romeo's state of mind. he will give us a rationalistic account of love at first sight by bringing on this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion owing to his rejection by a woman not otherwise connected with the story. it is perfectly true that this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first sight. the effect upon romeo's very boyish, unreal, and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the rejection (for which we must always respect rosaline) is to throw him, and all the unstable elements of which he is made, into a giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it will require only the glance of a pair of eyes to precipitate into the very elixir of true love. all this is true, but no audience cares about the episode or requires the explanation. indeed, it jars upon the sentimental notion of many persons to this day, and in many stage versions it is avoided. these preparatory scenes bring out in a most subtle way the egoism at the basis of romeo's character,--the same lyrical egoism that is in all his language and in all his conduct. when we first see romeo, he is already in an uneasy dream. he is wandering, aloof from his friends and absorbed in himself. on meeting juliet he passes from his first dream into a second dream. on learning of the death of juliet he passes into still a third and quite different dream,--or stage of dream,--a stage in which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating intellect of a maniac. the mental abstraction of romeo continues even after he has met juliet. in capulet's garden, despite the directness of juliet, he is still in his reveries. the sacred wonder of the hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, but into poetry. juliet's anxieties are practical. she asks him about his safety, how he came there, how he expects to escape. he answers in madrigals. his musings are almost impersonal. the power of the moonlight is over him, and the power of the scene, of which juliet is only a part. "with love's light wings did i o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt; therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me. * * * * * lady, by yonder blessed moon i swear that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops-- * * * * * it is my soul that calls upon my name: how silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears." these reflections are almost "asides." they ought hardly to be spoken aloud. they denote that romeo is still in his trance. they have, however, another and unfortunate influence: they retard the action of the play. as we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of lyrical feeling on romeo's part does not interfere with our enjoyment. it seems to accentuate the more direct and human strain of juliet's love. but on the stage the actor who plays romeo requires the very highest powers. while speaking at a distance from juliet, and in a constrained position, he must by his voice and gestures convey these subtlest shades of feeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. it is no wonder that the rôle of romeo is one of the most difficult in all shakespeare. the demands made upon the stage are almost more than the stage can meet. the truth to nature is of a kind that the stage is almost powerless to render. the character of romeo cannot hope to be popular. such pure passion, such unreasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven in a man. he must roll on the floor and blubber and kick. there is no getting away from this. he is not romeo unless he cries like a baby or a greek hero. this is the penalty for being a lyric poet. had he used his mind more upon the problems of his love, and less upon its celebration in petalled phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour of his need. in fact, throughout the play, romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. for one instant only does he rise into respectability,--at the moment of his quarrel with tybalt. at this crisis he is stung into life by the death of mercutio, and acts like a man. the ranting manner in which it is customary to give romeo's words in this passage of the play shows how far most actors are from understanding the true purport of the lines; how far from realizing that these few lines are the only opportunity the actor has of establishing the character of romeo as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero of a play:-- "alive, in triumph! and mercutio slain! away to heaven, respective lenity, and fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now! now, tybalt, take the 'villain' back again that late thou gay'st me;--for mercutio's soul is but a little way above our heads, staying for thine to keep him company: either thou, or i, or both, must go with him." the first three lines are spoken by romeo to himself. they are a reflection, not a declamation,--a reflection upon which he instantly acts. he assumes the calmness of a man of his rank who is about to fight. more than this, romeo, the man of words and moods, when once roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,--when once pledged to action,--romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. he is now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. we feel sure that he will kill tybalt in the encounter. the appeal to the supernatural is in his very gesture. the audience--nay, tybalt himself--gazes with awe on this sudden apparition of romeo as a man of action. this highly satisfactory conduct is soon swept away by his behavior on hearing the news of his banishment. the boy seems to be without much stamina, after all. he is a pitiable object, and does not deserve the love of fair lady. at mantua the tide of his feelings has turned again, and by one of those natural reactions which he himself takes note of he wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him above the ground with cheerful thoughts." it is the lightning before the thunderbolt. "her body sleeps to capel's monument, and her immortal part with angels lives. i saw her laid low in her kindred's vault, and presently took post to tell it you." balthasar makes no attempt to break the news gently. the blow descends on romeo when he least expects it. he is not spared. the conduct of romeo on hearing of juliet's death is so close to nature as to be nature itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost impossible to be given on the stage. _he does nothing._ he is stunned. he collapses. for fully five minutes he does not speak, and yet in these five minutes he must show to the audience that his nature has been shaken to its foundations. the delirium of miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. his words are gone. his emotion is paralyzed, but his mind is alert. he seems suddenly to be grown up,--a man, and not a boy,--and a man of action. "is it even so?" is all he says. he orders post-horses, ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences; it is evident that before speaking at all he has determined what he will do, and from now on to the end of the play romeo is different from his old self, for a new romeo has appeared. he is in a state of intense and calm exultation. all his fluctuating emotions have been stilled or stunned. he gives his orders in staccato. we feel that he knows what he is going to do, and will certainly accomplish it. meanwhile his mind is dominant. it is preternaturally active. his "asides," which before were lyrical, now become the comments of an acute intellect. his vivid and microscopic recollection of the apothecary shop, his philosophical bantering with the apothecary, his sudden violence to balthasar at the entrance to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness, his words and conflict with paris, whom he kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as it were, with his left hand, without malice and without remorse,--all these things show an intellect working at high pressure, while the spirit of the man is absorbed in another and more important matter. there is a certain state of mind in which the will to do is so soon followed by the act itself that one may say the act is automatic. the thought has already begun to be executed even while it is being formed. this occurs especially where the intent is to do some horrid deed which requires preparation, firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above all, external calmness. "between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. the genius and the mortal instruments are then in council; and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection." this is the phase through which romeo is passing on the way from mantua to verona. his own words give us a picture of him during that ride:-- "what said my man when my betossed soul did not attend him as we rode?" he has come like an arrow, his mind closed to the external world, himself in the blind clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on towards its fulfilment. only at the end, when he stands before the bier of juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for the first time,--only then is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; then does his triumphant purpose break into speech, and his words soar up like the flames of a great bonfire of precious incense streaming upward in exultation and in happiness. the whole course of these last scenes of romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. the very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing highly sane as to its words. it must be done quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must be created, which is created upon balthasar, that romeo is not in his right mind. a friend seeing him would cross the street to ask what was the matter. the whole character of romeo, from the beginning, has been imagined with reference to this self-destroying consummation. from his first speech we might have suspected that something destructive would come out of this man. there is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or thwarted by society. their fine energies have had no training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. they know no compromise. if they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. romeo is not suffering in this final scene. he is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. he glories in his deed. it satisfies his soul. it gives him supreme spiritual activity. the deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free. "o, here will i set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh." how much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the play--which appears to have been a popular one--in the years - ? probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a tolerable representation of the piece. the subtler truths of shakespeare have always been lost upon the stage. in turning over the first quarto of romeo and juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. the early audiences, like the popular audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. it is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. the reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. no doubt, in shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. it is impossible that the longer plays, like king lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from scene to scene. to make plain the course of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. the choruses are finger-posts. it is true that the choruses in shakespeare are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood. the prologue to romeo and juliet is a riddle to which the play is the answer. one might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by shakespeare's choruses. they play variations on the theme. they instruct only the instructed. if interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is probably the second. our chief loss in reading shakespeare is the loss of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. in every line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with the conditions on which they comment. a character on the stage has need, at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of something we know in real life. the types of shakespeare which have been found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in intensity, very different from their interest to us. the high life depicted by shakespeare has disappeared. no one of us has ever known a mercutio. fortunately, the types of society seem to change less in the lower orders than in the upper classes. england swarms with old women like juliet's nurse; and as to these characters in shakespeare whose originals still survive, and as to them only, we may feel that we are near the elizabethans. we should undoubtedly suffer some disenchantment by coming in contact with these coarse and violent people. how much do the pictures of contemporary england given us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! how different is the thing from the abstract! or, to put the same thought in a more obvious light, how fantastic are the ideas of the germans about shakespeare! how germanized does he come forth from their libraries and from their green-rooms! we in america, with our formal manners, our bloodless complexions, our perpetual decorum and self-suppression, are about as much in sympathy with the real element of shakespeare's plays as a baptist parson is with a fox-hunt. our blood is stirred by the narration, but our constitution could never stand the reality. as we read we translate all things into the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we translate the dialect of the english province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,--and indeed he is not; juliet, to be a most extraordinary young person; tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease would be the county paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly bred man. "what a man!" we should cry. "why, he's a man of wax!" * * * * * michael angelo's sonnets michael angelo is revealed by his sonnets. he wears the triple crown of painter, poet, and sculptor, and his genius was worshipped with a kind of awe even while he lived, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. the fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and were recognized as wonderful things. even in his lifetime they were treasured and collected in manuscript, and at a later day they were seized upon by the world at large. the first published edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. the extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. but the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in , guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. the bibliography of editions and translations which guasti gives is enough to show the popularity of the sonnets, their universal character, their international currency. there are upward of one hundred sonnets in every stage of perfection, and they have given rise not only to a literature of translations, but to a literature of comment. some years ago mrs. ednah cheney published a selection of the sonnets, giving the italian text, together with english translations by various hands. this little volume has earned the gratitude of many to whom it made known the sonnets. the italians themselves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of guasti's labors. but it has not been left to the italians to protect the treasures of their land. the barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. the last tribute has come from mr. john addington symonds, who has done the sonnets into the english of the pre-raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. his translations of the more graceful sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise at times into beauty. he has, however, insisted on polishing the rugged ones. moreover, being deficient in reverence, mr. symonds fails to convey reverence. nevertheless, to have boldly planned and carried out the task of translating them all was an undertaking of so much courage, and has been done with so much success, that every rival must give in his admiration. the poems are exceedingly various, some being rough and some elegant, some obvious and some obscure, some humorous, some religious. yet they have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. from the very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have been writing essays about them. one of them has been the subject of repeated academical disquisition. they absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. this is their quality. it is hard to say whence the vitality comes. they have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,--a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. they have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. the best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. the profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable depths of meaning. these sonnets are protean in character; they represent different things to different people,--religion to one, love to another, philosophy to a third. it is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation. the translator inevitably puts more of himself than of michael angelo into his version. even the first italian editor could not let them alone. he felt he must dose them with elegance. this itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. a translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. he is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. the language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and michael angelo's verse is very often neither the one nor the other. the selections which follow are not given as representative of the different styles in the original. they have been chosen from among those sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into english. the essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and special embarrassments are encountered in the italian sonnet. the italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thing so foreign to the english idea of what poetry should be, that no cultivation can ever domesticate it into the tongue. the seeds of flowers from the alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of english literature in their struggles with the italian sonnet. in italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the authorized form for a disconnected remark of any kind. its chief aim is not so much to express a feeling as an idea--a witticism--a conceit--a shrewd saying--a clever analogy--a graceful simile--a beautiful thought. moreover, it is not primarily intended for the public; it has a social rather than a literary function. the english with their lyrical genius have impressed the form, as they have impressed every other form, into lyrical service, and with some success, it must be admitted. but the italian sonnet is not lyrical. it is conversational and intellectual, and many things which english instinct declares poetry ought not to be. we feel throughout the poetry of the latin races a certain domination of the intelligence which is foreign to our own poetry. but in the sonnet form at least we may sympathize with this domination. let us read the italian sonnets, then, as if they were prose; let us seek first the thought and hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take care of itself. it is the thought, after all, which michael angelo himself cared about. he is willing to sacrifice elegance, to truncate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and grammar, if he can only hurl through the verse these thoughts which were his convictions. the platonic ideas about life and love and art, which lie at the bottom of most of these sonnets, are familiar to us all. they have been the reigning commonplace ideas of educated people for the last two thousand years. but in these sonnets they are touched with new power; they become exalted into mystical importance. we feel almost as if it were plato himself that is talking, and the interest is not lessened when we remember that it is michael angelo. it is necessary to touch on this element in the sonnets, for it exists in them; and because while some will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, others will be most struck by his great speculative intellect. it is certain that the sonnets date from various times in michael angelo's life; and, except in a few cases, it must be left to the instinct of the reader to place them. those which were called forth by the poet's friendship for vittoria colonna were undoubtedly written towards the close of his life. while he seems to have known vittoria colonna and to have been greatly attached to her for many years, it is certain that in his old age he fell in love with her. the library of romance that has been written about this attachment has added nothing to condivi's simple words:-- "he greatly loved the marchesana of pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in love, and was in return passionately beloved of her; and he still keeps many of her letters, which are full of most honest and tenderest love, such as used to issue from a heart like hers; and he himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of wit and tenderness. she often left viterbo and other places, where she had gone for pleasure, and to pass the summer, and came to rome for no other reason than to see michael angelo. and in return he bore her so much love that i remember hearing him say that he regretted nothing except that when he went to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her hand. he was many times overwhelmed at the thought of her death, and used to be as one out of his mind." it seems, from reading the sonnets, that some of those which are addressed to women must belong to a period anterior to his friendship with vittoria. this appears from the internal evidence of style and feeling, as well as by references in the later sonnets. one other fact must be mentioned,--both vittoria and michael angelo belonged to, or at least sympathized with, the piagnoni, and were in a sense disciples of savonarola. now, it is this religious element which makes michael angelo seem to step out of his country and out of his century and across time and space into our own. this religious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar to us; indeed, of a kind inborn and native to us. whether we be reading the english prayer-book or listening to the old german passion music, there is a certain note of the spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly recognize as a part of ourselves. what we recognize is, in fact, the protestantism which swept over europe during the century of michael angelo's existence; which conquered teutonic europe, and was conquered, but not extinguished, in latin europe; and a part of which survives in ourselves. if one wishes to feel the power of savonarola, one may do so in these sonnets. we had connected michael angelo with the renaissance, but we are here face to face with the reformation. we cannot help being a little surprised at this. we cannot help being surprised at finding how well we know this man. few of us are familiar enough with the language of the plastic arts to have seen without prompting this same modern element in michael angelo's painting and sculpture. we might, perhaps, have recognized it in the pieta in st. peter's. we may safely say, however, that it exists in all his works. it is in the medicean statues; it is in the julian marbles; it is in the sistine ceiling. what is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? the intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. but the meaning survives the craft. the lost arts retain their power over us. we understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. we cannot decipher the signs, yet we subscribe to their import. the world from which michael angelo's figures speak is our own world, after all. that is the reason they are so potent, so intimate, so inimitably significant. we may be sure that the affinity which we feel with michael angelo, and do not feel with any other artist of that age, springs from experiences and beliefs in him which are similar to our own. his work speaks to the moral sense more directly and more powerfully than that of any one,--so directly and so powerfully, indeed, that we whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are moved by michael angelo, although the rest of the _cinque cento_ culture remain a closed book to us. it is difficult, this conjuring with the unrecoverable past, so rashly done by us all. yet we must use what light we have. remembering, then, that painting is not the reigning mode of expression in recent times, and that in dealing with it we are dealing with a vehicle of expression with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. we may throw a bridge from the ground in the sonnets, upon which we are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in the frescos, which, by reason of our own ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and we may walk from one side to the other amid the elemental forces of this same man's mind. xxxviii give me again, ye fountains and ye streams, that flood of life, not yours, that swells your front beyond the natural fulness of your wont. i gave, and i take back as it beseems. and thou dense choking atmosphere on high disperse thy fog of sighs--for it is mine, and make the glory of the sun to shine again on my dim eyes.--o, earth and sky give me again the footsteps i have trod. let the paths grow where i walked them bare, the echoes where i waked them with my prayer be deaf--and let those eyes--those eyes, o god, give me the light i lent them.--that some soul may take my love. thou hadst no need of it. this rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a man who has been in love and has been repulsed. the shock has restored him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. he looks at the landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. the stream has lost its power, and the meadow its meaning. summer has stopped. his next thought is: "but it is i who had lent the landscape this beauty. that landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he breaks out with "give me back the light i threw upon you," and so on till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. the same clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is to be found in the famous sonnet--"_non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto_,"--where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her good-will--as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it, and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty, feels such pain. it is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. there is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men or women. there is question as to others whether they are prayers addressed to christ or love poems addressed to vittoria. in this latter case, perhaps, michael angelo did not himself know which they were. vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the words are alive in which he mentions her. "i wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in return for some of her own religious poems, "i wished, before taking the things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that i might receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own hand. but then, remembering and knowing that the grace of god may not be bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, i confess my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall arrive, not because they are in my house, but i myself as being in a house of theirs, shall deem myself in paradise." we must not forget that at this time michael angelo was an old man, that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that most people lose with their youth. a reservoir of emotion broke loose within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. a mystery play was enacted in him,--each sonnet is a scene. there is the whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. they do not seem so much like poems as like microcosms. they are elementally complete. the soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost. xl i know not if it be the longed for light of its creator which the soul perceives, or if in people's memory there lives a touch of early grace that keeps them bright or else ambition,--or some dream whose might brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives and leaves a burning feeling when it leaves-- that tears are welling in me as i write. the things i feel, the things i follow and the things i seek--are not in me,--i hardly know the place to find them. it is others make them mine. it happens when i see thee--and it brings sweet pain--a yes,--a no,--sorrow and grace surely it must have been those eyes of thine. there are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. and there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time. lv thou knowest that i know that thou dost know how, to enjoy thee, i did come more near. thou knowest, i know thou knowest--i am here. would we had given our greetings long ago. if true the hope thou hast to me revealed, if true the plighting of a sacred troth, let the wall fall that stands between us both, for griefs are doubled when they are concealed. if, loved one,--if i only loved in thee what thou thyself dost love,--'tis to this end the spirit with his belovéd is allied. the things thy face inspires and teaches me mortality doth little comprehend. before we understand we must have died. li give me the time when loose the reins i flung upon the neck of galloping desire. give me the angel face that now among the angels,--tempers heaven with its fire. give the quick step that now is grown so old, the ready tears--the blaze at thy behest, if thou dost seek indeed, o love! to hold again thy reign of terror in my breast. if it be true that thou dost only live upon the sweet and bitter pains of man surely a weak old man small food can give whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can. upon life's farthest limit i have stood-- what folly to make fire of burnt wood. the occasion of the following was probably some more than wonted favor shown to him by vittoria. xxvi. great joy no less than grief doth murder men. the thief, even at the gallows, may be killed if, while through every vein with fear he's chilled, sudden reprieve do set him free again. thus hath this bounty from you in my pain through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled, and more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain. good news, like bad, may bring the taker death. the heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, be it pressure or expansion cause the rift. let thy great beauty which god cherisheth limit my joy if it desire my life-- the unworthy dies beneath so great a gift. xxviii the heart is not the life of love like mine. the love i love thee with has none of it. for hearts to sin and mortal thought incline and for love's habitation are unfit. god, when our souls were parted from him, made of me an eye--of thee, splendor and light. even in the parts of thee which are to fade thou hast the glory; i have only sight. fire from its heat you may not analyze, nor worship from eternal beauty take, which deifies the lover as he bows. thou hast that paradise all within thine eyes where first i loved thee. 't is for that love's sake my soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows. the german musicians of the seventeenth century used to write voluntaries for the organ, using the shorthand of the older notation; they jotted down the formulas of the successive harmonies expressed in terms of the chords merely. the transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. and michael angelo has left behind him, as it were, the poetical equivalents of such shorthand musical formulas. the harmonies are wonderful. the successions show a great grasp of comprehension, but you cannot play them without filling them out. "is that music, after all," one may ask, "which leaves so much to the performer, and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so much to the reader?" it seems you must be a kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante of some sort, before you can transpose and illustrate these hieroglyphics. there is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. they claim no comment. comment claims them. call them not poetry if you will. they are a window which looks in upon the most extraordinary nature of modern times,--a nature whose susceptibility to impressions of form through the eye allies it to classical times; a nature which on the emotional side belongs to our own day. is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superstitious regard in italy, and in the sixteenth century? his creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. no one epoch has held the key to him. there lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "i fully understand michael angelo's works." it will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. but as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. as to michael angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "we are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pass, "but of this we are sure: _simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai_." * * * * * the fourth canto of the inferno there are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. but dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. the scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given. a work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. what english words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,-- "onorate 'l altissimo poeta, torna sua ombra che era dipartita"? the cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. and so with many of the most splendid lines in dante, the meaning inheres in the very italian words. they alone shine with the idea. they alone satisfy the spiritual vision. of all the greatest poets, dante is most foreign to the genius of the english race. from the point of view of english-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. it might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. there is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman. in the treatment of the supernatural the teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. this is so intrinsically true to the teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. when hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny," etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,--palsied, as it were, with fear,--there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. the northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. the sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in dante. the hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. the strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. his jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. this lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of dante's style. there is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of dante into english. english is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. the great english writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. shakespeare, sir thomas browne, sir walter scott, robert browning, all the typical writers of english, have been many-worded. they have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. the eighteenth century in england, with all its striving after classical precision, has left behind it no great laconic english classic who stands in the first rank. our own emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnected and prophetic. dante is not only concise, but logical, deductive, prone to ratiocination. he set down nothing that he had not thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. we have in english no prototype for such condensation. there is no native work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of dante. my heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, so that i shook myself, springing upright, like one awakened by a sudden stroke, and gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight slowly about me,--awful privilege,-- to know the place that held me, if i might. in truth i found myself upon the edge that girds the valley of the dreadful pit, circling the infinite wailing with its ledge. dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it eye could not probe, and though i bent mine low, it helped my vain conjecture not a whit. "let us go down to the blind world below," began the poet, with a face like death, "i shall go first, thou second." "say not so," cried i when i again could find my breath, for i had seen the whiteness of his face, "how shall i come if thee it frighteneth?" and he replied: "the anguish of the place and those that dwell there thus hath painted me with pity, not with fear. but come apace; the spur of the journey pricks us." thus did he enter himself, and take me in with him, into the first great circle's mystery that winds the deep abyss about the brim. here there came borne upon the winds to us, not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, and kept the eternal breezes tremulous. the cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, that makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus. i saw great crowds of children, women, men, wheeling below. "thou dost not seek to know what spirits are these thou seest?" thus again my master spoke. "but ere we further go, thou must be sure that these feel not the weight of sin. they well deserved,--and yet not so.-- they had not baptism, which is the gate of faith,--thou holdest. if they lived before the days of christ, though sinless, in that state god they might never worthily adore. and i myself am such an one as these. for this shortcoming--on no other score-- we are lost, and most of all our torment is that lost to hope we live in strong desire." grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, because most splendid souls and hearts of fire i recognized, hung in that limbo there. "tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire," cried i at last, with eager hope to share that all-convincing faith,--"but went there not one,--once,--from hence,--made happy though it were through his own merit or another's lot?" "i was new come into this place," said he, who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, "when him whose brows were bound with victory i saw come conquering through this prison dark. he set the shade of our first parent free, with abel, and the builder of the ark, and him that gave the laws immutable, and abraham, obedient patriarch, david the king, and ancient israel, his father and his children at his side, and the wife rachel that he loved so well, and gave them paradise,--and before these men none tasted of salvation that have died." we did not pause while he was talking then, but held our constant course along the track, where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen. and we had reached a point whence to turn back had not been far, when i, still touched with fear, perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black, made conquest of a luminous hemisphere. the place was distant still, but i could see clustered about the fire, as we drew near, figures of an austere nobility. "thou who dost honor science and love art, pray who are these, whose potent dignity doth eminently set them thus apart?" the poet answered me, "the honored fame that made their lives illustrious touched the heart of god to advance them." then a voice there came, "honor the mighty poet;" and again, "his shade returns,--do honor to his name." and when the voice had finished its refrain, i saw four giant shadows coming on. they seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien. and my good master said: "see him, my son, that bears the sword and walks before the rest, and seems the father of the three,--that one is homer, sovran poet. the satirist horace comes next; third, ovid; and the last is lucan. the lone voice that name expressed that each doth share with me; therefore they haste to greet and do me honor;--nor do they wrong." thus did i see the assembled school who graced the master of the most exalted song, that like an eagle soars above the rest. when they had talked together, though not long, they turned to me, nodding as to a guest. at which my master smiled, but yet more high they lifted me in honor. at their behest i went with them as of their company, and made the sixth among those mighty wits. thus towards the light we walked in colloquy of things my silence wisely here omits, as there 'twas sweet to speak them, till we came to where a seven times circled castle sits, whose walls are watered by a lovely stream. this we crossed over as it had been dry, passing the seven gates that guard the same, and reached a meadow, green as arcady. people were there with deep, slow-moving eyes whose looks were weighted with authority. scant was their speech, but rich in melodies. the walls receding left a pasture fair, a place all full of light and of great size, so we could see each spirit that was there. and straight before my eyes upon the green were shown to me the souls of those that were, great spirits it exalts me to have seen. electra with her comrades i descried, i saw Æneas, and knew hector keen, and in full armor cæsar, falcon-eyed, camilla and the amazonian queen, king latin with lavinia at his side, brutus that did avenge the tarquin's sin, lucrece, cornelia, martia julia, and by himself the lonely saladin. the master of all thinkers next i saw amid the philosophic family. all eyes were turned on him with reverent awe; plato and socrates were next his knee, then heraclitus and empedocles, thales and anaxagoras, and he that based the world on chance; and next to these, zeno, diogenes, and that good leech the herb-collector, dioscorides. orpheus i saw, livy and tully, each flanked by old seneca's deep moral lore, euclid and ptolemy, and within their reach hippocrates and avicenna's store, the sage that wrote the master commentary, averois, with galen and a score of great physicians. but my pen were weary depicting all of that majestic plain splendid with many an antique dignitary. my theme doth drive me on, and words are vain to give the thought the thing itself conveys. the six of us were now cut down to twain. my guardian led me forth by other ways, far from the quiet of that trembling wind, and from the gentle shining of those rays, to places where all light was left behind. * * * * * robert browning there is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical, during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. we are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. the element which we attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. our science becomes tinged with autobiography. such must be the fate of any essay on browning written at the present time. the generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly passed away. the generation he spoke for still lives. his influence seems still to be expanding. the literature of browning dictionaries, phrase-books, treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. mr. cooke in his guide to browning ( ) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on browning, which covers many finely printed pages. this class of book--the text-book--is not the product of impulse. the text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper follows the crop. we can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking over the account books of the makers of farm implements. thousands of people are now studying browning, following in his footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated. this browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting secondary outcome of his influence. it has its roots in natural piety, and the educational value of it is very great. browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he was able to respond to the call to leadership. unlike carlyle, he had something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a spiritual need. he gave them not only meal but seed. in this he was like emerson; but emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,--a treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners and passions are vividly recalled to us. in emerson's house there was not a peg to hang a note upon,--"this is his bookshelf, this his bed." but browning's palace craves a catalogue. and a proper catalogue to such a palace becomes a liberal education. robert browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any englishman since walter scott. he was born among books; and circumstances enabled him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,--a poet by profession. he was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well. indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know robert browning. religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of religious poetry that his work fulfilled. inasmuch as no man invents his own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that robert browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in christian theology. everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. what was distressing he rejected or explained away. in the world of robert browning _everything_ was right. the range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly small. we need not apologize for treating browning as a theologian and a doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a poet is always really both--and he has almost convinced us. the expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. the "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it. he believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end of existence. the strain and stress of life are incidental to growth, and therefore desirable. development and growth mean a closer union with god. in fact, god is of not so much importance in himself, but as the end towards which man tends. that irreverent person who said that browning uses "god" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. in browning, god is adjective to man. browning believes that all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his individual growth. the province of art and of all thinking and working is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give rise to. the first two fundamental beliefs of browning--namely: ( ) that, ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul of a man; and ( ) that a sense of effort is coincident with development--are probably true. we instinctively feel them to be true, and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to which we look for light, however dim. in the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it--in revolt against it. he is habitually pitted against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. it is in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that browning has created his masterpieces of poetry. never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less. what as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. the thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. his tales, his songs, his monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. his interest in the world was solely an interest in them. he saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. his nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which england can show in his time. he was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. he had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. his conclusions are fixed from the start. standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met with it in other people. the force of his feelings is so much greater than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. out of the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving the rest, or not noting it. there never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. that is the reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do not care for browning. one real glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. the public which loves him is made up of people who have been through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. the public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these experiences. to some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which nothing else will replace. to others, who do not need him, he is a boisterous and eccentric person,--a heracles in the house of mourning. let us remember his main belief,--the value of the individual. the needs of society constantly require that the individual be suppressed. they hold him down and punish him at every point. the tyranny of order and organization--of monarch or public opinion--weights him and presses him down. this is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements. now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,--against the atmosphere of caste or theory; of egyptian priest or manchester economist; of absolutism or of democracy. and this strong nature cries out that the souls of men are being injured, and that they are important; that your soul and my soul are more important than cæsar--or than the survival of the fittest. such a voice was the voice of christ, and the lesser saviors of the world bring always a like message of revolt: they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need of the world. carlyle, emerson, victor hugo, browning, were prophets to a generation oppressed in spirit, whose education had oppressed them with a jewish law of adam smith and jeremy bentham and malthus, of clarkson and cobden,--of thought for the million, and for man in the aggregate. "to what end is all this beneficence, all this conscience, all this theory?" some one at length cries out. "for whom is it in the last analysis that you legislate? you talk _of man_, i see only _men_." to men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came robert browning as a liberator. like carlyle, he was understood first in this country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. we had suffered more. we needed to be told that it was right to love, hate, and be angry, to sin and repent. it was a revelation to us to think that we had some inheritance in the joys and passions of mankind. we needed to be told these things as a tired child needs to be comforted. browning gave them to us in the form of a religion. there was no one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough to know what we lacked. if ever a generation had need of a poet,--of some one to tell them they might cry and not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the reason in john stuart mill; some one who should justify the claims of the spirit which was starving on the religion of humanity,--it was the generation for whom browning wrote. carlyle had seized upon the french revolution, which served his ends because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque examples of individual force. in his hero worship he gives his countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the individual. browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in france and italy. he glorified what we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. he was the apostle to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was complete. those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another. the second thesis which browning insists on--the identity of spiritual suffering with spiritual growth--is the one balm of the world. it is said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." if this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,--if the struggles and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or hereafter,--then the truth-to-feeling of much of browning's poetry has a scientific basis. it cannot be denied that browning held firmly two of the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic disquisition. it is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of browning or the sagacity with which he chose his effects. he gives us the sallow wife of james lee, whose soul is known to him, pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. he searches the world till he finds the man whom everybody will concur in despising, the mediæval grammarian, and he writes to him the most powerful ode in english, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man. his culture and his learning are all subdued to what he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. he mines in antiquity or drags his net over german philosophy or modern drawing-rooms,--all to the same end. in that miracle of power and beauty--the flight of the duchess--he has improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast which shall cause the soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. in childe roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism, because he requires it as a stage property. in a death in the desert you have the east in the first century--so vividly given that you wish instantly to travel there, bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with which your bible ought always to have been filled. his reading brings him to euripides. he sees that alcestis can be set to his theme; and with a week or two of labor, while staying in a country house, he draws out of the greek fable the world of his own meaning and shows it shining forth in a living picture of the greek theatre which has no counterpart for vitality in any modern tongue. the descriptive and narrative powers of browning are above, beyond, and outside of all that has been done in english in our time, as the odd moments prove which he gave to the pied piper, the ride from ghent to aix, incident in the french camp. these chips from his workshop passed instantly into popular favor because they were written in familiar forms. how powerfully his gifts of utterance were brought to bear upon the souls of men will be recorded, even if never understood, by literary historians. it is idle to look to the present generation for an intelligible account of one word more, rabbi ben ezra, prospice, saul, the blot on the 'scutcheon. they must be judged by the future and by men who can speak of them with a steady lip. it must be conceded that the conventional judgments of society are sometimes right, and browning's mission led him occasionally into paradox and _jeux d'esprit_. bishop blougram is an attempt to discover whether a good case cannot be made out for the individual hypocrite. the statue and the bust is frankly a _reductio ad absurdum_, and ends with a query. there is more serious trouble with others. the grammarian's funeral is false to fact, and will appear so to posterity. the grammarian was not a hero, and our calmer moments show us that the poem is not a great ode. it gave certain people the glow of a great truth, but it remains a paradox and a piece of exaggeration. the same must be said of a large part of browning. the new testament is full of such paradoxes of exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich man's chance for heaven, the wedding garment; but in these, the truth is apparent,--we are not betrayed. in browning's paradoxes we are often led on and involved in an emotion over some situation which does not honestly call for the emotion. the most noble quality in browning is his temper. he does not proceed, as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. he builds up; he is positive, not negative. he is less bitter than christianity itself. while there is no more doubt as to the permanent value of the content of browning than of the value of the spiritual truths of the new testament, there is very little likelihood that his poems will be understood in the remote future. at present, they are following the waves of influence of the education which they correct. they are built like palladio's theatre at vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. in order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. the colors are dropping from the poems already. the feeblest of them lose it first. there was a steady falling off in power accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how balaustion's adventure will strike posterity by reading parleyings with certain people. the distinctions between browning's characters--which to us are so vivid--will to others seem less so. paracelsus and rabbi ben ezra, lippo lippi, karshish, caponsacchi, and ferishtah will all appear to be run in the same mould. they will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet ever assumed. the lack of the dramatic element in browning--a lack which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his fondness for the trappings of the drama--will be apparent to the after-comers. they will say that all the characters in the blot on the 'scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the play; that pippa and pompilia and phene are the same person in the same state of mind. in fact, the family likeness is great. they will say that the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other. it cannot be denied that there is much repetition,--much threshing out of old straw. those who have read browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. when the later browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,--over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,--we know just where we are coming out in the end. we know the place better than he did himself. nor will posterity like browning's manners,--the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and _de te fabula_ of most of his talking. these unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means life, not art. posterity will want only art. we needed doctrine. if he had not preached, we would not have listened to him. but posterity evades the preachers and accepts only singers. posterity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. it will cull such out of the body of browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already, and will leave the great mass of him to be rediscovered from time to time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century. there is a class of persons who claim for browning that his verse is really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. this cannot be admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it. the rules of verse in english are merely a body of custom which has grown up unconsciously, and most of which rests upon some simple requirement of the ear. in speaking of the power of poetry we are dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and complex forces. the rhythm of versification seems to serve the purpose of a prompter. it lets us know in advance just what syllables are to receive the emphasis which shall make the sense clear. there are many lines in poetry which become obscure the instant they are written in prose, and probably the advantages of poetry over prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the matter. rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been reached. it punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our attention from the strain of suspended interest. all of the artifices of poetical form seem designed to a like end. naturalness of speech is somewhat sacrificed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uniformity of speech which rests and exhilarates. we need not, for the present, examine the question of euphony any further, nor ask whether euphony be not a positive element in verse,--an element which belongs to music. the negative advantages of poetry over prose are probably sufficient to account for most of its power. a few more considerations of the same negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or verse, may be touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, why browning is hard to understand and why his verse is bad. every one is more at ease in his mind when he reads a language which observes the ordinary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of sentences having subjects and predicates, and of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily into place. a doubt about the grammar is a doubt about the sense. and this is so true that sometimes when our fears are allayed by faultless grammar we may read absolute nonsense with satisfaction. we sometimes hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry is likely to endure just in proportion as the form of it is superior to the content. as to the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's reflection shows that the ideas and feelings which prevail from age to age, and in which we may expect posterity to delight, are in their nature, and of necessity, commonplace. and if by "superiority of form" it is meant that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing metres,--in words which are easy to pronounce, put together according to the rules of grammar, and largely drawn from the vulgar tongue,--we need not wonder that posterity should enjoy it. in fact, it is just such verse as this which survives from age to age. browning possesses one superlative excellence, and it is upon this that he relies. it is upon this that he has emerged and attacked the heart of man. it is upon this that he may possibly fight his way down to posterity and live like a fire forever in the bosom of mankind. his language is the language of common speech; his force, the immediate force of life. his language makes no compromises of any sort. it is not subdued to form. the emphasis demanded by the sense is very often not the emphasis demanded by the metre. he cuts off his words and forces them ruthlessly into lines as a giant might force his limbs into the armor of a mortal. the joints and members of the speech fall in the wrong places and have no relation to the joints and members of the metre. he writes like a lion devouring an antelope. he rends his subject, breaks its bones, and tears out the heart of it. he is not made more, but less, comprehensible by the verse-forms in which he writes. the sign-posts of the metre lead us astray. he would be easier to understand if his poems were printed in the form of prose. that is the reason why browning becomes easy when read aloud; for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of speech, and throw over all effort to follow the emphasis of the metre. this is also the reason why browning is so unquotable--why he has made so little effect upon the language--why so few of the phrases and turns of thought and metaphor with which poets enrich a language have been thrown into english by him. let a man who does not read poetry take up a volume of familiar quotations, and he will find page after page of lines and phrases which he knows by heart--from tennyson, milton, wordsworth--things made familiar to him not by the poets, but by the men whom the poets educated, and who adopted their speech. of browning he will know not a word. and yet browning's poetry is full of words that glow and smite, and which have been burnt into and struck into the most influential minds of the last fifty years. but browning's phrases are almost impossible to remember, because they are speech not reduced to poetry. they do not sing, they do not carry. they have no artificial buoys to float them in our memories. it follows from this uncompromising nature of browning that when, by the grace of inspiration, the accents of his speech do fall into rhythm, his words will have unimaginable sweetness. the music is so much a part of the words--so truly spontaneous--that other verse seems tame and manufactured beside his. rhyme is generally so used by browning as not to subserve the true function of rhyme. it is forced into a sort of superficial conformity, but marks no epoch in the verse. the clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye and not to the ear. the necessity of rhyming leads browning into inversions,--into expansions of sentences beyond the natural close of the form,--into every sort of contortion. the rhymes clog and distress the sentences. as to grammar, browning is negligent. some of his most eloquent and wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. in sordello grammar does not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. of course no one but a school-master desires that poetry shall be capable of being parsed; but every one has a right to expect that he shall be left without a sense of grammatical deficiency. the invocation in the ring and the book is one of the most beautiful openings that can be imagined. "o lyric love, half angel and half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire--boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, took sanctuary within the holier blue, and sang a kindred soul out to his face-- yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- when the first summons from the darkling earth reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, and bared them of the glory--to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer or to die-- this is the same voice: can thy soul know change? hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! never may i commence my song, my due to god who best taught song by gift of thee, except with bent head and beseeching hand-- that still, despite the distance and the dark what was, again may be; some interchange of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, some benediction anciently thy smile;-- never conclude, but raising hand and head thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn for all hope, all sustainment, all reward, their utmost up and on--so blessing back in those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, some whiteness, which, i judge, thy face makes proud, some wanness where, i think, thy foot may fall." these sublime lines are marred by apparent grammatical obscurity. the face of beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems sightless. we re-read the lines to see if we are mistaken. if they were in a foreign language, we should say we did not fully understand them. in the dramatic monologues, as, for instance, in the ring and the book and in the innumerable other narratives and contemplations where a single speaker holds forth, we are especially called upon to forget grammar. the speaker relates and reflects,--pours out his ideas in the order in which they occur to him,--pursues two or three trains of thought at the same time, claims every license which either poetry or conversation could accord him. the effect of this method is so startling, that when we are vigorous enough to follow the sense, we forgive all faults of metre and grammar, and feel that this natural niagara of speech is the only way for the turbulent mind of man to get complete utterance. we forget that it is possible for the same thing to be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, and charmed into music. prospero is as natural and as individual as bishop blougram. his grammar is as incomplete, yet we do not note it. he talks to himself, to miranda, to ariel, all at once, weaving all together his passions, his philosophy, his narrative, and his commands. his reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical as anything in browning, and yet all is clear,--all is so managed that it lends magic. the characteristic and unfathomable significance of this particular character prospero comes out of it. "_prospero_. my brother and thy uncle, called antonio-- i pray thee mark me,--that a brother should be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself, of all the world i lov'd, and to him put the manage of my state; as at that time through all the seignories it was the first, and prospero, the prime duke, being so reputed in dignity and for the liberal arts, without a parallel: those being all my study, the government i cast upon my brother, and to my state grew stranger, being transported and wrapped in secret studies. thy false uncle-- dost thou attend me?" it is unnecessary to give examples from browning of defective verse, of passages which cannot be understood, which cannot be construed, which cannot be parodied, and which can scarcely be pronounced. they are mentioned only as throwing light on browning's cast of mind and methods of work. his inability to recast and correct his work cost the world a master. he seems to have been condemned to create at white heat and to stand before the astonishing draft, which his energy had flung out, powerless to complete it. we have a few examples of things which came forth perfect, but many of even the most beautiful and most original of the shorter poems are marred by some blotches that hurt us and which one feels might have been struck out or corrected in half an hour. how many of the poems are too long! it is not that browning went on writing after he had completed his thought,--for the burst of beauty is as likely to come at the end as at the beginning,--but that his thought had to unwind itself like web from a spider. he could not command it. he could only unwind and unwind. pan and luna is a sketch, as luminous as a correggio, but not finished. caliban upon setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. in the poems which he revised, as, for instance, hervé riel, which exists in two or more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the same fierce haste with which the poems were written. we must not for an instant imagine that browning was indolent or indifferent; it is known that he was a taskmaster to himself. but he _could_ not write other than he did. when the music came and the verse caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer, then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of beauty to the earth. but the occasions when he did this are a handful of passages in a body of writing as large as the bible. just as browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. his way of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and write down the first sentence. "she should never have looked at me, if she meant i should not love her!" "water your damned flowerpots, do--" "no! for i'll save it! seven years since." "but give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!" "fear death? to feel the fog in my throat." sometimes his verse fell into coils as it came, but he himself, as he wrote the first line of a poem, never knew in what form of verse the poem would come forth. hence the novel figures and strange counterpoint. having evolved the first group of lines at haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in order to have any organic effect, would have to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and repeat it clumsily. individual taste must be judge of his success in these experiments. sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt to trace the logic of the rhymes which are concealed by the rough jolting of the metre. sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the first verse, but continues in irregular improvisation. browning never really stoops to literature; he makes perfunctory obeisance to it. the truth is that browning is expressed by his defects. he would not be robert browning without them. in the technical part of his art, as well as in his spirit, browning represents a reaction of a violent sort. he was too great an artist not to feel that his violations of form helped him. the blemishes in the grammarian's funeral--_hoti's business, the enclitic de_--were stimulants; they heightened his effects. they helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater than art. these savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking up of the ice. men loved browning not only for what he was, but also for what he was not. these blemishes were, under the circumstances, and for a limited audience, strokes of art. it is not to be pretended that, even from this point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic. the nineteenth century would have to be lived over again to wipe these passages out of browning's poetry. in that century he stands as one of the great men of england. his doctrines are the mere effulgence of his personality. he himself was the truth which he taught. his life was the life of one of his own heroes; and in the close of his life--by a coincidence which is not sad, but full of meaning--may be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in which he himself delighted. through youth and manhood browning rose like a planet calmly following the laws of his own being. from time to time he put forth his volumes which the world did not understand. neglect caused him to suffer, but not to change. it was not until his work was all but finished, not till after the publication of the ring and the book, that complete recognition came to him. it was given him by men and women who had been in the nursery when he began writing, who had passed their youth with his minor poems, and who understood him. in later life browning's powers declined. the torrent of feeling could no longer float the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly and for so long. his poems, always difficult, grew dry as well. but browning was true to himself. he had all his life loved converse with men and women, and still enjoyed it. he wrote constantly and to his uttermost. it was not for him to know that his work was done. he wrote on manfully to the end, showing, occasionally, his old power, and always his old spirit. and on his death-bed it was not only his doctrine, but his life that blazed out in the words:-- "one who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph. held, we fall to rise--are baffled to fight better-- sleep to wake." * * * * * robert louis stevenson in the early eighties, and in an epoch when the ideals of george eliot were still controlling, the figure of stevenson rose with a sort of radiance as a writer whose sole object was to entertain. most of the great novelists were then dead, and the scientific school was in the ascendant. fiction was entering upon its death grapple with sociology. stevenson came, with his tales of adventure and intrigue, out-of-door life and old-time romance, and he recalled to every reader his boyhood and the delights of his earliest reading. we had forgotten that novels could be amusing. hence it is that the great public not only loves stevenson as a writer, but regards him with a certain personal gratitude. there was, moreover, in everything he wrote an engaging humorous touch which made friends for him everywhere, and excited an interest in his fragile and somewhat elusive personality supplementary to the appreciation of his books as literature. toward the end of his life both he and the public discovered this, and his railleries or sermons took on the form of personal talk. beneath these matters lay the fact, known to all, that the man was fighting a losing battle against mortal sickness, and that practically the whole of his work was done under conditions which made any productivity seem a miracle. the heroic invalid was seen through all his books, still sitting before his desk or on his bed, turning out with unabated courage, with increasing ability, volume after volume of gayety, of boys' story-book, and of tragic romance. there is enough in this record to explain the popularity, running at times into hero-worship and at times into drawing-room fatuity, which makes stevenson and his work a fair subject for study. it is not impossible that a man who met certain needs of the times so fully, and whom large classes of people sprang forward to welcome, may in some particulars give a clew to the age. any description of stevenson's books is unnecessary. we have all read them too recently to need a prompter. the high spirits and elfin humor which play about and support every work justifies them all. one of his books, the child's garden of verses, is different in kind from the rest. it has no prototype, and is by far the most original thing that he did. the unsophisticated and gay little volume is a work of the greatest value. stevenson seems to have remembered the impressions of his childhood with accuracy, and he has recorded them without affectation, without sentimentality, without exaggeration. in depicting children he draws from life. he is at home in the mysteries of their play and in the inconsequent operations of their minds, in the golden haze of impressions in which they live. the references to children in his essays and books show the same understanding and sympathy. there is more than mere literary charm in what he says here. in the matter of childhood we must study him with respect. he is an authority. the slight but serious studies in biography--alas! too few--which stevenson published, ought also to be mentioned, because their merit is apt to be overlooked by the admirers of his more ambitious works. his understanding of two such opposite types of men as burns and thoreau is notable, and no less notable are the courage, truth, and penetration with which he dealt with them. his essay on burns is the most comprehensible word ever said of burns. it makes us love burns less, but understand him more. the problems suggested by stevenson are more important than his work itself. we have in him that rare combination,--a man whose theories and whose practice are of a piece. his doctrines are the mere description of his own state of mind while at work. the quality which every one will agree in conceding to stevenson is lightness of touch. this quality is a result of his extreme lucidity, not only of thought, but of intention. we know what he means, and we are sure that we grasp his whole meaning at the first reading. whether he be writing a tale of travel or humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story of horror, a morality, or a fable; in whatever key he plays,--and he seems to have taken delight in showing mastery in many,--the reader feels safe in his hands, and knows that no false note will be struck. his work makes no demands upon the attention. it is food so thoroughly peptonized that it is digested as soon as swallowed and leaves us exhilarated rather than fed. writing was to him an art, and almost everything that he has written has a little the air of being a _tour de force_. stevenson's books and essays were generally brilliant imitations of established things, done somewhat in the spirit of an expert in billiards. in short, stevenson is the most extraordinary mimic that has ever appeared in literature. that is the reason why he has been so much praised for his style. when we say of a new thing that it "has style," we mean that it is done as we have seen things done before. bunyan, de foe, or charles lamb were to their contemporaries men without style. the english, to this day, complain of emerson that he has no style. if a man writes as he talks, he will be thought to have no style, until people get used to him, for literature means _what has been written_. as soon as a writer is established, his manner of writing is adopted by the literary conscience of the times, and you may follow him and still have "style." you may to-day imitate george meredith, and people, without knowing exactly why they do it, will concede you "style." style means tradition. when stevenson, writing from samoa in the agony of his south seas (a book he could not write because he had no paradigm and original to copy from), says that he longs for a "moment of style," he means that he wishes there would come floating through his head a memory of some other man's way of writing to which he could modulate his sentences. it is no secret that stevenson in early life spent much time in imitating the styles of various authors, for he has himself described the manner in which he went to work to fit himself for his career as a writer. his boyish ambition led him to employ perfectly phenomenal diligence in cultivating a perfectly phenomenal talent for imitation. there was probably no fault in stevenson's theory as to how a man should learn to write, and as to the discipline he must undergo. almost all the greatest artists have shown, in their early work, traces of their early masters. these they outgrow. "for as this temple waxes, the inward service of the mind and soul grows wide withal;" and an author's own style breaks through the coverings of his education, as a hyacinth breaks from the bulb. it is noticeable, too, that the early and imitative work of great men generally belongs to a particular school to which their maturity bears a logical relation. they do not cruise about in search of a style or vehicle, trying all and picking up hints here and there, but they fall incidentally and genuinely under influences which move them and afterwards qualify their original work. with stevenson it was different; for he went in search of a style as coelebs in search of a wife. he was an eclectic by nature. he became a remarkable, if not a unique phenomenon,--for he never grew up. whether or not there was some obscure connection between his bodily troubles and the arrest of his intellectual development, it is certain that stevenson remained a boy till the day of his death. the boy was the creature in the universe whom stevenson best understood. let us remember how a boy feels about art, and why he feels so. the intellect is developed in the child with such astonishing rapidity that long before physical maturity its head is filled with ten thousand things learned from books and not drawn directly from real life. the form and setting in which the boy learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part of the matters themselves. he cannot disentangle what is conventional from what is original, because he has not yet a first-hand acquaintance with life by which to interpret. every schoolboy of talent writes essays in the style of addison, because he is taught that this is the correct way of writing. he has no means of knowing that in writing in this manner he is using his mind in a very peculiar and artificial way,--a way entirely foreign to addison himself; and that he is really striving not so much to say something himself as to reproduce an effect. there is one thing which young people do not know, and which they find out during the process of growing up,--and that is that good things in art have been done by men whose entire attention was absorbed in an attempt to tell the truth, and who have been chiefly marked by a deep unconsciousness. to a boy, the great artists of the world are a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments can perhaps be stolen and used again. to a man, they are a lot of human beings, and their works are parts of them. their works are their hands and their feet, their organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. to a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of dean swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of dr. johnson in eating. but stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towards his work remained unaltered from boyhood till death, though his practice and experiment gave him, as he grew older, a greater mastery over his materials. it is in this attitude of stevenson's mind toward his own work that we must search for the heart of his mystery. he conceived of himself as "an artist," and of his writings as performances. as a consequence, there is an undertone of insincerity in almost everything which he has written. his attention is never wholly absorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up with the notion of how each stroke of it is going to appear. we have all experienced, while reading his books, a certain undefinable suspicion which interferes with the enjoyment of some people, and enhances that of others. it is not so much the cream-tarts themselves that we suspect, as the motive of the giver. "i am in the habit," said prince florizel, "of looking not so much to the nature of the gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." "the spirit, sir," returned the young man, with another bow, "is one of mockery." this doubt about stevenson's truth and candor is one of the results of the artistic doctrines which he professed and practised. he himself regards his work as a toy; and how can we do otherwise? it seems to be a law of psychology that the only way in which the truth can be strongly told is in the course of a search for truth. the moment a man strives after some "effect," he disqualifies himself from making that effect; for he draws the interest of his audience to the same matters that occupy his own mind; namely, upon his experiment and his efforts. it is only when a man is saying something that he believes is obviously and eternally true, that he can communicate spiritual things. ultimately speaking, the vice of stevenson's theories about art is that they call for a self-surrender by the artist of his own mind to the pleasure of others, for a subordination of himself to the production of this "effect" in the mind of another. they degrade and belittle him. let stevenson speak for himself; the thought contained in the following passage is found in a hundred places in his writings and dominated his artistic life. "the french have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the daughters of joy. the artist is of the same family, he is of the sons of joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of men. the poor daughter of joy carrying her smiles and her finery quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a wounding pity. she is the type of the unsuccessful artist." these are the doctrines and beliefs which, time out of mind, have brought the arts into contempt. they are as injurious as they are false, and they will checkmate the progress of any man or of any people that believes them. they corrupt and menace not merely the fine arts, but every other form of human expression in an equal degree. they are as insulting to the comic actor as they are to michael angelo, for the truth and beauty of low comedy are as dignified, and require of the artist the same primary passion for life for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of the divine comedy. the doctrines are the outcome of an alexandrine age. after art has once learnt to draw its inspiration directly from life and has produced some masterpieces, then imitations begin to creep in. that stevenson's doctrines tend to produce imitative work is obvious. if the artist is a fisher of men, then we must examine the works of those who have known how to bait their hooks: in fiction,--de foe, fielding, walter scott, dumas, balzac. to a study of these men, stevenson had, as we have seen, devoted the most plastic years of his life. the style and even the mannerisms of each of them, he had trained himself to reproduce. one can almost write their names across his pages and assign each as a presiding genius over a share of his work. not that stevenson purloined or adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity. his enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he did. he was well read in the belles lettres of england and the romanticists of france. these books were his bible. he was steeped in the stage-land and cloud-land of sentimental literature. from time to time, he emerged, trailing clouds of glory and showering sparkles from his hands. a close inspection shows his clouds and sparkles to be stage properties; but stevenson did not know it. the public not only does not know it, but does not care whether it be so or not. the doughty old novel readers who knew their scott and ainsworth and wilkie collins and charles reade, their dumas and their cooper, were the very people whose hearts were warmed by stevenson. if you cross-question one of these, he will admit that stevenson is after all a revival, an echo, an after-glow of the romantic movement, and that he brought nothing new. he will scout any comparison between stevenson and his old favorites, but he is ready enough to take stevenson for what he is worth. the most casual reader recognizes a whole department of stevenson's work as competing in a general way with walter scott. kidnapped is a romantic fragment whose original is to be found in the scotch scenes of the waverley novels. an incident near the beginning of it, the curse of jennet clouston upon the house of shaws, is transferred from guy mannering almost literally. but the curse of meg merrilies in guy mannering--which is one of the most surprising and powerful scenes scott ever wrote--is an organic part of the story, whereas the transcript is a thing stuck in for effect, and the curse is put in the mouth of an old woman whose connection with the plot is apocryphal, and who never appears again. treasure island is a piece of astounding ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from robinson crusoe, and the plot belongs to the era of the detective story. the treasure of franchard is a french farce or light comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic. the tone, the _mise-en-scène_, the wit, the character-drawing, the very language, are all so marvellously reproduced from the french, that we almost see the footlights while we read it. the sieur de maletroit's door embodies the same idea as a well-known french play in verse and in one act. the version of stevenson is like an exquisite water-color copy, almost as good as the original. the isle of voices is the production of a man of genius. no one can too much admire the legerdemain of the magician who could produce this thing; for it is a story out of the arabian nights, told with a perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the english in which the later translators of the arabian nights have seen fit to deal, a simulation of the movement and detail of the eastern stories which fairly takes our breath away. it is "ask and have" with this man. like mephistopheles in the raths-keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. olalla is an instance in point. any one familiar with mérimée's stories will smile at the naïveté with which stevenson has taken the leading idea of lokis, and surrounded it with the spanish sunshine of carmen. but we have "fables," moralities, and psychology, jekyl and hyde, markheim, and will o' the mill. we have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say, "ye can go, boy; for i will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--aye, and by st. mary till the sun get up again." we must have opera bouffe, as in prince otto; melodrama, as in the pavilion on the links; the essay of almost biblical solemnity in the manner of sir thomas browne, the essay of charming humor in the style of charles lamb, the essay of introspection and egotism in the style of montaigne. let us not for a moment imagine that stevenson has stolen these things and is trying to palm them off on us as his own. he has absorbed them. he does not know their origin. he gives them out again in joy and in good faith with zest and amusement and in the excitement of a new discovery. if all these many echoing voices do not always ring accurately true, yet their number is inordinate and remarkable. they will not bear an immediate comparison with their originals; but we may be sure that the vintages of mephistopheles would not have stood a comparison with real wine. one of the books which established stevenson's fame was the new arabian nights. the series of tales about prince florizel of bohemia was a brilliant, original, and altogether delightful departure in light literature. the stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the french detective story. they are legitimate pieces of literature because they are burlesque, and because the smiling mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the pages of stevenson is for this time the acknowledged showman of the piece. a burlesque is always an imitation shown off by the foil of some incongruous setting. the setting in this case stevenson found about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the railways of sordid and complicated london. in this early book stevenson seems to have stumbled upon the true employment of his powers without realizing the treasure trove, for he hardly returned to the field of humor, for which his gifts most happily fitted him. as a writer of burlesque he truly expresses himself. he is full of genuine fun. the fantastic is half brother to the burlesque. each implies some original as a point of departure, and as a scheme for treatment some framework upon which the author's wit and fancy shall be lavished. it is in the region of the fantastic that stevenson loved to wander, and it is in this direction that he expended his marvellous ingenuity. his fairy tales and arabesques must be read as they were written, in the humor of forty fancies and without any heavy-fisted intention of getting new ideas about life. it will be said that the defect of stevenson is expressed by these very qualities, fancy and ingenuity, because they are contradictory, and the second destroys the first. be this as it may, there are many people whose pleasure is not spoiled by elaboration and filigree work. our ability to follow stevenson in his fantasias depends very largely upon how far our imaginations and our sentimental interests are dissociated from our interest in real life. commonplace and common-sense people, whose emotional natures are not strongly at play in the conduct of their daily lives, have a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a very low degree of energy, which delights to be occupied with the unreal and the impossible. more than this, any mind which is daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some of the true relations governing things as they are, finds its natural relaxation in the contemplation of things as they are not,--things as they cannot be. there is probably no one who will not find himself thoroughly enjoying the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued enough. hence the justification of a whole branch of stevenson's work. after every detraction has been allowed for, there remain certain books of stevenson's of an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books which can hardly be classed as imitations or arabesques,--kidnapped, weir of hermiston, the merry men. these books seem at first blush to have every element of greatness, except spontaneity. the only trouble is, they are too perfect. if, after finishing kidnapped, or the merry men, we take up guy mannering, or the antiquary, or any of scott's books which treat of the peasantry, the first impression we gain is, that we are happy. the tension is gone; we are in contact with a great, sunny, benign human being who pours a flood of life out before us and floats us as the sea floats a chip. he is full of old-fashioned and absurd passages. sometimes he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed. he is so careless of his english that his sentences are not always grammatical; but we get a total impression of glorious and wholesome life. it is the man walter scott who thus excites us. this heather, these hills, these peasants, this prodigality and vigor and broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. if we return now to weir of hermiston, we seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist. all is intention, all calculation. the very style of weir of hermiston is english ten times distilled. let us imagine that directness and unconsciousness are the great qualities of style, and that stevenson believes this. the greatest directness and unconsciousness of which stevenson himself was capable are to be found in some of his early writings. across the plains, for instance, represents his most straightforward and natural style. but it happens that certain great writers who lived some time ago, and were famous examples of "directness," have expressed themselves in the speech of their own period. stevenson rejects his own style as not good enough for him, not direct enough, not unconscious enough; he will have theirs. and so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, and brings home an elaborate archaism. although we think of stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels and miscellaneous reminiscences. it was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious artist, and this is true to a great extent. on the day of his death he was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel. but it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. he was exploited by the press of the united states, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of english can pass through. there was one year in which he earned four thousand pounds. his immeasurable generosity kept him forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to the weight carried by this dying and indomitable man. it is no wonder that some of his work is trivial. the wonder is that he should have produced it at all. the journalistic work of stevenson, beginning with his inland voyage, and the letters afterwards published as across the plains, is valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. sidney colvin suggested to him that in the letters across the plains the lights were turned down. but, in truth, the light is daylight. the letters have a freshness that midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of more permanent interest than all the polite essays he ever wrote. if we compare the earlier with the later work of stevenson as a magazine writer, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. it is not a single style which grows more intense, but his amazing skill in many which has increased. the following is a specimen of stevenson's natural style, and it would be hard to find a better:-- "the day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at north platte, stood together on the stern platform singing the sweet by-and-by with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. but it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than night-gear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale." the following is from an essay written by stevenson while under the influence of the author of rab and his friends. "one such face i now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. in his youth he was a most beautiful person, most serene and genial by disposition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. laughter attended on his coming.... from this disaster like a spent swimmer he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing never more to rise. but in his face there was the light of knowledge that was new to it. of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation. of his wounded pride we knew only by his silence." the following is in the sprightly style of the eighteenth century:-- "cockshot is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. his manner is dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. the point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. you can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it on the minute. 'let me see,' he will say, 'give me a moment, i should have some theory for that.'" but for serious matters this manner would never do, and accordingly we find that, when the subject invites him, stevenson falls into english as early as the time of james i. let us imagine bacon dedicating one of his smaller works to his physicians:-- "there are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule.... i forget as many as i remember and i ask both to pardon me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech." after finishing off this dedication to his satisfaction, stevenson turns over the page and writes a note in the language of two and one-half centuries later. he is now the elegant _littérateur_ of the last generation--one would say james russell lowell:-- "the human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of conduct for what i should have supposed to be the less congenial field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect, so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of mispronunciation." but in this last extract we are still three degrees away from what can be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of style. take the following, which is the very peach-blow of courtesy:-- "but upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no business in the arts. if he be not frugal he steers directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. if the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he should attain to--or preserve--distinction in the arts," etc. now the very next essay to this is a sort of intoned voluntary played upon the more sombre emotions. "what a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes." there is a tincture of carlyle in this mixture. there are a good many pages of gothic type in the later essays, for stevenson thought it the proper tone in which to speak of death, duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. he derived this impression from the works of sir thomas browne. but the solemnity of sir thomas browne is like a melodious thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing. "time sadly overcometh all things and is now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and looketh upon memphis and old thebes, while his sister oblivion reclineth semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. history sinketh beneath her cloud. the traveller as he passeth through these deserts asketh of her 'who builded them?' and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not." the frenzy to produce something like this sadly overcomes stevenson, in his later essays. but perhaps it were to reason too curiously to pin stevenson down to browne. all the old masters stalk like spectres through his pages, and among them are the shades of the moderns, even men that we have dined with. according to stevenson, a certain kind of subject requires a certain "treatment," and the choice of his tone follows his title. these "treatments" are always traditional, and even his titles tread closely on the heels of former titles. he can write the style of charles lamb better than lamb could do it himself, and his hazlitt is very nearly as good. he fences with his left hand as well as with his right, and can manage two styles at once like franz liszt playing the allegretto from the th symphony with an air of offenbach twined about it. it is with a pang of disappointment that we now and then come across a style which we recognize, yet cannot place. people who take enjoyment in the reminiscences awakened by conjuring of this kind can nowhere in the world find a master like stevenson. those persons belong to the bookish classes. their numbers are insignificant, but they are important because they give countenance to the admiration of others who love stevenson with their hearts and souls. the reason why stevenson represents a backward movement in literature, is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from speech, and new thoughts from life, and stevenson used all his powers to exclude both from his work. he lived and wrote in the past. that this scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period of english literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours' traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that literature. he is the improvisatore, and nothing more. it is impossible to assign him rank in any line of writing. if you shut your eyes to try and place him, you find that you cannot do it. the effect he produces while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can recall nothing but a succession of flavors. it is not to be expected that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning are impressional. he is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. he is the mistletoe of english literature whose roots are not in the soil but in the tree. but enough of the nature and training of stevenson which fitted him to play the part he did. the cyclonic force which turned him from a secondary london novelist into something of importance and enabled him to give full play to his really unprecedented talents will be recognized on glancing about us. we are now passing through the age of the distribution of knowledge. the spread of the english-speaking race since , and the cheapness of printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. all the books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in popular editions. the magazines fulfil the same function; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. andrew lang heads an army of organized workers who mine in the old literature and coin it into booklets and cash. the american market rules the supply of light literature in great britain. while lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the norse or provensal, stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends of his own--something just as good. the two men serve the same public. stevenson's reputation in england was that of a comparatively light weight, but his success here was immediate. we hailed him as a classic--or something just as good. everything he did had the very stamp and trademark of letters, and he was as strong in one department as another. we loved this man; and thenceforward he purveyed "literature" to us at a rate to feed sixty millions of people and keep them clamoring for more. does any one believe that the passion of the american people for learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? does any one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? it creates an eddy in the maelstrom of commerce. it is a power like niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people for second rate things. there is here nothing to be ashamed of. in fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this importation of culture by the carload. the state of mind it shows is a definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through, and which precedes the discovery that real things are better than sham. when the latest palace hotel orders a hundred thousand dollars' worth of louis xv. furniture to be made--and most well made--in buffalo, and when the american public gives stevenson an order for pulvis et umbra--the same forces are at work in each case. it is chicago making culture hum. and what kind of a man was stevenson? whatever may be said about his imitativeness, his good spirits were real. they are at the bottom of his success, the strong note in his work. they account for all that is paradoxical in his effect. he often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. and yet we do not reproach him. he has by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the scepticism inherent in them. and yet we know that he was not a sceptic; on the contrary, we like him, and he was regarded by his friends as little lower than the angels. why is it that we refuse to judge him by his own utterances? the reason is that all of his writing is playful, and we know it. the instinct at the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. hence the illusive and questionable personality of stevenson. hence our blind struggle to bind this proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. the truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of europe, there emerges out of the box of maelzel a pale boy. but the courage of this boy, the heroism of his life, illumine all his works with a personal interest. the last ten years of his life present a long battle with death. we read of his illnesses, his spirit; we hear how he never gave up, but continued his works by dictation and in dumb show when he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak to speak. this courage and the lovable nature of stevenson won the world's heart. he was regarded with a peculiar tenderness such as is usually given only to the young. honor, and admiration mingled with affection followed him to his grave. whatever his artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual nature in his work. it was this nature which made him thus beloved. [illustration: a day with browning] "the palazzo giustiniani recanati was a place of historical association and fifteenth-century traditions.... at three o'clock regularly, a friend's gondola, which was always at hand to convey him, came and carried him, usually, to the lido,--his favourite spot." [illustration: _painting by e. w. haslehust._ browning's house in venice.] [illustration: a day with the poet browning new york hodder & stoughton] _in the same series._ _longfellow._ _tennyson._ _keats._ _wordsworth._ _burns._ _scott._ _byron._ _shelley._ a day with browning. from his bed-room window in the palazzo giustiniani recanati, every morning in , robert browning watched the sunrise. "my window commands a perfect view," he wrote, "the still, grey lagoon, the few seagulls flying, the islet of san giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, from behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up, till presently all the rims are on fire with gold.... so my day begins." the palazzo, in which a suite of rooms had been placed by mrs. bronson at the disposal of the poet and his sister, was a place of historical association and fifteenth-century traditions. and no more appropriate abiding-place than venice could have been selected for a man of browning's temperament. the venetian colouring was a perpetual feast to his eye: its mediæval glories were a source of continual inspiration. and if much of his heart still remained with his native land, so that the london daily papers were a necessity of existence, and a certain sense of exile occasionally obtruded itself, we must needs be grateful to that fact for its result in certain immortal lines: oh, to be in england now that april's there, and whoever wakes in england sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough in england--now! and after april, when may follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent-spray's edge-- that's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture! and though the fields look rough with hoary dew, all will be gay when noontide wakes anew the buttercups, the little children's dower, --far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! but there had always been a frankly cosmopolitan spirit in browning,--no touch of parochialism or insularity. in the magnificent gallery of portrait studies, no two alike, which his poems present to us, the nationalities are legion. yet italian scenes predominate; for browning could gauge, with the unerring instinct of genius, all the subtleties of the italian temperament. so we come, at every turn, across some ardent vision of the south,--here, waring sailing out of trieste under the furled lateen-sail; and there, fra lippo lippi tracking "lutestrings, laughs, and whifts of song" down the darkling streets of florence. the "patriot," riding into brescia, "roses, roses all the way," and the duke of ferrara,--that "typical representative of a whole phase of civilisation," discussing _my last duchess_ and her foolishness. that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive; i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will't please you sit and look at her? i said "frà pandolf" by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus. sir, 'twas not her husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek: perhaps frà pandolf chanced to say "her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much," or "paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat;" such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. she had a heart ... how shall i say? ... too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. sir, 'twas all one! my favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. she thanked men,--good; but thanked somehow ... i know not how ... as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. (_my last duchess._) * * * * * that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive; i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will't please you sit and look at her? i said "frà pandolf" by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there. [illustration: _painting by w. j. neatby._ my last duchess.] after a light and early breakfast--the poet, when abroad, lived almost entirely on milk, fruit, etc., abjuring animal food--browning would follow his invariable custom, a stroll along the riva to the public gardens. he never failed to leave the house at the same hour of the day: he was a man of singularly methodical habits in many ways. "good sense," it has been said, "was his foible, if not his habit": and an orderly method of life was one of the strongest proofs of this fact: another evidence lay in his care to avoid being _labelled_. the disorderly locks and careless appearance of the typical poet were quite alien to this well-groomed, cleanly-looking englishman, with his "sweet, grave face," silvery hair, and smooth, healthy skin. singularly wholesome in body as well as in mind, until past seventy he could take the longest walks without fatigue; the splendid eyesight of his clear grey eyes remained untarnished to the last. these keen grey eyes of his never failed to notice anything worth seeing in his walks: an extraordinary minuteness of observation is perceptible in all his poems dealing with out-door life,--little touches of detail such as few men are masters of: and the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly, i noticed that, to-day; one day more bursts them open fully, --you know the red turns grey. (_the lost mistress._) and again, those lines of poignant, passionate reserve, which sum up _may and death_: i wish that when you died last may, charles, there had died along with you three parts of spring's delightful things; ay, and for me, the fourth part too. a foolish thought, and worse, perhaps! there must be many a pair of friends who, arm in arm, deserve the warm moon-births, and the long evening-ends. so, for their sake, be may still may! let their new time, as mine of old, do all it did for me: i bid sweet sights and sounds throng manifold. only, one little sight, one plant, woods have in may, that starts up green save a sole streak which, so to speak, is spring's blood, spilt its leaves between,-- that, they might spare; a certain wood might miss the plant; their loss were small: but i,--whene'er the leaf grows there, its drop comes from my heart, that's all. arrived at the public gardens, browning was careful to visit his "friends" there and to feed them--the elephant, baboon, kangaroo, ostrich, pelican, and marmosets. he had that particular _camaraderie_ with wild animals which is almost akin to a hypnotic influence over them: and when in the country, he would "whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them." flowers he enjoyed as a colour-feast for the eye; scenery he revelled in. in that perpetual contemplation of nature, which with wordsworth became an all-absorbent passion, browning had but little share: his chief interest was in man. but "now and again external nature was for him ... pierced and shot through with spiritual fire." three times punctually he would walk round the gardens, and then walk home. upon these daily strolls he was accompanied by his sister sarianna: in whose love and companionship he was singularly fortunate. sarianna browning had always been the best of sisters to the poet and his wife,--a kindred spirit in every sense of the word; and she was now intent to supply, so far as in her lay, the place of that "soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl"--elizabeth barrett browning. of the dead wife, who had been all-in-all to him, browning seldom spoke in words: but his burning need of her and hope of reunion with her gleamed continually through his writings: "oh, their rafael of the dear madonnas, oh, their dante of the dread inferno, wrote one song--and in my brain i sing it, drew one angel--borne, see, on my bosom!" and in all his poems which deal with the love of man and woman, "he regarded the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life." he thought of love "as a supreme possession in itself, and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it: as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit." hence, even where the shadow of death broods over a poem, as we see it _in a gondola_, that shadow "glows with colour like the shadows of a venetian painter." love, to the very last, is infinitely stronger than death. * * * * * i send my heart up to thee, all my heart, in this my singing. for the stars help me, and the sea bears part; the very night is clinging closer to venice' streets to leave one space above me, whence thy face may light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place. [illustration: _painting by w. russell flint._ in a gondola.] _he sings._ i send my heart up to thee, all my heart in this my singing. for the stars help me, and the sea bears part; the very night is clinging closer to venice' streets to leave one space above me, whence thy face may light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place. _she speaks._ say after me, and try to say my very words, as if each word came from you of your own accord, in your own voice, in your own way: "this woman's heart and soul and brain are mine as much as this gold chain she bids me wear; which," (say again) "i choose to make by cherishing a precious thing, or choose to fling over the boat-side, ring by ring." and yet once more say ... no word more! since words are only words. give o'er! unless you call me, all the same, familiarly by my pet-name which, if the three should hear you call, and me reply to, would proclaim at once our secret to them all. * * * * * _she speaks._ there's zanze's vigilant taper; safe are we! only one minute more to-night with me? resume your past self of a month ago! be you the bashful gallant, i will be the lady with the colder breast than snow: now bow you, as becomes, nor touch my hand more than i touch yours when i step to land, and say, "all thanks, siora!"-- heart to heart, and lips to lips! yet once more, ere we part, clasp me, and make me thine, as mine thou art! (_he is surprised and stabbed._) it was ordained to be so, sweet,--and best comes now, beneath thine eyes, and on thy breast. still kiss me! care not for the cowards! care only to put aside thy beauteous hair my blood will hurt! the three, i do not scorn to death, because they never lived: but i have lived indeed, and so--(yet one more kiss)--can die! (_in a gondola._) the latter hours of the morning were devoted by the poet to work, proof-sheets, and correspondence. he would complain bitterly of the quantity of "ephemeral correspondence" which took up so much of his time: yet, with the rarest exceptions, he answered every letter he received. he counted that day lost in which he had not written at least a little. in earlier life he had worked fast and copiously, but now he was satisfied with twenty or thirty lines as the result of a morning's work. and upon these lines he expended infinite trouble; for, despite all suppositions to the contrary, he finished his work with great care. "people accuse me of not taking pains!" he grumbled, "i take nothing _but_ pains!" his subject-matter fell naturally into three groups of poems: those interpreting love in its various phases, those occupied with art and artists, those treating of religious ideas and emotions. and these again may be subdivided into poems of failure and attainment: it is hard to say which are which, for browning was the singer of heroic failures, and they, to him, were spiritual triumphs. he held that "we fall to rise--are baffled to fight better,--sleep, to wake." no such moral tonic has ever been proffered to the weary and dispirited as the invulnerable optimism of browning. he regarded this present life as a state of probation and preparation; therefore, "his faith in the unseen order of things created a hope which persists through all apparent failure." the miltonic ideal, "and what is else, not to be overcome," is the core and centre of browning's teaching. sometimes it refers to hopeless love, as in _the last ride together_. i said--then, dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all, my life seemed meant for, fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave,--i claim only a memory of the same, --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me. my mistress bent that brow of hers; those deep dark eyes where pride demurs when pity would be softening through, fixed me a breathing-while or two with life or death in the balance: right! the blood replenished me again; my last thought was at least not vain: i and my mistress, side by side shall be together, breathe and ride, so, one day more am i deified-- who knows but the world may end to-night? sometimes death, to all seeming, has shut the doors of hope for ever: beautiful evelyn hope is dead! sit and watch by her side an hour. that is her book-shelf, this her bed; she plucked that piece of geranium-flower, beginning to die too in the glass; little has yet been changed, i think: the shutters are shut, no light may pass save two long rays thro' the hinge's chink. * * * * * is it too late then, evelyn hope? what, your soul was pure and true, the good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire and dew-- and, just because i was thrice as old and our paths in the world diverged so wide, each was nought to each, must i be told? we were fellow-mortals, nought beside? no, indeed! for god above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love: i claim you still, for my own love's sake! delayed it may be for more lives yet, through worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn and much to forget ere the time be come for taking you. but the time will come,--at last it will, when, evelyn hope, what meant, i shall say, in the lower earth, in the years long still, that body and soul so pure and gay? why your hair was amber, i shall divine, and your mouth of your own geranium's red-- and what you would do with me, in fine, in the new life come in the old one's stead. * * * * * i loved you, evelyn, all the while! my heart seemed full as it could hold-- there was place and to spare for the frank young smile, and the red young mouth and the hair's young gold. so, hush,--i will give you this leaf to keep-- see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand. there, that is our secret! go to sleep; you will wake, and remember, and understand. or, again, the tragedy of ingratitude and crumbled aspirations ends--as the world might say--upon the scaffold. it was roses, roses, all the way, with myrtle mixed in my path like mad: the house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, the church-spires flamed, such flags they had, a year ago on this very day! * * * * * there's nobody on the house-tops now-- just a palsied few at the windows set; for the best of the sight is, all allow, at the shambles' gate--or, better yet, by the very scaffold's foot, i trow. i go in the rain, and, more than needs, a rope cuts both my wrists behind; and i think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, for they fling, whoever has a mind, stones at me for my year's misdeeds. thus i entered brescia, and thus i go! in triumphs, people have dropped down dead. "thou, paid by the world,--what dost thou owe me?" god might question: but now instead, 'tis god shall requite! i am safer so. in all these, as in _childe roland_, that forlorn romance of dreary and depressed heroism, "the trumpet-note of the soul's victory rings through the darkness of terrestrial defeat": not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled increasing like a bell. names in my ears of all the lost adventurers my peers,-- how such a one was strong, and such was bold, and such was fortunate, yet each of old lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. there they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met to view the last of me, a living frame for one more picture! in a sheet of flame i saw them and i knew them all. and yet dauntless the slug-horn to my lips i set and blew, "_childe roland to the dark tower came_." ... at noon, browning would make a second and more substantial breakfast on italian dishes; and at three o'clock regularly, a friend's gondola, which was always at hand to convey him, came and carried him, usually, to the lido,--his favourite spot. "i walk, even in wind or rain," he wrote, "for a couple of hours on lido, and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand, as much as shelley did in those old days.... go there,--if only to be blown about by the sea-wind!" the sea-wind, indeed, was the very utterance of his own robust and vigorous nature, his keen alertness of sense, and his impetuous, impulsive spirit. in the course of the afternoon, he would explore venice in all directions, studying her multitudinous points of interest and beauty. the daughter of his hostess, mrs. bronson, sometimes companioned him on these excursions, guiding him through the narrow by-streets, or examining, with him, the monuments, sculptures and frescoes of the churches. art, in its various manifestations, had been a life-long study with browning. he took great delight in modelling in clay, and had for some while studied sculpture under story. he possessed the artistic temperament--fiery, nervous, susceptible--in its sanest form: and not only was he able to express all an artist's aims, ambitions, and despairs, but to arrive in all his poems, at one point or other, at a superb pictorial moment. some of his lines are penetrated from end to end with this remarkable pictorial quality: perhaps the most notable example is _love among the ruins_, with its triple contrast,--the infinite calm of the pasture-lands prolonging themselves into the sunset, the noise and vital movement which had filled the now-vanished city,--and the lover, endeavouring to curb his impatience for the one beloved face by dwelling on these outward things: * * * * * and i know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve smiles to leave to their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece in such peace, and the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey melt away-- that a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret whence the charioteers caught soul for the goal, when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb till i come. [illustration: _painting by w. russell flint_. love among the ruins.] where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles miles and miles on the solitary pastures where our sheep half asleep tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop as they crop-- was the site once of a city great and gay, (so they say) of our country's very capital, its prince ages since held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far peace or war. * * * * * and i know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve smiles to leave to their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece in such peace, and the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey melt away-- that a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret whence the charioteers caught soul for the goal, when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb till i come. but he looked upon the city, every side, far and wide, all the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' colonnades, all the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then, all the men! when i do come, she will speak not, she will stand, either hand on my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace of my face, ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech each on each. * * * * * oh heart! oh, blood that freezes, blood that burns! earth's returns for whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! shut them in, with their triumphs and their glories and the rest. love is best! another characteristic of browning was his consummate comprehension of artistic ideals, those of temperaments so opposite as fra lippo lippi, _pictor ignotus_, and that too-perfect painter andrea del sarto. his poem on the last-named was written and forwarded to a friend, who had begged him to procure a copy of the pitti portrait of del sarto and his wife. it tells far more than any portrait could: and expresses the writer's doctrine that in art, as in life, the aspiration toward the higher is greater than the achievement of the lower: "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?" according to browning's belief, a soul's probation, its growth, its ultimate value, lie mainly if not wholly in this choice between the high and the less high. ... love, we are in god's hand. how strange now, looks the life he makes us lead! so free we seem, so fettered fast we are! i feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! this chamber for example--turn your head-- all that's behind us! you don't understand nor care to understand about my art, but you can hear at least when people speak; and that cartoon, the second from the door --it is the thing, love! so such things should be-- behold madonna, i am bold to say. i can do with my pencil what i know, what i see, what at bottom of my heart i wish for, if i ever wish so deep-- do easily, too--when i say perfectly i do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge who listened to the legate's talk last week, and just as much they used to say in france. at any rate 'tis easy, all of it, no sketches first, no studies, that's long past-- i do what many dream of all their lives --dream? strive to do, and agonise to do, and fail in doing. i could count twenty such on twice your fingers, and not leave this town, who strive--you don't know how the others strive to paint a little thing like that you smeared carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-- yet do much less, so much less, someone says, (i know his name, no matter) so much less! well, less is more, lucrezia! i am judged. there burns a truer light of god in them, in their vexed, beating, stuffed and stopped-up brain, heart, or whate'er else, that goes on to prompt this low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. their works drop groundward, but themselves, i know, reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, enter and take their place there sure enough, though they come back and cannot tell the world. my works are nearer heaven, but i sit here. (_andrea del sarto._) social intercourse occupied a large portion of the day. browning identified himself with the daily life of venice, and, besides this, english and american acquaintances were frequently in venice: the poet, his reputation now firmly established and extending, was sought after by innumerable admirers. he was a man of great social charm,--a brilliant talker, full of amusing anecdotes,--his memory for historical incident was only paralleled by his immense literary knowledge, upon which he drew for apt illustration. yet he was naturally a reticent man, of painfully nervous excitability; "nervous to such a degree," as he said of himself, "that i might fancy i could not enter a drawing-room, did i not know from my experience that i _could_ do it." this very nervousness, however, often induced an almost abnormal vivacity of speech: and browning was warmly welcomed amongst the notable and even royal folk whose names were included in mrs. bronson's circle; they recognised in him, as frederick tennyson had done, "a man of infinite learning, jest, and _bonhomie_, and moreover a sterling heart that reveals no hollowness." to women he was specially attracted, and _vice-versâ_; "that golden-hearted robert," as his wife had termed him, had an intimate understanding of the woman's mind. but towards children, he was, so to speak, almost numb. devoted though he was to his only son, "the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him:" and the fervour of parental instinct finds practically no expression in his poems. in the course of the day the poet would lose no opportunity of hearing any important concert: an accomplished musician himself, his love for the tone-art amounted to a passion: and in many of his greatest poems, he had voiced the most secret meanings of music, and the yearning aspirations of a composer. we "sit alone in the loft" with the organist, master hughes of saxe-gotha, and his "huge house of the sounds," to listen and wonder while his fugue "broadens and thickens, greatens and deepens and lengthens," and the intricacy of constructive technique forms, as someone has said, "an interposing web spun by the brain between art and things divine." or we stand with abt vogler in his "palace of music" as it falls to pieces, and the magic of inspiration over-rides the mastery of construction. the void of the silence is filled with "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen," and faith is born of the composer's very impotence to realize the heights of his own ambition--yet one more rendering of that triumphant failure, of which browning was the prophet: all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity affirms the conception of an hour. the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by. and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonized? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized? sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know. (_abt vogler._) and, as a final contrast, drawn out of that shoreless sea of contrasts which music can reveal, we have _a toccata of galuppi's_, suffused with the melancholy of mundane pleasure, steeped in the ephemeral voluptuousness of eighteenth-century venice. in these lines, it has been pointed out, "browning's self-restraint is admirable.... the poet will not say a word more than the musician has said in his toccata." did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in may? balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, when they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? * * * * * well (and it was graceful of them) they'd break talk off and afford-- --she to bite her mask's black velvet, he to finger on his sword, while you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord? [illustration: _painting by w. russell flint._ a toccata of galuppi's.] oh, galuppi, baldassaro, this is very sad to find! i can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; but although i take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. what, they lived thus at venice, where the merchants were the kings, where st. mark's is, where the doges used to wed the sea with rings? * * * * * did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in may? balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, when they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? * * * * * well (and it was graceful of them) they'd break talk off and afford-- --she to bite her mask's black velvet, he to finger on his sword, while you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord? what? those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, told them something? those suspensions, those solutions--"must we die?" those commiserating sevenths--"life might last! we can but try!" "were you happy?"--"yes."--"and are you still as happy?"--"yes. and you?" --"then, more kisses!"--"did i stop them, when a million seemed so few?" hark! the dominant's persistence, till it must be answered to! so an octave struck the answer. oh, they praised you, i dare say! "brave galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay! i can always leave off talking when i hear a master play!" then they left you for your pleasure: till in due time, one by one, some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, death came tacitly and took them where they never see the sun. * * * * * (_a toccata of galuppi's._) the afternoon wore by quickly, and it was soon time to dress for dinner: for browning was precise in adhering to the customs of civilised life: and he liked to see his sister seated opposite him, clad in beautiful gowns of sombre richness, and wearing quaint old jewelry. browning accepted his meals with frank pleasure; he was no ascetic, and "his optimism and his belief in direct providence led him to make a direct virtue of happiness," and to welcome it in its simplest form. any guest who might be present was privileged to enjoy that sparkling and many-faceted eloquence to which reference has been made already. but the host was always careful to avoid deep or solemn topics--doubtless because he felt them far too keenly, to use them as mere texts for dinner-table discussion. "if such were broached in his presence, he dismissed them with one strong convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel." later on, he would probably visit the goldoni theatre, where he had a large box: or, if remaining at home, he was often prevailed upon to read aloud. his delivery was forcible and dramatic,--he would strongly emphasise all the light and shade of a poem, and the touches of character in the dialogue. especially was this the case when reading his own compositions. but often he would say with a smile, "no r. b. to-night!--let us have some real poetry," and would take down a volume of shelley, keats or coleridge. at last, another of the "divine sunsets" which browning adored had faded over the lido; the "quiet-coloured end of evening" had darkened into dusk and stars. even that alert and indefatigable frame grew weary with the day's long doings, and a natural desire for rest descended upon "the brain which too much thought expands." the vision of guercino's picture, "fraught with a pathos so magnificent," returned upon him from that sultry day in which he had beheld the "guardian angel" at fano, "my angel with me, too," and he longed for the touch of those divinely-healing hands. * * * * * dear and great angel, would'st thou only leave that child, when thou hast done with him, for me! let me sit all the day here, that when eve shall find performed thy special ministry and time come for departure, thou, suspending thy flight, may'st see another child for tending, another still, to quiet and retrieve. [illustration: _painting by w. russell flint._ the guardian angel.] dear and great angel, wouldst thou only leave that child, when thou hast done with him, for me! let me sit all the day here, that when eve shall find performed thy special ministry and time come for departure, thou, suspending thy flight, mayst see another child for tending, another still, to quiet and retrieve. then i shall feel thee step one step, no more, from where thou standest now, to where i gaze, --and suddenly my head is covered o'er with those wings, white above the child who prays now on that tomb--and i shall feel thee guarding me, out of all the world; for me, discarding yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door! i would not look up thither past thy head because the door opes, like that child, i know, for i should have thy gracious face instead, thou bird of god! and wilt thou bend me low like him, and lay, like his, my hands together, and lift them up to pray, and gently tether me, as thy lamb there, with thy garments spread?... how soon all worldly wrong would be repaired! i think how i should view the earth and skies and sea, when once again my brow was bared after thy healing, with such different eyes. o world, as god has made it! all is beauty: and knowing this, is love, and love is duty. what further may be sought for or declared? yet it was not to a celestial visitant that browning's thoughts turned most, now or at any other time. it was towards the one love of his life,--towards that re-union, that restoration, that infrangible joy of retrieval, which was the goal of his whole desire. and, characteristically of the man who was "ever a fighter," he did not expect to reach his haven by a calm and prosperous passage. it had to be fought for--struggled for from strength to strength,--attained through incessant and arduous combat. for those do not "mount, and that hardly, to eternal life," who remain content upon terrestrial planes; "surely they see not god, i know, nor all that chivalry of his, the soldier-saints, who, row on row, burn upwards each to his point of bliss, since, the end of life being manifest, he had cut his way through the world to this." therefore, as sleep, "death's twin-brother," came slowly through the darkness, the fighter faced his last hour in imagination, and made haste to "greet the future with a cheer." for _prospice_ is an "act of the faith which comes through love.... no lonely adventure is here to reward the victor o'er death: the transcendant joy is human love recovered": fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face, when the snows begin, and the blasts denote i am nearing the place, the power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe; where he stands, the arch fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go: for the journey is done and the summit attained, and the barriers fall, though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, the reward of it all. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. no! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers the heroes of old, bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness and cold. for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minute's at end, and the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, o thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest! (_prospice._) _printed by percy lund, humphries & co., ltd., bradford and london._ generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) works of s. s. curry, ph.d., litt.d. _of eminent value._--dr. lyman abbott. _both method and spirit practically without precedent._--j. m. leveque, editor morning world, new orleans. province of expression. a study of the general problems regarding delivery and the principles underlying its development. $ . ; to teachers, $ . . the work of a highly intellectual man who thinks and feels deeply, who is in earnest and whose words are entitled to the most thoughtful consideration.--william winter. lessons in vocal expression. study of the modulations of the voice as caused by action of the mind. it is the best book on expression i ever read, far ahead of anything published.--prof. george a. vinton, _chicago_. imagination and dramatic instinct. creative action of the mind, insight, sympathy, and assimilation in vocal expression. the best book ever published on elocution.--_a prominent teacher and public reader._ vocal and literary interpretation of the bible. deserves the attention of everyone.--_the scotsman, edinboro._ will serve to abolish "hardshell" reading where "hardshell" preaching is no longer tolerated.--dr. lyman abbott. foundations of expression. principles and fundamental steps in the training of the mind, body, and voice in speaking. "by its aid i have accomplished double the usual results." browning and the dramatic monologue. introduction to browning's poetry and dramatic platform art. studies of some later phases of dramatic expression. $ . ; to teachers, $ . postpaid. classics for vocal expression. $ . ; to teachers, $ . postpaid. _other books in preparation._ join the expression league by sending the names of three persons interested, and information will be sent you regarding all these books. address the expression league room , pierce building, copley sq. boston, mass. browning and the dramatic monologue nature and interpretation of an overlooked form of literature s. s. curry, ph.d., litt.d. president of the school of expression boston expression company pierce building, copley square copyright, by s. s. curry the university press, cambridge, u. s. a. contents page part i the monologue as a dramatic form i. a new literary form ii. the speaker iii. the hearer iv. place or situation v. time and connection vi. argument vii. the monologue as a form of literature viii. history of the monologue part ii dramatic rendering of the monologue ix. necessity of oral rendition x. actions of mind and voice xi. actions of mind and body xii. the monologue and metre xiii. dialect xiv. properties xv. faults in rendering a monologue xvi. importance of the monologue xvii. some typical monologues from browning index part i the monologue as a dramatic form i. a new literary form why were the poems of robert browning so long unread? why was his real message or spirit understood by few forty years after he began to write? the story is told that douglas jerrold, when recovering from a serious illness, opened a copy of "sordello," which was among some new books sent to him by a friend. sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought, and at last it dawned upon him that perhaps his sickness had wrecked his mental faculties, and he sank back on the sofa, overwhelmed with dismay. just then his wife and sister entered and, thrusting the book into their hands, he eagerly demanded what they thought of it. he watched them intently, and when at last mrs. jerrold exclaimed, "i do not understand what this man means," jerrold uttered a cry of relief, "thank god, i am not an idiot!" browning, while protesting that he was not obscure, used to tell this story with great enjoyment. what was the chief cause of the almost universal failure to understand browning? many reasons are assigned. his themes were such as had never before been found in poetry, his allusions and illustrations so unfamiliar as to presuppose wide knowledge on the part of the reader; he had a very concise and abrupt way of stating things. yet, after all, were these the chief causes? was he not obscure because he had chosen a new or unusual dramatic form? nearly every one of his poems is written in the form of a monologue, which, according to professor johnson, "may be termed a novelty of invention in browning." hence, to the average man of a generation ago, browning's poems were written in almost a new language. this secret of the difficulty of appreciating browning is not even yet fully realized. there are many "introductions" to his poems and some valuable works on his life, yet nowhere can we find an adequate discussion of his dramatic form, its nature, and the influence it has exerted upon modern poetry. let us endeavor to take the point of view of the average man who opened one of browning's volumes when first published; or let us imagine the feeling of an ordinary reader to-day on first chancing upon such a poem as "the patriot." the average man beginning to read, "it was roses, roses," fancies he is reading a mere story and waits for the unfolding of events, but very soon becomes confused. where is he? nothing happens. somebody is talking, but about what? one who looks for mere effects and not for causes, for facts and not for experiences, for a mere sequence of events, and not for the laying bare of the motives and struggles of the human heart, will be apt soon to throw the book down and turn to his daily paper to read the accounts of stocks, fires, or murders, disgusted with the very name of browning, if not with poetry. if he look more closely, he will find a subtitle, "an old story," but this confuses him still more. "story" is evidently used in some peculiar sense, and "old" may be used in the sense of ancient, familiar, or oft-repeated; it may imply that certain results always follow certain conditions. if a careful student glance through the poem, he will find the patriot an old story it was roses, roses, all the way, with myrtle mixed in my path like mad: the house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, the church-spires flamed, such flags they had, a year ago on this very day. the air broke into a mist with bells, the old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. had i said, "good folk, mere noise repels-- but give me your sun from yonder skies!" they had answered "and afterward, what else?" alack, it was i who leaped at the sun to give it my loving friends to keep! naught man could do, have i left undone: and you see my harvest, what i reap this very day, now a year is run. there's nobody on the house-tops now-- just a palsied few at the windows set; for the best of the sight is, all allow, at the shambles' gate--or, better yet, by the very scaffold's foot, i trow. i go in the rain, and, more than needs, a rope cuts both my wrists behind; and i think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, for they fling, whoever has a mind, stones at me for my year's misdeeds. thus i entered, and thus i go! in triumphs, people have dropped down dead. "paid by the world, what dost thou owe me?"--god might question; now instead, 'tis god shall repay: i am safer so. that the patriot is one who entered the city a year before, and who during this time has done his best to secure reforms, but at the end of the year is led forth to the scaffold. the poem pictures to us the thoughts that stir his mind on the way to his death. he recognizes the same street, he remembers the roses, the myrtle, the house-roofs so crowded that they seem to heave and sway, the flags on the church spires, the bells, the willingness of the multitude to give him even the sun; but he it is who aimed at the impossible--to give his friends the sun. having done all he could, now comes his reward. there is nobody on the house-tops, and only a few too old to go to the scaffold have crept to the windows. the great crowd is at the gate or at the scaffold's foot. he goes in the rain, his hands tied behind him, his forehead bleeding from the stones that are hurled at him. the closing thought, so abruptly expressed, the most difficult one in the poem, is a mere hint of what might have happened had he triumphed in the world's sense of the word. he might have fallen dead,--dead in a deeper sense than the loss of life; his soul might have become dead to truth, to noble ideals, and to aspiration. had he done what men wanted him to do, he would have been paid by the world. he has certainly not done the world's bidding, and in a few short words he reveals his resignation, his heroism, and his sublime triumph. "now instead, 'tis god shall repay: i am safer so." the first line of the last stanza in the first edition of the poem contained the word "brescia," suggesting a reference to the reformer arnold. but browning later omitted "brescia," because the poem was not meant to be in any sense historical, but rather to represent the reformer of every age whose ideals are misunderstood and whose noblest work is rewarded by death. "history," said aristotle, "tells what alcibiades did, poetry what he ought to have done." "the patriot" is not a matter-of-fact narrative, but a revelation of human experience. the reader must approach such a poem as a work of art. sympathetic and contemplative attention must be given to it as an entirety. then point after point, idea after idea, will become clear and vivid, and at last the whole will be intensely realized. for another example of browning's short poems take "a woman's last word." suppose one tries to read this as if it were an ordinary lyric. one is sure to be greatly confused as to its meaning. what is it all about? the words are simple enough, and while the ordinary man recognizes this, he is all the more perplexed. perceiving certain merits, he exclaims, "if a man can write such beautiful individual lines, why does he not make his whole story clear and simple?" if, however, one will meditate over the whole, take hints here and there and put them together, a distinct picture is slowly formed in the mind. a wife, whose husband demands that she explain to him something in her past life, is speaking. she has perhaps loved some one before him, and his curiosity or jealousy is aroused. the poem really constitutes her appeal to his higher nature and her insistence upon the sacredness of their present relation, which she fears words may profane. she does not even fully understand the past herself. to explain would be false to him, hence with love and tenderness she pleads for delay. yet she promises to speak his "speech," but "to-morrow, not to-night." perhaps she hopes that his mood will change; possibly she feels that he is not now in the right attitude of mind to understand or sympathize with her experiences. a woman's last word let's contend no more, love, strive nor weep: all be as before, love, --only sleep! what so wild as words are? i and thou in debate, as birds are, hawk on bough! see the creature stalking while we speak! hush and hide the talking, cheek on cheek. what so false as truth is, false to thee? where the serpent's tooth is, shun the tree-- where the apple reddens, never pry-- lest we lose our edens, eve and i. be a god and hold me with a charm! be a man and fold me with thine arm! teach me, only teach, love! as i ought i will speak thy speech, love, think thy thought-- meet, if thou require it, both demands laying flesh and spirit in thy hands. that shall be to-morrow, not to-night: i must bury sorrow out of sight: --must a little weep, love, (foolish me!) and so fall asleep, love, loved by thee. in this poem a most delicate relation between two human beings is interpreted. short though it is, it yet goes deeper into motives, concentrates attention more energetically upon one point of view, and is possibly more impressive than if the theme had been unfolded in a play or novel. it turns the listener or reader within himself, and he feels in his own breast the response to her words. all great art discharges its function by evoking imagination and feeling, but it is not always the intellectual meaning which first appears. however far apart these two poems may be in spirit or subject, there are certain characteristics common to them; they are both monologues. the monologue, as browning has exemplified it, is one end of a conversation. a definite speaker is conceived in a definite, dramatic situation. usually we find also a well-defined listener, though his character is understood entirely from the impression he produces upon the speaker. we feel that this listener has said something and that his presence and character influence the speaker's thought, words, and manner. the conversation does not consist of abstract remarks, but takes place in a definite situation as a part of human life. we must realize the situation, the speaker, the hearer, before the meaning can become clear; and it is the failure to do this which has caused many to find browning obscure. for example, observe browning's "confessions." confessions what is he buzzing in my ears? "now that i come to die, do i view the world as a vale of tears?" ah, reverend sir, not i! what i viewed there once, what i view again where the physic bottles stand on the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, with a wall to my bedside hand. that lane sloped, much as the bottles do, from a house you could descry o'er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue or green to a healthy eye? to mine, it serves for the old june weather blue above lane and wall; and that farthest bottle labelled "ether" is the house o'er-topping all. at a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, there watched for me, one june, a girl: i know, sir, it's improper, my poor mind's out of tune. only, there was a way ... you crept close by the side, to dodge eyes in the house, two eyes except: they styled their house "the lodge." what right had a lounger up their lane? but, by creeping very close, with the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain and stretch themselves to oes, yet never catch her and me together, as she left the attic, there, by the rim of the bottle labelled "ether," and stole from stair to stair, and stood by the rose-wreathed gate. alas, we loved, sir--used to meet: how sad and bad and mad it was-- but then, how it was sweet! here, evidently, the speaker, who has "come to die," has been aroused by some "reverend sir," who has been expostulating with him and uttering conventional phrases about the vanity of human life. such superficial pessimism awakens protest, and the dying man remonstrates in the words of the poem. the speaker is apparently in bed and hardly believes himself fully possessed of his senses. he even asks if the curtain is "green or blue to a healthy eye," as if he feared to trust his judgment, lest it be perverted by disease. an abrupt beginning is very characteristic of a monologue, and when given properly, the first words arrest attention and suggest the situation. after the speaker's bewildered repetition of the visitor's words and his blunt answer "not i," which says such views are not his own, he talks of his "bedside hand," turns a row of bottles into a street, and tells of the sweetest experience of his life. he refuses to say that it was not sweet; he will not allow an abnormal condition such as his sickness to determine his views of life. the result is an introspection of the deeper hope found in the heart of man. the poem is not an essay or a sermon, it is not the lyric expression of a mood; it portrays the conflict of individual with individual and reveals the deepest motives of a character. it is not a dialogue, but only one end of a conversation, and for this reason it more intensely and definitely focuses attention. we see deeper into the speaker's spirit and view of life, while we recognize the superficiality of the creed of his visitor. the monologue thus is dramatic. it interprets human experience and character. no one who intelligently reads browning can fail to realize that he was a dramatic poet; in fact he was the first, if not the only, english dramatic poet of the nineteenth century. with his deep insight into the life of his age, as well as his grasp of character, he was the one master whose writing was needed for the drama of that century; yet he early came into conflict with the modern stage and ceased to write plays before he had mastered the play as a work of art. he was, however, by nature so dramatic in his point of view that he could never be anything else than a dramatic poet. hence, he was led to invent, or adopt, a dramatic form different from the play. from the midst of the conflict between poet and stage, between writer and stage artist, the monologue was evolved, or at least recognized and completed as an objective dramatic form. any study of the monologue must thus centre attention upon browning. as shakespeare reigns the supreme master of the play, so browning has no peer in the monologue. others have followed him in its use, but his monologues remain the most numerous, varied, and expressive. the development of the monologue, in some sense, is connected with the struggles of the modern stage to express the conditions of modern life. a great change has taken place in human experience. in modern civilization the conflicts and complex struggles of human character are usually hidden. men and women now conceal their emotions. self-control and repression form a part of the civilized ideal. men no longer shed tears in public as did homer's heroes. in our day, a man who is injured does not avenge himself, or if he does he rarely retains the sympathy of his fellow-men. on the contrary, the person wronged now turns over his wronger to the law; conflicts of man with man are fought out in the courts, and a well-ordered government inflicts punishment and rights wrongs. all modern life and experience have become more subjective; hence, it is natural that dramatic art should change its form. let no one suppose, however, that this change marks the death of dramatic representation. dramatic art in some shape is necessary as a means of expression in every age. it has become more subtle and suggestive, but it is none the less dramatic. an important phase of the changes in the character of dramatic art is the recognition of the monologue. the adoption of this form shows the tendency of dramatic art to adapt itself to modern times. the dramatic monologue, however, did not arise in opposition to the play, but as a new and parallel aspect of dramatic art. it has not the same theme as the play, does not deal with the expression of human life in movement or the complex struggles of human beings with each other, but it reveals the struggle in the depths of the soul. it exhibits the dramatic attitude of mind or the point of view. it is more subjective, more intense, and also more suggestive than the play. it reveals motives and character by a flash to an awakened imagination. however this new dramatic form may be explained, whatever may be its character, there is hardly a book of poetry that has appeared in recent years that does not contain examples. many popular writers, it may be unconsciously, employ this form almost to the exclusion of all others. the name itself occurs rarely in english books; but the name is nothing,--the monologue is there. the presence of the form of the monologue before its full recognition is a proof that it is natural and important. forms of art are not invented; they are rather discovered. they are direct languages; each expresses something no other can say. if the monologue is a distinct literary form, then it possesses certain possibilities in expressing the human spirit which are peculiar to itself. it must say something that nothing else can say so well. its use by browning, and the greater and greater frequency of its adoption among recent writers, seems to prove the necessity of a careful study of its peculiarities, possibilities, and rendition. ii. the speaker what is there peculiar about the monologue? can its nature or structure be so explained that a seemingly difficult poem, such as a monologue by browning, may be made clear and forcible? in the first place, one should note that the monologue gets its unity from the character of the speaker. it is not merely an impersonal thought, but the expression of one individual to another. it was hegel, i think, who said that all art implies the expression of a truth, of a thought or feeling, to a person. in nature we find everywhere a spontaneous unfolding, as in the blooming of a flower. there is no direct presentation of a truth to the apprehension of some particular mind; no modification of it by the character, the prejudice, or the feeling of the speaker. the lily unfolds its loveliness, but does not adapt the time or the direction of its blooming to dominate the attention of some indifferent observer, or express its message so definitely and pointedly as to be more easily understood. man, however, rarely, if ever, expresses a truth without a personal coloring due to his own character and the character of the listener. the same truth uttered by different persons appears different. occasionally a little child, or a man with a childlike nature, may think in a blind, natural way without adapting truth to other minds; but such direct, spontaneous, and truthful expression is extremely rare. it is one of the most important functions of art to teach us the fact that there is always "an intervention of personality," which needs to be realized in its specific interpretation. the monologue is a study of the effect of mind upon mind, of the adaptation of the ideas of one individual to another, and of the revelation this makes of the characters of speaker and listener. the nature of the monologue will be best understood by comparing it with some of the literary forms which it resembles, or with which it is often unconsciously confused. on account of the fact that there is but one speaker, it has been confused with oratory. a monologue is often conceived as a kind of stilted conversational oration; and the word monologue is apt to call to mind some talker, like coleridge, who monopolized the whole conversation. a monologue, however, is not a speech. an oration is the presentation of truth to an audience by a personality. there is some purpose at stake; the speaker must strengthen convictions and cause decisions on some point at issue. but a monologue is not an address to an audience; it is a study of character, of the processes of thinking in one individual as moulded by the presence of some other personality. its theme is not merely the thought uttered, but primarily the character of the speaker, who consciously or unconsciously unfolds himself. again, the monologue has been confused with the lyric poem. browning called one of his volumes "dramatic lyrics"; another, "dramatic idyls"; and another, "dramatic romances and lyrics." though many monologues are lyric in spirit, they are more frequently dramatic. a lyric is the utterance of an individual intensely realizing a specific situation, and implies deep feeling. but the monologue may or may not be emotional. no doubt it may result from as intense a realization as the lyric poem. it resembles a lyric in being simple and in being usually short, but is unlike it in that its theme is chiefly dramatic, its interest indirect, and that it lays bare to a far greater degree human motives in certain situations and under the ruling forces of a life. the monologue is like a lyric also in that it must be recognized as a complete whole. each clause must be understood in relation to others as a part of the whole. an essay can be understood sentence after sentence. a story gives a sequence of events for their own sake. a discussion may consist of a mere recital or succession of facts. in all these the whole is built up part by part. but the monologue differs from all these in that the whole must be felt from the beginning. further, in the monologue ideas are not given directly, as in the story or essay, but usually the more important points are suggested indirectly. the attention of the reader or hearer is focussed upon a living human being. what is said is not necessarily a universal and impersonal truth, it is the opinion of a certain type of man. we judge what is said by the character of the speaker, by the person to whom he speaks, and by the occasion. mr. furnivall may prefer to have every man speak directly from the shoulder and may write slightingly of such an indirect way of stating a truth as we find in the monologue. we may all prefer, or think we do, the direct way of speaking,--a sermon or lecture, for example,--and dislike what edmund spenser called a "dark conceit"; but soon or late we shall agree with spenser, the master of allegory, that the artistic method is "more interesting," and that example is better than precept. the monologue is one of the examples of the indirect method common to all art--a method which is necessary on account of the peculiarities of human nature. one person finds it difficult to explain a truth directly to another. nine-tenths of every picture is the product, not of perception, but of apperception. hence, without the aid of art, we express in words only half truths. the monologue makes human expression more adequate. it is like a nut; the shell must be penetrated before we can find the kernel. the real truth of the monologue comes only after comprehension of the whole. it reserves its truth until the thought has slowly grown in the mind of the hearer. it holds back something until all parts are co-ordinated and "does the thing shall breed the thought." accordingly, there are many things to settle in a monologue before the truth it contains can possibly be realized. in the first place, we must decide who the speaker is, what is his character, and the specific attitude of his mind. it is not merely the thought uttered that makes the impression. as a picture is something between a thought and a thing, not an idea on the one hand nor an object on the other, but a union of the two, so the monologue unites a truth or idea with the personality that utters it. an idea, a fact, may be valuable, but it becomes clear and impressive to some human consciousness only by being united with a human soul, and stated from one point of view and with the force of an individual life. the story of count gismond, for example, is told by the woman he saved from disgrace, who loves him of all men, and who is now his wife. we feel the whole story colored by her gratitude, devotion, and tenderness. the reader must conceive the character of the speaker, and enter into the depths of her motives, before understanding the thought; but after he has done so, he receives a clearer and more forcible impression than is otherwise possible. the stories of sam lawson by mrs. harriet beecher stowe are essentially monologues. in professor churchill's rendering of them the peculiarities of this yankee were truly shown to be the chief centre of interest. as we realize the spirit of these stories, we easily imagine ourselves on the "shady side of a blueberry pasture," listening to sam talking to a group of boys, or possibly to only one boy, and our interest centres in the revelation of the working of his mind. his repose, his indifference to work, his insight into human nature, his quaint humor and sympathy, are the chief causes of the pleasure given by these stories. possibly the letter is the literary form nearest to the monologue. we can easily see why. a good letter writer is dominated by his attention to one individual. the peculiar character of that individual is ever before him. the intimacy and abandon of the writer in pouring out his deepest thoughts is due to the sympathetic, confidential, conversational attitude of one human being to another. "blessed be letters!" said donald g. mitchell. "they are the monitors, they are also the comforters, they are the only true heart-talkers." there is, however, a great difference between letters and conversation. in conversation "your truest thought is modified during its utterance by a look, a sign, a smile, or a sneer. it is not individual; it is not integral; it is social, and marks half of you and half of others. it bends, it sways, it multiplies, it retires, it advances, as the talk of others presses, relaxes, or quickens." this effect of others upon the speaker is especially expressed in the monologue, particularly in examples of a popular and humorous character. while the monologue is the accentuation of some specific attitude of one human being as modified by contact with another, in a letter the attitude toward the other person is usually prolonged, due to past relationship; is more subjective, and expressed without any change caused by the presence of the person addressed. in some very animated letters, however, the attitude of the future reader's mind is anticipated or realized by the writer, and there is more or less of an approximation to the monologue. at any rate, this realization of what the other will think colors the composition. letters are animated in proportion as they possess this dramatic character, and are at times practically monologues. the skilful writer of a monologue omits obscure references in words to the sneers and looks of the hearer, except those which directly change the current of the speaker's thought. all must centre in the impression made upon the character speaking. in conversation, at times, a talker becomes more or less oblivious of his companion, yet the presence of his listener all the time affects the attitude of his mind. if we render a letter artistically to a company of people, we necessarily turn it into a monologue. we read the letter with the person in our mind, as a listener, to whom it is directed. we do not give its deeper ideas and personal or dramatic suggestions to a company as a speech. it is not surprising to find many monologues in epistolary form. browning's "cleon," in which is so truly presented the spirit of the greeks,--to whom paul spoke and wrote and among whom he worked,--is a letter written by cleon, a greek poet, to king protus, his friend. protus has written to cleon concerning the opinions held by one paulus, a rumor of whose preaching of the doctrine of immortality has reached him. "an epistle containing the strange medical experiments of karshish, the arab physician," is a letter from karshish to his old teacher describing the strange case of lazarus with an account of an interview with him after he had risen from the dead. this poem illustrates also the fact that a monologue may not be on the personal plane. browning is seemingly the only writer in english who has been able to present a character completely negative, or one without personal relations to the events. the character in this poem has a purely scientific attribute of mind and looks upon this event from a purely neutral point of view. it is only to him a curious case. by this method, the deeper significance may be given to the events while at the same time accentuating a peculiar type of mind, or it may be a rare moment in the life of nearly every individual. this poem is accordingly very interesting from a psychological point of view. it illustrates the scientific temper. the french have many examples of such writers, but browning gives the best,--in fact almost the only illustration in english literature. "the biglow papers," by lowell, though in the form of letters, are really dramatic monologues. each character is made to speak dramatically or in his own peculiar way. the chief interest of every one of these poems centres in the character speaking. the mental action is sustained consistently; the dramatic completeness, the definite point of view, and the dialect, enable us to picture the peculiar characters who think and feel, live and move, talk and act for our enjoyment. the monologue, accordingly, is nearer to the dialogue than to a letter. the differences between the dialogue and the monologue are the chief differences between the monologue and the play. in a dialogue there is a constant and immediate effect of another personality upon the speaker. the same is true of the monologue. the speaker of the monologue must accentuate the effect of his interlocutor as flexibly and freely as in the case of the dialogue. in the dialogue, however, the speaker and the listener change places; the monologue has but one speaker, and can only suggest the views or character of a listener by revealing some impression produced upon the speaker while in the act of speaking. this makes pauses and expressive modulations of the voice even more necessary in the monologue than in the dialogue. yet the mere fact that a poem or literary work has but one speaker does not make it a monologue; it may be a speech. burns's "for a' that and a' that" is a speech. matthew arnold may not be quite fair when he says that it is mere preaching, that burns was not sincere, and that we find the real burns in "the jolly beggars." still, all must feel in reading it that burns is exhorting others and railing a little at the world, but not revealing a character unconsciously or indirectly, through contact with either a man of another type, or through the exigencies of a given situation. burns is boasting a little and asserting his independence. the monologue demands not only a speaker, but a speaker in such a situation as will cause him to reveal himself unconsciously and indirectly, and such a moment as will lay bare his deepest motives. he must speak also in a natural, lifelike way. there must be no suggestion of a platform, no conscious presentation of truth for a definite end, as with the orator. it is a peculiar fact that the most difficult of all things is to tell the truth. every man "knows a good many things that are not so." for every affirmation of importance, we demand witnesses. whenever a man speaks, we look into his character, into the living, natural languages which are unconscious witnesses of the depth of his earnestness and sincerity. even in every-day life men judge of truth by character. what a man is, always colors, if it does not determine, what he says. but the essence of the monologue is to bring what a man says and what he is into harmony. the interpreter of a monologue must be true to the character of the speaker. he must faithfully portray, not his own, but the attitude and bearing, feelings and impression, of this character. every normal person would greatly admire the beauties of "the villa," but the "italian person of quality," in browning's monologue, feels for it great contempt. in browning's "youth and art" we feel continually the point of view, the feeling, and the character of the speaker. youth and art it once might have been, once only: we lodged in a street together, you, a sparrow on the housetop lonely, i, a lone she-bird of his feather. your trade was with sticks and clay, you thumbed, thrust, patted, and polished, then laughed, "they will see, some day, smith made, and gibson demolished." my business was song, song, song; i chirped, cheeped, trilled, and twittered, "kate brown's on the boards ere long, and grisi's existence imbittered!" i earned no more by a warble than you by a sketch in plaster: you wanted a piece of marble, i needed a music-master. we studied hard in our styles, chipped each at a crust like hindoos, for air, looked out on the tiles, for fun, watched each other's windows. you lounged, like a boy of the south, cap and blouse--nay, a bit of beard, too; or you got it, rubbing your mouth with fingers the clay adhered to. and i--soon managed to find weak points in the flower-fence facing, was forced to put up a blind and be safe in my corset-lacing. no harm! it was not my fault if you never turned your eye's tail up as i shook upon e _in alt._, or ran the chromatic scale up; for spring bade the sparrows pair, and the boys and girls gave guesses, and stalls in our street looked rare with bulrush and water-cresses. why did not you pinch a flower in a pellet of clay and fling it? why did not i put a power of thanks in a look, or sing it? i did look, sharp as a lynx (and yet the memory rankles) when models arrived, some minx tripped up stairs, she and her ankles. but i think i gave you as good! "that foreign fellow--who can know how she pays, in a playful mood, for his tuning her that piano?" could you say so, and never say, "suppose we join hands and fortunes, and i fetch her from over the way, her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?" no, no; you would not be rash, nor i rasher and something over: you've to settle yet gibson's hash, and grisi yet lives in clover. but you meet the prince at the board. i'm queen myself at _bals-parés_, i've married a rich old lord, and you're dubbed knight and an r. a. each life's unfulfilled, you see; it hangs still patchy and scrappy; we have not sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy. and nobody calls you a dunce, and people suppose me clever; this could but have happened once, and we missed it, lost it forever. the theme is the dream and experience of two lovers. the speaker is married to a rich old lord, and her lover of other days, a sculptor, is "dubbed knight and an r. a." stirred by her youthful dreams, or it may be by the meeting of her lover in society, or possibly in imagination,--as a queen of "_bals-parés_" would hardly talk to a "knight and an r. a." in this frank manner,--it is the woman who breaks forth suddenly with the dream of her old love-- "it once might have been, once only,"-- and relates the story of the days when they were both young students, she of singing and he of sculpture, and describes, or lightly caricatures, their experience. is her laughter, as she goes on in such a playful mood describing the different events of their lives, an endeavor to conceal a hidden pain? has she grown worldly minded, sneering at every youthful dream, even her own, or is she awakening from this worldly point of view to a realization at last of "life unfulfilled"? browning, instead of an abstract discussion, presents in an artistic form an important truth, that he who lives for the world does not live at all. by introducing this woman to us in a serious attitude of mind, reflecting on the one hand a worldly mood, on the other the deep, abiding love of a true woman, he makes the desired impression. the last line throbs with deep emotion, and we feel how slowly and sadly she would acknowledge the failure of life: "and we missed it, lost it forever." browning's "caliban upon setebos" furnishes a forcible illustration of the importance of the speaker and the necessity of preserving his character and point of view in the monologue. "'will sprawl" begins a long parenthesis which implies the first intention of caliban to lie flat in "the pit's much mire." he describes definitely the position he likes "in the cool slush." the words express caliban's feelings at his noonday rest and the position he takes for enjoyment. he has not yet risen to the dignity of the consciousness of the ego. he does not use the pronoun "i" or the possessive "my." his verbs are impersonal,--"'will sprawl," not "i will sprawl,"--and he "talks to his own self, howe'er he please, touching that other whom his dam called god." he lies down in this position to have a good "think" regarding his "dam's god, setebos." notice the continual recurrence of the impersonal "thinketh" without any subject. here we have a most humorous but really profound meditation of such a creature with all the elements of "natural theology in the island." the subheading before the monologue, "thou thoughtest that i was altogether such an one as thyself," indicates the current of browning's ideas. when we have once pictured caliban definitely in our minds with his "saith" and "thinketh," we perceive the analogy which he establishes after the manner of men between his own low nature and that of deity. to read such a work without a definite conception of the character talking, makes utter nonsense of the reading. every sentiment and feeling in the poem regarding god is dramatic. however deep or profound the lesson conveyed, it is entirely indirect. how different is the story of the glove and king francis, as treated by leigh hunt, from its interpretation by browning! leigh hunt centres everything in the sequence of events and the simple statement of facts. "king francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport, and one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court." but browning! he chooses a distinct character, peter ronsard, a poet, to tell the story, and adopts a totally different point of view, centring all in the speaker's justification of the woman who threw the glove. practically the same facts are told; even the king's words are almost identical with those given by hunt: "'twas mere vanity, not love, set that task to humanity!" and he gives the ordinary point of view: "lords and ladies alike turned with loathing from such a proved wolf in sheep's clothing." but human character and motive is given a deeper interpretation and the poet does not accept their views: "not so, i; for i caught the expression in her brow's undisturbed self-possession amid the court's scoffing and merriment;-- as if from no pleasing experiment, she rose, yet of pain not much heedful so long as the process was needful." the poet followed her and asked what it all meant, and if she did not wish to recall her rash deed. "for i, so i spoke, am a poet, human nature,--behooves that i know it!" so he tells you she explained that he had vowed and boasted what he would do, and she felt that she would put him to the test. browning represents her as rejecting delorge, whose admiration was shown by this incident to be superficial, and as marrying a humble but true-hearted lover. "the ring and the book" illustrates possibly more amply than any other poem the peculiar dramatic force of the monologue. the story, out of which is built a poem twice as long as "paradise lost," can be told in a few words. guido, a nobleman of arezzo, poor, but of noble family, has sought advancement at the papal court. embittered by failure, he resolves to establish himself by marriage with an heiress, and makes an offer for pompilia, an innocent girl of sixteen, the only child of parents supposed to be wealthy. the father, pietro, refuses the offer, but the mother arranges a secret marriage, and pietro accepts the situation. the old couple put all their property into the hands of the son-in-law and go with him to arezzo. the marriage proves unhappy, and guido robs and persecutes the old people until they return poor to rome. the mother then makes the unexpected revelation that pompilia is not her child. she had bought her, and pietro and the world believe that she was her own. on this account they seek to recover pompilia's dowry. pompilia suffers outrageous treatment from her husband, who wishes to be rid of her and yet keep her property, and lays all kinds of snares in the endeavor to drive her away. she at length flees, and is aided in so doing by a noble-hearted priest. on the road they are overtaken by the husband, who starts proceedings for a divorce at rome. the divorce is refused, but the wife is placed in mild imprisonment, though later she is allowed to return to her so-called parents, in whose home she gives birth to a son. guido now tries to get possession of the child, as, by this means he secures all rights to the property. with some hirelings he goes to the lonely house, and murders pompilia and her parents. pompilia does not die immediately, but lives to give her testimony against her husband. guido flees, is arrested on roman territory, and is tried and condemned to death. an appeal is made to the pope, who confirms the sentence. this story is told ten or twelve times, all interest centring in the characters of the speakers, in their points of view and attitudes of mind. more fully, perhaps, than any other poem, "the ring and the book" shows that every one in relating the simplest events or facts gives a coloring to the truth of his character. in book i browning speaks in his own character, and states the facts and how the story came into his hands. in book ii, called "half-rome," a roman, more or less in sympathy with the husband, tells the story. in book iii, styled "the other half-rome," one in sympathy with the wife tells the story. in book iv, called "tertium quid," a society gentleman, who prides himself on his critical acumen, tells the story in a drawing-room. each speaker in these monologues has a character of his own, and the facts are strongly colored according to his nature and point of view. in book v guido makes his defence before the judges. he is a criminal defending himself, and puts facts in such a way as to justify his actions. in book vi the priest who assisted pompilia to escape passionately proclaims the lofty motives which actuated pompilia and himself. in book vii pompilia, on her deathbed, gives her testimony, telling the story with intense pathos. in book viii a lawyer, with all the ingenuity of his profession, speaks in defence of guido, but without touching upon the merits of the case. in book ix pompilia's advocate, endeavoring to display his fine cultured style, gives a legal justification of her course. in book x the pope decides against guido, and gives the reasons for this decision. book xi is guido's last confession as a condemned man; here his character is still more definitely unfolded. he tries to bribe his guards; though still defiant, he shows his base, cowardly nature at the close, and ends his final weak and chaotic appeal by calling on pompilia, thus giving the highest testimony possible to the purity and sweetness of the woman he murdered: "don't open! hold me from them! i am yours, i am the granduke's--no, i am the pope's! abate,--cardinal,--christ,--maria,--god, ... pompilia, will you let them murder me?" in his defence he was concealing his real deeds and character, and justifying himself. in this book he reveals himself with great frankness. in book xii the case is given as it fades into history, and the poem closes with a lesson regarding the function or necessity of art in telling truth. "the ring and the book" affords perhaps the highest example of the value of the monologue as a form of art. men who have only one point of view are always "cranks,"--able, that is, to turn only one way. a preacher who can appreciate only the point of view of his own denomination will never get very near the truth. the statesman who declares "there is but one side to a question" may sometime by his narrowness assist in plunging his country into a great war. no man can help his fellows if unable to see things from their point of view. "the ring and the book" shows every speaker coloring the truth unconsciously by his own character, and browning, by putting the same facts in the mouths of different persons, enables us to discover the personal element. this is the specific function of the monologue. it artistically interprets truth by interpreting the soul that realizes it. this excites interest in the speaker and shows its dramatic character. browning, by its aid, interprets peculiarities of human nature before unnoticed. dramatic instinct is given a new literary form and expression. human nature receives a profounder interpretation. we are made more teachable and sympathetic. the monologue exhibits one person drawing quick conclusions, another meeting doubt with counter-doubt, or still another calmly weighing evidences; it occupies many points of view, thus giving a clearer perception of truth through the mirror of human character. iii. the hearer to comprehend the spirit of the monologue demands a clear conception, not only of the character of the speaker, but also of the person addressed. the hearer is often of as great importance to the meaning of a monologue as is the person speaking. it is a common blunder to consider dramatic instinct as concerned only with a speaker. nearly every one regards it as the ability to "act a character," to imitate the action or the speech of some particular individual. but this conception is far too narrow. the dramatic instinct is primarily concerned with insight into character, with problems of imagination, and with sympathy. by it we realize another's point of view or attitude of mind towards a truth or situation, and identify ourselves sympathetically with character. dramatic instinct is necessary to all human endeavor. it is as necessary for the orator as it is for the actor. while it is true that the speaker must be himself and must succeed by the vigor of his own personality, and that the actor must succeed through "fidelity of portraiture," still the orator must be able not only to say the right word, but to know when he says it, and this ability results only from dramatic instinct. the actor needs more of the personating instinct or insight into motives of character; the speaker, more insight into the conditions of human thought and feeling. while one function of dramatic instinct is the ability to identify one's self with another, it is much easier to identify one's self with the speaker than with the listener. even on the stage the most difficult task for the actor is to listen in character; that is, to receive impressions from the standpoint of the character he is representing. possibly the fundamental element in dramatic instinct is the ability to occupy a point of view, to see a truth as another sees it. this shows why dramatic instinct is the foundation of success. it enables a teacher to know whether his student is at the right point of view to apprehend a truth, or in the proper attitude of mind towards a subject. it tells him when he has made a truth understood. it gives the speaker power to adapt and to illustrate his truth to others, and to see things from his hearers' point of view. it gives the writer power to impress his reader. even the business man must intuitively perceive the point of view and the mental attitude of those with whom he deals. dramatic instinct as applied to listening on the stage, and everywhere, is apt to be overlooked. it is comparatively easy when quoting some one to stand at his point of view and to imitate his manner, or to contrast the differences between a number of speakers; but a higher type of dramatic power is exhibited in the ability to put ourselves in the place and receive the impressions of some specific type of listener. the speeches of different characters are given formally and successively in a drama. hence, the writer of a play, or the actor, is apt to centre attention, when speaking, upon the character, without reference to the shape his thought takes from what the other character has said, and especially from those attitudes or actions of the other character which are not revealed by words. the same is true in the novel, and even in epic poetry. true dramatic instinct in any form demands that the speaker show not only his own thought and motive by his words, but that of the character he is portraying, and the influence produced upon him at the instant by the thought and character of the listener. while the dialogue is not the only form of dramatic art, still its study is required for the understanding of the monologue, or almost any aspect of dramatic expression. the very name "dialogue" implies a listener and a speaker who are continually changing places. the listener indicates by his face and by actions of the body his impression, his attention, the effect upon him of the words of the speaker, his objection or approval. thus he influences the speaker in shaping his ideas and choosing his words. in the monologue the speaker must suggest the character of both speaker and listener and interpret the relation of one human being to another. he must show, as he speaks, the impression he receives from the manner in which his listener is affected by what he is saying. a public reader, or impersonator, of all the characters of a play must perform a similar feat; he must represent each character not only as speaker, but show that he has just been a listener and received an impression or stimulus from another; otherwise he cannot suggest any true dramatic action. in the monologue, as in all true dramatic representation, the listener as well as the speaker must be realized as continuously living and thinking. the listener, though he utters not a word, must be conceived from the effect he makes upon the speaker, in order to perceive the argument as well as the situation and point of view. the necessity of realizing a listener is one of the most important points to be noted in the study of the monologue. take, as an illustration, browning's "incident of the french camp." incident of the french camp you know, we french stormed ratisbon: a mile or so away, on a little mound, napoleon stood on our storming day; with neck out-thrust, you fancy how, legs wide, arms locked behind, as if to balance the prone brow oppressive with its mind. just as perhaps he mused, "my plans that soar, to earth may fall, let once my army-leader lannes waver at yonder wall,"-- out 'twixt the battery smokes there flew a rider, bound on bound full galloping; nor bridle drew until he reached the mound. then off there flung in smiling joy, and held himself erect by just his horse's mane, a boy: you hardly could suspect-- (so tight he kept his lips compressed, scarce any blood came through) you looked twice ere you saw his breast was all but shot in two. "well," cried he, "emperor, by god's grace we've got you ratisbon! the marshal's in the market-place, and you'll be there anon to see your flag-bird flap his wings where i, to heart's desire, perched him!" the chief's eye flashed; his plans soared up again like fire. the chief's eye flashed; but presently softened itself, as sheathes a film the mother-eagle's eye when her bruised eaglet breathes: "you're wounded!" "nay," his soldier's pride touched to the quick, he said: "i'm killed, sire!" and, his chief beside, smiling the boy fell dead. i have heard prominent public readers give this as a mere story without affording any definite conception of either speaker or listener. in the first reading over of the poem, one may find no hint of either. but the student catches the phrase "we french," and at once sees that a frenchman must be speaking. he soon discovers that the whole poem is colored by the feeling of some old soldier of napoleon who was either an eye-witness of the scene or who knew napoleon's bearing so well that he could easily picture it to his imagination. the poem now becomes a living thing, and its interpretation by voice and action is rendered possible. but is this all? to whom does the soldier speak? the listener seems entirely in the background. this is wise, because the other in telling his story would naturally lose himself in his memories and grow more or less oblivious of his hearer. but the conception of a sympathetic auditor is needed to quicken the fervor and animation of the speaker. does not the phrase "we french" imply that the listener is another frenchman whose patriotic enthusiasm responds to the story? the short phrases, and suggestive hints through the poem, are thus explained. the speaker seems to imply that napoleon's bearing is well known to his listener. certainly upon the conception of such a speaker and such a hearer depends the spirit, dramatic force, and even thought of the poem. i have chosen this illustration purposely, because, of all monologues, this lays possibly the least emphasis on a listener; yet it cannot be adequately rendered by the voice, or even properly conceived in thought, without a distinct realization of such a person. in browning's "rabbi ben ezra," the speaker is an old man. "grow old along with me!" indicates this, and we feel his age and experience all through the poem. but without the presence of this youth, who must have expressed pity for the loneliness and gloom of age, the old man would never have broken forth so suddenly and so forcibly in the portrayal of his noble philosophy of life. he expands with joy, love for his race, and reverence for providence. "grow old along with me!" "trust god: see all, nor be afraid!" his enthusiasm, his exalted realization of life, are due to his own nobility of character. but his earnestness, his vivid illustrations, his emphasis and action, spring from his efforts to expound the philosophy of life to his youthful listener and to correct the young man's one-sided views. the characters of both speaker and listener are necessary in order that one may receive an understanding of the argument. rabbi ben ezra grow old along with me! the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made: our times are in his hand who saith, "a whole i planned, youth shows but half; trust god: see all, nor be afraid!" not that, amassing flowers, youth sighed, "which rose make ours, which lily leave and then as best recall!" not that, admiring stars, it yearned, "nor jove, nor mars; mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" not for such hopes and fears, annulling youth's brief years, do i remonstrate; folly wide the mark! rather i prize the doubt low kinds exist without, finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. poor vaunt of life indeed, were man but formed to feed on joy, to solely seek and find and feast: such feasting ended, then as sure an end to men; irks care the crop-full bird? frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? rejoice we are allied to that which doth provide and not partake, effect and not receive! a spark disturbs our clod; nearer we hold of god who gives, than of his tribes that take, i must believe. then, welcome each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough, each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! be our joys three parts pain! strive and hold cheap the strain; learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! for thence--a paradox which comforts while it mocks-- shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: what i aspired to be, and was not, comforts me; a brute i might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. what is he but a brute whose flesh hath soul to suit, whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? to man, propose this test--thy body at its best, how far can that project thy soul on its lone way? yet gifts should prove their use: i own the past profuse of power each side, perfection every turn: eyes, ears took in their dole, brain treasured up the whole; should not the heart beat once "how good to live and learn"? not once beat "praise be thine! i see the whole design, i, who saw power, see now love perfect too: perfect i call thy plan: thanks that i was a man! maker, remake, complete,--i trust what thou shalt do!" for pleasant is this flesh: our soul, in its rose-mesh pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest: would we some prize might hold to match those manifold possessions of the brute,--gain most, as we did best! let us not always say, "spite of this flesh to-day i strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" as the bird wings and sings, let us cry, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" therefore i summon age to grant youth's heritage, life's struggle having so far reached its term: thence shall i pass, approved a man, for aye removed from the developed brute; a god though in the germ. and i shall thereupon take rest, ere i be gone once more on my adventure brave and new; fearless and unperplexed, when i wage battle next, what weapons to select, what armor to indue. youth ended, i shall try my gain or loss thereby; leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: and i shall weigh the same, give life its praise or blame: young, all lay in dispute; i shall know, being old. for note, when evening shuts, a certain moment cuts the deed off, calls the glory from the gray: a whisper from the west shoots, "add this to the rest, take it and try its worth: here dies another day." so, still within this life, though lifted o'er its strife, let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, "this rage was right i' the main, that acquiescence vain: the future i may face now i have proved the past." for more is not reserved to man, with soul just nerved to act to-morrow what he learns to-day; here, work enough to watch the master work, and catch hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. as it was better, youth should strive, through acts uncouth, toward making, than repose on aught found made; so, better, age, exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. thou waitedst age; wait death nor be afraid! enough now, if the right and good and infinite be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, with knowledge absolute, subject to no dispute from fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. be there, for once and all, severed great minds from small, announced to each his station in the past! was i the world arraigned, were they my soul disdained, right? let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! now, who shall arbitrate? ten men love what i hate, shun what i follow, slight what i receive; ten, who in ears and eyes match me: we all surmise, they this thing, and i that; whom shall my soul believe? not on the vulgar mass called "work" must sentence pass, things done, that took the eye and had the price; o'er which, from level stand, the low world laid its hand, found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: but all, the world's coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb, so passed in making up the main account; all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount; thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act, fancies that broke through language and escaped; all i could never be, all men ignored in me, this i was worth to god, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. ay, note that potter's wheel, that metaphor! and feel why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,-- thou, to whom fools propound, when the wine makes its round, "since life fleets, all is change; the past gone, seize to-day!" fool! all that is at all lasts ever, past recall; earth changes, but thy soul and god stand sure: what entered into thee, _that_ was, is, and shall be: time's wheel runs back or stops; potter and clay endure. he fixed thee mid this dance of plastic circumstance, this present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest machinery just meant to give thy soul its bent, try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. what though the earlier grooves which ran the laughing loves around thy base, no longer pause and press? what though, about thy rim, skull-things in order grim grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? look thou not down but up! to uses of a cup, the festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, the new wine's foaming flow, the master's lips a-glow! thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? but i need, now as then, thee, god, who mouldest men; and since, not even while the whirl was worst, did i--to the wheel of life, with shapes and colors rife, bound dizzily--mistake my end, to slake thy thirst; so take and use thy work, amend what flaws may lurk, what strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! my times be in thy hand! perfect the cup as planned! let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! even when the words are the same, the delivery changes according to the peculiarities of the hearer. no one tells a story in the same way to different persons. when it is narrated to a little child, greater emphasis is placed on points; we make longer pauses and more salient, definite pictures; but if it is told to an educated man, the thought is sketched more in outline. to one who is ignorant of the circumstances many details are carefully suggested. even the figures and illustrations are consciously or unconsciously so chosen by one with the dramatic instinct as to adapt the truth to the listener. in "the englishman in italy," the story is told to a child. after the quotation, "such trifles," the englishman speaking would no doubt laugh. the spirit of the poem is shown by the fact that it is spoken by an englishman to a little child that is an italian. a monologue shows the effect of character upon character, and hence nearly always implies the direct speaking of one person to another. in this it differs from a speech. still, the principle applies even to the speaker. he cannot present a subject in the same way to an educated and to an uneducated audience, but instinctively chooses words common to him and to his hearers and finds such illustrations as make his meaning obvious to them. all language is imperfect. truth is not made clear by being made superficial, but by the careful choosing of words and illustrations understood by the hearer. the speaker, accordingly, must feel his audience. the imperfection of ordinary teaching and speaking is thus explained by a form of dramatic art. browning says at the close of "the ring and the book": "why take the artistic way to prove so much? because, it is the glory and good of art, that art remains the one way possible of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. how look a brother in the face and say 'thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou, yet art blind, thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length, and, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!' say this as silvery as tongue can troll-- the anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of him are not so bad to bear--but here's the plague, that all this trouble comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom it left; while falsehood would have done the work of truth. but art,--wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,--art may tell a truth obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word." in "a woman's last word," already explained (p. ), the listening husband, his attitude towards his wife, his jealousy and suspicion, all serve to call forth her love and nobility of character. he is the cause of the monologue, and must be as definitely conceived as the speaker. without a clear conception of his character, her words cannot receive the right interpretation. in "bishop blougram's apology," the listener, mr. gigadibs, is definitely, though indirectly, portrayed. he is a young man of thirty, impulsive, ideal, but has not yet struggled with the problems of life. his criticisms of blougram are answered by that worldly-minded ecclesiastic, who can declare most truly the fact that an absolute faith is not possible, and then assume--and thus contradict himself--that to ignorant people he must preach an absolute faith. the character of the bishop is strongly conceived, and his perception of the highest possibility of life, as well as his failure to carry it out, are portrayed with marvellous complexity and full recognition of the difficulties of reconciling idealism with realism. but the character of his young, enthusiastic, and earnest critic, who lacks his experience and who may be partially silenced, is as important as the apology of blougram. the poem is a debate between an idealist and a realist, the speech of the realist alone being given. we catch the weakness and the strength of both points of view, and thus enter into the comprehension of a most subtle struggle for self-justification. it is some distance from bishop blougram to mr. dooley, but the necessity for a listener in the monologue, a listener of definite character, is shown in both cases. dooley's talks are a departure from the regular form of the monologue, in the fact that hennessey now and then speaks a word directly; but this partial introduction of dialogue does not change the fact that all of these talks are monologues. such interruptions are not the only types of departure from the strict form of the monologue. browning gives a narrative conclusion to "pheidippides" and "bishop blougram's apology," and many variations are found among different authors. hennessey's remarks may be introduced as a way of arousing in the imagination of ordinary people a conception of the listener. the relationship of the two characters is thus possibly more easily pictured to the ordinary imagination. of the necessity of hennessey there can be no doubt. mr. dooley would never speak in this way but for the sympathetic and reverently attentive hennessey. the two are complemental and necessary to each other. mrs. caudle's curtain lectures were very popular, perhaps partly because of the silence expressing the patience of caudle, though there were appendices that indicated remarks written down by mr. caudle, but long afterwards and when alone. there are some advantages in the pure form; the mind is kept more concentrated. so without hennessey's direct remarks the picture of dooley might have been even better sustained. the form of a monologue, however, must not be expected to remain rigid. the point here to be apprehended is the necessity of recognizing a listener as well as a speaker. every dooley demands a listener. he must have appreciation. these monologues are a humorous, possibly unconscious, presentation of this principle. the audience or the reader is turned by the author into a contemplative spectator of a simple situation. a play demands a struggle, but here we have all the restfulness, ease, and repose of life itself. we all like to sit back and observe, especially when a character is unfolding itself. in the monologue as well as in the play there is no direct teaching. things happen as in life, and we see the action of a thought upon a certain mind and do our own exhorting or preaching. the monologue adapts itself to all kinds of characters and to every species of theme. it does not require a plot, or even a great struggle, as in the case of the play. attention is fixed upon one individual; we are led into the midst of the natural situations of every-day life, and receive with great force the impressions which events, ideas, or other characters make upon a specific type of man. eugene field often makes children talk in monologues. some persons have criticized field's children's poems and said they were not for children at all. this is true, and field no doubt intended it so. he made his children talk naturally and freely, as if to each other, but not as they would talk to older people. "jes' 'fore christmas" is true to a boy's character, but we must be careful in choosing a listener. the boy would not speak in this way to an audience, to the family at the dinner table, nor to any one but a confidant. he must have, in fact, a hennessey,--possibly some other boy, or, more likely, some hired man. it is a mistake, unfortunately a common one, to give such a poem as a speech to an audience. it is not a speech, but only one end of a conversation. it is almost lyric in its portrayal of feeling, but still it concerns human action and the relations of persons to each other. therefore, it is primarily dramatic, and a monologue. the words must be considered as spoken to some confidential listener. a proper conception of the monologue produces a higher appreciation of the work of field. as monologues, his poems are always consistent and beautiful. when considered as mere stories for children, their artistic form has been misconceived, and interpreters of them with this conception have often failed. even "little boy blue," a decided lyric, has a definite speaker, and the objects described and the events indicated are intensely as well as dramatically realized. notice the abrupt transitions, the sudden changes in feeling. it is more easily rendered with a slight suggestion of a sympathetic listener. many persons regard james whitcomb riley's "knee-deep in june" as a lyric; but has it enough unconsciousness for this? to me it is far more flexible and spontaneous when considered as a monologue. the interpreter of the poem can make longer pauses. he can so identify himself with the character as to give genial and hearty laughter, and thus indicate dramatically the sudden arrival of ideas. to reveal the awakening of an idea is the very soul of spontaneous expression, and such awakening is nearly always dramatic. so in the following conception, what a sudden, joyous discovery can be made of "mr. blue jay full o' sass, in them base-ball cloes o' hisn." notice also the sudden breaks in transition that can be indicated in "blue birds' nests tucked up there conveniently for the boy 'at's apt to be up some other apple tree." notice after "to be" how he suddenly enjoys the birds' cunning and laughs for the moment at the boys' failure. you can accentuate, too, his dramatic feeling for may and "'bominate its promises" with more decision and point. the "you" in this poem and the frequent imperatives indicate the conception in the author's mind of a speaker and a sympathetic companion out in the fields in june. it certainly detracts from the simplicity, dramatic intensity, naturalness, and spontaneity to make of it a kind of address to an audience. the same is true of the "liztown humorist," "kingsby's mill," "joney," and many others which are usually considered and rendered as stories. they are monologues. possibly a completer title for them would be lyric monologues. while the interpreter of these monologues can easily turn his auditors into a sympathetic and familiar group who might stand for his listener, he can transport them in imagination to the right situation; and while this is often done by interpreters with good effect, to my mind this does not change their character as monologues. granting, however, that some of riley's poems are more or less speeches, it must be admitted that he has written some definite and formal poems which cannot be so conceived. "nothin' to say," for example, is one of the most decided and formal monologues found anywhere. in this the listener nothin' to say nothin' to say, my daughter! nothin' at all to say!-- gyrls that's in love, i've noticed, ginerly has their way! yer mother did afore you, when her folks objected to me-- yit here i am, and here you air; and yer mother--where is she? you look lots like yer mother: purty much same in size; and about the same complected; and favor about the eyes: like her, too, about her _livin_ here,--because _she_ couldn't stay: it'll 'most seem like you was dead--like her!--but i hain't got nothin' to say! she left you her little bible--writ yer name acrost the page-- and left her ear-bobs fer you, ef ever you come of age. i've allus kep' 'em and gyuarded 'em, but ef yer goin' away-- nothin' to say, my daughter! nothin' at all to say! you don't rikollect her, i reckon? no; you wasn't a year old then! and now yer--how old air you? w'y, child, not "_twenty!_" when? and yer nex' birthday's in aprile? and you want to git married that day? ... i wisht yer mother was livin'!--but--i hain't got nothin' to say! twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found. there's a straw ketched onto yer dress there--i'll bresh it off--turn round. (her mother was jes' twenty when us two run away!) nothin' to say, my daughter! nothin' at all to say! can be as definitely located as the speaker. to conceal his own tears, the speaker turns or stops and pretends to brush off a straw caught on his daughter's dress. we have here in this monologue also something unusual, but very suggestive and strictly dramatic,--an aside wherein he evidently turns away from his daughter-- ("her mother was jes' twenty when us two run away.") since the daughter is definitely located as listener and the other speeches are spoken to her, this can be given easily as a contrast, as an aside to himself, and a slight turn of the body will serve to emphasize, even as an aside often does in a play, the location of the daughter, and the speaker's relation to her. the sentiment also serves to emphasize the character of the speaker. in "griggsby's station" we have a most decided monologue. who is speaking, and to whom is the monologue addressed? is the speaker the daughter in a family suddenly grown rich, talking to her mother? the character of the speaker and of the listener must be definitely conceived and carefully suggested in order to give truth to the rendering or even to realize its meaning. the same is true regarding many of holman day's stories in his "up in maine," and other books. with hardly any exception these are best rendered as monologues. many of the poems of sam walter foss and other popular writers of the present are monologues. the homelike characters demand sympathetic listeners, who are, by implication, of the same general type and character as the speaker. even "the house by the side of the road" is better given with the spirit of the monologue. it is too personal, too dramatic, to be turned into a speech. again, notice mrs. piatt's "sometime," and a dozen examples in webb's "vagrom verse"; also "with lead and line along varying shores"; and in oscar fay adams's "sicut patribus," where you would hardly expect monologues, you find that "at bay" and "conrad's choir" have the form of monologues. many monologues in our popular writers seem at first simple and without the formal and definite construction of those employed by browning, yet after careful examination we feel that the conception of the monologue has slowly taken possession of our writers, it may be unconsciously, and that the true interpretation of many of the most popular poems demands from the reader a dramatic conception. for the comprehension of any monologue, those points where the speaker is directly affected by the hearer need especial attention. the speaker occasionally echoes the words of his hearer. mrs. caudle, for instance, often quotes the words of her spouse, and these were printed by douglas jerrold in italics and even in separate paragraphs. "for the love of mercy let you sleep?" for example, was thus printed to emphasize the interruption by caudle. these words would be echoed by her with affected surprise. then she would pour out her sarcasm: "mercy indeed; i wish you would show a little of it to other people." in most authors these echoed speeches are indicated by quotation marks. browning sometimes has words in parentheses. note "(what 'cicada'? pooh!)" in "a tale." "cicada" was certainly spoken by the listener, but the other words in the parentheses and other parentheses in this monologue are more personal remarks by the speaker. they have reference, however, to the listener's attitude. in some cases browning gives no indication by even quotation marks that the speaker is echoing words of the hearer. the attitude of the listener must be varied by the dramatic instinct of the reader. the grasp of the situation greatly depends upon this. it is one of the most important aspects of the dramatic instinct. ("up at a villa--down in the city," see p. .) "why" and "what of a villa" certainly refers to the words, or at least the attitude, of the listener, which is realized from the manner of the speaker. in the same poem the question "is it ever hot in the square?" may be the echo of a word or a thought of the listener. in this case the speaker would answer it more abruptly and positively when he says, "there is a fountain to spout and splash." if, on the contrary, the thought is his own, and comes up naturally in his mind as one of the points in his description or as a result of living over his experience down in the city, he would give it less abruptly, with less force or emphasis. in general, a quotation or the echo of the words of a listener are given by the speaker with a different manner. tennyson, though the fact is often overlooked, has written many monologues. some readers give "lady clara vere de vere" as a mere story. is there, then, no thought of the character of the yeoman who is talking with burning indignation at the death of his friend? lady clara vere de vere lady clara vere de vere, of me you shall not win renown: you thought to break a country heart for pastime, ere you went to town. at me you smiled, but unbeguiled i saw the snare, and i retired: the daughter of a hundred earls, you are not one to be desired. lady clara vere de vere, i know you proud to bear your name, your pride is yet no mate for mine, too proud to care from whence i came. nor would i break for your sweet sake a heart that doats on truer charms. a simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred coats of arms. lady clara vere de vere, some meeker pupil you must find, for were you queen of all that is, i could not stoop to such a mind. you sought to prove how i could love, and my disdain is my reply. the lion on your old stone gates is not more cold to you than i. lady clara vere de vere, you put strange memories in my head; nor thrice your branching limes have blown since i beheld young laurence dead. oh, your sweet eyes, your low replies: a great enchantress you may be: but there was that across his throat which you had hardly cared to see. lady clara vere de vere, when thus he met his mother's view, she had the passions of her kind, she spake some certain truths of you. indeed i heard one bitter word that scarce is fit for you to hear: her manners had not that repose which stamps the caste of vere de vere. lady clara vere de vere, there stands a spectre in your hall: the guilt of blood is at your door: you changed a wholesome heart to gall. you held your course without remorse, to make him trust his modest worth, and, last, you fixed a vacant stare, and slew him with your noble birth. trust me, clara vere de vere, from yon blue heavens above us bent the gardener adam and his wife smile at the claims of long descent. howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'tis only noble to be good. kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than norman blood. i know you, clara vere de vere, you pine among your halls and towers: the languid light of your proud eyes is wearied of the rolling hours. in glowing health, with boundless wealth, but sickening of a vague disease, you know so ill to deal with time, you needs must play such pranks as these. clara, clara vere de vere, if time be heavy on your hands, are there no beggars at your gate, nor any poor about your lands? oh! teach the orphan-boy to read, or teach the orphan-girl to sew, pray heaven for a human heart, and let the foolish yeoman go. the character of the speaker must be realized from first to last. but there is something more. did the yeoman win or lose his case? does tennyson give us no sign of the effect of his words upon the lady to whom his rebuke was directed? all whom i have heard read it, cause one to think that she remains stolid, unresponsive, and cold, or else she was not really present, and the poem is a kind of lyric. but you will notice that in the last stanza the speaker drops the "lady," and says "clara, clara," which certainly shows a change in feeling. there are also other indications that she was affected by his words, and that the speaker saw it. in the line, "you know so ill to deal with time," he may be excusing her conduct, while in the last lines he suggests how she should live to atone for the past: "oh! teach the orphan-boy to read, or teach the orphan-girl to sew." he certainly would not have spoken thus if she had not by word or look shown indications of repentance. truth must accomplish its results. art must reflect the victory of truth. we perceive the signs of victory in the very words of the poem, and the character of the speaker's expression must reflect the response in her. the reader who dramatically or truly interprets the poem, feeling this, will show a change in feeling and movement, and give tender coloring to the closing words. of course there is much moralizing in this and a smoother movement than in a monologue by browning. tennyson is not a master of the monologue. some may think that clara would never have endured this long lecture, and that it is unnatural for us to conceive of her as being really present; but, though poetry usually takes fewer words to say something than would be used in life, sometimes--and here possibly--it takes more. certainly tennyson often takes more, and this is one reason why he is not a dramatic poet. the poem, however, can be effectively rendered as a monologue, and thus receive a more adequate interpretation. there is frequently more than one listener. in "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church," the bishop speaks to many "sons," though he calls out anselm especially, his chief heir, perhaps. in "the ring and the book" some of the speakers address the court and almost make speeches, as do the lawyers in their pleas, for instance. but the pope, who acts, it will be remembered, as the judge, is in many cases the person addressed. the principle is the same, though the situations may differ. in every case, such a situation, listener, or listeners are chosen as will best express the character of the speaker. notice, for example, that pompilia tells her story on her dying bed to the sympathetic nuns, who would best call forth the points in her story. the listener is sometimes changed, or may change, positions. in riley's "there, little girl, don't cry," the three great periods in a woman's life are portrayed, and the location of the listener must be changed to show the different situations and changes of time and place as well as the character of the listener. long pauses and extreme variations in the modulations of the voice are also necessary in such a transition. this poem also affords an example of the age and experience of the listener affecting expression. in many monologues the person about whom the speaker talks is of great importance. in "the flight of the duchess" we almost entirely lose sight of the speaker and of the hearer, and our thought successively centres upon the duke, on his mother, on the old crone, and, above all, on the duchess. these characters are made to live before us, and we see the impressions they produce upon a simple, loyal heart. the beauty of this wonderful monologue lies in the portrayal of the honest nature of the speaker and the revelation of the impressions made upon him by those who have played parts in his life. the series of monologues or soliloquies styled by browning "james lee's wife" were called "james lee" in his first edition, and many feel that browning made a mistake in changing the title; for the theme in these is the character, not of the woman who speaks so much as of the man about whom she speaks. in browning's "clive," the speaker, who "is by no means a clive," according to professor dowden, "has to betray something of his own character and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale." here, of course, both speaker and listener are subordinated to clive, the person spoken of. hence some may be tempted to think that "clive" is a mere story. dowden, chesterton, and others speak of it as a story, but it has the movement, the dramatic action, the unity and spirit of a monologue. the fact that the chief character is the one about whom the speaker talks makes the poem none the less dramatic. the more "clive" is studied, the more will the student feel that its chief theme is the contact and conflict of characters, and the more, too, will he perceive that its atmosphere and peculiarities are caused by the sense of a speaker and a listener, each of a distinct type. this indirect narration or suggestion is often important, but in every case it is the speaker who reflects as from a mirror impressions produced upon him by the characters of those about whom he speaks. the study of the relations of speaker and hearer requires discrimination to be made between the soliloquy and the monologue. shakespeare's soliloquies may be thought to be unnatural. no man ever talked to his fellows as hamlet talks when alone, and juliet at the window is made to reveal her deepest feelings. but all love songs express what the words of the ordinary man can never reveal. all art, and especially all literature, is a kind of objective embodiment of feeling or the processes of thinking. while shakespeare's soliloquies may not seem as natural as conversation, in one sense they are more natural expressions of thinking and feeling. the highest poetry may be as natural as prose, or even more natural; all depends upon the mood or theme. in all art and literature, naturalness is due not to mere external accidents, but to the truthfulness of the expression of deeper emotions of the human heart. many feel that any representation in words of a mood or feeling is a lyric; hence they regard most monologues as lyrics. but are not shakespeare's soliloquies dramatic? the lyric spirit gives objective form to feeling, but dramatic poetry does this in a way to show character and motives as well as moods. to a certain extent, the lyric spirit and the dramatic can never be completely separated. there has never been a good play that was not lyric as well as dramatic. there has never been a true lyric poem that has not revealed some trait of human character and implied certain relations of human beings to each other. it is only the predominance of feeling and mood that makes a poem lyric, or the predominance of relations or conflicts of human beings that makes a passage dramatic. all the elements of poetry are inseparably united because they express living aspects of the human heart. shakespeare's soliloquies deserve careful study as the best introduction to the deep nature of the monologue. they are objective embodiments in words of feelings and moods of which the speaker himself is only partly conscious. this is the very climax of literature,--to word what no individual ever words. in a sense, this is true of a lyric, which may interpret in the many words of a song what in life is a mere look or the hardly revealed attitude of a soul. the deepest feelings of love can never be expressed in the prose of conversation. they can be suggested only in the exalted language of poetry. these principles apply especially to the appreciation of a soliloquy. of this phase of dramatic or literary art there has been but one master, and that was shakespeare. he could make hamlet think and feel before us without relation to another human being. he is the only author, practically, who has ever been able to portray a character entirely alone. in the great climaxes of his plays, we feel that he is dealing with the interpretation of the deepest moods and motives of life. the exclamation, "oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt," after the departure of the king and the court, reveals to us hamlet's real condition, his impression or premonition that something is wrong. we are thus prepared for the effect of the news brought by horatio and marcellus, because his attitude has been first revealed to us by shakespeare. shakespeare alone could perform this marvellous feat. again, one of the most important acts closes with a soliloquy which reveals hamlet's spirit more definitely than could be done in any other way. this soliloquy comes naturally. hamlet drives all from him, that he may arrange the dozen lines which he wishes to add to the play. this plan has come to him while he was listening to the actor, and must be shown by his action during the actor's speech. hamlet, in a proper stage arrangement, is so placed as to occupy the attention of the audience while the actor is reciting. the impressions produced upon him, and not the player's rehearsal, form the centre of interest. by turning away while listening to the actor, he can indicate his agitation and the action of his mind in deciding upon the plan which is definitely stated in the soliloquy and forms the culmination of the act. notice, too, how shakespeare makes this soliloquy come naturally between his dismissal of the two emissaries of the king and the writing of the addition to the play. hamlet's soul is laid bare. he is roused to a pitch of great excitement over the grief of the actor and his own indifference to his father's murder. then, taking up the play, he begins to prepare his extra lines, and with this closes the most passionate of all soliloquies. strictly speaking, a soliloquy is only a revelation of the thinking of a person entirely alone and uninfluenced by another; but a monologue implies thinking influenced by some peculiar type of hearer. browning's soliloquies are practically monologues. we feel that the character almost "others" itself and talks to itself as if to another person. this is also natural. we know it by observing children. but it is very different from the lonely soul revealing itself in shakespeare's soliloquies. in fact, the monologue has taken such hold upon browning that even pippa's soliloquies in "pippa passes" are practically monologues. in the "soliloquy of the spanish cloister," the monk talks to himself almost as to another person, and his every idea is influenced by brother lawrence, whom he sees in the garden below him, but to whom he does not speak and who does not see him. soliloquy of the spanish cloister gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! water your damned flower-pots, do! if hate killed men, brother lawrence, god's blood, would not mine kill you! what? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? oh, that rose has prior claims-- needs its leaden vase filled brimming? hell dry you up with its flames! at the meal we sit together: _salve tibi!_ i must hear wise talk of the kind of weather, sort of season, time of year: _not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely dare we hope oak-galls, i doubt: what's the latin name for "parsley"?_ what's the greek name for swine's snout? whew! we'll have our platter burnished, laid with care on our own shelf! with a fire-new spoon we're furnished, and a goblet for ourself, rinsed like something sacrificial ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps-- marked with l for our initial! (he-he! there his lily snaps!) _saint_, forsooth! while brown dolores squats outside the convent bank with sanchicha, telling stories, steeping tresses in the tank, blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, --can't i see his dead eye glow, bright as 'twere a barbary corsair's? (that is, if he'd let it show!) when he finishes refection, knife and fork he never lays cross-wise, to my recollection, as do i, in jesu's praise. i the trinity illustrate, drinking watered orange-pulp-- in three sips the arian frustrate; while he drains his at one gulp. oh, those melons? if he's able we're to have a feast: so nice! one goes to the abbot's table, all of us get each a slice. how go on your flowers? none double? not one fruit-sort can you spy? strange!--and i, too, at such trouble keep them close-nipped on the sly! there's a great text in galatians, once you trip on it, entails twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails: if i trip him just a-dying, sure of heaven as sure can be, spin him round and send him flying off to hell, a manichee? or, my scrofulous french novel on gray paper with blunt type! simply glance at it, you grovel hand and foot in belial's gripe: if i double down its pages at the woeful sixteenth print, when he gathers his greengages, ope a sieve and slip it in't? or, there's satan!--one might venture pledge one's soul to him, yet leave such a flaw in the indenture as he'd miss, till, past retrieve, blasted lay that rose-acacia we're so proud of! _hy, zy, hine ..._ 'st, there's vespers! _plena gratiâ ave, virgo!_ gr-r-r--you swine! in this "soliloquy" we have, in a few lines, possibly the strongest interpretation of hypocrisy in literature. the soliloquy begins with the speaker's accidental discovery of the kindly-hearted monk, brother lawrence, attending to his flowers in the court below, and the sight causes an explosion of rage. so intense is his feeling that, in his imagination, he talks directly to brother lawrence. note, for example, such suggestions as, "how go on your flowers?" of course, brother lawrence knows nothing of the speaker's presence; that worthy, with gusto, answers his own questions to himself. notice also the abrupt transitions. browning, even in his soliloquies, often introduces events. "there his lily snaps!" is given with sudden glee as the speaker discovers the accident. the difference between browning and shakespeare may be still more clearly conceived. "shakespeare," says some one, "makes his characters live; browning makes his think." shakespeare reveals character by making a man think alone, or, in contact with others, act. browning fixes our attention upon an individual, and shows us what he is by making him think, and usually he suggests the cause of the thinking in some relation to objects, events, or characters. the situation in every case is most favorable to the expression of thought and feeling, and of deeper motives. the chief difference between shakespeare and browning is the difference between a play and a monologue. the point of view of the two men is not the same, and we must appreciate that of both. browning's "saul" may be regarded as a soliloquy. david is alone. browning's words here help us to an appreciation of his peculiar kind of soliloquy. "let me tell out my tale to its ending--my voice to my heart which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night i took part, as this morning i gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, and still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep!" "my voice to my heart" is very suggestive. browning always made his speaker, when alone, talk to himself. he divides the personality of the individual much more than did shakespeare. shakespeare simply makes a man think aloud, while browning almost makes consciousness dual. some one may ask,--why not take any story or lyric and give it directly to an imaginary listener, and only indirectly to the audience? this is exactly what should be done in some cases. who can declaim as a speech or as if to an audience "john anderson, my jo," or "the lover's appeal," and not feel the situation to be ludicrous? some of the tenderest lyric poems should be given as though to an imaginary auditor somewhat to one side. as the lyric is subjective, the turning to one side is a help to the subjective sympathetic condition, especially in cases where the words of the lyric are supposed to be addressed to some individual character. it is very difficult for readers to speak to an audience directly and not pass into the oratoric attitude of mind. a little turn to the side, when simple, suggests the indirect nature of a poem. it gives power to change attention and suggests degrees of subjectivity, and thus tends to prevent the true spirit of the poem from being destroyed by oratorical or declamatory effects. perhaps charles lamb's famous saying, that recitation perverts a beautiful poem, would have been qualified had some poem been read to him with full recognition of its artistic character. the poem is not a speech, but a work of art, and the speaker must be clearly conceived, his emotion sympathetically realized, and given, not to an audience, but to an imaginary listener; thus all the delicacy and tenderness may be truthfully revealed and declamation and unnaturalness avoided. in general, every kind of literature can be adequately rendered aloud. the true spirit of those poems that have been considered unadapted to such rendering can possibly be shown by the voice if we find the real situation, and do not try to give the words the directness of an oration or a lesson, or the objectivity of a play. when a story or a poem can be made more natural and more effective by being conceived as spoken by a character of a definite type to a definite type of hearer, it should usually be regarded as a monologue. readers who picture not only the peculiar character speaking, but the person to whom he speaks, will receive and give a more adequate impression, one more dramatic, more simple, and far more expressive of character than those who confuse it with a lyric or a story. dramatic art, in fact all art, is indirect, except in some forms of speaking. the true orator or speaker, however, while having a direct purpose, never directly commands or dominates his audience. every true artist, painter, musician, or even orator, simply awakens the faculties and powers of others, and leads men to decide for themselves. the true speaker should appeal to imagination and reason, and not attempt to force men to accept his ideals and convictions. that would be domination, not oratory. true art is on the rational basis of kinship of nature. faculty awakens faculty, vision quickens vision. no hard and fast line can be drawn between the arts, even between the oration and the monologue. but the oration is more direct, more conscious; speaker and listener understand, as a rule, exactly the purpose and the intention. the monologue, on the contrary, is indirect. its interpreter endeavors faithfully to portray human nature. he reveals the impressions produced upon him instead of endeavoring directly to produce a specific impression upon an audience. the conception of the listener in the monologue is different from that of the listener in the oration. in every monologue, the interpreter shows the contact of a speaker with a listener and conveys a definite impression made upon him by each. he especially conveys, not only his identification with the character speaking, but that character's mental or conversational attitude towards another human being and the unconscious variation of mental action resulting from such a relationship. iv. place or situation whether or not we agree with the ancient rules of the unities regarding place, time, and action as laws of the drama, every one must recognize the fact that all three conceptions are in some sense necessary to an illusion. a dramatic action or position implies not only character, but specific location and circumstance. the situation helps to reveal the character and shows its relation to human life. therefore, dramatic effect implies more than contact of different characters. it is concerned with such a placing of the characters as will reveal something of motives. two men may meet continually in society or in the ordinary and conventional relations of business and the peculiar characteristics of neither may ever be revealed. steel and flint may lie passively side by side or may be frozen in the same ice without any suggestion of heat. the steel must strike the flint suddenly to bring forth a spark of fire. in the same way, character must collide with character in such a situation, such a conflict of interests, such opposite determinations or ambitions, as will cause a revelation of motives and dispositions. steel and flint illustrate character. the stroke is the situation, the spark the dramatic result. place, accordingly, is often of great importance in dramatic art. the monologue is no exception to this. the reader must definitely imagine not only a speaker and a listener, but also a location or situation. from a dramatic point of view, situation is perhaps more necessary to a monologue than to a play. without a situation, nothing can be dramatic. in browning's "up at a villa--down in the city," is the speaker located in the city, at the villa, or at some point between the two? up at a villa--down in the city (as distinguished by an italian person of quality) had i but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, the house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there! something to see, by bacchus, something to hear, at least! there, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; while up at a villa one lives, i maintain it, no more than a beast. well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull just on a mountain's edge as bare as the creature's skull, save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull! --i scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's turned wool. but the city, oh the city--the square with the houses! why? they are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's something to take the eye! houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry! you watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by: green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; and the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly. what of a villa? though winter be over in march by rights, 'tis may perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights. you've the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze, and the hills over-smoked behind by the faint gray olive-trees. is it better in may, i ask you? you've summer all at once; in a day he leaps complete with a few strong april suns! 'mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well, the wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell. is it ever hot in the square? there's a fountain to spout and splash! in the shade it sings and springs; in the shine such foam-bows flash on the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash round the lady atop in the conch--fifty gazers do not abash, though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash! all the year long at the villa, nothing's to see though you linger, except yon cypress that points like death's lean lifted forefinger. some think fireflies pretty, when they mix in the corn and mingle or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem a-tingle. late august or early september, the stunning cicala is shrill, and the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill. enough of the seasons,--i spare you the months of the fever and chill. ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church-bells begin: no sooner the bells leave off, than the diligence rattles in: you get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin. by and by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth; or the pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath. at the post-office such a scene-picture--the new play, piping hot! and a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot. above it, behold the archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, and beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the duke's! or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the reverend don so-and-so who is dante, boccaccio, petrarca, saint jerome, and cicero, "and moreover," (the sonnet goes rhyming,) "the skirts of saint paul has reached, having preached us those six lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." noon strikes,--here sweeps the procession! our lady borne smiling and smart with a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! _bang, whang, whang_, goes the drum, _tootle-te-tootle_ the fife; no keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure in life. but bless you, it's dear--it's dear! fowls, wine, at double the rate. they have clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil pays passing the gate it's a horror to think of. and so, the villa for me, not the city! beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still--ah, the pity, the pity! look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and sandals, and the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding the yellow candles. one, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles, and the duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention of scandals. _bang, whang, whang_, goes the drum, _tootle-te-tootle_ the fife. oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life! of course, there are arguments in favor of placing the "person of quality" in the city near his beloved objects. one of the last lines, beginning "look, two and two go the priests," seems to imply the discovery and actual presence of the procession. but if browning had located the speaker in the city, would he not say "here" and not "there," as he does at the end of the third line? if at the villa, why does he say to his listener, "well, now, look at our villa!" the fact that he points to it and says, "stuck like the horn of a bull just on a mountain's edge," seems to imply, though in plain sight of it, that he is some distance away. again, if at the villa, how can he discover the procession? was the monologue spoken during a walk? we can easily imagine the "person of quality" and his companion starting from the villa and talking while coming down into the city. but this is hardly possible, because when browning changes his situation in this way, he always suggests definitely the stages of the journey. he never makes a mistake regarding the location or situation of his characters. his conceptions are so dramatic that he is always consistent regarding his characters and the situations or points of view they occupy. however obscure he may be in other points, he never confuses time and place or dramatic situation. is it not best to imagine him as having walked out with a friend to some point where the villa above and the city below are both clearly visible? and as the humor of the monologue consists in the impressions which the two places make upon the speaker, the contrasts are sharp and sudden. in such a position we can distinctly realize him now looking with longing towards the city that he loves and then turning with disgust and contempt towards the villa he despises. possibly his listener is located on the side towards the villa, as that unknown and almost unnoticed personage seems once or twice, at least, to make a mild defence. that his listener does not wholly agree with him, is indicated by "why?" at the end of the eleventh line, to which he replies, heaping encomiums upon the city, careless of the fact that his arguments would make any lover of beauty smile: "houses in four straight lines." "and the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly." "what of a villa?" may also be an echo of the listener's question or remark, or apply to a look expressive of his attitude of mind. "is it ever hot in the square?" suggests some satire on his part. the listener, however, is barely noticed, as the speaker seems to scorn the slightest opposition or expression of opinion. in such a position, we can easily imagine him with the whole city at his feet in sufficiently plain view to allow him to discover enough of the procession to waken memory and enthusiasm, and bring all up as a present reality. the procession can be easily imagined as starting from some convent outside the walls and appearing below them on its way to town. all the facts of the procession need not be discovered. it is a scene he has often observed and delighted in, and distance would lend enchantment to the speaker and serve as the climax of his enthusiasm, as he portrayed to his less responsive friend the details of the procession. some of his references to both villa and city are certainly from memory. for example, the different sights and sounds that he has seen and heard from time to time in the city, such as the "diligence," the "scene-picture at the post-office." the spirit of the monologue, the enthusiasm and exultation over what gives anything but pleasure to others, requires such a character as will enjoy "the travelling doctor" who "gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth." notice browning's touch for the reformers, he makes such a man rejoice at the news, "only this morning three liberal thieves were shot." the "liberal thieves" are doubtless three italian reformers who had been trying to deliver their country. it is possible to imagine the procession as wholly from memory, and "noon strikes" to be simply a part of his imagination and exultation. how gaily he skips as our lady, the madonna, is "borne smiling and smart, with a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart!" he has no conception of the symbol of the seven deadly sins, but dances away at the music, "no keeping one's haunches still." later, however, when he exclaims to his listener, "look," he seems to make an actual discovery. does he start as he actually sees a procession in the distance? a real one coming before him would give life and variety to the monologue. browning intentionally leaves the conceptions gradually to dawn in the imagination. the doubts, and the questions which may be asked, have been dwelt upon in order to emphasize the point that the speaker must be conceived in a definite situation. when once a situation is located, this will modify some of the shades of feeling and expression. the point, then, is, that a reader or interpreter must conceive the speaker as occupying a definite place, and when this is done, the position will determine somewhat the feeling and the expression. difference in situation causes many differences in action and in voice modulations. whatever location, therefore, the reader decides upon, everything else must be consistent with it. one point in this monologue may be especially obscure, where reference is made to the city being "dear!" "fowls, wine, at double the rate." i was one of three in a carriage who were once stopped at a gate in florence and examined to see whether we carried any "salt," "oil," or anything on which there was a tax, which, according to the owner of the villa, "is a horror to think of." some italian cities do not have free trade with the surrounding country; food stuffs are taxed upon "passing the gate," thus making life in the city more expensive. and here is the reason why this man sadly mourns: "and so, the villa for me, not the city! beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still--ah, the pity, the pity!" whatever may be said regarding browning's obscurity, however far he may have gone into the most technical knowledge of science in any department of life, however remote his allusions to events or objects or lines of knowledge which are unfamiliar to the world, there is one thing about which he is always definite, possibly more definite than any other writer. in every monologue we can find an indication of the place or situation in which the monologue is located. browning has given us one monologue which takes place during a walk, "a grammarian's funeral." the speaker is one of the band carrying the body of his master from the "common crofts," and so he is represented as looking up to the top of the hill and talking about the appropriateness of burying the master on the hilltop. browning's intimate knowledge of greek was shown by the phrase "gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _de_." the london "times" criticized this severely when the poem was published, saying that with all respect to mr. browning, there was no such enclitic. browning answered in a note that proved his fine scholarship, and called attention to the fact that this was the point in dispute which the grammarian had tried to settle. even the stages of the journey are shown, "here's the town-gate reached: there's the market-place gaping before us." in another place he says, "caution redoubled, step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!" while all the time he pours out his tribute to his master: "oh, if we draw a circle premature heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!... that low man seeks a little thing to do, sees it and does it: this high man, with a great thing to pursue, dies ere he knows it. that low man goes on adding one to one, his hundred's soon hit: this high man, aiming at a million, misses an unit. that, has the world here--should he need the next, let the world mind him! this, throws himself on god, and unperplexed seeking, shall find him." then, when they arrive at the top, he says, "well, here's the platform, here's the proper place," and addressing the birds, "all ye highfliers of the feathered race," he continues, giving his thoughts, as suggested by the very situation: "this man decided not to live but know-- bury this man there? here, here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send! lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him, still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying." browning's "at the 'mermaid'" reproduces a scene of historic interest. the inn where shakespeare, ben jonson, and other sympathetic friends used to meet, is presented to the imagination, and shakespeare is the speaker. some one has proposed a toast to him as the next poet. shakespeare protests, and the poem is his answer. here are shown his modesty, his optimism, his reverence, and his noble views of life. he smilingly points to his works and talks about them to these his friends in a simple, frank way. "look and tell me! written, spoken, here's my lifelong work: and where-- where's your warrant or my token i'm the dead king's son and heir? "here's my work: does work discover-- what was rest from work--my life? did i live man's hater, lover? leave the world at peace, at strife?... "blank of such a record, truly, here's the work i hand, this scroll, yours to take or leave; as duly, mine remains the unproffered soul. so much, no whit more, my debtors-- how should one like me lay claim to that largest elders, betters sell you cheap their souls for--fame?... "have you found your life distasteful? my life did, and does, smack sweet. was your youth of pleasure wasteful? mine i saved and hold complete. do your joys with age diminish? when mine fail me, i'll complain. must in death your daylight finish? my sun sets to rise again.... "my experience being other, how should i contribute verse worthy of your king and brother? balaam-like i bless, not curse. i find earth not gray, but rosy, heaven not grim, but fair of hue. do i stoop? i pluck a posy. do i stand and stare? all's blue.... "meanwhile greet me--'friend, good fellow, gentle will,' my merry men! as for making envy yellow with 'next poet'--(manners, ben!)" it is difficult to imagine any other situation, any other place, any other group of friends, chosen by browning, that would have been more favorable to the frank unfolding by shakespeare of the motives which underlie his work and his character. this any one may recognize, whatever his opinions may be regarding the success of this monologue. the poem is meaningless without a grasp of the situation. "manners, ben!" at the close is a protest against ben's drinking too soon. is this a delicate hint at ben's habits? or was his beginning to drink a method by which browning suggests a comment of ben's to the effect that shakespeare talked too much? browning here brings out the true shakespeare spirit, not, of course, to the satisfaction of those who have their hobbies and systems and consider shakespeare the only poet, but to others who wish to comprehend the real man. douglas jerrold has indicated the situation of his series of monologues in the title, "mrs. caudle's curtain lectures." the mind easily pictures an old-fashioned bed, the draperies drawn around it, with mr. and mrs. caudle retired to rest. mrs. caudle seizes this moment when she has her busy spouse at her mercy. before she falls asleep, she refers to his various shortcomings and fully discusses future contingencies or consequences of his evil deeds as a kind of slumber song for poor caudle. the imagination distinctly sees caudle holding himself still, trying to go to sleep. no word can relieve the tension of his mind, and mrs. caudle monopolizes all the conversation. caudle is exercising those powers which epictetus says that "god has given us by which we can keep ourselves calm and reposeful, as socrates did, without change of face under the most trying circumstances." a study of any monologue will furnish an illustration of situation, but we are naturally, in the study of the subject, led back again to browning. in his "andrea del sarto," we are introduced to a scene common in the lives of artists. it has grown too dark to paint, and, dropping his brush, the painter sits in the gray twilight and talks with his wife, who serves him as a model, and muses over his work and his life. no one can fully appreciate the poem who has not been in a studio at some such moment when the artist stopped work and came out of his absorption to talk to those dear to him. at such a time the artist will be personal, will criticize himself severely, and throw out hints of what he has tried to do, of his higher aims, visions, and possibilities, and, while showing appreciation of what other artists have said of him, will recognize, also, the mistakes and failures of his art or life. it is the unfolding of a sensitive soul, a transition from a world of ideals, imaginations, and visions, to one of reality. nowhere else in poetry has any author so fully caught the essence of such an hour. nowhere else can there be found art criticism equal to this self-revelation of the artist who is called "the faultless painter." what a revelation! what might he have done! what has he been! what a woman is beside him, his greatest curse, but one whose willing slave he recognizes himself to be! what a weak acquiescence, and what a fall! notice also the abrupt beginning: "but do not let us quarrel any more." she is asking ostensibly for money for her "cousin," but really, to pay the gambling debts of one of her lovers. he grants her request, but pleads that she stay with him in his loneliness and promises to work harder, and again and again in his criticism of himself, of his very perfection, even while he shows raphael's weakness in drawing, he hints that there is something in the others not in him. in fact, he recognizes one of the deepest principles of life, as well as art, and exclaims, "ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for? all is silver-gray, placid and perfect with my art: the worse!" he reveals his deep grief, how he dare not venture abroad all day lest the french nobles in the city should recognize him and deal with him for having used for himself--or rather for his wife, to build her a house, at her entreaty--the money which had been given by francis for the purchase of pictures and for his return to paris. and yet we find a weak soul's acquiescence in fate-- "all is as god o'errules." how sympathetically does browning reproduce the painter's point of view in-- "... why, there's my picture ready made, there's what we painters call our harmony! a common grayness silvers everything,-- all in a twilight." or again: "... let me sit the gray remainder of the evening out." while this poem is recognized as a great art criticism, its spirit can be realized only by one recognizing the dramatic situation and appreciating the delicate suggestions of the atmosphere of a studio and of time and place in relation to an artist's life. one of the finest situations in browning's verse is that in "la saisiaz." the poet has an appointment to climb a mountain with one of his friends, a miss smith, daughter of one of the firm of smith, elder & co., but when the time comes, she is dead. the other, himself, keeps the appointment, walks up alone, and pausing on the height, utters aloud his reflections upon the immortality of the soul. the poem is none the less a monologue because it is browning himself that speaks, and because the friend of whom and to whom he speaks has just passed to the unseen world. she whom he had expected as his companion in this climb is so near to him as to be almost literally realized as a listener. the poem fulfils the conditions of a monologue: a living soul intensely realizing a thought and situation with relation to another soul. it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of situation in art. it is the situation that gives us the background. an isolated object can hardly be made the subject of a work of art. art is relation, and shows the kinship of things. "it is where the bird is," said hunt, "that makes the bird." v. time and connection the monologue touches only indirectly the progressive development of character as regards time. it deals with only one instant, the present, which reflects the past and the future. but for this very reason its aspect differs from that of the drama, since it focuses attention upon the instant and reveals motives, possibilities, and even results. the monologue is not "still-life" in any sense of the word. in an instant's flash it may show the turning point of a life. the most important words in the study of a monologue are usually the first. as a monologue is a sudden vision of a life, it of course breaks into the continuity of thought or discussion. the first words are nearly always spoken in answer to something previously said or in reference to some event or circumstance which is only suggested, yet which must be definitely imagined. one of the most important questions for the student to settle is the connection of what is printed with what is not printed. when does a character begin to speak, that is, in answer to what,--as a result of what event, act, or word? for this reason the first words of a monologue must usually be delivered slowly and emphatically, if auditors are to be given a clue to the processes of the thought. the inflections and other modulations of the voice in uttering the first words must always directly suggest the connection with what precedes. "rabbi ben ezra" begins abruptly: "grow old along with me!" this poem has already been discussed with reference to the necessity of conceiving the listener, but we must also apprehend the thought which the listener has uttered before we can get the speaker's point of view. the young man has, no doubt, expressed pity or regret for the old man's isolation, for the loss of all his friends, and must have remarked something about how gloomy a thing it is to grow old. this is the cause of the older man's outburst of joyous expostulation amounting almost to a rebuke. now the reader must realize this, must make it appear in the emphasis which he gives to the first words of the rabbi: that is, he must so render these words as to bring the ideas of the rabbi in opposition to those of the young man. the antithesis to what has been said or implied gives the keynote of the poem, whether we are interpreting it to another or endeavoring to understand it for ourselves. we perceive here a striking contrast between the dramatic monologue and the story. the story may begin, "once upon a time," but the monologue as a part of real life must suggest a direct continuity of thought and also of contact with human beings. even a play may introduce characters, gradually lead up to a collision, and make emphatic an outbreak of passion, but the monologue must, as a rule, break in at once with the specific answer of a definite character in a living situation to a definite thought which has been uttered by another. the reader must receive an impression of the character at the moment, but in relation to a continuous succession of ideas. accordingly, the right starting of the monologue is of vital importance. in a story we often wait a long while for it to unfold. but except in the first preliminary reading, one cannot read on in the monologue, hoping that the meaning will gradually become clear. when a reader fully understands the meaning, he must turn and express this at the very beginning. the very first phrase must be colored by the whole. frequently the settling of the connection of the thought is the most difficult part in the study of a monologue, yet, on account of the unique difference of this type of literature from a story and other literary forms, the study of the beginning is apt to be overlooked. the reader must first find out where he is. i was once in search of bishopsgate street in london, and meeting, in a very narrow part of a narrow street a unique old man, who reminded me of ralph nickleby, i asked him to tell me the way. he looked me straight in the eye and said, "where are you now?" i told him i thought i was in threadneedle street. "right," and then he pointed out the street, which was only a few steps away, but which i had been seeking for some time in vain. he was wise, for unless i knew where i was, he could not direct me. in the study of a monologue, if we will find exactly where we are, many difficult questions will be settled at once; and the interpreter by pausing and using care can make clear, through the emphatic interpretation of the first sentences, a vast number of points which would otherwise be of great difficulty. mr. macfadyen has well said, "much of the apparent obscurity of browning is due to his habit of climbing up a precipice of thought, and then kicking away the ladder by which he climbed." the opening of browning's "fra lippo lippi" requires a conception of night and a sudden surprise-- "i am poor brother lippo, by your leave! you need not clap your torches to my face. zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!" these words cannot be given excitedly or dramatically without realizing the rôle the police are playing, their rough handling of lippo, and their discovery that they have seized a monk at an unseemly hour of the night and not in a respectable part of the city. we must identify ourselves with lippo and feel the torches of the police in the face, and the hand "fiddling" on his throat. this whole situation must be as definitely conceived as if a part of a play. the reference to "cosimo of the medici" should be spoken very suggestively, and we should feel with lippo the consequent relief that resulted, and the dismay also of the police on finding they have in hand an artist friend of the greatest man in florence. "boh! you were best!" means that the hands of the policeman have been released from his throat. all this dramatic action, however, must be secondary to the conception of the character of the monk-painter. almost immediately, in the very midst of the excitement, possibly with reference to the very fellow who had grasped his throat, the artist, with the true spirit of a painter, exclaims, "he's judas to a tittle, that man is! just such a face!" and as the chief of the squad of police sends his watchmen away, the painter's heart once more awakes and discovers a picture, and he says, almost to himself: "i'd like his face-- his, elbowing on his comrade in the door with the pike and lantern,--for the slave that holds john baptist's head a-dangle by the hair with one hand ('look you, now,' as who should say) and his weapon in the other, yet unwiped! it's not your chance to have a bit of chalk, a wood-coal or the like? or you should see! yes, i'm the painter, since you style me so. what, brother lippo's doings, up and down, you know them, and they take you? like enough! i saw the proper twinkle in your eye-- 'tell you, i liked your looks at very first. let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch." thus the monologue is introduced, and with a captain of a night-watch in florence as listener, this great painter, who tried to paint things truly, pours out his critical reflections,-- "a fine way to paint soul, by painting body so ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further and can't fare worse!" this great reformer in art is made by browning to declare why men should paint "god's works--paint anyone, and count it crime to let a truth slip by," for according to this man, who initiated a new movement in art, "art was given for that; god uses us to help each other so, lending our minds out.... this world's no blot for us nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink." this monologue, while only a fragment of simple conversation, touches those profound moments which only an artist can realize, and unfolds the real essence of a character. abrupt beginnings are very common in monologues, but the student will find that these are often the easiest to master. they can be easily interpreted by dramatic instinct. there is always a situation, dramatic in proportion to the abruptness of the beginning, and a few glances will fasten attention upon the real theme. the monologue will never stir one who desires long preliminary chapters of descriptions before the real story is opened, but one with true dramatic imagination can easily make a sudden plunge into the very midst of life and action. the unity of time on account of the momentary character of a monologue needs no discussion. and yet we find in one otherwise strong monologue, "before sedan," by austin dobson, a strange violation of the principle of time. before sedan "the dead hand clasped a letter." here, in this leafy place, quiet he lies, cold, with his sightless face turned to the skies; 'tis but another dead; all you can say is said. carry his body hence,-- kings must have slaves; kings climb to eminence over men's graves: so this man's eye is dim;-- throw the earth over him. what was the white you touched, there, at his side? paper his hand had clutched tight ere he died;-- message or wish, maybe;-- smooth the folds out and see. hardly the worst of us here could have smiled:-- only the tremulous words of a child;-- prattle, that has for stops just a few ruddy drops. look. she is sad to miss, morning and night, his--her dead father's--kiss; tries to be bright, good to mamma, and sweet, that is all. "marguerite." ah, if beside the dead slumbered the pain! ah, if the hearts that bled slept with the slain! if the grief died;--but no;-- death will not have it so. the title of this monologue suggests something of the situation, and from the first sentence we gather that it is spoken by one searching for the dead in remote nooks of the battle-field. from the remarks against war, the speaker seems to be one of the citizens searching their farms for any who, wounded, have crawled away for water, or have died in an obscure corner. a body is found, and something white, a paper, in the soldier's hand, is discovered; the leader, who is the speaker, asks another to smooth out the folds, as it may express some dying wish. it is found to be a letter from his child, which the dying man has taken out and kissed. all this is in the true spirit of the monologue. but now we come to a blemish,--"could have smiled." so far, all has been in the present tense, dramatically discovered and represented as a living, passing scene; but here there is a relapse into mere narration, and the speaker appears to be telling the story long afterwards. we never have such a blemish in a production of browning's. in his hands the monologue is always a present, living, moving thing. it is not a narrative of some past action. all dramatic art is related to time, but the only time in which we can act is the present. this fact is a help to the understanding of the monologue, for we must bring a living character into immediate action and contact with some other, or with many other, human beings. vi. argument to comprehend the meaning of a monologue, it is necessary to grasp, fully and clearly, the relation of the ideas, or the continuity of thought. in an essay or speech, the argument is everything, and even a story depends upon a sequence of events. many persons object to the monologue because the full comprehension of the meaning can only come last, and seem to think that the characters and situations should be mere accidents. mr. chesterton has well said: "if a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that we require to know." not only is this true, but the impression of every event or truth, which is all any man can tell, is dependent upon the character of the man, and while the monologue seems to reverse the natural method in requiring us to conceive of character and situation before the thought, it thus presents a deeper truth and causes a more adequate impression. both the person talking and the scene must be apprehended by the imagination; then the meaning is no longer abstract; it is presented with the living witnesses. persons who want only the meaning usually ignore all situation or environment. the co-ordination of many elements is the secret of the peculiar power and force of the monologue. the monologue is not unnatural. life is complex, and elements in nature are not found in isolation. the colors of nature are always found in combination, and primary colors are rare. art is composed of a very few elements, but how rarely do we find one of these separated from the others. so an emphatically demonstrated abstract truth is rarely found. truth gives reality to truth. thought implies a thinking soul. no thought is completed until expressed; art is ever necessary to show relations. in every age the parable, or some other indirect method, has been employed for the simplest lessons. words can only hint at truth. an abstraction verges toward an untruth. a mere rule, even an abstract statement of law, is worth little except as obeyed or its working seen among men. men or women of the finest type rarely discuss their fellow-beings, for the smallest remark quoted from another may produce a false impression. what was the occasion? what was the spirit with which it was spoken? what was the smile upon the face? what was the tenderness in the voice? the exact words may be quoted, yet without the tone and action these may be falsified. even facts may convey an utterly false impression. everything in nature is related. an interpretation of truth, accordingly, demands the presentation of right relations. the flower that is cut and placed in a vase has lost the bower of green leaves, the glimmer of the sunlight, the sparkle of the dew, and the blue sky "full of light and deity." in the monologue we must pass from "the letter that killeth" to "the spirit that giveth life." the primary meaning hides itself, that we may take account of the witnesses first, for in the mouth of "two or three witnesses every word may be established." "the word that he speaks is the man himself." but how rarely do we realize this. it is impossible to do so without a conception of the voice. the smile and the actions of the body and natural modulations of the voice reveal the fulness of the impression and the life that is merely suggested by a word. the monologue, implying all these, makes men realize a truth more vividly by showing the feeling and attitude toward truth of a living, thinking man. it is not to superficialize the truth that the monologue adopts an indirect method. it does not concern itself with situations and characters for mere amusement or adornment. it does not introduce scenery to atone for lack of thought, but seeks to awaken the right powers to realize it. a profound theme may be discussed dramatically as well, and at times much better than in an essay or a speech. to receive a right impression from "abt vogler," for example, the reader must consciously or unconsciously realize the point of view, and also the philosophic arguments for the highest idealism of the age. we must know the depth of meaning in the line: "on the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round." we must perceive, too, the philosophy beneath such words as these: "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist," and even the argument that makes "our failure here but a triumph's evidence." "sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know." "musicians" is used in a suggestive sense to indicate mystics and idealists. the argument of the monologue, accordingly, is found in dramatic sequence of natural thinking. it is not a logical or systematic arrangement of points, but the association of ideas as they spring up in the mind. as has been shown, the start is everything, since it indicates the connection of the speaker with the unwritten situation or preceding thought of his listener. the argument then follows naturally. the argument of "a death in the desert" is one of the most complex and difficult to follow. browning opens and closes the poem with a bracketed passage, and inserts one also in another place. these bracketed lines are written or said by another than pamphylax, the speaker in the main part of the monologue. they refer to the old fragments and parchments with their methods of enumeration by greek letters. this gives the impression and feeling of the ancient documents and the peculiar difficulties in the criticism of the texts of the new testament, upon which so much of the evidence of christianity depends. pamphylax gives in the monologue an account of the death of john, the beloved disciple, who was supposed to have been the last man who had actually seen the christ with his own eyes. it occurs in the midst of the persecution which came about this time. the dying john is in the cave, near ephesus, with a boy outside pretending to care for the sheep, but ready to give warning of the approach of roman soldiers. the speaker, who was present, describes all that happened, and repeats the words of the dying apostle. browning makes john foresee that the evidences of christianity would no longer depend upon simply "i saw," as there would be no one left when john was dead who could say it. he thus makes him foresee all the critical difficulties of modern times in relation to the evidences of christianity, and, in the spirit of john's gospel and of the whole philosophy of that time, as well as with a profound understanding of the needs of the nineteenth century, he makes john unfold a solution of the difficulties. this profoundly significant poem will tax to the very utmost any method of explaining the monologue. but browning anticipates this difficulty in part, and gives the atmosphere of the ancient manuscripts, introducing to us details about the rolls, the situation, the spectators, and the appearance of john. in fact, a monologue is found within a monologue, the words of john himself constituting the essence or spirit of the passage; and thus browning is enabled to present the deepest thought through the words of the beloved disciple. the difficulties are thus brought into relation with the philosophy of that age, and at the same time the strongest critical and philosophical thought of the poet's time is expounded. one special difficulty in tracing the argument of a monologue will be found in the sudden and abrupt transitions. these, however, are perfectly natural; in fact, they are the peculiar characteristics of all good monologues, and express the dramatic spirit. since the monologue is the direct revelation of this spirit in human thinking rather than in human acting, which is shown by the play, these sudden changes of mood or feeling are necessary to the monologue as the drama of the thinking mind. the person who reads a monologue aloud will find that its abrupt transitions are a great help, and not a hindrance. when properly emphasized and accentuated by voice and action, they become the chief means of making the thought luminous and forcible. one of the best examples of what we may call the dramatic argument of a monologue is found in browning's "the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church," one of the ablest criticisms ever offered upon both the moral and the artistic spirit of the renaissance. notice that "rome, --" is a subtitle. the bishop begins with the conventional lament, "vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!" he is dying, and has called his nephews,--now owned as sons, for he has been unfaithful to his priestly vow of chastity,--about his bed for his farewell instructions. his greatest anxiety is regarding his monument, and as he thinks of this purpose of his life, his whole character reveals itself. we perceive his old jealousy and envy of a former bishop, and the very thought of this predecessor causes sudden transitions and agitations in the dying man's mind. we discover that his seeming love of the beautiful is only a sensuous admiration entirely different from that true love of art which browning endeavored to interpret. to his sons he speaks frankly of his sins. his pompous and egotistical likings are shown in his causing his sons to march in and out in a stately ceremonial. this adds color to the poem and helps to concentrate attention upon the character of the speaker. ruskin has some important words in his "modern painters" upon this poem: "i know no other piece of modern english, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told as in these lines, of the renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good latin. it is nearly all i said of the central renaissance in thirty pages in 'the stones of venice,' put into as many lines, browning's being also the antecedent work. the worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble." in studying the argument the reader should note the many sudden changes in almost every phrase, especially at first. for example, "nephews--sons mine ... ah god, i know not!" and so he continues: "she is dead beside," and "saint praxed's ever was the church for peace." note his break into business: "and so, about this tomb of mine...." this must be given with much saliency in order to show that it is the chief point he has in mind and the purpose of his bringing them together. most of the other sayings are only dramatic asides, which, however, must be strongly emphasized as indicative of his character. note the expression of his hate in "old gandolf cozened me," though he fought tooth and nail to save his niche. but still, his enemy had secured the south corner: "he graced his carrion with, god curse the same!" yet he accepts the result, and feels that his niche is not so bad: "one sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side." "onion-stone" and "true peach" are, of course, in direct opposition. then he tells the great secret of his life, how he has hidden a great lump of "... lapis lazuli, big as a jew's head cut off at the nape," and where it can be found to place between his knees on the monument. and in this he shall have a great triumph over his enemy-- "for gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!" after this outbreak of selfishness and envy he resumes the conventional whine: "swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years." suddenly, with a totally different inflection, he returns to the thought of his tomb: "did i say basalt for my slab, sons? black-- 'twas ever antique-black i meant!" this is said suddenly, and with the most positive and abrupt inflections. notice that amid the gloom he will even laugh over the bad latin of old gandolf the "elucescebat" of his inscription, and abruptly demands of his sons that his epitaph be "choice latin, picked phrase, tully's every word." observe his sudden transition from "nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!" to his appeal to their superstition because he has "... saint praxed's ear to pray horses for ye...." and his sudden threat: "else i give the pope my villas!" if we realize his character, this kind of "concentrated writing" will not need "so much solution" before the reader can "get the good of it." certainly people's patience should not fail them, nor should they "give the thing up as insoluble." on the contrary, one who follows the suggestions indicated, understands the natural languages, and has any appreciation of the dramatic spirit, will feel that browning's form is the best means of giving with a few strokes a thorough understanding of the character of a great movement and era in human history. this is one of browning's "difficult" poems. why difficult? because most "concentrated"; because it gives the fundamental spirit of a certain era of the world; because the poet uses in every case the exact word, however unusual it may be, to express the idea. he should not be blamed if he send the reader to the dictionary to correct his ignorance. why should not art be as accurate as science? why should it perpetuate ignorance? * * * * * to understand a monologue according to these suggestions the student must first answer such questions as, who speaks? what kind of a man says this? to whom does he speak? of whom is he talking? where is he? at what point in the conversation do we break in upon him in the unconscious utterance of his life and motives? then, last of all,--what is the argument? the general subject and thought will gradually become plain from the first question and the argument may be pretty clear before all the points are presented. when the points are taken up in this order, the meaning of a monologue will unfold as naturally as that of an essay or a simple story, and at the same time afford greater enjoyment and express deeper truth in fewer words. all of these questions are not applicable to every monologue. sometimes one has greater force than the others. some monologues are given without any necessity of conceiving a distinct place; some require no definite time in the conversation; in a few the listener may be almost any one; but in some monologues every one of these questions will have force. the application of these points, however, is easy, and will be spontaneous to one with dramatic instinct. only at first do they demand special attention and care. the application of all the points suggested or questions to be answered will be shown best by an illustration,--a short monologue which exemplifies them all. let us choose for this purpose browning's "my last duchess." the speaker is the duke, and the meaning of the whole is dependent upon the right conception of his character. he stands before us puffed up with pride, one who chooses "never to stoop." the person spoken of, the duchess, and her character form the real theme of the poem, and the character of the duke is made to look blacker by contrast. how her youth, beauty, and loveliness shine through his sneers! "she liked whatever she looked on, and her looks went everywhere," and he was offended that she recognized "anybody's gift" on a plane with his gift of a "nine-hundred-year-old name." this grew, and he "gave commands, then all smiles stopped together." my last duchess ferrara that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. i call that piece a wonder, now: frà pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will't please you sit and look at her? i said "frà pandolf" by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus. sir, 'twas not her husband's presence only called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek: perhaps frà pandolf chanced to say, "her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much," or, "paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. she had a heart--how shall i say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. sir, 'twas all one! my favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace,--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush at least. she thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--i know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling? even had you skill in speech--(which i have not)--to make your will quite clear to such an one, and say, "just this or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, or there exceed the mark"--and if she let herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, e'en then would be some stooping; and i choose never to stoop. oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, when'er i passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? this grew; i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. there she stands as if alive. will't please you rise? we'll meet the company below, then. i repeat, the count your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretence of mine for dowry will be disallowed; though his fair daughter's self, as i avowed at starting, is my object. nay, we'll go together down, sir. notice neptune, though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which claus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me! to whom is the duke speaking? from the phrase, "the count your master," and other hints, we infer that the listener is the legal agent of the count who is father of the next victim, the new duchess, and that this legal agent has stepped aside to talk with the duke about the "dowry." the duke has led the agent upstairs, drawn aside the curtain from the portrait of his last duchess, and monopolizes the conversation. the situation is marvellously suggestive. he draws the curtain which "none puts by" but himself, and assumes an attitude of a connoisseur of art, and calls the portrait "a wonder." does this admiring of art for art's sake suggest the degeneracy of his soul? he asks the other to "sit and look at her." the subject in hand is shown by the word "last." how suggestive is the emphasis upon the word, for they have been talking about the new duchess. in a few lines, as dramatically suggestive as any in literature, his character and motives are all revealed, as he intimates to his hearer what is expected from him. why did he say all this to such a person? to overawe him, to show him what kind of man he had to deal with, and the necessity of accepting the duke's terms lest "commands" might also be given regarding him, and his "smiles" stop, like those of the lovely duchess. it is only an insinuation, but in keeping with the duke's character. the rising at the end shows that he takes it for granted that everything is settled as he wished it. notice that the agent falls behind, like an obedient lackey, but as this would not appear well to the "company below," the duke says:-- "nay, we'll go together down." by the time the reader has answered these questions the whole argument becomes luminous. a company has gathered at the duke's palace to arrange the final settlement for a marriage between the duke and the daughter of a count. the duke and the steward of the count, or some person acting as agent, have stepped aside to consult regarding the dowry. the place is chosen by the duke; in drawing the curtain in front of the picture of his last duchess, he unfolds his character and also the story, and forcibly portrays the character of his last victim. she was one who loved everybody and everything in life with true human sympathy. she "thanked" him for every gift, but that was not enough. she smiled at others. she was a flower he had plucked for himself alone, and she must not show love or tenderness, or blush at "the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, ..." it is doubtful whether she died of a broken heart or was deliberately murdered. his commands, of course, would not be given to her, but to his lackeys. many think she was murdered. browning leaves it artistically suggestive and uncertain. these questions, of course, will not be answered in any regular order. one point will suggest another. the meaning will be partially apparent from the first; but usually the points will be discovered in this sequence. when completed, the whole is as simple as a story. the pompous, contemptuous air of the duke, the insinuating way in which he speaks, the hint afforded by his voice that he will have no trifling, that he had made his demands, and that was the end of it; all these details slowly unfold until the whole story, nay, even the deepest motives of his life and character, are clearly perceived. what a wonderful portrayal in fifty-six lines! many a long novel does not say so much, nor give such insight into human beings. many a play does not reveal processes so deep, so profound as this. browning hints in his subtitle, "ferrara," the part of the world and the age in which such a piece of villany would have been possible. if the reader will examine some of the most difficult monologues of browning, or any of the more popular monologues, by the questions given, he will see at once the peculiar character of the monologue as a form of dramatic poetry. such work must be at first conscious, but when it has been thoroughly done, the rendering or reading of a monologue will be as easy as that of a play. the enjoyment awakened by a good monologue, and the insight it gives into human nature, will well repay the study necessary to realize the artistic peculiarities of this form of poetry. vii. the monologue as a form of literature the nature of the monologue will be seen more clearly and forcibly if compared with other forms of literature. forms of literature have not been invented or evolved suddenly. they have been in every case slowly recognized; in fact, one of the last, if not most difficult phases of literary education and culture is the definite conception of the difference between the various forms of poetry. to many persons the word lyric and the word epic are loose terms, the one standing for a short poem and the other for a long one. the real spirit and character of the most elemental forms of poetry are often indefinitely and inadequately realized. if this is true of the oldest and most fundamental forms of poetry, it is still more true of the monologue. the word awakens in most minds only the vaguest conceptions. if the monologue be discriminated at all from other forms of literature, it is apt to be regarded as an accidental, if not an unnecessary or unnatural, phase of literary creation. even in books on browning, nine-tenths of whose work is in this form, the monologue is often spoken of as if it were a speech. it is sometimes treated as if it were simply a long monotonous harangue of some talker like coleridge, the outflow of whose ideas and words subordinates or puts to silence a whole company. but unless the peculiar nature of the monologue is understood, much modern verse will fail to produce an adequate impression. like the speech, the monologue implies one speaker. but an oration implies an audience, a platform, conscious preparation, and a direct and deliberate purpose. the monologue, on the contrary, implies merely a conversation on the street, in the shop, or in the home. usually, only one listener is found, and rarely is there an assembled audience or the formal occasion implied by a speech. the occasion is some natural situation in life capable of causing spontaneous outflow of thought and feeling and an involuntary revelation of motive. the monologue is not a poetic interpretation of an oration, though the latter is frequently found in poetry. burns's poem on the speech of bruce at bannockburn was called by carlyle "the finest war-ode in any language," and it is none the less noble because it suggests a speaker. it is a poetic realization of an address to an army. burns gives the situation and the chief actor speaking as the artistic means of awakening a realization of the event. but it is the poetic interpretation of oratory, a lyric, and not a monologue. dr. holmes's "our boys" is an after dinner speech in metric form, full of good-natured allusions to members of the class who were well-known men, but even such a definite situation does not make his work a monologue. "anything may be poetic by being intensely realized." poetry may have as its theme any phase of human life or endeavor, and the spirit of oratory has often been interpreted by poetry. oratory has a direct, conscious purpose. it implies a human being earnestly presenting arguments to move and persuade men to a course of action. the monologue reflects the unconscious and spontaneous effect of one human being upon another, but it does not express the poet's own feelings, convictions, or motives, except indirectly. we must not take the words of any one of browning's characters as an echo of the poet's personal convictions. the monologue expresses the impressions which a certain character receives from events or from other people. epic poetry, from its application to an individual case or situation, is made to suggest the ideals, aspirations, or characteristics of the race. the epic makes events or characters more typical or universal, and hence more suggestive and expressive. its personations embody universal ideals. odysseus is not simply a man, but the representative of every patient, long-suffering hellenic hero, persevering and enduring trials with fortitude. achilles is not merely a youth full of anger, but a type of the passionate, liberty-loving and aspiring greek. both achilles and odysseus are not so much individual characters as typical greeks. they express noble emotions breathed into the hearts of mortals by athena. odysseus embodies the virtue of temperance and patience symbolized by the cloudless sky, represented by athena's robe, and of perseverance shown by her unstooping helmet. achilles with his "destructive wrath," embodies the spirit of youth and eager passion corresponding to the lightning and the storm which are shown by the serpents on athena's breast. we are apt to regard the epic as simply differing in form from the drama; the drama being adapted to stage representation, while the epic is not. but there are deeper differences. though the drama may portray a character as noble as the suffering prometheus, a representative of the race, or one as low as nick bottom; and though the epic may portray by the side of the swift-footed achilles and the wise ulysses the physical and rough ajax, still at the heart of every form of poetry is found a different spirit. even when the same subject is introduced, a different aspect will be suggested. every form of human art expresses something which can be adequately expressed in no other way. dramatic art is recognized as being complex. from the following definition of the term "dramatic" by freytag in his "technique of the drama," many points may be inferred regarding its unique character: "the term dramatic is applicable to two classes of emotions: those which are sufficiently vigorous to crystallize into will and act, and those which are aroused by an act. it accordingly includes the psychical processes which go on within the human soul from the initiation of a feeling up to passionate desire and activity, and also the influences exerted upon the soul by the acts of oneself or of others. in other words, it includes the outward movement of the will from the depths of the nature toward the external world, and the inward movement of impression from the external world which influence the inner nature: or, in fine, the coming into existence of an act; and its consequences for the soul. neither action in itself nor passionate emotion in itself is dramatic. the function of dramatic art is not the representation of passion in itself, but of passion leading to action; it is not the representation of an event in itself, but of its reflections in the human soul. the representation of passionate emotion in itself, as such, is the function of the lyric; the depicting of interesting events, as such, is the business of the epic."[ ] this explanation of dramatic art at first seems very thorough and complete. it certainly includes more than the play, although worked out with special reference to the play. but any true study of dramatic art must recognize the fact that the play, important as it is, is only one of its aspects. this definition, fine as it is, needs careful consideration, and possibly may be found, after all, inadequate. if it refers at all to some of the most important aspects, the reference is vague. dramatic art must also include points of view, insight into motives, the nature and necessity of situation, and especially the discovery by one man of another's attitude of mind. the definition is notable because it does not define dramatic art, as is so apt to be the case, by limitation. when any form of art is defined by limitation, the next great artist that arises will break the shackles of such a rule, and show its utter inadequacy. when sir joshua reynolds said blue could not be used as the general color scheme of a picture, gainsborough responded with the now famous painting, "the blue boy." dramatic art is especially difficult to define because it is the very essence of poetry, and deals with that most difficult of all subjects, the human soul. accordingly, illustrations of dramatic art are not only safer than definitions, but more suggestive of its true nature. definitions are especially inadequate in our endeavors to perceive the differences between the dramatic elements of a play and those of a monologue. to realize more completely the general nature of dramatic art, let us note how a play differs from a story. a certain noble and his wife slew their king while he was their guest, and usurped the crown. in order to conceal their crime and keep themselves on the throne, the new king slew other persons, and even murdered the wife and children of a noble who had fled to england and espoused the cause of the rightful heir to the throne, the son of the murdered king. the usurper was finally overthrown and killed in battle by the knight whose family he had slain. such are the bare items of the story of "macbeth." when these facts were fashioned into a play, the interest was transferred from the events to the characters of the principal individuals concerned. their ambitious motives, their resolution or hesitation to perform the murder, and the effects of this crime upon them were not only portrayed by shakespeare, but to lady macbeth is given a different type of conscience from that of her husband. while at first, or before macbeth committed his first crime, he hesitated long, his conscience afterward became "seared as with a hot iron." although he hesitated greatly over the murder of duncan, he later pursued his purpose without faltering for a moment. the conscience of lady macbeth, on the contrary, is awakened by crime. these two types of conscience are often found in life, but have never been so truly represented as in shakespeare's interpretation of them. possibly no other art except dramatic art could have portrayed this experience and interpreted such deep differences between human beings. now note the peculiarities of the monologue. a man must part from a woman he loves. he has been rejected, or for other reasons it is necessary for him to speak the parting word; they may meet as friends, but never again can they meet as lovers. there are not enough events here to make a story, and the mere statement of them awakens little interest. but browning writes a monologue upon this slender theme which is so short that it can be printed here entire. the lost mistress all's over, then: does truth sound bitter as one at first believes? hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter about your cottage eaves! and the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly, i noticed that, to-day; one day more bursts them open fully: you know the red turns gray. to-morrow we meet the same then, dearest? may i take your hand in mine? mere friends are we,--well, friends the merest keep much that i resign: for each glance of the eye so bright and black, tho' i keep with heart's endeavor,-- your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back, tho' it stay in my soul for ever!-- yet i will but say what mere friends say, or only a thought stronger; i will hold your hand but as long as all may, or so very little longer! here we have as speaker a distinct type of man, and the precise moment is chosen when he is bidding good-bye. attention is focussed upon him for a single moment during a single speech. observe the naturalness of the reference to insignificant objects in stanzas one and two. in the hour of bitterest experience, every one remembers some leaf or tree or spot of sunshine that seems burnt into the mind forever. note the speaker's hesitation, and how in the struggle for self-control he makes seemingly careless remarks. how true to human nature! here we have presented an instant in the life of a soul; a trying moment, when, if ever, weakness will be shown; when refuge is taken in little things to stem the tide of feeling, as the man gives up the supreme hope of his life. this is dramatic, and the disclosure of character is unconscious, spontaneous, involuntary. again, take as an illustration a longer monologue. a certain young duke has been taken away by his mother to foreign parts and there educated, and has come back proud and conventional. he must marry; and a beautiful woman, chosen from a convent, is elevated to his exalted sphere. but, regarded as a mere flower cut from the woods and brought to adorn his room, she is not allowed to exercise any influence over her supposed home. desiring to revive the medieval customs, the duke arranges a ceremonious hunt, with costumes of the period, and the duchess is given the part of presiding at the killing of the victim. this part she refuses. as the angry duke rides away to the hunt, he meets an old gypsy, and, to punish the duchess, instructs this old crone to give his wife a fright, promising her money for the service. when the duke returns, duchess and gypsy have fled. this is the story of "the flight of the duchess." browning chooses a family servant who was witness to the whole transaction to tell the story, when long after the event he comes in contact with a friend, a sympathetic foreigner, who will not betray him, and to whom he can safely confide the real facts. the speaker starts out with a sudden reference to his being beckoned by the duke to lead the gypsy back to his mistress. he describes the place, the character of the duke,--born on the same day with himself,-- "... the pertest little ape that ever affronted human shape;" his education, his return, his marriage with the duchess, and gives, not a mere story, but his own point of view, his impressions, while the complex effect of the actions and character of the duke, the duchess, and the rest upon himself are meanwhile suggested. vividly he describes the first entrance of the duchess into the old castle and her desire to transfigure it all, as was her right, into the beauty and loveliness of a home; and how she was shut up, entirely idle. as a participant in the hunting scene, he describes the bringing out of ancestral articles of clothing, the tugging on of old jack-boots, and the putting on of discarded articles of medieval dress. what a touch regarding the experiences of the duke's tailor! then follows the long study as to the rôle the duchess should play,--she, of course, being supposed to sit idly awaiting it, whatever it might be. when, to the astonishment of the duke, she refuses the part, his cruelty and that of his mother is shown in the fearful description of the latter's tongue. at last they leave the duchess alone to become aware of her sins. what pictures does the servant paint! the old gypsy crone sidles up to the duke as he is riding off to the hunt. he gives no response until she says she has come to pay her respects to the new duchess. then his face lights up, and he whispers in her ear and tells her of the fright she is to give the duchess; and beckoning a servant,--the speaker in the monologue, sends him as her guide. this man, as he guides the old woman toward the castle, sees her become transfigured before him. later he, with jacinth, his sweetheart, waits outside on the balcony until, awakened by her crooning song, he becomes aware that the gypsy is bewitching the duchess. yet, when his mistress issues forth, a changed woman, with transfigured face and a look of determination, he obeys her least motion, brings her palfrey, and thus aids in her escape. browning gives a characteristic final touch, and we see this man gazing into the distance and expressing his determination soon to leave all and go forth into the wide world to find the lost duchess. the theme of all art is to interpret impressions or to produce upon the human heart an adequate impression of events and of truth. dramatic art has always led the other arts in its power to present the motives of different characters, show the various processes of passion passing into action, the consequences of action, or the working of the complex elements of a human character. professor dowden in his recent life of browning, in endeavoring to explain the peculiarities of browning's plays, makes an important point, which is still more applicable to the dramatic form which he calls "the short monodrama," but which i call the monologue. "dramatic, in the sense that he (browning) created and studied minds and hearts other than his own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate his most intimate ideas or impulses, he effected this indirectly, by detaching them from his own personality and giving them a brain and a heart other than his own in which to live and move and have their being. there is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another kind which we may term dynamic. the former deals especially with characters in position, the latter with characters in movement. passion and thought may be exhibited and interpreted by dramatic genius of either type; to represent passion and thought and action--action incarnating and developing thought and passion--the dynamic power is required. and by action we are to understand not merely a visible deed, but also a word, a feeling, an idea, which has in it a direct operative force. the dramatic genius of browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or labored success with character in movement" ("browning," by edward dowden, p. ). the expression "static dramatic" is more applicable to browning's plays, paradoxical as it may seem, than to his monologues. the monologues are full of dynamic force. even dowden himself speaks in another place of "muléykeh," and calls it "one of the most delightful of browning's later poems, uniting as it does the poetry of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion." browning certainly does in many of his monologues suggest most decided action. the expression "static" must be understood as referring to the dramatic elements or manifestations of character, which result from situation and thinking rather than through action and plot. if the scope of dramatic art be confined to a formal play with its unity of action among many characters, with its introduction, slow development, explosion, and catastrophe, then the monologue must have a very subordinate place. the dramatic element, however, is in reality much broader than this. it is not a mere invention of a poet, but the expression of a phase of life. this may be open, the result of a conflict on the street, or concealed, the result of deep emotions and motives. it may be the outward and direct effect of one human being upon another, or the result of unconscious influence. nor is it mere external action, mere conflicts of men in opposition to each other that reveal character. its fundamental revelations are found in thinking and feeling. whatever method or literary form can reveal or interpret the thought, emotion, motive, or bearing of a soul in a specific situation, is dramatic. the essence of the dramatic spirit is seen when shakespeare presents macbeth thinking alone, after speaking to a servant:-- "go, bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, she strike upon the bell. get thee to bed." while waiting for this signal that all is ready, shakespeare uncovers the conflicts of a soul about to commit a crime. the inner excitement, the roused imagination and feeling, the chaotic whirl of thoughts and passions reveal the nature of the human conscience. what would macbeth be to us without the soliloquies? what would the play of "hamlet" be without the uncoverings of hamlet's inmost thought when alone? nay, what is the essence of the spirit of shakespeare, the most dramatic of all poets? not the plots, frequently borrowed and always very simple, but the uncovering of souls. he makes men think and feel before us. the unities of time, place, and action are all transcended by a higher unity of character. it is because shakespeare reveals the thinking and feeling heart that he is the supreme dramatic poet. no spectacular show, no mere plot, however involved, no mere record of events, however thrilling, interprets human character. nor does dramatic art centre in any stage or formal play, nor is the play dramatic unless it centres in thinking and reveals the attitude of the mind. the dramatic element in art shows the result of soul in conflict with soul; and more than this, it implies the revelation of a soul only half conscious of its motives and the meaning of life, revealing indirectly its fiercest battles, its truest nature. viii. history of the monologue a glance over english literature shows us the fact that the monologue was no sudden invention of browning's, but that it has been gradually developed, and is a natural form, as natural as the play. a genuine form of poetry is never invented. it is a mode of expressing the fundamental life of man, and while authors may develop it, bring it to perfection, and make it a means for their "criticism of life," we can always find hints of the same form in the works of other authors, nations, and ages. if we examine the monologue carefully, comparing it with various poems, ancient and modern, we shall find that the form has been long since anticipated, and was simply carried to perfection by browning. it is not artificial nor mechanical, but natural and necessary for the presentation of certain phases of experience. the monologue, as has already been shown, is closely akin to the lyric; hence, among lyric poems we find in all ages some which are monologues in spirit. if criticism is to appreciate this form and its function in literary expression, and show that it is the outcome of advancement in culture and of the necessity for a broader realization of human nature, some attention should be given to its early examples. if we go no farther back than english poetry, and in this only to sir thomas wyatt (b. ) we find that "the lover's appeal" has some of the characteristics of a monologue. the words are spoken by a distinct character directly to a specific hearer. "and wilt thou leave me thus? say nay! say nay! for shame, to save thee from the blame of all my grief and shame. and wilt thou leave me thus? say nay! say nay!" marlowe's "the passionate shepherd to his love," beginning-- "come live with me and be my love," also represents a lover talking to his beloved. in reading it we should picture their relations to each other. the poem may be spoilt by introducing a transcendence of the dramatic element. it is a simple lyric. the shepherd is idealized, and expresses the universal love of the human heart. still it is not the kind of love that one would directly express to an audience. the reader will instinctively imagine his character and his hearer, and, if reading to others, will unconsciously place her a little to the side. this objective element aids lyric expression. to address it to an audience, as some public readers do, implies that the loving youth is a mormon. both these poems imply two characters, one speaking, one listening, and an adequate interpretation of each poem must suggest a feeling between two human beings. in sir walter raleigh's "reply to marlowe's shepherd," the positions of the listener and the speaker are simply reversed. these poems are, of course, lyrics. they may be said by any lover. the emotion is everything. the situation or idea is simple. the expression of intense personal feeling predominates, and the impetuous, spontaneous movement of passion subordinates or eliminates all conception of character. still, though primarily lyrics, in form these poems are monologues. in each there is one person directly addressing another. in the expression of these lyrics, we find the naturalness of the situation represented by a monologue. while "the passionate shepherd to his love" is one of the distinctive lyrics in the language, yet the intense realization of the object loved will cause the sympathetic interpreter to turn a little away from the audience. the subjective and personal elements in the poem awaken emotion so exalted in its nature that the speaker is unconscious of all except his beloved. still there is a slight objective element. the words are spoken by a shepherd in love and are addressed directly, at least in imagination, to his beloved. but when not carried too far or made dramatic and other than lyric, this monologue element may be an aid, not a hindrance; it may intensify the expression of the lyric feeling. such poems, which are very common, may be called monologue lyrics or lyrical monologues. they show the naturalness of the form of the monologue, its unconscious use, its gradual recognition, and completion. forms of poetry are complemental to each other, and one who tries to be merely dramatic without appreciating the lyric spirit becomes theatric. in rendering such lyrics, the turning aside demands greater intensity of lyric feeling, otherwise it is better that they be given with simple directness to the audience. "why so pale and wan, fond lover? prythee, why so pale? will, if looking well can't move her, looking ill prevail? prythee, why so pale? "why so dull and mute, young sinner? prythee, why so mute? will, when speaking well can't win her, saying nothing do't? prythee, why so mute? "quit, quit, for shame! this will not move, this cannot take her; if of herself she will not love, nothing can make her: the d--l take her!" this poem implies a speaker who is laughing at a lover, and both speaker and listener remain distinct. its rendering seems dramatic. its jollity and good nature must be strongly emphasized and it must be directly addressed to the lover. it is still lyric, however, because the ideas and feelings are more pronounced than any distinct type of character, in either the speaker or the listener. the same is true of michael drayton's "come, let us kiss and part." this implies a situation still more dramatic. the characters of the speaker and the listener seem to be brought in immediate contact, revealing not only intense feeling, but something of their peculiarities. "since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part; nay, i have done, you get no more of me; and i am glad, yea, glad with all my heart that thus so cleanly i myself can free; shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows; and when we meet at any time again, be it not seen in either of our brows that we one jot of former love retain.-- now at the last gasp of love's latest breath, when his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, when faith is kneeling by his bed of death, and innocence is closing up his eyes, now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, from death to life thou might'st him yet recover." burns's "john anderson, my jo" has possibly more of the elements of a monologue. we must conceive the character of an old scottish wife, enter into sympathy with her love for her "jo," and fully express this to him. her love is the theme. yet it is not the feeling of any lover, but instead, that of an aged wife, a noble, a faithful and loving character of a specific type. still, though the poem can be rendered dramatically, in dialect, and with the conception of a specific type of woman, the poet realized the emotion as universal, and the specific picture is furnished only as a kind of objective means of showing the nobleness of love. some persons, in rendering it, make it so subjective that they represent the woman as talking to a mental picture of her husband, rather than to his actual presence. but it would seem that some dramatic interpretation is necessary. we do not identify ourselves completely with the thought and feeling, but rather with her situation or point of view as the source of the feeling, and certainly it may be rendered with the interest centred in her character. many other poems of burns's have a dramatic element. the failure to recognize some of his poems as monologues has possibly been the cause of some of the adverse criticism upon him. he was not insincere in "afton water." it is not a personal love poem. in fact, it expresses admiration for nature more than any other emotion. the mary in this poem is an imaginary being. dr. currie was no doubt correct when he said the poem was written in honor of mrs. stewart of stair. it may also be in honor of highland mary, as the poet's brother, gilbert, thought. the two views will not seem inconsistent to one who knows burns's custom in writing his poems. burns frequently used this indirect or dramatic method. in situations calling only for the expression of simple friendship, he adopted the manner of a lover pouring out his feelings to his beloved, and many poems which are nothing more than celebrations of friendly and kindly relations are yet conceived as uttered by a lover. one of his last poems, written, in fact, when he was on his death-bed, was addressed to jessie lewars, the sister of a brother exciseman, a young girl who took care of the poet and of his sick wife and family during his last illness, and without whose kindness the dying poet would have lacked many comforts. in writing this poem, however, his manner still clung to him, and he expresses his gratitude in the tone of a lover. "oh, wert thou in the cauld blast on yonder lea, on yonder lea, my plaidie to the angry airt, i'd shelter thee, i'd shelter thee: or did misfortune's bitter storms around thee blaw, around thee blaw, thy bield should be my bosom, to share it a', to share it a'. "or were i in the wildest waste, of earth and air, of earth and air, the desert were a paradise if thou wert there, if thou wert there. or were i monarch o' the globe, wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, the brightest jewel in my crown wad be my queen, wad be my queen." of course, this is lyric. though not the lover of jessie, in imagination he became such, and hence the lover's feeling, though the result of an imaginary situation, completely predominates. the point, however, here is that it has a monologue form, and that we make a mistake in conceiving that every poem which burns wrote is purely personal. the monologue situation was so intensely realized by his imagination that his poetry, while lyric in form, cannot be adequately understood unless we perceive the species of dramatic element which a true understanding of the monologue should enable us to realize. burns's poems often contain dramatic elements peculiar to the monologue and must be rendered with an imaginary speaker and an imaginary listener. little conception of character is given, and, of course, the lyric element greatly predominates over all else. those poems in which he speaks directly out of his own heart in a purely lyric spirit, such as "highland mary," are more highly prized. but if we did not constantly overlook the peculiar dramatic element in some of his other poems we should doubtless appreciate them more highly. even "to a mountain daisy" and "to a field mouse" are monologues in form. coming to the consideration of more recent literature, we find in lyric poems an increasing prevalence of the objective or dramatic element. whitman's "oh, captain, my captain," seems to be the direct unburdening of the writer's overweighted heart. he does not materially differ in his feeling for lincoln from his fellow-citizens, and every one, in reading the poem aloud, adopts the emotion as his own. there is certainly no dramatic emotion in the heart of the speaker in the poem. but there is a definite figurative situation and representation of the ship of state, coming in from its long voyage,--that is, the civil war,--and a picture of lincoln, the captain, lying upon the deck. this objective element enables us to grasp the situation and more delicately suggests lincoln, whose name does not occur in the poem. it is almost impossible to separate the different forms of poetry. we can discern differences, but they are not "separable entities." the monologue is possibly as much the outgrowth of the lyric as of the dramatic spirit. it is, in fact, a union of the two. notice the title of some of browning's books: "dramatic idyls," "dramatic lyrics," "dramatic romances." mr. palgrave calls "sally in our alley," by carey, "a little masterpiece in a very difficult style; catullus himself could hardly have bettered it. in grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humor it is worthy of the ancients, and even more so from the unity and completeness of the picture presented." he neglects, however, to add that its "unity and completeness" are due to the fact that it is in form a monologue. the person addressed is indefinitely conceived, but we can hardly imagine the poem to be a speech to a company. it must therefore be imagined as spoken to some sympathetic friend. the necessity of a right conception of the person addressed was not definitely included in the monologue until browning wrote. the character of the speaker in this poem, however, is most definitely drawn, and is the centre of interest. we must adequately conceive this before understanding the spirit of the poem. then we shall be able to agree with what mr. palgrave says, not only regarding the picture presented, but the direct relationship of every figure, word, and turn of phrase as consistent with the character. sally in our alley of all the girls that are so smart there's none like pretty sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. there is no lady in the land is half so sweet as sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. her father he makes cabbage-nets and through the streets does cry 'em; her mother she sells laces long to such as please to buy 'em: but sure such folks could ne'er beget so sweet a girl as sally! she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. when she is by, i leave my work, i love her so sincerely; my master comes like any turk, and bangs me most severely-- but let him bang his bellyful, i'll bear it all for sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. of all the days that's in the week i dearly love but one day-- and that's the day that comes betwixt a saturday and monday; for then i'm drest all in my best to walk abroad with sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. my master carries me to church, and often am i blamed because i leave him in the lurch as soon as text is named; i leave the church in sermon-time and slink away to sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. when christmas comes about again o then i shall have money; i'll hoard it up, and box it all, i'll give it to my honey: i would it were ten thousand pound, i'd give it all to sally; she is the darling of my heart, and she lives in our alley. my master and the neighbors all make game of me and sally, and, but for her, i'd better be a slave and row a galley; but when my seven long years are out o then i'll marry sally,-- o then we'll wed, and then we'll bed, but not in our alley! all these poems show the necessity for classification as lyric monologues; that is, poems lyric in every sense of the word, which yet have a certain dramatic or objective form peculiar to the monologue to give definiteness and point. the reader, however, must be very careful not to turn lyrics into monologues. the pure lyric should be rendered subjectively, neither as dramatic, on the one hand, nor as oratoric on the other. to render a lyric as a dramatic monologue is as bad as to give it as a speech. the discussion of the peculiar differences between the lyric and the monologue, and the discrimination of lyric monologues as a special class, should suggest the great variety of lyrics and monologues, how nearly they approach and how widely they differ from each other. whether a poem is a lyric or a monologue must be decided without regard to types or classifications, except in so far as comparison may throw light upon the general nature and spirit of the poetry. different forms are often used to interpret each other, and the spirit of nearly all may be combined in one poem. a peculiar type of the monologue, found occasionally in recent literature, may be called the epic monologue. tennyson's "ulysses" seems at first, in form at least, a monologue. ulysses speaks throughout in character, and addresses his companions. but we presently find that ulysses stands for the spirit of the race. he is not an individual, but a type, as he was in homer, though he is a different type in tennyson; and the poem typifies the human spirit advancing from its achievements in the art and philosophy of greece into a newer world. western civilization is prefigured in this poem, and ulysses meeting again the great achilles symbolizes the spirit of mankind once more entering upon new endeavors, these being represented by achilles. "ulysses" is thus allegoric or epic. the monologue elements are but a part of the objective form that gives it unity and character. the same is true of "sir galahad." while sir galahad is the speaker, and the poem is in form a monologue, yet to regard him as a mere literal character would make him appear egotistic and boastful, and this would totally pervert the poem. the knight stands for an ideal human soul. every person identifies himself with sir galahad, but not in the dramatic sense. while in the form of a monologue, it is, nevertheless, allegoric or epic, and the search for the holy grail is given in its most suggestive and spiritual significance. if the monologue is a true literary form, it has not been invented. if it is only a mechanism, such as the rondeau, it is unworthy of prolonged discussion; but that it is a true literary form is proven by the fact that it necessarily co-ordinates with the lyric, epic, and dramatic forms of literature. these show that it is not mechanical or isolated, but as natural as any poetic or literary form. that the monologue is fundamental, no one can doubt who has listened to a little child talking to an imaginary listener, or telephoning in imagination to santa claus. that the monologue can reveal profound depths of human nature, no one familiar with browning can deny. that the form and the spirit of the monologue are almost universal, no one who has looked into english literature can fail to see. this power of the monologue to unite and enrich other phases or forms of literature proves that it is an essential dramatic form, and that its use by recent authors cannot be regarded as a mere desire to be odd. the fact that a story is told by a single speaker does not necessarily make a poem a monologue. longfellow's "paul revere's ride" is told by the old innkeeper, but the only indication of this is in the opening clause, "listen, my children." there is hardly another word in the story that takes color from his individual character. the poem is simply a narrative, and the same is true of all "the tales of a wayside inn." mr. chesterton calls "muléykeh" and "clive," by browning, "possibly the two best stories in poetry told in the best manner of story-telling." now, are these poems stories or monologues? they are both of them monologues. the chief interest is not in the events, but in the characters portrayed. every event, every word, and every phrase has the coloring of human motives and experience. the events of "muléykeh" from the narrative point of view are few. muléykeh, or pearl, is the name of a beautiful horse belonging to hóseyn, a poor arab. the rich duhl offers the price of a thousand camels for muléykeh, but his offer is rejected. he steals pearl by night. hóseyn is awakened and pursues on another horse. he sees that "dog, duhl," does not know how to ride muléykeh, and shouts to the fellow what to do to get better speed. the thief takes the hint, and touching the "right ear" and pressing with the foot pearl's "left flank," escapes. his neighbors "jeered him" for not holding his tongue, when he might easily have had her. "'and beaten in speed!' wept hóseyn: 'you never have loved my pearl.'" this poem is in the form of a story, but it is colored not only by the character of the arab and his well-known love of a horse, but by a narrator who can reveal the character and the peculiar love of the weeping hóseyn. any one reading the poem aloud must feel that though browning may have intended it as a story, he was so affected by the dramatic point of view, that it is in spirit, though not in form, essentially a monologue. if there is any doubt about "muléykeh," there can be none that "clive" is a monologue. "clive" may seem to some to be involved. why did not browning make his hero tell his own story? because it was better to take another person, one not so strong, and thus to reveal the impressions which clive's deed makes upon the average man. such a man's quotation of clive's words can be made more exciting and dramatic in its expression. it is difficult at times to decide whether a story is a monologue or a mere narrative. but, in general, when a story receives a distinct coloring from a peculiar type of character, even though in the form of a narrative, it may be given with advantage as a monologue. its general spirit is best interpreted by this conception. "hervé riel," for example, seems at first a mere story, but it has a certain spirited and dramatic movement, and though there is no hint of who the speaker is, it yet possesses the unity of conversation and of the utterance of some specific admirer of "hervé riel." this may be browning himself. he wrote the poem and gave it to a magazine,--a rare thing with browning,--and sent the proceeds to the sufferers in the french commune; hence, its french subject and its french spirit. the narrator appears to be a frenchman; at least he is permeated with admiration for the noble qualities in the french character at a time when part of the world was criticizing france, if not sneering at it on account of the victory of the germans and the chaos of the commune. one who compares its rendition as an impersonal story with a rendering when conceived by a definite character, by one who realizes the greatness of the forgotten hero of france, will perceive at once the spirit and importance of the monologue. one must look below mere phrases or verbal forms to understand the nature or spirit of the monologue. the monologue is primarily dramatic, and the word "dramatic" need hardly be added to it any more than to a play, because the idea is implied. whatever may be said regarding the monologue, certainly the number has constantly increased of those who appreciate the importance of this form in art, which, if browning did not discover, he extended and elevated. we can hardly open a book of modern poetry which is not full of monologues. kipling's "barrack-room ballads" are all monologues. there is a rollicking, grotesque humor in "fuzzy-wuzzy" that makes it at first resemble a ballad, as it is called by the author, but it interests because of its truthful portrayal of the character of a generous soldier. kipling is dramatic in every fibre. he even portrays the characters of animals, and certain of his animal stories are practically monologues. what a conception of the camel is awakened by "oonts!" "rikki-tikki-tavi" awakens a feeling of sympathy for the little mongoose. in his portrayal of animals, kipling even reproduces the rhythm of their movements. the very words they are supposed to utter are given in the character of the army mule, the army bullock, and the elephants. all kipling's sketches and so-called ditties, or "barrack-room ballads," are practically dramatic monologues. to render vocally or even to understand kipling requires some appreciation of the peculiarities of the monologue. the duke of connaught asked kipling what he would like to do. the author replied, "i should like to live with the army on the frontier and write up tommy atkins." monologue after monologue has appeared with tommy atkins as a character type. the monologue was almost the only form of art possible for "ballads" or "ditties" or studies of unique types of character in such situations. all poetry, according to aristotle, expresses the universal element in human nature. lyric, epic, and dramatic writing alike must become poetic by such an intense realization of an idea, situation, or character that the soul is lifted into a realization of the emotions of the race. some forget this in studying the differences between lyric and dramatic poetry. it is not the lyric alone that idealizes human experience and universalizes emotion. the study of kipling's "mandalay" especially illustrates the differences between the lyric and the dramatic spirit, and their necessary union in the portrayal of human experience. this is both a lyric and a monologue. it has a dramatic character. a british soldier in a specific place, london, is talking to some one who can appreciate his feeling, and every word is true to the character speaking and to the situation. but this dramatic element does not interfere with, but on the contrary aids, the realization and expression of a profoundly lyric feeling and spirit. the soldier reveals his love,--love deeper than racial prejudices,--and though "there aren't no ten commandments" in the land of his beloved, he feels the universal emotion in the human heart, a profound love that is superior to any national bound or racial limit. in the poem this love dominates everything,--the rhythm, the color of the voice. he even turns from his hearer, and sees far away the vision of the old moulmein pagoda, and the suddenness of the dawn, coming up "... like thunder outer china 'crost the bay!" the fact that poetry expresses the "universal element in human nature" is true not only of lyric poetry, but also of dramatic poetry; and in the noblest exaltation of emotion, lyric, dramatic, and epic elements coalesce. it is the affinity of the monologue with lyric and epic poetry that proves its own specific character. the fact that there can be a lyric, epic, and narrative monologue, proves its naturalness. many of america's most popular writers have adopted the monologue as their chief mode of expression. james whitcomb riley's sketches in the hoosier dialect present the hoosier point of view with a homely and sympathetic character as speaker. even his dialect is but an aspect of the types of character conceived. the centre of interest is not always in the emotion or the ideas, but in the type of person that is the subject of a monologue. the same is true of the poems by the late dr. drummond of montreal. the peculiar french-canadian dialect was never so well portrayed; but this is only accidental. the chief interest lies in his creation or realization of types of character. the artistic form is the monologue, however conscious or unconscious may have been the author's adoption of the form. a recent popular book, "the second mrs. jim," uses a series of monologues as the means of interpreting a new kind of heroine, the mother-in-law. the centre of interest being in this character, the author adopted a series of eight monologues with the same listener, a friend to whom mrs. jim unfolds her inmost heart. with this person she can "come and talk without its bein' spread all over the township." she remarks once that she took something she wanted to be told to a neighbor who was a "good spreader, just as you're the other kind." all the conditions of the monologue are complied with; the situation changes, sometimes being in mrs. jim's house, but four or five times in that of her friend. speaker and listener are always the same. the author wishes to centre attention upon the character of the speaker, her common-sense, her insight into human nature, her skill in managing jim, and especially the boys; hence a listener is chosen who will be discreet and say but little, and who is in full sympathy with the speaker. there is little if any plot; but while mrs. jim narrates what has happened in the meantime, it is her character, her insight, her humor, her point of view and mode of expression, in which the chief interest centres. this book might be called a narrative monologue, but the narrative is of secondary importance; the centre of interest lies in the portrayal of a character. the use of the monologue as a literary form has grown every year, and no reason can be seen why its adoption or application may not go on increasing until it becomes as truly a recognized literary form as the play. the varieties that can be found from the epic monologue "ulysses" of tennyson to such a popular poem as "griggsby's station" by james whitcomb riley, indicate the uses to which the monologue can be turned and its importance as a form of poetry. the fact that we meet a number of monologues before browning's time shows the naturalness and the necessity of this dramatic form; yet it is only in browning that the monologue becomes profoundly significant. browning remains the supreme master of the monologue. here we find the deepest interpretation of the problems of existence, and the expression of the depths of human character. so strongly did this form fit his great personality and conception of art that his plays cannot compare with his monologues. it was by means of the monologue that he made his deepest revelations. it is safe to say that, without his adoption of the monologue, the best of his poetry would never have been written; and where else in literature can we find such interpretation of hypocrisy? where else can we find a more adequate suggestion of the true nature of human love, especially the interpretation of the love of a true man, except in browning? who can thoroughly comprehend the spirit of the middle part of the nineteenth century, and get a key to the later spiritual unfolding, without studying this great poet's interpretation of the burden of his time? who can contemplate, even for a few moments, some good example of this dramatic form, especially one of browning's great monologues, and not feel that this overlooked form is capable of revealing and interpreting phases of character which cannot be interpreted even by the play or the novel? one form of art should never be compared with another. no form of art can ever be substituted for the play in revealing human action and motive, or even for the novel, with its deep and suggestive interpretation of human life. while the monologue will never displace any other form of art, the fact that it can interpret phases of human life and character which no other mode of art can express, proves it to be a distinct form and worthy of critical investigation. its recognition constitutes one of the phases of the development of art in the nineteenth century, and it is safe to say that it will remain and occupy a permanent place as a literary form. we must not, however, exaggerate its importance on the one hand, nor on the other too readily pronounce it to be a mere incident and passing oddity. its instinctive employment by leading authors, those with a message and philosophy of life, proves that its true nature and possibilities deserve study. part ii dramatic rendering of the monologue ix. necessity of oral rendition the monologue, in common with all forms of literature, but especially with the drama, implies something more than words,--only its verbal shell can be printed. as the expression of a living character, it necessarily requires the natural signs of feeling, the modulations of the voice, and the actions of the body. after all questions regarding speaker, hearer, person spoken of, place, connection, subject, and meaning have been settled, the real problem of interpretation begins. the result of the reader's study of these questions must be revealed in the first word or phrase he utters as speaker. since the poem may be unknown to his auditors, each point must be made clear to them, each question answered, by the suggestive modulations of his voice and the expressive action of his body. this is the real problem of the dramatic artist, and without its solution he can give no interpretation. the long meditation over a monologue, the serious questionings and comparisons, are not enough. he must have a complete comprehension of all the points enumerated,--but this is only the beginning. he must next discover the bearings of the supposed speaker, the attitude of his mind, his feelings and motives. to do this, the reader must carefully study those things which the writer could only suggest or imply in words. the poem must be re-created in his imagination. his feeling must be more awake, if possible, than that of the author. in one sense, the terms "vocal expression" and "vocal interpretation of literature," are a misuse of words. the histrionic presentation of a play is not, strictly speaking, a vocal interpretation, nor an interpretation by action. vocal modulations, motions, and attitudes, the movements of living men and women, are all implied in the very conception of a drama. the voice and action are only the completion of the play. the same is true of the monologue. the rendering of it is not an adjunctive performance, not a mere extraneous decoration. it is more than a personal comment; to render a monologue is to make it complete. "words," said emerson, "are fossilized poetry." if a monologue is fossilized poetry, its true rendering should restore the original being to life. the written or printed monologue is like an empty garment, to be understood only as it is worn. a living man inside the garment will show the adaptation of all its parts at once. the presentation of a play or of a monologue is its fulfilment, its completion, expressing more fully the conceptions which were in the mind of the writer himself, though with the individuality and the true personal realization of another artist. no two hamlets have ever been alike, nor ever can be alike, unless one of the two is an imitation of the other. dramatic art implies two artists,--the writer, who gives broad outlines and suggestions; and the living, sympathetic dramatic interpreter, who realizes and completes the creation. the author creates a poem and puts it into words, and the vocal interpreter then gives it life. a true vocal interpretation of the monologue, as of the play, does not require the changing of one word or syllable used by the author. it is the supplying of the living languages. words and actions are complemental languages. verbal expression is more or less intellectual. it can be recorded. it names ideas and pictures. it is composed of conventional symbols, and only when the words are understood by another mind can it suggest a true sequence of ideas and events. vocal expression, however, shows the attitude of the mind of the man towards these ideas. words are objective symbols of ideas. the modulations of the voice reveal the process of thinking and feeling. the word, then, in all cases, implies the living voice. it is but an external form: the voice reveals the life. action shows, possibly, even more than tones do, the character of the man, his relations, his "bearings," his impressions or points of view. these three languages are, accordingly, living witnesses. one of them is not complete, strictly speaking, without the others, and the artistic rendering of a monologue is simply taking the objective third which the author gives, and which can be printed, and supplying the subjective two-thirds which the imagination of the reader must create and realize from the author's suggestion. all printed language is but a part of one of these three languages, which belong together in an organic unity. in the very nature of the case, the better the writing, the greater the suggestion of the modulations of voice and body. the highest literature is that which suggests life itself, and a living man has a beaming eye, a smiling face, a moving body, and a voice that modulates with every change in idea and feeling. no process has ever been able to record the complexity of these natural languages. their co-ordination depends upon dramatic instinct. as the play always implies dramatic action, as the mind must picture a real scene and the characters must move and speak as animated beings before there can be the least appreciation of its nature as a play, so the monologue also implies and suggests a real scene or moment of human life. the monologue is an artistic whole, and must be understood as a whole. each part must be felt to be like the limb of a tree, a part of an organism. as each leaf on the tree quivers with the life hidden in trunk and root, so each word of the monologue must vibrate with the thought and feeling of the whole. hence, the interpreter of the monologue must command all the natural, expressive modulations of voice and body. he must have imagination and insight into human motives, and his voice and body must respond to this insight and understanding. he must know the language of pause, of touch, of change of pitch, of inflection, of the modulation of resonance, of changes in movement. he must realize, consciously or subconsciously, the importance of a look, of a turn of the head, of a smile, of a transition of the body, of a motion of the hand; in brief, throughout all the complex parts constituting the bodily organism he should be master of natural action, which appeals directly to the eye and precedes all speech. every inflection must be natural; every variation of pitch must be spontaneous; every emotion must modulate the color of the voice; every attitude of the interpreter must be simple and sustained. he must have what is known as the "mercurial temperament" to assume every point of view and assimilate every feeling. the first great law of art is consistency, hence all the parts of a higher work of art must inhere, as do all parts of a plant or flower; but this unity and consistency should not be mechanical or artificial. delivery can never be built; it must grow. true expression must be spontaneous and free. one must enjoy a monologue; one must live it. every act or inflection must suggest a dozen others that might be given. the fulness of the life within, in thinking and feeling, must be delicately suggested. the most important point to be considered is a suggestion of the reality of life and the intensity of feeling. the interpreter must study nature. he must speak as the bird sings, not mechanically, but out of a full heart, yet not chaotically or from random impulses. all his movements must come, like the blooming of the rose, from within outward; but this can only result from meditation and command of mind, body, and voice. "everything in nature," said carlyle, "has an index finger pointing to something beyond it"; so every phrase, every word, action, or pause, every voice modulation, must have a relation to every other modulation. in the art of interpreting the monologue, which is a different art from the writing of one, all must be as much like nature as possible. yet this likeness is secured, not by imitation or by reproducing external experiences, but by sympathetic identification and imaginative realization. every art has a technique. the modulations of the voice and the actions of the body must be directly studied, or there can be no naturalness. meaningless movements and modulations lead to mannerisms. the reader must know the value of every action of voice or body, and so master them that he can bring them all into a kind of subconscious unity for the expression of the living realization of a thought or situation. the interpreter must use no artificial methods, but must study the fundamental principles of the expressive modulations of voice and body and supplement these by a sympathetic observation of nature. the questions to be settled by the reader have been shown by the analysis of the structure of the monologue. he must first consider the character which he is to impersonate, and his conception of it must be definite and clear as that of any actor in a play. in one sense, conception of character is more important in the monologue than in the play, on account of the fact that the speaker stands alone, and the monologue is only one end of a conversation. in a play the actor is always associated with others; has some peculiarity of dress; has freedom of movement, and his character is shown by others. he is only one of many persons in a moving scene, and often fills a subordinate place. but in the monologue, the interpreter is never subordinate, and has few accessories, or none. he must not only reveal the character that is speaking, but also indicate the character of the supposed listener. he must suggest by simple sounds and movements, not by make-up or artificial properties. thus the interpretation of a monologue is more difficult than that of a play. the actor has long periods of listening when another is speaking, so that he has better opportunities to show the impression produced upon him by each idea. the interpreter of a monologue must often show that he, too, is listening, and express the impression received from another. to illustrate the necessity of the vocal rendering of a monologue and the peculiar character of the interpretation needed, take one of the simplest examples, a humorous monologue of douglas jerrold's, one of "mrs. caudle's curtain lectures." take, for example, the lecture she gives after mr. caudle has lent an umbrella: mr. caudle has lent an acquaintance the family umbrella bah! that's the third umbrella gone since christmas. "what were you to do?" why, let him go home in the rain, to be sure. i'm very certain there was nothing about him that could spoil. take cold, indeed! he doesn't look like one of the sort to take cold. besides, he'd have better taken cold than taken our only umbrella. do you hear the rain, mr. caudle? i say, do you hear the rain? and as i'm alive, if it isn't st. swithin's day! do you hear it against the windows? nonsense; you don't impose upon me. you can't be asleep with such a shower as that! do you hear it, i say? oh, you do hear it! well, that's a pretty flood, i think, to last for six weeks; and no stirring all the time out of the house. pooh! don't think me a fool, mr. caudle. don't insult me. he return the umbrella! anybody would think you were born yesterday. as if anybody ever did return an umbrella! there--do you hear it! worse and worse! cats and dogs, and for six weeks, always six weeks. and no umbrella! i should like to know how the children are to go to school to-morrow? they shan't go through such weather, i'm determined. no; they shall stop at home and never learn anything--the blessed creatures!--sooner than go and get wet. and when they grow up, i wonder who they'll have to thank for knowing nothing--who, indeed, but their father? people who can't feel for their own children ought never to be fathers. but i know why you lent the umbrella. oh, yes, i know very well. i was going out to tea at dear mother's to-morrow--you knew that; and you did it on purpose. don't tell me; you hate me to go there, and take every mean advantage to hinder me. but don't you think it, mr. caudle. no, sir; if it comes down in buckets-full, i'll go all the more. no; and i won't have a cab. where do you think the money's to come from? you've got nice high notions at that club of yours. a cab, indeed! cost me sixteenpence at least--sixteenpence, two-and-eight-pence, for there's back again. cabs, indeed! i should like to know who's to pay for 'em; i can't pay for 'em, and i'm sure you can't, if you go on as you do; throwing away your property, and beggaring your children--buying umbrellas! do you hear the rain, mr. caudle? i say, do you hear it? but i don't care--i'll go to mother's to-morrow; i will; and what's more, i'll walk every step of the way,--and you know that will give me my death. don't call me a foolish woman, it's you that's the foolish man. you know i can't wear clogs; and with no umbrella, the wet's sure to give me a cold--it always does. but what do you care for that? nothing at all. i may be laid up, for what you care, as i daresay i shall--and a pretty doctor's bill there'll be. i hope there will! i shouldn't wonder if i caught my death; yes: and that's what you lent the umbrella for. of course!... men, indeed!--call themselves lords of the creation!--pretty lords, when they can't even take care of an umbrella! i know that walk to-morrow will be the death of me. but that's what you want--then you may go to your club and do as you like--and then, nicely my poor dear children will be used--but then, sir, you'll be happy. oh, don't tell me! i know you will. else you'd never have lent the umbrella!... the children, too! dear things! they'll be sopping wet; for they shan't stop at home--they shan't lose their learning; it's all their father will leave 'em, i'm sure. but they shall go to school. don't tell me i said they shouldn't: you are so aggravating, caudle; you'd spoil the temper of an angel. they shall go to school; mark that. and if they get their deaths of cold, it's not my fault--i didn't lend the umbrella. the peculiar character of mrs. caudle must be definitely conceived, and the interpreter must express her feelings and reveal with great emphasis the impressions produced upon her, for these are the very soul of the rendering. the sudden awakening of ideas in her mind, or the way she receives an impression, must be definitely shown, for such manifestations are the chief characteristics of a monologue. such mental action is the one element that makes the delivery of a monologue differ from that of other forms of literature. the fact that one end of the conversation is omitted, or only echoed, concentrates our attention upon the workings of mrs. caudle's mind. the interpreter must vividly portray the arrival of every idea, the horrors with which she contemplates every successive conjecture. the reader must express mrs. caudle's astonishment after she has found out mr. caudle's offence. "'what were you to do?'" is no doubt an echo of the question made by mr. caudle. sarcastic surprise possesses her at the very thought of his asking such a question. "let him go home in the rain, to be sure," is given with positiveness, as if it settled the whole matter. "take cold, indeed!" is also, no doubt, a sarcastic echo of mr. caudle's words. the abrupt explosion and extreme change from the preceding indicates clearly her repetition of mr. caudle's words. the pun: "he'd have better taken cold than taken our umbrella," may sound like a jest, but with mrs. caudle it is too sarcastic for a smile. mrs. caudle must "hear the rain" and appear startled. the thought of the following day causes sudden and extreme change of feeling, face, and voice. her wrath is aroused to a high pitch when caudle snores or gives some evidence that he is asleep, and she is most abrupt and bitter in: "nonsense; you don't impose upon me; you can't be asleep with such a shower as that." she repeats her question with emphasis. then there must have been some groan or assent from poor caudle, which is shown by a change of pitch and a sarcastic acceptance of his answer, "oh, you _do_ hear it!" presently, mr. caudle causes another explosion by evidently suggesting that the borrower would return the umbrella, "as if anybody ever did return an umbrella!" a dramatic imagination can easily realize the continuity of thought in mrs. caudle's mind, her expression of profound grief over the poor children, the sudden thought of "poor mother" that awakens in her the reason for his doing the terrible deed, and her self-pity. every change must be expressed decidedly, to show the working of her mind. such a monologue is decidedly dramatic, and to interpret it requires vivid imagination, quick perceptions, a realization of the relation of a specific type of character to a distinct situation and the interaction of situation and character upon each other. the interpreter must have a very flexible voice and responsive body. he must have command of the technique of expression and be able to suggest depth of meaning. it is easy enough to study a monologue superficially, and find its meaning for ourselves in a vague way, sufficient to satisfy us for the moment, but there is necessity for more study when we attempt to make the monologue clear and forcible to others. the interpreter will discover, when he tries to read the monologue aloud, that his subjective studies were crude and inconclusive. he will find difficulties in most unexpected places; but as he contemplates the work with dramatic instinct, or imaginative and sympathetic attention to each point, new light will dawn upon him. there is need always for great power of accentuation. discoveries should be sudden, and the connections vigorously sustained. the modulations of the voice must often be extreme, while yet suggesting the utmost naturalness. the length and abruptness of the inflections must change very suddenly. there must be breaks in the thought, with a startled discovery of many points, and extreme changes in pitch to show these. some parts should go very slowly, while others should have great quickness of movement. any serious monologue will serve to illustrate the necessity of vocal expression for its interpretation. take, for example, browning's "tray," and express the strong contrasts by the voice. tray sing me a hero! quench my thirst of soul, ye bards! quoth bard the first: "sir olaf, the good knight, did don his helm and eke his habergeon ..." sir olaf and his bard.--! "that sin-scathed brow" (quoth bard the second), "that eye wide ope as though fate beckoned my hero to some steep, beneath which precipice smiled tempting death...." you too without your host have reckoned! "a beggar-child" (let's hear this third!) "sat on a quay's edge: like a bird sang to herself at careless play, and fell into the stream. 'dismay! help, you the stander-by!' none stirred. "bystanders reason, think of wives and children ere they risk their lives. over the balustrade has bounced a mere instinctive dog, and pounced plumb on his prize. 'how well he dives! "'up he comes with the child, see, tight in mouth, alive too, clutched from quite a depth of ten feet--twelve, i bet! good dog! what, off again? there's yet another child to save? all right! "'how strange we saw no other fall! it's instinct in the animal. good dog! but he's a long while under: if he got drowned i should not wonder-- strong current, that against the wall! "'here he comes, holds in mouth this time --what may the thing be? well, that's prime! now, did you ever? reason reigns in man alone, since all tray's pains have fished--the child's doll from the slime!' "and so, amid the laughter gay, trotted my hero off,--old tray,-- till somebody, prerogatived with reason, reasoned: 'why he dived, his brain would show us, i should say. "'john, go and catch--or, if needs be, purchase that animal for me! by vivisection, at expense of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, how brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!'" this short poem well illustrates browning's peculiar spirit and earnestness, and also the strong hold which his chosen dramatic form had upon him. it was written as a protest against vivisection. browning represents the speaker as one seeking for an expression among the poets of the true heroic spirit. "bard the first" opens with the traditions and spirit of knighthood, but the speaker interrupts him suddenly in the midst of his first sentence, implying by his tone of disgust that such views of heroism are out of date. the second bard begins in the spirit of a later age, "'that sin-scathed brow ... that eye wide ope, ...'" and starts to portray a hero facing death on some precipice, but the speaker again interrupts. he is equally dissatisfied with this type of hero found in the pages of byron or bret harte. when the third begins--"a beggar child,"--the speaker indicates a sudden interest, "let's hear this third!" the speech of the third bard must be given with greater interest and simplicity, and in accordance with the spirit of the age,--the change from the extravagant to the perfectly simple and true, from the giant in his mail, or the desperado, to just a little child and a dog. approval and tenderness should be shown by the modulations of the voice. long, abrupt inflections express the excitement resulting from the discovery that the child has fallen into the stream, "dismay! help." then observe the sarcastic reference to human selfishness, and, in tender contrast to the action of the bystanders, old tray is introduced, followed by the remarks of the on-lookers and their patronizing description of the dog's conduct. notice that the quotation is long, and that the point of view of the careless bystanders is preserved. the spirit of these bystanders is given in their own words until they laugh at old tray's pains and blind instinct in fishing up the child's doll from the stream. now follows the real spirit of bard the third, who portrays the sympathetic admiration for the dog. "'and so, amid the laughter gay,'" requires a sudden change of key and tone-color to express the intensity of feeling and the general appreciation of the mystery of "a mere instinctive dog." the poem closes with an example of the cold, analytic spirit of the age, that hopes to settle the deepest problems merely by experiment. "'by vivisection, at expense, of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, how brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!'" the student will soon discover that the monologue is not only a new literary or poetic form, but that it demands a new histrionic method of representation. the monologue should be taken seriously. it is not an accidental form, the odd freak of some peculiar writer. browning has said that he never intended his poetry to be a substitute for an after-dinner cigar. a similar statement is true of all great monologues. a few so-called monologues on a low plane can be understood and rendered by any one. every form of dramatic art has its caricature and perversion. burlesque seems necessary as a caricature of all forms of dramatic art and so there are burlesques of monologues. these, however, must not blind the eyes to the existence of monologues on the highest plane. many monologues, though short and seemingly simple, probe the profoundest depths of the human soul. such require patient study; imagination, sympathetic insight, and passion are all necessary in their interpretation. x. actions of mind and voice the complex and difficult language of vocal expression cannot, of course, be explained in such a book as this, but there are a few points which are of especial moment in considering the monologue. all vocal expression is the revelation of the processes of thinking or the elemental actions of the mind. the meaning of the expressive modulations of the voice must be gained from a study of the actions of the mind and their expression in common conversation. while words are conventional symbols, modulations of the voice are natural signs, which accompany the pronunciation of words, and are necessary elements of natural speech. such expressive modulations of the voice as inflections are developed in the child before words. hence, vocal expression can never be acquired from mechanical rules or by imitation. as the monologue reveals primarily the thinking and feeling of a living character, it affords a very important means of studying vocal expression. in all dramatic work there is a temptation to assume merely outward bearings and characteristics, attitudes, and tones without making the character think. the monologue is a direct revelation of the mind and can be interpreted only by naturally expressing the thought. the interpreter of the monologue must reveal the point of view of his character, and must show the awakening or arrival of every idea. all changes in point of view, the simplest transitions in feeling and impressions produced by an idea, must be suggested. the mental life, in short, must be genuinely and definitely revealed by the actions of voice and body. the first sign or expression of life is rhythm. all life begins and ends in rhythm, and accordingly, rhythm is the basis of all naturalness. in vocal expression the rhythmic process of thinking, the successive focussing and leaping of the mind from idea to idea, must be revealed by the rhythmic alternation in speech of pause and touch. without these, genuine thinking cannot be expressed in speaking. the pause indicates the stay of attention; the touch locates or affirms the centre of concentration. the mind receives an impression in silence, and speech follows as a natural result. the interpretation of a poem or any work of literature demands an intensifying of the processes of thinking, and the pause and touch constitute the language by which this increase of thinking is expressed. a language is always necessary to the completion or, at least, to the accentuation of, any mental action. the impression received from each successive idea must be so vivid as to dominate the rhythm of breathing, and the expansion and other actions of the body. the progressive movement of mind from idea to idea implies consequent variation and discrimination more or less vigorous. this is revealed by change of pitch in passing from idea to idea or phrase to phrase, and the extent of this variation is due, as a rule, to the degree of discrimination in thinking. in the employment of these three modulations, pause, touch, and change of pitch, each implies the others. the degree of change in pitch and the vigor of touch justify the length of pause. lengthening the pause without increasing the touch suggests tameness, sluggishness, or dullness of thought. notice the long pauses, the intense strokes of the voice, and the decided changes of pitch harmoniously accentuated, which are employed to indicate the depth of passion in rendering "in a year" (p. ). pauses are of special importance in a monologue. this woman shows by long pauses and abrupt changes her struggle to comprehend the real meaning of the coldness of the man whom she loves,--to whom she has given all. the touch and the changes of pitch show the abruptness and the intensity of her passion. the careful student will further perceive an inflection in conversation, or change of pitch, during the utterance of the central vowel of each word, and a longer inflection in the word standing for a central idea. inflections show the relations of ideas to each other, the logical method, the relative value of centres of attention, and the like. marked changes of topics, for example, will be indicated by a long inflection upon the key-word. in rendering browning's "one way of love," the word "rose" in the first line is given saliency. it is the centre of his first effort. note the long pause followed by decided rising inflections on the words: "she will not turn aside?..." succeeded by a pause with a firm fall,-- "alas! let them lie...." in the second stanza, note the falling inflection upon "lute," which introduces a new theme, a new endeavor to win her love. then follows another disappointment with suspensive or rising inflections denoting surprise with agitation, and then new realization one way of love all june i bound the rose in sheaves. now, rose by rose, i strip the leaves and strow them where pauline may pass. she will not turn aside? alas! let them lie. suppose they die? the chance was they might take her eye. how many a month i strove to suit these stubborn fingers to the lute! to-day i venture all i know. she will not hear my music? so! break the string; fold music's wing: suppose pauline had bade me sing! my whole life long i learn'd to love. this hour my utmost art i prove and speak my passion--heaven or hell? she will not give me heaven? 'tis well! lose who may--i still can say, those who win heaven, bless'd are they! of failure with a falling inflection indicating submission. the same is true of the word "love" in the last stanza which brings one to the climax of the poem. this has a long, firm falling inflection. note the suspensive intense rise upon "heaven" and the falling on "hell." the question: "she will not give me heaven?..." reiterates the earlier questions, only with greater grief and intensity. the character of his "love," which a poor reader may slight, neglect, or wholly pervert, must suggest the nobility of the man, and the last words must reveal his intensity, tenderness, and, especially, his self-control and hopeful dignity. note in browning's "confessions" (p. ) that the rising inflections on the first words indicate doubt or uncertainty, and seem to say, "did i hear aright?" but the firm falling inflection in the answer, "ah, reverend sir, not i!" indicates that the speaker has settled the doubt and now expresses his protest against such a view of life. the inflections after this become more colloquial. there is, however, still a suggestion of earnestness as the description continues until at the last a decided inflection on the word "sweet" expresses his real conviction. though life may appear but vanity to his listener, such is not his experience. the modulations of the voice in speaking "sad and bad and mad" can show that they embody his hearers' opinions and convictions, not his own, and "it was sweet!" can be given to show that they are his own. inflection, especially in union with pause, serves an important function in indicating the saliency of specific ideas or words. note, for example, in browning's "the italian in england" that in the phrase "that second time they hunted me," there is a specific emphasis on "second." this word shows that he is talking of his many trials when in italy and the narrowness of his escape, while also indicating some other time when he was hunted by the austrians. this sentence, and especially this word "second," should be given the pointedness of conversation, and then will naturally follow the account of his escape. in this poem, browning suggests what difficulties were encountered by the italian patriots who labored to free their country from austrian rule. it is a strange and unique story told in london to some one who is planning with the speaker for italian liberty. the italian in england that second time they hunted me from hill to plain, from shore to sea, and austria, hounding far and wide her blood-hounds thro' the country-side, breathed hot an instant on my trace,-- i made, six days, a hiding-place of that dry green old aqueduct where i and charles, when boys, have plucked the fire-flies from the roof above, bright creeping thro' the moss they love: --how long it seems since charles was lost! six days the soldiers crossed and crossed the country in my very sight; and when that peril ceased at night, the sky broke out in red dismay with signal-fires. well, there i lay close covered o'er in my recess, up to the neck in ferns and cress, thinking on metternich our friend, and charles's miserable end, and much beside, two days; the third, hunger o'ercame me when i heard the peasants from the village go to work among the maize; you know, with us in lombardy, they bring provisions packed on mules, a string with little bells that cheer their task, and casks, and boughs on every cask to keep the sun's heat from the wine; these i let pass in jingling line, and, close on them, dear, noisy crew, the peasants from the village, too; for at the very rear would troop their wives and sisters in a group to help, i knew. when these had passed, i threw my glove to strike the last, taking the chance: she did not start, much less cry out, but stooped apart, one instant rapidly glanced round, and saw me beckon from the ground. a wild bush grows and hides my crypt; she picked my glove up while she stripped a branch off, then rejoined the rest with that; my glove lay in her breast. then i drew breath; they disappeared: it was for italy i feared. an hour, and she returned alone exactly where my glove was thrown. meanwhile came many thoughts: on me rested the hopes of italy. i had devised a certain tale which, when 'twas told her, could not fail persuade a peasant of its truth; i meant to call a freak of youth this hiding, and give hopes of pay, and no temptation to betray. but when i saw that woman's face, its calm simplicity of grace, our italy's own attitude in which she walked thus far, and stood, planting each naked foot so firm, to crush the snake and spare the worm-- at first sight of her eyes, i said, "i am that man upon whose head they fix the price, because i hate the austrians over us; the state will give you gold--oh, gold so much!-- if you betray me to their clutch, and be your death, for aught i know, if once they find you saved their foe. now, you must bring me food and drink, and also paper, pen and ink, and carry safe what i shall write to padua, which you'll reach at night before the duomo shuts; go in, and wait till tenebræ begin; walk to the third confessional, between the pillar and the wall, and kneeling whisper, '_whence comes peace?_' say it a second time, then cease; and if the voice inside returns, '_from christ and freedom; what concerns the cause of peace?_' for answer, slip my letter where you placed your lip; then come back happy we have done our mother service--i, the son, as you the daughter of our land!" three mornings more, she took her stand in the same place, with the same eyes: i was no surer of sun-rise than of her coming. we conferred of her own prospects, and i heard she had a lover--stout and tall, she said--then let her eyelids fall, "he could do much"--as if some doubt entered her heart,--then, passing out, "she could not speak for others, who had other thoughts; herself she knew:" and so she brought me drink and food. after four days, the scouts pursued another path; at last arrived the help my paduan friends contrived to furnish me: she brought the news. for the first time i could not choose but kiss her hand, and lay my own upon her head--"this faith was shown to italy, our mother, she uses my hand and blesses thee." she followed down to the sea-shore; i left and never saw her more. how very long since i have thought concerning--much less wished for--aught beside the good of italy. for which i live and mean to die! i never was in love; and since charles proved false, what shall now convince my inmost heart i have a friend? however, if i pleased to spend real wishes on myself--say, three-- i know at least what one should be i would grasp metternich until i felt his red wet throat distil in blood thro' these two hands. and next, --nor much for that am i perplexed-- charles, perjured traitor, for his part, should die slow of a broken heart under his new employers. last --ah, there, what should i wish? for fast do i grow old and out of strength. if i resolved to seek at length my father's house again, how scared they all would look, and unprepared! my brothers live in austria's pay --disowned me long ago, men say; and all my early mates who used to praise me so--perhaps induced more than one early step of mine-- are turning wise: while some opine "freedom grows license," some suspect "haste breeds delay," and recollect they always said, such premature beginnings never could endure! so, with a sullen "all's for best," the land seems settling to its rest. i think then, i should wish to stand this evening in that dear, lost land, over the sea the thousand miles and know if yet that woman smiles with the calm smile; some little farm she lives in there, no doubt: what harm if i sat on the door-side bench, and while her spindle made a trench fantastically in the dust, inquired of all her fortunes--just her children's ages and their names, and what may be the husband's aims for each of them. i'd talk this out, and sit there, for an hour about, then kiss her hand once more, and lay mine on her head, and go my way. so much for idle wishing--how it steals the time! to business now. the conversation takes place preliminary "to business." it is a fine example of the monologue for many reasons. it takes simply a single moment in life, a moment in this case when a turn is made from serious business into personal experiences. the speaker is probably waiting for other reformers to take active measures for the liberation of his country. in this moment, seemingly wasted, light is thrown upon the inner life of this patriot. this beautiful example of browning's best work will serve as a good illustration of the force and power of a monologue to interpret life and character and also the elements necessary to its delivery. the student will do well to thoroughly master it, noting every emphatic word and the necessity of long pauses and salient inflections to make manifest the inner thought and feeling of this man. from such a theme some may infer that the monologue portrays accidental parts of human life, but browning in this poem has given deep insight into a great struggle for liberty. such irrelevant words spoken even on the verge of what seems to us the greater business of life may more definitely indicate character, and on account of the fact that they spring up spontaneously may reveal men more completely than when they proceed "to business." note the importance of inflection in "wanting is--what?" in giving "wanting is--" there is a suspensive action of the voice with an abrupt pause, as if the speaker were going to continue with "everywhere" or something of the kind. the dash helps to indicate this. the idea is still incomplete, when the attitude of the mind totally changes, and he gives a very strong and abrupt rise in "what," as if to say: "will you, browning, with your optimistic beliefs, utter a note of despair?" the understanding of the whole poem, of the passing from one point of view to another, depends upon the way in which this abrupt change of thought in the first short line is given by the voice. wanting is--what? wanting is--what? summer redundant, blueness abundant,-- where is the blot? beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,-- framework which waits for a picture to frame: what of the leafage, what of the flower? roses embowering with naught they embower! come then, complete incompletion, o comer, pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! breathe but one breath rose-beauty above, and all that was death grows life, grows love, grows love! change of point of view, situation, or emotion is revealed by a change in the modulation of the resonance of the voice, or tone-color. in this poem, note the joyous, confident feeling in the short lines, beginning with the word "what," then after a long pause, the change in key and resonance to the regret and despair expressed in the first of the long lines. then there is a passing to a point of view above both the optimistic and pessimistic attitudes which have been contrasted. this truer attitude accepts the dark facts, but sees deeper than the external, and prays for the "comer" and the transfiguring of all despair and death into life and love. note also the importance of pause after a long falling inflection on the word "roses" to indicate an answer to the previous question. the first two words of the poem, this word, and the contrast of the three moods by tone-color are the chief points in the interpretation. read over again also "one way of love" (p. ), and note that there are not merely changes in inflection in passing from the successive questions and from disappointment to acquiescence, but change also in the texture or tone-color of the voice. this contrast in tone-color becomes still more marked in the last stanza between the vigorous suspense and disappointment in "she will not give me heaven?..." and the heroic resignation of "'tis well!" with a change of key still more marked. between these clauses there is a long pause and an extreme change of pitch which are suggestive of the intensity of his sorrow as well as of the nobility and dignity of his character. he does not exclaim contemptuously, that "the grapes are green." everywhere we find that changes in situation, dramatic points of view, imaginative relations, sympathetic attitudes of mind, or feeling resulting from whatever cause, are expressed by corresponding changes in the modulations of the texture or resonance of the tone, which may here be called tone-color. one of the most elemental characteristics of conversation is the flexible variation of the successive rhythmic pulsations, that is to say, the movement. this variation is especially necessary in all dramatic expression. one clause will move very slowly, and show deliberative thinking, importance, weight, a more dignified point of view or firm control; another will be given rapidly, as indicative of triviality, mere formality, uncontrollable excitement, lack of weight and sympathy, or of subordination and disparagement. a slow movement indicates what is weighty and important; a rapid one excitement or what is unimportant. these are the elements of naturalness or the expressive modulations of the voice in every-day conversation. for the rendering of no other form of literature is the study and mastery of these elements so necessary as in that of the monologue. monologues are so infinitely varied in character, they reproduce so definitely all the elements of conversation, even requiring them to be accentuated; they embody such sudden transitions in thought and feeling, such contrasts in the attitude of the mind, that a thorough command of the voice is necessary for their interpretation. not only must the modulations of the voice be studied to render the monologue, but a thorough study of the monologue becomes a great help in developing power in vocal expression. because of the necessary accentuation of otherwise overlooked points in vocal expression, the orator or the teacher, the reader or the actor, can be led to understand and realize more adequately those expressive modulations upon the mastery of which all naturalness in speaking depends. not only must we appreciate the distinct meaning of each of these modulations, but also that of their combination and degrees of accentuation, which indicate marked transitions in feeling and situation. in fact, no voice modulation is ever perceived in isolation. they may not all be found in a sentence, but some of them cannot be present without others. for example, touch is meaningless without pause, and a pause is justified by change of pitch. inflection and change of pitch constitute the elements of vocal form which reveal thought, and all combine with tone-color and movement, which reveal feeling and experience. naturalness is the right union and combination of all the modulations. memorabilia ah, did you once see shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to you, and did you speak to him again? how strange it seems, and new! but you were living before that, and also you are living after; and the memory i started at-- my starting moves your laughter! i crossed a moor, with a name of its own and a certain use in the world, no doubt, yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 'mid the blank miles round about: for there i picked up on the heather and there i put inside my breast a moulted feather, an eagle-feather! well, i forget the rest. read over any short monologue several times and satisfactorily locate and define the meaning of each of these modulations. observe also the great variety of changes among these modulations and their necessary union for right interpretation. take for example "memorabilia," one of browning's shortest monologues, and observe in every phrase the nature and necessity of these modulations of the voice. the reading of a volume of shelley is said to have greatly influenced browning when a boy, and this monologue is a tribute to that poet. some lover of shelley, possibly browning himself, meets one who has seen shelley face to face. he is agitated at the thought of facing one who had been in the presence of that marvellous man. note the abrupt inflections, the quick movement indicating excitement, the decided touches, and animated changes of pitch. at the seventh line a great break is indicated by a dash. the speaker seems to be going on to say: "the memory i started at must have been the greatest event of your life." but as he notes the action of the other, the contemptuous smile at his enthusiasm, perhaps a sarcastic remark about shelley, there is a sudden, abrupt pause after "started at" which is given with a rising or suspensive inflection. "my starting" has extreme change in pitch, color, and movement. astonishment is mingled with disappointment and grief. then follows a still greater transition. in the last eight lines of the poem, the speaker, after a long pause, possibly turning slightly away from the other and becoming more subjective, in a slow movement and a total change of tone-color, pays a noble, poetic, and grateful tribute to the object of his admiration. he carefully weighs every word, and accentuates his thought with long pauses, and decided touches upon the words. he gives "moor" a long falling inflection, pausing after it to suggest that he meant more than a moor, possibly all modern or english literature or poetry. he adds "... with a name of its own and a certain use in the world, no doubt," as a reference to english poetry or literature and to show that he was not ignorant of its beauties and glories. still stronger emphasis should be given to "hand's-breadth," with a pause after it, subordinating the next words, for he is trying to bring his listener indirectly up to the thought of shelley. "miles" may also receive an accent in contrast to "hand's-breadth." then there is great tenderness: "for there i picked up ..." note the change in the resonance of the voice and the low and dignified movement. there is a long inflection, followed by a pause on the word "feather" and a still longer one on the word "eagle." now follows another extreme transition. thought and feeling change. he comes back to the familiarity of conversation. he shows uncertainty or hesitation by inflection and a long pause after the word "well." he has no word of disparagement of other writers, but simply adds, "well, i forget the rest." all else is forgotten in contemplating that one precious "feather" which is, of course, shelley's poetry. it is impossible to indicate in words all the mental and emotional actions, or the modulations of the voice necessary to express them. the more complex the imaginative conditions, the more all these modulations are combined. notice that change of movement, of key, and also of tone-color combine to express extreme changes in situation, feeling, or direction of attention. when there is a very strong emphatic inflection, there is usually an emphatic pause after it. wherever there is a long pause there is always a salient change of pitch or some variation in the expression to justify it. after an emphatic pause when words are closely connected, there is always a decided subordination, and thus a whole sentence, or, by a series of such changes, an entire poem, is given unity of atmosphere, coloring, and form. no rules can be laid down for such artistic rendering; for the higher the poetry and the deeper the feeling, the less applicable is any so-called rule. only the deepest principles can be of lasting use. take, for example, browning's epilogue to "the two poets of croisic," printed also by him in his book of selections under the title of "a tale:" a tale what a pretty tale you told me once upon a time --said you found it somewhere (scold me!) was it prose or was it rhyme, greek or latin? greek, you said, while your shoulder propped my head. anyhow there's no forgetting this much if no more, that a poet (pray, no petting!) yes, a bard, sir, famed of yore, went where suchlike used to go, singing for a prize, you know. well, he had to sing, nor merely sing but play the lyre; playing was important clearly quite as singing: i desire, sir, you keep the fact in mind for a purpose that's behind. there stood he, while deep attention held the judges round, --judges able, i should mention, to detect the slightest sound sung or played amiss: such ears had old judges, it appears! none the less he sang out boldly, played in time and tune, till the judges, weighing coldly each note's worth, seemed, late or soon, sure to smile "in vain one tries picking faults out: take the prize!" when, a mischief! were they seven strings the lyre possessed? oh, and afterwards eleven, thank you! well, sir,--who had guessed such ill luck in store?--it happed one of those same seven strings snapped. all was lost, then! no! a cricket (what "cicada"? pooh!) --some mad thing that left its thicket for mere love of music--flew with its little heart on fire, lighted on the crippled lyre. so that when (ah joy!) our singer for his truant string feels with disconcerted finger, what does cricket else but fling fiery heart forth, sound the note wanted by the throbbing throat? ay and, ever to the ending, cricket chirps at need, executes the hand's intending, promptly, perfectly,--indeed saves the singer from defeat with her chirrup low and sweet. till, at ending, all the judges cry with one assent "take the prize--a prize who grudges such a voice and instrument? why, we took your lyre for harp, so it shrilled us forth f sharp!" did the conqueror spurn the creature, once its service done? that's no such uncommon feature in the case when music's son finds his lotte's power too spent for aiding soul-development. no! this other, on returning homeward, prize in hand, satisfied his bosom's yearning: (sir, i hope you understand!) --said "some record there must be of this cricket's help to me!" so, he made himself a statue: marble stood, life-size; on the lyre, he pointed at you, perched his partner in the prize; never more apart you found her, he throned, from him, she crowned. that's the tale: its application? somebody i know hopes one day for reputation thro' his poetry that's--oh, all so learned and so wise and deserving of a prize! if he gains one, will some ticket, when his statue's built, tell the gazer "'twas a cricket helped my crippled lyre, whose lilt sweet and low, when strength usurped softness' place i' the scale, she chirped? "for as victory was nighest, while i sang and played,-- with my lyre at lowest, highest, right alike,--one string that made 'love' sound soft was snapt in twain, never to be heard again,-- "had not a kind cricket fluttered, perched upon the place vacant left, and duly uttered 'love, love, love,' whene'er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone." but you don't know music! wherefore keep on casting pearls to a--poet? all i care for is--to tell him that a girl's "love" comes aptly in when gruff grows his singing. (there, enough!) we have a suggestion of the position of the speaker, a woman upon the arm of the chair of her lover or husband. how pointed and simple is the first statement: "scold me!" an apology for not remembering or for not having given more attention. the humorous or pretended effort to remember whether it was prose or rhyme, greek or latin, is given by slow, gradual inflections followed by a marked, abrupt inflection upon the word "greek," as if she were absolutely sure of that point and her memory of it definite. again, note toward the last, how the impression of his pretending not to understand causes her to give a humorous and abrupt emphasis to the point of her story. the flexibility and great variety in the modulations of the voice requisite in the interpretation of a monologue will be made clear by comparing such a monologue with some short poem which suggests a speech. byron's "to tom moore," though there is one speaker, is not a monologue. "my boat is on the shore, and my bark is on the sea; but before i go, tom moore, here's a double health to thee." it is a kind of after-dinner speech, or lyric full of feeling, an imaginative proposal by byron of a health to tom moore. but moore is not expected to say anything. byron is dominated entirely by his own mood. it is therefore quite lyric and not at all dramatic. note how intense but regular are the rhythmic pulsations, the pause and the touch. while there are changes of pitch and inflection, variety of movement and tone-color, yet all of these are used in a very simple and ordinary sense. there is none of that extreme use of inflection, pause or tone-color found in browning's "memorabilia." the difference between the modulations of the voice in a monologue and in a play should be noted. take, for example, the words of the archbishop in "henry v" regarding the character of the king. they are addressed to friends in conversation and are almost a speech. they have the force of a judicial decision and are given with a great deal of emphasis as well as with logical continuity of ideas. but this emphasis is regular and simple. it can be noted in any animated or emphatic conversation, and the argument of the speech may be studied to advantage by speakers on account of the few and salient or emphatic ideas. in rendering some monologues, however, which embody the same ideas, such as the "memorabilia" (see p. ), which has been made the central illustration of this chapter, greater range, greater abruptness in transitions, more and greater complexity of the modulations of the voice as well as sudden and strong impressions are required of the reader. he should read both passages in contrast, and note the difference in delivery. one distinct peculiarity of the monologue is the fact that it can give a past event from a dramatic point of view. note, for example, that in jean ingelow's familiar poem, "the high tide on the coast of lincolnshire," the first stanza gives us the spirit or movement of the whole poem. the first line, "the old mayor climbed the belfry tower," emphasizes the excitement. a definite situation is set before us, and we can see, too, why the events are given as belonging to the past. a vivid impression of the high tide along the whole coast of lincolnshire is afforded by its relation to one humble cottage and family. an old grandmother tells the story long after the events have blended in her mind into one lasting tragic impression. this brings the whole poem into unity, makes a distinct, concrete picture and a most impressive poetic, not to say dramatic, interpretation of the event. the author by presenting this old mother talking about her beloved daughter-in-law, elizabeth, with "her two bairns," and the excited race of the son to reach home before she went for the cows, appeals to sympathy and feeling, awakens imagination, and presents not only a vivid and specific picture, but such distinct types of character as to make the event real. the poem is a fine example of the union of lyric and dramatic imagination. the speaker becomes more and more excited and animated as she gives her memories of the successive events, but in the midst of each event relapses into grief. again and again at the close of stanzas, a single clause or line indicates her emotion, rather than her memory of the exciting events. the event is portrayed dramatically, but these last lines are decidedly lyric. after the excited calling of "elizabeth! elizabeth!" by her son the very name seems to awaken tenderness in her heart, and she utters this deep lyric conviction:-- "a sweeter woman n'er drew breath than my sonne's wife, elizabeth." the son, when he reaches home after his excited chase to save his wife, looks across the grassy lea,-- "to right, to left," and cries "ho, enderby!" for at that moment he hears the bells ring "enderby!" which seem to be the knell of his hopes. the next line, "they rang 'the brides of enderby,'" expresses the emotion of the grandmother as she recalls the effect of the bells upon her son, and possibly her own awakening to the meaning of the tune which has taken such deep hold of her imagination, and becomes naturally the central point of the calamity in her memory. the poem brings into direct contrast the excited realization of each event and her feeling over the disaster as a whole. the first is dramatic; the second, lyric. the mother realizes dramatically her son's exclamations and feelings, but the line "they rang 'the brides of enderby'" is purely lyric and expressive of her own feeling in remembrance of the danger. the climax of the dramatic movement of the story comes in the intense realization of the personal danger to herself and her son when they saw the mighty tidal wave rolling up the river lindis, which "sobbed in the grasses at our feet: the feet had hardly time to flee before it brake against the knee." then the poet does not mention the son's efforts in her behalf, the flight to the roof of their dwelling in the midst of the waves, and makes a sudden transition again from the dramatic situation to the lyric spirit as she moans with no thought of herself: "and all the world was in the sea." another sudden transition in the poem is indicated by a mere dash after "and i--" starting to relate her own experience with a loving mother's instinct she turns instead to the grief of her son,-- "... my sonne was at my side, and yet he moaned beneath his breath." this is followed by another passionate dramatic climax,-- "and didst thou visit him no more? thou didst, thou didst, my daughter deare, the waters laid thee at his doore, ere yet the early dawn was clear. thy pretty bairns in fast embrace, the lifted sun shone on thy face, down drifted to thy dwelling-place." here feeling is deepest in the speaker, and in the listener, and, of course, in the reader. the rest of the poem is a sweet and mournful lyric: "i shall never hear her more where the reeds and rushes quiver." the poem closes with a crooning over elizabeth's song as the aged woman heard it for the last time. many public readers centre their whole interest in the imitation or mere representation of this song, and all the fervor of the piece is made accidental to this. but such a method centres all attention in mere vocal skill, to the loss, if not to the perversion of its spirit. this song must not be given literally, but in the character of the aged speaker. it lives in the old mother's mind as a heart-breaking memory, and any artificial or literal rendering of it destroys the illusion or the true impression of the poem. it should be given in a very subdued tone with the least possible suggestion, if any at all, of the music of the song. the first stanza is apt also to be given out of character. it is a burst of passionate remembrance and must be given carefully as the overture embodying the spirit of the whole. when the grandmother is asked by the interlocutor regarding the story, she breaks into sudden excitement, and then gradually passes into the quieter mood of reminiscence. after that, the poem is rhythmic alternation between her memory of the exciting events, and her own experiences; in short, a co-ordination of the lyric and the dramatic spirit. the study of this poem affords a fine illustration of movement,--similar to that of a great symphony. the long pauses, sudden transitions in pitch and color, and especially the pulsations of feeling, when given in harmony illustrate the marvellous power of the human voice. xi. actions of mind and body as the monologue is a form of dramatic expression, it necessarily implies action,--the most dramatic of all languages. dramatic expression, in its very nature, implies life, and life is shown by movement. for this reason action is in some sense the primary or most necessary language required for dramatic interpretation. action is a language that belongs to the whole body. as light moves quickest in the outer world, so action,--the language that appeals to the eye--is the first appeal to consciousness. life expands,--the gleaming eye, the elevated and gravitating body, the lifted hand,--all these show character and a living or present realization of ideas, and are most important in the monologue. on account of the abrupt opening of most monologues, the first clause requires salient and decided action. the speaker must locate his hearer, and must often indicate, by some decided movement, the effect produced upon him by some previous speech which has to be imagined. as the words of the listener are not given but must be suggested, it is necessary that the action be decided. though action or pantomime always precedes speech, this precedence is especially pronounced in monologues. notice, for example, in bret harte's "in a tunnel," the look of surprise and astonishment followed by the words given with long rising inflections: "didn't know flynn?" "didn't know flynn--flynn of virginia--long as he's been 'yar? look'ee here, stranger, whar _hev_ you been? "here in this tunnel,--he was my pardner, that same tom flynn--working together, in wind and weather, day out and in. "didn't know flynn! well, that _is_ queer. why, it's a sin to think of tom flynn--tom with his cheer, tom without fear,--stranger, look 'yar! "thar in the drift back to the wall he held the timbers ready to fall; then in the darkness i heard him call--'run for your life, jake! run for your wife's sake! don't wait for me.' and that was all, heard in the din, heard of tom flynn,--flynn of virginia. "that's all about flynn of virginia--that lets me out here in the damp--out of the sun--that ar' dern'd lamp makes my eyes run. "well, there--i'm done! but, sir, when you'll hear the next fool asking of flynn--flynn of virginia--just you chip in, say you knew flynn; say that you've been 'yar." the look of wonder is sustained until there is a change to an intense, pointed inquiry: "whar _hev_ you been?" the intense surprise reveals the rough character of the speaker, a miner in a mining camp, and his admiration for flynn, who has saved his life. then note the sudden transition as he begins his story. his character must be maintained, and expressed by action through all the many transitions; but in the first clause especially there must be a pause with a long continued attitude of astonishment. action is required to present this vivid scene which is suggested by only a few words, the admiration of the speaker for flynn, who in the depths of the mine, with but a moment to decide, gives his life for another. the hero calls out "run for your wife's sake," the heart of the speaker warms with admiration and the tears come; then the rough westerner is seen brushing away his tears and attributing the water in his eyes to the "dern'd lamp." truth in depicting human nature, depth of feeling, action, character, in short, the whole meaning, is dependent upon the decided actions of the body and the inflections of the voice directly associated with these. in "the italian in england" (p. ), the word "second" not only needs emphasis by the voice, as has been shown, to indicate that the speaker has already given an account of another experience, but he may possibly throw up his hands to indicate something unusual, something beyond words in the experience he is about to relate. it is especially necessary in the monologue that action should show the discovery, arrival, or initiation of ideas. a change in the direction of attention, a new subject or current of ideas, cannot be indicated wholly by vocal expression. the mental conjectures of mrs. caudle, for example, are very pronounced, and cannot be fully expressed by the voice without action. notice how definitely action, in union with vocal expression, shows whether mrs. caudle's new impressions are due to the natural association of ideas in her mind, or to the words or conduct of caudle. the last mentioned give rise to her explosiveness, withering sarcasm, and anger. such discriminations produce the illusion of the scene. in "up at a villa--down in the city" (p. ), notice how necessary it is for the interpreter to show the direction of his attention, whether he is speaking regarding his villa or the city. note the disgust and attitude of gloom in his face and bearing as he gazes towards his villa. "over-smoked behind by the faint gray olive-trees," suggests a picture calling for admiration from us, but not from him. to him the tulip is a great "bubble of blood." all this receives a definite tone-color, and it must be borne in mind that without action of the body, the quality of the voice will not change. the emotion diffuses itself through the whole organism of the impersonator of the "person of quality," and even hands, feet and face are given a certain attitude by this emotion. contempt for the villa will depress his whole body and thus color his tone. on the contrary, when the speaker turns to the city, his face lights up. the "fountain--to splash," the "houses in four straight lines," the "fanciful signs which are painted properly,"--all these are apparently contemplated by him with such an expansion and elevation of his body as almost to cause laughter. this contrast, which is sustained through the whole monologue, can be interpreted or presented only by the actions of the body and their effect on the tone. expression of face and body are necessary to suggest the delicate changes in thinking and feeling. notice in "a tale" (p. ) that the struggle of the woman to remember is shown by action. the two lines "said you found it somewhere, ... was it prose or was it rhyme?" are not so much addressed to the listener as to herself, as she tries to remember, and she would show this by action. every subtle change in thought and feeling is indicated by a decided expression in the face. in her efforts to remember, she would possibly turn away from him at first with a bewildered look, then she might turn toward him again, as she asked him the question; but if she asked this of herself, her head would remain turned away. when she decides with a bow of the head that it is greek, note how her face would light up and possibly intimate confidence that she was right. at the close of the poem, notice the tender mischief of her glance when she refers to "somebody i know" who is "deserving of a prize." the monologue is full of the subtlest variations of point of view and thought, and these variations call for a constant play of feature. the struggle for an idea must be frankly disclosed. an interruption, a thought broken on account of a sudden leap of the mind, must be interpreted faithfully by the eyes, the face, the walk, or the body, in union with vocal expression. in the soliloquy of the "spanish cloister" (p. ), for example, notice how the whole face, head, and body of the speaker recoil at the very start on discovering brother lawrence in the garden. notice, too, the fiendish delight as he sees the accident, "there his lily snaps!" how sarcastic is his reference to the actions of brother lawrence, who, unconscious that any one is looking at him, seems to stop and shake his head in a way that leads the speaker to infer that a "myrtle-bush wants trimming:" but instantly, with a sneer he adds, "oh, that rose has prior claims." such sarcastic variations occur all through the monologue. "how go on your flowers?" is given with gleeful expectancy, and he notes with cruel joy the disappointment of brother lawrence when looking to find one "double," and chuckles to himself "strange!--and i, too, at such trouble, keep them close-nipped on the sly!" note, too, the difference in facial action when the speaker is observing brother lawrence and when conjuring up schemes to send this good man "off to hell, a manichee." another point to be noted in the study of the monologue is the giving of quotations. these, of course, are an echo of what the hearer has said, and must be rendered with care. look again at browning's "a tale," and note "cicada," which is quoted. this is followed by an interrogation, and refers to the listener's humorously sarcastic question regarding the scientific aspects of her subject. she echoes it, of course, with her own feeling of surprise, and the exclamation "pooh!" silences him so that she may go on with her story. notice how necessary action is here to enable the reader to interpret the meaning of this to the audience. quotations especially call for action as they reflect the opposition of the character of the listener to that of the speaker; they are always given with decided changes. the words only, however, and at times the ideas only, are quoted; the feeling, the impression, are all the speaker's own. quotations are merely the conversational echo of the words of another such as are frequently heard in every-day life, and demand both action and vocal expression for their true interpretation. the subject of quotations requires special attention in the monologue. they must be given, not only with decided pauses, inflections, changes of movement and variations in accentuation, and in all the modulations of the voice, but with suggestive action, changes in the direction of the eye, head, and body. in short, there must be a complete change in all the expression from what preceded, because the impression produced by an idea in the speaker's own mind is not so forcible as the effect of a word from a listener; at any rate, the impression is different. in telling our story to him, his attitude of mind, in demurring or assenting, will cause a sudden change or recoil on our part. the difference in the impressions made upon the speaker by his own ideas and by what his listener says must be indicated, and this can only be indicated by uniting the language of action and vocal expression with words. a change of idea or some remembrance awakened in our own mind comes naturally, but a sudden remark or interruption produces a more decided and definite impression upon us. the surprised look and abrupt turn of the head are necessary to show the sense of imaginative reality. observe the definite and extreme, even sudden, transitions which are made in conversation. these abrupt leaps of the mind from one subject to another are indicated by a simple turn, it may be, of the head, with sudden changes in the face, and, of course, with changes of pitch and movement. the monologue gives the best interpretation of these actions of the mind to be found in literature. as an example, note riley's "knee-deep in june." the more decided and sudden the transitions in this poem, the better. the abrupt arrival of an idea, the subtle start it gives to face or head or body, should be naturally suggested. action is especially needed in all abrupt transitions in thought and feeling. in many of the more humorous monologues, there is often a sudden pathetic touch towards the last, requiring slower movement in the action of the body. occasionally, very sudden and extreme contrasts occur. the reader must make long pauses in these cases, and accentuate strongly the action, of which vocal expression is more or less a result. as further illustrative of a sudden transition, note how in riley's monologue, "when de folks is gone," the scared negro grows more and more excited until a climax of terror is reached in the penultimate line: "wha' dat shinin' fru de front do' crack?" between this line and the last the cause of the light outside is discovered, and a complete recovery from terror to joy must be indicated. with the greatest relief he must utter the last line: "god bress de lo'd, hit's de folks got back." the study of action in the rendering of a monologue brings us to one of the most important points in all dramatic expression. no form of dramatic art is given so directly to an audience as is a story or a speech. the interpreter of a monologue must feel his audience, but not speak to it. he must address all his remarks to his imaginary listener. where shall he locate this listener, and why in that particular place? the late joseph jefferson called attention to the difference between oratory and acting. "the two arts," he said, "go hand in hand, so far as magnetism and intelligence are concerned, but there comes a point where they differ widely. the actor is, or should be, impressionable and sensitive; the orator, on the other hand, must have the power of impressing." accordingly, the orator speaks directly to his audience; the actor does not. this distinction is important. it may possibly go too far, because the orator must give his attention to his truth, must receive impressions from his ideas, and reveal his impressions to his audience. he too must be impressionable and sensitive, but his attentive and responsive attitude is always to the picture created by his own mind. he is impersonal and gives direct attention to his auditors. he receives vivid impressions from truth, and then endeavors to give these to others. in a play, on the contrary, the actor receives an impression from his interlocutor. he must give great attention to what his interlocutor is saying, and must reveal his impressions to his audience by faithfully portraying the effect of the other's thought and feeling upon himself. in the monologue the same is true. the interlocutor, however, is imagined. more imagination is called for, and greater impressionability and sensitiveness, because there is no interlocutor there for the audience to see. the hearer must judge entirely from the impressions made upon the speaker. action, therefore, is most important. the impersonator must reveal decidedly and definitely every impression made upon him, but must speak to, and act toward, his imaginary auditor, and only indirectly to his audience. the interpretation of the monologue thus brings us to a unique form of what may be called platform action, demanding specific attention. if the interpreter is not supposed to speak directly to his audience but to address an imaginary hearer, where must this imaginary hearer be located, and why there? usually somewhat to one side. only in this way can the speaker suggest his differing relations to listener and audience. the suggestion of these relations is an aspect of expression frequently overlooked. in society or on the street it is not polite to talk to any one over the shoulder, and turning the back upon a man repels him most effectively. the turning away of the body may show contempt or inattention. it may, however, also show subjectivity and indicate the fact that the man is turning his attention within to ponder upon the subject another has mentioned, or is reflecting on what he is going to say. attention is the basis of all expression, and the first cause of all action, since we turn our attention toward a person and listen to what he has to say before we speak to him. accordingly, pivotal action of the body is important in life, and is of great importance in all forms of dramatic art, whether on the stage or in the rendering of a monologue. a speaker, especially a dramatic speaker, pivots from his audience when he becomes subjective, and suggests an imaginary listener, or represents a conversation between two or more in a story. he does not do this consciously and deliberately, but from instinct. primarily, it is obedience to the dramatic instinct that causes this pivotal action. any one who will observe the natural actions of men on the street, in business, in society, or in impassioned oratory, can recognize the meaning and importance of the pivotal actions of the body. it is one of the fundamental manifestations of dramatic instinct. pivoting toward any one expresses attention and politeness. attention is the secret of politeness. to listen to another is a primary characteristic of good breeding. pivoting toward one is also indicative of emphasis. in conversation, even in walking on the street, when one has something emphatic to say he turns directly to his interlocutor, and often adds gesture; on the other hand, turning away, or failing to pivot toward some one, indicates an estimate that something is trivial or unimportant. in the delivery of a monologue there is often an object referred to which the interlocutor naturally places on one side, while he locates his listener on the other. thus, in the unemphatic parts he would turn away and not be continually "nosing his interlocutor" or talking directly to him. this would cause him to give his ideas to the audience directly or indirectly. whenever he talks emphatically, he would turn toward his interlocutor. when the object referred to is more directly in the field of attention, he would turn toward that. ruth mcenery stuart, for example, is the author of a monologue in which an old countryman talks about his son winning a "diplomy." the speaker in the monologue would naturally locate the diploma on one side and the listener on the other. it is easy to see that this pivotal action is of great importance on the stage. it is the very basis of all true stage representation. the amateur always "noses" his interlocutor. the artist is able to show all degrees of attention by the pivotal action of the body, and thus reveal to an audience the very rank of the person addressed, whether that consists in dignity of character, which makes him a special object of interest, or in a royal or conventionally superior station. that the pivotal action of the body in a monologue is especially important can be seen at once. the object of attention is an invisible listener, and the turning of the body to the side not only shows the speaker's own attention, but it helps the auditor to locate the person addressed. without this pivotal action, the reader is apt to declaim a monologue, and confuse it with a speech. the monologue is never a direct endeavor to impress an audience. only occasionally can the audience be made to stand for the person addressed. some one will ask, why at the side? because if we hold out two objects for an audience to observe, we shall put them side by side. the placing of one before the other will cause confusion or prevent the possibility of discrimination. in art, the law of rhythm, or of composition, demands that objects be distributed side by side in order to win different degrees of attention. a picture of any kind demands such an arrangement of objects as will hold the attention concentrated. an object in the background may aid the sustaining of attention upon something in the foreground. objects are placed in opposition to cause the mind to alternate from one to the other, and thus to sustain attention until it penetrates the meaning of the smallest scene. this is the soul, not only of pictorial, but of dramatic art. placing an imaginary character at the side does not make words necessarily dramatic. this may be only an external aspect of the poem. the most passionate lyrics may be given with this change of attitude because of their great subjectivity. they are often as subjective as a soliloquy. again, this turning of the body to the side does not mean that the person to whom the speaker seems to be talking is definitely represented. the listener may be located at the side for a moment, it may be unconsciously, and lost sight of almost entirely. the feeling must often absorb the speaker and pass into the most subjective lyric intensity. dramatic art must move; there must be continual progressive transitions. hence, the picture must continually change, and pivotal flexibility is especially necessary. such turning of the body can be seen in every-day conversation. the degree of attention to a listener varies in all intercourse. while talking to another, the speaker may become dominated by a subjective idea or mood and turn away; yet the listener's presence is always felt. transition to the side as expressive of attention takes place in the platform reading of a drama with several characters. in this case, the interpreter distributes the characters in various directions; but this must be done according to their importance, and as each one speaks, the person addressed must be indicated as in the monologue. hence, it is not an artificial arrangement to place the character you address somewhat to the side, but in accordance with the laws of the mind and with every-day conversation. by this placing of an imaginary listener, all degrees of attention and inattention toward another can be indicated. you can show a subjective action of the mind by pivoting naturally away from the person to whom you speak, but at the moment an idea comes to you clearly and definitely, it dominates you, and you turn towards him. in pivoting the body, or showing attention, the eye always leads. an impolite man has little control of his eyes or of his pivotal action. an embarrassed or nervous man shows his agitation especially in his eye. the polite man gives the attention of his eye, the head follows that, and then the whole body turns attentively. accordingly, the turn of the eye, the head, and the whole body must be brought into sympathetic unity. the interpreter of the monologue must have a free use of his entire body, must be able to step and move with ease in any direction. but a single step is all that is necessary, except in rare cases. the simpler the movements and attitudes of the interpreter the better, and the more impressive and suggestive will he be to the imagination of his audience. chaotic movements backward and forward will confuse the hearer's attention and fail to indicate the direction of his own, which is of vital moment. often the slightest turn of the head is all that is necessary. the interpretation of a monologue must be more suggestive in its action than that of a play. on the stage there may be many actors, and the pivotal movements of many characters toward each other must often bring a large number into unity, so that a group can express the situation by co-operative action. the attention of a hundred can be focussed on one picture or on one idea. but the interpreter of the monologue has only his own eye, head, and body to lead the attention of his auditors and to suggest the most profound impressions. in the nature of the case, accordingly, the situation of the monologue must be more simple and definite; and for the same reason, the actions must be more pronounced and sustained. the interpretation of the monologue thus calls for the ablest dramatic artist. there are many important phases of this peculiar pivotal action. the speed of the movement, for example, shows the degree of excitement. the eye only, or the eye and the head, or both with the body, may turn. each of these cases indicates a difference in the degree of attention or in the relations of the speaker to the listener. again, this pivotal action has a direct relation to the advancing of the body forward toward a listener, the gravitation of passion which shows sympathy and feeling as well as attention. the student may think such directions mechanical, especially when it is said that the body in turning must sustain its centrality, and that there must be no confusion or useless steps; but in this case the foot acts as a kind of eye, by a peculiar instinct which always indicates the proper direction, if the speaker is really thinking dramatically. the turning action of the body has been discussed more at length than the other elements of action on account of its importance in the rendering of a monologue, and also because it is usually misunderstood or entirely overlooked. there are many other expressive actions associated with this turning of the body which need discussion. they, however, belong to the subject of pantomimic expression, rather than to a general discussion of the nature of the monologue and the chief peculiarities of its interpretation. the same may be said regarding the innumerable and extremely subtle and complex actions of other parts of the body. the actions concerned in the rendering of a monologue are those associated with the every-day intercourse of men in conversation, and are often so delicate and unpronounced that an auditor will hardly notice them. he will simply feel the general impression of truthfulness. the interpreter of the monologue, for this very reason, needs to give the most careful attention to action as a language. neglect of action is the most surprising fault of modern delivery. anything like an adequate discussion of action as a language is impossible in this place. there are, however, certain dangers which call for special though brief attention. in the first place, action must never be declamatory or oratoric. swinging actions of the arms and extravagant movements of the body--possibly pardonable in oratory, on account of the great desire to impress truth upon men, to drive home a point energetically--are out of place in a monologue. the manner must be forcible, but simple and natural. activity must manifest thought and passion; it should not be merely descriptive, but must arise from the relations of the interlocutor. the monologue requires great accentuation of the subjective element in pantomime. this brings us to a second danger. the dramatic artist is tempted merely to represent or imitate. he desires to locate not only his listener, but every object, and so is tempted to objective descriptions. action is of two kinds,--representative and manifestative. in representative action one illustrates, describes, indicates objects, places, and directions. one shows the objective situations and relations. manifestative pantomime, on the contrary, reveals the feelings and experiences of the human mind, or the subjective situations and relations. representative pantomime is apt to degenerate into mere imitative movements. manifestative pantomime centres in the eye or the face, but belongs to the whole body. even when we make representative movements with the hand and arm, the attitude of the hand shows the conditions prompting the gesture, and face and body show the real experiences and feelings. in the giving of humorous monologues, representative action is often appropriate and necessary. the hearer must be located, objects must often be distributed and rightly related to assist the audience in conceiving the situation. the need of representative action is seen in day's "old boggs' slarnt." old boggs' slarnt old bill boggs is always sayin' that he'd like to, but he carnt; he hain't never had no chances, he hain't never got no slarnt. says it's all dum foolish tryin', 'less ye git the proper start, says he's never seed no op'nin' so he's never had no heart. but he's chawed enough tobacker for to fill a hogset up, and has spent his time a-trainin' some all-fired kind of pup; while his wife has took in washin' and his children hain't been larnt 'cause old boggs is allus whinin' that he's never got no slarnt. them air young uns round the gros'ry hadn't oughter done the thing! now it's done, though, and it's over, 'twas a cracker-jack, by jing. boggs, ye see, has been a-settin' twenty years on one old plank, one end h'isted on a saw-hoss, t'other on the cistern tank. t'other night he was a-chawin' and he says, "i vum-spt-ooo-- here i am a-owin' money--not a gol durn thing to do! 'tain't no use er buckin' chances, ner er fightin' back at luck, --less ye have some way er startin', feller's sartin to be stuck. needs a slarnt to get yer going"--then them young uns give a carnt, --plank went up an' down old boggs went--yas, he got it, got his slarnt. course, the young uns shouldn't done it--sent mine off along to bed-- helped to pry boggs out the cistern--he warn't more 'n three-quarters dead. didn't no one 'prove the actions, but when all them kids was gone, thunder mighty! how we hollered! gab'rel couldn't heered his horn. when the speaker in the monologue describes the plank which has "one end h'isted on a saw-hoss, t'other on the cistern tank," he would naturally in conversation describe and indicate the tank and the saw-horse and the direction of the slope of the plank. then, when "... them young uns give a carnt," and the plank went up, it might be indicated that one end went up, by one hand, and by the other that old boggs went down. this can be done easily and naturally and in character. the genius of the "gros'ry," who is speaking, would indicate these very simply with hand and eye. this action will not only express the humor, but help the audience to conceive the situation. in a serious monologue, such as "a grammarian's funeral" (p. ), the speaker looks down toward the town, and talks about the condition of those there who did not appreciate his master. the reader must indicate where the speaker locates his friends who are carrying the body, and suggest also, by looking upward to the hill-top, where they are to bury him. this representative action, when only suggestive, in no way interferes with, but rather assists, the manifestation of feeling. it must not be forgotten that there is great danger in exaggerating the objective or representative action of a monologue. the exaggeration of accidents is the chief means of degrading noble literature in delivery. for example, one of the finest monologues, "the vagabonds," by j. t. trowbridge, has been made by public readers a mere means of imitating the oddities of a drunkard. the true centring of attention should be on the mental characteristics of such a man. a degraded method of delivering this centres everything on the mere accidents and oddities of manner. thus a most pathetic and tragic situation may be portrayed in a way not to awaken sympathy, but laughter. the vagabonds we are two travellers, roger and i. roger's my dog. come here, you scamp. jump for the gentleman--mind your eye! over the table--look out for the lamp! the rogue is growing a little old: five years we've tramped through wind and weather, and slept out doors when nights were cold, and ate, and drank, and starved together. we've learned what comfort is, i tell you: a bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, a fire to thaw our thumbs (poor fellow, the paw he holds up there has been frozen), plenty of catgut for my fiddle (this out-door business is bad for strings), then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, and roger and i set up for kings. no, thank you, sir, i never drink. roger and i are exceedingly moral. aren't we, roger? see him wink. well, something hot then, we won't quarrel. he's thirsty too--see him nod his head. what a pity, sir, that dogs can't talk; he understands every word that's said, and he knows good milk from water and chalk. the truth is, sir, now i reflect, i've been so sadly given to grog, i wonder i've not lost the respect (here's to you, sir) even of my dog. but he sticks by through thick and thin, and this old coat with its empty pockets, and rags that smell of tobacco and gin, he'll follow while he has eyes in his sockets. there isn't another creature living would do it, and prove, through every disaster, so fond, so faithful, and so forgiving, to such a miserable, thankless master. no, sir! see him wag his tail and grin-- by george! it makes my old eyes water-- that is, there's something in this gin that chokes a fellow, but no matter. we'll have some music if you are willing, and roger here (what a plague a cough is, sir) shall march a little. start, you villain! paws up! eyes front! salute your officer! 'bout face! attention! take your rifle! (some dogs have arms you see.) now hold your cap while the gentlemen give a trifle to aid a poor old patriot soldier. march! halt! now show how the rebel shakes when he stands up to hear his sentence; now tell how many drams it takes to honor a jolly new acquaintance. five yelps, that's five--he's mighty knowing; the night's before us, fill the glasses; quick, sir! i'm ill; my brain is going; some brandy; thank you: there, it passes. why not reform? that's easily said. but i've gone through such wretched treatment, sometimes forgetting the taste of bread, and scarce remembering what meat meant, that my poor stomach's past reform, and there are times when, mad with thinking, i'd sell out heaven for something warm to prop a horrible inward sinking. is there a way to forget to think? at your age, sir, home, fortune, friends, a dear girl's love; but i took to drink; the same old story, you know how it ends. if you could have seen these classic features-- you needn't laugh, sir, i was not then such a burning libel on god's creatures; i was one of your handsome men. if you had seen her, so fair, so young, whose head was happy on this breast; if you could have heard the songs i sung when the wine went round, you wouldn't have guess'd that ever i, sir, should be straying from door to door, with fiddle and dog, ragged and penniless, and playing to you to-night for a glass of grog. she's married since, a parson's wife; 'twas better for her that we should part; better the soberest, prosiest life than a blasted home and a broken heart. i have seen her? once! i was weak and spent on the dusty road; a carriage stopped, but little she dreamed as on she went, who kissed the coin that her fingers dropped. you've set me talking, sir, i'm sorry; it makes me wild to think of the change. what do you care for a beggar's story? is it amusing? you find it strange? i had a mother so proud of me, 'twas well she died before. do you know, if the happy spirits in heaven can see the ruin and wretchedness here below? another glass, and strong to deaden this pain; then roger and i will start. i wonder, has he such a lumpish, leaden, aching thing, in place of a heart? he is sad sometimes, and would weep if he could, no doubt remembering things that were: a virtuous kennel with plenty of food, and himself a sober, respectable cur. i'm better now; that glass was warming. you rascal! limber your lazy feet! we must be fiddling and performing for supper and bed, or starve in the street. not a very gay life to lead you think? but soon we shall go where lodgings are free, and the sleepers need neither victuals nor drink; the sooner the better for roger and me. "the vagabonds" deserves study on account of its revelation of the subjectivity possible to the monologue. notice the speaker's talk to his dog: "come here, you scamp,"--"jump for the gentleman,"--"over the table, look out for the lamp." then he begins the story of his life, exhibiting his pathetic condition, and displaying his realization of his downfall. after this he resolutely turns to his violin and calls upon his dog to perform: "paws up! eyes front! salute your officer! 'bout face! attention! take your rifle!" then suddenly the note of remorse is sounded; his sense of illness, his restoration with the brandy, are true in every line to human character. the interpretation of such a poem is difficult because it verges so close upon the imitative that readers are apt to lose the spirit and intention of the author. it must be made entirely a study of character. the underlying spirit, not the accidents, must be accentuated by the action of the body. in general, even when representative actions are most appropriate and helpful, the manifestative actions of face and body must be accentuated and at all times made to predominate over the representative actions. the more serious any interpretation is, the more necessary is it that manifestation transcend representation. every student should observe how manifestative action of face and body always supports descriptive gesture. again, in the monologue there must not be too much motion. motion is superficial, showing merely extraneous relations, and may indicate nervousness or lack of control. the attitude must be sustained. any motion should be held until it spreads through the whole being. motions reveal superficial emotions; attitudes, the deeper conditions. conditions must transcend both motions and attitudes, and attitudes must always predominate over motions. the monologue must not be spectacular, and cannot be interpreted by external and mechanical movements. the whole body must act, but in a natural way. expansions of the body, the kindling eye, the animated face, form the centre of all true dramatic actions. the attitude at the climax of any motion makes the motion emphatic. the monologue is so subtle, and requires such accentuation of deep impression, that attitudes are especially necessary. an attitude accentuates a condition or feeling by prolonging its pantomimic suggestion. as the power to pause, or to stay the attention until the mind realizes a situation and awakens the depths of passion, is important in vocal expression, so the staying of a motion at its climax, a sustaining of the attitude that reveals the deepest emotional condition, is the basis of true dramatic action. of all languages, action is the least noticeable, the most in the background, but, on the other hand, of all languages it is the most continuous. from the cradle to the grave, sleeping or waking, pantomimic expression is never absent. consciously or unconsciously, every step we take, every position we assume, reveals us, our character, emotions, experiences. hence, any dramatic interpretation of human experiences or character, such as a monologue, demands thorough and conscientious study of this language, which reveals both the highest and the lowest conditions of the heart. xii. the monologue and metre one of the most important questions in regard to form in poetry, especially the form and interpretation of the monologue, relates to metre. to most persons metre is something purely arbitrary and artificial. books on the subject often give merely an account of the different kinds of feet with hardly a hint that metre has meaning. but metre is not a mechanical structure which exists merely for its own sake. when the metre is true, it expresses the spirit of the poem, as the leaf reveals the life and character of the tree. the attitude of mind of many persons of culture and taste toward metre is surprising. rarely, for example, is a hymn read with its true metric movement. is this one reason why hymns are no longer read aloud? not only ministers and public speakers, but even the best actors and public readers, often blur the most beautiful lines. how rarely do we find an edwin booth who can give the spirit of shakespeare's blank verse! few actors realize the pain they give to cultivated ears or to those who have the imagination and feeling to appreciate the expressiveness of the metric structure in the highest poetry. the development of a proper appreciation of metre is of great importance. though the student should acquaint himself with the metric feet and the information conveyed in all the rhetorics and books on metre, still he has hardly learned the alphabet of the subject. to appreciate its metre, one must so enter into the spirit of a poem that the metric movement is felt as a part of its expression. the nature of the feet chosen, the length of the lines,--everything connected with the form of a fine poem, is directly expressive. the sublimer the poem, the painting, or any work of art, the more will the smallest detail be consistent with the whole and a necessary part of the expression. metre has been studied too much as a matter of print. few recognize the fact that metre is necessarily a part of vocal rather than of verbal expression, and can only be suggested in print. metre can be revealed only by the human voice. as a printed word is only a sign, so print can afford a hint only of the nature of metre. its study, accordingly, must be associated with the living voice and the vocal interpretation of literature. the mastery of metre requires first of all a development of the sense of rhythm, a realization especially of the subjective aspects of rhythm, a consciousness of the rhythm of thinking and feeling and the power we have of controlling or accentuating this. there must be developed in addition a sense of form and a realization of the nature of all expression, and of the necessity that ideas and feelings be revealed through natural and objective means. another step not to be despised is the training of the ear. at the basis of every specific problem of education will be found the necessary training of a sense. how can a painter be developed without education of the eye as well as control of the hand. so metre must be recognized by the ear before it can be revealed by the voice. last of all, the imagination must recreate the poem and the reader must realize the specific language of every foot and feel its hidden meaning. all these aims will be developed, more or less together, and be in direct relation to all the elements of expression. metre is a difficult subject in which to lay down general principles, lest they become artificial rules. every poem that is really great shows something new in the way of combining imperfect feet, and the student must study the movement for himself. many will be tempted to ask, "what has metre to do with the monologue?" it is true that metre belongs to all poetry, but the monologue has some specific and peculiar uses of metre, and, more than any other form of poetry except the poetic drama, demands the living voice. hence a few suggestions are necessary at this point upon this much neglected and misconceived subject. to understand the relation of metre to the monologue, it should be held in mind that metre is far more flexible and free in dramatic than in lyric poetry. in lyric poetry it is usually more regular and partakes of the nature of song; but in dramatic poetry it is more changeable and bears more resemblance to the rhythm of speech. in the lyric, metre expresses a mood, and mood as a permanent condition of feeling necessitates a more regular rhythm; but in dramatic poetry, metre expresses the pulse-beat of one character in contact with another. it must respond to all the sudden changes of thought and feeling. the difference between the metre of keats or shelley or chaucer and that of shakespeare or of browning is not wholly one of personality. it is often due to a difference in the theme discussed and in the spirit of their poetry. so important is the understanding of metre to the right appreciation of any exalted poetic monologue, that in general, unless the interpreter thoroughly masters the subject of metre, he is unprepared to render anything but so-called monologues on the lowest plane of farce and vaudeville art. very close to the subject of metre is length of line. a long line is more stately, a short line more abrupt, passional, and intense. a short line in connection with longer lines, generally contains more weight, and such an increase of intensive feeling as causes its rendering to be slow, requiring about as much time as one of the longer lines. the short line suggests the necessity of a pause. it is usually found in lyric poetry; rarely in dramatic. the peculiar variation in length of line found in the pindaric ode belongs almost entirely to lyric poetry. monologues and dramatic poems are frequently found in blank verse. we find here a peculiar principle existing. in blank verse there is greater variation of the feet than in almost any other form of poetry, and yet in this the length of line is most fixed. in the pindaric ode, on the contrary, where the foot is more regular, there are great variations in the length of line. is there not discoverable here a law, that where length of line is more fixed, metre is more variable, but where length of line is more variable, the metric feet tend to be more regular? art is "order in play"; the free, spontaneous variation is play; the fixed or regular elements give the sense of order. true art always accentuates both order and play, not in antagonistic opposition, but in sympathetic union. whenever the order is more apparent in one direction, there is greater freedom of play in another, and the reverse. we find this principle specially manifest in pantomimic expression. man is only free and flexible in the use of his arms and limbs when he has a stability of poise and when his movement ends in a stable attitude. there is opposition between motions and positions. this important law has been overlooked both in action and in vocal expression. it is not quite the same as delsarte's law: "stability is characteristic of the centre; flexibility, of the surface." while this is true, the necessary co-ordination of the transcendence of stability of attitude over motion is also a necessary law of all expression. before trying to lay down any general law regarding metre as a mode of expression, let us examine a few monologues in various feet. notice the use of the trochee to express the loving entreaty in "a woman's last word" (p. ). to give this a careless rendering with its metric movement confused, as is often done, totally perverts its meaning and spirit. the accent on the initial word of the line gives an intensity of feeling with tender persuasiveness. this accent must be strong and vigorous, followed by a most delicate touch upon the following syllables:-- "be a god, and hold me with a charm! be a man, and fold me with thine arm!" one who has little sense of metre should try to read this poem in some different foot. he will soon become conscious of the discord. when once he catches the spirit of the poem with his own voice, he will experience a satisfaction and confidence in his rhythmic instinct, and in his voice as its agent, that will enable him to render the poem with power. note in this poem also the shortness of the lines, which express the abrupt outbursts of intense feeling. the fact that every other line ends upon an accented syllable adds intensity, sincerity, and earnestness to the tender appeal. the delicate beauty of the rhymes also aids in idealizing the speaker's character. the whole form is beautifully adapted to express her endeavor to lift her husband out of his suspicious and ignoble jealousy to a higher plane. browning's "in a year" has seemingly the same foot and the same length of line as "a woman's last word," but how different its effect! "in a year" is made up of bursts of passion from an overburdened heart. it seems more subjective or more of a soliloquy. there is not the same direct appeal to another, but no print can give the difference between the emotional movement of the two poems. in both, the trochaic foot and the very short line indicate abrupt outpouring of feeling. compare these two poems carefully. what is the significance of the form given them by browning, the metre, the length of line, and the stanzas? why are the stanzas of "in a year" longer than those of "a woman's last word"? what is the effect of the difference in rhyme of these two poems? does one detect any difference in the metric movement? in a year never any more, while i live, need i hope to see his face as before. once his love grown chill, mine may strive: bitterly we re-embrace, single still. was it something said, something done, vexed him? was it touch of hand, turn of head? strange! that very way love begun: i as little understand love's decay. when i sewed or drew, i recall how he looked as if i sung, --sweetly too. if i spoke a word, first of all up his cheek the color sprung, then he heard. sitting by my side, at my feet, so he breathed but air i breathed, satisfied! i, too, at love's brim touched the sweet: i would die if death bequeathed sweet to him. "speak, i love thee best!" he exclaimed: "let thy love my own foretell!" i confessed: "clasp my heart on thine now unblamed, since upon thy soul as well hangeth mine!" was it wrong to own, being truth? why should all the giving prove his alone? i had wealth and ease, beauty, youth: since my lover gave me love, i gave these. that was all i meant, --to be just, and the passion i had raised, to content. since he chose to change gold for dust, if i gave him what he praised was it strange? would he loved me yet, on and on, while i found some way undreamed --paid my debt! gave more life and more, till all gone, he should smile "she never seemed mine before. "what, she felt the while, must i think? love's so different with us men!" he should smile: "dying for my sake-- white and pink! can't we touch these bubbles then but they break?" dear, the pang is brief, do thy part, have thy pleasure! how perplexed grows belief! well, this cold clay clod was man's heart: crumble it, and what comes next? is it god? why is "hervé riel" in trochaic movement? it is heroic; why not then iambic? the poem opens in a mood of anxiety, a state of suspense, a fear of the certain loss of the fleet. when hope revives and hervé riel is introduced in the words, "for up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid all these," we have a line of mixed anapestic and iambic feet, expressive of resolution, courage, and confidence; so with the first and second lines of the sixth stanza expressing indignation at the pilots; also in much of his speech to the admirals. if the poet had led us sympathetically to identify ourselves with hervé riel's resolution and endeavor, the metre would have been anapestic or iambic, but he gives the feeling of admiration for hervé riel and we are made to contemplate how easily he performed his great deed, and hence the prevailing trochaic movement is one of the charms of the poem. criticism of this poem, such as i have heard, reveals a lack of appreciation of the dramatic spirit of metre. the trochaic delicately expresses the emotional feeling, admiration, and tenderness for the forgotten hero, as well as the anxiety and realization of danger in the first parts of the poem. the change to the iambic in the central part of the poem only proves the real character of the trochaic feet, and, in fact, accentuates their spirit. the trochee seems in general to indicate an outpouring of emotion or sudden burst of feeling too strong for control. many of the most tender and prayerful hymns have this foot. it expresses also, at times, a sense of uneasiness or restlessness. the reader must take these statements, however, as mere suggestions, for the very first poem written in this metre that he reads may give expression to a different spirit. so complex, so mysterious, is the metric expression of feeling, that no one poem can be made a standard for another. the iambic foot, more than any other, expresses controlled passion,--passion expressed with deliberation. it implies resolution, confidence, or the heroic carrying out of an intention. while the trochee suggests the bursting out of feeling against the will, the iambic may suggest the spontaneous cumulation of emotion under the dominion of will with a definite purpose or conscious realization of a situation. the iambic can express passion controlled for an end, the trochee seems rather to float with the passion or be thrust forward by waves or bursts of feeling, which the will is trying to hold back. note the predominant metric movement of "rabbi ben ezra," and how it expresses the confidence and noble conviction of the venerable rabbi. why is "the last ride together" iambic? because no other metre could so well express the nobility of the hero, his endurance, his refusal to yield to despair or become antagonistic, his self-control, and the preservation of his hopefulness when all his "life seemed meant for fails." the last ride together i said--then, dearest, since 'tis so, since now at length my fate i know, since nothing all my love avails, since all my life seemed meant for fails, since this was written and needs must be-- my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness! take back the hope you gave,--i claim only a memory of the same, --and this beside, if you will not blame, your leave for one more last ride with me. my mistress bent that brow of hers; those deep dark eyes where pride demurs when pity would be softening through, fixed me a breathing-while or two with life or death in the balance: right! the blood replenished me again; my last thought was at least not vain: i and my mistress, side by side, shall be together, breathe and ride, so, one day more am i deified. who knows but the world may end to-night? hush! if you saw some western cloud all billowy-bosomed, over-bowed by many benedictions--sun's and moon's and evening-star's at once-- and so, you, looking and loving best, conscious grew, your passion drew cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too, down on you, near and yet more near, till flesh must fade for heaven was here!-- thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear! thus lay she a moment on my breast. then we began to ride. my soul smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll freshening and fluttering in the wind. past hopes already lay behind. what need to strive with a life awry? had i said that, had i done this, so might i gain, so might i miss. might she have loved me? just as well she might have hated, who can tell! where had i been now if the worst befell? and here we are riding, she and i. fail i alone, in words and deeds? why, all men strive and who succeeds? we rode; it seemed my spirit flew, saw other regions, cities new, as the world rushed by on either side. i thought,--all labor, yet no less bear up beneath their unsuccess. look at the end of work, contrast the petty done, the undone vast, this present of theirs with the hopeful past! i hoped she would love me; here we ride. what hand and brain went ever paired? what heart alike conceived and dared? what act proved all its thought had been? what will but felt the fleshy screen? we ride and i see her bosom heave. there's many a crown for who can reach. ten lines, a statesman's life in each! the flag stuck on a heap of bones, a soldier's doing! what atones? they scratch his name on the abbey-stones. my riding is better, by their leave. what does it all mean, poet? well, your brains beat into rhythm, you tell what we felt only; you expressed you hold things beautiful the best, and pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 'tis something, nay 'tis much: but then, have you yourself what's best for men? are you--poor, sick, old ere your time-- nearer one whit your own sublime than we who have never turned a rhyme? sing, riding's a joy! for me, i ride. and you, great sculptor--so, you gave a score of years to art, her slave, and that's your venus, whence we turn to yonder girl that fords the burn! you acquiesce, and shall i repine? what, man of music, you grown gray with notes and nothing else to say, is this your sole praise from a friend, "greatly his opera's strains intend, but in music we know how fashions end!" i gave my youth; but we ride, in fine. who knows what's fit for us? had fate proposed bliss here should sublimate my being--had i signed the bond-- still one must lead some life beyond, have a bliss to die with, dim-descried. this foot once planted on the goal, this glory-garland round my soul, could i descry such? try and test! i sink back shuddering from the quest. earth being so good, would heaven seem best? now, heaven and she are beyond this ride. and yet--she has not spoke so long! what if heaven be that, fair and strong at life's best, with our eyes upturned whither life's flower is first discerned, we, fixed so, ever should so abide? what if we still ride on, we two, with life forever old yet new, changed not in kind but in degree, the instant made eternity,-- and heaven just prove that i and she ride, ride together, forever ride? adequate rendering of this poem requires a very decided touch upon the strong foot, that is, an accentuation of the iambic movement. notice also the two, three, or four long syllables at the first of many lines (such as lines six, seven, and eight), showing the passion and the intense control. observe the almost completely spondaic line, indicating deliberation, patient waiting, or intense, pent-up feeling held in poise: "those deep dark eyes where pride demurs," and then the short syllables and lyric effect in the next line. note the strong isolation of the word "right" at the end of the fifth line, stanza two. notice that in stanza four, when the ride begins, the first foot is not iambic, but choriambic; yet all through the poem where manly resolution and confidence is asserted and expressed, the iambic movement is strong. tennyson's "lady clara vere de vere" (p. ) expresses the severity and earnestness of the speaker by the predominance of iambic feet, while the sudden uneasiness, or burst of passion, is best expressed by trochaic feet. note the effect of the first line of most of the stanzas, then the quick change to iambic movement expressing the rebuke which is the real theme of the poem. the spondee is found in solemn hymns or in any verse expressing reverence and awe. it is contemplative and poised, and is frequently blended with other feet, especially with iambic, to express deliberation. in browning's "prospice," the iambus predominates, and expresses heroic endurance and courage in meeting death; but the first foot--"fear death"--is a spondee, and indicates the deliberative realization of the situation. it is the straightening up, as it were, of the whole manhood of the soldier before he begins his battle with death. very forcible are the occasional spondees in "abt vogler." these give dignity and weight and sustain the contemplative and reverent meditations. it will be noted that the dactyl is very closely related in expression to the trochee, and the anapest to the iambic. triple rhythm or metre, however, implies a more circular and flowing movement. the dactyl is used in some of the most pathetic and passionate monologues of the language. notice the fine use of it in hood's "bridge of sighs." the bridge of sighs one more unfortunate, weary of breath, rashly importunate, gone to her death! take her up tenderly, lift her with care; fashion'd so slenderly, young, and so fair! look at her garments clinging like cerements, whilst the wave constantly drips from her clothing; take her up instantly, loving, not loathing. touch her not scornfully; think of her mournfully, gently and humanly; not of the stains of her--all that remains of her now, is pure womanly. make no deep scrutiny into her mutiny rash and undutiful: past all dishonor, death has left on her only the beautiful. still, for all slips of hers, one of eve's family--wipe those poor lips of hers oozing so clammily. loop up her tresses escaped from the comb, her fair auburn tresses; whilst wonderment guesses where was her home? who was her father? who was her mother? had she a sister? had she a brother? or was there a dearer one still, and a nearer one yet, than all other? alas! for the rarity of christian charity under the sun! o! it was pitiful! near a whole city full, home she had none. sisterly, brotherly, fatherly, motherly feelings had changed: love, by harsh evidence, thrown from its eminence; even god's providence seeming estranged. where the lamps quiver so far in the river, with many a light, from window and casement, from garret to basement, she stood, with amazement, houseless by night. the bleak wind of march made her tremble and shiver; but not the dark arch, or the black, flowing river; mad from life's history, glad to death's mystery swift to be hurl'd--anywhere, anywhere out of the world! in she plunged boldly, no matter how coldly the rough river ran, over the brink of it,--picture it, think of it, dissolute man! lave in it, drink of it, then, if you can! take her up tenderly, lift her with care; fashion'd so slenderly, young and so fair! ere her limbs frigidly stiffen too rigidly, decently, kindly, smooth and compose them; and her eyes close them, staring so blindly! dreadfully staring through muddy impurity, as when with the daring last look of despairing fix'd on futurity. perishing gloomily, spurr'd by contumely, cold inhumanity burning insanity into her rest.--cross her hands humbly, as if praying dumbly, over her breast! owning her weakness, her evil behavior, and leaving, with meekness, her sins to her saviour! some persons may not regard this poem as a monologue. but if not rendered by a union of dramatic and lyric elements, it will be given, as it often is, as a kind of a stump speech to an audience on the banks of the thames over the body of some poor, betrayed woman, who has ended her life in that murky stream. it is true that we are little concerned with the character of the speaker, and the feeling is intensely lyric and universal. but the situation is so definite, and the "one more unfortunate" is so vividly portrayed to us, that it is, at least, partly dramatic. even those who are caring for the body are directly addressed: "take her up tenderly, lift her with care." it is a lyric monologue. the sad, passionate outbursts can hardly be suggested by any other metre than that which is used by hood, and we feel that its choice is singularly appropriate. the poem is intensely subjective. the conceptions regarding the life just closed arise through the natural association of ideas. the speaker thinks and feels definitely before us. the whirling circles suggested by the dactyl, with the occasional passionate break of a single accented word or syllable at the end of a line, assist the reader. without such dactylic movement, the vocal expression of a pathos so intense would be hardly possible to the human voice. notice the two long syllables at the very beginning of the poem expressive of the stunned effect at the discovery of the body. render the poem printed as prose to avoid the sing-song of short lines, and note that in proportion to the depth of passion the metre becomes pronounced. it is impossible to read it in its proper spirit when not correctly rendering its metric rhythm. the dactyl is used with a very similar effect in austin dobson's "before sedan" (p. ). what a difference is expressed by the use of these same feet, with greater changes, and in longer lines, in browning's "the lost leader"! restlessness is here expressed, arising not from pathos, but from indignation and disappointment. the rhythmic movement of the metre is totally different in this case. while the feet may be mechanically the same, the length of the lines and the rhythmic spirit differ greatly in the two poems. the feeling is different, the tone-color of the voice not the same, and the whole expression differs, though in a mechanical scanning they seem nearly alike. the lost leader just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat,-- found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, lost all the others, she lets us devote; they, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, so much was theirs who so little allowed: how all our copper had gone for his service! rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud! we that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye, learned his great language, caught his clear accents, made him our pattern to live and to die! shakespeare was of us, milton was for us, burns, shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves! he alone breaks from the van and the freemen, he alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! we shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence; songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre; deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence, still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire; blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, one task more declined, one more footpath untrod, one more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels, one wrong more to man, one more insult to god! life's night begins: let him never come back to us! there would be doubt, hesitation and pain, forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight, never glad confident morning again! best fight on well, for we taught him--strike gallantly, menace our heart ere we master his own; then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! one aid in realizing metre as an element of expression is to examine a poem printed as prose and attempt to discover the peculiar value and force of the metric forms, length of lines, length of the stanzas, and even the rhymes. all these in a true poem are expressive. there is nothing really artificial or accidental in a true poetic or artistic form. (see p. and p. .) many poems in this book and in the accompanying monologues for further study are printed as prose, not because metre and length of line are unimportant, but for the very opposite reason. the form of a printed poem is so apt to be disregarded or considered a mere matter of print that this unusual method of printing a poem is adopted to furnish opportunity for the reader to work out for himself the metre and other elements of the form. in reading over a poem thus printed, almost any one will become conscious of the metric movement, and in every case the metric structure and length of line should be indicated and felt by the reader. there is never, in a fine poem, especially in a dramatic poem, a mere mechanical and regular succession of the same foot, though one foot may predominate and give the general spirit to the whole. true metre never interferes with thinking or with the processes of natural speech; on the contrary, it is an aid to thinking, feeling, and vocal expression. if the student will think and feel intensely such a poem as "rabbi ben ezra" (p. ), and will strongly accentuate the metre, he will find that he can read it easily, because, when true to its objective form, he is the better able to give its spirit. innumerable changes in the metric feet occur in browning's "saul," in "abt vogler," or in any great poem. the more deeply we become imbued with the spirit of a poem, the more do we feel that these variations are necessary. the reader must be slow to criticize a seeming discord in metre. an apparent fault may appear as a real excellence after one has genuinely seized the true spirit of the passage. notice, for example, the discord in the word "ravines" in coleridge's "hymn before sunrise." it gives a sudden arrest of feeling almost as if one stood trembling on the verge of a precipice. with mechanical regularity of feet such an impression could not be made. a great musical composer weaves in discords as a means of expression, and the same is true of a great master of metre. in nearly all cases where there is a seeming discord of metre, some peculiar vocal expression is necessary. "ravines" compels a good reader to make an emphatic pause after it. the importance of pause in relation to metre has often been overlooked. in tennyson's "break, break, break," we have a most artistic presentation of only the strong words of the metric line. a period of silence is necessary in order to give the whole line its movement. it requires as much time as if it had its full complement of syllables. this suggests the depth of the emotion. such pauses, however, bring us to the subject of rhythm rather than metre. they have a wonderful effect in awakening a perception of the spirit of the poem. notice in "my last duchess" (p. ), the lack of rhyme, the stilted blank verse, the tendency towards iambic feet,--possibly to show the domineering and tyrannical spirit of the character. the almost prosaic irregularity of the feet is certainly very expressive of his thinking and feeling. it is easy, in this passage, to realize the appropriate expressiveness of browning's metre. the metre of "a death in the desert" seems to a dull ear the same as that in "my last duchess." but let one render carefully the dying john in contrast with the duke. what a difference! how smooth the flow, what dignified intensity, when the beloved disciple gives his visions of the future! the spirit of the two when interpreted by the voice differ in the metric movement. what a rollicking good-nature is suggested appropriately by the metre of "sally in our alley" (p. ). imagine this young fellow telling his story, as he walks along. it would be impossible for him to talk in a steady, straight-forward iambic, or even in the hesitating, emotional trochee. his passion comes in gusts and outbursts, so that now and then he leaps into a kind of dance. the poem is wholly consistent with the character, and the metre is not the least important means of revealing the spirit of the emotions and sentiments. plain, prosaic criticism, however, can hardly touch it. the characteristic spirit of the lad must be so deeply appreciated and felt as to lift the whole, notwithstanding its homely character, into the realm of exalted poetry, in fact, into a rare union of lyric and dramatic elements. notice, too, in "up at a villa--down in the city" (p. ), that the very mood, the very way an "italian person of quality" would stand, walk, saunter along, loll in a chair, roll his head, or swing his feet, are suggested by the metric movement. changes of movement are required to show the person's change of feeling and action. quicker pulsation at his exaltation over the city will demand a swifter movement, while the slow, retarded rhythm will show contempt for the villa. through the whole, the unity of the feet, the seeming carelessness, and the constant variation which suggests the commonplace character of the person, are part of the humorous impression made upon us. the metre, in this case, as in all monologues expressive of humor, must give the real spirit of the character; when once we realize the situation and the feeling, the right vocal expression of the metric form is a natural result. observe the grotesque humor, not only of the rhymes such as "eye's tail up" and "chromatic scale up," but also the peculiar feet in browning's "youth and art" (p. ). the most common foot in the poem, an amphibrachys, three syllables with the middle one long, is often used with comical or grotesque effect in poems full of humor. the last line, however, full of tenderness and sadness, is trochaic. observe the tenderness of "evelyn hope." evelyn hope beautiful evelyn hope is dead! sit and watch by her side an hour. that is her book-shelf, this her bed; she plucked that piece of geranium-flower, beginning to die too, in the glass; little has yet been changed, i think: the shutters are shut, no light may pass save two long rays thro' the hinge's chink. sixteen years old when she died! perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; it was not her time to love; beside, her life had many a hope and aim, duties enough and little cares, and now was quiet, now astir, till god's hand beckoned unawares,-- and the sweet white brow is all of her. is it too late then, evelyn hope? what, your soul was pure and true, the good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire and dew-- and, just because i was thrice as old and our paths in the world diverged so wide, each was naught to each, must i be told? we were fellow mortals, naught beside? no, indeed! for god above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love: i claim you still, for my own love's sake! delayed it may be for more lives yet, thro' worlds i shall traverse, not a few: much is to learn, much to forget ere the time be come for taking you. but the time will come, at last it will, when, evelyn hope, what meant (i shall say) in the lower earth, in the years long still, that body and soul so pure and gay? why your hair was amber, i shall divine, and your mouth of your own geranium's red-- and what you would do with me, in fine, in the new life come in the old one's stead. i have lived (i shall say) so much since then, given up myself so many times, gained me the gains of various men, ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, either i missed or itself missed me: and i want and find you, evelyn hope! what is the issue? let us see! i loved you, evelyn, all the while! my heart seemed full as it could hold; there was place and to spare for the frank young smile, and the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. so hush,--i will give you this leaf to keep: see, i shut it inside the sweet cold hand! there, that is our secret: go to sleep! you will wake, and remember, and understand. note especially the transition from the trochees, expressive of tender love and feeling, in stanza three, to the iambics, expressing conviction and confidence, in the following stanzas: "for god above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love: i claim you still, for my own love's sake." in browning's "one way of love" (p. ) the iambics in the first lines express determination and endeavor, but there is a decided change in the metric movement caused by the agitation, disappointment, and deep feeling of the last two lines of each stanza. it is never possible to study metre in cold blood. it is the language of the heart. only an occasional versifier in a critical or intellectual spirit grinds out a machine-made metre, every foot of which can be scanned according to rule. a poem which is written seemingly in one metric measure will be found, when read aloud with proper feeling, to have several. contrast the last stanza with the third from the last of "in a year" (p. ), and one feels that the third from the last has the stronger iambic movement. this possibly expresses hope, or impetuous longing, while the last, returning to the trochee, expresses intense despair. at any rate, these two stanzas cannot be read alike. of course, a different conception on the part of the reader would affect the metre. the interpreter must take such hints as he finds, complete them by his imagination, and so assimilate the poem as to express its metre adequately by the voice. the living voice is the only revealer, as the ear is the only true judge, of metre. in "confessions" (p. ), the waking of the sick man, his confusion, his uncertainty whether he has heard aright, and his repetition of the words of his visitor, are given with trochaic movement, while his own conviction and answer are given in iambics; yet his story, possibly on account of the tenderness of recollections, frequently returns to the trochaic movement. in the same way, to his question "... is the curtain blue or green to a healthy eye?" he gives a slightly trochaic effect as a recognition of his own sick condition. a positive settling of the question by his own illustration is indicated by the emphasis of the iambic movement in the next line. these are illustrations only. two persons who have thoroughly assimilated the spirit of a poem, may not completely agree concerning its metre. it is not necessary nor best that they should. there are delicate variations which show spontaneously the difference in the realization of the two readers. such personal variations, however, which result from peculiar experiences and types of character, must not be confused with the careless breaking of the metre which we hear from all our actors and public readers. the latter is the result of ignorance and lack of understanding and realization. the late henry a. clapp, criticizing a prominent actor in "julius cæsar," broke forth in a kind of despair and said: "after all, where could he go to find adequate methods for the development of a true sense of metre?" metre will never be fully understood until studied in connection with vocal expression, nor will vocal expression ever rise to its true place until applied to the interpretation not only of poetic thought, but of such elements of poetic form as metre. and where can a better means be found for both steps than the study of the monologue? the student should observe the metre as well as the thought of every monologue he examines, and read it aloud, attending faithfully to the spirit of its metric expression. so poor is the ordinary rendering of metre, that it is almost impossible to tell the metre from the ordinary reading. trochaic metre is often read, as if it were a kind of crude iambic. when one is in the mood or spirit of one foot, unless he has imaginative and emotional flexibility, all feet will be read as practically the same. i have known readers, speakers, and actors who have completely lost the dactylic and even the trochaic spirit or mode of expression. let any one select a poem and render it successively with different metres and note the effect. we must often be made to feel the power of wrong vocal expression to pervert a poem before we can realize the force of right voice modulation in interpreting its spirit. the student must realize each metric foot as an objective expression of a subjective feeling. doubt is often felt even by the best critics, and great difference of opinion exists among them, but the reader who understands vocal expression, studies into the heart of the poem and uses his own voice to express his intuition, will settle most of these difficulties satisfactorily to himself. vocal interpretation is the last criterion of metric expression. the universal lack of attention to metre is, no doubt, connected with a universal neglect of the expressive modulations of the voice. in our day the printed word and not the spoken word is regarded as the real word. this has gone so far that some educated men seem to regard metre as solely a matter of print. while metre may be one of the last points to be considered, it is not the least important to study; nor is it, when mastered, the least useful to the thought, feeling, imagination, and passion, or to the right action of the voice in interpreting the spirit of the monologue. there is an almost universal tendency to regard as superficial, actors and those capable of interpreting human experience by the living voice. men who should have known better have said that it is not mental force but simply a certain peculiarity of temperament that gives dramatic power. one of the most important things to be sought is the better understanding of the psychology of dramatic instinct. i have already tried to awaken some attention to the peculiar nature and importance of this in "imagination and dramatic instinct," but the subject is by no means exhausted. that discussion was meant only as a beginning. when actors and public readers feel it necessary to train the voice and the ear, to develop imagination and feeling, to apprehend the true nature of human art, and to meditate profoundly over the spirit of some great poem; when they treat their own art with respect and give themselves technical training, adequate metric expression will begin to be possible. at present, it must be said in sorrow that the ablest actors and most prominent public readers blur and pervert the most beautiful lines in the language. they seem blind to differences as great as those between the sunflower and the rose. xiii. dialect many monologues, especially the most popular ones are written in dialect; and frequently the public reader or interpreter gives his chief attention to the accurate reproduction of characteristic vowels, odd pronunciation of words, and the externals of the manner of speaking. the writer also often seems to make these matters of the greatest importance. what is the real meaning of dialect? how far is it allowable? is it ever necessary? what principles apply to its use? dialect is one of the accidental expressions of character, and must be dramatic or it is worth nothing. it sometimes adds coloring by giving a grotesque effect; helps to produce an illusion; or aids the reader or hearer to create a more definite conception of the character speaking and hence to appreciate more fully the thought, feeling, and spirit. it is a kind of literary or vocal stage make-up that enables the reader or auditor to recognize the character. james whitcomb riley has chosen the homely hoosier dialect as the clothing of the speaker in most of his monologues. as burns spoke in the scottish dialect which was simple and native to his heart, so riley seems to consider the dialect of his native state the best medium for conveying the peculiar feelings and experiences of types of character with which his life has been directly associated. there is justification for this, for it is well known that burns's best poems are those in scottish dialect. his english poems, with one or two possible exceptions, are weaker, and in them he seems to be using a foreign language. poetry is very near the human soul; and when the dialect is native to the heart, a quaint mode of expression may be necessary to the dramatic spirit of the thought. as a character of a certain type may be an aid to the conception of a thought or sentiment, so the experiences of a character may be better suggested by dialect. in that case, it is justifiable, if not indeed a dramatic necessity. in english some of the ablest writers have employed dialect. tennyson uses dialect in his monologue of the "northern farmer," and he is possibly our most careful author since gray. the french do not use dialect poems to such an extent as english and american writers. they regard dialect as a degradation of language. the provençal writers take their peculiar _langue d'oc_ too seriously to regard it as a dialect. american writers, especially, think too much of dialect. a young writer often employs much dialect in a first book, but in a second or third, the spelling indicates the dialect less literally and with more suggestion of its dramatic spirit. there are many instances where the earlier and the later books of an author present marked contrasts in this respect. public readers, especially, devote too much attention to the mere literal facts of dialect. readers who give no attention to characterization or dramatic instinct pride themselves upon their mastery of many dialects. their work is purely imitative and external. in representing a dialect, the general principles of expression, the laws of consistency and harmony, must be carefully considered by both the writer and the reader. in general, the greatest masters of dialect are those who use dialects associated with their own childhood, such as riley, with the hoosier dialect, day, with the maine yankee dialect, or harris, with that of the colored people of georgia. true dialect must always be the result of sympathy and identification. many writers have been led by a study of peculiar types and through natural imaginative sympathy or humor to understand and appreciate a specific dialect. dunbar thus writes many of his poems in the peculiar dialect of his race. the reader need not be told that many of his poems are monologues. for a perfect type see "ne'er mind, miss lucy." dunbar was led, no doubt, by genuine sympathy or dramatic instinct, to write in the dialect of his race some of his most tender as well as his more humorous poems. dr. drummond, of montreal, after many experiences among the french canadians, has written several volumes of monologues in which he has introduced to the world some peculiar types of the french canadian. their quaint humor is portrayed with genuine and profound sympathy, and these poems are capable of very intense dramatic interpretation, and are deservedly popular. he preserves not only the peculiarity of the words, but the melodic and rhythmic movement of the dramatic spirit of his characters. dieudonnÃ� if i sole ma ole blind trotter for fifty dollar cash or win de beeges' prize on lotterie, if some good frien' die an' lef' me fines' house on st. eustache, you t'ink i feel more happy dan i be? no, sir! an' i can tole you, if you never know before, w'y de kettle on de stove mak' such a fuss, w'y de robbin stop hees singin' an' come peekin' t'roo de door for learn about de nice t'ing's come to us-- an' w'en he see de baby lyin' dere upon de bed lak leetle son of mary on de ole tam long ago-- wit' de sunshine an' de shadder makin' ring aroun' hees head, no wonder m'sieu robin wissle low. an' we can't help feelin' glad too, so we call heem dieudonné; an' he never cry, dat baby, w'en he's chrissen by de pries'; all de sam' i bet you dollar he'll waken up some day, an' be as bad as leetle boy bateese. there is great danger, however, in employing dialect. when the accidental is made the essential, when dialect is put forward as something interesting in itself, or adopted as a mere affectation, or where used by writer or reader independent of the spirit of the poem, of the story, or even of the character, and is regarded as something capable of entertaining by the mere effect of imitation, it becomes insipid and a hindrance. genuine dialect is dramatic. a dialect too literally reproduced will be understood with great difficulty, and the reading will cause no enjoyment. the fact must be recognized that dialect is only accidental as a means of expression, and hence is justified only when necessary to the portrayal of character, or in manifesting a unique spirit, point of view, or experience. some of the best examples of the dramatic character of dialect in the monologue are found in kipling. his tommy atkins is so vividly portrayed that he must necessarily speak in the peculiar manner of a british soldier. kipling has so identified himself with certain characters that their dramatic assimilation requires dialectic interpretation, as in the case of "fuzzy-wuzzy," "danny deever," and "tommy." when dialect is thus inevitable from the dramatic point of view, it is legitimate. in fact, while dialect is grotesque and accidental, and even stands upon a low plane, yet, by intense poetic realization, it may be lifted into a more exalted place. energy has been called the father, and joy the mother, of the grotesque. humor is not inconsistent with the greatest pathos; in fact, it is necessary to it. the grotesque sometimes becomes the gothic. in "shamus o'brien," a monologue formerly popular, many of the characters speak in dialect. shamus, however, seems to use less dialect on account of the dignity of his character and speech. in all such cases, the accidental becomes less pronounced in proportion to the emphasis of the essential. the dialect of the whole poem may be explained by the fact that an irishman tells the story. there seems, however, to be an exception to this. carlyle, it is said, when expressing the profoundest feeling in conversation always lapsed into broad scottish dialect. colonel t. w. higginson says that he, with another gentleman and carlyle, once passed through a park belonging to a private estate. some children were rolling on the grass, and one boy coming forward timidly, approached carlyle, whose face seemed to the boy the most kindly disposed to children, and said, "please, sir, may we roll on the grass?" carlyle broke into the broadest scotch, "ye may roll at discretion." as already intimated, dialect must not be so extreme that the audience cannot easily understand what the reader is saying. all true art is clear; it is not a puzzle. on account of its theme, and its appeal to the higher faculties, its comprehension may at times require long continued contemplation and earnest endeavor; but an accidental element, such as dialect, must never prevent immediate understanding of the words spoken or thoughts expressed. dialect must be perfectly transparent. its whole charm will be lost if it does not give a simple, quaint suggestion of character. the chief element of dialect is not in the words or the pronunciation of the elementary sounds but in the melody. every language has a kind of "accent," as it is called, and it is this "accent" which is most characteristic. every word may be pronounced correctly, but the artistic reader or actor can suggest immediately by the peculiar melodic form of his phrases whether it is a frenchman, a german, an italian, an irishman, or a scotsman who speaks. in fact, the more subtle, more natural, more suggestive the dialect, the better. it must never be labored; never be of interest in itself. it is secondary to character, to thinking, and even to feeling. dialect should always be the result of assimilation rather than imitation. if there is imitation at all, it must be of that higher kind resulting from sympathetic identification and a right use of the dramatic instinct. one of the greatest mistakes in rendering dialect consists in taking the printed word as the sole guide. because a word here and there is spelled oddly, the reader confines the dialect to these words. true dialect is not a matter of individual words. it must penetrate the speech; it never can be more than vaguely suggested in print, and the print can be only a very inadequate guide to the reader. he must go to life itself and study the melodic spirit, the peculiar relations to character, the quaint inflections and modulations of the voice, which have little to do with mere pronunciation. a scotchman may have corrected certain peculiarities of his vowels, or a frenchman be able to pronounce individual words accurately, but still both will show a melodic peculiarity, which remains a fundamental characteristic. one who renders monologues and omits this peculiar melodic element will fail to give the fundamental element in dialect. dialect must not only be dramatic and sympathetic, but also delicately suggestive and accurate. the accuracy, however, should not be literal. it must be true to the type, and be felt as a part of the background. in the rendering of a monologue, in general nothing should be given in dialect unless the dialect is directly expressive of the character of the speaker, his views, ideas, or feelings, or unless it is necessary to the complete representation of the ideas, or can add something to the humorous or suggestive force of the thought. peculiarities of dialect are always associated with dramatic action. in fact, dialect is to speech what bearings are to movements. this again shows that dialect is primarily dramatic, and justifies a full discussion of the subject in connection with the dramatic monologue. a mere mechanical imitation of dialect in the pronunciation is wrong from this point of view also. the movements and actions of a character are as essential as dialect, but are more general and will often determine the most important part of the dialect, namely, the peculiar melody. when a character is truly assimilated by instinct, if there is no mechanical imitation, the dialect becomes almost an unconscious revelation. the study of dialect is very close to the subject of dramatic diction. many of our modern poets who use the monologue, such as day, foss, riley, and drummond, are blamed by superficial critics for the roughness of their language. fastidious critics often say the work of these authors is too rough, and "not poetry." in reply to such criticism it may be said that the peculiar nature of dramatic diction is not realized. this rough language is necessary because of the peculiar type of character. the man cannot be revealed without making him speak his own native tongue. browning is blamed as an artist for using burly and even brutal english, but as mr. chesterton has shown, "this is perfectly appropriate to the theme." an ill-mannered, untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. but the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them occur bursts of pure poetry which are like the sudden song of birds. flashes of poetry at unexpected moments are natural to all men. high ideals, aspirations, and even exalted visions belong to every one. poetry is as universal as the human heart, though only a few can give it word. the rough language, however, is not antagonistic to these poetic visions, but necessary for the truthful presentation of the character; that is to say, dramatic poetry must present both the external, objective form and the internal thought and ideal. the very nature of dramatic poetry demands such a union. this principle must govern all dramatic diction, dialect included, but the law of suggestion and delicate intimation governs everywhere. xiv. properties a play is a complete dramatic representation. the scenery, dress, and many details are realistically presented to the eye. all the characters concerned come forth upon the stage literally represented and objectively identified in name, dress, look, and action. any speaker may take himself bodily out of the scene. there are properties, scenery, and other characters to sustain the movement and continuity of the story. hence, upon the stage, situations and accidents can be represented more literally than in the monologue, where much is hinted, or only intimated. in the latter there is but one speaker and the situation is not represented by scenery. it is a mental performance, and everything must be simple. the monologue cannot be represented to the eyes as literally as a play; hence, appeal must not be made to the eyes, but to the mind. the interpreter of the monologue, however, too often takes the stage as the standard. there seems to be no well-conceived principle regarding the use of scenery. the ambition is to make everything "dramatic," and the result is that monologues are often made literal, showy, and theatrical, and presented with inconsistencies which are almost ridiculous. many readers arrange a platform as a stage with furniture, and dress for their part as if in a play. they show great attention to all sorts of mechanical accidents. they must have a fan or some extraordinary hat which can be taken off and arranged on the stage, and they sometimes go to greatest extremes in sitting, standing, walking, and kneeling, thus crudely violating the principles of unity, without which there is no art. the first principle which must govern the use of scenery on the stage, and especially of properties by the interpreter of a monologue, is significance. nothing must be used that is not positively and necessarily expressive of the thought and spirit of the passage rendered. when duse once looked at the stage before the curtain rose, she found a statue in the supposed room. this was not unnatural, and seemed to the stage-manager all right, as it made the place look more home-like; but she said the statue must go out at once, as it was not a subject that would interest the character depicted. he would never have such a statue in his room. so out went the statue. and duse was right. in general, in our day, on the stage as well as on the platform, there is a tendency to use too many properties, too many accidentals, or merely decorative details. things should not be put on a platform or stage because they are beautiful, but because they have significance. even an artistic dress is governed by the same principle. whatever is not expressive of the personality, whatever does not become a part of the whole person, is a blemish and should be at once eliminated. in most instances, vulgarity consists in the use of too many things. as one word well chosen is more expressive than a dozen carelessly selected, so the highest type of monologue demands the greatest simplicity in its rendering. it must be borne in mind that the aim of all vocal expression is to win attention. many objects which at first seem to attract attention will be found really to distract the auditor's mind. let the reader try the experiment of omitting them, and he will discover the advantage of few properties. the painter must have the power of generalizing, of putting objects into the background and enveloping all in what is sometimes called "tone." all objects should be dominated by the same spirit, and must, therefore, be made akin to each other and brought into unity. on the stage the lights are often so arranged as to throw objects into shadow; yet this can hardly equal the painter's art of subordination. the interpreter of a monologue, however, has no such assistance. he must subordinate, accordingly, by elimination, by the greatest simplicity in accessories, and by accentuating central ideas or points. it is well known that during the greatest periods of dramatic art, such as the age of shakespeare, the stage was kept extremely simple, and this is the case also in the best french and german drama of the present time. the fundamental law governing not only all dramatic art, and the monologue and platform, but pictures and other forms of art, is unity. simplicity does not elaborate details or properties or gorgeous scenery. it is the result of the subordination of means to one end. every part of the stage must be an integral portion and express the spirit of the scene. modern electric lights and appliances are such that a scene can be brought into unity by effects of light in a way that was not possible until recent years. power to bring gorgeous scenery into unity has been shown especially by sir henry irving. in general, in proportion as a play becomes spectacular, and the stage is made a means of exhibiting splendid scenery for its own sake, there is absence of the dramatic spirit. the same is true regarding properties. a man may use his cane until it becomes imbued with his own personality, and he can extend the sense of feeling to its farthest tip, as the blind man uses a stick to feel his way through the streets of a city. hence, whenever any article of dress is a necessary part of the character and has an inherent relation to the story or the thought, when it becomes an essential part of the expression, then it may be properly employed. coquelin, for example, in one of his monologues, comes out with a hat in his hand, but the name of the monologue is "the hat." it is to the hat that his good fortune is due. he treats it with great affection and tenderness, and it becomes in his hand an agency for gesticulation as well as an object of attention. it can be managed with great flexibility and freedom and in no way interferes with, but rather aids, the subtle, humorous transitions in thought and feeling that occur all through the monologue. the temptation to most interpreters, however, is to drag in something which should play the most accidental rôle possible and make it a centre of interest. this destroys expression. to illustrate: in a popular monologue a lady is supposed to discover under the edge of a curtain a pair of boots which she takes for evidence that a man is standing behind the curtain in concealment. now, if literal boots are arranged on the stage behind a curtain, they have a totally different effect from coquelin's hat. they are there all the time. the audience sees them. they cannot move or be used in any way except indirectly. besides, the woman should discover the boots, and the audience is supposed to discover them with her. a literal pair of boots, therefore, will interfere with the imagination and an imaginary one is far more easily managed. it is difficult, however, to lay down a universal principle, as much depends upon the artist, the situation, and the circumstances, but in general the chief mistake is in having too many things and in being too literal. the monologue, it must never be forgotten, depends more upon suggestion than the play, and the law of suggestion must always be obeyed. the monologue, or its interpretation, is simply a mode of expression, and the employment of all accessories and properties must, first of all, be such as will not destroy expression, but rather increase the intensity and enforce the central spirit of the thought. a second principle might be named the law of centrality. the artist must carefully distinguish between the accidental and the essential, and be sure to remember that art is the emphasis of the essential; that emphasis is the manifestation of what is of fundamental importance and the subordination of what is of secondary value. careless and inartistic minds always find the accidental first; the accidental is to them always more interesting. but when an accidental is made an essential, the result is a one-sided effect; and while a temporary impression may be produced upon an audience, it is never permanently valuable. the reader who emphasizes accidents will himself grow weary of his monologue in a short time and not know the reason. only a thing of beauty is a joy forever. only that which is natural and in accordance with the laws of nature will stand forever as an object of interest. a third law is consistency. as the oak-leaf is consistent with the whole tree, so in art, the degree of literalness in one direction must be justified by a corresponding degree in another. if mrs. caudle is to have a night-cap, then an old-fashioned curtain bed, a stuffed image for caudle, and a phonograph for his snore are equally requisite. the temptation to be literal would hardly lead a monologue interpreter to place caliban in the position browning suggests in the poem, since it is impracticable to have a pool on the stage and let caliban lie in the cool slush. in the very nature of the case, accessories are suggestive, and the degree of suggestion in one direction must determine the degree in others. these three suggestive principles of unity, centrality, and consistency show that what may be done on the stage should not be a standard for the interpretation of a monologue. in the very nature of the case, the interpreter of the monologue cannot have all the means of producing an optical illusion which are available on the stage. his illusion must be mental and imaginative. circumstances, however, change, though the laws will be found to apply. because the speaker is supposed to be sitting in a grocery store on a barrel, it is not necessary for the reader to sit upon a table and swing his feet. we are not interested in the barrel, but in the one who sits upon it, and he would be as interesting if sitting upon something else, or even standing. the fundamental centre of interest in all expression is the mind, and whatever cannot reinforce that is not only useless, but a hindrance. the old age of rabbi ben ezra is purely accidental. to present him as weak and enfeebled would destroy for us the vigorous mind, and strong convictions of the old man. one of the precious memories of my youth, the most adequate rendering of a monologue i ever heard, was charlotte cushman's reading of tennyson's "the grandmother." sitting quietly in her chair, as she did in nearly all of her readings, she suggested the mind of the grandmother whose girlhood memories, "seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago," were accentuated by the trembling head and hands and voice. all the mental attitudes so well portrayed by tennyson--the lapses into forgetfulness; the tenderness of the experience; the patience born of old age;--were faithfully depicted. it was something which those who heard could never forget. the greatness of charlotte cushman's art was shown in the fact that she could give an extremely simple monologue with marvellous consistency and force. it is strange that among american dramatic artists no one has tried to follow in her steps. i can laugh yet when i remember her transcendent interpretation of "the annuity," a monologue in scottish character and dialect. i owe a great debt to miss cushman, for she awakened my interest in the monologue, and gave me, over thirty years ago, an ideal conception of the possibilities of dramatic platform art. she never used properties of any kind. at times she stood up and walked the platform and acted a scene from macbeth or some other play, but always with the simplest possible interpretation, without any mechanical accessories. she never stood in giving her monologues, or readings, which she gave the last year of her life. care, of course, is needed in regard to the employment of properties also on the stage. the difficulty of placing a horse upon the stage is well known. he cannot be made a part of the picture, cannot be subordinated, or "made up." if we observe from the gallery when a horse is on the stage, we find that the attention of everybody is centred upon him, and the point of the play is lost. who ever receives an impression of the splendid music while brunhilde stands holding by the bridle a great cart-horse? the centre of interest in goldsmith's "she stoops to conquer" is not in the horse that tony lumpkin has been driving, but in his dialogue with his mother, and her fright at her husband, whom she believes to be a highwayman. to introduce two horses, making the audience uneasy as to what they will do, destroys the dramatic interest of the scene. the bringing of real horses on the stage in a play always causes fear of an accident and distracts attention from the real point of the scene. to see a noted singer motioning to a super to bring her horse on the stage makes "the judicious grieve." there is no doubt a tendency at the present time to over-elaboration and to extravagance in realistic presentation. but if too much literalism is objectionable in the play, how much more is it in the monologue? all these principles may be combined in one, the law of harmony. this is possibly the simplest law regarding properties, dialect, and all accidentals in the interpretation of a monologue. the degree of realism in one direction or in one part must be justified by corresponding degrees in others. all art is relative, and depends upon the unity of impression. a man's clothes may be a part of his character, and a singular individual often has an odd hat, or cane, that has become an essential means in the expression of his character. where a man uses a stick habitually in an individual way, the dramatic artist may use this to a certain extent, especially in monologues of a lower type. so of any article of dress; when an essential part of a character is needed for expression, it is proper to use it. the same principle applies here that was shown in the case of dialect. though accidental, an article of dress may become a means of expression. in the higher and more exalted monologues, however, there should be more suggestion and less literal presentation of properties or adjuncts. the sublimer the literature, the more appeal is made to the imagination; the deeper the feeling, the more complete is the dependence upon the imagination of the audience. the more lyrical also, a monologue, the less must there be of any accidental representation. this is sure to destroy the lyric spirit. even when there is not a lyric element the dramatic element is only suggested, and in the sublimest monologues often verges towards the epic. the monologue is rarely purely dramatic, that is, dramatic in a sense peculiar to the theatre. the application of these principles to the interpretation of a monologue is clear. nothing in the way of properties should ever be employed in the presentation of a monologue which is not absolutely necessary. there should be nothing on the platform which does not directly aid in interpreting the passage. all which does not co-operate in producing the illusion will be a hindrance. whenever attention is called to a literal object, or even to a mere objective fact, attention is distracted from the central theme. all properties appeal to the eye, and it requires a careful management of light and a study of the stage picture to bring them into unity with the scene. but the reader of the monologue can have no such advantages. if unity in the literal representation of the stage is necessary, and cannot be won without great subordination, how much more is this needful in the presentation of a monologue, where the appeal is to the mind, and people are supposed to use not their eye, but their imagination, and even to supply a listener. the laws of consistency and suggestion, accordingly, require the elimination or very careful subordination of properties and scenery in the presentation of the monologue. whenever one thing is carried beyond the limit of suggestiveness or the degree of realistic representation possible in all directions, the effect is one-sided. the necessity of subordinating properties and make-up in the monologue is shown by the fact that they are more permissible in those of a very low type or in the burlesque or the farce. dramatic elements and actions need to be emphasized by the interpreter of a monologue. the actor can "take the stage" or give it up to another, but this is impossible in a monologue. the interpreter on a platform has no one to hold the stage while he falls. he can only suggest all the actions and relations of character to character. he cannot make the same number of movements, or turn so far around or walk so great a distance, or make such a literal portrayal of objects as is possible on a stage. the monologue must centre expression in the face, eyes, and action, and in the pictures awakened in the minds of the hearers, not in mere accidents or properties. i have seen a prominent reader bend over at the hip and lean on a cane, so that his face could not be seen by the audience, and people were expected to accept this monstrosity as an old man. one among twenty thousand old men might be bent over in this way, but then he could never talk as this reader talked. certainly such action was foreign to the intention of his author and the spirit of his selection, as well as to the spirit of art. face and body must be seen in order to fully understand language, and no accidental must be so exaggerated as to interfere with a definite, artistic accentuation of that which is necessary to the meaning and expressive presentation of the whole. in general, let the reader beware of accidentals, and in every case, as much as possible, emphasize the fundamentals. xv. faults in rendering a monologue many faults in the rendering of a monologue have been necessarily suggested in the preceding discussion. there are some, however, which have been but barely referred to, that possibly need some further attention. the monologue must not be stagy. it should possess the quiet simplicity, the long pauses, the abrupt movement, the animated changes in pitch, and the simple intensity which belong to conversation. the italian in england would remember and feel again the excitement of danger, and gratitude for delivery; but he would not employ descriptive gestures and declamatory presentation as if delivering an oration. an important error to be avoided in rendering a monologue is monotony or inflexibility. a monologue is more suggestive than any other form of literature, for it implies sudden exclamations and abrupt transitions. the ideas and feelings are often hardly hinted at by the writer. there is not only greater difficulty in realizing the continuity of ideas and meaning, but a greater necessity for abrupt changes of voice than in any other mode of expression. the reader of the monologue must suggest the impressions produced upon him, the hidden causes, the unreported words of another character, and at the same time a distinct and definite imaginative situation. hence, the rendering of a monologue requires the greatest possible accentuation of the processes of thinking and feeling and the most delicate transitions of ideas. an impression produced by a mere look must be definitely revealed by the interpreter. we thus see the necessity for the employment of great flexibility of voice and of body, and especially the exercise of versatility of the mind. the interpreter must have a sympathetic temperament, and must be able to accentuate and sustain the simplest look, the most delicate inflection and change of pitch, and to modulate the color and movement of his voice with perfect freedom. to read a monologue on one pitch completely perverts its spirit. monotony is a bad fault in rendering all forms of literature, but it is possibly worse in the monologue on account of the peculiarly broken and suggestive character of that form of writing. all the elements of conversation must be not only realized, but emphasized. the reader must be able to make some of these so salient as to reveal the very first initiation of an idea; otherwise, the real point may be lost. the thought must be made clear at all hazards. the monologue must not be tame. because it is printed in such regular lines the suggestive character may be lost, and the words simply presented as in a story or essay. there is a great temptation to give the feeling with the personal directness of the lyric story or essay. the monologue requires extreme definiteness and decision in the conception of character and feeling, and every point must be made salient. another fault in the rendering of the monologue is a declamatory tendency. as the reader discovers but one speaker he confuses the words with a speech. he feels the presence of the audience to whom he is addressing the words, or unconsciously imagines an audience, in preparing his monologue, and forgets entirely the dramatic auditor intended by the author. thus, the interpreter, confusing the points of situation, transforms the monologue into a stump speech. it degrades the quiet intensity of "a grammarian's funeral" to make the grammarian's pupil, who is aiding in bearing his body up the mountain side, declaim against the world. how quietly intense and simple should be the rendering of "by the fireside." although the subtleties of conversation need some accentuation, and although there is an enlargement of the processes of thinking, and fuller realization of the truth than in conversation, the monologue never becomes a speech. an audience may be felt, but never directly dominated, nor even addressed. in the oration, the speaker directly dominates the audience; in dramatic representation, the artist does not even look at his audience. his eye belongs to his interlocutor. the direction of the audience is that of attraction, and away from the audience that of negation. he must feel a tendency to gravitate in passion towards the audience, and in the negation of passion to turn from them; but still he succeeds, not by direct instruction, but by fidelity of portraiture. the monologue is as indirect as a play. it is the revelation of a soul, and to be used not to persuade, but to influence subtly. the truth is portrayed with living force, and the auditor left to draw his own conclusions and lessons. another fault is indefiniteness. every part of a monologue must be brought into harmony with the rest. part must be consistent with part, as are the hand and foot belonging to the same organism. if "abt vogler" be started as a soliloquy, it must not be turned into a speech to an audience, nor even into a direct speech to one individual. if conceived as a speech to one individual, that character must be preserved throughout. even though talking to some one, he would be very meditative, and would often turn and speak as if to himself. closely allied to indefiniteness is exaggeration of certain parts. all accentuation must be in direct proportion. if inflection be made longer and more salient, there must also be longer pauses, greater changes of pitch, and greater variations of movement and color. in the enlargement of a portrait, it is necessary that all parts be enlarged in proportion. if only the nose or the upper lip be enlarged, the truth of the portrait is lost. but on account of the suggestive character of the monologue, essentials only must be expanded and accentuated. hardly any form of art demands that accidentals be more completely subordinated. to exaggerate accidents is to produce extravagance; to appeal to a lower sense is to violate the artistic law of unity. naturalness can be preserved in any artistic accentuation by increased emphasis of essentials. this prevents the monologue from being tame on the one hand, and extravagant on the other. failures in the ordinary rendering of a monologue are frequently occasioned by lack of imagination. the scene, situation, and relation of the characters do not seem to be clearly or vividly realized. hence, there is a lack of passion, of emotional realization of a living scene, and consequently of natural modulations of voice and body. the audience depends entirely upon the interpreter, since there is no scenery to suggest the situation. all centres in the mind of the reader. if he does not see, and does not show the impression of his vision, his auditor cannot be expected to realize anything. at first thought, it seems impossible for a reader to cause an audience to discover a complicated situation from a look. the reader may think it necessary to make a long explanation first and be tempted to depend upon objects around him. it is presently found, however, that a mere hint, a turn of the head, a passing expression of the face, will kindle the imagination of the auditor. if the reader really sees things himself, and is natural, flexible, and forcible, he need not fear that his audience will not imagine the scene. an illusion is easily produced. imagination kindles imagination; vision evokes vision. every picture, every situation, the location of every character, the entrance of every idea, must be naturally revealed, and there is no need for extravagance of labor. whatever turns the attention of the audience to the labor of the reader will prevent imaginative creation of the scene, while all minds will be concentrated on the thought when there is a natural, easy manifestation of a simple impression. the reader in rendering a monologue has especial need for dramatic imagination, and must have insight into the motives of character. the character he portrays must think and live, and the character to whom he is supposed to speak must also be realized. he must sympathetically identify himself with every point of view. a lack of dramatic instinct upon the stage may at times be concealed by a show of scenery and properties, but without dramatic instinct the rendering of a monologue is impossible. it is the dramatic imagination that enables a reader to feel the implied relations, to awaken to a consciousness of a situation, or of the meaning and intimation of the impression produced by another character. lack of clearness must be corrected by unusual emphasis. in fact, the monologue demands what may be called dramatic emphasis. not only must words that stand for central ideas be made salient, but so also must be the impressions of ideas or of situations that need special attention. these give to the audience the situation and life. it is the dramatic ellipses that need especially to be revealed in order to make a monologue clear as well as forcible. a monologue demands the direct action of the dramatic instinct. all dramatic art must live and move. there is always something of a struggle implied, and this must be suggested and represented. the whole interest of dramatic art centres in the effect of one human being upon another. without dramatic realization of the effect of character upon character, genuine interpretation of a monologue is not possible. the monologue must never be theatrical or spectacular. if the interpreter exaggerates at the first some situation, however great or important, beyond the bounds of living, moving, natural life, the result becomes mere posing. an attitude that might have been a simple and clear revelation of feeling is altogether exaggerated, and appeals to the eye instead of to the imagination. it is the result, perhaps, of an expert mechanic, but not of dramatic instinct. if there is a locating of everything, literalism is substituted for imaginative suggestiveness. an extravagant earnestness, or loudness, or unnatural stilted methods of emphasis, will entirely prevent the reader's imaginative and dramatic action in identifying himself with the character, or entering into sympathetic relations with the scene. a monologue must always be perfectly true to life, and as simple and natural as every-day movements upon the street. the interpreter of a monologue must study nature; must train his voice and body to the greatest degree of flexible responsiveness, and become acquainted with the human heart. he must cultivate a sympathetic appreciation of all forms of literature; must understand the subtle influences of one human being over another, and comprehend that only by delicate suggestion of the simplest truth can the imagination and sympathies be awakened. he must have confidence in his fellow-men, and be able, by a simple hint, to awaken men's ideals. in short, faults in rendering monologues must be prevented by genuineness, by developing taste, and awakening the imagination, dramatic instinct, and artistic nature. xvi. importance of the monologue when we have once discovered the nature and peculiarities of the monologue, the character of its interpretation, and its uses in dramatic expression, its general importance in art, literature, and education becomes apparent. in the first place, its value is shown by the fact that it reveals phases of human nature not otherwise expressed in literature, or in any other form of art. to illustrate this, let us take browning's "saul." it is founded upon a very slight story in the book of kings to the effect that when saul was afflicted with an evil spirit, a skilful musician was sought to charm away the demon, and the youthful david was chosen. browning takes this theme, transfigures it by his imagination, and produces what is considered by some the greatest poem of the nineteenth century. without necessarily subscribing to this judgment, let us study this poem which has called forth from some critics so much enthusiasm. browning makes david the speaker in the monologue, and its occasion after the event, when he is "alone" with his sheep, endeavoring to realize what happened while playing before saul, and what it meant. the poem begins with his arrival at the israelitish camp, and abner's kindly reception and indication to him of his duty. browning isolates saul in his tent, which no one dares approach. this stripling with his harp must, therefore, go into that tent alone. after kneeling and praying, he "runs over the sand burned to powder," and at the entrance to the tent again prays. then he is "not afraid," but enters, calling out, "here is david." presently he sees "something more black than the blackness," arms on the cross-supports (note the cross). now what can david, a youth, before the king, sing or say or do? he first plays "the tune all our sheep know," that is, he starts, as endeavor should ever start, upon the memory of some early victory. possibly his first victory was the training of the sheep to obey his music. the winning of one victory gives courage for another. it is practically the only courage a human being can get. hence, david tries the same song. he is not ashamed to trust his childhood's experiences. then follows the tune by which he had charmed the "quails," the "crickets," and the "quick jerboa." later experiences succeed, the tune of the "reapers," the "wine-song," the praise of the "dead man." then follows "... the glad chant of the marriage ..." and "... the chorus intoned as the levites go up to the altar." here he stops and receives his first response. "in the darkness saul groaned." then david pours forth the song of the perfection of the physical manhood of which saul was the type. "'oh, our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste, not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,'" and calls him by name, "king saul." then he waits what may follow, as one at the climax of human endeavor pauses to see what has been accomplished. after a long shudder, the king's self was left "... standing before me, released and aware." what more could he do? "(for, awhile there was trouble within me.)" then he turns to the dreams he had had in the field. he has gone the rounds of his experience and done his best to interpret them. now he passes into a higher realm. he describes the great future, and all the different causes working to perpetuate saul's fame. "'so the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part in thy being! then, first of the mighty, thank god that thou art!'" as he closes, the harp falling forward, he becomes aware "that he sat, as i say, with my head just above his vast knees which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak roots which please to encircle a lamb when it slumbers." then saul lifted up his hand from his side and laid it "in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' my hair the large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power-- all my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower." and david peered into the eyes of the king-- "'and oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign?'" his intense love and longing lifts david into a state of exaltation. "then the truth came upon me. no harp more--no song more! outbroke--" the instrument drops to his side, for inspiration at its highest is expressed by the simplest means. with a heart thrilled by love of this fellow-being, out of that human love david comes to realize something of the divine love, and he breaks into the finest strain of nineteenth century poetry. in noble anapestic lines he pours forth the thought as it comes to him: "'behold, i could love if i durst! but i sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake god's own speed in the one way of love: i abstain for love's sake. what, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal? in the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? do i find love so full in my nature, god's ultimate gift, that i doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift? here, the creature surpass the creator,--the end, what began?... would i suffer for him that i love? so wouldst thou--so wilt thou!'" this poem of browning's is conceived in the loftiest spirit of religious verse. david foretelling the christ as the manifestation of divine love, and the authentication of the fact of immortality, reaches the true spirit of all prophecy, a theme almost transcending poetry. then follow a few words of david's, descriptive of the effect of the new law which he has discovered upon the world around him on his way home. illumination has come to him, the world is transfigured by love; and this sublime poem closes with the murmur of the brooks. what does it all mean? one person makes it the text of a long discussion on the use of music to cure disease. another thinks it a suggestion in poetry of the spirit of hebrew prophecy. there is no end to its applications. it is a parable. is it not the poetic interpretation of all noble endeavor? may not david represent any human being facing some great undertaking? is not the gloomy tent the world, and saul outstretched in the form of a cross the race, and david with his harp any trembling soul who attempts to charm away the demon from his fellow-men? is it too much to say that every successful artist follows david's example as portrayed by browning? the artist will also share in david's experience in the transformation of the world. without the monologue could such a marvellous interpretation be possible? how could we receive such suggestions, such glimpses into man's spiritual nature? what other form of art could serve as an objective means of expressing those experiences? the evolution of the monologue has made "saul" possible. there has been much discussion whether the book of job is a dramatic or an epic poem. it contains both elements, but if we study the singular character of the many speeches, we can see that the real spirit of the poem is explained by the principles of the dramatic monologue. it is a series of monologues by different speakers, each character being separately defined, and his words and ideas definitely colored by his character, as in "the ring and the book." the ninetieth psalm is a monologue. whoever the author may have been, he conceived of moses as the speaker. the experience is not that of mankind in general. a peculiar situation and type of character are demanded. no other man in history can utter so fittingly the words of the psalm as can moses. "lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art god. thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest, return, ye children of men. for a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. for we are consumed in thine anger, and in thy wrath are we troubled. thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. for all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we bring our years to an end as a sigh. the days of our years are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore years; yet is their pride but labor and sorrow; for it is soon gone, and we fly away. who knoweth the power of thine anger, and thy wrath according to the fear that is due unto thee? so teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom. return, o jehovah; how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. oh satisfy us in the morning with thy lovingkindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory upon their children. and let the favor of the lord our god be upon us; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it." the very first words hint at his experiences. he never had a home; how natural, therefore, for him to say, "lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." cradled on the nile, brought up by pharaoh's daughter, jethro's shepherd for forty years, and for another forty a wanderer in the wilderness and the leader of his people, surely he was rich in tried knowledge! notice how these conditions save the psalm from untruthfulness. "all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a sigh." such statements are true of moses and the people condemned to die in the desert, joshua and caleb only being permitted to pass over the jordan. moses in his grief at the divine judgment could say this truthfully to god, but to give these words a universal application would falsify a christian's faith and hope. they are dramatic rather than lyric. the psalm should be read as a monologue, the character should be sustained; the feeling and experience, not of every one, but of moses in particular, should be felt and truly interpreted. what light the study of the monologue throws upon the peculiar oratory of the hebrew prophets! these are speeches, sermons with fragmentary interruptions. note, for example, in the twenty-eighth chapter of isaiah, a speech to the drunkards of jerusalem. the speaker is referring as a warning to the drunkards of samaria, the northern city being intimated by the figure of the "crown--on the head of the fat valley." but in verses nine and ten the drunkards retort, and their words have to be read as quotations, as the expression of their feelings. the speeches of the prophets, of course, are not regular forms of the monologue; but a study of the monologue enables us to recognize their dramatic character, and greatly aids in discovering the meaning of these sublime poems or addresses. the monologue is capable of rendering special service to many classes of men. it has an important, but overlooked, educational value. it can render, for example, great assistance in the training of a speaker. the chief dangers of the speaker are unnaturalness, declamation, extravagance, and crude methods of emphasis, such especially as over-emphasis. he inclines to employ physical force rather than mental energy, to give a show of earnestness rather than to suggest intensity of thought and feeling. the monologue furnishes the speaker with a simple method of studying naturalness. if set to master a monologue, he must observe conversation, and be able to express thoughts saliently and earnestly to one person. although no true speaker can ever afford to neglect the study of shakespeare and the great dramatists, still the monologue affords a great variety of dramatic situations, and especially interprets dramatic points of view. it will also help him to gain a knowledge of character and furnish a simple method of developing his own naturalness. an orator presents truth directly, for its own sake, and hence is apt to overlook the fact that oratory, after all, is "the presentation of truth by personality," and that personal peculiarities will interfere with such presentation. a study of the monologue will reveal him to himself, and help him to understand something of the necessity of making truth clear to another personality. by studying dramatic art, the speaker, in short, not only comes to a knowledge of human nature, and the relation of human beings to each other, but is furnished with the means of understanding himself. another important service which the monologue is capable of rendering is the awakening of a perception of the necessary connection between the living voice and literature. the greeks recognized this, but in modern times we have almost lost the function of the spoken word in education, in our over-emphasis of the written word. the monologue is capable of furnishing a new course in recitation and speaking, of bringing the most important study of the natural languages into practical relationship with the study of literature. on the one hand, it elevates the study of the spoken word, and gives a practical course for the colleges and high schools in the rendering of some of the masterpieces of the language; on the other hand, it prevents the courses in literature from becoming a mere scientific study of words. the true study of literature must be subjective. psychology has tested and tried every study in recent years. men will soon come to realize that there is a psychology of literature, and centre its study, not in words, but in the living expression of thought and feeling. written language will then be directly connected with the awakening of the creative faculties of the mind. the value of the monologue will then be appreciated because of its direct revelation of the action of man's faculties, and it may be realized also that the evolution of the monologue is a part of the progressive spirit of our own time. the rendering of the monologue also will aid us in securing a method and emphasize the fact that literature as art must be studied as art and by means of art. scientific study of literature is abnormal or necessarily one-sided. the study of the monologue when rightly pursued will aid in studying literature as the mirror of life and prevent the student from developing contempt for the literary masterpieces which he is made to analyze. it will aid in the study of literature as "the criticism of life" and enable the individual student to realize literature as the mirror of human experience. it will prevent students from studying literature as mere words. it will awaken deeper and truer appreciation and will prevent the contempt, born of mechanical drudgery, for literary masterpieces. educated men do not know by heart the noble poetry of the language. the voices of american students are hard and cold. there is among us little appreciation of art. the monologue seems to come as a peculiar blessing at this time as a means of educating the imagination and dramatic instinct. it furnishes a course for recitation that obviates the necessity for a stage, avoids the stiltedness of declamation, yet supplies an adequate method of studying the lost art of recitation,--the art that made the greek what he was. the monologue will help students in all the arts to overcome tendencies to mechanical practice. there is danger of making all exercises mechanical. take, for example, the student of song. if he practises scales or songs without thought, or any sense of expressing feeling to others, it is simply a matter of execution. some of our leading singers express no feeling. song, to them, is a matter of technical execution,--very beautiful as an exhibition, but not as a revelation of the heart. a similar condition is found also in other forms of art,--in instrumental music, in painting or drawing. there is a continual tendency to forget that art is the expression of thinking and feeling to another mind; and while there must be very severe training to master technicalities, this is not the end, but the means. the monologue furnishes a simple and adequate method for the mastery of the relations of one mind to another. it is just as necessary in the development of the artist that he should come to feel the laws of the human mind, the laws of his own thinking and feeling, and the character of the suggestion of that feeling, and to recognize the modifications which the presence of another soul makes upon his own, as it is that he should master the technique of his art. all art is social. it is founded on the relation of human beings to each other; on the character of the soul; on the love of one human being for others, and the desire to reveal to his fellows the impressions that nature, or human character, make upon him. in all artistic practice, of song, of instrumental music, of painting, of drama, there should be in the mind of the artist a perception of the race. the monologue is especially helpful to dramatic students. they are too apt to despise the monologue, and not appreciate the assistance its mastery could give them. they desire mere rehearsals of plays; they want scenery, properties, accessories, forgetful that the primary elements of dramatic art are found in thought, feeling, and motives and passions. dramatic art must be based on the revelation of the nature of man; and on the effect of mind upon mind. the monologue enables the dramatic student to study the dramatic element in his own mind, as well as in the relations of one character to another. when he has no interlocutor to listen to or to lead the attention of the audience, or hold it in the appreciation of what he is saying, thinking, and doing, he is thrown back upon his instincts, and must imagine his interlocutor and depend upon himself. the monologue, however, is important for its own artistic character. it is primarily important because it belongs to dramatic art. it gives insight into human character, embodies the poetry of every-day life, and reveals the mysteries of the human heart, as possibly no other literary form can do. it focuses attention upon human motives independent of "too much story" or literary digression. it interprets human conduct, thinking, feeling, and passion, from a distinct point of view. it suggests the secret of human follies, misconceptions, and perversities, and gives the key to greatness and nobility in character. insignificant as the form may seem to one who has never studied it, it is a mirror of human life, and as such can be made a means of criticizing public wrong or folly. it can express a universal feeling, and is one of the finest agents of humor. by its aid mr. dooley reflects the weaknesses and foibles of people and parties in such a way as to make a whole nation smile, and even to mould public sentiment. thus, the amusing and humorous monologues must not be despised. think of the services humor has rendered in the advance of human civilization! alas for him who cannot smile at folly, and alas for human art which appeals only to the morbid! the highest function of human art is to awaken pleasure at the sight of the beautiful, and the true. if a man finds pleasure in what is below his ordinary plane of life, he injures himself. if enjoyment leads him in the direction of his ideal, although indirectly, by a portrayal of the comic, the abnormal, or even of low characters, he is benefited, no matter how this benefit is received. men delight to teach and to preach, but it is astonishing how little direct teaching and preaching accomplish. on account of the hardness of the heart, the parable, or some other less direct method of teaching, some artistic method, that is, is absolutely necessary. we desire to see a living scene portrayed before us; we must know and judge for ourselves. we must perceive both cause and effect, and then make the application to our own lives. art, especially dramatic art, is a necessity of human nature. "without art," says william winter, "each of us would be alone." only by art are we brought near together, and chiefly in our art will be found our true advance in civilization. the monologue is a new method, a new avenue of approach from heart to heart. dramatic art must have many forms. when no longer truthfully presented by the play, as is often the case; when it has become corrupted into a spectacular show, into something for the eye rather than for the mind; when no longer concerned with the interpretation of character and truth, or when debased to mere money making, then the irrepressible dramatic spirit must evolve a new form. hence, the origin and the significance of the monologue. whether the play can be restored to dramatic dignity or not, the monologue has come to stay. as a parallel, or even as a subordinate phase of dramatic art, it has become a part of literature. it is distinct from the play, and from every other literary form or phase of histrionic expression. of all forms of art, the monologue has most direct relation to one character only, a character not posing for his portrait. it portrays and interprets an individual unconsciously revealing himself. it presents some crucial situation of life, and brings one character face to face with another character, the one best calculated to reveal the hidden springs of conduct. it must not be implied that the monologue is superior to other forms of art. it certainly will supersede no other form of poetry. it is unique, and its peculiar nature may be seen in comparing it with a play. a monologue may be of any length, from a few lines to that of "the ring and the book," which is really a collection of monologues, the longest poem, next to "faerie queene," in the english language. the subject of the monologue can be infinitely varied. by its aid almost everything can be treated dramatically. it is far more flexible than the formal drama, because the same movement and formality of plot are not required as in the play. it can be conceived upon any plane,--burlesque, farce, comedy, or tragedy. it can be prose in form, or it may adopt any metre or length of line. it may employ the most commonplace slang, and the dialect of the lowest characters, or it may adopt the highest poetic diction. a monologue can be presented anywhere, for it demands no stage, no carloads of expensive scenery, no trained troupe of a hundred artists. it does require, however, an artist, a thoroughly trained artist,--with perfect command of thought, feeling, imagination, and passion, as well as complete control of voice and body. fully as much as the play, it requires obedience to the laws of art, and demands that the artist be not fettered and trammelled as to his ideal. he is not compelled to repress his finest intuitions, or to soften down his honest conceptions of a character and the place of that character in a scene, for the sake of some "star." the monologue is not in danger of being spoiled by some second-class actor in a subordinate part. the artist is free to adopt any means to meet the taste, judgment, and criticism of the audience, and to realize for himself the true nature of art. the monologue is less likely than the play to be degraded into a spectacular exhibition. the monologue, however, has its dangers. the play has the experience of centuries of criticism, and constant discussion, but to the critics, the monologue is new. it may be well said that no adequate criticism of any interpreter of a monologue has yet been given. not only this, but various cheap and chaotic performances have been called monologues, simply for lack of a word. these are often a mere gathering together of comic stories and cheap jokes, and have nothing really in common with the dramatic monologue. such perversions, however, are to be expected. the lack of critical discussion, the lack of definition and true appreciation of its possibilities lead naturally to such a confused situation. the interpreter of the monologue must be a serious student, for he is creating or establishing a new art. if he is careless and superficial, and yields to that universal temptation to exhibition which has been in every age the danger of dramatic art, he will fail, and bring the monologue into consequent contempt. he must study the spirit underlying all great art and take his own work seriously, thinking more of it than of himself. the monologue has, also, literary limitations. it can never take the place of the play, nor must it lead us to disparage the play. the play has its function and in some form will forever survive. the monologue interprets certain aspects of character which can never be interpreted in any other way; but it can never show as adequately as the play the complexity of human life. it cannot portray movement as well as the play. the monologue, however, has its own sphere. it can reveal the attitude of one man towards life, towards truth, towards a situation, towards other human beings, more fully than is possible in any other form of art. its theme is not the same as that of the play. how can a play express the subjective struggles and heroism embodied in "the last ride together?" (p. ). what form of art could so effectively unmask the arch hypocrite in the "soliloquy of the spanish cloister" (p. )? try to put this theme into a play, or even into a novel, and browning's short monologue will show its superiority at once. the monologue can absorb one moment of attention, paint one picture, which, though without the movement of a drama, may yet the more adequately reveal the depths of a character. what an inspiring conception is found in "the patriot" (p. ); if expanded into a play, its purpose would be defeated. the tenderness and atmosphere of home in "by the fireside," no stage could present. did not kipling choose wisely his form of art in portraying the character of tommy atkins? is there any more effective way of making known to the world the character and emotions peculiar to a man when soldier subordinates man? after even a superficial study of modern poetry, who can fail to realize that the monologue is a distinct form of literature? how vast the range of subjects and emotions expressed, and yet underneath we find a form common to them all. this form has served to unfold the peculiar actions of mrs. caudle's mind and also the sublime convictions of rabbi ben ezra. it gives us the point of view and the feeling, not only of tommy atkins, but the high ideals and exalted emotions of abt vogler. it has been used to immortalize "tray," a "mere instinctive dog," as well as to express the resolute spirit of job and the cold, calculating counsel of his friends. it has even imaged the sublimest thoughts and emotions of the psalms. surely a form that has proven itself so adequate, so universal a help to human expression, is worthy of being regarded and carefully studied as one of the permanent modes of embodying human experience. xvii. some typical monologues from browning appearances and so you found that poor room dull, dark, hardly to your taste, my dear? its features seemed unbeautiful: but this i know--'twas there, not here, you plighted troth to me, the word which--ask that poor room how it heard! and this rich room obtains your praise unqualified,--so bright, so fair, so all whereat perfection stays? ay, but remember--here, not there, the other word was spoken! ask this rich room how you dropped the mask! andrea del sarto (called "the faultless painter") but do not let us quarrel any more, no, my lucrezia! bear with me for once: sit down and all shall happen as you wish. you turn your face, but does it bring your heart? i'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, treat his own subject after his own way, fix his own time, accept too his own price, and shut the money into this small hand when next it takes mine. will it? tenderly? oh, i'll content him,--but to-morrow, love! i often am much wearier than you think, this evening more than usual: and it seems as if--forgive now--should you let me sit here by the window, with your hand in mine, and look a half-hour forth on fiesole, both of one mind, as married people use, quietly, quietly the evening through, i might get up to-morrow to my work cheerful and fresh as ever. let us try. to-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! your soft hand is a woman of itself, and mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve for each of the five pictures we require: it saves a model. so! keep looking so-- my serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! --how could you ever prick those perfect ears, even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet-- my face, my moon, my everybody's moon, which everybody looks on and calls his, and, i suppose, is looked on by in turn, while she looks--no one's: very dear, no less. you smile? why, there's my picture ready made. there's what we painters call our harmony! a common grayness silvers everything,-- all in a twilight, you and i alike --you, at the point of your first pride in me (that's gone, you know)--but i, at every point; my youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down to yonder sober pleasant fiesole. there's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; that length of convent-wall across the way holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; the last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, and autumn grows, autumn in everything. eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape, as if i saw alike my work and self and all that i was born to be and do, a twilight-piece. love, we are in god's hand. how strange now looks the life he makes us lead; so free we seem, so fettered fast we are! i feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! this chamber for example--turn your head-- all that's behind us! you don't understand nor care to understand about my art, but you can hear at least when people speak: and that cartoon, the second from the door --it is the thing, love! so such things should be-- behold madonna!--i am bold to say. i can do with my pencil what i know, what i see, what at bottom of my heart i wish for, if i ever wish so deep-- do easily, too--when i say, perfectly, i do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, who listened to the legate's talk last week; and just as much they used to say in france. at any rate 'tis easy, all of it! no sketches first, no studies, that's long past: i do what many dream of, all their lives, --dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing. i could count twenty such on twice your fingers, and not leave this town, who strive--you don't know how the others strive to paint a little thing like that you smeared carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-- yet do much less, so much less, someone says, (i know his name, no matter)--so much less! well, less is more, lucrezia: i am judged. there burns a truer light of god in them, in their vexed, beating, stuffed and stopped-up brain, heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt this low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. their works drop groundward, but themselves, i know, reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, enter and take their place there sure enough, tho' they come back and cannot tell the world. my works are nearer heaven, but i sit here. the sudden blood of these men! at a word-- praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. i, painting from myself and to myself, know what i do, am unmoved by men's blame or their praise either. somebody remarks morello's outline there is wrongly traced, his hue mistaken; what of that? or else, rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? speak as they please, what does the mountain care? ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? all is silver-gray, placid and perfect with my art: the worse! i know both what i want and what might gain, and yet how profitless to know, to sigh "had i been two, another and myself, our head would have o'erlooked the world!" no doubt. yonder's a work now, of that famous youth the urbinate who died five years ago. ('tis copied, george vasari sent it me.) well, i can fancy how he did it all, pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, above and thro' his art--for it gives way; that arm is wrongly put--and there again-- a fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, its body, so to speak: its soul is right, he means right--that, a child may understand. still, what an arm! and i could alter it: but all the play, the insight and the stretch-- out of me, out of me! and wherefore out? had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, we might have risen to rafael, i and you! nay, love, you did give all i asked, i think-- more than i merit, yes, by many times. but had you--oh, with the same perfect brow, and perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, and the low voice my soul hears, as a bird the fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare-- had you, with these the same, but brought a mind! some women do so. had the mouth there urged "god and the glory! never care for gain. the present by the future, what is that? live for fame, side by side with agnolo! rafael is waiting: up to god, all three!" i might have done it for you. so it seems: perhaps not. all is as god over-rules. besides, incentives come from the soul's self; the rest avail not. why do i need you? what wife had rafael, or has agnolo? in this world, who can do a thing, will not; and who would do it, cannot, i perceive: yet the will's somewhat--somewhat, too, the power-- and thus we half-men struggle. at the end, god, i conclude, compensates, punishes. 'tis safer for me, if the award be strict, that i am something underrated here, poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. i dared not, do you know, leave home all day, for fear of chancing on the paris lords. the best is when they pass and look aside; but they speak sometimes; i must bear it all. well may they speak! that francis, that first time, and that long festal year at fontainebleau! i surely then could sometimes leave the ground, put on the glory, rafael's daily wear, in that humane great monarch's golden look,-- one finger in his beard or twisted curl over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, one arm about my shoulder, round my neck, the jingle of his gold chain in my ear, i painting proudly with his breath on me, all his court round him, seeing with his eyes, such frank french eyes, and such a fire of souls profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,-- and, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, this in the background, waiting on my work, to crown the issue with a last reward! a good time, was it not, my kingly days? and had you not grown restless ... but i know-- 'tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said; too live the life grew, golden and not gray: and i'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt out of the grange whose four walls make his world. how could it end in any other way? you called me, and i came home to your heart. the triumph was--to reach and stay there; since i reached it ere the triumph, what is lost? let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, you beautiful lucrezia that are mine! "rafael did this, andrea painted that; the roman's is the better when you pray, but still the other's virgin was his wife--" men will excuse me. i am glad to judge both pictures in your presence; clearer grows my better fortune, i resolve to think. for, do you know, lucrezia, as god lives, said one day agnolo, his very self, to rafael ... i have known it all these years.... (when the young man was flaming out his thoughts upon a palace-wall for rome to see, too lifted up in heart because of it) "friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub goes up and down our florence, none cares how, who, were he set to plan and execute as you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!" to rafael's!--and indeed the arm is wrong. i hardly dare ... yet, only you to see, give the chalk here--quick, thus the line should go! ay, but the soul! he's rafael! rub it out! still, all i care for, if he spoke the truth, (what he? why, who but michel agnolo? do you forget already words like those?) if really there was such a chance so lost,-- is, whether you're--not grateful--but more pleased. well, let me think so. and you smile indeed! this hour has been an hour! another smile? if you would sit thus by me every night i should work better, do you comprehend? i mean that i should earn more, give you more. see, it is settled dusk now; there's a star; morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall, the cue-owls speak the name we call them by. come from the window, love,--come in, at last, inside the melancholy little house we built to be so gay with. god is just. king francis may forgive me: oft at nights when i look up from painting, eyes tired out, the walls become illumined, brick from brick distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, that gold of his i did cement them with! let us but love each other. must you go? that cousin here again? he waits outside? must see you--you, and not with me? those loans? more gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? while hand and eye and something of a heart are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? i'll pay my fancy. only let me sit the gray remainder of the evening out, idle, you call it, and muse perfectly how i could paint, were i but back in france, one picture, just one more--the virgin's face, not yours this time! i want you at my side to hear them--that is, michel agnolo-- judge all i do and tell you of its worth. will you? to-morrow, satisfy your friend. i take the subjects for his corridor, finish the portrait out of hand--there, there, and throw him in another thing or two if he demurs; the whole should prove enough to pay for this same cousin's freak. beside, what's better and what's all i care about, get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! love, does that please you? ah, but what does he, the cousin! what does he to please you more? i am grown peaceful as old age to-night. i regret little, i would change still less. since there my past life lies, why alter it? the very wrong to francis!--it is true i took his coin, was tempted and complied, and built this house and sinned, and all is said. my father and my mother died of want. well, had i riches of my own? you see how one gets rich! let each one bear his lot. they were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died: and i have laboured somewhat in my time and not been paid profusely. some good son paint my two hundred pictures--let him try! no doubt, there's something strikes a balance. yes, you loved me quite enough, it seems to-night. this must suffice me here. what would one have? in heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-- four great walls in the new jerusalem, meted on each side by the angel's reed, for leonard, rafael, agnolo and me to cover--the three first without a wife, while i have mine! so--still they overcome because there's still lucrezia,--as i choose. again the cousin's whistle! go, my love. mulÃ�ykeh if a stranger passed the tent of hóseyn, he cried "a churl's!" or haply "god help the man who has neither salt nor bread!" --"nay," would a friend exclaim, "he needs nor pity nor scorn more than who spends small thought on the shore-sand, picking pearls, --holds but in light esteem the seed-sort, bears instead on his breast a moon-like prize, some orb which of night makes morn. "what if no flocks and herds enrich the son of sinán? they went when his tribe was mulct, ten thousand camels the due, blood-value paid perforce for a murder done of old. 'god gave them, let them go! but never since time began, muléykeh, peerless mare, owned master the match of you, and you are my prize, my pearl: i laugh at men's land and gold!' "so in the pride of his soul laughs hóseyn--and right, i say. do the ten steeds run a race of glory? outstripping all, ever muléykeh stands first steed at the victor's staff. who started, the owner's hope, gets shamed and named, that day. 'silence,' or, last but one, is 'the cuffed,' as we use to call whom the paddock's lord thrusts forth. right, hóseyn, i say, to laugh!" "boasts he muléykeh the pearl?" the stranger replies: "be sure on him i waste nor scorn nor pity, but lavish both on duhl the son of sheybán, who withers away in heart for envy of hóseyn's luck. such sickness admits no cure. a certain poet has sung, and sealed the same with an oath, 'for the vulgar--flocks and herds! the pearl is a prize apart.'" lo, duhl the son of sheybán comes riding to hóseyn's tent, and he casts his saddle down, and enters and "peace!" bids he. "you are poor, i know the cause: my plenty shall mend the wrong. 'tis said of your pearl--the price of a hundred camels spent in her purchase were scarce ill paid: such prudence is far from me who proffer a thousand. speak! long parley may last too long." said hóseyn "you feed young beasts a many, of famous breed, slit-eared, unblemished, fat, true offspring of múzennem: there stumbles no weak-eyed she in the line as it climbs the hill. but i love muléykeh's face: her forefront whitens indeed like a yellowish wave's cream-crest. your camels--go gaze on them! her fetlock is foam-splashed too. myself am the richer still." a year goes by: lo, back to the tent again rides duhl. "you are open-hearted, ay--moist-handed, a very prince. why should i speak of sale? be the mare your simple gift! my son is pined to death for her beauty: my wife prompts 'fool, beg for his sake the pearl! be god the rewarder, since god pays debts seven for one: who squanders on him shows thrift.'" said hóseyn "god gives each man one life, like a lamp, then gives that lamp due measure of oil: lamp lighted--hold high, wave wide its comfort for others to share! once quench it, what help is left? the oil of your lamp is your son: i shine while muléykeh lives. would i beg your son to cheer my dark if muléykeh died? it is life against life: what good avails to the life-bereft?" another year, and--hist! what craft is it duhl designs? he alights not at the door of the tent as he did last time, but, creeping behind, he gropes his stealthy way by the trench half-round till he finds the flap in the folding, for night combines with the robber--and such is he: duhl, covetous up to crime, must wring from hóseyn's grasp the pearl, by whatever the wrench. "he was hunger-bitten, i heard: i tempted with half my store, and a gibe was all my thanks. is he generous like spring dew? account the fault to me who chaffered with such an one! he has killed, to feast chance comers, the creature he rode: nay, more-- for a couple of singing-girls his robe has he torn in two: i will beg! yet i nowise gained by the tale of my wife and son. "i swear by the holy house, my head will i never wash till i filch his pearl away. fair dealing i tried, then guile, and now i resort to force. he said we must live or die: let him die, then,--let me live! be bold--but not too rash! i have found me a peeping-place: breast, bury your breathing while i explore for myself! now, breathe! he deceived me not, the spy! "as he said--there lies in peace hóseyn--how happy! beside stands tethered the pearl: thrice winds her headstall about his wrist: 'tis therefore he sleeps so sound--the moon through the roof reveals. and, loose on his left, stands too that other, known far and wide, buhéyseh, her sister born: fleet is she yet ever missed the winning tail's fire-flash a-stream past the thunderous heels. "no less she stands saddled and bridled, this second, in case some thief should enter and seize and fly with the first, as i mean to do. what then? the pearl is the pearl: once mount her we both escape." through the skirt-fold in glides duhl,--so a serpent disturbs no leaf in a bush as he parts the twigs entwining a nest: clean through, he is noiselessly at his work: as he planned, he performs the rape. he has set the tent-door wide, has buckled the girth, has clipped the headstall away from the wrist he leaves thrice bound as before, he springs on the pearl, is launched on the desert like bolt from bow. up starts our plundered man: from his breast though the heart be ripped, yet his mind has the mastery: behold, in a minute more, he is out and off and away on buhéyseh, whose worth we know! and hóseyn--his blood turns flame, he has learned long since to ride, and buhéyseh does her part,--they gain--they are gaining fast on the fugitive pair, and duhl has ed-dárraj to cross and quit, and to reach the ridge el-sabán,--no safety till that be spied! and buhéyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last, for the pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit. she shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange and queer: buhéyseh is mad with hope--beat sister she shall and must though duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank. she is near now, nose by tail--they are neck by croup--joy! fear! what folly makes hóseyn shout "dog duhl, damned son of the dust, touch the right ear and press with your foot my pearl's left flank!" and duhl was wise at the word, and muléykeh as prompt perceived who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey, and a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore. and hóseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved, looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may: then he turned buhéyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore. and lo, in the sunrise, still sat hóseyn upon the ground weeping: and neighbors came, the tribesmen of bénu-asád in the vale of green er-rass, and they questioned him of his grief; and he told from first to last how, serpent-like, duhl had wound his way to the nest, and how duhl rode like an ape, so bad! and how buhéyseh did wonders, yet pearl remained with the thief. and they jeered him, one and all: "poor hóseyn is crazed past hope! how else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite? to have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl, and here were muléykeh again, the eyed like an antelope, the child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!"-- "and the beaten in speed!" wept hóseyn: "you never have loved my pearl." count gismond[ ] aix in provence christ god who savest man, save most of men count gismond who saved me! count gauthier, when he chose his post, chose time and place and company to suit it; when he struck at length my honor, 'twas with all his strength. and doubtlessly ere he could draw all points to one, he must have schemed! that miserable morning saw few half so happy as i seemed, while being dressed in queen's array to give our tourney prize away. i thought they loved me, did me grace to please themselves; 'twas all their deed; god makes, or fair or foul, our face; if showing mine so caused to bleed my cousins' hearts, they should have dropped a word, and straight the play had stopped. they, too, so beauteous! each a queen by virtue of her brow and breast; not needing to be crowned, i mean, as i do. e'en when i was dressed, had either of them spoke, instead of glancing sideways with still head! but no: they let me laugh, and sing my birthday song quite through, adjust the last rose in my garland, fling a last look on the mirror, trust my arms to each an arm of theirs, and so descend the castle-stairs--and come out on the morning troop of merry friends who kissed my cheek, and called me queen, and made me stoop under the canopy--(a streak that pierced it, of the outside sun, powdered with gold its gloom's soft dun)--and they could let me take my state and foolish throne amid applause of all come there to celebrate my queen's-day--oh i think the cause of much was, they forgot no crowd makes up for parents in their shroud! however that be, all eyes were bent upon me, when my cousins cast theirs down; 'twas time i should present the victor's crown, but ... there, 'twill last no long time ... the old mist again blinds me as then it did. how vain! see! gismond's at the gate, in talk with his two boys: i can proceed. well, at that moment, who should stalk forth boldly--to my face, indeed--but gauthier? and he thundered "stay!" and all stayed. "bring no crowns, i say! bring torches! wind the penance-sheet about her! let her shun the chaste, or lay herself before their feet! shall she, whose body i embraced a night long, queen it in the day? for honour's sake no crowns, i say!" i? what i answered? as i live i never fancied such a thing as answer possible to give. what says the body when they spring some monstrous torture-engine's whole strength on it? no more says the soul. till out strode gismond; then i knew that i was saved. i never met his face before, but, at first view, i felt quite sure that god had set himself to satan; who would spend a minute's mistrust on the end? he strode to gauthier, in his throat gave him the lie, then struck his mouth with one back-handed blow that wrote in blood men's verdict there. north, south, east, west, i looked. the lie was dead, and damned, and truth stood up instead. this glads me most, that i enjoyed the heart of the joy, with my content in watching gismond unalloyed by any doubt of the event: god took that on him--i was bid watch gismond for my part: i did. did i not watch him while he let his armourer just brace his greaves, rivet his hauberk, on the fret the while! his foot ... my memory leaves no least stamp out, nor how anon he pulled his ringing gauntlets on. and e'en before the trumpet's sound was finished, prone lay the false knight, prone as his lie, upon the ground: gismond flew at him, used no sleight o' the sword, but open-breasted drove, cleaving till out the truth he clove. which done, he dragged him to my feet and said "here die, but end thy breath in full confession, lest thou fleet from my first, to god's second death! say, hast thou lied?" and, "i have lied to god and her," he said, and died. then gismond, kneeling to me, asked--what safe my heart holds, though no word could i repeat now, if i tasked my powers forever, to a third dear even as you are. pass the rest until i sank upon his breast. over my head his arm he flung against the world; and scarce i felt his sword (that dripped by me and swung) a little shifted in its belt: for he began to say the while how south our home lay many a mile. so, 'mid the shouting multitude we two walked forth to never more return. my cousins have pursued their life, untroubled as before i vexed them. gauthier's dwelling-place god lighten! may his soul find grace! our elder boy has got the clear great brow; tho' when his brother's black full eye shows scorn, it ... gismond here? and have you brought my tercel back? i was just telling adela how many birds it struck since may. by the fireside how well i know what i mean to do when the long dark autumn evenings come: and where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? with the music of all thy voices, dumb in life's november too! i shall be found by the fire, suppose, o'er a great wise book, as beseemeth age; while the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, and i turn the page, and i turn the page, not verse now, only prose! till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, "there he is at it, deep in greek: now then, or never, out we slip to cut from the hazels by the creek a mainmast for our ship!" i shall be at it indeed, my friends! greek puts already on either side such a branch-work forth as soon extends to a vista opening far and wide, and i pass out where it ends. the outside-frame, like your hazel-trees--but the inside-archway widens fast, and a rarer sort succeeds to these, and we slope to italy at last and youth, by green degrees. i follow wherever i am led, knowing so well the leader's hand: oh woman-country, wooed not wed, loved all the more by earth's male-lands, laid to their hearts instead! look at the ruined chapel again half-way up in the alpine gorge! is that a tower, i point you plain, or is it a mill, or an iron-forge breaks solitude in vain? a turn, and we stand in the heart of things; the woods are round us, heaped and dim; from slab to slab how it slips and springs, the thread of water single and slim, thro' the ravage some torrent brings! does it feed the little lake below? that speck of white just on its marge is pella; see, in the evening-glow, how sharp the silver spear-heads charge when alp meets heaven in snow! on our other side is the straight-up rock; and a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it by boulder-stones where lichens mock the marks on a moth, and small ferns fit their teeth to the polished block. oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers, and thorny balls, each three in one, the chestnuts throw on our path in showers! for the drop of the woodland fruit's begun, these early november hours, that crimson the creeper's leaf across like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, o'er a shield else gold from rim to boss, and lay it for show on the fairy-cupped elf-needled mat of moss, by the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged last evening--nay, in to-day's first dew yon sudden coral nipple bulged, where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew of toadstools peep indulged. and yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge that takes the turn to a range beyond, is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge, where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond danced over by the midge. the chapel and bridge are of stone alike, blackish-gray and mostly wet; cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke. see here again, how the lichens fret and the roots of the ivy strike! poor little place, where its one priest comes on a festa-day, if he comes at all, to the dozen folk from their scattered homes, gathered within that precinct small by the dozen ways one roams--to drop from the charcoal-burners' huts, or climb from the hemp-dressers' low shed, leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts, or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread their gear on the rock's bare juts. it has some pretension too, this front, with its bit of fresco half-moon-wise set over the porch, art's early wont: 'tis john in the desert, i surmise, but has borne the weather's brunt--not from the fault of the builder, though, for a pent-house properly projects where three carved beams make a certain show, dating--good thought of our architect's--'five, six, nine, he lets you know. and all day long a bird sings there, and a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times; the place is silent and aware; it has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, but that is its own affair. my perfect wife, my leonor, oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, whom else could i dare look backward for, with whom besides should i dare pursue the path gray heads abhor? for it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them; youth, flowery all the way, there stops--not they; age threatens and they contemn, till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops, one inch from life's safe hem! with me, youth led ... i will speak now, no longer watch you as you sit reading by firelight, that great brow and the spirit-small hand propping it, mutely, my heart knows how--when, if i think but deep enough, you are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme; and you, too, find without rebuff response your soul seeks many a time, piercing its fine flesh-stuff. my own, confirm me! if i tread this path back, is it not in pride to think how little i dreamed it led to an age so blest that, by its side, youth seems the waste instead? my own, see where the years conduct! at first, 'twas something our two souls should mix as mists do; each is sucked in each now: on, the new stream rolls, whatever rocks obstruct. think, when our one soul understands the great word which makes all things new, when earth breaks up and heaven expands, how will the change strike me and you in the house not made with hands? oh i must feel your brain prompt mine, your heart anticipate my heart, you must be just before, in fine, see and make me see, for your part, new depths of the divine! but who could have expected this when we two drew together first just for the obvious human bliss to satisfy life's daily thirst with a thing men seldom miss? come back with me to the first of all, let us lean and love it over again, let us now forget and now recall, break the rosary in a pearly rain, and gather what we let fall! what did i say?--that a small bird sings all day long, save when a brown pair of hawks from the wood float with wide wings strained to a bell: 'gainst noon-day glare you count the streaks and rings. but at afternoon or almost eve 'tis better; then the silence grows to that degree, you half believe it must get rid of what it knows, its bosom does so heave. hither we walked then, side by side, arm in arm and cheek to cheek, and still i questioned or replied, while my heart, convulsed to really speak, lay choking in its pride. silent the crumbling bridge we cross, and pity and praise the chapel sweet, and care about the fresco's loss, and wish for our souls a like retreat, and wonder at the moss. stoop and kneel on the settle under, look through the window's grated square: nothing to see! for fear of plunder, the cross is down and the altar bare, as if thieves don't fear thunder. we stoop and look in through the grate, see the little porch and rustic door, read duly the dead builder's date; then cross the bridge that we crossed before, take the path again--but wait! oh moment one and infinite! the water slips o'er stock and stone; the west is tender, hardly bright: how gray at once is the evening grown--one star, its chrysolite! we two stood there with never a third, but each by each, as each knew well: the sights we saw and the sounds we heard, the lights and the shades made up a spell till the trouble grew and stirred. oh, the little more, and how much it is! and the little less, and what worlds away! how a sound shall quicken content to bliss, or a breath suspend the blood's best play, and life be a proof of this! had she willed it, still had stood the screen so slight, so sure, 'twixt my love and her: i could fix her face with a guard between, and find her soul as when friends confer, friends--lovers that might have been. for my heart had a touch of the woodland time, wanting to sleep now over its best. shake the whole tree in the summer-prime, but bring to the last leaf no such test! "hold the last fact!" runs the rhyme. for a chance to make your little much, to gain a lover and lose a friend, venture the tree and a myriad such, when nothing you mar but the year can mend: but a last leaf--fear to touch! yet should it unfasten itself and fall eddying down till it find your face at some slight wind--best chance of all! be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place you trembled to forestall! worth how well, those dark gray eyes, that hair so dark and dear, how worth that a man should strive and agonize, and taste a veriest hell on earth for the hope of such a prize! you might have turned and tried a man, set him a space to weary and wear, and prove which suited more your plan, his best of hope or his worst despair, yet end as he began. but you spared me this, like the heart you are, and filled my empty heart at a word. if two lives join, there is oft a scar, they are one and one, with a shadowy third; one near one is too far. a moment after, and hands unseen were hanging the night around us fast; but we knew that a bar was broken between life and life: we were mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen. the forests had done it; there they stood; we caught for a moment the powers at play: they had mingled us so, for once and good, their work was done--we might go or stay, they relapsed to their ancient mood. how the world is made for each of us! how all we perceive and know in it tends to some moment's product thus, when a soul declares itself--to wit, by its fruit, the thing it does! be hate that fruit or love that fruit, it forwards the general deed of man: and each of the many helps to recruit the life of the race by a general plan; each living his own, to boot. i am named and known by that moment's feat; there took my station and degree; so grew my own small life complete, as nature obtained her best of me--one born to love you, sweet! and to watch you sink by the fireside now back again, as you mutely sit musing by firelight, that great brow and the spirit-small hand propping it, yonder, my heart knows how! so, earth has gained by one man the more, and the gain of earth must be heaven's gain too; and the whole is well worth thinking o'er when autumn comes: which i mean to do one day, as i said before. pheidippides [greek: chairete, nikômen] first i salute this soil of the blessed, river and rock! gods of my birthplace, dæmons and heroes, honor to all! then i name thee, claim thee for our patron, co-equal in praise --ay, with zeus the defender, with her of the ægis and spear! also, ye of the bow and the buskin, praised be your peer, now, henceforth and forever,--o latest to whom i upraise hand and heart and voice! for athens, leave pasture and flock! present to help, potent to save, pan--patron i call! archons of athens, topped by the tettix, see, i return! see, 'tis myself here standing alive, no spectre that speaks! crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, athens and you, "run, pheidippides, run and race, reach sparta for aid! persia has come, we are here, where is she?" your command i obeyed, ran and raced: like stubble, some field which a fire runs through, was the space between city and city: two days, two nights did i burn over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks. into their midst i broke: breath served but for "persia has come. persia bids athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth; razed to the ground is eretria--but athens, shall athens sink, drop into dust and die--the flower of hellas utterly die, die with the wide world spitting at sparta, the stupid, the stander-by? answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er destruction's brink? how,--when? no care for my limbs!--there's lightning in all and some-- fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth!" o my athens--sparta love thee? did sparta respond? every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust, malice,--each eye of her gave me its glitter of gratified hate! gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for excuses. i stood quivering,--the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch from dry wood: "persia has come, athens asks aid, and still they debate? thunder, thou zeus! athene, are spartans a quarry beyond swing of thy spear? phoibos and artemis, clang them 'ye must'!" no bolt launched from olumpos! lo, their answer at last! "has persia come,--does athens ask aid,--may sparta befriend? nowise precipitate judgment--too weighty the issue at stake! count we no time lost time which lags thro' respect to the gods! ponder that precept of old, 'no warfare, whatever the odds in your favor, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is unable to take full-circle her state in the sky!' already she rounds to it fast: athens must wait, patient as we--who judgment suspend." athens,--except for that sparkle,--thy name, i had mouldered to ash! that sent a blaze thro' my blood; off, off and away was i back, --not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and the vile! yet "o gods of my land!" i cried, as each hillock and plain, wood and stream, i knew, i named, rushing past them again, "have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honors we paid you erewhile? vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! too rash love in its choice, paid you so largely service so slack! "oak and olive and bay,--i bid you cease to enwreathe brows made bold by your leaf! fade at the persian's foot, you that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a slave! rather i hail thee, parnes,--trust to thy wild waste tract! treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! what matter if slacked my speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to cave no deity deigns to drape with verdure?--at least i can breathe, fear in thee no fraud from the blind, no lie from the mute!" such my cry as, rapid, i ran over parnes' ridge; gully and gap i clambered and cleared till, sudden, a bar jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way. right! for i minded the hollow to traverse, the fissure across: "where i could enter, there i depart by! night in the fosse? athens to aid? tho' the dive were thro' erebos, thus i obey-- out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! no bridge better!"--when--ha! what was it i came on, of wonders that are? there, in the cool of a cleft, sat he--majestical pan! ivy drooped wanton, kissed his head, moss cushioned his hoof; all the great god was good in the eyes grave-kindly--the curl carved on the bearded cheek, amused at a mortal's awe, as, under the human trunk, the goat-thighs grand i saw. "halt, pheidippides!"--halt i did, my brain of a whirl: "hither to me! why pale in my presence?" he gracious began: "how is it,--athens, only in hellas, holds me aloof? "athens, she only, rears me no fane, makes me no feast! wherefore? than i what godship to athens more helpful of old? ay, and still, and forever her friend! test pan, trust me! go, bid athens take heart, laugh persia to scorn, have faith in the temples and tombs! go, say to athens, 'the goat-god saith: when persia--so much as strews not the soil--is cast in the sea, then praise pan who fought in the ranks with your most and least, goat-thigh to greaved-thigh, made one cause with the free and the bold!' "say pan saith: 'let this, foreshowing the place, be the pledge!'" (gay, the liberal hand held out this herbage i bear --fennel,--i grasped it a-tremble with dew--whatever it bode), "while, as for thee ..." but enough! he was gone. if i ran hitherto-- be sure that, the rest of my journey, i ran no longer, but flew. parnes to athens--earth no more, the air was my road; here am i back. praise pan, we stand no more on the razor's edge! pan for athens, pan for me! i too have a guerdon rare! * * * * * then spoke miltiades. "and thee, best runner of greece, whose limbs did duty indeed,--what gift is promised thyself? tell it us straightway,--athens the mother demands of her son!" rosily blushed the youth: he paused: but, lifting at length his eyes from the ground, it seemed as he gathered the rest of his strength into the utterance--"pan spoke thus: 'for what thou hast done count on a worthy reward! henceforth be allowed thee release from the racer's toil, no vulgar reward in praise or in pelf!' "i am bold to believe, pan means reward the most to my mind! fight i shall, with our foremost, wherever this fennel may grow,-- pound--pan helping us--persia to dust, and, under the deep, whelm her away forever; and then,--no athens to save,-- marry a certain maid, i know keeps faith to the brave,-- hie to my house and home: and, when my children shall creep close to my knees,--recount how the god was awful yet kind, promised their sire reward to the full--rewarding him--so!" * * * * * unforeseeing one! yes, he fought on the marathon day: so, when persia was dust, all cried "to akropolis! run, pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due! 'athens is saved, thank pan,' go shout!" he flung down his shield, ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the fennel-field and athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through, till in he broke: "rejoice, we conquer!" like wine thro' clay, joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss! so, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute is still "rejoice!"--his word which brought rejoicing indeed. so is pheidippides happy forever,--the noble strong man who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a god loved so well, he saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began, so to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute: "athens is saved!"--pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed. prospice fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face, when the snows begin, and the blasts denote i am nearing the place, the power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe, where he stands, the arch fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go; for the journey is done and the summit attained, and the barriers fall, though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, the reward of it all. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. no! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers, the heroes of old, bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold. for sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minute's at end, and the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy breast, oh, thou soul of my soul! i shall clasp thee again, and with god be the rest! the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church (rome, --.) vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! draw round my bed: is anselm keeping back? nephews--sons mine ... ah god, i know not! well-- she, men would have to be your mother once, old gandolf envied me, so fair she was! what's done is done, and she is dead beside, dead long ago, and i am bishop since, and as she died so must we die ourselves, and thence ye may perceive the world's a dream. life, how and what is it? as here i lie in this state-chamber, dying by degrees, hours and long hours in the dead night, i ask "do i live, am i dead?" peace, peace seems all. saint praxed's ever was the church for peace; and so, about this tomb of mine. i fought with tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: --old gandolf cozened me, despite my care; shrewd was that snatch from out the corner south he graced his carrion with, god curse the same! yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence one sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, and somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, and up into the aery dome where live the angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: and i shall fill my slab of basalt there, and 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, with those nine columns round me, two and two, the odd one at my feet where anselm stands: peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe as fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. --old gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, put me where i may look at him! true peach, rosy and flawless: how i earned the prize! draw close: that conflagration of my church --what then? so much was saved if aught were missed! my sons, ye would not be my death? go dig the white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, drop water gently till the surface sink, and if ye find ... ah god, i know not, i!... bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, and corded up in a tight olive-frail, some lump, ah god, of _lapis lazuli_, big as a jew's head cut off at the nape, blue as a vein o'er the madonna's breast ... sons, all have i bequeathed you, villas, all, that brave frascati villa with its bath, so, let the blue lump poise between my knees, like god the father's globe on both his hands ye worship in the jesu church so gay, for gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: man goeth to the grave, and where is he? did i say, basalt for my slab, sons? black-- 'twas ever antique-black i meant! how else shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? the bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, those pans and nymphs ye wot of, and perchance some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, the saviour at his sermon on the mount, saint praxed in a glory, and one pan ready to twitch the nymph's last garment off, and moses with the tables ... but i know ye mark me not! what do they whisper thee, child of my bowels, anselm? ah, ye hope to revel down my villas while i gasp bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine which gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then! 'tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest i grieve. my bath must needs be left behind, alas! one block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, there's plenty jasper somewhere in the world-- and have i not saint praxed's ear to pray horses for ye, and brown greek manuscripts, and mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? --that's if ye carve my epitaph aright, choice latin, picked phrase, tully's every word, no gaudy ware like gandolf's second line-- tully, my masters? ulpian serves his need! and then how i shall lie thro' centuries, and hear the blessed mutter of the mass, and see god made and eaten all day long, and feel the steady candle-flame, and taste good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! for as i lie here, hours of the dead night, dying in state and by such slow degrees, i fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, and stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, and let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: and as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts grow, with a certain humming in my ears, about the life before i lived this life, and this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, saint praxed at his sermon on the mount, your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, and new-found agate urns as fresh as day, and marble's language, latin pure, discreet, --aha, elucescebat quoth our friend? no tully, said i, ulpian at the best! evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. all _lapis_, all, sons! else i give the pope my villas! will ye ever eat my heart? ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, they glitter like your mother's for my soul, or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, piece out its starved design, and fill my vase with grapes, and add a vizor and a term, and to the tripod ye would tie a lynx that in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, to comfort me on my entablature whereon i am to lie till i must ask "do i live, am i dead?" there, leave me, there! for ye have stabbed me with ingratitude to death--ye wish it--god, ye wish it! stone-- gritstone, a-crumble! clammy squares which sweat as if the corpse they keep were oozing through-- and no more _lapis_ to delight the world! well, go! i bless ye. fewer tapers there, but in a row: and, going, turn your backs --ay, like departing altar-ministrants, and leave me in my church, the church for peace, that i may watch at leisure if he leers-- old gandolf at me, from his onion-stone, as still he envied me, so fair she was! sibrandus schafnaburgensis plague take all your pedants, say i! he who wrote what i hold in my hand, centuries back was so good as to die, leaving this rubbish to cumber the land; this, that was a book in its time, printed on paper and bound in leather, last month in the white of a matin-prime just when the birds sang all together. into the garden i brought it to read, and under the arbute and laurustine read it, so help me grace in my need, from title-page to closing line. chapter on chapter did i count, as a curious traveller counts stonehenge; added up the mortal amount; and then proceeded to my revenge. yonder's a plum-tree, with a crevice an owl would build in, were he but sage; for a lap of moss like a fine pontlevis in a castle of the middle age, joins to a lip of gum, pure amber; where he'd be private, there might he spend hours alone in his lady's chamber: into this crevice i dropped our friend. splash went he, as under he ducked, --i knew at the bottom rain-drippings stagnate; next a handful of blossoms i plucked to bury him with, my bookshelf's magnate; then i went indoors, brought out a loaf, half a cheese, and a bottle of chablis; lay on the grass and forgot the oaf over a jolly chapter of rabelais. now, this morning, betwixt the moss and gum that locked our friend in limbo, a spider had spun his web across, and sate in the midst with arms a-kimbo: so, i took pity, for learning's sake, and, _de profundis, accentibus lætis, cantate_! quoth i, as i got a rake, and up i fished his delectable treatise. here you have it, dry in the sun, with all the binding all of a blister, and great blue spots where the ink has run, and reddish streaks that wink and glister o'er the page so beautifully yellow-- oh, well have the droppings played their tricks! did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow? here's one stuck in his chapter six! how did he like it when the live creatures tickled and toused and browsed him all over, and worm, slug, eft, with serious features, came in, each one, for his right of trover; when the water-beetle with great blind deaf face made of her eggs the stately deposit, and the newt borrowed just so much of the preface as tiled in the top of his black wife's closet. all that life, and fun, and romping, all that frisking, and twisting, and coupling, while slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping, and clasps were cracking, and covers suppling! as if you had carried sour john knox to the play-house at paris, vienna, or munich, fastened him into a front-row box, and danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic. come, old martyr! what, torment enough is it? back to my room shall you take your sweet self! good-by, mother-beetle; husband-eft, sufficit! see the snug niche i have made on my shelf: a.'s book shall prop you up, b.'s shall cover you, here's c. to be grave with, or d. to be gay, and with e. on each side, and f. right over you, dry-rot at ease till the judgment-day! abt vogler (after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention) would that the structure brave, the manifold music i build, bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work, claiming each slave of the sound at a touch, as when solomon willed armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk, man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim, adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,-- should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable name, and pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princes he loved! would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine, this which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise! ah, one and all, how they helped would dispart now and now combine, zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise! and one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell, burrow awhile, and build broad on the roots of things, then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well, founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs. and another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was; ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest, raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass, eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest, for higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire, when a great illumination surprises a festal night-- outlining round and round rome's dome from space to spire) up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight. in sight? not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth; nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as i; and the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, as the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky: novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star; meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine, for earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far. nay, more: for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the protoplast, furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, lured now to begin and live in a house to their liking at last; or else the wonderful dead who have passed through the body and gone, but were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new: what never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon; and what is--shall i say, matched both? for i was made perfect too. all through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, all through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, all through music and me! for think, had i painted the whole, why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: had i written the same, made verse,--still, effect proceeds from cause; ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; it is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:-- but here is the finger of god, a flash of the will that can, existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they are! and i know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, that out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought; it is everywhere in the world--loud, soft, and all is said: give it to me to use! i mix it with two in my thought: and, there! ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head! well, it is gone at last, the palace of music i reared; gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow; for one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, that he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go. never to be again! but many more of the kind as good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me? to me, who must be saved because i cling with my mind to the same, same self, same love, same god: ay, what was, shall be. therefore to whom turn i but to thee, the ineffable name? builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! what, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same? doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? there shall never be one lost good! what was, shall live as before; the evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; what was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more: on earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist,-- not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity affirms the conception of an hour. the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by. and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days? have we withered or agonized? why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized? sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear; each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: but god has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know. well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: i will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. give me the keys. i feel for the common chord again, sliding by semitones, till i sink to the minor,--yes, and i blunt it into a ninth, and i stand on alien ground, surveying awhile the heights i rolled from into the deep; which, hark! i have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, the c major of this life: so, now i will try to sleep. saul said abner, "at last thou art come! ere i tell, ere thou speak, kiss my cheek, wish me well!" then i wished it, and did kiss his cheek. and he, "since the king, o my friend, for thy countenance sent, neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent thou return with the joyful assurance the king liveth yet, shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet. for out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer or of praise, to betoken that saul and the spirit have ended their strife, and that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life. "yet now my heart leaps, o beloved! god's child, with his dew on thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat were now raging to torture the desert!" then i, as was meet, knelt down to the god of my fathers, and rose on my feet, and ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. the tent was unlooped; i pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under i stooped; hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone, that extends to the second enclosure, i groped my way on till i felt where the foldskirts fly open. then once more i prayed, and opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid, but spoke, "here is david, thy servant!" and no voice replied. at the first i saw nought but the blackness; but soon i descried a something more black than the blackness--the vast, the upright main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all;-- then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof,--showed saul. he stood as erect as that tent-prop; both arms stretched out wide on the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side: he relaxed not a muscle, but hung there,--as, caught in his pangs and waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs, far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come with the spring-time,--so agonized saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb. then i tuned my harp,--took off the lilies we twine round its chords lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide--those sunbeams like swords! and i first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one, so docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. they are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed; and now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far! --then the tune for which quails on the cornland will each leave his mate to fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate, till for boldness they fight one another: and then, what has weight to set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house-- there are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse!-- god made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear, to give sign, we and they are his children, one family here. then i played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, when hand grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great hearts expand and grow one in the sense of this world's life.--and then, the last song when the dead man is praised on his journey--"bear, bear him along with his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! are balm-seeds not here to console us? the land has none left such as he on the bier. oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!"--and then, the glad chaunt of the marriage,--first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt as the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.--and then, the great march wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch nought can break; who shall harm them, our friends?--then, the chorus intoned as the levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. but i stopped here--for here in the darkness, saul groaned. and i paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart; and the tent shook, for mighty saul shuddered,--and sparkles 'gan dart from the jewels that woke in his turban at once with a start-- all its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. so the head--but the body still moved not, still hung there erect. and i bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked, as i sang,-- "oh, our manhood's prime vigor! no spirit feels waste, not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced. oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock-- the strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree,--the cool silver shock of the plunge in a pool's living water,--the hunt of the bear, and the sultriness showing the lion is crouched in his lair. and the meal, the rich dates, yellowed over with gold dust divine, and the locust's-flesh steeped in the pitcher; the full draught of wine, and the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell that the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. how good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses, forever in joy! hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword thou didst guard when he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward? didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung the low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint tongue joining in while it could to the witness, 'let one more attest, i have lived, seen god's hand through a lifetime, and all was for best'? then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, not much,--but the rest. and thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working whence grew such result as from seething grape-bundles, the spirit strained true! and the friends of thy boyhood--that boyhood of wonder and hope, present promise, and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,-- till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; and all gifts which the world offers singly, on one head combine! on one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage, like the throe that, a-work in the rock, helps its labor, and lets the gold go: high ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,--all brought to blaze on the head of one creature--king saul!" and lo, with that leap of my spirit, heart, hand, harp, and voice, each lifting saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice saul's fame in the light it was made for--as when, dare i say, the lord's army in rapture of service, strains through its array, and upsoareth the cherubim-chariot--"saul!" cried i and stopped, and waited the thing that should follow. then saul, who hung propped by the tent's cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name. have ye seen when spring's arrowy summons goes right to the aim, and some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held, (he alone, while the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone a year's snow bound about for a breastplate,--leaves grasp of the sheet? fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet, and there fronts you, stark, black but alive yet, your mountain of old, with his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold-- yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest--all hail, there they are! now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his crest for their food in the ardors of summer! one long shudder thrilled all the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled, at the king's self left standing before me, released and aware. what was gone, what remained? all to traverse 'twixt hope and despair-- death was past, life not come--so he waited. awhile his right hand held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to remand to their place what new objects should enter: 'twas saul as before. i looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore at their sad level gaze o'er the ocean--a sun's slow decline over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and entwine base with base to knit strength more intense: so, arm folded arm o'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. what spell or what charm, (for, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should i urge to sustain him where song had restored him?--song filled to the verge his cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty! beyond on what fields, glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by? he saith, "it is good;" still he drinks not--he lets me praise life, gives assent, yet would die for his own part. then fancies grew rife which had come long ago on the pastures, when round me the sheep fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep, and i lay in my hollow, and mused on the world that might lie 'neath his ken, though i saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky: and i laughed--"since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks, let me people at least with my fancies, the plains and the rocks, dream the life i am never to mix with, and image the show of mankind as they live in those fashions i hardly shall know! schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains, and the prudence that keeps what men strive for." and now these old trains of vague thought came again; i grew surer; so once more the string of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus-- "yea, my king," i began--"thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that spring from the mere mortal life held in common by man and by brute: in our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,--how its stem trembled first till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely outburst the fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect; yet more was to learn, e'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. our dates shall we slight, when their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? not so! stem and branch shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch every wound of man's spirit in winter. i pour thee such wine. leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine! by the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy more indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy. crush that life, and behold its wine running! each deed thou hast done dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the sun looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface, can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace the results of his past summer-prime,--so, each ray of thy will, every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill thy whole people the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth a like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the south and the north with the radiance thy deed was the germ of. carouse in the past. but the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last. as the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height, so with man--so his power and his beauty forever take flight. no! again a long draught of my soul-wine! look forth o'er the years-- thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's! is saul dead? in the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise a gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till built to the skies. let it mark where the great first king slumbers--whose fame would ye know? up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall go in great characters cut by the scribe,--such was saul, so he did; with the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,-- for not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there! which fault to amend, in the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend (see, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and record with the gold of the graver, saul's story,--the statesman's great word side by side with the poet's sweet comment. the river's awave with smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet winds rave: so the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part in thy being! then, first of the mighty, thank god that thou art." and behold while i sang.... but o thou who didst grant me that day, and before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay, carry on and complete an adventure,--my shield and my sword in that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,-- still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavor and scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever on the new stretch of heaven above me--till, mighty to save, just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance--god's throne from man's grave! let me tell out my tale to its ending--my voice to my heart, which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night i took part, as this morning i gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, and still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep! for i wake in the gray dewy covert, while hebron upheaves the dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and kidron retrieves slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. i say then,--my song while i sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more strong made a proffer of good to console him--he slowly resumed his old motions and habitudes kingly. the right hand replumed his black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the swathes of his turban, and see--the huge sweat that his countenance bathes, he wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as of yore, and feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set before. he is saul, ye remember in glory,--ere error had bent the broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, god did choose, to receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose. so sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by the pile of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there a while, and so sat out my singing,--one arm round the tent-prop, to raise his bent head, and the other hung slack--till i touched on the praise i foresaw from all men in all times, to the man patient there, and thus ended, the harp falling forward. then first i was 'ware that he sat, as i say, with my head just above his vast knees which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak-roots which please to encircle a lamb when it slumbers. i looked up to know if the best i could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but slow lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow; thro' my hair the large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power-- all my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower, thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized mine-- and oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign? i yearned--"could i help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, i would add to that life of the past, both the future and this. i would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, as this moment,--had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!" then the truth came upon me. no harp more--no song more! outbroke-- "i have gone the whole round of creation: i saw and i spoke! i, a work of god's hand for that purpose, received in my brain and pronounced on the rest of his handwork--returned him again his creation's approval or censure: i spoke as i saw. i report, as a man may of god's work--all's love, yet all's law! now i lay down the judgeship he lent me. each faculty tasked to perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dew-drop was asked. have i knowledge? confounded it shrivels at wisdom laid bare. have i forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the infinite care! do i task any faculty highest, to image success? i but open my eyes,--and perfection, no more and no less, in the kind i imagined, full-fronts me, and god is seen god in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. and thus looking within and around me, i ever renew (with that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) the submission of man's nothing-perfect to god's all-complete, as by each new obeisance in spirit, i climb to his feet! yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, i shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. there's one faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, i am fain to keep still in abeyance (i laugh as i think) lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, i worst e'en the giver in one gift.--behold! i could love if i durst! but i sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake god's own speed in the one way of love: i abstain, for love's sake! --what, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal? in the least things, have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? do i find love so full in my nature, god's ultimate gift, that i doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift? here, the creature surpass the creator, the end, what began?-- would i fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, and dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, to bestow on this saul what i sang of, the marvellous dower of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul, such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole? and doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) these good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best? ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height this perfection,--succeed with life's day-spring, death's minute of night? interpose at the difficult minute, snatch saul, the mistake, saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,--and bid him awake from the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set clear and safe in new light and new life,--a new harmony yet to be run and continued, and ended--who knows?--or endure! the man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure. by the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss, and the next world's reward and repose, by the struggle in this. "i believe it! 'tis thou, god, that givest, 'tis i who receive: in the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. all's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer as i breathe out this breath, as i open these arms to the air. from thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread sabaoth: _i_ will?--the mere atoms despise me! why am i not loath to look that, even that in the face too? why is it i dare think but lightly of such impuissance? what stops my despair? this;--'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do? see the king--i would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through. could i wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, to fill up his life, starve my own out, i would--knowing which, i know that my service is perfect.--oh, speak through me now! would i suffer for him that i love? so wouldst thou--so wilt thou! so shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown-- and thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down one spot for the creature to stand in! it is by no breath, turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death! as thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved! he who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. 'tis the weakness in strength that i cry for! my flesh, that i seek in the godhead! i seek and i find it. o saul, it shall be a face like my face that receives thee: a man like to me, thou shalt love and be loved by, forever! a hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the christ stand!" i know not too well how i found my way home in the night. there were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive--the aware-- i repressed, i got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, as a runner beset by the populace famished for news-- life or death. the whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews; and the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but i fainted not. for the hand still impelled me at once and supported--suppressed all the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth-- not so much, but i saw it die out in the day's tender birth; in the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills; in the shuddering forests' new awe; in the sudden wind-thrills; in the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still tho' averted, in wonder and dread; and the birds stiff and chill that rose heavily, as i approached them, made stupid with awe. e'en the serpent that slid away silent,--he felt the new law. the same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers; the same worked in the heart of the cedar, and moved the vine-bowers. and the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, with their obstinate, all but hushed voices--"e'en so, it is so!" index titles of complete monologues are printed in _italics_; authors of these in small capitals; subjects of lessons are printed in capitals; ordinary topics in roman. abrupt beginning, cause of browning's obscurity, _abt vogler_, ; theme in, - action, - importance at opening, - precedence of, significance of, in a monologue, in italian in england, in mrs. caudle, in up at a villa, - in a tale, - caused by change in thinking and feeling, - by struggle for idea, in quotations, - transitions and, pivotal, shows attention and politeness, - locations of objects, - monologue must not be declaimed, descriptive and manifestative, - in old boggs' slarnt, day, in vagabonds, trowbridge, - dangers of, attitude, importance of, _andrea del sarto_, _appearances_, argument of monologue, - illustrated by a death in the desert, illustrated by bishop orders his tomb, - (poem, ) illustrated by _memorabilia_, - art, function of, dramatic, important, forms of, not invented, necessary, - browning on, indirect, composed of few elements, - theme of, social, at the mermaid, - extract from, attention, key to dramatic, shown by pivotal action, - attitude, importance of, barrack-room ballads are monologues, _before sedan_, dobson, biglow papers are monologues, bishop blougram's apology, listener in, - _bishop orders his tomb_, listener in, dramatic argument of, - body, actions of mind and, - =bret harte's=, _in a tunnel_, _bridge of sighs_, =hood=, metre of, =browning= _patriot, the_, _woman's last word, a_, _confessions_, _youth and art_, _incident of the french camp_, _rabbi ben ezra_, _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_, _up at a villa--down in the city_, a grammarian's funeral, at the mermaid, _my last duchess_, _lost mistress_, _tray_, _one way of love_, _italian in england_, _wanting is--what?_ _memorabilia_, _a tale_, _in a year_, _lost leader_, _evelyn hope_, _appearances_, _andrea del sarto_, _muléykeh_, _count gismond_, _by the fireside_, _pheidippides_, _prospice_, _bishop orders his tomb_, _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_, _abt vogler_, _saul_, why not appreciated, - invented monologue, - his art form, dramatic, - compared with leigh hunt, - influence of, compared with tennyson, compared with shakespeare, - soliloquies are monologues, - obscurity of, - master of monologue, - grotesque, element in, variety of his themes, - =burns=, monologues in, - _o wert thou in the cauld blast_, _by the fireside_, caliban upon setebos, character of, speaker in, caudle, mrs., _on the umbrella_, character of speaker must be realized, =chesterton=, on personal element in story-telling, on clive and muléykeh, justifies browning's grotesque language, =churchill, j. w.=, rendering of sam lawson, cleon, monologue or letter, clive, illustrates person spoken of, why a monologue, _confessions_, connection, importance of first words to the, - consistency, law of, - conversation, elements of, _count gismond_, speaker in, =cushman, charlotte=, her rendering of monologue, - definition of monologue, delivery nature of, important in monologue, - three languages in, complementary, - dialect, - must be dramatic, - in riley, burns, tennyson, not literal, - dramatic, - results from assimilation, must express character, - part of grotesque, - _didn't know flynn_, =bret harte=, _dieudonné_, dr. drummond, =dobson, austin,= _before sedan_, change of situation in, - dooley monologues, hennessey in, - dowden, edward, on static dramatic, - on muléykeh, dramatic art, important, dramatic instinct, overlooked, necessary in human life, listener in, definition of, - illustrated by, - static dramatic, - nature of, - interprets odd moments, =drayton, michael= _come, let us kiss and part_, =drummond, dr.= french canadian dialect, _dieudonné_, _duchess, my last_, epic spirit, nature of, in tennyson's ulysses, - , in sir galahad, _evelyn hope_, expression, vocal, necessity of, - nature of, in the monologue, - faults in rendering a monologue, - staginess, monotony, cause of, - tameness, declamation, - indefiniteness, exaggeration, cause of, false, - =field, eugene=, monologues in, _fireside, by the_, flexibility illustrated by a tale, flight of the duchess, as illustration of monologue, - form of literature, the monologue as a, - not invented, - , - monologue, one, - foss, sam walter, monologues by, fra lippo lippi, connection in, - =freytag's= definition of drama, - grammarian's funeral, a, situation in, - grigsby's station, a monologue, grotesque, nature of, dramatic, importance of, - illustrations of, - hearer, the, - implied in dramatic art, - in monologue, necessary, illustrated by rabbi ben ezra, in bishop blougram, - by dooley and hennessey, in riley's nothin' to say, - in tennyson's lady clara, hervé riel, metre in, higginson, col. t. w., story of carlyle, history of the monologue, - in early literature, - in burns, - =hood, thomas=, _bridge of sighs_, hunt, leigh, browning's method differs from, - imitation, danger of, in high tide, importance of monologue, - illustrated by saul, - ; by job, by ninetieth psalm, - ; by prophets, has educational value, speakers, - proves necessity of voice to literature, gives new course in speaking, ; illustration, prevents students of art from being mechanical, shows necessity of art, of any length or theme, requires an artist, requires no expensive scenery, has limitations, its range, _in a tunnel_, =bret harte=, _in a year_, _incident of the french camp_, inflection, function of, importance of, - , interpreter of monologue must command natural languages, interpretation of monologue difficult, necessary, unites three languages, must be dramatic, - _italian in england, the_, jerrold, douglas, situation in his monologues, on sordello, mrs. caudle and the umbrella, its spirit, - john anderson, my jo, =burns=, =kipling=, dramatic spirit in, - mandalay lyric or monologue, - dialect of results from dramatic spirit, _lady clara vere de vere_, =tennyson=, language, threefold, - la saisiaz, situation of, _last ride together_, letters and monologues compared, - literary form, a new, - not invented, monologue, as a, - monologue, a true, , - literature, the monologue as a form of, - implies unprinted elements, - suggests life, - _lost leader, the_, _lost mistress, the_, lyric, nature of, compared with monologue, - macbeth, story of, compared to monologue, - _memorabilia_, illustrates vocal expression of monologue, - mental actions modulate voice, - _mermaid, at the_, passage from, - metre and the monologue, - mistakes regarding, appreciation of, part of vocal expression, - meaning of, , - relation to length of line, - in woman's last word and in a year, study of, _mistress, the lost_, mitchell, d. g., on letters, modulations of voice, - monologue contrasted with the play, - "invention" of browning, one end of conversation, study of, centres in, speaker in, - , - dramatic, person spoken of, in, - compared with soliloquy, - situation in, - connection, - argument of, - as literary form, - compared with play, - before browning, common in english poetry, - common in modern literature, - needs delivery, - vocal expression of, - rhythm of thinking in, action in, - metre in, - dialect in, - use of properties, - faults in rendering, - importance of, - movement illustrated by high tide, - mrs. jim, a series of monologues, _muléykeh_, chesterton on, as a monologue, - _my last duchess_, illustrates elements of monologue, - natural languages, function of, - _nothin' to say_, riley, obscurity, chief cause of browning's, _old boggs' slarnt_, day, _one way of love_, oratory and acting compared, , - jefferson on, - palgrave on sally in our alley, - _patriot, the_, pause, importance of, personal element in art, chesterton on, found in all conversation and expression, - _pheidippides_, play, a monologue, - poetry, aristotle on, dramatic, not invented, epic, - properties, - use of, in play and monologue, - significance of, - need of generalizing, irving, sir henry, scenery in unity, consistency in, use of scenery, - must not be literal, when dramatic, - _prospice_, metre of, _psalm ninetieth_, a monologue, - _rabbi ben ezra_, rendering of monologues, - rendition, necessity of, - rhythm, first element in interpretation, =riley, james whitcomb=, hoosier monologue, - knee-deep in june, a monologue, situation in, _nothin' to say_, ring and the book, the, proves value of monologue, - extract from, on art, _sally in our alley_, =carey=, sam lawson, stories of, mrs. stowe, monologues, illustrates nature of monologue, - _saul_, shakespeare compared with browning, his soliloquies compared to monologues, - _sibrandus schafnaburgensis_, situation, place and, - dramatic, monologue implies, up at a villa--down in the city, in browning, always definite, - changes in grammarian's funeral, in douglas jerrold, andrea del sarto (poem, ) _soliloquy of the spanish cloister_, soliloquy compared with monologue, - shakespeare's, difference between browning and shakespeare, - speaker, the, in monologue, - speech and monologue compared, - =suckling, sir john=, _why so pale and wan_, _tale, a_, =tennyson's= _lady clara vere de vere_, a monologue, many monologues, not master of, time and connection, - abrupt beginning, - tone-color explained, - _tray_, _up at a villa--down in the city_, _vagabonds, the_, =trowbridge=, vocal expression nature of, reveals processes of mind, - unprintable, in play and monologue, - voice, actions of mind and, - _wanting is--what?_ whitman, dramatic element in his "o captain," _why so pale and wan_, suckling, _woman's last word, a_, words complemented by tone and action, =wyatt, sir thomas=, the lover's appeal, lyric in form of monologue, _youth and art_, metre of, the university press cambridge, u. s. a. footnotes: [ ] freytag, technik des dramas, chap. i, sec. , p. (leipzig, ). translation by prof. h. b. lathrop. [ ] to emphasize the nature and importance of poetic form (see pp. , ), "count gismond" and "by the fireside" are here printed as prose. find the length of line, the stanzas, and the metre, the meaning and appropriateness of all these. how should they be paragraphed? transcriber's notes: passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. the original text includes greek characters. for this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. several of the poems appear in the middle of a paragraph. they have been left as placed in the original text. in the index, the original text used small capitals to indicate authors of the complete monologues and capitals to indicate the subjects of lessons. in order to differentiate the two in this text version, =small capitals= has been used to indicate authors of the complete monologues. the following misprints have been corrected: "'" corrected to "i'" (page ) "call st" corrected to "callest" (page ) "attenton" corrected to "attention" (page ) "muleykeh" standardized to "muléykeh" (page ) "in" corrected to "is" (page ) "al" corrected to "all" (page ) other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. generously made available by the internet archive.) browning and dogma london: george bell and sons portugal st. lincoln's inn, w.c. cambridge: deighton, bell & co. new york: the macmillan co. bombay: a. h. wheeler & co. browning and dogma seven lectures on browning's attitude towards dogmatic religion by ethel m. naish (formerly scholar of newnham college, camb. hist. tripos) london george bell and sons contents page lecture i introductory, and caliban upon setebos lecture ii cleon lecture iii bishop blougram's apology lecture iv christmas eve and easter day (i) lecture v christmas eve and easter day (ii) lecture vi christmas eve and easter day (iii) lecture vii la saisiaz synopsis lecture i sources of browning's influence as a teacher. connection between the five poems of the course. _caliban upon setebos_--origin of--criticisms. characteristics of caliban. cf. caliban of shakespeare. analysis of poem. (i) introductory (ll. - ). (ii) conception of setebos. (_a_) place of abode (ll. - ). (_b_) creator of things animate and inanimate (ll. - ). (_c_) motives of creation: self-gratification or wantonness (ll. - , - ). (_d_) answer to prayers addressed by his creatures uncertain because result of caprice (ll. - ). (_e_) main characteristic--power, irresponsible and capricious (ll. - , - ). (iii) "the quiet" and caliban's estimate of evil (ll. - , - ). other lines of thought relating to: _a._ doctrine of sacrifice. _b._ a future life. _c._ indirect suggestion of necessity of an incarnation of the deity arising from negative conditions ascribed to "the quiet." lecture ii cleon _cleon._ cf. _caliban_: (i) dramatic change; (ii) point of contact. greek conception of life--influences affecting cleon. analysis of poem. i. introductory and descriptive (ll. - ). ii. varied attainments of cleon indicative of progress of race through development of _complexity_ of nature (ll. - ). includes (ll. - ) cleon's conception of an incarnation. iii. answer to question of protus, is death the end to the man of thought as well as to the man of action? (ll. - .) increase of happiness not necessarily accompaniment of fuller knowledge (ll. - ). fuller insight, attribute of artist-nature, rather productive of keener sense of loss in face of death (ll. - ). cf. _old pictures in florence_, etc. iv. hence arises conception of necessity to man of future life (ll. - .) v. conclusion. with reference to current reports of christianity. cf. cleon and paul (ll. - ). lecture iii bishop blougram's apology dramatic character of poem. connection with preceding poems. identity of bishop blougram--browning's treatment of subject--criticisms discussed. indications of identity--_a._ external. _b._ personal characteristics. analysis of poem. i. epilogue (ll. - ). how far is the bishop serious in his assertions? ii. introductory. bishop and critic (ll. - ). iii. bishop's life. cf. ideal of critic (ll. - , - , - ). cf. _a grammarian's funeral_, _dîs aliter visum_, _rabbi ben ezra_, etc. iv. how far schemes of life reconcilable--difficulties of consistency in either (ll. - ). v. positions compared--advantages of belief (ll. - ). vi. is life divorced from faith possible? (ll. - .) vii. recognition of value of enthusiasm result of faith (ll. - ). viii. is "pure faith" possible? (ll. - .) ix. deeper thoughts suggested: faith increased through conflict with doubt. truth essential to life. mystical element of blougram's faith. lecture iv christmas eve and easter day (i) special interest of poems, common and individual. _christmas eve._ faith corporate. i. realism in art, i-iv--zion chapel and methodism--soliloquist at first capable of criticism only--inspiration of love wanting (ll. - , - ). ii. truth absolute, iv-ix--god revealed in nature as _power_ and _love_--knowledge finite, love infinite. the vision (ll. - )--essentials of worship, spirit and truth. iii. rome, st. peter's, x-xii. symbolism or materialism in worship? iv. german university, xiii-xviii--historic criticism by lecturer of christian creed--treatment of criticism by soliloquist. v. mental attitude, result of night's experience, xix-xxi. (i) easy tolerance, succeeded by (ii) realization of necessity of individual acceptance of creed. vi. return to zion chapel and ultimate choice of creed, xxii. reasons for choice. lecture v christmas eve and easter day (ii) _easter day._ faith individual. part i, sections i-xii. discussion between _first speaker_, struggling with difficulties involved in practical acceptance of christianity, and _second speaker_, who would hold the faith without question. _first speaker_, i (ll. - , - , - ), iii, v, vii (ll. - ), viii, x, xii. _second speaker_, i (ll. , , - ), ii, iv, vi, vii (ll. - ), ix, xi. part ii. _the vision._ sections xiii-xxxiii. introductory, xiii, xiv. the judgment, xv-xxii; character of. results. freedom in complete possession of earth. no satisfaction derivative therefrom in (_a_) nature, xxiii, xxiv; (_b_) art, xxv, xxvi; (_c_) intellectual attainment, xxvii, xxviii; (_d_) love-- sought as final refuge, xxix-xxx (l. ). argument in favour of credibility of gospel story, xxx (ll. - ). ultimate results of vision--acceptance of existing uncertainty rather than of satiety within temporal limitations, xxxi-xxxiii. lecture vi christmas eve and easter day (iii) general character of poems. how far dramatic? expression of browning's personal opinions under dramatic guise on i. doctrine of the incarnation. ii. faith and life temporal. iii. judgment and future punishment. dramatic element stronger in references to iv. roman catholicism. v. nonconformity of "zion chapel." vi. asceticism. lecture vii la saisiaz peculiar interest attaching as _direct_ expression of browning's thought. general character of poem. cf. _prospice_. prologue outcome of conclusions of poem. circumstances giving rise to _la saisiaz_. death of miss egerton-smith, . analysis of poem. _a._ prelude (ll. - ). (i) narrative of events leading to subsequent reflections (ll. - ). (ii) immortality of the soul--treatment of question (ll. - ). (iii) nature of immortality (ll. - ). (iv) primary truths constituting basis of succeeding argument (ll. - ). (v) grounds for belief in a future life--imperfections of present life--its probationary character--preponderance of evil (ll. - ). _b._ argument, imaginary, between fancy and reason (ll. - ). _c._ conclusions from foregoing (ll. - )--supplementary (ll. - ). relation of _la saisiaz_ to earlier poems considered. its relation to browning's attitude towards christianity--christianity and a future life. summary of browning's creed as deduced from foregoing considerations-- dogma and spiritual growth. errata page , line , _for_ "four hundred years" _read_ "five hundred." page , line , _for_ "men to become" _read_ "man." page , line , _for_ "interval of six years, in " _read_ "four years, in ." page , line , _for_ " " _read_ " ." lecture i introductory, and caliban upon setebos browning and dogma lecture i introductory, and caliban upon setebos he at least believed in soul, was very sure of god.[ ] to this faith, to this assurance, is largely attributable the influence unquestionably possessed by browning as a teacher in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. for the intentionally didactic element in the work may not honestly be ignored in whatever degree it is held to militate against artistic merit. amid the throng of seekers after truth in the world of poetry, browning stands pre-eminent as one who not only sought truth, but, having gained what he held to be truth, kept it as "the sole prize of life." poets of the school of thought of which matthew arnold and a. h. clough may perhaps be regarded as among the more prominent exponents, are able to give no even approximately satisfying answer to the questionings bound inevitably to arise, at some time or other, in all minds whose energies are not dissipated by a too ready compliance with the demands of the hour. in certain moods their work appeals to us irresistibly, but the appeal is one of sympathy with doubt rather than of suggestion of solution. the author of _obermann_ may indeed in "hours of gloom" remind us that there have been "hours of insight"; that the individual soul, though through prolonged struggle and effort alone, may "mount hardly to eternal life." the consolation he would offer to spiritual depression is that of self-dependence. nature may soothe, but is powerless to satisfy; the appeal to her is answered by that which, although "severely clear," is but "an air-born voice," directing the enquirer back upon himself-- resolve to be thyself, and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.[ ] so, too, clough, sympathizing fully with doubt, may in his more inspired moments speak of hope and of the assurance 'tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all. although from his pen has come at least one short poem[ ] worthy in invigorating force of the faith of browning himself, yet the note of defeat rather than the ring of triumph is more generally characteristic of his language. tennyson had splendid glimpses of the truth, passing visions of glory; yet here, too, the vision was but transitory, the full glory evanescent. the continued popularity of _in memoriam_ is undoubtedly due in large measure to the fact that the author has there given poetic utterance to those questionings and aspirations of the human soul, peculiar to no time or place, to no nation or form of creed--to the cry wrung from the heart when inexorable death brings with it the hour of separation. there is in truth a triumphant note towards the close of _in memoriam_: the child of the fifty-fourth stanza "crying in the night, and with no language but a cry," though yet crying in the night, becomes in the final section (stanza cxxiv) a child "who knows his father near." but even when the heart rises triumphantly, and in defiance of the arguments of reason asserts "i have felt," the faith so expressed is not the faith of browning. beyond all the temporary darkness of _la saisiaz_ we recognize that the author of _asolando_ is speaking nothing more than the truth when he tells us that he "never doubted clouds would break." the dispersal of the clouds gathered over la salève added confidence to the _epilogue_ which constitutes so fitting a close to the life's work. the assertion "i believe in god and truth and love," expressed through the medium of the lover of pauline, finds its echo in the more direct personal assertion of the concluding lines of _la saisiaz_, "he believed in soul, was very sure of god." this was the irreducible minimum of browning's creed. how much more he held as absolute, soul-satisfying truth it is the design of this and the six following lectures to determine. and here at once on the threshold of our investigation we are confronted by the difficulty inseparable from any consideration of browning's literary work; the difficulty of eliminating the dramatic and gauging the extent of the purely personal element. although, as was inevitable, such difficulty has been universally recognized by critics and students, yet the very strength of the dramatic power has in many cases proved misleading. browning has too completely lost himself in his subject. in the writings of the man capable of merging his personal identity in that of an andrea and a pippa, of a caliban and a s. john; of assuming positions as opposed as those of a guido and a caponsacchi, it is a sufficiently simple matter to discover opinions supporting directly or indirectly any individual line of thought. to him who seeks with intent to obtain such confirmation may the promise be fairly made as is your sort of mind so is your sort of search; you'll find what you desire.[ ] moreover, whilst the obscurity of the writing has been the subject of too general comment, the frequently elusive character of the meaning may be liable to escape notice. a certain course of thought having been detected is accepted to the exclusion of an even more important undercurrent only now and again rising to the surface. despite the difficulties attendant upon a genuine study of browning, both from the frequently recondite character of the subject and the amount of literary or historical knowledge demanded of the reader, comparatively slight attempt has so far been made towards a detailed treatment of individual poems such as that, for example, accorded to the plays of shakespeare. and yet such concentrative labour possesses the highest value as a protection against misconstruction arising from a too hastily formed conception of the relative proportions of personal intention and dramatic presentation. having once fallen into the error of accepting an under-estimate (an over-estimate is rarely possible) of the histrionic element in certain avowedly dramatic soliloquies, there is danger lest the temptation of seeking amongst others confirmation of the theory thus suggested should prove too strong for our literary honesty. any investigation as to browning's attitude towards religion in the wider acceptation of the term--as that which relates to the spiritual element in human nature and life--must of necessity be co-extensive with his work. for him to whom "the development of a soul" was the object alone worthy the devotion of the intellectual faculties, it was inevitable that to the consideration of this spiritual element his mind should continually revert. from _pauline_ to _asolando_ it is hardly too much to say such consideration is never absent. with the addition to the title of our subject of the term _dogmatic_, the scope of the inquiry is at once narrowed, whilst the difficulty of ascertaining fairly the position is possibly proportionately increased, since the writer, who has been designated "the most christian poet of the century," is claimed by unitarians as their own. it is, therefore, of especial importance in dealing with the subject that no assumption be made, no assertion advanced, unsupported by adequate proof. the direct statements of the few non-dramatic poems afford us, however, some vantage-ground whence to begin our advance: for the rest, progress must be made through careful comparison of the dramatic poems as to subject and treatment, (we may not judge of one poem apart from the rest) recognizing that the dramatic character of the soliloquy does not necessarily _exclude_, as it does not necessarily _imply_, an expression of the author's own opinions. when, therefore, we find the same theme perpetually treated through the medium of different externals, when we are met by similar expressions of belief emanating from the various soliloquists of the _dramatis personae_ and the _men and women series_, we may not unreasonably hold ourselves to possess fair _prima facie_ evidence that in a theory so treated is centred much of the interest of the writer; in the arguments deduced is to be accepted a more or less definite expression of the writer's own belief, or at least of that form of creed to which he is most strongly attracted. of the five poems chosen as illustrative or explanatory of browning's attitude towards that which we have designated _dogmatic_ religion, one only, _la saisiaz_, the latest in point of time, is non-dramatic in character. between the other four a line of connection is easily established, since all deal with different aspects of the same subject regarded through different media. if, then, beginning with the lowest link of the chain, we gain by means of a consideration of _caliban_ some realization of the dramatic feats which browning could accomplish at pleasure, we shall find less difficulty in distinguishing between the dramatic and personal elements in _christmas eve and easter day_ where the line of demarcation is more finely drawn. in _caliban upon setebos_ (from the _men and women series_ of ) is presented the lowest conception of a deity and of his dealings with the world and humanity, as evolved by a being incapable of aspiration, satisfied with existing conditions in so far, although in so far only, as they afford opportunity for material gratification. with _cleon_ follows the substitution of the greek conception of life at the beginning of the christian era, speculations as to the design of zeus in his intercourse with man. the speculator, at once poet, musician, artist, to whom have been accessible all the stores of greek philosophy and greek culture, feels inevitably the necessity for the existence of a deity differing from that of the monster of prospero's isle. nevertheless to the greek thinker the immortality of the soul is not yet more than a vague suggestion, the outcome of desire. his world has come into touch, but at its extreme edge, with the recently promulgated tenets of christianity. to this inhabitant of "the sprinkled isles" the teaching of the apostles of galilee is so far "a doctrine to be held by no sane man": and yet his very yearning, nay, even his reasonable deductions from the experience of life, point to the need of "doctrines" such as those which he now deems impossible of credence. of the character of the changes separating the world of religious thought of blougram from that of cleon, suggestions are afforded by the _epilogue_ to the _dramatis personae_. the christianity which cleon criticized from afar has, by the date of the bishop's _apology_, become the creed of the civilized world. not only has the time passed when the temple filled with a cloud, even the house of the lord, porch bent and pillar bowed: for the presence of the lord, in the glory of his cloud, had filled the house of the lord. (_epilogue, dram. pers._) but more than this, the _simplicity_ of the earlier faith is at an end. past, too, are those mediaeval days when the faith of a prelate of the church would have been assumed without question by the lay world. both stages of development have been left behind, but the yet later condition has not been attained when scepticism shall cause as little comment as did the childlike faith of the middle ages: a condition defined by the lament of renan-- gone now! all gone across the dark so far, sharpening fast, shuddering ever, shutting still, dwindling into the distance, dies that star which came, stood, opened once! (_epilogue, dram. pers._) _bishop blougram's apology_ is a possible exposition of the religious attitude of a professing christian of the nineteenth century. it matters little whether his form of creed be that of anglican or roman catholic: his position as a dignitary of the church alone compels apology. from these unquestionably dramatic poems we pass to one, the classification of which appears to be usually regarded as less obvious, judging from the criticisms of commentators. how far the decision of the soliloquist in _christmas eve_ may be justly held as that of browning himself is a question requiring separate and careful consideration (to be given in the sixth lecture). here it is sufficient to notice that, entering the confines of dogmatic religion, in this poem has found more immediate expression that which we may fairly deem one principle, at least, of the teaching which its author would impress upon his public; that in no one form of creed is the divine influence to be exclusively found; that wherever love dwells, in however limited a degree, there, too, may with confidence be sought the presence of the supreme love. in _easter day_ the discussion is again transferred to a wider plane and deals with the individual difficulties involved in an unconditional acceptance of christianity itself--difficulties in the end not only acknowledged as inevitable, but thankfully accepted by the speaker as essential to the strengthening of personal faith, to the advancement of individual development. finally, with _la saisiaz_ we are brought face to face unmistakably with the struggle, with the doubts and yearnings of browning himself at a critical hour of life, twelve years before the end--a struggle whence he was ultimately to issue with faith in the fundamental articles of his belief confirmed and deepened. of other poems bearing more or less directly upon the subject, the most notable as well as the most familiar, are probably _rabbi ben ezra_, _an epistle of karshish_, and _a death in the desert_. of these, _rabbi ben ezra_, in its treatment of the theory of asceticism and of the working out of the design of the perfect unity of the individual human life, goes further afield and carries us beyond the limits of any definite dogma: though on the ascetic side it may serve as comment on some of the conclusions of _easter day_. _an epistle of karshish_ embodies two of browning's favourite themes: ( ) the essentially probationary character of human life as exemplified by the attitude of lazarus towards things temporal, an attitude at once becoming _super_-human through a revelation obviating the necessity for faith; ( ) the collateral suggestions contained in the estimate of christianity conceived by the arab physician. of these, the first may be well employed as a comparison with the final decision of _easter day_, the second with the references of cleon to the apostolic teaching. _a death in the desert_ offers but another form of refutation of the results of the german methods of biblical criticism represented by the teaching of the göttingen professor of _christmas eve_. direct declarations of faith such as those contained in _prospice_ and the _epilogue_ to _asolando_ serve but as confirmation of the assertion standing at the head of this lecture. to a superficial consideration the first of the dramatic poems is not pre-eminently attractive, nor as a soliloquist is caliban attractive in the ordinary acceptation of the term as an appeal to the senses affording distinctly pleasurable sensations. but the attraction peculiar to the grotesque in any form is here present in a marked degree: an attraction frequently stronger than that exerted by the purely beautiful, involving as it does a more direct intellectual appeal; since grotesqueness, whether in nature or in art, does not usually denote simplicity. and caliban is by no means a simple being, rather is he a singularly remarkable creation even for the genius of browning. as we know, the idea suggested itself whilst the poet was reading _the tempest_, when there flashed through his mind the passage from the psalms (l, ) which stands beneath the title: "thou thoughtest that i was altogether such a one as thyself." in a recognition of the full significance of this fact may be found the key to all seeming inconsistencies which have evoked criticisms describing the poem from its theological aspect as a "monstrous bridgewater treatise,"[ ] and "a fragment of browning's own christian apologetics," the "reasoning" of caliban as "an initial absurdity,"[ ] whilst caliban himself is designated "a savage with the introspective powers of a hamlet and the theology of an evangelical clergyman"[ ]--the entire scheme of this "wonderful" work being even summarized as a "design to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them."[ ] there is perhaps more to be said for the poem than the suggestions involved in any or all of these comments. a protracted investigation as to how far browning's caliban is an immediate development of the caliban of _the tempest_ would be beside the main object of these lectures; but for an understanding of the value to be reasonably attached to the soliloquy it is essential to estimate as fairly as may be possible the character, intellectual and moral, of the soliloquist, since caliban's conception of his creator must necessarily be influenced by the limitations of his own powers, whether physical or mental. for here, as elsewhere in the dramatic poems, browning has completely identified himself with his soliloquist. how far, therefore, we are justified in claiming for caliban's theology the title of "a fragment of browning's own christian apologetics" can only be decided by a careful consideration and a comparison with work not avowedly dramatic in character. reading again those scenes of _the tempest_, in which caliban plays a part, we become more than ever convinced that the caliban of the poem is but the caliban of the play seen through the medium of browning's phantasy. this, however, is not equivalent to the admission of simplicity as a characteristic of this strange being, merely is it a recognition that the potentialities existent in shakespeare's caliban are nearer to becoming actualities in the caliban of browning. caliban's may, indeed, be the nature of a primitive being, but the nature is not, therefore, simple; to the peculiarly complex character of his personality is due the main interest of the poem--curiously undeveloped in some departments of his nature, the moral sense appears to be almost non-existent, he is, nevertheless, an imaginative creature with a distinct poetic and artistic vein in his composition. whilst prospero's estimate of him seems to have been a fairly accurate one: the most lying slave whom stripes may move, not kindness; as mr. stopford brooke has pointed out "his very cursing is imaginative"[ ]-- as wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both. (act i, sc. ii.) and it is caliban who appreciates the music of ariel which to trinculo and stephano, products of civilization so-called, is a thing fearful as the work of the devil. be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. (act iii, sc. ii.) such is the re-assurance offered by the "man-monster" of shakespeare. but the caliban of browning is yet in his primitive condition, untouched by contact with the outer world as represented even by these dregs of a civilization which, whilst checking the expression of the brutish instinct, increases by repression the force of passions struggling for an outlet to which conventionality bars the way. to the caliban of _the tempest_ prospero rather than setebos is the immediate author of the evils of his environment. he has not yet reached the stage of formulated speculation with regard to the character of his mother's god--to which browning's caliban shows himself to have attained. and it is worthy of notice that the caliban of the poem does not accept without examination such information as he has received from sycorax concerning setebos. only after due consideration does he advance his own ideas (not according with those of sycorax) on the subject; proving himself thus capable not merely of imagination but of reasoning; his intellect is alive whatever limitations may be assigned to its capacity for exercise. although no immediate evidence is afforded of the capabilities of shakespeare's caliban in the regions of abstract thought, yet of the potential existence of the ratiocinative faculty sufficient testimony is afforded by his attitude towards the supernatural powers of prospero, by his scheme for rendering the new-comers instruments, subserving his own interests in his designs against his employer and tyrant--all this clearly the outcome of something more than a mere brute cunning. with these aspects of the character of caliban before him as ground-work, browning has developed his poem; and in the twenty-three opening lines, introductory to the definite reflections concerning setebos, are discoverable evidences of all the characteristics of the caliban of _the tempest_. browning has done nothing without intention, and we are here prepared, or should be prepared, for what is to follow later in the poem. here the "man-monster" is described as sprawling in the mire, in the enjoyment of such comfort as may be derived from the sunshine in the heat of the day: the sensuous side of the nature finding its satisfaction in kicking both feet in the cool slush and feeling about his spine small eft things course, run in and out each arm, and make him laugh. (ll. , .) at the same time is recognizable the artistic element in the composition--for not only does he enjoy a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch, but he looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times.) (ll. - .) here is assuredly the language of no mere savage! compare with this the later descriptions of the inhabitants of the island as assigned to setebos (ll. - ). no mere dry category of animal life, it suggests the result of the observations of a mind at once poetic and imaginative. yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech, yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds; a certain badger brown he hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants: the ants themselves that build a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole. not because this is the work of a poet, but because it is the work of a _dramatic_ poet do we get these lines: and browning has unquestionably, i think, given its character to this earlier passage with intention. he would suggest that this element--poetic and imaginative--in caliban's nature must of necessity influence his conception of his deity. but whilst emphasis is thus given to the sensuous and artistic aspects of the character of this most complex being, by these introductory lines is more than suggested the obliquity of the moral nature--this, too, influencing, as is inevitable, its theology. deception is to the caliban of browning as to the caliban of shakespeare, the very breath of life. his pleasure in inactivity is vastly intensified by the consciousness that he is thereby defrauding prospero and miranda of the fruits of his labours. it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, letting the rank tongue blossom into speech. (ll. , .) immediately combined with this is the form of cowardice distinctive of the lowest moral grade, the cowardice which would insult whilst occupying a position of security, but which grovels before the object of its antipathy as soon as it sees reason to fear approaching vengeance. to the mere physical pleasure of basking in the sunlight is added not alone the negative gratification of the consciousness of defrauding his employer, but the more active enjoyment of soliloquizing concerning "that setebos whom his dam called god." and why? with the sole purpose of affording him annoyance. in the winter-time such discussion might prove dangerous to the speaker, as caliban possesses an insurmountable dread of that "cold" so powerful a weapon in the hands of his deity. even in summer he deems it desirable to avoid a too openly offered challenge to setebos; hence the employment throughout his soliloquy of the third person, singular, in a curious attempt to mislead his hearer. and what according to browning's theory as expressed elsewhere are we to expect of the god of this untaught, half-savage being, morally undeveloped, with artistic and poetic faculties already awakening? more or less will it necessarily be the outcome of his own experiences. a commentary on that familiar passage which s. john in _a death in the desert_ (ll. - ) puts into the mouth of the objector to the truth of the facts of christianity, who would regard the conception of the godhead as subjective rather than objective in character. first in the history of the race came the ascription to the deity of hands, feet, and bodily parts; then followed the human passions of pride and anger. finally, all yield to the higher attributes of "power, love, and will," these succeeding to and supplanting the earlier characteristics. in his imaginary answer the evangelist is represented as attributing these changes of conception to the necessity of growth in human nature whereby man uses such aids to his development as may be attainable. the truth itself remaining unaltered and unalterable, man obtains from time to time fuller glimpses thereof, the greater superseding, even apparently falsifying, the less. caliban, uniting the two earlier conceptions of the deity--as a being possessed of bodily parts and human passions--offers but the merest suggestion of any further and higher development. yet there are such _indirect_, should we rather say _negative_, suggestions observable towards the close of the poem. to setebos is assigned as a dwelling-place "the cold o' the moon," possibly because the speaker feels it satisfactory that the god whom he fears should be at what he deems a distance sufficiently remote from his own habitation; partly also because to him "the cold o' the moon" or, indeed, any cold, is suggestive of intensely disagreeable sensations, and to his unsatisfactory environment he ascribes the attempts of setebos towards creation as designed to effect a change in his own condition. all things animate or inanimate inhabiting the island have been, according to caliban, the work of setebos. what still lies beyond the range of his creative power? not the sun, as might have been anticipated, since to caliban its agency is purely beneficial, and its influence apparently of limitless extent; not the sun, "clouds, winds, meteors," but the stars. these "came otherwise," how or by what means the soliloquist is unable to determine. then arises the further question. if, indeed, setebos is the author of the visible creation, what has been the motive instigating him to the work? in accordance with caliban's experience of his own nature, it is impossible that any motive other than self-interest in some form or another should have actuated the creator: hence he attributes the design to the discomfort of the dwelling-place "in the cold o' the moon." nevertheless, even after the creation of the sun its warmth proved insufficient for comfort, the god failed to enjoy "the air he was not born to breathe." again, in the constitution of the animate beings inhabiting the island he strove to realize (so says caliban) "what himself would fain in a manner be." hence the creatures made by setebos are "weaker in most points" than is the god himself, yet "stronger in a few." a theory suggesting an interesting comparison with the arguments by which david in _saul_ deduces the necessity of an incarnation. caliban ascribes to setebos the power of originating faculties which he does not himself possess, and which in the nature of things he might, therefore, be deemed incapable of realizing. the illustration or comparison offered is that of caliban's own imagined occupation in an idle moment, when the idea occurs to him to make a bird of clay, endowing it with the power of flight, a power not numbered amongst his own capabilities. thus he holds that setebos, too, may create living beings, bestowing upon them faculties which he is himself incapable of exercising, making them, though, "weaker in some points, stronger in a few." to the more cultivated intelligence of the hebrew psalmist, as represented by browning, such theory is untenable. that "the creature [should] surpass the creator--the end what began"[ ] is as incomprehensible as it is illogical. love existent in the creature is to david proof sufficient of the existence of love in the creator. so thinks not caliban. and yet with the curious inconsistency marking the reasoning of the slowly developing intellect, setebos is represented as mocking his creatures whilst envying the capabilities with which he has gifted them. thus: so brave, so better though they be, it nothing skills if he begins to plague. (ll. , .) as the creation has been the result of mere wantonness, so the recognition of all appeal from created beings to the creator will be governed by the same caprice. as with caliban's imagined dealings with his clay bird, he would do good or ill accordingly as the chance were this might take or else not take my fancy. (ll. - .) so also is the action of the deity towards his creation in all relations of life. he has elected prospero for a career of "knowledge and power," and, as his servant judges, one of supreme comfort, whilst he has appointed caliban, equally deserving--in his own estimation--to hold the position of slave. he hath a spite against me, that i know, just as he favours prosper, who knows why? (ll. - .) power which is irresponsible is exercised in a manner wholly capricious. there is no more satisfactory explanation of the dealings of setebos with his creatures than that which caliban can offer for his own treatment of the crabs that march now from the mountain to the sea, when he may let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, loving not, hating not, just choosing so. (ll. - .) of one thing the savage deems himself assured, again judging from the pettiness which he finds existent in his own nature. of one thing he is assured--that the wrath of the god is most readily to be kindled through envy, envy of the very objects of his own creation. a display of happiness is the surest method of incurring his vengeance; therefore even so, 'would have him misconceive, suppose this caliban strives hard and ails no less, and always, above all else, envies him: (ll. - .) a belief inherent in all pre-christian creeds in intimate connection with the doctrine of sacrifice, the place of which in the theology of caliban must receive separate consideration. so does herakles warn admetus against indulgence in a supreme happiness, only the rapture must not grow immense: take care, nor wake the envy of the gods.[ ] thus will caliban in spite kill two flies, basking "on the pompion-bell above," whilst he gives his aid to two black painful beetles [who] roll their ball on head and tail as if to save their lives. (ll. - .) such are, according to browning, some of the main features of the "natural theology in the island," suggesting conditions of life at once depressing and degrading: no satisfaction for the present but in deception of the over-ruling power, the sole hope for the future, that this dread being may tire of his early creation and hence relax his malicious watch in favour of a new and distant world, made "to please him more." it is not difficult to conceive of such a creed as the outcome of deductions from the teaching of sycorax, who held that "the quiet" was the virtual creator, the work of setebos being limited to disturbing and "vexing" these creations of the quiet. in this aspect setebos would appear as representative of the powers of evil. and of great interest in any study of browning are the suggestions resulting from caliban's treatment of the subject. ( ) he holds that the author of evil must be supreme. that the quiet, had he been the creator, _could_ unquestionably, and, therefore, _would_ most certainly have rendered his creatures of strength sufficient to be impervious to the attacks of setebos. therefore he attributes the weaknesses of humanity to design on the part of a creator who would wantonly torment. his dam held that the quiet made all things which setebos vexed only: 'holds not so. who made them weak, meant weakness he might vex. had he meant other, while his hand was in, why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint, like an orc's armour? ay,--so spoil his sport! (ll. - .) ( ) again, and later in the poem, he treats setebos--or evil--not merely as a negative aspect of good, but as that which may in time become transmuted into good. he may surprise even the quiet's self some strange day--or, suppose, grow into it as grubs grow butterflies. (ll. - .) ( ) one further alternative suggests itself--and this yet more probable--that evil may finally be overcome of good, or may of itself become inoperative. that some strange day, will either the quiet catch and conquer setebos, or likelier he decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. (ll. - .) two or three less obvious thoughts may not be omitted in any consideration of a poem containing much which is characteristic of browning's work wherever found. from the theology of caliban inevitably results _the doctrine of sacrifice_, though in its lowest, crudest form. since that condition most likely to excite the wrath of setebos, as we have already had occasion to notice, is the happiness of his creations, caliban would, therefore, present himself as a creature full of misery, moaning even in the sun; only in secret rejoicing that he is making setebos his dupe. should he be discovered in his deception, in order to avoid the greater evil attendant on the expression of the god's wrath, he would of his own will submit to the lesser ill; cut a finger off, or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, or push my tame beast for the orc to taste. (ll. - .) a sacrifice the outcome of fear. spare me, and i will do all to appease thy wrath. into the midst of the meditations of caliban breaks the thunder-storm, and what he has depicted as a possible event of the future has become a present danger. white blaze, a tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, his thunder follows! fool to gibe at him! (ll. - .) the prospective vows are now made in earnest. 'lieth flat and loveth setebos! 'maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, will let those quails fly, will not eat this mouth one little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape. (ll. - .) sacrifice as distinguished from or opposed to the principle of _self_-sacrifice. whilst self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-suppression--call it what we may--marks the crowning height of spiritual attainment, scaled alone by the few, and those the pioneers and saviours of the race, all early forms of religion bear witness to the existence of this belief in _sacrifice_--the propitiation of the deity--as an element inherent in human nature, whether embodied in the legend of polycrates, in the vow of jacob at bethel,[ ] or in that condition of his descendants when in accordance with the prophetic denunciation[ ] sacrifice had superseded mercy and burnt-offerings constituted a substitute for the knowledge of god. again and again on different soil, amid men of alien races, the principle of sacrifice is found reappearing throughout history. as the enthusiasm of self-sacrifice becomes enfeebled, by a retrograde process of moral development the barren growth of sacrifice would appear to thrive. the echo of the unquestioning outcry, "god wills it," had died away when, in the crusading vows of the later era of the movement, expression was too frequently given to the theory of _sacrifice_. how far may the one be regarded as the outcome of the other, the higher the development of the lower instinct? when man has learned to know even hate is but a mask of love's to see a good in evil, and a hope in ill-success;[ ] then, too, may the links between sacrifice and self-sacrifice become apparent. along this line of connection we have to pass in traversing the ground between _caliban_ and _easter day_. and what place does the creed of the unwilling slave of setebos accord to the _life beyond the grave_? will the future, if future there be, prove but an indefinite prolongation of the present? from the evils of this life the groveller in the mud sees no escape. he has discarded that tenet of his mother's creed which included a theory of retribution after death when setebos "both plagued enemies and feasted friends." such theory would indeed have been wholly inconsistent with that which represented the god as indifferent to his creatures, as utterly capricious in his dealings for good or ill--whereby he may be said to have neither enemies nor friends. no, poor caliban, brutal and selfish, can but hold that "with the life, the pain shall stop." what satisfaction to be derived from the continuance of a loveless existence? without love, life to the author of _caliban upon setebos_ would have lost its use, would be fearful of contemplation; the "can it be, and must, and will it?" of _la saisiaz_[ ] finds no faintest echo on prospero's isle. in the one case the utterances are the utterances of caliban, in the other those of browning himself. from the calculations of the one the doctrine of immortality is as inevitably excluded as it is inevitably included in those of the other. finally, whilst in the various scattered references to "the quiet" are to be found some of the most striking evidences of the existence of the artistic element in caliban's nature--"the something quiet" which he deems resting "o'er the head of setebos" out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief. * * * * * [the] stars the outposts of its couch; (ll. - .) yet far more than this is involved in the suggestions of the relations subsisting between the quiet and setebos and the creation to which caliban belongs. the quiet too far from caliban's sphere of existence for him to be in any way affected by it. he only surmises as to its possible influence upon, and ultimate triumph over, setebos, who partakes sufficiently of his own nature to call forth fear and enmity, who lives in a proximity to his creations which renders advisable the avoidance of any action calculated to excite his wrath. the quiet, the impersonation of supreme power, is beyond the reach of all the ills attendant upon this lower phase of existence, hence is equally incapable of experiencing joy and grief, since both alike are relative terms. although here suggested as incidental to caliban's reflections, the theory involved is one appearing more or less frequently elsewhere in browning's work, notably in _a death in the desert_, and again in _cleon_, when it is, however, applied to "the lower and inconscious forms of life." to the supreme power beyond man, as to the world of animal life below, is denied "man's distinctive mark," progress. thus incidentally in these references to the quiet may be traced a _suggestion foreshadowing_ in a degree, however remote, _the necessity of an incarnation_. not that this outcome of his theories would appear to have found any place in caliban's mind; it may possibly indeed be an assumption, wanting sufficient warrant, to assign to browning himself any definite intention in the matter. nevertheless, even the suggestion, remote as we may admit it to be, leads up to the argument used by david in _saul_ in the extremity of his anxiety to relieve the sufferings of the object of his affections. through sympathy alone may suffering be relieved, and genuine sympathy may be best attained through personal experience of suffering. humanity suffers, but is unequal to the task of aiding effectively its fellow-sufferers. the deity, whilst possessing the necessary power, is yet untouched by the sympathy resultant from fellow-feeling. a suffering god! can this be? only, therefore, through union of the human with the divine, through an incarnation alone, can the relief of human suffering be fully accomplished. even caliban feels the need of contact between the creator and his creatures. the quiet, incapable of experiencing joy or grief, is also beyond the reach of mortal intercourse or worship. he cannot be god even in the sense in which setebos is god until, through an approach to his creatures. he experiences something of the sorrows as of the joys of humanity. this in brief is the general course of browning's arguments for the reasonable necessity of an incarnation. the suggestion, if suggestion we may call it, here made constitutes the lowest rung in the ladder which leads us to the confession of s. john. the acknowledgment of god in christ accepted by thy reason, solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it.[ ] lecture ii cleon lecture ii cleon between caliban and cleon a wide gulf is fixed: between the savage sprawling in "the pit's much mire," gloating over his powers of inflicting suffering, at once cowering before and insulting his god: and the cultured greek, inhabitant of "the sprinkled isles," poet, philosopher, artist, musician, sitting in his "portico, royal with sunset," reflecting on the purposes of life, his own achievements and the design of zeus in creation, which, though inscrutable, he yet must hold to have been beneficent. could contrast be anywhere more striking than that suggested by these two scenes? and yet amidst outward dissimilarity there is a point towards which all their lines converge. on one subject of reflection alone, this man, the product of greek intellectual life and culture, has hardly passed beyond that of the savage awakening to a "sense of sense." to both alike death means the end of life, to neither does any glimpse of light reveal itself beyond the grave. and death to the greek is infinitely more terrible than to the son of sycorax. to caliban the belief that "with the life the pain will stop," affords a feeling akin to relief in the present, when the mental discomfort arising from fear of setebos temporarily over-powers the physical satisfaction to be derived from basking in the sun. to cleon, possessed of the capacity for "loving life so over-much," the idea of death affords so terrible a suggestion that its very horror forces upon him at times the necessity of the acceptance of some theory involving belief in the immortality of the soul. thus we have moved onwards one step, though one step only, in the ladder of thought, of which caliban's soliloquy constitutes the lowest rung. the inert conjectures, the vague surmises of the savage are succeeded by the reflections and subsequent logical deductions of the man of intellectual culture, culminating in the anguished cry: i, i the feeling, thinking, acting man. * * * * * sleep in my urn. it is so horrible, i dare at times imagine to my need some future state revealed to us by zeus. * * * * * ... but no! zeus has not yet revealed it, and alas, he must have done so, were it possible! (_cleon_, . - .) different as are the modes of contemplating death, differing as the character and environment of the soliloquist, one is yet in a sense the outcome of the other, an exemplification of cleon's own assertion: in man there's failure, only since he left the lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. - .) * * * * * most progress is most failure. (l. .) with the opening out of wider possibilities to the mind comes the consciousness of the gulf between actuality and ideality. to caliban, whose pleasurable conceptions of life are bounded by the prospect of defrauding prospero of his services, lying in the mire drinking the mash, with brain become alive, making and marring clay at will; (_caliban_, . - .) to such a being not long endowed with a capacity for the realization of his own individuality, with the "sense of sense," the greek appreciation of life is a sheer impossibility. by the mind capable of entering into sympathy with homer, terpander, phidias, the joys of life are felt too keenly to be relinquished without a struggle, and that a bitter one. death and the grave cast a chilling shadow over the brightness of the present. before analysing the arguments contained in the reflections of cleon, it may be well to inquire what were the influences to which the poet had been subjected, and which resulted in the condition of mind in which the messengers of protus found him. the greece in which cleon lived was the greece to which s. paul addressed himself from the areopagus, the character of which is sufficiently indicated by the circumstances leading to the assembly on that memorable occasion. the athenians, we are told by the writer of the _acts_, "spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing."[ ] the age was then, it would appear, not one of action or of practical thought. all had been done in the past that could be done in the departments of artistic achievement, of poetry, of philosophy. now _creative_ power would seem to have disappeared from amongst greek thinkers, all that remained being the natural restlessness which ultimately succeeds satiety. much had been accomplished in the past: what remained to the future? it is in accordance with this spirit of the age that cleon writes to protus: we of these latter days, with greater mind than our forerunners, since more composite, look not so great, beside their simple way, to a judge who only sees one way at once, one mind-point and no other at a time,-- compares the small part of a man of us with some whole man of the heroic age, great in his way--not ours, nor meant for ours. (ll. - .) hence the poet of modern times, though he has left the "epos on [the] hundred plates of gold," the property of the tyrant protus, and the little popular song so sure to rise from every fishing-bark when, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net; (ll. , .) yet admits freely that he has not "chanted verse like homer." what though he has "combined the moods" of music, "inventing one," yet has he never "swept string like terpander," his predecessor by some seven centuries. what though he has moulded "the image of the sun-god on the phare," or painted the poecile its whole length, yet has he not "carved and painted men like phidias and his friend"--his forerunners by something like four hundred years. with these mighty achievements in poetry and art of those giants amongst men to be contemplated in retrospect, what hope remains for the future? what greater attainments may be possible to the human intellect? here again life--this mortal life--would seem to have become all that it is capable of becoming; the powers of mind and body have alike been developed to the full. thus on this side too is satiety. the yearning for growth, for progress, inherent in human nature, seeks instinctively further heights of attainment. when for the time being all visible peaks appear to have been scaled, then, in the phraseology of s. john, "man [turns] round on himself and stands."[ ] and then arises the enquiry into the purposes of existence, an enquiry unheard in the earlier days of practical activity and struggle. is this the end of all? no progress being possible along the old tracks, we must hear or see some new thing. the late dr. westcott in comparing the dramatic work of euripides with that of Æschylus, and remarking that euripides (only a generation younger) had to take account of all the novel influences under which he had grown up, adds, "once again asia had touched europe and quickened there new powers. greece had conquered persia only that she might better receive from the east the inspiration of a wider energy."[ ] once more in the days of cleon might it be said that asia had touched europe and quickened there new powers. but this time the positions of conquered and conquerors were reversed. asia was to conquer europe, but the conquest effected by the sword of alexander was to be avenged by weapons forged in another armoury. this time asia invaded europe when paul of tarsus responded to the appeal "come over to macedonia and help us." so far that invasion had borne small fruit: "certain men" had believed, including dionysius the areopagite, whilst others, whose attitude protus would appear to have shared, desired to hear further on the subject of the resurrection.[ ] cleon is represented as ranking among the sceptics with reference to the new christian teaching. the special influence of greek thought upon his philosophy and creed, as expressed in the poem, may be best noticed in a closer consideration to which we now turn. i. the opening lines ( - ) present, with browning's usual power of delineation, the environment of the speaker. cleon, the poet, as well as his correspondent, protus, the tyrant, seem alike to be imaginary personages. with lines - the soliloquist at once strikes the key-note of the poem. by the act of munificence which showers gifts upon the poet, "whose song gives life its joy," the king evinces his "recognition of the use of life": and by this recognition proves himself no mere materialist. he is ruling his people, not with exclusive attention to their material needs, though they may not themselves look beyond the gratification of these. whilst he is building his tower, achieving his life's work, the beauty of which is sufficient to the "vulgar" gaze, he, the builder, is looking "to the east"; and looking to the east in a sense not intended by the greek when he makes enquiry through his messengers for the "mere barbarian jew," "one called paulus." ii. the following section of the poem (ll. - ) is an interesting elaboration of cleon's theory of the development, not only of the individual (browning's favourite theme), but of the growth of the race. the greek holds that where individual members of humanity have attained in their several departments to the greatest heights, nothing further _in that direction_ is possible of accomplishment. what then remains for the advancement of the race? when the "outside verge that rounds our faculties" has been reached, "these divine men of old" must remain unsurpassed by their successors in that particular department of work or thought. where they reached, who can do more than reach? what then remains? how may the contemporary of cleon excel "the grand simplicity" of homer, of terpander, and in later times of phidias? it is to the growing complexity of the human mind that cleon looks for an answer. although in one intellectual department he may fall short of that which has been attained in the past, he is yet capable of appreciating all that his predecessors have achieved to a degree impossible to an earlier generation of mankind. _all_ the faculties are developed, not one to the exclusion or limitation of the others; hence is obtained a more completely sympathetic union of the intellectual capacities. thus the further development of the race is to be sought in a greater complexity of being rather than in an advance along any individual line of progress. three several illustrations of his theory cleon adduces ( ) that suggested by the mosaic-work of the pavement before him: and ( ) the more unusual one of the sphere with its contents of air and water: yet again ( ) the comparison between the wild and cultivated plant. ( ) each individual section of the mosaic was in itself perfect--thus with the great ones of old. this perfection having been attained, all that should succeed would be at best but a reproduction of the already perfect forms, a repetition, a renewal of that which had gone before. a higher, because more complex beauty might, however, be created by a combination of these separate perfections, producing thus a new form, that, too, perfect in itself. and this synthetic labour must prove an advance on the almost exclusively analytic which had preceded it; since new and more complex forms should be thus evolved, "making at last a picture" of deeper meaning and finer interests than those offered by any number of individual chequers uncombined, however perfect in symmetry and colour. hence there might still remain a goal towards which human energy should direct its efforts. though man may have attained to perfection _in part_, to continue the simile, he has now to develop towards the attainment of a perfect _complex whole_, resulting from a composition and adjustment of perfect individual parts, united by a bond of sympathetic intellectual appreciation non-existent in past ages. when cleon shall have "chanted verse like homer," "swept string like terpander," "carved and painted men like phidias and his friend," then, not only will the individual of recent times have surpassed each of his forerunners in the variety and comprehensiveness of his powers, but he will have attained in each individual department of his being to that greatness for the development of which man's entire faculties were of old required. to this cleon has by no means yet attained. such growth, change, and expansion in the individual character is not, he would suggest, readily recognized by the world, and the second illustration here applies: ( ) water, the more palpable, material element, is estimated at its worth, whilst air, with its subtler properties, tho' filling more fully than the water did; though holding thrice the weight of water in itself. (ll. - .) is yet accounted a negligible quantity, and the sphere is pronounced empty. of the deeper, more subtle, thoughts and workings of the soul in cleon and his fellows, the outcome of the labours of humanity in past generations, thoughts too deep for expression, ideas only destined to bear fruit in the years to come; of all these, and such as these, the contemporary world takes little heed. to the gods alone cleon would refer for his appreciation. with david he would exclaim: 'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do![ ] with ben ezra he would triumph all, the world's coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb, so passed in making up the main account; all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: * * * * * thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act, fancies that broke through language and escaped: all i could never be, all, men ignored in me; ("ignored" because incapable of the understanding essential to appreciation); _this_, i was worth to god, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.[ ] for cleon, equally with the jewish philosopher of the middle ages, accepts the entire subserviency of man to his creator. both alike recognize the value of life, human life; its unity, its perfection in itself: both alike realize that this life means growth. "why stay we on the earth unless to grow?" asks the greek. "it was better," writes the jew as age approaches, it was better, youth should strive, through acts uncouth, towards making, than repose on aught found made.[ ] thus progress! nevertheless, the rabbi, whilst recognizing to the full the value of the present life as a thing _per se_, bearing its peculiar uses, its perfect development advancing from youth through manhood until age shall "approve of youth, and death complete the same!" with the _unity_ yet recognizes also _continuity_; and at the close of the old life can stand upon the threshold of the new "fearless and unperplexed," "what weapons to select, what armour to indue," for use in the renewed struggle he foresees awaiting him. to the greek life was equally, nay, surpassingly beautiful, the human faculties equally worthy of cultivation. as in nature, so with man (and here is employed the third of his illustrations): ( ) the wild flower, _i.e._, according to his interpretation, the possessor of the single artistic faculty--homer, terpander, phidias-- was the larger; i have dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower if not so large: i stand myself. (ll. - .) whilst the rabbi esteems himself as clay in the hands of the potter, the greek admits no personal pride in the multiplicity or magnitude of his gifts. all alike he refers to "the gods whose gift alone it is," continuing the reflection-- which, shall i dare (all pride apart) upon the absurd pretext that such a gift by chance lay in my hand, discourse of lightly, or depreciate? it might have fallen to another's hand: what then? (ll. - .) so far with ben ezra. but where the rabbi can say with confidence thence shall i pass, approved a man, for aye removed from the developed brute: a god though in the germ. (xiii.) with arthur i pass _but shall not die_, merely shall i thereupon take rest, ere i be gone once more on my adventure brave and new (xiv.) for the greek is no such confidence possible. he, too, shall pass--"i pass too surely." his hope, if hope it be, lies in the development of a humanity of the future which shall have profited by the experience of its individual members in the past--"let at least truth stay!" incidentally is introduced in this section of the poem a reference to the yearning of the correspondent of protus for some revelation of the gods to be made through man to men. through an incarnation alone can the purposes of zeus in creation be fully and comprehensibly revealed to man. truth may indeed stay, but its revelation is progressive in character; according thus with the nature of the human intelligence (a favourite theme with browning). for any more complete realization of truth absolute, a direct revelation of the deity is essential. god, in man, may show that which it is possible for men to become, hence the design of zeus in placing him upon earth. so had cleon "imaged," and "written out the fiction," that he or other god descended here and, once for all, showed simultaneously what, in its nature, never can be shown, piecemeal or in succession;--showed, i say, the worth both absolute and relative of all his children from the birth of time, his instruments for all appointed work. (ll. - .) through this revelation, too, may be proved the immanence of the deity, a doctrine even now accepted by the greek. the speaker on the areopagus[ ] needed only to remind his hearers of this their belief, when he assured them that the god of whom he preached was not one who dwelt in temples made with hands--but is "not far from every one of us," since "in him we live and move and have our being." even, in the words of aratus, "we are his offspring." but this theory of an incarnation which "certain slaves" were teaching in a fuller, more satisfying form, than that presented by the imagination of the greek philosopher, might be to him but "a dream": his sole hope rested, as we have seen, on an advance of the race through the higher development of individual members. no dream, let us hope, that years and days, the summers and the springs, follow each other with unwaning powers. (ll. - .) iii. with line we pass to a consideration of the more intensely personal question, yet one involving in its answer much that has gone before; the question put by protus in the letter accompanying his gifts: is death (which king and poet alike esteem the end of all things), is death to the _man of thought_ so fearful a thing in contemplation as it must be to the _man of action_? to protus, the man of action, who has enjoyed life to the full, whose portion has been wealth, honour, dignity, power, physical and mental appreciation of all the privileges attendant on his station and environment; to the possessor of life such as this death, as not an interruption merely, but as an end to all joy, all gratification, must perforce bring with it nothing but horror. the horror which browning represents elsewhere as falling momentarily upon the venetian audience listening to the weird strains of galuppi's music,[ ] when an interpolated discord suggests to the onlooker the question, "what of soul is left, i wonder?" when the pleasures of life are ended? and the answer is given, with its note of hopeless finality, "dust and ashes." to protus, too, recurs the answer, "dust and ashes." although his work as a ruler has been of that character which has caused him to seek the intellectual and moral, as well as the material welfare of his people (so much we saw cleon recognizing in his introductory message), yet he regretfully, and probably unjustly, in a moment of depression, estimates his legacy to posterity as "nought." my life, complete and whole now in its power and joy, dies altogether with my brain and arm, is lost indeed; since, what survives myself? the brazen statue to o'erlook my grave, set on the promontory which i named. and that--some supple courtier of my heir shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps, to fix the rope to, which best drags it down. (ll. - .) (an estimate suggesting a truth of practical experience: schemes of absolute government not infrequently bearing within themselves the seeds of their own decay: the "sceptred arm," originally the symbol of its strength, becoming in good sooth the chief agent in the work of destruction.) to protus, whose life has been thus spent in activity, forgetfulness seems the one thing most terrible of contemplation. he must pass, and in the words of the dying alcestis, "who is dead is nought"; of him shall it be said, "he who once was, now is nothing." but for the man whose life "stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study," for him may not death prove triumph, since "_thou_ dost not go"? yet cleon deals with the question as might have been anticipated. genius, even in its highest form, culture, art, learning, alike fail to satisfy the restless soul, tossed upon the waves of uncertainty, unanchored by any reasonable hope for the future. all these fail where the satisfaction derivative from wealth and power honourably wielded has already failed. the genius ruling in the kingdom of intellectual life has no consolation to offer the sovereign ruling the outer life--the material and moral welfare--of his subjects. poet and tyrant alike bow before the inevitable approach of death, taking "the tear-stained dust" as proof that "man--the whole man--cannot live again." the entire poem has been happily designated "the ecclesiastes of pagan religion." at the outset we have remarked cleon admitting that protus equally with himself has recognized, not only that joy is "the use of life," but that joy may not be found in material gratification alone, but rather in the cultivation of the higher faculties of man. for so shall men remark, in such an act [_i.e._, in the munificence displayed by the gifts bestowed upon the poet] of love for him whose song gives life its joy, thy recognition of the use of life. (ll. - .) the poet had so estimated "joy." it is in truth a higher estimate than that based upon a recognition of material good. nevertheless, he is now to confess that from this, too, but an empty and transitory satisfaction is obtainable. his answer to protus affords an analysis of his own reflections on the subject, since the thoughts have clearly not arisen now for the first time. and in the arguments immediately following we cannot but recognize browning's own voice. the theory advanced is reiterated constantly throughout his writings, dramatic and otherwise. cleon directs the attention of protus to the perfections of animal life as created by zeus in lines suggesting an interesting comparison with that remarkable and frequently quoted passage from the concluding section of _paracelsus_ (ll. - ). the centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, and the earth changes like a human face; * * * * * * * * * * the grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms like chrysalids impatient for the air, the shining dorrs are busy, beetles run along the furrows, ants make their ado; above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark soars up and up, shivering for very joy; afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls flit where the sand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets; savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain--and god renews his ancient rapture. thus he dwells in all, from life's minute beginnings, up at last to man--the consummation of this scheme of being, the completion of this sphere of life: whose attributes had here and there been scattered o'er the visible world before, asking to be combined, dim fragments meant to be united in some wondrous whole, imperfect qualities throughout creation, suggesting some one creature yet to make, some point where all those scattered rays should meet convergent in the faculties of man. so writes cleon: if, in the morning of philosophy, ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived, thou, with the light now in thee, could'st have looked on all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird, ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage-- thou would'st have seen them perfect, and deduced the perfectness of others yet unseen. conceding which,--had zeus then questioned thee "shall i go on a step, improve on this, do more for visible creatures than is done?" thou would'st have answered, "ay, by making each grow conscious in himself--by that alone. all's perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock, the fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims and slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight, till life's mechanics can no further go-- and all this joy in natural life is put like fire from off thy finger into each, so exquisitely perfect is the same." (ll. - .) but the teuton of the renascence passes beyond the greek in his history of the evolution of man--as the outcome, the union, the consummation of all that has gone before. in his description of human nature so evolved, he continues by enumerating power controlled by will, knowledge and love as characteristics, hints and previsions of which strewn confusedly about the inferior natures--all lead up higher, all shape out dimly the superior race, the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, and man appears at last.[ ] to cleon such hopes, but vaguely suggested, leading upwards and onwards towards a recognition of the soul's immortality, are too fair for _truth_, their very beauty leads him to question their reality. admitted then that in "all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird," perfection is to be found, in what direction may advance be made? impossible in degree, it must, therefore, be in kind: some new faculty shall be added to those which man, the latest born of the creatures, shall share in common with his predecessors in the world of animal life--the knowledge and realization of his own individuality. in due time [after leading the purely animal life] let him critically learn how he lives. and what shall be the result of the new gift? to him who, inexperienced in its uses, lives "in the morning of philosophy," it must be indicative of an increase of happiness. with the greater fulness of life, resultant from extended knowledge, must surely follow also an extension of enjoyment. but such a belief, says cleon, living in the eve of philosophy, could have existed only in its morning "ere aught had been recorded." experience, that prosaic but infallible instructor, has taught man otherwise. the simplicity of mere animal life, though involving not the conscious happiness of a reasoning being (if indeed happiness there be for such) served to impart "the wild joy of living, mere living." a joy from which caliban was to be found awakening to a realization of his own individuality, and also to a realization that joy and grief are relative terms: that joy, equally with grief, was impossible to the quiet, the possessor of supreme power, as it was impossible to yonder crabs that march now from the mountain to the sea.[ ] to cleon, oppressed by a profound sense of discouragement in life, the cynical suggestion presents itself that the semi-conscious vegetating existence of the animal may be more desirable than the yearnings and aspirations inevitably attendant on human life, with its joys keen and intensified, but, alas! all too brief. thou king, hadst more reasonably said: "let progress end at once,--man make no step beyond the natural man, the better beast, using his senses, not the sense of sense." (ll. - .) it is a purely pagan view of life. in man there's failure, only since he left the lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. - .) so man grew, and his widening intelligence opened out vast and ever-increasing possibilities of joy. but with the realization of possibilities came also the consciousness of his limitations. so long as the flesh had remained absolutely paramount, the restrictions it was capable of imposing upon the workings of the soul had been unfelt. now, when the soul has climbed its watch-tower and perceives a world of capability for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us. when at this moment the soul in its yearning "craves all," then is the time of the flesh to reply, take no jot more than ere thou clombst the tower to look abroad! nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought deduction to it. (ll. - .) in other words, the ever-recurring conflict between flesh and spirit. in human nature, as at present constituted, one is bound to suffer at the expense of the other; the sound mind in the sound body is unfortunately a counsel of perfection too rarely attainable in practical life. the poet is conscious of the growing vitality of the spirit as well as that of the intellect (although he does not admittedly recognize that this is so, his use of the term "soul" being seemingly synonymous with "intellect"), the decreasing power of the flesh. in vain the struggle to supply fresh oil to life, repair the waste of age and sickness. (ll. - .) thus the fate of the man of genius, of keener perceptions, of wider capacities for enjoyment, becomes proportionately more grievous than that of the less complex nature of the man of action. say rather that my fate is deadlier still, in this, that every day my sense of joy grows more acute, my soul (intensified by power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; while every day my hairs fall more and more, my hand shakes, and the heavy years increase-- the horror quickening still from year to year, the consummation coming past escape when i shall know most, and yet least enjoy. (ll. - .) a recognition of the emptiness of life, necessarily hopeless when thus viewed in relation to its sensuous and intellectual possibilities only. to these things the end must come. thus browning leads us on, as so frequently elsewhere, to an admission of _the inevitableness of immortality_. an estimate of life curiously opposed to this simple pagan aspect is that afforded by the conception of _paracelsus_, a poem containing no small element of the mysticism which offered so powerful an attraction to its author. in a familiar passage at the close of the first section we find paracelsus describing the methods he proposes to pursue in his search for truth; truth which he deems existent within the soul of man, and acquired by no external influence. truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe. there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception--which is truth. a baffling and perverting carnal mesh binds it, and makes all error: and to know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.[ ] * * * * * see this soul of ours! how it strives weakly in the child, is loosed in manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled by age and waste, set free at last by death.[ ] in s. john's reflections in _a death in the desert_, a similar suggestion of mysticism is modified by the medium through which it has passed. the christian teacher who wrote that "god is love," and that in the knowledge of this truth immortality itself consists, propounds for himself a question similar to that which has so hopeless a ring when issuing from the mouth of the greek. is it for nothing we grow old and weak? a suggestion of the character of the answer is found in the conclusion of the question, "we whom god loves." can they share --they, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength about each spirit, that needs must bide its time, living and learning still as years assist which wear the thickness thin, and let man see-- with me who hardly am withheld at all, but shudderingly, scarce a shred between, lie bare to the universal prick of light?[ ] true is the lament of the reply to protus. we struggle, fain to enlarge our bounded physical recipiency, increase our power, supply fresh oil to life, repair the waste of age and sickness. (ll. - .) all too true. but if, as we are assured, there is no waste in nature, whence comes the apparent destruction wrought by age and sickness? what the design of which it is the evidence? in the words of the christian mystic, but to admit "the universal prick of light," to effect the union of the individual soul with that central fire of which it is an emanation; when the training and development inseparable from suffering shall have done their work, since "when pain ends, gain ends too." thy body at its best, how far can that project thy soul on its lone way?[ ] the decay, it must be, of its temporal habitation which shall bring to the soul eternal freedom. to the greek, on the other hand, with the decay of the body, passed not only all that made life worth living, but the life itself. the keener the appreciation of life, the harder, therefore, the parting of soul from body. he, indeed, sees the wider but to sigh the more. "most progress is most failure." failure absolute if death is the end of life; failure relative and indicative of higher, vaster potentialities of being, if that dream of a moment's yearning might be true, if death prove itself but "the throbbing impulse" to a fuller life; if, freed by it, man bursts "as the worm into the fly," becoming a creature of that future state unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy. but to the greek the door of actuality remains fast closed. before concluding an examination of this section of the poem which has suggested, as was inevitable, a comparison between the pagan and the christian conception of life; between an estimate into which physical and intellectual considerations alone enter, and that in which spiritual also find place, it may not be unprofitable to recall the method by which browning has treated the same subject elsewhere, in a different connection. _old pictures in florence_, published originally in the volume of the _men and women series_, which likewise contained _cleon_, is one of the few poems in which the author may be assumed to speak in his own person. the contrast there drawn is that between the products of greek art which "ran and reached its goal," and the works of the mediaeval italian artists. having pointed to the greek statuary, to the figures of theseus, of apollo, of niobe, and alexander, the speaker recognizes therein a re-utterance of the truth of man, as by god first spoken, which the actual generations garble, ... soul (which limbs betoken) and limbs (soul informs) made new in marble.[ ] here all is perfection, man sees himself as he wishes he were, as he "might have been," as he "cannot be." in such finished work no room is left for "man's distinctive mark," progress,--growth. when, then, according to browning, did growth once more begin? when was the depression of cleon's day out-lived? vitality, he asserts, once more became apparent when the eye of the artist was turned from externals to that which externals may denote or conceal, not outwards but inwards, from the form betokening the existence of soul to soul itself. the mediaeval painters started on a new and endless path of progress when in answer to the cry of greek art, and what more wish you? they replied, to become now self-acquainters, and paint man man, whatever the issue! make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, new fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: to bring the invisible full into play! let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?[ ] browning's estimate of art, as of all departments of work, was necessarily one which would lead him to sympathize with that form which strives, however imperfectly, to bring "the invisible full into play," though the achievement must be effected, not by neglect of, but rather by the fullest treatment of the visible. the avowed function of art, in the most comprehensive acceptation of the term, was with him to achieve "no mere imagery on the wall," but to present something, whether in music, poetry, or painting, which should mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside.[ ] the more distinctive artistic function (commonly so accepted) of gratifying the senses is not to be neglected, although it may not--as with the greek--be cultivated to the exclusion, whole or partial, of that which is in its essence more enduring. the monkish painter ( - ), whilst defending his realistic methods, yet perceives in vision the immensity of possible achievement if he "drew higher things with the same truth." to work thus were "to take the prior's pulpit-place, interpret god to all of you."[ ] in so far, then, as he strives towards this realization of the spiritual, the early italian painter holds, according to browning, higher place in the ranks of the artistic hierarchy than the greek who had attained already to perfection in his particular department, feeling that "where he had reached who could do more than reach?" no such perfection of attainment was possible to him who would "bring the invisible full into play." his glory lay rather "in daring so much before he well did it." thus the first of the new, in our race's story, beats the last of the old.[ ] as with the artist, so with the spectator, growth had only begun when looking [his] last on them all, [he] turned [his] eyes inwardly one fine day and cried with a start--what if we so small be greater and grander the while than they? are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? in both, of such lower types are we precisely because of our wider nature; for time, theirs--ours, for eternity.[ ] * * * * * they are perfect--how else? they shall never change: we are faulty--why not? we have time in store. the artificer's hand is not arrested with us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished.[ ] bitter as is to cleon the realization that "what's come to perfection perishes," to the christian artist the same axiom serves but as incentive to more strenuous effort. in imperfection he recognizes the germ of future progress. the help whereby he mounts, the ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall, _since all things suffer change save god the truth_.[ ] as imperfection suggests progress, so to "the heir of immortality" is failure but a step towards ultimate attainment. with confidence he may inquire what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence[ ] for the fulness of the days? the greek, with his bounded horizon, realizes but the first aspect of the truth: that in man there's failure, only since he left the lower and inconscious forms of life. that most progress is most failure. the horizon being bounded by the grave, progress cut short by the approach of death, failure may become failure absolute, irremediable. what wonder, then, that the horror should "quicken still from year to year"; until the very terror itself demands relief in the imaginative creation of a future state. but for this there is no warrant; for the greek all attainable satisfaction must be sought through the present phase of existence alone. iv. cleon's answer to the question of protus with regard to death's aspect to the man of thought, whose works outlast his personal existence (ll. - ), is but an utterance of the cry of human nature in all times and in all places. individuality must be preserved! in a moment of artistic fervour the poet may acquiesce in the fate by which his friend has become "a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely,"[ ] but such acquiescence can only hold good where poetic imagination has overborne human affection. the soul of the man first, the poet afterwards, demands that eternal form shall still divide eternal soul from all beside, and that i shall _know_ him when we meet.[ ] and what he claims for his friend, man requires also for himself. the individual soul, as at present constituted, cannot conceive of divesting itself of its own individuality, of becoming "merged in the general whole." as easy almost is it to conceive of annihilation. in hours of abstract thought such theories may be evolved, and in accordance with the mental constitution of the thinker, be rejected or honestly accepted; but when brought face to face with the issues of life and death, the heart, freeing itself from the trammels of intellectual sophistries, cries out, "i have felt"; and yearns for a creed which shall allow acceptance of a tenet involving future recognition and reunion, hence, by implication, preservation of individuality, and identity. whatever his nominal creed, experience teaches us that man at supreme moments of life craves for some such satisfaction as this. it is, indeed, the greek, materialist here rather than artist, who points out to protus that, in his estimate of the joy of leaving "living works behind," he confounds "the accurate view of what joy is with feeling joy." confounds the knowing how and showing how to live (my faculty) with actually living. otherwise where is the artist's vantage o'er the king? because in my great epos i display how divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act-- is this as though i acted? if i paint, carve the young phoebus, am i therefore young? methinks i'm older that i bowed myself the many years of pain that taught me art! * * * * * * * * * * i know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king! (ll. - .) all the greek love of life, of physical beauty is here, intensified by the consciousness of the brief and transitory character of its existence. if death ends all things, then the poet and philosopher, whilst acquiring the knowledge "how to live," has sacrificed the power of living. yet a sacrifice even greater than this is enthusiastically welcomed by the grammarian of the revival of learning, greater since in this case the devotion of a lifetime leaves behind it no monument of fame. yet, having counted the cost, oh! such a life as he resolved to live, when he had learned it. * * * * _sooner, he spurned it._[ ] we can almost detect the voice of cleon in the urgency of the student's contemporaries. "live now or never," since "time escapes." in the reply lies the clue to the immensity of difference between the two positions-- leave now for dogs and apes! man has forever.[ ] in the one instance, life being lived in the light of the "forever," it is possible to perceive with pompilia that "no work begun shall ever pause for death":[ ] and life, whatever its trials and limitations, becomes to the believer in immortality very well worth the living. thus the christian conception of human life transcends the pagan as the designs of the italian painters surpass in their suggestive inspiration the perfection of the more purely technical achievements of greek art. the whole discussion is so peculiarly characteristic of browning's work that it seemed impossible to omit this comparison in the present connection, even though we shall be again obliged to revert to the grammarian, and the theory exemplified in his history, in analyzing the defence of bishop blougram. in passing, then, to the concluding section of cleon's reply to protus, we are met by no exclusively greek utterance; the voice is the voice of humanity unfettered by limitations of race or mental training. "but," sayest thou ... ... "what thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: sappho survives, because we sing her songs, and Æschylus, because we read his plays!" why, if they live still, let them come and take thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, speak in my place. thou diest while i survive? (ll. - .) it is self-abnegation, carried to an extent rendering impossible the preservation of the race, which can look to happiness, or even to satisfaction, in the prospect of annihilation so long as posterity shall enjoy the fruits of a life of labour--which may express all its yearnings towards immortality in the petition: o may i join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence: ... * * * * * _so to live is heaven_: * * * * * _this is life to come_ which martyred men have made more glorious for us who strive to follow. may i reach that purest heaven ... * * * * * be the sweet presence of a good diffused, and in diffusion ever more intense. yet the mind which originated these nobly philosophic lines found it impossible to continue literary work when severed from the human comradeship and sympathy, criticism and inspiration to which the heart, even more than the brain, had grown accustomed. after the death of mr. g. h. lewes we are told--in the author's own words--that "the writing seems all trivial stuff," ... and that work is resorted to as "a means of saving the mind from imbecility."[ ] we shall find browning himself refusing, in the hour of bereavement, to admit the satisfaction to be derived from a contemplation of the progress of the race through individual sacrifice and loss of personal identity; the satisfaction of the knowledge that somewhere new existence led by men and women new, possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you; * * * * * [whilst we] working ne'er shall know if work bear fruit. others reap and garner-- we, creative thought, must cease in created word, thought's echo, due to impulse long since sped! poor is the comfort there's ever someone lives although ourselves be dead.[ ] something more than this, more even than "the thought of what was" is demanded for the satisfaction of the soul, yet this is all the greek has to offer to his correspondent. before leaving this section of the poem, one further comparison of striking interest claims at least a brief consideration--a comparison also of the life of the man of action with that of the man of thought: of salinguerra, the ghibelline leader and sordello, the poet and dreamer, ghibelline by antecedents, guelph by conviction; the visionary and dreamer, but the dreamer whose dreams should remain a legacy to posterity, the visionary who held that "the poet must be earth's essential king." the comparison is especially interesting, since in this case also it is drawn (bk. iv) by the poet himself. to sordello, however, the recognition of a future existence has at times a very potent influence upon the present. for him, moreover, in his moments of insight, _service_ not _happiness_, is the inspiration of life. lofty as is the estimation in which he holds the office of poet, he yet deems salinguerra one of happier fate, and all i should have done, he does; the people's good being paramount with him.[ ] here is a nature made to serve, excel in serving, only feel by service well![ ] to the poet of the middle ages then, as to the greek, though for different reasons, the man of action has the happier fate. but where the greek shudders before the approach of death, the italian issues triumphantly from the final struggle of life--the supreme temptation--through the realization that death, i fly, revealed so oft a better life this life concealed, and which sage, champion, martyr, through each path have hunted fearlessly.[ ] only he would crave the consciousness which served as inspiration to sage, champion, martyr, and he, too, will hunt death fearlessly, will demand, "let what masters life disclose itself!" v. the concluding lines of the poem ( - ) contain a curiously suggestive contrast between the influences of an effete pagan culture, and of christianity in its infancy. on the one hand, the greek philosopher surrounded by evidences of marvellous physical and intellectual achievements, admitting the experience of an overwhelming horror, in face of the approach of "a deadly fate." on the other hand, "a mere barbarian jew" and "certain slaves," pioneers of that faith which should offer solution to the problems before which greek learning shrank confessedly powerless. a contrast between two stages of that development in the life of man, indicated by the theory of st. john's teaching, given in the interpolated note introductory to the main arguments of _a death in the desert_: the doctrine he was wont to teach, how divers persons witness in each man, three souls which make up one soul. ( ) the lower or animal life, distinguished as "what does," ( ) the intellect inspiring which "useth the first with its collected use," and is defined as "what knows," that which _cleon_ calls soul. ( ) finally, the union of both for the service of the third and highest element, which is in itself capable of existence apart from either: subsisting whether they assist or no, designated as "what is," that which _browning_ calls soul in _old pictures in florence_. life, in the person of cleon, would appear to have reached the second of the stages thus distinguished--physical development, combined with intellectual pre-eminence, marking "an age of light, light without love." with paulus life has passed beyond, and the spiritual energy has attained to its position of predominance over the lower elements constituting this trinity of human nature. the barbarian jew heralds a new phase in the world's history. the entire conclusion may well serve as commentary on the lines already quoted from _old pictures in florence_: the first of the new in our race's story beats the last of the old.[ ] lecture iii bishop blougram's apology lecture iii bishop blougram's apology in _bishop blougram's apology_ we are afforded yet another striking illustration of browning's methods of working by means of dramatic machinery. on some occasions we have already found him relying on the arguments of his imaginary soliloquists to support an apparently favourite theory, on others we have noticed him employing these arguments to expose the weak points of a system of which he personally disapproves. more rarely two conflicting theories are placed side by side, the decision as to the author's own relation to either being left to the judgment of the reader. thus with the bishop and the journalist of the present instance--who may assert with confidence to which side browning's sympathies incline? how are we to judge of his actual feelings in the case? would he hold up to severer opprobrium the representative of honest scepticism or the advocate of opportunism? does he intend us to accept the scepticism of the journalist as genuine, the justification of the bishop as offered in entire good faith? do his sympathies indeed belong wholly to either side? to hold that he necessarily sets forth a direct expression of his own opinions is to misunderstand the spirit in which he is accustomed to approach his subject. as well believe caliban to give utterance to his conception of a supreme being as the personification of irresponsible and capricious power; and cleon to estimate his recognition of christianity as "a doctrine to be held by no sane man." this and the two foregoing dramatic poems have been chosen as leading step by step from the earlier and cruder forms of religious belief, to the later and more complex: before approaching the debatable ground of _christmas eve and easter day_, and the unquestionably personal expression of feeling in _la saisiaz_. a wide gulf seemed indeed, at first sight, to be fixed between caliban and cleon, but yet wider is the actually existent distance dividing cleon from blougram. less marked the change in outward circumstances, the inherent difference becomes the more striking. the beauties of greek art and culture are but replaced by the nineteenth century luxury surrounding a dignitary of the roman catholic church. "greek busts, venetian paintings, roman walls, and english books ... bound in gold"; the central figures, the bishop and his companion dallying with the pleasures of the table, discoursing of momentous truths over the wine and olives. surely the distance between this and cleon is less to traverse than that between the greek, surrounded by the proofs of the munificence of protus, and caliban revelling in his mire. the superficial difference less, the inherent difference so wide that the idea at first suggested itself of taking as an intermediate and connecting link the poem immediately preceding this in the collected edition of the works, _the bishop orders his tomb at saint praxed's church_. on more mature consideration it would seem, however, that the prelate of the nineteenth century sufficiently approaches the type of the renaissance churchman to render the added link unnecessary. all, therefore, that remains for consideration before analyzing the bishop's apology, is a brief survey of the changes effected in the outlook of the civilized world, in so far as they relate to the subject before us, during the eighteen centuries which had elapsed between the letter of cleon to protus and the monologue of blougram addressed to the unfortunate owner of the name of gigadibs. in the first century of the christian era in which cleon wrote, the greek world had, as we have noticed, come into contact with christianity only at its extreme edge: to cleon, student and representative of greek philosophic thought, its tenets were impossible of credence. the difficulty of faith _then_ was that involved in the acceptance of any formulated theory which should include an assertion of the immortality of the soul and its future state of existence. the difficulties which demand the defence of blougram are of a character wholly different. christianity has become the creed of the civilized world: during the intervening centuries the simplicity of the mediaeval faith has given place to the more logical reasoning following the freedom of thought which accompanied the renaissance; whilst this has, in its turn, been superseded by the more purely critical attitude of mind, resulting in the scepticism, and consequent casuistry, attendant on the dogmatism of the earlier years of the nineteenth century. the bishop's definition of his position is sufficiently descriptive of the situation. he is put upon his defence, in truth, solely on account of the peculiar conditions of the environment in which his lot has fallen. three centuries earlier who would have questioned the genuineness of his faith? twice as many decades later who would require that his acceptance of the creed he professes should be implicit and detailed? his defence is made merely before the tribunal of his fellow men; the character of this tribunal having changed from the warmth of unquestioning faith to the barren coldness of scepticism, the nature of the attack has likewise changed. your picked twelve, you'll find, profess themselves indignant, scandalized at thus being unable to explain how a superior man who disbelieves may not believe as well: that's schelling's way! it's through my coming in the tail of time, nicking the minute with a happy tact. had i been born three hundred years ago they'd say, "what's strange? blougram of course believes;" and, seventy years since, "disbelieves of course." but now, "he may believe; and yet, and yet how can he?" all eyes turn with interest. (ll. - .) * * * * * i, the man of sense and learning too, the able to think yet act, the this, the that, i, to believe at this late time of day! enough; you see, i need not fear contempt. (ll. - .) in short, the bishop's is a figure claiming the interest of his contemporaries in that his position is one not readily definable: he may be a saint and a whole-hearted churchman; it is yet more probable, so says the world, that his conventional orthodoxy may be but the cloak of an underlying scepticism. the identity of bishop blougram with cardinal wiseman was, as every one knows, established from the first. that this should have been so was inevitable from the various external indications introduced with obvious intention into the poem; to the unprejudiced student it does not, however, appear equally inevitable that the character sketch thus outlined should be commonly estimated as conceived in a spirit hostile to the original. yet such would seem to be the case. in his _browning cyclopaedia_, dr. berdoe quotes from a review contributed to _the rambler_ of january, , "which," he adds, "is credibly supposed to have been written by the cardinal himself." this article referred to the bishop's portrait as "that of an arch-hypocrite and the frankest of fools." apparently accepting this criticism, the author of the _cyclopaedia_ not unnaturally observes that "it is necessary to say that the description is to the last degree untrue, as must have been obvious to any one personally acquainted with the cardinal." a similar opinion is expressed by no less an authority than mr. wilfrid ward, who characterizes the portrait as "quite unlike all that wiseman's letters and the recollections of his friends show him to have been. subtle and true as the sketch is in itself, it really depicts someone else."[ ] is this so? may it not rather be the case that the true character of browning's prelate has not been fairly estimated? does the bishop occupy the position assigned him by mr. ward when he continues, "blougram acquiesces in the judgment that catholicism and christianity are doubtful, and yet that they are no more provable as false than as true; that in one mood they seem true, in another false; that either the moods of faith or the moods of doubt may prove to correspond with the truth, and that in this state of things circumstances and external advantage may be allowed to decide his vocation, and to justify him in professing consistently as true, what in his heart of hearts he only regards as possible?"[ ] again, "the sceptical element which had tried wiseman in his early years was something wholly different from blougram's scepticism."[ ] is there not something more than this to be said for the bishop's apology? it is, indeed, the main difficulty of the poem to decide to what extent the speaker is, or is not, serious in his assertions; but if we come to the conclusion that he is either "an arch-hypocrite," or "the frankest of fools," we shall assuredly be very far from having read the defence aright. browning himself has, according to report, had something to say on this subject.[ ] when accused by sir charles gavin duffy and mr. john forster of abhorrence of the roman catholic faith on the grounds of the then recent publication of this poem, containing, as was alleged, a portrait of a sophistical and self-indulgent priest, intended as a satire on cardinal wiseman, browning met the charge with what would appear to have been genuine astonishment; and, whilst admitting his intention of employing the cardinal as a model, concluded, "but i do not consider it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it." and, looked at more closely, it is questionable whether much of the alleged hostility is to be detected. at least our feelings towards the bishop contain no element of either aversion or contempt as we conclude our study of his defence! the external indications of identity are scattered, as if incidentally, throughout the poem, according to the method habitual to browning. ( ) cardinal in , wiseman had been already consecrated bishop in , and sent to england as vicar apostolic of the central district in conjunction with bishop walsh. the year of his appointment as cardinal was also the date of the papal bull assigning territorial titles to roman catholic bishops in england, a measure, rightly or wrongly, attributed popularly to the influence of wiseman. his episcopal title from had been that of "melipotamus in _partibus infidelium_," hence sylvester blougram, styled _in partibus episcopus, nec non_--(the deuce knows what it's changed to by our novel hierarchy). (ll. - .) ( ) the reference in lines - to the bishop's influence in the literary world, in particular with the editors of reviews, "whether here, in dublin or new york," recalls the fact that _the dublin review_ had been founded by cardinal wiseman in . ( ) again, in the opening lines, the allusion to augustus welby pugin, the genius of ecclesiastical architecture of the last century. when wiseman, in , became president of oscott college, pugin was alarmed for the results of his influence in architectural matters; since the cardinal's tastes had been formed in rome, whilst the design of pugin included a gothic revival in ecclesiastical architecture and vestments, as well as the universal adoption of gregorian chants in the services of the church. in spite, however, of the architect's fears, and some preliminary collisions, the two men subsequently succeeded in preserving amicable relations. hence the bishop's tolerant, but half-satirical comment, we ought to have our abbey back, you see. it's different, preaching in basilicas, and doing duty in some masterpiece like this of brother pugin's, bless his heart! i doubt if they're half-baked, those chalk rosettes, ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere. (ll. - .) ( ) any considerations of internal evidences, especially those touching the question of scepticism, will necessarily be repeated in following the bishop's arguments: but it may be well to refer briefly in this place to the most noted characteristics of the cardinal as estimated by the contemporary world. (_a_) by some, even among his own clergy, he is reported to have been opposed on account of his ultramontane tendencies and innovating zeal, in particular with regard to the introduction of sacred images into the churches, and the adoption of certain devotional exercises not hitherto in use amongst english members of the roman catholic community. thus we find the bishop asserting, "i ... ... would die rather than avow my fear the naples' liquefaction may be false, when set to happen by the palace-clock according to the clouds or dinner-time. (ll. - .) browning thus suggests the fact obvious to the world at large,--the apparently implicit acceptance by the cardinal of miracles which to the average mind are impossible of credence; at the same time he allows opportunity for an explanation of the position: the prelate fears the effect upon the main articles of his faith of questioning that which is least. first cut the liquefaction, what comes last but fichte's clever cut at god himself? (ll. - .) (_b_) whilst, however, preserving these extreme views with regard to the position and tenets of the church, the cardinal, with statesmanlike wisdom, recognized that, in accordance with its genius as implied in the attribute catholic, it must likewise keep pace with the intellectual advance of the age, not holding aloof from, but, where possible, assimilating the highest results of contemporary thought. now it is easy to perceive that the onlooker of that day may have found these apparently conflicting tendencies in the cardinal's mind difficult of reconcilement, and only to be accounted for by the supposition already suggested that the man capable of assuming such an attitude towards his creed must be, if not a fool, then an arch-hypocrite. it has been the work of browning to show how, without detriment to his intellectual capacity, the bishop may justify his position. to what extent, if at all, his moral character is affected thereby must depend upon the degree of sincerity which we allow to the entire exposition. it is no part of the present plan to attempt a vindication of browning's treatment of the character of cardinal wiseman; the issues suggested by the apology lie deeper, and are far broader than those involved in such a discussion. one object, at least, of the design would appear to be that of a defence of belief in those tenets of a creed which transcend the powers of reason; the particular religious body to which the speaker belongs being of little import to the real issue. it seemed, however, that any treatment of the poem would be incomplete which did not contain some brief comparison such as has been here attempted. and even now there is danger lest the attempt may prove misleading. whether or not browning has given us the true character of the cardinal is not the question; the only fact in that connection which we shall do well to bear in mind is that, working from the materials at his command--the outward and visible manifestations afforded by wiseman's life as known to his contemporaries--the author of the apology has given what may be a possible interpretation of character, sufficiently reasonable, at any rate, to account for, and to reconcile seeming inconsistencies, without laying its owner open to the charge of either folly or knavery. in approaching a more detailed examination of the poem we must not neglect to take into account the peculiar conditions of religious life and thought prevailing in england at the time of the publication, . fourteen years earlier had appeared the celebrated no. of _tracts for the times_. after an interval of six years, in , had followed the secession of j. h. newman to the church of rome, in that of cardinal manning. it was a time of anxiety and sorrow amongst all those most deeply attached to the church of england, and of general unrest and uneasiness throughout the country. sufficient evidence of the universal unsettlement and anxiety is afforded by the alarm, amounting almost to panic, excited by the bull of announcing the territorial titles scheme. in a letter to dean stanley on the question of the oxford university reform bill of , mr. gladstone wrote, "the very words which you have let fall upon your paper 'roman catholics,' used in this connection (_i.e._, of extending full university privileges to students other than members of the church of england) were enough to burn it through and through, considering we have a parliament which, _were the measure of not law at this moment, would, i think, probably refuse to make it law_."[ ] such was the spirit of the times in england at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, and the existence of this spirit must not be left out of account in dealing with bishop blougram and his apology. that browning did not wholly escape its influence, even though removed from direct contact, is readily conceivable. and in spite of his own expressed surprise at the suggestion that he did not favourably regard the roman catholic creed, his natural sympathies would certainly appear to have inclined towards a puritanic form of worship rather than to a more ornate ritual; setting aside questions of doctrine of which these may be the outward manifestations. this being the case, ample reason is at once discoverable for the resolve to examine the position more thoroughly, ascertaining how far it was possible to make out a case for the other side. for, whilst on the one hand, we have every right, despite his cosmopolitanism and his italian sympathies to claim the author of the _apology_ as a genuine englishman, with a fair proportion of the englishman's characteristics, on the other hand, we may exonerate him, if not wholly, yet to a very large extent, from insular prejudices and narrow-minded judgments. had he designed to present blougram either as fool or hypocrite, he might assuredly have attained his object with equal certainty by writing something less than the thousand and odd lines devoted to the work of psychological analysis: for, in making his defence, the bishop is likewise revealing himself--to him who has eyes to see. here, as elsewhere, it is browning's intent to present to his readers not what man sees but "what _this_ man sees"; to lead them to judge of cause rather than of effect, of motive rather than of action, or of action by the recognition of motive. we may attempt to classify his characters, if we will: a browning society may write and read papers on the "villains" or the "hypocrites" of browning as distinguished from his saints. such a classification is perhaps fairly possible in the case of a character delineator such as dickens, whose lines of demarcation are stronger and broader, purposely so, than those of actual life; but it is questionable whether browning himself could have thus labelled his people and separated them into distinct compartments. for if the complexity of human nature and character is fully recognized by any writer whether poet, novelist, or biographer, it has surely been so recognized by the author of _paracelsus_, of _sordello_, of _the ring and the book_. it has been so frequently remarked that it seems but reiterating a truism to repeat the assertion that he writes of the individual, not of the race, not of _man_ but of _men_; of men with much indeed which is common to the race, but with peculiar attention also to those idiosyncrasies which establish individuality. hence the choice of soliloquists for the dramatic poems is most frequently made amongst those the interpretation of whose actions has presented special difficulty to the world at large. thus to browning was left the vindication of paracelsus, and for the bombast, the quack, the drunkard, of contemporary biography has been substituted the pioneer and martyr of science, failing, but on account of the magnitude of his designs; recognizing even in defeat the divine nature of the mission entrusted to his charge. for an andrea del sarto--to a less profound student of character appearing as "an easy-going plebeian" satisfied with a social life among his compeers, as an artist "resting content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant"--is offered the andrea of the poem bearing his name; a sometime aspiring nature, now embittered by the struggle, wellnigh ended within the soul, between yearnings towards future greatness and the desire for present gain; a nature of insight sufficient to realize that the bonds of materialism are galling, of moral force inadequate to effect their rupture. the more subtle, the more outwardly misleading the character, the stronger the attraction it would appear to have borne for browning. it is no matter for surprise that in _prince hohenstiel schwangau_ he should have devoted over , lines to a study of that mysterious, if disappointing, figure in european politics of the middle of the last century--"at once the sabre of revolution and the trumpet of order." and if conflicting elements of character constituted the main attraction of the personality of napoleon iii, a similar cause of fascination, as we have already noticed, exists in the instance before us; viz., the possibility of reconciling the extreme opinions professed in matters of church ritual and doctrine, with the erudition, the political ability, and width of intellectual outlook notably characteristic of cardinal wiseman. i. for avoidance of misunderstanding as to the intention of the apology it is well to read the epilogue as prologue, although, even with this introduction, it is not easy to decide how far the speaker is serious in his assertions--a definite answer to the question would probably have presented (so browning would suggest) some difficulty to the bishop himself. for blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke. the other portion, as he shaped it thus for argumentatory purposes, he felt his foe was foolish to dispute. some arbitrary accidental thoughts that crossed his mind, amusing because new, he chose to represent as fixtures there, invariable convictions (such they seemed beside his interlocutor's loose cards flung daily down, and not the same way twice) while certain hell-deep instincts, man's weak tongue is never bold to utter in their truth because styled hell-deep ('tis an old mistake to place hell at the bottom of the earth) he ignored these--not having in readiness their nomenclature and philosophy: he said true things, but called them by wrong names. "on the whole," he thought, "i justify myself on every point where cavillers like this oppugn my life: he tries one kind of fence, i close, he's worsted, that's enough for him. he's on the ground: if ground should break away i take my stand on, there's a firmer yet beneath it, both of us may sink and reach. his ground was over mine and broke the first." (ll. - .) ii. thus the bishop believed himself to realize the weakness of his opponent; his superficiality in spite of his appeal to the ideal; the worldliness which would esteem this hour of intercourse with the prelate the highest honour of his life, the thing, you'll crown yourself with, all your days. an incident which he would not fail to turn to capital account; "when somebody, through years and years to come, hints of the bishop,--names me--that's enough: blougram? i knew him"--(into it you slide) "dined with him once, a corpus christi day, all alone, we two: he's a clever man: and after dinner,--why, the wine you know,-- oh, there was wine, and good!--what with the wine ... 'faith, we began upon all sorts of talk! he's no bad fellow, blougram; he had seen something of mine he relished, some review: he's quite above their humbug in his heart, half-said as much, indeed--the thing's his trade. i warrant, blougram's sceptical at times: how otherwise? i liked him, i confess!" (ll. - .) just or unjust, such is the bishop's estimate of his companion--(if the opportunist is "quite above their humbug in his heart," not so the would-be idealist!) and, accepting this view, the futility of casting pearls before swine restrains him from a free expression of those deeper thoughts which rise to the surface only here and there throughout the monologue, evidence of the man beneath the prelate. there are problems which do not admit of discussion "to you, and over the wine." hence blougram holds himself justified in exercising that "reserve or economy of truth" recognized[ ] by a contemporary writer of his own community as permissible under given conditions, within one class of which he may reasonably account as falling, his interview with gigadibs; viz., that in which the listener is incapable of understanding truth stated exactly, when it may be presented in the nearest form likely to appeal to his comprehension. the journalist is thus from the first accepted by the bishop as representative of his world--that portion of the lay world to which the position of this particular prelate of the roman catholic church is one requiring justification. scepticism is so easy to this special intellectual type of man, faith so difficult, that it is to him incomprehensible that the bishop may be genuine in his profession. on these grounds blougram bases the necessity for his defence. iii. taking himself then at his critics' estimate, _i.e._, as a sceptic masquerading in the garb of an ecclesiastical dignitary, he opens his exposition by a comparison of his life as actually lived with the ideal life advocated by the critic and his compeers. pursuing the subject--having attained even to the supreme honour to which his calling admits, having ascended the papal throne, the position would yet be but one of _outward_ splendour, incomparable with "the grand, simple life" a man _may_ lead; grand, because essentially genuine--"imperial, plain and true." nevertheless, he would submit, it is better for a man so to order his life that it may be lived to his satisfaction in rome or paris of the nineteenth century, rather than to dissipate his powers in the evolution of some ideal scheme, impossible of practical execution. as illustration, follows the incident of the outward-bound vessel in which are provided cabins of equal dimensions for the accommodation of all passengers. one would fain fill his "six feet square" with all the luxuries which the mode of life hitherto pursued has rendered essential to his comfort. his neighbour, meanwhile, has limited his requirements to the possibilities of the space allotted; with the result that the man content with little finds himself satisfactorily equipped for the voyage; whilst he of great, but impracticable aspirations, is left with a bare cabin, one after the other the articles of his proposed outfit having been rejected by the ship's steward. hence the deduction, that the man of moderate requirements is better fitted for life, as life now is, than he of the "artist nature." later on (l. ) the speaker again reverts to the same simile, passing to the further illustration of the traveller providing his equipment in advance, in each case adapting it to a climate to be subsequently reached, rather than to that in which he is at the moment living. as when a traveller, bound from north to south, scouts fur in russia: what's its use in france? in france spurns flannel: where's its need in spain? in spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for algiers! (ll. - .) the question not unreasonably follows, "when, through his journey, was the fool at ease?" thus, according to the bishop, he who can most completely accommodate himself to the exigencies of the present life, evinces his capability for adapting himself to that which is to come. a theory, in direct opposition, it would appear, to browning's usual doctrine, repeated in so many of the familiar poems. it is difficult to imagine a figure affording more striking contrast to the prosperous prelate than that of the grammarian, once the "lyric apollo, electing to live nameless," occupied with the pursuit of an abstract good; only paving the way for the attainment of his successors; and in death throwing on god the task of making "the heavenly period perfect the earthen," that incomplete phase of existence, full of unsatisfied aspirations, of unfinished attempts. of him the poet gives us the assurance that he shall find the god whom he has sought: whilst for the worldling who has the world here--should he need the next, let the world mind him! in _cleon_, in _a death in the desert_, in _dîs aliter visum_, and perhaps above all in _abt vogler_ (to refer to only a few illustrations out of the many possible), the fact that man is incapable of accommodating himself to his environment is treated as a proof that this is not his true sphere of existence; that he was designed, and is still destined, for something higher. so asks the lover of pauline: how should this earth's life prove my only sphere? can i so narrow sense but that in life soul still exceeds it? in _dîs aliter visum_, the assertion what's whole, can increase no more, is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere; has especial reference to love, the sole spark from god's life "at strife" with death, so, sure of range above the limits here. but there is a recognition of the general principle that that work alone is worth beginning here and now, which "cannot grow complete," and which "heaven (not earth) must finish." even where, as in _rabbi ben ezra_, browning lays strongest emphasis upon "the unity of life"; where age is regarded as the completion of the physical life begun in youth, the question is put, and left unanswered: thy body at its best, how far can it project thy soul on its lone way? these years of mortal life are to be devoted to the best use, so that it shall not be possible to say that "soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul." nevertheless, the final result is to be that man, in yielding his physical life, passes a man, for aye removed from the developed brute; a god though in the germ. it cannot be denied that the bishop is taking a distinctly lower position than that suggested by any of the theories thus advanced. nevertheless, he holds himself, and probably with reason, to be upon higher ground than that occupied by his critic. recognizing his incapacity for experiencing the enthusiasm of a luther, he does not, therefore, feel constrained to adopt the coldly critical attitude of a strauss. in his own words-- my business is not to remake myself, but make the absolute best of what god made. (ll. - .) so luigi, in calculating his fitness for the office of assassin assigned him, is found reckoning his very insignificance as of greater worth, under the given conditions, than his strength--extending his philosophy in a general application to human life. every one knows for what his excellence will serve, but no one ever will consider for what his worst defect might serve: and yet have you not seen me range our coppice yonder in search of a distorted ash? i find the wry, spoilt branch, a natural, perfect bow.[ ] there is a possible vocation in life for a blougram as for a luther. iv. admitting then the wide difference between the ideal life proposed by his critics, and the practical life which he has himself adopted, with line the bishop passes to a consideration of the possibility of effecting any form of reconciliation between the two theories. what restrained his college friend from seeking the position occupied by his comrade? what but his incapacity for belief, or, more accurately speaking, his incapacity for accepting any fixed and markedly defined creed. this difficulty the bishop assumes himself to share: his faith is relative rather than absolute; hence, having adopted the position of unbelievers, so-called, the question remains, how may each in his several station, lead a life consistent with such profession? the prelate holds that to preserve a fixed attitude of unbelief is a feat of even greater difficulty than that of maintaining the opposed position of faith--neither being in fact absolutely and unalterably defined. it is easy enough for the onlooker to imagine that the creed of the church is a matter straightforward and unperplexing for those living within the fold, admitting of no questioning, no error; faith or unfaith; no half measures possible. not so; even within the church the believer has his difficulties wherewith to contend, his doubts, his hesitations. that way over the mountain, which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it be meant for road; while, if he views it from the waste itself, up goes the line there, plain from base to brow, not vague, mistakeable! what's a break or two seen from the unbroken desert either side? (ll. - .) the bishop would go yet further, and suggest that the inevitable doubts and questionings of the earnest believer are in themselves but a means of strengthening faith: this being so, what should restrain him from entering the church's fold? what if the breaks themselves should prove at last the most consummate of contrivances to train a man's eye, teach him what is faith? and so we stumble at truth's very test! (ll. - .) since consistent unbelief is at least as impossible as consistent faith, the conclusion follows that life must be either one of "faith diversified by doubt," or of "doubt diversified by faith." well, he has chosen one, let gigadibs enjoy the other--if he can. v. which life is preferable, that which calls the chess-board white, the life of faith (in so far as faith is possible); or that which calls the chess-board black, the life of doubt? the predominating (though by no means absolute) influence of belief or of unbelief, determines the lines on which character and life alike shall develop. now, the bishop asserts that for him belief will bring, nay, has indeed brought, what he most desires in life--"power, peace, pleasantness, and length of days." if gigadibs suggests that in his case unbelief will bring the satisfaction which belief affords his companion of the dinner-table, then the bishop demurs. the faith of which he makes profession is calculated to meet all exigencies--faith is in short his "waking life." the scepticism of the journalist is, on the contrary, void of all practical utility. should he wish to live consistently he must cut himself off from those everyday demands of life to which faith is an absolute requisite. he must "live to sleep." and here the bishop emphasizes an obvious, though not commonly recognized fact--a powerful argument in favour of faith--in the abstract, at least. he who professes himself a sceptic in matters spiritual, is yet compelled to the exercise of faith in each act of practical life. mutual confidence abolished between man and man, business transactions become impossible, and mercantile activity is brought to a standstill. belief involved in matters such as these, must, would the sceptic prove consistent, be cast overboard with the other faiths of his childhood: and the active man of the world becomes "bed-ridden." amongst the temporal advantages which the bishop accounts as resulting from his profession, first rank is accorded "the world's estimation, which is half the fight," to gain which nothing less than a positive confession of unswerving faith is required. hence circumstances have forced from him the assertions: friends, i absolutely and peremptorily believe! (ll. - .) * * * * * i say, i see all, and swear to each detail the most minute in what i think a pan's face--you, mere cloud: i swear i hear him speak and see him wink, for fear, if once i drop the emphasis, mankind may doubt there's any cloud at all. (ll. - .) the world has decided that with regard to certain points, left wholly to himself, when once a man has arbitrated on, ... he must succeed there or go hang. (ll. - .) and of the most important of these "points" is the form of faith his conscience holds the best, whate'er the process of conviction was. (ll. - .) the roman catholic faith is that in which the bishop was born and educated. it had been decided from childhood that he should become a priest: hence his choice of vocation. and this faith is, for him, one in which power temporal, as well as spiritual, puts forth its claims. its undaunted champion may assert "i have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore i die in exile," but in drawing the distinction between "peter's creed" and that of hildebrand, blougram recognizes by implication the political aspect of the cause for which the struggle thus closing had been sustained. vi. if then, in satisfaction of the demands of those uncompromising advocates of truth of whom gigadibs is representative, the prelate of the nineteenth century shall renounce his position as confessor of the creed of the eleventh, in what rank of life may he take his stand? from what career may faith be, without injurious effects, wholly excluded? for if faith, to merit its title, is to be unmixed with doubt, equally must unbelief be unalloyed in quality. a life apart from faith? that of napoleon? if so, then does the critic claim that napoleon shares with him the "common primal element of unbelief," belief being an impossibility. yet to such an admission the corsican's whole career would give the lie. whatever the character of the faith which sustained him, faith there was, sufficient to lead him on to colossal deeds: his trust may have been "crazy," "god knows through what, or in what"; but to all intents and purposes it was faith, possessing the essential element of faith, _life_, and the inspiration of life: it's alive and shines and leads him, and that's all we want. but to the bishop such a life would have been impossible, since he has not the clue to napoleon's faith. "the noisy years" would not have offered him his ideal, even were this life all. and he does not himself believe that this life _is_ all: although he will not assert that to him a future state of existence is matter of absolute certainty. if the career of "the world's victor" is not then possible without faith of some kind, what of that of the artist, of the poet? with a return to the earlier cynical recognition of his own limitations, the bishop enquires of what use an attempt on his part to emulate shakespeare when endowed by nature with neither dramatic nor poetic faculty? nevertheless he finds that he has much in life which shakespeare would have been glad to possess. the author of _hamlet_ and of _othello_ might in truth enjoy the good things of earth by the mere exercise of imagination; yet, strange anomaly, he built himself the trimmest house in stratford town; saves money, spends it, owns the worth of _things_. even a shakespeare, then, may be more or less of a materialist. thus the successful churchman who has attained the object of his ambition, whose life is one of pleasantness and peace, may with confidence, turning to the poet, ask him-- if this life's all, who wins the game? vii. if, however, the existence of another life _is_ to be recognized; if belief is to be allowed to take the place of scepticism, then the face of the argument is at once changed, and the bishop is as ready as is his critic to admit that enthusiasm is the grandest inspiration of human nature. but he is--or so he would have his listener believe--no more capable of the enthusiastic faith of luther than of the strategic achievements of napoleon or the dramatic creations of shakespeare. nevertheless, the negations of the sceptic's creed bear for him no attraction. in either case remains the risk that faith or absence of faith may prove error. the uncertainty on both sides being equal, it is _not_ as well to be strauss as luther. better even the mere desire for belief in the story of the gospels, than a dispassionately critical attempt to reconcile discrepencies in that which has no personal interest for the enquirer: the one means spiritual vitality, the other stagnation. viii. with line , once more reverting to his earlier demonstration of the impossibility of a "pure faith," the bishop would submit that the divine presence is veiled rather than revealed by nature, until such time as man shall have become capable of being "confronted with the truth of him." but what of the mediaeval days, "that age of simple faith"? were men the better for their simplicity of belief? by no means, replies the casuist of the nineteenth century, whose faith "means perpetual unbelief." the simple faith proved itself unequal to the task of inspiring a life of outward morality: men could and did lie, kill, rob, fornicate full in beliefs face rather the lifelong struggle with doubt, than this childish credulity empty of practical result. and in spite of his doubts, blougram holds his faith "sufficient," since it just suffices to keep the doubts in check. nevertheless he will not incur the risk of shaking unduly such faith as he possesses. he must not, therefore, begin to question even the most questionable of ecclesiastical miracles. whilst he cannot trust himself to criticize things spiritual, he may yet prevent himself from taking the first step in that direction. and here browning has been accused of implying that the roman catholic church demands of its members acceptance of miracles, such as that held to affect the blood of s. januarius, referred to as "the naples' liquefaction." the bishop is obviously intended to suggest no universal obligation; with him the matter is purely personal. he has not, as he has already admitted, sufficient confidence in the calibre of his faith to allow reason to step in and question the reliability of that which he would fain hold implicitly as truth. he fears to take the first step on the road of criticism which ends in the definition of god as "the moral order of the universe." is not this, allowing for the assumed scepticism of the bishop, consistent with what we find cardinal wiseman writing of his experiences in the early days of struggle with doubts and questionings which cost him so much? thus he writes to a nephew twenty years after the worst of the conflict was over; "during the struggle the simple submission of faith is the only remedy. thoughts against faith must be treated at the time like temptations against any other virtue--put away--though in cooler moments they may be safely analysed and unravelled."[ ] in conclusion, the prelate emphatically reasserts the _practical_ superiority of his choice of a career over that of this particular sceptic, since it is in fact impossible for the journalist to live his life of negation. he obeys the dictates of reason only where these do not run counter too markedly to the prejudices of others: there he is forced to yield to some extent. thus he "grazes" through life, with "not one lie," escaping the censure of his fellow men, but not gaining their esteem or admiration, essentials to the happiness of his companion. so the bishop remains victorious on all counts, and emphasizes the superiority of his position by bestowing upon his guest practical proof in the "three words" of introduction to publishers in london, dublin, or new york, securing such terms as never [he] aspired to get in all our own reviews and some not ours. ix. a few supplementary observations upon those points at which the apologist touches the firmer ground which he recognizes as existing beneath the surface on which he bases his defence. that he is not entirely satisfied with the conditions of his existence is obvious from the character of the apology, which suggests, from time to time, thoughts higher than those to which he gives direct utterance. opportunist as he would present himself to be, lines - , are unmistakably the expression of inmost experience-- when the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something. god stoops o'er his head, satan looks up between his feet--both tug-- he's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes and grows. prolong that battle through his life! never leave growing till the life to come! it is here almost as if browning cannot restrain the expression of his own personal feeling, so markedly characteristic is this passage of his general teaching. that which holds good of all struggle is applicable also to the contest between faith and doubt. that implicit faith of mediaeval times, which exerted too little influence on practical life, was in character less virile, a factor less potent for good than is the bishop's own limited belief, constantly assailed by doubt. good strengthened by the contest with evil, faith increased by the conflict with doubt. the creed of browning, in brief: i shew you doubt, to prove that faith exists. the more of doubt, the stronger faith, i say, if faith o'ercomes doubt. how i know it does? by life and man's free will, god gave for that! (ll. - .) * * * * * let doubt occasion still more faith. (l. .) words recalling tennyson's reference to the spiritual struggles of a more finely tempered nature than that of blougram: he fought his doubts and gather'd strength, he would not make his judgment blind, he faced the spectres of the mind and laid them: thus he came at length to find a stronger faith his own.[ ] and the bishop may not unjustly claim the sum of all is--yes, my doubt is great, my faith's still greater, then my faith's enough. (ll. - .) these higher utterances, intermingled as they are with the openly expressed tenets of the opportunist; whilst testifying most clearly to the genius of browning in its penetrative comprehension of human nature, that admixture of noble aspiration and base compromise; find their counterpart in the memorable advice of polonius to laertes, constituted for the main part of prudential maxims regulating the social comportment of the successful worldling; then, almost suddenly, as it were, at the close, breaking through to deeper ground and striking upon that unalterable principle of life, of universal import, of inexhaustible illuminative power, since it treats only of that which is in its essence infinite-- to thine ownself be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. though the life which the bishop defends may not be the highest measured by the standard of his own ideal, yet, "truth is truth, and justifies itself in undreamed ways." and there _is_ truth in the recognition that the faith to which he looks for inspiration and guidance is a faith barely capable of holding its own in face of the battalion of assailant doubts. it may yet be that "the dayspring's faith" shall finally crush "the midnight doubt." some solution of the problems of life must be sought, and why should that alone be rejected which alone offers a satisfactory clue? there is perhaps no finer passage in browning, certainly none more melodious, than that in which blougram, after comparing the relative positions of faith and unbelief as influencing life, concludes with this query. just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower bell, some one's death, a chorus-ending from euripides,-- and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears as old and new at once as nature's self, to rap and knock and enter in our soul, take hands and dance there, fantastic ring, round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- the grand perhaps! we look on helplessly. there the old misgivings, crooked questions are-- this good god,--what he could do, if he would, would, if he could--then must have done long since: if so, when, where and how? some way must be,-- once feel about, and soon or late you hit some sense, in which it might be, after all. why not, "the way, the truth, the life?" (ll. - .) it must be left to the individual decision to acquit or condemn the bishop. the decision may perhaps depend upon the acceptance or rejection of the alternative, "whole faith or none?" and "whole faith" as defined by the apology is that which accepts all things, from the existence of a god down to the latest ecclesiastical miracle. such an attitude is possible only to the uncritical mind. the spheres of faith and reason are not identical. the childlike intelligence may receive without question or effort of faith all that is offered it of things spiritual. it sees no cause for question, hence doubt does not arise. the logical and critical faculties have not been developed. but in the mind of the thinker, the logician, the metaphysician, reason will assert itself; judgment will not be blindfolded. if the postulates of faith are capable of proof by reason, then is faith no longer necessary; its sphere is usurped by reason which has become all-sufficient. to the man, therefore, whose intellect questions, analyses, dissects truths as they present themselves to him, a proportionately stronger faith is a necessity: the doubts so arising being, "the most consummate of contrivances to teach men faith." having once satisfied the insistent yearning of a nature which declares, i ... want, am made for, and must have a god ... no mere name want, but the true thing with what proves its truth, to wit, a relation from that thing to me, touching from head to foot--which touch i feel. (ll. - .) (with this compare mr. w. ward on cardinal wiseman, "his own early doubts ... had been the alternative to a passionate, mystical, and absorbing faith.") this relation having been attained, the speaker is prepared to take the rest, this life of ours. faith in the greatest having been assured, faith in that which is less may or may not follow. he who feels in touch with the divine may well endure the existence of doubts and questionings inevitable in matters of less vital import. to the child "who knows his father near" tears are not an unalloyed bitterness; or, to adopt the bishop's own simile, so be it the path leads to the mountain top, a break or two by the way matters little. lecture iv christmas eve and easter day (i) lecture iv christmas eve and easter day (i) no poems of browning's have probably excited more widely-spread interest (the question of admiration being set aside) than those which we have before us for consideration in this and the two following lectures. the interest so excited is due, one believes, less to artistic merit than to the character of the subjects treated--unfailing in their attraction for the speculative tendencies of the human intellect. the form in which they now make appeal is no longer identical with that in which they presented themselves when _christmas eve and easter day_ appeared in the middle of the last century: fifty years hence the embodiment of thoughts thus suggested may well differ yet more widely from that obtaining at the present day. nevertheless, beneath all external variations, that which is essentially permanent remains: and in this enduring interest of subject inevitably subsists the immortality of that literary work, whether poetry or prose, in which it has found, or is destined to find, a vehicle of expression. if it were permissible to suggest a division where the author clearly intended no division should be, it might on the foregoing hypothesis be reasonable to prognosticate for _easter day_ a more enduring interest than for the companion poem; since, whilst the dramatic attraction is less powerful than in _christmas eve_, the treatment of subject goes deeper, and is more independent of temporary accessaries. in a memorable phrase professor dowden has defined the subjects of the two poems as "the spiritual life individual, and the spiritual life corporate."[ ] both indeed deal with faith in its relation to life: the first with faith as found incorporated in typical religious communities of the civilized world; the second with faith as it makes direct appeal to the individual apart from the influence of external formulae. the one aspect of the subject is obviously regarded by browning as complementary to the other. "easter day" is essential to the completion of "christmas eve." both poems were originally published in one volume ( ), and still remain united by the joint title standing at the head of both. individual faith is necessary to the vitality of faith corporate. the considerations engaging the attention of the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ are confined to a decision as to which of the forms of creed presented for choice shall receive his adherence; or whether it may be justly yielded to that which he finally accounts no creed, the theory of life based upon the teaching of the professor of göttingen? in _easter day_ the debate in the mind of the speaker goes deeper yet, and relates mainly to the difficulties attendant upon a practical and consistent acceptance of christian belief in its simplest form: an acceptance involving a necessary reconstruction of life on the lines of faith. in another sense also are the two poems complementary. as indicated by the sequence of names in the title, the love and universal tolerance suggested by the peace and goodwill of christmas find their fuller development, their essential, practical outcome in the personal faith, implying a personal acceptance of the sacrifice of which easter day marks the triumphant culmination. hence the more notable _asceticism_, if we are so to term it, of the second poem as compared with the first. rightly, he who would fain be a christian stands in awe before the all-stupendous tale,--that birth, that life, that death! (_e. d._, ll. - .) thus in _easter day_ is to be found no trace of that "easy tolerance" in matters spiritual which suggests itself--only, however, to be finally rejected--to the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ as the result of his night's experiences. but a comparison of the two poems will be more satisfactorily made after a brief separate consideration of each in this and lecture v. lecture vi will be mainly occupied with a discussion of criticisms relating to both, as well as to the question of vital importance touching browning's own position--how far must the conclusions of either or both be regarded as dramatic in character? from a merely artistic point of view _christmas eve_ presents its own peculiar interest. having once read it, in whatever degree our minds may have become impressed by its theological or dogmatic arguments, externals have been so forcibly presented, that zion chapel and the common outside "at the edge of which the chapel stands," always thereafter bear for us a curious kind of familiarity similar to that which attaches itself to remembered haunts of our childish days. the first three sections of the poem contain what may certainly be classed amongst the most grimly realistic descriptions in english literature. it may, indeed, be objected that these opening stanzas are _perilously_ realistic in character where poetry is concerned, fitted rather for the pages of dickens or of gissing than for their present position. the fat weary woman, panting and bewildered, down-clapping her umbrella with a mighty report, grounded it by me, wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones. then "the many-tattered little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother," "the sickly babe with its spotted face," and the tall yellow man, like the penitent thief, with his jaw bound up in a handkerchief. (ll. - .) in short, read the second section in its entirety. such description is certainly not "poetic." but browning knew well what he was doing. influenced doubtless by his love of striking effects, we cannot but feel that he makes the unpleasing characteristics of the congregation assembled within the walls of zion chapel the more repellant, that the transition from the mundane to the divine may strike the reader with greater force. from the flock sniffing its dew of hermon with such content in every snuffle. the soliloquist of the poem calls us to follow him as he "flings out of the little chapel"; and with section iv we have passed into the boundless waste of the common, where is a lull in the rain, a lull in the wind too; the moon ... risen [which] would have shone out pure and full, but for the ramparted cloud-prison, block on block built up in the west. (ll. - .) the scene thus outlined prepares us for the culmination of section vi. for lo, what think you? suddenly the rain and the wind ceased, and the sky received at once the full fruition of the moon's consummate apparition. the black cloud-barricade was riven, ruined beneath her feet, and driven deep in the west; while, bare and breathless, north and south and east lay ready for a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, sprang across them and stood steady. 'twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect. * * * * * * * * * * but above night too, like only the next, the second of a wondrous sequence, reaching in rare and rarer frequence, till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, another rainbow rose, a mightier, fainter, flushier and flightier,-- rapture dying along its verge. (ll. - .) so the poet leads us to the climax--to the silence awaiting the answer to the speaker's query oh, whose foot shall i see emerge? (l. .) then follow sections vii and viii, revealing the vision. the too-much glory, as it seemed, passing from out me to the ground, then palely serpentining round into the dark with mazy error. * * * * * all at once i looked up with terror. he was there. he himself with his human air. on the narrow pathway, just before. but the writer keeps strictly within the bounds of reverence: i saw the back of him, no more. (ll. - .) this treatment in itself may, i believe, be not unjustly taken as indicative of browning's devotional attitude towards the subject. when, in section ix, the face is turned upon the narrator, he but records so lay i, saturate with brightness. (l. .) where, in _easter day_, the description of the divine presence is given (xix, l. , _et seq._), it is suggested with an awe and vagueness which certainly narrow the conception to no material presentation. in addition to this vividness of contrast between the first three and the following sections, the realistic force with which the poem opens has a yet further result. the uncompromising character of the realism opens the way for a more readily accorded credence in the subsequent events of the night. he who describes the vision has likewise seen the congregation in zion chapel. when he "flung out" of the meeting-house, his mood was certainly not indicative of imaginative idealism or mystic contemplation. he is in a frame of mind little likely to prove unduly susceptible to supernatural influences. a realization of this mental attitude is essential to a fair estimate of the line of argument throughout the poem. i. sections i, ii, and iii are thus occupied with the description of the chapel and the congregation gathered within its walls, of the preacher and the spiritual food whereby he proposes to sustain the members of his flock. and notice: the speaker has entered perforce, driven within the sacred precincts by the violence of the elements. he is an outsider, and, as such, prepared to assume the attitude of critic rather than of sympathizer. and the severity of the criticism is intensified by physical and intellectual repulsion at the scene before him. hence he recognizes all that is peculiarly objectionable in the special aspect of non-conformity presented within the chapel. he perceives at once ( ) "the trick of exclusiveness," and the consequent self-satisfaction induced; and ( ) the "fine irreverence" of the preacher in presenting the "treasure hid in the holy bible" as "a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance, not improved by [his] private dog's-ears and creases." he perceives "the trick of exclusiveness" which causes the congregation to hold itself to be the men, and [that] wisdom shall die with [them], and none of the old seven churches vie with [them]. * * * * * and, taking god's word under wise protection, correct its tendency to diffusiveness. (ll. - .) later, when freed from the physical irritation attendant on proximity to this special collection of representatives of humanity, his prejudices are sufficiently modified to allow of the perception that some explanation of this exclusiveness is possible. these people have really felt, no doubt, a something, the motion they style the call of them; and this is their method of bringing about * * * * * the mood itself, which strengthens by using. (ll. - .) the speaker is quite willing (when at a distance from the chapel) to admit this right of attempting a reproduction of that mood in which the original conversion may have been effected. nevertheless, he will _not_ admit the right of the flock to shut the gate of the fold in the face of any outsider seeking entrance. still mine's the same right with your poorest and sickliest supposing i don the marriage vestiment. (ll. - .) in _johannes agricola in meditation_ this personal satisfaction of the calvinist is presented in a still more extreme form. ere suns and moons could wax and wane, ere stars were thundergirt, or piled the heavens, god thought on me his child; ordained a life for me, arrayed its circumstances every one to the minutest. and this pre-ordained object of the divine love may assert with confidence-- i have god's warrant, could i blend all hideous sins, as in a cup, to drink the mingled venoms up; secure my nature will convert the draught to blossoming gladness fast. thus happiness assured, inevitable, for the elect. for those excluded from the sacred number-- i gaze below on hell's fierce bed, and those its waves of flame oppress, swarming in ghastly wretchedness; whose life on earth aspired to be one altar-smoke, so pure!--to win if not love like god's love for me, at least to keep his anger in; and all their striving turned to sin. it is difficult to believe that the author of _this_ poem, at any rate, would willingly have identified himself with the calvinistic creed. to caliban, a creature so largely devoid of moral sense, we have, indeed, seen him assigning a belief closely akin to that involved in the meditations of johannes, when he refers to the difference of the fates irrevocably allotted by setebos to himself and to prospero; both theories in curious contrast with the reflections of the book of _wisdom_: "for thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldest thou have made anything, if thou hadst hated it.... but thou sparest all, for they are thine, o lord, thou lover of souls."[ ] thus is explained "the trick of exclusiveness." what of the "fine irreverence" of the preacher? here the success of the sermon as a means of spiritual conviction, is held to be dependent upon the attitude of mind of the listener. 'tis the taught already that profits by teaching. (l. .) the method employed is only "abundantly convincing" to "those convinced before." to the critic possessed of unprejudiced intellectual faculties, the arbitrary collection of texts and chapters brought into connection by the capricious choice of the preacher is deserving of condemnation as a misrepresentation of the truth, by "provings and parallels twisted and twined," which would draw from even the more obvious old testament narrative proof of some doctrinal mystery of his creed--that pharaoh received a demonstration by his baker's dream of baskets three, of the doctrine of the trinity. (ll. - .) those of us who are inclined to reproach browning for the severity of the condemnation of roman catholic ritual ascribed to the soliloquist in section xi will do well to read again sections i to iv, which assuredly place the service of zion chapel in a far less attractive light than that thrown upon the ceremony in progress beneath the dome of st. peter's. ii. thus the listener passes from the confines of the chapel to the limitless expanse of the common without: and the change in externals is indicative also of that within. whilst discerning the errors of preacher and congregation, the critic has been blinded to the fact that he, too, is equally removed from the spirit of love designed to prove the inspiring principle of all forms of christianity, however crude their mode of expression. the soothing influence of nature to which he has ever been peculiarly susceptible, causes at once a glad rebound from the heart beneath, as if, god speeding me, i entered his church-door, nature leading me. (ll. - .) so he stands, recalling the visions of youth, when he "looked to these very skies, probing their immensities," and "found god there, his visible power." the power was unquestionable, a mere response to the evidence of the senses; but reason, coming to the aid of sight, pointed to the existence also of love, "the nobler dower." the deduction is logical, since the absence of love at once imposes limitations to power otherwise apparently infinite. the craving for love existent within the human heart demands satisfaction, and if in this direction the deity is _unable_ to satisfy the needs of his creatures, man here surpasses his maker, the creature the creator. irresponsible power, not comprehensive of love, is of the character of that exercised by setebos according to the theory of caliban. here man is seen endowed with gifts of heart and brain, to exercise _through_ his own will, but _for_ the glory of his creator "as a mere machine could never do." power (in this place synonymous with force combined with knowledge) may advance by degrees, not so love. love does not admit of measurement, since it is by nature infinite. as with eternity, so with love. by no relative estimate of time can any possible realization of eternity be approached; the sole result of any such attempt at exposition being necessarily conducive to a wholly erroneous impression on the mind, since that which is in its essence infinite admits of no defined measure. thus infinite love remains infinite in spite of human limitations. whilst absolute truth remains, though the revelation to man is gradual, so does love remain unimpaired, though man may profit by or abuse it. 'tis not a thing to bear increase as power does: be love less or more in the heart of man, he keeps it shut or opes it wide, as he pleases, but love's sum remains what it was before. (ll. - .) thus s. augustine: "do heaven and earth then contain thee, since thou fillest them?... the vessels which are full of thee do not confine thee, though they should be shattered, thou wouldest not be poured out."[ ] to sum up: where power alone was at first discernible, in the wonderful care manifested in the smallest creation, "in the leaf, in the stone," the work of love eventually became equally clear. for a similar expression of browning's more immediately personal faith we have only to turn to his latest published work, _the reverie of asolando_. from the first power was--i knew. life has made clear to me, that, strive but for closer view, love were as plain to see. in simple faith in this all-prevailing providence, in a recognition of the immanence of the divine love, the critic of zion chapel believes himself to have found the highest form of worship. before the night is ended he is, however, to learn differently. the vision of sections vii to ix renders still more forcible the revelation already begun with the escape from the chapel--that the love which may be duly worshipped alone in spirit and in truth yet recognizes the feeblest manifestation of either in the worshipper: and that the nearest approach to union with the divine love is to be sought in a fuller and more immediate response to the human. and it is worthy of notice that the vision does not reveal itself within the confines of zion chapel, the abode of religious exclusiveness and intolerance; only when the freer atmosphere of nature has been reached. iii. rome, st. peter's. with the opening of the next division of the poem (sections x to xii), we find the man who has been anxious that the divine worship shall be celebrated in beauty, as well as in spirit and in truth, again an onlooker: waiting without the walls of st. peter's, "that miraculous dome of god,"--waiting without, yet with eye "free to pierce the crust of the outer wall," and perceive the crowd thronging the cathedral in expectation of the main-altar's consummation. and here is to be found all that was wanting to the bare whitewashed interior of "mount zion" with its "lath and plaster entry," with "the forms burlesque, uncouth" of its worship. here the vast building ablaze in front, all paint and gilding, with marble for brick, and stones of price for garniture of the edifice. (ll. - .) in place of the "snuffle" of the methodist congregation and the "immense stupidity" of the utterances of the preacher is the silence which may be felt of that solemn moment preceding the elevation, when "the organ blatant holds his breath.... as if god's hushing finger grazed him." (ll. - .) whatever the sympathies of spectator or author, no lines in the entire poem are more impressive for the reader than those which follow: earth breaks up, time drops away, in flows heaven, with its new day of endless life, when he who trod, very man and very god, this earth in weakness, shame and pain, dying the death whose signs remain up yonder on the accursed tree,-- shall come again, no more to be of captivity the thrall, but the one god, all in all, king of kings, lord of lords, as his servant john received the words, "i died, and live for evermore!" (ll. - .) the conviction is almost inevitable that here something beyond even the power of dramatic genius has to be reckoned with; that some spirit more nearly akin to intimate personal sympathy served as inspiration of this passage. carried away by the infection of the prevailing enthusiasm, the spectator questions as to the cause which has led him to remain without upon the threshold-stone of the cathedral, whilst he who has led him hither is within. and the answer which reason returns is, that whilst the divine wisdom may be capable of discerning the faith and love existent beneath the outward imagery, yet with "mere man" the case is otherwise; hence for him to disregard the inward promptings of his nature is dangerous to his spiritual welfare. thus the decision: i, a mere man, fear to quit the due god gave me as most fit to guide my footsteps through life's maze, because himself discerns all ways open to reach him. (ll. - .) for him to whom the bare walls of zion chapel have proved repellant, the glories of st. peter's may conceivably be fatally attractive in their appeal to the senses: such, reasonably or unreasonably, is at least the belief of the soliloquist. the argument of this eleventh section is perhaps the most difficult to follow satisfactorily of all those leading to the ultimate choice of creed. before attempting to estimate the worth of the conclusions, it may be well to trace briefly the line of thought by which they appear to have been reached. ( ) the spectator, at first struck by the glory of outward display as a means of still imposing upon the world "rome's gross yoke," is yet led, through proximity to the divine presence, whilst seeing the error, "above the scope of error" to realize the love. and further, to admit ( ) that the love inspiring the worshippers of st. peter's on this christmas eve of was also "the love of those first christian days," a love which did not hesitate to sacrifice all which might interpose between itself and the divine love whence it emanated. when the antique sovereign intellect which then sat ruling in the world, ... was hurled from the throne he reigned upon. (ll. - .) subsequently followed all the wealth of poetry and rhetoric, of sculpture and painting sometime the pride of the classical world. love, and it _was_ love which was acting, drew her children aside from these intellectual and sensuous gratifications, and pointed to the crucified. she thus, says the soliloquist, had demanded of her votaries vast sacrifices which might reasonably have been held essential in the early days of christianity. we have already seen, indeed, how empty of ultimate satisfaction had been these same intellectual pleasures to cleon: how obviously light would have been, to him, the sacrifice involved in an acceptance of any faith which should afford a definite and reasonable hope for a future state of existence: how small a price would have been the loss of life temporal in view of the gain of life eternal. ( ) but the critic, whilst admitting the sublimity of the sacrifice of the first century of the christian era, deprecates the demand made for its repetition in the nineteenth. it is time for love's children not only to "creep, stand steady upon their feet," but to "walk already. not to speak of trying to climb" (ll. - ). the limitations imposed upon the intellect and its free development should long since have been discarded. ( ) yet, though recognizing this to the full, the speaker will not condemn one of those, however mistaken, whose foreheads bear "_lover_ written above the earnest eyes of them." these worshippers within st. peter's need some satisfaction of the demands made upon their nature by an inherent craving for beauty; and yet have they sacrificed for love's sake all that they might have found of intense enjoyment in unfettered life. dwelling amidst the glories of rome, ancient and modern, they yet turn from the "majesties of art around them." faith struggles to suppress intellectual and artistic cravings; and these, at length subdued, they "offer up to god for a present." denied in the world without the sensuous satisfaction for which they yearn, they would seek it in the display attendant on the roman catholic ritual. this is the view of the man who believes himself to be the true "lover" of god, capable of worshipping in spirit and in truth. how far is he justified in such criticism? unquestionably he is prejudiced. there exists an unconscious mental bias towards that creed which he is represented as finally accepting; and there is little doubt that it is browning's intention to expose the prejudice. the failure in appreciation of the ceremonial at st. peter's arises from inability to apprehend beauty in the outward accessories of the service of which he is witness. to his nature it would appear that the demand upon the sensuous side is not so strong as he imagines when he expresses the fear of entering the cathedral and joining the worshipping crowd. he seems, moreover, to ignore, or to pass over lightly, the productions of christian art, whether in painting or in the music of religious ritual, when he inquires (ll. , _et seq._): love, surely, from that music's lingering, might have filched her organ-fingering, nor chosen rather to set prayings to hog-grunts, praises to horse-neighings. he ignores, too, the value of symbolism in the later mocking allusion to this experience as "buffoonery--posturings and petticoatings." in the main line of thought, however, beginning with section xi, and developed more fully in xii, is treated no imaginary danger, but that bound inevitably to attend on any religious system in which authority is paramount. the error attributed to the advocates of the roman catholic creed is that of rendering the head too completely subservient to the heart. faith cannot indeed be acquired by any considerations of logic; nevertheless, there is no necessity that reason and faith should prove antagonistic forces. to the brain, as well as to the heart, must be allowed scope for development. hence the speaker represents that church, in which freedom of thought is limited, as interposing as an intermediary between the conscience and the divine influence. such church he regards as having devoted its energies to the development of a single element or faculty of human nature to the exclusion or limitation of the rest. nevertheless, in one direction there has been development to an extraordinary degree: and browning himself, as we have good reason to know, would have been unlikely to criticize adversely this whole-hearted devotion to a cause. for illustration the soliloquist employs that of the sculptor who, without calculating the dimensions of his marble, devotes his energies to the production of a perfect head and shoulders only. this, though necessarily unfinished in actual performance, is far grander in conception than a smaller and fully modelled figure; and the spectator is free to seek elsewhere the completion of the unfinished statue in the work of an artist complementary to that of the first. thus the onlooker at st. peter's resolves to accept the provision there offered for the "satisfaction of his love," then depart elsewhere--depart to seek the completion of the statue--"that [his] intellect may find its share." and it is noteworthy that the same critic, who condescends to the employment of language such as that marking the references to the service of st peter's, ascribes to the church of rome the development of that element which he esteems highest in human nature. love is ever with the author of _christmas eve_, as with the soliloquist, of worth immeasurably greater than mere intellect. iv. with section xiii the critic of zion chapel passes once more into the night in search of satisfaction for those demands of the intellect which have been left unanswered at st. peter's; and in section xiv he is represented as finding that which he seeks. love and faith to the exclusion of intellectual development he has left in the cathedral at rome; intellect without love he meets in the lecture hall at göttingen. believing himself to have learned the lesson that wherever even nominal followers of christ are to be found, there, too, is the divine presence, he is now "cautious" how he "suffers to slip" the chance of joining in fellowship with any that call themselves his friends. (ll. - .) hence, entering the hall, he follows the course of the consumptive lecturer's reasoning on "the myth of christ." as to this fable which "millions believe to the letter" he (the lecturer) proposes to attempt the work of discrimination between truth and legend. ( ) he reminds his audience, and justly, that it is well at times to pause to inquire concerning the source of articles of their belief; historic fact may become disguised or concealed by accretions of legendary narrative gathered round it: by the various expositions assigned it by commentators of different ages. ( ) having thus examined and freed his "myth" from the misinterpretations of the early disciples, from later additions and modifications; when all has been done he yet admits that the residuum is well worthy of preservation. a man!--a right true man, however, whose work was worthy a man's endeavour. (ll. - .) moreover was _he_ not surely the first to insist on the natural sovereignty of our race? (ll. - .) as it were in startling comment upon the assertion of this natural sovereignty, the professor's further speech is interrupted by a fit of coughing, and the listener avails himself of the opportunity thus offered to leave the hall. once more free to breathe the outer air his critical powers reassert themselves, and he sees from a point of observation, sufficiently removed, the relative effects of the excesses of the most widely differing forms of christianity and of that form of belief or of scepticism which denies the divinity of the founder of the creed. his decision is given in favour of superstition as opposed to scepticism. truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic when papist struggles with dissenter, * * * * * each, that thus sets the pure air seething, may poison it for healthy breathing-- but the critic leaves no air to poison. (ll. - .) then follows the criticism of the critic. what has the lecturer, indeed, left to the followers of the christ? ( ) intellect? is the possession of pure intellect to be accounted cause for worship? even so, others have taught morality as christ taught it, with the difference (and this surely an advantage from the critic's standpoint) that these teachers have failed to assert of themselves that to which christ laid claim on his own behalf: that, he, the sage and humble, was also one with the creator. (ll. - .) ( ) worship of the intellect being thus disallowed, what then of the moral worth of the man christ as admitted by the lecturer? is mere virtue, however great in degree, sufficient to claim as of right for its possessor the submission of his fellow men? perfection of moral character being allowed, is this adequate reason that the christ should be held supreme ruler of the race? to answer the question satisfactorily one of two theories must be accepted: either "goodness" is of human "invention" or it is a divine gift freely bestowed. if the first, the professor's listener holds that "worship were that man's fit requital" who should have proved himself capable of exhibiting in his own life, _for the first time in the world's history_, that which "goodness" really is. recognizing, however, the incontrovertible fact that moral worth was present in the world prior to the foundation of christianity, the so-called "invention" of goodness resolves itself into a mere matter of definition, and the adjustment of names to qualities already existent. in this case he who has achieved this work is no more deserving of worship as the originator or creator of goodness than is harvey to be adjudged inventor of the circulation of the blood. one is inclined here to question whether the speaker is not carrying his argument beyond the point necessary to the exposure of the weakness of the lecturer's position as professed follower of a merely human christ. whether or not this be so, he has succeeded in proving logically untenable the first of the two hypotheses suggested in this connection. what then of the second? if goodness is admittedly the direct gift of god, if the founder of christianity taught how best to preserve such gift "free from fleshly taint"; then he merits indeed the title of saint, but no more transcendent honour, his powers differing in degree, not in kind, from those of his fellow men: he was inspired, but as shakespeare was inspired. no immensity of virtue may effect the conversion of human nature into the divine; and the man of supreme moral dignity, as of marvellous intellectual capacity, remains man only; vastly, but yet measurably, beyond his fellows; the position attained being one to which it is possible that humanity may again attain, nay, which it may even surpass in the future "by growth of soul." and this divine gift of goodness may, moreover, necessarily be bestowed in accordance with the divine will; hence, he who made this man pilate may well make "this other" christ. thus then, if the prophet of nazareth is to be regarded as mere man, the professor's argument breaks down following the adoption of either hypothesis--that involving a divine or a human origin of goodness. is there any point at which the faith of the christian may come into contact with that of him who, whilst calling himself a follower of christ, by a denial of his divinity refuses credence to a direct assertion on the part of his leader? to the christian the main proof of divine inspiration is the spark of divine light kindled within the human breast, that which supplies motive for action, which instigates to practical application of the good already recognized as good by the intelligence: not identical with conscience (as is clear from line ), but the power which awakens the activities of conscience. here again a suggestion of browning's usual estimate of the relative worth of the intellect and the heart. the man whose moral standard of life is most depraved is yet possessed of the capacity for discriminating between good and evil; since such capacity does not necessarily imply the co-existence of a life-giving faith, and through faith alone may knowledge become of practical utility. whom do you count the worst man upon earth? be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more of what right is, than arrives at birth in the best man's acts that we bow before. (ll. - .) to _know_ is not to _do_: a distinction akin to that drawn in the epistle of james[ ] between intellectual credence and living faith--between belief, the result of the acceptance of certain facts making inevitable appeal to the intellect, and faith inspiring life, the ultimate results of which are manifest in action. this distinction we find again strikingly presented in parabolic form in _shah abbas_ of _ferishtah's fancies_. the most marked lines of divergence between listener and lecturer would appear then to be that mere abstract good, even morality personified, is insufficient for the satisfaction of the demands of human nature: that the life lived in palestine did not denote a mere renewal of things old, a more extended development of the good already existent in the world. it introduced a new and more active principle of life, that to which all past history had been leading up, that from which the future history of the human race must take its starting point. _the revelation of god in man had been made to men._ to sum up-- morality to the uttermost, supreme in christ as we all confess, why need we prove would avail no jot to make him god, if god he were not? what is the point where himself lays stress? does the precept run, "believe in good, in justice, truth, now understood for the first time?"--or, "believe in me, who lived and died, yet essentially am lord of life?" whoever can take the same to his heart and for mere love's sake conceive of the love,--that man obtains a new truth; no conviction gains of an old one only, made intense by a fresh appeal to his faded sense. (ll. - .) these the lines of divergence. are there none of approach? asks the listener who is gradually learning from his night's experience to seek a common bond of sympathy between himself and his fellow men, rather than an increase of the repulsion so spontaneously awakened within the walls of zion chapel. at rome he took his share in the "feast of love," which afforded little satisfaction to intellectual cravings; here he would fain accept all that may accrue to him from the pursuit of learning apart from love. unlearned love was safe from spurning-- can't we respect your loveless learning? (ll. - .) recognizing the zeal for truth which has instigated the critical investigations of the lecturer, he is prepared, with a liberality of which he is clearly sufficiently conscious, to allow to him and to his followers such benefit as may be derived from the acceptance of "a loveless creed"; even conceding to them, so be it they still desire it, the name of christian, which he too bears. with generosity yet greater he will refrain from all attempt to disturb that condition of stoical calm to which they have at length attained, by pointing out to them the weaknesses of their theory, which he has just so amply demonstrated to his own satisfaction. v. thus he leaves the lecture hall in a "genial mood of tolerance," of which the conclusions of section xix are the outcome. the element of truth existent in varying forms of creed, beneath all dissimilarities of outward expression, has at length become recognizable; carrying with it the prevision of that complete union ultimately to be effected before "the general father's throne." when "the saints of many a warring creed" shall have learned that _all_ paths to the father lead where self the feet have spurned. where moravian hymn and roman chant in one devotion blend; and all discords find harmonious close, in god's atoning ear.[ ] of what nobler conception, it may be asked, is the human imagination capable? nevertheless, to certain natures (so holds the soliloquist, clearly recognizing his own as of this calibre) there is danger lest this generous comprehensiveness should prove inseparable from the "mild indifferentism" fatal to action. hence in section xx, whilst engaged in watching his foolish heart expand in the lazy glow of benevolence, (ll. - .) he is not surprised to perceive, in the token of the receding vesture, indications of the divine disapproval of his position. and he is led to the conclusion that not only for the individual worshipper must there be some special form of creed best adapted to the individual needs of temperament, but (as ll. - would appear to suggest) some _absolute_ form of creed may possibly be discoverable. and to this "single track": god, by god's own ways occult, may--doth, i will believe--bring back all wanderers. (ll. - .) thus unity is attained, but with a suggestion of methods of attainment other than those indicated at the close of section xix. the main difference of intention between the two sections would appear to be that whilst here (xx) also ultimate unity is to be achieved through the divine providence, yet something more is required of the individual believer than a passive reliance on the assurance of this future fusion of creeds. and further, the manifest and immediate duty being the discovery of the, for him, "best way of worship," this once reached, he must rest satisfied with no merely personal acceptance: the benefits resultant from his own spiritual experiences are designed for a wider use, a more extended service of human fellowship; he, too, may seek to "bring back wanderers to the single track." here again is perceptible one of browning's prevailing ideas. never (i believe) is he to be found advocating any vast corporate revolution for the amelioration of mankind: the advance of the race is to be secured through the advance of individual members. vi. as a practical result of the foregoing conclusions follow (in section xxii) a return to the chapel, and an application to the special form of worship therein celebrated, of the genial "glow of benevolence" already kindling within the breast of the sometime critic. and here the dramatic character of the poem becomes perhaps more strikingly obvious than hitherto. by one or two able and characteristic strokes is suggested the egotistical temperament of the soliloquist, with its susceptibility to external influences, its inevitable tendency towards criticism. even though he has, as he deems, learnt from the night's experience the valuable lesson of receiving "in meekness" the mode of worship simplest in form and most spiritual in character, yet the language employed in lines - is that of no advocate of a kindly tolerance, but of an orthodox and bigoted methodist. it is a part, so it would seem, of the dramatic purpose, and of the mental analysis of which browning was so fond, to thus demonstrate to his readers how a reasoning and reflective being, possessed of a certain amount of intellectual alertness, should enrol himself amongst the members of a body whose pre-eminent characteristic to the unsympathizing spectator appears that of a narrow dogmatic exclusivism, combined with extreme intellectual limitations. nevertheless, in spite of practical result, very ably does the speaker in section xxii theoretically define the essence of true worship, the spirit of devotion. whilst human nature remains untranslated, and man is possessed of physical perceptions, and of ratiocinative faculties, the nasal intonation, and logical and grammatical lapses of the preacher, though they may be condoned, can hardly be ignored. but to the seeker after truth, so ardent should be the yearning towards the attainment of the end, that all defects in the means should be cheerfully accepted. it is perhaps not easy to put the case strongly enough, without going too far on the other side, and ignoring the means absolutely, thus returning to the position, already renounced by the soliloquist in section v, where man looks direct "through nature to nature's god." a condition which, whilst unquestionably the highest and most purely spiritual, would appear to be possible to a certain type of mind only, and that in moments of special illumination. to the average temperament might arise from such a system the danger lest, whilst dispensing with forms, the spirit should likewise be forgotten; and worship should thus altogether cease. in accordance with the capacity for growth inherent in man's nature, with his creed, as with all else, must be development, if life is to be preserved. the means appointed for his instruction may not be always those in most complete adjustment with his inclinations; nevertheless let him not neglect those vouchsafed him so long as all tend, however indirectly, towards the attainment of the ultimate goal, the complete realization of truth. seeking to gain for himself further knowledge of the divine will, let him not lose sight of the end in a too critical consideration of the means. what avails the thirsty traveller the splendour of the marble drinking-cup, if so be that it is empty: better have knelt at the poorest stream that trickles in pain from the straitest rift! (ll. - .) to the question of main import advanced in the present instance, is there water or not to drink? (l. .) the latest comer to zion chapel replies in the affirmative; though he would fain wish the flaws were fewer in the earthen vessel, holding treasure which lies as safe in a golden ewer. (ll. - .) we are inclined to ask, might he not, too, have returned an affirmative answer in yet another relation, had he but regarded the celebrants of st. peter's in that spirit of tolerance with which he now condones the defects of the methodist preacher: since, on his own showing, there prevails in zion chapel the jealous exclusivism resultant from spiritual pride. was not some valuable residuum of truth to be found in rome? surely so. but had the soliloquist proved capable of giving this answer, with the change of personal character thus indicated, would have been transformed, also, the character of the entire poem. the reason for his present choice he makes sufficiently clear. that form of creed shall be his which takes into account the complexity of human nature. the emotions (so he holds) alone received satisfaction at rome; intellectual development being checked. at göttingen the intellect was cultivated at the expense of the spiritual faculties. now in the poverty and ignorance of zion chapel he believes himself to discern provision, however poor in quality, for all man's requirements and aspirations. immeasurably inferior to rome in beauty of architectural form, in the impressiveness of its ritual; incomparably below göttingen in intellectual attainment, it is yet in some sort superior to both alike. superior to rome in that it allows scope for the development of the intellectual capacity, coarse and poor as is the quality of the mental pabulum offered by its minister. superior to göttingen in that the preacher would fain afford some satisfaction to the emotional as well as to the intellectual cravings of his congregation. to these poor "ruins of humanity," a personal saviour is a necessity: something more substantial than a fable, myth, or personification. _some one, not something_, who in the critical hour of life shall do for him what no mere man shall, and stand confessed as the god of salvation. (ll. - .) clearly to the speaker, in spite of the objectionable character of the surroundings, they secure a "comfort"-- which an empire gained, were a loss without. (ll. - .) thus the choice is made in face of defects seemingly at first hopelessly repellant. and in leaving the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ amidst the zion chapel congregation, our conviction touching the future is based upon grounds amply justifiable; that he may in spiritual development outgrow the limits he has for the present assigned himself. since, despite the influences of prejudice and of bigotry yet remaining, he has already proved capable of seeking a position whence, in his own words, direct reference is made to him "who head and heart alike discerns." from such a position, progress, expansion, as the law of life becomes, not only possible, but inevitable, since the soul's outlook is at once freed from limitations by the transference of contemplation from the gift ... to the giver, and from the cistern to the river, and from the finite to infinity, and from man's dust to god's divinity. (ll. - .) such deductions as to the intention of _this_ poem are at least fully in accordance with those suggestions of theories which we have so far gathered from a consideration of other of browning's works. lecture v christmas eve and easter day (ii) lecture v christmas eve and easter day (ii) how very hard it is to be a christian! thus in the opening lines of _easter day_ is suggested the subject occupying the entire poem: a consideration of the difficulty attendant upon an acceptance of the christian faith, sufficiently practical in character to serve as the mainspring of life. the difficulty is not solved at the close, since identical in form with the earlier assertion is the final decision i find it hard to be a christian. (ll. - .) nevertheless, the nature of the position has been modified. the obstacles in the way of faith are no longer regretted as a bar to progress, rather are they welcomed as an impetus towards the increase of spiritual vitality and growth. it is the work of the intervening reflections and resultant deductions to effect this change, by supplying a reasonable hypothesis on which to base an explanation of the existent conditions of life. as with _christmas eve_, so here, for a full appreciation of the arguments advanced, some understanding is essential of the character of the speaker. it is at once obvious that he who finds it hard to be a christian may not be identified with the critic of the göttingen lecturer: but, that no loophole may be left for question, the statement is directly made in section xiv. on such a night three years ago, it chanced that i had cause to cross the common, where the chapel was, our friend spoke of, the other day. (ll. - .) later, in the same section (ll. - ), a descriptive touch is supplied, recalling curiously browning's estimate of himself in _prospice_. i was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, the best and the last! i would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, and bade me creep past. thus the first speaker in _easter day_ refers to his childish aversion to uncertainty, even though uncertainty meant present safety. i would always burst the door ope, know my fate at first. (ll. - .) this then is the man, a fearless fighter, an uncompromising investigator who, whilst he would "fain be a christian," is yet bound to reject a mere uncritical acceptance of the tenets of christianity. opposed to him in the first twelve sections is a second speaker to whom, somewhat strangely it would seem, the designation sceptic has been applied. the title in its virtual sense, is, indeed, justly applicable, but in the ordinary acceptation might possibly prove misleading. it is a fact of common experience that among professing christians, of whatever form of creed, are to be found those who, in that peculiar crisis of life when death removes from sight those dearest to them, go back from the fundamental tenets of a faith in which hitherto their confidence appeared to have been unshaken. even that main pillar of faith, a belief in the immortality of the soul, lies temporarily shattered. such failure suggests itself as the result of an insufficiently considered acceptance of dogma; an acceptance without question, rather than in spite of doubts and questionings. this distinction we have seen bishop blougram drawing between the position of the man who implicitly believes, since, his logical and reasoning faculties being undeveloped or inactive, no cause for question arises; and the position of him who, in the midst of spiritual perplexity, makes "doubt occasion still more faith." to browning, with whom half-heartedness was the one unpardonable sin, this so-called faith would necessarily be far more dangerous than downright acknowledged scepticism. hence the succeeding argument of _easter day_ becomes one, not between a pronounced sceptic and a would-be christian, but rather between two nominal christians whose outward profession may be similar but the motives inspiring it wholly at variance--this in accordance with browning's peculiar attraction towards problems involving the establishment of connection between motive and action. as in _bishop blougram's apology_ his psychological analysis would reconcile two apparently irreconcilable aspects of the mind of a prelate whose position had perplexed the world. as by a method closely akin to this treatment, he offers explanation of the presence, amongst the illiterate and bigoted congregation of zion chapel, of a man whose intellectual capacity should have led him to assume a position of wider tolerance: so here, too, he would discover and reveal the link between the outward form of creed and the widely differing spiritual acceptance of the same in two individual cases. i. the arguments of sections i to xii are not always easy to follow closely; but, in passing with section xiii to the history of the vision, all obscurity vanishes, and we have no difficulty in tracing the line of thought of the first speaker, resulting in his willing reconcilement to the uncertainties inseparable from human life as at present constituted. a brief attempt to follow the preceding course of argument will afford an explanation of the speaker's position at the opening of section xiii. ( ) the difficulty advanced at the outset of attaining to even a moderate realization of the possibilities of the christian life is ascribed by the first speaker (at the close of section i) to the essential indefiniteness in things spiritual implied in the very suggestion of advance, of growth. that which we believed yesterday to be the mountain-top proves to-day but the vantage-ground for a yet higher ascent: and where we looked for crowns to fall, we find the tug's to come. (ll. - .) in reply, the second speaker admits the existence of difficulty, but of one differing somewhat in character from that recognized by his interlocutor. the christian life were a sufficiently straightforward matter, if belief pure and simple were possible: if, as he puts the case, the relative worth of things temporal and eternal were once rendered clear and unmistakable. even martyrdom itself would then become as nothing to the believer. ( ) the first speaker, or the soliloquist (since he it is who actually advances the arguments consistent with the position of his imaginary companion), whilst accepting the truth of the proposition, reasserts the theory, little more than suggested in section i, that such fixity and definiteness of belief is, under existing conditions, an impossibility. if not in the visible world, granting so much, yet beyond it, is that which may not be grasped by the finite intelligence. such limitations may perchance serve for the term of mortal life; but in the light thrown upon life by the approach of death a change will inevitably pass over the aspect of all things, and eyes, late wide, begin to wink nor see the path so well. (ll. - .) again, the christian who does not wish his position of moderate faith to be disturbed, agrees; but attributes the shifting ground of belief to the self-evident truth that faith would no longer be faith were the objects with which it deals mere matters of common and proved knowledge, belief in them as inevitable as the necessity of breath to the living creature. you must mix some uncertainty with faith, if you would have faith be. (ll. - .) even in the intercourse of everyday life, faith is a necessity. now, had the easy-going christian paused at this stage of the discussion, with line , his argument would have had the weight which attaches to an elaboration of the same theory given by browning elsewhere--in _an epistle of karshish_. but even he, upon whom these considerations are forced for what one may well believe to be the first time, finds that any individual proposition requires constant modification, that a doubt will "peep unexpectedly." thus, though faith, with its attendant uncertainty, may well obtain in the relations between man and man, yet, between the creator and his creation, is it not possible that more clearly defined regulations shall subsist? ( ) the thinker who is anxious to rightly adjust his own position in the world of faith interposes before the argument has passed to its final stage, and points to the conditions prevailing in the world of lower animal life where the entire creation "travails and groans"--reverting again to the assurance which, as the conclusion of the poem is to show, had been indelibly stamped upon his mind by the experience of the vision--the assurance already referred to in sections i and ii, that could these conditions be changed, then, too, would be altered the character of human life, its purpose--as browning ever regards it--would be annulled. this is not the place to discuss the question of the probationary character of life and its educative purpose; it is sufficient to recognize that in nature is discoverable no definite and final answer to the questionings of doubt. hence, with section vi, the second speaker shifts his ground; and admitting that this suggested "scientific faith," is impracticable, declares himself none the more prepared, therefore, to yield such faith as may yet be possible to him. all he would ask is that the greater probability may rest upon the side of that creed which he professes. his belief, such as it is, affords him satisfaction, and will continue, so he holds, sufficient for his needs until its "curtain is furled away by death." and he would at once meet the arguments which he sees his companion prepared to advance in favour of asceticism. to give up the world for eternity is surely an act sufficiently easy of accomplishment, since the renunciation is daily effected for causes of small moment. whilst the would-be christian shrinks at prospect of the hardships involved in self-denial, his worldly neighbour is adopting that self-same life of abstention that he may attain an object no more important than that of acquiring a record collection of beetles or of snuff-boxes. in short, in the speaker's own words, by subduing the demands of the flesh, he would be doing that alone, to gain a palm-branch and a throne, which fifty people undertake to do, and gladly, for the sake of giving a semitic guess, or playing pawns at blindfold chess. (ll. - .) ( ) the second speaker then, having declared himself satisfied with a minimum of evidence as to the truth of his creed, a balance, merely, in favour of its probability, there follows the scornful comment of the man who would take nothing upon trust, investigation of which is possible-- as is your sort of mind, so is your sort of search: you'll find what you desire, and that's to be a christian. (ll. - .) to such a nature belief is easy where belief is desirable; the very reason which would hinder faith on the part of his opponent. the search made either for intellectual or emotional satisfaction will meet with equal result. whether for historical confirmation of the scriptural narrative, or in a philosophic attempt to adapt the christian creed to the wants of the human heart. where, indeed, this satisfaction is found for spiritual cravings, the intellectual may be disregarded; when faith plucks such substantial fruit * * * * * she little needs to look beyond. (ll. - .) so bishop blougram in a somewhat different connection-- if you desire faith--then you've faith enough: what else seeks god--nay, what else seek ourselves? (_b. b. a._, ll. - .) in the concluding lines of section vii and in section viii is presented the contrast between the two opposing views. on the one hand, that of the man who is glad to accept the christian faith as that best calculated for his advantage both in this world and in that to which he looks in the future. on the other hand, the view of the man who will take nothing on trust, who is "ever a fighter," and who, having fought, and partially, though by no means wholly, vanquished his doubts, is prepared "to mount hardly to eternal life," at whatever cost of sacrifice and self-denial may be demanded of him. the criticism of the second speaker touching this proposed life of asceticism is that it is to be deprecated, not on account of the self-denial involved, but because such life ignores the bountiful provision of the creator as evidenced in nature. to abstain from the enjoyment of the gifts offered is an act of ingratitude towards the provider. on the contrary, the christian, whilst discerning love in every gift, should seek from his creed intensification rather than diminution of the joys of life: and in time of adversity when sorrows and privations take the place of joy, the truths of christianity shall throw upon the darkness the light of revelation, and the thing that seems mere misery, under human schemes, becomes, regarded by the light of love, as very near, or quite as good a gift as joy before. (ll. - .) ( ) the arguments of this and the section following are of special importance, since on them are based the charges of a too great asceticism which have been urged against the poem. here, too, the dramatic element is more pronounced than elsewhere. the life of ease, physical and spiritual, to the second speaker a source of supreme gratification and happiness, to the man of sterner mould presents itself as an impossibility. "the all-stupendous tale" of the gospel leaves him "pale and heartstruck." the belief that the sufferings there recorded were undergone for the purpose of intensifying the joys of life and affording consolation for its ills, is to him an explanation so inadequate as to approach the verge of profanity. this being so he would demand of the advocate of the life of ease, how do you counsel in the case? the answer is characteristic: i'd take, by all means, in your place, the _safe_ side, since it so appears: deny myself, a few brief years, the natural pleasure. (ll. - .) that the eternal reward will outweigh the temporal suffering to the exclusion even of recollection, the testimony of the martyr of the catacombs affords ample proof. for me, i have forgot it all. (l. .) ( ) _if_ this be so, then indeed there remains a direct and certain means of escape from sin, of fulfilment of the purposes of life--self-denial, renunciation. but, as the reply of section x points out, the argument has been conducted in a circle, and the starting-point on the circumference has now been reached. the original statement has never been satisfactorily controverted. "how hard it is to be a christian"; hard on account of the uncertainty bound to be attendant on all matters in which faith is requisite. it is hard to be a christian since the difficulty but shifts its ground and is not actually removed by any venture of faith. after all argument, all reasoning, the possibility remains that the christian's hope is a mistaken one; that death is not the gateway to fuller life but the annihilation of life; in short that the christian has renounced life for the sake of death and nothing else. (ll. - .) in which case his gain is less than that of the worldling, since he has, at least, temporarily possessed the object towards the acquisition of which his self-denial was directed. beetles and snuff-boxes may be but small gains, but gains they are to whomso desires them: and "gain is gain, however small." nevertheless, in the spirit of browning, the wrestler with his doubts would rather risk all for the vaguest spiritual hope, than rest satisfied with a life limited to material gratification: rather be the grasshopper that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun, (ll. - .) than the mole groping "amid its veritable muck." when bishop blougram makes the same decision--in favour of faith as opposed to scepticism--the motive he alleges is one which might well be ascribed to the second speaker of _easter day_. the choice is influenced, not by aspirations which refuse to be checked, but by considerations of prudence touching a possible future. doubt may be wrong--there's judgment, life to come! with just that chance, i dare not [_i.e._ relinquish faith]. (ll. - .) the attitude of the second speaker towards life generally recalls, indeed, not infrequently the professed opportunism of the bishop. with blougram also he fears the effects upon the stability of his faith of a critical investigation of its tenets. hence, the reproach of section xi, addressed to the first speaker, whose questionings threaten to disturb the earlier condition of "trusting ease." the reply of section xii points out that, the eyes having been once opened, to close them wilfully, living in a determined reliance on hopes proved only too probably fallacious, is to adopt a pagan rather than a christian conception of life. ii. section xiii constitutes the introduction to the second part of the poem in which is given the history of the revelation to which the narrator ascribes his realization of the momentous nature of the faith which he and his companion alike profess; and of the life which should be lived upon the lines of that faith. vivid as the account of the vision in _christmas eve_ is the description by the first speaker of the experiences of the night preceding the dawn of easter day, three years ago; when, into the midst of his reflections touching the possibility of a near approach of a day of judgment, there broke that tremendous conflagration marking the crisis when man shall awaken to realities from that insane dream we take for waking now, because it seems. (ll. - .) and the portrayal of the judgment which follows is, in character, just that which we should expect from the pen of the writer who held that "the development of a soul, little else is worth study." how far the conception is indeed browning's own will be best considered in estimating the extent of the dramatic element--in lecture vi. to trace the history of this particular soul awaiting judgment is our immediate object. in a position of personal isolation from his kind, face to face with his creator, to that lonely soul "began the judgment day." the sentence from without was unnecessary to him who should pass judgment upon himself. the intuition burned away all darkness from [his] spirit too; (ll. - .) and he recognized in that moment of revelation that, whatever the uncertainty of his position before "the utmost walls of time" should "tumble in" to "end the world," in that moment was no uncertainty; his choice of life was fixed irrevocably. hitherto he had loved the world too well to relinquish its joys wholly, whilst yet looking for a time when the renunciation, in which he believed to discern the highest course, should become possible: when he would at last "reconcile those lips" to letting the dear remnant pass ... some drops of earthly good untasted! (ll. - .) in the light of that flash of intuition, it at once became clear that such an attitude of compromise had meant, in fact, a decision in favour of the world; a choice of things temporal to the virtual exclusion of things eternal. that he, too, had been doing that which he to-night reproaches the christian of placid assurance for doing: he had been but using his faith "as a condiment" wherewith to "heighten the flavours" of life. the final issue being assured, the true relations of life and faith became manifest. the sentence of the voice beside him was unessential to the revelation life is done, time ends, eternity's begun, and thou art judged for evermore. (ll. - .) and yet "the shows of things" remain. no longer fire that would shrink and wither off the blasted face of heaven, (ll. - .) but the common yet visible around, and the sky which above stretched drear and emptily of life. (l. .) in that vast stillness of earth and heaven, judgment is as emphatically pronounced as if read from "the opened book," in the presence of "the small and great," following "the rising of the quick and dead" which all prior conceptions of the day of judgment had led the spectator to anticipate. but he whose sentence had been passed was not of those whom bold and blind, terror must burn the truth into. (ll. - .) for these, _their_ fate: such fate as the old pope trusted should awaken the criminal franceschini to a realization of the horror and brutality of a deed which he sought to justify to himself and to the world, as an act of self-defence. sentence is there passed in lines recalling, though with intensified force, the description of section xv. thus, the result of the papal reflections-- for the main criminal i have no hope except in such a suddenness of fate. i stood at naples once, a night so dark i could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. so may the truth be flashed out by one blow, and guido see, one instant, and be saved.[ ] no such violence of retribution is here necessary. to the more finely tempered nature another fate. the choice between flesh and spirit having been decided, henceforth for the flesh the things of the flesh; for the spirit those of the spirit. the line of demarcation remains unalterable. for him who has chosen "the spirit's fugitive brief gleams," yearning for fuller light and life, for him shall those transitory gleams expand into complete and enduring radiance, and he shall "live indeed." for him who has but employed the spirit as an aid to the gratification of the flesh, using it to star the dome of sky, that flesh may miss no peak, no nook of earth. (ll. - .) for him, as the inevitable outcome of the choice, shall the heaven of spirit be shut; the material world delivered over for the full gratification of the senses. no sudden revelation of terror, no judgment by fire, but the permission-- glut thy sense upon the world: 'tis thine for ever--take it. (ll. - .) the hell designed for this man is one in which externals inevitably take no part. the world and its inhabitants apparently pursue their course, "as they were wont to do," before the time of probation was at an end. the sole difference is to be found in the spiritual outlook. the interest attaching to these things of time is no longer existent; no longer is the soul "visited by god's free spirit." thus is again suggested that central doctrine of browning's creed: the superlative worth of the individual soul in the divine scheme of the universe. "god is, thou art." from this it is only one step to the assurance, the rest is hurled to nothingness for thee. (ll. - .) all upon which the eye rests has become for the spectator but an outward show, to be regarded with the consciousness that his own period of probation is for ever ended. it is, of course, in reference to this result of the judgment that in section xiii the speaker questions the utility of a narration of his story; since if, on the one hand, the listener is actually alive, not to be numbered amongst the outward shows of things, then this fact is proof sufficient of the illusory character of the vision. yet, on the other hand, should the listener be "what i fear," that is, the presentation of a man passed already beyond his probationary phase of existence, then, in good sooth, will the warnings fray no one; (ll. - .) as they will convert no one. with him, the speaker, alone rests the knowledge of the nature of his surroundings, and at times he, too, experiences the old uncertainty as to their true character. and what the results following the judgment? (_a_) at first, joy that all is now free of access where heretofore part only was attainable. _nature_ lies open not merely for the gratification of the senses, but to be studied by aid of science-- i stooped and picked a leaf of fern, and recollected i might learn from books, how many myriad sorts of ferns exist (etc.). (ll. - .) will not the vistas of "earth's resources," thus opening out before the lover of nature, prove composed of "vast exhaustless beauty, endless change of wonder?" yes: but the judgment has taught that which the term of probation failed to teach--that a genuine appreciation of these beauties was even then a possibility. absolute renunciation was not essential to spiritual development: for that alone was needed the insight capable of looking beyond "the gift to the giver," beyond "the finite to infinity." which could recognize in all partial beauty--a pledge of beauty in its plenitude. (ll. - .) the cause of life's failure, justifying condemnation, lay in an acceptance of the means as the end, of the pledge in place of the ultimate fulfilment. now, absolute satiety being attained, the soul's ambition being bounded by the limits of earth, the plenitude of "those who looked above" is not for it. (_b_) but if nature refuses to yield the satisfaction demanded, the seeker for consolation would turn thence to a contemplation of _art_, the works of which he holds as "supplanting," mainly giving worth to nature: art which bears upon it the impress of human labour. and here again recurs the teaching of _andrea del sarto_, of _a toccata of galuppi's_, of _old pictures in florence_, of _rabbi ben ezra_, of _cleon_: in short, of almost any of the more characteristic poems. in so far as these artists, to whom the lover of earth looks for satisfaction in his search for the beautiful, refused to recognize as binding the limitations imposed upon their work by temporary conditions: in so far was a sphere of higher development prepared for and awaiting them elsewhere. undesirous of contemporary appreciation, the true artist is represented as fearing lest judgment should be passed upon that which he realizes to be but the imperfection denoting "perfection hid, reserved in part to grace" that after-time of labour, the existence of which the world ignores. he was afraid his fellow men should give him rank by mere tentatives which he shrank smitten at heart from, all the more, that gazers pressed in to adore. (ll. - .) and the speaker has been amongst the throng of spectators who accepted these "mere tentatives" as the consummation of the artist's powers. thus with art as with nature, "the pledge sufficed his mood." hence, in both relations--failure. enjoyment, enjoyment to the full, of art as of nature was no impossibility, only, here too, with the sensuous gratification should have subsisted also the "spirit's hunger," unsated--not unsatable. (ll. - .) unsated, until the soul's true sphere shall have been attained. now is that judgment pronounced which we find andrea del sarto passing upon himself whilst life and its opportunities yet remained his. deride their choice now, thou who sit'st outside. (ll. - .) their choice, whose guide has been "the spirit's fugitive brief gleams." so says andrea of his fellow artists in florence-- themselves, i know, reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, * * * * * my works are nearer heaven, but i sit here.[ ] (_c_) nature and art have then alike failed. wherein may the yearnings of the soul discover the satisfaction hitherto denied them? perchance, through a more complete _intellectual development_. mind is best--i will seize mind. (l. .) * * * * * oh, let me strive to make the most of the poor stinted soul, i nipped of budding wings, else now equipped for voyage from summer isle to isle! (ll. - .) here a direct reversal of the theory of bishop blougram, implied by his censure of the traveller whose equipment was ever adapted to the needs of the future to the neglect of existing requirements. this man, the soliloquist of _easter day_, whose lot is now irrevocably confined to earth, recognizes too late the fatal character of the mistake perpetrated in "nipping the budding wings": realizes that, as an inevitable result, the course of the race and the goal of the ambition are alike limited, henceforth, by an earthly environment. that "the earth's best is but the earth's best." the failure to look above is, in fact, here more disastrous in its results than in either of the earlier instances: since here the possibilities are also greater. through the mind alone may come those intuitions, grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less, making the finite comprehend infinity. (ll. - .) to genius have been granted from time to time glimpses of the spiritual world, made plain in moments of insight, yet not too plain. a world which, during his sojourn on earth, is intended not for man's permanent habitation. a world he must "traverse, not remain a guest in." once capable of continuing a denizen of the spiritual world, the uses of earth as a training-ground would be for that man at an end. he who should so live would become a lazarus, as the arabian physician presents him to us; in dr. westcott's phrase, "not a man, but a sign." brief visions of heaven are vouchsafed, that he who has once seen may "come back and tell the world," himself "stung with hunger" for the fuller light. as in nature, as in art, so, too, here in a more purely intellectual sphere, the pledge is not the plenitude, the symbol not the reality. since highest truth, man e'er supplied, was ever fable on outside. (ll. - .) this, too, left unrealized; hence failure also here. (_d_) the search for sensuous and for intellectual satisfaction having alike failed, is there no refuge for him whose lot is earth in its fulness? yes, there is _love_, love which we saw the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ recognizing as the "sole good of life on earth." so now the wearied soul recalls to mind, in the past, how love repaired all ill, cured wrong, soothed grief, made earth amends with parents, brothers, children, friends. (ll. - .) hence the appeal for "leave to love only," made in full confidence of the divine approval. in place of approval, however, falls the reproof of section xxx: the warning that all now left to the petitioner is "the show of love," since love itself has passed with the judgment. the "semblance of a woman," "departed love," "old memories," now alone survive of that which might have been all in all to the soul during its life's struggle. and here we find the man who has failed through a too exclusive devotion to things temporal taught, by this vision of the final judgment, the truth, at first accepted in _christmas eve_ by the man who had looked through nature to the god of nature, and refused to worship in the "narrow shrines" of the temples made with hands. that love shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it. and i shall behold thee, face to face, o god, and in thy light retrace how in all i loved here, still wast thou![ ] thus the voice of judgment before the easter dawn-- all thou dost enumerate of power and beauty in the world, the mightiness of love was curled inextricably round about. love lay within it and without, to clasp thee. (ll. - .) but we saw the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ ultimately rejecting this universal recognition of love in favour of the narrow shrine of zion chapel: acting, as he believed, with the divine approval. again proof of the dramatic character of the poems. the lesson of life is variously interpreted by its different students. yet even here, where love is at length sought as the supreme good, the voice of _easter day_ proclaims once more--failure--and its cause, the inability to recognize the divine love: the object of search is even now but human love. some semblance of a woman yet, with eyes to help me to forget, shall look on me. (ll. - .) the love of "parents, brothers, children, friends": the seeker has stopped short of pippa's final decision,[ ] "best love of all is god's." why has he failed to realize this until time has passed? why, but because, with cleon, he deemed it "a doctrine to be held by no sane man," that divine love should prove commensurate with divine power; that he "who made the whole," should love the whole, should undergo death in thy stead in flesh like thine. (ll. - .) but this scepticism, based upon the ground that in the gospel story is found "too much love," is illogical, since it suggests by implication the belief of man that his fellow mortals, in whom he daily discerns abundant capacity for ill-will, have been yet capable of inventing a scheme of perfect love such as that involved in the history of the incarnation. the doctrine that this was the divine work is assuredly less difficult of credence than that which assigns it to the invention of the human imagination? disbelief on this the ground of "too much love," revealed in the gospel story, is dealt with also by the evangelist in _a death in the desert_. there, too, is presented a position similar to that occupied by the soliloquist of easter day. through satiety, man has turned round on himself and stands,[ ] which in the course of nature is, to die. when man demanded proof of the existence of a god, the representative of power and will, evidence of all was granted-- and when man questioned, "what if there be love behind the will and might, as real as they?"-- he needed satisfaction god could give, and did give, as ye have the written word. but when the written word no longer sufficed, when (following the argument of this thirtieth section of _easter day_) man believed himself to be the originator of love, when beholding that love everywhere, he reasons, "since such love is everywhere, and since ourselves can love and would be loved, we ourselves make the love, and christ was not." then, asks the evangelist, how shall ye help this man who knows himself, that he must love and would be loved again, yet, owning his own love that proveth christ, rejecteth christ through very need of him? the lamp o'erswims with oil, the stomach flags loaded with nurture, and that man's soul dies.[ ] the soliloquist of _easter day_, experiencing practically the position imagined by st. john, makes (with the opening of section xxxi) a final appeal to the love of god, that he may be permitted to continue in that uncertainty which, in the midst of "darkness, hunger, toil, distress," yet allows room for hope. better the sufferings of unending struggle than the deadly calm of despair. to him who has experienced what satiety may bring, the life of probation offers powerful attractions. whether the vision may have been a reality or the creation of his own imagination, even this uncertainty is preferable to the judgment that shall grudge "no ease henceforth," whilst the soul is "condemned to earth for ever." thus the poem closes with the inevitable demand of the soul for progress, for growth; and the collateral recognition of its present life as a state of probation, hence of essential uncertainty-- only let me go on, go on, still hoping ever and anon to reach one eve the better land! (ll. - .) feeble as is the hope at times, the dawn of easter day yet recalls the boundless possibilities opening out for human nature. and, for the moment at least, faith is paramount; no vague, impersonal belief, but that which looks for its direct inspiration to a living christ. christ rises! mercy every way is infinite,--and who can say? lecture vi christmas eve and easter day (iii) lecture vi christmas eve and easter day (iii) the closer and more unprejudiced the study accorded it, the stronger becomes the conviction of the essentially dramatic character of the composition of both _christmas eve_ and _easter day_. and at first sight it may, to many readers, be matter of regret that this is so: to those readers more especially who had at first rejoiced to discover, in the assertions of the soliloquists, what they held to be an immediate assurance that browning's faith was that form of dogmatic belief which was also theirs. if, in all honesty, we are compelled to renounce our original acceptance of the less complex nature of the poems, what is the worth, it may be asked, of the arguments which would unquestionably, were they the direct expression of the writer's feelings, stamp him as a devout christian, prepared to make even "doubt occasion still more faith"? nevertheless, further reflection minimizes the cause for regret. although we may not accept without question, as browning's own, the criticisms of the soliloquist of _christmas eve_, directed against the arguments of the humanitarian lecturer, or the reasoning of the concluding sections of _easter day_, in favour of belief in the gospel story and in the essentially probationary character of human life; yet that which we have already had occasion to notice as true concerning all dramatic work, is true also here. the expression of the author's own opinions is not necessarily excluded, as it is not necessarily implied. thus, in the present instance, occur not a few passages in which it seems almost impossible that we should be in error in discerning browning's own personality beneath the disguise of the speaker; the immediate expression of his own vital belief, in the theories advanced. and the passages seemingly thus directly inspired are those dealing with the permanent truths of life, which find at once embodiment and limitation in the dogma of various religious bodies. how far such passages may justly be accepted as non-dramatic in character can only be ascertained by reference to and comparison with treatment of these and similar subjects elsewhere in the works. we may not judge from one poem alone as to the writer's intention; evidence so obtained is insufficient. i. in both _christmas eve_ and _easter day_ the most prominent position in the thoughts and dissertations of the soliloquist is necessarily--so the title would suggest--afforded the doctrine of the incarnation. its introduction may not, in the single instance, be incontrovertibly significant as to browning's attitude towards christianity. but, when we find the same subject dealt with repeatedly from different points of view, by speakers widely separated from one another by time, place, nationality, and personal character; and when, in spite of the variety of external conditions, we yet find the arguments employed ever converging towards the same goal; here even the hypercritical student is surely bound to conclude that browning did, indeed, realize, and was anxious to make plain his realization of, the value to the individual life of the belief involved, and of the intelligibility and reasonableness of such belief. to notice a few amongst the numerous aspects in which this doctrine of the incarnation has been presented. in _saul_, the logical inevitableness of its acceptance by the seeker after god, as revealed, first in nature, then in his dealings with humanity, is traced by the seer of a remote past before the historic fact has been accomplished. in _cleon_, the demand for a direct revelation of god in man is the result of the cravings of a nature unable to rest satisfied in the merely deistic creed hitherto responsible for its theories of life. the very pagan character of the treatment of subject by the soliloquist, in this instance, is so handled by the poet as to lend additional force to the negative deductions from the suggestions advanced. in _an epistle of karshish_, once more as in _saul_, the speaker, though an onlooker only where christianity is concerned, is yet a believer in a divine order of the universe, and in a personal god revealed in his creation. the subject of which karshish treats in his letter is no longer, however, as with david, an expectation to be realized in a distant future, but a matter comprehending a series of historic events recently enacted. nevertheless, he too, whilst nominally rejecting the evidence of the witnesses as to fact, forces upon the reader the conviction that not only is it possible, but inevitable, that the "all-great" shall be "the all-loving too"; and must have revealed his love through the life lived by the physician of galilee, whose deeds lazarus reported. later, when that life has become still further a thing of the past, when "what first were guessed as points," have become known as "stars," in _a death in the desert_ are put into the mouth of the dying evangelist, st. john, arguments which reach the final culmination towards which those of david and of cleon alike tended. and st. john, in imagination confronting opponents of christianity, sees not only his own contemporaries, but those of browning: his reasoning would refute not so much the heresy of the gnostics of the first and second centuries of the christian era as the criticisms of german literary men of the nineteenth. and here, too, is attained the same result as that of the foregoing instances--proof of the inevitableness of an incarnation, and of such an incarnation as that of the gospel story, in any definite and clearly formulated scheme of human life. thus then, when we turn to _christmas eve and easter day_ to find again, in the conclusions reached, not only the outcome of the suggestions and arguments of david, of karshish, and of cleon, but, further, a position occupied by the speaker closely akin to that held in imagination by the evangelist; we can hardly fail to be justified in believing that browning cared sufficiently for the subject under consideration to wish to present it to his public in those varying lights which should afford proof of its universal import, and confirm, if possible, credence in its absolute truth. to refuse, indeed, to allow due weight to the evidence thus obtained, would be to neglect the best available opportunities for estimating the true nature of the beliefs of a dramatic author; since it is necessarily by such indirect and comparative methods alone that it is possible to ascertain their character. in this exposition, then, of the fundamental truths of christianity, as set forth by the soliloquist in either poem, we may reasonably believe ourselves to be listening to authorized assertions and arguments. ii. again is the voice of browning himself unmistakably heard in the acceptance by both speakers in _easter day_ (although with different practical results in each case) of the inevitable extinction of faith as a necessary consequence of absolute certainty in matters spiritual. it is, in fact, but another form of the constantly advanced theory of the progressive character of human nature, involving a recognition of the world as a training-ground, mortal life as a probation. a theory finding expression in terms more or less pronounced throughout browning's literary career; from the suggestions, dramatic in form, of _pauline_, , to the direct personal assertions of the _asolando epilogue_ in . whether it be in the _individual_ aspiration of the lover of _pauline_, how should this earth's life prove my only sphere? can i so narrow sense but that in life soul still exceeds it? (ll. - .) or in the final estimate of _the race_ by paracelsus-- upward tending all though weak, like plants in mines which never saw the sun, but dream of him, and guess where he may be, and do their best to climb and get to him. (_par._, v, ll. - .) the same belief, whilst it inspires the utterances of pompilia and of abt vogler, of the grammarian and the lover of _evelyn hope_, is likewise discernible as underlying, though possibly less consciously instigating the reflections of luria and of the organist of _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, of andrea del sarto and of the victim of a prudence outweighing love, in _dîs aliter visum_. and progress is the recognized law of faith as of life. the existence of truth, absolute, does not preclude its gradual revelation and realization. in the _epilogue_ to the _dramatis personae_, browning, by the mouth of the "third speaker," would point out that the lamentation of rénan over a vanished faith is unwarranted by fact since, truth existing in its entirety, the peculiar revelations of truth are adapted to each successive stage of the development of the human race. hence "that face," the vestige even of which the "second speaker" held to be "lost in the night at last," that one face, far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows. a fuller realization of truth has become possible in these later days than in the past of jewish ritual, when the presence of the lord, _in the glory of his cloud_, had filled the house of the lord. of _easter day_ it has been remarked in this connection, "if mr. browning has meant to say ... that religious certainties are required for the undeveloped mind, but that the growing intelligence walks best by a receding light, he denies the positive basis of christian belief."[ ] comparing this criticism with the treatment in _a death in the desert_ of the subject of faith in relation to the incarnation, it becomes sufficiently clear that an acceptance of "the positive basis of christian belief" was to browning's mind perfectly compatible, not indeed with "a receding light," but with that absence of certainty in matters spiritual which the first speaker of _easter day_ accepts as inevitable. and surely the suggestion in _easter day_, as elsewhere in browning, is that the development of the "religious intelligence" is best advanced, not by _a receding light_, but by that ever-increasing illuminative power which shall effect gradually the revelation presented in the vision of the judgment as the work of a moment. the revelation of the true relation between things temporal and spiritual, between the divine and the human. for, whilst st. john bases his arguments upon the central assurance that "god the truth" is, of all things, alone unchangeable, immediately upon the assurance follows the assertion-- man apprehends him newly at each stage whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done.[ ] since "such progress" as is the peculiar characteristic of human nature could no more attend his soul were all it struggles after found at first and guesses changed to knowledge absolute, than motion wait his body, were all else than it the solid earth on every side, where now through space he moves from rest to rest.[ ] thus with christianity itself will [man] give up fire for gold or purple once he knows its worth? could he give christ up were his worth as plain? therefore, i say, to test man, the proofs shift, nor may he grasp that fact like other fact, and straightway in his life acknowledge it, as, say, the indubitable bliss of fire.[ ] the effect on human nature and life of the change of "guesses" to "knowledge absolute" is elsewhere exhibited in concrete form where lazarus, in _an epistle of karshish_, is represented, as browning's imagination would visualize him, in the years succeeding his resurrection from the dead. there the need for faith is accounted as no longer existing. during those four days of the spirit's sojourn beyond the limits of the visible world, the unveiled light of eternity had thrown into their true relative positions the things of time. thenceforth, for him who had once _known_, the hopes and fears attendant upon uncertainty were no longer a possibility. in view of that which is eternal, temporal prosperity or adversity had become of small moment. the advance of a hostile force upon the sacred city, centre of the national life, was to the risen nature an event trifling as "the passing of a mule with gourds." sickness, death, were alike met by the imperturbable "god wills." yet this apparently immovable serenity was at once overthrown by contact with "ignorance and carelessness and sin." to the non-christian onlooker, the attitude thus attained was attributable to the peculiar condition of life by which heaven was opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven. the man capable of this two-fold vision had indeed become but "a sign," noteworthy it is true, yet of little value as a practical example to his fellows, since what held good in this single and unprecedented case must be of no avail as a criterion for the multitude. the importance, as an educative instrument, of the demands on faith made by the absence of overwhelmingly conclusive and unalterable evidence in matters spiritual, is again illustrated in that remarkable little poem _fears and scruples_, following _easter day_ after an interval of more than a quarter of a century (pub. ). the writer there declares his personal preference for the condition of life ultimately the choice of the first speaker, in which uncertainty may admit of hope, even though the future should prove such hope fallacious. the old theory is advanced beneath the illustration of relationship to an absent friend, proofs of whose affection, of whose very existence, rest upon the evidence of letters, the genuineness of which has been called in question by experts. nevertheless, the friend at home, the soliloquist of the poem, refuses to yield credence to calumny. his faith in the friend, if misplaced, has been hitherto a source of spiritual elevation and inspiration. even though the truth be ultimately proved but falsehood, he is yet the better for those days in which he deemed it truth. therefore, one thing's sure enough: 'tis neither frost, no, nor fire, shall freeze or burn from out me thanks for truth--though falsehood, gained--though lost. all my days, i'll go the softlier, sadlier, for that dream's sake! how forget the thrill through and through me as i thought "the gladlier lives my friend because i love him still!" the parallel is enforced by the suggestion at the close-- hush, i pray you! what if this friend happen to be--god? (_f. and s._, viii, ix, xii.) iii. in considering the position of the first speaker in _easter day_, we have already noticed the character of the final judgment, the nature of the hell designed for the punishment of him who had chosen the things of the flesh in preference to the things of the spirit.--a hell consisting in absolute future exclusion from opportunities of spiritual satisfaction and development.--a judgment which we remarked in passing, as peculiarly characteristic in its conception of browning's usual treatment of matters relative to the spiritual life of man. in _ferishtah's fancies_, we are able to obtain direct confirmation of this suggestion, with reference to the subject actually in question. in reading this collection of poems, the work of the author's later life (pub. ), we hardly need his warning (or so at least we believe) to avoid the assumption that "there is more than a thin disguise of a few persian names and allusions." sheltering himself thus behind the imagined personality of the persian historian, browning, in his seventy-second year, gave freer utterance than was customary with him to his own opinions and beliefs touching certain momentous questions of life and faith. _a camel-driver_ is devoted to a discussion of the doctrine of judgment and future punishment of the sins committed in the flesh. ferishtah, as dervish, submits that here, as in all allied matters, man with finite capacities cannot conceive of the infinite purpose. knowing "but man's trick to teach," he does but reason from the character of his own dealings, in this respect, with the animals, as creatures of lower intelligence, employed in his service. the general conclusions from the arguments thus deduced are, in brief: ( ) the punishment as regards the sufferer is not designed to be retributive only, but remedial and reformatory in character. ( ) with respect to the sinner and his fellow mortals, it must be deterrent. ( ) hence, to be effective, its infliction should be immediate rather than future. by postponement, the exemplary effect of punishment is rendered void: the connection between offence and penalty is obscured, and sympathy with the sufferer will result, rather than avoidance of the offence for which the suffering is inflicted. such is the estimate by ferishtah, or browning, of the punishment of a future hell of fire. from a merely human point of view it is illogical. for the purification of the sinner, or for the admonition of the onlooker, it is alike useless. and the deduction? man can but work and, therefore, teach as man, and not as god. at best he may but see a little way into the eternal purpose: into that portion alone which is revealed through the experiences of mortal life. here he must be content to rest without further speculation. before man's first, and after man's poor last, god operated, and will operate, is the assertion of reason. to which adds ferishtah, process of which man merely knows this much,-- that nowise it resembles man's at all, teaching or punishing. for the character of the divine process:--as in _easter day_, so here the penalty is immediately adjusted to the peculiar requirements of the nature to be "taught or punished." to the man of spiritual discernment, of right thought and purpose, but of imperfect performance, no hell is needed beyond that to be found in the comparison of the might-have-been with the has-been and the is. and in this sadness of retrospect are to be remembered, too, the sins of ignorance; even forgiveness is powerless to efface wholly the misery of remorse. thus shall omnipotence deal with the individual soul. thus does the work of judgment and of education differ essentially from that of man who "lumps his kind i' the mass," passing upon the mass sentence, involving a uniformity of punishment, which must fall in individual cases with varying degrees of intensity, by no means proportionate to the magnitude of the offences committed. that which to the sensitive soul is torture unfathomable, to the "bold and blind" is as naught. by some other method must be forced on _him_ the recognition and realization of past sin. terror may "burn in the truth," where the recollection of irremediable evil has failed to create remorse. only a mind incapable of spiritual discernment would award a similar penalty for a life's faults of omission and commission to the several inmates of the morgue, and to the onlooker who would see, in the temporary despair which had caused the end, failure apparent, not absolute. for his part he could but deem that the misery which had resulted in an overwhelming abhorrence of life had, in itself, been punishment sufficient; he could but think "their sin's atoned."[ ] yet in his own case, even though he held that "we fall to rise," those falls from which no human life may be wholly exempt, were in themselves cause more than adequate for remorseful anguish without the super-addition of external penalty: forgiveness? rather grant forgetfulness! the past is past and lost. however near i stand in his regard, so much the nearer had i stood by steps offered the feet which rashly spurned their help. that i call hell; why further punishment?[ ] iv. so far we have only treated of conclusions which, by comparison with other poems obviously dramatic, and with his more avowedly confessed opinions elsewhere, we have felt ourselves justified in accepting as browning's own. turning to the questions yet remaining for consideration, we are upon more debatable ground. but here, too, pursuing similar methods, we may expect the results to be also decisive in so far as our means of investigation will allow. to what extent did personal feeling influence the criticism of roman catholic ritual contained in _christmas eve_? in what degree may browning be held to have sympathized with the final decision in favour of the creed of zion chapel? an answer to the first question involves at least a partial answer to the second. browning's attitude, could it be accurately estimated, towards roman catholicism, might be decisive as to how far it was possible for him to concur in the conclusions attributed to the soliloquist as the result of his night's experience. with regard to external evidence touching browning's opinions on any given question, it is usually of so conflicting a character as to leave us still in the condition of mental indecision in which we began the enquiry. in the present instance we have the report to which reference has been already made of the author's own assertion respecting _bishop blougram's apology_; that he intended no hostility, and felt none towards the roman catholic church. on the other side of the argument has to be reckoned the reply to miss barrett's wish, expressed in the early days of their acquaintance, that he would give direct utterance to his own opinions, not sheltering himself behind his various _dramatis personae_. whilst promising to accede to the request, he adds, "i don't think i shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about popes and imaginative religions that i must say." this correspondence took place five years before _christmas eve and easter day_ was published. to the year of publication is to be referred the author's satirical observation on the premature proclivities evinced by his infant son, during a visit to siena, towards church interiors and ritual. "it is as well," he remarked, "to have the eye-teeth and the puseyistical crisis over together." of this comment writes professor dowden, to whom we have been recently indebted for so much valuable light on browning's life and work: "although no more than a passing word spoken in play [it] gives a correct indication of browning's feeling, fully shared by his wife, towards the religious movement in england, which was altering the face of the established church. 'puseyism' was for them a kind of child's play, which unfortunately had religion for its playground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger."[ ] it was, indeed, as we have already had occasion to notice, in the nature of things unlikely that browning should have remained uninfluenced by the spirit of anxiety and unrest, agitating the minds of english churchmen of all grades of thought during the years which succeeded the tractarian movement. that this should have led him to assume an attitude of distrust towards the roman catholic church is hardly matter for surprise; that it was one of hostility he himself denies. and it is a satisfaction to believe that _the pope_ section of _the ring and the book_ was the more matured expression of his feeling in this connection. the most valuable _internal_ evidence on the subject is probably to be derived from a comparison of this poem and _bishop blougram's apology_, with section x-xii, and xxii of _christmas eve_. in _bishop blougram's apology_, as in _the pope_, all direct reference to the church is made from _within_, not from _without_. the speaker is no critical onlooker, but, as we have seen, a prelate noted alike for his ultramontane tendencies, and for the breadth of his views with regard to the adaptability of his church to the developments of contemporary intellectual life. this man is a leading member of the religious community for which browning is accused of having in _christmas eve_ expressed his aversion. but, although a leading member, he is not therefore to be judged as a typical representative; his marked individuality being doubtless a main cause of the author's choice of subject. and what does this man say in defence of his church? he points out that a profession before the world of faith, clearly defined and absolute, is essential to his influence and authority. whatever the searchings of heart, the doubts and questionings inevitable to a keenly logical and analytic intellect, these must be concealed, lest the priest should be accounted a pretender, his profession a cloak of hypocrisy. his belief in the latest ecclesiastical miracle must be as avowedly absolute as that in a god as creator and supreme ruler of the universe. thus he stands firm upon the ground which he has chosen. the question is throughout a personal one, and the implication is clearly not intended that the roman catholic church would _necessarily_ demand of its members this implicit credence, would thus closely fetter the intellectual faculties. turning to _christmas eve_, we find the case reversed, and the soliloquist occupying the position of one of those outsiders to whom the bishop believed himself compelled to present an unquestioning and unquestionable orthodoxy. for the prelate is substituted the man of active critical instinct, inclined to pass judgment with data insufficient to prove a satisfactory basis for the decision: of perceptions readily responsive to the glories of nature and their inspiration: but, we surely are not wrong in adding, of imaginative faculty unequal to the realization of those spiritual suggestions afforded to minds of different calibre by the symbolism of a ritualistic worship. the solemn silence of the vast crowd assembled in the cathedral makes stronger appeal to his sympathies than does the gorgeous display of ritual following. hence it is a not illogical outcome of the position that he will but hear in the music of the service "hog-grunts and horse-neighings" that he will but see in the ceremonial observed "buffoonery--posturings and petticoatings." this man of spiritual and intellectual capacity so far developed is yet numbered amongst the congregation of the calvinistic meeting-house, where the preacher is without erudition, the flock of mental outlook metaphorically as limited as the space bounded by the four walls within which they are assembled. how is the presence of this presumably unsympathetic personality to be accounted for in their midst? how otherwise than by the recognition of this peculiar deficiency in the nature which, whilst leaving it capable of looking directly upwards to the god of all creeds, yet renders it unable, in looking downwards, to see below the surface, and realize the worth of symbolism in worship where spiritual insight is not of the keenest. the utterance of the _third speaker_ of the _epilogue_[ ] may well be his as he awaits the coming of the vision on the common without the chapel: why, where's the need of temple, when the walls o' the world are that? and in his anxiety to avoid the "narrow shrines" of man's erection, he is ultimately driven to worship at one of the narrowest, chosen because the veil of ritual there interposed between the worshipper and his god is of the thinnest. the urgency of the desire to be freed from all outward ceremonial causes him to overlook the real faults of spiritual pride and exclusiveness characteristic of the calvinistic congregation. true of heart, he would reject all shows of things; but there is in his nature a puritanic strain which refuses to be eradicated, and this it is which finally leads him to become a member of the religious community whose failings he at first unsparingly condemned. v. no stronger proof of the dramatic power of the poem is, perhaps, to be found than that afforded by the criticism quoted below, to which it has seemed almost impossible to avoid reference, bearing as it does the highest literary authority. browning appears here to be regarded as occupying the position assigned by him to the soliloquist, so completely has he succeeded in identifying himself with his _dramatis persona_. "of english nonconformity in its humblest forms browning can write, as it were, from within" [the soliloquist has become a member of the calvinistic congregation when he narrates his experiences]; "he writes of roman catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside" [the position literally and metaphorically assigned to the critic on the threshold-stone of st. peter's]; "his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in st. peter's at rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling" [may not the sympathy capable of inspiring the closing lines of section x be taken as indicative of something deeper than this?]. "for a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find, indeed, that love is also here, and therefore christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under 'rome's gross yoke,' are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings.... and this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, 'not to speak of trying to climb.' such a short and easy method of dealing with roman catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as browning without being as crude as he is in misconception. he does not seriously consider the catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. it is enough for him to declare his own creed, which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the divine as an obstruction or a veil." then after quoting the passage describing the soliloquist's final choice: "this was the creed of milton and of bunyan; and yet with both milton and bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means, not of concealing, but revealing the things of the spirit."[ ] was it not just this inability to seriously consider the things of sense as made luminous by the spirit which browning wishes to represent as accounting for the otherwise unaccountable presence of the man of culture and intellect in zion chapel? surely to the characteristic weaknesses of the soliloquist, not to the crude misconception of the author, is attributable the intolerance of the criticism, whether directed, as in the earlier sections, against the congregation of zion chapel, or, in the later, against that of st. peter's? this belief in the strength of the dramatic element in _christmas eve_ is confirmed when we turn to _the ring and the book_, and the question suggests itself--would the critic of the earlier poem have been capable of representing any member of the church which he condemns in the light in which browning gives us innocent xii? a nature to which is possible in age the purity and simplicity of a childlike personal faith. o god, who shall pluck sheep thou holdest, from thy hand? (_the pope_, ll. - .) of a tenderness which yearns in memory over the defenceless member of his flock, lately the victim of brutality and disappointed avarice. pompilia, then as now perfect in whiteness.... (ll. - .) ... my flower, my rose, i gather for the breast of god. (ll. - .) with tenderness is coupled that humility which can say to this child of the faith: go past me and get thy praise,--and be not far to seek presently when i follow if i may! (ll. - .) * * * * * stoop thou down, my child, give one good moment to the poor old pope heart-sick at having all his world to blame. (ll. - .) yet, in spite of the heart-sickness, is present also the moral rectitude which refuses to shrink from the task demanding fulfilment--the censure of "all his world"--from the archbishop who repulsed the injured wife's appeal for protection, "the hireling who did turn and flee," through the entire list of offenders to the "fox-faced, horrible priest, this brother-brute, the abate," and the chief criminal, guido, for whom also his friends would claim clerical immunity from the penalty attaching to his offence. realizing to the full the character of his office, the weight of authority and historical continuity lying behind, the old pope might well be tempted to grant to the miscreants that shelter which they crave. but the very fact which leads him to magnify the dignity of his official position, "next under god," leads him also to recognize the immensity of personal responsibility attaching thereto. the sentence to be passed is the outcome of a _personal_ decision. how should i dare die, this man let live? yet whilst laying bare before his mental vision the evils existent in his church, obvious alike in the individual even though he should himself "have armed and decked him for the fight"; and in the communal life of convent and monastery; whilst rejoicing that caponsacchi should have had the necessary courage to break through ecclesiastical convention and let light into the world through that irregular breach o' the boundary: (ll. - .) he yet points to the strength of the church as safeguarding, by her rule as "a law of life," those whose natural impulses may not be relied on to lead them to follow the course of caponsacchi, and to whom it would not be safe to grant the permission: "ask _your_ hearts as _i_ asked mine." to these and such as these the law of life laid down by the church's rule is essential. whatever the traditions of the past, whatever the possibilities of ecclesiastical modifications and developments in the future, in the present no considerations of personal interest or compassion must be permitted to warp the judgment of him who is armed with paul's sword as with peter's key. and it is to be remembered, that the man who could thus reason, thus decide, was head of that church which excited the mocking condemnation of the soliloquist of _christmas eve_: and that caponsacchi, "the warrior-priest, the soldier-saint," bore likewise the title of canon. to so remember may serve to cast new light upon browning's supposed attitude towards roman catholicism. vi. the most important subject of discussion in relation to _easter day_ is that touching its so-called asceticism. here also, as in _christmas eve_, two interdependent questions must be asked: ( ) what is the _nature_ of the asceticism advocated by the first speaker? ( ) how far may it be regarded as the expression of browning's own theory of life? a plain answer to the first question is necessary in order that, by comparison with the treatment of the same subject elsewhere, it may be possible to determine the extent to which the opinions advanced are in agreement: whether browning was desirous of advocating renunciation even in the degree held essential by the first speaker. the key to the position seems to be contained in two recorded comments on the poem by the poet and his wife. when mrs. browning complained of the "asceticism," her husband answered, that it stated "_one side_ of the question." her supplementary observation adds, "it is his way to _see_ things as passionately as other people _feel_ them."[ ] it was by the exercise of this exceptionally powerful imaginative faculty that the author of _easter day_ has dramatically stated the case which he perceived might be made out for renunciation, as well as for grateful acceptance and enjoyment of the gifts of life. if we admit the accuracy of the criticism which would define the spirit of the poem as refusing to recognize, "in poetry or art, or the attainments of the intellect, or even in the best human love, any practical correspondence with religion,"[ ] then indeed we are bound to acknowledge that it stands absolutely alone in browning's work and is in direct opposition to his theory of life. i venture to think, however, that a careful study of this particular aspect of the poem will result in the conviction that the first speaker is represented as realizing that, desirable as is renunciation in his own case, it is not the highest course possible to human nature. sections viii, xvi, xx, xxiv, xxx, are those which deal chiefly with this question of asceticism. taken in sequence, they present in outline the history of the spiritual life of the first speaker. this it is desirable to notice very briefly before comparing the rule of life thus indicated with that suggested by references to browning's work elsewhere. in section viii is depicted the attitude of the first speaker towards the gospel story; the attitude of "the fighter" who would not only wrestle with evil, but would search for any possibly existent danger and bring it to light (section xiv). to such a nature the intellectual belief in the incarnation--"the all-stupendous tale--that birth, that life, that death!" is productive of heartstruck horror: whilst for a practical acceptance of the faith, life must be regulated in accordance with scriptural teaching, expressed in certain words, broad, plain, uttered again and yet again, hard to mistake or overgloss--(_e. d._, viii, ll. - .) words which declare that the loss of things temporal is the gain of things spiritual and eternal. but the asceticism thus advocated does not find full explanation until section xxx. the gradual revelation begins with section xvi where, before judgment has been pronounced from without, conscience passes sentence upon itself; realizing that that which it had deemed in life a mere temporizing, had in fact been a final choice. that, dallying with the good things of life, whilst believing renunciation the higher course, had meant a practical decision in favour of things temporal to the exclusion of things spiritual. in that exclusion lay the error. and the recognition of failure here is in entire accordance with browning's usual attitude towards life. condemnation is merited not on account of indulgence, but because that indulgence had meant running counter to the convictions of the man who held that, for him, renunciation was the higher course. not possessing the courage of his opinions, he had chosen that which he recognized as the lower course, the path of compromise: enjoyment in the present, renunciation before it was too late. therefore for him who had so chosen--the hell of satiety. now, as we have already noticed,[ ] the experience of the results of the judgment tended to exhibit the true worth, both absolute and relative, of the things amid which life had been hitherto passed. satiety checked enjoyment of the beauties of nature. why should this be? in section xxiv is given the answer: all partial beauty was a pledge of beauty in its plenitude. but, engrossed in contemplation of the partial beauty the spectator had found that "the pledge sufficed [his] mood." therefore, the plenitude was not for him, but for those only who had looked above and beyond the pledge, seeking that of which it was a proof. and in each of the successive attempts towards happiness by an appeal to art, and to the exercise of the higher intellectual faculties, the same explanation of failure is vouchsafed by the judge. the symbol has been accepted for the reality, the pledge for the fulfilment. after the final choice has been made in favour of love, "leave to love only," the fuller explanation follows; the secret of life's success or failure. failure through the inability to recognize the divine love in the visible creation, or in the more immediate revelation to man: in either case ample proof being afforded to him who had eyes to see, intelligence to grasp, and heart to respond to the love so taught. yet the soliloquist of _easter day_ had proved himself incapable of such recognition of the highest truth. the world of sense had been used not to subserve but to supersede the world of spirit. to the nature which thus found in all externals a temptation to rest content with "the level and the night," asceticism was as essential to the preservation of the spiritual life as, under certain conditions, amputation may be to the preservation of physical life. but it must not be overlooked that the necessity for amputation implies the existence of mortal disease. hence, whilst realizing this personal necessity for renunciation, the speaker recalls the teaching of the divine judge of the vision as pointing to a higher standard of life for him who should be able to attain to it. a life in which all things should be not avoided as a snare, but accepted as cause for thankfulness; the relation of the gift to the giver being recognized as constituting its primary value. to the lover of the beautiful is pointed out how all thou dost enumerate of power and beauty in the world, the mightiness of love was curled inextricably round about. love lay within it and without, to clasp thee,--but in vain! (_e. d._, xxx, ll. - .) in this passage may be found the solution to the whole question of the asceticism advocated. when the love thus expressed had been realized, the step was not a difficult one to the acceptance of the fuller revelation of love in the incarnation. and in this realization the highest aspect of life temporal would have been reached. love, not abrogating the law would have served as its fulfilment. as the statements of bishop blougram are personal in relation to the treatment of doubt, so the speaker in _easter day_ would make out a case for personal asceticism. not advocating it as the ideal universal course, he would yet claim for it highest value as safeguarding his individual life. to him who is incapable of moderation, renunciation may become a necessity; yet, through renunciation, may be attained that higher life consisting in a grateful enjoyment and generous communication of all gifts of the divine love. of the other poems dealing with this subject indirectly or directly, _paracelsus_, , _rabbi ben ezra_, , _ferishtah's fancies_, , are sufficiently representative of the different periods of the poet's literary life to render them valuable as illustrations of his mode of treatment. in the last, at least, we may be fairly confident that the decision given is his own. in one aspect _paracelsus_ may be regarded as the history of a man of genius who marked out for himself a career of complete asceticism; of work apart from human sympathy, love, and friendship, as well as from all gratifications of the flesh. and the scheme was pursued unflinchingly--for a time--until the inevitable reaction set in, spirit and flesh alike avenging themselves for their temporary suppression. not only are love and friendship found claiming their own, but a host of petty wild delights, undreamed of or spurned before, (_par._, iii, ll. - .) offer themselves to supply the place of what the earlier ascetic, in a moment of despairing self-contempt, terms his "dead aims." the declaration at colmar is made whilst the influence of reaction still prevails. i will accept all helps; all i despised so rashly at the outset, equally with early impulses, late years have quenched. * * * * * all helps! no one sort shall exclude the rest. (_par._, iv, ll. - .) only when he has learned from experience that human nature is not to be developed through suppression, that "its sign and note and character" are "love, hope, fear, faith"--that "these make humanity," only then can he fearlessly, as in youth, "press god's lamp to [his] breast," assured of the divine guidance and protection. _sordello_, so closely allied to _paracelsus_ in time of composition (pub. , begun before _strafford_, ), demands a brief reference since it has been especially singled out for notice in this connection as constituting "an indirect vindication of the conceptions of human life which _christmas eve and easter day_ condemns."[ ] in the _sixth book of sordello_ the question of renunciation has become imminent and practical. it is the moment for decision. the imperial badge which he tells his soul "would suffer you improve your now!" must be accepted or rejected: and with it the attendant temporal advantages. but the reflections occupying the poet's mind, at this crisis of his fate, are akin to those following the vision of the judgment in _easter day_. why not enjoy life to the full? why treat it as a mere ante-room to the palace at the door of which stands the usher, death? even accepting the simile i, for one, will praise the world, you style mere ante-room to palace. * * * * * oh, 'twere too absurd to slight for the hereafter the to-day's delight.[ ] yet the thought recurs, how often has the cup of life been set aside by "sage, champion, martyr," to whom had been revealed the secret of that which "masters life." to what causes is attributable the failure which he recognizes in reviewing his own past? the soul, true inhabitant of the infinite, has been unable to adapt itself to its lodgment in the body fitted, by its constitution, for time only. sorrow has been the inevitable result of the soul's attempts at subjecting the body to its use. sorrow to be avoided only when the employer shall match the thing employed, fit to the finite his infinity.[ ] some solution of the difficulty there must assuredly be. the question of _sordello_ is in different form the question of the soliloquist of _easter day_-- must life be ever just escaped which should have been enjoyed?[ ] and the answer?-- nay, might have been and would, each purpose ordered right--the soul's no whit beyond the body's purpose under it.[ ] yet the struggle ends in _renunciation_, and salinguerra arrives to find sordello dead, "under his foot the badge": but still, palma said, a triumph lingering in the wide eyes.[ ] in _rabbi ben ezra_ a more material conception of life is to be expected from the change in the personality of the soliloquist. the jewish rabbi of the twelfth century takes the place of the mantuan poet of the thirteenth. the rabbi also recognizes the limitations imposed by the body upon the development of the soul. pleasant is this flesh, our soul, in its rose-mesh pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest. (_r. b. e._, xi.) * * * * * thy body at its best, how far can that project thy soul on its lone way? (viii.) yet, since "gifts should prove their use," he would, in so far as may be, utilize the body for the advancement of the soul. let us not always say "spite of the flesh to-day i strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" as the bird wings and sings, let us cry "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" (xii.) in this complete co-operation of spirit and flesh--if attainable--might be found a satisfactory answer to sordello's question concerning the possibility of that use of life which should prove a legitimate enjoyment of its gifts, no mere avoidance of its snares. the parable of _the two camels of ferishtah's fancies_ is employed to again introduce the subject of asceticism and its uses. the conclusions there reached differ, perhaps, rather in degree than in kind from those which have gone before. not asceticism, but enjoyment develops best the faculties of man. the perfect achievement of the work allotted him is the object of his existence. hence the admonition, dare refuse no help thereto, since help refused is hindrance sought and found. the decision, however, goes a step further than that of _easter day_ where it is noticeable that the professing christian, who objects to an examination of the basis of his faith, appears to have no anxiety respecting the world at large. the salvation of his individual soul is that which alone concerns him, and pretty well limits his outlook on life temporal and eternal. in _the two camels_, ferishtah, in rejecting asceticism as a mode of life, looks not to its personal effects only, but to those influences which he is bound to transmit to his fellow men. to become a joy-giving medium, individual experience of joy is, he claims, essential, and to be best acquired through a free and grateful acceptance, and a reasonable enjoyment of the blessings of earth. just as i cannot, till myself convinced, impart conviction, so, to deal forth joy adroitly, needs must i know joy myself. renounce joy for my fellows' sake? that's joy beyond joy; but renounced for mine, not theirs? * * * * * no, son: the richness hearted in such joy is in the knowing what are gifts we give, not in a vain endeavour not to know![ ] that, i believe, we must take as browning's final word on the subject. does it differ so widely from the teaching of _easter day_? surely not? the man who feared to enjoy earth lest earth should prove a snare, was taught by the final judgment that, to a nature of higher capacity, might be possible that full enjoyment of life comprehended in the use of all good things as opportunities for soul-enlargement. an enjoyment following immediately upon the discovery that in all of power and beauty in the world, the mightiness of love was curled inextricably round about. lecture vii la saisiaz lecture vii la saisiaz the peculiar interest attaching to _christmas eve and easter day_ is wholly absent from _la saisiaz_; for here is no uncertainty as to the identity of the speaker, no soliloquist interposed between the author and his public. the dramatic interest absent, the personal interest is, however, proportionately stronger. as in _prospice_ the closing lines are unmistakably the outcome of an overwhelming torrent of feeling, so in the later poem the problems demanding consideration have been forced into prominence by the events of the hour; and the mourner, who was "ever a fighter," will not rest until he has confronted them, and has done all that may be fairly and honestly done towards the settlement of tormenting doubts and fears. thus, in _la saisiaz_, we get, perhaps, the sole example in browning's work of a direct attempt on his part to give to the world a rational and sustained argument, resulting in his personal decision as to the questions immediately involved; the immortality of the soul and the relation of its future to its present phase of existence. it is to this deliberate design that the striking difference in character of these two similarly inspired poems may be mainly attributable: that the joyful assurance of _prospice_ is succeeded by the reasoned hope of _la saisiaz_. the mourner hesitates to launch himself upon the waves of faith until he has argued the questions before him in so far as they are capable of argument. for the confidence of _prospice_ that the fiend-voices that rave _shall_ dwindle, _shall_ blend, _shall_ change, _shall_ become ... a peace out of pain: we have the hope of _la saisiaz_, no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope. (l. .) in place of the triumphant certainty of future reunion, o thou soul of my soul! i _shall_ clasp thee again, is the answering query--sole response to the question as to mutual recognition in another world can it be, and must, and will it? (l. .) but the problems of _la saisiaz_ are not capable of solution by argument; there comes a stage at which it is inevitable that faith must supplement and succeed the reasoning powers of the intellect. "man's truest answer" is, after all, but human: the finite may not grasp the infinite; and, looking upon the infinite as revealed through nature, man can but reflect how were it did god respond? it is the necessary failure in the attainment of a satisfactory conclusion by ratiocinative methods alone which causes the apparent uncertainty: apparent rather than actual, since, wherever in the course of the discussion feeling is allowed free exercise, there faith--or hope--prevails. in _prospice_, reasoning offers no check to the emotions, and faith holds complete sway. though faith and reason are no antagonistic forces, the ventures of faith must yet transcend the powers of reason, and reasoning, whilst it may define, is incapable of limiting the province of faith, since even "true doctrine is not an end in itself: it cannot carry us beyond the region of the intellect.... all formulas are of the nature of outlines: they define by exclusion as well as by comprehension; and no object in life is isolated. our premisses in spiritual subjects, therefore, are necessarily incomplete, and even logical deductions from them may be false."[ ] but whatever the intellectual questionings and uncertainties occurring in the course of the poem itself, the prologue is a pure lyric of spiritual triumph. though actually the outcome of the premises preceding and the conclusions following the argument between fancy and reason, no suggestion of effort is apparent in the joyous song of the soul freed from the trammels of the body to "wander at will," in the fruition of its fuller life. the reference to its mortal tenement recalls no painful element in the process of material decay; only autumn woods, the glowing colours of fading leaves and mosses. waft of soul's wing! what lies above? sunshine and love, skyblue and spring! body hides--where? ferns of all feather, mosses and heather, yours be the care! of the circumstances immediately giving rise to this personal expression of feeling the briefest notice will suffice, the bare facts being stated beneath the title in the latest edition of the works; whilst for the details necessary to fill in the outline, we have only to turn to the poem itself, reading the first lines. miss egerton-smith was one of browning's oldest women friends, but it was not until many years after their first meeting in florence that their intercourse seems to have become a really important factor in the lives of both: when, after the return to england following his wife's death, the poet temporarily established himself in london with his sister as housekeeper. miss egerton-smith would appear to have been of a nature not readily responsive to the demands of ordinary social intercourse; a nature likely to make special appeal to the man who saw in imperfection, perfection hid, and in complete temporal adaptability the exclusion of possibilities of future growth. hence we find him writing in the moment of bereavement: you supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: may be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. but more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand --maybe, throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,-- treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue. disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice, prove i knew an alpine-rose which all beside named edelweiss? (ll. - .) at the time of the chief intercourse between the two friends, browning's health rendered it necessary for him to leave england during a part of each year, and for four successive summers miss egerton-smith had been the companion of the brother and sister in their foreign sojourns, when that of was interrupted by her sudden death from heart disease on the night of september th. the villa "la saisiaz" (in the savoyard dialect "the sun"), at which the party was staying, was situated above geneva, and almost immediately beneath la salève, the summit of which was the destination of the expedition occupying miss egerton-smith's thoughts at the time of her death. the shock to her friends was wholly unexpected, as she had been in better health than was usual to her during the days immediately preceding. to browning it would appear to have been at first overwhelming. it was not long, however, before the emotional and intellectual faculties were sufficiently under control to render the arguments of _la saisiaz_ a possibility. when he added the concluding lines in "london's mid-november," only six weeks had elapsed since that "summons" in the swiss village which had meant for him temporary bereavement of affection and friendship. _a._ the first lines of the poem proper--exclusive of the prologue--constitute a prelude to the formal debate conducted between fancy and reason, designed as a rational and logical course of argument by which the writer would assure himself of the immortality of the soul as a no less reasonable hypothesis than is the self-evident fact of the mortality of the body: that the assumption with which instinct forces him to start is also the goal to which reason ultimately draws him. the assumption-- that's collonge, henceforth your dwelling. all the same, howe'er disjoints past from present, no less certain you are here, not there. (ll. - .) the conclusion--that even though o'er our heaven again cloud closes ... hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom. (ll. - .) line may be not unfitly taken as significant of the whole course of thought what will be the morning glory, when at dusk thus gleams the lake? (i) the first part of the prelude (if we may so call it), occupying lines, calls for little more comment than that already necessitated by the foregoing consideration of the circumstances giving rise to the poem. (ii) in taking the solitary walk to the summit of la salève five days after miss egerton-smith's death, the poet recalls the circumstances of their last climb together; and as he stands looking down upon collonge, that final resting-place of the body, the question recurs-- here i stand: but you--where? the heart has already assured itself that, in spite of the occupation of that dwelling-place at collonge, the certainty remains, "you are here, not there." but this assurance has proved transitory as the feeling which engendered it. no "mere surmise" will suffice concerning a matter "the truth of which must rest upon no legend, that is no man's experience but our own."[ ] so to the author of _la saisiaz_ the suggestion as to proofs of spiritual survival presents itself only to be rejected. what though i nor see nor hear them? others do, the proofs abound! such second-hand evidence is inadmissible. my own experience--that is knowledge. (l. .) * * * * * knowledge stands on my experience: all outside its narrow hem, free surmise may sport and welcome! (ll. - .) here, as with the uncompromising investigator of _easter day_, the fact that credence in a certain tenet is desirable, is advantageous, proves cause for rejection rather than acceptance. all evidence must be sifted with the utmost care. thus the question is stated in line , the answer, or attempted answer to which, is to occupy the entire poem-- does the soul survive the body? the second part of the question is on a different platform-- is there god's self, no or yes? the existence of god is accepted at the outset of the enquiry as a premise on which the subsequent argument may be based: as is also the existence of the soul: it is the condition of immortality alone which is to be proved. and the poet puts the question, determined to face the truth--whether it meets his "hopes or fears." it would be difficult to find a more characteristic assertion of browning's usual attitude than that of lines - . weakness never need be falseness: truth is truth in each degree --thunderpealed by god to nature, whispered by my soul to me. (iii) but the events of the preceding days have converted the abstract enquiry, "does the soul survive the body?" into one of vital personal import. was ending ending once and always, when you died? (l. .) hence suggests itself the further question, a necessary sequel to the first. if death is not the ending of the soul's life, what is the _nature_ of that immortality, the actuality of which the speaker seeks to establish? we have already seen cleon emphatically repudiating the theory of protus as to the satisfaction afforded by a vicarious immortality, "what thou writest, paintest, stays: that does not die." equally unsatisfactory to human nature is the suggestion in the present instance of a prolongation and renewal of life by influences transmitted to succeeding generations. and yet is the certainty of the thirteenth century possible to the nineteenth? "phrase the solemn tuscan fashioned." i believe and i declare-- certain am i--from this life i pass into a better, there where that lady lives of whom enamoured was my soul. with this assurance all would be well. (iv) now, the mere possibility of propounding questions such as the foregoing, involves the existence of that which asks, and of that to which the enquiry is addressed with at least an anticipation, however vague, of obtaining an answer. in other words, the existence of an intelligent being and an external source of intelligence to which its questionings are directed. these are the only facts on which the speaker would insist as a basis for subsequent argument: but of the certainty of these he is absolutely assured. that their existence is beyond proof he holds as testimony to their reality. call this--god, then, call that--soul, and both--the only facts for me. prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving, proves them such: fact it is i know i know not something which is fact as much. (ll. - .) god and the soul. the primary fact of life and that which is dependent on the primary. that the soul knows not whence it came nor whither it goes is no argument against either its existence and immortality, or the existence and omnipotent and omniscient control of a divine being. the relative positions of the rush and the stream lend themselves to the illustration of this assertion. whatever the purpose of life, it is yet possible that man should exist without possessing assured knowledge concerning his future destiny. all that the rush may conjecture of the course of the stream is "mere surmise not knowledge": nevertheless, the existence of the stream is a fact as self-evident to the onlooker as is that of the rush. therefore-- ask the rush if it suspects whence and how the stream which floats it had a rise, and where and how falls or flows on still! what answer makes the rush except that now certainly it floats and is, and, no less certain than itself, _is_ the everyway external stream that now through shoal and shelf floats it onward, leaves it--may be--wrecked at last, or lands on shore there to root again and grow and flourish stable evermore. --may be! mere surmise not knowledge: much conjecture styled belief, what the rush conceives the stream means through the voyage blind and brief. (ll. - .) thus all man's conjecture as to his future existence is but conjecture: surmise based upon probabilities deduced from the present conditions of life and accumulated experience. (v) and is then this fact of the present existence of the soul cause sufficient to demand belief in its immortality? the affirmative answer, "because god seems good and wise," proves inadequate when the eyes of the enquirer are turned to a world in which evil is manifestly existent, and not only existent, but frequently predominant. the possibility of reconciling such conditions with the design of a beneficent omnipotence is only attained through the acceptance of belief in a future life which shall disentangle the complexities of the present; which shall render perfect that which is imperfect; complete that which is incomplete. without such a prospect of the ultimate solution of its problems life would be unintelligible, therefore impossible as the work of an intelligent being: hence the existence of god is denied by implication, and the premise originally accepted (l. ) is rejected. this question is treated more fully later in the poem (ll. - ). but, granted this possibility of a future, then just that hope, however scant, makes the actual life worth leading. with hope the poet would rest satisfied, since certainty is neither possible, nor, in view of the educative purpose which he claims for life, desirable. upon this recognition of "life, time,--with all their chances," as "just probation-space," rests one of the main dogmas of browning's teaching--suggested or expressed in countless passages throughout his works; embodied in most concise form perhaps in the concluding stanzas of _abt vogler_. this life being the prelude to another, failure becomes "but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days," when for the evil of the present shall be "so much good more": when, indeed, all those unfulfilled hopes which had "promised joy" to the author of _la saisiaz_, shall find soul-satisfying fulfilment. and all we have willed or dreamed of good shall exist. so long as eternity may be held to "affirm the conception of an hour," all the seeming inconsistencies of life may admit of solution. in this passage of _la saisiaz_ recurs also that suggestion so characteristic of browning--introduced dramatically in _easter day_, to be met with again later in the expositions nominally ascribed to ferishtah--the theory of the adaptation of the entire universe, as known to man, to the needs and development of the individual soul. as in _easter day_ is depicted by the vision the work of absolute omnipotence, able its judgments to dispense to the whole race, as every one were its sole object; (_e. d._, ll. - .) so again in _a camel-driver_ is emphasized the individual character of the final judgment: thou and god exist-- so think!--for certain: think the mass--mankind-- disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,-- thee and no other,--stand or fall by them! that is the part for thee: _regard all else for what it may be--time's illusion_. similarly here the entire scheme of life is to be regarded from the individual standpoint; all outside the "narrow hem" of personal experience can be but the result of surmise. therefore solve the problem: "from thine apprehended scheme of things, deduce praise or blame of its contriver, shown a niggard or profuse in each good or evil issue! nor miscalculate alike counting one the other in the final balance, which to strike, soul was born and life allotted: ay, the show of things unfurled for thy summing-up and judgment,--thine, no other mortal's world!" (ll. - .) with the acceptance, however, of the doctrine, "his own world for every mortal," recurs again the disturbing reflection inevitable to the contemplation of that world whether in its personal relation, or as a training-ground for "some other mortal." were the extreme transitoriness and the preponderance of pain indispensable factors in the scheme of instruction? can we love but on condition, that the thing we love must die? needs then groan a world in anguish just to teach us sympathy? (ll. - .) certainly personal experience has resulted in the conclusion: howsoever came my fate, sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed,--preponderate! (ll. - .) in the discussion which follows (ll. - ) the fact of the existence of these evils is employed to enforce the admission of the necessity of a future life. it is in fact the earlier argument (ll. , _et seq._) repeated and elaborated. how are the existing conditions of life to be reconciled with the belief in the over-ruling providence of a god whose name is synonymous with goodness, wisdom, and power? here each attribute is dealt with categorically--was it proof of the divine goodness that within the limits of the poet's personal experience the good within [his] range or had evil in admixture or grew evil's self by change? (ll. - .) again could it be deemed a token of the divine wisdom that becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance from a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance? (ll. - .) finally, seeing that power must within itself include the force known as will, could that indeed rank as omnipotence, which was incapable of securing for man even the enjoyment of life possessed by the worm which, on the hypothesis of the non-existence of a future world, becomes "man's fellow-creature," man too being thus but the creature of an hour? since with the loss of his immortal destiny passes also the reason (according to browning's reiterated theory) of his imperfection as compared with the more complete physical perfection of the lower world of animal life. if, then, such a consummation is the sole outcome of the creator's work the conclusion is inevitable, that the goodness, wisdom, and power ascribed to him must be limited in range and capacity. thus again the premise originally accepted as a basis of argument has to be rejected--a god possessing merely human attributes is no god. but once more also, though in stronger terms, the conclusion of ll. - : only grant a second life, i acquiesce in this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts gain about to be. (ll. - .) thus all experience fairly considered goes to prove the necessity for a future life; and with the hope of such a future is closely interwoven the need also for reunion with those who have already tested the grounds of their belief: grant me (once again) assurance we shall each meet each some day. * * * * * worst were best, defeat were triumph utter loss were utmost gain. (ll. - .) _b._ nevertheless, the soul refuses even yet to accept, without that which it deems reasonable proof, the justice of its intuitions and of its hopes arising from experience. it will assume the position of arbitrator in the debate which it permits between the sometime opposing forces of reason and fancy, as to the results of an acceptance of that belief, for an assurance of the truth of which it yearns. _fancy._ to the facts already admitted as the basis of argument fancy may, therefore, add a third, "that after body dies soul lives again." _reason._ in accepting the challenge to employ these three facts--god, the soul, a future life--in a rational development of the present phase of existence, reason would reply that deductions from experience suggest that the future life must necessarily prove an advance on the old. this being so, the most prudent course is obviously that which would take, without delay, the step leading from the lower to the higher; always allowing that there is no existent law restrictive of man's free will in this matter. what shall then deter his dying out of darkness into light? (l. .) _fancy._ the deterrent is to be found in the suggestion by fancy of the law rendering penal "voluntary passage from this life to that." he shall find--say, hell to punish who in aught curtails the term. (l. .) _reason._ and what influence upon life it must be asked will this new knowledge exert? life, says reason, would thus be reduced to a condition of stagnation. the absolute certainty involved in this exact knowledge of the future would stultify action in the present. a result similar to that which, according to karshish, was attained in the case of lazarus. the things of this world matter not in view of an ever-present realization of eternity. the use of faith is at an end as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," since all is clear, definite and, further still, unalterable to the inward vision. _fancy._ again fancy interposes with the suggestion that this equal realization of future and present must be accompanied by an appreciation of the worth of life temporal and its opportunities, of the eternal import of the deeds wrought in the flesh. thus the future life completely revealed would not, as reason holds, supersede the uses of this, but would serve rather as an incentive to action in the present, on the assumption that the virtual reward of performance is reserved for the after-time. _reason._ the final position is then examined by reason. to the original premises--the existence of the soul, an intelligent being, and of a god, the author of an intelligible universe in which man's lot is cast--has been added the certainty of a future world, but a world into which man may not pass until his allotted term has been fulfilled on earth. further, that in this world to come are to be dealt out allotments of happiness or misery in exact relative proportion to the deeds accomplished during the period of mortal life. that by laws as unerring and relentless as those of nature's code, pain will follow evil-doing, pleasure will succeed acts of self-devotion to that which is esteemed goodness and truth. absolute certainty in all things spiritual being thus established, free will becomes but a name, and the probationary character of life is at an end. here again a reminiscence of the discussion contained in the early stanzas of _easter day_ when the second speaker suggests that faith may be a touchstone for god's purposes, even as ourselves conceive of them. could he acquit us or condemn for holding what no hand can loose, rejecting when we can't but choose? as well award the victor's wreath to whosoever should take breath duly each minute while he lived-- grant heaven, because a man contrived to see its sunlight every day he walked forth on the public way. (_e. d._, iv, ll. - .) so _la saisiaz_ thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must. lay but down that law as stringent "wouldst thou live again, be just!" as this other "wouldst thou live now, regularly draw thy breath! for, suspend the operation, straight law's breach results in death--" and (provided always, man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane) prompt and absolute obedience, never doubt, will law obtain! (ll. - .) the difference between the sanction attaching to laws moral and spiritual, and to those of nature is not, reason would hold, the result of defective power on the part of the legislator. some definite purpose is existent in the scheme of the universe in accordance with which certain laws exist already which to hear means to obey; therefore not without a purpose these man must, while those man may keep and, for the keeping, haply gain approval and reward. (ll. - .) _c._ in short, the conclusion reached is that already propounded as the outcome of experience--that uncertainty is one of the essential attributes of life temporal. that in its probationary character lies its educative influence. that since "assurance needs must change this life to [him]" the author of _la saisiaz_, no less than the soliloquist of _easter day_, would willingly continue in that state of probation which fosters growth and development; would cling to that uncertainty which allows of the existence of hope. as employed by reason, and generally throughout the poem, the word hope possesses more than the comparatively vague significance commonly attaching to it: it becomes practically synonymous with faith. in a similar sense the term occurs in the _epistle to the romans_,[ ] when the writer asserts that "we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope" (the argument which browning is here using). "for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? but if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it." it is further noticeable that here, as elsewhere in browning, is rejected the belief in a future which shall, in the words of paracelsus, reduce the present world to the position of "a mere foil ... to some fine life to come."[ ] the necessity for a future life is throughout the argument based upon the fact that immortality is needed to render intelligible the conditions attendant upon life temporal. it is the _unintelligibility_ of life, if cut short by death, which demands its renewal beyond the grave. the concluding lines of the poem proper (immediately preceding the supplementary stanza), although not directly essential to the argument, are especially interesting from the allusions contained in them and the resulting inferences which have met with some diversity of interpretation. thanks, thou pine-tree of makistos, wide thy giant torch i wave. (l. .) is thus explained by dr. berdoe in his _browning cyclopaedia_. "the reference to makistos is from the _agamemnon_ of Æschylus. the town of makistos had a watch-tower on a neighbouring eminence, from which the beacon lights flashed the news of the fall of troy to greece. clytemnestra says sending a bright blaze from ide, _beacon did beacon send_, pass on--the pine-tree--to makistos' watch-place." this pine tree, as "the brand flamboyant," which should replenish the beacon-fire of makistos, browning takes as symbolic of fame. the knowledge and learning of gibbon constitute the trunk-- this the trunk, the central solid knowledge ... rooted yonder at lausanne [where gibbon's history was finished]. but learning is hardly permitted "its due effulgence," being "dulled by flake on flake of [the] wit"--nourished at ferney (sometime the home of voltaire). to the learning of gibbon, the wit of voltaire is added in "the terebinth-tree's resin," the "all-explosive eloquence" of rousseau and of diodati:[ ] whilst in the heights, above all "deciduous trash," climbs the evergreen of the ivy, significant of the immortality of byron's poetic fame. having lifted "the coruscating marvel," the watcher on la salève would likewise stand as a beacon to those millions who have their portion, live their calm or troublous day, find significance in fireworks. that by his help they may confidently lay to heart ... this: "he there with the brand flamboyant, broad o'er night's forlorn abyss, crowned by prose and verse; and wielding, with wit's bauble, learning's rod ... well? why, he at least believed in soul, was very sure of god." of these three concluding lines dr. berdoe writes: "many writers have thought that ... the poet referred to himself. of course, any such idea is preposterous; the reference was to voltaire. mr. browning, apart from the question of the egotism involved, could not say of himself, 'he at least believed in soul.' there was no minimizing of religious faith in the poet. still less could he speak of himself as 'crowned by prose and verse.'" whence arises dr. berdoe's misapprehension? apart from the context the significance might not be obvious; taken in connection with the passage immediately preceding, it is valuable as adding emphasis to the conclusions of the foregoing argument, and proclaiming in unmistakable language the worth to browning as a personal possession of that creed which he has just declared himself to hold. reflecting upon the widespread influence of those literary men whose presence has rendered celebrated the region lying before him, he attributes it to the "phosphoric fame" which attended the path of each. "famed unfortunates" all, yet "the world was witched" and became enslaved by their pessimistic theories of life. forced to believe because "the famous bard believed!" because the renowned man of letters could say, "which believe--for i believe it." such being the power of fame as an agency for influencing the human mind, what might not the author of _la saisiaz_ achieve, were he, too, armed with this "brand flamboyant!" no pessimistic creed is his, but that which involving an absolute belief in god and in the soul would thence deduce a confidence in "that power and purpose" existent throughout life, indicated and recognized by the presence and revelations of "hope the arrowy." so would he gather in one the fame of his predecessors in the literary world; would become as rousseau, "eloquent, as byron prime in poet's power": learned for the nonce as gibbon, witty as wit's self voltaire. thus would he stand "crowned by prose and verse." and why? because the millions still take "the flare for evidence," and "find significance" in the fireworks of fame. only by wielding "the brand flamboyant" may he succeed in impressing upon mankind his own supreme assurance. to this end he would desire fame. it remains to assign to _la saisiaz_ the position which, as a declaration of faith, it occupies in relation to the poems we have already considered. in _caliban_, dealing with a peculiar phase of "natural theology," we found the suggestions of a deity those derived from the conceptions of a semi-savage being, with whom the intellectual development would seem to have outrun the moral. passing to the reflections of cleon, with the greek theory and practice of life there set forth, we reached the utmost heights attainable by paganism. in _bishop blougram's apology_ the unbelief threatening was not that of paganism in the early interpretation of the word, but of the paganism which would substitute authority for faith. with _christmas eve_ came the individual choice of creed, the voluntary acceptance of the position of worshipper at one of the narrow shrines of human invention; but an acceptance which involved likewise a personal faith in the divinity of jesus christ. the faith thus accepted received fuller analysis and investigation through the questionings of _easter day_. but all these poems are, as we have been forced to conclude, more or less dramatic in character, the first three wholly, the two last to a degree which we have attempted to define. only with _la saisiaz_ do we reach the undisguised and definite expression of browning's personal faith, the basis, though not the culmination of which, is emphatically asserted as a belief in the soul and in god. at first sight it may appear disappointing to many readers that the irreducible minimum of the creed should contain but these two tenets. on this ground, indeed, we might have been tempted, had such a transposition been justifiable to place _la saisiaz_ before, instead of after, _christmas eve and easter day_, allowing the profession of faith on la salève to serve as a foundation for the superstructure supplied by the arguments of the listener without the lecture hall at göttingen. on consideration, however, nothing is discoverable in the position occupied by the author of _la saisiaz_ to render untenable that held by the soliloquist of _christmas eve_ or the first speaker of _easter day_. there is, as we have indeed noticed, a marked similarity between the arguments employed in the two last cases (_la saisiaz_ and _easter day_) and in the conclusions reached: in both, the assurance that in the probationary character of this present life, with its possibilities for spiritual development through the exercise of faith, lies its main value. mrs. sutherland orr admits that browning "was no less, in his way, a christian when he wrote _la saisiaz_ than when he published _a death in the desert_ and _christmas eve and easter day_, or at any period subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had learned at his mother's knee. he has repeatedly written or declared in the words of charles lamb: 'if christ entered the room i should fall on my knees'; and again in those of napoleon: 'i am an understander of men, and _he_ was no man.' he has even added: 'if he had been, he would have been an imposter.'" but she has already remarked of the poem that "it is conclusive both in form and matter as to his heterodox attitude towards christianity." and she continues: "the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in _la saisiaz_ for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a christian revelation on the subject."[ ] we may indeed regret that such criticism should result from a study of the poem; but, after all, do the truths discussed in _la saisiaz_ involve any immediate question either of the acceptance or rejection of a christian revelation on this or on any subject? do they not go deeper, if we may so say, than christianity itself? until faith in these fundamental truths has been unassailably established, no basis for christianity has been secured. to him who is not yet "sure of god," the revelation of god in christ can have little meaning. for whilst far more than the belief necessarily implied in the confession on la salève must be held essential to the fulness of life, without it no superstructure of faith is possible. its very strength would seem to lie in the fact that, avoiding the limitations of strictly defined dogma, it "leaves place" for all subsequent revelations of spiritual truth. and what _is_ "the christian revelation" on these matters? the questions concerning death, immortality, and future recognition and reunion, ever suggesting themselves in new form to the human heart and intellect, are yet unanswered. even that "acknowledgment of god in christ" to which the dying evangelist points as to the solution of "all questions in the earth and out of it,"[ ] implies the acceptance of a creed not necessarily involving a revelation of the future life. the teaching of the gospel serves as _present_ inspiration of a faith content to leave the future in the confidence our times are in his hand who saith "a whole i planned."[ ] life eternal is there defined, not with reference to a future state, but as the knowledge of god, the beginnings of which are attainable here and now, by present service and self-devotion: to him who should do the will should the doctrine be made known.[ ] the record of the intercourse between the master and his disciples during the forty days following the resurrection is silent concerning any lifting of the veil before which they so consciously stood. that browning was a christian in the broadest, deepest, and possibly in the least conventional acceptation of the term, it was the attempt of the last lecture to demonstrate by a consideration of the dramatic poems bearing reference to christianity and its relation to human life. and there is no word throughout _la saisiaz_ which should preclude belief in the conclusions of david in _saul_ or of st. john in _a death in the desert_. to the man who was "very sure of god"--who had recognized the divine revelation in nature--an acceptance of the more immediate and special revelation was but a natural sequence. "ye believe in god, believe also in me":[ ] when the assertion holds good the command is not difficult of fulfilment. whilst extreme caution is necessary in dealing with a matter in which the student is too readily tempted to "find what he desires to find," the historical and logical necessity for an incarnation was, as we have seen, so favourite a theme with browning for dramatic treatment, that it is wellnigh impossible to dissociate the personal interest. this subject the reflections of _la saisiaz_ do not directly approach. he at least believed in soul, was very sure of god. the creed so expressed meant for the author a gain, once experienced, too great to remain unshared. no mere abstract belief, but an assurance of which he could assert fact it is i know i know not something which is fact as much. (l. .) for him the power and the purpose which he beheld, "if no one else beheld," ruling in nature and in human life were alike love. the last word on the subject comes to us direct, unmodified by any dramatic medium-- power is love-- * * * * from the first, power was--i knew. life has made clear to me that, strive but for closer view, love were as plain to see. when see? where there dawns a day, if not on the homely earth, then yonder, worlds away, where the strange and new have birth, and power comes full in play.[ ] the hope of _la saisiaz_ has become the assurance of the _reverie_. this recognition of "the continuity of life" is the main inspiration, the invigorating principle of browning's creed. cleon _felt_ the necessity which reason demonstrated on la salève. yet again, eleven years later, the author of _asolando_ can speak with absolute confidence of the certainty that death will afford no interruption to the energies, the activities, the progress of the soul's life. that he who has _here_ "never turned his back" will _there_ still continue the forward march. it is, in other words, the faith of pompilia which can look beyond the limitations of the present to the boundless developments of which this life, with its struggles and apparent failures, is but the beginning: and in the hour of defeat can hold that "no work begun shall ever pause for death." it is in the midst of the "bustle of man's work-time" that "the unseen" is to be greeted. is it too much to say that browning, in the admonition of these closing lines of the _asolando epilogue_, makes confession of his belief in the communion of saints? but it is characteristic that the expression of faith (if such we may account it) is made in terms which admit of no distinctly formulated definition. the command comes as an inspiration to the seen and the unseen. greet the unseen with a cheer! bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "strive and thrive!" cry "speed,--fight on, fare ever there as here!" the underlying confidence is beyond that of the reasoning of _la saisiaz_, but not far in advance of the joyful spontaneity of the _prologue_ _dying we live._ fretless and free, soul, clap thy pinion! * * * body shall cumber soul-flight no more. and if--admitting that browning, even when writing _la saisiaz_, possessed the assurance thus expressed--we ask why he should have rested satisfied with the confession of faith contained in its concluding line, the answer must be--that the author of _la saisiaz_ is to be numbered amongst that small minority of religious teachers for whom it may be claimed that "they cannot fail to recognize that the formulas which express the truth suggested by the facts of their creed are themselves of necessity partial and provisional." it is impossible to doubt that with him the consciousness was strongly present, that "formulas do not exhaust the truth"; that "the character and expression of doctrine ... is relative to the age."[ ] that in proportion as satisfaction is found in formula does faith lose its life-giving power. progress being the law of life, he would, therefore, enforce upon no man as binding formulae of which the comparative inelasticity might tend to fetter mental or spiritual development. on the contrary, he would have the seeker after truth prepared to relinquish in due time definitions once essential, since threatening to become restrictive to growth. before all things, is to be avoided the danger of resting on that which is not the truth itself, but merely a necessary introduction to the truth. hence, the help whereby he mounts, the ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall, since all things suffer change save god the truth.[ ] only through such employment of the means may the end be attained, since whether it be concerning "god the truth," "the eternal power," or "the love that tops the might, the christ in god," in all new lessons shall be learned ... till earth's work stop and useless time run out.[ ] index _abt vogler_, , , , . _acts, the_, , , . Æschylus, , , . alcestis, . _andrea del sarto_, , , , , . _apparent failure_, . aratus, . arnold, matthew, , . art, , - , , - , . asceticism, , , - , - . _asolando_, , . _asolando, epilogue_, , , , . athenians, . augustine, st., . _balaustion's adventure_, . barrett, miss (_see_ mrs. browning), , . berdoe, e., , , , - . _bishop blougram's apology_, , , - , , , , , , , , , . _bishop orders his tomb_, . _book and the ring, the_, . brooke, a. stopford, . browning, mrs., , . byron, lord, , . caliban, , - , - , , , , , . _caliban upon setebos_, - , , , . calvinism, - , - . _camel-driver, a_, - , , . caponsacchi, , , . chesterton, g. k., , . christianity, - , , , , , , , , - , , - , - , , , - . _christmas eve_, , , - , , . _christmas eve and easter day_, , , - , , . _cleon_, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , . clough, a. h., , . collonge, , . cross, j. w., . david, (_see_ _saul_). _death in the desert_, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . dickens, c., , . diodati, . dionysius, . _dîs aliter visum_, , , . doubt, (_see_ faith and doubt). dowden, e., , , , , , . dramatic power of browning, - , , , , , , - , , - . _dramatis personae_, . _dramatis personae, epilogue_, , , , , . _easter day_, , , , - , , , , , , (_see_ _christmas eve and easter day_). egerton-smith, miss, - . eliot, george, . emerson, . _epistle of james_, . _epistle of karshish, an_, , , , , , , . _epistle to the romans_, . euripides, , . _evelyn hope_, . evil, . faith, , , , - , - , . faith and doubt, , , - , - , , , . fancy, , , , . _fears and scruples_, , . _ferishtah's fancies_, , (_see_ _shah abbas_, _a camel-driver_, _the two camels_). _fra lippo lippi_, . future life, , , , , - , - , - . geneva, , (_note_). gibbon, - . gissing, g., . gladstone, w. e., . _grammarian's funeral_, , , , . greece (greeks), , - , , , , , , - , - , , , . guido franceschini, , , . _hamlet_, , , , . hildebrand, . homer, , , , , . humanitarianism, - . immortality, (_see_ future life). incarnation, the, , , , , - , , , - , , . _in memoriam_, , , , , . innocent xii (_see_ _the pope_). _johannes agricola in meditation_, , . john, st., , (_see_ _a death in the desert_). judgment, - , , , - , , , , . lamb, c., . _la saisiaz_, , , , , , , , - . la salève, , , , , , , . lazarus, , , , , , (_see_ _epistle of karshish_). lewes, g. h., . love, divine and human, , , , , , - , - , , - , , . lowell, j. r., . luigi, . luther, , , . makistos, , . manning, cardinal, . _master hugues of saxe-gotha_, . _men and women series_, , , . miracles, , . morley, j., , . napoleon i, - , . napoleon iii (_see_ _prince hohenstiel schwangau_). nature, , , , , - , , , , , - , , , , , , , , . newman, j. h., , . obscurity of browning, . _old pictures in florence_, - , , . orr, mrs. sutherland, , , , , . _paracelsus_, , - , , , , , , , . paul (paulus), , , , . _pauline_, , , , , . phidias, , , , , . pippa, . _pippa passes_, , . pompilia, , . _pompilia_, , . _pope, the_, , , , - . power, , , , , , , , , , . _prince hohenstiel schwangau_, . progress, law of life, , - , - , , , , , , , , , . prospero, , , , , , . _prospice_, , , , . protus, - , - , , - , , , . pugin, a. w., . "quiet, the," , - , . _rabbi ben ezra_, , - , , , , , , . reason, , , , - , - , . _reverie_ (_asolando_), , . _ring and the book_, (_see_ _book and the ring_, _pompilia_, _the pope_). roman catholicism, , - , , , , - , , , - . rousseau, , . sacrifice, doctrine of, , . _saul_, , , , , , , . setebos, - , , , . shakespeare, , , , , , , , . sharp, w., . shelley, p. b., . _sordello_, , , , - . stanley, dean, . _strafford_, . strauss, , . sycorax, , , . _tempest, the_, - . tennyson, a., , (_see_ _in memoriam_). terpander, , , , , . _the two camels_, . _toccata of galuppi's_, , . tolerance, - . tractarian movement, . _tracts for the times_, . truth, , , , , , , , , , , , , . voltaire, - . ward, w., , , , . westcott, b. f., , , , , , . _wisdom_, . wiseman, cardinal, - , , , , . zeus, , , , . chiswick press: printed by charles whittingham and co. tooks court, chancery lane, london. footnotes: [ ] _la saisiaz_, l. . _r. browning_, vol. ii, smith, elder and co. [ ] _self dependence._ matt. arnold. [ ] _say not the struggle nought availeth._ [ ] _easter day_, vii. [ ] _browning_, e. dowden, j. m. dent and co., p. . [ ] _r. browning_, w. sharp (_great writers_), p. . [ ] _browning cyclopaedia_, berdoe, p. (quoted). [ ] _r. browning_, g. k. chesterton (_eng. men of letters_), p. . [ ] _browning_, s. brooke, isbister, p. . [ ] _saul_, . [ ] _balaustion's adventure_, vol. i, p. . [ ] _genesis_, xxviii, . [ ] _hosea_, vi, . [ ] _paracelsus_, - , pt. v. [ ] l. . [ ] _a death in the desert_, ll. - . [ ] _acts_, xvii, . [ ] _a death in the desert_, . [ ] _religious thought in the west._ [ ] _acts_, xvii, . [ ] _saul_, . [ ] _rabbi ben ezra_, xxiv, xxv. [ ] _ibid._, xix. [ ] _acts_, xvii, - . [ ] _a toccata of galuppi's._ [ ] _paracelsus_, v, - . [ ] _caliban_, . [ ] _paracelsus_, i, - . [ ] _ibid._, i, - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _rabbi ben ezra_, viii. [ ] _old pictures in florence_, xi. [ ] _ibid._, xix. [ ] _the book and the ring_, - . [ ] _fra lippo lippi._ [ ] _old pictures in florence_, xx. [ ] _old pictures in florence_, xv. [ ] _ibid._, xvi. [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _abt vogler_, xi. [ ] _adonais_, shelley. [ ] _in memoriam_, xlvii. [ ] _a grammarian's funeral._ [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _pompilia_, . [ ] _life of george eliot_, cross. letters to j. blackwood and j. w. cross. [ ] _la saisiaz._ [ ] _sordello_, bk. iv. [ ] _ibid._, bk. v. [ ] _ibid._, bk. vi. [ ] cf. _st. matthew_, xi, . [ ] _life and times of cardinal wiseman_, by wilfrid ward. vols. . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _ibid._ [ ] incident related _browning_. g. k. chesterton. (_eng. men of letters._) [ ] _life of gladstone._ j. morley. vol. i. [ ] _apologia pro vita sua._ j. h. newman. [ ] _pippa passes_, iii, - . [ ] quoted. _life and times of cardinal wiseman._ w. ward. [ ] _in memoriam_, xcvi. [ ] _browning_, dent and co., p. . [ ] _wisdom of solomon_, xi, - . [ ] _confessions_, bk. i, chap. iii. [ ] chapter ii, - . [ ] _godminster chimes._ j. r. lowell. [ ] _the pope_, - . [ ] _andrea del sarto_, - . [ ] _christmas eve_, - . [ ] _pippa passes_, - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _life and letters of robert browning_, mrs. sutherland orr, smith, elder and co., p. . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _ibid._, - . [ ] _apparent failure._ [ ] _a camel-driver._ [ ] _browning_, e. dowden, j. m. dent and co., pp. , . [ ] _dramatis personae._ [ ] _browning_, e. dowden, pp. - . [ ] _browning_, dowden, p. . [ ] _life and letters of browning_, mrs. s. orr, p. . [ ] _supra_, pp. - . [ ] _browning_, mrs. s. orr, pp. - . [ ] _sordello_, book the sixth. [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _sordello_, book the sixth. [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _the two camels._ [ ] _christian aspects of life_, westcott, p. . [ ] emerson. [ ] chap. viii, , . [ ] _paracelsus_, iii, - . [ ] the reference in l. . "is it _diodati_ joins the glimmer of the lake?" is to byron's villa at geneva. that of l. , to the calvinistic theologian ( - ) born at lucca, famous through his work at geneva as a preacher, etc. [ ] _life and letters of r. browning_, pp. - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _rabbi ben ezra_, i. [ ] _gospel of st. john_, xvii, ; vii, . [ ] _ibid._, xiv, . [ ] _reverie, asolando._ [ ] _christian aspects of life_, westcott, macmillan, pp. - . [ ] _a death in the desert_, - . [ ] _ibid._, - . generously made available by the internet archive.) browning and his century by the same author browning's italy browning's england a guide to mythology ancient myths in modern poets longfellow's country hawthorne's country the poets' new england [illustration: browning at (london )] browning and his century by helen archibald clarke author of "_browning's italy_," "_browning's england_," etc. illustrated from photographs garden city new york doubleday, page & company _copyright, , by_ doubleday, page & co. _all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the scandinavian_ to the boston browning society in commemoration of the browning centenary-- - contents page chapter i the battle of mind and spirit chapter ii the century's end: promise of peace chapter iii political tendencies chapter iv social ideals chapter v art shibboleths chapter vi classic survivals chapter vii prophetic visions illustrations browning at (london ) _frontispiece_ facing page paracelsus herbert spencer david strauss cardinal wiseman william ewart gladstone william morris john burns alfred tennyson a. c. swinburne dante gabriel rossetti george meredith euripides aristophanes walter savage landor browning at ( ) browning and his century prologue to robert browning "say not we know but rather that we love, and so we know enough." thus deeply spoke the sage; and in men's stunted hearts awoke a haunting fear, for fain are they to prove their life, their god, with yeas and nays that move the mind's uncertain flow. then fierce outbroke,-- knowledge, the child of pain shall we revoke? the guide wherewith men climb to things above? nay, calm your fears! 'tis but the mere mind's knowing, the soul's alone the poet worthy deeming. let mind up-build its entities of seeming with toil and tears! the toil is but for showing how much there lacks of truth. but 'tis no dreaming when sky throbs back to heart, with god's love beaming. i the battle of mind and spirit during the nineteenth century, which has already receded far enough into the perspective of the past for us to be able to take a comprehensive view of it, the advance guard of the human race found itself in a position entirely different from that ever before occupied by it. through the knowledge of cosmic, animal, and social evolution gradually accumulated by the laborious and careful studies of special students in every department of historical research and scientific experiment, a broader and higher state of self-consciousness was attained. mankind, on its most perceptive plane, no longer pinned its faith to inherited traditions, whether of religion, art, or morals. every conceivable fact and every conceivable myth was to be tested in the laboratory of the intellect, even the intellect itself was to undergo dissection, with the result that, once for all, it has been decided what particular range of human knowledge lies within the reach of mental perception, and what particular range of human knowledge can be grasped only through spiritual perception. such a momentous decision as this in the history of thought has not been reached without a long and protracted struggle extending back into the early days of christianity, nor, it may be said, is the harmony as yet complete, for there are to-day, and perhaps always will be, human beings whose consciousness is not fully orbed and who either seek their point of equilibrium too entirely in the plane of mind or too entirely in the plane of spirit. in the early days, before christianity came to bring its "sword upon earth," there seems to have been little or no consciousness of such a struggle. the ancient hindu, observing nature and meditating upon the universe, arrived intuitively at a perception of life and its processes wonderfully akin to that later experimentally proved by the nineteenth century scientist, nor did he have a suspicion that such truth was in any way antagonistic to religious truth. on the contrary, he considered that, by it, the beauty and mystery of religion was immeasurably enhanced, and, letting his imagination play upon his intuition, he brought forth a theory of spiritual evolution in which the world to-day is bound to recognize many elements of beauty and power necessary to any complete conception of religion in the future. even the babylonians made their guesses at an evolutionary theory of the universe. greek philosophy, later, was permeated with the idea, it having been derived by them perhaps from the chaldeans through the phoenicians, or if the theories of aryan migrations be correct, perhaps through inheritance from a remote aryan ancestry. when christian thought gained its hold upon the world, the account of creation given in genesis became so thoroughly impressed upon the minds of men that it was regarded as the orthodox view, rooted in divine revelation, and to question it was to incur the danger of being called an atheist, with its possibly uncomfortable consequences of being martyred. strangely enough, the early church adopted into its fold many pagan superstitions, such as a belief in witchcraft and in signs and wonders, as well as some myths, but this great truth upon which the pagan mind had stumbled, it would have none of. these two circumstances--the adoption on the part of christianity of pagan superstitions and its utter repudiation of the pagan guesses upon evolution, carrying within it the germs of truth, later to be unearthed by scientific research--furnished exactly the right conditions for the throwing down of the gauntlet between the mind and the spirit. the former, following intellectual guidance, found itself coming more and more into antagonism with the spirit, not yet freed from the trammels of imagination. the latter, guided by imagination, continued to exercise a mythopoeic faculty, which not only brought it more and more into antagonism with the mind, but set up within its own realm an internecine warfare which has blackened the pages of religious history with crimes and martyrdoms so terrible as to force the conviction that the true devil in antagonism to spiritual development has been the imagination of mankind, masquerading as verity, and not yet having found its true function in art. regarded from the point of view of the student of intellectual development, this conflict of two thousand years has the fascination of a great drama of which the protagonist is the mind struggling to free the spirit from its subjection to the evil aspects of the imagination. great thinkers in the field of science, philosophy, and religion are the _dramatis personæ_, and in the onward rush of this world-drama the sufferings of those who have fallen by the way seem insignificant. but when the student of history takes his more intimate survey of the purely human aspects of the struggle, heartrending, indeed, become the tragedies resulting from the exercise of human bigotry and stupidity. indignation and sorrow take possession of us when we think upon such a spectacle as that of roger bacon, making ready to perform a few scientific experiments before a small audience at oxford, confronted by an uproar in which monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, crying out, "down with the magician!" and this was only the beginning of a persecution which ended in his teaching being solemnly condemned by the authorities of the franciscan order and himself thrown for fourteen years into prison, whence he issued an old and broken man of eighty. more barbarous still was the treatment of giordano bruno, a strange sort of man who developed his philosophy in about twenty-five works, some prose, some poetry, some dialogues, some comedies, with such enticing titles as "the book of the great key," "the explanation of the thirty seals," "the expulsion of the triumphant beast," "the threefold minimum," "the composition of images," "the innumerable, the immense and the unfigurable." his utterances were vague, especially to the intellects of his time, yet not so vague that theology, whether catholic or calvinistic, did not at once take fright. he held that the investigation of nature in the unbiased light of reason is our only guide to truth. he rejected antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority; he exclaimed, "let us begin by doubt. let us doubt till we know." acting upon these principles, he began to unfold again that current of greek thought which the system imposed by the church had intercepted for more than a thousand years, and arrived at a conception of evolution prefiguring the modern theories. he conceived the law of the universe to be unceasing change. "each individual," he declared, "is the resultant of innumerable individuals; each species is the starting point for the next." furthermore, he maintained that the perfecting of the individual soul is the aim of all progress. tenets so opposite to the orthodox view of special creation and the fall of man could not be allowed to go unchallenged. it is to be remembered that he was a priest in holy orders in the convent of st. dominic, and in the year he was accused by the provincial of his order of heresy on one hundred and thirty counts. he did not await his trial, but fled to rome, thence to northern italy, and became for some years a wanderer. he was imprisoned at geneva; at toulouse he spent a year lecturing on aristotle; in paris, two years as professor extraordinary in the sorbonne; three years in london, where he became the friend of sir philip sidney, and influenced the philosophy of both bacon and shakespeare. oxford, however, was unfriendly to his teachings and he was obliged to flee from england also. then he wandered for five years from city to city in germany--at one time warned to leave the town, at another excommunicated, at another not even permitted to lodge within the gates. finally, he accepted the invitation of a noble venetian, zuane mocenigo, to visit venice and teach him the higher and secret learning. the two men soon quarreled, and bruno was betrayed by the count into the hands of the inquisition. he was convicted of heresy in venice and delivered to the inquisition in rome. he spent seven years in its dungeons, and was again tried and convicted, and called upon to recant, which he stoutly refused to do. sentence of death was then passed upon him and he was burned at the stake on february , , on the campo de' fiori, where there now stands a statue erected by progressive italy in his honor. his last words were, "i die a martyr, and willingly." then they cast his ashes into the tiber and placed his name among the accused on the rolls of the church. and there it probably still remains, for no longer ago than , when his statue was unveiled on the ninth of june, on the site of his burning, in full view of the vatican, pope leo xiii, it is said, refused food and spent hours in an agony of prayer at the foot of the statue of st. peter. catholic, and even protestant, denunciation of bruno at this time showed that the smoke from this particular battle in the war of mind with spirit was still far from being laid. with the fate of giordano bruno still fresh in his mind, galileo succumbed to the demands of the inquisition and recanted, saying that he no longer believed what he, himself, with his telescope had proved to be true. "i, galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your eminences, having before my eyes the holy gospel, which i touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth." if this recantation had brought any comfort or peace into his life it might have been hard to forgive galileo's perjury of himself. his persecution, however, continued to the end. he was exiled from his family and friends, and, even when he had become blind and wasted by sorrow and disease, he was still closely watched lest he might utter the awful heresy that the earth moved. a hundred years later than this, when buffon attempted to teach the simple truths of geology, he was deposed from his high position and made to recant by the theological faculty of the sorbonne. the man who promulgated geological principles, as firmly established to-day as that of the rotation of the earth upon its axis, was forced to write: "i declare that i had no intention to contradict the text of scripture; that i believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. i abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of moses." such are the more heinous examples of the persecution of the men who discovered the truths of science. to these should be added the wholesale persecution of witches and magicians, for unusual knowledge of any sort ran the chance of being regarded as contrary to biblical teaching and of being attributed to the machinations of the prince of darkness. every new step made in the direction of scientific truth has had thus to face the most determined opposition. persecution by torture and death died out, but up to the nineteenth century, and well on through it, denunciation, excommunication, suppression, the loss of honorable positions have all been used as weapons by church or university in the attempt to stamp out whatever it considered dangerous and subverting doctrines of science. the decisive battle was not to be inaugurated until the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the advent in the field of such names in science as spencer, darwin, tyndall and huxley, and such names in biblical criticism as strauss and renan. the outposts, it is true, had been won by advancing scientific thought, for step by step the church had compromised, and had admitted one scientific doctrine after another as not incompatible with biblical truth. but now, not only theology, the imperfect armor in which the spirit had been clothed, was attacked, but the very existence of spirit itself was to be questioned. the thinking world was to be divided into materialists and supernaturalists. now, at last, mind and spirit, who in the ages long gone had been brothers, were to stand face to face as enemies. was this mortal combat to end in the annihilation of either, or would this, too, end in a compromise leading to harmony? at the dawn of this century, in , came into the world its master poetic mind. i say this to-day without hesitation, for no other english poet of the century has been so thoroughly aware of the intellectual tendencies of his century, and has so emotionalized them and brought them before us under the humanly real conditions of dramatic utterance. it is not surprising, considering this fact, that in his second poem, written in , browning ventures into the arena and at once tackles the supreme problem of the age, what is to be the relation of mind and spirit? it is characteristic of the poetic methods, which dominated his work, that he should have presented this problem through the personality of a historical figure who played no inconsiderable part in the intellectual development of his time, though not a man to whom general historians have been in the habit of assigning much space in their pages. browning, however, as hall griffin informs us, had been familiar with the name of paracelsus from his childhood, of whom he had read anecdotes in a queer book, wanley's "wonders of the little world." besides, his father's library, wherein as a boy he was wont to browse constantly, contained the _opera omnia_ of paracelsus. with the confidence of youth and of genius the poet attempts in this poem a solution of the problem. to mind he gives the attribute of knowledge, to spirit the attribute of love. the poem as a whole does not concern us here except as a background for its final thoughts. in order, however, to put the situation clearly before readers not already familiar with it, i venture to transcribe a portion of a former analysis of my own. paracelsus aspires to the acquisition of absolute knowledge and feels born within him the capabilities for attaining this end, and, when attained, it is to be devoted to enlarging the possibilities of man's life. the whole race is to be elevated at once. man may not be doomed to cope with seraphs, yet by the exercise of human strength alone he hopes man may one day beat god's angels. he is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of his age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or the philosopher's stone. he especially disclaims such puerile schemes in the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his lifelong efforts have been. he stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. he has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first the secrets of life's laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about life's betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery of some magic secret by means of which life's laws might be overcome. yet he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. the creed which spurs him to his quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul, but to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in outer nature must be found. an intuitive mind like paracelsus's will recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds them; and these are what paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek and find, sure he will "arrive." one illustration of the results so obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. the real paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory. though such methods are a long distance from those of the modern scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond to hypotheses born of intuition. browning's presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most recent criticisms of this extraordinary man's life. according to these he fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent and scientific observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the side of scientific ways of working; and above all made the great step from a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of parallelisms between nature processes and human processes. though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must necessarily be a failure, from his own point of view, with his "india" not found, his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that the poet dwells. for a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as impossible as paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. both have desired to help men, but paracelsus has desired to help them rather through the perfecting, even immortalizing, of their physical being; aprile, through giving man, as he is, infinite sympathy and through creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist. paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his knowledge to men. the scornful and proud reformer has not, however, truly learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned against by those whom he would teach. then the old ideal seizes upon him again, and still under the influence of aprile he seeks in human experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through aprile he had neglected for the ever-illusive secret, but neither does success attend him here, and only on his deathbed does his vision clear up, and he is made to indulge in a prophetic utterance quite beyond the reach of the original paracelsus. in this passage is to be found browning's first contribution to a solution of the great problem. that it is instinct with the idea of evolution has become a commonplace of browning criticism, a fact which was at least independently or, as far as i know, first pointed out by myself in an early essay upon browning. at the time, i was reading both browning and spencer, and could not but be impressed by the parallelisms in thought between the two, especially those in this seer-like passage and "the data of ethics." writers whose appreciation of a poet is in direct ratio to the number of exact historical facts to be found in a poem like to emphasize this fact that the doctrine of evolution can be found in the works of paracelsus. why not? since, as we have seen it had been floating about in philosophical thought in one form or another for some thousands of years. indeed, it has been stated upon good authority that the idea of a gradual evolution according to law and of a god from whom all being emanates, from whom all power proceeds, is an inherent necessity of the aryan mind as opposed to the semitic idea of an outdwelling god and of supernaturalism. thus, all down the ages the aryan mind has revolted from time to time against the religious ideas superimposed upon it by the semitic mind. this accounts for the numerous heresies within the bosom of the church as well as for the scientific advance against the superstitions of the church. generalizations of this sweeping order are apt to contain only partial truth. it would probably be nearer the whole truth, as we are enabled to-day to trace historical development, to say that, starting with opposite conceptions, these two orders of mind have worked toward each other and the harmonization of their respective points of view, and, furthermore, that this difference in mind belongs to a period prior even to the emergence of the aryan or the semitic. researches in mythology and folklore seem to indicate that no matter how far back one may go in the records of human thought there will be found these two orders of mind--one which naturally thinks of the universe as the outcome of law, and one which naturally thinks of it as the outcome of creation. there are primitive myths in which mankind is supposed to be descended from a primitive ancestor, which may range all the way from a serpent to an oak tree, or, as in a certain zulu myth, a bed of reeds growing on the back of a small animal. and there are equally primitive myths in which mankind is created out of the trees or the earth by an external agent, varying in importance from a grasshopper to a more or less spiritual being. browning did not need to depend upon paracelsus for his knowledge of evolution. he may not have known that the ancient hindu in the dim mists of the past had an intuition of the cosmic egg from which all life had evolved, and that he did not know of the theory as it is developed in the great german philosophers we are certain, because he, himself, asseverated that he had never read the german philosophers, but it is hardly possible that he did not know something of it as it appears in the writings of the greek philosophers, for greek literature was among the earliest of his studies. he might, for instance, have taken a hint from the speculations of that half mythical marvel of a man, empedocles, with which the paracelsus theory of the universe, as it appears in the passage under discussion, has many points of contact. according to empedocles, the four primal elements, earth, air, fire and water, are worked upon by the forces of love and discord. by means of these forces, out of the primal elements are evolved various and horrible monstrosities before the final form of perfection is reached. it is true he did not correctly imagine the stages in the processes of evolution, for instead of a gradual development of one form from another, he describes the process as a haphazard and chaotic one. "many heads sprouted up without necks, and naked arms went wandering forlorn of shoulders, and solitary eyes were straying destitute of foreheads." these detached portions of bodies coming together by haphazard produced the earlier monstrous forms. "many came forth with double faces and two breasts, some shaped like oxen with a human front, others, again, of human race with a bull's head." however, the latter part of the evolutionary process as described by empedocles, when love takes command, seems especially pertinent as a possible source of browning's thought: "when strife has reached the very bottom of the seething mass, and love assumes her station in the center of the ball, then everything begins to come together, and to form one whole--not instantaneously, but different substances come forth, according to a steady process of development. now, when these elements are mingling, countless kinds of things issue from their union. much, however, remains unmixed, in opposition to the mingling elements, and these, malignant strife still holds within his grasp. for he has not yet withdrawn himself altogether to the extremities of the globe; but part of his limbs still remain within its bounds, and part have passed beyond. as strife, however, step by step retreats, mild and innocent love pursues him with her force divine; things which had been immortal instantly assume mortality; the simple elements become confused by interchange of influences. when these are mingled, then the countless kinds of mortal beings issue forth, furnished with every sort of form--a sight of wonder." though evolution was no new idea, it had been only a hypothesis arrived at intuitionally or suggested by crude observations of nature until by perfected methods of historical study and of scientific experimentation proof was furnished of its truth as a scientific verity. let us glance at the situation at the time when paracelsus was published. in science had made great strides in the direction of proving the correctness of the hypothesis. laplace had lived and died and had given to the world in mathematical reasoning of remarkable power proof of the nebular hypothesis, which was later to be verified by fraunhofer's discoveries in spectrum analysis. lamarck had lived and died and had given to the world his theory of animal evolution. lyall in england had shown that geological formations were evolutionary rather than cataclysmal. in fact, greater and lesser scientific lights in england and on the continent were every day adding fresh facts to the burden of proof in favor of the hypothesis. it was in the air, and denunciations of it were in the air. most interesting of all, however, in connection with our present theme is the fact that herbert spencer was still a lad of fifteen, who was independently of darwin to work out a complete philosophy of evolution, which was to be applied in every department of cosmic, geologic, plant, animal and human activity, but (and this is of special interest) he was not to give to the world his plan for a synthetic philosophy until , and not to publish his "first principles" until , nor the first instalment of the "data of ethics," the fruit of his whole system, until . besides being familiar with the idea as it crops out in greek thought, it is impossible that the young browning was not cognizant of the scientific attitude of the time. in fact, he tells us as much himself, for when doctor wonivall asked him some questions as to his attitude toward darwin, browning responded in a letter: "in reality all that seems proved in darwin's scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning." entirely familiar with the evolutionary idea, then, however he may have derived it, it is just what might be expected that he should have worked it into paracelsus's final theory of life. the remarkable thing is that he should have applied its principles in so masterly a fashion--namely, that he should have made a complete philosophical synthesis by bringing the idea of evolution to bear upon all natural, human and spiritual processes of growth twenty-five years before herbert spencer, who is regarded on this particular ground as the master mind of the century, gave his synthetic philosophy of evolution to the world. a momentary glance at the passage in question will make this clear. paracelsus traces first development as illustrated in geological forms: "the center-fire heaves underneath the earth, and the earth changes like a human face; the molten one bursts up among the rocks, winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright in hidden mines, spots barren river beds, crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask." next he touches upon plant life and animal life. the grass grows bright, the boughs are swollen with blooms, ants make their ado, birds fly in merry flocks, the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets, savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain. then he shows how in all this animal life are scattered attributes foreshadowing a being that will combine them. then appears primitive man, only half enlightened, who gains knowledge through the slow, uncertain fruit of toil, whose love is not serenely pure, but strong from weakness, a love which endures and doubts and is oppressed. and out of the travail of the human soul as it proceeds from lower to higher forms is finally evolved self-conscious man--man who consciously looks back upon all that has preceded him and interprets nature by means of his own human perceptions. the winds are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, a querulous mutter or a quick, gay laugh, never a senseless gust, now man is born. but development does not end with the attainment of this self-consciousness. after this stage has been reached there continues an evolution which is distinctively spiritual, a tendency to god. browning was not content with the evolution of man, he was prophetic of the final flowering of man in the superman, although he had never heard of nietszche. the corollary to this progressive theory of life, a view held by scientific thinkers, is that sin is not depravity, but is merely a lack of development. paracelsus is therefore made wise to know even hate is but a mask of love, to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to sympathize, even be proud of man's half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim struggles for truth--all with a touch of nobleness despite their error, upward tending all, though weak. though there are points of contact between the thought of the true paracelsus and of browning, the points of contact between spencer and browning are far more significant, for browning seems intuitively to have perceived the fundamental truths of social and psychic evolution at the early age of twenty-three--truths which the philosopher worked out only after years of laborious study. we, who, to-day, are familiar with the application of the theory of evolution to every object from a dustpan to a flying machine, can hardly throw ourselves into the atmosphere of the first half of the last century when this dynamic ideal was flung into a world with static ideals. the christian world knew little and cared less about the guesses of greek philosophers, whom they regarded when they did know about them as unregenerate pagans. german thought was caviare to the general, and what new thought of a historical or scientific nature made its way into the strongholds of conservatism filled people with suspicion and dread. such a sweeping synthesis, therefore, as browning gives of dawning scientific theories in paracelsus was truly phenomenal. that it did not prove a bone of contention and arouse controversies as hot as those which were waged later around such scientific leaders as spencer, darwin, huxley, and clifford was probably due to the circumstance that the poem was little read and less understood, and also to the fact that it contained other elements which overlaid the bare presentation of the doctrines of evolution. so far i have spoken only of the form of the paracelsus theory of life, but a theory of life to be complete must have soul as well as form. only in adding the soul side to his theory of life does browning really give his solution of the problem, what is to be the relation of mind and spirit? one other point of resemblance is to be noted between the thought of browning's paracelsus and herbert spencer. they agree that ultimate knowledge is beyond the grasp of the intellect. neither was this a new idea; but up to the time of spencer it was taken simply as a negative conclusion. spencer, however, having found this negation makes it the body of his philosophy--a body so shadowy that many of his critics consider it too ghostly to stand as a substantial basis for philosophical thought. he regards the failure of the intellect to picture the nature of the absolute as the most certain proof that our intuitions of its existence are trustworthy, and upon this he bases all religious aspiration. like the psalmist, he exclaims, "who by searching can find out god?" the attitude of paracelsus is identical as far as the intellect is concerned. his life, spent in the search for knowledge, had proved it to him. but he does not, like spencer, make it the body of his philosophy. through the influence of aprile he is led to a definite conception of the infinite as a being whose especial characteristic is that he feels!--feels unbounded joy in his own creations. this is eminently an artist's or poet's perception of the relation of god to his universe. as aprile in one place says, "god is the perfect poet, who in his person acts his own creations." as i have already pointed out, the evil of pain, of decay, of degeneration is taken no account of. there is the constant passing onward from joy to joy. all the processes of nature from the simplest to the most complex bring, in their turn, a delight to their creator until man appears, and is not only a joy to his creator, but is the first in the order of creation to share in the joy of existence, the first to arrive at the full consciousness of beauty. so overwhelming is this consciousness of beauty that man perceives it struggling for expression in the hates and fallacies of undeveloped natures. all this is characteristic of the artistic way of looking at life. the artist is prone either to ignore the ugly or to transmute it by art into something possessing beauty of power if not of loveliness. what are plays like "hamlet" and "macbeth," "brand" and "peer gynt," music like "tristan and isolde" or the "pathetic symphony," rodin's statues, but actual, palpable realizations of the fact that hate is but a mask of love, or that human fallacies and human passions have within them the seeds of immense beauty if only there appear the artist who can bring them forth. if this is true of the human artist, how much more is it true of the divine artist in whose shadow, as pompilia says, even a guido may find healing. the optimism of such a theory of existence is intoxicating. not only does this artist-man look backward and rejoice in all the beauty of past phases of creation, but he looks forward to endless progression in the enjoyment of fresh phases of beauty--"a flying point of bliss remote." this is a universe in which the prometheus of the old myths is indeed unbound. mankind is literally free to progress forever upward. if there are some men in darkness, they are like plants in mines struggling to break out into the sunlight they see beyond. the interesting question arises here, was browning, himself, entirely responsible for the soul of his paracelsus theory of life or was there some source beyond him from which he drew inspiration? it has frequently been suggested that aprile in this poem is a sort of symbolic representation of shelley. why not rather a composite of both shelley and keats, the poet of love and the poet of beauty? an examination of the greatest poems of these two writers, "prometheus unbound" and "hyperion," will bring out the elements in both which i believe entered into browning's conception. in the exalted symbolism of the "prometheus unbound" shelley shows that, in his view, evil and suffering were not inherent in the nature of things, the tyranny of evil having gained its ascendancy through the persistence of out-worn ideals, such as that of power or force symbolized in the greek idea of jupiter. prometheus is the revolting mind of mankind, enslaved by the tyranny of jupiter, hating the tyrant, yet determined to endure all the tyrant can inflict upon him rather than admit his right to rule. the freeing of prometheus and the dethronement of jupiter come through the awakening in the heart of prometheus of pity for the tyrant--that is, prometheus has learned to love his enemies as he loves his friends. the remainder of the poem is occupied with showing the effects upon humanity of this universal awakening of love. in the fine passage where the spirit of the earth hears the trumpet of the spirit of the hour sound in a great city, it beholds all ugly human shapes and visages which had caused it pain pass floating through the air, and fading still "into the winds that scattered them, and those from whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms after some foul disguise had fallen, and all were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise and greetings of delighted wonder, all went to their sleep again." and the spirit of the hour relates: "soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled the abysses of the sky and the wide earth, there was a change: the impalpable thin air and the all-circling sunlight were transformed as if the sense of love dissolved in them had folded itself around the sphered world." in the meantime, the over-souls of humanity--prometheus, symbolic of thought or knowledge, is reunited to asia, his spouse, symbolic of nature or emotion, from whom he has long been separated and together with asia's sisters, panthea and ione--retire to the wonderful cave where they are henceforth to dwell and where their occupations are inspired by the most childlike and exalted moods of the soul. before considering the bearing of their life of love and art in the cave upon the character of aprile let us turn our attention for a moment to a remarkable passage in "hyperion," which poem was written as far back as . keats, like shelley, deals with the dethronement of gods, but it is the older dynasty of titans--saturn and hyperion usurped by jupiter and apollo. shelley's thought in the "prometheus" is strongly influenced by christian ideals, but keats's is thoroughly greek. the passing of one series of gods and the coming into power of another series of gods was a familiar idea in greek mythology. it reflected at once the literal fact that ever higher and higher forces of nature had been deified by them, beginning with crude nature gods and ending with symbols of the most ideal human attributes, and at the same time that their thought leaned in the direction of interpreting nature as an evolutionary process. seizing upon this, keats has presented in the words of the old titan oceanus a theory of the evolution of beauty quite as startling as a prophecy of psychological theories upon this subject as browning's is of cosmic and social theories. addressing saturn, oceanus says: "we fall by course of nature's law, not force of thunder, or of love.... ... as thou wast not the first of powers so art thou not the last; it cannot be: from chaos and parental darkness came light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, that sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends was ripening in itself. the ripe hour came and with it light, and light, engendering upon its own producer, forthwith touched, the whole enormous matter into life. upon that very hour, our parentage the heavens and the earth were manifest; then thou first-born, and we the giant-race, found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms * * * * * as heaven and earth are fairer far than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs, and as we show beyond that heaven and earth in form and shape compact and beautiful, in will, in action free, companionship and thousand other signs of purer life, so on our heels a fresh perfection treads, a power more strong in beauty, born of us and fated to excel us, as we pass in glory that old darkness: nor are we thereby more conquered than by us the rule of shapeless chaos. for 'tis the eternal law that first in beauty should be first in might. yea, by that law, another race may drive our conquerors to mourn as we do now." there is in the attitude of oceanus a magnificent acceptance of this ruthless course of nature reminding one of that taken by such men as huxley and clifford in the face of their own scientific discoveries, but one is immediately struck by the absence of love in the idea. an apollo, no matter what new beauty he may have, himself, to offer, who yet disregards the beauty of hyperion and calmly accepts the throne of the sun in his stead, does not satisfy us. what unreason it is that so splendid a being as hyperion should be deposed! as a matter of fact, he was not deposed. he is left standing forever in our memories in splendor like the morn, for keats did not finish the poem and no picture of the enthroned apollo is given. perhaps keats remembered his earlier utterance, "a thing of beauty is a joy forever," and cared for his own hyperion too much to banish him for the sake of apollo. be that as it may, the points in relation to our subject are that shelley's emphasis is upon the conservation of beauty, while keats's emphasis is upon the evolution of new beauty. in the cave where prometheus and asia dwell--the cave of universal spirit--is given forth the inspiration to humanity for painting, poetry and arts, yet to be born, and all these arts return to delight them, fashioned into form by human artists. love is the ruling principle. therefore all forms of beautiful art are immortal. aprile,[ ] as he first appears, is an elaboration upon this idea. he would love all humanity with such intensity that he would immortalize in all forms of art--painting, poetry, music--every thought and emotion of which the human soul is capable, and this done he would say: "his spirits created-- god grants to each a sphere to be its world, appointed with the various objects needed to satisfy its own peculiar want; so, i create a world for these my shapes fit to sustain their beauty and their strength." in short, he would found a universal art museum exactly like the cave in which prometheus dwelt. the stress is no more than it is in shelley upon a search for new beauty, and there is not a hint that a coming beauty shall blot out the old until aprile recognizes paracelsus as his king. then he awakes to the fact that his own ideal has been partial, because he has not been a seeker after knowledge, or new beauty, and in much the same spirit as oceanus, he exclaims: "lo, i forget my ruin, and rejoice in thy success, as thou! let our god's praise go bravely through the world at last! what care through me or thee?" but paracelsus had learned a lesson through aprile which the apollo of keats had not learned. he does not accept kingship at the expense of aprile as apollo would do at the expense of hyperion. he includes in his final theory of life all that is beautiful in aprile's or shelley's ideal and adds to it all that is beautiful of the keats ideal. the form of his philosophy is evolutionary, and up to the time of his meeting with aprile had expressed itself as the search for knowledge. through aprile his philosophy becomes imbued with soul, the attributes of which are the spirit of love and the spirit of beauty, one of which conserves and immortalizes beauty, the other of which searches out new beauty. so, working hand in hand, they become one, while the search for knowledge, thus spiritualized, becomes the search for beauty always inspired by love. the aim of the evolutionary process thus becomes the unfolding of ever new phases of beauty in which god takes endless delight, and to the final enjoyment of which mankind shall attain. to sum up, browning's solution of the problem in the paracelsus theory of life is reached not only through a synthesis of the doctrines of evolution as applied to universal activities, cosmic and human, prophetic, on the one hand, of the most advanced scientific thought of the century, but it is a synthesis of these and of the art-spirit in its twofold aspect of love and beauty as already expressed in the poetry of shelley and keats. it is not in the least probable that browning set to work consciously to piece together these ideals. that is not the method of the artist! but being familiar to him in the two best beloved poets of his youth, they had sunk into his very being, and welled forth from his own subconsciousness, charged with personal emotion, partly dramatic, partly the expression of his own true feeling at the time, and the result be it said is one of the most inspiring and beautiful passages in english poetry. [illustration: paracelsus] at the end of his life and the end of the century herbert spencer, who had spent years of labor to prove the fallacies in all religious dogmas, and who had insisted upon religion's being entirely relegated to intellectually unknowable regions of thought, spoke in his autobiography of the mysteries inherent in life, in the evolution of human beings, in consciousness, in human destiny--mysteries that the very advance of science makes more and more evident, exhibits as more and more profound and impenetrable, adding: "thus religious creeds, which in one way or other occupy the sphere that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more, the more it seeks, i have come to regard with a sympathy based on community of need: feeling that dissent from them results from inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions could be found." loyal to the last to his determination to accept as knowledge only what the intellect could prove, he never permitted himself to come under the awakening influence of an aprile, yet like browning's ancient greek, cleon, he longed for a solution of the mystery. at the dawn of the century, and in his youth, browning ventured upon a solution. in the remainder of this and the next chapter i shall attempt to show what elements in this solution the poet retained to the end of his life, how his thought became modified, and what relation his final solution bears to the final thought of the century. in this first attempt at a synthesis of life in which the attributes peculiar to the mind and to the spirit are brought into harmonious relationship, browning is more the intuitionalist than the scientist. his convictions well forth with all the force of an inborn revelation, just as kindred though much less rational views of nature's processes sprang up in the mind of the ancient hindu or the ancient greek. the philosophy of life herein flashed out by the poet was later to be elaborated fully on its objective or observational side by spencer--the philosopher par excellence of evolution--and finally, also, of course, on the objective side, to become an assured fact of science through the publication in of darwin's epoch-making book, "the origin of species," wherein the laws, so disturbing to many at the time, of natural selection and the survival of the fittest were fully set forth. while the genetic view of nature, as the phraseology of to-day goes, had been anticipated in writers on cosmology like leibnitz and laplace, in geology by such men as hutton and lyall, and had entered into the domain of embryology through the researches of von baer, and while spencer had already formulated a philosophy of evolution, darwin went out into the open and studied the actual facts in the domain of living beings. his studies made evolution a certainty. they revealed the means by which its processes were accomplished, and in so doing pointed to an origin of man entirely opposed to orthodox views upon this subject. thus was inaugurated the last great phase in the struggle between mind and spirit. henceforth, science stood completely revealed as the unflinching searcher of truth. intuition was but a handmaid whose duty was to formulate working hypotheses, to become scientific law if provable by investigation or experiment, to be discarded if not. the aspects which this battle has assumed in the latter half of the century have been many and various. older sciences with a new lease of life and sciences entirely new have advanced along the path pointed out by the doctrines of evolution. battalions of determined men have held aloft the banner of uncompromising truth. each battalion has stormed truth's citadel only to find that about its inmost reality is an impregnable wall. the utmost which has been attained in any case is a working hypothesis, useful in bringing to light many new objective phenomena, it is true, but, in the end, serving only to deepen the mystery inherent in the nature of all things. such a working hypothesis was the earlier one of gravitation whose laws of action were elaborated by sir isaac newton, and by the great mind of laplace were still further developed with marvelous mathematical precision in his "méchanique celeste." such another hypothesis is that of the atomic theory of the constitution of matter usually associated with the name of dalton, though it has undergone many modifications from other scientific thinkers. of this hypothesis theodore merz writes in his history of nineteenth-century scientific thought: "as to the nature of the differences of the elements, the atomic view gives no information; it simply asserts these differences, assumes them as physical constants, and tries to describe them by number and measurement. the atomic view is therefore at best only a provisional basis, a convenient resting place, similar to that which newton found in physical astronomy, and on which has been established the astronomical view of nature." the vibratory theories of the ether, the theories of the conservation of energy, the vitalistic view of life, the theory of parallelism of physical and psychical phenomena are all such hypotheses. they have been of incalculable value in helping to a larger knowledge of the appearances of things, and in the formation of laws of action and reaction, but in no way have they aided in revealing the inner or transcendent realities of the myriad manifestations of nature and life! during the last half of the century this truth has forced itself with ever increasing power upon the minds of scientists, and has resulted in many divisions among the ranks. some rest upon phenomena as the final reality; hence materialistic or mechanical views of life. some believe that the only genuine reality is the one undiscoverable by science; hence new presentations of metaphysical views of life. during these decades the solid phalanx of religious believers has continued to watch from its heights with more or less of fear the advance of science. here, too, there has been division in the ranks. many denounced the scientists as the destroyers of religion; others like the good bishop colenso could write such words as these in : "bless god devoutly for the gift of modern science"; and who ten years earlier had expressed satisfaction in the fact that superstitious belief in the letter of the bible was giving way to a true appreciation of the real value of the ancient hebrew scriptures as containing the dawn of religious light. from another quarter came the critical students of the bible, who subjected its contents to the keen tests of historical and archæological study. serene, above all the turmoil, was the small band of genuine philosophers who, like browning's own musician, abt vogler, knew the very truth. no matter what disturbing facts may be brought to light by science, be it man's descent from anthropoids or a mechanical view of sensation, they continue to dwell unshaken in the light of a transcendent truth which reaches them through some other avenue than that of the mind. browning belonged by nature in this last group. already in "sordello" his attention is turned to the development of the soul, and from that time on to the end of his career he is the champion of the soul-side of existence with all that it implies of character development--"little else being worth study," as he declared in his introduction to a second edition of the poem written twenty years after its first appearance. on this rock, the human soul, he takes his stand, and, though all the complex waves of the tempest of nineteenth-century thought break against his feet, he remains firm. beginning with "sordello," it is no longer evolution as applied to every aspect of the universe but evolution as applied to the human spirit which has his chief interest. problems growing out of the marvelous developments of such sciences as astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry or biology do not enter into the main body of the poet's thought, though there are allusions many and exact which show his familiarity with the growth of these various objective sciences during his life. during all the middle years of his poetic career the relations of the mind and the spirit seemed to fascinate browning, especially upon the side of the problems connected with the supernatural bases of religious experience. these are the problems which grew out of that phase of scholarly advance represented by biblical criticism. such a poem as "saul," for example, though full of a humanity and tenderness, as well as of a sheer poetic beauty, which endear it alike to those who appreciate little more than the content of the poem, and to those whose appreciation is that of the connoisseur in poetic art, is nevertheless an interpretation of the origin of prophecy, especially of the messianic idea, which places browning in the van of the thought of the century on questions connected with biblical criticism. at the time when "saul" was written, , modern biblical criticism had certainly gained very little hearing in england, for even as late as bishop colenso's enlightened book on the pentateuch was received, as one writer expresses it, with "almost unanimous disapprobation and widespread horror." critics of the bible there had been since the seventeenth century, but they had produced a confused mass of stuff in their attacks upon the authenticity of the bible against which the orthodox apologists had succeeded in holding their own. at the end of the eighteenth and the dawn of the nineteenth century came the more systematic criticism of german scholars, echoes of whose theories found their way into england through the studies of such men as pusey. but these, though they gave full consideration to the foremost of the german critics of the day, ranged themselves, for the most part, on the side of orthodoxy. eichhorn, one of the first of the germans to be studied in england, had found a point of departure in the celebrated "wolfenbüttel fragments," which had been printed by lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer reimarus discovered in the wolfenbüttel library. these fragments represent criticism of the sweepingly destructive order, characteristic of what has been called the naturalistic school. although eichhorn agreed with the writer of the "fragments" that the biblical narratives should be divested of all their supernatural aspects, he did not interpret the supernatural elements as simply frauds designed to deceive in order that personal ends might be gained. he restored dignity to the narrative by insisting at once upon its historical verity and upon a natural interpretation of the supernatural--"a spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity itself," which might result from primitive misunderstanding of natural phenomena, from the poetical embellishment of facts, or the symbolizing of an idea. doctor paulus, in his commentary on the gospels ( ), carried the idea still farther, and the rationalistic school of bible criticism became an assured fact, though kant at this time developed an entirely different theory of bible interpretation, which in a sense harked back to the older allegorical interpretation of the bible. he did not trouble himself at all about the historical accuracy of the narratives. he was concerned only in discovering the idea underlying the stories, the moral gist of them in relation to human development. with the naturalists and the rationalists, he put aside any idea of divine revelation. it was the moral aspiration of the authors, themselves, which threw a supernatural glamour over their accounts of old traditions and turned them into symbols of life instead of merely records of bona fide facts of history. the weakness of kant's standpoint was later pointed out by strauss, whose opinion is well summed up in the following paragraph. "whilst kant sought to educe moral thoughts from the biblical writings, even in their historical part, and was even inclined to consider these thoughts as the fundamental object of the history: on the other hand he derived these thoughts only from himself and the cultivation of his age, and therefore could seldom assume that they had actually been laid down by the authors of these writings; and on the other hand, and for the same reason, he omitted to show what was the relation between these thoughts and those symbolic representations, and how it happened that the one came to be expressed by the other." the next development of biblical criticism was the mythical mode of interpretation in which are prominent the names of gabler, schelling, bauer, vater, de wette, and others. these critics among them set themselves the difficult task of classifying the bible narratives under the heads of three kinds of myths: historical myths, philosophical myths, and poetical myths. the first were "narratives of real events colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural"; the second, "such as clothe in the garb of historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time"; the third, "historical and philosophical myths partly blended together and partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of the poet has woven around it." this sort of interpretation, first applied to the old testament, was later used in sifting history from myth to the new testament. it will be seen that it has something in common with both the previously opposed views. the mythical interpretation agrees with the old allegorical view in so far that they both relinquish historical reality in favor of some inherent truth or religious conception of which the historical semblance is merely the shell. on the other hand it agrees with the rationalistic view in the fact that it really gives a natural explanation of the process of the growth of myths and legends in human society. immediate divine agency controls in the allegorical view, the spirit of individuals or of society controls in the mythical view. neither the out-and-out rationalists nor the orthodox students of the bible approved of this new mode of interpretation, which was more or less the outcome of the study of the sacred books of other religions. in , however, appeared an epoch-making book which subjected the new testament to the most elaborate criticism based upon mythical and legendary interpretation. this was the "life of jesus, critically examined," by dr. david friedrich strauss. this book caused a great stir in the theological world of germany. strauss was dismissed from his professorship in the university of tübingen in consequence of it. not only this, but in , when he was appointed professor of church history and divinity at the university of zurich, he was compelled at once to resign, and the administration which appointed him was overthrown. this veritable bomb thrown into the world of theology was translated by george eliot, and published in england in . through this translation the most advanced german thought must have become familiar to many outside the pale of the professional scholar, and among them was, doubtless, the poet browning, if indeed he had not already become familiar with it in the original. when the content and the thought of browning's poems upon religious subjects are examined, it becomes certain that he was familiar with the whole trend of biblical criticism in the first half of the century and of its effect upon certain of the orthodox churchmen, and that with full consciousness he brought forward in his religious poems, not didactically, but often by the subtlest indirections, his own attitude toward the problems raised in this department of scientific historical inquiry. some of the problems which occupied his attention, such as that in "the death in the desert," are directly traceable to the influence of strauss's book. whether he knew of strauss's argument or not when he wrote "saul," his treatment of the story of david and saul is not only entirely in sympathy with the creed of the german school of mythical interpreters, but the poet himself becomes one of the myth makers in the series of prophets--that is, he takes the idea, the messianic idea, poetically embellishes an old tradition, making it glow with humanness, throws into that idea not only a content beyond that which david could have dreamed of, but suggests a purely psychical origin of the messianic idea itself in keeping with his own thought on the subject. the history of the origin and growth of the messianic ideal as traced by the most modern jewish critics claims it to have been a slow evolution in the minds of the prophets. in genesis it appears as the prophecy of a time to come of universal happiness promised to abraham, through whose seed all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed, because they had hearkened unto the voice of god. from a family ideal in abraham it passed on to being a tribal ideal with jacob, and with the prophets it became a national ideal, an aspiration toward individual happiness and a noble national life. not until the time of isaiah is a special agent mentioned who is to be the instrument by means of which the blessing is to be fulfilled, and there we read this prophecy: "there shall sprout forth a shoot from the stem of jesse, upon whom will rest the spirit of yahveh, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and strength, of the knowledge and fear of god. he will not judge according to appearance, nor will he according to hearsay. he will govern in righteousness the poor, and judge with equity the humble of the earth. he will smite the mighty with the rod of his mouth, and the wicked with the breath of his lips." the ideal expressed here of a great and wise national ruler who would bring about the realization of liberty, justice and peace to the hebrew nation, and not only to them but to all mankind, becomes in the prophetic vision of daniel a mystic being. "i saw in the visions of night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven came down as a likeness of the son of man. he stepped forward to the ancient of days. to him was given dominion, magnificence and rule. and all the peoples, nations and tongues did homage to him. his empire is an eternal empire and his realm shall never cease." in "saul" browning makes david the type of the prophetic faculty in its complete development. his vision is of an ideal which was not fully unfolded until the advent of jesus himself--the ideal not merely of the mythical political liberator but of the spiritual saviour, who through infinite love would bring redemption and immortality to mankind. david in the poem essays to cheer saul with the thought of the greatness that will live after him in the memory of others, but his own passionate desire to give something better than this to saul awakens in him the assurance that god must be as full of love and compassion as he is. thus browning explains the sudden awakening of david, not as a divine revelation from without, but as a natural growth of the human spirit godward. this new perception of values produces the ecstasy during which david sees his visions, the "witnesses, cohorts" about him, "angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware." this whole conception was developed by browning from the single phrase in i samuel: "and david came to saul, and stood before him: and he loved him greatly." in thus making david prophesy of an ideal which had not been evolved at his time, browning indulges in what the biblical critic would call prophecy after the fact, and so throws himself in on the side of the mythical interpreters of the bible. he has taken a historical narrative, embellished it poetically as in the imaginary accounts of the songs sung by david to saul, and given it a philosophical content belonging on its objective side to the dawn of christianity in the coming of jesus himself and on its subjective side to his (the poet's) own time--that is, the idea of internal instead of external revelation--one of the ideas about which has been waged the so-called conflict of science and religion as it was understood by some of the most prominent thinkers of the latter half of the century. in this, again, it will be seen that browning was in the van of the thought of the century, and still more was he in the van in the psychological tinge which he gives to david's experience. professor william james himself could not better have portrayed a case of religious ecstasy growing out of genuine exaltation of thought than the poet has in david's experience. this poem undoubtedly sheds many rays of light upon the feelings, at the time, of its writer. while he was a profound believer in the spiritual nature and needs of man, he was evidently not opposed to the contemporary methods of biblical criticism as applied to the prophecies of the old testament, for has he not himself worked in accord with the light such criticism had thrown upon the origin of prophecy? furthermore, the poem is not only an instance of his belief in the supremacy of the human spirit, but it distinctly repudiates the comtian ideal of a religion of humanity, and of an immortality existing only in the memory of others. the comte philosophy growing out of a material conception of the universe and a product of scientific thought has been one of the strong influences through the whole of the nineteenth century in sociology and religion. while it has worked much good in developing a deeper interest in the social life of man, it has proved altogether unsatisfactory and barren as a religious ideal, though there are minds which seem to derive some sort of forlorn comfort from this religion of positivism--from such hopes as may be inspired by the worship of humanity "as a continuity and solidarity in time" without "any special existence, more largely composed of the dead than of the living," by the thought of an immortality in which we shall be reunited with the remembrance of our "grandsires" like tyltyl and mytyl in maeterlinck's "blue bird." here, as always, the poet throws in his weight on the side of the paramount worth of the individual, and of a conception of life which demands that the individual shall have a future world in which to overcome the flaws and imperfections incident to earthly life. although, as i have tried to show, this poem undoubtedly bears witness to browning's awareness to the thought currents of the day, it is couched in a form so dramatic, and in a language so poetic, that it seems like a spontaneous outburst of belief in which feeling alone had played a part. certainly, whatever thoughts upon the subject may have been stowed away in the subconscious regions of the poet's mind, they well up here in a fountain of pure inspiration, carrying the thought forward on the wings of the poet's own spirit. poems reflecting several phases of the turmoil of religious opinion rife in mid-century england are "christmas eve" and "easter day." baffling they are, even misleading to any one who is desirous of finding out the exact attitude of the poet's mind, for example, upon the rival doctrines of a methodist parson and a german biblical critic. the methodist chapel and the german university might be considered as representative of the extremes of thought in the more or less prescribed realm of theology, which largely through the influence of the filtering in of scientific and philosophic thought had divided itself into many sects. within the church of england itself there were high church and low church, broad church and latitudinarian, into whose different shades of opinion it is not needful to enter here. outside of the established church were the numerous dissenters, including congregationalists, baptists, quakers, methodists, swedenborgians, unitarians, and numerous others. there was one broad line of division between the established church and the dissenting bodies. in the first was inherent the ancient principle of authority, while the principle of self-government in matters of faith guided all the dissenters in their search for the light. it is not surprising that with so many differing shades of opinion within the bosom of the anglican church it should, in the earlier half of the century, have lost its grip upon not only the people at large, but upon many of its higher intellects. the principle of authority seemed to be tottering to its fall. in this crisis the roman catholic church exercised a peculiar fascination upon men of intellectual endowment who, fearing the direction in which their intellect might lead them, turned to that church where the principle of authority kept itself firmly rooted by summarily dismissing any one who might question it. it is of interest to remember that at the date when this poem was written the tractarian movement, in which was conspicuous the oxford group of men, had succeeded in carrying over four hundred clergymen and laity into the catholic church. those who were unafraid followed the lead of german criticism and french materialism, but the large mass of common people found in methodism the sort of religious guidance which it craved. to this sect has been attributed an unparalleled influence in the moral development of england. by rescuing multitudes from ignorance and from almost the degradation of beasts, and by fostering habits of industry and thrift, methodism became a chief factor in building up a great, intelligent and industrious middle-class. its influence has been felt even in the established church, and as its enthusiastic historians have pointed out, england might have suffered the political and religious convulsions inaugurated by the french revolution if it had not been for the saving grace of methodism. appealing at first to the poor and lowly, suffering wrong and persecution with its founder, wesley, it was so flexible in its constitution that after the death of wesley it broadened out and differentiated in a way that made it adaptable to very varied human needs. in consequence of this it finally became a genuine power in the church and state of great britain. the poem "christmas eve" becomes much more understandable when these facts about methodism are borne in mind--facts which were evidently in the poet's mind, although the poem itself has the character of a symbolic rather than a personal utterance. the speaker might be regarded as a type of the religious conscience of england. in spite of whatever direct visions of the divine such a type of conscience may gain through the contemplation of nature and the revelations of the human heart, its relations to the past cause it to feel the need of some sectarian form of religion--a sort of inherited need to be orthodox in one form or another. this religious conscience has its artistic side; it can clothe its inborn religious instincts in exquisite imaginative vision. also, it has its clear-sighted reasoning side. this is able unerringly to put its finger upon any flaw of doctrine or reasoning in the forms of religion it contemplates. hence, catholic doctrine, which was claiming the allegiance of those who were willing to put their troublesome intellects to sleep and accept authority where religion was concerned, does not satisfy this keen analyzer. nor yet is it able to see any religious reality in such a myth of christ rehabilitated as an ethical prophet as the göttingen professor constructs in a manner so reminiscent of a passage in strauss's "life of jesus," where he is describing the opinions of the rationalists' school of criticism, that a comparison with that passage is enlightening. having swept away completely the supernatural basis of religion, the rationalist is able still to conceive of jesus as a divine messenger, a special favorite and charge of the deity: "he had implanted in him by god the natural conditions only of that which he was ultimately to become, and his realization of this destiny was the result of his own spontaneity. his admirable wisdom he acquired by the judicious application of his intellectual powers and the conscientious use of all the aids within his reach; his moral greatness, by the zealous culture of his moral dispositions, the restraint of his sensual inclinations and passions, and a scrupulous obedience to the voice of his conscience; and on these alone rested all that was exalted in his personality, all that was encouraging in his example." the difficulty to this order of mind of the direct personal revelation lies in the fact that it is convincing only to those who experience it, having no basis in authority, and may even for them lose its force. what then is the conclusion forced upon this english religious conscience? simply this: that, though failing both from the intellectual and the æsthetic standpoint, the dissenting view was the only religious view of the time possessing any genuine vitality. it represented the progressive, democratic religious force which was then in england bringing religion into the lives of the people with a positiveness long lost to the anglican church. the religious conscience of england was growing through this methodist movement. this is why the speaker of the poem chooses at last that form of worship which he finds in the little chapel. while no one can doubt that the exalted mysticism based upon feeling, and the large tolerance of the poem, reflect most nearly the poet's personal attitude, on the other hand it is made clear that in his opinion the dissenting bodies possessed the forms of religious orthodoxy most potent at the time for good. in "easter day," the doubts and fears which have racked the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of individuals, as the result of the increase of scientific knowledge and biblical criticism are given more personal expression. the discussion turns principally upon the relation of the finite to the infinite, a philosophical problem capable of much hair-splitting controversy, solved here in keeping with the prevailing thought of the century--namely, that the finite is relative and that this relativity is the proof of the infinite. the boldness of this statement, one such as might be found in the pages of spencer, is by browning elaborated with pictorial and emotional power. only by a marvelous vision is the truth brought home to the speaker that the beauties and joys of earth are not all-sufficient, but that they are in the poet's speech but partial beauty, though through this very limitation they become "a pledge of beauty in its plenitude," gleams "meant to sting with hunger for full light." it is not, however, until this see-er of visions perceives the highest gleam of earth that he is able to realize through the spiritual voice of his vision that the nature of the infinite is in its essence love, the supreme manifestation of which was symbolized in the death and resurrection of christ. this revelation is nevertheless rendered null by the man's conviction that the vision was merely such "stuff as dreams are made on." at the end as at the beginning he finds it hard to be a christian. his vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. like the type in "christmas eve," conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural revelation. he is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who cannot, as the tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious anthropomorphism of the sectarian. he doubts his own reasoning attempts to formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction against the supernatural dogmas of christianity. like others of his ilk, he probably stayed in the anglican church and weakened it through his latitudinarianisms. a study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of bishop blougram. here we have not a generalized type as in "christmas eve," nor an imaginary individual as in "easter day," but an actual study of a real man, it being no secret that cardinal wiseman was the inspiration for the poem. wiseman's influence as a catholic in the tractarian movement was a powerful one, and in the poet's dissection of his psychology an attempt is made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less independent thinkers. with faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt underfoot. browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to him from what he makes them mean to blougram. the poet's aspiration would be toward a belief in omniscient love and power, his doubts would grow out of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds in life. blougram's consciousness is on a lower plane. his aspiration is to believe in the dogmas of the church, his doubts arise from an intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. where browning seems to miss comprehension of such a nature as blougram's is in failing to recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. while this poem shows in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and its allusions to strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of gigadibs, the man emancipated from the church, how entirely familiar the poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls short as a fair analysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a tremendous religious influence upon englishmen of the caliber of cardinal newman, kingsley, arnold, and others. if we leave out of account its connection with a special individual, the poem stands, however, as a delightful study of a type in which is depicted in passingly clever fashion methods of reasoning compounded of tantalizing gleams of truth and darkening sophistication. the poem which shows most completely the effect of contemporary biblical criticism on the poet is "a death in the desert." it has been said to be an attempt to meet the destructive criticism of strauss. the setting of the poem is wonderfully beautiful, while the portrayal of the mystical quality of john's reasoning is so instinct with religious feeling that it must be a wary reader indeed who does not come from the reading of this poem with the conviction that here, at least, browning has declared himself unflinchingly on the side of supernatural christianity in the face of the battering rams of criticism and the projectiles of science. but if he be a wary reader, he will discover that the argument for supernaturalism only amounts to this--and it is put in the mouth of john, who had in his youth been contemporary with christ--namely, that miracles had been performed when only by means of them faith was possible, though miracles were probably not what those who believed in them thought they were. here is the gist of his defence of the supernatural: "i say, that as a babe, you feed awhile, becomes a boy and fit to feed himself, so, minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth: when they can eat, babes'-nurture is withdrawn. i fed the babe whether it would or no: i bid the boy or feed himself or starve. i cried once, 'that ye may believe in christ, behold this blind man shall receive his sight!' i cry now, 'urgest thou, _for i am shrewd and smile at stories how john's word could cure-- repeat that miracle and take my faith_?' i say, that miracle was duly wrought when save for it no faith was possible. whether a change were wrought in the shows o' the world, whether the change came from our minds which see of shows o' the world so much as and no more than god wills for his purpose,--(what do i see now, suppose you, there where you see rock round us?)--i know not; such was the effect, so faith grew, making void more miracles, because too much they would compel, not help. i say, the acknowledgment of god in christ accepted by thy reason, solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it, and has so far advanced thee to be wise. wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved? in life's mere minute, with power to use the proof, leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung? thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die!" the important truth as seen by john's dying eyes is that faith in a beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. whether the accounts of the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little importance, the faith itself is no less god-given, as another passage will make clear: "man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect he could not, what he knows now, know at first; what he considers that he knows to-day, come but to-morrow, he will find misknown; getting increase of knowledge, since he learns because he lives, which is to be a man, set to instruct himself by his past self; first, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. god's gift was that man should conceive of truth and yearn to gain it, catching at mistake as midway help till he reach fact indeed." the defence of christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the theology of schleiermacher, a résumé of which the poet might have found in strauss's "life of jesus." although schleiermacher accepted and even went beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of the church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive christianity. he starts out from the consciousness of the christian, "from that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection with the christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give dialectically a form that satisfies science." again, "if we owe to him [jesus] the continual strengthening of the consciousness of god within us, this consciousness must have existed in him in absolute strength, so that it or god in the form of the consciousness was the only operative force within him." in other words, in jesus was the supreme manifestation of god in human consciousness. this truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally recognized in man's developing consciousness as a consummation brought about by natural means. john's reasoning in the poem can lead to no other conclusion than this. schleiermacher's theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground that if this incarnation of god was possible in one man, there is no reason why it should not frequently be possible. this is the orthodox objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by "one" at the end of the poem showing the weakness of john's argument from the strictly orthodox point of view. with regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally interpreted--that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless proofs and analyses. how much this poem owes to hints derived from strauss's book is further illustrated by the "glossa of theotypas," which is borrowed from origen, whose theory is referred to by strauss in his introduction as follows: "origen attributes a threefold meaning to the scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the soul, and the mystical to the spirit." on the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual contents of strauss's book than to be deliberately directed against his thought, for john's own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might be deduced from more than one passage in this work wherein are passed in review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist schools of thought. the poem "an epistle" purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of lazarus. we have here, on the one hand, the arab's natural explanation of the miracle as an epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and lazarus's interpretation of his cure as a supernatural event. though absolutely skeptical, the arab cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of lazarus, because of their revelation of god as a god of love. thus browning brings out the power of the truth in the underlying ideas of christianity, whatever skepticism may be felt as to the letter of it. the effect of the trance upon the nature of lazarus is paralleled to-day by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. i remember reading of a case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty toward which he seemed to be flying through space, and his disinclination to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. this higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day without the intervention of such an experience as that of lazarus or one such as that of the above subject of the society for psychical research. in describing lazarus to have reached such an outlook upon life, browning again ranges himself with the most advanced psychological thought of the century. hear william james: "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. as a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. they are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. they do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. it is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. it must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. the difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. the wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. it would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. we should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fulness of the truth." the vision of lazarus belongs to the beatific realm, and the naturalistic arab has a longing for similar strange vision, though he calls it a madman's, for-- "so, the all-great, were the all-loving too-- so, through the thunder comes a human voice saying, 'o heart i made, a heart beats here! face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, but love i gave thee, with myself to love, and thou must love me who have died for thee.'" a survey of browning's contributions to the theological differences of the mid-century would not be complete without some reference to "caliban" and "childe roland." in the former, the absurdities of anthropomorphism, of the god conceived in the likeness of man, are presented with dramatic and ironical force, but, at the same time, is shown the aspiration to something beyond, which has carried dogma through all the centuries, forward to ever purer and more spiritual conceptions of the absolute. in the second, though it be a purely romantic ballad, there seems to be symbolized the scientific knight-errant of the century, who, with belief and faith completely annihilated by the science which allows for no realm of knowledge beyond its own experimental reach, yet considers life worth living. despite the complex interpretations which have issued from the oracular tripods of browning societies, one cannot read the last lines of this poem-- "dauntless the slug-horn to my lips i set, and blew, '_childe roland to the dark tower came_'"-- without thinking of the splendid courage in the face of disillusionment of such men of the century as huxley, tyndall or clifford. when we ask, where is browning in all this diversity of theological opinion? we can only answer that beyond an ever-present undercurrent of religious aspiration there is no possibility of pinning the poet to any given dogmas. everywhere we feel the dramatic artist. in "paracelsus" the philosophy of life was that of the artist whose adoration finds its completion in beauty and joy; now the poet himself is the artist experiencing as aprile did, this beauty and joy in a boundless sympathy with many forms of mystical religious ecstasy. every one of these poems presents a conflict between the doubts born of some phase of theological controversy and the exaltation of moments or periods of ecstatic vision, and though nowhere is dogmatic truth asserted with positiveness, everywhere we feel a mystic sympathy with the moving power of religious aspiration, a sympathy which belongs to a form of consciousness perhaps more inclusive than the religious--namely, a poetic consciousness, able at once to sympathize with the content and to present the forms of mystic vision belonging to various phases of human consciousness. ii the century's end: promise of peace passing onward from this mid-century phase of browning's interest in what i have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he treated it in "paracelsus," yet with a marked difference in temper. god is no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder and beauty of his creations. the ideal of the artist has been modified by the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather than by artistic emotion. life's experiences have shown to the more humanly conscious browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so easily dismissed. the scientist may point out that evil is but lack of development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human, feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. it does not satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders the problem, "why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!" about this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite, browning's latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about the basis of religious belief. it is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of browning's earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later poems, especially "ferishtah's fancies," and "the parleyings," not only as expressions of the poet's own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century. the date at which various critics have declared that browning ceased to write poetry might be considered an index of the time when that critic's powers became atrophied. no less a person than edmund gosse is of the opinion that since the poet's books were chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in him, and as leading fresh generations of readers to what he had already published. fortunately it has long been admitted that homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said to attend the nods of jove. hence, in spite of mr. gosse's undoubted eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding. if mr. gosse were right, it would practically put on a par with a mere advertising scheme many poems which have now become household favorites. take, for example, "hervé riel." think of the blue-eyed breton hero whom all the world has learned to love through browning, tolerated simply as an index finger to "the pied piper of hamelin." take, too, such poems, as "donald." this man's dastardly sportsmanship is so vividly portrayed that it has the power to arouse strong emotion in strong men, who have been known literally to break down in the middle of it through excess of feeling; "ivan ivanovitch," in which is embodied such fear and horror that weak hearts cannot stand the strain of hearing it read; the story of the dog tray, who rescued a drowning doll with the same promptitude as he did a drowning child--at the relation of whose noble deeds the eyes of little children grow eager with excitement and sympathy. and where is there in any poet's work a more vivid bit of tragedy than "a forgiveness?" and would not an unfillable gap be left in the ranks of our friends of the imaginative world if balaustion were blotted out?--the exquisite lyric girl, brave, tender and with a mind in which wisdom and wit are fair play fellows. as carlyle might say, "verily, verily, mr. gosse, thou hast out-homered homer, and thy nod hath taken upon itself very much the semblance of a snore." these and many others which might be mentioned since the date when mr. gosse autocratically put up the bars to the poet's genius are now universally accepted. there are others, however, such as "the red cotton night-cap country," "the inn album," "aristophanes' apology," "fifine at the fair," which are liable at any time to attacks from atrophied critics, and among these are the groups of poems which are to form the center of our present discussion. without particularizing either critics or criticism it may be said that criticism of these poems divides itself into the usual three branches--one which objects to their philosophy, one which objects to their art, one which finds them difficult of comprehension at all. this last criticism may easily be disposed of by admitting it is in part true. the mind whose highest reaches of poetic inspiration are ministered unto by such simple and easily understandable lyrics as "twinkle, twinkle, little star," might not at once grasp the significance of the parleying with george bubb dodington. indeed, it may be surmised that some minds might sing upon the starry heights with hegel and fathom the equivalence of being and non-being, and yet be led into a slough of despond by this same cantankerous george. but a poetical slough of despond may be transfigured in the twinkling of an eye--after a proper amount of study and hard thinking--into an elevated plateau with prospects upon every side, grand or terrible or smiling. are we never to feel spurred to any poetical pleasure more vigorous than dilly-dallying with keats while we feast our eyes upon the wideness of the seas? or lazily floating in a lotus land with tennyson, perhaps, among the meadows of the musketaquid, in canoes with silken cushions? beauty and peace are the reward of such poetical pleasures. they fall upon the spirit like the "sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor," but shall we never return from the land where it is always afternoon? is it only in such a land as this that we realize the true power of emotion? rather does it conduce to the slumber of emotion, for progress is the law of feeling as it is the law of life, and many times we feel--yes, feel--with tremendous rushes of enthusiasm like climbing matterhorns with great iron nails in our shoes, with historical and archæological and philosophical alpen-stocks in our hands, and when we reach the summit what unsuspected beauties become ours! then let us hear no more of the critic who wishes browning had ceased to write in or at any other date. it may be said of him, not as of whitman, "he who reads my book touches a man," but "he who reads my poems from start to finish grasps the life and thought of a century." there will be no exaggeration in claiming that these two series of poems form the keystone to browning's whole work. they are like a final synthesis of the problems of existence which he has previously portrayed and analyzed from myriad points of view in his dramatic presentation of character and his dramatic interpretations of spiritual moods. in "pauline," before the poet's personality became more or less merged in that of his characters, we obtain a direct glimpse of the poet's own artistic temperament, and may literally acquaint ourselves with those qualities which were to be a large influence in moulding his work. as described by himself, the poet of "pauline" was "made up of an intensest life, of a most clear idea of consciousness of self, distinct from all its qualities, from all affections, passions, feelings, powers; and thus far it exists, if tracked, in all: but linked in me to self-supremacy, existing as a center to all things, most potent to create and rule and call upon all things to minister to it." this sense of an over-consciousness is the mark of an objective poet--one who sympathizes with all the emotions and aspirations of humanity--interprets their actions through the light of this sympathy, and at the same time keeps his own individuality distinct. the poet of this poem discovers that he can no longer lose himself with enthusiasm in any phase of life; but what does that mean to a soul constituted as his? it means that the way has been cleared for the birth of that greater, broader love of the fully developed artist soul which, while entering into sympathy with all phases of life, finds its true complement only in an ideal of absolute love. this picture of the artist aspiring toward the absolute by means of his large human sympathy may be supplemented by the theory of man's relation to the universe involved in "paracelsus" as we have seen. from this point in his work, browning, like the hindu brahma, becomes manifest not as himself, but in his creations. the poet whose portrait is painted for us in "pauline" is the same poet who sympathetically presents a whole world of human experiences to us, and the philosopher whose portrait is drawn in "paracelsus" is the same who interprets these human experiences in the light of the great life theories therein presented. but as the creations of brahma return into himself, so the human experiences browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when, like his own rabbi ben ezra, he reaches the last of life for which the first was planned in these "fancies" and "parleyings." though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. several things are gained in this way: first, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the poet expresses his opinions as an individual, and not in his own person as a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. second, variety is given and the mind stimulated by having opposite points of view presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional force through the heat of argument. it has frequently been objected, not only of these poems, but upon general grounds, that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for treatment in poetry. there is one point which the critic of æsthetics seems in danger of never realizing--namely, that the law of evolution is differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. it is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to this or that kind of a subject, or to say that nothing is dramatic which does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for homer to declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain a catalogue of ships. these facts exist! we have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas in which character development is of prime importance; dramas wherein action and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action means more than appears upon the surface, like hauptmann's "sunken bell," or ibsen's "master builder"; then why not dramas of thought and dramas of mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an actual stage. surely such an extension of the possibilities of dramatic art is a development quite natural to the intellectual ferment of the nineteenth century. as the man in "half rome" says, "facts are facts and lie not, and the question, 'how came that purse the poke o' you?' admits of no reply." by using the dramatic form, the poet has furthermore been enabled to give one a deep sense of the characteristics peculiar to the century. the latter half of victorian england in its thought phases lives just as surely in these poems as renaissance italy in its art phases in "fra lippo lippi," "andrea del sarto," and the rest; and this is true though the first series is cast in the form of persian fables and the second in the form of "parleyings" with worthies of past centuries. it may be worth while for the benefit of the reader not thoroughly familiar with these later poems to pass quickly in review the problems in them upon which browning bends his poet's insight. nothing bears upon the grounds of moral action more disastrously than blind fatalism, and while there have been many evil forms of this doctrine in the past there has probably been none worse than the modern form, because it seems to have sanction in the scientific doctrines of the conservation of energy, the persistence of heredity, and the survival of the fittest. even the wise and the thoughtful with wills atrophied by scientific phases of fatalism allow themselves to drift upon what they call the laws of development, possessing evidently no realizing sense that the will of man, whether it be in the last analysis absolutely free or not, is a prime factor in the working of these laws. such people will hesitate, therefore, to throw in their voices upon either side in the solution of great national problems, because, things being bound to follow the laws of development, what matters a single voice! such arguments were frequently heard among the wise in our own country during the cuban and philippine campaigns. upon this attitude of mind the poet gives his opinion in the first of "ferishtah's fancies," "the eagle." it is a strong plea for the exercise of those human impulses that lead to action. the will to serve the world is the true force from god. every man, though he be the last link in a chain of causes over which he had no control, can, at least, have a determining influence upon the direction in which the next link shall be forged. ferishtah appears upon the scene, himself, a fatalist, leaving himself wholly in god's hands, until he is taught by the dream god sent him that man's part is to act as he saw the eagle act, succoring the helpless, not to play the part of the helpless birdlings. another phase of the same thought is brought out in "a camel driver," where the discussion turns upon punishment. the point is, if, as ferishtah declares, the sinner is not to be punished eternally, then why should man trouble himself to punish him? universalist doctrines are here put into the mouth of ferishtah, and not a few modern philanthropists would agree with ferishtah's questioners that punishment for sins (the manifestations of inherited tendencies for which the sinners are not responsible) is no longer admissible. ferishtah's answer amounts to this. that no matter what causes for beneficent ends may be visible to the divine mind in the allowance of the existence of sin, nor yet the fact that divine love demands that punishment shall not be eternal; man must regard sin simply from the human point of view as absolute evil, and must will to work for its annihilation. it follows then that the punishing of a sinner is the means by which he may be taught to overcome the sin. there is the added thought, also, that the suffering of the conscience over the subtler sins which go unpunished is all the hell one needs. another doctrine upon which the nineteenth-century belief in progress as the law of life has set its seal is that of the pursuit of happiness, or the striving for the greatest good of the whole number in which oneself is not to be excluded. with this doctrine browning shows himself in full sympathy in "two camels," wherein ferishtah contends that only through the development of individual happiness and the experiencing of many forms of joyousness can one help others to happiness and joyousness, while in "plot culture" the enjoyment of human emotion as a means of developing the soul is emphasized. the relation of good and evil in their broader aspects occupy the poet's attention in others of this group. nineteenth-century thought brought about a readjustment of these relations. good and evil as absolutely definable entities gave place to the doctrine that good and evil are relative terms, a phrase which we sometimes forget must be understood in two ways: first, that good and evil are relative to the state of society in which they exist. what may be good according to the ethics of a fejee islander would not hold in the civilized society of to-day. this is the evil of lack of development which in the long run becomes less. on the other hand, there is the evil of suffering and pain which it is more difficult to reconcile with the idea of omnipotent power. in "mihrab shah," browning gives a solution of this problem in consonance with the idea that were it not for evil we should not have learned how to appreciate the good, to work for it, and, in doing so, bring about progress. to his pupil, worried over this problem, ferishtah points out that evil in the form of bodily suffering has given rise to the beautiful sentiments of pity and sympathy. having proved in this way that good really grows out of evil, there is still the query, shall evil be encouraged in order that good may be evolved? "no!" ferishtah declares, man bound by man's conditions is obliged to estimate as "fair or foul right, wrong, good, evil, what man's faculty adjudges as such," therefore the man will do all he can to relieve the suffering or poor mihrab shah with a fig plaster. the final answers, then, which browning gives to the ethical problems which grew out of the acceptance of modern scientific doctrines are, in brief, that man shall use that will-power of which he feels himself possessed--the power really distinguishing him from the brute creation--in working against whatever appears to him to be evil; while that good for which he shall work is the greatest happiness of all. in the remaining poems of the group we have the poet's mature word upon the philosophical doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, a doctrine which received the most elaborate demonstration from herbert spencer in many directions. it is insisted upon in "cherries," "the sun," in "a bean stripe also apple eating," and especially in that remarkable poem, "a pillar at sebzevar." that knowledge fails is the burden of these poems. knowledge the golden is but lacquered ignorance, as gain to be mistrusted. curiously enough, this contention of browning's has been the cause of most of the criticisms against him as a thinker, yet the deepest thinkers of to-day as well as many in the past have held the opinion in some form or another that the intellect was unable to solve the mysterious problems of the universe. even the metaphysicians who build their unstable air castles on _à priori_ ideas declare these ideas cannot be matters of mere intellectual perception, but must be intuitions of the higher reason. browning, however, does not rest in the mere assertion that the intellect fails. from this truth, so disconcerting to many, he draws immense comfort. though intellectual knowledge be mistrusted as gain, it is not to be mistrusted as means to gain, for through its very failure it becomes a promise of greater things. "friend," quoth ferishtah in "a pillar of sebzevar," "as gain--mistrust it! nor as means to gain: lacquer we learn by: cast in firing-pot, we learn--when what seemed ore assayed proves dross surelier true gold's worth, guess how purity i' the lode were precious could one light on ore clarified up to test of crucible. the prize is in the process: knowledge means ever-renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach." for men with minds of the type of spencer's this negative assurance of the infinite is sufficient, but human beings as a rule will not rest satisfied with such cold abstractions. though job said thousands of years ago, "who by searching can find out god," mankind still continues to search. they long to know something of the nature of the divine as well as to be assured of its existence. in this very act of searching browning declares the divine becomes most directly manifest. from the earliest times of which we have any record man has been aspiring toward god. many times has he thought he had found him, but with enlarged perceptions he discovered later that what he had found was only god's image built up out of his own human experiences. this search of man for the divine is described with great power and originality in the fancy called "the sun," under the symbol of the man who seeks the prime giver that he may give thanks where it is due for a palatable fig. this search for god, browning calls love, meaning by that the moving, aspiring force of the whole universe in its multifarious manifestations, from the love that goes forth in thanks for benefits received, through the aspiration of the artist toward beauty, of the lover toward human sympathy, even of the scientist toward knowledge, to the lover of humanity like ferishtah, who declares, "i know nothing save that love i can, boundlessly, endlessly." the poet argues from this that if mankind has with ever-increasing fervor aspired toward a god of love, and has ever developed toward broader conceptions of human love, it is only reasonable to infer that in his nature god has some attribute which corresponds to human love, though it transcend our most exalted imagining of it. at the end of the century a book was written in america in which an argument similar to this was used to prove the existence of god. this book was "through nature to god," by john fiske, whose earlier work, "cosmic philosophy," did much to familiarize the american reading public with the evolutionary philosophy of spencer. fiske claimed that his theory was entirely original, yet no one familiar with the thought of browning could fail to see the similarity of their points of view. fiske based his proof upon analogies drawn from the evolution of organic life in following out the law of the adjustment of inner to outer relations. for example, since the eye has through æons of time gradually adjusted itself into harmony with light, why should not man's search for god be the gradual adjustment of the soul into harmony with the infinite spirit? this adjustment, as browning expresses it, is that of human love to divine love. [illustration: herbert spencer] other modern thinkers, notably schleiermacher in germany and shaftsbury in england, have placed the basis of religious truth in feeling. the idea is thus not a new one. yet in browning's treatment of it the conception has taken on new life, partly because of the intensity of conviction with which it is expounded in these later poems, and partly because of its having been so closely knit into the scientific thought of the century. optimistically the thought is finally rounded out in "a bean stripe also apple eating," in which ferishtah argues that life in spite of the evil in it seems to him on the whole good. he cannot believe that evil is not meant to serve a good purpose since he is so sure that god is infinite in love. from all this it will be seen that browning accepts with spencerians the negative proof of god growing out of the failure of intellect to grasp the realities underlying all phenomena, but adds to it the positive proof based upon emotion. the true basis of belief is the intuition of god that comes from the direct revelation of feeling in the human heart, which has been at once the motive force of the search for god and the basis of a conception of the nature of god. it was a stroke of genius on the part of the poet to present such problems in persian guise, for persia stands in zoroastrianism for the dualism which ferishtah with his progressive spirit decries in his recognition of the part evil plays in the development of good, and through mahometanism for the fatalism ferishtah learned to cast from him. the persian atmosphere is preserved throughout not only by the introduction constantly of persian allusions traceable to the great persian epic, "the shah nameh," but by the telling of fables in the persian manner to point the morals intended. with the exception of the first fancy, derived from a fable of bidpai's, we have the poet's own word that all the others are inventions of his own. these clever stories make the poems lively reading in spite of their ethical content. ferishtah is drawn with strong strokes. wise and clever he stands before us, reminding us at times of socrates--never at a loss for an answer no matter what bothersome questions his pupils may propound. if we see the thoughtful and brilliant browning in the "fancies" proper, we perhaps see even more clearly the emotional and passionate browning in the lyrics which add variety and an unwonted charm to the whole. this feature is also borrowed from persian form, an interesting example of which has been given to english readers in edwin arnold's "gulistan" or "rose garden" of the poet sa'di. indeed browning evidently derived the hint for his humorous prologue in which he likens the poems to follow to an italian dish made of ortolans on toast with a bitter sage leaf, symbolizing sense, sight, and song from sa'di's preface to the "rose garden," wherein he says, "yet will men of light and learning, from whom the true countenance of a discourse is not concealed, be well aware that herein the pearls of good counsel which heal are threaded on strings of right sense; that the bitter physic of admonition is constantly mingled with the honey of good humor, so that the spirits of listeners grow not sad, and that they remain not exempt from blessings of acceptance." a further interest attaches to these lyrics because they form a series of emotional phases in the soul-life of two lovers whom we are probably justified in regarding as mr. and mrs. browning. one naturally thinks of them as companion pictures to mrs. browning's "sonnets from the portuguese." in these the sunrise of a great love is portrayed with intense and exalted passion, while the lyrics in "ferishtah's fancies" reflect the subsequent development of such a love, through the awakening of whole new realms of feeling, wherein love for humanity is enlarged criticism from the one beloved welcome; all the little trials of life dissolved in the new light; and divine love realized with a force never before possible. do we not see a living portrait of the two poets in the lyric "so the head aches and the limbs are faint?" many a hint may be found in the browning letters to prove that mrs. browning with just such a frail body possessed a fire of spirit that carried her constantly toward attainment, while he, with all the vigor of splendid health, could with truth have frequently said, "in the soul of me sits sluggishness." these exquisite lyrics, which, whether they conform to elizabethan models or not, are as fine as anything ever done in this form, are crowned by the epilogue in which we hear the stricken husband crying out to her whom twenty years earlier he had called his "lyric love," in a voice doubting, yet triumphing in the thought that his lifelong optimism is the light radiating from the halo which her human love had irised round his head. no more emphatic way than the interspersion of these emotional lyrics could have been chosen to bring home the poet's conviction of the value of emotion in finding a positive basis for religious belief. in the "parleyings" the discussions turn principally upon artistic problems and their relation to modern thought. four out of the seven were inspired by artist, poet or musician. the forgotten worthies whom browning rescued from oblivion make their appeal to him upon various grounds that connect them with the present. bernard de mandeville evidently caught browning's fancy, because in his satirical poem, "the grumbling hive," he forestalled, by a defence of the duke of marlborough's war policy, the doctrine of the relativity of good and evil. this subject, though so fully treated in the "fancies," still continued to fascinate browning, who seemed to feel the need of thinking his way through all its implications. fresh interest is added in this case because the objector in the argument was the poet's contemporary carlyle, whose well-known pessimism in regard to the existence of evil is graphically presented. browning clenches his side of the argument with an original and daring variation upon the prometheus myth led up to by one of the most magnificent passages in the whole range of his poetry, and probably the finest example anywhere in literature of a description of nature as interpreted by the laws of cosmic evolution. a comparison of this passage with the one in "paracelsus" brings out very clearly the exact measure of the advance in the poet's thought during the fifty years between which they were written-- and . while in the "paracelsus" passage it is the thought of the joy in the creator's soul for his creations, and the participation of mankind in this joy of progression while pleasure climbs its heights forever and forever, which occupies the poet's mind, in the later passage, there is no attempt at a definite conception of the divine nature. force represented in the sunlight is described as developing life upon the earth. the thrill of this life-giving power is felt by all things, and is unquestioningly accepted and delighted in. "everywhere did earth acknowledge sun's embrace sublime thrilling her to the heart of things: since there no ore ran liquid, no spar branched anew, no arrowy crystal gleamed, but straightway grew glad through the inrush--glad nor more nor less than, 'neath his gaze, forest and wilderness, hill, dale, land, sea, the whole vast stretch and spread, the universal world of creatures bred by sun's munificence, alike gave praise." man alone questions. his mind reaches out for knowledge of the cause; he would know its nature. man's mind will not give any definite answer to this question. but prometheus offered an artifice whereby man's mind is satisfied. he drew sun's rays into a focus plain and true. the very sun in little: made fire burn and henceforth do man service. denuded of its scientific and mystical symbolism, browning thus makes the prometheus myth teach his favorite doctrine, namely, that the image of love formed in the human heart by means of the burning glass supplied by sense and feeling is a symbol of infinite love. daniel bartoli, a jesuit of the seventeenth century who is dyed and doubly dyed in superstition, is set up by browning in the next poem simply to be knocked down again upon the ground that all the legendary saints he worshipped could not compare with a real woman the poet knows. the romantic story of the lady is told in browning's most fascinating narrative style, so rapid and direct that it has all the force of a dramatic sketch. the heroine's claim upon the poet's admiration consists in her recognition of the sacredness of love, which she will not dishonor for worldly considerations, and finding her betrothed incapable of attaining her height of nobleness, she leaves him free. this story bears upon the poet's philosophy as it reflects his attitude toward human love, which he considers so clearly a revelation that any treatment of it not absolutely noble and true to the highest ideals is a sin against heaven itself. george bubb dodington is the black sheep of these later poems. he gives the poet an opportunity to let loose all his subtlety and sarcasm, while the reader may exercise his wits in discovering that the poet _assumes_ to agree with dodington in his doubtful doctrine of serving the state with an eye always upon his own private welfare, and pretends to criticise him only for his method of attaining his ends. his method is to disclaim that he works for any other good than that of the state--a proposition so preposterous in his case that nobody would believe it. the poet then presents what purports to be the correct method of successful statesmanship--namely, to pose as a superior being endowed with the divine right to rule, treating everybody as his puppet, and entirely scornful of any criticisms against himself. if he will adopt this attitude he may change his tactics every year and the people, instead of suspecting his sincerity, will think that he has wise reasons beyond their insight for his changes. the poem is a powerful, intensely cynical argument against the imperialistic temper and in favor of liberal government. this means for the individual not only the right but the power to judge for himself, instead of being obliged to depend, because of his own inefficiency, upon the leadership of the over-man, whose intentions are unfortunately too seldom to be trusted. the poet called from the shades by browning, christopher smart, is celebrated in the world of criticism for having only once in his life written a great poem. the eulogies upon the beauties of "the song of david" might not be echoed by all lay readers of poetry; nor is it of any moment whether browning actually agreed with the conclusions of the critics, since the episode is used merely as a text for discussing the problem of beauty versus truth in art. should the poet's province be simply to record his vision of the beauty and the strength of nature and the universe--visions which come to him in moments of inspiration such as that which came once to christopher smart? browning answers the question characteristically with his feet upon the earth. the visions of poets should not be considered as ends in themselves, but as material to be used for greater ends. the poet should find his inspiration in the human heart, and climb to heaven by its means, not investigate the heavens first. diligently must he study mankind, and teach as man may through his knowledge. in "francis furini" the subject is the nude in art. the keynote is struck by the poet's declaring he will never believe the tale told by baldinicci that furini ordered all his pictures in which there were nude figures burned. he expresses his indignation at the tale vigorously at some length, showing plainly his own sympathies. the passage in the poem bearing more especially upon the present discussion is the lecture by furini imagined by the poet to have been delivered before a london audience. it is a long and recondite speech in which the scientific and the intuitional methods of arriving at truth are compared. while the scientific method is acknowledged to be of value, the intuitional method is claimed as by far the more important. a philippic against greek art and its imitation is delivered by the poet in the "parleying with gerard de lairesse," whom he makes the scapegoat of his strictures, on the score of a book lairesse wrote in which was described a walk through a dutch landscape when every feature was transmogrified by classic imaginings. to this good soul, an old sepulcher struck by lightning became the tomb of phaeton, and an old cartwheel half buried in the sand near by, the chariot of the sun. in a spirit of bravado browning proceeds to show what he himself could make of a walk provided he condescended to illuminate it by classic metaphor and symbol, and a remarkable passage is the result. it occupies from the eighth to the twelfth stanza. it is meant to be in derision of a grandiloquent, classically embroidered style but so splendid is the language, so haunting the pictures, the symbolism so profound that it is as if a god were showing some poor weakling mortal how not to do it--and through his omniscience must perforce create something wondrously beautiful. the double feeling produced in reading this passage only adds to its interest. after thus classicizing in a manner that might make euripides, himself, turn green with envy, he nonchalantly remarks: "enough, stop further fooling," and to show how a modern poet greets a landscape he flings in the perfectly simple and irresistible little lyric: "dance, yellows, and whites and reds." the poet's strictures upon classicism are entirely consonant with his philosophy, placing as he does the paramount importance on living realities, "do and nowise dream," he exclaims: "earth's young significance is all to learn; the dead greek love lies buried in its urn where who seeks fire finds ashes." the "parleying" with charles avison is more a poem of moods than any of the others. the poet's profound appreciation of music is reflected in his claiming it as the highest artistic expression possible to man. sadness comes to him, however, at the thought of the ephemeralness of its forms, a fact that is borne in on him because of the inadequateness of avison's old march styled "grand." he finally emerges triumphantly from this mood of sadness through the realization that music is the most perfect symbol of the evolution of spirit, of which the central truth-- "the inmost care where truth abides in fulness"-- as paracelsus expresses it, remains always permanent, while the form is ever changing, but though ever changing it is of absolute value to the time when the spirit found expression in it. furthermore, in any form once possessing beauty, by throwing one's self into its historical atmosphere the beauty may be regained. the poem has, of course, a still larger significance in relation to all forms of truth and beauty of which every age has had its living, immortal examples, the "broken arcs" which finally will make the perfect round, each arc perfect in itself, and thus the poet's final pæan is joyous, "never dream that what once lived shall ever die." the prologue of this series of poems prefigures the thought in a striking dialogue between apollo and the fates wherein the fates symbolize the natural forces of life, behind which is zeus or divine power; apollo's light symbolizes the glamour which hope and aspiration throw over the events of human existence, without actually giving any assurance of its worth, and the wine of bacchus symbolizes feeling, by means of which a perception of the absolute is gained. man's reason, guided by the divine, accepts this revelation through feeling not as actual knowledge of the absolute which transcends all intellectual attempts to grasp it, but as a promise sufficiently assuring to take him through the ills and uncertainties of life with faith in the ultimate triumph of beauty and good. the epilogue, a dialogue between john fust and his friends, brings home the thought once more in another form, emphasizing the fact that there can be no new realm of actual, palpable knowledge opened up to man beyond that which his intellect is able to perceive. once having gained this knowledge of the failure of intellectual knowledge to solve what whitman calls the "strangling problems" of life, man's part is to follow onward through ignorance. "dare and deserve! as still to its asymptote speedeth the curve, so approximates man--thee, who reachable not, hast formed him to yearningly follow thy whole sole and single omniscience!" it will be seen from this review of the salient points enlarged upon by browning in these last groups of poems that he has deliberately set himself to harmonize the intellectual and the intuitional aspects of human consciousness. he has sought to join the hands of mind and spirit. the artistic exuberance of paracelsus is supplemented by spiritual fervor. to the young browning, the beauty of immortal, joyous life pursuing its heights forever was as a radiant vision, to the browning who had grappled with the strangling problems of the century this beauty was not so distinctly seen, but its reality was felt with all the depth of an intensely spiritual nature--a nature moreover so absolutely fearless, that it could unflinchingly confront every giant of doubt, or of disillusionment which science in its pristine egotism had conjured up, saying "keep to thine own province, where thou art indeed powerful; to the threshold of the eternal we may come through thy ministrations, but the consciousness of divine things cometh through the still small voice of the heart." thus, while he accepted every law relating to phenomena which science has been able to formulate, he realized the futility of resting in a primal, wholly dehumanized energy, that is, something not greater but less than its own outcome, humanity. he was incapable of any such absurdity as clifford's dictum that "reason, intelligence and volition are properties of a complex which is made up of elements, themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious." since clifford's time, the marked differences between the processes of a psychic being like man, and the processes of nature have been so fully recognized and so carefully defined by psychologists that browning's insistence upon making man the center whence truth radiates has had full confirmation. theodore merz has summed up these psychological conclusions in regard to the characteristics peculiar to man as distinguished from all the rest of the universe in the following words: "there are two properties with which we are familiar through common sense and ordinary reflection as belonging especially to the phenomena of our inner self-conscious life, and these properties seem to lie quite beyond the sphere and the possibilities of the ordinary methods of exact research. "as we ascend in the scale of human beings we become aware that they exhibit a special kind of unity which cannot be defined, a unity which, even when apparently lost in periods of unconsciousness, is able to reestablish itself by the wonderful and indefinable property called 'memory'--a center which can only be very imperfectly localized--a together which is more than a mechanical sum; in fact we rise to the conception of individuality, that which cannot be divided and put together again out of its parts. "the second property is still more remarkable. the world of the inner processes which accompany the higher forms of nervous development in human beings is capable of unlimited growth and it is capable of this by a process of becoming external: it becomes external, and, as it were, perpetuates itself in language, literature, science and art, legislation, society, and the like. we have no analogue of this in physical nature, where matter and energy are constant quantities and where the growth and multiplication of living matter is merely a conversion of existing matter and energy into special altered forms without increase or decrease in quantity. but the quantity of the inner thing is continually on the increase; in fact, this increase is the only thing of interest in the whole world." thus the modern psychologist and the poet who in the early days of the century said the soul was the only thing worth study join hands. the passage already referred to in "francis furini" presents most explicitly the objective or intellectual method and the subjective or intuitional method of the search for truth. furini is made to question-- "evolutionists! at truth i glimpse from depths, you glance from heights, our stations for discovery opposites, how should ensue agreement! i explain." he describes, then, how the search of the evolutionist for the absolute is outside of man. "'tis the tip-top of things to which you strain." arriving at the spasm which sets things going, they are stopped, and since having arrived at unconscious energy, they can go no further, they now drop down to a point where atoms somehow begin to think, feel, and know themselves to be, and the world's begun such as we recognize it. this is a true presentation of the attitude of physicists and chemists to-day, the latter especially holding that experiment proves that in the atoms themselves is an embryonic form of consciousness and will. from these is finally evolved at last self-conscious man. but after all this investigating on the part of the evolutionist what has been gained? of power--that is, power to create nature or life, or even to understand it--man possesses no particle, and of knowledge, only just so much as to show that it ends in ignorance on every side. this is the result of the objective search for truth. but begin with man himself, and there is a fact upon which he can take a sure stand, his self-consciousness--a "togetherness," as merz says, which cannot be explained mathematically by the adding up of atoms; and furthermore an inborn certainty that whatever is felt to be within had its rise or cause without: "thus blend the conscious i, and all things perceived in one effect." through this subjective perception of an all-powerful cause a reflex light is thrown back upon all that the investigations of the intellect have accomplished. the cause is no longer simply blind energy, but must itself be possessed of gifts as great and still greater than those with which the soul of man is endowed. the forces at work in nature thus become instinct with wonder and beauty, the good and evil of life reveal themselves as a means used by absolute power and love for the perfecting of the soul which made to know on and ever must know "all to be known at any halting stage of [the] soul's progress, such as earth, where wage war, just for soul's instruction, pain with joy, folly with wisdom, all that works annoy with all that quiets and contents." to sum up--our investigations into browning's thought show him to be a type primarily of the mystic. mysticism in its most pronounced forms regards the emotions of the human mind as supreme. the mystic, instead of allowing the intellectual faculty to lead the way, degrades it to an inferior position and makes it entirely subservient to the feelings. in some moods browning seems almost to belong to this pronounced type; for example, when he says in "a pillar at sebzevar," "say not that we know, rather that we love, therefore we know enough." [illustration: david strauss] it must be remembered, however, that he is not in either class of the supernatural mystic, one of which supposes truth to be gained by a fixed supernatural channel, the other that it is gained by extraordinary supernatural means. on the contrary, truth comes to browning in pursuance of a regular law or fact of the inward sensibility, which may be defined in his case as a mode of intuition. his intuition of god, as we have seen, is based upon the feeling of love both in its human and its abstract aspects. but this is not all. upon the intellectual side browning accepted the conclusions of scientific investigation as far as phenomena were concerned, and while he denied its worth in giving direct knowledge of the absolute, he recognized it as useful because of its very failure in strengthening the sense of the existence of a power transcending human conception. "what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence of the fulness of the days?" and, furthermore, with mystic love already in our hearts, all knowledge that the scientist may bring us of the phenomena of nature and life only adds immeasurably to our wonder and awe of the power which has brought these things to pass, thus "with much more knowledge" comes "always much more love." once more, the poet's mysticism is tempered by a tinge of idealism. there are several passages in his poems, notably one already quoted from furini, which show him to have had a perception of god directly through his own consciousness by means of what the idealist calls the higher reason. his perception, for instance, that whatever takes place within the consciousness had its rise without and that this external origin emanates from god is the idealist's way of arriving at the absolute. thus we see that into browning's religious conceptions enter the intuitions of the artistic consciousness as illustrated in paracelsus where god is the divine artist joying in his creations, the intuitions of the intellect which finds in the failure of knowledge to probe the secrets of the universe the assurance of a transcendent power beyond human ken, the intuition of the higher reason which affirms god is, and the intuitions of the heart which promise that god is love, through whom is to come fulfilment of all human aspirations toward beauty, truth, and love in immortality. if these are all points which have been emphasized, now by one, now by another, of the vast array of thinkers who have crowded the past century, there is no one who to my knowledge has so completely harmonized the various thought tendencies of the age, and certainly none who has clothed them in such a wealth of imaginative and emotional illustration. in these last poems browning appears to borrow an apt term from whitman, as the "answerer" of his age. in them he has unquestioningly accepted the knowledge which science has brought, and, recognizing its relative character, has yet interpreted it in such a way as to make it subserve the highest ideals in ethics, religion, and art. far from reflecting any degeneration in browning's philosophy of life, these poems place on a firmer basis than ever thoughts prominent in his poetry from the first, while adding to these the profounder insight into life which life's experiences had brought him. the subject matter and form are no less remarkable than their thought. the variety in both is almost bewildering. religion and fable, romance and philosophy, art and science all commingled in rich profusion; everything in language--talk almost colloquial, dainty lyrics full of exquisite emotion, and grand passages which present in sweeping images now the processes of cosmic evolution, now those of spiritual evolution, until it seems as if we had indeed been conducted to some vast mountain height, whence we can look forth upon the century's turbulent seas of thought, into which flows many a current from the past, while suspended above between the sea and sky, like the crucifix in simons's wonderful symbolic picture of the middle ages, is the mystical form of divine love and joy which browning has made symbolic of the nineteenth century. iii political tendencies in the political affairs of his own age and country browning as a poet shows little interest. this may at first seem strange, for that he was deeply sympathetic with past historical movements indicating a growth toward democratic ideals in government is abundantly proved by his choice and treatment of historical epochs in which the democratic tendencies were peculiarly evident. why then did he not give us dramatic pictures of the victorian era, in which as perhaps in no other era of english history the yeast of political freedom has been steadily and quietly working? there were probably several reasons for his failure to make himself felt as an influence in the political world of his time. in the first place, he was preëminently a dramatic poet, and as such his interest was in the presentation and analysis of individual character as it might work itself out in a given historical environment. to deal with contemporaries in this analytic manner would be a difficult and delicate matter, and, as we see, in those instances where he did venture upon an analysis of english contemporaries, as in the case of wiseman (bishop blougram), carlyle in bernard de mandeville and in "george bubb dodington," the sketch of lord beaconsfield, he takes care to suppress every external circumstance which would lead to their identification, and to dwell only upon their intellectual or psychic aspects. a second reason is that the present is usually too near at hand to be used altogether effectively as dramatic material. contemporary conditions of history seem to have an air of stateliness owing to the fact that every one is familiar with them, not only through talk and experience but through newspapers and magazines, while their larger, universal meanings cannot be seen at too close a range. if, however, past historical episodes and their tendencies can be so presented as to illustrate the tendencies of the present, then the needful artistic perspective is gained. in this manner, with a few minor exceptions, browning has revealed the direction in which his political sympathies lay. when browning was born, the first napoleonic episode was nearing its close. absolutism and militarism had in its lust for power and bloodshed slaughtered itself for the time being, and once more there was opportunity for the people of england to strive for their own enfranchisement. as a progressive ministry in england did not come into power until , the struggles of the people were rewarded with little success during many years after the battle of waterloo. during the childhood and boyhood of browning the events which from time to time marked the determination of the downtrodden englishman to secure a larger measure of justice for himself were exciting enough to have made a strong impression upon the precocious mind of the incipient poet even in the seclusion of his father's library at camberwell. the artificial prosperity which had buoyed up the workman during the war with france suddenly collapsed with the advent of peace after the battle of waterloo. everything seemed to combine to make the affairs of the workingman desperate. public business had been blunderingly administered, and while a fatuous cabinet was congratulating the nation upon the flourishing state of the country, trade was actually almost at a standstill, and failures in business were the order of the day. to make matters worse, a wet summer and early frosts interfered with farming, and the result was that laborers and workmen could not find employment. a not unusual percentage of paupers in any given district was four fifths of the whole population. thinking the farmers were to blame for the high price of bread, these starving people wreaked their vengeance on them by burning farm buildings, and machinery, and even stacks of corn and hay. [illustration: cardinal wiseman] instead of giving sympathy to these men in their desperate condition, a conservative government saw in them only rioters, and took the most stringent measures against them. they were tried by a special commission, and thirty-four of them were condemned to death, though it is recorded that only five of them were executed. the miners of cornwall and wales, the lace makers of nottingham, and the iron workers of the black country, next broke out and the smashing of machinery continued. finally there was a meeting of the artisans of london, westminster, and southwick in spa fields, clerkenwall, which had been called by harry hunt, a man of property and education, who was known as a supporter of extreme measures, and the leader of the radicals of that day. they met for the legitimate purpose, one would think, of considering the propriety of petitioning the prince regent and parliament to adopt means of relieving the existing distress. one of the speakers, however, a poor doctor by the name of watson, was of a more belligerent disposition. he made an inflammatory speech which ended by his seizing a tri-colored flag and marching toward the city followed by the turbulent rabble. on their way they seized the contents of a gunsmith's shop on snow hill, murdered a man, and finally were met opposite the mansion house by the lord mayor, who, assisted by a strong body of police, arrested some of the leaders and dispersed the rest. the arrested persons were brought to trial and indicted for high treason by the attorney general, but the jury, evidently thinking the indictment had taken too exaggerated a form, acquitted watson, and the others were dismissed. the conservative parliament was, however, so alarmed by these proceedings that, instead of seeking some way of removing the cause of the difficulties, it thought only of making restrictions for the protection of the person of the regent, of the more effective prevention of seditious meetings and of surer punishment. and what were some of these measures? debating societies, lecture halls and reading rooms were shut up. even lectures on medicine, surgery and chemistry were prohibited. though there was a possibility of getting a license to lecture from the magistrate, the law was interpreted in the narrowest spirit. parliamentary reform began to be spoken of in , when a resolution pledging the house of commons to the consideration of the state of representation was rejected by a vote of one hundred and fifty-three to fifty-eight. this decision stirred up the reform spirit, and large meetings in favor of it were held. the people attending these meetings received military drilling and marched to their meetings in orderly processions, a fact naturally very disturbing to the government. when a great meeting was arranged at manchester on the th of august, troops were accordingly sent to manchester. the cavalry was ordered to charge the crowd, and although they used the flat side of their swords, the charge resulted in the killing of six persons and the wounding of some hundreds. the clash did not end here, for to offset the ministerial approval of the action of the magistrates and their decision that the meeting was illegal, the common council of london passed a resolution by a large majority declaring that the meeting was legal. a number of whig noblemen also were on the side of the london council and made similar motions. but the ministers, unmoved by these signs of the times, introduced bills in parliament for the repression of disorder and the further restraining of public liberty. the bills, it is true, were strenuously opposed in both houses, but the eloquence expended against them was all to no purpose, the bills were passed, and reform for the time being was nipped in the bud. although after this laws were gradually introduced by the ministers which tended very much to the betterment of conditions, the fire of reform did not burst out again with full fury until the time of the revolution of july, in france, which it will be remembered was directed against the despotic king charles x, and ended in his being deposed, when his crown was given to his distant cousin louis philippe. the success of the french in their stand against despotism caused a general revolutionary stir in several european countries, while in england the spirit of revolution showed itself in incendiary fires from one end of the country to the other. with parliament itself full of believers in reform, the chief of the cabinet, the duke of wellington, announced that the house of commons did not need reform and that he would resist all proposals for a change. so great was the popular excitement at this announcement that the duke could not venture to go forth to dine at the guildhall for fear that he might be attacked. such were the chief episodes in the forward advance of the people up to the time of the presentation of the reform bill in parliament. this important measure has been described as the greatest organic change in the british constitution that had taken place since the revolution of . when this bill was finally passed it meant a transference of governmental control from the upper classes to the middle classes, and was the inauguration of a policy which has constantly added to the prosperity and well-being of the english people. the agitation upon this bill, introduced in the house by lord john russell, under the premiership of earl grey, and a ministry favorable to reform, was filling the attention of all englishmen to the exclusion of every other subject just at the time when browning was emerging into manhood, and , and though he has not commemorated in his poetry this great step in the political progress of his own century, his first play, written in , takes up a period of english history in which a momentous struggle for liberty on the part of the people was in progress. important as the reform bill was, it furnished no such picturesque episodes for a dramatist as did the struggle of pym and strafford under the despotic rule of king charles i. in choosing this period for his play the poet found not only material which furnished to his hand a series of wonderfully dramatic situations, but in the three men about whom the action moves is presented an individuality and a contrast in character full of those possibilities for analysis so attractive to browning's mind. another point to be gained by taking this remote period of history was that his attitude could be supremely that of the philosopher of history. he could portray with fairness whatever worth of character he found to admire in the leaders upon either side, at the same time that he could show which possessed the winning principle--the principle of progress. in dealing with contemporary events a strong personal feeling is sure to gain the upper hand, and to be non-partisan and therefore truly dramatic is a difficult, if not an impossible, task. when we come to examine this play, we find that the character which unquestionably interested the poet most was strafford's; not because of his political principles but because of his devotion to his king. human love and loyalty in whomever manifested was always of the supremest interest to browning, and, working upon any hints furnished by history, the poet has developed the character of strafford in the light of his personal friendship for the king--a feeling so powerful that no fickle change of mood on the part of the king could alter it. upon this fact of his personal relations to the king strafford's actions in this great crisis have been interpreted and explained, though not defended, from the political point of view. some wavering on the part of pym is also explained upon the ground of his friendship for and his belief in strafford, but mark the difference between the two men. pym, once sure that strafford is not on the side of progress, crushes out all personal feeling. he allows nothing to stand in the way of his political policy. with unflinching purpose he proceeds against his former friend, straight on to the impeachment for treason, straight on, like an inexorable fate, to the prevention of his rescue from execution. browning's dramatic imagination is responsible for this last climax in which he brings the two men face to face. here, in pym's strength of will to serve england at any cost, mingled with the hope of meeting strafford purged of all his errors in a future life, and in strafford's response, "when we meet, pym, i'd be set right--not now! best die," is foreshadowed the ultimate triumph of the parliamentary over the monarchical principles of government, and the poet's own sympathy with the party of progress is made plain. it is interesting in the present connection to inquire whether there are any parallels between the agitation connected with the reform legislation of and the revolution at the time of charles i which might send browning's mind back to that period. the special point about which the battle raged in was the representation in parliament. this was so irregular that it was absolutely unfair. in many instances large districts or towns would have fewer representatives than smaller ones, or perhaps none at all. representation was more a matter of favoritism than of justice. the votes in parliament were, therefore, not at all a true measure of the attitude of the country. it seems strange that so eminently sensible a reform should meet with such determined opposition. as usual, those in power feared loss of privilege. the house of lords was the obstruction. the bill was in fact a step logically following upon the determination of the people of the time of charles i that they would not submit to be levied upon for ship-money upon the sole authority of the king. they demanded that parliament, which had not been assembled for ten years, should meet and decide the question. this question was not merely one of the war-tax or ship-money, but of whether the king should have the power to levy taxes upon the people without consent of parliament. as every one knows, when the king finally consented to the assembling of parliament, in april, , he informed it that there would be no discussion of its demands until it had granted the war subsidies for which it had been asked. the older vane added to the consternation of the assembly by announcing that the king would accept nothing less than the twelve subsidies which he had demanded in his message. in the face of this ultimatum the committee broke up without coming to a conclusion, postponing further consideration until the next day, but before they had had time to consider the matter the next day the king had decided to dissolve the parliament. the king was forced, however, to reassemble parliament again in the autumn. in this parliament the people's party gained control, and many reforms were instituted. led by such daring men as pym, hampden, cromwell, and the younger vane, resolutions were passed censuring the levying of ship-money, tonnage and poundage, monopolies, innovations in religion--in fact, all the grievances of the oppressed which had been ignored for a decade were brought to light and redressed by the house, quite regardless of the king's attitude. the chief of the abuses which it was bent upon remedying was the imposing of taxes upon the authority of the king and the persecution of the puritans. but there was another grievance which received the attention of the long parliament, and which forms a close link with the reforms of --namely, the attempt to improve the system of representation in parliament, an attempt which was partially carried into effect by cromwell later. under charles ii, however, things fell back into their old way and gradually went on from bad to worse until the tide changed, and the people became finally aroused after two hundred years to the need of a radical change. the blindness of the duke of wellington, declaring no reform was needed, is hardly less to be marveled at than that of king charles declaring he would rule without parliament. the king took the ground that the people had no right to representation in the government; the minister, that only some of the people had a right. the horrors of revolution followed upon the blindness of the one, with its reactionary aftermath, while upon the other there was violence, it is true, and a revolution was feared, but through the wise measures of the liberal ministers no subversion of the government occurred. violence reached such a pitch, however, that the castle of nottingham in derby was burned, the king's brother was dragged from his horse, and lord londonderry roughly treated. the mob at bristol was so infuriated that sir c. wetherell, the recorder of the city, who had voted against the bill, had to be escorted to the guildhall by a hundred mounted gentlemen. two men having been arrested, the mob attacked and destroyed the interior of the mansion house, set fire to the bishop's palace and to many other buildings. there was not only an enormous loss of property, but loss of life. a quieter demonstration at birmingham carries us back, as it might have carried browning, to the "great-hearted men" of the long parliament. a meeting was called which was attended by one hundred and fifty thousand persons, and resolutions were passed to the effect that if the reform bill were not passed they would refuse to pay taxes, as hampden had refused to pay ship-money. the final act in this momentous drama was initiated with the introduction by lord john russell of the third reform bill in december, . again it was defeated in the house of lords, whereupon some of the cabinet wished to ask the king to create a sufficient number of new peers to force the bill through the house. earl grey was not at all in favor of this, but at last consented. this course was not welcome to the house of lords, and the doubtful members in the house promised that if this suggestion were not carried into effect they would insure a sufficient majority in the house of lords to carry the bill. this was done, but before the lords went into committee a hostile motion postponing the disfranchisement clauses was carried. then earl grey asked for the creation of new peers. as it would require the creating of about fifty new peers, the king refused, the ministry resigned and the duke of wellington came into power again. but his power, like that of strafford, was broken. he had reached the point of recognizing that some reform was needed, but he could not persuade his colleagues of this. in the meantime the house of commons passed a resolution of confidence in the grey administration. such determined opposition being shown not only in parliament but by the people in various ways, wellington felt his only course was resignation. william iv had, much to his chagrin, to recall grey, but he escaped the necessity of creating a large number of peers, by asking the opposition in the house of lords to withdraw their resistance to the bill. the duke of wellington and others thereupon absented themselves, and finding further obstruction was useless, the lords at last passed the bill and it became law in june, . this national crisis through which browning had lived could not fail to have made its impression on him. it is certainly an indication of the depth of his interest in the growth of liberalism that his first english subject, written only a few years subsequent to this momentous change in governmental methods, should have dealt with a period whose analysis and interpretation in dramatic form gave him every opportunity for the expression of his sympathy with liberal ideals. broad-minded in his interpretation of strafford's career, in love with his qualities of loyalty, and his capabilities of genuine affection for the vacillating charles, he made strafford the hero of his play, but it is pym whom, in his play, he has exalted as the nation's hero, and into whose mouth he has put one of the greatest and most intensely pathetic speeches ever uttered by an englishman. it is when he confronts strafford at the last: "have i done well? speak, england! whose sole sake i still have labored for, with disregard to my own heart,--for whom my youth was made barren, my manhood waste, to offer up her sacrifice--this friend--this wentworth here-- who walked in youth with me, loved me, it may be, and whom, for his forsaking england's cause, i hunted by all means (trusting that she would sanctify all means) even to the block which waits for him. and saying this, i feel no bitterer pang than first i felt, the hour i swore that wentworth might leave us, but i would never leave him: i do leave him now. i render up my charge (be witness, god!) to england who imposed it. i have done her bidding--poorly, wrongly,--it may be, with ill effects--for i am weak, a man: still, i have done my best, my human best, not faltering for a moment. it is done. and this said, if i say ... yes, i will say i never loved but one man--david not more jonathan! even thus i love him now: and look for that chief portion in that world where great hearts led astray are turned again, (soon it may be, and, certes, will be soon: my mission over, i shall not live long)-- ay, here i know and talk--i dare and must, of england, and her great reward, as all i look for there; but in my inmost heart, believe, i think of stealing quite away to walk once more with wentworth--my youth's friend purged from all error, gloriously renewed, and eliot shall not blame us. then indeed ... this is no meeting, wentworth! tears increase too hot. a thin mist--is it blood?--enwraps the face i loved once. then, the meeting be." at the same time that browning was writing "strafford," he was also engaged upon "sordello." in that he has given expression to his democratic philosophy through his construction and interpretation of sordello's character as a champion of the people as well as a poet who ushered in the dawn of the italian literary renaissance. as he made paracelsus develop from a dependence upon knowledge as his sole guide in his philosophy of life into a perception of the place emotion must hold in any satisfactory theory of life, and put into his mouth a modern conception of evolution illuminated by his own artistic emotion, so he makes sordello develop from the individualistic type to the socialist type of man, who is bent upon raising the masses of the people to higher conditions. the ideal of liberal forms of government was even in sordello's time a growing one, sifting into italy from greek precedents, but browning's sordello sees something beyond either political or ecclesiastical espousal of the people's cause--namely, the espousal of the people's cause by the people themselves, the arrival of the self-governing democracy, an ideal much nearer attainment now than when browning was writing: "two parties take the world up, and allow no third, yet have one principle, subsist by the same injustice; whoso shall enlist with either, ranks with man's inveterate foes. so there is one less quarrel to compose the guelf, the ghibelline may be to curse-- i have done nothing, but both sides do worse than nothing. nay, to me, forgotten, reft of insight, lapped by trees and flowers, was left the notion of a service--ha? what lured me here, what mighty aim was i assured must move taurello? what if there remained a cause, intact, distinct from these, ordained for me its true discoverer?" the mood here portrayed was one which might have been fostered in browning in relation to his own time. he doubtless felt that neither the progressive movements in the state nor those in religion really touched upon the true principles of freedom for the individual. he might not have defined these principles to himself any more definitely than as a desire for the greatest happiness of the whole number. and even of such an ideal as that he had his doubts because of the necessity of his mind to find a logical use for evil in the world. this he could only do by supposing it a divine means for the development of the human soul in its sojourn in this life. speaking in his own person in "sordello," he gives expression to this doubt in the following passage in the third book: "i ask youth and strength and health for each of you, not more--at length grown wise, who asked at home that the whole race might add the spirit's to the body's grace, and all be dizened out as chiefs and bards. * * * * * "----as good you sought to spare me the piazza's slippery stone or keep me to the unchoked canals alone, as hinder life the evil with the good which make up living rightly understood." still, though vague as to what the good for the whole people might be, there was no vagueness in his mind as to the people's right to possess the power to bring about their own happiness. yet given the right principles, he would not have the attempt made to put them into practice all at once. his final attitude toward the problem of the best methods for bettering human conditions in the poem is, strictly speaking, that of the opportunist working a step toward his ideal rather than that of the revolutionist who would gain it by one leap. sordello should realize that "god has conceded two lights to a man-- one, of men's whole work, man's first step to the plan's completeness." man's part is to take this first step, leaving the ultimate ideal to be worked out, as time goes, on by successive men. to reach at one bound the ideal would be to regard one's self as a god. some such theory of action as this is the one which guides the fabian socialist working in england to-day. nothing is to be done to subvert the present order of society, but every opportunity is to be made the most of which will tend to the betterment of the conditions of the masses, until by degrees the socialist régime will become possible. sordello was too much of the idealist to seize the opportunity when it came to him of helping the people by means of the ghibelline power suddenly conferred upon him, and so he failed. this opportunist doctrine is one especially congenial to the english temperament and certainly has its practical advantages, if it is not so inspiring as the headlong idealism of a pym, which just as surely has its disadvantages in the danger that the ideal will be ahead of humanity's power of seizing it and living it, and will therefore run the risk of being overturned by a reaction to the low plane of the past; especially does this danger become apparent when the way to the attainment of the ideal is paved with violence. while browning was writing "sordello," the preparation of which included a short trip to italy, the chartist agitation was going on in england. it may well, at that time, have been considered to demand an ideal beyond possibility of attainment, which was proved by its final utter annihilation. the workingmen's association led by mr. duncombe was responsible for a program in the form of a parliamentary petition which asked for six things. these were: universal suffrage, or the right of voting by every male of twenty-one years of age; vote by ballot; annual parliaments; abolition of the property qualification for members of parliament; members of parliament to be paid for their services; equal electoral districts. there were two sorts of chartists, moral-force chartists and physical-force chartists, the latter of whom did as much damage as possible in the agitation. the combined forces were led by feargus o'connor, an irish barrister, who madly spent his force and energy for ten years in carrying forward the movement, and, at last, confronted by disagreement in the ranks of the chartists and the duke of wellington and his troops, gave it up in despair. he was a martyr to the cause, for he took its failure so much to heart that he ended his days in a lunatic asylum. this final failure came many years after "sordello" was finished, but the poet's conclusions in "sordello" seem almost prophetic in the light of the passage in the poem already quoted, in which the poet declares himself grown wiser than he was at home, where he had asked the utmost for all men, and now realized that this cannot be attained in one leap. agitation about the relations between england and ireland were also filling public attention at this time, but most important of all the contemporary movements was the league for the repeal of the corn laws. the story of the growth and the peaceful methods by which it attained its growth is one of the most interesting in the annals of england's political development. it meant the adoption of the great principle of free trade, to which england has since adhered. for eight years the agitation in regard to it was continued, during which great meetings were held, thousands of pounds were subscribed to the cause, and the names of sir richard cobden and john bright became famous as leaders in the righteous cause of untaxed food for the people. john bright's account of how he became interested in the movement and associated himself with cobden in the work, told in a speech made at rochdale, gives a vivid picture of the human side of the problem which by the conservatives of the day was treated as a merely political issue: "in the year i was at leamington and spent several months there. it was near the middle of september there fell upon me one of the heaviest blows that can visit any man. i found myself living there with none living of my house but a motherless child. mr. cobden called upon me the day after that event, so terrible to me and so prostrating. he said, after some conversation, 'don't allow this grief, great as it is, to weigh you down too much. there are at this moment in thousands of homes in this country wives and children who are dying of hunger--of hunger made by the law. if you come along with me, we will never rest till we have got rid of the corn law.' we saw the colossal injustice which cast its shadow over every part of the nation, and we thought we saw the true remedy and the relief, and that if we united our efforts, as you know we did, with the efforts of hundreds and thousands of good men in various parts of the country, we should be able to bring that remedy home, and to afford that relief to the starving people of this country." the movement thus inaugurated was, as molesworth declares, "without parallel in the history of the world for the energy with which it was conducted, the rapid advance it made, and the speedy and complete success that crowned its efforts; for the great change it wrought in public opinion and the consequent legislation of the country; overcoming prejudice and passion, dispelling ignorance and conquering powerful interests, with no other weapons than those of reason and that eloquence which great truths and strong conviction inspire." a signal victory for the league was gained in , when the london _times_, which up to that time had regarded the league with suspicion and even alarm, suddenly turned round and ranged itself with the advancing tide of progress by declaring, "the league is a great fact. it would be foolish, nay, rash, to deny its importance. it is a great fact that there should have been created in the homestead of our manufacturers (manchester) a confederacy devoted to the agitation of one political question, persevering at it year after year, shrinking from no trouble, dismayed at no danger, making light of every obstacle. it demonstrates the hardy strength of purpose, the indomitable will, by which englishmen working together for a great object are armed and animated." the final victory, however, did not come until three years later, when sir robert peel, who became prime minister to defend the corn laws, announced that he had been completely convinced of their injustice, and that he was an "absolute convert to the free-trade principle, and that the introduction of the principle into all departments of our commercial legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question of time and convenience." this was in january, , and shortly after, june, , the bill for the total repeal of the corn laws passed the house. how much longer it might have been before the opposition was carried is a question if it had not been for the failure of the grain crops and the widespread potato disease which plunged ireland into a state of famine, and threatened the whole country with more or less of disaster. even when this state of affairs became apparent in the summer of there was still much delay. the cabinet met and discussed and discussed; still parliament was not assembled; and then it was that the mansion house relief committee of dublin drew up resolutions stating that famine and pestilence were approaching throughout the land, and impeaching the conduct of the ministry for not opening the ports or calling parliament together. but still peel, already won over, could not take his cabinet with him; he was forced to resign. lord john russell was called to form a ministry, but failed, when peel was recalled, and the day was carried. browning's brief but pertinent allusion to this struggle in "the englishman in italy" shows clearly how strongly his sympathies were with the league and how disgusted he was with the procrastination of parliament in taking a perfectly obvious step for the betterment of the people. "fortnu, in my england at home, men meet gravely to-day and debate, if abolishing corn laws be righteous and wise if 'twere proper, scirocco should vanish in black from the skies!" an occasional allusion or poem like this makes us aware from time to time of browning's constant sympathy with any movement which meant good to the masses. even if he had not written near the end of his life "why i am a liberal," there could be no doubt in any one's mind of his political ideals. in "the lost leader" is perhaps his strongest utterance upon the subject. the fact that it was called out by wordsworth's lapse into conservatism after the horrors of the french revolution had brought him and his _sans culotte_ brethren, southey and coleridge, to pause, a fact very possibly freshened in browning's mind by wordsworth's receiving a pension in and the poet-laureateship in , does not affect the force of the poem as a personal utterance on the side of democracy. browning, himself, considered the poem far too fierce as a portrayal of wordsworth's case.[ ] he evidently forgot wordsworth, and thought only of a renegade liberal as he went on with the poem. it was written the same year that there occurred the last attempt to postpone the passing of the anti-corn law bill, when the intensity of feeling on the part of all who believed in progress was at its height, and the bare thought of a deserter from liberal ranks would be enough to exasperate any man who had the nation's welfare at heart. that browning's feeling at the time reached the point not only of exasperation but of utmost scorn for any one who was not on the liberal side is shown most forcibly in the bitter lines: "blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, one task more declined, one more footpath untrod, one more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels, one more wrong to man, one more insult to god!" browning speaks of having thought of wordsworth at an unlucky juncture. whatever the exact episode which called forth the poem may have been, we are safe in saying that at a time when disraeli was attacking sir robert peel because of his honesty in avowing his conversion to free trade, and because of his bravery in coming out from his party, in breaking up his cabinet and regardless of all costs in determining to carry the bill or resign, and finally carrying it in the face of the greatest odds--at such a time, when a great conservative leader had shown himself capable of being won over to a great liberal principle; the spectacle of a deserter from the cause, and that deserter a member of one's own brotherhood of poets, would be especially hard to bear. one feels a little like asking why did not browning let his enthusiasm carry him for once into a contemporary expression of admiration for sir robert peel? perhaps the tortuous windings of parliamentary proceedings obscured to a near view the true greatness of peel's action. the year of this great change in england's policy was the year of robert browning's marriage and his departure for italy, where he lived for fifteen years. during this time and for some years after his return to england there is no sign that he was taking any interest in the political affairs of his country. human character under romantic conditions in a social environment, or the thought problems of the age, as we have already seen, occupied his attention, and for the subject matter of these he more often than not went far afield from his native country. in "prince hohenstiel-schwangau" is the poet's first deliberate portrayal of a person of contemporary prominence in the political world. the alliance of napoleon iii with england brought his policy of government into strong contrast with that of the liberal leaders in english politics, a contrast which had been emphasized through lord palmerston's sympathy with the _coup d'état_. the news of the manner in which louis napoleon had carried out his policy of smashing the french constitution caused horror and consternation in england, and the queen at once gave instructions that nothing should be done by her ambassador in paris which could be in any way construed as an interference in the internal affairs of france. already, however, lord palmerston had expressed to the french minister of foreign affairs his entire approbation in the act of napoleon and his conviction that he could not have acted otherwise than as he had done. when this was known, the prime minister, lord john russell, wrote palmerston a letter, causing his resignation, which was accepted very willingly by the queen. the letter was as follows: "while i concur in the foreign policy of which you have been the adviser, and much as i admire the energy and ability with which it has been carried into effect, i cannot but observe that misunderstandings perpetually renewed, violations of prudence and decorum too frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to have followed from a sound policy and able admirers. i am, therefore, most reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct of foreign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advantage to the country." when england's fears that louis napoleon would emulate his illustrious predecessor and invade her shores were allayed, her attitude was modified. she forgot the horrors of the _coup d'état_ and formed an alliance with him, and her hospitable island became his refuge in his downfall. a prominent figure in european politics for many years, louis napoleon had just that combination of greatness and mediocrity which would appeal to browning's love of a human problem. furthermore, napoleon was brought very directly to the poet's notice through his italian campaign and mrs. browning's interest in the political crisis in italy, which found expression in her fine group of italian patriotic poems. the question has been asked, "will the unbiased judgment of posterity allow to louis napoleon some extenuating circumstances, or will it pronounce an unqualified condemnation upon the man who, for the sake of consolidating his own power and strengthening his corrupt government, spilled the blood of no less than a hundred thousand frenchmen?" when all europe was putting to itself some such question as this, and answering it with varying degrees of leniency, browning conceived the idea of making napoleon speak for himself, and at the same time he added what purports to be the sort of criticism of him indulged in by a thiers or a victor hugo. the interest of the poem centers in napoleon's own vindication of himself as portrayed by browning. what browning wrote of the poem in a letter to a friend in explains fully his aim, as well as showing by indirection, at least, how much he was interested in political affairs at this time, though so little of this interest crops out in his poetry: "i think in the main he meant to do what i say, and but for weakness--grown more apparent in his last years than formerly--would have done what i say he did not. i thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made and gave indications of intending to redeem. i think him very weak in the last miserable year. at his worst i prefer him to thiers's best." at another time he wrote: "i am glad you like what the editor of the _edinburgh_ calls my eulogium on the second empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, 'a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of england.' it is just what i imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself." browning depicts the man as perfectly conscious of his own limitations. he recognizes that he is not the genius, nor the creator of a new order of things, but that his power lies in his faculty of taking an old ideal and improving upon it. he contends that in following out his special gifts as a conservator he is doing just what god intended him to do, and as to his method of doing it that is his own affair. god gives him the commission and leaves it to his human faculties to carry it out, not inquiring what these are, but simply asking at the end if the commission has been accomplished. once admit these two things--namely, that his nature, though not of the highest, is such as god gave him, and his lack of responsibility in regard to any moral ideal, so that he accomplishes the purpose of this nature--and a loophole is given for any inconsistencies he may choose to indulge in in bringing about that strengthening of an old ideal in which he believes. the old ideal is, of course, the monarchical principle of government, administered, however, in such a manner that it will be for the good of society in all its complex manifestations of to-day. his notion of society's good consists in a balancing of all its forces, secured by the smoothing down of any extreme tendencies, each having its orbit marked but no more, so that none shall impede the other's path. "in this wide world--though each and all alike, save for [him] fain would spread itself through space and leave its fellow not an inch of way." browning makes him indulge in a curiously sophisticated view of the relativity of good and evil in the course of his argument, to the effect that since there is a further good conceivable beyond the utmost earth can realize, therefore to change the agency--the evil whereby good is brought about, try to make good do good as evil does--would be just as foolish as if a chemist wanting white and knowing that black ingredients were needed to make the dye insisted these should be white, too. a bad world is that which he experiences and approves. a good world he does not want in which there would be no pity, courage, hope, fear, sorrow, joy--devotedness, in short--which he believes form the ultimate allowed to man; therefore it has been his policy not to do away with the evil in the society he is saving. to mitigate, not to cure, has been his aim. browning would, himself, answer the sophistry, here, by showing that evil though permitted by divine power was only a means of good through man's working against whatever he conceives to be evil with the whole strength of his being. to deliberately follow the policy of conserving evil would be in the end to annihilate the good. prince hohenstiel-schwangau could not see so far as this. it is not astonishing that with such a policy as this his methods of carrying it out might seem somewhat dubious if not positively criminal. his departure from his early idealism is excused for the reason that idealism is not practicable when the region of talk is left for the real action of life. every step in his own aggrandizement is apologized for on the ground that what needed to be accomplished could only be done by a strong hand and that strong hand his own. he was in fact an unprincipled utilitarian as browning presents him, who spoiled even what virtue resides in utilitarianism by letting his care for saving society be too much influenced by his desire for personal glory. one ideal undertaking he permitted himself, the freeing of italy from the austrian yoke. but he was not strong enough for any such high flight of idealism, as the sequel proved. browning does not bring out in the poem the emperor's real reasons for stopping short in the italian campaign, which certainly were sufficient from a practical standpoint, but as archibald forbes says in his "life of napoleon," should have been thought of before he published his program of freedom to italy "from the alps to the adriatic." "even when he addressed the italians at milan," continues forbes, "the new light had not broken in upon him which revealed the strength of the quadrilateral, the cost of expelling the austrians from venetia, and the conviction that further french successes would certainly bring mobilized germany into the field. that new light seems to have flashed upon napoleon for the first time from the stern austrian ranks on the day of solferino. it was then he realized that should he go forward he would be obliged to attack in front an enemy entrenched behind great fortresses, and protected against any diversion on his flanks by the neutrality of the territories surrounding him." mrs. browning, whose consternation and grief over villafranca broke out in burning verse, yet made a defence of napoleon's action here which might have been worked into browning's poem with advantage. she wrote to john foster that while napoleon's intervention in italy overwhelmed her with joy it did not dazzle her into doubts as to the motive of it, "but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on belgium and an invasion of england. have we not watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? wasn't he to crush piedmontese institutions like so many eggshells? was he ever going away with his army, and hadn't he occupied houses in genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? didn't he keep troops in the north after villafranca on purpose to come down on us with a grand duke or a kingdom of etruria and plon-plon to rule it? and wouldn't he give back bologna to the pope?... were not cipriani, farini and other patriots his 'mere creatures' in treacherous correspondence with the tuileries 'doing his dirty work'?" of such accusations as these the intelligent english journals were full, but she maintains that against "the inane and immense absurd" from which they were born is to be set "a nation saved." she realized also how hard napoleon's position in france must be to maintain "forty thousand priests with bishops of the color of monseigneur d'orleans and company, having, of course, a certain hold on the agricultural population which forms so large a part of the basis of the imperial throne. then add to that the parties who use this italian question as a weapon simply." many of napoleon's own statements have furnished browning with the arguments used in the apology. after deliberately destroying the constitution, for example, and himself being the cause of the violence and bloodshed in paris, he coolly addressed the people in the following strain, in which we certainly recognize hohenstiel-schwangau: "frenchmen! the disturbances are appeased. whatever may be the decision of the people, society is saved. the first part of my task is accomplished. the appeal to the nation, for the purpose of terminating the struggle of parties, i knew would not cause any serious risk to the public tranquillity. why should the people have risen against me? if i do not any longer possess your confidence--if your ideas are changed--there is no occasion to make precious blood flow; it will be sufficient to place an adverse vote in the urn. i shall always respect the decision of the people." his cleverness in combining the idea of authority with that of the idea of obeying the will of the people is curiously illustrated in his speech at the close of his dictatorship, during which it must be confessed that he had done excellently well for the country--so well, indeed, that even the socialists were ready to cry "_vive l'empereur!_" "while watching me reëstablish the institutions and reawaken the memories of the empire, people have repeated again and again that i wished to reconstitute the empire itself. if this had been so the transformation would have been accomplished long ago; neither the means nor the opportunities would have been lacking.... but i have remained content with that i had. resolved now, as heretofore, to do all in my power for france and nothing for myself, i would accept any modification of the present state of things only if forced by necessity.... if parties remain quiet, nothing shall be changed. but if they endeavor to sap the foundations of my government; if they deny the legitimacy of the result of the popular vote; if, in short, they continually put the future of the country in jeopardy, then, but only then, it might be prudent to ask the people for a new title which would irrevocably fix on my head the power with which they have already clothed me. but let us not anticipate difficulties; let us preserve the republic. under its banner i am anxious to inaugurate once more an epoch of reconciliation and pardon; and i call on all without distinction who will frankly coöperate with me for the public good." in contrast to such fair-sounding phrases napoleon was capable of the most dishonorable tactics in order to gain his ends. witness the episode of his tempting bismarck with offers of an alliance against austria at the same time that he was treating secretly with francis joseph for the cession of venetia in return for silesia. and while negotiating secretly and separately with these two sworn enemies, he pretended to be so disinterested as to suggest the submission of their quarrel to a european congress. browning has certainly presented a good portrait of the man as the history of his own utterances contrasted with the history of his actions proves. in trying to bridge with this apology the discrepancies between the two he has, however, attributed to louis napoleon a degree of self-consciousness beyond any ever evinced by him. the principle of imperialism was a conviction with him. that he desired to help the people of france and to a great extent succeeded, is true; that he combined with this desire the desire of power for himself is true; that he used unscrupulous means to gain whatever end he desired when such were necessary is true; but that he was conscious of his own despicable traits to the extent that the poet makes him conscious of them is most unlikely. nor is it likely that he would defend himself upon any such subtle ground as that his character and temperament being the gift of god he was bound to follow out his nature in order that god's purposes might be accomplished. it is rather an explanation of his life from the philosopher's or psychologist's standpoint than a self-conscious revelation. it is none the less interesting on this account, while the scene setting gives it a thoroughly human and dramatic touch. whatever may be said of napoleon himself, his rule was fraught with consequences of import for the whole of europe, not because of what he was, but because of what he was not. he was an object lesson on the fallacy of trying to govern so that all parties will be pleased by autocratically keeping each one from fully expressing itself. the result is that each grows more aware of the suppression than of the amount of freedom allowed to it, and nobody is pleased. when added to such a policy as this is the surmounting desire for power and the machiavellian determination to attain it by any means, fair or foul, a principle of statecraft which by the middle of the century could not be practised in its most acute form without arousing the most severe criticism, his power carried within it the seeds of destruction. it has been said that "never in the history of the world has one man undertaken a task more utterly beyond the power of mortal man than that which louis napoleon was pledged to carry through." he professed to be at one and the same time the elect sovereign of the people, a son of the revolution, a champion of universal suffrage, and an adversary of the demagogues. in the first of these characters he was bound to justify his elevation by economic and social reforms, in his second character he had to destroy the last trace of political liberty. he had, in fact, assumed various utterly incompatible attitudes, and the day that the masses found themselves deceived in their expectations, and the middle classes found their interests were betrayed, reaction was inevitable. [illustration: william ewart gladstone] in spite of his heinous faults, however, historians have grown more and more inclined to admit that napoleon filled for a time a necessary niche in the line of progress, just that step which browning makes him say the genius will recognize that he fills--namely, to "carry the incompleteness on a stage, make what was crooked straight, and roughness smooth, and weakness strong: wherein if i succeed, it will not prove the worst achievement, sure in the eyes at least of one man, one i look nowise to catch in critic company: to-wit, the man inspired, the genius, self destined to come and change things thoroughly. he, at least, finds his business simplified, distinguishes the done from undone, reads plainly what meant and did not mean this time we live in, and i work on, and transmit to such successor: he will operate on good hard substance, not mere shade and shine." that is, at a time when europe was seething with the idea of a new order, in which the ideal of nationality was to take the place of such decaying ideas as the divine right of kings, balance of power, and so on, napoleon held on to these ideas just long enough to prevent a general disintegration of society. he held in his hands the balance of power until the nations began to find themselves, and in the case of italy actually helped on the triumph of the new order. it is interesting to note in this connection that one of the principal factors in the making of gladstone into the stanch liberal which he became was the freeing of italy, in which napoleon had so large a share. gladstone himself wrote in of the events which occurred in the fifth decade: "of the various and important incidents which associated me almost unawares with foreign affairs ... i will only say that they all contributed to forward the action of those home causes more continuous in their operation, which, without in any way effacing my old sense of reverence for the past, determined for me my place in the present and my direction toward the future." in gladstone dined with cavour at turin, when the latter had the opportunity of explaining his position and policy to the man whom he considered "one of the sincerest and most important friends that italy had." but as his biographer says, gladstone was still far from the glorified democracy of the mazzinian propaganda, and expressed his opinion that england should take the stand that she would be glad if italian unity proved feasible, "but the conditions of it must be gradually matured by a course of improvement in the several states, and by the political education of the people; if it cannot be reached by these means, it hardly will by any others; and certainly not by opinions which closely link italian reconstruction with european disorganization and general war." yet he was as distressed as mrs. browning at the peace of villafranca, about which he wrote: "i little thought to have lived to see the day when the conclusion of a peace should in my own mind cause disgust rather than impart relief." by the end of the year he thought better of napoleon and expressed himself again somewhat in the same strain as mrs. browning, to the effect that the emperor had shown, "though partial and inconsistent, indications of a genuine feeling for the italians--and far beyond this he has committed himself very considerably to the italian cause in the face of the world. when in reply to all that, we fling in his face the truce of villafranca, he may reply--and the answer is not without force--that he stood single-handed in a cause when any moment europe might have stood combined against him. we gave him verbal sympathy and encouragement, or at least criticism; no one else gave him anything at all. no doubt he showed then that he had undertaken a work to which his powers were unequal; but i do not think that, when fairly judged, he can be said to have given proof by that measure of insincerity or indifference." gladstone's gradual and forceful emancipation into the ranks of the liberals may be followed in the fascinating pages of morley's "life," who at the end declares that his performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison. gladstone's own summary of his career gives a glimpse of what these performances were as well as an interpretation of the century and england's future growth which indicate that had he had another twenty years in which to progress, perhaps fewer, he would beyond all doubt have become an out and out social democrat. "the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so i love to reckon them) of my formal connection with midlothian is too important to pass without a word. i consider it as beginning with the reform act of lord grey's government. that great act was for england, improvement and extension: for scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the scottish nation in the preceding period. i rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognized, and how that power has been used. the threescore years offer as the pictures of what the historian will recognize as a great legislative and administrative period--perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. it has been predominantly a history of emancipation--that is, of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them i rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, scotland has done battle for the right. "another period has opened and is opening still--a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. these have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these--the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, _and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole_ to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope." mr. gladstone entered parliament at twenty-three, in , and a year later browning, at twenty-one, printed his first poem, "pauline." the careers of the two men ran nearly parallel, for browning died in , on the day of the publication of his last volume of poems, and gladstone's retirement from active life took place in , shortly after the defeat of his second home rule bill. though there is nothing to show that these two men came into touch with each other during their life, and while it is probable that browning would not have been in sympathy with many of the aspects of gladstone's mentality, there is an undercurrent of similarity in their attitude of mind toward reform. the passage in "sordello" already referred to, written in , might be regarded almost as a prophecy of the sort of leader gladstone became. i have said of that passage that it expressed the ideal of the opportunist, not that of the revolutionary. opportunist mr. gladstone was often called by captious critics, but any unbiased reader following his career now as a whole will see, as morley points out, that whenever there was a chance of getting anything done it was generally found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt it. a distinction should be made between that sort of opportunism which _waits_ upon the growth of conditions favorable to the taking of a short step in amelioration, and what might be called militant opportunism, which, at all times, seizes every opportunity to take a step in the direction of an evolving, all-absorbing ideal. is not this the opportunism of both a browning and a gladstone? such a policy at least tacitly acknowledges that the law of evolution is the law that should be followed, and that the mass of the people as well as the leader have their share in the unfolding of the coming ideal, though their part in it may be less conscious than his and though they may need his leadership to make the steps by the way clear. the other political leader of the victorian era with whom gladstone came most constantly into conflict was disraeli, of whom browning in "george bubb dodington" has given a sketch in order to draw a contrast between the unsuccessful policy of a charlatan of the dodington type and that of one like disraeli. the skeptical multitude of to-day cannot be taken in by declarations that the politician is working only for their good, and if he frankly acknowledged that he is working also for his own good they would have none of him. the nice point to be decided is how shall he work for his own good and yet gain control of the multitude. dodington did not know the secret, but according to browning disraeli did, and what is the secret? it seems to be an attitude of absolute self-assurance, a disregard of consistency, a scorn of the people he is dealing with, and a pose suggesting the play of supernatural forces in his life. this is a true enough picture of the real disraeli, who seems to have had a leaning toward a belief in spiritualism, and who was notorious for his unblushing changes of opinion and for a style of oratory in which his points were made by clever invective and sarcasm hurled at his opponents instead of by any sound, logical argument, it being, indeed one of his brilliant discoveries that "wisdom ought to be concealed under folly, and consistency under caprice." many choice bits of history might be given in illustration of browning's portrayal of him; for example, speaking against reform, he exclaims: "behold the late prime minister and the reform ministry! the spirited and snow-white steeds have gradually changed into an equal number of sullen and obstinate donkeys, while mr. merryman, who, like the lord chancellor, was once the very life of the ring, now lies his despairing length in the middle of the stage, with his jokes exhausted and his bottle empty." as a specimen of his quickness in retort may be cited an account of an episode which occurred at the time when he came out as the champion of the taunton blues. in the course of his speech he "enunciated," says an anonymous writer of the fifties, "one of those daring historical paradoxes which are so signally characteristic of the man: 'twenty years ago' said the taunton blue hero, 'tithes were paid in ireland more regularly than now!' "even his supporters appeared astounded by this declaration. "'how do you know?' shouted an elector. "'i have read it,' replied mr. disraeli. "'oh, oh!' exclaimed the elector. "'i know it,' retorted disraeli, 'because i have read, and you' (looking daggers at his questioner) 'have not.' "this was considered a very happy rejoinder by the friends of the candidate, and was loudly cheered by the blues. "'didn't you write a novel?' again asked the importunate elector, not very much frightened even by mr. disraeli's oratorical thunder and the sardonical expression on his face. "'i have certainly written a novel,' mr. disraeli replied; 'but i hope there is no disgrace in being connected with literature.' "'you are a curiosity of literature, you are,' said the humorous elector. "'i hope,' said mr. disraeli, with great indignation, 'there is no disgrace in having written that which has been read by hundreds of thousands of my fellow-countrymen, and which has been translated into every european language. i trust that one who is an author by the gift of nature may be as good a man as one who is master of the mint by the gift of lord melbourne.' great applause then burst forth from the blues. mr. disraeli continued, 'i am not, however, the puppet of the duke of buckingham, as one newspaper has described me; while a fellow laborer in the same vineyard designated me the next morning, "the marleybone radical." if there is anything on which i figure myself it is my consistency.' "'oh, oh!' exclaimed many hearers. "'i am prepared to prove it,' said mr. disraeli, with menacing energy. 'i am prepared to prove it, and always shall be, either in the house of commons or on the hustings, considering the satisfactory manner in which i have been attacked, but i do not think the attack will be repeated.'" it seems extraordinary that such tactics of bluff could take a man onward to the supreme place of prime minister. possibly it was just as much owing to his power to amuse as to any of the causes brought out by browning. is there anything the majority of mankind loves more than a laugh? the conflicts of disraeli and gladstone form one of the most remarkable episodes of nineteenth-century politics. one is tempted to draw a parallel between napoleon iii and disraeli, whose tactics were much the same, except that disraeli was backed up by a much keener intellect. possibly he held a part in english politics similar to that held by napoleon in european politics--that is, he conserved the influences of the past long enough to make the future more sure of itself. browning, however, evidently considered him nothing more than a successful charlatan. when browning wrote, "why i am a liberal," in , liberalism in english politics had reached its climax in the nineteenth century through the introduction by mr. gladstone, then premier for the third time, of his home rule bill. the injustices suffered by the irish people and the horrible atrocities resulting from these had had their effect upon mr. gladstone and had taken him the last great step in his progress toward freedom. the meeting at which this bill was introduced has been described as the greatest legislative assembly of modern times. the house was full to overflowing, and in a brilliant speech of nearly four hours the veteran leader held his audience breathless as he unfolded his plans for the betterment of irish conditions. we are told that during the debates that followed there was a remarkable exhibition of feeling--"the passions, the enthusiasm, the fear, and hope, and fury and exultation, sweeping, now the surface, now stirring to its depths the great gathering." the bill, which included, besides the founding of an irish parliament in dublin, which would have the power to deal with all matters "save the crown, the army and navy, foreign and colonial policy, trade, navigation, currency, imperial taxation, and the endowment of churches," also provided that ireland should annually contribute to the english exchequer the sum of £ , , . eloquence, enthusiasm, exultation--all came to naught. the bill did not even suit the liberals, the bargain from a financial point of view being regarded as hard. it was defeated in parliament and fared no better when an appeal was made to the country, and mr. gladstone resigned. in nine months, however, a general election returned him to office again, and again he introduced a home rule bill, and though it passed the commons, it was overwhelmingly defeated in the house of lords. it is pleasant to reflect that in this last act of a noble and brilliant career spent in the interests of the ever-growing ideals of democracy gladstone had the sympathy of browning, shown by his emphatic expression of "liberal sentiments" at a momentous crisis, when a speech on the liberal side even from the mouth of a poet counted for much. as we have seen, the reflections in browning's poetry of his interest in public affairs are comparatively few, yet such glimpses as he has given prove him, beyond all doubt, to have been a democrat in principle, to have arrived, in fact, at the beginning of his career at a point beyond that attained by england's rulers at the end of the century. this far-sighted vision of his may have been another reason to be added to those mentioned at the beginning of the chapter why his interest in the practical affairs of his country did not more often express itself. the wrangling, the inconsequentialness, the eloquence expended upon mere personal interests which make up by far the larger proportion of all political agitation, are irritating to the last degree to a man of vision. his part was that of the philosopher and artist--to watch and to record in the portrayal of his many characters the underlying principle of freedom, which was the guiding star in all his work. iv social ideals browning's social ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. his ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of english society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve. the fact of which browning seemed more conscious than of any other fact of his existence, and which, as we have seen, was the very core of his mysticism, was feeling. things about which an ordinary man would feel no emotion at all start in his mind a train of thoughts, ending only in the perception of divine love. the eating of a palatable fig fills his heart with such gratefulness to the giver of the fig that immediately he fares forth upon the way which brings him into the presence of the prime giver from whom all gifts are received. what ecstasy of feeling in the artist aspiring through his art to the higher regions of absolute beauty in "abt vogler" of the poet who loves, aspiring to the divine through his human love in the epilogue to "ferishtah's fancies!" the perception of feeling was so intense that it became in him exalted and concentrated, incapable of dissipating itself in ephemeral sentimentalities, and this it is which gives feeling to browning its mystical quality, and puts personal love upon the plane of a veritable revelation. though reports have often floated about in regard to his attachments to other women after mrs. browning's death, the fact remains that he did not marry again, that he wrote the lyrics in "ferishtah's fancies," and the sonnet to edward fitzgerald just before his death, and thirty years after his wife's death. moreover, in the epilogue to "the two poets of croisic" he gives a hint of what might be his attitude toward any other women who may have come into his life, in the application of the tale of the cricket chirping "love" in the place of the broken string of a poet's lyre-- "for as victory was nighest, while i sang and played, with my lyre at lowest, highest, right alike--one string that made love sound soft was snapt in twain, never to be heard again,---- "had not a kind cricket fluttered, perched upon the place vacant left, and duly uttered, 'love, love, love,' when'er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone." these rare qualities of constancy, exaltation and aspiration, in love sublimating it into a spiritual emotion, which was evidently the distinctive mark of browning's personality on the emotional side, furnishes the keynote by which his presentation or solution of the social problems involved in the relations of men and women is always to be gauged. he had been writing ten years when he essayed his first serious presentation of what we might to-day call a problem play on an english subject in "a blot in the 'scutcheon." in all of his long poems and in many of his short ones personal love had been portrayed under various conditions--between friends or lovers, husband and wife, or father and son, and in every instance it is a dominating influence in the action, as we have already seen it to be in "strafford." again, in "king victor and king charles" the action centers upon charles's love for his father, and is also moulded in many ways by polyxena's love for her husband, charles. but a perception of the possible heights to be obtained by the passion of romantic love only fully emerges in "pippa passes," for example in ottima's vision of the reality of her own love, despite her great sin as contrasted with that of sebald's, and in jules's rising above the conventionally low when he discovers he has been duped, and perceiving in phene a purity of soul which no earthly conditions had been able to sully, "who, what is lutwyche, what natalia's friends, what the whole world except our love--my own, own phene?... i do but break these paltry models up to begin art afresh ... some unsuspected isle in the far seas! like a god going through the world there stands one mountain for a moment in the dusk, whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow: and you are ever by me while i gaze --are in my arms as now--as now--as now! some unsuspected isle in the far seas! some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!" again, in "the return of the druses" there is a complicated clash between the ideal of religious reverence for the incarnation of divinity in djabal and human love for him in the soul of anael, resulting at the end in the destruction of the idea of djabal's supernatural divinity, and his reinstatement perceived by anael as divine through the complete exaltation of his human love for anael. these examples, however, while they illustrate browning's attitude toward human love, are far enough removed from nineteenth-century conditions in england. in "pippa," the social conditions of nineteenth-century italy are reflected; in "the druses," the religious conditions of the druse nation in the fifteenth century. in the "blot in the 'scutcheon" a situation is developed which comes home forcibly to the nineteenth-century englishman despite the fact that the scene is supposed to be laid in the eighteenth century. the poet's treatment of the clash between the ideal, cherished by an old and honored aristocratic family of its own immaculate purity, and the spontaneous, complete and exalted love of the two young people who in their ecstasy transcend conventions, illustrates, as perhaps no other situation could, his reverential attitude upon the subject of love. gwendolen, the older, intuitional woman, and mertoun, the young lover, are the only people in the play to realize that purity may exist although the social enactments upon which it is supposed to depend have not been complied with. tresham learns it only when he has wounded mertoun unto death; mildred never learns it. the grip of conventional teaching has sunk so deeply into her nature that she feels her sin unpardonable and only to be atoned for by death. mertoun, as he dies, gives expression to the essential purity and truth of his nature in these words: "die along with me, dear mildred! 'tis so easy, and you'll 'scape so much unkindness! can i lie at rest, with rude speech spoken to you, ruder deeds done to you?--heartless men shall have my heart and i tied down with grave-clothes and the worm, aware, perhaps, of every blow--o god!-- upon those lips--yet of no power to bear the felon stripe by stripe! die mildred! leave their honorable world to them! for god we're good enough, though the world casts us out." this is only one of many instances which go to show that browning's conception of love might include, on the one hand, a complete freedom from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or commercial reasons. a sin against love seems in browning's eyes to come the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin. it must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true outside of it. another illustration of browning's belief in the existence of a love such as shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is given in the "inn album." here, again, the characters are all english, and the story is based upon an actual occurrence. such changes as browning has made in the story are with the intention of pitting against the villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by killing the aristocratic villain. the young man is betrothed to a girl he cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. all is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward. browning has nowhere translated into more noble action the love of a man than in the passage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly to the woman who has been so deeply wronged: "take heart of hers, and give her hand of mine with no more heart than now, you see upon this brow i strike! what atom of a heart do i retain not all yours? dear, you know it! easily may she accord me pardon when i place my brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign, since uttermost indignity is spared-- mere marriage and no love! and all this time not one word to the purpose! are you free? only wait! only let me serve--deserve where you appoint and how you see the good! i have the will--perhaps the power--at least means that have power against the world. fortune-- take my whole life for your experiment! if you are bound--in marriage, say--why, still, still, sure, there's something for a friend to do, outside? a mere well-wisher, understand! i'll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know, swing it wide open to let you and him pass freely,--and you need not look, much less fling me a '_thank you!--are you there, old friend?_' don't say that even: i should drop like shot! so i feel now, at least: some day, who knows? after no end of weeks and months and years you might smile! '_i believe you did your best!_' and that shall make my heart leap--leap such leap as lands the feet in heaven to wait you there! ah, there's just one thing more! how pale you look! why? are you angry? if there's after all, worst come to worst--if still there somehow be the shame--i said was no shame,--none, i swear!-- in that case, if my hand and what it holds,-- my name,--might be your safeguard now,--at once-- why, here's the hand--you have the heart." the genuine lovers in browning's gallery will occur to every reader of browning: lovers who are not deterred by obstacles, like norbert, lovers like miranda, devoted to a woman with a "past"; like the lover in "one way of love," who still can say, "those who win heaven, blest are they." sometimes there is a problem to be solved, sometimes not. whenever there is a problem, however, it is solved by browning on the side of sincerity and truth, never on the side of convention. take, for example, "the statue and the bust," which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of browning's solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. but he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their browning: "let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will!" there is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line. "--the sin i impute to each frustrate ghost is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, though the end in sight was a vice, i say." in "the ring and the book," the problem is similar to that in the "inn album," except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. the lover, caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of browning's readers seem to doubt as possible. caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for pompilia. in this poem it is pompilia who is given the divine vision. if i may resay what i have said in another connection,[ ] there is no moral struggle in pompilia's short life such as that in caponsacchi's. both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. she was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a struggle begins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. neither archbishop nor friendly "smiles and shakes of head" could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her attitude toward him was inevitable. no qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. that she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. and how quick and certain her defence of caponsacchi, threatened by guido, when he overtakes them at the inn! as she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of god. "if i sinned so--never obey voice more. o, the just and terrible, who bids us 'bear.' not--'stand by; bear to see my angels bear!'" the gossip over her flight with caponsacchi does not trouble her as it does him. he saved her in her great need; the supposition that their motives for flight had any taint of impurity in them is too puerile to be given a thought, yet with the same sublime certainty of the right, characteristic of her, she acknowledges, at the end, her love for caponsacchi, and looks for its fulfilment in the future when marriage shall be an interpenetration of souls that know themselves into one. having attained so great a good she can wish none of the evil she has suffered undone. she goes a step farther. not only does she accept her own suffering for the sake of the final supreme good to herself, but she feels assured that good will fall at last to those who worked the evil. in her absolute certainty of her realization of an unexpressed love in a future existence, she is only equaled in browning's poetry by the speaker in "beautiful evelyn hope is dead." that browning's belief in the mystical quality of personal love never changed is shown by the fact that near the end of his life, in the "parleying" with daniel bartoli, he treats a love romance based upon fact in a way to emphasize this same truth which so constantly appears in his earlier work. the lady in this case, who is of the people, having been offered a bribe by the king which will mean the dishonoring of herself and her husband, and which if she does not accept will mean her complete separation from her husband, instantly decides against the bribe. she prefers love in spirit in a convent to the accepting of the king's promise that she will be made much of in court if she will sign a paper agreeing that her husband shall at once cede his dukedoms to the king. she explains her attitude to the duke, who hesitates in his decision, whereupon she leaves and saves his honor for him, but his inability to decide at once upon the higher ground of spiritual love reveals to her the inadequacy of his love as compared with her own and kills her love for him. she later, however, marries a man who was only a boy of ten at the time of this episode, and their life together was a dream of happiness. but she dies and the devoted husband becomes a man of the world again. the duke, however, has a streak of genuineness in his nature after all. although carried away by the charms of a bold, black-eyed, tall creature, a development in keeping with the nature of the duke in the true story, browning is equal to the occasion, and makes him declare that the real man in him is dead and is still faithful to the old love. all she has is his ghost. some day his soul will again be called into life by his ideal love. the poet frequently expresses a doubt of man's power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife's death. "any wife to any husband" reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. the poet's answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in "fifine at the fair," an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love. browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. in relation to the duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks: "one leans to like the duke, too; up we'll patch some sort of saintship for him--not to match hers--but man's best and woman's worst amount so nearly to the same thing, that we count in man a miracle of faithfulness if, while unfaithful somewhat, he lay stress on the main fact that love, when love indeed, is wholly solely love from first to last-- truth--all the rest a lie." it may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of chivalry. true, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of love, and few have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in browning. it is not beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who touches divinity in browning's mind. human love is then not an impossible ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to god through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the human soul. other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have in store for the aspiring soul. in holding to such an ideal of love as this browning has ranged himself entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the church of affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand, gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom in the relations of the sexes. the first degrades love by making it too much a matter of law, the second by making it an ephemeral passion from which almost everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of necessity, eliminated. to either of these extreme factions browning's attitude is equally incomprehensible. the first cries out against his liberalness, the second, declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either church, law or god, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are, however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions. the chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that brings with it the sense of revelation. for many people law or the church is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well as its personal aspect. yet the law and the church should both allow sufficient freedom for the breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive at browning's conception of human love. truth to one's own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with browning, it follows that truth to one's nature in any direction is desirable. he even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he has portrayed, guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person he had most deeply wronged, pompilia. with exquisite vision she, even, can say: "but where will god be absent! in his face is light, but in his shadow healing too: let guido touch the shadow and be healed! and as my presence was unfortunate,-- my earthly good, temptation and a snare,-- nothing about me but drew somehow down his hate upon me,--somewhat so excused therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,-- may my evanishment for evermore help further to relieve the heart that cast such object of its natural loathing forth! so he was made; he nowise made himself: i could not love him, but his mother did." it is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which underlies a poem like "fifine at the fair." through expressing the truth of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally reaches a higher truth. a nature like guido's was not born with a faculty for development. he simply had to live out his own hate. the man in "fifine" had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the most common type of man to-day. there are others like norbert or mertoun, in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. in many of the varying types of men and women portrayed by browning there is the recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of guido, there is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a universe ruled by a god of love. in his views upon human character and its possibilities of development browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing the orthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined entity, against which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine to be attained, will gradually disappear. but the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. yet browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, "rephan," and imagines that any other state than one of flux between good and evil would be monotonous: "startle me up, by an infinite discovered above and below me--height and depth alike to attract my flight, "repel my descent: by hate taught love. oh, gain were indeed to see above supremacy ever--to move, remove, "not reach--aspire yet never attain to the object aimed at! scarce in vain,-- as each stage i left nor touched again. "to suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss, wring knowledge from ignorance:--just for this-- to add one drop to a love--abyss! "enough: for you doubt, you hope, o men, you fear, you agonize, die: what then? is an end to your life's work out of ken? "have you no assurance that, earth at end, wrong will prove right? who made shall mend in the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?" in his attitude toward the existence of evil browning takes issue with carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. carlyle, as browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. he makes the opponent, who is an echo of carlyle in the argument in "bernard de mandeville," exclaim: "where's knowledge, where power and will in evidence 'tis man's-play merely! craft foils rectitude, malignity defeats beneficence, and grant, at very last of all, the feud 'twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude though good be garnered safely and good's foe bundled for burning. thoughts steal even so-- why grant tares leave to thus o'ertop, o'ertower their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower, triumph one sunny minute?" no attempt must be made to show god's reason for allowing evil. any such attempt will fail. this passage comes as near as any in browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century's end. his gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it. carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions in england, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by which evil could be turned into good. he little realized that his own storming at the ineptitude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. though he was not to suggest practical means for leading the masses out of bondage, he was to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed. by so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken soon. while carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose which would later mean militant action against it, browning was settling in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. in fine, carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the century, while browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist of to-day calls the middle-class individualist. liberalism, which had taken on social conditions to the point through legislation where every man was free to be a property holder if he could manage to become one, and to amass wealth, left out of consideration the fact that he never could be free as long as he had to compete with every other man in the state to get these things. hence the movement of the working classes to gain freedom by substituting for a competitive form of society a coöperative form. great names in literature and art have helped toward the on-coming of this movement. carlyle had railed at the millions of the english nation, "mostly fools;" ruskin had bemoaned the enthronement of ugliness as the result of the industrial conditions; matthew arnold had proposed a panacea for the ills of the social condition in the bringing about of social equality through culture, and, best of all, william morris had not only talked but acted. [illustration: william morris] to any student of social movements to-day, whether he has been drawn into the swirl of socialistic propaganda or whether he is still comfortably sitting in his parlor feeling an intellectual sympathy but no emotional call to leave his parlor and be up and doing, morris appears as the most interesting figure of the century. the pioneers in the nineteenth-century movement toward socialism in england, unless we except the social enthusiasm of a shelley or a blake, were owen and maurice. owen was that remarkable anomaly, a self-made man who had gained his wealth because of the new industrial order inaugurated by the invention of machinery, who yet could look at the circumstances so fortuitous for him in an impersonal manner, and realize that what had put a silver spoon into his own mouth was taking away even pewter spoons from other men's mouths. although he was really in love with the new order of machine production, he realized what many to-day fail to see, that machine production organized for the benefit of private persons would most assuredly mean the poverty and the degradation of the workers. he did not stop here, however, but spent his vast fortune in trying to make the conditions of the workingmen better. in the estimation of socialists to-day his work was of a very high order, "not mere utopianism." it bore no similarity to the romantic dreams of poets who saw visions of a perfect society regardless of the fact that a perfect society cannot suddenly blossom from conditions of appalling misery and degradation. owen was a practical business man. he knew all the ins and outs of the industrial régime, and consequently he had a practical program, not a dream, which he wished to see carried out. accounts of the conditions of the workers at that time are heartrending. everywhere the same tale of abject poverty, ignorance, and oppression in field and factory, long hours of labor and dear food. to bring help to these downtrodden people was the burning desire of robert owen and his followers. his efforts were not rewarded by that success which they deserved, his failure being a necessary concomitant of the fact that even a practical program for betterment cannot suddenly take effect owing to the inevitable inertia of any long-established conditions. in showing the causes which kept him from the full accomplishment of his ideals, in spite of his genuine practicalness, brougham villiers, the recent historian of the socialist movement in england, says he attempted too much "to influence the workers from without, trying, of course vainly, to induce the governing classes to interest themselves in the work of social reform. yet it is difficult to see what else he could have done at the time. we have already shown how utterly disorganized the working classes were, how incapable, indeed, of any organization. they were also destitute of political power, and miserably underpaid. what could they do to help themselves? help, if it was to come at all, must come from the only people who then had the power, if they only had the will, to accord it, and to them, at first, robert owen appealed. later, he turned to the people, and for them indeed his work was not utterly wasted, though generations were to pass before the full effect of it could be seen." however abortive his attempts to gain political sympathy for his socialist program, and in spite of the fact that socialist agitation came to a standstill in england with the defeat of the somewhat chaotic socialism of the chartists, it cannot be doubted that his efforts influenced the political reformers who were to take up one injustice after another and fight for its melioration until the working classes were at least brought to a plane where they could begin to organize and develop toward the still higher plane where they could themselves take their own salvation in hand. another man who did much to bring the workingman's cause into prominence was maurice, who emphasized the christian aspect of the movement. he was an excellent supplement to owen, whose liberal views on religion militated in some quarters against an acceptance of his humane views in regard to workingmen. notwithstanding the personal strength of these two men they failed not only in the practical attainment of their object, but their ideas on socialism did not even wedge itself into the thought consciousness of the englishmen. the men who did more than any one else to awaken the sleeping english consciousness were carlyle, ruskin, arnold and morris. of these morris held a position midway between the old-fashioned dreamer of dreams and the new-fashioned hustling political socialist, who now sends his representatives to parliament and has his "say" in the national affairs of the country. being a poet, he could, of course, dream dreams, and one of these, "the dream of john ball," puts the case of the toilers in a form at once so convincing and so full of divine pity that it does not seem possible it could be read even by the most hardened of trust magnates without making him see how unjust has been the distribution of this world's goods through the making of one man do the work of many: "in days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men--yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men." this is a riddle which john ball cannot grasp at once, and when it is explained to him he is still more mystified at the result. "thou hast seen the weaver at his loom: think how it should be if he sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but if the shed open of itself, speed through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of itself, and the weaver standing by ... looking to half a dozen looms and bidding them what to do. and as with the weaver so with the potter, and the smith, and every worker in metals, and all other crafts, that it shall be for them looking on and tending, as with the man that sitteth in the cart while the horse draws. yea, at last so shall it be even with those who are mere husbandmen; and no longer shall the reaper fare afield in the morning with his hook over his shoulder, and smite and bind and smite again till the sun is down and the moon is up; but he shall draw a thing made by men into the field with one or two horses, and shall say the word and the horses shall go up and down, and the thing shall reap and gather and bind, and do the work of many men. imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a tale of enchantment told by a minstrel, and then tell me what shouldst thou deem that the life of men would be amidst all this, men such as these of the township here, or the men of the canterbury guilds." and john ball's conclusion is that things in that day to come will be not as they are but as they ought to be. with irresistible logic he declares: "i say that if men still abide men as i have known them, and unless these folk of england change as the land changeth--and forsooth of the men, for good and for evil, i can think no other than i think now, or behold them other than i have known them and loved them--i say if the men be still men, what will happen except that there should be all plenty in the land, and not one poor man therein ... for there would then be such abundance of good things, that, as greedy as the lords might be, there would be enough to satisfy their greed and yet leave good living for all who labored with their hands; so that these should labor for less than now, and they would have time to learn knowledge," and he goes on, "take part in the making of laws." but morris was not the man to dream, merely. though he did not trouble himself about the doctrinaire side of socialism, he preached it constantly from the human side and from the artistic side. while some socialist writers make us feel that socialism might possibly only be gradgrind in another guise, he makes us feel that peace and plenty and loveliness would attend upon the sons and daughters of socialism. as one of his many admirers says of him: "he was an out-and-out communist because of the essential sanity of a mind incapable of the desire to monopolize anything he could not use." the authoritarianism of the marxian socialists was distasteful to him, for, to quote from the same admirer, his "conception of socialism was that of a free society, based on the simple rights of all to use the earth and anything in it, and the consequent abolition of all competition for the means of life." his attitude of mind on these points led him to break away from the social democratic federation, which, with its political program, was distasteful to morris's more purely social feeling, and found the socialist league. this emphasized more particularly the artistic side of socialism. morris and his followers were bent upon making life a beautiful thing as well as a comfortable thing. according to all accounts, the league was not as great a force in the development of socialist ideals as was morris himself, who inspired such men as burne-jones and walter crane with a sympathy in the new ideals, as well as multitudes of lesser men in the crowds that gathered to listen to him in waltham green or in some other like open place of a sunday. morris's chief contribution to the growth of the cause was perhaps his own business plant, into which he put as many of his ideals for the betterment of the workingmen's conditions as he was able to do under existing conditions. who has not gloated over his exquisite editions of chaucer and the like--books in which even the punctuation marks are a delight to the eye, and the illustrations as far beyond ordinary illustrations as the punctuation marks are beyond ordinary periods. if anything could add to the richness of the interior it is the contrasting simplicity of the white vellum bindings, and, again, if there is another possible touch of grace--a gilding of the lily--what could better fulfil that purpose than the outer boxing covered with a morris cotton print! the critical may object that these morris editions are so expensive that none but millionaire bibliophiles can have many of them. how many of us have even seen them except in such collections! and how many of his workmen are able to share in this product of their labor to any greater extent than the product of labor is usually shared in by its producers, may be asked. though we are obliged to answer that the workmen probably do not have the morris books in their own libraries, they yet have the joy of making these beautiful books under conditions of happy workmanship--that is, they are skilled craftsmen, who have been trained in an apprenticeship, who are asked to work only eight hours a day, who receive higher wages than other workmen and, above all, who have the stimulation of the presence of morris, himself, working among them. morris's enthusiasm for a more universally happy and beautiful society combined with the object lesson of his own methods in conducting a business upon genuinely artistic principles has done an incalculable amount in spreading the gospel of socialism. still there was too much of the _laissez faire_ atmosphere about his attitude for it to bring about any marked degree of progress. the opinion of mr. william clarke who had many conversations with morris on the subject reveals that, after all, there was too much of the poet about him for him to be a really practical force in the movement. he writes: "it is not easy to understand how morris proposes to bring about the condition of things he looks forward to. no parliamentary or municipal methods, no reliance upon lawmaking machinery, an abhorrence of everything that smacks of 'politics': it all seems very impracticable to the average man, and certainly suggests the poet rather than the man of affairs. what morris thinks will really happen is, i should say, judging from numerous conversations i have had with him, something like this: existing society is, he thinks, gradually, but with increasing momentum, disintegrating through its own rottenness. the capitalist system of production is breaking down fast and is compelled to exploit new regions in africa and other parts, where he thinks its term will be short. economically, socially, morally, politically, religiously, civilization is becoming bankrupt. meanwhile it is for the socialist to take advantage of this disintegration by spreading discontent, by preaching economic truths, and by any kind of demonstration which may harass the authorities and develop among the people an _esprit de corps_. by these means the people will, in some way or other, be ready to take up the industry of the world when the capitalist class is no longer able to direct or control it. morris believes less in a violent revolution than he did and thinks that workmen's associations and labor unions form a kind of means between brute force on the one hand and a parliamentary policy on the other. he does not, however, share the sanguine views of john burns as to the wonders to be accomplished by the 'new' trades unionism." the practical ineffectiveness of the morris socialism in spite of its having taken some steps in the direction of vital activity was overcome by the next socialist body which came into prominence--the fabian society, in which bernard shaw has been so conspicuous a figure. as already mentioned, the fabians are not a fighting body, but a solidly educational body. to them is due the bringing of socialism into the realm of political economy, and in so doing they have striven to harmonize it with english practical political methods. besides this, they have done a vast amount of work in educating public opinion, not with the view to immediately converting the english nation to a belief in the changing of the present order into one wholly socialistic, but with a view to introducing socialistic treatment of the individual problems which arise in contemporary politics. [illustration: john burns] their campaign of education was conducted so well that its effects were soon visible, not only in the modification of public opinion, but upon the workingmen themselves. the method was simple enough: "if any public, especially any social, question came to the front, the fabian method was to make a careful independent study of the matter, and present to the public, in a penny pamphlet, a thoughtful statement of the case and some common sense, and incidentally socialistic, suggestions for a solution." fabian ideas were thus introduced into the consciousness of the awakening trades unionists. it has been objected that the gain was much more for the trades unionists than for the fabians. their one-time eager pupils have, it is said, progressed beyond their masters, as a review of recent socialistic tendencies would divulge had we the time to follow them in this place. however that may be, the great fact remains that the fabians have done more than any other branch of socialists to bridge over the distance between what the english writers call the middle-class idealist and the proletarian, with the result that the proletarian has begun to think for himself and to translate middle-class idealism into proletarian realism. socialism, from being the watch word of the enthusiastic revolutionary, began to be discussed in every intelligent household and in every debating society. this enormous growth in public sentiment occurred during the session of the unionist parliament, - . when this parliament opened there was hardly any socialist literature, and when it closed everybody was reading bellamy and the "fabian essays," and sir william harcourt had made his memorable remark: "we are all socialists now." the gesticulating and bemoaning idealists, the carlyles and the ruskins, the revolutionary but _laissez faire_ prophets like morris, who believed in a complete change but not in using any of the means at hand to bring about that change, had given place to men like keir hardie and john burns, who had sprung into leadership from the ranks of the workingmen themselves, and who were to be later their representatives in parliament when the independent labor party came into existence. all this had been done by that group of progressive men, long-headed enough to see that the ideal of a better and more beautiful social life could not be gained except by a long and toilsome process of education and of action which would consciously follow the principles of growth discovered by scientists to obtain in all unconscious cosmic and physical development, the very principle which as we have seen, browning declared should have guided his hero sordello long before the fabian socialists came into existence--namely, the principle of evolution. that their methods should have peacefully brought about the conditions where it was possible to form an independent labor party, which would have the power to speak and act for itself instead of working as the fabians themselves do through the parties already in power, shouts aloud for the wisdom of their policy. and is there not still plenty of work for them to do in the still further educating of all parties toward the flowering of genuine democracy, when the dreams of the dreamer shall have become actualities, because true and not spurious ways of making them actual shall have been worked out by experience? this remarkable growth in social ideals was taking place during the ninth decade of the century and the last decade of browning's life. is there any indication in his later work that he was conscious of it? there is certainly no direct evidence in his work that he progressed any farther in the development of democratic ideals than we find in the liberalism of such a parliamentary leader as mr. gladstone, while in that poem in which he considers more especially than in any other the subject of better conditions for the people, "sordello," he distinctly expresses a mood of doubt as to the advisability of making conditions too easy for the human being, who needs the hardships and ills of life to bring his soul to perfection, a far more important thing in browning's eyes than to live comfortably and beautifully. all he wishes for the human being is the fine chance to make the most of himself spiritually. the socialist would say that he could not secure the chance to do this except in a society where the murderous principle of competition should give way to that of coöperation. with this browning might agree. indeed, may this not have been the very principle sordello had in mind as something revealed to him which neither guelf nor ghibelline could see, or was this only the more obvious principle of republican as opposed to monarchical principle and still falling under an individualistic conception of society? while his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of men, browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a ruskin, nor yet its lack of culture with the priggishness of an arnold, nor would he stand in open spaces and preach discontent to the masses like morris. why? because he from the first was made wise to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to be proud of men's fallacies, their half reasons, their faint aspirings, upward tending all though weak, the lesson learned after weary experiences of life by paracelsus. his thought was centered upon the worth of every human being to himself and for god. earth is after all only a place to grow in and prepare one's self for lives to come, and failure here, so long as the fight has been bravely fought, is to be regarded with anything but regret, for it is through the failure that the vision of the future is made more sure. what he finds true, as we saw, in the religious or philosophical world, he finds true in the moral world. lack in human knowledge points the way to god; lack in human success points the way to immortality. the meaning of this life in relation to a future life being so much more important than this life in itself, and man's individual development being so much more important than his social development, browning naturally would not turn his attention upon those practical, social or governmental means by which even the chance for individual development must be secured. he is too much occupied with the larger questions. he is not even a middle-class idealist, dreaming dreams of future earthly bliss; he is the prophet of future existences. does his practical influence upon the social development of the century amount to nothing then? not at all. he started out on his voyage through the century toward the democratic ideal in the good ship individualism--the banner ship indeed. what he has emphasized upon this voyage is first the paramount worth of each and every human being, whether good or bad. second, the possibility in every human being of conceiving an ideal, toward which by the exertion of his will power he should aspire, battling steadfastly against every obstruction that life throws in his course. third, that even those who are incapable of formulating an ideal must be regarded as living out the truth of their natures and must therefore be treated with compassion. fourth, that the highest function of the human soul is love, which expresses itself in many ways, but attains its full flowering only in the love of man and woman on a plane of spiritual exaltation, and that through this power of human love some glimpse of the divine is caught; therefore to this function of the soul it is of the utmost importance that human beings should be loyal and true, even if that loyalty and truth conflict with conventional ways of looking at life. sailing in this good ship he also expresses his sympathy indirectly in his dramas and directly upon several occasions with the ideals of political freedom which during the century have been making progress toward democracy in the english parliament through the legislation of the liberals, whose laws have brought a greater and greater measure of freedom to the middle classes and some measure of freedom to the working classes. but it seems as if when nearing the end of the century browning landed from his ship upon some high island and straining his eyes toward the horizon of the dawn of another life did not fully realize that there was another good ship, socialism, struggling to reach the ideal of democracy, and now become the banner ship whose work is to sail out into the unknown, turbulent seas of the future, finding the path to another high island in order that the way may be made clear for the ship individualism to continue her course to another stage in the voyage toward a perfect democracy. and as the new ship, socialism, passes on its way it will do well to heed the vision of the poet seer, straining his eyes toward the dawn of other lives in other spheres, lest in the struggle and strain to bring about a more comfortable and beautiful life upon earth, the important truth be slighted that humanity has a higher destiny to fulfil than can be realized in the most utopian dreams of an earthly democracy. this truth is in fact not only forgotten but is absolutely denied by many of the latter-day social reformers. to sum up, i think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century browning is of his age. in his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by his age. in his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and to god he is both of his age and beyond it. as has been said of philosophy, "it cannot give us bread but it can give us god, soul and immortality," so we may say of browning, that though he did not raise up his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon the truths of god, the soul and immortality. v art shibboleths in the foregoing chapters the relations of the poet to the philosophical, religious, political, and social movements of the nineteenth century have been pointed out. in this and the next chapter some account of his relation to the artistic and literary ideals of the century will be attempted. browning's relation to the art of the century is, of course, twofold, dealing as it must with his own conceptions and criticisms of art as well as with the position of his own art in the poetic development of the century. in order to understand more fully his own contribution to the developing literary standards of the century it may be well first to consider the fundamental principles of art laid down by him in various poems wherein he has deliberately dealt with the subject. the poem in which he has most clearly formulated the general principles underlying the growth of art is the "parleying" with charles avison. though music is the special art under consideration, the rules of growth obtaining in that are equally applicable to other arts. they are found to be, as we should expect in browning, a combination of the ideas of evolution and conservation. though the standards of art change and develop, because as man's soul evolves, more complex forms are needed to express his deeper experiences, his wider vision, yet in each stage of the development there is an element of permanent beauty which by the aid of the historical sense man may continue to enjoy. that element of permanence exists when genuine feeling and aspiration find expression in forms of art. the element of change grows out of the fact that both the thought expressed and the form in which it is expressed are partial manifestations of the beauty or truth toward which feeling aspires; hence the need of fresh attempts to reach the infinite. the permanence of feeling, expressing itself in ever new forms, is brought out finely in this passage: "truths escape time's insufficient garniture: they fade, they fall--those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine and free through march frost: may dews crystalline nourish truth merely,--does june boast the fruit as--not new vesture merely but, to boot, novel creation? soon shall fade and fall myth after myth--the husk-like lies i call new truth's corolla-safeguard." in another passage is shown how the permanence of feeling conserves even the form, if we will bring ourselves into touch with it: "never dream that what once lived shall ever die! they seem dead--do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? bring our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king starts, you shall see, stands up." this kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a concrete form to deal with--a form which reflects the thought with much more definiteness than music is able to do. the strength and weakness, at once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to nature than those of other art forms. in his poems on music, the poet always emphasizes these aspects of music. its supremacy as a means of giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt upon in "abt vogler" and "fifine at the fair." the abbé, from the standpoint of the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: "the rest may reason and welcome. 'tis we musicians know." upon the evanescence of the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact that the music is improvised. yet even this fact does not mean the entire annihilation of the form. in the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a symbol of the immortality of all good: "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist when eternity confirms the conception of an hour, the high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, are music sent up to god by the lover and the bard; enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by." the sophistical arguer in "fifine" feels this same power of music to express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner. "words struggle with the weight so feebly of the false, thick element between our soul, the true, and truth! which, but that intervene false shows of things, were reached as easily by thought reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought up with thy fine free force, oh music, that canst thrill, electrically win a passage through the lid of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against, hardly transpierce as thou." and again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for fifine, the fiz-gig. it is found in schumann's "carnival": "thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evince feeling like music,--mine, o'er-burthened with each gift from every visitant, at last resolved to shift its burthen to the back of some musician dead and gone, who feeling once what i feel now, instead of words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same, truth that escapes prose,--nay, puts poetry to shame. i read the note, i strike the key, i bid _record_ the instrument--thanks greet the veritable word! and not in vain i urge: 'o dead and gone away, assist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay, thy record serve as well to register--i felt and knew thus much of truth! with me, must knowledge melt into surmise and doubt and disbelief unless thy music reassure--i gave no idle guess, but gained a certitude i yet may hardly keep! what care? since round is piled a monumental heap of music that conserves the assurance, thou as well was certain of the same! thou, master of the spell, mad'st moonbeams marble, didst _record_ what other men feel only to forget!'" the man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he experiences with equal force music's power as a recorder of feeling. he notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress, "the stuff that's made to furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed substantially the same from age to age, with change of the outside only for successive feasters." in this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar experiences. what the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that very element of change. in this power of suggestiveness lies music's greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of the deepest. if we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of the incompleteness of the form. in so far as painting or sculpture reaches a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express. this in browning's opinion is the limitation of greek art. it touches perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to the brief passion of a day. the effect of such art is to arouse a sort of despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems nothing left to accomplish: "so, testing your weakness by their strength, your meagre charms by their rounded beauty measured by art in your breadth and length, you learned--to submit is a mortal's duty." when such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. therefore, "to cries of greek art and what more wish you?" the poet would have it that the early painters replied: "to become now self-acquainters, and paint man, whatever the issue! make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, new fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: to bring the invisible full into play! let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?" the revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection--"the first of the new, in our race's story, beats the last of the old." his emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: fra lippo lippi, the realist, whose madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and andrea del sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing's line, an error that he could alter for the better, "but all the play, the insight and the stretch," beyond him. the importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later insisted upon in francis furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. "let my pictures prove i know," says furini, "somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours or is or should be, how the soul empowers the body to reveal its every mood of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude of passion." the evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells. the little poem "popularity" shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. any minor poet, for that matter, any nokes or stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish "the murex up" that contains the precious drop of royal blue. more than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet's art. in "transcendentalism" he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for "song" is the art of the poet. some stout mage like him of halberstadt has his admiration, who with a "'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, and in there breaks the sudden rose herself, over us, under, round us every side, nay, in and out the tables and the chairs and musty volumes, boehme's book and all,-- buries us with a glory young once more, pouring heaven into this shut house of life." he was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopoeic greek eyes. this is driven home in the splendid fooling in "gerard de lairesse" where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in derision of the style of lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, swinburne and morris. reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of greek ideals of art, speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of greek subjects. to the poets whose poetic creed is "dream afresh old godlike shapes, recapture ancient fable that escapes, push back reality, repeople earth with vanished falseness, recognize no worth in fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back pallid by fancy, as the western rack of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam of its gone glory!" he would reply, "let things be--not seem, i counsel rather,--do, and nowise dream! earth's young significance is all to learn; the dead greek lore lies buried in the urn where who seeks fire finds ashes. ghost, forsooth! what was the best greece babbled of as truth? a shade, a wretched nothing,--sad, thin, drear, * * * * * sad school was hades! gladly,--might the dead but slink to life back,--to the dregs once more would drink each interloper, drain the humblest cup fate mixes for humanity." the rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet's mind in this poem. though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one lost good echoing the thought in "charles avison," the climax of his mood is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must leave greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty: "the past indeed is past, gives way before life's best and last the all-including future! what were life did soul stand still therein, forego her strife through the ambiguous present to the goal of some all-reconciling future? soul, nothing has been which shall not bettered be hereafter,--leave the root, by law's decree whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree! busy thee with unearthing root? nay, climb-- quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower--reach, rest sublime where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day." when it comes to the subject matter of poetry, browning constantly insists that it should be the study of the human soul. a definite statement as to the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth very early in his poetical career in "paracelsus" and it is all-inclusive. it is the passage where aprile describes how universal he wished to make his sympathy as a poet. no one is to be left out of his all-embracing democracy. such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and subject matter. these do not touch upon the question so often discussed of the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. this point the poet considers in "sordello," where he throws in his weight on the side of the objective poet. in the passage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives illustrations of three sorts of poetic composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the third to the subjective manner of writing. the dramatic method is the most forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still, talk about it. further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by shakespeare, "house" and "shop," but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant by a dramatic poet, which was something more than shakespeare's "holding the mirror up to nature." in his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer as well as the penetration of a psychologist. he must hold the mirror up not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. he must in fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. the passage referred to in the "introduction to the shelley letters" points out how in the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty. while browning's own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident here as in the passage in "sordello," he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from shelley's influence, the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic evolution: "it would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. if the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. for it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. the spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain. there may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. nor is there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. a mere running in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary circumstance. far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. a tribe of successors (homerides), working more or less in the same spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest. then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe; getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men's outer and not inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,--to endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to something higher--when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which, however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend." if we measure browning's own work by the poetic standards which he has himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has on the whole lived up to them. he has shown himself to be an illustration of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from all previous standards of taste in poetry. the history of poetry in england has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the greatest english poets. from shakespeare down they have one and all run afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. when spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. though these sticklers for classical forms could see clearly enough that spenser was possessed of genius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written hexameters, perversely exclaiming "why a god's name may not we as else the greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity to the verse?" when milton appears and finds blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of having his "paradise lost" "tagged with rhymes," as he expresses it, by dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version of the poem. milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface to "paradise lost" for using blank verse, as browning defends himself in the epilogue to "pacchiarotto and how we worked in distemper" for writing "strong" verse instead of the "sweet" verse the critics demand of him. by the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched in the editorial den, from which, shielded by any sort of shibboleth they can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refuge in sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has in very truth, "fished the murex up." the caliber of man who could speak of "the ode to immortality" as "a most illegible and unintelligible poem," or who wonders that any man in his senses could put his name to such a rhapsody as "endymion," or who dismissed "prometheus unbound" with the remark that it was a _mélange_ of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry, would hardly be expected to welcome "sordello" with effusion. even very intelligent people cracked unseemly jokes upon the appearance of "sordello," and what wonder, for browning's british instinct for freedom carried him in this poem to the most extreme lengths. in "pauline" he had allied himself with things familiar to the english reader of poetry. many of the allusions are classical and introduced with a rich musicalness that shelley himself might have envied. the reminiscences of shelley would also come within the intellectual acreage of most of the cultured people of the time. and even in "paracelsus," despite the unfamiliarity of the subject, there was music and imagery such as to link the art with the admired poetic art of the day, but in "sordello" all bounds are broken. no one but a delver in the byways of literature could, at that time, have been expected to know anything about sordello; no one but a historian could have been expected to know about the complicated struggles of the guelfs and the ghibellines; no one but a philosopher about the tendencies, both political and literary, manifesting themselves in the direction of the awakening of democratic ideals in these pre-dantean days; no one but a psychologist about the tortuous windings of sordello's mind. only by special searching into all these regions of knowledge can one to-day gain a complete grasp of the situation. he must patiently tread all the paths that browning trod before he can enter into sympathy with the poet. then he will crack no more jokes, but he will marvel at the mind which could wield all this knowledge with such consummate familiarity; he will grow ecstatic over the splendors of the poem, and will regret its redundancy not of diction so much but of detail and its amazing lack of organic unity. no one but a fanatic could claim that "sordello" is a success as an organic work of art. while the poet had a mastery of knowledge, thought and feeling, he did not have sufficient mastery of his own form to weld these together into a harmonious and convincing whole, such mastery as he, for example, shows in "the ring and the book," though even in that there is some survival of the old redundancy. one feels when considering "sordello" as a whole as if gazing upon a picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are not well related to each other. as great an abundance of detail is expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge more important affairs from the center of consciousness. it is, not to be too flippant, something like alice's game of croquet in "through the looking glass." when the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else. there, then, in "sordello" is perhaps the most remarkable departure from the accepted in poetic art that an englishman has ever attempted. in its elements of failure, however, it gave "a triumph's evidence," to use the poet's own phrase, "of the fulness of the days." in this poem he had thrown down the gauntlet. his subject matter was not to be like that of any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. he discarded the flowing music of "pauline" and of "paracelsus." his allusions were no longer to be classic, but to be directly related to whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need be, or noble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had been. all he required at the time when "sordello" appeared was to find that form in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the organic completeness necessary to a work of art. no matter what new regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this new region. unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. he becomes the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure sooner or later to be recognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. before "sordello" browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative in "pauline," the dramatic poem in "paracelsus," a regular drama in "strafford," which however runs partly parallel with "sordello" in composition. he had also done two or three short dramatic monologues. he evidently hoped that the regular drama would prove to be the form most congenial to him, for he kept on persistently in that form for nearly ten years, wrote much magnificent poetry in it and at times attained a grandeur of dramatic utterance hardly surpassed except in the master of all dramatists, shakespeare. but while he has attained a very genuine success in this form, it is not the success of the popular acting drama. his dramas are to-day probably being left farther and farther aside every moment in the present exaggerated demands for characters in action, or perhaps it might be nearer the truth to say clothes horses in action. besides, the drama of action in character, which is the type of drama introduced into english literature by browning, has reached a more perfect development in other hands. ibsen's dramas are preëminently dramas of action in character, but the action moves with such rapidity that the audience is almost cheated into thinking they are the old thing over again--that is, dramas of characters in action. browning's characters in his dramas are presented with a completeness of psychological analysis which makes them of paramount interest to those few who can and like to listen to people holding forth to any length on the stage, and with superb actors, who can give every subtlest change of mood, a browning drama furnishes an opportunity for the utmost intensity of pleasure. still, one cannot help but feel that the impressionistic psychology of ibsen reaches a pinnacle of dramatic art not attained by browning in his plays, delightful in character portrayal as they are, and not upon any account to have been missed from dramatic literature. in the dramatic monologue browning found just that form which would focus his forces, bringing them into the sort of relationship needed to reveal the true law of being for his new region of poetic art. if we inquire just why this form was the true medium for the most perfect expression of his genius, i think we may answer that in it, as he has developed it, is given an opportunity for the legitimate exercise of his mental subtlety. through the voice of one speaker he can portray not only the speaker but one or more other characters, and at the same time show the scene setting, and all without any direct description. on the other hand, his tendency to redundancy, so marked when he is making a character reveal only his own personality, is held in check by the necessity of using just those words and turns of expression and dwelling upon just those details which will make each character stand out distinctly, and at the same time bring the scene before the reader. the people in his dramatic monologues live before us by means of a psychology as impressionistic as that of ibsen's in his plays. the effect is the same as that in a really great impressionistic painting. nature is revealed far more distinctly--the thing of lights and shadows, space and movement--than in pictures bent upon endless details of form. "my last duchess" is one among many fine examples of his method in monologue. in that short poem we are made to see what manner of man is the duke, what manner of woman the duchess. we see what has been the duke's past, what is to be his future, also the present scene, as the duke stands in the hall of his palace talking to an ambassador from the count who has come to arrange a marriage with the duke for the count's daughter. besides all this a glimpse of the ambassador's attitude of mind is given. this is done by an absolutely telling choice of words and by an organic relationing of the different elements. the law of his genius asserts itself. browning's own ideal of the poet who makes others see was not completely realized until he had perfected a form which would lend itself most perfectly to the manner of thing which he desired to make others see--namely, the human soul in all its possible manifestations of feeling and mood, good, bad, and indifferent, from the uninspired organist who struggles with a mountainous fugue to the inspired improvisor whose soul ascends to god on the wings of his music, from the unknown sensitive painter who cannot bear to have his pictures the subject of criticism or commerce to the jolly life-loving fra lippo, from the jealous, vindictive woman of "the laboratory" to the vision-seeing pompilia, from ned bratts to bishop blougram, and so on--so many and wonderful that custom cannot state their infinite variety. consistent, so far, with his own theories we find the work of browning to be. he also follows his ideal in the discarding of classical allusion and illustration. part of his dictum that the form should express the thought is shown in his habitual fitting of his allusions to the subject he is treating. by this means he produces his atmosphere and brings the scene clearly before us; witness his constant references to molinos and his influence in "the ring and the book," an influence which was making itself felt in all classes of society at the time when the actual tragedy portrayed in the poem occurred. this habit, of course, brings into his poetry a far wider range of allusions unfamiliar to his contemporaries than is to be found in other victorian poets, and makes it necessary that these should be "looked up" before an adequate enjoyment of their fitness is possible. hence the browning societies, so often held up to ridicule by the critics, who blindly prefer to show their superior attitude of mind in regard to everything they do not know, and growl about his obscurity, to welcoming any movement which means an increase of general culture. the browning societies have not only done much to make browning's unusual allusions common matters of knowledge, but they have helped to keep alive a taste for all poetry in an age when poetry has needed all the friendly support it could get. all great poets lead the ordinary mind to unfamiliar regions of knowledge and thereby to fresh planes of enjoyment. that browning has outdone all other poets in this particular should be to his honor, not to his dispraise. in one very marked direction, however, he is not a perfect exemplar of his own theories--that is, he is not always consistently dramatic. he belongs to that order of poets described by himself in the shelley introduction as neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but with the two faculties at times running in upon each other. he is often absolutely objective in his expression of a mood or a feeling, but the moment the mood takes upon it the tinge of thought we begin to feel browning himself. the fundamental principles upon which he bases his own solution of the problems of existence are seen to crop out, colored, it is true, by the personality of the speaker, but yet traceable to their source in the mental make up of browning himself. it may well be that browning has come so near to the ultimate truth discoverable by man in his fundamental principles that they are actually universal truths, to be found lying deep down at the roots of all more partial expressions, just as gravitation, conservation of energy, evolution underlie every phenomena of nature, and therefore when a pope in "the ring and the book," a prince hohenstiel-swangau, a bishop blougram, a cleon or a john in "the death in the desert," give utterance to their views upon life, they are bound to touch from one or another angle the basic principles of life common to all humanity as well as to the poet--the center within us all where "truth abides in fulness." this would seem an even more complete fusing of the two faculties in one poet than that spoken of by browning, where a poet would issue successive works, in some of them the one faculty and in some of them the other faculty being supreme. that browning was, to a certain extent, a poet of this third order of which he prophesied is true, for he has written a number of poems like "la saisiaz," "reverie," various of his prologues and epilogues which are purely subjective in content. there are also subjective passages in the midst of other poems, like those in "sordello," "prince hohenstiel," the "parleyings," etc. if we place such a poem as "reverie" side by side with "fra lippo lippi" we see well-nigh perfect illustrations of the two faculties as they existed in the one poet, browning. on the other hand, in those poems where the thought, as i have said, suggests browning, in the speech of his characters he has something of the quality of what browning calls the subjective poet of modern classification. "gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, he is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the one above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's soul." browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the "liberal movement in english literature," as courthope calls it, inaugurated at the dawn of the century by the lake school, which reacted against the correct school of dryden and pope. along with the earlier poets of the century he shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. the critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quantity except to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of the thinking world at large until beyond the middle of the century; whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife's sister, and when the higher criticism of the bible had not yet migrated to england from germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious because entirely different from anything they had seen before. the century had to grow up to him. it is needless to say that it did so. just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought has emerged a serene belief in man's spiritual destiny, so out of the turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the value of the new, the original, the different in art. critics begin to apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as browning applied it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may have a further vision of what is to come than any other man of his age. the people first, for the most part, found out that here in browning's work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom and conventional academies. and gradually to the few appreciative critics of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and browning, though later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own. in a certain chart of english literature with which i am acquainted, wherein the poets are graphically represented in mountain ranges with peaks of various heights, tennyson is shown as the towering peak of the victorian era, while browning is a sturdy but much lower peak with a blunted top. this is quite symbolic of the general attitude toward browning at the end of the century, for, with all the appreciation, there has been on the part of authority a disinclination to assign to him the chief place among the poets of the victorian era. courthope, who most of the time preserves a remarkable reticence upon browning, voices this general attitude in a remark ventured upon in one of his lectures in . he says: "no one who is capable of appreciating genius will refuse to admire the powers of this poet, the extent of his sympathy and interest in external things, the boldness of his invention, the energy of his analysis, the audacity of his experiments. but so absolutely does he exclude all consideration for the reader from his choice of subject, so arbitrarily, in his treatment of his themes, does he compel his audience to place themselves at his own point of view, that the life of his art depends entirely upon his own individuality. should future generations be less inclined than our own to surrender their imagination to his guidance, he will not be able to appeal to them through that element of life which lies in the universal." to the present writer this seems simply like a confession on courthope's part that he was unable to perceive in browning the elements of the universal which are most assuredly there, and which were fully recognized by a scotch writer, dawson, at the same time that courthope was questioning his power to hold coming generations. "the fashions of the world may change," writes dawson, "and the old doubts may wear themselves out and sink like shadows out of sight in the morning of a stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the finer poems of browning for intellectual stimulus, for the purification of pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of hope. "or if the darkness still thickens, all the more will men turn to this strong man of the race, who has wrestled and prevailed; who has illumined with imaginative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who has made his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos, passion, tenderness, fancy, and imagination, but also of the most robust and masculine thought. he has written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics which must move all who act, songs which must cheer all who suffer, poems which must fascinate all who think; and when 'time hath sundered shell from pearl,' however stern may be the scrutiny, it may be said that there will remain enough of robert browning to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and secure for him the sure reward of fame." but it is to france we must go for the surest authoritative note--that land of the academy and correct taste which _hums_ and _hahs_ over its own immortals in proverbially unpenetrating conclave. no less a man than taine declares that browning stands first among english poets--"the most excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a common dower." while there can be no doubt that browning outdid all the other great poets of his time in "azure feats," in developing an absolutely self-centered ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul--each of the other half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current tendencies of the time than browning's. [illustration: alfred tennyson] tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their attitude. browning, if i may be excused for quoting one of shakespeare's most abused phrases, rides over the century like a "naked new-born babe striding the blast." tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. this may seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. he never follows; he leads. with his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be _man_ at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an oedipus confronting the sphynx. the mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him. it is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life's mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. while he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. mr. santayana has called him a barbarous poet. in a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry "proof, proof, where there can be no proof," is barbarous. it was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child's in maeterlinck's "les aveugles" which kept browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. his plane is not unlike that of his own lazarus, about whom the arab physician says: "the man is witless of the size, the sum, the value in proportion of all things, or whether it be little or be much. discourse to him of prodigious armament assembled to besiege his city now, and of the passing of a mule with gourds-- 'tis one! then take it on the other side, speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt with stupor at its very littleness, (for as i see) as if in that indeed he caught prodigious import, whole results; and so will turn to us the bystanders in ever the same stupor (note this point) that we, too, see not with his opened eyes." the import of an event is everything. large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity. though tennyson talks of the "far-off divine event" he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. as he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from browning's vision. thus it happens that tennyson voices the feelings of an immense class of cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new day. tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to appeal to it as it appealed to him. he waxes enthusiastic over conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society, though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. these are all entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life, further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music. though so satisfactory a representative of his times, he did outrage one of the shibboleths of the critics in his efforts to find a new and richer music than poets had before used by bringing scientific imagery into his verse. of all the absurd controversies indulged in by critics, the most absurd is that fought out around the contention that science and poetry cannot be made to harmonize. wordsworth was keen enough to see this before the rest of the world and prophesied in the preface to his "lyrical ballads" that science would one day become the closest of allies to poetry, and tennyson was brilliant enough to seize the new possibilities in scientific language with a realization that nature imagery might almost be made over by the use in describing it of scientific epithets. a famous illustration of the happy effects he produced by these means is in the lines "move eastward happy earth and round again to-night." his observation of nature, moreover, had a scientific accuracy, which made possible far more delicate and individual descriptions of nature's aspects than had been produced before. it was also a happy thought for him to weave so much of his poetry around the arthurian legends. beautiful in themselves, they came nearer home than classical or italian legends, and, when made symbolic of an ideal which must appeal to the heart of every cultured englishman, who regarded himself as a sort of prototype of the blameless king arthur, and whose grief at the failure of the social fabric planned by him would be as poignant as that of the king himself, they carried with them a romantic and irresistible attraction. the reasons why tennyson should appeal especially to the nineteenth century cultured and highly respectable englishman far outweighed any criticisms that might be made by critics on his departure from poetic customs of the past. he pleased the highest powers in the land, became laureate and later lord tennyson. he will therefore always remain the poet most thoroughly representative of that especial sort of beauty belonging to a social order which has reached a climax of refinement and intelligence, but which, through its very self-satisfaction, cuts itself off from a perception of the true value of the new forces coming into play in the on-rushing stream of social development. the other poets who divide with browning and tennyson the highest honors of the victorian era are landor, arnold, rossetti, swinburne, morris, mrs. browning, george meredith. landor and arnold preserved more than any of the others a genuine classical aroma in their verse, and on this account have always been delighted in by a few. after all, the people may not immediately accept a poet of too great independence, but they are least of all likely to grow enthusiastic over anything reactionary either in style or thought. romantic elements of not too startling a character win the favor of most readers. though classic in style both these poets reflected phases of the century's thought. landor differed from browning in the fact that he frequently expressed himself vigorously upon the subject of current politics. his political principles were not of the most advanced type, however. he believed in the notion of a free society, but seems to have thought the best way of attaining it would be a commonwealth in which the wise should rule, and see that the interests of all should be secured. still his insistence upon liberty, however old-fashioned his ideas of the means by which it should be maintained, puts him in the line of the democratic march of the century. swinburne calls him his master, and represents himself in verse as having learned many wise and gracious things of him, but his thought was not sufficiently progressive to triumph over the classicism of his style in an age of romantic poetry, though there will always be those who hold on to the shibboleth that, after all, the classic is the real thing in poetry, never realizing that where the romantic is old enough, it, too, becomes classic. matthew arnold stands in poetry where men like huxley and clifford stood in science, who, childe-roland like, came to the dark tower, calmly put the slug horn to their lips and blew a blast of courage. science had undermined their belief in a future life as well as destroying the revealed basis of moral action. in such a man the intellectual nature overbalances the intuitional, and when inherited belief based on authority is destroyed, there is nothing but the habit of morality left. arnold has had the sympathy of those who could no longer believe in their revealed religion, but who loved it and regretted its passing away from them. he gives expression to this feeling in lines like these: "the sea of faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. but now i only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world." the regret for something beautiful that is gone is capable of exquisite poetic treatment, but it is not an abiding note of the century. it represents only one phase of its thought, and that a transcient one, because it could be felt with poignancy only by those whose lives were rudely shaken by the destruction of the ideal in which they had been bred and in which they devoutly believed. arnold's sympathetic treatment of this phase of doubt seems, however, to have been of incalculable service to those who felt as he did. it softened the anguish of the shock to have not only the beauty of the past dwelt upon, but to have the beauty of courage in the face of a destroyed ideal erected into a new ideal for living brave and noble lives. in "stanzas from the grande chartreuse" is a fine example of the beauty which may be imparted to a mood as melancholy as could well be imagined: "not as their friend, or child, i speak! but as, on some far northern strand, thinking of his own gods, a greek in pity and mournful awe might stand before some fallen runic stone-- for both were faiths, and both are gone. "wandering between two worlds, one dead the other powerless to be born, with nowhere yet to rest my head, like these, on earth i wait forlorn, their faith, my tears, the world deride-- i come to shed them at their side." such hope as he has to offer comes out in stanzas like the following, but all is dependent upon strenuous living: "no, no! the energy of life may be kept on after the grave, but not begun; and he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, from strength to strength advancing--only he, his soul well-knit, and all his battle won, mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life." nor shall better days on earth come without struggle since life "is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, sparing us narrower margin than we deem. nor will that day dawn at a human nod, when, bursting through the network, superposed by selfish occupation--plot and plan, lust, avarice, envy-liberated man, all difference with his fellow-mortal closed, shall be left standing face to face with god." though arnold was sternly criticised he had before the end of the century been accorded his proper place as a poet, which was that of the chief poet between the greatest lights of the century, browning and tennyson and the pre-raphaelite group. gosse, with more penetration than can always be accorded to him, declares that "his devotion to beauty, the composure, simplicity and dignity of his temper, and his deep moral sincerity gave to his poetry a singular charm which may prove as durable as any element in modern verse." the phase of romanticism carried to its climax by the pre-raphaelite poets rossetti and his sister, morris and swinburne had, like the work of tennyson, its full recognition, in its own time, because these poets, like him, have put into exquisite music romantic subjects derived both from the classics and from mediæval legend. the new note of sensuousness, due largely to the italian influence of rossetti, with his sensuous temperament, his intensity of passion and his love of art, and also in morris and swinburne to their pagan feeling, one of the elements inaugurated by the general breaking down of orthodox religious ideals through the encroachments of science, does not seem to have affected their popularity. as there were those who would sympathize with the tennysonian attitude toward doubt, and those who would sympathize with matthew arnold's, there were others to feel like swinburne, pantheistic, and, like morris, utterly hopeless of a future, while others again might criticise the pagan feeling, but, with their inheritance of beauty from tennyson and his predecessors of the dawn of the century, would delight in these new developments of the romantic spirit. [illustration: a. c. swinburne] ruskin is said to have been the original inspirer of these four poets, though fitz-gerald's "rubaiyat" of omar khayyám was not without its influence. but as edmund gosse says, "the attraction of the french romances of chivalry for william morris, of tuscan painting for d. g. rossetti, of the spirit of english gothic architecture for christina rossetti, of the combination of all these with greek and elizabethan elements for swinburne, were to be traced back to start--words given by the prophetic author of the 'seven lamps of architecture.'" though the first books of this group of poets, the "defence of guenevere" ( ), "goblin market," "early italian poets," "queen mother and rosamond" ( ), did not make any impression on the public, with the publication of swinburne's "atalanta in calydon" an interest was awakened which reached a climax with the publication of rossetti's poems in . rossetti had thrown these poems into his wife's grave, as the world knows, but was prevailed upon to have them recovered and published. in the success of this group was vindicated at last the principles of the naturalists of the dawn of the century. here was a mixture of color, of melody, of mysticism, of sensuousness, of elaboration of form which carried originality and independence as far as it could well go in a direction which painted life primarily from the outside. but when this brilliant culminating flash of the early school of coleridge and keats began to burn itself out, there was tennyson, who might be called the conservative wing of the romantic movement, dominant as ever, and browning, the militant wing, advanced from his mid-century obscurity into a flood-tide of appreciation which was to bear him far onward toward literary pre-eminence, placing him among the few greatest names in literature. the originality of the pre-raphaelites grew out of their welding of romantic, classical, and mediæval elements, tempered in each case by the special mental attitude of the poet. rossetti and his brother artists, millais and holman hunt, who founded the pre-raphaelite brotherhood of painters, pledged themselves to the fundamental principle laid down by rossetti in the little magazine they started called the _germ_. this new creed was simple enough and ran: "the endeavor held in view throughout the writings on art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature." in their interpretation and development of this simple principle, artists and the poets who joined them differentiated from one another often to a wide extent. in rossetti, it becomes an adoration of the beauty of woman expressed in ultra-sensuous though not in sensual imagery, combined with an atmosphere of religious wonder such as one finds in mediæval poets, of which "the blessed damozel" stands as a typical example. in it, as one appreciator has said, all the qualities of rossetti's poetry are found. "he speaks alternately like a seer and an artist; one who is now bewitched with the vision of beauty, and now is caught up into paradise, where he hears unutterable things. to him the spiritual world is an intense reality. he hears the voices, he sees the presences of the supernatural. as he mourns beside the river of his sorrow, like ezekiel, he has his visions of winged and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of the world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries of a world to come. there is no poet to whom the supernatural has been so much alive. religious doubt he seems never to have felt. but the temper of religious wonder, the old, childlike, monkish attitude of awe and faith in the presence of the unseen, is never absent in him. the artistic force of his temperament drives him to the worship of beauty; the poetic and religious forces to the adoration of mystery." to swinburne the simplicity of nature included the utmost lengths to which eroticism could go. upon this ground he has been severely censured and he has had an unfortunate influence upon scores and scores of younger writers who have seemed to think that the province of the poet is to decry the existence of sincere affection, and who in their turn have exercised actual mischief in lowering social standards. this is not all of swinburne, however. his superb metrical power is his chief contribution to the originality of this group, and when he developed away from his nauseating eroticism, he could charm as no one else with his delicious music, though it often be conspicuous for its lack of richness in thought. his fate has been somewhat different from that of most poets. when his "atalanta in calydon" was published it was received with enthusiasm, but the volumes overweighted with eroticism which followed caused a fierce controversy, and many have not even yet discovered that this was only one phase of swinburne's art, and that, unfortunate as it is in many respects, it was a phase of the century's life which must find its expression in art if that life is to be completely given, and that it was a passing phase swinburne himself proved in the development of other phases shown in his interest in current political situations, his enthusiasm for italy and his later expressions of high moral ideals, as well as in a quasi-religious attitude of mind, not so far from that of emerson, himself, in which strong emphasis is placed upon the importance of the individual, and upon the unity of god and man. there is moral courage and optimism in the face of doubt of a high order in the following lines: --"are ye not weary and faint not by the way seeing night by night devoured of day by day, seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire? sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye, too sleep? --we are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet, and surely more than all things sleep were sweet, than all things save the inexorable desire which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep. "is this so sweet that one were fain to follow? is this so sure when all men's hopes are hollow, even this your dream, that by much tribulation ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight? --nay though our life were blind, our death were fruitless, not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless; but man to man, nation would turn to nation, and the old life live, and the old great word be great." but swinburne in his farthest reaches of pantheistic aspiration is to be seen in a poem like "hertha": "i am that which began; out of me the years roll; out of me god and man; i am equal and whole; god changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; i am the soul. "the tree many-rooted that swells to the sky with frondage red-fruited the life-tree am i; in the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye shall live and not die. "but the gods of your fashion that take and that give, in their pity and passion that scourge and forgive, they are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live. "my own blood is what stanches the wounds in my bark: stars caught in my branches make day of the dark, and are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark." morris's interpretation of pre-raphaelite tenets took him into mediæval legend and the classics for his subject matter. in his first volume, "the defence of guenevere and other poems," he came into competition with tennyson, who was at the same time issuing his arthurian legends. the polish of tennyson's verse, as well as its symbolical meaning for the time, was more acceptable than the actual return to the nature of the fifteenth century, and this the first volume from a pre-raphaelite was hardly noticed by the critics. morris sulked within his literary tents for ten years before he again appeared, this time with "the life and death of jason" ( ), which immediately became popular. later came the "earthly paradise." these tales, in verse noble and simple, in style recalling the tales of chaucer, yet with a charm all their own, in which the real men and women of chaucer give place to types, have been the delight of those who like to find in poetry a dreamland of romance where they may enjoy themselves far from the problems and toils of everyday life. he differs from all the other poets of this group in his lack of religious hope. his mind was of the type that could not stand up against the undermining influences of the age: hence world-weariness and despair are the constantly recurring notes. [illustration: dante gabriel rossetti] mrs. browning far outdistanced her husband in the early days in popularity. she pleased the people by her social enthusiasm, a characteristic more marked in her verse than in that of any of the poets mentioned. the critics have found many faults in her style, mainly those growing out of an impassioned nature which carried her at times beyond the realm of perfectly balanced art. but even an english critic of the conservatism of edmund gosse could at last admit that "in some of her lyrics and more rarely in her sonnets she rose to heights of passionate humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country." contemporary criticism of "aurora leigh," which was certainly a departure both in form and matter from the accepted standards, was, on the whole, just. _the quarterly review_ in said of it: "this 'aurora leigh' is a great poem. it is a wonder of art. it will live. no large audience will it have, but it will have audience; and that is more than most poems have. to those who know what poetry is and in what struggles it is born--how the great thoughts justify themselves--this work will be looked upon as one of the wonders of the age." mrs. browning resembles her husband in the fact that she does not fit into the main line of evolution of the romantic school, but is an individual manifestation of the romantic spirit, showing almost as great freedom from the trammels of accepted romanticism as browning does. the writer of the century whose experience as a novelist almost paralleled that of browning as poet was meredith. because of his psychological analysis and the so-called obscurity of his style, he waited many years for recognition and finally was accepted as one of the most remarkable novelists of the age. his poetry, showing similar tendencies, and overshadowed by his novels, has not yet emerged into the light of universal appreciation. one finds it even ignored altogether in the most recent books of english literature, yet he is the author of one of the most remarkable series of sonnets in the english language, "modern love," presenting, as it does, a vivid picture of domestic decadence which forms a strange contrast to rossetti's sonnets, "the house of life," indicating how many and various have been the forces at work during the nineteenth century in the disintegrating and molding of social ideals. meredith writes of "hiding the skeleton". "at dinner she is hostess, i am host. went the feast ever cheerfuller? she keeps the topic over intellectual deeps in buoyancy afloat. they see no ghost. with sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball: it is in truth a most contagious game; _hiding the skeleton_ shall be its name. such play as this the devils might appall, but here's the greater wonder; in that we, enamor'd of our acting and our wits, admire each other like true hypocrites. warm-lighted glances, love's ephemeral, shoot gayly o'er the dishes and the wine. we waken envy of our happy lot. fast sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot. dear guests, you now have seen love's corpse-light shine!" rossetti writes "lovesight": "when do i see thee most, beloved one? when in the light the spirits of mine eyes before thy face, their altar, solemnize the worship of that love through thee made known? or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone), close-kiss'd and eloquent of still replies thy twilight--hidden glimmering visage lies, and my soul only sees thy soul its own? o love, my love! if i no more should see thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, nor image of thine eyes in any spring,-- how then should sound upon life's darkening slope, the ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of hope, the wind of death's imperishable wing?" browning's criticism of painting was evidently much influenced by the pre-raphaelites. their admiration for the painters who preceded raphael, revealing as it did to them an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human life, is echoed in his "old pictures in florence," which was written but six years after hunt, millais, and rossetti formed their brotherhood. in poetry, they did not eschew classical subjects, as browning did for the most part, but they treated these subjects in a romantic spirit, and so removed them from the sort of strictures that browning made upon the perfection of greek art. from this summary of the chief lines of literary development in the nineteenth century it will be seen, not only what a marvelous age it has been for the flowering of individualism in literary invention, but how browning has surpassed all the other poets of note in the wideness of his departure from accepted standards, and how helpless the earlier critics were in the face of this departure, because of their dependence always upon critical shibboleths--in other words, of principles not sufficiently universal--as their means of measuring a poet's greatness. tennyson and the pre-raphaelites won their popularity sooner among critics because they followed logically in the line of development inaugurated by the earlier poets, wordsworth, shelley, keats, etc., whose poetry had already done some good work in breaking down the school of dryden and pope, though it succeeded only in erecting another standard not sufficiently universal to include browning. the evolution of art forms, a principle so clearly understood, as we have shown by browning, has never become a guiding one with critics, though mr. gosse in his "modern english literature" has expressed a wish that the principle of evolution might be adapted to criticism. he has evidently felt how hopeless is the task of appraising poets by the old individualistic method, which, as he says, has been in favor for at least a century. it possesses, he declares, considerable effectiveness in adroit hands, but is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory of the unalterable type, merely substituting for the one authority of the ancients an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern instances. for this inflexible style of criticism he proposes that a scientific theory shall be adopted which shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in pope and in wordsworth, in spenser and in swift. he writes: "herbert spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolution, but we seem slow to admit them into the little province of æsthetics. we cling to the individualist manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all others to proportional obscurity. there are critics of considerable acumen and energy who seem to know no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic gooseberries. they do their best to nip off all other buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be concentrated on their favorite fruit. such a plan may be convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in earlier times our general ignorance of the principles of growth might well excuse it. but it is surely time that we should recognize only two criteria of literary judgment. the first is primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, does the work before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised? if not, he interests the higher criticism not at all; but if yes, then follows the second test: where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his own kith and kin?" [illustration: george meredith] with such principles of criticism as this, the public would sooner be brought to an appreciation of all that is best worth while in literature, instead of being taken, as it too often is, upon a wrong scent to worship at the shrine of the nokes and stokes, who simply print blue and eat the turtles. if mr. gosse had himself been fully imbued with such principles would he have made the statement quoted in chapter two in regard to browning's later books? and should we have such senseless criticism as a remark which has become popular lately, and which i believe emanated from a university in the south--namely, that browning never said anything that tennyson had not said better? as an illustration of this a recent critic may be quoted who is entirely scornful of the person who prefers browning's "god's in his heaven, all's right with the world" to tennyson's "and hear at times a sentinel who moves about from place to place, and whispers to the worlds of space in the deep night that all is well." one might reply to this that it is a matter of taste had not courthope shown conclusively that matthew arnold's criterion of criticism--namely, that a taste which is born of culture is the only certain possession by which the critic can measure the beauty of a poet's line--is a fallacy. his argument is worth quoting: "you have stated strongly one side of the truth, but you have ignored, completely ignored, the other. you have asserted the claims of individual liberty, and up to a certain point i agree with you. i do not deny that spiritual liberty is founded on consciousness, and hence the self-consciousness of the age is part of the problem we are considering. i do not deny that the prevailing rage for novelty must also be taken into account. liberty, variety, novelty, are all necessary to the development of art. without novelty there can be no invention, without variety there can be no character, without liberty there can be no life. life, character, invention, these are of the essence of poetry. but while you have defended with energy the freedom of the individual, you have said nothing of the authority of society. and yet the conviction of the existence of this authority is a belief perhaps even more firmly founded in the human mind than the sentiment as to the rights of individual liberty.... the great majority of the professors of poetry, however various their opinions, however opposite their tastes, have felt sure that there was in taste, as in science, a theory of false and true; in art, as in conduct, a rule of right and wrong. and even among those who have asserted most strongly the inward and relative nature of poetry, do you think there was one so completely a skeptic as to imagine that he was the sole proprietor of the perception he sought to embody in words; one who doubted his power, by means of accepted symbols, to communicate to his audience his own ideas and feelings about external things? yet until some man shall have been found bold enough to defend a thesis so preposterous, we must continue to believe that there is a positive standard, by which those at least who speak a common language may reason about questions of taste." armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry, we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from tennyson and browning to the effect that the person of really good taste might like each of them in its place. while tennyson's mystical quatrain is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as "in memoriam," it would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of asolo on a sunny morning singing her little songs. she is certainly a more lifelike child speaking browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a tennysonian manner. that her song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is one of the most popular songs of the day as set by mrs. h. h. a. beach, and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness. vi classic survivals before passing in review browning's treatment of classical subjects as compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general. to compare browning's choice of subject-matter with that of other english poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of literary development. subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature, but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit--the mere external facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or dramatic _motif_, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet is able to insinuate into it. however far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own creative genius, for the body of their subject-matter, until the question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind. conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human origins are in question. doubtless, this first poet was no separate individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the great hindu, greek, and teutonic classics, and which thus crystallized became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets. each new poet, however, who is worthy of the name, sets up his own particular interplay with man and nature; and however much he may be indebted for his inspiration to past products of this universal law of action and reaction, he is bound to use them or interpret them in a manner colored by his own personal and peculiar relations with the universe. in so doing he supplies the more important spiritual side of subject-matter and becomes in very truth the poet or maker, to that extent at least which browning himself lays down as the province of art--namely, to arrange, "dissociate, redistribute, interchange part with part: lengthen, broaden ... simply what lay loose at first lies firmly after, what design was faintly traced in hesitating line once on a time grows firmly resolute henceforth and evermore." sometimes the poet's power of arranging and redistributing and interchanging carries him upward into the realm of ideas alone, among which his imagination plays in absolute freedom; he throws over the results of man's past dallyings with nature and makes his own terms with her, and the result is an approach to absolute creation. except in the case of lyric poetry the instances where there have been no suggestions as to subject-matter are rare in comparison with those where the subject-matter has been derived from some source. look, for instance, at the father of english poetry, chaucer, how he ransacked french, italian and latin literature for his subject-matter, most conscientiously carrying out his own saying, that "out of olde feldys as men sey comyth all this newe corn from yere to yere, and out of olde books in good fey cometh all this new science that men alere." how external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his earlier work, is well illustrated in "the parliament of fowls," which he opens by relating the dream of scipio, originally contained in cicero's treatise on the "republic," and preserved by macrobius. this dream, which tells how africanus appears to scipio, and carries him up among the stars of the night, shows him carthage, and prophesies to him of his future greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres--this dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel. the bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface analogies for the linking together of its thoughts. just as talking about his ancestor, the great scipio africanus, with the old king masinissa caused scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused chaucer, who has to close his book and go to bed for want of a light, to dream of scipio africanus also, who "was come and stood right at his bedis syde." africanus then plays the part of conductor to chaucer in a manner suggestive not only of his relations to scipio, but of virgil's relation to dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the garden of love. the description is of the temple of venus in boccaccio's "la teseide." there nature and the "fowls" are introduced and described, and at last the point is reached. nature proclaims that it is st. valentine's day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. the royal falcon is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon nature's hand. two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same fowl, and nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither venus nor cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three shall serve their lady another year--a pretty allegory supposed to refer to the wooing of blanche of lancaster by john of gaunt. the main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few examples in chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a real event, but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on anglo-saxon soil, but in france and italy. his most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his descriptions of the canterbury pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a keen observation of men and women at first hand. so lifelike are they that in them he has made the england of the fourteenth century live again. but how small a proportion of the bulk of the "canterbury tales" is contained in these glimpses of english life and manners. it is but the framework upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden, and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, boccaccio. the thoroughly human instincts of the poet assert themselves, however, in the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. he allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories as well as to culture-lore. the magic of the east, the love tales of italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all give up their wealth to his gentle touch. with a keen sense of propriety he, with few exceptions, gives each one of his pilgrims a tale suited in its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes, but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most uncomplimentary in their tenor. in fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it is which makes him much more than the "great translator" that eustace les champs called him, and settles the nature of the "subtle thing" called spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter. he brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. he was a combination of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. as a scholar he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters the moral tone of the characters. cressida is an interesting example of this. but instead of the characters suggesting by their own action and speech all the needed moral, chaucer himself appears ever at hand to analyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that one hesitates to call him didactic. the result of all this is that the external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not completely fused. we often see a sort of guileless working of the machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the extent insisted on by morley, that he has something of the shakespearian quality which enables him to show men as they really are, "wholly developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect and prejudiced observer." in his great work, spenser is no less dependent upon sources for his inspiration, but there is a marked difference in his use of them. although his range of observation is much narrower than chaucer's, hardly extending at all into the realm of actual human effort, yet he makes an advance in so far as his powers of redistribution are much greater than chaucer's. the various knights of the "fairy queen" and their exploits are not modeled directly upon any previous stories, but they are made up of incidents similar to those found scattered all through classic lore; and as his inspirations were drawn in most cases directly from the fountain-head of story in the greek writers--instead of as they filtered through the latin, italian, and french, with the inevitable accretions that result from migrations,--and from the comparatively unalloyed arthurian legends, there is a clearer reflection in them of the cosmic elements that shine through both the greek and arthurian originals than is found in chaucer. although spenser was certainly unaware of any such modern refinement of the mythologist as a solar myth, yet the "fairy queen" forms a curious and interesting study on account of the survivals everywhere evident of solar characteristics in his characters and plots. indeed it could hardly be otherwise, considering his intention, and his method of carrying it out, which he, himself, explains in his quaint letter to sir walter raleigh--namely, "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." he goes on: "i close the history of king arthur as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men's former works, and also further from danger and envy of suspicion of present time. in which i have followed all the antique poets historical; first homer, who in the person of agamemnon and ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his 'iliad,' the other in his 'odyssey'; then virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas: after him, ariosto comprised them both in his orlando, and lately tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, the part which they in philosophy call ethice or virtues of a private man, colored in his rinaldo, the other, named politice, in his godfieldo. by example of which excellent poets, i labor to portray in arthur before he was king, the image of a brave knight perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve books." in the fashioning of his knight he took arthur, a hero whose life as it appears in the early romances is inextricably mingled with solar elements, and has built up his virtues upon other ancient solar heroes. here are all the paraphernalia of solar mythology: invincible knights with marvelous weapons, brazen castles guarded by dragons, marriage with a beautiful maiden and parting from the bride to engage in new quests, an enchantress who turns men into animals, even the outcast child; but none of the incidents appear intact. it is as if there had been a great explosion in the ancient land of romance and that in the mending up of things the separate pieces are all recognizable, although all joined together in a different pattern, while under all is the allegory. a gentle knight is no longer a solar hero as set forth by max müller or cox, but holiness; his invincible armor is not the all-powerful rays of the sun, but truth; the enchantress not night casting a spell over mortals, but sensuous pleasure entangling them. these two poets, chaucer and spenser, are prototypes of two poet types of two poetical tendencies that have gone on developing side by side in english literature: chaucer, democratic, interested supremely in the personalities of men and women, portraying the real, and spenser, aristocratic, interested in imaging forth an ideal of manhood, choosing his subject-matter from sources that will lend themselves to such a purpose; chaucer drawing his lessons out of the real actions of humanity; spenser framing his story so that it will illustrate the moral he wishes to inculcate. shakespeare, of course, ranges himself in line with chaucer. his interest centered on character, and wherever a story capable of character development presented itself, that he chose, altered it in outline comparatively little, and when he did so it was in order to carry forward the dramatic _motif_ which he infused into his subject. the dramatic form in which he wrote furnished him a better medium for reaching a complete welding together of the external and spiritual side of his subject-matter. where chaucer hinted at the possibilities of an artistic development of character that would cause the events of the story to appear as the inevitable outcome of the hidden springs of action, shakespeare accomplished it, and peopled the world of imagination with group after group of living, acting characters. in the nineteenth century tennyson and browning have represented, broadly speaking, these two tendencies. as with spenser, the classics and the arthurian legends have been the sources from which tennyson has drawn most largely; but although a philosophical undercurrent is this poet's spiritual addition to the subject-matter, his method of putting his soul inside his work is very different from spenser's. he does not tear the old myths to pieces and join them together again after a pattern of his own to fit his allegorical situation, but keeps the events of his stories almost unchanged, in this particular resembling chaucer and shakespeare, and--except in a few instances, such as tithonus and lucretius, where the classic spirit of the originals is preserved--he infuses in his subject a vein of philosophy, illustrating those modern tendencies of english thought of which tennyson, himself, was the exemplar. even when inventing subjects, founded upon the experiences of everyday life, he so manipulates the story as to make it illustrate some of his favorite moral maxims. his characters do not act from motives which are the inherent necessities of their natures, but they act in accordance with tennyson's preconceived notions of how they ought to act. he manipulates the elements of character to suit his own view of development, just as spenser manipulated the elements of the story to suit his own allegorical purpose. browning is the nineteenth-century heir of chaucer; but it is doubtful whether chaucer would recognize his own offspring, so remarkable has the development been in those five centuries. with chaucer's keen interest in human nature deepened to a profound insight into the very soul of humanity, and the added wealth of these centuries of human history, browning not only had a far wider range of choice in subject-matter, but he was enabled to instil into it greater intellectual and emotional complexities. rarely has he treated any subject that has already been treated poetically unless we except the transcripts from the classics soon to be considered. wherever he saw an interesting historical personage, interesting, not on account of his brilliant achievements in the eyes of the world, but on account of potentialities of character, such a one he has set before us to reveal himself. there are between twenty and thirty portraits of this nature in his work, chosen from all sorts and conditions of men--men who stand for some phase of growth in human thought; and always in developing a personality he gives the kernel of truth upon which their peculiar point of view is based. thus, among the musical poems, abt vogler speaks for the intuitionalist--he who is blessed by a glimpse of the absolute truth. charles avison, on the other hand, is the philosopher of the relative in music and the arts generally. among the art poems, fra lippo lippi is the apostle of beauty in realism, andrea del sarto the attainer of perfection in form. in the religious poems the jewish standpoint is illustrated in "saul" and "rabbi ben ezra," the christian in the portrait of john in "the death in the desert"; the empirical reasoner in "paracelsus." this is only one of browning's methods in the choice and use of subject-matter. the characters and incidents in his stories are frequently the result of pure invention, but he sets them in an environment recreated from history, developing their individualities in harmony with the environment, thus giving at one stroke the spirit of the time and the individual qualities of special representatives of the time. examples of this are: "my last duchess," where the duke is an entirely imaginary person and the particular incident is invented, but he is made to act and talk in a way perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time--mediæval italy. "hugues of saxe-gotha" is another being of browning's fancy, who yet represents to perfection the spirit of the old fugue writers. "luria," "the soul's tragedy," "in a balcony," all represent the same method. another plan pursued by the poet is either to invent or borrow a historical personage into whose mouth he puts the defence of some course of action or ethical standard that may or may not be founded upon the highest ideals. sludge, the hero of "fifine at the fair," bishop blougram, hohenstiel-schwangau, range themselves in this group. there are comparatively few cases where he has taken a complete story and developed its spiritual possibilities without much change in external detail, but how adequate his art was to such ends, "the ring and the book," "inn album," "two poets of croisic," "red cotton nightcap country," the historical dramas of "strafford," and "king victor and king charles" fully prove, including, as they do, some of his finest masterpieces. history and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like "clive," "hervé riel," "donald," etc. there remains, however, a large number of poems containing some of browning's loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. "a blot in the 'scutcheon," "in a balcony," "colombe's birthday," "childe roland," "james lee's wife" are some of them. even in this rapid survey of the field the fact is patent that browning's range of subject-matter is infinitely wider and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any other english poet. he seems the first to have completely shaken himself free from the trammels of classic or mediæval literature. there are no echoes of arthur and his knights in his poetry, the shadows of the greek gods and goddesses exert no spell--except in the few instances when he deliberately chose a greek subject. the fact that browning was so free from classical influence in the great body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose classical themes for his subjects. there are not more than ten all told, and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest and most original work, for browning could not touch a classical theme without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own genius. his first and most conventionally classical poem is the fragment in "men and women," "artemis prologizes," written in . it was to have been the introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of hippolytus for a nymph of artemis, after that goddess had brought about his resuscitation. it has been suggested by mr. boynton in an interesting paper that browning shows traces of the influence of landor in his poetry. this fragment certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of diction along with its greek severity and terseness of style which leads to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain head of greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this nineteenth-century greek. the poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. this is to be regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood unique in his work as a true survival of greek subject wedded with classical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison with the best work done in this field by landor or swinburne, who tell over the classical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is said, do not write as if they were actually themselves greeks. there is no other instance in browning of such a survival. in his other poems on greek subjects it is browning bringing greek life to our ken with wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed poetical methods, or, as in "ixion," a greek story has been used as a symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely browning's own. in spite of the fact that he has turned to greece so seldom for inspiration, his greek poems range from such stirring pictures of greek life and feeling as one gets in the splendid dramatic idyl "pheidippides," based on a historical incident, through the imaginary "cleon," in which is found the sublimated essence of greek philosophical thought at the time of christ--thought, weary of law and beauty, longing for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in the new ideal of love being taught by the christians--to "aristophanes' apology," in which the athens of his day, with its literary and political factions, is presented with a force and analysis which place it second only to "the ring and the book." this poem taken, with balaustion, gives the reader not only a comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly shows the poet's own attitude toward the literary war between euripides and aristophanes. so different are browning's greek poems from all other poems upon classical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems. "cleon" links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in the mind of the century. cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. though he is a greek and a pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of morris or matthew arnold. he is the latest child of his own time, the heir of all the ages during which greece had developed its æsthetic perfection, discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an absorption into divine being. cleon would fain believe in personal immortality but cannot, and, like matthew arnold, believes in facing death imperturbably. in "balaustion's adventure" a historical tradition is used as the central episode of the poem, but life and romance are given to it by the creation of the heroine, balaustion, a young greek woman whose fascinating personality dominates the whole poem. she was a rhodian, else her freedom of action and speech might seem too modern, but among the islands of greece, at least at the time of euripides, there still survived that attitude toward woman which we see reflected in the homeric epics. away from athens, too, euripides was a power; hence his defence is put into the mouth of one not an athenian. she had saved a shipload of athenian sympathizers by reciting euripides when they were in danger from the hostile syracusans. [illustration: euripides] besides the romantic touch which is given the story by the creation of the lyric girl, there is an especial fitness in making the enthusiastic devotee of this poet a woman, for no one among the ancients has so fully and sympathetically portrayed woman in all her human possibilities of goodness and badness as euripides, yet he has been called a woman-hater--because some of his men have railed against women--but one alkestis is enough to offset any dramatic utterances of his men about women. the poet's attitude should be looked for in his power of portraying women of fine traits, not in any opinions expressed by his men. furthermore, browning had before him a model of balaustion in her enthusiasm for euripides, in mrs. browning. these circumstances are certainly sufficient to prove the appropriateness of making a rhodian girl the defender of euripides. there is nothing more delicious in browning than balaustion's relation of "alkestis," as she had seen it acted, to her three friends. her woman's comment and criticisms combine a browning's penetration of the fine points in the play with a girl's idealism. such a combination of masculine intellectualism and feminine charm has been known in women of all centuries. as the translation of the beautiful play of "alkestis" proceeds, balaustion interprets its art and moral, defending her favorite poet, not with the ponderousness of a grave critic weighing the influences which may have molded his genius, or calculating the pros and cons of his style, but with the swift appreciation of a mind and spirit full of the ardor of sympathy. moreover, her talk of the play being a recollection of how it appeared to her as she saw it acted, the mere text is constantly enlarged upon and made vital with flashing glimpses of the action, as, for example, in the passage just after the funeral of alkestis: "so, to the struggle off strode herakles, when silence closed behind the lion-garb, back came our dull fact settling in its place, though heartiness and passion half-dispersed the inevitable fate. and presently in came the mourners from the funeral, one after one, until we hoped the last would be alkestis, and so end our dream. could they have really left alkestis lone i' the wayside sepulchre! home, all save she! and when admetos felt that it was so, by the stand-still: when he lifted head and face from the two hiding hands and peplos' fold, and looked forth, knew the palace, knew the hills, knew the plains, knew the friendly frequence there, and no alkestis any more again, why, the whole woe billow-like broke on him." again, her criticism of admetos gives at once the natural feeling of a girl who could not be satisfied with what seemed to her his selfish action, and browning's feeling that euripides saw its selfishness just as surely as balaustion, despite the fact that it was in keeping, as numerous critics declare, with the customs of the age, and would not by any of his contemporaries be regarded as selfish on his part: "so he stood sobbing: nowise insincere, but somehow child-like, like his children, like childishness the world over. what was new in this announcement that his wife must die? what particle of pain beyond the pact he made with his eyes wide open, long ago-- made and was, if not glad, content to make? now that the sorrow, he had called for, came, he sorrowed to the height: none heard him say, however, what would seem so pertinent, 'to keep this pact, i find surpass my power; rescind it, moirai! give me back her life, and take the life i kept by base exchange! or, failing that, here stands your laughing-stock fooled by you, worthy just the fate o' the fool who makes a pother to escape the best and gain the worst you wiser powers allot!' no, not one word of this; nor did his wife despite the sobbing, and the silence soon to follow, judge so much was in his thought-- fancy that, should the moirai acquiesce, he would relinquish life nor let her die. the man was like some merchant who in storm, throws the freight over to redeem the ship; no question, saving both were better still, as it was,--why, he sorrowed, which sufficed. so, all she seemed to notice in his speech was what concerned her children." among modern critics who take the conventional ground in regard to admetos may be cited churton collins, whose opinion is, of course, weighty. he writes: "alcestis would be considered fortunate for having had an opportunity of displaying so conspicuously the fidelity to a wife's first and capital duty. had admetus prevented such a sacrifice he would have robbed alcestis of an honor which every nobly ambitious woman in hellas would have coveted. this is so much taken for granted by the poet that all that he lays stress on in the drama is the virtue rewarded by the return of alcestis to life, the virtue characteristic of admetus, the virtue of hospitality; to this duty in all the agony of his sorrow admetus had been nobly true, and as a reward for what he had thus earned, the wife who had been equally true to woman's obligations was restored all-glorified to home and children and mutual love." most readers, however, will find it difficult to put themselves into the appropriate greek frame of mind, and will sympathize with browning's supposition that after all euripides had transcended current ideas on the subject and deliberately intended to convey such an interpretation of the character of admetos as balaustion gives. balaustion shows her penetration again in her appreciation of herakles. he distinguishes clearly between evil that is inherent in the nature as the selfishness of admetos, and evil which is more or less external, growing out of conditions incident to the time rather than from any real trait of nature. herakles' delight in the hospitality accorded him, his drinking and feasting in the interim of his labors, did not touch the genuine, large-hearted helpfulness of the demigod, who became sober the moment he learned there was sorrow in the house and need of his aid. in her proposed version of the story, balaustion is surely the romantic girl, who would have her hero a hero indeed and in every way the equal of his spouse. yet if we delve below this romanticism of balaustion we shall find the poet's own belief in the almost omniscient power of human love the basis of the relation between admetos and alkestis. the soul of alkestis in one look entered into that of admetos; she died, but he is entirely guiltless of agreeing to her death. alkestis herself had made the pact with apollo to die for her husband. he, when he learns it, refuses to accept the sacrifice, and unable to persuade him that his duty to humanity demands that he accept it, alkestis asks him to look at her. then her soul enters his, but when she goes to hades and demands to become a ghost, the queen of hades replies: "hence, thou deceiver! this is not to die, if, by the very death which mocks me now, the life, that's left behind and past my power, is formidably doubled--say, there fight two athletes, side by side, each athlete armed with only half the weapons, and no more, adequate to a contest with their foes. if one of these should fling helm, sword and shield to fellow--shieldless, swordless, helmless late-- and so leap naked o'er the barrier, leave a combatant equipped from head to heel, yet cry to the other side, 'receive a friend who fights no longer!' 'back, friend, to the fray!' would be the prompt rebuff; i echo it. two souls in one were formidable odds: admetos must not be himself and thou! "and so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, the lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; and lo, alkestis was alive again, and of admetos' rapture who shall speak?" how unique a treatment of a classical subject this poem is, is self-evident. not content with making a superb translation of the play, remarkable both for its literalness and for its poetic beauty, the poet has dared to present that translation indirectly through the mouth of another speaker, and to incorporate with it a running commentary of criticism in blank verse. still more daring was it to make play and criticism an episode in a dramatic monologue in which we learn not only the story of the rescue of the shipload of athenian sympathizers, but the story of balaustion's love. along with all this complexity of interest there is still room for a lifelike portrayal of balaustion herself, one of the loveliest conceptions of womanhood in literature. to reiterate what i have upon another occasion expressed in regard to her, she is a girl about whom the fancy loves to cling--she is so joyous, so brave, and so beautiful, and possessed of so rare a mind scintillating with wit, wisdom and critical insight, not browning's own mind either except in so far as his sympathies were with euripides. her ardor for purity and perfection is perhaps peculiarly feminine. it is quite different from that of the mind tormented by the problem of evil and taking refuge in a partisanship of evil as a force which works for good and without which the world would be a waste of insipidity. her suggested version of the alkestis story converts admetos into as much of a saint as alkestis, and makes an exquisite and soul-stirring romance of their perfect union, though it must be admitted that it would do away with all the intensity and dramatic force of the play as it is presented by euripides. like the angels who rejoice more over one sinner returned than over the ninety and nine that did not go astray, an artist prefers the contrast and movement of a sinning and regenerated admetos to an admetos more suited from the first to be the consort of alkestis. this is the touch, however, which preserves balaustion's feminine charm and makes her truly her own self--an ardent soul very far from being simply browning's mouthpiece. "aristophanes' apology" is a still more remarkable play in its complexity. again, balaustion is the speaker, and browning has set himself the task in this monologue of relating the fall of athens, of presenting the personality of aristophanes, of defending euripides, a translation of whose play, "herakles," is included, and incidentally sketching the history of greek comedy, all through the mouth of the one speaker, balaustion. not until one has grasped the law by which the poet has accomplished this, and has moreover freshly in his mind the facts of greek history at the time of athens' fall, and greek literature, especially the plays of aristophanes and euripides, can the poem be thoroughly enjoyed. in the very first line the suggestion of the scene setting is given, and such suggestions occur from time to time all through the poem. it should be observed that they are never brought in for themselves alone, but are always used in connection with some mood of balaustion's or as imagery in relation to some thought. while the reader is thus kept conscious of the background of wind and wave, as balaustion and her husband voyage toward rhodes, it is not until the end of the poem that we learn with a pleasant surprise that the boat on which they are sailing is the same one saved once by balaustion when she recited euripides' "sweetest, saddest song." thus there is a dramatic denouement in connection with the scene setting. through the expression of a mood of despair on the part of balaustion at the opening of the poem the reader is put in possession not only of the scene setting but of the occasion of the voyage, which is the overthrow of athens. from the mood of despair balaustion passes to one in which she describes how she could better have borne to see athens perish. this carries her on to a more hopeful frame of mind, in which she can foresee the spiritual influence of athens persisting. the peace of mind ensuing upon this consideration makes it possible for her calmly to survey the events connected with its downfall, among which the picturesque episode of the dancing of the flute girls to the demolition of the walls of the piræus is conspicuous. she then sees the vision of the immortal athens while sparta the victorious in arms will die. then comes a mood in which she declares it will be better to face the grief than to brood over it, which leads to her proposing to euthukles that they treat the fall of athens as a tragic theme, as the poet might do, and enact it on the voyage. then grief over the recent events takes possession of her again, and now with the feminine privilege of changing her mind, she thinks it would be better to rehearse an event which happened to herself a year ago as a prologue. speaking of adventures causes her very naturally to drop into reminiscences about her first adventure, when she recited euripides and met the man who was to become her husband. [illustration: aristophanes] thus, through this perfectly natural transition from one mood to another, balaustion leads up to the real subject-matter of the poem, aristophanes' defence of himself, which, however, is preceded by an account of the effect of the death of euripides upon the athenians as witnessed by euthukles, his death being the occasion of aristophanes' call on balaustion. what she calls the prologue is really the main theme of the poem, while all her talk up to this point is truly the prologue. the actual account of the fall of athens does not come until the conclusion, and is related in comparatively few words. what seems, then, to be the chief theme of the poem with its setting of wind and wave and bark bears somewhat the same relation to the real theme as incidental music does to a play. upon first thoughts it may seem like a clumsy contrivance for introducing aristophanes upon the scene, but in the end it will be perceived, i think, that it serves the artistic purpose of placing aristophanes in proper perspective. balaustion with her exquisitely human moods and progressive spirit forms the right complement to the decaying ideals of aristophanes, and gives him the proper flavor of antiquity. instead of seeing him in the broad light of a direct dramatic presentation we see him indirectly through balaustion's thoughts and moods, who, though permitting him to do full justice to himself, yet surrounds him all the time with the subtle influence of her sympathy for euripides. as the better way to follow the development of the preliminary part of the poem is by regarding every step as the outcome of a mood on the part of balaustion, so the better way of following aristophanes through what seems his interminable defence of himself is again by tracing the moods through which his arguments express themselves. aristophanes comes in half drunk to make his call on balaustion, and his first mood is one of graciousness toward her whose beauty has impressed his artistic perceptions, but noticing her dignity and its effect in routing the chorus, he immediately begins to be on the defensive. the disappearance of his chorus, however, takes him off on a little excursion about the moves which are being made by the city to cut down the expense of dramatic performances by curtailing the chorus. in a spirit of bravado he declares that he does not care so long as he has his actors left. a coarse reference causes balaustion to turn and he changes his mood. he acknowledges he is drunk and rushes off into a defence of drunkenness in general for playwrights and for himself, which on this occasion came about on account of the supper he and his players have attended. he rattles on about the supper, telling how the merriment increased until something happened. the thought of this something changes his mood completely. balaustion notices it, he reads her expression, and characteristically explains the change in himself as due to her fixed regard. the reader is left in suspense as to the something which happened, yet it haunts the memory, and he feels convinced that some time he is to know what it was. now aristophanes bids balaustion speak to him without fear. she does so, conveying in her welcome both her disapproval and her admiration. aristophanes, evidently piqued, does not answer, but makes personal remarks upon the manner of her speech, asking her if she learned tragedy from _him_--euripides. this starts him off on dreams of a new comedy in which women shall act, but he concludes that his mission is to ornament comedy as he finds it, not invent a new comedy. this gives balaustion a chance to ask if in his last play, later than the one euthukles had seen, he had smoothed this ancient club of comedy he speaks of into a more human and less brutal implement of warfare, and was it a conviction of this new method he might use in comedy which was the something that happened at the feast. aristophanes, as usual when he is cornered, makes no direct reply, but asks if euthukles saw his last play, to which balaustion frankly replies that having seen the first he never cared to see the following. aristophanes avows he can show cause why he wrote them, but glances off in a sarcastic reference to euripides, whose art he says belongs to the closet or the cave, not to the world. he prefers to stick to the old forms of art and make athens happy in what coarse way she desires. he then proceeds to enlarge upon what that is. then he changes again and asks with various excursions into side issues (for example: the rise of comedy; how it is now being regarded by the government, which favors tragedy, giving him another chance for a dig at euripides) if he is the man likely to be satisfied to be classed merely a comic poet since he wrote the "birds?" balaustion encourages him a little here, and, cheered up, he goes on to tell how he gave the people draught divine in "wasps" and "grasshoppers," and how he praised peace by showing the kind of pleasures one may have when peace reigns--and still at every opportunity casting slurs at the tragic muse, especially euripides. he goes on describing his play until he touches on some of the sarcasms which make balaustion wince. then he turns about and declares he loathes as much as she does the things of which he tells, but his attempts at bringing comedy up to a high level having failed, he is obliged to give the athenians what they want, a smartened up version of the "thesmaphoriazousai," which had failed the year before. he describes his triumph with this which was being celebrated at the supper when the something happened which is now at last described--namely, the entrance of sophocles, who announces that he intends to commemorate the death of euripides by having his chorus clothed in black and ungarlanded at the performance of his play next month. this startling scene, being prepared for and not brought in until aristophanes has done much talking, seems to throw a sudden flash of reality into the poem. ill-natured criticism, aristophanes shows, follows on the part of the feasters, though aristophanes' mood is one of sudden recognition of the value of euripides. but when he, sobered for the time being, proposes a toast to the tragic muse, the feasters consider it a joke. he quickly accepts the situation, and comes off triumphant by proposing a toast to both muses. after this balaustion asks aristophanes if he will commemorate euripides with them. but his sober mood is gone. he looks about the room, sees things that belong to euripides, and immediately begins stabbing at him. balaustion objects, and upon the theme of respect to the dead he begins his usual invective against his rivals, but finally ends by giving respect to euripides, him whose serenity, he declares, could never with his gibes be disturbed. after venting this mood of animosity he begins soberly to discuss the origin of comedy. he traces its growth to the point where he found it, and enlarges on the improvements he has made, touching, as always, upon the criticisms of his opposers, and finally arriving at the chief point of difference between himself and euripides, which he enlarges upon at great length. here the incidental music breaks in with talk between balaustion and euthukles, in which the former rather tries to excuse herself from relating her reply to aristophanes. however, she does give her reply, which is conducted in a more truly argumentative fashion than the defence of aristophanes. she picks up his points and makes her points against him usually by denying the truth of what he has said. her supreme defence is, however, the reading of the play "herakles." aristophanes, touched but not convinced, finally insists that he is athens' best friend. he is no thamuris to be punished for seeing beyond human vision. the last characteristic touch is when aristophanes catches up the psalterion and sings the lyric of thamuris. then he departs, and balaustion rehearses the last days of athens, with euthukles' part in delaying the tragedy of the doomed city. by threading one's way thus through the apology, not from the point of view of aristophanes' arguments, but from the point of view of his moods, one experiences a tremendous sense of the personality of the man. repetitions which are not required for the full presentation of his case take their place as natural to a man who is not only inordinately vain but is immediately swayed by every suggestion and emotion that comes to him. owing to his volatile temperament the argument is varied by now a bit of vivid description like that of the archon's feast when sophocles appeared, now by some merely personal remark to balaustion. the criticism in this play, as in that of "balaustion's adventure," may be considered either as representing some phase of contemporary opinion about aristophanes or as expressing the opinion of the poet himself. balaustion's indignation is especially aroused by the two plays, "the lusistrata" and the "thesmophoriazousai," both of which she finds utterly detestable. it is interesting to compare with this entirely unfavorable criticism the feeling of such distinguished classical scholars as gilbert murray and j. a. symonds. the first murray describes as a play "full of daring indecency, it is true, but the curious thing is that aristophanes, while professing to ridicule the women, is all through on their side. the jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the inferior--to give them their roman names--are seldom remarkable either for generosity or refinement, and it is our author's pleasant humor to accuse everybody of every vice he can think of at the moment. yet with the single exception that he credits women with an inordinate fondness for wine parties--the equivalent it would seem of afternoon tea--he makes them on the whole perceptibly more sensible and more sympathetic than his men." of the second play symonds speaks with actual enthusiasm. "it has a regular plot--an intrigue and a solution--and its persons are not allegorical but real. thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. but the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. the artifices by which euripides endeavors to win agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of muesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine jar, his apprehension by cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which euripides endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final _ruse_ by which he eludes the scythian bowmen, and carries off muesilochus in triumph--all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes." again, "there is no passage in aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of muesilochus. the portrait, too, of agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. but the crowning sport of the 'thesmophoriazousai' is in the last scene when muesilochus adapts the palamedes and the helen of euripides to his own forlorn condition, jumbling up the well-known verses of these tragedies with coarse-flavored, rustical remarks; and when at last euripides, himself, acts echo and perseus to the andromeda of his father-in-law, and both together mystify the policeman by their ludicrous utterance of antiphonal lamentation." in her welcome of him, balaustion expresses rather what she thinks he might be than what she really thinks he is. she welcomes him: "good genius! glory of the poet, glow o' the humorist who castigates his kind, suave summer-lightning lambency which plays on stag-horned tree, misshapen crag askew, then vanishes with unvindictive smile after a moment's laying black earth bare. splendor of wit that springs a thunder ball-- satire--to burn and purify the world, true aim, fair purpose: just wit justly strikes injustice,--right, as rightly quells the wrong, finds out in knaves', fools', cowards', armory the tricky tinselled place fire flashes through. no damage else, sagacious of true ore; wit learned in the laurel, leaves each wreath o'er lyric shell or tragic barbiton,-- though alien gauds be singed,--undesecrate." her attitude here is very like that of criticism in general, except that she is more or less sarcastic, meaning to imply that such aristophanes might be but is not. symonds, on the other hand, thinks him really what balaustion thinks he might be. "if," he says, "coleridge was justified in claiming the german word lustspiel for the so-called comedies of shakespeare, we have a far greater right to appropriate this wide and pregnant title to the plays of aristophanes. the brazen mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed broadly, serenely, as if its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow eye-sockets suggest infinite possibilities of profoundest irony. buffoonery carried to the point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity, and gaiety concealing the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow and disgust, seem ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are molded to a proud perpetual laughter. it is a laughter which spares neither god nor man--which climbs olympus only to drag down the immortals to its scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but which, amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly asserting, as by paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to heaven and makes us respect our brothers." one cannot help feeling, in view of these very diverse opinions, that both are exaggerated. the enthusiasm of symonds seems almost fanatic. though no one of penetration can fail to see the wit and wisdom, and at times, in such lyrics as those in "the clouds," the poetic charm of aristophanes, the person of fastidious taste, whether a greek girl of his own day, or a man of these latter days, must sometimes feel that his buffoonery oversteps the bounds of true wit, even when it is not shadowed by a coarseness not to be borne at the present day. when balaustion asks him "in plain words," "have you exchanged brute blows, which teach the brute man may surpass him in brutality,-- for human fighting, or true god-like force which breeds persuasion nor needs fight at all?" aristophanes replies that it had not been his intention to turn art's fabric upside down and invent an entirely new species of comedy. that sort of thing can be done by one who has turned his back on life, friendly faces, sympathetic cheer, as euripides had done in his salaminian cave. this may be regarded, on the whole, as a good bit of defence on aristophanes' part. it is equivalent to his saying that there was no use in his trying to be anything for which his genius had not fitted him. this chimes in, again, with such authoritative criticism as murray's, who declares: "the general value of his view of life, and, above all, his treatment of his opponent's alleged vices, may well be questioned. yet admitting that he often opposed what was best in his age, or advocated it on the lowest grounds, admitting that his slanders are beyond description and that, as a rule, he only attacks the poor and the leaders of the poor, nevertheless he does it all with such exhuberant high spirits, such an air of its all being nonsense together, such insight and swiftness, such incomparable directness and charm of style, that even if some archelaus had handed him over to euripides to scourge, he would probably have escaped his well-earned whipping." much of aristophanes' defence consists in slurring at euripides, against whom he waxes more and more fierce as he goes on. his plays furnish numerous illustrations of his rivalry with euripides, yet curiously enough, as critics have pointed out, aristophanes imitates euripides to a noteworthy extent, so much so that the dramatist cratinus invented a word to describe the style of the two--euripid-aristophanize. judging from his parodies on euripides, he must certainly have read and reread his plays until he knew them practically by heart. balaustion, as browning has portrayed her in this poem, is the lyric girl developed into splendid womanhood. she has a large heart and a large brain, as well as imagination and strong ethical fervor. her intense feeling at the fall of athens, which had been the ideal to her of greatness, and her reverential love for euripides, her charity toward aristophanes the man, if not toward his work, show how deep and far-reaching her sympathies were. again, her imagination flashes forth in her picturesque descriptions of the ruined athens and her prophetic picture of the new athens, of the spirit which will arise in its place, in her telling portraiture of aristophanes and his entrance into her house, as well as in many another passage. her intellect shines out in her clever management of the argument with aristophanes, and her ethical fervor in her denunciations of the moral depravity of certain of the plays. as to the question of whether a young greek woman would be likely to criticise aristophanes in this way, opinion certainly differs. history is, for the most part, silent about women. as mahaffy says, it is only in the dramatists and the philosophers that we can get any glimpses of the woman of the time. mahaffy's opinions are worth quoting as an example of the pessimism growing out of a bias in favor of a particular type of woman which he idealized in his own mind. he seems utterly incapable of appreciating the humanness of the women in the greek dramatists, especially those in euripides. "sadder than the condition of the aged was that of women," he writes, "at this remarkable period. the days of the noble and high-principled penelope, of the refined and intellectual helen, of the innocent and spirited nausikaa, of the gentle and patient andromache, had passed away. men no longer sought and respected the society of the gentler sex. would that euripides had even been familiar, as homer was, with the sound of women brawling in the streets! for in these days they were confined to asiatic silence and seclusion, while the whole life of the men, both in business and recreation, was essentially public. just as the feverish excitement of political life nowadays prompts men to spend even their leisure in the clubs, where they meet companions of like passions and interests with themselves, so the athenian gentleman only came home to eat and sleep. his leisure as well as his business kept him in the market place. his wife and daughters, ignorant of philosophy and politics, were strangers to his real life, and took no interest in his pursuits. "the results were fatal to athenian society. the women, uninstructed, neglected, and enslaved, soon punished their oppressors with their own keen and bitter weapons, and with none keener than their vices. for, of course, all the grace and delicacy of female character disappeared. intellectual power in women was distinctly associated with moral depravity, so that excessive ignorance and stupidity was considered the only guarantee of virtue. the qualifications for society became incompatible with the qualifications for home duties, so that the outcasts from society, as we call them, were not the immoral and the profligate but the honorable and the virtuous." such is the view to be gleaned from history, and in mahaffy's opinion the literature of the time tells the same story. he goes on: "when we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history. in tragedy or in the social theories of the philosophers alone can we hope for a glimpse into the average character and position of athenian women. here at least we might have expected that the portraits drawn with such consummate skill by homer would have been easily transferred to the athenian stage. but to our astonishment we find the higher social feelings toward women so weak that the athenian tragic poets seem quite unable to appreciate, or even to understand, the more delicate features in homeric characters. they are painted so coarsely and ignorantly by euripides that we should never recognize them but for their names. base motives and unseemly wrangling take the place of chivalrous honor and graceful politeness. "but the critics of the day complained that euripides degraded the ideal character of tragedy by painting human nature as he found it: in fact as it was, and not as it ought to be. let us turn, then, to sophokles, who painted the most ideal women which the imagination of a refined athenian could conceive, and consider his most celebrated characters, his antigone and his elektra. a calm, dispassionate survey will, i think, pronounce them harsh and masculine. they act rightly, no doubt, and even nobly, but they do it in the most disagreeable way. except in their external circumstances they differ in no respect from men." certainly, the opinion expressed of the women of euripides is tainted by the feeling that they ought to act like english matrons and their daughters. quite a different impression is given by symonds, who, in regard to some of the sentences occurring in euripides which are uncomplimentary to women, says: "it is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in women as the iphigenia, the elektra, the polyxena, the alkestis." but the complete vindication of the fact that balaustion and mrs. browning and our own women of to-day are on the right side in their appreciation of euripides as the great woman's poet of antiquity is found in the opinion of our contemporary critic, gilbert murray, who more than thirty years after these poems were written writes of the "wonderful women-studies by which euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. they called him a hater of women; and aristophanes makes the women of athens conspire for revenge against him. of course he was really the reverse. he loved and studied and expressed the women whom the socratics ignored and pericles advised to stay in their rooms. crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. heroines like medea, phaedra, stheneboia, aërope, clytemnestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the angelic or devoted type--alcestis, who died to save her husband, evadne and laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. but the significant fact is that, like ibsen, euripides refuses to idealize any man, and does idealize women. there is one youth-martyr, menoikeus in the 'phænissae,' but his martyrdom is a masculine, businesslike performance--he gets rid of his prosaic father by a pretext about traveling money without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the virgins." where then did euripides find these splendid women of force and character? it seems quite impossible that he could have evolved them out of his own inner consciousness. he must have known women who served at least, in part, as models. besides, there was undoubtedly a new woman movement in the air or plato in his "republic" would not have suggested a plan for educating men and women alike. the free women of athens are known in some cases to have attained a high degree of culture. aspasia, who became the wife of pericles, is a shining example. there was sappho, also, with her school of poetry attended by girls in lesbos. taking all these facts into consideration, it would seem that browning was sufficiently justified in drawing such a woman as balaustion, and that a woman of her penetrating intellect and ardor of spirit would love euripides, and dislike aristophanes, seems absolutely certain. therefore, if the historical attitude is taken toward balaustion and her criticism and appreciation, it can be on the whole accepted as reflecting what would probably be the feeling of an ardent woman-follower of euripides in his own day. but, on the other hand, if the criticism be taken as browning's own, it is open to question whether it is partisan rather than entirely broad-minded. take the consensus of opinion of modern critics and we find them all agreed in regard to the genius of aristophanes, though admitting that his coarseness must, at times, detract from their enjoyment of him. there is much truth in symonds' criticism of the poem. he says of it: "as a sophist and a rhetorician of poetry, mr. browning proves himself unrivaled, and takes rank with the best writers of historical romances. yet students may fairly accuse him of some special pleading in favor of his friends and against his foes. it is true that aristophanes did not bring back again the golden days of greece; true that his comedy revealed a corruption latent in athenian life. but neither was euripides in any sense a savior. impartiality regards them both as equally destructive: aristophanes, because he indulged animalism and praised ignorance in an age which ought to have outgrown both; euripides, because he criticised the whole fabric of greek thought and feeling in an age which had not yet distinguished between analysis and skepticism. "what has just been said about mr. browning's special pleading indicates the chief fault to be found with his poem. the point of view is modern. the situation is strained. aristophanes becomes the scapegoat of athenian sins, while euripides shines forth a saint as well as a sage. balaustion, for her part, beautiful as her conception truly is, takes up a position which even plato could not have assumed. into her mouth mr. browning has put the views of the most searching and most sympathetic modern analyst. she judges euripides not as he appeared to his own greeks, but as he strikes the warmest of his admirers, who compare his work with that of all the poets who have ever lived." it would seem that mr. symonds, himself, does some special pleading here. as we have seen, euripides, though not a favorite in athens, did have warm admirers in his own day; consequently there is nothing out of the way in portraying one of his contemporaries as an admirer. furthermore, balaustion does not represent him as a savior of his age. she sees only too clearly that in the narrow sense of convincing his age he has not been a success. what is her vision of the spiritual athens which is to arise but a confession of this fact! nor is it entirely improbable that she might be prophetic of a time when euripides will be recognized as the true power. any disciple of a poet ahead of his time perceives these things. one should be careful in judging of the poem as good modern criticism not to be entirely guided by the opinions of balaustion. it should never be forgotten that it is a dramatic poem in which aristophanes is allowed to speak for himself at great length, and whatever can be accepted as good argument for himself upon his own ground should be set over against the sweeping strictures of balaustion. indeed it may turn out that browning has, after all, said for him the most exculpatory word of any critic, for he has so presented his case as to show that he considers him the outcome of the undeveloped phase of morals then existing for which he is hardly responsible because the higher light has not yet broken in upon him. this is evidenced especially in the strange combination in him of a frank belief in a life of the senses which goes along with a puritanical reverence for the gods, and a hatred of anything that falls within his own definition of vice. to sum up, if i may again be forgiven for re-expressing an opinion elsewhere printed, which states as clearly as i am able to do my conviction of where the play stands as criticism, like all dramatic work, this poem aims to present the actual spirit of the time in which the actors moved upon the stage of life, and to reproduce something of their mental and emotional natures. any criticism of the poets who figure in the poem, or of the larger question of the quarrel between tragedy and comedy, should be deduced indirectly, as implied in the sympathetic presentation of both sides, not based exclusively upon direct expressions of opinion on either side. so regarded it would seem that browning was able to appreciate the genius of aristophanes as well as that of euripides, but that he considered aristophanes to have value chiefly in relation to his age, as the artistic mouthpiece of its long-established usages, while euripides had caught the breath of the future, and was the mirror of the prophetic impulses of his age rather than of its dominant civilization. it is not improbable that landor's fascinating portrayal of the brilliant aspasia may have had some influence upon browning's conception of balaustion, upon the intellectual side at least. alcibiades says that many people think her language as pure and elegant as pericles, and pericles says she was never seen out of temper or forgetful of what argument to urge first and most forcibly. when all is said, however, it may be that the "halo irised around" balaustion's head was due, more than to any one else, to the influence of the memory of mrs. browning, of whom she is made to say with a sublime disregard of its anachronism: "i know the poetess who graved in gold, among her glories that shall never fade, this style and title for euripides, _the human with his droppings of warm tears_." after such a study of greek life as this, wherein every available incident in history, every episode in the plays of aristophanes bearing on the subject, every contemporary allusion are all woven together with such consummate skill that the very soul and body of the time is imaged forth, the classical poems of the other great names of the century seem almost like child's play. landor's poems on greek subjects sound like imitations in inferior material of antiquity. arnold's are even duller. swinburne tells his greek tales in an endless flow of rhythmical, musical verse, which occasionally rises into the realm of having something to say. morris tells his at equal length in a manner suggestive of chaucer without chaucer's snap, but where among them all is there such a bit of stinging life as in "pheidippedes" or "echetlos?" [illustration: walter savage landor] tennyson has, it is true, written some altogether exquisite verse, upon classical themes, and in every case the poems are not descriptive nor dramatic, but are dramatic soliloquies, thus approaching in form browning's dramatic idyls. one of the most beautiful of these is "oenone." there we have a mere tradition enlarged upon and the feelings of oenone upon the desertion of paris expressed with a richness of emotional fervor in a setting of appropriate nature imagery which carries us back to the idyls of theocritus. "ulysses," again gives the psychology of a wanderer who has become so habituated to adventures that he is quite incapable of settling down with penelope for the remainder of his life. one cannot quite forgive the poet for calling the ever youthful and beautiful penelope, whose hand was sought by so many suitors, and who, although twenty years had passed, might still be quite young, an "aged wife." it has always seemed to the writer like a wholly unnecessary stab at a very beautiful story, and the poem would have been just as effective if ulysses' hunger for lands beyond the sun had not been coupled with any scorn of penelope, but with a feeling of pain that again fate must take him away from her. aside from this note of bad taste--bad, because it shadows a picture of faithfulness, cherished as an almost universal possession of humanity--the poem is fine. there is also, though not greek, the remarkable study of lucretius going mad from the effects of his wife's love philter, in which the most fascinating glimpses of his philosophy of atoms are caught amid his maniacal wanderings, and, last, the very beautiful demeter and persephone. these are as unique in their way as browning's greek poems are in theirs, standing quite apart from such work as morris', or swinburne's, not only because of their haunting music, which even swinburne cannot equal, but because of a deeper vein of thought running through them. as far as thought is concerned, however, all pale in significance the moment they are placed in juxtaposition with any of browning's classical productions. not the least interesting of browning's classical poems is "ixion." in his treatment of the myth of ixion he proves himself a true child of the greeks, not that he makes any slavish attempt to reproduce a greek atmosphere as it existed in the lifetime of greek poetry, but he exercises that prerogative which the greek poets always claimed, of interpreting a myth to suit their own ends. it has become a sort of critical axiom to compare browning's "ixion" with the "prometheus" of literature. this is one of those catching analogies which lay hold upon the mind, and cannot be shaken off again without considerable difficulty. mr. arthur symons first spoke of the resemblance; and almost every other critic with the exception of mr. nettleship has dwelt mainly upon that aspect of the poem which bears out the comparison. but why, it might very well be asked, did browning, if he intended to make another prometheus, choose ixion for his theme? and the answer is evident, because in the story of ixion he found some quality different from any which existed in the story of prometheus, and which was especially suited to the end he had in view. the kernel of the myth of prometheus as developed by Æschylus is proud, unflinching suffering of punishment, inflicted, not by a god justly angry for sin against himself, but by a god sternly mindful of his own prerogatives, whose only right is might, and jealous of any interference in behalf of the race which he detested--the race of man. thus prometheus stands out as a hero in greek mythology, a mediator between man and the blind anger of a god of unconditional power; and prometheus, with an equally blind belief in fate, accepts while he defies the punishment inflicted by zeus. he tacitly acknowledges the right of zeus to punish him, since he confesses his deeds to be sins, but, nevertheless, he would do exactly the same thing over again: "by my choice, my choice i freely sinned--i will confess my sin-- and helping mortals found mine own despair." on the other hand, ixion never appears in classic lore as a hero. he has been called the "cain" of greece, because he was the first, as pindar says, "to introduce to mortal men the murder of kin not unaccompanied by cunning." zeus appears, however, to have shown more leniency to him for the crime of killing his father-in-law than he ever did to prometheus, as he not only purified him from murder, but invited him to a seat among the gods. but to quote pindar again, "he found his prosperity too great to bear, when with infatuate mind he became enamored of hera.... thus his conceit drave him to an act of enormous folly, but the man soon suffered his deserts, and received an exquisite torture." ixion, then, in direct contrast to prometheus, stands forth an embodiment of the most detestable of sins, perpetrated simply for personal ends. to depict such a man as this in an attitude of defiance, and yet to justify his defiance, is a far more difficult problem than to justify the already admired heroism of prometheus. it is entirely characteristic of browning that he should choose perhaps the most unprincipled character in the whole range of greek mythology as his hero. he is not content, like emerson, with simply telling us that "in the mud and scum of things there alway, alway something sings"; his aim is ever to bring us face to face with reality, and to open our ears that we may hear for ourselves this universal song. in fine, browning chose ixion and not another, because he wanted above all things an unquestioned sinner; and the task he set himself was to show the use of sin and at the same time exonerate the sinner from the eternal consequences of his act. so mystical is the language of the poem that it is extremely difficult to trace behind it the subtle reasoning. mr. nettleship has given by far the best exposition of the poem, though even he does not seize all its suggestiveness. ixion, the sinner, suffering eternal torment, questions the justice of such torment. the first very important conclusion to which he comes, and it is one entirely in accord with science, is that sin is an aberration of sense, merely the result of external conditions in which the soul of man has no active part. the soul simply dreams, but once fully awakened, it would free itself from this bondage of sense if it were allowed to do so. ixion argues that it is zeus that hath made him and not he himself, and if he has sinned it is through the bodily senses which zeus has conferred upon him, and if he were the friendly and all-powerful god which he claimed himself to be and which ixion believed he was, why did he allow these distractions of sense to lead him (ixion) into sin which could only be expiated by eternal punishment? without body there would have been nothing to obstruct his soul's rush upon the real; and with one touch of pitying power zeus might have dispersed "this film-work, eye's and ear's." it is entirely the fault of zeus that he had sinned; and having done so will external torture make him repent any more who has repented already? this is the old, old problem that has taxed the brains of many a philosopher and the faith of many a theologian--the reconcilement of the existence of evil with an omnipotent god. then follows a comparison between the actions of zeus, a god, and of ixion, the human king; and ixion declares could he have known all, as zeus does, he would have warded off evil from his subjects, would have seen that they were trained aright from the first--in fact, would not have allowed evil to exist, or failing this, could he have seen the heart of the criminals and realized how they repented he would have given them a chance to retrieve their past. ixion now realizes that his human ideal is higher than that of zeus. he had imagined him possessed of human qualities, and finds his qualities are less than human. what must be the inevitable result of arriving at such a conclusion? it means the dethronement of the god, and either a lapse into hopeless atheism or the recognition that the conception formed of the god was that of the human mind at an earlier stage of understanding. this conception becomes crystallized into an anthropomorphic god; but the mind of man goes onward on its way to higher heights, and lo! there comes a day when the god-ideal of the past is lower than the human ideal of the present. it is such a crisis as this that ixion has arrived at, and his faith is equal to the strain. since zeus is man's own mind-made god, ixion's tortures must be the natural consequences of his sin, and not the arbitrary punishment of a god; and what is ixion's sin as browning has interpreted the myth? the sin is that of arrogance. ixion, a mere man, strives to be on an equality with gods. in lucian's dialogue between hera and zeus the stress is laid upon the arrogance of ixion. jupiter declares that ixion shall pay the "penalty not of his love--for that surely is not so dreadful a crime--but of his loud boasting." browning raises the sin into a rarer atmosphere than that of the greek or latin. zeus and hera may be taken to represent the attributes of power and love as conceived by man in divinity; and ixion, symbolic of man, arrogantly supposes that he is capable of putting himself on an equality with divinity by conceiving the entire nature of divinity, that out of his finite mind he can construct the absolute god, and this is the sin, or, better, the aberration of sense, which results in the crystallization of his former inadequate conceptions into an anthropomorphic god, and causes his own downfall. ixion, now fully aroused to the fact that the god he has been defying is but his own miserable conception of god, realizes that the suffering caused by this conception of god is the very means through which man struggles toward higher ideals: through evil he is brought to a recognition of the good; from his agony is bred the rainbow of hope, which ever shines above him glorified by the light from a purity far beyond, all-unobstructed. successive conceptions of god must sink; but man, however misled by them, must finally burst through the obstructions of sense, freeing his spirit to aspire forever toward the light. "ixion," then, is not merely an argument against eternal punishment, nor a picture of heroic suffering, though he who will may draw these lessons from it, but it is a tremendous symbol of the spiritual development of man. pure in its essence, the spirit learns through the obstructions of sense to yearn forever for higher attainment, and this constitutes the especial blessedness of man as contrasted with zeus. he, like the pythagorean father of number, is the conditioned one; but man is privileged through all æons of time to break through conditions, and thus ixion, triumphant, exclaims: "where light, where light is, aspiring thither i rise, whilst thou--zeus, keep the godship and sink." in these poems, as in other phases of his work, browning runs the gamut of life, of art, and of thought. he has set a new standard in regard to the handling of classic material, one which should open the field of classic lore afresh to future poets. instead of trying to ape in more or less ineffectual imitations the style and thought of the great masters of antiquity, or simply use their mythology as a well-spring of romance to be clothed in whatever vagaries of style the individual poet might be able to invent, the aim of the future poet should be to reconstruct the life and thought of that wonderful civilization. one playwright, at least, has made a step in the right direction. i refer to gilbert murray, whose classical scholarship has thrown so much light upon the vexed questions of browning's attitude toward euripides, and who, in his "andromache," has written a play, not in classical, but in modern form, which seems to bring us more into touch with the life of homer's day than even homer himself. vii prophetic visions the division between centuries, though it be an arbitrary one, does actually appear to mark fairly definite steps in human development, and already there are indications that the twentieth century is taking on a character quite distinct from that of the nineteenth. it looks now as if it were to be the century of the realization of mankind's wildest dreams in the past. air navigation, the elixir of life, perpetual motion, are some of them. about the first no one can now have much skepticism, for if airships are not as yet common objects of the everyday sky, they, at least, occupy a large share of attention in the magazines, while the aviator, a being who did not exist in the last century, is now the hero of the hour. with regard to the second, though no sparkling elixir distilled from some rare flower, such as that septimius felton sought in hawthorne's tale, has been discovered, the great scientist metchnikoff has brought to light a preserver of youth more in keeping with the science of the day--namely, a microbe, possessing power to destroy the poison that produces age. whether perpetual youth is to lead to immortality in the flesh will probably be a question for other centuries to discuss, though if metchnikoff is right there is no reason why we should not retain our youthfulness all our lives in this century. add to this, machinery run by the perpetual energy of radium--a possibility, if radium can ever be obtained in sufficient quantities to supply the needed power to keep modern civilization on its ceaseless "go"--and we may picture to ourselves, before the end of the twentieth century, youths of ninety starting forth on voyages of thirty years in radium ships, which, like the fairy watch of the princess rossetta, will never go wrong and will never need to be wound up, metaphorically speaking. it would almost seem as if some method of enlarging the earth, or of arranging voyages to the moon and mars, would be necessary in order to give the new radium machinery sufficient scope for its activities. however, at present it seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to produce more than half an ounce of radium a year. as it would take a ton to run one ship for thirty years, and the expense would be something almost incalculable, it is a dream only to be realized by the inventing of methods by which the feeble radio-activity known to exist in many other substances can be utilized. these methods have not yet been invented, but it is a good deal that they have been thought of, for what man thinks of he generally seems to have the indomitable energy to accomplish. how such inventions as these, even if very far from attaining success, may affect the social and thought ideals of the century it is impossible to say. the automobile is said to have brought about a change, not altogether beneficial, to the intellectual and artistic growth of society to-day. it has taken such powerful possession of the minds of humanity that homes have been mortgaged, music and books and pictures have been sacrificed, in order that all the money procurable could be put into the machines and their running. you hear complaints against the automobile from writers, musicians, and artists. the only thing that really has a good sale is the automobile. what effect rushing about so constantly at high speed in the open air is to have on the brain-power is another interesting problem. perhaps it is this growing subjective delight in motion which is causing the development of an artistic taste dependent upon motion as its chief element. motion pictures and dancing appeal to the public with such insistence that plays will not hold successfully without an almost exaggerated attention to action and dancing, which, whenever it is at all possible, make a part of the "show." the pictures of the new school of painters, the futurists, also reveal the craze for motion. they try to put into their pictures the successive and decidedly blurred impressions, from the illustrations i have seen, of scenes in motion, with a result that is certainly startling and interesting, but which it is difficult to believe is beautiful. one has a horrible suspicion that all this emphasis upon motion in art is a running to seed of the art which appeals to the eye and with a psychological content derived principally from sensation. perhaps in some other century, fatuous humanity will like to listen to operas or to plays in a pitch-dark theatre. this will represent the going to seed of the art which appeals to the ear, and a psychological content derived principally from sentiment. while movement seems to be the keynote of the century thus far, in its everyday life and in its art manifestation, very interesting developments are taking place in scientific theories and in philosophy, as well as in the world of education and sociology. in relation to browning and the other chief poets of the nineteenth century, the only aspects of interest are in the region of thought and social ideals. with the exception of tennyson, no other of the chief poets of the century need be considered in this connection with browning, because, as we have seen in a previous chapter, they reflected on the whole the prevalent disbelief and doubt of the century which came with the revelations of science. many people have regarded tennyson as the chief prophet of the century. he seems, however, to the present writer to have held an attitude which reflected the general tone of religious aspiration in the century, rather than one which struck a new note indicating the direction in which future religious aspiration might turn. the conflict in his mind is between doubt and belief. to doubt he has often given the most poignant expression, as in his poem called "despair." the story is of a man and his wife who have lost all religious faith through the reading of scientific books: "have i crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? o, yes, for these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press, when the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon, and doubt is the lord of the dunghill, and crows to the sun and the moon, till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into blood. and hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good; for their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter'd from hand to hand-- _we_ have knelt in your know-all chapel, too, looking over the sand." if the effect of science was bad upon this weak-minded pair, the effect of religion as it had been taught them was no better. the absolute hopelessness of a blasted faith in all things reaches its climax in the following stanzas: "and the suns of the limitless universe sparkled and shone in the sky, flashing with fires as of god, but we knew that their light was a lie-- bright as with deathless hope--but, however they sparkled and shone, the dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own-- no soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, a fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe. "see, we were nursed in the drear nightfold of your fatalist creed, and we turn'd to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed, when the light of a sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the past. and the cramping creeds that had madden'd the peoples would vanish at last, and we broke away from the christ, our human brother and friend, for he spoke, or it seemed that he spoke, of a hell without help, without end. "hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away; we had passed from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day; he is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire, the guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire-- of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong, of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder and wrong." there are many hopeful passages in tennyson to offset such deep pessimism as is expressed in this one, which, moreover, being a dramatic utterance it must be remembered, does not reflect any settled conviction on the poet's part, though it shows him liable to moods of the most extreme doubt. in "the ancient sage" the agnostic spirit of the century is fully described, but instead of leading to a mood of despair, the mood is one of clinging to faith in the face of all doubt. the sage speaking, says: "thou canst not prove the nameless, o my son, nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one. thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no, nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son, thou canst not prove that i who speak with thee, are not thyself in converse with thyself, for nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven. wherefore thou be wise, cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to faith beyond the forms of faith! she reels not in the storm of warring words, she brightens at the clash of 'yes' and 'no.' she sees the best that glimmers thro' the worst, she feels the sun is hid but for a night, she spies the summer thro' the winter bud, she tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, she hears the lark within the songless egg, she finds the fountain where they wail'd mirage!" there is nothing here more reassuring than a statement made by the sage, based upon no argument, nor revelation, nor intuition--nothing but the utilitarian doctrine that it will be wiser to cling to faith beyond faith! this is a sample of the sort of assurance in the reality of god and of immortality which tennyson was in the habit of giving. in the poem called "vastness" he presents with genuine power a pessimistic view of humanity and civilization in all its various phases--all of no use, neither the good any more than the bad, "if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last?" the effect of the dismal atmosphere of the poem as a whole is supposed to be dissipated by the last stanza: "peace, let it be! for i loved him, and love him forever: the dead are not dead but alive." the conviction here of immortality through personal love is born of the feeling that his friend whom he has loved must live forever. the note of "in memoriam" is sounded again. tennyson's philosophy, in a nutshell, seems to be that doubts are not so much overcome as quieted by a struggling faith in the truths of religion, of which the chief assurance lies in the thought of personal love. not as in browning, that human love, because of its beauty and ecstasy, is a symbol of divine love, but because of its wish to be reunited to the one beloved is an earnest of continued existence. while tennyson's poetry is saturated with allusions to the science of the century, it seems to be ever the dark side of the doctrine of evolution that is dwelt upon by him, while his religion is held to in spite of the truths of science, not because the truths of science have given him in any way a new revelation of beauty. much more emphasis has been laid upon tennyson's importance as a prophet in religious matters than seems to the present writer warranted. he did not even keep pace with the thought of the century, though his poetry undoubtedly reflected the liberalized theology of the earlier years of the second half of the century. as joseph jacobs says, "in memoriam" has been to the broad church movement what the "christian year" has been to the high church. but where is the broad church now? tennyson was, on the whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in english speculation for the last quarter of a century. so far as he was the voice of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the "sixties." what vision tennyson did have came not through intuition or the higher reason, but through his psychic power of self-hypnotism. in "the ancient sage" is a passage describing the sort of trance into which he could evidently cause himself to fall: "for more than once when i sat all alone, revolving in myself the word that is the symbol of myself, the mortal limit of the self was loosed, and passed into the nameless, as a cloud melts into heaven. i touch'd my limbs, the limbs were strange, not mine--and yet no shade of doubt, but utter clearness, and thro' loss of self, the gain of such large life as match'd with ours were sun to spark--unshadowable in words, themselves but shadows of a shadow world." such trances have been of common occurrence in the religious life of the world, as professor james has shown so exhaustively in his great book, "varieties of religious experience." and in that book, too, it is maintained, against the scientific conclusions, that such ecstasies "signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporal one of degeneration and hysteria," that mystical states have an actual value as revelations of the truth. after passing in review many examples of ecstasy and trance, from the occasional experiences of the poets to the constant experiences of the mediæval mystics and the hindu yogis, he finally comes to the interesting conclusion that: "this overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the absolute is the great mystic achievement. in mystic states we both become one with the absolute and we become aware of our one-ness. this is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. in hinduism, in neoplatonism, in sufism, in christian mysticism, in whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity--which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land." the witness given religion in tennyson's mystical trances is then his most valuable contribution to the speculative thought of the century, and in a sense is prophetic of the twentieth century, because in this century revelations attained in this way have been given a credence long denied them except in the case of the uneducated and super-emotional, by a man of the sound scholarship and good judgment of professor james. how fully browning was a representative of the thought of this time, combining as he did an intuitional with a scientific outlook has already been shown. evolution means for him the progress toward the infinite, and is full of beauty and promise. the failures in nature and life which fill tennyson with despair furnish to browning's mind a proof of the existence of the absolute, or a somewhere beyond, where things will be righted. observation shows him everywhere in the universe the existence of power and mystery. the mystery is either that of the incomprehensibleness of causes, or is emphasized in the existence of evil. the first leads to awe and wonder, and is a constant spur to mankind to seek further knowledge, but the poet insists that the knowledge so accumulated is not actual gain, but only a means to gain in so far as it keeps bringing home to the human mind the fact of its own inadequacy in the discovery of truth. the existence of evil leads to the constant effort to overcome it, and to sympathy and pity, and as the failure of knowledge proves a future of truth to be won, so the failure of mankind to attain perfection in moral action proves a future of goodness to be realized. all this may be found either explicitly or implied in the synthetic philosophy of herbert spencer, whose fundamental principles, despite the fire of criticism to which he has been subjected from all sides--science, religion, metaphysics, each of which felt it could not claim him exclusively as its own, yet resenting his inclusion of the other two--are now, in the first decade of the twentieth century, receiving the fullest recognition by such masters of the history of nineteenth-century thought as theodore merz and Émile boutroux. people often forget that while spencer spent his life upon the knowledge or scientific side of human experience, he frequently asserted that there was in the human consciousness an intuition of the absolute which was the only certain knowledge possessed by man. here again browning was at one with spencer. discussing the problem of a future life in "la saisiaz," he declares that god and the soul are the only facts of which he is absolutely certain: "i have questioned and am answered. question, answer presuppose two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers--_is_, it knows; as it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, unaffected by its end--that this thing likewise needs must be; call this--god, then, call that--soul, and both--the only facts for me. prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving, proves them such." to this scientific and metaphysical side browning adds, as has also already been pointed out, a mystical side based upon feeling. his revelations of divinity do not come by means of self-induced trances, as tennyson's seem to have come, but through the mystery of feeling. this mystical state seems to have been his habitual one, if we may judge by its prominence in his poetry. he occasionally descends to the realm of reason, as he has in "la saisiaz," but the true plane of his existence is up among the exaltations of aspiration and love. his cosmic sense is a sense of god as love, and is the quality most characteristic of the man. it is like, though perhaps not identical with, the mysticism of whitman, which seems to have been an habitual state. he writes: "there is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though i think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter." this mystic mood of browning's which underlies his whole work--even a work like "the ring and the book," where evil in various forms is rampant and seems for the time being to conquer--is nowhere more fully, and at the same time more concisely, expressed than in his poem "reverie," one of his last, which ends with a full revelation of this mystical feeling, from which the less inspired reasoning of "la saisiaz" is a descent: "even as the world its life, so have i lived my own-- power seen with love at strife, that sure, this dimly shown-- good rare and evil rife "whereof the effect be--faith that, some far day, were found ripeness in things now rathe, wrong righted, each chain unbound, renewal born out of scathe. "why faith--but to lift the load, to leaven the lump, where lies mind prostrate through knowledge owed to the loveless power it tries to withstand, how vain! in flowed "ever resistless fact: no more than the passive clay disputes the potter's act, could the whelmed mind disobey knowledge the cataract. "but, perfect in every part, has the potter's moulded shape, leap of man's quickened heart, throe of his thought's escape, stings of his soul which dart, "through the barrier of flesh, till keen she climbs from the calm and clear, through turbidity all between from the known to the unknown here, heaven's 'shall be' from earth's 'has been'? "then life is--to wake not sleep, rise and not rest, but press from earth's level where blindly creep things perfected more or less, to the heaven's height, far and steep, "where, amid what strifes and storms may wait the adventurous quest, power is love--transports, transforms, who aspired from worst to best, sought the soul's world, spurned the worms! "i have faith such end shall be: from the first, power was--i knew. life has made clear to me that, strive but for closer view, love were as plain to see. "when see? when there dawns a day, if not on the homely earth, then yonder, worlds away, where the strange and new have birth and power comes full in play." browning has, far more than tennyson, put religious speculation upon a basis where it may stand irrespective of a belief in the revelations of historical christianity. for the central doctrine of christianity he had so profound a reverence that he recurs to it again and again in his poetry, and at times his feeling seems to carry him to the verge of orthodox belief. so near does he come to it that many religious critics have been convinced that he might be claimed as a christian in the orthodox sense of the word. a more careful reading, however, of such poems as "the death in the desert," and "christmas eve and easter day," upon which rest principally the claim of the poet's orthodoxy, will reveal that no certain assertion of a belief in supernaturalism is made, even though the poems are dramatic and it might be made without necessarily expressing the feeling of the poet. what browning felt was that in historical christianity the highest symbol of divine love had been reached. though he may at times have had moods in which he would fain have believed true an ideal which held for him great beauty, his worth for his age was in saving religion, _not_ upon a basis of faith, but upon the ground of logical arguments deduced from the failure of knowledge, of his personal intuition of god and his mystical vision in regard to the nature of god. so complete a synthesis is this that only in the present century is its full purport likely to be realized. the thought of the century is showing everywhere a strong reaction away from materialism and toward religious thought. even in the latest stronghold of science, psychology, as we have already seen, there is no formula which will explain the existence of individuality. while the scientists themselves plod on, often quite unconscious that they are not dealing with ultimates, the thinkers are no longer satisfied with a philosophy of materialism, and once more it is being recognized that the province of philosophy is to give us god, the soul and immortality. it is especially interesting in this connection to observe that germany, the land of destructive biblical criticism, which browning before the middle of the century handled with the consummate skill characteristic of him, by accepting its historical conclusions while conserving the spirit of christianity, has now in the person of professor rudolf eucken done an almost similar thing. like browning, he is a strong individualist and believes that the development of the soul is the one thing of supreme moment. "there is a spontaneous springing up of the individual spiritual life," he writes, "only within the soul of the individual. all social and all historical life that does not unceasingly draw from this source falls irrecoverably into a state of stagnation and desolation. the individual can never be reduced to the position of a mere member of society, of a church, of a state; notwithstanding all external subordination, he must assert an inner superiority; each spiritual individual is more than the whole external world." [illustration: browning at ( )] he calls his system "activism," which merely seems to be another way of saying that the soul-life is one of aspiration toward moral ideals and the will to carry them out. such a life, he thinks, demands a new world and a new character in man, and is entirely at variance with nature. "our whole life is an indefatigable seeking and pressing forward. in self-consciousness the framework is given which has to be filled; in it we have acquired only the basis upon which the superstructure has to be raised. we have to find experience in life itself to reveal something new, to develop life, to increase its range and depth. the endeavor to advance in spirituality, to win through struggle, is the soul of the life of the individual and the work of universal history." readers of browning will certainly not feel that there is anything new in this. in so far, however, as he finds the spiritual life at variance with nature he parts company with browning, showing himself to be under the influence of the dualism of the past which regarded matter and spirit as antagonistic. in browning's view, matter and spirit are the two aspects of god, in the one, power being manifested; in the other, love. it follows naturally from this, that eucken does not think of evil as a means by which good is developed. he prefers to regard it as unexplained, and forever with us to be overcome. its reduction to a means of realizing the good leads, he thinks, "to a weakening which threatens to transform the mighty world-struggle into an artistic arrangement of things and into an effeminate play, and which takes away that bitterness from evil without which there is no strenuousness in the struggle and no vitality in life. thus it remains true that religion does not so much explain as presuppose evil." an attempt to explain evil, he says, belongs to speculation rather than to religion. that he has an inkling of the region to which speculation might lead him is shown when it is realized, that upon his explanation, as one critic of him has said, it might be possible to find "some reconciliation in the fact that this world with its negations had awakened the spiritual life to its absolute affirmation, which could, therefore, not be in absolute opposition." in leaving aside speculation and confining himself to what he considers the religious aspects of life, he no doubt strengthens himself as a leader of those whose speculative powers have not yet been developed, or who can put one side of the mind to sleep and accept with the other half-truths. the more developed mind, however, will prefer browning's greater inclusiveness. to possess a complete view of life, man must live his own life as a human being struggling to overcome the evil, at the same time keeping in mind the fact that evil is in a sense the raw material provided by god, or the absolute, or whatever name one chooses to give to the all-powerful and all-loving, from which the active soul of man is to derive a richness of beauty and harmony of development not otherwise possible. eucken's attitude toward jesus is summed up in a way which reminds one strongly of the position taken in the comment made at the end of "the death in the desert." he writes: "the position of the believer in the universal christian church is grounded upon a relation to god whose uniqueness emerges from the essential divinity of jesus; only on this supposition can the personality of christ stand as the unconditional lord and master to whom the ages must do homage. and while the person of jesus retains a wonderful majesty apart from dogma, its greatness is confined to the realm of humanity, and whatever of new and divine life it brings to us must be potential and capable of realization in us all. we therefore see no more in this figure the normative and universally valid type of all human life, but merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be directly imitated. at any rate the figure of jesus, thus understood in all its height and pure humanity, can no longer be an object of faith and divine honor. all attempts to take shelter in a mediating position are shattered against a relentless either--or. between man and god there is no intermediate form of being for us, for we cannot sink back into the ancient cult of heroes. if jesus, therefore, is not god, if christ is not the second person in the trinity, then he is a man; not a man like any average man among ourselves, but still man. we can therefore honor him as a leader, a hero, a martyr, but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him or root ourselves in him; we cannot submit to him unconditionally. still less can we make him the centre of a cult. to do so from our point of view would be nothing else than an intolerable deification of a human being." the comment at the end of "the death in the desert" puts a similar question, and answers, "call christ, then, the illimitable god, or lost!" but the final word which casts a light back upon the previous conclusion is "but, 'twas cerinthus that is lost"--the man, in other words, who held the heresy that the christ part only resided in jesus, who was merely human, and that the divine part was not crucified, having flown away before. thus it is implied that neither those who believe jesus divine, nor those who believe him human, are lost, but those who try as cerinthus did to make a compromise. the same note is struck in "christmas eve," and now professor eucken takes an exactly similar ground in regard to any sort of compromise, coming out boldly, however, as browning does not in this poem, though he makes no strong argument against it--in the acceptance of christ as human. browning's own attitude is expressed as clearly as it is anywhere in his work in the epilogue to "dramatis personæ," in which the conclusion is entirely in sympathy with that of eucken: "when you see what i tell you--nature dance about each man of us, retire, advance, as though the pageant's end were to enhance "his worth, and--once the life, his product gained-- roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained, and show thus real, a thing the north but feigned-- "when you acknowledge that one world could do all the diverse work, old yet ever new, divide us, each from other, me from you-- "why, where's the need of temple, when the walls o' the world are that? what use of swells and falls from levites' choir, priests' cries, and trumpet calls? "that one face, far from vanish, rather grows, or decomposes but to recompose, become my universe that feels and knows." the hold which the philosophy of eucken seems to have taken upon the minds of many people all over the world shows that it must have great elements of strength. that there is a partial resemblance between his thought, which belongs to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and browning's is certain, but the fact remains that the poet made a synthesis of the elements which must go to the forming of any complete religious conceptions of the future so far in advance of his own century that even eucken is in some respects behind it. another interesting instance of browning's presenting a line of reasoning which resembles very strongly one phase of present-day philosophy is to be found in "bishop blougram's apology." the worldly bishop gives voice to good pragmatic doctrine, which in a nutshell is, "believe in, or rather follow, that ideal which will be of the most use to you, and if it turns out not to be successful, then try another one." the poet declares that blougram said good things but called them by wrong names. if the ideal is a high one there is no great danger in such reasoning, but it can very easily be turned into sophistical arguments for an ideal of living to thoroughly selfish ends, as blougram actually did. the poem might almost be taken as a prophetic criticism of the weak aspects of pragmatism. the belief in immortality which pervades browning's work often comes out in a form suggesting the idea of reincarnation. his future for the human soul is not a heaven of bliss, but life in other worlds full of activity and aspiration. this note is struck in "paracelsus," where life's destiny is described to be the climbing of pleasure's heights forever the seeking of a flying point of bliss remote. in his last volume the idea is more fully brought out in "rephan." in this it is held that a state of perfect bliss might grow monotonous, and that a preferable state would be to aspire, yet never attain, to the object aimed at. the transmigration is from "rephan," where all was merged in a neutral best to earth, where the soul which had been stagnating would have an opportunity to strive, not rest. the most beautiful expression, however, of the idea of a future of many lives is found in "one word more": "so it seems: i stand on my attainment. this of verse, alone, one life allows me; verse and nothing else have i to give you. other heights in other lives, god willing: all the gifts from all the heights, your own, love!" though the theory of reincarnation is so ancient a one, and one entirely discredited by christianity, browning was again expressing an ideal which was to be revived in our own day. oriental thought has made it almost a commonplace of talk. many people doubtless speak of what they mean to do in their next incarnation without having the thought very deeply imbedded in their consciousness, yet the mere fact that one hears the remark so often proves what a hold the theory has on the imagination of mankind. as browning gives it in "one word more," the successive incarnations take one on to higher heights--"other lives in other worlds." thus regarded, it is the final outcome of evolution and progress, a process to be carried forward in other worlds than our own, and has no degrading suggestion of a degenerating, because of sin, into lower forms of existence. the movement is always upward. thus it has been effected by the idea that progress is the law of life, and that evolution means, on the whole, progress. again, in the liberality of his social ideals, combined with an intensest belief in the supremacy of genuine love, he was the forerunner of ibsen, who, the world is beginning to discover, was not a subverter of high moral ideals, as it had thought, but a prophet of the new day, when to be untrue to the highest ideal of love will be accounted the greatest crime of one human being against another. from "the doll's house" to "when we that are dead awaken" the same lesson is taught. few people realize that this is the keynote of browning's teaching, or would be ready to regard him as a prophet of an ideal of love which shall come to be seen as the true one after the science of eugenics, the latest of the exact sciences, has found itself as powerless as all other sciences have been to touch the reality of life, because amid all the mysteries of the universe none is greater than the spiritual mystery of love. among writers who are to-day recognizing a part of the truth, at least, is ellen key, but neither she nor ibsen has insisted in the way that browning has upon the mystical source of human love. that browning is the poet who has given the world the utmost certainty of god, the soul and immortality, and the most inspiring ideals of human love, will be more completely recognized in the future. as time goes on he will emerge above the tumultuous intellectual life of the present, which, with its enormous increase of knowledge of phenomena, bringing with it a fairly titanic mastery of the forces of nature, and its generation of multitudes of ideas upon every conceivable subject, many of them trite, many of them puerile, and some of them no doubt of genuine value, obscures for the time being the greatness of any one voice. a little later, when the winnowing of ideas shall come, browning will be recognized as one of the greatest men of his own age or any age--a man combining knowledge, wisdom, aspiration, and vision to a marvelous degree. he belongs to the master-order of poets, who write some things which will pass into the popular knowledge of the day, but whose serious achievements will be read and studied by the cultured and scholarly of all time. no students of greek literature will feel that they can omit from their reading his greek poems, no students of sociology will feel that they can omit from their reading "the ring and the book." lovers of the drama must ever respond to the beauty of "the blot in the 'scutcheon" and "pippa passes." even the student of verse technique will not be able to leave browning out of account, and making allowances for the fact that the individuality of his style sometimes overasserts itself, he will realize more and more its freshness and its vividness, its power of suggestion, and its depths of emotional fervor. when the romanticism of a keats or a shelley has completely worked itself out in musical efflorescence; from which all thought-content has disappeared, there may grow up a school of poets which shall, without direct imitation, develop poetry along the lines of vigor and strength in form, and which shall have for its content a tremendous sense of the worth of humanity and an unshakable belief in the splendor of its destiny. _virilists_ might well be the name of this future school of poets who would hark back to browning as their inspiration, and a most pleasant contrast would they be to the sentimental namby-pambyism which passes muster as poetry in much of the work of to-day. in closing this volume which has been inspired by a deep sense of the abiding greatness of robert browning, it has been my desire to put on record in some way my personal indebtedness to his poetry as an inspiration not only to high thinking and living, but as a genuine revelation to me of the rare possibilities in poetic art, for i may almost say that browning was my first poet, and through him, strange as it may seem, i came to an appreciation of all other poets. his poetry, fortunately for me an early influence in my life, awakened my, until then, dormant faculty for poetic appreciation. i owe him, therefore, a double debt of gratitude: not only has he given me the joy of knowing his own great work, but through him i have entered the land of all poésie, led as i truly think by his sympathy with the scientific dispensation into which i was born. his thought has always seemed so naturally akin to my own that it has never seemed to me obscure. finding such thoughts expressed through the medium of great poetic genius, the beauty of poetic expression was brought home to me as it never had been before, and hence the poetic expression of all thought became a deep pleasure to me. so much interpretation and criticism of browning has been given to the world during the last twenty years, that further work in that direction seems hardly necessary for the present. there will for many a day to come be those who feel him to be among the greatest poets the world has seen, and those who find much more to blame in his work than to praise. i have tried to give a few suggestions in regard to what robert browning actually was in relation to his time. the nineteenth century was so remarkable a one in the complexity of its growth, both in practical affairs and in intellectual developments, that it has been possible in the space of one volume to touch only upon the most important aspects under each division, and to try to show what measure of influence important movements had in the molding of the poet's genius. though in the nature of the case the treatment could not be exhaustive, i hope to have opened out a sufficient number of pathways into the fascinating vistas of the nineteenth century in its relation to browning to inspire others to make further excursions for themselves; and, above all, i hope i may have added at least one stone to the cairn which many, past and to come, are building to his fame. the end the country life press, garden city, n. y. footnotes: [ ] the influence of the "prometheus unbound" upon the conception of aprile's character was first brought forward by the writer in a paper read before the boston browning society, march , , a typewritten copy of which was placed in the browning alcove in the boston public library. in the "life of browning," published the same year and not read by the writer until recently, mr. hall griffin touches upon the same thought in the following words: "from some elements in the myth of prometheus browning unmistakably evolved the conception of his aprile as not only the lover and the poet but as the potential sculptor, painter, orator, and musician." [ ] see the author's "browning's england." [ ] see introduction to "ring and book"--camberwell browning.